Yawning into his fist

This afternoon I took off work early and walked down the street to see my therapist. I'm not sure what pseudonym I'll make for him.

Things have been going well, I think. Better. A couple weeks ago I upped my dosage and added in a low dosage of neurontin for the evenings.

Immediate affect: decreased libido, which is all for the better.

I never thought it would be this hard.

I thought that the medication would kick and suddenly I'd want to go to the gym. I'd want to be social. I'd want to make love to you like old times.

Instead, everyone just hovers on by past me.

It's so incredibly easy to spend a whole week or a whole weekend indoors. I'm not cruising for sex but I'm not really doing anything much. Playing Star Wars Battlefront. Reading blogs. Watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Downloading obscure films like Tarnation and ripping copies out of my Netflix queue. Thank god for Netflix in this low cold doldrum of a winter, depressed, nothing really going right.

We talked about it today...how much work it is. To force myself to get off my ass and go to the gym, to not fall asleep. To stay healthy. To pick up the goddamn phone and call a friend and say hello. I know this might sound hard to believe, but I can't begin to tell you how incredibly painful and exhausting it is to even begin to think about calling you and catching up.

I can get up in the morning, go to the bus, put in a good eight hours at work, correspond and call authors, make presentations to colleagues, plan, juggle projects, line edit next season's trade titles.

But when I get home at the end of the day and I think about the fact that we haven't spoken in several weeks...I get a headache, my eyeballs hurt, my shoulders clench up. I'd rather slink away under a blanket on the couch then admit, outloud, again, what I am dealing with.

Today was the day I came the closest to crying in my therapist's office, though that has never happened and even today I was massively incontrol. But I began to get so tired of this shit months ago, and here are still spinning our wheels.

I have begun to forget how I was, how I used to be...you know, the happy Darling Daintyfoot. I did some incredibly happy things, oh let me tell you, and loved...and moved in so many circles and had a bright future.

I am resting on a siding now. Rusting.

Do you actually feel?

Last night I sat around in my apartment and contemplated going to the orgy.

There's this regularly-occuring orgy in some far-flung suburb , hidden on some nondescript frontage road behind the facade of a banal, camouflaged condominium development.

The temperature was -10 below zero.

I also thought about going to the gym and instead I did neither. I ate dinner. Twirled in front of a mirror, naked, to find the angel at which I look the thinnest.

Stared out the window at traffic.

Before going on antidepressants, I'd spent a night like this in front of the computer, cruising the online hook up sites for sex, looking at porn, hitting poppers now and then, jerking off for hours and hours until my nose was raw and it was three in the morning and I had nothing left; then finally my dick would leach something out of my body, somethine week and zygotic.

Nowadays, on medication, I spend those sorts of evenings eating chocolate-covered raisins, drinking lemonade, and playing Star Wars Battlefront.

This morning while showering I asked myself whether this was an improvement or not. I think it is.