DRAFT – Chapter 5 – Darkness and Hope – The Other Side |2022
This is a draft copy of Darkness and Hope, Chapter 5 of The Other Side by K.W. Turner, unedited. We will be releasing a good amount of the chapters of this story over the coming week to ten days.
Enjoy.
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Lately have been feeling rather hopeless about how the tone can change around here. And it becomes worrisome. Worrisome because of the darkness. It feeds into my fears.
The idea of having a roommate makes me nauseated. I hope that’s the right word for it. The last time I lived with somebody was back in 2008. I had a male roommate who was a referral that my ex-wife gave me.
My ex-wife knew that I needed a roommate. Required might be a more important word than required. She had met him at an indoor soccer game, a league she and I played in. She was always chatting with everybody because that was her way.
Let’s say his name was Coss. Coss was Canadian and just a very relaxed, smart guy, and a good human. So I want that to be the focus here, and I hope that comes across.
It wasn’t so bad, but man, I fucking hated having somebody else around. It wasn’t about Coss, and it was that darkness I have that consumes me and pushes me to hide. I didn’t want always to be hiding from Coss, but that would often happen.
Much like my ex-wife, I know Coss didn’t love that I’d get home and go into my office. I’d decompress for an hour or so, depending on how craptacular my day was. That was less about my ex-wife or Coss.
While having a roommate wasn’t horrible because of Coss’s personality, the extra money was excellent. But I had a $2000 a month mortgage payment, and he was giving me $500 a month. So while it helped some, it didn’t help that much.
If I said, “But that’s 25%, dude,” I would be forced to slap myself.
And queue the shitty inner monologue.
All of this is ultimately my fault because I took some job or made life decisions that were inconsistent with what I should be doing, and therefore I have to pay the price for them. I hope that makes sense.
I thought it would have a different direction in my life, just like everyone else. I thought I was getting away from the darkness, but I wasn’t. Instead, the darkness pulled me back in, no matter how far I ran.
Now I have this big fucking house that I’m renting. I bought a new car, which required me to trade in my diesel that I had paid off. Thus it got me nowhere. I’ve gone nowhere. Sigh.
In a moment of sadness and self-realization, I now have decided that I would start applying for jobs that I am so incredibly overqualified that the likelihood of getting an interview is minimal. On top of that, any offer would be so minimal.
That is because no sane manager or director will hire somebody with 15 years of experience, highly experienced, for a job where they’re answering emails all day for customer support. It’s just stupid.
My alternatives, though, are nearly as unappealing. I have to figure out how to bring home a certain amount of money, just like everybody else. I have to figure out a way to survive because my ultimate goal here is not to kill myself.
The ultimate goal is to get back to where I was, but if I get to that point and I know, I know what I have to do.
Elsewhere in my book, I make comments or notation on my fears with suicide because I do enjoy Dante’s Inferno and would it change to have the usefulness of the idea.
And in the darkness for me, that would take me to the seventh level. That isn’t a hotel, and nowhere anyone who had any hope or delusion of it being anywhere that the darkness would not find them.
I got to thinking about it one day, and I mentioned the topic to The RevCD. He’s one of the few people that I look up to, and I have the utmost respect for him. He’s a super fantastic human, and I value his opinion immensely.
He asked me why I thought so highly of Dante’s Inferno and
I’m talking about all my tattoos to see, and the tattoos represent pain to me because I have so much. I have full sleeves, a full vest, a full lower on my legs, and my back is about 30% done—330 hours or so at this point of tattoo work time.
At the very least, for this event, we’re talking $40,000. – $45,000 easy of money that I put into myself, but I, from a technical perspective, pissed away money that I could be living off of right now.
Let’s be real here, I still would’ve fucked around with that money anyway and got myself into the position I am now. Inevitable.
I think this is because I often feel like the walls are getting closer and closer and closer. Closing me in, strangling me and my life. It keeps putting me into hopeless positions where some of the decisions I have to make are a little less appealing.
All of my apathy aside, I wonder to myself, “What is it going to take to turn things around? What is it that I’m not doing right? How do I keep succeeding at failing at everything I do?” Does it lead me to know where? Or is it putting me right where I’m supposed to be?
What I mean by that I am curious if I am paying the price for something I did or didn’t do, for the actions that I have taken or not taken, and how much more do I have to pay for this, how much more of this shit am I supposed to handle and deal with before I break.
I ask it that way because I feel like I’m being punished. While millions upon millions of people in the United States are suffering like I am, there are millions upon millions across the planet who are suffering like I am.
Growing up, I was a huge fan of the Punisher comic book by Marvel. Not the movies because they kind of weren’t great but yeah. I appreciated his tenacity and determination to make people pay the price for their misdeeds when the system isn’t.
Now while I don’t condone his murdering of lots of people, I do entirely grasp and understand nay I get it. However, I don’t believe I have transgressed in such a manner that the punishment is so intense and relentless in my life.
I recognize that how I feel is dependent upon what is around me, the transpiring events. And that is the same to be said for so many people. But fuck them. Just kidding.
It presents a specter above and beyond what it is now that I am dealing with. Its black cloud brings me pain, suffering, and misery.
I don’t feel like I can ever be pleased, and it’s not just because of some of the things that I have lost in my life, just like everybody else. But not everybody else has mental health issues, and I would want to say I’m thankful that they don’t.
I wonder. I wonder what I did wrong. If you could hear me speaking right now, it would be incredibly somber and self-reflecting or self-reflective. I always want to make myself a better person, and it is a driving factor in my life.
But now I have no drive. I have no desire or push, or motivation to get there. I feel dead inside, and while I’m not scared of this facet, it is a bit concerning because my friends aren’t exactly helping me. How could they?
Meanwhile, Good sister is doing a fantastic job of taking care of some financial sides of things. It is challenging to maintain any positivity and maintain my brain.
I mentioned this to Debo a few weeks ago while we were doing technical stuff at his house, and I commented that I was concerned that I was losing my mental acuity and technical skills because I was not using them.
One of the reasons why I felt this way was due to a project that I had started working on a specific and specialized system build, which had been slowed by parts being delivered that I had ordered off of eBay.
I had ordered a new video card, upgraded processors, a wifi card, and a few other bits in the hopes of building a system that can replace my iMac, the one I’m dictating on right now. Potentially a second system on top of that for downstairs as the video card in the kitchen is just going to shit.
The punishment that I’m getting or taking is often related to having to sell or part with things in my life that are part of me, that defined me and embodied who I am.
The paintings, the DAC, the tube amp that I love so much, the diamond engagement ring that my ex-wife gave me back so I could sell it (that lays around my neck). That one hurts a lot. And then my computer. These all represent things that are part of me, and it hurts.
I find myself questioning myself and what I have done, what did I do that was so egregious that I’m being punished in such a manner that I feel like I’m falling apart, and I just am having such a fucking hard time dealing with it. The darkness increasingly tears at me.
When you start thinking about or planning out how you’re going to commit suicide and then work on getting all the things in place to carry that out, you know you have issues. Or at least you should know!
And the last thing I had wanted to do was bring harm to the gatos.
Another aspect of this is the consequences of talking openly and honestly with your friends. They either don’t want to hear it or are afraid of it because it is tough to deal with that fact.
What I don’t understand, and I’m not second-guessing the motives of my friends because I care about them and they are essential to me, and I enjoy them is that either they’re not taking me seriously or they don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.
The only thing I can do is hope that I can find what I did so horrible that I am being punished the way I am or find a way to break out of this. But, unfortunately, I don’t see either of them being plausible or possible, for that matter, at this time.
I think of what I write on my blog, and often it’s just something that comes up in my mind, and I say, oh, that reminds me of this song, and I write a couple of hundred words about it I posted. Then from time to time, I come up with good ideas or ideas and write about them.
This morning I posted up a rather lengthy blog about Anesthesia, which is my absolute favorite song from Type O Negative.
I noted in the first paragraph the following quote “In case you didn’t know, Anesthesia from Type O Negative is my favorite song. That includes every Dream Theater song, ever. It holds powerful meanings to me and in my life.”
And as I go through, a couple of bits are of interest to help give context to what I’m writing today. and here are a few quotes from my post:
- I fucking feel like everything is a surgery now. I feel like parts of me are being destroyed, removed.
- My whole life, my whole world, was destroyed to block the pain, to relieve myself from it. To make me comfortable, comfortable with this horrible shit. I don’t feel anything.
- I am fighting the future; I am fighting the past. I cannot win the present.
- I am so broken now I dissolve into a mess of alcoholism, drug use, and substance abuse. I am trying to find a way to NOT FEEL ANYTHING! I don’t want to feel anything.
If those quotes do not give you enough background or understanding as to how I feel and how it is that I think I have no hope, how I cannot win, then there might not be enough words to do so.
I let those feelings soak in that day. It hurt that I felt so sad and lost. I know that I want to go back to normality, but what is normality?
And just like that, I realized I was so fucking far into my head that I could see myself from afar. Just drifting.
Backlinks to other Chapters
DRAFT – Chapter 0 – Lost – The Other Side |2022
DRAFT – Chapter 1 – Backstory – The Other Side |2022
DRAFT – Chapter 2 – Hope With a Side of Fear – The Other Side |2022
DRAFT – Chapter 3 – Fear without Hope – The Other Side |2022
DRAFT – Chapter 4 – Fear with Darkness – The Other Side |2022