portraits of people you never knew iii
I inhaled and then coughed with uncontrollable violence as the carbon monoxide ravaged my lungs. “Jeez man! How can you smoke these menthol things?”
Ryan shrugged with a total indifference followed only by a hard swallow of some Jack.
I spat. “It’s like smoking fucking eucalyptus or something.”
We both laughed, I suffered through the mint flavored smoke, and Ryan handed me the bottle to wash out the taste. As my cigarette slowly burned, Ryan slid his newly obtained running shoes onto his feet and inspected them carefully.
“BECAUSE” was sprayed, in rust-colored paint, upon the side of one of the cement walls. The simplicity of the message held my attention while Ryan laced up the shoes. I formed the word with my lips and thought, “Because what?”
“It’s almost over, man.” The words slipped past Ryan’s cigarette.
“What is?” I spat again at the concrete floor.
“This.” Ryan motioned with his hand at the surrounding office buildings. “You’re gone in a week and a half. You think it’ll be like this when you come back? If you come back.”
I didn’t want to leave. I stubbed out my cancer-stick and mumbled, “Of course I’m coming back.”
portraits of people you never knew ii
The roof was empty like one of those zombie movies, where no one else is left alive. Apocalyptic.
“No one ever parks up here, Joe,” Ryan mumbled, “and besides, these mall-going vampires hate sunlight.” He popped the trunk and unlocked the doors. “Don’t mix metaphors.”
“So, what are we doing here?” I asked. Out of the car, I stretched.
“I say, mix drinks.” From the open trunk, Ryan grabbed a plastic bag. “Sort of like a last supper.”
“A little early for dinner,” I joked.
Ryan smiled. “I know, man.”
In the black bag were two bottles of Jack Daniel’s and three packs of Parliaments: two blue and one green. I thought of the ocean.
“Looks like a party.” I grinned and snatched a pack.
The bottle passed between us. The sun hung high and bright. White clouds spotted the sky like scattered sheep. I don’t remember the last time I looked up at the blue above, without even the slightest fear that something was going to fall from it. Warm beneath that summer sun, I picked the dead skin of week old sun burn. It came off my arm in thin flakes like tiny pieces of tissue paper.
“It’s the end of an age, man.” He lit a Parliament and took an endless drag. In his smoke, I smelled mints. Ryan tossed me his Zippo and a Parliament from his green pack.
portraits of people you never knew i
We always dreamt about getting out.
Read Morecounseling chris
Chris rolls his eyes and I see so much of myself in them. Cold, unfeeling, and blue. “I don’t care, any more.” ’m at a temporary lost. I look down at my pizza. The pupil-less eyes of the pepperonis stare back. “Come on man, don’t say that,” I warn him. “You should care. Chris, he’s your father. He’s sick.”
Read Morethe truth (is a lie)
“Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald from “The Crack-Up”
Read More
good mourning, moratorium iii
So what?
You don’t like the decisions you’ve made, the person you’ve become.
And sure,
you could describe it as
self-destructive,
suicidal,
passive aggressive
whatever,
but it’s not that simple.
You put yourself in these
impossible situations,
casually inviting disaster in,
and you do it
with a smile.
These disasters are pristinely orchestrated .
The same hands
turn the key,
push the button,
delivered the killing blow
to those who you should have been proud to call your
true friends.
But you didn’t call them that,
did you?
Wouldn’t allow.
Is it this you find yourself truly regretting, now?
And of course, there’s a reason for all of this.
No,
it’s not because mommy and daddy didn’t love you enough
or the convoluted fact that the other kids picked on you when you were younger.
No,
the reason is a much more selfish one.
Every job you couldn’t hold down,
every relationship you’ve let crumble and die,
every sweet, star-struck girl you’ve ever made cry:
it’s all for the same reason.
You see, it’s not that you have it out for yourself,
that you secretly want to see yourself fail,
ultimately.
You don’t consciously booby-trap your life because of a self-loathing obsession with failure.
You do it all to see just how much shit this pitiful excuse for an existence of yours can really take.
Like a kid playing with fire,
you hold a palm over the open flame
to see
just how much
pain
it takes before eyes start to shed tears.
But who’s crying? Them or you?
It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. It all comes out the same in the wash.
The small cracks interest you not.
You want to know how many times you can drop something before it finally ceases to function.
But you don’t really want it to break,
in the end,
even though that is the goal
to which all of this
has
been
building,
because,
then,
the game would be over.
And it has never really been about crossing the line, but simply about seeing just how close to it you can get.
Since expectation and reality never meet, you can, instead, expect nothing and, therefore, never be disappointed, never find yourself haunted with this ugly regret.
Let go.
You will only be pleasantly surprised.
And seriously, who doesn’t like surprises?
good mourning, moratorium ii
But you can’t enjoy anything.
Can you?
Regret never allows.
In this attempt to bid farewell to one thing, you have forgotten to welcome another.
And so,
the time has come for some re-evaluation,
hasn’t it?
That regret is rearing its
snot-nosed,
ugly head
again,
isn’t it?
Then there’s this list
of all those hopes,
your dreams:
what
they
are
and
how
catastrophically
you have failed them,
because in the end it is you failing them and not the other way around.
Let’s be clear.
You’ve taken, what, four years away in refuge from this Podunk little town. Isn’t that enough? Presidents change in that much time. Lives are loved and lost in usually less.
God
needed six days
to do His whole creation
thing.
Jesus,
think what he could have done
with four fucking years.
So, it isn’t too much of a leap of faith to expect life to have kept on without you,
for things to have shifted,
altering, the ripple-effect.
Why then do you find everything more or less exactly where you left it as though this entire place has been on pause while you were gone?
The lives of people you’ve grown up with, were raised by, worked for, learned from, laughed with, loved, and hated have simply ceased to exist in your absence.
Expectation versus reality.
And, well, nothing’s changed.
Sure, a few houses have been remodeled, some individuals have less hair and some have more, some have gained weight while others lost it,
but fundamentally
nothing has changed.
The clothes you wore in high school still hang in your closet. Your backpack has not moved from the spot on the rug on which you dropped it on your last day of classes.
Parents still eye children with those same fake, nervous smiles.
Strangely, there is no dust on any of it or any of them.
You’re not the same person,
so why should
they
be?
All you keep thinking is,
“It seems like just yesterday -- ”
and each time the absurdity of this entire situation prevents you from finishing the thought.
Perhaps this regret gives way to a second chance.
Maybe everyday is a opportunity to vanquish those mistakes of old.
Are there not some things which cannot be undone or mended or completely forgotten in the wake of time?
Then there comes the realization,
an answer
in the form
of a question:
If everyone acts like they did and nothing’s really changed,
are you then,
by association now,
the same as
you once were?
Are you unchanged?
Just as quickly as this moment comes, maybe you notice some more recent scars seem to be faded more than they used to, maybe you breathe a little easier and start to feel young again, maybe the clock starts to turn back to a simpler, more innocent time,
and maybe
this whole thing is starting to
drive you crazy.
Newer memories are slipping, because everything’s been getting so fuzzy lately.
Was all you’ve done, everything you’ve become for nothing?
Was your regret misdirected?
Is it not growing up, never growing up, which you really fear?
And it’s killing you
just the same.
This regret
with a different name.
You had your chance at escape and took it, but now for some reason which you’re having an increasingly difficult time remembering,
you came back and staying means a slow and painful death sentence at your own hands.
It’s like ink in your mouth
and it stains
in all the same ways.
That woman, middle-aged and unaware of her own imprisonment, sitting across from you at a bar,
asks,
“What’s a boy to do?”
Do you rebel and leave? Abandon regret and chase some intangible dream.
Can you, even?
Since that’s the obvious choice, the one everyone expects you to make, do you then rebel and stay?
Abandon regret and learn to see the things right in front of you.
The things ahead.
Decisions, decisions.
Expectation versus reality.
The fate of your parents and their parents.
Are you mature enough to make the difficult choice, the selfless choice, the stupid choice, the utterly and completely idiotic one?
My God,
can you be any more
melodramatic?
It’s really that simple.
Start a fire and walk away.
Watch it burn from a hillside or at a safe distance, on a TV in a different bar somewhere.
Stay. Go.
What difference does it make?
No matter where you go, your life will ultimately reach the same outcome.
Will there always be regret?
Is it, then, something unavoidable?
You’ll be miserable here in much the same way you are miserable everywhere else.
Because you see,
it’s not them,
you
self-centered
little fuck.
You
are the problem.
It’s you and your own self-destructive flaw of which you have now and forever condemned yourself.
Misery loves company and company, thy name is
you.
good mourning, moratorium i
You get through it all:
high school,
college,
and ultimately find yourself spending an increasing number of sleepless nights looking back, wondering
what happened
and
at which point
you
went
wrong.
You cannot quite put your finger on it, but the entire experience closely resembles what the others might call regret.
Where were all the parties, the countless, faceless, drunken co-eds waiting and willing to be taken to bed?
The expectation and the reality never seem to meet.
The books and movies have been so misleading.
All stories are lies, not to be trusted on some level.
Nothing is ever as good as you build it up to be in your head.
Nothing ever prepares you for this heartbreaking disappointment.
And maybe that’s the problem.
Now,
straddling
this line
between
two worlds,
with one leg
in childhood
and
the other
in the land of adults,
you’re faced with nothing
but the subtlety of regret.
One foot
past,
one foot
future,
while
the present is
fucking you
up the ass
because suddenly, there’s no more time remaining to make
bad decisions,
choices without
real consequences,
the free-bees,
the do-overs.
The time to say goodbye to what it truly means to be young has arrived, bursting through a window and not the door through which you were expecting.
The personal catastrophes you’ve been saving up for, experimentations with strange new drugs and multiple sexual partners have all been missed, some how, while you were
waiting,
stalling,
biding time.
Your designated “fuck-up years” have come and, just as quickly, have gone by without you even noticing.
Given the chance, what would you change?
Because, of course, now, life matters,
your choices affect the future,
and nothing you ever
secretly wanted
to do
can be
done.
Your choice was a path, the safe one, and you traveled down it, hoping all the while that something better, something far more exciting would stumble upon you.
Making no moves,
taking no risks,
you planned,
hoped,
and prayed
for the universe’s great revelation,
when the sky would open up at sunset and rearrange the cosmos of your pathetically bland existence
without you having to even so much
as lift
a finger.
Sure, you only chose this life out of spite towards parents, teachers, and everyone else whoever made the mistake of expecting anything other than banality from you.
You did it all,
though you’ll never admit it,
to yourself.
Patience is a weakness.
Expectation
versus
reality.
Coasting creates a trap,
this snare of misery tightening around your throat.
So, enjoy what you end up with:
buried
in a job
you hate,
married
to a person
you do not love.
It’s your life,
your mess,
your neat little pile of bullshit.
And
you are so fucked.
Enjoy.