Hiding from the Dark Lord

My posting has gone down so much since the end of December. I'm not sure if people are going to be happy or sad about that.

I feel so uncomfortable during my days lately. I'm so intent on getting home from work and turning the rest of the world off. I've never appreciated my friends so much as I do now. Life sucks without people you can relate to. And even though I may not see people as often, knowing that they are there makes things so much easier. I turn my social skills completely off at work. I embrace the inner cog and just do what I have to do to get through the day. Honestly if anyone at work saw me in a good mood where I was laughing and joking and carefree they wouldn't recognize me at all. In some ways I like that because it makes me seem more mysterious. In many other ways I realize that it is just a slow form of death. And not the fun types of slow death, like drinking and smoking. No, this is the kind that is more like being drowned in your own dehydration. You think about that, and if it makes sense, then you, too, probably have had an experience in life like the one I am having now.

Bitching about work seems so pointless. No one really cares. If I bitch about it not paying me anything they say "well, you are basically a volunteer" and if I say I want to leave they say "you can't leave, you made a commitment." There really isn't any middle ground. I either suck it up or I am a horrible person. I know that isn't what people are really thinking, but that is the impression I get. I bitch to whoever will listen about my job. Most people get this tone in their voice that seems to indicate that I am a horrible person for bitching about working as an AmeriCorps. That really doesn't seem fair. Everyone is entitled to bitch about their jobs. I am really, really unhappy doing what I'm doing now and everyone treats me like a fucking asshole for even mentioning that I'm upset at all. Well, everyone but a few.

I'm not smart, I'm not wise, I'm just an average guy who wants to make something out of himself at some point. To that end I try a lot of different things. Working in security, working in restaurants, working in ballparks, serving coffee, trying to sell comics online, being unemployed for long periods of time, driving across country for no reason but to be on my own for a while to try to give myself inspiration to write something that other people might want to read at some point. And as for my romantic life I tend to go after the weirdest chicks I can find. Looking at my life the only constant is that I am always trying to find something new and exciting to get my ire up. Usually that doesn't work out so well. But I deal with it and I move on, because that is really the only other option that is available to me. I notice that I fail at a lot of things I try, and I don't think that it is always because of a lack of effort or because I am just a lazy bastard. Mostly it is because on some level I know the only way to enjoy my life is to get as much misery out of the way now so that I can actually understand what it is that I want and why it is that I want that. The fact of the matter is that I'd rather completely fuck up my life when I'm single and 25 then to suddenly try to drastically change my life when I am married with children at 35. Not that I suspect I'll have kids in ten years, but you never know. When I fuck up my life now the only person that really suffers is myself. Later I will lose that buffer zone. I will start to really screw over people that are counting on me. I can't even imagine anyone counting on me these days.

I really like my life these days, though. Despite my job, things are falling in place pretty well. Tanner living here is so far working out pretty well. And although I've had to adjust a few of my habits here and there to work around him being here, just having someone else around has made my life seem to suck considerably less. Plus Allison is here a fair amount, and I must admit that having a woman in the house from time to time makes it feel much more like a home than just some low-rent hobbit hole that I found. Life is happening here now! It isn't just a sad burnt out man with nothing to lose, now it is a place that people inhabit.

There are, right now, four women that I have made plans to hang out with in the near future. Most of those plans have fallen through already, and I suspect the rest will fall through as well. But, still, for a cynical asshole like me, that is fairly good. I often find myself wondering why I don't ever bother trying harder with women, then I get situations like this were I have cast a wider net and there is some level of interest. Granted it doesn't always turn into anything, but I like to think of it as practice. Much like writing and "publishing" a blog is practice for writing fiction that will be published. It may not amount to much of anything at the time, but in the long run it is helpful. Just knowing that I am doing something, no matter how febily, helps to make me realize that something will work out the way I want it to in the long run.

Speaking of writing, there is a short story I have been sitting on for some time that I feel needs to be published and I just haven't gotten around to sending it off to lit mags. It probably won't get published anywhere, but I need to try. Because I feel like if I get one story published then it is going to make me confident enough to try to start pushing through the rest of my stories. I really want to get paid to be a writer. That is probably the only job that I am really qualified for and want to do. Excuse the metaphor, but if I could get paid for writing it'd be like making a career out of masturbation. I'm going to do it one way or another, might as well get some cash for it.