It's a good thing I don't have a gun tonight. Everywhere I go I'm pounded by my own failure. I live in a city full of successful people, all of whom have figured out some way to game life into a nice house, a nice spouse, things to do, family, friends, dogs, retirement, god, country, peers, travel, security, healthcare, dentistry, reason for optimism...it goes on and on.
I walk around a gathering of thousands of people my age, in my city, they all look so interesting to me, beautiful women, people talking, laughing. And there I am, and I can walk around this thing for hours and not find anyone I know except macdaddy, who knows everyone and would probably be nice to me if I had an infected 3rd eye coming out of the side of my forehead because he's just that nice of a guy. No, I come home to an empty house. The love is gone, the dog is shot, the career is shit, the motorcycle is a peice of shit, the truck shakes on the freeway and will not be fixed no matter how much money I throw at it like an idiot fool, the house is ugly and fucking hot as shit in the summer, and there is no betterment on the horizon. All these people I know, there's some miraculous story of things just falling into place. Oh we met on the chairlift and her family has tons of money! Oh, we met at (random place) and it turns out blah blah blah. It all works out for them: the end. I wouldn't believe it was true in my position except that I remember when things fell into place for me, for years. I never tried to make shit happen in my life in taos, I just lived it and it worked out. I move to this huge city and now I'm in an ocean, in a life raft in the pacific, water water everywhere and not a drop to drink. I can look around at almost any time and see people, none of whom are my friends, I can look around wherever I go and see awesome women who scowl at me if I smile at them or look afraid if I try to make conversation with them. What the fuck. am I some kind of freak, has it really gone from me being a great skier that people looked forward to seeing to in 4 years I suck ass and everything I touch turns to shit? How can that be! I'm the same person I was inside my head, but obviously everything else must have changed.
Tonight, if I had a gun, I wouldn't be typing this and worrying about trying to wake up and do my shit job in the morning hung over, I'd probably write a nice long detailed note so my mother, who clearly had zero concept how to raise children, would have some real explanation why I quit at this. I'm tired of coming home every night a failure. I hate trying to figure out why everyone around me has their lives dialed in when I can't even figure out where to start on any of it.
I have no goals remaining in life. The one thing I have to look forward to is skiing. I suck ass at skiing, for somebody who's skied well for 1500 or so days, thinking about how I'm basically no different than some accountant in salt lake that takes a day off to go beater around in pow and that's how any good skier at snowbird sees me, as just another obstacle that shouldn't be near their steeps and is just in the way...it kills me to think what a gaper I've become. it's going to kill me. This is when normal people who aren't repulsive to the opposite sex start raising children so it doesn't matter that they aren't so fast or so good looking anymore, they're a parent, they have goals in terms of raising children and the process of opening their little minds to the world covers whatever decline they're facing. But no, not here. I had my chance and failed. epic fail. So when I'm at a table in a bar with women and eventually they're not only so disinterested in me that they ignore what I occasionally say in their conversation, but they're so disinterested that they go into the kind of conversational mode that you'd have when there is no strange guy there that you don't know...when that happens I have no choice but to think that it's just nature telling me that I AM NOT VIABLE IN THIS WORLD. I'm not only not very interesting to them, I'm so much so that I'm INVISIBLE to them. Good thing though, because in these times you wonder what it would be like if you were gone, if it would be an inconvenience toward any of these people I casually deal with in my life. But really, not so much as it turns out. My opinions about how to do things at work are treated as no factor, I'm no factor in anybody's life other than to feebly grope out for some human contact because I'm lonely, I'm no factor to any family-all of whom live a thousand miles from me and don't call or write. Nature has somehow tagged me as a loser. I lose. So what is there now? Religion...is that what there is to convince me to keep going to get to another winter where I suck worse than the one before? What is it...I worry that what lies beyond is terrible, far worse than this because wherever place the good people on my street with the nicely mowed lawn and the suburban and the sunday school clothes end up, is surely not where I end up. Those people can't stand me, If they had a flat tire and I stopped to help they'd lock their frightened children in the car and their dog would bite me in the nuts....so I'm not going to their heaven. I'm going to some place where I wander around looking at everyone's unbridled success and know that I'm going to sleep alone tonight again and that all the thoughts and ideas I've ever had have amounted to nothing, and that nothing I can do will ever make a difference in this massive clusterfuck of life annd whatelse? That if God had a plan for me, that it must have been to let me get really close to that happy place, or to let me see it in thousands of small glimpses, but to jerk it away HARD and FAST when I wasn't looking and leave me alone with these thoughts. So there it is, eat the front sight and maybe the screen goes dark or maybe I wake up in hell. just some ridiculous gamble. Is it a test? Am i supposed to think: hey, things are so much worse for lots of other people so what's wrong with me? because I think that a lot too, why can't I be happy completely by myself like some pod, some lone tree in the desert that doesn't need anybody or anything? I don't know, it's clearly not for me to know.
I know this: I'm ashamed, I'm embarrassed, i'm lonely, I hate how lame my life is, I would trade everything I have for a time machine to go back and have friends and be a good skier with a family again. That's the only goal that makes any sense to me is to somehow find a way to be in a coma where I remember what my life was life when I couldn't help but kill it. I'd wake up at 3:30AM with my beautiful girlfriend next to me and quietly roll that way and kiss her, and when she woke up gently and we had our middle of the night sex so the kids wouldn't hear it, it would be good. and I'd let my dog out to howl at the running coyotes in taos canyon and look at my wood pile, the fruit of my labor, an expression of love and friendship. My love for the girls, my wanting them to be warm and comfortable in the winter, my friends helping me split it, my mentoring the kid next door to learn to drive the wood truck and cut trees...all of it in front of me on the porch with the dog howling and the stars out and my girls upstairs sleeping peacefully. I'd wake up the next day and go to my job with my best friends and laugh and laugh at some stupid something and make plans to do something fun somewhere...dirtbikes or shooting guns in the desert or swimming in the river or what ever. That's what the time machine is. There is no such thing, of course, I've thought: hey, why give up now, just keep going and sooner or later things will get better. sure they will, but I will be older, fatter, sadder, and stupider if they do, and surely they'll take another shit, because that's what things in my life do, they find some amazing ways to fuck themselves up.
It's a good thing I don't have a gun tonight. Because there's nothing for me tomorrow but another day of having my face rubbed in my own massive failure at life. Failure at life. think about that, so many failures on top of one another so as to constitute an entire life failure. there's no figuring but I'm afraid it just gets worse from here as I go crazy and homeless. If I had a gun I'd make it easy to clean up because I don't need people traumatized by my mess. I'd be sure everyone knew it was my failure, I'd do a good job being sure my stuff was really well written so no judges had to go through and worry about who gets what stuff. If I had a gun I'd still be courteous and try hard to be good at it. I imagine I'd find some way to fail at that too.