Monday, January 30, 2006 // 12:06 AM

i've crashed again, and i recognize it.

the last time i felt this, was post promos, my post promos crash. i can pinpoint the exact moment this started, and that was waking up, thursday evening, after a half an hour nap, to drag myself out of bed and miss bs, miss stj, go shopping. if you're talking recognizable manifestation, that really is when i started Feeling Like Shit, i know that much, i felt it. i fell asleep and woke up completely completely exhausted. i've been trying to give it names since it started, and things like anger, things like running away, they come to mind. i walked out of service today because i just really really really. needed to get out of that room, out of that front row. i ended up in 206 playing the piano, playing the piano but not really playing the piano, do you know what i mean? you know how it feels when things feel far away, when you feel so strangely amputated from reality, when it feels like you are watching things happen without feeling like they are a part of you, when the whole world feels muted, dumbed down. i really really really wanted to play the piano, actually, and i think i did, but, but. i didn't hear a single bit of it, it did not feel like me, sitting there, running my fingers over the keys. sometimes you want things so much you imagine it physically aches, you sometimes, sometimes you give in to it.

i've been reading my archives from the corresponding time last year and i think it articulates everything that i feel, right about now. a little less, actually, i really do feel like this time the creeping bogeyman of a sensation has grown a little more substantial.

you know. i don't know what will happen if some day i crash like this, in entirely different circumstances. add another few notches of stress, add the isolation of a foreign country, add a deadline or two to meet, add another screwed up relationship. there really is something to be said for lethal combinations, this, this is not one of them. i had a pretty darn good chinese new year, for how crappy i'm feeling right now. i think. i think this is scarier than a nervous breakdown, really, because my nervous breakdowns are contained, have some sort of discernible trigger. i can't put my finger on this, this sudden violent and drifting aimlessness, this hollowness, it runs beneath and it rises and falls like the tide, and i can't for the life of me make out the reasons why.

"It was a combination of many factors," Dr. Hornicker said in his last report, written for no medical reason but just because he couldn't get the girls out of his head. "With most people," he said, "suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty.
-The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides