Good Advice, Long Delayed

I was advised a while back that personal news, rather than random trifles of political interpretation and off-color material, was the key to a blog item of any general inter-est. I'm awfully prone to emoting in a confessional mode, having been reared a papist and taking a perverse pride yet in its wondrous inversion of the dubious art of psychotherapy, wherein one's story of sin redeems itself in the telling. So here's some personal news:

I'm still terribly nasty to myself. I've inoculated myself against any remnant idea of fair play and perspective, and so grow irritable and entertain violent thoughts. The angel on my right shoulder says, "you've been offered so much, with white skin and quick tongue and taxpayer support, if you don't make something of it you'll be hapless, worthless, and entirely beyond the pale. The devil on the left laughs at the notion, knowing that you haven't had anything from your parents and betters that others didn't get (except for the occasion not two months ago which saved your life, and dares not speak its name); that success is suspect, given the country and the prospect of 20 years of Weimar America, where people I know now will be blamed for knifing the government in the back; and that the "gap between rich and poor" (how anodyne a metaphor, the "gap"; sure it should be minded, but there's no comforting chasm between the 70 hours a week by force and the 60 hours a week by choice crowds. Manhattan mixes them together, and leaves those without to wonder and uneasily avoid the conclusion even Aerosmith knew to draw) means I will always seethe in stupid, nonsensical, unhelpful, confused anger.

When the joy of becoming a historian, and speaking however helplessly to the enormous condescension of posterity thus far happily bestowed on my subjects, will return, is more than I know. I think my best friend is sick to death of me, and can't see how to persist and abide when I don't know any other strategy. I owe my brother money, and still indulge myself in vices the vast majority of people my age foreswear.

But self-loathing is so 2003, and can't bear any more of a burden than it already does. Thank god for good role models.