Fear and Loathing

Mission 1. Hook up with someone as old as my mom (54) and as young as my sister (20) in a month.
Mission 2. Live a completely gay lifestyle (without the gay sex) for a month.
Mission Three: Live without an apartment for a month.

I am in a bit of a funk today. The absolute combination of physical suffering and cerebral disconnect. I feel like a child learning to walk, trying to summon the mental and physical capacity to take a step, to instinctually move ahead, beyond a point of reference.

I’ve slept in my car the last two nights, which means I can only do it once more based on my own guidelines. My back is sore, and it never gets like that. I was hoping to have a bigger car for this, but fate would just not cooperate. Derek fell through for the car buy/pickup in Vegas this weekend. What makes it even worse was that I already relegated that machine to my past. Seeing it, driving it just makes me feel like this month is not progressing.

Maybe I need to take a step back to take two forward. I’ve always subscribed to that thinking, so why not? Tonight, I think I need to visit someone from my past. Someone who has felt me, but doesn’t really know me. That is the interpersonal level that I need right now. To be loved by a relative stranger.

Sleeping in my car has not given me any insight, just physical pain. It is just like waiting at a stoplight, except I’m doing it for 6 hour stretches in the crisp night air. Sure, it’s amusing to see a guy camped out in a Porsche rather than an 80’s K-car stacked with reams of paper and clothes, but I can’t enjoy it. Because I am living the life rather than abstracting to the folly of it.

I owe a lot of this present feeling to Vegas. There was too much hyper-realism everywhere I looked. My family friend Jeff from PA was getting married to someone equally as distant. Our conversation was as misguided as a conversation could be. How can you catch up on the last five years of your life in a few breaths? I didn’t even know where to begin. I tried to keep the dialogue as present as possible, so I wouldn’t have to discuss my real estate decisions, “ladies” in my life or if I saw “so-and-so” from high school. My small talk in this area was intentionally aloof and belligerent. I only spoke of what I saw at that moment.

I am not in love. But when I am, I do not intend to predicate my wedding date with fake stripper tits in my face. It is a senseless and confusing spectacle. Is this what I have to look forward to? Rarifying the past and diluting the future. Ostentatiously slapping the mistake of marriage in the face of a friend weeks before he commences the union? God, Las Vegas had made me weary. Even tits seemed off the menu for me. Once again, I was getting too cerebral for my own good. The pain of my last visit greeted me at the state line and has stuck on me like a bad sunburn.

In Vegas, it seemed like everyone was on a path but me. Even M.C. got along better with these guys than I did. He and Derek became fast friends. My brother bought M.C. three lap dances and drank with him till 4:30 Saturday night. But they were in another Vegas than the one I was wading in. They were splashing in the spirited banality of dancing fountains, pirates, and God-awful fake volcanos. I was in the progressive nudity of my own fear and self-loathing. Fuckin’ Rob Lowe.

Sometimes I wish there was an event to reference back to my relative depression. A flashpoint that I can go back and fix, like a leaky faucet or a misplaced keystroke. But life is never that easy. Moods are triggered by a phone call from your mom, a traffic ticket and a misplaced electric bill--an unreturned phone call, a computer glitch and spilled cocktail. These collective moments make up life, both the good and the bad.

Tonight, I will not sleep in my car. I will sleep where rest does not live. I will take a page from the past and read from it by candlelight in the hopes that tommorrow, all that will remain from the moment will be a bookmark. Tonight, I will retreat and in the morning, I will attack.I will awaken a new man, filled with spirit worthy of your readership. Tomorrow, Rob Lowe will dance.