ACCOZZAGLIA

I should be asleep. It’s 5am. And for the last several months, this hour became my bedtime ever since I left my body clock to its own devices.

Not so tonight. I fell asleep around 11:30 and found myself wide awake around 4. The minutiae of my sleep sked is not so important as the fact that I feel entirely disoriented after the last several hours of low-grade unpleasantries.

Goddamn hormones. The same chemical that gives bodies like mine a sense of empowerment and expression can also make you a heaping mass of sob and nerves. Making the mundane feel just plain magnaminous.

Perhaps I’m overreacting, but it feels like the tides just changed in the last 24 hours. Quite radically, even. Priorities have yet been moulded a new way still, and I’m not sure if I’m ready for this. The incessant dischord and cacophony of my ADD-impaired mind is not helping things, either.

* * *

One note that worries me: just how little can you know someone that you happen to consider a best friend? Despite sharing our fair share of scary, tough shit over the last year (and a lifetime before that), I feel more distant from the person I question right now than I could have ever anticipated.

Of whose volition, though?

She’s closely guarded — for legit reasons, given her tumultuous life history. But that guardedness is exactly what makes communicating candidly and without reservation with her so goddamned difficult. Like I have to apply a different standard to her, versus the others in my inner circle. Completely.

As her friend, I want to be there in that capacity when things are tough, as they’ve been of late. But do I really have a bloody clue as to what she’s been going through? Of course not. Or at least that’s the impression I feel that she’s emoting. She’s confronting ishoos that I likely never will, given our unique circumstances, but how does that impede upon our universal life experiences?

It’s just impossible to bring someone into the fold when they aren’t (and may never be) ready to acknowledge that they are not the only ones to know what it feels like to be Atlas. Certainly not from someone who is so much like them that it brings the fear of all things unspeakable into the mix.

But despite my own insecurity about something which I really have no business being — concerned — it’s a price I’m willing to pay for said friendship.

So.

* * *

The question I hate most, when I have so many things on the itinerary, is, “Where am I gonna start?” This question always hobbles — even petrifies — me into indecision. Cognitively, I’m aware that once I get a rhythm by just choosing a direction and sticking with it, I feel so much relief in the long run. But I hold back, fully aware that once I do pick a task and stick to it, the others are relegated to the background, utterly neglected in the process. And what good is that, anyway?

[nonsequitir: dawn's first light begins here around 4:30am right now. in 35 days, it'll begin at 3:45am. wheee.]

Furthermore, I’m aware that this panic and sense of anxiety is something probably chemical. Cycles and all.

I mean, my personal life is something that isn’t a problem these days (what a new gold relief), and for that, I can’t begin to express enough gratitude for making up so much lost ground after four years of being placed on emotional hold. I have a weekend of holiday time coming up in June, and three people have made their overtures to take me aside and do unspeakable things (as well as steal unstealable things). Whatever could possibly be bad about this?

And yet, why the bloody anxiety? Make it stop? Hello?

Not helping matters any, my confidence in visual branding, copywriting and creative direction feels completely compromised these days. Perhaps the applauded, but rejected branding proposal in early April played a major hand in this (sekrit hint: the accozzaglia icon was ruthlessly lifted from a portion of this rejected branding kit proposal).

Perhaps it’s my own fear that creative direction will make a success out of me (which sounds contrived until you consider that I don’t wanna be a creative director for the rest of my professional life. In fact, I’d be thrilled if it just ended tomorrow and I could start law school instead).

Perhaps my recent lack of applying this stuff is also a culprit. But it’s almost as if I never created anything in my portfolio and would be incapable now of reproducing any of it if asked to do so.

Talk about absurdity and embarrassment.

At least I get to discover what it’s like to be a legit delegate Saturday. I’m joining my fellow Green bud Lisa on a road trip in her cheerfully bright art car — a Geo Metro — to one of the myriad “Saint” burgs in this here fine state [pfffft] about an hour and change away. It’ll be educational to learn how democracy works in a nation where it simply … doesn’t.

And when I get home from the Green nomination convention, I’ll take up the invitation to go to my first-ever strip/dancing club for my friends’ combo bachelour/bachelourette party, before they marry each other early next month. Hmmm. Both are chain smokers. Both are about my age. One is beginning to reveal symptoms of Parkinson’s. Both are wonderful people. And both know good eighties music when they hear it. One is a DJ, while the other is a faboo fashion diva.

Such an aimless, disjointed entry. This must be why they created LJ: to expose the banality in all our lives and make us unwitting exhibitionists and voyeurs at the same time.

And for that, I owe an apology to every voyeur who comes across this disjointed rant. Why?

For subjecting them to five minutes of living literary hell, that’s why.