Based on decades of observation, I propose that sudden high levels of external praise always trigger an equal amount of inner self-loathing.
--Hazie, from Chuck Palahniuk's Tell-All
Going into full details would be boring, but suffice it to say that I had my heart broke in the Spring of 2000. The very short version would go like this: I came back from a college trip to Dauphin Island and felt tired. I had been tired for months. I was a Resident Advisor [aka, RA] and spent a lot of time helping out with the front desk and volunteering to put on programs and events. My grades were slipping. My friendships were slipping. My ability to handle my own emotions? Gone. Right at this point in time, a person I thought I was at least somewhat dating — it would be years before I realized my own demisexuality and how that was impacting such relationships — got fed up waiting for me to progress with her physically and unilaterally decided it was time to date someone else. In hindsight, I do not blame her. At the time, it was like a breaking point.
I found out while waiting to hear from her and then seeing her — she was a resident in the dorm I was RA over — go to her room with someone else.
I was out of commission for three days. Did nothing. No classes. No thoughts. No real TV. No real computing. I ate and drank, I suppose, but that's a guess. Probably shitty ramen and cheap soda. I remember mostly being in bed and just willing the great machine that was the dorm and its needy residents to go on without me. While it was actually something like a week before I left the dorm for anything more than a quick night time stroll, three days passed before I even so much as allowed myself to mentally exist in a world where other people might reside. After the three days, though, I turned angry. Not angry enough to realize that the failure was with both of us. Just angry enough to want to whine a little, and in this pre-Social Network days the one tried and true way to whine outloud was to either get drunk and make a fool of yourself or to skip straight past the booze to the end and write poetry. My drinking days came later, by the way.
Picture the black t-shirt. The nascient beard. The chubby, depressed, and deeply broken-hearted geek sitting in his gray-paint room. He probably stinks because those three days have had nothing but the food you find in dorm room cabinets and staring up at ceilings. No showers. He must have tripped into the bathroom from time to time but likely just the minimum. What he did have was some poems brewing: the angry, whiny, emo sort. He does not want to leave his room, doesn't actually want to talk about it, but, for reasons that even he could not hope to explain he wants to share them. Got that image in mind? Good. It was awful.
I sat down, on my old Windows 98 computer (already old by the year 2000's standards) and wrote three e-mails off the top of my head. One for each day I had been out of touch. Each was a poem and I am pretty sure that none of these first three had explanation (with apologies to all those friends). One included the line "Some days you're the windshield and some days you smash". Another had something like "I would give you roses if I knew you wouldn't throw them away". I forget the last one, but I'm guessing it was maudlin. Then, I sent them out to just about everybody. One hell of a group send.
A cry for help? Eh, no. Only in the way that flinging a textbook at someone is to asking them to help you study. I was in that angry-sad stage, where you shove people away and then dare them to say something. Mostly, though, they were all meant for her to read even though she was only one of the two or three dozen recipients that eventually ended up getting them — though not all at once.
That's right, I sent them to her like an abusive ex. The rose poem? Rose was her middle name. It gets even worse than that. I actually later bought a book of rose photography, handwrote that poem in it, and gave it to her. Jesus. The absolute saddest part is that she stayed on the poetry list and never once complained. I mean, in what might be close to my own defense, she would also do shit like share discussions of her love life with me. She would almost randomly reach out to me to complain about her sex-life or how she wasn't sure if she actually liked the guy that she was still with. It was grotesque on both our parts and it took me way too long to be able to phrase it as such.
Moving on to sad-sack middle, though: over the next two years or so, I wrote a lot of e-mails. Just the poems I felt were salvageable, semi-keepable, added up to 690 different poems. This does not include those that were scribbles, nor the paragraphs of explanatory text that went with them, the replies, and so forth. Each poem was sent to probably an average of a dozen people, maybe two dozen at the peak with only seven or eight at the bottom end. Lots and lots of drivel that generated, possibly, a dozen good poems. Yes, that's a rose pun.
Enough good ones got out that some praise and suggestions and feedback got back to me. One friend printed out several of them. Another forwarded them on to other friends. Some would quote them. Several friends would tell me about their favorite. It was the written, intangible record of the redemption of William Doug Bolden via the expurgation of rotten text from his tortured soul and it almost worked. Except, well, she was technically still around; I burned a good handful of bridges at the end of my RA job; it took me another couple of years just to get back into classes; and there is something about bemoaning yourself to the world that breeds further bemoanings. You become addicted to others seeing your darker side. I had been e-mail blogging nearly a poem a day on average for two straight years. Then, in 2002 or so, I changed the list over, tightened my poetry belt, narrowed it down to only about half a dozen or so core people with some extras here or there, and ended the old list in favor of a much more irregular thing.
During the entire duration, all the praise and all the positive feedback that has built up over those two years were deep down taken as something like, "The only thing people like about you is your suffering." I actually started trying to live up to this twisted ideal as a whiny, broken, ball of pus and I wanted to shock and surprise people. To some degree, I did, including such great lines as "masturbating to the sound of my own phlegm". I started to realize I had that go. Stop fishing for condolences. Stop bitching about her in coded words.
I did not stop soon enough, alas. That self-ideation as the fucked up, bitchy-ass poet set a course for my personal communication skills that would takes years to iron back out.
The 690 poems that I kept from that time will probably follow me, largely unused, until some random hard-drive crash writes them out of existence. My bread crumbs leading me back to the shape and sound of my mental breakdown, where reading I wrote back then even shows me writing in an altogether different rhythm than I normally write (the same rhythm that surfaced during the Summer of Hell, examples would be hard but it is weird to read what I wrote during those times because it would be generally unrecognizable from my normal form of writing). Like a "Dark Doug" or maybe "Depressed Doug" is squished down inside as a twin and he comes out, less charismatic, less charming, less forceful but somehow more direct. It is strange, and one day it will be forgotten. Thank goodness.
However, while the 690 are the core collection, there were other bits: snippets and half-assed attempts at fragments, that are not included. Most are already gone, deleted with old e-mail accounts and thrown into the trash as pointless old files. By something like luck I unearthed three or four snippets that has been either sent out to only a few, or (in a couple of cases) I wrote with myself as the sole recipient because I intended to go back and finish them later and ended up forgotten. I took them, realized that all of them were a waste, and so essentially threw them away for a second time, this time for good, except I recycled bits of them into one final poem from that era. This one is dedicated to that now Past-Doug with his weird, stilted way of talking and his demands for attention from the very people he is more or less attacking.
Good night, good sir, and I'll not forget you; though I would prefer to never be you again.
I remember
Yesterday
As a series of sounds, syllables, smells, taste
Sensations:
Words, delicacies, unspoken lines, wheels within
Wheels.
What good will any of us
Laugh
Into being like a frog from a river's bank, like a
Finding of the self
Well after you are damned if you'll keep looking?
What good will any of us
Die,
Thinking we are becoming?
Over there, a fountain in the sunset, unworking,
A marble edifice to some forgotten plumbing.
And here: a tree, axis mundi, bhodi, tum-tum.
There some weeds,
Somewhere an age
Of man
Gilded silver and iron wrought:
The necessity,
The things we hate,
The dance in the sunrise, dew stained, and dun.
Mirrored by the waters
Where the seas sought when they ran
Their course and knew themselves done.
The earth, silent, consumes.