This weekend I took a bit of a vacation, accompanying my only remaining friends on a nostaligic trip back to our primordial origins, a journey backwards in time to the place we might've called our hometown. It was a welcome reprieve from the monotony of my life, something which has evolved into an endless cycle of spacing out in front of a computer for eight hours of the day, only to return home and have my creative desire stifled by the allure of cheap entertainment and internet pornography.

Is it callous to call myself an artist? I have no great works to my name, no formal training in the field and a fairly limited skillset. Maybe someday I'll stop my useless dreaming, recognizing my mediocrity as I discover I'm long past the point where I could've made my mark on the world. A stout balding middle-aged man with a nice television and a decent job selling computer software or whatever career my decades of meaningless work experience have contributed themselves to. And if I'm lucky maybe I can take my son along with me on my business, just like my dad used to do, lamenting all the opportunities I passed up on and the women who'd broken my heart. Regaling him with the same tales of how bright the world looked when I was young.

I've long held the theory that middle school is the point in time at which your life is most embarrassing. There are no memories of middle school that I recall with any degree of fondness, every scene left in my mind a cringing mess of misplaced confidence resulting in overwhelming failure. Whether it was my pasty overweight self wearing a headband the first day of school in an effort to kickstart my image, or entering my awful drawing of an anime angel warrior into the school's yearbook cover contest - every decision I made sticks out to me as completely illogical. I will say that middle school was the first time in my life I ever made any friends, something I honestly attribute to having developed limited social interaction skills simply by hanging out on Pokemon message boards for an entire summer. The point is, I was an awful fucking person - we all were, and yet somehow middle school puts the idea in you head that you've arrived. That you are a living breathing competent human being, that your opinion is relevant, that your useless dreams of rock and roll superstardom are easily achieved if you keep strumming away at that Wal-Mart electric guitar everyday after school.

(My only relic of middle school is an obviously anime-inspired story I wrote called Kaze's Revenge or something. It's cringe inducing beyond belief)

I think if anything I learned more from middle school than most people, simply to never take any thought or feeling you might have seriously. As most any artist knows (or at least, should know, many seem blind to it) - it's impossible to judge your own works correctly without distancing yourself from them for at least a small period. Many times I've opened old sketchbooks to find figures I had once considered the pinnacle of my own talent, only to become disgusted with the awkward proportions and squashed faces. Sometimes it takes only a week, or maybe a few hours before I can return to something no longer running off my creator's high, and revalue it objectively.


The problem then is that I realize I'm still stuck in middle school, and may remain there for my entire life. Despite my recognition of how pitifully juvenile it is, I still find myself lying in bed listening to the same Radiohead song over and over. I still find myself strangely clinging to the unrealistic ideal of myself as some sort of tragic figure, ignoring the fact that my youth has all but faded. 22 years old and I still want to do it all over again. I want the high school romance I never had, I want to take that quiet shy girl to the prom before taking her back to my house and fucking her properly.

I just finished reading a Japanese comic called Onani Master Kurosawa (Masturbation Master Kurosawa). It's an impossibly endearing story about a confused middle school kid who masturbates in the girl's bathroom at school, his rape fantasies about classmates his only revenge against the world he feels no place in. This somehow spins from a quick gag to a legitimate coming-of-age tale, and I found myself wondering what middle school would've been like if like him I'd tried to change.

Instead, I find myself still lamenting my dead loves. Still obsessing over the things I could've been. Still printing out porn and satisfying myself in the men's bathroom.


I'm trying to change.

It might even work this time.

Yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a holiday we celebrated by purchasing twenty-four pieces of supermarket fried chicken and a varied assortment of 40oz malt liquor bottles. I like to pretend that this act was committed in the name of some bizarre social justice, lambasting the racist iconography and the absurdity of its existence. Truth be told it was more an excuse to eat greasy chicken and get unreasonably drunk.

Tell the children all is well. We have not yet succumbed to our weakness.

Happy New Year

Was it the Mayans who first decided to break down the formless eternity of existance into easily dicernable chunks? Sliced the endless passage of time into seconds and minutes and hours, broke the passage of days into months and seasons and then finally years? If so, the real question is why. Were they simply tired of no one knowing exactly when to show up for the afternoon beheading? Or was it some strange human desire to feel something pass, to for some reason anticipate the turning of the calendar page, to pretend each day is somehow unlike the last.

New Years Eve I accidently found myself at a Jersey Shore theme party, legions of middle-aged professionals in muscle-ts and halter tops, screaming and pounding Yaeger-Bombs as a household of Italian Stereotypes did likewise in a much less ironic fashion. I quickly escaped, spilling out into the cold night air and taking the trains downtown with Grocer and Click's Sister. We looked at the lackluster ice sculptures and blew as hard as we could on our noisemakers, which were for some reason so fucked up that if you blew hard enough it sounded like a woman was screaming as a car drove over her. People kept looking around for the apparent accident, which only made us laugh and blow harder.

Down at the wharf the fireworks are exploding in rather grand fashion as we hoot like idiots. And when the girl kisses me on the cheek I try to tell myself it's a tradition. That like most things it means nothing, and even if it had meant something, in the grand scheme of things it really didn't. Still, I find myself recklessly believing this is some sort of grand sign - a great culmination of my years of regret and lonliness. Not knowing the words to Auld Lang Sine me and Grocer make it halfway through the Star Spangled Banner before realizing we don't know the words to that either. Instead we start screaming the chorus of Born in the USA as loud as we can. And as we scream our reckless and lofty new years resolutions at the exploding light show and guzzle down plastic bottles of orange juice spiked heavily with Vodka I wonder if maybe everything'll be ok.

For the longest time I've been recieving email messages intended for someone else with the same name. I open my inbox today to find an email from Uncle Rick, forwarded by Grandpa Dr, wishing me a Happy Birthday.

Here's to that I guess.