Have you ever been in a situation where everything is quite obviously spiraling down into inevitable destruction, but you can't seem to think of any viable way to extricate yourself?

Welcome to my world.

So, in the past... oh, about a week now, I have slept twice. Why, do you ask? Because every night this week, at somewhere between 6pm and 8pm, things have gone to shit. Either one of my roommates will allow a small herd of his drunken friends into the house, or the other one will decide to crank up the stereo in the living room so that he can listen to music while he's fucking around in the basement. This has usually gone on until at least 2am or 3am.

On the plus side, on two occasions this week, Adrienne has been nice enough to let me sleep on the futon in her living room, so I've actually managed to sort of cope.

And that would be all fine and good, a stopgap measure at best, but something that should tide me over until I can either find somewhere new to live (a difficult prospect considering that I am on a fixed income), sell enough of my stuff that I can stay on someone's couch for a few weeks until I can find somewhere new to live, or fucking kill myself.

The only problem is that I just learned what exactly went on in the house last night after I left to sleep at Adrienne's. Seems that one of my roommates got shit-faced drunk, invited a bunch of dodgy strangers into the house, and spent most of the night smoking crack.

I'm not fucking kidding you.

Two of the goddamn things I insisted upon making clear when I moved into this place in the first place were that 1 - there would never, EVER be any drugs in this house, and 2 - there would be no smoking in the house of any kind, because I am fucking allergic and there is a small chance that it will fucking KILL ME.

I have no idea what the fuck I'm going to do.

- JCH

So recently, someone asked me why I never post in my livejournal anymore. Which is a good question, really. I mean, on a superficial level, looking back, I used to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and fill this space with all sorts of stuff on an amazingly regular basis. Now, however, I don't.

I figured that I would look into it, and see if there was a good reason. I have to do that sometimes, because while my reasons for doing most things can be justifiably summed up with "Eh, crazy.", sometimes, there's an underlying reason, and when I figure those out, on occasion, I learn something.

This time, however, it's all pretty straightforward. While investigating my recent silence, I realized two things that, in my diseased mind, explain everything.

The first is that, while on the surface it may appear as if I have always written a great deal in this space, the truth of the matter is that very nearly all of this has been whining. Seriously. I complained about everything. How hard it was for me to find work when I would spontaneously faint or break out in tears while trying to muster up the guts to talk to someone. How sick I always was. How I never had any money. How people kept having emotional responses to my actions that I just couldn't understand. Bitch, bitch, bitch.

That alone explains a lot of why I don't have much to say anymore. There was something wrong with me, and I was projecting it on everything around me. Now, I'm working on fixing it, and that coupled with a greater awareness of the fact that what I see, hear, and experience is in a great number of cases not even remotely similar to what's actually going on in the world around me, has left me with a whole heck of a lot less to complain about.

In fact, I'm pretty damn happy. Sure, there are still scary things that I have to deal with (Like the fact that vastly increased heating expenses have left me with a bill for utilities that my fixed income won't entirely cover), but so long as I take my medication and stop listening to the moronic proles I used to surround myself with who continually told me that not living up to the expectations of people I don't care about was the end of the world, I have the capacity to beat that fear. Or at least hold it at bay.

I mean, come on. I have a roof over my head, roommates who are fucking awesome people, I just bought groceries, and Poppy wished me happy Valentine's Day at one in the morning. What the fuck do I have to be unhappy about?

There is a second reason why I don't write as much anymore, though. I used to use my LJ primarily as a forum to communicate things to my friends. And you know what I realized when I took a look at my user information just the other day? Of the over seventy-five people on my journal's list of friends, I have had meaningful contact with fewer than ten of them in the past year.

More interesting, perhaps, is the fact that in most cases, there hasn't really been any appreciable change in my quality of life as a result, either.

I guess what I'm trying to say, really, is that if anyone reading this really cared to hear about what I have to say or how my life is going, they'd be motivated enough to actually talk to me.

And if you don't care, more power to you! If I've learned anything over the past seven or eight years of living in this city, it's that caring leads to ulcers. And god how I have come to hate ulcers.

So will you be hearing more from my livejournal any time soon? Not bloody likely. Send me an e-mail or something, we'll have a couple of beers over lunch and catch up on life.

- JCH

Yeah, for reference, my journal is, as the locals say, "Friends Only". And after going back through three or four years of archives and editing them all so that they were only visible to my friends... goddamn am I boring.

Comment here if you want to be added.

- h3l!x