May 14, 2020: A list of thoughts and regrets keeping me up tonight.

Someone once said that writers write to forget.

It's after midnight. These are the thoughts running through my head right now:

• Being in middle school and having the wherewithal to realize my mother was getting fleeced by a Mexican naturopath doctor selling “electrically charged water”
  
  
• Getting fired; walking out of a building in downtown Seattle carrying my office plant, keyboard, books, and misc office supplies in a penguin themed Christmas gift bag. 
  
  
• Fantasizing about punching my former manager in the face. 
• Fantasizing about suffering in jail for a long time for punching my former manager in the face.
  
  
• Remembering telling the property manager at my apartment that I could no longer afford to live there after just having moved in two months prior. 
• Getting broken up with by my girlfriend on the last day in my apartment, and then laying in a stuffy room, on a mattress placed on the floor, surrounded by all of my belongings in messy piles, and then (against my better judgement) checking my email to find out I was denied unemployment benefits. 
  
  
• Regretting a facebook post I made when I was 19 where I wrote “fuck your Prius” on the back of my Jeep that I had for a few months before selling it and buying a Honda Fit.
  
  
• Regretting logging into my sister’s facebook account while I was in high school and messaging one of her friends to tell her that her makeup made her look like a whore. I had a crush on her, and I knew I wasn’t good enough to date her. I really wasn’t, in part due to my sense of inferiority.
  
  
• Regretting shaving my eyebrows in high school because I craved attention—even if it meant totally humiliating myself.
  
  
• Remembering getting black out drunk multiple times a week while I was stationed in Korea because I couldn’t stand the pain of consciousness; it was better to slip away than suffer my miserable life there.
  
  
• Picturing what I looked like from an outsider’s perspective when I was high on mushrooms, sitting in a friend's backyard, on a bucket, under a small awning, muttering to myself as I crossed back-and-forth over the threshold of drug induced psychosis and being merely hallucinating 
• Remembering the panic attacks that followed during the following months.
  
  
• Remembering waking up in jail with no memories of the night before.
• Remembering trading my socks in jail for a book that I never read and now realizing that I still owe a violent criminal a pair of cotton underwear.
  
  
• Wondering how I managed to get two corneal abrasions that sent me to the ER within three years.
  
  
• Regretting wasting my time grinding away hours in Runescape in middle school.
  
  
• Wondering what stopped me from being a better guitar player in high school. (Video games.)
  
  
• Wondering how many other people I went to high school with that might have shared my same anxiety and the sense of being detached from their body.
  
  
• Being frustrated with my dad for doing nothing to prepare me for the workforce.
  
  
• Fantasizing about punching my dad in the face for being enamored with Ken Ham. 
  
  
• Fantasizing about throwing a knife in my dad’s TV that I bought him with every time he says something positive about the Trump presidency. 
  
  
• Fantasizing about slapping my mother for one time expressing a naive, childish, fantasy about how she wished she could do homemaker duties for Tump in the White House, organizing his desk and dusting.
  
  
• Regretting fantasizing about slapping my mother.
  
  
• Regretting not taking high school math seriously. 
  
  
• Regretting not having the guts to have studied more math in college. 
  
  
• Regretting not valuing education earlier in life. 
  
  
• Realizing that other people have faced greater adversity than me and have achieved much more while both complaining and worrying much less.
  
  
• Pondering the fact that there are other people much worse off than me that don’t complain and worry as much as I do. 
  
  
• Thinking about how happiness has little to do with being a good person or developing good character. (For there are many happy bad people)
  
  
• Remembering that time my dad almost punched me in the face while I was brushing my teeth after came home from church on a Wednesday because I called him a “jerk”. 
  
  
• Remembering being a Christian and thinking that God wanted me to marry a particular girl; remembering how badly I wanted it to happen despite how unlikely it seemed at that time.
• Being thankful that I did not marry that girl. 
  
  
• Remembering being in early high school and repeatedly recommending the Halo soundtrack to a middle-age adult mentor who was a skilled musician and not taking the hint that what I was doing was actually really lame.
  
  
• Remembering skinning a bull-snake that was killed on the road and watching parasites squirm their way out of its intestines; being surprised at how quickly flies congregated.
  
  
• Regretting setting a large (and illegal) firework in what I thought was a teacher’s front yard as a prank but actually placing it in the wrong yard.
• being thankful the fuse broke and the firework never went off. 
  
  
• Feeling a sense of panic when I think of numerous times that I could have been caught with drugs and ruined my life.
  
  
• Remembering holding up my hand in front of my face pleading with my sister not to shoot me with a BB gun; remembering  at the pain of being shot and the blood blister that formed on my palm.
  
  
• Regretting spending too much time regretting and not enough time learning to change my behavior. 
  
  
• Remembering a close army friend who fell off the wagon and is probably addicted to opiates.
• Remembering the time we dropped acid and we acted like we had discovered the profoundest secrets of the universe and, for a while, really believing it. 
  
  
• Regretting trying to “save” friends, wasting energy lecturing them. 
  
  
• Beholding the tragedy of how much anxiety I regularly carry and yet fail to properly acknowledge. 
  
  
• Comparing my worst internal states of being with self-generated ideal caricatures of supposedly perfect people. —all so many ghosts. 
  
  
• Feeling that I am unremarkable and that my life would be better if I stopped pretending I was better than i really am. 
  
  
• Wishing I could live life with less thinking. 
  
  
• Regretting not starting this list sooner and getting all of this off my mind so I could go to bed at an earlier time.