Which about sums it up. If not very succulently or even coherently. One day I was thirty, I did a bunch of things that I do every single day of every single week. I went to bed, the next day I was thirty-one, and I did all the things I do on that day every week and felt more or less exactly the same as I did every other week while doing those things. But the number lingers in my head. Like there's a hidden message to it, something lurking within the curvatures of its digits. But there probably isn't and I'm just thinking on it too hard. Thirty-one isn't all that different from thirty, which was different from twenty-nine, but because external changes forced internal changes, and my life was radically altered in many--almost overwhelmingly positive--ways. And twenty-nine was different from twenty-eight because I wasn't passing out in a drunken stupor in anymore surrounded by burnt-black heroin spoons. Thirty-two will be different and it will be the same. I'm largely all right with that. Forty-nine will probably be largely the same, with more morning smoker's cough and less hair. Which, okay, I can live with that.

Getting old(er) isn't anything like what I thought it would be when I was young(er). It's largely been enjoyable and fascinating. For the most part its been a process of pushing the corners of what my brain can think and process out further and further and knowing things with an ever increasing level of certainty, limited only by the only really intelligent thing I know with any certainty: there's always something new I can learn. The most enjoyable thing about aging? The increasing ease with which my abilities can achieve the demands of my ego coupled with the increasing reasonableness and self-control exhibited by that ego.

It's quite nice, all told.

Work:
I am still working. Still trading precious labor resources for seemingly inadequate wage-monies. Ah, market forces. More on this later. But in the meantime, the salient details are this: I was out of work for an entire month. Then I was rehired in a new capacity at reduced hours. My new job is managing a small, suburban business improvement district . One of those not-quite-but-almost Rust Belt, blue collar towns, with a quaint downtown shopping district dying on the vine, white kids playing with heroin, and police arresting black teenagers for vandalism that gets labeled as harmless fun when the white kids (on heroin) do it. Pretty common sort of place in my working experience, although the local politics of the joint are shockingly brutal and petty, even by small-town/small-mind standards.

But the experience has been, overall, fantastic. Tonight I'm working late into the night on the first major event, which I pretty much put together from nothing. New experiences this week include manipulating news coverage and placing large ad buys. Which is surprisingly easy. Had I known I would've started sooner.

Things that are not Work:
With extra hours on hand (and the complementary less money such hours provide) I decided to go back to school. Thinking--obviously--it would be like that fantastic eighties comedy starring Rodney Dangerfield. What was it called? Caddyshack. Instead it's been like that horrible eighties comedy starring Rodney Dangerfield called Back to School. I keep calling Kurt Vonnegut's people to see if he's willing to make a guest-starring appearance in my life, but they haven't gotten back to me. Possibly because he is dead.

Actually, school's been fantastic. I link and quote Atlantic senior editor Ta-Neishi Coates a lot, mainly because in the dying days of my wilderness years, when the best my ravaged brain could summon was the intellectual capacity to acquire more whiskey and the barest vitamins necessary to keep from lapsing into a vegetative state (typically found in bar nachos) he was one of the few places I still found intellectual stimulation. But also, and more seriously, because the guy is just a drop-dead beautiful wordsmith, and rarely a week goes by that he doesn't put some emotion or thought I've been struggling to vocalize into just pitch-perfect summation. Relevant example:

I didn't come from the soci-economic background Coates is referring to there, and would be lying if I tried to front that I was struggling towards intellectualism in a household or cultural milieu (middle class suburban white) that didn't foster and encourage it. But at the same time, my intellectualism turned to bitter cynicism early on, and I purposefully left behind those homes and that culture to explore--at varying points--homelessness, violence, criminality, substance abuse, and a modest working class existence. I acquired enough knowledge for it be dangerous and rejected concepts of actual knowledge or truths, and went out looking for--at first--radically different lives and lifestyles to what I had been raised in, and when those proved ultimately unappealing, easy shortcuts to rewards that mainstream society offered without having to put in the work.

And all those journeys and seeking mostly led me to depressing dive bars and dope spots filled with people mostly exactly like me: barroom philosophers and addict autodidacts. Which should, and are (at least by me), to be respected. Nothing gets me interested like listening to the sixty year old x-junkie tending bar expound on why Gabriel Garcia Marquez*** wrote the best novel of the 20th century. But, sadly, that doesn't confer much. It doesn't open doors to jobs populated by people like that, or let you put something on your resume that commands a 5 to 10% bump in salary, or even really give you the knowledge and deeper understanding that just reading Marquez's work on your own. Which isn't to say it has no value. It's just to say that there are other ways to achieve that value that confer their own rewards with it as well.

All of which is the long way around the barn to saying: I was a remarkably arrogant teenager and young adult. I rejected the notion that society had anything to teach me and embraced nihilism. When nihilism didn't accomplish anything lasting, I rejected that and embraced, in essence, goals and plans predicated on the notion that I was inherently smarter and therefore better than every one else and that I could uncover some heretofore unknown path to success or riches or something that would make me happy. When none of the worked I chucked most of what I was doing, started doing things different and saw that not only is there always something remarkable and new and exciting to learn, but that the learning of it is a reward in and of itself, regardless of what status, wealth, or access it eventually grants you.

All of which is an only slightly shorter, but still quite long way of saying: I'm enjoying higher education immensely. I achieved a 4.0 my first semester, and have been recommended for the school's honors program, in addition to picking up some (minor) awards for my fiction writing. I could fall back on cynicism and dismiss these achievements by citing the fact that it's just a small city college, and that in the academic (and professional) world it might not amount to much, but it's a start and it does matter. It matters to me.

And if this sounds vain or self-serving, or meglomanical, or--yes, still, probably always--arrogant. Well. Fuck you. Because it wasn't until I was sitting here typing it that I fully realized many of these things about my own life. So this--at least this section, here--isn't so much a blog as it is my own belated birthday present to myself. If you enjoyed reading it, well, so much the better. I remain an arrogant adult, inclined to giving myself late birthday presents that serve as reminders of how fantastic my life actually is. Lest I forgot.

Now, moving on.

(Sick + Hatefuck being classy and mysterious, somewhere in downtown Pittsburgh, New Year's Eve 2011)

It's been almost a year since this thing started. On church steps and in church basements (at a Jonathan Richman show, actually), and various other places. Circling each other like sharks swimming through blood-red water****. In the nine + 1/2 months of it there's been long talks in the dark and tears and raised voices (for various reasons) and cute nicknames and funny (to us) in-jokes and all the things that happen in good relationships and some of the things that happen in bad relationships, but mostly there's just been a lot of time spent holding each other and feeling something resembling contentedness.

This is probably the closest I've ever come to an actual adult relationship.

I've been in bad relationships, and I've been in bad relationships that--often through sheer desire and godawful will--have been forced into vaguely resembling working relationships until they finally exploded in a horrorshow of hurt feelings and recriminations. I've done really horrible, fucked-up things to people I love. Not past tense. People that I still love to this day, that I think of and smile, even through the terrible things that came between us, because I've been lucky enough in my life to meet an incredibly broad variety of people and, in the grand scheme of things, lost very few of them for any reason. The ones that I've lost through my own general ineptitude at being human, I can at least be happy about the fact that--jesus--they exist in a world full of amazing and interesting and fascinating humans that, on the whole, make the world a better place for having them in it*****.

And Hatefuck is one of those people. With the added benefit of always being able to make me smile and laugh and having eyes (not pictured) that I can just lose myself entirely in. And there's awful shit, too, and moments when I want to scream at her over something she's done that makes me angry (and times I have), and times I want to just be left alone because she's hurt me and I know all the same things are true for her, as well. But most times, more often than not, she makes me unbelievably happy.

I think the trick of it (And really, sorry if the existential self-exploration leading to deep realization is grating by now, but I kinda don't give a fuck. I am old[er], and prone to self-reflection regardless of age. Also? Get off my lawn.) is that I long thought good relationships were effortless, in the sense that the lack of work required was what made them good. I was relatively convinced that a good enough mate meant synchronicity to a degree that precluded arguments and fears and scars all running into one another and triggering deep-seated paranoias and panics. Which, I suppose, can and does happen. Mainly to white middle-class people who marry the first person they fuck before they get all scarred up by living life and they die in their seventies ranch home after a lifetime lived in off-white and beige tones having boring missionary sex every other Friday night after ABC's family hour sitcoms go off and before their kids start to resent them or after they get home before curfew.

What do I know?

My point is, at least for me, this isn't true. Relationships require work and patience and actually being committed to the person you're with and putting in the effort to stay with them. Which is probably something you figured out a long time ago, but I better late then never, right?

And that's where her and I are. And it's glorious.

And at the end of the summer Hatefuck is (most likely) relocating to the west coast to attend law school in San Francisco, the city that makes her happier than this city.

And I, well, I'm not.

Maybe more on this later, but it doesn't warrant dwelling on these days. Just know that most of the time, The Sick + Hatefuck Romanace feels a lot like this:



And every night is another great one night stand. And it looks like nothing like LA. So, really, win/win.