Racism

Yesterday I went out to eat with my BDSM girlfriend and her black sexual dom of a roommate. She'd suggested a popular Italian chain (not the Olive Garden), something to which I had agreed while thinking in the back of my head "Or we could go to a real restaurant and eat like adults" - a thought which I shared with my hunting roommate, who laughed.

The dinner itself was rather uneventful. The two of them both go to nursing school, and spent a lot of time complaining about that state of affairs. I guess it's just what we humans do best, is complain, though my BDSM girlfriend has been riding an unemployment train for the past year, and pays no rent in return for cleaning the apartment. My lord, the concept of not paying rent boggles my mind. As has been mentioned before I've already proven I can subsist happily on a diet of ramen noodles and hot dogs if need be, and properly budgeted my current level of funds could likely carry me for at least two, three years if I never had to pay rent again. That's my honest to god dream, to live like a derelict. Currently 40+ hours of my week are spent accomplishing nothing of importance to myself, an act which exhausts me long before I return home.

To be fair, during the intirim period of no responsibilty following my graduation from college and my move to the city, I spent every day jerking off, dicking around at the mall and stealing shit from Wal Mart. It was not a productive time in my life.

Anyhow, this story is less remarkable for its recounting of $12 plates of cheap macaroni and the insufferable anxiety I suffered every time my fellow diners made outlandish requests of our host, demanding additional dinner rolls and actually going as far as to order items not on the menu. Rather it was the train ride home that struck a note. Boarding at the last stop for the ride back into the city, a Muslim woman in one of those headscarf type deals sits across from me (Hajib? Something like that). At first I honestly paid no heed, glancing over only to see the cute little kid she was riding with. At some point however, I noticed the strange rectangular box under her shawl.

To be quite honest I felt something primal kicking in. My reptillian desire to survive, fighting a desperate battle against my social etiquitte. The rational brain keeps telling me "C'mon man, she's just some dumb Muslim broad. Her religion might be asinine, but she isn't any more of a threat than Khaki pants Polo shirt guy a few seats up." Meanwhile my panic button is screaming "What the fuck. You're going to take a chance on this because your education somehow elevates you above the racial panic of the working class?" She must've noticed me staring a few times, tracing the outline of that sinister box beneath her clothes and wishing to god she'd pull it out and I could see it was just a shoebox or something harmless - a pair of sneakers for her son, not some concoction of wires and timer devices. And in my head I keep wondering just how powerful a bomb of that size is. I picture the train car flashing white, shrapnel propelled outward from the box in her hands, taking her and her little boy along with it, my body parts scattered about the train car as my life is uselessly snuffed out.

I eventually end up down the other end of the train car, assuming its far enough away from the blast that my only real worry is getting damaged when the thing derails. I consider diving beneath the seats if she gets up and starts screaming in Muslim, though wonder if I'd be trapped or impaled by the seat supports when the crash occurs.

The point is, I can't pretend I'm immune to racism, whether its the result of post 9/11 trauma or just the fact that someone wearing all-black, face hidden, with a big box under their coat- is like some giant outlandish cartoon portrait of what a villian should look like. It's really fun to see the hypocrisy of life. We yell at our homeland security agents for profiling minorities, and yet even a supposedly educated liberal like myself can't help but act in the benefit of my own self-interest. I can't well apologize for that.

Someone called me a sociopath and I realized it was a true statement. Truly I believe most functions of our current society are off, from how we raise our children, to our outdated and illogical concepts of morality, and of course to how we percieve races/classes of people. The real problem is that since birth I was taught two opposing concepts.

1) There exists different groups of people
2) These people are all the exact same

Our current way of explaining the first statement is to show how cultures differ, something which immediately contradicts the incredible importance of the second statement and one which, as a functioning human adult, I find myself somehow unable to rekindle after decades of improper education. Look, this race is so different from ours. They have different customs and feelings and thoughts and ideals. Look at this religion and how they worship, look at this social class and how they suffer.

They are different from us is made clear
We are all the same is not

The first and only time I have ever been able to understand the second part of this grand unified race theory was a few months ago. When my grandfather died we looted his house of whatever we could find in an odd mixture of nostalgia and treasure hunting. My sister took his old police uniform and wore it to a costume party, this lack of any respect for the dead fitting of her generation. I took an old Super-8 video camera worth a hundred something bucks on eBay, a field manual to firing Colt Revolvers, and a book on the Holocaust called "The Good Old Days". The book is rather disturbing, and it's the kind of material I wish was taught in our schools, much more real than the screenings of Schindler's list or the tired readings of fictionalized crap like "Night" or nonsense like Anne Frank's diary, which cuts out before any of the true atrocities take place. The entire book is nothing but first person accounts of regular people, soliders, officers, or just commoners, and the things they saw - related in letters, in journal entries, all seemingly unfabricated first-person material. The stories are of course, horrible to read. People led to the gas chambers, or gassed in vans which locked shut, carbon monoxide piped in through the back. People lined up - shot in the head and pushed into a pit, only for the next in line to step forward and take their place. Letters from soldiers discussing the best way to speed up the process of death, or worse the sympathizers who could not stop it, or the victims who watched friends and family taken from them.
And the whole time I read this book I kept saying the same things.

"Those poor Jews."
"How could they do that to the Jews?"
"The trials those jews suffered."

Until suddenly, that night in the shower, it hit me.

They were me. These atrocities had happened to my people. We were exactly the same.

It was a feeling so strong I wanted to weep.

That's been the problem of our education. To me and to other white anglo-saxon Catholics like myself, we are taught that the Holocaust is this horrible thing which happened to someone else. That slavery is a horrible thing that happened to someone else. That every tragedy over time has usually happened to other people, and that we were the ones responsible.

But the truth is, we are all exactly the same. I am the Jewish Holocaust Victim, I am the African Slave. My people were subjected to the Rape of Nanking, to the boming of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Stretching back my people have been slaves to the egyptians, my people were given smallpox by the English settlers. My people have endured every torment known to humanity.

And yet in the same breath - I am also the Nazi, the Slaveowner, the Japanese Solider and the man who dropped the Atomic Bomb.

Within each of us exists this same duality. We inherit every trait of our ancestors, take on every ounce of suffering and cruelty and innocense and ignorance and bear it as our own. I know there are some who would never accept this. Maybe it's callous or even rediculous for a middle-class Italian-Irish white kid to claim to understand the suffering of black slaves or jews, while also claiming to accept responsibility for the actions of German soldiers and Egyptian pharohs. And yet the only truth I can see is that we all stem from a common ancestor. We are all bound to this race of ours, the race of humanity, each of us creatures capable of great acts of both virtue and of vice.

All I know is that for one brief moment I was connected to all the people of the world. I understood for a moment what we were, how equal we all are. Until again the logical groupings beaten into me by society again took over, and I felt nothing.

Back in the real world I see a Muslim woman on the train. She is different from me. We worship different gods, we have different sets of morals, and we know nothing about each other.

And we are exactly the same.

The Friends I Used to Have

I spent this weekend in a state of artistic stupor. Too tired or apathetic to attempt finishing any of the works I've started, I eventually find myself doodling a naked anime woman on my computer, wishing I knew enough of anatomy to make her breasts look right. I like to fill my plate with as many unfinished projects as possible to help cement my status as a ne'r-do-well. Currently I'm in the process of designing a website for a friend's band, working on some graphics for an Xbox game that won't ever be finished, a half-attempted video game review for the semi-unpopular website I sometimes contribute to, and of course the empty pages of my novel continue to stare back at me, wondering why the fuck I'm so able to rank up my Mafia Wars character and yet can't pen coherant dialogue.

For the record this blog experiment of mine has been a great exercise in trying to get something done on a regular basis. It's odd how quickly the words flow in this stream of conciousness type mindset I can get into, whereas when I have to take the characters I've obsessed over for the last four years and force them to interact with each other, I can't help but get caught up in perfecting each individual adjective. I was also fairly distracted by the videos I found of this German woman in a latex cow outfit, her tits hooked up to an industrial milking machine, mooing as a monotone robotic voice enforced her slavery. The amateur pornography is always the best. Why would I want to watch a paid actress get fucked when I can watch normal everyday people show me how equally depraved they are? If I could form my own support group the members would include me and the five or six normal looking middle-aged women whose living-room sexual excapades have excited me for the last six or eight years. Petra, Alice, and most of all Angie - whose pictures I first discovered on a newsgroup back in 2001 when I was still in middle school, having spent the last eight years trying to put together a complete collection. I'm at something like 800 pics of hers now, though I know I'm probably missing plenty.

So, in-between bouts of visiting my support group, I found the time to stumble over to my buddy's apartment. Apparently my old friend was in town as well, so we all ended up stumbling over to the bar to see my buddy's roomate play a show. The show was beautiful for largely two reasons. One, the act that was playing as we arrived. The band featured an assortment of out-of-shape forty & fifty year olds desperately attempting to rock. As my old friend remarked, it really was something quite amazing. They must've known their chances at rock and roll stardom had died years ago, though still they clung to this beautiful adolescent dream, living it as hard as they could. At one point the lead guitarist, an overweight guy with a cherry-red guitar and hair much too long for his age-bracket, slides to his knees, wailing out as hard as he can. Playing guitar behind his back, with his teeth, eventually returning to the stage so he and his bandmate could sword fight with their instruments, first rubbing the tips together before individually stroking the lengths from the top quickly towards the base.

I hope that when I'm old and awful, that I still have a dream like that to blindly believe in. That I can still impress the crowd of other mid-life crisis sufferers, taking some fading broad home to my apartment so we can remark about what it could've been like if we were still young.

The second highlight of this beautiful night was my two friends deciding to mosh midway through the roomates show, all the snarling old broads who'd to that point been giggling like idiots and dancing like white people- moving off to the side to watch in horror as these two young adults violently slammed into each other. At one point my heavy friend, weighing something like 350 pounds, is sent reeling towards the door, where he punches the bouncer in the face and gets us all banned from the club forever. All of this happens on the night of the previously unmentioned third roomates' 21st birthday, girlfriend of the second roomate and a spectacular drunk. The next day I find out someone has vomited all over the bathroom. I am blamed for this as I am an easy scapegoat, and the accusations will continue for the next few days, as no one makes any attempt to clean the filth up.

Our lazy hangover of a Sunday is spent looking for something to watch, managing some half-starts on several on demand movies before settling on cult-classic hockey comedy Slap Shot - starring Paul Newman (after failing to make it through twenty minutes of the awful hockey comedy docudrama No Sleep Til Madison starring Jim Gaffagin and being unable to find legendary hockey comedy D2: The Mighty Ducks starring the legendary Emilio Estevez). I can't even sum up this movie in any way that makes sense. On one hand, its awful, the jokes which were likely cutting-edge stuff thirty odd years ago (Foreigners talking is funny, dirty sexual talk is funny) kind of fall flat in today's modern age. What really sticks with you though is the sense of plot, not needing any logical continuity or motivations for its characters, just two hours of hockey fights and childish name calling. The real achievement comes in the final act, where the team is really broken up about where its gone, that they've gotten so far away from the sport they love, embroiled in nothing but the fighting and useless showmanship. So for their final match they try to play a clean game, to bring some respect back to the sport even as they get their faces pounded in by the savage other team.

Then they find out the talent scouts are there.

Any chance at a moral is thrown at the window. Everyone starts kicking everyone's ass and the one pacifist on the team performs a strip-tease on the ice, something which through a bizarre deus-ex-machina gets the other team disqualified. Everyone is bleeding or naked as they take the championship cup back to the locker room, all of it culminating in a grand parade through the streets, marching band and all, children cheering for their new heroes.

I wonder if whoever wrote that movie realized he was a genius.

Morality

Yesterday my BDSM girlfriend came over and we ended up watching Jesus Camp while enjoying the $35 worth of Chinese food I felt inclined to pay for. I'm normally a very stingy person, but in the few months it's taken for my bank account to approach ten grand I've actually become something approaching generous. It may just be a few isolated incidents, but I bought my roommate a $2 coffee yesterday and waved her away as she pulled out her pocketbook, while I fully intended to give a dollar to the homeless man selling newspapers outside, though he was gone by the time it took for me to figure out the asinine ATM prompts. I've long known that my personal level of morality is directly related to my income bracket. Back when I had first moved to the city, slaving away as a deli clerk making slightly more than minimum wage, I was a horrible goddamn person. I stole constantly, managing to somehow live on only $100 a month, most of my costs cut by stealing food and other essentials from my place of work. I've always been a bit of what I guess you would call a objectivist, simply I know that my worth as a person far exceeds that of any other. My personal hapiness is the one goal worth striving for, and this is why society should not hesitate to begruge me a few porterhouse steaks, salmon filets, $20 lamb roasts and whatever else I stuff in my giant ass jacket. If a man cannot live like a king he may as well eat like one, laws be damned.

Anyhow - Jesus Camp if you don't know, is a movie about the extreme religious right attempting to recuit children. The whole thing largely serves as an excuse for progressive liberals and the atheists to bitch and moan, which while warranted, I've grown awfully tired of this attaboy nonsense. We all hate the fucking South and we all know organized religion continues to fuck up this country's chance at progress in a variety of ways. My real problem is that among the people I know, namely the young intellectual females who continue to dabble in promiscuous sex and other forms of abstract self-expression and rebellion, none intend to have children. This is the new trend, something I refer to as the "Barren Intellectual" syndrome. It seems that our current culture has made the unfortunate distinction that because poor uneducated southern women continue to pump out children at alarming rates, that the mere act of procreation is somehow outddated - something best left to this contingent of god-fearing malcontents. Simply put it's thinking like this that is going to burn America to the ground. A few generations from now and the rabid right-wing fag-bashers are going to outnumber our supposedly enlightened ranks at a 4 to 1 ratio. There's a reason our presidents are forced to play the part of the perfect native son, unable to express any thoughts on religion other than "Boy I sure am glad our magic sky friend keeps this country running so smoothly."

Then again, the new atheism seems to also be gaining ground, which is not to say in any way that I condone this radical other end of the spectrum. All I want is for us to arrive at a middle ground, a sane and rational country where you can believe in god if you wish, and no one is going to either praise or denounce you for it. The book I'm writing now takes place fifty years past our current religious predicament, a world where these opposing forces have both achieved their ends; the north a godless secular state with a growing suicide rate, and a south still breeding the hate that keeps its people strong.  The death of god is something that will eventually be traced back to this time period, and I can only feel a bit like Carl Sagan, saying "My god, we've been to the moon" only the moment we're watching is the last point in time that humanity believed in something greater than itself, before succumbing to hopelessness.

Maybe the Ubermensche will eventually arrive. In all likelihood he'll be regarded as a savior, a new religion will spring up around him once he's martyred, and we'll be back at square one.

Honestly I've no idea what I'm talking about. If there's a point worth making it's that the Christians and the Catholics continue to maintain this idea that there exists in this world evil people. Not people who have differing viewpoints, or whose view of morality is skewed, but people whose only wish in their heart of hearts is to genuinely inflict harm on those around them. The rational man says "this is wrong! Look around you at your fellow man!" The murderer is driven by chemicals, the thief driven by biological needs, the pedophile bourne of his own unfortunate sexual tragedy. And yet here I am, a normal upbringing, a stable chemical balance, and a full awareness of the immortality of my actions. And yet still I find myself among the ranks of the countless deviants, wandering amongst the flock with a lascivious grin, discounting the morality of god as outdated as I continue to steal and curse and fuck without remorse, without purity or beauty in any of it.

I am the proof that evil exists.

I'm not sure how that makes me feel.

Weight

I've been trying to get back into shape again. At one point I weighed about 260 pounds, and I looked like an awful son of a bitch. These days I don't look much better, having gotten down to 210 at one point and a year of laziness later I'm up to 230. This is due in part to many factors, the most powerful of which is an obvious and disgusting addiction to food. To be honest none of this is a subject I like dwelling on, because I honestly feel like I'm trying, between biking to work and even lifting weights now. The real problem for me is that for someone who likes to micromanage every part of their life, maticulously organizing everything I own, there is just not enough consistant information on how to stay fit for me to properly plan some sort of healthy lifestyle for myself without excessive strain. I mean really, what the fuck am I supposed to do? The only valid advice I've been able to discover is - count calories. Well great. So what about strength training, or cardio, or what the fuck should I eat to feel full and should I just be eating salad everyday and how many fucking calories are in that salad I'm eating anyway. I mean, there's cheese and salami in the salad, is that cheating? Am I just eating more calories than I'd get out of a slice of pizza anyhow?

The world really needs a "What the fuck" button. That should be a website really, type in something, press "What the fuck?" and arrive at an answer that somebody somewhere researched and somebody elsewhere fact checked to make sure the first guy wasn't some corporate whore shilling his book or trying to save the dairy industry. My current plan is to eat fish and chicken breast exclusively, drink more water, do some bicep curls every three days and hope for the best. Maybe I'll get out to the gym more often, but it sure is getting fuck nuts cold for me to be riding my bike up there every day. Time Magazine had a recent article saying that exercise is useless, which is probably bullshit but who knows.

I have a date tonight with my BDSM girlfriend. We're going to watch The Iron Giant because she's never seen it, and then I'm hoping she ends up in my bedroom though I somehow doubt it. Last night I didn't get any writing done because I was too busy watching American Movie while photoshopping this really hot picture I found of this cute little white girl about to get gangraped by like six black guys. I changed her shirt color and made it so she's crying at the situation instead of grinning like she's high on something. I posted it to a forum for similar minded perverts and the only responses so far have been to let me know I'd uploaded it wrong and nobody could see the picture.

I just need a sliver of positive praise once in awhile. Whether it's because somebody reads my works or because they jerked off to my porno movie highlight mash-up reel, it's the high that keeps me going.

Family

I have no idea why my family likes me so much. That's actually a rather unreasonable statement, I can tell full well why my family likes me so much, I just wish they could recognize just how hard I'm forced to try while I'm around them. When I was younger it used to be I could be as morose as I wanted, sneaking off during family functions to play gameboy or something else to cement the anti-social attitude my preteen self decided felt right. Lately though my feelings of inadequacy force me to try and impress those extended reletives of mine, putting on a bright smile, playing the part of the jovial guest. When truly my only wish is that these very nice and caring people would stop giving so much of a shit about me.

Again, it's mostly a problem of my percieved lack of success in life, contrasted against the other members of my family. I am a real bastard in this way, secretly pleased that my older cousin still works in the grocery store and that my aunt and uncle are getting a divorce because uncle Rick can't stop smoking pot and gambled away all the family's money over the course of the last two years. These are the things that strangely put me at ease, that convince me I don't have to try so hard.

I only bring up my family because next week is Thanksgiving and I'm likely presssed to make an appearance. It's not that I have anything against eating a decent meal, it's simply knowing that I'll again be forced to defend my current position in life to people who for some reason have a vested interest in my prosperity. There's something wrong with me psychologically I must assume, or likely I've just taken to heart that old idea of working not for your own sake, but for the sake of your family. I am the last male heir to our patriarical name, not counting the retard and the six year old. There's a certain burden; at least in my mind; to do something good with that name, and so far I've done little of note. It's one thing to have been in a state of flux, at least when I was in college I could pretend to have plans of some sort, pretend my success currently persisted in a quantum bubble which would snap once I fufilled the requirements of my degree. Now I simply have a well paying job doing nothing special, at which everyone can remark "That's nice" and move on. Maybe that's enough then. Maybe they'll settle that I've arrived at a crossing of points, and will stop questioning me about my plans. That was always the worst part, trying to adequitely describe what your future held. All I could do was mumble something about wanting to be a journalist, or looking into a graphic arts degree, never really getting down to the real truth.

The real truth? I am a monster.  I've given up on god, most times viewing the world as a moraless playground for me to play in, or better yet an illusion of some sort, a construct of my mind which my immortal self created to entertain myself through eternity. I steal constantly, curse at strangers attempt to provoke fights with anyone who glances at me sideways, and any ambition I might have pales in comparison to the horrible sexual misdeeds I commit on a regular basis.

Currently I have plans on Saturday to meet with a girl whose name I can't even remember. She has a daddy fetish, which means she dresses up in juvinile outfits so we can essentially roleplay her incestuous pedophilic fantasies. This involves us watching cartoons while I fondle her crotch, or take her across my knee for a spanking before laying her down, forcing a pacifier into her mouth as I fuck her. She's the first girl who's not only let me do her in the ass, but actually asked for it. I'm torn throughout the whole thing, both turned on by the obvious sexual gratification, and disgusted by the simulation of these morally reprehensible activities. There was a good period during our first "session" where I thought, dear lord, I'm raping a child. As she cried "Daddy!" protesting all the whole, I felt almost sick to my stomach. I was unable to finish for a good 15-20 minutes or so, finally arriving at a weak orgasm, her happily squealing at how incredible I was at maintaining the illusion.

As I wash my cock off in the bathroom sink I examine myself in the mirror. I break into a awkward smile, shaking my head sadly.

I should stop meeting up with girls on the internet, especially the ones with these fetishes. She's possibly worse than I am, which is a feat. Her favorite thing to do now is to pleasure herself on the webcam while I watch and type encouragement. She's asked me to get a webcam, but I don't, knowing she'll likely be turned off to see me browsing comic book websites while I falsely type out how hard my dick is. What makes it even worse is she's told me about how her real father is estranged from the family, how she and her brother dropped his name, and how he's a scumsucking shitbag of a man. I could make some guesses at incidents from her childhood, though the situation is already awkward enough.

That's my problem I guess. Always trying to please others. Whether it's smiling my way through a thanksgiving dinner, or raping my slut of a daughter as she begs to be punished. Both are situations that though alluring, fill me with that same sense of social anxiety, forced to my limits as I try to portray the role that's expected of me. When all I really want to do is sleep for awhile.

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.