You grow up and you calm down

The Clash once said “you grow up and you calm down”.

I guess when I am still quoting from punk bands to talk about your thoughts I ain’t quite there yet.

Once – years ago now – I started an internet diary called Superman’s Dead. To be honest with you, I don’t remember the day itself. It was the summer, that I remember. Whether it was a long, hot summer or a largely rainy one I couldn’t tell you.

I was troubled.

Yeah, I know – I’m not so very straight these days either. The moods come down on me like summer thunderstorms; the clouds build up, and just steadily lower on me. But I was worse then. Then again, who isn’t at that age?

I was in one of my love-struck funks. I don’t remember what was bugging me about my relationship with [Fiona], but like I say – I was troubled. On this particular day I got bored with my angst, and started my alternative diary.

To describe what I was like you only really had to read my first entry. The anti-hero wakes up in a strange bed next to a girl he doesn’t know, dresses, and leaves before she wakes up. It was a good fiction from my own life. I created a typically anti-social anti-hero who I intended to be largely dislikeable.

The thing with this diary was some days I would write some anti-social fiction, other days I would just rant on about things I didn’t like and didn’t feel comfortable putting my name to. Stuff like how I didn’t, and don’t believe, in such a thing as selfless behaviour...

A funny thing about that diary was that people liked it. Sometimes I used to go to chart rooms and pick fights. I had no interest in “chatting”, I just wanted arguments with people I thought weren’t as smart as me – I can be strangely conceited like that, sometimes. More often than not in these arguments I would end up with person after person sending me private messages, wanting to talk. The diary was a bit like that, I guess people liked the brutal honesty – because although I was sometimes writing fictional accounts of nights drinking vodka and playing pool, it was always honest in the feeling.

Some people were pretty pissed off when I told them I wasn’t who I appeared to be. Some of these people are still knocking about on Open Diary, I’m pretty sure, and I think they’re still bitter about it. I tried explaining once or twice I wasn’t the heel and the fraud they made me out to be, but the diary’s anti-hero would never have apologised for anything, so...

This is all a very long preamble.

A few weeks back, I started to register the same name here. I have periodically revived the diary over the years – but almost always quit it when I get uncomfortable splitting my mind in two the way I was doing. This time I quit one step earlier. I got the “please click here to confirm and register your diary” email, but had changed my mind it I didn’t register it.

I’ve been thinking recently.

I mentioned in a thread over in the forums that when I was a teenager I used to really identify with Holden Caulfield, but how in later years I have felt more irritated by him than anything else. Over the past few days I got the chance to catch the film Igby Goes Down, which I think I’m right in saying is a loose adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye – Igby’s style of speech reminded me a lot of Holden Caulfield, even though the plot had very little in common with Salinger’s novel.

The thing is this. It’s not me anymore.

I could argue it was never me, not really, not in practice – but emotionally, I always identified. And though I still have my... issues, and the occasional diary entry locked from the world, I’m not splitting my psyche into different diaries.

Yes, I still want to stay up all night, high on speed, painting – or probably, more likely, writing. And yes, there is a dark side to me and that cold spot in my head that is sharp and clear as a knife. And yes, I still don’t want to spend my life sitting on the couch night after night, stuffing fucking junk food into my mouth and watching spirit crushing soul destroying game shows…

But now I want to meditate in desert and get a feeling of the great oneness of the universe like that one time I did in Moab.

And, yeah, I get disaffected and sarcastic and, yeah, I distance myself from people almost as often as I get too close to them. But all the same, I’m not my own anti-hero. I may not have the necessary character traits to be the hero, but I’m something more now – I'm more than just the sum of my dysfunctional parts.

This is all.

No great insights, but I just wanted to share this moment of clarity.