It wasn’t that she wasn’t cute. The night had progressed weirdly and I needed to be alone with my thoughts. What kind of a girl would do this anyways, a weird guy walking toward the bottom of a bridge at midnight, a foil wrapped sandwich in his pocket. Ask some directions, sure that’s fine. Ask me to get in your car and help you find a place? OK, sure. But the neverending yammer of your jaw and something desperate in the constant laughter ha-ha won’t this be hilarious ha-ha what did i do i picked up a guy rattle that is currently jamming out of her face full force. She wants me to look at her hands, they’re shaking, she says.

Out my window there are the lines and I see one, hair black and straight eyes dazzling and she looks at me and when those eyes bat I _want_ her. I want to tear those buttons off with my teeth and tell her all my problems. I want her to make them better and make me come and thenimbackinthejeep.

She doesn’t smoke, she says, fingering the pack, but four just now in the stress of trying to find her way down. I tried to explain, the streets are in order, like the alphabet. And even if you’re a subnormal you can remember up to G, right? Four drinks, she says, but she’s not drunk, not even a bit, the stress of the drive has sobered her right up as we slide past the lines. They’re turning off their cell phones. Guys do that. When they’re trying to get laid. Right right. Yes it’s spelled like couch but it’s said like cooch. Ha-ha. But then I’m sitting in her checkered seat cover and she’s blasting me just bombarding me with it. It’s in the edge of her eyes that perfect glassy pupil but then something behind it like… broken clockwork. It’s on a loop now and she says she’s so young ha-ha but she just looks young she’s not that young ha-ha and like young but not 18 young. Her hands are shaking and she touches the pack again and I lick my lips thinking about the taste of hay and the red hot receptors currently throbbing in my head just flare. Take one and you won’t even notice it till it’s gone you’ll cough once or twice but no biggie and she says she doesn’t smoke, you’ll probably get the pack. We’ve driven through two parking lots now trying to find a place. There’s nothing on the street, not this late on a Friday. The problem with these lots is, most of them, you see, they just don’t take cards and she doesn’t have any cash and she’s going to pay my cover though at the club oh look at the line we’ll have to wait. I scratch my beard and think about asking her if I look like the sort of person who waits in line at clubs. But then I realize maybe she doesn’t think there’s any other type of person. In her world there are only people who go out on Friday night and wait in line for clubs, and Parents. An uncomfortable silence has dawned since I answered a fourth question in a row with a noncommittal grunt. There are no more line-girls to ogle. It’s not that she isn’t cute, I look at her. She’s fine. Plain. Drunk. I think she is talking about a different club that she was at before. She has totally ruined my buzz. When we park I bail, and she asks after me and I just pretend like I’ve lost much of the english language. We could have a week together, and it would not be enough for me to thoroughly explain why I’m leaving to go walk until I have blisters. It’s complicated, and it starts with age, honey, but that’s really more like chapter three. If you’ll open up the workbook to page one and get out your Mortimer Ichabod Marker. You don’t get that huh. Yeah, see. Again. Chapter three. But you’ve ruined a twenty dollar drunk, and that’s not a good start. She’s got her tiny purse and her daddy’s debit card and the club is this way hey wait I hook a thumb over my shoulder and cannot think of a single thing to say. The walking again, then. A third bridge crossing of the night. Steel, instead of Broadway. I’ve still not walked that one. My phone dies just after letting me know there are no more trains back to the car. But it’s warm enough, and there’s no rain, and I’m thankful.

The socks had to come out two miles from the car, revealing a hum dinger of a blister, which squidges against the cement satisfactorily while I barefoot carefully past the movie theater. Better without the socks, once the sidewalk-to-glass ratio dips unnervingly low, and we’re over the hill now. It’s all downhill from here. Gimme that lemon lime gator, and a black and mild. Single? Of course a fucking single. It’s two AM and you’re a 7-11 clerk at the ass end of Portland do a lot of motherfuckers come in here to stock up? It’s angry now, I’ve processed all the fun out of that booze and now it’s just the pain, throbbing in time with my steps, like when I step on that blister it squeezes red hot pus up into the back of my skull.

I’m back to the car now and it’s something o’clock I forgot to change it with daylight saving. I forget if it’s an hour ahead or behind. It’s almost quarter till something. No need for much precision. Gingerly now on the clutch, use just the big toe, that’s better. Almost home now. To sleep, and dream of an apocalypse, where all my little bullshit problems today seem hilarious and small, and my dream feet throb, as I walk from place to place, searching for signs of civilization.

Let me tell you the story of the second time I did acid. The first time was in college and it was just a hazy mess of drinking and god only knows if it was good or real, but the second time… the phone call letting me know “uncle sid” was in town, the drive to Scottsdale, the five sugar cubes with their off-colored spots on all faces, divided carefully. The decision to not drop until it was just dusk, the Annoying Girl Who Could Not Identify Planes, the birthday party, the memories of that second time are rock solid. It’s not happened in a long time but if I concentrate just right… I can be back there any time – that many hits pretty much clips your third eye open and gives it the Clockwork Orange treatment for the better part of a day. But this is not the time to talk about my psychedelic awakening, this is time to talk about the dance.

That evening, unlike every single other evening of my life in Phoenix, AZ, ended at The Mason Jar in Tempe, on Goth night (when it became… THE KILLING JAR). Since I fit in at a goth club like Dita Von Teese fits in at Christmas mass, my activities were… limited. I sweated out petrochemical derivatives and got hit with a giant pixie-stick, ground my teeth a lot and watched the dancers dance. And as I squatted in the corner of the darkened bar, spacetime unfolding itself endlessly into my midbrain, I came to some conclusions about dancing. I am not a talented dancer. I have neither the grace nor poise to truly master any physical activity, and my self-censoring prevents me from that kind of attention-inspiring behavior. Like singing, lovemaking, or cooking, one must first be unafraid of failure, then unafraid of work, then finally unafraid of attention in order to do it properly. Needless to say, it terrifies me.

All dance clubs are fundamentally the same: keep the music loud enough to dissuade conversation and the booze cheap enough to attract single women. Dancers at a goth club are _similar_ to dancers at other clubs. They are typically single with a high ratio of dancing females to akwardly stationary males, but unlike other club scenarios, there is an incredibly low percentage of dancer-coupling. There’s no “freak” or “waltz” or “hop” for this crowd, no slowdancing couple fingerfucking their way toward the front door or back corner, part of the mystique of this crowd is individuality, specifically loneliness, so the dancing is incredibly solitary, reed like onyx-clad bodies writhing seductively to nobody in particular. In the occasional flash of dance floor illumination, a crowd of late teens and twenty somethings move and react spastically, utterly without rhythm, without cohesion, eyes closed. And I watched this for two songs. Three. An hour. And I began to pick out individuals to watch in this mess, to see what they did, what their rhythm was, to see what kept them going in this apparently unselfconscious undulation.

And that’s when I saw it. I focused on a girl. Not a woman, mind you — a girl, she was young enough for girl. As the music moved her, she whooped and whirled her body, straight black hair waving over skin tight shirt, rings on fingers and chains on neck, eyes shut. And as the music swelled, the beeps and blorps of the fourty minute club mix winding down from its cilia-slaughtering peak, she performed a beautiful flourish. So in time with the music, so utterly crisp and perfect that my breath caught in my throat, a simple move, natural, so evocative of the beat. It showed off her every curve, the flow of her waist to the hip, the concavity between neck and shoulder, taut abdomen under gossamer top, her nipples brought to stark relief by strobing light. I was transfixed. So gorgeous she was, so lovely, and so unaware of it! I watched her and all other people disappeared from the earth for thirty glorious seconds, it was just her blind undulation and my hungry eyes. And then she did it again. It broke me out of the moment, just slightly, to listen for a queue in the music. Another flourish without a musical swell, and another. I watched as her once-perfect flourish dissolved into something she did two or three times per song, and her eyes, far from meditatively closed, were instead clamped hard, concentrating, and I could see at once what she was doing. Trying sooo hard to look cool. Trying to make each motion of her dance grand and final, like at one point she’d do it just right and the whole world would pause the scene, fade to black, and roll credits. It took me out of my reverie and I looked at the whole mass of skinny black jeans and buckles, each of them alone on that floor. Eyes clamped shut. Trying so hard, every song, to get that flourish right. And it at once went from looking like a crowd of seekers experiencing music physically to a floor of desperate, lonely people, trying hard to time their next grand flourish so it looks like it was effortless. Not practicing to perfect their dance, just trying over and over to FINISH it.

I told someone earlier today some pretty harsh stuff, because they are trying to live their life from grand flourish to grand flourish, like somehow the little shit will just get tied up without any work as long as you’ve exhausted yourself with the ridiculous and outlandish. Life isn’t a sprint. It’s not a movie. It’s not a mini series. It’s not dancing. It’s an ultramarathon of indeterminate length. There are no mile markers and there’s no rest stops, no finish line and no competitors, just an endless road that you must travel at your own speed. And if you are to make progress, you must work at it, you cannot simply close your eyes, stretch your arms and hope that today is the day you find the finish line.

Just in case you were curious why I went on a six month hiatus then posted two pictures of myself shirtless followed by another six month hiatus and then came back with an angry sounding thing about being bored: I’m frustrated, internets. Frustrated and kind of at the end of my tether.

2009 was not a banner year for me. It was harried, bipolar and awkward. I severed a very long term friendship at the end of 2008 and spent the winter huddling for warmth at the bottom of a liquor bottle. Once I had successfully navigated the Annual Birthday BlackoutDrunk, I immediately decided that I should let my penis do the thinking for a while. I’ve never been good with romanticals so I spent the bulk of Spring and Summer 2009 making really unfortunate relationship decisions and skill-less sexual advances on a series of increasingly awkward, drunken nights out. I ran out of money and got a new roommate who slowly made me feel uncomfortable in my own house. I was becoming increasingly tired of my job, which by this point was a 60 hour a week mess with two weeks of 24×7 on-call every three weeks. I was drunk every weekend night and exhausted. I was at the heaviest I’ve been in my adult life, constantly working, and miserable.

Finally, it seemed like nothing else could possibly make my life worse. My roommate, who was only tolerable because of his dependable rent payment, lost his job, so I was broke again. I wasn’t even having fun sex and I was still dealing with every type of needy, codependent clinger that I could. 4am phone calls, late night driving around with one eye squinted, trying to figure out the alchemy of getting a girl drunk enough to deign to have sex with me without running the risk of me blacking out or them being too drunk for me to be comfortable. It was just a fucking mess.

And then I met her. Things got very domestic for a while and that was nice. What I saw there was an end to these clumsy nights out, an end to the constant fucking over the people do to each other. It was one bright spot in the otherwise entirely pissfilled cavern of my life. My sister and her boyfriend moved into the house. The drinking tapered off. I lost some weight. I was happier. Life became OK for a time. I went into the winter with worries, with depression, but I _believed_, for the first time. I thought I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, but it turns out I was just catching the reflection off the train windshield.

As 2009 drew to a close, Samantha and I sat down and promised each other that 2010 wouldn’t fuck us over this way. That it would be the year that shit didn’t suck as much, that it would help wash away the memory of 2009 and leave us refreshed. It hasn’t. My relationship exploded in May. Or March. Or maybe it started in December. Or October. I don’t remember. The drinking ticked back up, up, and then over. The rollercoaster of bullshit had taken this brief respite to crank me up to the apex of an enormous drop, and it dropped me. So far this year I have dealt with… I don’t know. I can’t even list it, it just makes me angry. So far this year I have dealt with anger. Every minute. From the first thing when I wake up until finally I give up and go to bed. I’ve been accused of looking out for myself, of being closeted, of being too selfless, of being too silly, of being too serious. And each time I look at where the accusations come from, I can only heave a fucking sigh. I’ve been given every type of stupid fucking advice, from people who have zero credibility with me. I’ve been prodded and poked, I’ve been manipulated and passive aggressively pressured. There are a dozen things that my “friends” have said to me this year that made me wish that I were dead, instead of a human that had to rely on other humans. And this is from my friends. These are the ones who were worth talking to.

The only thing I have going right now is that this is all opt in. I’ve dropped a fair number of people out of my life in the past, it’s kind of what I do. But I’m doing it again. I won’t be treated this way by the people I spend time with.

I wrote this a month ago, and nothing has changed in the relationships I’ve mentioned. Nothing. Poke. Prod. Manipulate. Convince me it’s my fault. Convince me I’m crazy. Convince me I just don’t know what I’m thinking. Fuck you.

Your whole life story came out almost as an apology. A stifled cough in church, a formality. Something said often and meant rarely. Have a good day. Wish you were here. Happier now that you’re gone. You like animals. You like to laugh. Your memorized, normalized, homogenized two-line-bio. The you you want your coworkers to know about — a caricature of normalcy, the painted paper-mache shell of the-person-you-want-people-to-see. It’s boring. Your quiet mouse squeak fades into the murmur, your mask fades into the scenery, and I’m alone again, waiting to hear that echo and crash sound, the tear and gnash. Waiting to sit, eyes teary, reality sundered and eardrums raw with it. Waiting to savor the desperate grunt of something genuine fleeing through your ragged paper teeth.