There's something about tonight that seems to be catching all of us, at least my fellow journalers. This air of self-loathing, of being tired/disillusioned. Of seeing through all our ruses and wondering what the hell we are doing.

This romantic notion I have of myself is tawdry, and used. There are people who actually know who I am and know that I am needy and nothing special.

I don't know how to get around this. I hate coming here. Leaving this place means I have to rebuild my myth, or discard whatever I had and start a new one, one that I can pretend is real and will save me and the world.

It's ridiculous, how much of a myth I need to keep myself interested. And for what? What, in the end, do I do that matters? Who actually cares?

And now, right now, am I saying this for sympathy? It just seems another part of the artifice--some 'dark night of the soul' into which every person who possesses some spark of passion must find themselves at one time or another. Not that I haven't been here before.

At this point I doubt the things that I thought were most genuine about myself. There is nothing that doesn't seem like a veil for something petty, nothing that doesn't seem like a selfish ploy. There is nothing I can think of that doesn't make me feel pathetic.

It's times like this when I wish I could step outside my door and a stranger would be waiting there for me, knowing I would come. They'd take me to an abandoned warehouse where five people are warming themselves at a small fire, and I would join them, nobody talking, and there I would be--that easy, nameless, goodbye.

That's all I want to do right now. Sit in front of a fire with strangers who agreed to be silent. Alone together. If I could have one infinite moment of that.

It's funny, the fact that I'm totally over the idea of killing myself actually makes these moments harder to deal with. No easy way out of confusion. No definite solution.

I just got a vision of me injecting/stinging myself with poison. I've got to stop doing that.

2:07 a.m. 2003-12-18�