The idea of posting writing on a blog dried up as an alluring outlet for me sometime around 2012. Perhaps it had something to do with the decline of Google Reader? The aggregation of RSS feeds really did guide my media consumption in a very specific way, and thereafter, I honestly can't remember reading blogs with any regularity, whereas I had been for years prior.
I kind of resorted solely to journalling, either in handwritten, typewritten, or digital form, and the results became increasingly inartistic, even inarticulate. The sense that there was not even a potential human that would be interacting with whatever was being written initially gave me license to cop to some of the most unglamorous, un-laudable truths I could sniff out in myself. It became more my practice to eviscerate myself than to justify, give context to, beautify, humanise, or be fair to myself. It didn't need to be funny or entertaining or even proceed logically or even end coherently. Many pages just stop dead in the middle of something because I was at a cafe and someone arrived, or because Grace came home, and there wasn't enough steam in what I was doing to pause the world outside to finish up.
But now, I'd like to have a place where I can share what I'm going through, because I can't always just drink it off, or have a friend to unburden myself to, or worse, start sending her messages. My emotions are chaos now, and my memory is bad. And I feel like perhaps having this page nearly constantly open, where I can update it anytime I have a fluctuation, will make me both feel a bit better, as though I had talked to someone, and will also allow me to look back and see where I've been, even over the course of a day.
Grace and I broke up, after more than five and a half years. I don't have the energy to tell that story again right now; I've told it to quite a few people in various forms and different levels of detail. I'm sure it'll come out here eventually. But for now, I'm just going to put down how I'm feeling, what I'm thinking of, and what I'm doing. I intend for the break-up to be the central feature here, but I'm not limiting it to that. Today I watched that Elysium film, and I'm now beginning another one in a similar vein, Captive State. I came home from teaching a student and sat in the dark for an hour after eating two сосиски в тесте (sosiski v testye), which are basically pigs in a blanket. I've been eating a bit of crap, and I haven't visited the gym once since she left, although right before she did, I paid 16,000 rubles, or about two hundred dollars, for a year long membership. I know that going would help me mentally, but I just haven't felt like it.
And then after having thought about suicide on the way home, messaged her, sat in the dark, closed the computer, fell asleep and woke up, opened the computer to check if she'd responded and saw it'd only been twenty minutes, I decided I'd make watching this film something productive. I would take notes; I would pay attention to the decisions made, the themes, the stand-out moments. I'd construct a reading, a thesis, like in university. I would do something rather than idly gorge my mind. And immediately thereafter, I picked up the violin and began practicing scales. I saw Capital lying there, still unfinished, beckoning to me with its power, its challenge. I saw my Russian textbooks, comprehensive guides to the case system, sat on the coffee table. I remembered how in the first day after she and I broke up, I was invigorated that I now had all the free time to develop everything I wanted about myself, and this is still true. I don't have a lot of students; I don't have a lot of money now that I'm paying her rent. But I have time; I have interests. And I have ability. I will make the most of this. I am sad; I am lonely; I am empty. But there's much more to it than that.
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