Bad day...

Nobody cares. Really. For the most part, every issue we face, everything we do, all that we accumulate and amass over our lifetime, all that we give away and contribute to amounts to diddly squat. Nobody cares.

I got jacked up at the plasma center today.

















(This photo was taken several days later but it gives a good idea of why I had to wear long sleeve shirts in the middle of summer...)

Put a hole in my vein, bled out around the needle, now, ten hours later, my arm is beginning to look blue. They stuck my other arm...nothing. Two hours, one waiting, one being prodded like a corpse, and ten bucks is what I get, five dollars for each stick. Unbelievable. And I probably won't be able to donate this week 'cause my arm is jacked up. I realized today what it feels like to be a commodity. Wow. It's bad enough I sell my blood for oil but just what this means became clear today.

It started with some dipshit cutting in line in front of me. No apologies, nothing, just stepped right up. It happens all the time, people whose lives are such that this is their assertion of power. So I let him. But it rattled me. It started me off. And of course when I was getting stuck he was in the bed right in front of me so I could look right at him.

And the very fact that I am stating this, looking at it, realizing just what my situation is, it saddens me deeply. How did I get here? How is it that this is somehow ok?

But I exercised damn it. I iced my arm for several hours, put a hot towel on it to try and bleed it out and I worked my back and biceps today. Kiss my ass, jackin' me up like that. Sorry I'm not too expressive today, profanity a substitute for some anger convoluted through poetics. I'm pissed. And tired. And I feel like I'm disappearing, like I could just vanish.

It's not even that no one would notice. I would just be gone. I'm partially there. Maybe what I really desire is that it just happen that way so I can be done with it. I'm basically a sponge, a consumer, taking, taking, taking. What do I contribute? Obviously nothing as my circle of influence is pretty small. Aloof, bored, arrogant. This is how I appear. And maybe this is who I am.

Everything seems stupid, in a pointless, futile kind of way, not in a way that I know so much better. Because I don't. But I am failing today to see the point.

I have no joy at the moment. Even my love for music fails to move me. It all seems boring. Have I lost faith? Have I no love? Is this what it means to lose hope? And it isn't because of the plasma incident. No, it goes much deeper than that. It's been coming on for years and I feel completely helpless to stop it.

It feels as if I am dying, slowly, rotting from the inside out. It will be a long time before my body catches up to how I actually feel inside. It's horrible to say these thing because from appearances, I've got it good. Good health, healthy family, a job (well, two...plus blood for oil), a roof over my head, food in my belly, reliable transportation, a right mind and relative freedom (except that irritating suburban groupthink thing).

And yet...