I Need You To Believe In Love

All of us were young once and perhaps that is our primary curse. I used to think that we had only one curse to deal with, but as it turns out, we have secondary and tertiary curses.

I first fell out of love with John when we were twenty six. Well, I was twenty six. He’d just turned twenty seven. We had our whole lives ahead of us but considered ourselves amongst the elderly and were already talking about our plans for retirement. (Community in Boca Raton. Walks along the beach. Spare bedroom for the grand kids.) We were in a taxi cab on our way back to our apartment - we had just seen Phantom - and I looked over at him and really looked at him and then thought about other things. Let me be clear, I had really looked at him and thought about other things many times before this cold November night, but this time it was different. If life were but ones and zeros, absolute truths and pitiful lies, God might have looked down on me that night and told me I was wrong.

“This night isn’t any different from any other night. You still love him because this has happened before.” I wasn’t wrong, though. It was as if everything had shifted five degrees to the left. A seismic shift had taken place and thankfully nobody else had noticed.

I don’t know why I didn’t stop the taxi and tell him that I wanted a divorce and that I was going to go spend the night with “Wayne, from accounting.” I’m pretty sure that Wayne had no idea that I was attracted to him, and at times I was skeptical myself, but when push comes to shove you sometimes have to make hard choices. Of course I didn’t jump out of the taxi at a red light. “The actress playing Christine was really good. I have no idea how she hits all of those high notes. I could never do that.”

When we got back to our apartment we briefly tried to have sex and then were much more successful at getting ready for bed. I remember staring at myself in the bathroom mirror and promising myself that John would not find out.

“This has been working. Don’t to anything too rash. Don’t fuck this up. You could wake up tomorrow morning and love him again. Hopefully that’s what happens.”

When you’ve been doing something for long enough it’s harder to stop. My grandfather used to say that he wasn’t afraid of heights, he was afraid of falling from heights and colliding with the ground. I look back on my twenty six year old self and realize that the fall wasn’t that far. I’m sure I would have made it. “Wayne, from accounting” probably would have slept with me (he died from an aneurysm two weeks later so I never found out if he was even capable of speech) and I, bruised and maybe with a dislocated shoulder, would have moved out and moved on. And John would have moved on too.

I kept my promise to myself and days dragged into weeks and eventually I forgot that I had ever been honest with my feelings. I would kiss John and tell him that I loved him and he would apologize and say that it wasn’t about me but that he had had a very long day and really just needed to get some sleep. John loved sleeping. He slept a lot around that time. Probably stress at work.

Eventually I fell back in love, of course. There’s a certain indescribable pain that comes with the transition from pretending to have feelings to actually having feelings, and that first time I went through it it almost killed me. And of course there’s relief too, like when you can finally feel yourself starting to get better after a long and miserable cold.

I’ve been thinking a lot about curses and a lot about demons recently, for obvious reasons. When I was twenty six years old I might have asked John what his were. I can’t now. I don’t want to know how many times he’s looked in the mirror in our master bathroom and made promises to himself.

"American Idiot" by Green Day

It was October 2004 and my mother was driving me to the seventh/eighth grade dance in the passenger’s seat of my family’s white 2001 Jeep Cherokee. I wanted to be a rock star - had you seen by black Fender Squire Strat!?!? - and at every turn took great pains to demonstrate my will. This meant getting my mom to buy me black, baggy pants at Hot Topic with like 15 zippers on each leg. This meant obsessively listening to the compact discs my sister had given me Christmas 2003: Sum 41’s seminal Does This Look Infected? and (with slightly less enthusiasm due to its significantly harsher quality) Punk-O-Rama Vol. 2. This also meant listening to DC101, which kept bands like Incubus, Pearl Jam and The Foo Fighters in heavy rotation. Occasionally, however, a gem would come on. That night, waiting at a red stoplight on Twinbrook Parkway, I got lucky.

A cutting guitar, then a moist band, then: “Don’t wanna be an American Idiot / Don’t want a nation under the new media.” I’d heard my friend Jonah talk about how something called “Jesus of Suburbia” was his favorite. “And can you hear the sound of hysteria? / The subliminal mind— America.”

“Oh, who is this?” my mom asked.

“It’s Green Day, I think,” although I already knew. Their black and red hand grenade advertising had already captivated me. They fucking were rock and roll.

“Oh. I’ve heard of them.”

An election was a month away that we all (as a seventh grader I was well versed in the evils of George W. Bush - thanks Michael Moore!) hoped would go a different way than it eventually would, and the “liberal elite media” was doing its best to pile on. And had I been the cynical, pseudo-intellectual, twenty eight year old hipster that I am now back then I likely would have dismissed all of the standing around on soapboxes as piling on with nothing original to say. After all, the sentiments behind “Fuck the government for going to war” and “Don’t be a follower” are as old as they are easy to get behind, and, well, follow. The Washington Post review of Green Day’s concert at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland also pointed this out, and it pissed me the fuck off, because at that point I was a dyed-in-the-wool Green Day fan (but mostly American Idiot) and John Kerry had lost.

I was not alone because American Idiot was the perfect album for a 13-year-old suburban liberal kid in 2004. It was edgy and made my parents uncomfortable - Billie Joe Armstrong used the f-word and my mother ask/told me in the way that only parents can, “You’re not going to use that kind of language, right?” - but it was also relatively “clean” and “wholesome.” It was a bunch of rich, white men singing about love conquering all even in the face of abject media disillusionment to middle-to-upper-class white kids so it all made sense. It was the musical equivalent of going to the movies for the first time with your friends, and pretending you were unsupervised, even as your dad slept through most of Spider Man 2 in the back of the theater. It was the appearance of danger and independence with all of the actual danger and independence removed.

American Idiot inspired me, and so I learned how to play a power chord, bought a black button up shirt and a red tie and started to resent my parents for my upper-middle class upbringing: what do you write about when everything in your life has been pretty okay? I had no idea so I wrote about class-struggle, income inequality, the war effort, HIV (thanks, Rent) and the dangers of doing drugs: “Something was wrong / Made you think things were hopeless / Something was wrong / Made you think you should take drugs.”

I wish that “Whatever Didi Wants” wasn’t the only song that I enjoyed listening to on Punk-O-Rama Vol. 2, or that I got into any number of bands back “when they were good,” but that’s just not the way that things worked out. My mom gave me Weezer’s The Red Album and I actually really enjoyed listening to it. I wish that I wasn’t so desperate to fit in and I wish that I was smarter. None of this wishing does anything, but it’s also incorrect to not recognize how much I was influenced by mediocrity and safety.

I had nothing to be scared of and so I invented things to be scared of and the best thing about invented, scary things is that there is no proving they don’t exist. You can stew, and spiral and nobody can convince you otherwise. In 2004, I knew that my parents were going to get a divorce. I knew I was a weird kid that no girl would ever be interested in so it was better that I just stand off to the sideline and look at boobs. I knew that the only way that I would matter would be if I one day became Bille Joe Armstrong - became Green Day. Then it would all make sense. Then everyone would be jealous. Then I’d have a story to tell.

Until then…

Speedboat

I once had a friend named Dennis who was a dentist. From age zero to twenty six he had perfect teeth. On the eve of his twenty-sixth birthday he was smacked in the jaw by cricket bat and spent thousands of dollars on reconstructive surgery because when you’ve had perfect teeth for twenty-six years you don’t waste money on dental insurance. The surgery was a painful and arduous affair and many casual observers of Dennis’s life thought that this would abhor the dental profession for the rest of his life. Those casual observers (as many before them) were wrong. On his twenty-seventh birthday Dennis phoned his father and told him that he was enrolling in dental school. His father’s response was one of annoyance as Dennis was calling from Palm Beach, and his father lived in Tucson. The call was therefore of a long distance nature. This was back when that sort of thing mattered.

“What are you stupid or something?” his father said. It wasn’t a question. It was closest to an observation. “Why aren’t you using the ringback service I set up! You think I’m made of money. Oh, look! Now you’ve made Mandy upset! She’s crying now, Dennis. I bet you’re fucking happy now.” Mandy was Dennis’s much younger sister. They didn’t share mothers. You understand. You don’t need to focus much on her. She doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. The last time I will ever mention her is in the following paragraph.

And so it was that Dennis started dental school with many misgivings and a remarkably heavy heart. And so it was again that a short while later he graduated dental school and set out on his exciting new career path of looking inside mouths and making comments about what he saw. Nothing much had changed in the intervening years except that Mandy was now dead. A classmate of hers had brought a switchblade to school and had stabbed her and five other students. She was the only one that died. In a half hearted attempt to reassure parents, the school installed metal detectors and dedicated a memorial garden in Mandy’s honor. Dennis and his father spoke every month but had not talked about what had happened. By the time Dennis noticed their collective silence, it had now been long enough that he was pretty sure they never would talk about it. He did wonder how he would go about even bringing something like that up. “Sorry Mandy’s dead, dad.”

There’s an old, running joke within dental circles goes like this: dentists are around a lot of chemicals that are derived from heavy metals so they have a much higher rate of suicide. That’s funny. It was the kind of thing that Dennis would laugh at, red in the face and fun at the yearly East Coast Dental Convention. He would sit at the bar of the Downtown Newark Hilton and get wasted on Macallan 12 and wonder how his life could have become so comfortable and also so boring. He had morphine and anesthesia back at his office. He also had knives.

It’s nice when the universe sends you a sign and when Dennis was hit in the jaw with that cricket bat he felt wonderful because he finally saw clearly where his life was headed. He could hear all of the stars and planets and galaxies talking to him: “You’re going to be Dennis The Dentist,” they said, and they meant it. And it was good.

Dennis discovered three months into dental school that he hated dentistry. He could not stand the smell of the polishing material, and with advances in our nation’s fluoride programs, most of his job was dealing with polishing material. He also hated teeth. And mouths. And tongues. And the office storefront at Pike and Rose Plaza that he already knew would be his until he retired.

If he was a different kind of man (if he wasn’t Dennis The Dentist) he would have laid on his back in his backyard on the eve of his thirtieth birthday and screamed up into the heavens: “WHY?!” But that didn’t seem like something he would do so he didn’t do it. He just kept going, kept living. Frightened. What else could he do?

“How’s the practice going?” his dad asked over piles of smoked salmon and ritz crackers at his retirement party.

“It’s good. It’s great. I’m buying a speedboat.”

“Good,” said his dad. “That’s good. I’m proud of you.” It was the best moment of Dennis’s life.

Annie

I was depressed. It was at Christmas In July. I was six years old.

I don’t know if other cities hold things like Christmas In July (I am evidently too lazy for a single Google search) but I’m assuming that they do. It’s probably somehow a neglected step-child of either The New Deal or The Great Society and so it’s observed across the nation to remind us all that in only five more months, we’ll be pretending to be excited about the junk we tear apart brightly colored, expensive paper to get to.

I, of course, did not think this way when I was six years old. I was a romantic. I wanted to see the best in everyone and most of the time I did. I also looked forward to Christmas, but on this balmy July evening I was not looking forward to anything, in fact, I was fairly positive that I had just peaked. It was all downhill from here. My whole world had just fallen apart.

I would feel this feeling again, although less acutely. I would come back the next year and play Robin Oakapple in Ruddigore (which is admittedly a pretty fucked up character for a seven year old to play, but what’re you gonna not just do Ruddigore?!) and I would actually have lines that time. Making the leap from playing Sandy in Annie to the lead in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera is the kind of thing that actors of any age dream of, and I made that fucking leap in a single year: first grade. I know. I’m pretty goddamn impressive. Or at least I was. I don’t know what I am now. (Existing?)

I loved playing Sandy. I got to wear a dog costume and hang out with a bunch of cool older (7-9 year old) girls. I got to be part of something that was bigger than I was and I got to put on a show. For two weeks that was all that I cared about. And then Friday afternoon came, we performed (what I would later find out was a thoroughly abridged production of Annie) and then went home. Camp was over. See you next year.

And oh what a blow it was because when you are six a year feels like an eternity. Sure, there would be the school year drama classes. But those would be straight plays, not musicals, and it wouldn’t be the same as focusing on something really hard for two weeks straight and trying your best. Annie had been something special. I asked my mom to buy both the libretto at Music And Arts Center and the Original Broadway Recording at Tower Records and had cried to the sound of Andrea McArdle belting out “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow / You’re only a day away” completely obvious to the fact that the song had already been a punchline for over twenty years. I was honest. I had feelings. I was six years old.

Endings are a part of life. They seem to be one of the better ways that we have of measuring just how good the thing being ended was. If you feel badly when something ends, then it probably was a good thing. The opposite of the analogy of hitting your thumb repeatedly with a hammer. This is a hard thing to explain to a six year old, but I was a six year old who understood endings: I was afraid every evening when the sun would go down because that meant that sleep was coming and sleep felt a little bit too much like death.

And so I sat there with my family at an event meant to ready us for “the most wonderful time of year.” (I Googled: it’s a thing that seems like it happens all around the world so retract whatever thanks you gave the ghosts of Johnson and FDR) and then we went home and I wondered if I would ever be happy again.

14 More Things

1. I am going to try my best to be softer and to worry less about perfection.

2. I will work to convince myself (over and over again) that societal myths about productivity, wealth and power are false. I know this will be difficult because I live in society. I will try over and over (and over and over) to remind myself otherwise.

3. I will give in to the urges of my body and my mind and not feel terrible for doing so.

4. I will eat less meals on the subway. I will eat less meals in front of a computer screen.

5. I won’t feel bad about staying in on a Friday night if what I want to do is to stay in on a Friday night.

6. I won’t feel bad about feeling bad.

7. I will learn new things. I will re-learn others. And I will forget and make mistakes that I last made twenty years ago.

8. I will drink more water and use the bathroom regularly.

9. I will give myself room to understand what I want out of life and in doing so I understand that I will still occasionally (often) get lost. I will find my way and figure it out. And then I will re-figure it out. Over and over again.

10. I used to like General Tso’s Chicken. I do not care for it anymore. I will accept this. I am still me.

11. I will watch pornography and sometimes I will watch too much. I will swear that I will never watch pornography again. And then I will watch pornography again and sometimes I will watch too much.

12. I will be in nature and I won’t worry about what my beingness in nature is preventing me from accomplishing. (See also #2)

13. I will forgive those who I hated in high school, and hope that they also forgive me.

14. I will accept that I am ever changing and hope that those who love me will change with me.

Red Line

We used to run into one another on the red line. You’d be surprised to see me and ask me how long I was in town for and I would respond and say that it was only for a hot second. I’d just come down to renew my drivers license (something to do with avoiding jury duty) and would be leaving in the morning. But how are you? Are things good?

A few years ago this would have been the kind of interaction that I would heap sorrys upon and see how high I could get them to stack. But I don’t apologize anymore and so, as the conversation got to the point where I might have offered my condolences, things fell quiet. It felt like you were searching for something. I wasn’t going to be any help and so as we pulled into Grosvenor you said that this was your stop and you got off. The doors announced themselves to be closing and then there was metal and plastic between us and then I was pulled away. And I wondered what it was that you were up to in Grosvenor and what your life was like there and who you had become. And then I went home and went to sleep.

Eventually I stopped coming home, or would come home with more thought and attention to detail, and wouldn’t have to ride the red line late at night. I’m pretty sure you didn’t change the way I lived my life back then but I don’t know for certain. At a certain point if you want to stop lying to the people that you love you have to stop coming up with lies. I didn’t love you anymore so if I stopped riding the red line late at night it was because I was protecting my parents, my brother and sister. I was also protecting myself.

I’m not sure what I was trying to tell you when I showed up unannounced and uninvited at your 23rd birthday party, but if I was trying to tell you something I can only hope that you got the message. Your girlfriend was singing karaoke: “She Used To Be Mine” by Sara Bareilles. (Your girlfriend just calls her “Sara.”) It’s possible that I mumbled, “Hey, you were a good friend once and I miss that and so let’s start over,” and I also could have said “This was great and thanks for the invite but I’ve really got to get going.” You leaned in to hear better as I repeated it a second time and then you nodded and gave me a big hug and said that you hoped that we would see each other soon. I think I remember saying “For sure” or “Definitely” or “Yeah man!” but I had crossed you off my list of things to worry about. Six months later I would stumble upon a Facebook photo album of you and your fiancé’s trip to Rome and the worrying would begin again because I’m fucking great at worrying.

And then you got married. And then you moved to my city to study accounting (I think it was accounting - whenever you talk I day dream about sweaters and boats) and the one time that I saw you in that little dumpling shop in BedStuy, you were pink-cheeked and glutinous and I promised that I would see you again but I never did.

And in a few years I’ll get a Facebook invite to your going away party and I’ll tell my therapist that I am going to go. He will be understandably skeptical. You’re moving to just outside of Branson, Missouri to build a psychiatry practice and you will say that you want one last chance to say goodbye. I will worry about this because I’m fucking great at worrying and what else would I do with my time? (What do you do with your time?)

I will get off at Myrtle-Willoughby and I will walk up to the front door of (what I believe to be) your apartment building and I will hear noises up above and the hissing in my head will get louder. I will step up to the buzzer and look for your name. It won’t be there. You’re moving out in the morning and the superintendent has already put the next tenant’s name in: M. Goldberg. I’m will be relieved and then I will remember that the Facebook invite had an apartment number on it. I will also have your cellphone number from that trip to the dumpling shop. So many ways of getting an answer that I don’t want. I will take another step back.

I will look up and notice someone leaning out of the window, surveying the city through the apartment building across the street. It will be you. You will now have glasses and dark hair that, I will notice from a great distance, now has flecks of grey. I will stare for a moment, marveling, and then fear will snap me back and I will look down at my phone and pretend to be busy. I will scurry away.

“Scott? Hey, Scott! Is that you? Is that Scott?” I will think about stopping but I will not stop. I will not look up. I will keep going. I won’t breathe.

I will be back at Myrtle-Willoughby soon and you will think that it was someone else. And then you’ll move on to other things. You’ll think of me fondly and that will be fine. A fitting ending. “Remember Scott? I wonder what happened to him.”

Your psychiatry practice will grow and then one day you will retire and you will wonder every decade or so about whether or not that was actually me on the street on the night of your going away party. It certainly will have looked like me. Or your memory of me. Or your memory of the top of my head and my shoulders and my fraying pea coat. Couldn’t be.

What kind of a person comes down from Queens (on the G!) to the doorstep of a party that they were invited to and then turns around and goes back to their apartment? What kind of a person does that?

I do.

Bowling Team

Most of the time I like to talk to you because you’re willing to do most of the talking. I can stand in the doorway and beat a hasty retreat if I get over my head. I can never seem to get the conversation to end. You always have just “one more” thing to add: “I went bowling this past weekend. Bowled a 147.” (You’ve never bowled a frame in your life. But if you read this, I’d like you to have to wonder if this is about you. But you’re not going to read this.) I stand and block the doorway and ignore my responsibilities to hear tell about each and every frame you bowled and what your buddy, Mohammed, said when it looked like you were going to bowl a turkey but it turned out to be just a spare. I hate my responsibilities more than I find your stories boring so I stay and listen and I laugh when your body language tells me that it’s expected. I want you to like me and I think that you do.

Most of the time I like to talk to you until you start talking about a certain politician and how that politician was unfairly treated. “He was the perfect kind of politician,” you say, and I nod because that’s the only muscle in my body I know how to use. “You know, you elect politicians based off of maybe one issue, and for me, you know, it’s gun rights or, you know, gun reform. Gun control. And then the rest of the time you just have to assume that they know more than you do and you just sort of have to, you know, trust them. And he’s the best one. He’s the best kind of those kinds of people. So what if he kissed her!”

I’m too good at nodding - which means that a lot of people like me - but I’m no good at listening. People think that I am listening intently to their boring as fuck story about them visiting their friend Steve in Poughkeepsie, New York, but in actuality I just nod when their body language tells me that my nodded is what is both expected and encouraged. Laugh and nod. Laugh and nod. Nod nod nod. (I retain so little of what anybody tells me that it’s actually some kind miracle that I remember anything at all. But I remember what you said. I remember more of it than I wish I did.) And I know where this conversation is going and so I try and remember more of my responsibilities. Perhaps I try and make up an extra responsibility that I was not given, but in this instance would gladly take on. Something that will take me away from the door of your office but I can’t and anyway you are off and you are running and there is no slowing you down.

“He’s a good person. I know he’s a good person. Met him once. Shook his hand in Columbia in ’83. Most of what has been said about him has, you know, been roundly rejected by actual fact and anyway he never got his day in court. He was forced to resign when he wasn’t actually guilty. That’s terrible. We have a court system for a reason and you should be innocent until proven guilty.”

I nod. Here is what I don’t say: If he thought he was so innocent then why did he resign? Nobody held his veiny, old man hand and told him to leave. If we believe in free will then we can’t really get mad at the people who “made a stink” and “forced” him to resign. He resigned on his own.

I don’t say any of this because I run from conflict. I get the fuck away as fast as I fucking can!

“It just makes me sick,” you say and I try again to coax the urge to say something, anything, out of hiding, and it feels like when I am with my girlfriend and she is tired and just wants to go to sleep. “Also it was a different time back then. I mean, clearly he wouldn’t do something like that now but that was then. You know? Different standard. And are we supposed to throw out everything that he’s done since? Get rid of it all? I mean, he’s helped so many people, you know! Does that all go out the window?! It’s ridiculous! God damn travesty is what it is.” I nod and keep nodding because I am starting to suspect that I might not be the person I think I am.

I flash back to eighth grade and a school-sanctioned, silent protest that I was a willing, if not giddy participant in. My science teacher, Shannon (real name), asked the entire class, “So you’re really going to do this?” and we either nodded in the affirmative or stayed silent in the affirmative. Clearly Shannon did not understand what we were doing. We were goddamn warriors of justice, were standing up for what was right and just and free and god damn it, we might have been thirteen years old, but we had a voice! Hear us roar! There were a few people in my class (that I still judge now) who did not take that day long vow of silence. I knew at the time that they were heartless Republicans whose families probably voted for George W. Bush (twice) and supported the Iraq war and had stock piles of guns next to their stock piles of religious memorabilia next to their stock piles of gay conversion therapy pamphlets. They were eighth grade baby killers, or at the very least, the eighth-grade offspring of baby killers. Monsters with iPod Minis. Monsters who liked Green Day. Monsters who went by the names of Kayla, Brandon, Timmy, Camille (not their real names) but monsters all the same.

You snap me out of my trance and I remember that I was trying to leave: “How was your trip?” you ask.

“What trip?”

“You said that you were going somewhere.”

“I did? Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” There is a silence in the room after that. I want to break it but know I am not strong enough. I had told you I was going on a trip but it was because I needed something to say and the truth would have taken far too long to actually explain. I wasn’t embarrassed about the truth and it wasn’t as if I had promised anyone that I would keep it a secret (that I can remember) but it also didn’t feel like the kind of thing that I necessarily needed to share. I could have told you what was actually happening, and you would have understood because I believe that you are good person who is open minded and honest. You would have nodded along and smiled at the crazy ridiculousness of life, and then when I was finished talking, you would have your own story that would be far too long and contain far too much insignificant detail. And it would be about a similar thing happening in your life. I have no reason for keeping the truth from you other than I have kept it from you for this long and I don’t want you to wonder if maybe we aren’t as close as you think we were. Clearly we aren’t, but I want you to think that we are because I want you to like me because I need friends even if they think that I’m someone else.

“I visited my friend Steve in Poughkeepsie two weekends ago. Maybe that was it.”

“Yeah, maybe,” you say.

I leave your office and walk down the linoleum hallway that reminds me of my elementary school’s linoleum hallways and then out into the bright sunlight of a crisp autumn afternoon and I tell myself that I am not coming back - never coming back! - and that I will never see you again. I will become a legend and then slowly fade from away. I wonder what you would do if I never came back. I wonder if you would try to contact Steve in Poughkeepsie and how many Steves, Stevens and Stephens you would contact on Facebook or LinkedIn before you would give up. Pick your daughter up from school. Drop her off at soccer practice. Pick her up. Take her home. I wonder how much of your bowling game you made up because, for the past five years you’ve told me that you were a bowler. Jake, I know you’ve never bowled a frame in your life!

Renting A U-Haul At Midnight

Fort Reno, Washington, D.C.

I watched you as you said goodbye to your dreams. You weren’t aware that you were saying goodbye or if you were it wasn’t the kind of awareness that you would share with me. We would meet at a dive bar we had outgrown and drink black label and eat cheese puffs and you would tell me about what you found inspiring and I would complain about my job. I took you at your face value word that we were in this together: artists railing against a capitalist system that had no place for art other than generation of capital. And so I guzzled the black label with gusto and then went home and ate a Shin Bowl, this being the best and cheapest way to not be hung over. But I was hung over anyway because no matter what happens in your late twenties, that seems to be what happens (and I’m told it only gets worse).

You told me about what you found inspiring and maybe you didn’t find your savings account inspiring. Or the woman that you had met on Hinge (“Have you tried Hinge? It’s great. So much better than OKCupid or Tinder. They, like, redid it.”) who was going to school to become an RN and you really liked her. (“This might be the one.”) Perhaps inspiring is the wrong word but I do hope that you found some pleasure in being around her, meaning in her company. And I wish you would have told me about her but you didn’t. You only spoke of the bad frustrating things perhaps because, when we met, it seemed like only bad and frustrating things were happening. We bonded over our frustration and maybe you didn’t tell me about her or about the application you just submitted to be a kindergarten music teacher because you were worried that you were changing. And maybe if you changed enough, you’d no longer be as frustrated. And maybe if you were no longer as frustrated, we would no longer be friends. Because friendships have to be about something.

It’s too late now, but I still do wonder if I had pointed out just how abandoned your dreams were feeling if you would have done anything differently. The past is so easy to try and re-litigate and I’m a sucker for figuring out, and focusing on, the ways in which I was wrong. I should have been a better friend and pointed out what the rest of us saw: your financial security wasn’t making you any happier; your new, more expensive wardrobe didn’t make you a better person; you didn’t really like this woman, did you? It’s too late now but I still lie awake thinking about these things because it turns out I absolutely have to lie awake and think about something. God knows I couldn’t just be happy.

One day soon you’re going to get married, move to the suburbs and you’re going to rent a house and buy a car and then you’re going to have a child, maybe two. Three seems a little bit excessive, and you were never an excessive person. And we’ll see each other occasionally, most of the time when you come into the city for work. We’ll meet at a wine bar in the village that I can’t afford, and we’ll pretend to know things about wine. I’ll tell you about what I find inspiring and you’ll tell me about how adorable Annabel’s recorder recital was, and you’ll have several videos on your phone for proof. I’ll go back to my three roommates and you’ll go back to your three bedroom and we’ll both secretly judge each other and we’ll both know that we made the right decisions. I’ll tell my roommate Frank about you and say that you gave up the dream, and “once you’ve given up, you know, what is there to live for?” and you’ll talk with your wife about my arrested development and about how sad it is that I haven’t grown up. And we’ll both know that we’re right and maybe we both will be.

But I am more right because you took the easy way out, motherfucker. Look at you! Is this what you fucking dreamed of?

Good Luck

Look, it’s impossible to prepare expecting parents for what is about to happen so I have stopped trying. There was a while there where I would give them advice but eventually I stopped because having a kid is so life altering in such indescribable ways that why bother describing it. I then found myself saying “good luck” and moving on to talk to someone else at the party. There’s so much that happens that you don’t expect when you have a child that to go through every single thing would take a lifetime and who has time for that? And then there’s the stuff that you expect to happen that doesn’t. That’s the stuff you can talk about, but no-one wants to listen.

When Joshua was born I thought my life would suddenly have meaning (Josh, if you’re reading this, know that I love you with all my heart and maybe you should stop reading here) and it did in the sense that there was now this totally dependent being that needed me to survive. It was amazing. Here, before me, was this perfect being, and so my life was complete. My life felt complete. I felt like my life should have been complete but then I dug down deep inside of myself. I don’t recommend this practice. Most of the time it leads places you won’t want to go. Anyway, I dug down deep and looked around, I discovered that I was still the same person I had always been. I was still me and I was still empty.

On the one hand, you know, fine. Good. Back when we decided that we were going to try to have children, I pulled myself aside and made a promise that I would not define myself by my children the way my father had defined himself by my brothers and I. I remember visiting that first thanksgiving after we had all gone off to college and he seemed so empty and lost. We noticed and asked him what was wrong and he said “nothing” but it felt like a part of him was missing. We all felt like there was something wrong. And I felt guilty (as I am wont to do) and began to come up with a plan to move back home so that I could be near him so that he wouldn’t feel so alone. I put this plan away in a drawer and forgot about it and, as the roots of my life away from him grew deeper, it became harder to put the plan in action. I forgot about it, moved on with my life, got married and had children of my own. But on the day that he died, I still felt guilty. Hell, I still feel guilty today.

And I don’t want my children to feel guilty when they ultimately leave. I want them to leave and have rich, full lives. I don’t want them to have to wonder if maybe they should move back home. So I’m keeping myself separate. I’m keeping myself out of it. I’m me and they are them and I’m still empty.

Back when I was in the business of giving expectant parents advice I would tell them that having a child would be life changing and they would say that they knew, and I would tell them that, no, really, it’s going to change your goddamn life. And they would smile, and say thank you, and then walk away from me and try and find someone else to talk to at the party. “You’ll see,” I would think to myself. “You’ll fucking see.” But see what exactly?

Could part of the reason that I was so forceful in my assertion that “having children changes your life” be because I had hoped that, in having kids, my life would have changed more? That I had hoped that they would change me? That I had hoped that the nagging, life long suspicion of my brokenness would suddenly be erased when I saw Josh’s scrunched, screaming, red face for the first time?

You have children and life keeps going because life has a tendency to do that. You’re not different because you are you and you probably always will be. You just have kids now. You have less time. You have less money. You get less sleep. You stay awake late at night and wait for the sound of their car pulling into the driveway. It’s not yet past their curfew, but you woke up an hour ago with images of police lights and caution tape. They shut off the engine, come inside and go upstairs, but you lay awake ‘till dawn. They’re leaving tomorrow. You were so excited for this visit and now it is over. Where the fuck did the time go?

(Anyway)

I say “good luck” to expecting parents now because I hope that they find what they are looking for. Or rather I sincerely hope that they aren’t actually looking for anything because that seems to be the best way to go through life. To commit to something and just sort of see what happens. To not really have a plan.

When I was 13 years old I knew what I wanted my life to be and for the most part I got what I wanted.

But now what? Seriously. If you have any advice let me know!

A Night Of Scott Goodin

A photograph of Scott Goodin.

The society held an event on what it is like to be Scott Goodin. It was called “A Night of Scott Goodin: What It Is Like.” Spurred on by strong pre-sale sales, the society planned for an overflow room at the event as well. It is always nice when things turn out to be even more popular than you expected. Gladys Something was the only person who was in the overflow room for the duration of the event, and that is likely only because she had been there for “An Afternoon of Gilbert Henry: What It Is Like” and had fallen asleep. She woke up halfway through, and texted her daughter to come get her, because Gladys can’t drive. Gladys thought about waiting in the lobby out front, but figured that she might as well stay and listen because Scott Goodin had been there listening intently during “An Afternoon of Gilbert Henry” and it seemed like the polite thing to do. Rex Something had turned off the lights in the overflow room because, at the time, Gladys had been asleep, and it seemed like the polite thing to do. So Gladys sat there, politely in the dark, listening to the panel describe what it is like to be a 27 year old middle class white man.

It was about the time that Gladys started to doze off again, that her daughter, driving down a portion of the highway she had driven on many times before, lost her balance on her moped, and was promptly crushed by two 18 wheeler trucks carrying baby supplies. Gladys Something’s daughter was pronounced dead on the scene, and Captain Something wrote in his log book that it looked like she died immediately, even before the first set of tires was done crushing her into her bike. But Captain Something had his doubts and knew that there was likely some portion of her still breathing as the mash of daughter and bike parts was kicked over to the side of the road by the second pair of wheels of the second 18 wheeler.

Gladys Something is a strong woman, and a fighter, and needs to just keep going on. We all do.

Scott Goodin was invited to “A Night of Scott Goodin: What It Is Like” because to not invite him would have been rude, and the society is very interested in not being un-polite. But at no point was it the plan for Scott to speak. If Scott had known this, he would not have come, because he finds the most pleasure in being discussed when he is not present, as if he has died. When he found out that he wasn’t going to be speaking, he heaved a sigh of relief, and tried to beat a hasty retreat, but couldn’t find a moment to duck out. And anyway, his wife, whom he had texted to come pick him up, was stuck in traffic on the highway caused by what looked like two 18 wheelers that were carrying baby supplies that had jackknifed on the highway. So Scott Goodin stayed, and smiled and nodded at each speaker and presenter, feeling super fucking smug and polite.

Tom Something Something was first to speak. “Look,” said Tom, “I never had the pleasure of meeting Scott. I came to appreciate him, you know, later on, during the loneliness years, so I’m not really familiar with any of his work, but I have come up with a version of him in my head, so, if you’ll permit me, let me tell you a little bit of what Scott Goodin, the man, was like.”

Scott Goodin smiled and leaned eleven degrees forward, which was meant to convey interest in what was about to be said, which is something his mother taught him to do.

Outside, in the overflow room, Gladys had received the news about to spoiled baby supplies, and was already coming up with ways to end conversations when people would ask her, “Oh my god, I am so sorry. I can’t even imagine. How’re you doing?”

If you don’t have the means, or willingness, to visit a psychologist, then you may never have the experience of realizing just what a boring person you are. You know, you thought you were interesting, but through therapy, you will hopefully realize that your problems aren’t special, and are just slight variations on those of the mindless drones that surround you, who, as it turns out, are also in therapy - some of them even also see Dr. Keegan. Scott goes to therapy once a week, but, as it turns out, Dr. Keegan isn’t very good at what he does, so, before “A Night of Scott Goodin,” Scott still thought he was super fucking interesting. Happily however, “A Night of Scott Goodin: What It Is Like” took care of that, because there’s nothing on earth that makes you feel less significant than having your virtues and triumphs ticked through, one by one, in front of a packed community center gym at 8pm on a Tuesday night.

As smoke filled the room, and the first few notes of the three hour techno break that was intended to cover Scott’s tenure working for the state government puffed out of the speakers on stage, Scott began to wonder if maybe this whole thing had been a bad idea. Not a terrible idea. Just a bad one. But bad enough that he would try his hardest to never do something like this again.

And that’s when Gayle Something tapped Scott on the shoulder and told him that there was someone on the office phone for him and that he should come and take it, because the person just kept calling, and Gayle was getting annoyed.

“Look, I wanted to call and tell you, because we both know what is coming,” said the voice.

“Mom?” said Scott.

“We both know this is coming. You’re going to feel regret. You’re going to feel pain. And you’re going to repeatedly ask yourself if what you are about to do, and what you just did, was the right thing.

“You are going to categorize yourself as “pre-break-up Scott” and “post-break-up Scott” and you are going to think of yourself and your memories in those terms. You will look back on “pre-break-up Scott” and marvel at how happy he was, but also marvel at the anvil swinging over his head. And then there’s “post-break-up Scott” who will write a letter that he realizes half way through no-one will ever read, and take a photo of himself to express how massive a mistake he believes just made.”

“Can you get off the phone? I need to make a call,” said Gayle.

“And maybe you were happier,” said the voice on the phone. “You tell yourself that you weren’t. That this is better. But you don’t trust yourself. And so your words only go so far.”

“I..really…I need to make a call.” Gayle grabbed the phone from Scott, but the voice on the phone was done with its speech, and if Scott had stayed on, all they would have talked about was what a nightmare the Trump presidency was.

And Scott went back to listen. To breathe in the smoke in the room, and chew on the furniture. To join in the joy that is a group of people in a darkened room, listening to music, willing themselves to enjoy it, but sincerely wondering when the music is going to be over.

Don’t remember yourself. It’s not a good idea.

You Shouldn't Snore And Here's Why

I don’t recognize the man laying next to me and that’s terrifying because he was the one. The one. The one that was supposed to make everything better and make everything make sense. I would never say out loud something like I believed that he would fix me, but deep down that’s exactly what I believed. (Don’t tell anyone. I’ll find out that it was you if you tell someone.) I love him. Maybe. I know that I used to love him but I also know that love changes shape and that things change in general and so now all that I know is that I love that I used to love him. Or I feel alright about it. And I like that I felt love at all because I know that most people never do. Most people convince themselves that they are feeling love when what they are actually experiencing is comfortable infatuation. A kind of crush that allows you to check off boxes and move on with the rest of your life. Now get married. Now have kids. Now move to Long Island.

We saw a marriage counselor seven years ago and went for three sessions before both of us decided that the marriage counselor was an idiot and that we knew better how to fix our situation than she did. We didn’t fix our situation. We went and saw The Help instead. But we were also right - that marriage counselor was an idiot. Meeting with her felt like trying to fix a flooded basement and suggesting that maybe, in the future, we should try and not have the basement flood. I remember the flooded basement analogy vividly because our basement had just flooded from Hurricane Sandy. On the car ride home from the second session we joked about this. Neither one of us said that the next session would be our last one but we both knew.

I bring up the marriage counselor thing only because I know that some of my friends will read this. And although they are my friends, and I love them, I know that they will comfort themselves by saying that I’m feeling this way because John and I just didn’t work hard enough. I want to assure you, friends and readers, that we worked and that just because we worked and now I feel like I’ve lost touch with the grunting man snoring next to me in this stifling room on this stifling block in this stifling subdivision of this stifling town it doesn’t mean that your marriage is in any danger of crumbling to the ground. It might but the particulars of my story doesn’t mean that it will. You can keep reading.

He chokes briefly on a pool of saliva in the back of his throat and for about seven seconds I dream about him dying. But the bastard keeps breathing and so I think about what it would have been like if we had met today. Like if we had been teenagers today and had met in today’s world. Times have changed. I keep telling my kids that when I try and understand what they are going through. My son is twenty eight years old and is single and has mostly been single. Most of the time this doesn’t seem to bother him all that much but he will occasionally drop a hint that makes me wonder if it actually does. I don’t want to ask flat out because I worry that this will make the problem worse (if there is a problem) so I try and find other ways of asking. I haven’t found out anything so I still worry without knowing if I should.

John and I met when we were still malleable, not-fully-formed humans and I think that there is a great deal to be said for that. I think we share a bond because we grew up together and so we weather storms much better than other couples who met later in life. They get divorced. Our love is deeper and more tangled into who we are. I sometimes wonder who I would be if he wasn’t snoring next to me. Would I cease to exist? I think I would be okay but I don’t actually know because that isn’t something that I have even remotely explored.

Our love story was a romantic comedy up until the point at which it stopped being one although I challenge anyone to pinpoint exactly when that point was because I sure as hell can’t. There was no burning bush or hotel room charged to a credit card in the middle of an unremarkable Thursday in April. There was only this whatever this was. Bland uncertainty and boredom. Not a nightmare but no dream either. Just the reality of both of us being too old and too tired and too comfortable in our discomfort to change.

They say that you fall in love with six different people over your lifetime and I love that John has been all six people.

But now what?

12 True Statements (of Variable Verity)

1. I like to stay up late at night, get fucked up on hard cider, and read CNN paid sponsorship clickbait.

2. I sometimes try and make myself cry on the G train because I’d like to be the kind of person who could cry.

3. I tell myself that I am going to go to yoga and then don’t go to yoga and then hate myself more for not going to yoga.

4. I go to chain restaurants and lie when they ask if I have “been here before.” I tell them that I haven’t. But I have. I just want to make sure that I am doing everything correctly. Maybe I’m forgetting something. I’m probably forgetting something. My memory is terrible. It’s better to just play dumb and have them repeat their spiel to me. Then I’ll get everything right. I’ll be the perfect customer. But also sometimes they recognize me.

5. College students ask me what I want to do with my life. I’m 27. I don’t have an answer for them.

6. My mother has been sending me articles. She sent me an article about a group of bi plane pilots who live in Cincinnati. I saw a bi plane when I was five and couldn’t stop talking about it for weeks. (I don’t remember this but it tracks.)

7. In number 3, search and replace “yoga” for every activity in my life that would help me feel better about myself.

8. The burrito place I like to go to has a loyalty rewards program. Nine burritos and the tenth one is free. It’s a punch card system. I don’t have the punch card. They’ve never offered it and I’m too afraid of people to ask. But also sometimes they recognize me.

9. The task of electing a literature chair is the main thing that is keeping me from attending 12 step meetings.

10. I deleted (most of) my social media accounts. I now look for validation doing this instead. It’s barely working.

11. If I am walking to my apartment building and I see that someone else is already at the front door, fumbling with their keys, I will walk around the block so that they don’t feel like I am sneaking in behind them.

12. I go to parties on rooftops and immediately hear police sirens.

Some Bar Off The Fulton Stop

He was in the bathroom and she found herself wishing that this was a bad date, and feeling oddly thankful for the few bad dates that she had had. This date was decidedly not bad, and he was clearly not a bad person. This date was okay. They had enough in common. The equation added up and was even balanced. Things were fine.

“You can write on the wall in there,” he said as he returned and immediately took a swig of his pretentiously named IPA as if the trip to the bathroom had made him thirsty. “I guess maybe enough people write on the wall of bathrooms anyway that they made the walls chalk walls and then give you chalk to write with.”

“Huh.” Really? This is what we’re talking about?

“Chalk boards. I meant to say chalk boards.” Okay. This is what we’re talking about.

“What would a chalk wall be?” she said, not caring enough to hear the answer but trying to demonstrate that she could be caring. She sipped on her drink that was mostly water. It was something to do.

“What?” he said.

“You said ‘chalk wall’ you know, and I was just wondering what a chalk wall would be. Like how it would be different from a chalk board. It’s not that interesting.”

“I wonder why people write on the walls of bathrooms?” he asked. “Probably because it’s the one place everyone goes and there’s nothing else to do but read what’s around you.”

“There are no cameras in the bathroom.”

“What?” Exactly. WHAT? Why would you say something like that?

“Hopefully.” Really making things better.

“Yeah. That’d be creepy,” he said.

“So you’re going to Berlin in August? That’s fun. I’ve never been,” she said, still thinking about cameras in bathrooms.

“No. I’m not.”

“Really? I thought you were.”

“No.” No is right. That had been another UX/UI designer that lived in Brooklyn.

Maybe she was getting her wish. Maybe this whole thing was turning. She sipped on her drink. Air.

“Would you like another one? I’ll grab this time.”

“Okay.” This was hopeless. She was hopeless. What kind of a person brings up cameras in the bathroom although the more that she thought about it the more she thought she was right. There were hopefully no cameras in bathrooms because that would be an invasion of privacy and also gross and people like to break rules and vandalize things but they also don’t really want to ever get caught. So the inside of a bathroom was the perfect spot.

“Here you go,” he said, plopping the brown drink on the table. She had forgotten what she ordered initially.

“So…” she said.

“I’m still thinking about the bathroom,” he said.

“Oh, thank god! Me too! I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“Yeah…”

She took a breath.

“Look, this is going badly. We both know it. It wasn’t going badly before but it certainly wasn’t going great. Maybe I’ve been on too many dates lately. It feels like a lot. But also maybe I haven’t been on enough and haven’t gotten my sea legs yet, or whatever. It’s bad now and I don’t see it getting better. You’re a nice enough person, I think, but actually on second thought I really don’t know. I don’t know if you can know that a person is a ‘nice enough person’ solely based on one date.

“I’ve been told I have to set boundaries and that I have to listen more to myself and so I am going to listen to myself and say that this is no longer worth the hang over tomorrow. So, uh, goodbye.

“Thanks for the drink. You can finish it if you want.”

“What?” he said.

Steady Now

It was when he told me that it had been four years since he had seen a therapist that I knew he was going to be a problem. Don’t worry though because this isn’t going to be a story about a life-changing therapeutic session - I think that therapy works for some people, but for most it functions as a sort of friend for hire. These are people who go to therapy every Thursday at 8:45 am for forty-five minutes, are billed for an hour, and don’t really want to change or improve which is okay because they were mostly fine to begin with. Jason Apple was not one of these people. Jason Apple would have seriously benefited from weekly, structured, psychological help.

He was the kind of person that you worry about when you think about new people. A being, an invasive species that you let into your world and, before you know it, it has set up a bed and breakfast that it tells you it can’t close because then where will it’s mother sleep? And you feel bad about not having an answer for this, and also it’s mother isn’t horrible, but also it’s telling that you met her because this particular invasive specie just came into your life to purchase your futon or at least that’s what you thought he was doing.

I know now that this is how Jason Apple gets his hooks into people. He answers Craigslist ads for things he has no intention of buying in order to befriend the owner of the item in question. I can’t imagine that this works each time he tries it, but I am pretty sure that there are enough suckers out there to keep him in business. The sad, sorry folk of this world who think that their bigger problem (loneliness) will be solved by getting rid of a smaller problem (a futon that kind of smells like cat urine but only if you put your head really close to the part that Sigmund peed on).

To be honest I was kind of surprised that he didn’t just immediately bolt, but sat for a while and seemed to really consider the couch. Most of the other people who came to look at it (I was asking for a low price so people did come) figured out pretty quickly why my price point was so competitive and then made some sort of excuse about how, you know, on second thought, it wasn’t really going to vibe with the rest of the furniture in their rec room. Some people were kind and just said thanks but no thanks. Jason stayed, and somehow the conversation turned from the kind of fabric that the futon cover was made out (which I didn’t know) to what bands I was listening to and if I believed that God existed or not. Jason is a staunch atheist but I respected and liked the fact that he didn’t try to sell me on his atheism. I told him that I didn’t really know what I felt, and that I hadn’t thought about it all that much. I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t thought about it because I didn’t really want to think about it, but I think he picked up on that anyway.

And then, somehow, he went to go grab beers at the local grocery store. He was gone for 20 minutes, and I called my aunt Beth to tell her what was happening.

“But he just came to buy your futon? And now you’re gonna drink together? I mean, that’s good, because you don’t really have any friends there.” When he knocked at the door, I took a few steps up the stairs, toying with the idea of maybe just hiding under my covers until he went away. He would knock for a little while, maybe even text me, but then eventually get the message and go away. I paused on the staircase, not entirely aware that the next six months of my life would be decided by this one moment, but I could still feel the gravity of a voice that whispered: “Steady now.”

I opened the door and let him in.

Now we watch TV and drink Blue Moon every night.

I wanted to be a writer but my therapist told me that I spend too much time alone and that I should try and say yes to more situations. So I’ve said yes to watching baseball even though baseball is about as boring as a Senate hearing on C-SPAN. I’ve said yes to the Blue Moon hangover (which is indescribably different than other hangovers). And I’ve said yes to being friends with a person that I really have nothing in common with and don’t really like being around.

My therapist said she is proud of me and that I’m making progress which made me feel warm and fuzzy inside because I care what she thinks about me and I want her to approve.

Their Kingdom

“Hello, Marshall.”

Marshall was pleased that he had made it somewhere, although he didn’t much like the receptionist referring to him as Marshall. He had not been called Marshall in years, and had enjoyed every second of it. He wasn’t Marshall. Yes, that’s right. That’s what he wanted to tell the receptionist. “I have a new name now.” But he didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure why he was so tight lipped, but blamed it on the place itself. Wherever the hell this place was? Was this the place? It couldn’t be. Maybe it was some intermediary. Maybe -

“Sign here please.” His thoughts were cut short by the receptionist, whom he was really growing to detest, indicating a dotted line at the bottom of an eight-and-a-half by eleven sheet of white paper. The receptionist handed him a pen and smiled. “Are you okay, Marshall?”

“Yeah.” But he wasn’t okay. This wasn’t right at all. This was all far too mundane to be the place. “Where’s Bonnie?” he asked.

“Who?” said the receptionist.

This was going nowhere. This guy clearly had no idea what the fuck was going on. No idea of the gravity of the situation. No idea of anything. If he could only find Bonnie then he knew that everything would be alright. If he found her she would take him to where he needed to be. To where they all needed to be. All of them. He turned back to the receptionist, who was still smiling.

“Where are…I came in with a bunch of other people. Do you know what happened to them?”

“I really don’t like contradicting guests, but no you did not, sir.”

“Well then where did they go?” Marshall asked.

“Where did who go?”

“Everyone I came in with.”

“I’m not sure that I -“

“Everyone that I brought with me. I brought people with me. Where are they.”

“I’m sorry sir but if they’re not here now, well, they must be somewhere else.”

“Where’s that?”

“Not here. Somewhere else.”

It’s really tough when you put a lot of time into planning something only to have it not go well at all. It’s even harder when you were looking forward to it going well. You surrounded yourself with people who believed in you and who also wanted it to go well. And so maybe you overlooked a few things. Maybe your preparations weren’t as thorough as they could have been. But they were still pretty goddamn thorough. So what the hell went wrong.

“Could you please sign the form, sir? There is a line forming.” Marshall spun around again, hoping to see a familiar face, but alas nothing. Well, sure, there were people in the line - all different flavors and shapes of annoyed people - but none of them were any of the ones who had been with him in that house in Rancho Santa Fe. He turned back to the receptionist. No use in prolonging the inevitable.

Marshall signed. The receptionist smiled at him.

“Great. Now if you could just wait over there with all the others.”

“Wait for what?”

“For something to happen.”

“Has anything happened yet?” asked Marshall.

“Nope,” said the receptionist. “But something could any day now and we really should be ready. It’s exciting, isn’t it?”

Marshall sighed and looked for a vacant seat but all of the chairs had been taken for the last four thousand years. So he decided to stand. All that was left to do now was to watch the others talk with the receptionist. That was the most interesting thing going on in this…wherever it was that they were. A whole group waiting for something to make their existence meaningful. To make their existence make sense.

One day.

“This is some fucking kingdom,” Marshall sighed. And he was right.

This Is It

This is it. This is who you are going to be. You’re done. You’re not changing. You’re not getting any better. You’re you. This is it.

You’re going to be alone forever. This past weekend proves that. You spent the entirety of last weekend alone and that’s not going to change. Last weekend is going to be the rest of your life and you’re a fucking idiot if you think anything else. And don’t be a fucking idiot.

It’s useless to try things. It’s pointless to meet people. Because you’re always going to come back to this place because, like I said before, you’re not going to change. You can’t be around people and you are much more comfortable being on your own and although this loneliness gets to a level that is physically uncomfortable, it’s the way that it is. You are who you are. Stop trying to fight it. Stop trying to become what you are not. You’re you. You’re miserable.

You can see stories unfold before you and they look like those trails that were in Donnie Darko. (Don’t worry if you haven’t seen Donnie Darko. That’s not important.) You see the trails of the happy people around you and they have one thing in common: they were happy as children, too. You weren’t a happy child. You weren’t a sad child. You were. You still are.

Seeing happy people makes you realize how very not happy you are. And for the briefest of moments you audition the idea of becoming a happy person. “What would that be like?” But that’s a fools errand because the only people who are happy were happy as children, and you were not happy as a child, so you certainly wouldn’t be happy right now. Because that’s not how the world works.

Because you know how the world works. It runs on a certain type of math not taught in classrooms. This math says that there is only a certain amount of everything. Food. Water. Oxygen. Meaning.

A while back you made peace with the idea that you might not ever be happy. All the happiness had already been sucked up, and you weren’t quick enough to grab the few morsels that got dropped every once in a while. You told yourself that that was okay as long as you could find this thing called meaning. And so you went looking for it. But it too had all been snatched up. You were so frustrated that you stopped looking. You settled on nothing. Because nothing is the one thing that is infinite in the great math equation of the universe. Or so you believed for a while. Until you discovered the other thing in infinite supply: comfort.

And so you lived in comfortable nothingness. And that was okay because there were plenty of people around you living the exact same way. Going to the grocery store. Picking the kids up from soccer. Dying of bladder cancer.

You don’t know if they thought about changing at one point in their lives. And there’s no way that you could ask all of them. You imagine that some of them probably felt like you did way back in the day when you thought change was possible. And then their hopes were dashed. Hopefully those hopes were dashed sooner than later.

You look around in your old age and you see young people. And you wish them well in their quest for change and personal growth. But you’re not holding your breath for them either. Most of them won’t make it so it’s not worth even hoping. Most of them will end up like you. And that’s okay.

“I’m going to change. I’m going to be happy,” they say. You want to scream at them.

“You’re you! This is it! And that’s okay!” But you don’t. You just smile and nod.

Nobody likes difficult conversations.

Swollen Feet

My feet are swollen. Let’s start with that. Let’s continue with the fact that I am 6 foot 7 inches and three years ago my father almost died from an aortic dissection. Whenever I Google “swollen feet,” WebMD tells me that I am going to die or possibly that I am already dead, and asks me why I didn’t report to New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist like yesterday. WebMD also tells me that swollen feet could be a sign of complications with my pregnancy. And I don’t have a primary care doctor because I am young and young people don’t get sick. Young people shouldn’t have swollen feet.

I had never noticed people’s ankles before, but now that’s really all I look at. I look at ankles and feel bad about how my left foot is so bulbous that you can barely see the tiny little bump where there should be a rather noticeable bone sticking through the skin. I am hopelessly self conscious about my feet, but am also good at living in denial, everyday asking God (if there is a God) to just fucking fix this on his/her own so that I don’t have to actually go in and find out that my ever nearing death is in fact imminent. All of this was true, until yesterday, when I finally dragged myself into CityMD to get help.

Now if you happen to know of CityMD, I know what you are thinking: CityMD is an urgent care provider that deals with broken bones and strep throat. All you can possibly hope that they’ll be able to do for your swollen feet is to refer you to a specialist. Why not just go about trying to find the specialist yourself and save the forty dollar co-pay. Also, you should probably go and get a yearly physical with your primary care doctor. You don’t have a primary care doctor? You should get one. You should really get a primary care doctor. They’d be able to help you with this kind of thing. What are you, stupid or something?

Neither the technician that took my medical history (and told me that he thinks I have high blood pressure, which is a new fun thing) nor the doctor, who came and looked at my foot and then joked out in the hallway with the other nurses (“Any of you have any foot fetishes?”) were nearly this blunt with me, but they nonetheless sang a similar tune. “We can’t fix this here but also why haven’t you gotten this fixed by now? What is wrong with you?”

“Well, here’s the thing, doc. I have a problem with trying to control things in my life. I want to feel like I control things that I could not possibly control. This is why, on the infrequent occasion that I go to social engagements, I spend most of the preceding day coming up with things to talk about that will be both inoffensive and reveal as little about my actual self as possible. This is why, if I am at a social event for too long, I make up an excuse about how I am drunk/tired/have an early call time, so that I can return to the safety of my apartment, and my bed, and my Netflix. This is also why I don’t go to doctors, because I can’t predict what they are going to say due to the very nature of why I am going to see them in the first place: they know more than me. So instead I just don’t go. I ask God (if there is a God) to just fix it for me, or alternatively, let me die. (I have not at all made peace with death. This is more something that I say to myself in passing. But it’s a conversation with myself that I have had on multiple occasions.)”

When I was nine years old my family moved to Almaty, Kazakhstan, which meant that I had to bid farewell to the comfort of Rockville, Maryland, Green Acres School, and all of my friends for the next two years. I had agreed that I was on board with this plan, but had immediate buyers remorse and as hard as I tried to will it otherwise, eventually the last day of school came, and I had to say goodbye. I was going to say goodbye to my home, and then go with my two best friends to see a DC United game and then have a sleep over. But of course, things in life that are actually important never go exactly as planned, and I put a massive wrinkle in my own heroic send off by, at about 10:30 am, vomiting right next to the third grade class hamster cage. The teachers noticed. I was sent to the office. My mother was called. She came to pick me up.

A modicum of clemency was eventually granted, and I was allowed to return for the rest of the school day, but the plans for the soccer game and sleep over had to be scrapped. I was sick. Or at least I might be.

That was nineteen years ago, and for nineteen years I have regretted that I didn’t make it to the bathroom. I could have taken care of the situation and then returned to the festivities of the day, with no-one else any the wiser, and therefore under no obligation to do anything about it. Continue as normal. As you were. Amen.

I’ve never checked myself into hospice, and hopefully won’t need to for a very long time, but yesterday morning felt like I was preparing for a life changing event and I packed a bag to bring with me accordingly. And I knew, as I stepped out of my apartment building and began the fifteen minute walk to the Williamsburg CityMD that I wouldn’t be coming back to my apartment any time soon. I was going to the office all over again. I had been on the run for long enough, and was finally turning myself in.

I’m fine. Or at least I’m not dying tomorrow. More tests have to be done. I have to see specialists. It’s going to cost money. I wish I could say that this moment is a turning point. That after this I will be more likely to seek help, but I know myself well enough to be skeptical. I’m not good at lying to other people but I’m a fucking pro at lying to myself, and will probably keep lying if it means that I don’t have to be a burden. Keep lying so that I seem healthy. So I seem happy. So I seem whole.

Lucky

There is a man who used to beg for change on the Metro. I don’t know what has become of him. I no longer live in the DC suburbs and so I no longer stare at my shoes while riding the late night Red Line to Shady Grove. My shoe staring is now reserved for the L train. Or the G.

I remember him because he was angry. The homeless around us mostly fade into obscurity: “I’m sorry to bother you, but if you could just spare some change, or if you have a bite to eat, I would really appreciate it. Have a blessed day.” Not this guy. He was incensed at a world that had handed him a raw deal and told him that deal was entirely his fault. Told him that he was the one who was wrong. That his mental illness was his alone.

A fun thing about American identity is that we lay our failures entirely on society and make our successes ours alone. Although we have no state mandated religion, we believe that some people were just built better. We think that it’s okay that our country’s promise of equality does not extend to matters of addiction, brain chemistry or really the over all luck of the situation we were born into. This does not even scratch the surface of what people of color and the LGBTQ+ among us have to contend with.

The man on the Red Line train to Shady Grove presented as Caucasian. He also smelled really bad. “Come on! Can’t somebody please just spare like thirty-four cents? It’s just fucking thirty four cents! Please? Really? Nobody can spare thirty four fucking cents?” He stopped in front of me. I was struggling through a particularly dense (and pointless) section of Paradise Lost. “I’m sure that book will give you all the answers you fucking need. Have fun reading it, asshole.” I didn’t give him any money.

If I were a homeless person don’t think I’d be nice or grateful either. It’s so much easier to be #Grateful when the world has truly given you a lot. When, as I write this, I can sit in my air conditioned apartment and altogether avoid the deadly one hundred and ten degree heat wave outside. I’m so grateful that I’ve got gratitude to fucking give to others. But if I had to legitimately live on the street, and had to get up every day to a world that told me that my real problem was that I just wasn’t trying hard enough, I’d be pissed off too. With every passing day, the belief that I could somehow get myself out of this thing would weaken. Doing the same thing expecting different results. I’d be pissed. Because when the world said “work harder” it didn’t mean “work harder.” “Work harder” is there to help those who got lucky think that they deserved their luck. “Work harder” really means “be lucky.”

How in the flying fuck does one become lucky?

I recently had lunch with an old friend I had lost touch with. We talked about many different things, and eventually got to the topic of the homeless. I told him, happily, that I had started giving money to the homeless when they asked for it. I was being a good and compassionate human. I was proud of myself, and secretly judged those around me for not being able to shell out a dollar for this person who was clearly in need. After all, with a few more dollars, you could go get something to eat. I was helping buy a person a meal. I was inherently a good person. I wanted my friend to acknowledge how good of a person I was!

“They’re probably going to buy drugs with that though. Like, what if you knew that they were going to buy drugs with that? Would you still give it to them? I think you have to be okay with the idea that they’re probably going to buy drugs with it.”

We are all on some kind of journey. Whatever the fuck this thing we’re doing is. And in theory I know that it should not matter what a gift (“thirty four cents”) is going to be used for. You give it because you believe in the humanity of the other person. Or you give it to restore the humanity of yourself.

I know that my friend was right. I know that it should not matter. I would like to think that, if I ran across the angry homeless man on my way to visit my parents in their DC suburban home, that this time I would give. But I’ve also stopped giving in general.

I’ve thought too much about it.

I’m paralyzed.

Hospital Rooms

Jake Goodin. May 2005.

He knew that he had wasted his life but knew that it would be easier if everyone just assumed that he felt like it had been fulfilling. You don’t want your father or grandfather (his wife had died four years ago - complications from a car accident) to turn to you on his death bed and tell you that his life has been mostly, if not almost all a waste, because what does that say about you? He would then have to explain that, no, that part was the other part, the part that wasn’t a waste. But everything else…

People like endings that are nice and don’t want to hear about all the remorse and regret for a life mis-lived as the mis-liver is preparing to die. So what do you do? You lie. You lie and you are honest with yourself about the lie. You know that it might be better for them in the long run if they know the truth as maybe there are things about their respective lives that they might want to change. But in that moment where you are looking into their watering eyes (sincerely wishing you could water yours and try and match them in emotion) you know that you can’t tell them the truth.

“It’s okay. It’s time. I think that I’m ready to go.”

His daughter’s eyes - so very like her mothers - reminded him of her mother, and what she had said right before they turned the life support machines off.

“It’s okay. It’s time. I’m ready to go. I am.”

Had she been lying too? “Oh god (if there is a god - I’ll find out soon!), what a terrifying thought,” he thought. What if she too had looked back on her life, on their life together, and thought about all the wasted moments, the times at which they held back from each other and rationed out the little nuggets of good upon which all of us live? What if she too was filled with anger and resentment about all of the times she said no to things because she was tired, or because she felt she might be tired in the middle of doing them, or because they were just plain inconvenient? What if she died feeling this same level of terror at the unknown? If that’s how she had felt, why hadn’t she said anything?

If you ever find yourself in a hospital room waiting for the results of a potentially life altering (or life ending) test you might consider asking your family, friends and loved ones to leave the room. They will balk at this request, of course: “We drove 500 miles to be here and now you’re asking us to leave?!?! What the fuck, Dale!” This is for everyone’s benefit, as they don’t need to act strong and resilient when they find out the news, and you can choose which parts of the diagnosis to tell them and which parts to keep a secret. (God bless HIPPA.) I can’t, in these few words here, detail what you should disclose in each and every instance, but it is generally advisable to tell them the headline, and omit (you can say that you just “forgot”) the gory, suffering details. They don’t need to know those things. They’ll find out soon enough. Or, if they have the internet, they can find out when the get home.

The fundamental problem with being a dying person (apart from the really, really big problem we don’t need to talk about because it’s too terrifying) is that you can’t imagine any of the healthy people around you dying. “I mean, they seem so healthy. So why burden them,” he thought. And then he thought, “I think I’m getting close, is this what the end feels like? Maybe. Maybe I should tell them. Maybe I should tell them to not worry about their jobs, or what other people think about them, and just focus on loving the people who are around them. Maybe I should tell them that most of the people you think are friends won’t amount to much, but there are a few who will, and you should focus on those. Maybe if I tell them these things then my life won’t have been a waste. Maybe…”

“What is it, dad?”

“Maybe…” he thought.

“Dad?”

“Nope. Never mind.”

“Dad? Dad? What’s wrong?”

“He’s gone,” said the nurse. “I’m sorry.”

Like Me

Good evening.

Something you should know about me is that I am incredibly easy to manipulate. If you drop an ounce of a doubt on the floor, I will do the rest of the work for you. I will take that ounce and spin it into something that will cost me money and time. I will book flights. I will cross continents. I will hold my breath for the assurance that you are not actually mad at me. I don’t want you to be mad at me. You not being mad at me is more important than my own happiness and sanity. You didn’t ask for any of this but you are also so welcome. You’re welcome!

Because your silence means everything to me even though I know it means nothing to your prefrontal cortex. I know that your silence is just lack of thought but I also know that you are sitting by your phone trying to teach me a lesson. I know that you are trying to manipulate me. And I hate you for it. I hate you for it and I also want you to stop being mad at me because I know that you are mad at me. Please stop being mad at me.

You are trying to manipulate me but jokes on you because I am much better at manipulating myself than you could ever be because I know all my fucking buttons that need pushing. When I receive orders from on high to “Make Scott miserable” I know exactly what to do and I do it with so much fucking glee that you might think my sports team won the Super Bowl and that I hit my head real hard and started to care abut sports teams.

Fuck you. But the fuck yous don’t last long. They’re a passing fad because I could never stay mad at you because I bet my entire sense of self upon you. I’m sorry and you don’t deserve the burden but it’s yours and I’m not taking it back.

I hope you don’t find this.

I hope you never read this.

Starting this website was a dumb idea. whatsgoodinhere.com is a dumb name.

I hope you’re not mad at me.

I hope you’re mad at me because at least that will mean that you’re thinking of me.