Killoggs : I really like to wrestle. Do you like wrestling?

And I realize the limitations of trying to step outside the normal bullshit associated with Brandon GIF. etc. And I don't want to upstage Ed, and I'm not drunk, I am under the influence of other things, mostly fear and stomach-dissolving anxiety, and, ok, Mr. Crowley's steed.

A few things, a number of people that have done this before have warned me that moving back to your hometown without a plan always results in depression, it's inevitable - you feel like you've failed. Well, I'm in the thick of that. What to do? Personality and identity are inextricably related to place. And, uprooting oneself is like transplanting a plant. It often goes into shock before recovering. Worse yet, do you remember that episode of Star Trek the Next Generation wherein Q sadistically grants Picard the ability to go back to his academy days and mess with the events that lead to his having to have a synthetic heart and thus succumbing to a laser blast in his future self. Picard goes back, and all the things that he regretted as Cpt. Picard, he tries to fix - sleeping with the girl he always regretted not sleeping with, not getting into the bar fight that resulting in his fatal, future injury. Q then shows him his alternate future, where he festers in a science officer position - having cleansed himself of the desire to take risks - none of his superior officers see him as promotable material, and he decides that he'd rather be dead in the future, than a nonentity in the safer, alternate future.

Somehow Picard's lesson didn't sink in. It's not that I had friends, a girl, an angry Romulan waiting for me in Baton Rouge, I just, I've tried to squeeze everyone back into their roles, as if they had been in cryogenic freeze while I was gone, and that I could slip back into the role of pseudo-intellectual alcoholic who eats weird things.

Erica asked me the other day: "What do you do?" and I had no good answer to it. I don't know what I do. I just don't know. Does anyone? I don't even know what I want to someday do. I mean, I'm 27, and I've done some things, some interesting things, and I've plowed over a ton of things in life that would give other more intelligent and cagey people pause for reflection and reassessment, and now, well, the chickens have come home to roost, and those chickens are of the 6 legged mutant variety. I remember our philosophy teacher in high school, a consummate bullshitter, telling us about his moment of nausea, conversio, enlightenment and it seems to me now that I've been there a dozen times, I just can't get it straight.

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say, I really fucked things up tonight, but in my self-effacing, Woody Allen slamming his car into the parked cars in Annie Hall sort of way.

Anyway, Saturday, I'm taking the LSAT, it's a big step for me and I'm absolutely scared shitless about it. In ways that I can't explain. I'm smart - book smart - I test really well (better than I perform really) But, I can't get those Kurt Wagner words out of my head, looking down from the bus at his reflection and noticing the age on his face. Haunting. For weeks now I've been going nuts taking practice tests everyday, wrapping my mind around testing strategies, dissecting newspaper articles and magazines as if they were reading comprehension passages, staring at chicken-scratched notes, tearing up during the teletubbies, glazing over at midmorning after hours of this crap and letting Buffy wash over me, burning time here when I just can't cope.

Anyway, I don't want your sympathy. God knows there's none here for me, I'm such a dick - and that's not going to change. But, if there's some something to be gleaned from this, well, actually I don't know what it is, maybe it's this: if you have something good, hold onto it, don't listen to the voices that tell you you'll have to sacrifice it for the future.

No that's definitely for another post.

You can't go home again?

Nope, well, true, but, not really.

Stay away from drugs, kids?

Good. But, no.

How about, if you are so isolated and you feel as if you're going to burst, don't take the risk of demolishing a really good friendship because of a moment of weakness.

Lifetime: Television for Idiots.

Actually, I suppose there is no lesson. I missed out on the boat several times to make things good both in friendships and relationships. And I truly believe that you only get so many chances, not because there are only so many meted out to you. But, the organs of your brain, they close off a little more with each catastrophic failure, until you get to the point that no one can get to you - not that you enter an autistic state, you can go through the motions, I suppose, but that inner kernel of you - if you persist in insisting that it's there - turns away more and more, unable to assimilate new experiences as new without comparing them to older and more painful experiences.

Maybe the lesson of this all is that you're your own goddamn fault goddamnit, but not really, but the only way to function is if you accept that limited conclusion.

So, responses, don't need them. If you'd maybe toss a good thought my way for Saturday, I'd appreciate it. Honestly, I don't know why I'm subjecting you to all this, probably because I'm high as a fucking kite right now - I'll regret this in the morning - (fuck, it is morning) definitely.

Anyway, Thomas Carlyle once wrote that you should never pass up the chance to kiss a pretty girl. About talking to that girl the next day, he remains silent. But what do I know? Apparently very little.