mahiwaga

The weather really does make me want to crawl back into bed and call it a day. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Instead, with a mania partly fueled by caffeine, but significantly driven by some kind of raging insanity, I feel compelled to wander back out into the tangled mass of chrome and light precipitation that creeps outside my door.

It’s no joke. No one in Southern California knows how to drive in the rain. It’s really pathetic. I don’t understand it.

But on my excruciatingly long, slow commute from work, I got to thinking about this whole timing thing.

I’ve never been very good with timing, as most people who’ve known me for the past decade or so know. And it’s not like I have a knack for very bad timing, either. I just can’t get things right. I’m in dyssynchrony with the universe or something.

But somewhat surprisingly, this situation (or perhaps, more accurately, this non-situation) that I find myself skirting around the edges of and refusing to write about is the fortuitous result of coincidence. Things couldn’t’ve transpired any earlier (what with redacted being in a relationship and all) but any later and I probably wouldn’t have all this time to ruminate, ponder, and over-analyze everything.

I discovered an amusing blog post by Kahlee about why ‘nice guys’ finish last, and yeah, it’s true, most guys who think they’re nice guys aren’t really nice guys. They’re just unattractive shlubs who expect a woman to just dig their emo-ness and whining, and who have serious co-dependency issues. Because, come on. The pendulum swings both ways (so to speak), and just like it’s feminist dogma that a woman doesn’t need a man to be complete (the whole “fish and bicycle” thing), it’s also true that a man doesn’t really need a woman so long as he’s got at least one hand, some type of lubricant, and free access to porn.

Or, to summarize the one enlightening epiphany I’ve had in the last 15 years or so: I am going to live the rest of my life alone and unloved, and when I die, no one is going to miss me until they notice that the work is starting to pile up and I haven’t been pulling my weight at the office. If I’m extremely lucky, death will be swift and painless.

Oh well. It’s only life, after all.

I did try the whole hedonism thing for a while. No one cares what you look like if you wave around a bunch of benjamins (I’m’a tell you what Wu told me: cash rules everything around me) and while it’s kind of depressing to only be able to have sex with skanky hos with chipped teeth who charge by the hour, in smoke-filled motel rooms with busted-ass beds, sometimes the porn just doesn’t cut it, and it’s nice to have a warm body underneath you or on top of you for all of those 30 seconds. And, in reality, once you realize that sex is relatively easy to obtain no matter what you look like, it really sort of loses its charm and novelty.

In all seriousness, though, it was really just booze and drugs, the latter only rarely, and never with the use of needles.

OK, OK, perhaps I over-exaggerate things for effect, but you get the picture. Even the messy, vomit-smelling oblivion of drunkenness never really did much except drain my wallet. It was a decent way to kill time in the Midwest during Winter (otherwise known as all the months between October and May) but you couldn’t do it every day of the week (although we damn well tried our best!)

I was fucking doomed from the start. I’ve always dug this quote from Louis-Ferdinand Céline (translated from French):

Even I am shocked by the idea that I’ve somehow survived 15 years of this sort of despair.

The other thing that Kahlee’s post makes me finally, finally understand is what N was trying to tell me all those years ago when she cheated on my sad, emo, co-dependent ass by fucking some dude she knew for all of fifteen minutes: lust wins. Unconditional love is all well and good, but if she doesn’t think you’re hot, it’s just not going to happen. And it’s true. Even the nicest girls who aren’t superficial still want the hot guy, provided that he is a decent human being.

That last part, of course, is the kicker, and the only way I have an in with women of significant attractiveness. Given enough exposure and enough alcohol, I think I can manage to worm my way into any woman’s heart, and as long as I can keep her away from hot guys who are nicer than I am, I just might have a chance. It is therefore in my best interests to go around promulgating the notion that all hot guys are assholes. This is, of course, not true. (Any statement that claims ‘all’, ‘none’, ‘always’, or ‘never’ is false. Gödel would be proud of that one.) But the same story happens over and over again, much to my amusement. If you fall for that hot guy, be prepared to get shafted! (OK, that was probably low-hanging fruit. I’ll aim higher next time.)

My downfall is probably the fact that I can’t stand anyone feeling sorry for me. I mean, if it means having sex with me, I can probably stand it for at least 30 seconds, maybe even a full minute. But eventually it does get on the nerves. There’s something abysmal about being treated like some mentally-retarded and crippled pet rabbit. Eventually, even the most empathetic woman gets sick of that kind of patheticness anyway, no matter how cute it seemed at the time.

I suppose one could look at things from an extremely optimistic standpoint: at least most of the women whom I fell for, and who had no interest in me in That Way™ were decent human beings who didn’t lead me on, and who let me know the score fairly early. What’s a little suicidal depression among friends, right?

I am afraid that this conversation will eventually come up with redacted, like it usually does whenever I fall for someone who is way out of my league (which is essentially every time) and then what? Back to my personal existential hell, I guess.

What prompted all this soul-searching? I suppose it’s the fact that redacted has hooked up with someone, and for some reason, I feel like this is it. She found her One™. Whatever chance I had (and I realize the idea of me having a chance with redacted is an incredible assumption) is long gone and completely evaporated. To quote the Comic Book Guy: Oh, I’ve wasted my life.

The other thing is that another of my friends whom I’ve known for the longest time told me a little while ago that she was going to get married next year, and I realize that I probably squandered my opportunities with her as well (that is, if there was even any opportunities, which is always the big “if”)

I have essentially run out of single female friends with whom I might’ve had remote, perhaps infinitesimal—yet nonetheless finite—chances of hooking up with.

But, instead of aiming lower, I manage to fall for someone who is totally way out of my league. Extraordinarily beautiful. Wonderfully brilliant. Authentically caring. And magically creative. She could literally have any guy she wanted. There’s just no way in hell. I don’t know what the hell I’m thinking.

I am reminded by Bram that this is typical of my behavior. (Man, I really miss Bram and Ben. They always knew exactly when to kick me in the head so that I’d stop acting like a dumbass.) Go for something that you know you’re going to fail at spectacularly. Because it’s safe. If you know how it’s going to turn out, then you don’t have to deal with the messiness of uncertainty. If it doesn’t kill you, how bad could it be, right?

And I can tell you, I’m pretty damn good at failing miserably. It’s a wonder that I managed to survive life as long as I have.

Whoo. It was good to get that out of my system. I don’t know why I never learned to play this game the way it was supposed to be played. Maybe because I was never meant to be a player. Darwin decided early on that I shouldn’t be allowed to contribute to the gene pool, perhaps.

Given all that tripe, I did have a decent day today. I managed to get in an arterial line after three tries. The attending that I’m working with—who has a reputation for making interns cry—thinks that I’m probably no dumber than a box of rocks. (Which, believe me, is a complement.)

Small triumphs. Little victories.

One of these days, I might manage to get a little self-confidence. What is this world coming to?

8 Asians introduces me to the acronym SDU, which means single, desperate, and ugly. I find this acronym highly amusing since I find it so self-applicable.

I am also reminded of something that I think S (not S.!) told me once: desperate is so not sexy. Or maybe it was N. I sometimes get all these women who rejected me mixed up.

So I have, in fact, tried to cultivate the demeanor of someone who is not desperate. It’s been so long that I’ve almost forgotten that I’ve been consciously trying to do it.

But sometimes reality pimp-slaps you upside the head. I mean, doesn’t the fact that I’ve been single all this time undermine the notion that I’m not desperate?

I suppose I could just put a spin on it. I just haven’t met the right girl yet. Riiight. That’s the ticket. My standards are just too high. Yeah. Or I just haven’t been looking.

I mean, there is some truth to that last notion. I have been living a sort of twilight existence this last half decade or so. I work all the time. I deal with death and disease. That alone is enough to sort of anesthetize the soul, really.

And then bad shit happens. When my dad had his big fat LAD, I took it pretty badly. Mostly because I held it all in for quite a while. I actually stopped blogging for almost two months. But that shit got me thinking about mortality big time, and I don’t think I’ve ever really gotten over it. My dad is doing pretty well, but none of us are getting any younger. The fact that there aren’t any little kids at Christmas kind of gets me down. If I were ever to have kids, I’d want them to meet my dad and remember him. But only Atropos knows when those threads run out, really.

But that reflex to just shut down and burrow in gets me every time.

What really threw my mind for a curve ball was the fact that my cousin D died about a year and a half ago. She was just a little younger than me, 29 at the time. I had gone to her wedding just a few years before. We weren’t the closest of cousins, but we pretty much grew up together. I still remember those days when we were all little kids and we’d go out to Fallbrook to my aunt-and-uncle’s place and play badminton or something. Or when they’d come out to Harbor City or even to Eagle Rock. When I finally moved down to San Diego, I saw her a bit more. We had sushi about two months before she died. That was the last time I saw her. We made a deal to hang out more.

That’s probably the last time I couldn’t stop crying. Even though I tried to let it all out, and not hold anything back, it still ached as I wept, like something was yanking my insides out. I remember that awful clawing feeling at my chest as they lowered her casket into the ground, as I watched her brother, her mom, and her dad just bawling, just trying to hold each other up. Just thinking about it fucking kills me.

I walled-up pretty good that time, cocooned in my own ball of self-pity and dread.

I think about the people I’m taking care of lately. You would think, that after all this time, I would’ve gotten used to death. But maybe it’s just the reflex of the living, to fear death. There’s one poor woman whose lungs have just been obliterated by smoking, and now she’s on a ventilator. The chances of her getting off the ventilator are pretty much slim-to-none. It’s guaranteed to be slow, drawn-out, painfully protracted experience. Today, her brother saw her for the first time. The last he had heard was that she had gotten discharged and was actually doing better. Unfortunately, that lasted for all of twelve hours, and she ended up back with us. I had a hard time looking him in the eye, telling him what had been going on, and what we had been doing. That look of shock on his face kind of haunts me, to tell you the truth. You’d think I’d know how to deal with that by now. At least I don’t choke up any more and need someone to hold my hand and help me out.

Then there’s this other lady whose life has been seriously unnaturally prolonged. She showed up in 2006 with lung cancer that was already all over the place. Metastatic to the brain, the bones, the liver. When you’re at that stage, we usually measure life expectancy in weeks. Months if you’re extremely lucky.

But she persevered, and demanded everything that modern medicine could throw at her. And we probably crossed a line somewhere. That point when everything you’re doing can only hurt. Sure, you can intervene, but in the end, it doesn’t really mean a goddamned thing.

Somehow, she convinced a surgeon to open up her chest and lop off the part of her lung that was tattered and torn up by tumor. Never mind that the mets in her brain were getting bigger. She got hard-core quasi-experimental chemotherapy that left her weak as a kitten.

She got two extra years out of the bargain. Maybe it was worth it. But I don’t know. Ultimately, we’re just delaying the inevitable. She’s dying. Not in the existential way we’re all dying, but actively dying. The cancer has managed to chew it’s way through the part of the airway that the surgeons had to sew up after lopping off part of her lung. And she and her family aren’t even close to accepting the undeterrable fact that she just ain’t gonna make it. You always have the chance to die very badly—with ribs cracked apart, blood spewing from your mouth, shit and piss all over the place, and you struggling for air, or die well—peacefully, with dignity, and a chance for your loved ones to remember you at rest. I hope she makes the right choice. (Oh yes, there is a right choice.)

You would think, this far into things, I’d have gotten used to it.

Maybe, it’s because, ultimately, we’re all narcissistic, and I can’t stop thinking about that day when I finally come to a full, complete stop.