The Countdown Begins

Today is November 18th, one month past my 22nd birthday and the realization that all my dreams of an early success have finally shattered. The book I started four years ago has a grand total of six chapters finished, my career as a succesful comedic actor is dampened by the fact that I've become far too morose to attempt anything funny, and while friends and former peers study abroad in locales such as Paris or Japan, finishing up their four year degrees and rushing off towards fufilling careers, I have a two year community college degree and a resume filled with time spent as a deli clerk, pizza delivery driver and mall santa.

My current job isn't all bad, office work, good pay, strong possibility for promotion. Though that's another problem entirely. The paycheck has me complacent my old manager at the deli says. Get back to school he says, get the degree while you can. He himself is an apparently brilliant seventy year old man stuck working in a chain grocery store as a deli clerk, his co-workers consisting mostly of unruly teenage hispanic kids and Guatamalan immigrants. If anything, I see his cautions as something worth heeding.

Though everyone knows the 22nd is the first birthday not worth celebrating, I figured I might as well try and put something together. All my life I've thought about putting together one of those grand and epic birthday parties for myself, where legions of family and friends would all gather in great numbers to help elebrating my continued survival, patting me on the back while red dixie cups full of cheap beer slosh about precariously. In the end though there's always two conclusions I arrive at, the first being that I am familiar with at best a handful of people, even less of which fill the criteria of both living within distance of my current location, or liking me enough to even consider attending a party in my honor. The other conclusion of course is that throwing a party for yourself is perhaps one of the saddest endevors one can attempt. What am I trying to prove really? That people care about me? Why on earth would I want to even pretend that's true?

So, after canceling any party plans I'd announced, rescinding facebook invites and screaming at any who will listen that my birth has been cancelled - I instead wait until the week after, stopping by the liquor store to pick up as much alcohol as I can before calling every person on my phone and screaming about how I'm going to get them drunk, and they'd better take advantage of my sudden lapse of latent Jewish faith while they can. My late birthday consists of me, my roomate, the asian kid, the girl I have secretely obsessed over for the past eight years, and a gaggle of other hangers-on and malcontents. For the next few hours we scream at each other and play Dreamcast and mark down each beer we drink on a homemade "High Score" table which hangs above the couch, arguing over how many points a shot of gin is worth (1.5), or how many beers the nanny has really drunk thus far (her pace is impossible). I manage to squeak out third place at 12 beers, before vomiting some extra froth into the toilet. When the other roomates arrive home we engage in a philisophical discussion over who's not doing the dishes. This is by far the worst part of the night, and thinking back on it I probably should've just instigated a brawl.

Last year, turning 21, I had the sense to get drunk before the after-party drama could kick in, funneling 3 beers at Josh's house, a couple of shots of Vodka after that, an Irish car bomb somewhere in-between, and about there the memory of my drink intake fades out. Instead I remember staring at a cheeseburger at the local pub and realizing I'm ready to throw up. I ran to the bathroom, then waited for my friend's awful girlfriend to do her business as I held my hurl back best I could. A few minutes later I'm doing my best to scrub the remnants of my vomit from every porcelin surface in the tiny quarters, screaming to whoever is outside knocking "You really don't want to come in here right now! You're gonna have to give me a few minutes!" I'd make the mistake of directing my sick into the sink, where the chunks of partially digested cheese fries have clogged the thing, leaving a puddle of pinkish stomach contents about two inches deep. I plung my hand into it and pull out the bigger pieces, tossing them into the toilet before hurling again.

I get home, remain barely concious in the shower for an hour, then pass out in my bed. Sometime during the night my boss from work comes by and chucks an entire bag of hostess fruit pies at me from the doorway while I apparently try in vain to defend myself. I wake up surrounded by pastry and remember none of this.

Thinking back, at about the same time last year I was alone and languishing in my own mediocrity. Having graduated with the aforementioned two-year community college degree a few months prior, my only thoughts were how much of a failure I was. So I dragged this not-unpretty girl down to my old Elementary school and made her wattch as I drowned in nostalgia - scribbling my name across a pillar in sharpie and swinging myself as high as the swings would take me; all the while wishing I could've just lain her down beneath that October moon, fucking her there beside the remnants of my youth. This is the extent of my poetic sensibilities. A year past and the furthest I ever got was feeling her up in an oversized bean bag chair. Today she dates the owner of that bean-bag chair, a stout bearded motherfucker who I'm supposed to be making a video game with - and though I would still like to fuck the shit out of her I'm too tired to attempt the awful world of geek dating ever again, where he with the better programming degree is the alpha-male of that sad social group.

This all took part at the same point in time I met my current fling on an online BDSM dating site, her sharing some select choices from my laundry list of bizarre sexual fetishes. These are the things that bring us freaks together, the things that cause us to overlook the fact that we're painfully dissimilar. A year past initial contact, after saying hi to each other at various social gatherings for people of our damaged persuasion, she invites me to a Halloween party at a leather dungeon a state over. She helpfully spells out the word "date" for me after I fail, like always, to read into any of her obvious signals. It's at that point I figure out she's probably been wanting to date for this past year, and I'd just been too retarded to notice. At the last minute I smear pancake makeup across my face, dotting the meat coat I've stolen from my old butcher's job with fake blood and swiping a stethoscope from the local party supply store. At the party I exchange banter with the countless other doctors and sexy nurses as unimaginative as me, while a fat Dwarf of a man lectures me on proper whipping technique for a good forty five minutes. Later a tall gray-haired homosexual hits on me and I feel strangely both honored and a bit apoligetic when I turn him down. After this I find myself torturing my date's nipples with some metal wire brush, while her large black dom lays into her with a variety of whips and flogs. They smile and joke the whole way through, while I can only laugh in nervous awareness of my surroundings.

I'm strangely obsessed with these failed relationships of mine I realize. For some reason I can only define myself through my shortcomings, and my greatest shortcoming of all has been my apparent inhability to make it work. I met my first and only almost real girlfriend at a Burger King, and three years of awkward dates and sex with the lights out, she tells me our relationship never really counted. Still, I know she regrets this apparent breakup of ours, as to this day she still begs me for sex whenever she's around (though I'm happy to oblige). She's really quite cute (if you're into fat chicks, which I am) - though she subscribes to another one of those social cliques I can't help but hold disdain for, surrounded by the hipster fags she's befriended at art school. She asks me if I like her photography and I lie through my teeth. It seems only right.

Maybe the worst though was Lauren. I'm not even sure if that was her name. We shared a few community college classes together, she was actually 3 or 4 years older than me at the time. I have no idea what she liked about me, though again I was too stupid or unconfident to do anything about it. Before class she'd order martinis at the 99 Restaurant around the corner from the school, and we'd eat crappy food and joke about class and sometimes get lost just driving around for a bit. Once we went back to her house, and after silently watching something awful on the On Demand cable service she tells me about her cat, all the while scolding him for killing another mouse in the garden outside. Turns out he had a brother once, and the two of them would play in the backyard and were, as all kittens are, impossibly cute. Then the brother got hit by a car, and for about a year the remaining little guy would sit at the window meowing sadly, as if he did it loud enough his brother would come back and they could play some more.

That story broke my heart. It still does. There's a metaphor for the human condition in there somewhere but I'm too tired to look for it. I still have Lauren's number on a piece of loose-leaf paper from the last time I wrote down all the numbers in my phone. Every few months I'm sure I've lost it, that I've lost her number and that without it she's truly gone forever. But always I find it again, always I consider adding the number to my memory and always I don't. I tried calling once, got a machine and didn't leave a message. All day I expected one of those "Hey, I got a call from this number" calls, and all day I wondered what I'd do. Hang up without even answering? Tell her I had the wrong number? Or tell her I've spent the last year thinking about her and that damn cat, and that I was younger then and stupider then but goddamnit I really did like her and we probably could've made it work?

Is there a point to any of this? Maybe not. All I know is that I am 22 years old and the world is coming to an end. December 21st, 2012 is the date the universe collapses inward on itself. I know this because there's a new movie starring John Cusack which tells me so. And all I want is to stop regretting everything in my life. To find something worth giving a shit about.

1128 days, 11 hours, 13 minutes, 43 seconds to go.

Let's try and make it count.