just words

A new year dawns, and so too a bunch of promises inevitably broken.

For the record, I think New Year’s resolutions are stupid. I see people make all sorts of New Year’s resolutions that are never realized. I’m going to write a novel. I’m going to stop smoking. I’m going to lose 50 lbs. I’m going to stop drinking. I’m going to stop being so negative all the time. These are things that never work as New Year’s resolutions. I've seen them fail time and time again, with myself and others. It seems to me that a resolution can be made at any time, so why wait until the new year? Why not exercise some willpower earlier in the year? Is there some sort of cosmic willpower-enhancing magic produced when the Earth completes a full rotation around the sun? How long does that magic last? And does that magic only exist at the exact moment of orbit completion? Perhaps there’s no cosmic magic at all; perhaps it’s all symbolic? New year, new you. After all, there’s no real set “complete orbit” in the grand scheme of things; we humans defined the criteria for when an orbit is complete. I could say that the orbit starts in June and ends next June, or February and February, and so on; it’s all societally constructed anyway.

What really gets me is that people will often put off their resolutions until the new year; they know they should stop drinking, but they don’t want to stop drinking right this second because that would be no fun, so they pick some arbitrary date on the Gregorian calendar to stop drinking instead. “I will for sure stop drinking come January 1st, no doubt about it.” And when January 1st comes around, many will have already broken this promise to themselves. “Just a small glass of wine to celebrate the new year, no big deal.” Or, by the time January 1st comes around, they’ll have rationalized the “no drinking” resolution into something more manageable, like “no drinking on weekdays” or something like that. It seems to me that, if one has the thought to “stop drinking,” or whatever, then they should do that thing right then and there, not wait until some random date on a calendar. Otherwise, how serious are they, really? Do they really want to stop drinking, or do they just want to make themselves feel better? And if it’s to make themselves feel better, isn’t this whole thing kind of counterproductive then, considering they'll most definitely feel bad when they inevitably break the resolution?

This is why, every year, I tell myself that I am not going to make any sort of New Year’s resolution. But I’m now realizing that this New Year’s anti-resolution becomes a sort of New Year’s resolution itself because it fits the core definition of one: a promise corresponding to the Earth’s rotation around the sun. Meaning, by telling myself I am not going to have a New Year’s resolution, I am, in fact, setting a New Year’s resolution, meaning I am unwittingly participating in the very thing I am criticizing. And considering my position on New Year’s resolutions, which asserts that all New Year’s resolutions are weak promises inevitably broken, my own “no New Year’s resolution” resolution is doomed to fail, meaning I am bound to set some sort of different New Year’s resolution for myself, although I kind of already have what with the “no New Year’s resolution” resolution, which we already know is bound to fail, which means I am bound to set some sort of different New Year’s resolution, and so on.

You can quickly see how the “no New Year’s resolution” resolution establishes a sort of paradox in which, when the resolution is broken, you end up fulfilling the resolution by breaking it, and when you try to keep it, you break it by keeping it. It is definitionally self-defeating. Perhaps the only way to break the paradox is to stop overthinking it, or just not care. But even that, I guess, becomes its own sort of resolution, meaning you’re kind of fucked either way.

Ultimately, I think the only choice for me here is to stop being so cynical and just set some non-paradoxical resolution like everyone else does. The problem with that, however, is that whenever I tell myself I’m going to do something, the likelihood of me doing the thing goes down considerably. I don’t know why this happens. When I tell myself I am going to write, I end up playing video games; and when I tell myself I am going to play video games, I end up writing; and when I tell myself I am going to read, I end up outside smoking a cigarette while watching mindless YouTube Shorts on my phone. And yes, I realize this is all a matter of willpower, but unfortunately, willpower is a character stat I sorely lack.

This do-the-exact-opposite-of-what-I-tell-myself-I’m-going-to-do paradigm has gotten so bad that I have taken to telling myself to do the thing I don’t really want to do in hopes that the paradigm will kick in and compel me to do the thing I actually want to do; when I want to write, I will tell myself that I am going to play video games instead, hoping that I will betray myself and thus end up writing. But this sort of reverse psychology undermines itself, because of course, I’m aware of the self-trickery going on and thus end up doing the opposite of the opposite, which means I’m right back where I started. However, I have found that this tell-myself-to-do-the-thing-I-don’t-want-to-do-in-hopes-that-I-do-the-thing-I-actually-want-to-do method of psychological self-trickery does, in fact, produce better outcomes than just telling myself to do the things I want to do.

So, this year, I have come up with a list of New Year’s resolutions that I think are just perfect for producing good outcomes, and I will list them below.


Don’t Read Anything, Ever
This year, I aspire to read absolutely nothing. No books. No magazines. No articles. No blog entries. Nothing. Reading is a waste of time, as it fills my head with a bunch of pointless ideas, pointless because, in the cosmic scheme of things, I'm going to die anyway, so who cares. I could be playing video games or watching YouTube Shorts instead of reading a dumb book or whatever.

Give Up Writing Completely
Writing is a stupid waste of time. No one reads any of my stuff anyway. I only started writing in hopes that people would swoon at how smart I am pretending to be. Writing is a pompous, egotistical endeavor, and I should try not to be so self-absorbed and pretentious; so, writing has to go. Everything I write is some rip-off of David Foster Wallace or J. D. Salinger anyway, so it’s not like I’m even original in any way. And when I die, about three people will have read any of my stuff anyway, so it’ll be like I had never written to begin with, so what’s the point? It’s time to grow up and focus on the important things in life, the stuff that makes me feel good, like watching YouTube Shorts and playing video games.

Spend More Time on My Phone
This year, I aspire to look at my phone way more than ever before. Behind that tempered glass is a wonderland of entertainment and good feels. I will download all the apps, spend hours lying on my bed swiping through YouTube Shorts, and sign up for more social media than ever before so that I can make funny and/or smart posts in hopes that people give me lots of upvotes and retweets because this is a surefire way to get the validation I desperately seek. I will replace my in-person community with the Reddit app and get all my news from echo chambers so that all my smart opinions are constantly validated. This will make me very happy.

Eat Shitloads of Candy
This one’s self-explanatory, but this year I will endeavor to never be without candy. If I run out of candy, I will immediately drive to the nearest gas station or grocery store and buy more. I will dedicate a kitchen cabinet solely to candy. It will be called the Candy Cabinet. I will not share the candy. I will eat whole bags. I will try all sorts of new candies and savor each and every sugary explosion of taste. I will become a candy connoisseur who eats nothing but candy. And I will absolutely not go to the dentist.

Don’t Go Outside and Never Work Out
Going outside is a pain in the ass and working out is hard. These things require a lot of mental and physical effort, all for very little short-term payoff. And, in the cosmic scheme of things, these things don’t matter because nothing matters. Everyone dies, so what’s the point? This year, instead of going outside or working out, I will instead use that time to play video games or watch YouTube Shorts, because life is short so I might as well keep myself entertained at all times.

Drink Every Night and Consider Day Drinking
Historically, I have had problems with drinking; once I start, I cannot stop. But this year, I’m realizing that this is not my problem, it’s society’s problem. It's the people around me who are the problem. If the people around me were more accepting of my drinking, then it wouldn’t be such a big deal. So, this year, I am going to start drinking way more, and I'm going to tell those around me to lighten up and deal with it. “Stop fucking with my vibe.” I'm going to drink a bottle of wine each night and perhaps start day drinking as well, because it makes me more charismatic and sociable and fun, and most importantly it makes me feel really good. Again, life is short, so I might as well spend as much time as possible making myself feel good. I could die tomorrow, after all, so why deprive myself of the things I so enjoy?

And that’s it. Those are my New Year’s resolutions. These are the promises I am making to myself, promises that I sincerely hold and will try my best to fulfill. I am really looking forward to achieving all my goals this year. It would be a terrible shame if I ended up doing the opposite of any of these things.

Happy New Year.

It must have been around 5 PM. I was in the living room, sitting on the big wrap-around couch. My eyes were glued to channel 176. Toonami. I wanted to watch Mobile Suit Gundam, but they were playing Dragon Ball instead for some reason. Goku and Krillin were fighting each other over a stone or something. Then my dad came home. He walked into the living room, grabbed the remote, and flipped the channel. “Hey, I was watching that,” I said. But he didn’t say a word. He just sat down next to me and placed a big hand on my leg. Then we both just stared into the glow, watching the world burn.

That morning, it must have been around 9 AM, the whole lower half of my face was glittering like a rainbow, and there was a sour, metallic taste in my mouth. I was sitting Indian style in the hallway outside of class, my back to the wall. Two nurses and a teacher were towering over me. I could see a mash of students’ faces through the classroom-door window, they were all clamoring for a peek. The taller of the two nurses held out a clear, thin tube and said, “You drank this?” I nodded. “Why?” she said. I shrugged. Then my 5th-grade teacher, Ms. Brooks, chimed in, “Did one of the kids make you do it?” I shook my head. “Do you feel OK? Does your stomach hurt?” I shook my head again. Then they started talking like I wasn’t there. “You can’t just take his word for it, he’s a kid,” the shorter nurse said. “Maybe it’s slow-acting?” said Ms. Brooks. “What brand is it?” There was a pause. The taller nurse observed the tube closely. “Sakura Gelly Roll, Rainbow Stardust Glitter.” The shorter nurse nodded at this. “They’re all the rage, my daughter has a case full of them.” Ms. Brooks added, “Does it say anything else, safe for children?” There was another pause. “Nothing.” I was just sitting there, smacking my lips a little bit, trying to make the nasty taste go away, watching them go back and forth, like I was a ghost or something. “I don’t think it’s toxic,” the taller nurse said. “We can’t just assume,” Ms. Brooks responded. “Fine, I’ll call poison control.” I felt my stomach twist at the word “poison.” The shorter nurse hurried down the hall. Ms. Brooks shifted her attention toward me, “Honey, are you sure one of the kids didn’t make you do it?” Her tone was fake-sweet, manipulative almost. I shook my head again. “Then why’d you do it, honey?” I shrugged. “Well, I’m going to have to call your parents, let them know, but I’d like to be able to tell them what happened.” I looked down at my criss-cross-applesauce legs and thought hard for a few seconds, then I looked up and said, “I dunno, was trying to be funny.” She blinked. “And I wanted to know what it tastes like,” I added. She blinked again. I could tell the nurse was holding in a laugh. After a few blinking seconds, Ms. Brooks asked, “Well, did it taste good?” And no, no it did not. It did not taste good at all. It was one of the worst tastes I had ever tasted. So I shook my head at her question, smacked my lips, made a face. “Nope. Tastes real bad.” And that’s when Ms. Brooks and the nurse burst into laughter. Then Ms. Brooks held out her hand and said, “C’mon honey, let’s go get you some water, wash that taste out.” I took her hand. “Are you sure you’re feeling alright?” she added. I nodded and stood up, then I followed Ms. Brooks down the hall, a little worried about the poison.

But we didn’t make it very far before Ms. Brooks was stopped by the computer lab teacher, Mr. Wainwright. He leaned in real close and said something under his breath, at which point something changed, like some sort of heavy gloom had drifted into the hallway. Ms. Brooks looked down at me with an expression I had never seen before. I could not parse it. Was this about the poison? I was still smacking my lips and rubbing my mouth, getting rainbow ink all over my sleeve. I thought maybe I was about to get in big trouble for drinking the gel pen, or that maybe they heard back from poison control, found out that Sakura Gelly Roll was actually poisonous. I started squirming, worrying about death.

Then Ms. Brooks lightly grabbed me by the wrist and led me into the computer lab. There were about twenty iMacs in there, the translucent ones that are all rounded and colorful, and there were kids sitting behind each one, but they weren't focusing on their computer screens, no, they were focusing on something else, the small television up in the high corner of the classroom. There was something happening on the TV. Something was on fire, billowing smoke. I couldn't quite make it out. I looked at Ms. Brooks with a confused look on my face. I wanted to ask her what we were doing here, why we weren't getting anything to drink. I also wanted to ask her if I was going to die from the poison. But when I looked up at her, she was covering her mouth and tears were streaming down her face, so I asked her a different question. I asked, “What’s wrong, Ms. Brooks?”

“The world, honey,” she said. “The world’s wrong.”

I didn’t understand what she meant.

By 10 AM, we were all in the gymnasium, waiting for our parents to pick us up. The teachers were there too, congregated into little groups, murmuring while they kept an eye on us. It was weird because none of us were making any trouble like we usually do. That heavy gloom was in the air, affecting us all. We were all spread out in the gym, sitting around in our little circles, nervously fidgeting and wondering what the heck was going on. It was as if someone had released a sedative through the air vents or something. And the poison control people never came. I guess they forgot. I kind of forgot too. I had stopped worrying about death and was now worried about something else entirely, something I could not quite put my finger on. I was just sitting there in a little circle with all the other nerdy kids. They all had bad haircuts and slightly protruding bellies, and some were wearing Pokemon shirts. And none of them seemed to care that my face was a glittery rainbow, they were all too busy talking in weird, hushed tones.

So I just sat there, not saying a word, listening to the back and forth.

I wonder if anybody died. All I saw was smoke and fire and stuff. How long do we have to stay here? I heard it was aliens. Aliens aren't real, idiot. I need to go pee. Maybe it was Godzilla. Are they gonna let us play dodgeball? Godzilla lives in Japan. He could have come here. No, he couldn’t. Yeah, he could. Nuh-uh. Yeah-huh. I really have to pee. Why are the teachers acting so weird? I don’t know. It's kind of scary. Are they gonna bring us lunch? I saw Ms. Johnson praying in the hall. Why would Godzilla even come here? Maybe he got bored. Ms. Brooks was crying. Big monsters don't just get bored, that's dumb. At least we get out of school early. Anyone got any snacks? My mom’s here, see you tomorrow. My dad works till seven. Are they gonna let us take the bus? My sister is gonna pick me up, she drives a Mustang. My dad drives a BMW. So what? If they let us play dodgeball, I hope they play Cotton Eye Joe. I hate that song. My big brother and I listen to Metallica. I'm gonna go find the bathroom. I'm really hungry. My neighbor has a pet monkey who can do tricks. What's that got to do with anything? I wonder what the teachers are talking about over there. Maybe the school’s closing down for good. Yeah, I wish. Austin said it was a meteor. That’s stupid, they can deflect meteors, I saw it in a movie. You're all stupid, I heard the teachers talking, they said it was terrorists.

My ears perked up. “What's a terrorist?” I said.

The kids just looked at me with big, blinky eyes, saying nothing. They didn't know either.

The teachers eventually brought food for us to eat. They also brought out the balls and said we could play dodgeball, but no one actually played. None of our hearts were really in it. I eventually took out my cow-print notebook and started drawing. I was big into Gundam and had been watching it religiously on Toonami every day after school. I was working on a full-page spread of little Gundams battling each other in a massive city. There were little robots on the buildings, lasers streaking through the cloud-bubble skies, beam sabers clashing over the roads, stomped cars in the streets, explosions all over the place, little stick-figure people with jagged speech bubbles reading, “RUN, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE.” I was about halfway done with the drawing when my dad showed up. It must have been around 4 PM. I was one of the last kids to leave.

The car ride was weird. My dad wasn’t listening to the hard-rock station like he normally does. He was listening to some news broadcast. A woman was talking in a very sad tone. "The blaze has only intensified over the last several minutes. At this hour, there is still no word on the status of the search-and-rescue teams who entered Building 7 earlier this afternoon. Our prayers go out to those brave first responders and their families. Reporting live, we will bring you updates the moment we have them.” The woman paused for a while, then she said, “Dear God, bless America." My dad only shook his head and turned the radio off, only the hum of the engine and the bump of the road remained. My dad wasn't saying a word. He didn’t even ask about my rainbow face. So, wanting to break the uncomfortable silence, I started asking him questions.

“How'd you know to pick me up?”

“They called me, kiddo.”

“Oh, what took you so long?”

“I was showing a house on the other side of the city.”

“Is it a big house?”

“It’s big enough.”

“Why are they closing the school?”

“They didn’t tell you?”

“Austin said it was a meteor.”

“Austin said that?”

“And someone else said it was aliens.”

My dad only shook his head, then he said, “Maybe that would’ve been better.”

“What do you mean, Dad?”

“Better than the truth.”

I didn’t understand what he meant.

When we pulled into the downstairs garage, it must have been around 4:30 PM. My dad said he had a few errands to run, so he dropped me off and told me to make myself some lunch. When I entered the basement through the garage, the house felt different, but my dog, Freddy, was waiting for me at the top of the stairs like he always did, wagging his tail like mad, happy to see me as usual, like it was just another normal day for him. So I got on all fours and climbed up the stairs real quick like a wild animal, like I usually do, and I pounced on him at the top. We wrestled a little bit, but my heart wasn't really in it, so I stopped short and just lay on the floor, looking up at the ceiling. Freddy started licking my face for almost a whole minute, like there was something tasty on there, and I just let him do it because why not.

Next thing I did was, I went to the bathroom, and after taking a leak, I looked at myself in the mirror. I noticed the rainbow was gone and realized why Freddy had been licking me for so long. Then I went into the kitchen and made some Easy Mac. The instructions say to leave the water in after microwaving the pasta, but I always poured it out and added milk instead. It tasted better that way. I sat in silence in the kitchen, eating my mac and cheese. It tasted good, but I didn’t eat it all. There was something weird going on with my stomach, and it wasn’t the gel pen, it was something else, something I didn’t understand. When I was done, I put the bowl on the floor and let Freddy eat the rest. He really liked that. Then I looked at the kitchen clock and realized Gundam was about to come on, so I rushed out of the kitchen.

It must have been around 5 PM. I was in the living room, sitting on the big wrap-around couch. My eyes were glued to channel 176. Toonami. I wanted to watch Mobile Suit Gundam, but they were playing Dragon Ball instead for some reason. Goku and Krillin were fighting each other over a stone or something. Then my dad came home. He walked into the living room, grabbed the remote, and flipped the channel. “Hey, I was watching that,” I said. But he didn’t say a word. He just sat down next to me and placed a big hand on my leg. Then we both just stared into the glow, watching the world burn.

A slideshow of catastrophe flashed across my eyes. Images of people screaming and buildings burning and towers falling played on repeat, over and over again. It looked like a scene from Mobile Suit Gundam, but real life. A woman stood in front of it all, speaking directly to the camera. She kept saying things like “unthinkable horror” and “World Trade Center” and “national tragedy and “ground zero” and “Boeing 767” and “no survivors” and “day of mourning” and “terrorist attack.”

At that last one, my ears perked up, so I turned to my dad.

“Dad?”

“Yes, son?”

“What’s a terrorist?”

He thought about this for a moment.

“Is it like a bad guy?” I said.

“Something like that.”

“What’d they do?”

“They hurt a lot of people, son.”

“Why’d they do that?”

He thought about this for a moment, too.

“Did we do something bad to them?” I added.

“It’s complicated.”

“Tell me.”

He paused for a moment, then he said, “They hate us.”

“Why would they hate us, what did we do to them?”

“It’s not that simple, son.”

I didn’t understand what he meant.

We didn’t say anything for a while after that. We just sat there, watching the world burn. But eventually, getting bored, I turned to my dad and said, "Guess what?”

“What?”

“I drank a gel pen today.”

He looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “What? Why would you do that?”

“I dunno. I wanted to see what it tastes like.”

He blinked. “Well, did it taste good?”

“No, it taste real bad.”

And at that, he smiled, then he let me watch Toonami for the rest of the night.

Back in 2016, when I was 25 years old, I was living in one of those single-wide mobile homes perilously held up by stacked cement blocks, one of those ones with the cheap vinyl skirts they wrap around the bottom to hide all the duct-taped plumbing and rotted-out wood and raccoon colonies and maybe a dead body or two, because who knows what was actually going on under there. I may have flirted with the dark abyss, but I sure as hell did not want to crawl into it to find out what was inside. My life philosophy at the time a laissez-faire mixture of red wine and nicotine clouds and pixels, so I didn’t even care about much of anything, to tell you the truth. In fact, the rent was so cheap at $650 a month that when the landlord originally showed me the property, I immediately said “Where do I sign?” and moved my wife and three-year-old daughter into the place without even so much as a basic cursory inspection, driven mostly by the fact that I was destitute both philosophically and financially, answering phones for a coffee company for like $14 an hour and binge drinking every night. I just wanted a stable roof over my family’s head, a place that wasn't in an apartment complex, a place with a yard, with some level of privacy, a place where I could play video games, drink wine, and blast super loud music while chain-smoking cigarettes outside without someone filing a noise complaint, and this super cheap rundown trailer from the 80s checked all those hedonistic boxes. 

But as it turns out, skipping the cursory inspection was a big mistake, because, as I would come to find out years later, the place was a deathtrap, and I learned this the hard way, or, well, my daughter did, when the roof in her bedroom collapsed.

It’s hard to believe that almost a decade has passed since I first moved into that shithole, because I remember it as if it were yesterday. My daily routine started in medias res, do something with my daughter after work, pour my first glass of wine around 8 p.m., finish my seventh by 2 a.m., pop a few Benadryl to fall asleep, drive to the call center six hours later, repeat. I would drink so much the night before that I was pretty much still wasted the morning after. My skin was always clammy and pale and my eyes were raccoon eyes. They say men between the age of 20 to 30 are in their prime, able to muster almost supernatural levels of strength, persevere through any hardship by sheer force of will, but I spent whatever supernatural strength I had just getting out of bed in the morning with the worst hangovers known to man and then somehow driving five miles through busy morning traffic all without getting into a single car accident despite the fact that I was nodding off behind the wheel the whole time. Half the time, I wouldn’t even remember driving to work, I’d just appear at my desk in the call center, as if I had somehow teleported there, taking calls in this autopilot-like daze. “Thank you for calling Keurig, my name is Forrest. May I have your first and last name, please? Thank you. And your email address? And your coffee maker’s serial number? Thank you again. And you say your coffee maker is short-cupping? I understand. I know that must be frustrating. We’ll have to do some troubleshooting, so please be aware that the needles inside the machine are very sharp, but could you please gather a paperclip and small measuring cup, then we can get started.”

And this worked for me somehow. I reached a certain level of homeostasis. I made around $1,800 a month, $650 of that went to rent, $300 went to utilities, food was paid for by SNAP, a couple hundred went to things for my daughter, and whatever money left over went to Marlboro Lights and Liberty Creek Cabernet Sauvignon, which was the cheapest supermarket swill wine money could buy at the time, at like $8 per 2-liter bottle, which, at 30 proof, was also the most bang for your buck in terms of getting absolutely shitfaced as quickly as possible, outside of just drinking straight liquor, which I never had the stomach for. Back then, when I was 25, I was still a child, singularly focused on myself, and whatever seemingly grown-up big-boy shit I did do was only done to maintain my comfortable homeostasis. I knew I had a drinking problem, but the negative consequences were not severe enough for me to take it seriously, especially since the euphoria after a few glasses of wine was so strong that it felt like I could not live without the stuff, like life would be just a boring slog without my Cabernet. And there was an identity aspect to it as well, because I thought drinking was super cool, and I even thought that having a drinking problem was kind of cool too, like it added character in some way, a sort of tortured-soul aesthetic. When I drank red wine, I felt like some sort of vampire sophisticate. I loved the whole ritual, the orbed glass, the twist of the wine key, the pop of the cork, the glug-glug of the pour, the exotic aroma, all of it. I would hold that first sip in my mouth for like a whole minute, just swishing it around in there like a mouthful of blood. And after a few sips, I would go outside and sit on the small uncovered wooden steps that functioned as my porch, to smoke cigarettes and listen to super loud music, bringing my orbed glass along with me, because music just hits different and cigarettes just taste better when you’re wasted, and that’s a fact.

After my daughter went to bed, I would sit myself down at my computer desk with a glass of red and boot up a video game. I would play Final Fantasy XI or The Elder Scrolls Online or some other life-suck type game, just getting totally fucked up and lost in those virtual worlds. Eventually, I started joining a Discord server with my old friends from high school, which only made my drinking worse, as we’d all drink and get fucked up together. A sort of digital drinking culture evolved, to the point that, for a few years there, we would be in that Discord server every night, drinking to the point of blurred vision and slurred speech, playing our preferred game of the week, be it Monster Hunter World, Tekken 7, Risk of Rain, Counter-Strike: Source, Diablo III,  King of Fighters XIII, or whatever, just yelling and laughing and trolling the shit out of each other, sometimes to the point of bitter rivalries, weeks-long feuds, all settled with our preferred choice of alcoholic beverage and controller. There was a real sense of community there, built on old friendships and video games and, most importantly, alcohol, because it was weird when someone wasn’t drinking while everyone else was, like you couldn’t connect on the same existential plane or something if you weren’t basically blackout drunk. It was the same sort of peer pressure you might experience in high school, just carried over unspoken into adulthood.

Between rounds of whatever we were playing at the time, I would step outside and smoke a cigarette or two, making sure to bring my wine glass along with me, because after I got my first taste of blood, I could not stop. The moment I could no longer taste the aftertaste of that bittersweet earthy red, something like anxious dread would creep in, a persistent fear that the night would end, that the euphoria would fade, unless I kept drinking, so I would drink and drink and drink, a crimson tide flowing down my esophagus every minute of the night, even when I was outside smoking. And to make my outside-smoking excursions more entertaining, I would play music from my phone’s speakers, and I would literally dance and sway out there in my front yard, sometimes singing at the top of my lungs. 

This is the night of the expanding man
I take one last drag as I approach the stand
I cried when I wrote this song
Sue me if I play too long
This brother is free
I'll be what I want to be

Back then, my favorite band was Steely Dan. It all started when I heard the song “Peg” on the radio one day. I had heard the song before but never really paid much attention to it until one day, when the stars aligned, when it came on the classic rock station and I happened to be in just the right mood. The song resonated with me. The downtown strut of the electric piano, the intricate bounce of the bassline, the bitter darkness hidden within the joyful melody, that rich baritone background vocal by Michael McDonald, all the crazy guitar shit going on that you don’t even notice without specifically listening for it. It’s just a fantastic song, one of the greatest pop tunes ever written. It got me obsessed with Steely Dan, head over heels for their whole dark-irony-hidden-behind-layers-of-smooth-jazz sound. They had that whole anti-hipster thing going on too, which aligned well with my own anti-hip contrarian attitude. Of course, being an anti-hipster is actually just another flavor of being a hipster, perhaps the worst kind, but that didn’t stop me from going through Steely Dan’s entire discography, repeat listening to each album, falling in love with songs like “Only a Fool Would Say That,” “Bodhisattva,” “Rose Darling,” “Kid Charlemagne,” “Gaucho,” and “Your Gold Teeth II,” which, if you’ve been rolling your eyes at the Steely Dan stuff thus far, is probably the song you should listen to because it’s just straight-up poetic and beautiful, one of their few uplifting songs, musically transcendent almost, so much so that if you don’t like it, then there’s a good chance you just don’t like music, period. But back then, “Your Gold Teeth II” wasn’t my favorite song by them. My favorite song was actually “Deacon Blues,” a song that sounds like the inside of a smoky underworld dive bar, a place where the tragically hip and the perpetually misunderstood come together to drink their lives away.

Learn to work the saxophone
I play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
And die behind the wheel

Back then, Steely Dan was my band, and “Deacon Blues” was my song. I identified with that song. I wanted to live inside that song. I saw myself as the protagonist of that song, the tragic hero, the misunderstood artist, playing exactly what he feels, drinking all night long, maybe one day dying behind the wheel, because who cares, nothing really matters, the universe is all chaos and jazz, no one even asked to be here, we’re all just specks of stardust, a flash in the cosmic scheme of things.

So call me Deacon Blues.

And alcohol was my one true love, my muse. It got to the point where, if alcohol wasn’t in my bloodstream, I wasn’t really there, in the present. During the daylight hours, when I wouldn’t drink, I would spend time with my daughter, take her to the playground, the indoor kids’ places, even play dolls on the floor of her small 10x10 trailer park bedroom, but I was never really there. I mean, my physical body was there, but my soul was not. It was someplace else entirely. I was pretending. I went through the motions because I felt like I had to, out of some persistent feeling of guilt, but my heart was never really in it. Every moment I spent with her, I was counting down the seconds until my first glass of wine. The daylight hours were just an excruciatingly long prelude to getting wasted, hammered, shitfaced, sloshed, just absolutely ossified. These were my priorities. I was a child pretending to be a father, a shell of a parent. I would constantly tell my daughter that I loved her as a way to sort of compensate for my parental absenteeism, as if cheap words could ever make up for shit parenting. But whenever she would have trouble falling asleep, making me late to my first glass of wine, I would suddenly become a harsh disciplinarian, not because I thought it was an effective way to discipline a child, but because I would become frustrated and short-tempered without wine, sometimes shouting orders at the girl like I was an army drill instructor or something. “THAT WAS THE LAST STORY. GET IN BED. PUT YOUR DAMN TOYS AWAY. CLOSE YOUR EYES. IT’S BEDTIME. DON’T MAKE ME TELL YOU AGAIN.” And this was usually followed by some pathetic apology and cheap I-love-you.

When my wife would confront me about the shouting, I would justify my outbursts by espousing some rigid parenting philosophy that I didn’t actually believe in. “Kids need discipline. There’s a certain level of fear that must be maintained. This is the way of the world, just look at countries, states, governments, they all maintain order through fear. This is just reality. Laws exist for a reason. My shouting functions as a deterrent to bad behavior, in the same way that the threat of jail functions as a deterrent to crime. What do you really think the world would be like without laws? Do you really think it would be a better place? Honestly? Don’t be naive.” And then I would pour the first of many glasses of wine and disappear into my office, feeling guilty for a whole ten seconds before my blood alcohol levels spiked, at which point I would ride the crimson tide, waves of drunken euphoria, without a care in the world. And this is how it went, night after night.

And it was on one of these nights that the roof caved in.

It had been raining all throughout the week, so it was a damp Friday night. I read my daughter a short story, cleaned up her Legos and Bratz dolls and stuffed animals, tucked her into her cheap Minnie Mouse toddler bed, kissed her on the head, told her that I loved her, apologized for shouting, turned off the lights, shut the bedroom door behind me, poured my first glass of red, logged into the Discord server, and started my whole hedonistic routine. I drank and smoked and listened to Steely Dan for hours and hours. And by the time I got ready for bed, which was around three in the morning, I had drunk so much that my head felt like it was being repeatedly hit with a hammer underwater, and my stomach was one of those bubbling lava pits you see in video games. I had lost control, failed to pace myself, as I often did. I was hunched over the toilet at three in the morning, vomiting up a crimson tide. The inside of the bowl looked like the scene of some grisly murder. After about an hour of throwing up, through sheer force of will, I picked myself up, stumbled to bed, and fell face first on the mattress, passing out.

When I woke up, my head was pounding something fierce, my chest was burning, and it was still dark outside. My wife was shouting something from the foot of the bed. I didn't want to get up, but it seemed serious, so I used some of that supernatural strength young men supposedly have and rolled myself out of bed. My wife was gesticulating, frantically explaining something that I could not comprehend in the moment, and then she grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the living room. It was dark, and our daughter was sitting there on the couch, hands in her dark hair, sobbing. My wits were slowly coming back, so I walked up to my daughter, put a hand on her shoulder, and tried to comfort her, but she wouldn’t calm down. Then my wife said something like, “It’s her bedroom. The roof. The roof fell through. She was in there for hours.” And I could not believe it. So I rushed to my daughter’s bedroom to see for myself.

It was dark in there, and there was a draft, and there was a heaviness in the air. I started coughing, covering my mouth. Then I turned the light on, saw the pile of rotted wood right by the Minnie Mouse bed, the bed itself covered in a thick layer of gray and brown. There were clouds of dust hovering throughout the room, obscuring the Disney pinups and galaxies of glow-in-the-dark ceiling stars. I looked up, and that’s when I saw it, a huge gaping hole, pieces of ceiling and wood jutting out all around the wound, just dangling there, still in the process of collapse. My wife said something from behind me. “I told you this place was a deathtrap.” So I turned to my wife, asked her when this happened, and she said it must have happened hours ago, according to our daughter, so it must have happened when I was awake in the office. She said our daughter was paralyzed with fear, that she couldn't move, that she had just stayed there in bed, under the covers, for who knows how long, frozen with fear, calling out for help. My wife asked if I had heard anything, if I had heard the crash, if I had heard our daughter calling out. I told her that I hadn't heard a thing. She glared at me with something like disgust in her eyes.

I remember just standing in that broken room, thinking it was a symbol of some kind, of neglect, of carelessness, of dysfunction. I had no words. My eyes were like super moons, and my body had taken on some sort of heinous gravity. I imagined our daughter, under the covers, eyes closed tight, her little body trembling, fearing for her life, believing some monster had crawled out of the ceiling and was about to eat her. I imagined her calling out for mommy, for daddy, for God, for anyone, to come help, how her cries went unanswered solely because I was too drunk to hear them.

My wife said something like, “This place is unlivable. I’m going to file a lawsuit.” And then she pulled out her phone and started fiddling with it. “We’re going to need pictures. Let me take a picture.”

But I stopped her, told her to let me do it, so she gave me her phone. I walked further into the room to get a better look at the hole, but I was too afraid to go directly underneath it, so instead I booted up the phone’s camera app, turned the flash on, stretched my phone-arm, positioning the phone under the hole, and snapped a picture. And that’s when I saw it.

( Photograph #1 )

Apparently, there was a hole in the top roof, and a family of raccoons had been living up there in the attic-like space between the ceiling and the roof itself. The hole must have been pretty old, judging by the water damage and amount of mold shown in the picture. So I figured that, due to the accumulated rain water and who-knows-how-many raccoons, the ceiling just couldn’t hold anymore, finally collapsing under the weight of it all. And I figured that the raccoon in the picture must have been the matriarch of the family, who must have gotten out of there before the ceiling fell through. But, eyes wide and mouth agape at possibly the craziest picture I had ever taken in my life, I wondered why the mother raccoon was looking down into the room, like what could she have possibly been looking for?

That’s when my parenting instincts kicked in. The mother raccoon must have been looking for one of her babies, one of her little kits, who must have fallen through the ceiling. So I scoured the bedroom, looking for raccoons. And it only took me about five minutes to find one, a little baby raccoon, hidden underneath a pile of toys in the corner of the room, curled up in a little pink bowl.

( Photograph #2 )

The kit’s eyes were closed tight, and she was shivering a little bit. There was a pinkish bulge on one of her legs, like an injury of some sort, maybe from the fall. I knew she couldn't have landed in the bowl itself, as the bowl was on the other side of the room, so I figured that she must have crawled across the room after falling through the ceiling, and when she found a place to hide, she just curled up there and waited for mommy and daddy to come rescue her. But mommy and daddy never came, just me. And, luckily for that little kit, I love raccoons. But when I was holding that pink bowl in my hand, looking down at that injured baby raccoon, seeing it all helpless and afraid, I didn’t really see a raccoon at all, I saw my daughter.

My wife wouldn’t let us keep the baby raccoon, even though I wanted to. So, later that day, I put the kit in a box stuffed with towels and put the box outside, at the treeline of the woods near my trailer, hoping that mom would return, take her baby back home, wherever home was for them. But hours passed, and mom never showed up, so I got worried about the little kit, worried that she might starve, that she might succumb to her injuries, so my daughter and I took the baby raccoon to the local animal hospital, but they told us that they couldn’t take wild animals, that they didn’t have the proper permits or something. So we left that animal hospital dejected and confused, having no idea what to do with the little kit. I remember just sitting there in my car, head still pounding from the night before, coming up totally blank on what to do next.

But after about five minutes, a young woman walked up to my car and signaled me to roll down the window. “We’ll take the raccoon, but you’ll need to sneak it into the back. Drive around.”

So I turned the key, revved the engine, and started driving around to the backside of the animal hospital. The car’s stereo connected to my phone automatically via Bluetooth, playing the last song I was listening to the night before, which just happened to be “Deacon Blues.” And when I got to the backside of the animal shelter, I left the car running in park, told my daughter to wait, and carried the box with the baby raccoon in it to the back door, where the same young woman from before smiled at me, took the box from my hands, and said, “Don’t worry, she’ll be fine, we’ll take care of her.” And I was left feeling a little sad, because for some reason I knew that I would never see that baby raccoon again.

“Deacon Blues” was still playing when I got back into the car. It was on the chorus, so before I buckled my seatbelt and put the car in reverse, I paused to savor that dark, jazzy sound.

They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

But this was not the song I knew. It was different. It was an entirely new song, with an entirely new meaning. I started thinking to myself, the protagonist of this song, he’s not some tortured-soul romantic, some hip idealist, some sort of tragic hero rebelling against the tides of a dark, unfair world. He’s not any of those things.

He’s just some fucking alcoholic loser.

So call me Deacon Blues.

“The Citadel Military College of South Carolina (simply known as The Citadel) is a public senior military college in Charleston, South Carolina, United States. Established in 1842, it is the third oldest of the six senior military colleges in the United States.”
—Wikipedia

A few months ago, I was really into Columbo, and one night, while watching the show on Pluto TV, I was hit over the head by some seriously dreadful deja vu.

A cannon had backfired at a military academy ceremony, killing its headmaster, foul play was suspected, so up drives Columbo in his busted-up 1959 Peugeot convertible, shaking and backfiring and billowing smoke like crazy. He parks, gets out, bumbles through an open portcullis into the courtyard of a massive three-story barracks, floor a checkerboard pattern of red and white, walls smooth and white and taller than the eye can see. It’s all very orderly and intimidating and familiar somehow. And I’m sitting on my couch, overcome by this dreadful sense of profound deja vu, as if I had stood there before, right in the middle of that checkerboard courtyard, but I couldn’t place the when, where, or even the why. So up Columbo walks in his wrinkly old trench coat with that signature drunken-penguin gait of his, and there are dozens of young military cadets performing drills in the courtyard, and their drill instructor, a Colonel Lyle C. Rumford, played by Patrick McGoohan, who plays a villain in like every other episode of Columbo for some reason, instructs his cadets to continue their drills before turning to talk to the aloof hobo detective, at which point Columbo asks a few seemingly innocuous questions before going wait wait just one more thing, then asking a few more questions, and then wait wait just one more thing, and yet more questions before the Colonel reveals, in an overly calm and conspicuous way, that the now-deceased headmaster was planning to allow girls to join the academy, which of course makes Columbo instantly suspect the Colonel as the murderer, and so now Columbo is determined to figure out how the Colonel did it, how the Colonel murdered the headmaster while making it look like an accident done by one of the young cadets. And throughout this scene, shots of the barracks from every angle are shown, the three stories of white-cement archways, the rounded castle-like stairwells at each corner of the rectangular courtyard, the countless dark blue doors lining each identical floor, and of course the cadets with buzz cuts and fatigues all looking both stoic and miserable at the same time somehow. And all this is just making my deja vu more dreadful and profound. So I’m sitting there thinking to myself, I have been here before, I know I have, but where, where is this place, and it’s bothering me a little bit, so I whip out my phone and search up the episode, and that’s when it all comes flooding back.

This is the place my dad sent me for summer camp when I was like twelve. This is the Military College of South Carolina. The Citadel. How could I have forgotten?

“The Citadel was initially established as two schools to educate young men from around the state, while simultaneously protecting the South Carolina State Arsenals in both Columbia and Charleston.”
—Wikipedia

Back then, I played a lot of video games and shopped at Hot Topic and listened to 80s music on repeat. My youth was typified by a yin-yang dichotomy of apathy toward anything that didn’t interest me and hyperfocus toward things that did interest me, those things being Zelda, The Cure, Dragon Ball Z, and Gundam Wing, but never school. I was the type of kid who would literally use dog-ate-my-paper type excuses when teachers asked why I didn’t complete my homework. So my grades were terrible and I was put in special-ed classes. I always had the feeling that people thought I was dumb and detached, but looking back, I now realize this is only half true, although for people looking at me from the outside, this was not obvious, understandably so.

My parents divorced when I was like ten, so I would live with my mom one month and my dad the next, as outlined in their court-ordered custody agreement. My dad was a hardass, while my mom basically let me do whatever I wanted. This parental yin-yang colored my entire childhood. My mom’s favorite phrase was “yes, honey.” She indulged my every whim, either because she loved me and wanted to make me happy regardless of the consequences, or because she didn’t want to deal with my tantrums, or maybe a mixture of both. My dad was the opposite. He was all about hard work and personal responsibility, and he didn’t take no shit, and he was the only person who would tell me no. He was also very stubborn, so he could wait out my tantrums no matter how long it took. My dad had an old-school conservative upbringing typified by rulers and staring at walls, and he incorporated a watered-down version of this into his parenting technique. He was never abusive, but I grew to be afraid of my father, and this fear brought about a certain level of obedience. But after my parents got divorced, it was like I lived in two different galaxies, one with a warm bright star and another with a cold dark star. When I was living with my mom, I did whatever I wanted. I would come home from school, tell her I didn’t have any homework, drink soda and play video games all day, spend all night on my Dell PC just chatting away with strangers in the Yahoo! chatrooms while Adult Swim played repeats of Home Movies and Cowboy Bebop in my periphery. There, I lived a life of no responsibility and maximum comfort, courtesy of my new wealthy stepdad. I remember my bedroom only vaguely. It was on the second floor of a mansion, and you had to walk across something like an indoor bridge to get to it, so my mom never bothered to check on me at night as long as I kept quiet. My room was a decent size but felt small because of the king-size bed pushed against the middle wall. My computer desk was on the right side of the bed, with a bookshelf and stereo to the left, and there was a low-standing dresser with my television and Nintendo 64 to the right. A big dresser containing all my band shirts and tripp pants was situated on the left side of the bed, with only a small walking space between the bed and the dresser. I had stuck band stickers all over the dresser itself, which was something my stepdad hated because the dresser was an expensive antique, much like everything else in the lavish house, none of which I appreciated, because back then I never once thought about how privileged I was, because frankly I was a spoiled fucking brat, and my dad knew this better than anyone, because when I came to live with him, I had always gained like ten pounds since the last time he had seen me, and I was tired all the time, and so of course he blamed all my apathy and weight gain and bad grades and inability to focus on my mom.

Living with my dad was like orbiting a whole other star. From the moment I walked through the front door of his square brick house, party time was over. It was all about chores and schoolwork and playing on local church sports teams of which he was the coach. To this day, my old room is decorated with photos of the teams I played on, everyone looking bright and happy except me, wearing a huge scowl in every picture. At my dad’s, there was little time for doing the things I actually wanted to do. The Nintendo 64 was in the basement, and the basement was locked until I completed all my chores and schoolwork or whatever. When I came home from school, the first thing he would have me do was sit at the kitchen table and do my homework until it was perfect, often coming in and checking over my shoulder. But I would sit there in silent protest, in that uncomfortable metal chair, just using my pencil to poke little holes in the apples in the decorative bowl at the center of the table, pretending like I was stuck on a math problem or something. I was stubborn in a very dumb way, because I knew that if I completed my homework, then Dad would let me play video games, but I still didn’t complete my homework for some reason, so I never got to play video games. In this way, my dad’s parenting method didn’t really work to improve my grades, but it did work in preventing me from throwing tantrums like I would with my mom, because I was truly afraid of my dad, not because he was abusive or anything like that, but because he was firm and would take my stuff away and do all the other normal stuff normal parents would do when trying to raise their kids to be fine, upstanding citizens.

At some point, however, my dad got sick of it all, and realizing that my apathy was not fading and that I was not improving, he decided to send me to a summer camp for troubled youth, although he didn’t frame it that way at the time, positioning it as just a normal summer camp that normal kids went to, so it wasn’t until I walked through that open portcullis and onto that red and white checkerboard flooring that I realized that this was not a normal summer camp at all, this was actually a fucking military camp. I remember standing there, frozen, staring up at the castle-like compound, watching kids wearing buzz cuts and fatigues march in the courtyard, realizing that I was a long, long way from home, in a place that might as well have been hell, and that’s the first time I ever felt true dread.

“A lawsuit contends that The Citadel knew one of its counselors was abusing summer campers in the mid-1990s but didn’t fire him and did nothing to stop it, yet another in a string of sexual-abuse accusations that have been made against two men who worked at the military college’s summer camp.”
—The Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2013

The next thing I remember is my dad was gone, and I was being shouted at by some older man in full uniform. He directed me to get into marching formation with the other kids, but I was frozen in terror. I remember I was wearing my Cure t-shirt and tripp pants, and I was sweating profusely in the harsh summer sun. So when I didn’t immediately comply, the man shouted something like, “C’MON PIGGY, WE DON’T HAVE ALL DAY,” which kicked my ass into gear, and I immediately fell in line. We marched out of the portcullis, through the sports field, and into another huge white castle-like building. I had no idea what was going on. Some of the other kids were in civilian clothing, some were in fatigues. The ones in civilian clothing were separated from the fatigues-wearing ones and ordered to march down a thin hallway, where we stood silently outside a blue door. Kids entered this door one by one. At first, I didn’t know what was happening, but after the first kid entered with shaggy hair and exited with a buzz cut, my eyes grew wide, and I knew. They were cutting my hair. Back then, I was serious about my hair. I liked it long and messy, like Robert Smith from The Cure. So as the line and average length of hair for the regiment grew shorter, the pit in my stomach grew larger. Until eventually, I entered the barber’s room and was pushed into the chair. The clippers went BRRRRRR and just like that my hair was gone. I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. This was one of many hammers used by The Citadel to pound individuality and ego out of children.

Later that day, they assigned us our quarters. Mine was on the second floor. There’s a scene in that Columbo episode where the titular detective enters one of these rooms to question the cadet accused of accidentally backfiring the cannon. My room looked just like the one shown in the episode, indicating that The Citadel has not changed in a long long time. The walls of the room were white brick. There was a single barred window. It felt like one of those insane asylum rooms. There was a sink in the corner, a single dresser with two cabinets pushed against the right wall, and a bunk bed against the left wall. The mattresses were thin, and the blankets ratty and torn. I was paired with another kid. I forget his name, but he was strange and kind of horrific. I remember he was tall and lanky and acne-ridden and would make a lot of weird sex jokes. I slept on the bottom bunk in a perpetual state of psychic terror. On the first night, in the middle of the night, instead of going out to the bathroom, my bunkmate took a shit in his underwear, wrapped it up in a ball, and then put it in my cabinet dresser for me to find the next morning, like some sort of weird animalistic dominance thing. I was too afraid to report him, thinking he would hurt me or something, so I just cleaned it up and didn’t say a word about it. I remember, night after night, after they would ring the bell and scream “LIGHTS OUT” at 8 p.m., I would just lie in my bunk, frozen, staring up at the wire mesh above me, fantasizing about ways to escape. Occasionally, a camp counselor would creak open the door and peek their head in, checking on us. One time, at night, I remember a counselor entered my quarters, stopped in the middle of the room, and stared at the bunks for what felt like an hour. I was wide awake but holding my breath and keeping my eyes shut real tight, frozen with fear, thinking the guy was going to get me out of bed and beat the shit out of me or something. Nothing happened, but I learned how to play dead that night.

“The suit was filed in federal court in Charleston earlier this week by a now-25-year-old alleged victim who claimed to have been abused on 21 different occasions by Michael Arpaio. The Citadel ultimately closed its summer camp in 2005 after reaching a $3.8 million settlement with five campers who said the former Marine captain had abused them between 1995 and 2001.”
—The Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2013

Every day was the same. I would wake up at five in the morning to the sound of a loud whistle, put on my fatigues, hustle down the stairwell, and line up with the rest of the kids. Then we’d march to the mess hall, where they’d serve us the worst-tasting breakfast you have ever tasted, so bad that I hardly ever ate anything, only drinking some milk most mornings. Then we’d march out to the field, do push-ups and jumping jacks and sit-ups and burpees and laps for a few hours. Then we’d play soccer for some reason. Then we’d march back to the mess hall and eat the worst-tasting lunch ever. Then there’d be a thirty-minute block of free time, where we could socialize or whatever, but being so out of shape and practically starving myself, I was pretty much half-dead by this point, so I would just go back to my quarters and sprawl out on the bottom bunk and pretend I was in another place, pretend I was in the world of Hyrule, and this was a brief respite, my little form of escape.

They wouldn’t let us bring anything personal into the camp with us, but we were allowed paper and pencil for writing letters to family, and I remember one time, during the break period, I wrote a short letter to my grandma, Susu, because her address was the only one I could remember, and the letter went something like this: WHAT DID I FUCKING DO TO DESERVE THIS? I AM GOING TO DIE IN HERE. I WANT TO GO HOME. PLEASE. I’M SORRY FOR WHATEVER I DID. TELL MOM TO GET ME OUT EARLY. PLEASE. I CANNOT DO A WHOLE MONTH IN HERE. SAVE ME. PLEASE. This text is almost verbatim because Susu kept the note and still has it to this day, along with the newspaper clipping she found years later outlining why The Citadel summer camp was closed down permanently.

“Arpaio pleaded guilty to multiple charges in 2003 following a military court-martial and served 15 months at the Charleston Naval Brig. According to the lawsuit, Arpaio was indicted in 2009 on federal charges including conspiracy to commit murder and disposing of a cadaver and is in federal prison.”
—The Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2013

When it was all over, I had lost about thirty pounds and was mute for an entire week. I remember, when I got home, the first thing I did was fold all my clothes and arrange them neatly in my dresser, then I put all my Gundam models and Nintendo 64 games and Dragon Ball Z VHSs in the closet, hiding all the things I loved, then I straightened out my sports team photos on the dresser, organizing everything real nice, because I thought that if I hadn’t done all this, I’d be sent back there, back to hell. And then I sprawled out on my king-size bed, imagined myself in Hyrule, and passed out.

But it must have been midday or something, because I remember my dad woke me up. He was looking around my room with this astonished look on his face, and he said something like, “Wow, you really cleaned up, I guess your time at The Citadel taught you a thing or two, huh?”

And I remember rolling over in bed, looking up at him with this blank expression on my face, and nodding, then I went back to sleep, dreaming of Hyrule.

Then, the following year, around my thirteenth birthday, when the judge gave me the option to pick which parent I wanted to live with, I picked Mom, and then, just like that, I was back in Hyrule, for real this time.

“Conditioned place preference (CPP) is a form of Pavlovian conditioning used to measure the motivational effects of objects or experiences. This motivation comes from the pleasurable aspect of the experience, so that the brain can be reminded of the context that surrounded the encounter.”

Nostalgia has dominated my life since as far back as I can remember. I imagine this might be true for everyone to some extent, but my extent feels extreme to the extreme. I have a deep, almost unhealthy fondness for times long past, always have. Carefree childhood summers playing PS1 role-playing games at my grandma’s house. Super Smash Bros. competitions in the basements of suburbia. Staying up all night with a good friend in the same room playing our own separate games on our own separate television sets, having our own separate but shared experiences, just talking and laughing and having a good time. Cozying up in front of my old Dell XPS with a Diet Cherry Cola and some pretzels, playing online games from sunrise to sunset, curtains drawn, enveloped in the glow of warm orange lamplight, losing myself completely in those games, the ego falling away, as if I didn’t really exist in the physical realm but in the digital one. That sort of thing. I long to return to these situations, situations I could never possibly return to, so I chase the feeling, try to recreate it. I foster atmospheres redolent of times and places long gone. I do this through carefully controlled lighting, surrounding myself with certain material things, listening to music I used to listen to during those little epochs, and, most of all, playing the video games I enjoyed as a child and young adult. Video games elicit the strongest sense of nostalgia for me. If I had to analyze it scientifically, I’m guessing the medium’s mixture of aural, visual, and physical stimuli releases the most dopamine or something. I spent so much of my youth in front of a screen that my eyes are like permanently tattooed with a glowing box. I associate epochs of my life with certain video games, and I chase these video games relentlessly, meaning I replay them over and over, pretending I’m back there, pretending I’m feeling the feelings I once felt, as if no time has passed at all. For me, nostalgia is like a cheap time machine, one that has no forward option, only back, and when it takes me back, everything is faded, like I’m sort of phased out, relegated to a background plane, unable to truly interface with what I’m experiencing, but it feels good, so I keep doing it, as if nostalgia is like a CAT-1 controlled substance injected straight into the eyeballs that produces a withdrawal so wicked that I have to keep doing more and more just to feel a slight semblance of whatever it was I felt the first time. I cultivate situations reminiscent of old situations thereby creating new situations based on old situations that are never as good as the original situations but they're better than nothing so I keep doing it. Nostalgia, for me, is like a killer of new joys. I am averse to new things because they do not elicit the same nostalgic dopamine response as old things. There is something biologically harsh about all of this, something having to do with the brain and chemicals and questions of free will that I don’t like to analyze too deeply. I say things like, “I know this is a boomer thing to say, but games are actually much worse than they used to be,” pretending that my self-deprecation backs up the claim, when in reality I lack the knowledge to back up the claim because I have not actually played a new game in like five years. The last five games I’ve played are The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy VIII, Chrono Cross, Pokémon Crystal, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, all of which I associate with the elysian fields of my youth, blissful meadows wherein I popped Adderall recreationally to get euphorically lost in the games. I was prescribed Adderall from age 10 to 20. Adderall made me feel like I was part of the game’s world, like I was actually the hero holding the sword and casting the magicks and saving the world. Nothing else was important when I took Adderall. For most of my childhood, I was a character in a video game. I developed a fondness for digital places and things. My nostalgia is not linked to fields and meadows in the real world, but fields and meadows in the virtual plane. I feel as if this is a big problem but can’t quite place my finger on why. I cannot help but think this is a uniquely twenty-first-century problem, what with so many digital worlds available to get lost in. There’s also something incredibly sad and consumeristic about the whole thing, because it means that so much of my nostalgia is branded with corporate logos. Nintendo, Sony, The Walt Disney Company, Microsoft, Apple, Electronic Arts, SEGA, and most of all, Square Enix.

“Amphetamine has been shown to produce a conditioned place preference in humans taking therapeutic doses, meaning that individuals acquire a preference for spending time in places where they have previously used amphetamine.”

Out of all the games I have ever played, Final Fantasy XI, developed and published by Square Enix, produces the strongest nostalgic response for me. Final Fantasy XI is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game released back in 2003, and I’ve been playing it on and off since then. I must have been 12 years old when I first installed the game on the Dell-whatever PC that my mom bought and so naively placed in my childhood bedroom. My first character’s name was “Butterfly,” a lanky male Elvaan with jagged, chin-length black hair. I remember this vividly. Back then, I was taking Adderall in therapeutic doses as prescribed by the pediatric psychiatrist. It was thought that Adderall would improve my ability to focus in school, but all it did was improve my ability to focus on video games. I remember the game launcher, the PlayOnline Viewer, would boot up to some of the most sublime free jazz I had ever heard. Music so powerful that, even thirty years later, hearing it instantly makes me want to play Final Fantasy XI again, like some sort of Pavlovian response. The massive, bustling world of Vana’diel blew my little adolescent brain with its dense forests and rolling meadows and arid cliffs and windy grasslands full of windmills and monsters and beastmen who lingered just outside the sprawling cities wherein actual people behind their virtual fantasy avatars congregated at the fountains and auction houses, wearing their subligars and lizard jerkins and scorpion harnesses and haubergeons, their scimitars and staves and zaghnals and baghnakhs and halberds all tightened to their backs or clipped to their belts or whatever. Massive airships would fly over the cities, taking players wherever they needed to go, which was an absolutely breathtaking spectacle, and a technical marvel when you consider that people were actually up there on those airships. I remember I would stand in the markets of Bastok and just watch in awe as high-level players walked by, hoping that one day, with enough effort, I would be powerful and cool just like them. The pastoral, grounded soundtrack working its way into my undeveloped brain the whole time, tattooing itself there, ensuring that, in the future, whenever I heard the music, no matter where I was in life, I would be instantly transported back there, mentally. But back then, when I was 12, I had no idea how to actually play the game, spending most of my time fishing in the waterways of Bastok and getting myself killed by the giant turtle-men living in the Gustaberg region, all while, unbeknownst to my young self, the game was altering the fundamental chemistry of my brain, forming bonds with my neurons, landscaping the groundwork for all my future gaming aesthetic preferences.

“... dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens have been found to be elevated when rats are placed in the drug-paired environment, compared to the non-drug-paired environment.”

It wasn't until I was like 15 or so that I understood the basics of Final Fantasy XI. My stepdad had moved my mom and me to a fancy island resort primarily inhabited by old rich guys, meaning there were barely any kids around, meaning I had no friends, meaning I spent a lot of time playing games. It was around this time that I started abusing Adderall, hiding pills that were supposed to be taken before school and taking them after I got home, because I was now old enough to realize that this amphetamine stuff was like psychic gold, so I was using it to induce a sort of euphoric trance when playing Final Fantasy XI. I had created a new character named “Einhander,” who was also an Elvaan but had the spiky orange bowl cut. That epoch of my life must have lasted about a whole year, although the exact timeline is hazy. I remember I was listening to a lot of The Police, The Smiths, and Sting back then, and now those songs are like Pavlovian triggers, tempting reminders of Final Fantasy XI. But despite taking Adderall, which improves focus, I was rather unfocused in my approach to the game, leveling jobs up to 30 or 40 or so but then getting bored and switching to another job, only to repeat the process. And back then, leveling a job to 40 was a big deal, a big time-consuming deal, because not only were experience points divided out in very small amounts and traveling the world took literal hours from point A to point B, but also the early era of the game was all about community, meaning you couldn’t solo your way to level 30, you had to find a party of six other real people who had at least three hours to burn, and this party-finding process was often long in and of itself, involving at least an hour of shouting in town or whatever for a party, and sometimes you would go whole days without finding a party. For me, this process looked like the following, get home from school around 4, make myself some Easy Mac, eat the Easy Mac, stock up on Diet Cherry Cola, boot up my PC, stand around Jeuno looking for a party until around 6, get in a party, kill monsters for like 7 hours, get to bed around 3 in the morning or later, go to school the next day pretty much braindead, fall asleep in most of my classes, get home from school around 4, Easy Mac, Diet Cherry Cola, boot up the PC, and so on. The game’s community-minded ethos lent itself to making the world of Vana’Diel feel like a living, breathing world in which you got to know the residents because you were basically forced to, and this was one of the core draws of the game. Back then, Final Fantasy XI felt like a second life because you had to make it your second life, otherwise you wouldn't make any progress. In hindsight, this game-design philosophy is insidious, because it was clearly built around milking as much money from the player as possible, because the game has a monthly subscription fee, so the longer Square Enix can make you play, whether through entertaining means or grueling means, the more money they stand to make from you. And Final Fantasy XI is not unique in this way, this applies to pretty much all MMORPGs, as they’re all built around artificial roadblocks and harsh time constraints designed specifically to maximize profit. But of course, back then, being 15 years old and addicted to amphetamines, I didn’t analyze it in this way, I only wanted to be the coolest Red Mage on the server, which was something I didn’t achieve until years later after taking a long, long break, mostly because my Dad cracked down on me pretty hard and even sent me to military camp one summer, to correct my unfocused, juvenile behavior.

“Most drugs of abuse elicit a Conditioned Place Preference in rats and mice, and the neural substrates of these effects can often be traced to the mesolimbic DA system.”

At some point shortly after high school, when I was working at the animal shelter, a good friend of mine expressed some interest in getting into MMORPGs and asked me for my recommendation. He initially brought up World of Warcraft, which I had played for a bit back in high school but never really got sucked in, so I told him no, fuck that game, you should play Final Fantasy XI instead, it’s quite possibly the best video game ever made. And just like that, we were playing Final Fantasy XI together. I must have been like 18 or 19 or something, and for all intents and purposes I was pretty much a meth head, speed freak, tweaker, whatever you want to call it, because I was hardcore into Adderall. I also had a semi-serious girlfriend, and my mom was paying for me to go to college. But the moment my friend and I started playing Final Fantasy XI, all that stuff took a backseat, because suddenly my life was all about Vana’Diel. I had forgotten the account details to my old Einhander account, so I made a new account with a new character named “Ashleh,” and I would pretend I was an in-real-life girl in the game for some reason, which was kind of an eye-opening experience because guys truly do treat you completely different when they believe you’re a girl, even online. Anyway, my friend would come over with his laptop, pop one of my Adderalls, and we’d both be up until the wee hours of the morning playing Final Fantasy XI and drinking Diet Cherry Cola. Sometimes we’d take short breaks from the game to smoke cigarettes out on my porch, and during these breaks we’d have some of the best conversations in the world. Philosophical conversations. Gaming conversations. Absurd conversations. Philosophically absurd gaming conversations. So many inside jokes were cultivated during this period, many of which still persist between us to this day. WERMZ. WHERE U GET SWARD? Zerva was always trying to get virtually laid by female players in-game. And when my friend left, I’d play all day and night in my room. I skipped college classes, eventually dropping out. I showed up late for work every day because I could never get up on time, and eventually I just stopped showing up. I hesitate to say this, but I was in love with Final Fantasy XI, as much as a human being could love a video game, at least. My identity was intrinsically tied to the game. If something took time away from me playing the game, I would become irrationally upset in an almost drug-withdrawal-like way, like I would become dejected and fuming and just monstrous to be around. I had thrown everything away for love of the game, and it wasn’t until my girlfriend dumped my ass that I realized I had a serious fucking problem, at which point my life was already in total shambles, with only a level 90 Samurai and a blue-colored chocobo to show for it.

“In the standard conditioned place preference procedure, when the unconditioned stimulus is rewarding, rodents will be more likely to approach the compartment that contains cues associated with it. Alternatively, when the unconditioned stimulus is aversive, rodents will be more likely to escape and avoid the compartment that contains cues associated with it.”

Since then, I’ve stopped taking Adderall. I’ve gotten married. I’ve had two kids. I’ve learned to balance my obsessions with my responsibilities in a semi-manageable way. I’ve grown up. And I’ve also played Final Fantasy XI on and off, here and there, every few years. I’ve played it so much, in fact, that Ashleh is now level 99 in most jobs and I’ve got a bunch of colorful chocobos and my Mog House is full of awesome furniture. I’ve played the game so much that the epochs of my life could probably be categorized into “Was Playing Final Fantasy XI” and “Was Not Playing Final Fantasy XI.” Last time I checked, according to the in-game playtime tracker, I’ve played the game for a total of 103 days, 30 hours, and 15 minutes. That is not like “in-universe time,” that is real-world time. What I’m trying to say is, I’ve played the game a lot. And I’ve learned how to gracefully interweave playing the game with tending to my adult responsibilities quite well. I have compensated, adapted, if you will. Yet whenever I play Final Fantasy XI now, despite having grown up, I am always cognizant of the fact that I am sacrificing something else. My focus shifts ever so slightly. Something is always neglected when playing Final Fantasy XI, be it spending time with my kids or work or writing or other games or reading or whatever. Final Fantasy XI becomes my second life every time. Time must always be made for the game. It is almost like, with Final Fantasy XI, I cannot have more than two things going on in my life at once, Final Fantasy XI being one of those two things. And this scares me. It really does. It scares me so much that I haven’t played the game since March 23, 2023. Yes, I know the exact date. That’s how much it scares me.

So, when my friend from high school texted me on Halloween 2025, expressing interest in getting back into Final Fantasy XI, I was both scared to death and excited as hell, because despite knowing the game’s design philosophy is predatory, despite knowing that it has branded my nostalgia with some gross corporate logo, despite knowing that the main reason I like the game so much is probably due to some conditioned-place-preference response, despite knowing that I’ve fucked up my life by playing the game in the past, I still love the game for some reason. The game has like mutated itself into my DNA somehow. And now, faced with the temptation to play Final Fantasy XI once more, there is this internal conflict playing out in my mind. A shoulder-devil, shoulder-angel situation. I worry that I won’t be able to make time for my writing. I worry that I might skimp on my work. I worry that every second not playing the game will once again feel like some excruciatingly long prelude to playing the game. I worry that I won’t spend as much time with my kids. I worry that I’ll become so focused on playing just this one game that I won’t play anything else. And then I start telling myself stuff like who cares about playing other games, it’s all stupid entertainment anyway, why do I need to collect new memories of new stupid entertainments, why not just make new memories of old stupid entertainments, what’s the difference? And of course, I’ll give myself a strict schedule, I’ll only play Final Fantasy XI every other night on the weekdays, focus on my writing on the nights I’m not playing, and I’ll spend every weekend afternoon writing instead of playing, and I’ll never play the game when my kids are awake to ensure I spend as much time with them as possible, and I will strictly enforce this schedule and stick to the path and not stray, because I am a grown man with adult responsibilities and free will.

And just like that, I am flushed with dopamine, listening to some of the most sublime free jazz you have ever heard in your life.

About a month ago, I started wearing an analog watch, a men’s Timex Camper Military Field watch. Its round, low-profile design appealed to me. They stopped manufacturing these watches back in the ‘80s, so I couldn’t just go to the Timex website and buy one, I had to purchase one used from eBay. The watch passes an electric current through a quartz crystal that vibrates at a frequency of thirty thousand times per second. It keeps very precise time. The outer chassis is dark brown and smooth. The watch face is black with the words TIMEX QUARTZ at the top and a symbol for water near the bottom, indicating a certain level of waterproofing. The hands are white but coated in some sort of green glow-in-the-dark material, presumably so soldiers could keep time in a foxhole. In very quiet rooms, I can hear it, the passing of time. Tick tick tick. “Cesium atoms absorb microwaves with a frequency of 9,192,631,770 cycles per second, which then defines the international scientific unit for time, the second.” The strap is navy green and deteriorating, indicating a very used, timeworn watch. I sometimes wonder if this watch was worn by a soldier, if that soldier ever erased someone while wearing it, and if so, which numbers the hands were pointing at when that all went down. Do different people experience time differently? “Gravitational time dilation is a form of time dilation, an actual difference of elapsed time between two events, as measured by observers situated at varying distances from a gravitating mass.” The mayfly dies in a day, does that day feel like forever? “The lower the gravitational potential, the slower time passes, speeding up as the gravitational potential increases.” If I flung myself into a black hole, would my time stretch to infinity? What does time feel like? Does it stop for the dead? How would we ever know? I often wonder what that soldier would think now, now that some civilian is wearing his watch, would he be offended, pleased, nostalgic, would he experience some post-traumatic stress response, would he even remember? I don’t know. Where does the time go? I’m not into military stuff. I’ve never even held a gun. The first time I saw this watch was on the wrist of one MacGyver from the ‘80s television show MacGyver. It was then I knew that I had to have this watch. It was not only an aesthetic thing, but also a sentimental thing. My grandma and I used to watch the show all the time when I was a young boy. She barely remembers that, her mind and body now ravaged by the passing of time. Tick tick tick.

“Time, he's waiting in the wings. He speaks of senseless things. His script is you and me, boy.”

You will never truly feel the passing of time until you have children. This is a bold claim, I know, but it is one I fully believe. You may think you feel the passing of time now, but you will never truly feel it until you have a child of your own. No one knows the passing of time better than a parent who has discarded an old toy. The first haircut. The second haircut. The third. Tick tick tick. Dismantling the crib, replacing it with a full-sized bed with protective railings. Putting old stacking blocks and miniature farm sets and wooden alphabet puzzles in cardboard boxes. Donating the remnants of youth to Goodwill. Selling the old changing table on Facebook Marketplace. Tick tick tick. Looking at pictures taken just months ago. “When did he get so big?” The first word. The second word. The sentence. “Where did the time go?” Where does the time go? What happens to it? Do we live only in the present? “Time is probably the most measured quantity on Earth. It tells us when to wake and when to sleep, when to eat, work and play, when buses, trains and planes will depart and arrive. It helps organize and coordinate our lives.” Did the past even happen, what if we forget? Is it all relative? Semantics? Graduating from a high chair to a small table to a full-sized table. Baby formula to cow’s milk to juice and so on. Mush to hard food to Happy Meals and so forth. The first smile. The first laugh. The first steps. Diapers to pull-ups to whitey tighties to boxer shorts. Tick tick tick. “Ball” to “daddy” to “I love you” to “I hate you” to “I'm sorry” to “I'm getting a job” to “I'm moving out of the house” to “I’m getting married” to “I’ll take care of you now, Dad.” The last smile. The last laugh. The last steps. When will we know? Will we ever know, when our time comes? My twelve-year-old daughter wants so badly to be eighteen. She applies makeup and talks on the phone and wears band t-shirts for bands she doesn’t know a single song by. She is excited about getting her first period. She has no appreciation of her youth, resents it almost. She has no idea. Late at night, when I lay in bed with my two-year-old son, helping him fall asleep, I can hear the Timex, tick tick tick. “What’s that?” he says. “That’s just the passing of time, son.” Then I play rain sounds from the Smart Speaker so that he doesn't have to hear it. Tick tick tick. He liked Sesame Street, then he liked Little Bear, now he likes Paw Patrol. He's getting into Power Rangers. I have to buy him new clothes because his shirts are getting too small and his pants are becoming too tight. Pencil marks on the wall, tagged with name and date, progressively getting taller. When he blows out the candles, we celebrate out loud, but we mourn inside. He used to say mama and dada, now he says I want, I want, I want, give me that, mine. He's becoming less cuddly, more cautious, more aware. My daughter wouldn't be caught dead giving me a hug in public. She winces when I say “I love you.” The tragedy of youth is that they never appreciate it, the mercy of youth is that they have neither the experience nor the foresight to do so. They live in the moment, never dwelling on the passing of time. Imagine how awful it would be, to be young and obsessed with the passing of time, tick tick tick, always aware of your own youth slipping away. Muscles aching, wrinkles forming, thoughts muddled and confused. The young are spared this psychic dread. This comes later. I see it in my son’s deep blue eyes. A nascent spark, an intelligence just flickering into existence, soon to become a bright flame. He doesn't know it yet, but he will. Tick tick tick. Soon, it will show him.

And I’m so sorry.

To hear my dad tell it, I learned to read by playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, or so the legend goes.

I must have been like seven or eight or something. I have a hard time remembering that far back, but things come to me in flashes, like a movie montage of disparate events that all occurred somewhere between 1997 and 2000, playing to the background music of whatever my dad was listening to on 99X in his jellybean-shaped Ford Taurus. Stone Temple Pilots, Matchbox Twenty, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” Spin Doctors, “Even Flow,” that sort of stuff. Climbing on top of the slides at the playground at the park where my sister played softball while a wicked sunset was going on so everything was dragonfruit pink and cobalt blue and on fire. Time felt different, longer, more mysterious, mystical almost. My parents were still married. “Name” by The Goo Goo Dolls played on MTV a lot. Happy Meals cost like $1.50 and came with high-quality Power Rangers action figures with accessories. The food tasted better. I had a frankly embarrassing haircut that involved a bowl and kid-safe scissors. I would play Power Rangers out in the field by the haunted house with the other suburb kids. Space Jam featuring basketball legend Michael Jordan was heavily advertised, I remember. Special Ed classes and frequent parent-teacher conferences. Pokemon cards and fucking Crazy Bones, if you remember those. After-school programs. That one time I drank a whole gel pen and the teacher had to call poison control. I remember seeing a movie in the theater was like a bona fide special event and the next two months were colored by that movie as if everything in your life took on some aspect of that movie. PE teachers played “Cotton Eye Joe” at max volume over the gym loudspeaker while kids pelted each other with hard foam balls. Blue’s Clues in the mornings, Dexter’s Lab and Johnny Bravo and Powerpuff Girls in the evenings. I’d see scary witch faces in the darkness behind my eyelids at night, so I’d climb out of bed and go sleep in my sister’s room, which she hated. I would get like two dollars a week for allowance and thought that was a lot of money and spent that money at the comic book store in the strip mall that I could walk to through the backwoods area of my neighborhood, and my parents were totally fine with that for some reason. I couldn't read the comic books but loved the artwork. My dad made me play every little league sport imaginable even though I had no interest or aptitude in sports, and one time in the outfield when I was playing baseball a pop fly literally crash-landed into my skull and knocked me out for a good whole minute, and when I came to and my dad asked me, “Son, what were you doing out there, didn’t you see the ball, we were all shouting at you,” I simply responded, “I’m sorry, Dad, I was thinking about Zelda.”

I remember the first time I ever laid eyes on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was around this same epoch of my youth, at the Media Play, which was a few miles from my home, located in this giant strip mall near the movie theater. Media Play was this big white stucco warehouse-type building, a little smaller than a Walmart almost, with the words MEDIA PLAY in massive red LED channel letters high above the pneumatic double doors, and between MEDIA and PLAY was an image of the store mascot, a face made from an open green book with eyeballs made from a pair of red musical eighth notes, which looked very cubist and robotic. I must have been seven or eight or nine or something. My dad had taken my sister and me to Media Play to buy a new video game console because we had been bugging him for months to get one. The inside of the store was massive, with rows of ground-level shelf wiring for all sorts of entertainment, electronic or otherwise, like CDs and cassettes and VHS tapes and video games and books and even manga, and I remember the ceiling of the store was like this exposed web of steel beams on which hung fluorescent tubes that bathed the whole store in preternatural white light. My dad gave my sister and me the choice between the Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo 64. My sister was dead set on a PlayStation because this boy she hung out with in the neighborhood had Need for Speed II, and they would play it all the time, and she wanted to like fit in or whatever. But I wasn’t sure which console I wanted. The console we had back at home was the Sega Genesis, and I mostly played Sonic the Hedgehog and the 6-Pak on it, and I wanted something like that, and for some reason I had it in my head that the PlayStation was more akin to the Sega Genesis than the Nintendo 64 was, so I was leaning PlayStation. But at some point in the decision-making process, I had wandered off and ended up in the Nintendo section, which actually had its own section for some reason, and in that section, I came across a display cabinet that changed my life.

The cabinet itself is hazy in my memory, but I remember it was dark, woody almost, with curly gold lettering running along the thick wooden side bezels, and it had a large CRT monitor inlaid in the upper portion, and above that, situated on the very top of the cabinet itself, was this golden triangle thing, and the cabinet was double my prepubescent height, so I had to tilt my head pretty much skyward to see the thing in full. There was a single three-pronged controller poking out of the wood, about chin level with my adolescent self. The monitor was playing a scene of a green-clothed man wearing what looked like an elf’s hat, riding a horse through a twilit field while a huge full moon hung in the background. Back then, I wasn’t very attuned to music, but even then I could tell that the cabinet was emitting some of the most beautiful noises I would ever hear in my life. The soothing sounds of synthesized harp arpeggios over a flute melody that sounded like some sort of majestic owl holding its hoots for as long as possible over the ambient noise of hooves clomping and water flowing in a tranquil stream, all calling out to me. I stood there for a few minutes, totally entranced, just watching the green man ride his horse through that twilit field, until eventually I lifted my arms skyward, gripped the controller with both hands, lifted my head up over the thing so I could see the buttons, and pressed down on the big red start button, at which point a dark harmonious jingle sounded and the monitor switched to demo scenes of the same green-clothed man fighting lizard warriors and ghosts and giant super bosses, and then it showed the kid version of that man doing very similar things, and I was totally enthralled by this and at that moment knew I absolutely needed whatever this game was in my life, so when the Nintendo 64 logo popped up on the screen alongside the name of the game, which I couldn’t actually read because I had been diagnosed with dyslexia and had problems with phonetics and couldn’t actually read, but I knew my console-branding logos very well because I loved video games, I quickly released the controller and ran off through the store to find my dad.

When I found my dad, I grabbed him by the hand and dragged him to the magical cabinet I had found and then said, “I want this, I want this, I want this,” over and over until my dad, who was actually a big Mario fan, having played the original games in college obsessively, nodded and turned to my sister, who was arms-crossed and full of blossoming teenage angst, and then he, my dad, asked her what she thought, and at first she disagreed until both my dad and I wore her down, at which point she sort of threw up her hands and said something like, “Whatever,” so my dad flagged down an employee, asked the employee to “get one of those Nintendos and a copy of whatever that game is in the wooden display kiosk my son keeps going on about and a copy of Mario 64 and that Mario racing one too,” the latter of which my sister had picked out, and about an hour later we were back home in front of the old boob tube hooking up the old yellow, white, and red.

Days turned into weeks, and I was hooked on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I played it obsessively whenever my dad wasn’t playing Mario 64 and my sister wasn’t playing Mario Kart. The game blew my little adolescent mind. I got lost in the world of Hyrule, which to little seven-or-eight-or-nine-year-old me felt like a real place with its realistic graphics and its dynamic world and its day-night system and its massive open areas to explore. I skipped all the text because I couldn’t read, but through sheer perseverance and some luck, I managed to complete the Deku Tree and Dodongo Cavern dungeons. I related to the main character, Link, who was like seven or eight or nine himself, and whenever I couldn’t play the game, I was often pretending to be Link, swinging around whatever long sword-like objects I could find, imitating Link’s horizontal sword slashes and vertical sword slashes and that iconic hi-yah jump-slash attack, making the noises and everything. But I couldn’t read, so at a certain point, I was stuck. Weeks turned into months and now my daily play sessions of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time consisted of wandering around Hyrule Field, defeating skeletons and blowing up stuff, doing the same thing over and over, which kept me entertained for a little while, but eventually I grew confused because I couldn’t figure out where to go next because I couldn’t read, and eventually that confusion turned into boredom, and eventually I slowly lost interest in the game.

Back then, my parents would work with me daily, trying to help me learn how to read better. I could read a little bit, but certainly not at the reading level of the average kid my age. Back then, reading simply didn’t interest me, and if something didn’t interest me, I didn’t care, but if something did interest me, I would hyper-fixate on that thing until I wore it out. I was in special education classes for this very reason. Whenever my parents would sit down to teach me how to read better by practicing phonetics and reading me simple books and sounding things out, I would pretty much immediately zone out, and then my attention would wander to something that did interest me, like my action figures or my Legos or my video games, at which point my parents would give up for the day, letting me do my own thing because I was quite emotional as a child and would literally scream my head off if I was forced to do something I didn’t want to do. Of course, my parents would try to help me with reading the next day, but the same thing would happen, so they’d give up and try again the next day, and so on.

To hear my dad tell it, at a certain point, after so many failed attempts at teaching me how to read better, he became discouraged and was starting to believe that I had a serious incurable mental problem and like “why even try with the boy?”

That was until one day when I was in the living room sitting on the carpet in front of the old boob tube, wide-eyed and transfixed by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, when my dad sat down next to me on the carpet and asked what I was doing. I said I was playing Zelda. He said something like, “I can see that, but what are you doing, you know, in the game?” And I said something like, “I’m fighting skeletons.” And he said, noticing that I would fight skeletons a lot when I played Zelda, “Is that all you do in this game, fight skeletons?” And I said, “No, there’s lots of stuff to do, I just don’t know how.” And he said, “What do you mean, you don’t know how?” And that’s when I told him I was stuck. I told him I beat the big spider in the tree and the giant lizard in the cave and now I was stuck. I told him I didn’t know what to do. He just nodded and watched as I vanquished skeletons until the sun rose over Hyrule and there were no more skeletons to vanquish, at which point I was just wandering Link all over Hyrule Field, not really doing anything, until Navi, Link’s little fairy guide, said HEY LISTEN and pulled me into a dialogue with her. Naturally, I skipped all of Navi’s text and then kept wandering around until a few seconds later when Navi said HEY LISTEN again and pulled me into yet another dialogue, which I also skipped, but this time my dad, who was curiously watching me at this point, said, “What did she say? Maybe she's telling you what to do.”

So I turned to my dad and said rather pathetically, “I don’t know, Dad, I can’t read it.”

He smiled softly and said, “But you want to beat the game, right?”

So I said, “Yeah, I do, I want to get all the stuff and beat the game.”

And just then, Navi said HEY LISTEN again, and the text box was back up on the screen. I went to skip the text with the A button, but my dad placed his hand on mine, which froze me for a second, and then he turned to the screen and, presumably reading the text in his head, said, “Yep, she’s telling you what you need to do.”

So I started getting excited. “Tell me, tell me. What does she say?”

But my dad only shook his head, then he said, with that soft smile on his face, “Try sounding it out.”

And about a month later, I beat The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

A few nights ago, I went to one of those fancy five-star Italian restaurants and ordered noodles with butter.

The dinner was part of this big once-a-year two-day company conference in Dallas, Texas, where us employees are expected to hype up our products and wear the suits and build the relationships and pretend we're happy to be there and wake up at like six in the morning because sessions start at seven and end at four at which point everyone goes out to wine and dine customers before sneaking off to seedy dive bars to get totally debauched, all at the company’s expense. 

It was one of those four-star hotel slash convention center tech conferences with keynote speakers and customer panels and announcers saying stuff like “now presenting, the chief technology officer of the best software company in the world, John Smith” over poorly chosen alternative college rock with lyrics that are probably critical of corporate stuff like this if you actually bother to read them and of course there’s breakout sessions and customer-appreciation parties and raffles and long hallways with lots of double doors each opening to identical-looking people behind podiums presenting criminally boring PowerPoints on massive pull-down projector screens, PowerPoints about product roadmaps and industry best practices and return-on-investment case studies, all to an audience of middle-aged middle-management people jotting down notes in cheap little company-branded notebooks between taking iPhone photos of the slides themselves and occasionally burying their heads into their laptops because they're so whipped by work that they’re double-tasking work shit while attending the conference itself. And of course I’m tasked to sit in on all these presentations, mostly to fill out seats, so I’m just sitting in the back row, bored as hell, people-watching, counting the number of laptops in each room for some reason, and, by my count, there must have been at least like a million dollars’ worth of ThinkPads and MacBook Pros in that hotel conference center over the course of those two days, the future e-waste potential kind of mind-boggling to think about.

Anyway. I went to the Italian restaurant on the first night of the conference. About twenty customers were there. My boss was there, too. I was business casual in a gray short-sleeved collared shirt and some long khakis and I had taken my little silver-hoop earring out the night before, because for some reason people still raise eyebrows at men wearing earrings, and I was sitting opposite my boss between two clients, one of whom was a conservative woman who kept going on about her five-year-old son being like totally gifted and having a killer six-pack, for whatever reason, and I knew she was conservative because, after a few glasses of wine, she was not shy about telling me, plainly, that she was a conservative, and that the recent news shattered her faith in humanity, but only in humanity on the left-leaning side of the political spectrum, who, according to her, were irrationally violent and trying to start a civil war and must be stopped at all costs, so of course I was nodding along and smiling and just going with the flow, not wanting to get into some stupid meaningless political debate with a middle-aged wino mom who doesn’t know what the word “objectivity” means. The second customer sitting next to me was this younger African American woman who worked for an online school and kept going on about how she’ll never send her kids to college because it’s a scam and they don’t teach you anything there that you can’t learn online, which I thought was just a little ironic. So of course I hate these dinners with a fucking passion because not only do I not fit in with most of the people who attend these things, but also, despite being surrounded by people on all sides, I always feel this expectation to be host-like, because technically the company I work for is the one hosting, so I always feel like I should be making banal small talk and cracking little jokes and schmoozing everyone, so that’s what I was doing, making banal small talk and whatnot, asking about peoples’ days and their flights and their kids and like what sort of stuff do you like to do in your free time, oh play pickleball? nice, very cool, all while pretending that I don’t think pickleball is just a pussified version of tennis. 

The whole dinner made me feel very fake, as these things always do, so I decided to be daring and, instead of coming up with some sort of lie to get out of eating the food, because I’m very picky, having the diet of like a literal toddler, that being like pizza and Kraft Mac and Cheese and fucking white rice, I decided to be true to myself and just order what I wanted to order, which was noodles with butter, the only thing on the menu that seemed remotely appetizing, and it wasn’t even on the main menu, it was on the children’s menu, so I was ordering from the fucking children’s menu at the five-star Italian restaurant, and instead of alcohol, I just got some water, because I hadn’t drunk alcohol in like a year, which was another thing that kind of separated me from all my peers here, all of whom liberally drink alcohol as a sort of social lubricant, which is something I just cannot do because I have serious addiction problems that can only be avoided if I just do not partake in the things I enjoy, otherwise I will partake in those things until I literally die. 

So, again, there I was, at the upscale and very sophisticated Italian restaurant, sitting at a lavishly decorated table with candles and bread baskets and shit, surrounded by clients, my boss sitting right across from me, me ordering noodles with fucking butter and a glass of water please, somehow having convinced my toddler-ass self that this whole ordering-off-the-children's-menu thing was a good idea.

And by uttering the words “penne pasta with only butter please,” I fear I may have unwittingly gaslighted my boss, because after ordering this very juvenile order at this very expensive Italian restaurant, my boss was looking at me with this what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-you kind of expression on his face, you know the one where the eyes are narrowed and the hand is at the temple and the mouth is slightly agape and all that. So I can only imagine what he must have been thinking, surely something like “How could this child have come to be employed at my company? What was I smoking when I interviewed this guy? How could this toddler have slipped through the fucking cracks?” And then he just sat there silent for a few seconds, wearing the face of a man wrestling with some sort of serious personal crisis. He was probably rethinking all his life choices up to the very point where he witnessed an employee under his leadership and tutelage ordering noodles with fucking butter, probably questioning his entire ability to judge the character of others and his own effectiveness as a leader. So, needless to say, I was pretty worried about losing my job at that point.

But then, by the grace of God, the woman with the five-year-old with a six-pack said, “That’s exactly what my son eats when we go out,” at which point the conversation shifted to our children and their eating habits and the two women sitting next to me made many jokes at my expense, which kind of annoyed me, internally, like how come food is such a big deal and why can’t people just let others eat what they want without this sort of weird shame attached, like why is having a diverse palate some measure of a man in corporate America, nigh the entire fucking adult world, and how come I can’t just be myself and eat like a toddler and not get low-key ridiculed, and the more I thought about it, and the more jokes were made at my expense, the more I became flustered and annoyed, so, tired of being the butt of so many toddler-tinged jokes and tired of the woman next to me, who was at one point poking meat with a fork and holding it up real close to my face saying try it just try it, I said, “Look, I have a medical condition, so I can’t eat many foods,” which was of course a bold-faced lie, but at least it got everyone to shut up about my eating habits, because that’s when everyone’s demeanor shifted and the subject was changed and the dinner proceeded with its usual banal small talk, until eventually everyone finished their meals and my boss paid the egregiously expensive bill and we all exited the restaurant.

Later that night, at a seedy dive bar with my boss and some peers, after everyone, except me, was nice and debauched, I went up to my boss and I said, “do you want to hear something funny?” And he said, “yeah, sure, what?” And I said, “I don’t have a medical condition.”

And you know what he did, he literally burst out laughing. That’s it. And then he patted me on the back and said,

“You know what, Forrest, I like you.”

So I’m starting to think I overthought the whole thing.

If my life were a movie, it would surely be part of the “body horror” subgenre. 

For context, I'm about 6'2 on a good day, and last time I checked, I weighed around 185 lbs, but this was years ago, because I haven't gone to a doctor in like forever and I'm deathly afraid of scales. My wife says I'm very thin, but I don't believe her. Herein lies the problem. In regards to my appearance, my reality and the reality of those around me do not align, they seem to be vastly different, like we’re in totally different movie genres, almost.

Because every time I look in the mirror, I see a monstrous human blob, and then I see myself lifting my shirt, counting my ribs, squeezing at the flab around my stomach, suddenly overcome with the urge to cut the fat out with the nearest sharp object, thinking maybe that will slay the monster. Often I push my face real close to the glass and trace my jawline, which seems to me to just melt away into my jowls and neck, so I practice sucking my cheeks in to add some much-needed contours to my face, because otherwise I look like some sort of nasty toad creature. Sometimes I even lock myself in the bathroom, sit on the toilet seat, and attempt to create a circle around my thighs using the thumb and index finger of both hands, as some sort of thinness test, and when I can’t get my opposing thumbs and index fingers to touch, because my thighs are too thick or whatever, I end up feeling like a literally massive failure. And whenever I go out of the house and come across a mirror, like in the Target clothing section or whatever, I stop whatever it is I’m doing and pull at the loose fabric of my shirt so that it’s flush against my skin, then I obsess over the outline of my stomach and love handles, which puts me in some sort of fatass funk for the rest of the day. I now shun clothes whose fabric rests too close to my skin, because it makes me very body-conscious, thinking everyone can see how fat I actually am, so I wear incredibly baggy clothing, like sweatpants two sizes too big and sweaters, all to avoid these body-horror blues. I often fantasize about leaving my body entirely, releasing my consciousness from this sad sack of skin, my soul or whatever drifting away without fleshy constraints. And I have no impulse control whatsoever so sometimes I'll eat whole bags of candy and feel guilty like what the hell am I doing to myself, the whole obsessing-over-my-weight thing and lack-of-impulse-control thing constantly in conflict with one another, like some sort of mind-body dissonance that wreaks havoc on my psyche. Back in high school, I abused amphetamines and sometimes didn't eat for days, one time even passing out in my bedroom for a few hours, yet, to this day, I still think about getting a new Adderall prescription, mainly just to kill my appetite. And I only eat like one meal per day, and, for the last seven days, that meal has been Kraft Mac & Cheese Spirals, which is approximately 660 calories according to the nutritional label on the box. And I do push ups and sit ups throughout the day, not to get in shape, but to burn those Mac & Cheese calories off. I take supplements so that I don't die, although sometimes I want to die. And I'm acutely aware of when the waistline of my pants seems tighter than before, taking distressed mental notes whenever I need to use a new belt notch, and I become despondent whenever these things happen. And sometimes I eat snacks, usually saltines or pretzels, but this makes me feel like an expanding flesh balloon, so I tell myself no more snacks but somehow still end up eating snacks every day, which contributes to the whole mind-body dissonance thing. Sometimes I feel like I never grew up mentally beyond the age of sixteen, what with all my crippling self-image issues, like I’m trying to be thin and attractive for some high-school crush or something, yet my wife claims I’m already thin and attractive, so I have no idea who the fuck I’m actually trying to impress. I don’t want to feel this way. It's juvenile, vain, and ultimately unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I know this logically, but I can't help it, these body-horror blues seem to be totally outside of my conscious control. It has been something I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember. This is not a plea for attention. I am not looking for hugs or compliments. These are just the facts.

I guess I wanted to write this because, first, I’ve never really captured these feelings in text before, and second, I thought perhaps maybe writing about the body-horror blues would bring me closer to understanding why I even experience the body-horror blues to begin with. 

And when I begin to analyze the “why,” two main things come to mind.

I grew up in the age of MySpace. Everyone at my schools, plural because I went to many, had a MySpace. This was also the era of the “scenester,” which was this emo-adjacent cultural phenomenon amongst teens at the time, typified by skinny jeans, screamo bands like Senses Fail, Thursday, Boys Night Out, and Underoath, and these flat long uneven haircuts with bangs that fell down across the face like dark daggers with blonde highlights. Every scenester kid’s MySpace had pretty much the same profile picture, which was usually shot with a digital camera held way above the head pointing down to capture both the frankly ridiculous haircut and the skinny jeans, this camera angle also made everyone look thin as hell, often the hair would completely cover the eyes and the kid would be wearing a scowl, many had bite-mark lip piercings, and sometimes they would PhotoShop a black heart with an X over it into the picture or something. I was not really one of these scenester kids, per se, I was always a bit of a contrarian, but I hung around kids who fell into this crowd. I also had my own MySpace with my own embarrassing profile pictures, and many of these scenester kids were on my friends list, and we all followed these MySpace micro-celebrities, like Jeffree Star, for example, whose entire shtick was that he was thin and beautiful and androgynous, and he, due to his immense popularity on the site, proliferated this sort of image-is-everything attitude among young impressionable teenagers who spent far too much time on MySpace, myself included. I had been prescribed Adderall from the age of ten, but it was around this time, the MySpace epoch, when I was like thirteen or so, when I started to use Adderall as an appetite suppressant more so than a medical aide. And I did this because, in my mind, to become popular on MySpace, I had to be thin and beautiful like Jeffree Star. So I strived to become thin and beautiful. I cannot say if I was ever very successful at being beautiful, but I did gain a decent following on MySpace over the course of that year, and I attributed this popularity to being if not beautiful at least thin as fuck, like I was obviously putting in the effort and the MySpace micro-celebs could tell, and, as such, they treated me like one of their own, communicating with me and putting me in their “Top Friends” section, which resulted in even more image-is-everything minded followers, and this felt nice, for a time. Until, eventually, one girl from my class made a huge picture collage of all my embarrassing MySpace photos. She had printed them all out on this huge board, not to make fun of me or anything but literally out of some weird kind of stalkery admiration, and she had tried to gift this collage to me. And it was then that the whole MySpace thing started to feel a little embarrassing. Because when that girl showed me the collage she had made, which again included all my embarrassing MySpace photos, many of which were taken with a digital camera from a top-down perspective, many of which I tried very hard to look like a brooding skeleton who hadn’t eaten in days, because I hadn't, when she showed me this collage, at school one day, I immediately thought to myself “fuck I can’t bring this home, my dad would probably send me off to a camp or something,” so I actually took the collage, hid it in the janitor’s closet, and just left it there. To this day, I have no clue what ended up happening to that wretched thing. But it was then that I realized that I was pretty much uncomfortable and embarrassed about the whole MySpace scenester thing, and very soon after, I deleted my MySpace and kind of removed myself from the whole scenester image-is-everything crowd, becoming somewhat of a hermit who just sat around at home all day listening to old 80s pop music and playing video games. But for whatever reason, the desire to be thin and attractive never really went away.

So, yeah, MySpace was certainly a contributing factor in my body-horror blues, but that can’t be the only reason, surely something primed me for falling into this MySpace, image-is-everything trap at such a young age, and the only thing I can think of, outside of perhaps some sort of biological inclination toward vanity, is something that, on its face, seems a little arm-chair-psychology-ish, something a little Freudian and amateur, something that seems kind of like an excuse almost, as if I lack the agency to control myself or something, and that something is just how I was raised, my upbringing.

From a young age, both my mom and grandma, whom I had primarily lived with, would constantly make comments about my weight. As a young kid, I had the impulse control of like a cat chasing butterflies in the garden or something, meaning, if I saw food that I liked, I ate it, without a second thought, and because of this, I was a pretty chubby kid. And I remember my grandma would always say things like, “your face is getting a little puffy” or “that shirt is a little too tight on you now” or “how about unbreaded chicken and whole-wheat crackers instead? It’s a little less fattening.” And my mom would constantly buy me low-fat diet snacks and make half-joking comments about my belly and my “baby fat.” And even to this day, when I visit them, the first thing they mention is something about my weight, “you’ve filled out a little bit,” or, if I’ve lost weight, they like break out into song and dance almost, “have you been on a diet, you look great, have you been working out,” as if the first thing they notice about someone is their weight, almost like, to them, image is the most important thing about a person. And it’s been like this since as far back as I can remember.

But, back then, when I was a kid, none of this really bothered me. I certainly didn’t consciously internalize it. I didn’t really give a shit. I just wanted to keep eating and doing my dumb kid stuff. But now, as an adult, thinking back, and this is where it gets a little arm-chair-psychology-ish, I wonder if perhaps, even if I didn’t consciously internalize all this stuff, maybe I subconsciously internalized all of it? Perhaps this constant subtle reinforcement of image-is-everything from a very young age is what led me down the path of body-horror blues?

So, I guess, if there’s a lesson to be learned here, be careful what you say to your kids.

There’s a novel’s worth of material in every second of the day. This is not only the most beautiful thing about being a quote-unquote “writer” but also the most frustrating, knowing that those stories are there but not being able to capture them, the expectation that you actually even could.

Like, just earlier, I was sitting in my backyard, smoking a cigarette, and I noticed, on the ground in front of me, one of those brown digger wasps, pathetically crawling across the sand, its needly back legs splayed out behind it, wings motionless, depressed stinger drawing a death map in its wake. It was clearly dying. I was momentarily transfixed by the thought of how there's all sorts of hidden stories going on in our periphery, like within the tall grass and the sand and the canopies of all those towering trees, and I started thinking to myself, surely there was a series of secret events that placed this dying wasp right here, in front of me, on this gray Saturday morning, perhaps our crossing of paths was a sign or something, so I tried to draw some meaningful parallel, some deep poetic connection to my life, but I just couldn't think of anything. I couldn't think of anything at all.

Then my son, whose bedroom window opens out into the backyard, poked his head through the curtains, big smile on his face, and said, “Dad, Dad, what doing, what doing,” and I thought to myself, surely there’s some sort of deep parallel I could draw from the dying wasp to me sitting here smoking to my son obliviously questioning me from behind a plane of glass? But how does it all tie together? How does it relate? What is the meaning of it all? Is there some commentary here about smoking? How being a smoker is sort of like being a dying digger wasp, both hopelessly dragging ourselves across the sand, both knowing that we’re going to die yet still pulling ourselves along regardless, perhaps waiting for the perfect time and place to give up the ghost? But how does my son fit into all this? Maybe my son is actually the wasp, oblivious to the machinations of life and death, unaware of the mortal-coil shit going on with his father in the backyard? To him, Dad just likes to sit back there sometimes while holding glowy white sticks that twirl little streams of blue-gray smoke? Perhaps my son is the wasp because I am slowly killing my son by slowly killing myself?

None of the aforementioned parallels impressed me. They were actually sort of embarrassing. They all seemed too labored and dramatic, too try-hard, pretentious almost, and they barely made any sense when I started really thinking about them. So I tried to think of parallels that were a little more nuanced, a little more interesting, a little more unique, perhaps something that actually made sense, something that would be like wow this is very deep and wise and smart, but the thought of myself having these thoughts also made me feel pretentious, so I ended up pretentiousing myself right out of any meaningful insight whatsoever, meaning, once again, I couldn’t think of anything at all.

The other day, someone asked me if I thought of myself as a “writer,” but I don’t really know what that means. What actually makes someone a writer? Do you have to be published to be a writer? Or do you merely have to believe yourself to be a writer to be a writer? Do you even need to write to be a writer? I mean, yes, I do think of myself as a “writer” sometimes, but this is a sort of pretentious label that I have given myself, like labeling yourself a goth in high school and then going through all the motions of portraying yourself as such, like wearing the tripp pants and the studded belts and the eyeliner and affecting this sort of detached melancholy attitude and of course scowling at every polo shirt that happens to walk by, all to meet this self-imposed label of “goth.”

What I’m trying to say is, labels create expectations, not only from others but also from yourself.

And, if I’m being honest, I don’t like having all these expectations, because they fuck me up mentally. But at this point I can’t really help it, having all these expectations, because this label, this idea of “being a writer,” has rooted itself so deeply in my psyche that I’m constantly thinking about writing and others perceiving me as a writer and how everything that happens around me, like the wasp for example, can be warped into some sort of deeply meaningful writing prompt, all driven by these expectations I have unwittingly given myself by believing myself to be a quote-unquote “writer.” And when I can’t come up with anything that meets my own self-imposed expectations, I become frustrated and discouraged, like I am now, this whole rambling journal entry being something I am not particularly proud of, writing-wise, as I think it’s kind of vacuous and forced and stupid, and I’m actually considering just deleting the whole thing, because, when I write poorly like this, I am very aware of it and I start to think myself a bad writer, which makes me want to stop writing forever, meaning I get into these little writing funks that I suppose could be called something like “writer’s block,” but it’s deeper than that, I think, it’s more like a self-inflicted cycle of disappointment, “writer’s curse” more like, a sort of deep frustration with myself because I can’t meet the expectations I have placed on myself by even thinking that I am a “writer” to begin with.

So, to answer the question, do I think myself a writer? I guess so, but I would much rather just think of myself as myself, nothing more, nothing less, because at least then I would be free from the shackles of expectation.