Lies The Vacuum Told Me

My brother expressed a modicum of incredulity regarding my claim that I suffer from agoraphobia. Clinically, he's correct. My diagnosis is Avoidant Personality Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder. Social phobia and AvPD are pretty much the same thing. Regardless, I'm not afraid of being in public, so long as there is no social interaction.

Isn't that exciting? Nothing so interesting as refining the clinical labels of another person's mental illness. Today I managed to actually leave my flat, thus ending my isolation streak. Whilst strolling in the clement autumn air today in my newly unpacked sweater, my mind turned to the absurdity of social anxiety. To perpetually despair, with paranoid fervor, about how I am perceived and if I'm a decent person or not is impossible to justify given how inconsequential is life. My life will leave no footprint, nor will civilization or any organism. When such a thing is true, is there anything more ridiculous than agonizing about the way people think of you? That's a funny way of looking at it, though, as it indicates how crazy it is to work at living in any fashion. The intensity of pleasure and pain in life, emotional and physical, represents an intrinsic lie that is told by the universe in a loud, neverending series of harsh statements! One can't help but hear it, and feel it, and be compelled by how earnestly experience insists that this is all for something.

But it's a big, fat, hairy lie. Or not a lie, really, but a miscommunication within the void. Living isn't easy, and having the ability to reason is like falling nose first into fetid offal. Feeling is heinous enough, but awareness of our meaningless struggle is the harshest proof we have that there is no god watching our proverbial backs. The greatest comfort we have is the knowledge that it will end one day, and we will go deaf to the constant sermon of shock and horror and joy and love that is pounded into us through our nerves and minds. There will be the final, peaceful lack of awareness.

As I made my way past the Arlington Center for the Arts, where I stopped to look at a brochure about belly-dancing, I decided to get some lunch at Junior's Spa on Broadway. I got a couple of subs for my father and I. After that, I walked in the warm sun and cool air past the new bank they are building, and down North Union street. As I got to the school near my flat, I tripped on the uneven sidewalk and almost fell on my ass. My poor little toe cried out in pain, and I felt that the children playing nearby surely had seen what had happened and were laughing at me. A fat guy with a couple of subs tripping in a humorous fashion. The searing humiliation, and a faintly aching toe, insisted that this all mattered somehow. But I know better, even if it doesn't feel that way.