For instance, I would of course remember having met CG again anyway, as I'm presently feeling like that was the beginning of what would end up being a truly screwed up period of my life -- one that isn't quite over even yet, really.

But you see, this is where context helps, and where a journal is a good thing to help create that. Meeting CG did effectively blot out everything else that had been going on from my perspective -- and that was bad then, but it would be even worse if it continued to do so now.

For instance, I honestly had not read this entry since I wrote it, but reading it now makes it clear how very screwed up I already was at the time. I mean, it's not like I recall the time right before I broke my hand and only months after I broke my ankle as the most psychologically healthy period of my life. No, I did in fact recall this as something of a downward spiralling period of my life -- the excessive drinking which resulted in two broken bones being a rather hard to miss tell tale of this.

What I wasn't likely to have remembered quite accurately -- okay, what I didn't remember until I was scanning my archives -- is that what followed then was honest-to-goodness attempts to run damage control, to at least stop things from getting worse, if not to make them better.

I got a little religious -- or at least spiritual, I suppose we'd say. I don't suppose I can claim normal Christianity very well. Whatever, the point is I knew some things had to change if I wanted to be happy in the end. And yeah, I did stop drinking too, though I don't see an entry that's written specifically about that. It's something I kind of forget myself, except that the not-getting-boozed up and the not-trying-to-get-laid-constantly were pretty likely the two things that made me oh-so-popular at the hipster club of my discontent that summer. I stopped drinking like a fish. I stopped trying to use casual sex as a solution to loneliness. I even stopped smoking pot, and honestly I don't think you could get a more huge indicator of a desire for change out of me than that one.

No, wait. Yeah, you can. I didn't just become less social in the dating arena, I stopped hanging out with pretty much everyone, from closest friends to vague acquaintances. Probably most crucially, I cut ties with my best friend of sixteen years, because I really couldn't see how the relationship was healthy.

So okay, by any stretch even this period of my life would have stilled seemed a bit tumultous. But the point is the direction that you're going at any given time.

Life is never, ever going to be perfect for any of us -- in fact, we might hazard to say that you're in the most precarious position possible if things seem perfect, because you're then unsuspecting of what will come next. And it is funny, because I seemed to be learning to be happy only a week before I met CG again.

Well, we all know how that one turned out.

What's most disturbing to me is that, in my desire to appear normal, stable, and happy to CG -- who, as it turns out, was not any of those things herself -- I started doing all the things again that had screwed me up in the past. I drank again, first to be social with her then to deal with the stress she introduced into my life. I started hanging out again with the people I'd stopped hanging out with -- again, first so that I'd appear more "normal" to her, then so that I actually would have a social network and some sort of support outside of my relationship with her. (No, the irony of going to people you'd decided to avoid for support is not lost on me.)

And just to be clear, I'm not blaming any of these things on her. She actually never knew where I was when I met her, so of course she couldn't be in on the willing decision to backslide. I'm just saying that these side-effect things stop being so inconsequential, once the essential conflict has reached its inevitable conclusion. And yeah, I could try to explain what happened with CG and I better, but I still remember all of that quite vividly enough myself, so I don't feel any need to go over it again. Suffice to say, too much time with a crazy person will make you crazy.

Or, more seriously, it can easily just leave you drained, and lost as far as your sense of direction in life.

You see, where CG's reappearance in my life was particularly badly placed is that I've realized in recent years that I do want a family. I was never sure about that when I was younger. I mean, I had my own reasons for doubting, among them simply that the domesticated thing simply didn't fit with what I considered a "fun" life, therefore I couldn't see myself happy doing it. And, I figured, if I wasn't happy I'd just be one of those miserable dads who makes everyone around him miserable -- or worse, the one who does the same by not being around.

Well, I've had my single partying fun. More than enough of it in fact, as my state the summer before I met CG shows. I was becoming stable and happy because I was ceasing to do the things that made me unstable and unhappy -- that simple, really.

And I didn't need to meet her just then, because she wanted what I wanted, she was just the wrong person for me to do that with...

My point tho, with this link-ridden entry, is that I understand the malaise I've been suffering from of late. And I mean, it really is bad. Rather thankfully, that financial-aid scam isn't going to happen, because schools (mine at least) do have sense enough to not just give money to people who don't even register for classes. This does mean, tho, that I have no idea how I'm going to pay the stack of bills on the table ... and the bills aren't just intangible things of course, but representations of how very fucked up my life can become in quite short order.

But the malaise? It's the result of feeling like I just can't win. It's the result of feeling like there's no point in bothering -- there's no reason to try and believe in anything, because things just won't work out in the end, regardless.

It's a bunch of self-pitying bullshit, of course. Other people are successful at all kinds of things, even families, all the time. Hell, I've beens successful at plenty of things myself in the past.

What I can't get around is that none of them ever made me happy, in the sense of feeling like I was no longer alone. And yeah, we might say that everybody's alone, always, and there's no getting around that.

But what exactly is the point if that's true?

To recap: I tried everything I knew how to accomplish the one thing that really mattered to me. I didn't accomplish it, but I did screw myself in a lot of other ways in the process. How should I motivate myself to do something else, under the circumstances?