As far as I know, the full version of Durn's journal has never been published.
It has been almost a week since I came back from Israel. I have a bitter taste in my mouth and in my hear. I didn’t meet Israelis and Palestinians enough. This land is not mine. I am now utterly convinced that I don’t believe in God nor in life after death.
I will often pray my way in the future because I will be afraid and I will delude myself that I am listened and redeemed because I will admit that I was mistaken and that I failed. […] I write because I hope I can prove to myself that I am still alive even if objectively everything show that I am not.
I am fed up with always having in my head this sentence that always comes: “I didn’t live, I’m 30 and I lived nothing.” I am fed up with listening to radio for hours in order not to feel cut off from the rest of the world and with staying some evenings glued to the television even if I know it only turns people into mindless idiots and make them and their mind stupid. I am fed up with desperately waiting for a letter or a phone call whereas I don’t exist anymore for nobody, whereas everybody forgot me… I have never known how to fight. I have never known how to love myself a little (without being navel-gazing or egocentric). I am always putting my own limits on myself. I am always giving people a stick and making it easier for them to flagellate me. Enough of being the depressed man and the token pathetic guy (at best).
I am tired of seeing my body and my face grow old, tired of noting that time goes and that I have nothing. […] I don’t want to be at the bottom of the ladder anymore and to see all the people I knew go ahead in life (marriage, life in couple, financial independence, cutting the apron strings, professional career and strategies to make it advance). I feel stuck because I don’t have a wife. I feel stuck because I didn’t learn how to be vital to a group of people. I’m screwed because I don’t have any social and emotional bearings anymore. Now I am only a registration number nobody cares about. I am blindfolded and I go round in circles in a room and I bang into a furniture item or a wall every ten seconds. I don’t want to die without having fucked a lot. I don’t want to die without having been in love and without a woman having been in love with me, even if I am weak, clapped-out and immature and that I am already more than 30.
I don’t want to die without having known many people abroad, without having had one, even if it is only one, friend. I don’t want to die without having known beautiful and serious things in the world, for example, some landscapes, a place where I would feel good (desert, mountains, equatorial, tropical environment), swim with whales, with dolphins.
For months I have had thoughts of massacre and death in my mind. I don’t want to be submissive anymore. I don’t want to lack boldness and to get it wrong anymore. Why should I destroy myself and suffer alone like an idiot? Even if I will be cursed, even if I will be seen as a monster, I won’t feel deceived and humiliated anymore. I want to live. I want to love. I want to grow up, I want to fight and to find a fight I believe in, even if I lose. My mother can do nothing for me and we destroy ourselves each other. I don’t have a family anymore, no models anymore, no ideal anymore and I still haven’t find my own identity at 30.
I am tired of running away. I run away because I don’t know how to defend myself. I am always the defeated one. I am always imagining myself losing and I am ashamed of it so I do nothing. I am ashamed of having stayed watching this shitty World cup this summer instead of traveling in the desert or in a country or a place where I think I could have been happy, even if only for a few days. I am dying, I am becoming lazy and soon I will sink into desocialisation.
I will go with the aid convoy organized by Roland, hoping in a latent way that, either I will feel an electroshock and meet people who will awaken my taste for life, or I will die over there.
I am making a stupid bet. Something needs to happen during this humanitarian trip or there is nothing left. I want to scram from this house (from my mother’s place), from his city, from this monotony, from chaos. I am dying too much.
I want to see if I can live a little. All this need stop. Either I find the taste for life or I die suddenly but not bit by bit as I am doing.
I will now try to search into the deepest part of me. Am doing it out of a taste for self-flagellation, out of a narcissistic and morbid devotion, a last survival instinct to get through it, hoping it will cure me? Or am I trying to write again on what I am and what I do, hoping that I can escape boredom and emptiness?
My name is Durn Richard. I am more than 33 years old and I am incapable of doing anything in life and with my life. I have been an onanist for at least twenty years. I don’t know what the woman body is anymore and I never lived a true love story. I wank because I feel lonely, because I am used to being disgusted by myself, because I want to forget the emptiness of my life and probably out of pleasure. But what kind of pleasure do I really feel?
I failed my studies and I have no job because I am afraid to work and to deal with responsibilities. I don’t know how to fight in the world of work, I don’t know how to fall in with people without trying to grow attached to them like a lost child without his parents. […] Thus I have no social role nor source of income.
Octobre 9 1999 was an important date in my life as the coward and the moron that I am. As I realized that I was not accepted in the Bioforce school to become a humanitarian logistician, that I had no accommodation, no girlfriend (I had not made love for years nor during the summer holidays), I gave up life. I threw in the towel. I could take a training course to become a chief education adviser in a university institute for teachers, but why? To do a job I would abhor if I had passed the competitive exam.
I have always hated my past job as a school monitor, where I was a no-one and where I was humiliated and in which I vegetated. I suffer and I am full of hate. But this hate doesn’t externalize. It is repressed.
The conformist that I am needs to destroy lives, to do harm in order to feel at least once in my life that I exist. Taste for destruction, because I have always seen myself and lived as a no-one and because I am no-one. Why keep pretending to live? I can for just a few moments feel alive through killing.