Introspecticus
by Michael Sherrillo

Writing becomes an addiction. When you spend all your time reading books and writing, it becomes an escape, a freedom. You just start writing one day and you feel the freedom of it, it’s something you can’t find in conversation, because there are so many things you can’t say when you talk to other people. I can’t say what do you mean you don’t have enough money for rent, I gave you 550$, you only had to save 225$ out of the 400$ you’ve made these last 2 weeks! You wanted responsibility and now the choices you made effect not just you, but me, and pat, and all our lives, because you couldn’t wait till after you had made sure you had enough money for rent to by a plane ticket, or a sack, or go out. That I hope you figure something out because otherwise you have just screwed everyone. And I don’t know why you think that would be different if you moved out, because whoever you lived with would be screwed and responsible for your actions just like me and Pat are right now. The only difference is that you would owe much more and have much less. And they wouldn’t be nearly as forgiving. Not that we really can be if we end up being evicted. I mean, I could say that, but…

But I can’t. There is no freedom there. Not like here, where I can rant and rave and scream and do whatever I want, where I can escape my parents and my prison and my life. It’s better than reading, it’s more existentially real. In reading, I just hide from myself and the world, but in writing I’m channeled, I’m proactive. Even when I just sitting down pounding out pages of crap, like my last posting. It just came to me and I wrote it, and its crap. But it’s something, it’s real because in some way it’s me, me acting and doing and being. Even if the words and sentences strung together mean nothing, it’s the act of doing that gives the emotionally and mentally orgasmic release of everything I’ve been holding inside. I hit keys like a punching bag. And that lifts me and my mind away from the ground and the gravity of depression which I feel like is pulling and choking me so often. No one to silence me with words or feelings, because no one is here to feel this but myself. It is my guilty pleasure.

At some point I started to think like I write, my inner monologue becomes words flashing across my mind and joining together into paragraphs of thought. In that sense I do nothing but write. I feel myself wishing there were some device which could save the text of my thoughts, which seems so much better… better worded, better written, than when I finally get to sit in front of the keyboard and have to try to reconstruct all the text that has been running through me. That’s why this is crap too. If there was some way I could recapture that moment which existed no less than 10 minutes ago, when all these things first came, and as I ran to the computer lab to try to capture the final ephemeral fragments as they drifted away… if only.

It was in the fourth grade, around the ripe old age of ten years old, that I first began my true studies. We were sitting in the Jacuzzi in my back yard, the lid was on so it was only us, cooking in the hot water and it swirled with jets and currents around our bodies. With only a foot between the water and the lid, it felt like we were breathing the same air. The fumes of chlorine filled our lungs as the steam transformed the space between us into a hazy dream, a world all our own. It was with that first kiss with the neighbor girl that I began, what Cynthia Shearer once described as, “the serious lifelong study of the lady female member of the species homo sapiens human beings”.

That’s been stuck in my head for the past two hours. I had to get it out. And now I don’t know what to say. I guess that makes this a good a place to end as any. It doesn’t matter than none of it makes sense to anyone, because there is no one to hear this, it doesn't exist (if a tree falls in the forest...). And so, I am purged. I am clean again, my soul renewed.
I am free.