I'm coming unhinged.

Had fully intended to go out barhopping last night, enjoy the warm air, hit relentlessly on anyone willing to make eye contact with me, and see where the night took me.

I made it as far as Charlie's Kitchen, where, after a mere 2 drinks my emotions started going haywire, and I started to realize that if I stayed out I was going to get in a fight, or start crying there at the bar. I'm not sure what overcame me, some feeling of nausea or complete isolation coming from the realization that I was out drinking alone because all of my friends have paired off, or have quit drinking or have become sufficiently sick enough of my bad attitude that they just don't come around anymore. Ordinarily, flying solo is not a problem for me, I've spent half my life taking to strangers in bars, but it is becoming more and more difficult. I'm losing my nerve, that feeling that people are looking at you because you're there by yourself and they're thinking that there's something wrong with you because you are alone on a Saturday night is becoming more pervasive. I'm starting to believe it. All of the failed romances, the petty arguments, and the general nervous angst of Boston is starting to seep into my bones. It's a bad sign when going out and getting drunk isn't even fun anymore. It doesn't feel the same at 32 as it did at 28, 29, 30... It begins to feel like it will go on like this for the rest of my life. Peoples' lives around me seem to be changing, moving, forging ahead, but I am stuck in this place, this pattern, this hole.

So I went home, drank a bottle of Black Opal Shiraz, ate an entire box of Little Debbie Peanut Butter Crunch bars, read blogs and attempted to write. My writing is starting to suffer from my current mental/emotional state as well. I get stuck on the same themes, the same images, the same old same old.

It is a formidable rut I'm in. Ordinarily I pride myself on being able to do what I need to do to break out of such things. However lately it feels like I am losing the battle. One can only pick oneself up, dust oneself off and keep shambling along a certain number of times until it starts to feel pointless.

I am really staring to feel in my heart that I need to leave. It isn't that I don't love Boston. But Boston doesn't send me flowers anymore, Boston mutters and turns its back to me in bed, Boston doesn't return phonecalls, Boston forgets our anniversary, Boston is cheating on me. It's the hollow resignation, realization that one needs to leave, though one may not necessarily want to, entirely.

I spend too many nights drinking alone, too many weekends wandering around the cold streets of this city by myself to believe that there's some kind of "community" I'd be abandoning. There is no community, we've splintered into factions, gotten sick of each other, gotten lost in our own egos or seduced by the closed little worlds of our own problems.

It's like this, Boston: I'm lonely, my heart is broken, I asked you for whiskey and you gave me gasoline.

I can take care of myself, but not when the world around me has turned to stone. City of Boston, if you want to keep me here, then you've got alot of making up to do. I'm already halfway out the door.