Let’s Pretend We’re in Antarctica

I’m sure you’ve noticed this by now, but life can be a dick sometimes.  It doesn’t have to be, but it is anyway and I suspect that it is because it is rich.  It has everything we could hope for and dream about and instead of giving that shit away because we both know it wouldn’t miss it, life makes you work for it.  To do something you like, you often have to do something you dislike.  It’s a quid pro quo arrangement that life insists upon.  But that’s how the rich get rich and stay rich.  They don’t just give shit away.

I mostly boycott life because I’m not a big fan of the arrangement we have.  It seems domineering.  I tend to resent that.  But every once in a while, if the price is right, I will do something I do not want to do in order to do something that I enjoy.  One of the things I really enjoy in life is coaching baseball at, well, let’s leave the name of the school out of this.  You’ll see why in a minute.  In order to keep coaching one of things I need to do that I don’t enjoy is maintaining my certification in first aid and CPR.  It’s a small price to pay, really.  But guess what I had to do the other day…

It’s not that first aid and CPR are bad things to know.  They’re not obviously.  It’s just that I don’t feel anywhere near qualified to be doing something like that even after taking those courses.  They don’t really teach you anything, and there are so many people there that you can sort of mask the fact that you don’t know what you’re doing.  At the end, they let you change your answers on the exam so you can pass and in this particular case the instructor was way more interested in hitting on the two somewhat cute girls in the class than teaching us even 20% of the material that we would later be tested on.  All in all, a waste of time.

As I was administering chest compressions and mouth to mouth on the CPR dummy, I thought to myself that there is no fucking way I would ever do this is real life.  I could never crack someone’s rib cage to get their heart pumping or stick my fingers in someone’s mouth.  It’s not that I think it’s gross (it is), it’s just that I’m not that kind of person.  I don’t get messy with people.  I don’t like getting my hands dirty.  I mean, I’d call 911 and everything.  I’d wait until help got there.  But I can’t start anyone’s heart back up.  I’m not touching anybody.  And for some reason, all that made me think of was this…

You don’t need to read the article, though it’s not that long and somewhat lacking in details.  Basically a guy is presumed dead for something like thirty years.  He didn’t fake his own death, someone just made a mistake.  And it’s not exactly what I fantasize about.  It’s not that I want people to think I’m dead.  But man, I’ve always wanted to just disappear.

I don’t know how that would work exactly, unless you really did die.  You could kill yourself, but I don’t recommend that.  Trust me, people get really pissed off about that.  Besides, it’s missing the point.  I don’t want to actually not exist.  I just don’t want people to know about it.  I don’t know where that desire in me comes from, but I suspect that it has something to do with failing as just about every relationship I’ve had for most of my life.  I’ve never been one to get my hands dirty.  I don’t want to hear ribs crack to get hearts started. But in the last ten months or so, I’ve endeavored to do better.  I think I’ve been able to repair a few failed relationships to the point where they are “acceptable” or in some cases even “good”.  Hopefully I can begin repair work on some more in the future.  And I’m sure that are some that have moved on without me, probably for the better.  I gotta say though, the thought of it all really just makes me kind of queasy.

I’ve been sitting on all of this today when I had a bit of an illumination as I was stretching in preparation for some exercise.  As I reached down  to touch my toes I noticed three scars.  One on my hand and two on my legs.  I know exactly what all of these are from and I’m not terribly proud of this, but they all involve alcohol.  Well, alcohol and being clumsy and hard objects that are for some reason in my way when I am, you know, clumsy.  Some people think I drink more than I should but I disagree.  For the most part I am pleasant when I’m drunk, insofar as any drunk person is pleasant.  I don’t get violent or mean, and I generally don’t go the other direction and get sad or weepy.  Mostly i just have a good time.  And it lets me be around people, which for some reason is exactly what I want.

I’ve never been very good at people and to be fair I’ve never been really good at most things in life.  I recognize that I don’t have it together and in most cases I can’t even find the box let alone try to put together the pieces.  I don’t think I’ll evolve nearly as much as I’d like to in my lifetime and when I die I probably won’t be even half of the person I should or could be.  I think I’m okay with that.  But sometimes I try to do better.  I try to be a better friend to people even though most times I would rather be alone.  Far away.  Where nobody knows me.  Disappeared.  Somewhere I don’t have to get my hands so dirty.  I don’t know where that instinct comes from.  But I know now that’s not the way things work in relationships.  Sometimes you have to break bones.  Sometimes yours get broken.  And I’m not there yet.  I still hate crowds and I still get short of breath in most social situations.  I’m still not that good of a friend.  So I drink.  And it helps.  It might seem irresponsible, but I’ve never claimed to be responsible.  It’s the price life makes you pay for things you want.  Hangovers? Liver failure? Eh.  And the scars?  Well, for someone like me, incomplete as I am, they seem worth it.

Love, The Kind You Clean Up With a Mop and Bucket

Everybody who is anybody knows that Myspace is so 2005.  Facebook is probably the very late now and Twitter or something like that will be the future.  But whatever.  I don’t care about the future.  In fact, I barely care about the present.  I’ve conceded the present to an uncertain and unguaranteed future and so all I’m left with is the past.  And the past may be through with me, but I surely am not through with past.

I had a dream last night that made me think of an old friend.  It’s been nearly ten years since I’ve been in touch with this particular friend and part of me thinks that when you haven’t spoken with someone for ten years it is hard to keep calling them a “friend”.  In fact, I have a suspicion that he might prefer I didn’t refer to him as such.  Our lack of communication hasn’t been for a lack of effort on my part, but it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t want to be found.  The last time I asked someone who might know what he was up to I was told with a scowl, “I don’t know, probably smoking weed somewhere in Littlestown.”  Well, then.  That was three years ago.

The truth is, this guy was kinda hard to be friends with.  I know that I’m not the only one who feels this way (see the end of the last paragraph).  I was there with him through a lot.  There were a lot of people who were there with him through a lot more.  But he was by himself for WAY more than anyone could know about.  My old friend had a lot of issues.  Demons, he liked to call them.  And maybe they were.  Those are the kinds of words you use when you are raised in church.  Once, in a rare moment of vulnerability, I asked him why he couldn’t just let some of those things go.  It was a stupid question, but I was young when I asked it.  He was young when he answered it, but he told me something that made him seem old.  He told me that he likes his life better with his demons.  That he can’t image his life without them.  Ten years later I have no idea what has become of him, but I know this:  I don’t think you can blame people for their prisons.

Undeterred by my experience and spurred on by my dream, I decided to go hunting for my former friend in the only place I know where to find relics from my past: Myspace.  And some relics I did find.  I hardly use my myspace account anymore because like I said, it’s just so 2005.  But it is way easier to snoop and stalk people on myspace than say, facebook.  So I went looking through my friends list for people that might have some sort of a “friend of a friend” connection.  Nothing.  I searched a little deeper, thought of everything I could think of, still nothing.  I guess it doesn’t really surprise me that he doesn’t have a myspace, or at least one that I could find.  What did surprise me was everyone else I know who does.

It turns out that 90% of the people that I know are either married or have kids or both.  But not necessarily in that order.  And in a possibly but not certainly related story, most people I know look like shit.  I mean, they’re smiling and everything, but still.  Most people I know are fat and happy and have busted faces displaying thier families on myspace.  And good for them, I guess.  I just find I can’t relate.

I suppose that it is easy to make the argument that I am a lazy pathetic loser who never meets anyone because I refuse to leave the house and I don’t have any offspring because I don’t have nearly enough sex.  You’d get no rebuttal from me on that.  But something about this “settling down”, this having a family, a real job, a 401k, buying a house, it just seems so…so…foreign.  I just doesn’t seem within the realm of possibility for me.  Like it doesn’t even show up on the radar.  I don’t really understand why.  I suspect that it has something to do with the adversarial relationship I have with happiness.

You know, I gave it a shot, the whole happiness thing.  It’s not a secret to those that know me that last year was not really a good year for me (odd numbered years rarely are).  But something strange happened almost as soon as the calendar changed.  I started to feel…different.  I started sleeping.  I got motivated.  I started the novel I always wanted to write.  I don’t know if that is what you call happiness, but it was definitely something.

But recently, a different old friend showed up.  He usually resides in the pit of my stomach and gets his excercise circling my brain.  You know, as bad as it feels it kinda feels good.  Like things are back to normal.  Like I’m right about the way the world works.  But the funny thing is that I know I’m wrong.  It doesn’t change anything.  And it made me think of my decade-lost friend and what he said about his demons.  I finally understand what he meant.  I’d like to say that we all have our prisons, but I don’t think everybody does.  I believe people now when I read the cliches they put on thier myspace page.  I doesn’t make me angry or jealous, it just makes me feel like I’m reading Japanese.  But inside my prison the temperature is perfect.  I have the baseball package on TV and wireless internet.  I write that stupid fucking novel when the writing’s good and other times I just play video games.  Everything is comfortable here, even the fact that I am relentlessly unhappy.