I’ve spent the last year trying to convince myself that I am a hedonistic asshole. A bad man. I don’t need love. I don’t need caring and tenderness. To that end, I philander and drink and eat, perhaps hoping I can dig myself a quick grave and dive in. Hoping that the uselessness of suicide doesn’t matter if I die as a consequence of living life. I sometimes feel pains in my chest and think this is it, but nothing happens. When I swim in the ocean I wait for a shark to drag me beneath the waves, even if a drowning death is said to be the most horrible. The slow departure of life as one struggles to breathe.

I use women as much as I can. The ones I find lonely at bars, the ones I pay. I do things I haven’t done and it feels good—so fucking good—to do them. Share a woman with another man and she’ll plead. Bring a lonely wife to orgasm and she’ll cry. Hookers still have to be treated with a facade of respect before you treat them like whores.

It began innocently enough by trying to get out and date. Do what good people do when their hearts are broken and their lust is raging. Meet people, try new things. I met people and tried new things. I did leave that first girl on good terms last autumn. Our first date was to seeDrive. I met her mother. The only real pleasure I got out of her was knowing that I did it. I bagged her. I’d proven that I could go on a date with nice, pretty, boring girl. Then the dating part became useless. Then the talking part became useless. Then the kissing part.

On violence: I am. I have a place in my heart for a woman who, if I had her here right now, I’d strangle. I’d hold her throat in my hand and watch her struggle and cry. I believe this is hatred, but I am too ill-equipped to make the judgement call. Hatred is a stream I haven’t paddled. She would be the third person in my life whom I hate. I couldn’t hit her, though. It would somehow be too wrong. Too much like men who beat their wives and their kids, whom I hate in general. Just stop her from breathing, as if that is acceptable murder. Watch her fade away naturally.

My advice for the shamed and guilty and myself is usually that you simply allow the shittiness of your humanity to take hold and run its course. Maybe a minute, maybe a month, maybe a year. Whatever type you happen to be. Then you shake it off and continue. Your choice to steal that candy bar or to cheat on your spouse is reflective of who you were at that time, and now you’re someone else. Still human, but further ahead than you were before.

I can’t be a good man and I can’t be a bad man. I can’t describe how frightening that is.