So I do this thing now where somtimes I sit here at night and I want to write, but I struggle, and often I can’t, and often I don’t actually like anything that I write.
Because like the vast majority of the other people, I have learned how to lie, including to myself, and once you have learned how to lie, you lose the ability to see into the center of yourself or into the center of anyone else.
In a way, it’s how you know you’re not autistic. Because if you were autistic, you’d be able to tell the truth. And that’s why everyone who “supports” autistic people actually secretly hates them.
Funny how we all know it, but nobody calls them out about it.
— § —
There are an awful lot of things that we all know but that nobody calls anyone out about, like the way in which we let that bossy, insecure, do-right girl that nobody liked but the vice principal in high school become the soul of the entire society.
Though this one’s mostly on the women, because men aren’t supposed to hit women.
Women, please find all these other women who are walking around cooing and oohing and having causes and trying to do the right thing, and swing street signs right against their faces. Thanks.
I hope there are still some cool girls out there to read stuff like this. I don’t know, I’m old now and I mostly go to work so it’s hard to know who’s still out there.
— § —
I sit here sometimes recently and I think about age, mostly because I’ve got so much of it behind me and so little of it ahead of me.
Every now and then someone will say something like “Oh 48, you’re still young, bah!”
But of course that’s bullshit. I mean, I can count. I was born in the year of the dragon on the Chinese zodiac, which is a 12-year cycle. I knew very well when I was younger that I’d probably have either six or seven full cycles in my life.
Well, four of these are done. At most, there are three to go, but it’s more likely two, I think, based on life expectancy in America and the amount of chemicals I ingested and sleep I didn’t get throughout my teens and twenties.
And these are not exactly prime years.
I mean, I sit down and I can’t write for god’s sake, while it used to flow out of me. It’s been nearly two decades since my last book and god knows how long since I wrote anything creative that I liked.
I don’t take pictures any longer and I don’t read novels any longer.
— § —
I think I finished reading novels once I read 2666, which was a kind of distillation of the 20th century into a single work.
Take Hitler and Stalin and Vietnam and the rise of cars, and airplanes, and nuclear weapons, and the Chernobyl disaster, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and all of the cocaine and crack and heroin deaths and all of the rapes and combine them all into a tidy little magical realist novel about academics and there you have 2666, and once you read it, you stand up and you think, “Well that’s fucking it, I don’t think I’ll ever read another novel.”
And then mostly you don’t.
— § —
What will I do?
What should I do?
All the goals on the “bucket list” were completed years ago but by then there were kids and it was so very clear that the purpose of my existence, the reason to turn up to work in the morning, was to be a parent and raise kids.
But of course kids grow up and beyond that you once again have to confront the question of what you ought to be doing with yourself.
But without the bucket list, what do you do next?
You can’t really extend the old list, as all of those goals weren’t really yours anyway. People who make bucket lists young are just regurgitating what’s been in their water; they’re too young to know a damned thing about a damned thing, including what ought to go on a bucket list.
But starting a new list is really beyond the pale, too. I mean, you’re sitting there beginning to think “empty nest, kids have flown the coop, I have what, ten or twenty years left, depending” and the last thing you feel like you ought to do is “start from scratch.”
It really feels like you ought to be applying the final layer of polish to something, really working out the last remaining flaws so that it shines brilliantly even in dim light, something that can be left as a legacy to progeny.
But instead what you have is bloodwork from your last physical and some old $10 Chinese worry balls and a bunch of video games you beat a long time ago, and a paper mache PhD that you never used for anything that you got when you thought people were successful and accomplished because of education rather than because of how big their boobs are or how sound a social manipulator they are.
— § —
As someone who grew up on album rock, there is no good way to listen to music any longer. The album is dead, but you want to hear the fucking album, but you can’t. You just can’t. There are a bunch of streaming services that will interrupt you and add to your list and change what you’re trying to play and there are mp3 files and playlists that you have to manage into place and while you might do that for one album you sure as hell won’t bother to do it for a thousand albums so you don’t.
I asked somebody whether they were a “music” or a “not music” in the car and then later on I found myself reflecting on whether I was a music or a not music any longer. I listen to a lot of music still but I don’t think I hear it like I did when I was a kid.
For example, it would never cause me to set a fire or kill someone now, while I could conceivably have seen that happening when I was a teen.
Yes, that means that I “enjoy music in a more mature way” and so on, but if we’re honest what it really means is that once I was mostly alive and now I’m mostly dead, which I suppose is generally what happens to people as they age.
Yes, yes, you don’t want to run around killing people or setting fires, but you want to pose the threat of doing those things, and you certainly want to have those passions raging in your soul.
It’s no damned good to be full of peace and calm. At least not for the final, like half-century of your life.
— § —
I look back on the junior high school and high school crowds and I want to sort of return to the roots and reconnect with people, but there’s nobody on my wavelength, and that’s proven to be difficult over the years.
What I mean is that there’s the super-successful group, got their advanced degrees, moved to major cities, but then unlike me actually got tenure or founded the startup and now are a superstar professor or a CEO and rather well off, and so on, and it’s hard to hang around with them because mere mortals are dour about their mortality, so oil and water &c.
And then there’s the flame-out group, i.e. she’s in jail, so sad, she got pregnant five times by five different guys, so sad, she’s addicted to opiates, so sad, he’s in a halfway house, so sad, he’s been working at the convenience store across from the school since he graduated from school, so sad, but at least he’s not dead like the one who overdosed after beating up his wife and kids…
What’s missing are the “I was brilliant and got multiple advanced degrees and won awards and published books and founded companies but I am still impoverished and ultimately born and bred lower-middle class so I struggle to stay off junk food and charity events make me want to punch waiters and swear like a sailor, can we all just drink some gin and burn stuff down?”
Where are the lower-middle-class founder PhDs with expertise enough to have been on TV a few times but poor taste, worse manners, and worse still fashion sense? Who like to watch crime dramas and sitcoms? That’s my tribe, but they appear to be entirely missing from the world except for me.
— § —
I understand why people turn into embarrassing stoners once their kids grow up and leave home. I won’t do it because it’s embarassing, but I understand why.
The question is, what will I do?
Every now and then I get on the meet-up app and look around for stuff, or I think become Catholic or Orthodox and have organized religion to live with, but then I talk to someone nice on the phone or on the street and we have a pleasant conversation and I realize that this would make me want to kill myself, so I delete the meet-up app.
There are millions of other introverts like me out there who aren’t shy, and are lonely, but who find that what happens when you join a club or a party or a circle of friends is that you get twice as lonely whenever they’re around, and if it’s a really pleasant night with a really big circle of friends for once, you’re so lonely you want to bash your brains out, or at the very least never, ever go out again because it’s just too lonely to be with all these people.
So I don’t know, meet-ups are out.
I could write software. I could become a stock photographer again. I could write books again. I could take up martial arts again. I could start reading novels again. I could restore old cars. I could restore old homes. I could become an alcoholic. I could become a gardener. I could travel around the world. I could go back and teach college. I could learn to play a music instrument. I could learn to speak Chinese.
I could, I could, I could, but I won’t, because bullshit.
So I’ll just end this post.
The end.