LARP
I have just poured myself a stiff glass of $100 scotch into a novelty McDonald’s ‘crystal’ glass my housemate had lying around. With it, I took 10mg of diazepam, prescribed for alcohol detox that I have not followed and have no longer have any intention of following. The idea of me, compared to the me that exists in my mind, is of an old psychiatrist, smiling as he finishes off a week of brilliant and alluring intellectualism that will define future psychology. The reality is that I am a careless speaker, a chronic underachiever, a narcissist. There is not a single original thought in my mind, and there never has been. I am at most a student of far greater men.
In a few hours I will have a shower, and put on my salt and pepper jacket that I bought from an op shop for $20 in 2016 because I felt Jordan Peterson was the father I never had, and one who would save me from myself, when in reality it was him who needed saving by me. I will drive to university in my beat up car, previously nearly totalled from a drunk driving accident I was responsible for at the age of 19 that I never paid any of the consequences for, as well as many bumps and scrapes I have gathered over the years from being an inattentive, shitty driver. I will hold my head high and my shoulders back as I go sit in the classroom, being aloof and mysterious as I write about ideas that I pretend are my own, but are actually regurgitated from far more brilliant men. The purpose of this is to develop intrigue, desire; who is this mysterious, well educated man who speaks so well?
And I will put up a distant but polite exterior, letting them know, no, we will not be friends, we are colleagues at best. But of course this will only increase their desire for kinship, and my gratification will come from that. For being desired, the gratification I have not earned for being desired. I can only win, and they can only lose. I remain to them a tragic, brilliant but flawed intellectual, doomed to his own loneliness. But only if I could help him! They think. What if I could help him out of his shell? Show him the good of the world? Render him away from his world weariness? His alcoholism? His misogyny?
They do not realise I am a chronic underachiever. They do not realise that I probably could have saved myself at any time, and that I ultimately resent the idea of being saved despite the desire for it. But to reveal this would be for me to concede the game, to intentionally lose and pay all the costs of doing so. Without the game, the one which I criticise so many for playing, a pointless, unwinnable, social game, one that corrupts society and its members through dishonesty, I would die. If I had to live by the values I preached, it would mean facing something that I cannot face. It would mean acknowledging lessons I teach. It would mean telling all, all of the gratification in the world, no, I shall not partake, I shall have nothing, to spite myself, and somehow find happiness. And I cannot do that, because I have never known true happiness. Partially because I never had a choice, but then when I did have one, I chose what was familiar, what was comfortable, what was convenient. I never put in the work for it. I resented the idea that I might need to work for good things, because when I was meant to have good things, I didn’t.
And I have guilt about my desire. My pleasure. I cannot be myself with others without being drunk, and in that I am not myself. To paraphrase someone else, the burden of the positive experience is obliterated by my own obliteration: it is not happening to me. The positive is intolerable and undeserved. I am saved from the guilt of my pleasure, for it was not my pleasure.
So I will sit here and drink my scotch, and masquerade as an intellectual, and live my life as a lonely, miserable bastard, and pretend I didn’t choose this. Then I will be bitter and resentful, and pretend I am a victim, and that I never had any agency, even as I quoff down another pill I know will most likely make me take a hard dive into a power pole as I drive.