Vertigo.

How could I have been so wrong about everything? I can only count it as wilful ignorance. Why did I waste so much time being afraid? Stubbornness and rebellion and selfishness and anger... what a fool I've been. I want nothing more than this: What I have is the most beautiful love story ever written. In asking God to change my heart, He's showed me how much He loves me by showing me how much Eric loves me.

This changes everything.

I have never been so grateful for change. I've got vertigo from this paradigm shift. I'm raw and it scares me, but I can't live any other way. Not anymore.

Be the mayhem that you seek.

This afternoon, my friend J remarked that sometimes my life is like the plot of an indie movie. I can see her point, and it sparked something in me -- the unremarkable yet unavoidable mishap that leads to an existential crisis... Well, the existential crisis isn't unusual, considering I have one every week, but you get the point. How does it end? Regretfully, for the answers are never easy and being an adult requires a lot more self-discipline than I'd ever imagined as an adolescent.

And why can't I just be happy with where I'm at? Why must I be restless and insecure to a crippling degree? Why do I want to hit bottom, to have some sort of breakdown, to destroy something beautiful?

I don't think I've changed that much since I was younger. I'm still crazy and impulsive and reckless, but as life has happened to me, I've found my crazy tinged with something a bit closer to desperation; a grim sort of self-destruction that had not been present before. Perhaps it's because I no longer imagine myself immortal and invincible. Perhaps that's what I like about it. But even as I worry vaguely about the trajectory of my sadness, I can't help but love the dark a little. There's a thrill to impulsivity that is unlike anything else. Randomness. Chaos.

Be the mayhem that you seek.

Unfortunately or fortunately, there are also responsibilities that must be considered, and as much as I want to hit bottom sometimes (especially around this time of year) I would never be able to live with myself if I hurt the one person I love the most in this world.

So I deal with it as best I can, and it abates until I start to get itchy again in late April until sometimes July, sometimes September. This year will be ten years she's been gone. Each moment moves me farther away from her, until I resemble an actual person, someone for whom daily life does not hold the persistent echo of existential horror.

Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever let go, falling back into that lake of fire that is my much beloved self-destruction. I can't imagine a scenario in which I do so willingly. So I'll just hold on, as tightly as I can, for someone who deserves better than me.

Still.

Did you think I had forgotten? I had not. I am just turned inside out at the moment, with so little time to think. There will be a moment someday very soon when the noise will stop and I will be unable to escape my thoughts.

Until then.

Sadness.

Justin Cronin's The Twelve is destroying me, more so than the previous novel in this series. He handles destruction and sorrow with grace and pity, but he is merciless. He gives his characters honorable, even beautiful deaths. But they still die, and those who remain still mourn them.

This is turning out to be a surprisingly sweet and brutal series, as Cronin has managed to infuse hope into a world seemingly bereft of it. I'm savoring this book, as I savored the last.

Will to power.

The first time I read Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, I was 19, in college and working in the library. Her ideas were scandalous to me, a rebellious girl steeped in traditional morality. When one reads truly transformational literature, it is less a changing of one's mind and more a recognition of the ideas and perceptions that have been bubbling beneath the surface of one's consciousness. T.S. Eliot, Mark Steyn, Camille Paglia are but three of the writers with whom I have experienced such a recognition. It's that moment when you read something and your mind clicks on, the engine turns over, the light bulb is lit. Your subconscious whispers, "I feel that. I know that."

True, we are often shaped by what we read, but there are times of great recognition, the reassurance that one is not alone in her perception of the world around her. Paglia's acceptance of the deep darkness beyond the thin skin of civilization is comforting and terrifying all at once. Most of us don't ponder the chaos of freedom; some of us can't help it. Some of us have seen chaos and, while repulsed by it, are also quite willing to acknowledge its existence. Naming something doesn't make it go away, it simply allows one to retain their sanity in the face of reality.

Paglia asserts that societal constraints are needed to keep Nature at bay. The darkness without is also the darkness within, and humans need societal conditioning to keep from descending into the natural order of things, for which she uses Nietzsche's idea of "will-to-power." She does not subscribe to the Romantic ideal of the inherent goodness of mankind, and therefore the removal of repressive societal constraints will not free us but enslave us to our most base urges and desires.

This idea is so scandalous in the face of the accepted liberal definition of humanity, I can't help but find it compelling. Paglia has a beautifully wicked, brilliant mind. I just can't look away, no matter how uncomfortable it becomes.

Attention.

I miss writing about current events. (Does anyone even call it that anymore?) More specifically, I miss attention, I think. My shallowness and narcissism make me sad.

My dog eats used birdseed.

I love it when I am surprised by a story. I try to organize it, but it doesn't ever do what I want. If I set it free, however, it becomes something.