The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

5 pm

Dear Diary. Antonina and I are sitting on the porch. Everyone else has gone on a bike ride.

"So I think there's all kinds of mental illnesses in my family," I say. "Nothing serious, just slight stuff. Like my sister. I think my sister has something called borderline personality disorder?"

"Oh yeah, I have that," she says casually.

"What? Really? Borderline personality disorder?" I've never even met anyone who's ever heard of it.

"Oh yeah," says Antonina. "I was taking like eighteen types of medication for it."

"Oh wow."

"But I stopped taking all those medications. I don't take them anymore."

"Wait, is that a good idea?"

"Well, the medication was making me feel drowsy all the time, and numb, and I got tired of feeling like that, so yeah, it was a good idea."

We sit there in silence for a bit.

Then I say, "You know, my mom killed herself."

"Oh no, man. Really?" says Antonina.

"Yeah, she got depressed and she jumped off the top of a building."

"Really?""

"Yeah. She was depressed for a long time. Over a year. She tried all these ways of killing herself. Like swallowing batteries and jumping in front of a train. But nothing worked. Not until the day she jumped off the building."

"Aw man."

I don't know why I'm telling her this.

Then I decide to tell her about the crying this morning.

"I read your self-help book this morning," I say.

"Dude, that's not mine," says Antonina.

"Oh. Well, I read some of the book and it made me cry. I cried for like half an hour this morning. While everyone else was asleep."

"Oh man." She looks uncomfortable.

"And I think I lack empathy."

"Well if you lack empathy, then you need to find a solution. It's like any problem."

"Do you think it would help if I see a therapist?"

"I've seen therapists. Dozens of them. They don't do shit. If you have a problem you have to solve it yourself."

"Oh right. What about writing? Does that help?"

"Oh yeah, writing helps."

As she says this, I'm thinking about how all this will probably go on my blog later.

We continue to sit there on the chairs, listening to birds chirping and the distant sounds of passing cars.

Midnight

Joe and Antonina are having an argument. I say argument but from Joe's perspective, it's more of a discussion.

"So when you see a handsome man," says Joe, "and you think, 'He's handsome', what you're really seeing is the result of thousands of variables that he's likely been working on years. Very few men are just 'born' attractive. It's something that men have to work on, throughout their lives."

"I hate all that bullshit," says Antonina. "I don't know why guys have to trick girls into liking them. All guys need is to do is be nice to women. There's no need to trick them."

"So being nice to women, yes, that's one of the many thousands of factors that go into making an attractive man," says Joe. "And if you meet an attractive man, then it's likely he will have made a conscious decision somewhere along the line to act nice to women, because it'll improve his chances of finding a mate. So any 'nice' man is probably just an ordinary man who has made the calculated and deliberate decision to be nice so he can sleep with more women."

"That is such bullshit!" says Antonina. "Women can tell when men are faking niceness."

"Well yes, women have built-in detectors that have been refined by millions of years of evolution. The main one is a detector that tells them, essentially, whether a man's genes are worth creating children with. And it's the role of every man on the planet to essentially trick that detector by making planned, conscious steps to make themselves look more attractive than they actually are. And women are uncomfortable with hearing this, because it implies women are receiving genes that are a lower quality than they appear to be."

"Uh, Joe?" I say.

"Yes Paul."

"Do you think I could get a benzo? To help me sleep?"

So Joe gets up and goes to his bedroom. When he comes back, he hands me a couple of white pills.

"How much do I take?" I ask.

"Just take a quarter," says Joe. "That should be enough."

"A quarter? What happens if I took both pills?" Would I fall into a coma like the kid in early 1990s TV show The Odyssey?

"Well, we wouldn't see much of you tomorrow. My ex-girlfriend, she took two once, and she slept for 24 hours."

I think eight hours would be enough. A quarter of a pill it is then.