Gaze Deep Into My Navel And Despair...

How am I supposed to grow up?

I want to grow up.  I really do.  No, more than that, I need to.  I need to grow the fuck up.  I'm almost forty years old, but I still see myself as if I were twenty-five.  That might sound appealing on some level, at first; "young at heart" and all that.  And maybe it would be, if that's what I wanted for myself.  But it isn't.  I want to grow up.  I need to grow up, because I can't keep living like I'm twenty-five.  I'm not twenty-five anymore.  I can't eat like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  I can't move like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  I can't party like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  Fuck, I can't even sleep like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  It all hurts me now in a way that it never did, and I can feel myself breaking down at an astonishing rate, as if the force of Entropy inside me were being fed by some radioaction of chemical combustion.  Accelerated Decrepitude.  But on the other hand, trying to live within my almost-forty means, while still feeling like a twenty-five year-old inside, is so monumentally depressing that I can't even fucking bother; I always just end up feeling like I already have one foot in the grave.

A twenty-five year-old trapped in a forty year-old body.  How incredibly pathetic.  How incredibly modern.  How incredibly privileged.

But how am I supposed to grow up?  I don't know.  My observations tell me that for most people, this happens as a natural side-effect of breeding.  That creating a child shifts all perspectives, and forces the new parent into a maturity that cannot be achieved through any other means.  That makes sense to me.  I can understand that.

But I'm never going to have any children.  So what am I supposed to do?  How am I supposed to force myself to achieve a state that, for most people, requires quite possibly the single most life-altering event they will ever experience in order to achieve?

Sometimes I think, maybe I don't actually need to grow up?  If I don't have any children, then what do I need to grow up for?  Why do I feel this need anyways?  I can only assume it is because I reflexively compare my life to the model my parents set for me.  When I look at myself, and try to judge whether I'm doing well or not, I compare it to the life they lived.  And I always feel myself coming up short.

They went to college.  They got degrees.  They worked hard.  (My father still works harder than almost anyone else I know, and while my mother never worked as hard as he did, she still inarguably worked harder than I do now.)  They bore and raised children.  They owned houses, with yards and multiple floors and everything.

But I dropped out of college.  I have no degrees, and probably never will.  Yeah, I have a career that doesn't leave me wanting to kill myself, but I still hate it, just because it's work, and I hate work of any kind; I hate being forced to sell myself every day in order to sustain myself.  I don't own a house.  I own an absurdly tiny condo that I hate and will never be able to sell for as much as I paid for it.  I am almost certain I will end up having to live in that tiny little box for the rest of my life, watching it deteriorate around me, with me - and that thought terrifies me on a regular basis.

And even these modest achievements - a well-paying job that I can sort of do well and tolerate, and a tiny little condo I'm trapped in like a prison cell - even these barely note-worthy accomplishments I never actually earned; I didn't work hard to achieve these things.  I got this job because some well-meaning middle-aged women that I worked with took pity on me, and talked to their bosses, and told them they knew this kid they thought would do well as a programmer.  And they were right - I am a good programmer.  At least, I'm alright.  But again, not because I try to be, or because I studied or worked hard or went to school or anything else.  I just have a natural talent for logic and pattern recognition and symbology, and so I am a naturally decent programmer.  I could be a great programmer if I wanted to be; if I tried to be and put forth the effort.  But I don't.  Because I don't care.  I only want to put forth the minimum amount of effort to get by, and save the rest for indulging in my life's pleasures.

And it's a similar story with my "home."  I didn't work hard and save money every day so that I could eventually put a down payment on my dream home.  My grandfather died, and since my mother (his daughter) was already dead herself, the portion of his life's wealth that should have been hers (and he had worked hard all his life to achieve that wealth) came to me instead.  And I used all of that money to buy the apartment I had been living in for almost a decade at that point.  The biggest, most "adult" accomplishment of my life - becoming a home-owner - and it only happened because I was in a position to profit off of the deaths of two of my close family members.  And so it has never felt like an accomplishment to me.  It feels like blood money.

(It's true that I performed magick to get the job and the money and the apartment, but even taking the assumption that my magick worked doesn't help the situation any.  Magick is a short-cut.  It's easy compared to actually working hard to learn or to save money.  And it's fun to do, and for that reason alone I wanted to do it, whether it worked or not.  So even assuming that I came by these things through sorcery, it still doesn't feel like an accomplishment to me.  It still doesn't feel like I really earned them.  It feels like I cheated.)

And I will almost certainly never see that much money again in my lifetime.  I can barely maintain a savings of more than a couple of thousand dollars at a time.  I live paycheck-to-paycheck, even with my fairly significant salary.  I've always been that way.  If I have money, I want to spend it on making myself feel good right now, and I can't seem to deny myself comfort or happiness in the present, in order to save it for some undefined future.  As I've written here before, I feel like the Grasshopper, fiddling away as the first snow begins to fall.

But why do I determine the value of my life by comparing it to my parents'?  They were completely different people, living in a completely different time.  And who wanted completely different things from their life than I want from mine.  And I know this.  But I still can't shake this feeling that I am somehow failing at life, because I seem to remember my parents being so much better off in their twenties than I am in my thirties; or will be in my forties.  I just want to be happy, like anyone else.  But I constantly and consistently feel that the things that make me happy aren't good for me.  That they are self-indulgent, or immature, or masturbatory.  That I am a bad person for living my life the way that I do.  But trying to live my life any other way always leaves me just as miserable, if only in a different way.

I just want to spend my life relaxing in the bathhouse, playing games, reading, writing, watching TV and movies, sleeping, eating, drinking and getting high, and punctuating the whole thing with the occasional orgasm.  That is really all I want from life.

And I feel like a worthless waste of a human being for feeling that way.  I hate myself for feeling that way.  But even so, I have no idea how to change it; I have no idea how to want anything else.

Okay, sure, I want other things.  Bigger things.  I want to have a big house with a yard and a basement and an attic.  I want to be able to support myself through writing, or some other form of creative expression.  (If only I could make a living playing games!)  I want a sense of accomplishment.  I want to feel like my life mattered, in any way.  I want to feel a sense of confidence that when I'm gone, I will have made some mark on the world that is all my own; that I will leave behind something more than a pile of carbon dust.  I do want all of these things.  But when I think about them, and I envision the monumental amount of work it would take to even try to achieve any of them - with no guarantee of success! - I lose any hope I may have had about ever actually achieving them.

Because I know that I will never do that work.  I just don't have it in me.  Achieving anything of any real significance requires a single-minded devotion that I just don't have.  Have never had.

Because deep-down, I don't want to be great.  All I really want is to be comfortable.  And I guess I am.  So I should be happy, then, right?  Then why do I feel this way?  I just wish I could learn to be happy with what I have, instead of hating myself for not being able to be great.

I guess what it all really comes down to is this:  I feel lazy, and I hate myself for being lazy, but I don't know how to make myself be anything else.  And I hate myself for that, too.

+          +          +

Or maybe I'm just depressed because winter is coming, and I'm all out of drugs, and I can feel both of these things gnawing at my bones.

Three-hundred Fifty-one...

Only two weeks left.

Two weeks from today, I will drink a beer.  A Guinness.  In a bottle.  And then I will have a glass of whiskey.  Eagle Rare bourbon, my favorite.  On the rocks, in my favorite glass tumbler.  And who knows what else after that.

I can't tell what I'm feeling.  Something like excitement, but not quite.  Almost anxiety, but not exactly.  Anticipation?  Fear?  Some jumbled soup of them all, most likely.

I want it so badly.  I've never wanted a drink this much in my entire life.  I want a drink right now more than I ever, ever wanted a drink when I actually was drinking.

I feel so proud of myself for actually accomplishing this.

I feel guilty for feeling this way, and I try to suppress it, reminding myself that I haven't actually accomplished anything yet.  I have two weeks left to go.  I can feel proud then.  And celebrate with a drink.

I'm so scared that something bad is going to happen.  That I'm going to go off the deep end and lose control in some way that I never have before.  That I'm going to end up in another of those deep chemical depressions.  That I'm going to lose all of my creativity and desire to express myself.  That I'm going to lose the ability to write poetry.  Or worse, that I'm going to lose the ability to enjoy writing.  I'm scared of some other bad result that I haven't even thought of.

I'm scared of the fact that I don't know what's going to happen.

But I have to find out.

I have to know if I can handle it or not.

I have to find out how else the last year has changed me.

Discontent...

That was, beyond all doubt, the absolute worst christmas I have ever experienced in my entire life.  I never, ever want to go through anything like that, ever again.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Ironically, however, that might've been the best Boxing Day I've ever had.  You just never know what to expect.

So, it's probably best not to expect anything at all.

Surprise Morning...

NOTE:  I thought I had posted this on Friday, but my home internet connection has been buggy lately (as usual, really), and I guess something must've gone wrong, because I just noticed today that this post wasn't actually on the blog.  Everything seemed to go fine when I posted it, there were no signs of problems, but there it was this morning, still marked as "Draft."  So, anyways, here it is now, a few days late.

+     +     +

One exit away from work this morning, there was a loud BANG! from my engine, and smoke started pouring out from under my car.  (It's so weird, it seems like every time I've broken down in the last 5 years, I've been one exit away from my work, in this same spot.)  I pulled over to the side of the road, got out to look under the hood, and saw oil just pouring out from the underside of my car and pooling all over the road.

Wonderful.

Called AAA, and had them send out a tow-truck.  Got to spend a thrilling hour on the shoulder of 270 waiting for the truck to arrive, praying not to get plowed into by a fellow commuter doing 80mph in an Escalade.  The tow-truck finally showed up and gave me a lift back to the dealership, thirty miles away, dragging my poor, broken car behind.  Along the way, the greasy, 300 lbs. driver regaled me with tales of all the 19- and 20-year old "hippie chicks" he's "banging" right now.

This car is only a little over a year old.  It's still under warranty.  (Thankfully.)  And I just brought it in for maintenance a couple of weeks ago, just before our Thanksgiving trip to Pittsburgh.  So this shouldn't have happened.

Turns out that when they changed my oil back then, they didn't put the oil plug back into the oil pan properly.  As I've been driving it since then, the plug has been slowly working its way out.  The explosion I heard this morning was the plug shooting out of the oil pan like a bullet.

Luckily, an easy fix.  Just get a new plug, and fill the thing back up with oil.  And a free fix, too.  Still, though - not the way I would've preferred to spend my day.

But a useful reminder that we can never get complacent, because despite our assumptions, we can never really know what's going to happen to us next.

Raging Election...

(With apologies to everyone at The Colbert Report, from whom I blatantly stole the title for today's post.)

Wow.  Okay, so, yeah, I didn't see that coming last night, to be honest.  I'm so used to getting shellacked in these elections that I fully expected to be facing a Romney presidency this morning.  But not only did we re-elect Obama, but for the first time in my entire life, every single person or issue I voted for actually won.  And then to find out that Democrats and progressive issues won over and over again all across the country?  I'm just kind of stunned, honestly.

Last night, Maryland became the first state to uphold same-sex marriage with a voter referendum.  How fabulous is that?  So did Maine.  And Washington state looks like it's going to follow.  And speaking of Washington state, they legalized marijuana there last night.  They didn't just decriminalize it, they legalized it; for recreational use.  And so did Colorado.  Wow!

I was fully prepared to be seriously depressed today.  Now I don't quite know what to do with myself.

If you have any suggestions for ways I could spend my day not being depressed, please leave a comment below, and I will take it under consideration.  Thank you, and Gods Bless America.



Quick note about updates:  We're super-swamped at work with another tight deadline, and another series of endless snags delaying the whole process (yesterday was a clusterfuck on a scale that I have never witnessed here in fifteen years), and so I've been working more long hours again.  But this time, there's the added complication that I've been off-site for a lot of it, and so away from my computer.  And at home, we've got a couple of big projects to finish up in the next couple of weeks, as well, and so that's eating up a big chunk of what little free time I have left.  I actually have about a half a dozen posts started already that I've been wanting to get out there, but I just haven't had a chance to finish them yet.  Soon, soon.

Just wanted you to know that I'm still here, and I haven't given up or anything.  Just a tad too much on my plate at the moment.  Busy, busy Backson will be Back Soon.

Waah...

Finally managed to make it out the door early enough this morning to get in a workout, but never actually got to work out.

I've discovered the one major flaw in my otherwise pleasant new backroad commute:  accidents.  On the highway, when there's an accident, it slows everything down considerably.  But even if you're going much more slowly, you are still, at least, going.  But on the backroad, being a mere two-lane, when there's an accident, it shuts down the entire road.  On previous occasions, that has meant a sudden, unexpected detour, sending me off to gods-know-where, to try and find my way around the accident and back to my backroad, without having any clue as to where I am, or how to get where I'm going.  This morning, however, it meant simply sitting in my car for forty-five minutes, not moving, listening to the radio, and watching my average miles-per-gallon tick-tick-tick steadily downwards.

In hindsight, I know that I should've spent that time enjoying the lovely scenery and the beautiful day, taking advantage of the rare opportunity to sit still and take it all in.  After all, there was nothing I could do about it, so what was the point in being upset?  But, honestly, that never even occurred to me.  At the time, all I could think about were my plans and expectations once again being totally screwed up by random chance.  It's becoming apparent that one of the many things I seem to have lost since Walpurgisnacht, is that relaxed, easy-going outlook.  I keep finding myself getting more upset than I used to, more quickly and easily than I used to, and for longer stretches of time.  And this is all very comfortable and familiar to me, because it's who I've been for most of my life.  And while I always knew that my recently acquired state-of-grace wouldn't last forever, I thought it would last longer than it did, and that it would gradually taper off.  I didn't anticipate the possibility that I would bring it to a sudden, and untimely, end.

I don't like this person I am right now very much.  I like the person I've been the past few months a lot more.  I'm very sad to see that person go.  And even more so to know that it was my fault.

But, whatever, never mind, can't beat myself up about that.  Need to try to keep moving forward, and looking on the bright side, if I'm to have any hope at all of getting that version of my Self back again.  So, anyways, by the time I actually made it to the office, I no longer had time to get in a workout.  But I still needed to clean myself up, as I was in my gym clothes and hadn't bothered to fix my bedhead this morning.  (As mentioned previously, I'm going to work out and take a shower anyways, so why should I give a shit if I'm dressed nicely or if my hair is presentable?)  So instead of a workout, I got to enjoy simply going down to the locker room, taking a quick shower, getting cleaned up and dressed, and then coming straight back to my office to start working.

And this was the part of the day I was actually looking forward to and expecting to go well.  The rest of my schedule for the day looks to be no fun at all.  So, here's hoping that I'm just as wrong with all of those expectations, as well, and the rest of my day turns out to be fun and exciting.

But even if not, then oh, well.  There's always tomorrow.

Oh, wait.  Tomorrow's kickball.

So, there's always Friday.