You’ll have to excuse me for this week’s depressive post.
Unfortunately I live in the Northeast and have been stuck in the house for days because of the NEVER-ENDING Snowpocalypse and, as such, have been busy spending all my down time wondering what the hell happened to me.
So let’s begin this journey of self-pity together shall we?
In the beginning:
I entered the nineties in my sixteenth year all fresh and innocent and ended the decade in my mid-twenties bitter and with a ceaseless craving for high-grade weed. This “lost” decade as it were has become, as I make my way through my thirties, a period of reflection upon which I am determined to discover the origin of my incredible apathy and/or laziness.
Before the decade squandered my soul, I had plans for a career as a writer/adventurer. A sort of quasi-anthropologist-slash-chronicler in the vein of Tim Cahill or Wade Davis.
I would travel the world writing biographical, yet humorous, essays and books about my experiences. I would eschew the suburban lifestyle and all of its trappings for a one-room abode in some cosmopolitan city (Manhattan, Buenos Aires, or Paris) which I would use only as a stopping point between assignments and adventures. I would have lovers, eat exotic foods, drink wine, and be the envy of every cubicle dweller who read my work.
Unfortunately, in the nineties, I discovered the wonders of hallucinogenics and the hypnotic pulsating BPMs of raves. This, coupled by low paying retail work and a new interest in writing poetry, constructed an alternative dream life that has all but evaporated my adventure streak and, instead, built a life of laying on the floor of my living room watching television and yelling at Dr. Phil.
From the moment that I was introduced to gel acid, X, pot, and the ‘o so delicious mushroom bag, my life became freelance work and erotica stories.
The all-night dance-a-thons which mixed Herbal Ecstasy and copious amounts of Whiskey Sours ended a decade later with essays on the virtues of the Jizz mopper at porn stores and my irritable bowl problems. Instead of spending my twenties traipsing the world with a backpack and a notebook, I spent it as a used book buyer in Texas living off of cheese samples at the grocery store and writing chapbooks of self-published poetry of which I sold three copies and were about my “milky moonlit thighs”…dear God.
My thirties, it seems, has evolved into something much, much, worse.
I am boring.
Having given up on drugs, adventures, and illicit sex with dangerously dark foreigners, I have instead embraced the act of staring at squirrels, writing novellas that are never published, and creating paper goods to sell at craft fairs where I am constantly criticized by blue haired Mennonites who hate my secular sense of humor.
Instead of writing about the ritual circumcisions of young tribal boys in Africa, I watch television, read comic books, go into minute detail on the brilliance of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, spend horrific amounts of time on Facebook, and wear sweatpants out in public because I am no longer interested in presenting myself in the best light.
Instead of running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain I am running to the grocery store for hummus because I have decided to eat that and trail mix for dinner.
Instead of drifting down the Nile River underneath the moon, I am drifting to sleep after re-reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for the tenth time because tackling the catalog of John Grisham seems too taxing…well you get the drift.
So, was it the drugs that destroyed me or was it inevitable that I became this lump?
After careful evaluation and the countless conversations with friends who I met in the mythical Nineties it has become painfully obvious…I was to always become a lump. And, apparently, it was the drugs that made me more interesting. So here I am, Thirty-six, and a boring lump with very little in the way of a career and/or talent, staring at the precipice of my Forties without hope that I can “turn this thing around.” So I will do the only thing one can do when presented with such facts…return to drugs.
Yes, I will be scarfing down bag fulls of pills, licking toads, eating peyote buttons, and loosening the constraints of consciousness through pharmaceuticals all in an attempt to regain my teenage sensibilities when I thought I had all the time in the world.
I will finish out my thirties writing in a drug-induced stupor and thinking I am brilliant even though I am only typing the number 4 for 600 pages. I will pretend that I am twenty-two again and act accordingly. I will drop acid, stare at a wall for twelve hours, and think that the word “warble” is the password to get into the garden of Eden. I will listen to Phish and Dave Matthews and become all faux-hippy. It will be great.
I will hit the do-over button and start over again.
I don’t see how it can go wrong.
Of course, I might just go take a nap instead…the day is mine.
