A Life Not Spent

"There is one good: knowledge, and one evil: ignorance." -Socrates I live in DC. I'm 22. I love art, though I'm no artist. I write to get my soul back, since I seemed to have lost it somewhere between binge drinking and working a mindless job. These are my media: creative fiction and nonfiction, prose, poetry, photography and an occasional rant. This site is more or less anonymous, as I'd prefer to keep my personal writing away from people I know. Strangers are cool, though (as is constructive criticism)!

[alifenotspent-blog]

If you pass by Dupont Circle, take note.

Lambda rising has closed. A great symbol of gay progressivism, reduced to a Comfort One shoes.

[alifenotspent-blog]

This post makes me realize how dissatisfied I am.

I'm waiting. Not sure what for, though I suppose I’ll know eventually. Once and many more times I thought the waiting was over. High school was my first life, and I perpetually dreamed of what would come after. Something grand, I think. I did leave my sad little hometown to go to college. In my 16 year old head that is grand enough. In my second life, the life on campus, I once again became restless for something grand. Then I graduated and became my own benefactor, and that's life three.  My third life is simultaneously the most boring and most interesting life of all (though I would not classify it as grand). In some ways I am done waiting because I can look back and actually see what I was waiting for, and those things have come to pass. Independence, love, a new way of seeing the people and world around me. But there’s more to come, more to wait for: a fourth life, and maybe a fifth if I’m lucky. They are lives where I’m not necessarily done waiting, but I can finally start to not mind as much. Lives where the vague images I see in dreams are reality -- of golden architecture haunted by ghosts of men and women and great art, and no permanent address, and a journal that’s not full of complaints about the mundane but something else, something bolder. I don’t usually see anyone with me, but that’s okay. People usually just stay in one life and don’t cross the border onto the next. Maybe there will be someone; they just haven’t entered the dreams of my next life yet. But dreams are just dreams. Scattered moving images reflecting subconscious fears and desires. They aren’t a premonition of a fourth or fifth life. But I’ll keep waiting. Nothing better to do, I suppose.

[alifenotspent-blog]

Someday, but not today.

Who would have thought it possible to be lonely surrounded by friends and living with a boyfriend in a huge metropolis? But I am, so no use splitting hairs. I can blame myself for part of the loneliness. I don’t accept invitations to go out nearly as much as I used to because – get this – I just want to be alone. Or I’m so twitchy and on edge that I can’t go out because I’m continuously crying. Then there’s the Boy. Boy is boring, but he didn’t use to be. People can change so much in just a few short years. The man who craved adventure as much as I do is gone. He has been replaced by the model for a cable package commercial, immersing himself in gadgets and various sports games. Late into the night I lay in bed crying or fantasizing about other Boys and how it would feel to just get up, leave the apartment, find them, and fuck them. I think it’d feel pretty good.

I think about my job and I get a punch of butterflies to the gut. My manager, Alex, has been the cause of a double daily intake of my anti-anxiety medication since he arrived a few short months ago. Thinking about him makes me sneer. I hate that son of a bitch. He is so like my dad, and my reaction to him is so like my reaction to my dad. Dad/Alex: Screaming insults will somehow make you motivated to do better work! Me: Continuously striving to impress you will somehow, someday work, and when it doesn’t, I’ll keep trying! Please like/love me!

Too bad. I really wanted to leave that childhood behind.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been happy – so many years and stories ago. Six years might as well mean permanent. I will always miss that girl. Turning into a woman changed her. When I see her smile in photographs I cry because her face is so lit up and carefree, while that same face looks downtrodden and resigned when the woman she became smiles. I will never be that girl again. I have no talents to speak of, and even the things I love I’m not good at. Writing. Drawing. Graphic Design. History, my first academic love, is useless when it comes to getting a paycheck. Then there’s the eating disorder and the mental illness. What exactly is the fucking point of living like this? Why would I stay? What and who is there to stay for? Friends who live so far away they forget about me. A family that does things to my medication dosages that even Alex can’t. A boyfriend who I’m not sure I love anymore.

Nah, I think it’s time to go. But where? Now that’s a question that makes me smile. Maybe just a small town in upstate New York or Pennsylvania. I’ll work as a bartender and bike to a lake and go for an evening swim. I’ll rent a small house for the price of a week’s worth of groceries in this damn city. Maybe the house will be on the lake. I’ll have big comfy couches and walls upon walls of bookshelves. I’ll have a deck that overlooks the water and some nights I’ll fall asleep reading on an Adirondack chair, then wake up to a cool mist over the still water.

In the winter I’ll build fires in my stone fireplace and read even more. I’ll talk to locals at the bar as I serve them drinks and hear stories from people passing through. I’ll make just enough. I’ll miss things like new clothes, but I don’t think fashion will matter much in a place like this.

I’ll still travel. No reason not to. I can save up for the trips I’ve always wanted to take. The overnight train from Moscow to St. Petersburg. India. Thailand. Italy again (it’s just so beautiful, why not?).

I hope to meet someone. Preferably someone who hates sports, but that may be a bit of a stretch. Someone who has a sheepdog but doesn’t want kids.

I hope I keep writing and getting better at it. Maybe my story will be interesting enough someday to put in a book, though I doubt it.

[alifenotspent-blog]

Goodbye, House.

I grabbed my bag and turned to leave when I realized I was turning my back on this room for the last time. I turned back to face it and tried desperately to drink in every last shadow and corner, to memorize the exact shades of blue and green on the walls -- as if I might forget the room I slept in for ten years. I touched the wanesgoat on my closet, wishing I could talk to it, say goodbye. I finally cried, though I don't know why. This was the house in which I fought with my dad relentlessly and violently. I was abused, hopeless, and alone in this house, and I was grateful when I left to start a life elsewhere. I had only been back to visit a handful of times, and it had never felt like home. Why now? Why should I be sad to say goodbye for the last time? I clutched the door frame, trying to communicate my last goodbye to an empty, soulless room. And then I turned away, a goodbye not worth my time.

[alifenotspent-blog]

I was brought up to believe that is was shameful to not be able to "deal with the real world." Those kinds of people became professors or worked for nonprofits. They weren't strong enough to deal with the way life works. This is how life works: Do well in school. Go to a good college. Get a good job. Work hard. Be competitive. Make money. Take the occasional vacation. Retire, and die. But we have been lied to: that formula for success is not a formula for anything but living a completely ordinary and easily forgotten existence. And not being able to deal with "the real world" is not shameful because the real world was made up. It is fake and unyielding. It is uncreative and abusive. If suffocates your soul and tells you to abandon your dreams because your dreams aren't practical in this so-called "real" world. Advertisement propagandize us, but not as much as our communities and jobs. Communities that look down on small homes and old clothes. People that would rather call the police about a homeless man than offer him food. Jobs that tell us our office is our home and our co-workers are family. This is sinful and disgraceful. Our home is not where we sit completing tasks for a paycheck. Our home is a sanctuary - a sacred place filled with sacred people (our actual family). To insinuate that we make our jobs sacred is a sad and pathetic notion made up by those who couldn't deal with what the real world actually is: a beautiful opportunity to discover each other in an effort to leave the world better than we found it. It is not politics. It is not great civilizations or empires. It is not war or even peace. It is not a spreadsheet that will raise one share a fraction of a percent. It is not most things in the world because people made up most of those things to avoid confronting their humanity and the humanity of others. Because that, not anything else, is too real. And it is a travesty that the things that are so precious have been miscarried into something so fake, and yet so often thought to be real. So no, I can't deal with what our parents, teachers, counselors, and pastors call the real world. I am not ashamed; I am simply trying to be real.

[alifenotspent-blog]

Across the Anacostia

You can always tell when a train has crossed over into a bad neighborhood. It's not the riders; it's the train. It suddenly looks a little more dirty and worse for wear, like it's not bothering to dress up.

[alifenotspent-blog]

Only a Nerd...

How often do I miss school? Every day. All the time. Every labor day when it's so muggy and hot I can barely stand it, but there's a feeling of oncoming cool, and I know where I should be but am not. Every June when I look forward to summer then realize there's nothing after it. Every day when I wake up and come home bored. Every time I catch a kid in a backwards baseball cap cramped in the corner of a crowded bus studying some messy history notes. In august when the stores display their shiny back to school wares. I miss it then and now and probably always, but most especially when I realize I don't get to go back to that time. Even as a I grasp at pseudo-intellectual articles about world affairs and textbooks gathering dust on my bookshelf, I know it's not the same. I am losing my ability to absorb, and I have little to show for my time as an adult. 

[alifenotspent-blog]

Night after night...

9:30pm. The television is radiating onto my cross-legged figure with images of Futurama. I'm five episodes in and still waiting. 11:00pm. Bender is getting on my nerves. One more episode. 11:30pm. No sign of you. I go to bed and fall asleep easily. 12:30am. I hear you enter the apartment and quickly fall back asleep. 4:00am. The bedroom door creaks open, and you finally join me in bed. Why didn't you come sooner?

You said you kissed me when you came home, but I didn't feel it.

[alifenotspent-blog]

Silent, Still, Alone.

There's a time of day when everything falls silent and still, and you know, not feel, that you're alone. You may be at work or at the gym. Grocery shopping. Staring at the little lights behind your eyelids as you try to sleep flat on your back at 4am while the person next to you snores quietly, and you know you should feel content but you're too alone to feel anything at all.

It's the time we realize that we have nothing but ourselves. The people around us don't exist, except to themselves, and they, too, are alone. No one believes it, but they all know it. For one moment each day, we all know, without doubt, that there is no one else. We float through a world on our own, inventing our surroundings and creating characters for our own universe.

Of course it's all real. The world is real. The others are real. But they are not with us, and we are not with them. We are I. We are no one, and we are everyone. Alone.

[alifenotspent-blog]

How To Be Alone (by andyradorfman)

[talkativolive-deactivated201703]

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

— Walt Whitman (via talkativolive)

[alifenotspent-blog]

Beltway Escape

Drive, just go. As fast as you can. Fly over the traffic and land in the country of rolling green hills and haystacks. Keep going. The light dims, becoming purple and blue and finally black. Then it’s all yellow and orange dots getting closer, getting farther. We are not weary travelers. We are relieved escapees. We keep going and going, further away from all that plagues us and keep us up at night. We escape the nightmares and appreciate the real black above us. Uncorrupted and quiet.

[alifenotspent-blog]

An Open Letter

I saw you again last night. Not a surprise; we see each other an awful lot these days. Doesn't make things easier. I thought the more I saw you, the more immune to your cock-eyed smile and fuck-all personality I might become. I hoped I might want to wrap my arms around your waist and smile up at you adoringly a little less. Thought maybe the desire to kiss you and wind my hand around your balding head would fade. I don't want to look at you like that, but that goddamn smile and your rare but sweet remarks make my stomach turn and my cheeks blush, and all I can do is think about telling you how much your words mean to me. 

But you're not good for me. A good person perhaps, but someone too addictive. You make me forget what I already have. You make me ignore that you're wrong, wrong, wrong for me -- too strong, too honest, too brash. What is bad for me is what makes me want you. 

Then you look at me with that mischievous grin of yours, and I can't remember why I shouldn't push you up a wall and kiss you like they do in the movies. But I'm too old for schoolyard crushes and daydreams about stolen kisses and rough sex.

Oh, but it feel so good to lust again. Perhaps that's good enough, and I'll never have to tell you or touch you. But just in case, just on the tiny chance you find this and wonder, Erik Rizzo, this is for you. Come find me.

[alifenotspent-blog]

Starbucks, Adams Morgan

Backs to backs, eyes down. No one faces each other. Why doesn't anyone look at anyone else? Even people against walls have turned their chairs inwards, as if having their side exposed to the other patrons' backs is a frightening prospect. 

Coffee houses used to be social places, places to talk and exchange ideas. Very bourgeois. But the bourgeoisie has changed. Now we like solitude, and we shun intellectual conversation in favor of sanctuary as we sip $5 lattes and read bestsellers. (My copy of The Dante Club is in front of me, kept shut by the iPhone sitting on top of it.)

An industrial blender church loudly and no one turns. They read. They write. They don't look up.

[alifenotspent-blog]

Yor blog is gorgeous and your words are brilliant. I like you.

Wow - thank you so much!! I quite enjoy yours as well. :D 

[alifenotspent-blog]

Somehow this ended up on the NYT bestseller list. It incorporates a mary sue heroine, who happens to be the best witch of her generation, and a vampire, with whom she falls in love.

So, Twilight for adults who don't want to admit they read Twilight (or wanted to). 

Keep in mind I didn't read this book, but I was intrigued by its presence on the bestseller list. Read the one star reviews. Hi-larious.

[alifenotspent-blog]

Adulthood

I used to be creative. I wrote with the passion and vigor only a naive teenager can have. I drew, I made music, I laughed, I sang. I saw beauty. Everywhere.

Now I ride cabs to bars and take the bus to work. I sit at a desk and stare a screen. I have a business card - 1,000 of them to be exact.

I try, I really do. I have a Magritte calendar and a little stuffed owl on my desk. It hoots if you squeeze its belly. Small reminders. When I arrive in the lonely morning in this lonely office I sometimes sit and read until I hear the door-slam of another drone walking in. I hide the book and wait eight hours until I can open it again and pretend like this all isn't real.

Sometimes I look at schools online. I drool at the PhD programs for History like they're candy. I want them as bad as a child wants a puppy. But I can't have one right now. "Maybe when you're older and you're responsible enough." Be patient. 

I don't think I'll ever get the puppy. I'll probably always be bored. Things may change; I might drive to work and stop going to bars. 

Or maybe I'll burn every last one of those motherfucking business cards.