King with a (Temporary) Crown

The first snow of the season is a truly beautiful thing until you actually have to venture out into it.  It should come as no surprise that I much prefer to sit in my ivory tower on the 5th floor and be mesmerized by the large heavy chunks of white as they descend to the earth below.   Today I will have no such luck.  Today my teeth have no regard for my preferences.

As today is the first snow, I decide that it is occasion enough to dig through my boxes and break out my winter attire.  I normally try to get by on sweatshirts and windbreakers for as long as possible and I suppose this is to prove to the world how badassI am.   Instead, I just end up shivering everywhere I go and getting sick twice by mid-November.  I guess someday I’ll learn my lesson.  In truth, the real reason for this is that I lived in Florida for five years and down there everyone walks around in parkas and mittens the second the temperature drops below 55 and for reasons that have nothing to do withthe weather I never, ever wanted to be associated with Floridians as long as I live.  So I deprive myself of warmth for two months every year.  I guess everyone does something.

I find my knit hat, my gloves, and my scarf.  The first two I am fine with; I have never figured out the last one.  I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to wear a scarf the way the hipsters in my neighborhood wear them, just flung casually around the neck.  I’m not sure how that’s supposed to keep you warm.  I sort of just wrap the whole thing around my head like a mummy, though I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to do that either.  At least it keeps me warm, but it makes me feel like an idiot.  What I don’t need right now is to go out into the world feeling like an idiot.  But then I’ve never needed a scarf to do that.  Any scarf wearing advice is welcome in the comments section.

Now fully bundled, I leave the house to do one of my least favorite things…leave the house.  My journey will take me ten blocks uptown to Union Square and then over to the West Village, where the streets ignore my preference to be numbered and intersect at right angles, and end with an emergency trip to my absolute least favorite place, the dentist.

I don’t have any kids that I know of, but I understand the feeling of doing your damnedest to take care of something its entire existence only to be be resented and let down later in life.  I have been a stickler for proper dental care since I was young and all I have to show for it is the inability to chew on one side of my mouth and a currently cracked, throbbing, and swollen molar on the other.  I often wonder why my body never filled out in my mid-20’s and I constantly overlook the fact that eating food hurts me in ways most people take for granted.  And it is right about the time I am feeling sorry for myself about all of  this that I step in literally the first puddle I come across, a block from my apartment.  It looked solid to me.  What was I going to do, watch where I was going?  Be more careful in inclement weather?  Please, I was wallowing in self pity.  I don’t have time for all that vigilance.  My right foot is now soaked and freezing, which is a problem as it was one of the two feet I needed to get where I’m going today.

And now is the part of the story where I complain about how I don’t get life and continue to feel sorry for myself.  But given that 2008 is ending in a matter of days, I remember a promise that I made to myself at the beginning of this year that things would be different.  I was lucky to make it out of 2007 alive and I promised myself I would never have another year like that again.  The thing is, if you don’t stand up for yourself and your mental posterity it can get away from you quickly.  Your comfort zone gets violated, the things that you rely on disappear, your tooth throbs, your feet are wet, and the next thing you know you don’t feel that much better about your life than you did at this time last year. 

I’ve always resented the cliche that life is a struggle and nothing is handed to you.  That you have to crawl before you can walk.  Before you can run.  I’ve always resented that I couldn’t just be happy.  That I wasn’t sure that anything would ever make me happy.  But completed my errands in Union Square and making my way to the dentist, my life flashed before my eyes and not just because I ignored the orange hand on the other side of the crosswalk warning me not to plod slowly to the other side of the street.  As an SUV blared its horn at me I realized that I had completely lost my fight.  In my younger years I was an idealist, full of piss and vinegar.  Not happy, but not giving up on the idea that I could be.  Years of right crosses and black eyes, years of blows to the chin with nobody in your corner to stitch your gashes can cause you to throw in the towel.  Take some time off.  Early retirement.  Eight long blocks from knowing whether or not I can eat Christmas dinner, my step begins to ever so slightly spring.  If you want something in life you have to fight for it.  That includes happiness.  Pardon me while I become a cliche. 

I think everyone has a higher opinion of themselves than they should.  Everyone thinks they are a good person and deserve good things.  And maybe I give myself too much credit when I say deep down I’m not a miserable person.  It’s just that I’m generally unimpressed with what life has to offer.  I’ve been waiting to be amazed by something my entire life.  It hasn’t happened and maybe it never will.  But in the meantime I’m building my happiness on small things.  Like the fact that I am a more agile human being than the vast majority of the population.  Seriously, you should see me move in this snow.  I navigate the ice and slush with a grace and agility that parents should be telling thier kids about before putting them to bed.  Even though a quarter inch of wet gross has accumulated on the bottom of my right shoe, I still move past flustered pedestrians at an absurd rate of speed given the conditions.  I am a force of nature, every step drawing me closer to inner peace. 

As it turns out, teeth like years, can be salvaged.  And relatively pain free if you find a good dentist.  I throw another haymaker in the general direction of my brooding dark with the knowledge that I will indeed be able to enjoy Christmas dinner with a set of nearly fully functioning teeth.  I have a temporary crown in my mouth that feels more like a tooth than anything I’ve had in years, with the promise of a permanent one to come after the new year.  It cost me more than I really had, but sometimes you have to dig deep for things like that.  Wallet, soul, teeth, happiness, I don’t know anymore.  As I make my way home, bounding over puddles mere mortals can only hope to find a way around, I have no idea if I can do this.  But I know 2008 was better than 2007 because it had to be.  Next year will be better than this year because I won’t let it not be.

How to Shoot at Someone Who Outdrew You

I decided that the way this afternoon was going, I should take a walk.  It was a nice day, like yesterday, and I thought that I should not let two nice days in a row go by without being outside in them.  I had destinations in mind, errands to run.  But I abandoned most of those plans somewhere around 12th street and Avenue A.  The best course of action for this afternoon became wandering aimlessly.  As far as my scrawny legs could carry me.

All I really wanted was to turn my brain off for a while, but that never really works for me completely.  So I settled for turning off the part of my brain responsible for my self preservation and well being.  I wanted my eyes to glaze over.  I wanted there to be nothing behind them.  I wanted to walk slowly on crowded sidewalks.  I wanted to be the one in the way for once, instead of everyone being in mine.  I wanted to walk out in front of traffic.  I wanted to walk a hundred blocks up the east side and end up in Harlem.  I wanted to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes on the way.  But those things are like 12 dollars a pack now.  So fuck that.  More than anything I wanted to feel the kind of alone that can only be felt walking around on an island of a million people, and you don’t feel connected to any of them.

And then I had a disturbing thought.  You know what?  I should get a job.  Like a real job.  The kind of job you don’t have to lie to your parents about.  But what the hell would I even do with one?  I can’t imagine anything would last longer than a few months.  I think I’m just having a little crisis of confidence.

The thing is, we all know that everybody thinks they’re right.  We all necessarily think that we are right about the way we go about our lives, the stuff we value and the thoughts we think, otherwise we wouldn’t live that way, right?  I know there is a school of thought that says that you should just do what is right for you and that’s all well and good except that I just don’t see any way that can work.  I mean, not everybody can be right, can they?  Certainly not everybody is happy and if that isn’t the end in life I don’t know what is.  I mean, life isn’t supposed to suck, is it?  Oh, it is?  Well then.  Clearly I’ve been mistaken.  Clearly I’ve been wrong about a few things.  Which, in a way, kinda makes me right.

I don’t think I’m really trying to decipher between right and wrong right now.  I think I’ve made peace with that fact that I probably am never going to know for sure, which of course seems right and if you factor in the very real possibility that I could be wrong it just leaves me with a colossal mind fuck.  Another colossal mind fuck.  And I don’t think I’m really going to try to get a real job either, which just leaves me with that little crisis of confidence.

What I’m really trying to figure out is if life really isn’t supposed to suck or if that’s just something those of us who live in the first world have the luxury of believing.  I mean, probably at least 3/4 of the world would be envious of the position that I’m in.  I’m well educated.  Even with the shitty economy I could find a job and make 50k easy.  I had one of those jobs and I hated it.  It was soul draining.  I was miserable.  So at the beginning of this year I decided to write the novel I always wanted to write full time.  And now I wonder if I had a right to my misery.  I didn’t earn it.  I haven’t earned anything, really.  The thing is, I don’t think that I want a real just to have a real job.  I think I want a real job to be around people who aren’t me.  I spend way more time with me than I really think I should and I’ve had enough.  I’m kind of insufferable.  But I’ve spent enough time around most people to know that probably isn’t going to the trick either.

The truth is, whether I deserve to be having this little crisis of confidence or not, the problem isn’t that I am too selfish or that I should get a job.  The problem is that my imagination has slipped.  You see, it used to be that the thing that kept me going, whether I was working or writing or whatever, was that I could imagine something better.  I could imagine something good.  But I struggle to do that now.  It makes me feel old.  It makes me feel conventional.  It makes me think I should count my blessings.  I don’t know how to jump start it.  I don’t feel like I’m saying or thinking or feeling anything new.  It makes me feel less confident about the things that I’m doing now.

I usually regret anything I’ve written immediately after I finish it.  This might be the first thing I regret before I finish it.  It doesn’t make sense and it seems whiny.  But it’s the truth.  That can’t be all bad, can it?  And, um, I took all this time to write it so…

Welcome…

If you’ve stumbled here from god knows where…um, here you are.  This is the new blog where I will write things that are not my novel.  So for the foreseeable future things may be sparse.  But I hope it won’t be that way forever.  So things don’t looks so empty, I moved a few of the less event-specific posts over from the old blog.  By the way, looking at some of things I wrote last year…holy crap I was suicide-y.  Sorry about that.  Glad that’s all over.  Hopefully things will take on a bit of a different tone around here.

This Ain’t a Crash…

The weather is getting chillier and that’s going to be a problem for me.  I don’t want to catch a cold.

Sleep and I sort of have a tenuous relationship at the moment and the truth is that it’s been this way for a long time.  It’s some parts intensity and more parts deprival and it seems like there is no in between.  But it’s the intensity that I can’t live without.   When I sleep I dream vividly and in resplendent detail and on the rare occasions when this occurs I wake up and have no idea where I am for a good 30 seconds.  Sleeping like this is often the best part of my day.  And my bliss is being threatened.  I need to figure this out.

For the most part I’ve always been a light sleeper, the result being that most of the time my dreams elude me.  Most of the time I lie awake or fall asleep in short unsatisfying bursts until I get so annoyed that I just get out of bed.  Good morning to you too.  But the last few month have been different.  I’ve been sleeping.  It’s been surreal.  But the chill in the air is threatening to put an end to all of this.  It all has to do with my fan.

During the months when it was warm, I was sleeping.  The reason was because nothing was waking me up.  Nothing was stirring.  The whir of my fan created a controlled environment which blocked out any distractions and created an ideal temperature for sleeping.  Combine this with new, comfortable sheets and I’ve been dreaming the dreams of kings.  But now the fan makes me too cold.  I’ve had to turn it off.  And now I hear everything again.  My controlled utopia is crumbling piece by piece and falling faster than the leaves from the trees.  It turns out that I needed that constant noise to keep me from hearing what was happening outside my bed.  Mostly silence.  The only sound you can’t drown out is the silence.  I’m starting to think that this isn’t a story about fans.

To say that the last two months or so have been surreal would be to maybe not use enough word.  I don’t know what word is the next logical progression after surreal, but that would probably be the right word.  I feel like I’m in second 27 of the 30 seconds it takes me to realize where I am after a really great dream.  I’m afraid that in three seconds I’m going to realize that I am in the exact same spot where I laid my head the night before and nothing has really changed since I last saw the sun.  I’m a day older but not a day closer.  And I’m just so.  fucking.  bored.

And I’m starting to think that this was the real reason all long.  For all of it.  It’s my cowboy phase.  I’m just running out of stories.  I had nothing left to say.  And in three, two, one I have to start talking again and I’m just not ready.  I’m not ready to realize where I am and realize that it’s that same boring shit as it was the day before.  I’m not ready to be disappointed again.  I’m not ready to give in to the realization that the life that happens in my imagination is so much better than the one that happens when when I leave my aprtment.  I don’t understand how I got here.  I don’t know how this happened.  Any of it.  But I sure don’t remember anyone asking for my input on the subject.

I really didn’t want to write anything that wasn’t sushiney anymore, but I also promised I wouldn’t keep all of the dark inside anymore either.  It’s no good for me.  While I was away someone told me that I knew how this story starts and that I should stick around and see how it ends.  But I was never told to write my own ending and that makes more and more sense to me.  I’ve always struggled with endings.  I think it’s because I can never write one that is believable.  I have good ideas that just fall apart in the end.  That seems to be my through line.  But maybe this isn’t my story to write.  It just sucks when your life story is written by a shitty writer.  My Life by Dan Brown.

I don’t know whether I’m off the hook for this ending or not.  That doesn’t seem to be the issue.  The issue is that I’m afraid that no matter how it turns out it’s not going to as good as I can imagine it could be.  Like whether I’m writing it or not, I should be.  And all I know is that I’ve been laying here for 27 seconds after a night of whatever is just above surreal and in three, two, one I’m going to realize exactly where I am and I’m going to have no choice but to get out of my bed and go back to it.  And there’s going to be nothing in it that makes me happy or gives me any reason to want to do anything but go back to sleep.  No more whir to comfort me.  Distract me.  Nothing but the silence.  Three, two, one.  The only sound you can’t drown out is the silence.

Dependence Day

“You don’t have to fill that if you find you don’t need it, ” he says to me as I suppress the urge to giggle with glee.  I have just been given a perscription for 15 oxycontin and I wonder if this man knows something I don’t, or if he is just the best dentist ever.  Fifteen oxycotin for a root canal?  Seems a bit like overkill, doesn’t it?  And why don’t they give these out before the procedure.  That seems like the more approprate time to do it.  I should back up.

It is 11 am and I am debating perhaps permanently putting off a procedure to alleviate the pain on the right side of my jaw that has been there for 18 months.  It is really now or never, as my health insurance runs out in seven days.  I got fired from my job again (that’s 2 for 2 since I graduated college, if you’re scoring at home) and I doubt employment that offers health insurance is in my near future.  My appointment is at 2, so I have three hours to decide.  Fuck it, I’m going.  But as the hour approaches I find that my nerves are getting the best of me.  So I do what I normally do when I don’t want to deal with reality.  I just think of something else.  Usually something that doesn’t exist.  My feet know the way.  My brian doesn’t have to be along for the ride.

I sit in the dentist chair and the assistant reclines it so that I am now flat on my back.  Then she leaves.  I sit there for about 10 minutes wondering if I should just lay here like a prat or if I can get up and wander around for a bit until they are ready for me.  I should have brought a book.  When the dentist enters I learn that this will be the first root canal his assitant has seen.  Terrific.  Did she go to dental school?  What do they teach there if not root canals?  Fortunately this dentist is a pro ( I guess technically they all are) and the only thing this assitant needs to do is make sure not to drop the burn instrument on my face.  Oh, and this procedure apparently involves a burn instrument.  I am not calm right now.

I make the dentist give me a double shot of novocaine.  I don’t want to feel this at all.  Not even a pinch.  I am a baby.  I don’t care.  I going to my happy place with my spirit animal.  That shit better work.

I’d love to tell you a story about how painful this fucking thing was and how tough I am for enduring it, but it would not be true.  It actually wasn’t that bad.  But in a related story, I also cannot feel my face right now.  And this is where that perscription comes in.  I make my way to the nearest Duane Reade, resisting the urge not to jump in the air and click my heels along the way.  Fifteen oxycontin.  I don’t want to know what happens when I can feel my face again, but in a way I kinda can’t wait.

Tomorrow we celebrate the birth of our nation, and I choose to celebrate by leaving planet earth for 24 hours.  After about two hours, I regain feeling in my lower jaw and immediately am thankful for the 15 magic pills in a bottle next to me.  I take the first one and then it is nap time, but for some reason I can not bring myself to fall asleep.  I sort of fight it for the next few hours and half watch tv.  This is odd.  After a while I decide I need something stronger.

I get in to my bed and put in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a movie I have never watched sober and perhaps not surprisingly, have never finished.  I have read the book however, and I am acutely aware that perhaps everything I have ever written and everything I will ever write is a direct rip off of Hunter S. Thompson.  In fact I think that much of what you see in current pop culture is the evolution of this man’s ideas.  Gonzo journalism has now evolved into reality television, blogs, youtube, all of that.  The idea that you are the story, that I am the story, has changed the way we think and interact.  The idea that I could write anything outside of my own head is foreign to me in the sense that I am pretty sure I could not do it.  I don’t know how Stephen King or Tom Clancy write.  I could never do that.  They have a talent.  For right now, I have a bottle of gin.

I never really liked gin until right now.  I haven’t had it in years.  This bottle was given to me.  Kind of.  But right now, the taste gives me an idea.  I bet I could cut this with Absinthe.  And some lemon and seltzer.  Excellent.  The label on my bottle of oxycontin tells me that is may cause drowsiness and that alcohol will exacerbate this feeling.  It is almost midnight.  Almost independence day.  Sounds like a plan.

It occurs to me that I have not eaten anything all day and that this might be a bad thing at this point.  I am not going to eat anything now, because my mouth is not ready for it, but I will make some jello for tomorrow.  I boil some water and take a seat.  As I wait, I realize that I can no longer see straight.  That’s kinda fun.  Before I know it, the water is boiling and it is time to mix this all up.  By the time I get the jello in the fridge I am so nauseous that I need to lay down on the couch.  After a few minutes it goes away, so I decide to make my way back to bed.  Wow.  Apparently horizontal good, vertical bad.  I barely make it into bed.  I’m starting to wonder if this was a bad idea, but before I can give my choices a thorough evaluation I fall asleep.

My dreams are predictable in the sense that they are all over the place and extremely vivid.  I enjoy dreaming like this.  I like it better when there is a storyline, but on this night none emerges.  All I can remember is that a seahawk was involved.  Whatever the fuck that is.  It is was bold and sleek and it was my job to tell the world about it.  So that’s what I’m doing.  Not sure what else to say.  I wonder if my subconscious is telling me that it is okay to draft Shaun Alexander if he is available in fantasy football this year.  That’s the only thing I can think of.

I awake about 14 hours later.  It is July fourth.  There will be no fireworks for me today.  I emerge from my dungeon of a room into my cave of an apartment and I discover that the sun will not be shining for me today.  It’s just as well.  I’ve got twelve pills left.  I’m going back to bed.

Talk to Strangers

I should be gone by now.  I know this but I can’t explain why.  I don’t mean that I should be dead, but if you’re familiar with the way I’ve been talking and writing lately I can understand why you would think that way.  What I mean is that I should have left by now.  I should be on my way.  Something in my brain knows this.  It happens a lot in my brain.  You could set a clock to it.

It seems that just about every eight months a blaring alarm goes off in my head that demands that I make a decision.  Stay or go.  It’s never that simple really, but I guess it always is.  Run, get out, find something new, this sucks.  I don’t always physically leave after eight months, but mentally I check out.  It’s not long before the rest of me follows.  I could submit to you a timeline of the last eight years of my life as proof, but I think it almost goes without saying.  Stay or go.  I always go.  But not this time.  This time I stayed.  This time I’m here.  I don’t know what I’m doing here.  I don’t know how to be here.  Here is a place I’ve never really been, at least not this long.  For now, here is a book store in Grand Central Station, waiting for my parents to arrive.  We will spend the day together in the city until one of us decides that we can’t possibly take it anymore and then they will go home.  This is what passes for a healthy relationship.  Hooray for being related.  I really don’t know how to be here.

I have my reasons for being here.  For the first time since the alarms showed up, here is finally not so bad.  I can stand it.  It’s good even.  Not great.  Not yet.  But good.  I’m trying to be responsible.  I’ve got things set up here.  Ducks are in rows.  I turned 25 last week.  That seems old enough.  I should stay somewhere.  Have a life.  Have a resume.  It seems like the right thing to do, but my brain knows better.  I found the snooze on the alarm, but it just rings louder each time.  It’s time to go.  I know this.  But this should change soon, right?  It does change, doesn’t it?  Can I force myself to be something else?

The truth is that I would probably be seeing my parents about this time anyway, but not here.  It would be somewhere else on the way to somewhere else entirely.  I would blow in like a hurricane or a thief in the night or something else that comes and goes.  Pick your metaphor.  They all work.  That’s the thing about metaphors.  They all work.  I digress.  Anyway, the point is that I’m trying to change, but it’s not a dress that I wear well. And make no mistake, it is a dress.  But it’s just that every morning when I wake up I am sure that I can stay, but every evening before I turn in I am sure I have to go.  I think this is a bedtime story.

“You know, they pretty much ruled the world together” comes the voice of the person standing next to me as I peruse the new hardcovers.  “Nixon did whatever Kissinger told him.  Vietnam was all his idea.”  He says this in reference to the new book about Nixon and Kissinger that I am not looking at but apparently he is.  The man is old, short, and Italian, but the only way I know he is Italian is that it says so on his shirt.  I can’t tell people apart.  Everyone looks the same to me.  Well, except the blacks.  They’re pretty easy to spot.  Asians too, I guess.  The Spanish are tricky sometimes though.  But all white people look the same.  Anyway, I have no idea if he is right about Nixon and Kissinger.  I get all my history from the History Channel and right now they are all about Ice Road Truckers, which is fucking tits.   As it is, the man has a story to tell.  Who am I not to listen?  I won’t repeat it though.  Kinda boring.

I’m concerned that people don’t connect enough these days, at least not in any meaningful way.  And I’m afraid this is just going to get worse with the years.  I blame technology.  In a related story, I am 135 years old.   I am cheif of sinners in this regard, and my hypocracy is staggering.  Mostly because of the whole stay/go thing and my mostly going.  I get to avoid making meaningful connections with people because I am always temporary.  Fleeting.  I’m kind of a flake.  In an effort to combat this, I normally talk to strangers whenever an opportunity presents itself.  It’s almost always a waste of time.  Most people don’t have anything to say.  Me included.

“So what do you do for a living?” The old, short, presumably Italian asks as I shift my weight uncomfortably.  The correct answer to the question at this time is “I’m a massive tool”, but instead of saying that, I lie.  That’s the other reason why I don’t seem to make meaningful connections.  I tend to fib sometimes.  Most of the time.  It makes things more interesting, I guess.  Pathological isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.  So I tell the man a story.  I say that I am a writer which is true in a sense, but it is not the correct answer to the question.  He asks the obvious follow up.  “What do you write?”  “I’m working on a novel”, I say.  Again, not really a lie either.  “What is it about?”  Hmm….

I decide to tell him the story I should be telling you right now.  The story of me leaving.  The story of every eight months.  The story of my life.  Except that it isn’t.   Not this time, anyway.  I want to see what he thinks.  He’s like my own personal  short, Italian focus group.  I won’t tell you the story here.  I’m saving that bullet.  Besides, it’s kind of boring.  Everyone is boring.

The old man likes my story enough to tell me his name.  Jimmy.  I’m Mike.  No use in making that part up.  Jimmy suggests we grab a cup of coffee.  My parents are due any minute, but I decide to take him up on the offer.  My parents know how to use a cell phone, right?  Jimmy is mortified that I order green tea.  Whatever dude.

Jimmy is a native New Yorker now living in the Bronx.  I wonder why he is here at Grand Central on this day, hanging out at a bookstore.  I don’t ask.  Maybe I should.  I wonder if I will die today, but now I’m just being cynical.  Besides, being abducted and raped by a strange old man seems like a perfectly good way to spend a Saturday.  I mean, it’s that or hang out with the parents.  Jimmy used to live in the east village, which is where I live right now.  He tells me about the neighborhood in the old days.  Nostalgia is like crack for some people.  He tells me he used to go to the Palladium and that he saw The Doors, The Mommas and the Pappas (apparently that chick was always heavy), the Dead, the Stones, pretty much everyone who was important in the 60’s or 70’s, just before they were important.  All of a sudden this converstation got interesting.  The lesson?  Always lie to strangers.

I’m sure my parents are wandering around somewhere and will have no idea how to find me.  I feel guilty about this, so I tell Jimmy I need to be going.  I thank him for the beverage and he informs me that he will see me around and we will do this again sometime.  He sounds convincing even though we have not exchanged any sort of contact information.  I will not see Jimmy again, and I’m sure he is aware of this.  Right?  He also informs me that he will look for my book.  That is nice of him.  He should probably also start looking for a pegasus or a unicorn.  He’ll probably find one of those first.

I leave the coffee shop and turn a corner into the main terminal.  My parents are right in front of me, wandering aimlessly.  I give my mom a hug and strangely it doesn’t feel forced.   I wonder if people can change.  I wonder if I will change.  I wonder when I will grow up.  I wonder if that’s a good thing.  I ask my parents how long they’ve been waiting for me.  They say about a half an hour.  I feel guilty about making them wait, but maybe I shouldn’t.  I feel like I’ve been waiting for 25 years.

Stop Making Fun of Fat People

It’s not that I believe everything that I read, but I believe everything that I read.  I figure that anyone who takes the time to put something in writing probably knows what they’re talking about.  Of course most people are always wrong, which I guess makes me almost always wrong.  And this is why I pretty much hate everybody.  Because nothing is ever my fault.

As it turns out, I am secretly fat.  I don’t mean this in some sort of metaphysical, down-on-myself sort of sense; I mean this quite literally.  I read a study recently that found that sometimes people who appear skinny are really just as fat as classically fat people and that the fat instead accumulates around thier organs rather than around thier midsection and/or man boobs.  And since there is no legitmate reason for me to be as skinny as I am (mostly because I eat whatever my little heart desires and I do my best not to break a sweat), I am certain that I fall into the category of “secretly fat”.  I think that there is an obvious lesson to be learned here, possibly something about not judging a book by its cover.  But I have no desire to learn that lesson right now, mostly because I am not prepared to die young.

Up until now, I have always been certain that I would live to be 135 years old.  The main reason for this is that Billy Joel is always right.  And only the good die young.  Watch the news sometime.  Every “man on the street” reaction to some sort of tragedy involves someone talking about how kind and generous the victim was.  They always love thier families.  Thier smiles always light up a room.  People get crazy about dead people they don’t know.  I don’t want anyone to go crazy about me.

I think that the last twenty or so years of my life will involve lots of sitting around and watching TV.  In fact, I will probably die of dubious, unknown causes in my favorite chair with the TV on.  Since I will have no children and will have outlived all of my friends and/or anyone who agreed to sleep with me on a regular or semiregular basis, I will be found after three days by Lupe, the kindly Mexican woman whom I hired to clean the place and give me a sponge bath every week.  Actully, she might not be Mexican.  I think she is from Guatemala or one of the other banana republics.  But whatever.  Besides, she might not be so kindly afterall.  I think she’s stealing from me.  I know I had root beer in the fridge.

But now that I am fat, I might have to rethink things a bit.  I might have a heart attack and die at a relatively early age, and people might have to mourn me and say nice things about me on the news.  I am always afraid to know who would show at my funeral (actually I’d like a viking burial, if it turns out someone reading this is in charge of my final arrangements).  That was until I found out about Michael Jr.

I’m starting to think that having children, considering the world they will have to grow up in, is at probably at least slightly narcissistic and possibly morally questionable.  I don’t think I’m wrong about this, but Michael Jr. has forced me to see another side.

One of my responsibilities at work is to take care of my boss’s plants.  This is perhaps the one thing at work that I enjoy the most.  I can get whatever I want as far as plants go, and I just need to make sure they don’t die.  I think I have already lost an orchid to cancer, but I don’t feel like that was my fault.  Nevertheless, it was devestating.  At first I had visions of turning my boss’s apartment into a veritable hanging garden, but when I lost that orchid some of my confidence went with it.  You could say a part of me died, but that would be melodramatic.  If it’s true it was a very small part, and maybe like a tonsil.  Suffice to say I’ll get along fine without it.  But that won’t be the case if I lose Michael Jr.

I ordered a venus fly trap, and I took to it almost immediately.  You’d be surprised how small they are.  And very fragile.  I loved it unconditionally as soon as it arrived.  And like you do with things you love, I named it after myself.  I think I know what it’s like to be a parent.  For the first time I can understand the desire to mold something into a minature version of yourself.  I can understand the need for a legacy.  I want only the best for Michael Jr.  I think that all of these feelings make me closer to normal.  And somehow, so does being fat.  I think I am finally starting to fit in.

I’m not sure whether to be happy or sad about the fact that I am now pretty much like everyone else.  I guess like everyone else I will stop thinking about this sort of thing at all.  And like everyone else I will die sometime between the ages of 50 and 70 of heart disease.  Some people will go to my funeral and Michael Jr. will deliver the eulogy and perhaps compose a requiem, if he is talented enough.  I will think he is talented enough, but it won’t matter because I will be dead.  There will be people sitting in chairs.  Most of them will wear black and a few might cry.  Michael Jr will say that I was kind and generous and that I loved my family very much.  I had a smile that lights up a room.  Just like everyone else.

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.

A thought crushed me like a ton of bricks.  Just now.  Literally.  And while this metaphor is a bit overdramatic and decidedly not literal, you’ve read enough of these by now to understand that this is not the point (Or, a hearty welcome to you, reader #6).  The point is that, as usual, I am going to write an unnecessarily long preface to my thought, followed by a short, unsatisfying explanation of said thought, and then somehow avoid coming to any sort of conclusion.  But this time, the pieces fit.  I’ve had an epiphany, if you will.  Actually you can, but I won’t.  I’m not a fan of the word “epiphany”.  Mostly because I disagree with the spelling.

The most selfish person I know recently told me that I am a self-absorbed narcissist.  This, as far as I can tell, represents a change in thinking for her because up until that point she was one of the people that I believe I had conned into thinking that I have a soul.  It was an important statement because it was perhaps the most pithy thing she has ever said to me.  As it turns out, she does not double as the wisest person I know.  Or the most intelligent.  Or the most insightful.  Perhaps still the most interesting though, which is not so much a statement of how interesting she is as much as it is an indictment of everyone else I know.  Not you though, you’re right up there.  Seriously.

I mention this for two reasons.  First, because despite the source, this statement is correct.  Second, because it is important for you to realize that without one thinking about oneself at a near pathological level, epiphanies (literally, for lack of a better word) like this are just not possible.

I spend a good amount of my day trying to figure out what the hell I am doing at wherever it is I am at any given moment.  I always sort of feel like I have yet to get over the proverbial hump.  I’ve always felt like things should be better in some ambivalent, dubious sort of way.  It’s not that things are bad.  They’re not.  I really have nothing to complain about.  I’m not sure I have much to get excited about either.  So at what point does that change?  Does it change at all?  Am I at least allowed to hope for this?  I could make it happen right?  Hard work and determination?  Never give up, never ever give up?  Uhhh….. Here’s the thing.

And this is what hit me.  Hard, you know, kind of like a ton of bricks.  I have an intense and over-riding fear of success.  And of course, this is the most arrogant fear a person can have, which is exactly why I have it.  Of course, this sort of implies that I have the capacity for success, and considering that I have never really done anything it is entirely possible that my greatest attribute is the ability to dupe people into thinking that I have potential.  Potential is sort of an elusive concept, because if it is never realized, could you say it was ever really there?  Lots of people at various times have told me that I have potential in different areas, but since that has never really come to fruition, is it possible that I just suck at everything?  I have to at least consider it.  But of course, I won’t really.  Not yet.  For now I am sticking with the idea that success scares the shit out of me.  Mostly because I think I am right about that.  Consider the evidence.

I have now played seven seasons of NCAA football 2007 with Temple University, and for the last two seasons we have been on the brink of playing for the national title.  But I always blow it in the last game.  So I’m a choker, right?  Possibly, except that in this game you can choose your own schedule and I always save my toughest game for last.  So I like a challenge, right?  Well, Consider this.  I have a Master’s degree.  Barely.  I think my nickname around campus was “D-minus”.  Master’s level academics sure seems like a challenge, right?  Well, way to rise up son.  And of course, this happened for a lot of reasons, the most obvious of which is that I didn’t work hard enough.  But then again maybe I’m not smart enough.  I like to tell people that I will get a Ph.D, but maybe that is too far over my head.  I don’t think so, but there are lots of things about reality that I refuse to believe.  I believe success frightens me.  So I pretend to try.  But not really.  There’s more.

Despite the fact that I clearly had the best team on paper and was the #1 seed going into the playoffs, I blew my fantasy football league this year.  And you could argue that I have little to no control over what happens on an NFL football field from week to week and this is true.  Except for this.  One of the reasons I had such a good team to begin with was that I put some time and effort into it.  Included in said time and effort was the fact that every sunday at 12:45 I double checked my lineup to make sure none of my players would be game time inactives.  Except for the week of my first playoff game.  Since it was Christmas Eve, I spent the day with my brother and did not watch any football.  I would have done this anyway, except that we left the house at roughly 12:27.  Had I waited an extra 18 minutes, which I totally could have done, I would have seen that Braylon Edwards was deactivated for that week because of an attitude problem, and I could have inserted Mike Furrey into the lineup and scored nine more points for the day.  Check the record that week.  I would have advanced to the Super Bowl.  Potential?  Am I afraid of what would have happened had I won?  I think so, and I’ll explain in a minute.

All of these examples occurred in the last six months, but it is nothing recent.  I finished my undergrad with a 3.449 GPA, or .001 away from graduating with honors.  That is completely true.  What is also true is that I received a B in a class my final semester from a professor notorious for giving as many A’s as possible.  The reason?  I didn’t even entertain the idea of studying for my final exam.  It was an easy test, but with about 30 minutes of studying I could have aced it.  But I didn’t.  And I was in Lakeland, FL for fuck sake.  It’s not like it was Mardi Gras.  I had the time.  What would have happened if I had studied?  What am I afraid of?

But this predates college as well.  I like sports.  I mostly watch them these days, but I used to play them.  I was OK at most everything I tried, but if I was good at anything it was baseball.  I played on some pretty shitty baseball teams most of my life, but one year we were good.  We were in the playoffs, and by any objective measure, we were the best team in the league.  In the semifinals we played a team that wasn’t nearly as good as us but for some reason they hung around and took us into extra innings.  I was playing second base because I always play second base.  Their fast leadoff hitter was up with two out and none on, and I knew he was going to hit it in the hole between first and second because he had done so in all three of his previous at bats.  So I played him that way.  And he hit it right at me.  Hard.  I fielded it cleanly…and promptly threw it three feet wide of the first baseman.  Their guy got second on the error, stole third, and scored the go ahead run on a wild pitch (like I said, he was fast).  And to be fair, our first baseman was fat and a normal sized guy probably could have stretched and made that catch.  And to be fair I obviously didn’t make that throw on purpose.  But how would I have handled winning a championship that year?  I wonder if I could have.

It wasn’t a high school thing either.  In sixth grade I purposely misspelled a word in a spelling bee so I wouldn’t win.  I spelled guitar with a “j”.  In second grade I used to get the answers wrong on purpose when the teacher called on me.  In first grade I pretended I couldn’t read.  It’s all true.  And it’s all hitting me just now.

I wanted to do some research on the fear of success so you would think that I was clever.  I wanted to tell you it was called blahblaphobia and it is just as irrational as fearing spiders or the number thirteen and just as covered by a good health insurance plan.  But it’s not.  There is no phobia associated with success, which means it’s a completely rational fear.  And suddenly that makes sense.

What happens when you succeed?  You do something great and suddenly you have peaked.  And that is precisely what scares me.  What happens next?  How do you follow the best thing you have ever done?  You could try to top it, but that isn’t likely.  What is likely is that it is all down hill from here.  And if that doesn’t scare you, it should.  And everyone will use some sort of cliched platitude explaining that it is better to do something great once than to never reach the mountain top.  And I can’t decide if I agree.  Maybe it’s better to skate by on potential and be eternally hopeful that something better will happen and happen soon.  But there’s always the chance that it won’t.  There’s always the chance that I suck.

So true to form, I have no idea how to wrap this up.  But I know that I should.  So at what point does could, would, and should become can’t, didn’t, and won’t?  And if I potential never gets realized, does it ever really exist?  Maybe instead of being disappointed with the people in our lives who just don’t pan out, we should be disappointed in ourselves.  Maybe we were wrong all along about all those people we thought could be something and weren’t.  Maybe everybody’s been wrong about me.  Maybe the people who thought I sucked were right.  I’m not sure what the thought of that does to me, but somehow I’m not so afraid anymore.