Caio is not italian for food
06.17.04 - 10:31 am

I am sure this will come as no surprise to anyone out there who actually read this journal with any sort of regularity, but I'm not too good at updating this thing anymore. You see, life has this funny way of demanding your attention. It presents these little problems that need to be fixed. It invents these situations you need to get yourself out of. It reveals opportunities you need to consider.

This journal is avoidable and life is not.

Yes, there were some wonderful times, heartbreaking moments, and challenging setbacks brought on by living in New York City, but in the end I could no longer justify living there and persisting with a fruitless struggle. Facing eviction for the second time, I couldn�t find the energy to right myself financially and hunt for a new place just to remain at the same dead-end job with my girlfriend still three hundred miles away.

New York was like this great experiment, this endless test for me to prove that I could live on my own in one of the harshest climates in the world. People think that deserts are rough, but they�ve never tried to get a cheep Manhattan apartment.

I�d like to tell myself that I passed the test, that I succeeded in living on my own, but where is the cut-off point for success? If I�m measuring myself by merely surviving, what am I accomplishing?

Is that supposed to be life?

I packed up my stuff, for the fourth time in four years, and I finally left. What few friends I have left came out to bemoan my departure, but what they couldn�t understand is that this failure is one I can finally accept with pride.

I managed to live in New York for four years, two of them in Manhattan. I managed to stay up there all that time with almost no financial assistance, and only once did I actually earn enough money to clear the poverty line. For a lot of people, that sounds like financial stupidity, but for a stubborn guy like me...that�s proving something.

Now I�m down somewhere south, hunting for jobs with no luck. I�m searching for affordable transportation with no luck. I�m looking for a sign of what to do with my life, and I�m having no luck. I�m desperately trying to find a career, and I�m having no luck.

It�s not that there is less going on in my life. It�s not that these current events don�t deserve the literary attention I previously assigned to my life. The truth is that what this diary represented, the person that they explored, he�s not around anymore. That glutton for misery that explored every tortured internal thought in hopes that it might press into a memorable form, he�s become someone different.

It�s not that I�m any happier, even though in many ways I certainly am. The thing is that I�m different. The things that bother me aren�t the same anymore. The things that torture me aren�t the same anymore.

So while this diary was certainly beneficial to me at one time, the truth is that I have a new bitch.

I�m writing somewhere else now, and while the process is not quite as internal as it was before, it ends up being much more fulfilling to me in so many ways. I end up writing almost daily, sometimes several times a day, reporting the world around me in both pictures and words.

So, I guess what I�m trying to say is that the Insomniac�s Digest is dead.

This will be the last entry, and there probably won�t be any more to follow this one. I don�t expect that anyone actually checks this thing anymore, but I figured that I might as well send out a final goodbye to anyone who might stumble upon it. I often click upon a random page of this journal, and I�m often shocked at the writing that I�m presented with, and it seems as if a different person had written it. That person can continue to live here, but he�s not going to live with me anymore.

Thanks again to diaryland and everyone who I read and who read me. I appreciate it.

< Regress - Progress >


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Last Five Issues

06.17.04 - Caio is not italian for food

04.20.04 - homeless?

03.27.04 - best of

03.07.04 - production report

02.04.04 - milk, not buttermilk

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