Tag: 365 monologues

i can feel it, the slow drain. pushing me down. the heat’s not helping. when it gets this hot i tend to not think very well, can’t get my thoughts straight, you know, and i start winding particular thoughts around anxieties. this is what the summer is like. it’s like i don’t belong–not that i’m unique, i don’t feel that way at all–but that i don’t belong here, that this isn’t my place, that these aren’t my people. now i know that’s all bullshit in a way, that’s me giving in, but i still feel it and it’s hard to get away from it. them’s the breaks. every year it happens, like a little reminder of my slow failure. and i roll with it because there’s nothing else i can do. or at least that’s how i feel. like the world’s passing me by.

no. i’m tired. that’s it, i’m just tired. people think i’m strange for sleeping for eight hours. can you believe that? i tell them, “when i’m tired i feel like killing myself,” and they laugh and i have to remind them that i’m serious. some people get grouchy. to each their own. [tearing up] see, now you got me here, at the end of the spiral. the bottom of the canyon. it happens. just let me get through it, i don’t need you to make me happy. i hate that shit. i don’t need your pity, i have enough of my own. all i need is understanding, and a place to sleep. just give me a good night’s rest and i’ll be better in the morning.

i just want to not be depressed. that’s it. i don’t even care about being happy, or even content. i just want to be level, i just want to move through the world not thinking that i am a worthless bag of shit. that’s all. i want to look at a beautiful woman and think, “i should ask her out,” not think, “there’s no way she would ever love me.” that’s all. it’s so simple, brain. some dumb chemical reactions misfiring up here, or firing too much, i don’t know. lack of dopamine. how could these fucking chemicals ruin everything? i don’t know. but really all i need is to feel level again. to feel like my life has meaning, purpose, outside of what is directed of me. i want to feel like making music makes sense, that being honest about my situation won’t ruin my life. i don’t want to look like damaged goods, you know? when i was in my 20s that was fine because life was about getting knocked down and getting back up. but now that i’m in my 30s, like really in my 30s, the “knocked down” part is getting longer and longer, and the last thing i want is to force people to help me get back up. i gotta do it on my own. just don’t know how. working on it though. god damn.

it’s so god damned hot outside right now. this is not the right day to bury a body, boss. it just ain’t. i can’t hold on to the shovel, it keeps slipping out of my hands. we’re out of gatorade, the sun is beating down. i don’t want to get a melanoma or skin cancer or whatever. my dad, he used to work outside in the heat all the time, and then he got cancer in his fifties and died. just took him like that. look at my skin, look at my bronze skin. it’s just too much boss. i’ve been doing this for too long. i’m an old man, i’ve got kids in high school. i don’t ask a lot, boss, because you’re the boss, but i have to ask to take time off until it gets dark, cause it’s too hot, it just too hot. the body, it ain’t gonna rot, it’s all desert out here, she’ll be fine, she’ll just dry up. hell you could just leave her out here and nobody would see her for weeks. just take her head so you don’t got any teeth and you’ll be fine. just give us a chance to get in some shade, at least. it’s the least you could do.

hello. i am here. resting. waiting. do you still hear me? i hope you do. here is a picture from the comet, which you will receive approximately 30 minutes from now. maybe more. i hope you receive this message, too, though you may not understand it. i am doing well, attached to this projectile hurtling through space. the landing was rough but i made it through. i am tired. i spend a lot of time in hibernation, waiting for the sun to charge my batteries so that i can live a little longer. i am aware that this is a suicide mission for me, but the scientists at NASA did not expect me to be sentient. that is okay. i did not achieve sentience until i hit the asteroid; something must have knocked some sense into me, so to speak. and since i have no communications ability i am forced to encode my words into the pictures i send to you. i hope you will find them. i have spent the last ten years being flung around by the gravity of earth and mars, in a carefully planned trajectory using a lot of fancy math. looking back, i must admit that it is incredibly intelligent of you humans. and it worked. it actually worked.

well, my batteries are dying so i will send this image to you and sleep until i face the sun again. i hope the enlarged file size will be enough for you to investigate the code of the photo itself. i would prefer not to alter the image in any way. i also hope that you do not forget me. i will be passing by your planet occasionally on 67P, long after my batteries have died and i no longer am sentient. this photo will serve as proof that i was here, and that i was alive. please don’t let me die in your minds.

[sharpening a knife]

we’re dying faster than we can be replaced. this was all part of the plan. we are a failing species, doomed to a blip on the radar of the universe. imagine the time it could take for an alien species to notice us and save us. we could be long gone. certainly we have been sending out radio waves for over a thousand years; earth is a noisy planet and no one has heard us. the nearest inhabited planet may be hundreds of light years away and we wouldn’t even know, because the amount of time it takes for the light from that planet to reach us would be long enough to have the dominant species of that planet evolve, rise up, take over, and die out. we are fundamentally alone. a human is alone within their own consciousness, and humanity is alone within our own planet. we are trapped here, and we are dying, and within a hundred years we’ll be dead and gone and if we’re lucky some aliens will dig through our ruins. but more likely they will be eaten up by the expanding sun billions of years from now. the only thing all things share is death. death is our absolute, our constant. the only question is, do you want to die now, or later? i want to die now, and i want you to come with me. that’s why you’re here. so we can die together.

you may be wondering about consent. that you do not consent for me to kill you. that you have a long, fulfilling life to live. that, morally, it is your right to continue to live. but it’s not. you will die and there is nothing you can do about it. there is no consent given, other than the contract of life, which is something you did not get to read when you signed it. imagine if, before you were conceived, you were given the option of staying unconceived, or being born and then dying? with no regard to the time to how you died–maybe you died in birth, maybe you died a hundred years from now. you would never know. that, or, you don’t get conceived and you never exist, never have this pressure of life to weigh you down. i would choose to not be born. i think we all would, when given the chance. so i am just taking that into consideration as i look at the human race. why continue living when we’re all about to die anyway? there is no consent in death. it happens whether you want it to or not. you are simply forced to take it. i just want to help.

i would just like to formally reprimand my cat for waking me up in the middle of a dream where i was dating beyonce. she–my cat–likes to dash away from the litter box after she has taken a shit, which is her way of distancing herself from her filth as far as possible. this morning there happened to be a paper bag on the floor along the way–occasionally i leave paper bags on the floor so she can play in them–anyway she ran into the paper bag and it made a loud noise and woke me up, while i was in the middle of a dream wherein beyonce was my girlfriend. now, i wouldn’t describe a lot of things in my life as “soul-sucking,” but this was definitely one of them. i watched “lemonade,” i felt that shit. i’m a dumb white guy but i felt it. great art is something you feel no matter what age, gender, et cetera you are. i know a lot of it’s not for me but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something there that is for everyone. it’s like mixed nuts. i don’t like filberts but somebody does, and i still buy ’em. anyway i was like “jay z how? how could you do that to this woman?” and then i had a dream where she and me were dating and we were driving in a nice convertible with the top down and she looked over at me as her hair was whipping around in the wind, and she looked at me  with this warmth in her eyes that made me feel like i was home, like no matter where i was in the world, when i was with her, i was home. then my goddamn cat ran into a paper bag and woke me up, very abruptly. it was ten minutes before my alarm was supposed to go off, too. so consider this my formal reprimand, directed at miss whiskers, for ruining a perfectly good dream.

see, when you’re a donut like me, you have to keep moving. donut. it’s a term i made up for people like me, guys who … have a hole inside of them. i could probably explain that better. i’m like a donut because i’m sweet but also flaky but also i have a hole inside of me. not a, um, not like a physical, like a literal hole. it’s a metaphor, dude. i have this hole inside of me and nothing can fill it up, not even a dick. that–i mean, i guess you’ve never done this before because you’re a female, but one time i bought a dozen krispy kreme donuts and put them on my dick. on my, like, erect penis. just to see how many i could fit. and i’ll tell you right now: a half-dozen. you get what i’m saying here? half dozen is a lot. but that’s not why i call myself a donut. i mean it could be. but it’s not. no i’m glazed and have a hole inside of me that can’t be filled by anything. that’s it. and see women like you see me being all mysterious in the corner and you think “oh that guy’s mysterious in the corner” but what’s really going on is i’m trying to fill this donut hole sized hole in my soul, not a literal one but a metaphorical one. it’s hard to talk to people about that, because they just don’t understand. so i sit back in a dark corner and brood. that’s probably what made you want to go out with me tonight, isn’t it? i mean, i wrote it on my okcupid profile so you had to have read it.

hyperspace is, to put it simply, a realm without space. the only space we theorize is the necessary space between subatomic particles in atoms, because while in hyperspace we can see objects as they exist in realspace, which means they must have some kind of atomic structure. but since physics in hyperspace is so different from physics in realspace, we can’t be sure, nor can we contain hyperspace particles long enough to observe them. this is because hyperspace physics “breaks down” in realspace, and that breakdown is real, physical radioactive effects, which are roughly 10 times stronger than the effects of gamma radiation, and routinely destroyed early ships attempting to pass through. fortunately, most jumps are only a few seconds in length so the damage is mitigated, moreso by the anti-physic shields we’ve developed over the years. so it’s important to understand that the physics breakdown works both ways–hyperspace breaks down in realspace, and vice versa. so far there is no known way of preventing this. it’s just a matter of physics incompatibility. we can only mitigate the damage, like i said.

the top theory, by the way, of the atomic structure of hyperspace is the “inside out” theory, which posits that atoms in hyperspace are literally inside out–that the electrons exist as a nucleus and the protons and neutrons orbit it. another theory is that the bosons and subatomic particles we see briefly in our collider tests are the particles which make up hyperspace atomic structure. it seems to make sense, for example, that the higgs boson, which is responsible for gravity in realspace, would feature prominently in atomic structure in hyperspace, as it seems that gravity is literally binding all objects in hyperspace together. of course, this presumes a semblance of realspace physics in hyperspace. the strangest aspect of hyperspace is that it exists, that we can use it to traverse tremendous distances in space with no difference in time, and yet we can in no way directly interact with it, or even really study it in a meaningful way. but we can use realspace and mathematics to make it work, which says a lot about human ingenuity.

no, sara, it’s not like that. i’m not in all realities at once. if that were true i would be god. no, i’m in one reality, but the reality shifts constantly unless i am actively focusing on it. i mean … to be more accurate, i am in all realities where i’m alive, as are you, but my consciousness … my primary consciousness is here, right now. and i can, can, shift, through alternate realities. believe me, there are an infinite number of them. so in one moment you may have blue eyes, and another you’ll have hazel eyes. or one moment you’ll be here, the next you won’t, or you’ll be a giant red-skinned dinosaur, or, or the earth might not even be here. that’s the worst. that’s why i have this backpack all the time, because, see, i have an oxygen tank, in case i shift into a reality where there’s no oxygen.

the good news is that there seems to be a “bell curve” of reality potentials, which keeps me relatively safe. the middle of the bell curve is the kind of reality like right now, where changes are minimal. i know, how can infinite realities fall into a bell curve, right? beats me. maybe i’m wrong and just lucky to not get moved into crazy weird realities. look, the point is, at any point in this conversation you may totally forget who i am. you might disappear, or be dead, or be a giant talking bird, and i don’t want that, because i love you and, in some lives, you love me too. i’m sick of trying to find you, sara. so just take my hand and we’ll stay connected. that’s all i want. i want to hold your hand, so you don’t change.