October 11, 2004

• Topic: stream of consciousness

  
  

  He sits in front of the computer.  It’s the only person he can talk to.  Alone in the apartment, while his roommate has fallen asleep in front of the television.  The TV is the only other person who talks to him, but it isn’t the best listener.  Tv likes to talk and talk and talk.  He sometimes finds himself listening to tv for hours, without really hearing a word of it.

  
  

  The apartment serves as a prison.  He wanders around the rooms.  Entering the kitchen, he eats a cookie for companionship.  Entering the bathroom, he stares at the mirror to make sure he still exists. 

  
  

  In front of the computer he dreams.  If all that he sees could come alive.  The people he contacts.  The pictures he sees.  The ideas it displays.  Life in that little screen is so alive and vibrant, but he knows it’s not real.

  
  

  The time is 7pm.  It is dark out, and he hates that the day ends emotionally when it gets dark.  “There is so much day left”, he thinks to himself, but the remaining hours seem to slip by, so unproductive.  He takes solace in knowing that what he is experiencing is the prison that technology has produced for him.  “This house is better than being out in the cold, surely, but it just prevents me from being with people.”  He knows what’s wrong.  But, it has already sucked the energy out of him for the night.  The location of the appartment is part of the prison.  Any venturing outside leads to only more loneliness and solitude.

  
  

  He sits knowing that this is self-imposed.  “With stability, comes pain,” he thinks to himself.  “I don’t want to be in this home.  I want to be in a house of strangers.  I want to be in a land of strange customs and practices, where everything will have taste and have feeling.”  He watches soccer on tv, and reflects on how it is called something else in England.  And he reflects on how the feeling this one sport creates in that country fails to exist at home in America. 

  
  

  “There is something special about soccer, that I can’t explain.”  Perhaps the aura is created by its exoticness here at home.  He misses the city.  To be able to walk outside and in an instant find people to watch.

  
  

  He feels like he is burning time, in order to get somewhere.  Looking at the screen, he knows his life has the potential to be doing so much.  But where are the people?  Where is there sense of purpose like his?  He has alientated himself, as much as the world has made him an alien to his fellow man.  He understands this, and plans to change this.  “I cannot accept the life I now live.  Nobody but me is feeling this internal pain, and nobody but me will take action.  Tom. I will begin to live once again, as I know I have before.”

  
  

  A moment of non-medical depression.  A depression that will evaporate, and turn into joy.  He has diagnosed it, and the cure is in his hands.

  • 8:18 pm
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