This is My Life (the pyschobabble remix)

I am filled with hubris and false modesty, with feints and evasions and subversive rage simmering just beneath the surface and erupting in a sudden, cathartic bursts that have as their only audience a cold computer screen, framed snapshots, and slightly bemused cats.

I am filled with dark cynicism that is soothed by loud music, other people’s words in books, other people’s visions in moving pictures, guiltless gothic fantasies, and joyless sex with strangers who think they know me. I am a master and a victim, a fool and a hero,

This is my life.

I am full of dreams and inertia, I am wary and detached and always waiting for the other shoe to fall; I am full of acid bravado in absentia and hollow smiles that go unrecognized by those who are supposedly close to me. I am a disappointment to more than I care to think about and I don’t really care that I am because everybody is a disappointment to me as well.

I am a well-regarded afterthought and I am well used to that.

I am alone and not lonely. I am a would-be romantic who doesn’t believe in love anymore. I am aging and never as old as I feel. I am consumed by a youth that never happened and comforted by phantom love, rock and roll, and comic book super-heroes.

I am consumed by futures that probably won’t happen and sheltered by mazes of words and false laughter and becoming people that I will never reveal to anyone else.

I offer safe harbor and I long ago stopped looking to find the same for myself. I wallow in self-pity and self-regard in oddly equal measure and I find nothing untoward about that. I wallow in imagination and despair in equal measure and I find nothing untoward about that either.

And this is all absolutely true. And this is all absolute nonsense.

This is my life.