First Entry

A short stream-of-consciousness of the mind of a person stricken with socio-disaffective disorder.

I’ve attempted suicide for the second time this year. Mom keeps me in my room all the time now. I look out of the window and I see that dusk has arrived. The sky’s alit with fire and I close the curtains, tears welling up in my eyes. What if the roof catches fire? Where would I go? I hear the phone ring. I pick it up and say, “Hello?” but they’ve already hung up. Nobody gives a damn these days. I’m better off by myself. I really don’t need to take my medicine, either. Outside the front door someone is screaming.

Schizophrenia has a lot of negative connotations. I’ve been told, once, before that people are afraid that I can’t be trusted. That I’m a good person, but with my illness one day I might SNAP and hurt somebody. Like my granddad before me, I’m a functional schizophrenic. I have a job. I’ve had dates. I’ve stayed pretty focused in school, up until later in high school. I was going to drop out, anyway. And I’m happier working part time. I get to stay home the rest of the time and write. I’ve never hurt anybody.

Work has been alright. They keep me at part time and I know that I’ll never be a manager because I keep getting distracted. Funny story: I was washing the dishes one day and I hear this big explosion outside the back door. I open the back door and I see that a truck had crashed into a stop sign and the driver broke through the windshield and landed right in front of where I had just stepped out of. He was bleeding pretty badly and he got up, clothes torn to hell, and asked me if I could call EMS for him. I was going to. My cell phone was in the manager’s locker because we all have to put our cell phones in there to make sure that we don’t talk on the job. So, I go and try to find the manager and the manager’s at the front of the store and I’m asking him to help me get my cell phone and my manager runs to the back with me to look at the guy. The guy had walked in the store and he’s leaning over boxes and he’s bleeding over everything and my manager‘s just yelling at him to get out or we’d be sued for helping somebody. Now, I’m a good person, so I yell at my manager to help the guy, and I’m looking outside and I’m seeing a whole bunch of other people laying on the ground, hurt, because the man’s truck actually caused a pileup behind him and everyone’s actually stumbling around now, like Night of the Living Dead. My manager looks at me and I know that he’s going to fire me, but instead he just grabs the guy and throws him out of the store. I couldn’t believe it. I needed the job, so I never said anything else to him, but I knew from then on that my manager was against me. He’d never help push me forward.

People can be really mean. That’s why I don’t believe in religion. I know there’s a Jesus and a God, but I don’t worship them. I mean, if God and Jesus really cared there wouldn’t be any war, would there? There wouldn’t be any poverty or AIDS or 80’s music. I know they exist, though. God shows himself to me every chance he gets. And I’m not saying, like, his image shows himself on my toast, but when I’m walking through a busy street I see him on the face of everyone who passes by. Or when I walk through a garden field at the park, the wind will blow and I’ll see him in the rustling flowers. He’s here, but he’s just watching. I worshipped the Lord for ten years of my life, so I know what it’s like to worship. I just know better now. The pastor doesn’t even understand. I know what he’s thinking when we talk. The way he stands still but his body is ready to step back. He doesn’t have faith. People try to kid themselves into thinking that they have a relationship with our Lord, but they think that he’s up in the sky, looking down on us, as we do whatever we want to do. It’ll be funny when they finally realize where God really is while they’re in bed with a stranger. I know about that, too.

Image is very important to me. I’ll buy lots of issues of Men’s Vogue, GQ, sometimes every Vanity Fair, because they’re all mixed in and I can take inspiration from the women’s clothes as well as the men’s clothes. And even though I hate the 80’s, I’m still a big supporter of the androgynous look. And the androgynous look doesn’t apply to women anymore. It actually applies a lot more to men these days. Lithe bodies and rosy, high cheekbones make a good model these days. I’ve been told a million times before that I could model. I’ll be walking in the mall, always by myself, because I don’t like people. I’ve already written about that. I don’t really miss being around people anymore, to tell the truth. I feel calmer by myself than I ever did around a group of friends, or even one friend. But, yeah, I’m at the mall all the time and people will ask me if I’m a model. I tell them I am, but not signed with a specific agency. A lot of times people will just pick me up from the street and ask me to be in a photo shoot that they’re doing. I tell them that I’ll do it because I need new Myspace pictures, anyway. I’ve done underwater shoots, shoots on top of buildings, bondage leather, but I wasn’t naked for it. I’ve done catalog, and I even showed up in a JC Penny catalog a couple of years ago. It came in the mail and I was really surprised that they would have picked me to be in it. I don’t think that I’m really that attractive. I mean, if I was I would be signed to an agency already. I don’t get a lot of girls, though. But, then again, I don’t like people.

I don’t think about death all that much. I mean, I know that it’s coming and it’s crossed my mind, like if I’m awake and I can’t sleep at night. For me, life is too, too fast paced to think about it. I’m an average guy but so many crazy things happen to me, on a daily basis, and I have just really learned to live in the moment. I’m not someone who will rob a bank or go on a shooting spree just for a quick thrill but I like to have fun. I like hiking. I got lost in the woods, actually, once while I was hiking. I couldn’t find human civilization for two days. Luckily, I always bring a survival guide with me so I didn’t really have that much of a problem those couple of days. It was very peaceful. I lived off of the land and I slept in abandoned bear caves. I remember, the last night that I was sleeping I heard a growl, maybe, ten feet away from me. I jumped up with a start and I started clapping because I remember that that’s supposed to scare bears away. I saw a HUGE outline of something trundle away and I went back to sleep. I wasn’t afraid. God wouldn’t be as merciful as to give me a slow death. He hates me, as evidenced by my frantic life.

I look back out the window and it’s finally dark. I forgot to turn on my lamp because I was too busy typing this so I turn it on. I feel a little like Gollum from Lord of the Rings. Right now I’m thinking about death, and I think about my life. When I was little, I guess when everyone’s little, we have this dream of the wife, the two point five kids and the dog complete with the white picket fence, living in suburbia. Living the American dream. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. After my parents die, how will I live? It’s a scary thought. Maybe I can sign on with a professional modeling agency and take care of myself with that. But I know that my looks will fade. I feel a hand rest on my shoulder. Just for a second. I know that it’s Jesus. He’s watching me. He’s watching me type this and he’s probably hovering over my shoulder reading it. I don’t mind. I guess because I don’t have a choice. I’m a good person. And I’m okay because, at least, for right now, I’m safe. Outside the front door someone is screaming.

Reviews

[Shane Mohamed]

Writing about society and it's conflicts, whether civil or political has always been a great key to the reader's heart, if approached from the correct perspective. All of the previous great authors discussed social unrest in their works, whether fictional or non-fictional. This is a good recipe for success.