A Panic Attack (In A Lower Key)

"A Panic Attack (In A Lower Key)"
for somebody else by jake kilroy.

You find yourself in the middle of a story that you didn't write, throwing up over nothing. You find yourself cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the bathroom, cleaning your room and finding nothing new or interesting. You're aware of everything that belongs to you. And then, pretty soon, you're going to happy hours and dinner parties before you realize it's December. Shit, it's Christmas, you think. I have to care about something, but you don't. You don't even try. You barely managed the thought. Instead, you briefly lapsed into one night of gin and cookies before calling both quits in your new year's resolutions that you wrote down on a whim. And you didn't even type them up either. You just wrote them on the back of your car payment envelope. You send it out anyway. You'll remember them. And who cares if your dealership and insurance company sees what you want to change about yourself? They're probably not any better off. Soon, it's another year and you haven't changed. Change is all that brings doom. So you stay the same. You hold onto nothing and you believe in nothing. You aren't even atheist. Your god is a shrug. Your meals are whatever you have in the fridge. Your drives are exactly as they were the day before. You hum bullshit to yourself on every walk you take, but you never actually sit down to write songs. It's too much work. Soon, you're talking about writing music. That's what has made you, talking about doing something. You're drifting in the weirdest way, you think. You don't mind meeting co-workers for drinks, as long as it ends there. You don't mind going on dates, as long as they end there. You don't mind seeing your family, as long as the conversations stop at what happened in the last whatever-time-you-spent apart. You read, but you take in zero information. You watch movies, but all it inspires you to do is watch more movies. You realize all of this and break your new year's resolution and start getting really drunk. You're making phone calls to people that don't remember you when they answer the phone with the word 'hello' as a question. You're not a period. You're barely a comma. You're a run-on sentence that nobody wants to speak. You're barely a paragraph and everything is a fucking paragraph when you think about it. Start shopping more and buying things to make up your life. Start considering philosophy as moral groundings. Start quoting others so you can say something. Jesus, just say anything, you tell yourself. And most of what you say isn't to you or anybody. It's just to talk. It's so your mouth won't freeze in the great winter of your existence. Buy more coats so you look like you go places. Buy more kitchen utensils so it looks like you entertain. Shit, just kick holes in your wall, so it looks like something happened at some place. You start coming up with favorite sites, to look like you have an online presence. You start deciding favorite restaurants so you can rate them on sites you only visit when you accidentally click on online advertisements. You don't even eat there. You mostly eat at home, and, even then, it's the same thing night after night. You go through phases. They're not even trends. You're just a dart board of choices, but you hate sports. You don't understand them and you wish you did, but you don't. So you think maybe if you start exercising, it'll all just come to you, but it won't. You go on walks by yourself, but it's to places you need to go. You're taking walks to the supermarket to buy toothpaste and deodorant, just to be an acceptable person to be around. You start wishing for a nervous breakdown on the way home, just so you can feel something. You just want something big to happen, so you can react. Maybe if your house was on fire, you could at least feel the warmth of your neighbors. You just want to say 'oh no,' for two fucking seconds. You want to have something to lose. You want something to gain again. You want to repeat, just so you can call something a routine, because you don't see anything you do as routine. You see it as a sprawling landscape of nothing. Where do you build your life in the barren scope of you? How do you go about constructing anything? What is there to have? Get real, man, and get real quick. That's all you've got. You just got one big long fucking epic promise to yourself that means you're going to finally do something and get it together. And, until then, all you've got is this. And this sucks, guy.