The Real

Prologue

I am an addict. There is no other way to put it. I keep returning for my fix and I feel like I need it even though I know that is not true. I can live without it, but I “need it.” The need has become so insistent lately that it has become all that I think of. Nothing else matters anymore but my next fix. I have no ambition. I don’t care about the future. My job is just a means to keep my high going.

I hate myself and what I have become. I don’t look at myself in the mirror. I can’t bear to meet the accusation in my own eyes.

“You could be so much more,” they seem to say.

I wish I could go to rehab, but there’s no rehabilitation for life. I’m not addicted to any chemical substance that I can flush out of my system. There is no twelve-step program for my affliction. I can’t hit rock bottom. The bottom opens beneath me like the maelstrom. There is no end here but humiliation, failure, and death.

“Stop being so melodramatic!” You may say.

But is it so melodramatic? How many people go through their lives desperately hating their choices and actions? How many people become the very thing they swore they never would become? How many people toil away in a job they hate, working for people they don’t like, and doing something they do not value?

This is who I am now. A worker bee, buzzing around a hive I care nothing for, producing nothing, meaning nothing, good for nothing.

I said that I was addicted to life. That isn’t exactly true. I am addicted to everything that masquerades as life. I am addicted to the pretend. The make-believe. The façade. The story. The fabrication.

I am addicted to all that appears good and fun and enjoyable that demands nothing of me and does not cost me effort. No effort of will is required for my addiction. At least the heroin addict has to garner the will to poke himself with a needle. My addiction requires nothing of me but my time. And oh! The time I give it.

I pour my time into it. I feed my time to it. I load my time onto the pyres of its pleasure. And each time I do the fire glows a little dimmer. The flames burn a little cooler. The returns diminish.

You would think this would tell me something. Something is wrong, therefore something must be changed. But no, like a dog, I return to my vomit and prove myself a fool. I watch, I gaze, I lounge, I play, I sit and sit and sit.

My body is showing the mistakes my mind has made. I am drooping, flabby, and unkempt. All I do is devour the world with my eyes. My eyes are frantic but the rest of me is idle. I dart across pages and over screens and screens and screens. I consume light and become the darkness. These screens have never cast shadows so dark.

I am one of the babbling public who speak only in references: The show, the movie, the book, the game. I have become media. I reference references that reference other references. How far back to we have to go find what is real? Is the real now becoming the referential? Is this all we are? Another reference to something, someone, in the distant past? There may be some wisdom in that, but it is lost on all of us. We don’t care about the real. The real is the boring, the mundane, and the ordinary. The real we make now is a referenced reality with just the references we individually choose to keep as real. This is real convoluted.

I am sick. I am physically ill with all the references I have taken in.

No more.

I will seek the real.