The Good Father.

A sauce packet detonates, exploding like a BBQ firework as it’s thrown against the wall. Wrappers and stray chunks of food litter the tables and floor. They yell over one another, louder and louder, a positive feedback loop that can only end in the rupturing of eardrums. One kid walks across the seat cushions right in front of me, from one booth to the other, like the floor is fucking lava.

As I’m mopping up a large drink one of the kids spilled, just beneath another litter-filled table, one member of this gaggle of giggling idiots darts by at Mach 10. In the process of doing so, he catches the leg of his shorts on the mop handle, almost de-pantsing himself in the process.

I bark, “Hey!,” and after stopping a moment to apologize and catch a breath, the jacked-up poster-child for pro-choice just picks up where he left off.

Where are the parents, you ask?

Probably at home, their negligent fathers still convinced their pull-out game is strong despite evidence to the contrary, so both them and the wives consequently busy making more unsocialized crotch-goblins they’re not prepared to care for.

No matter, they’ll just send their little sociopaths to the local fast food joint, where a 45-year-old, childless bachelor with bleeding ears and rising blood pressure will be forced to clean up after them and carefully bottle up his rage so he doesn’t go ape-shit on the little spidermonkeys.

I should’ve been a fucking librarian.

After wheeling the mop bucket into the corner, I take a deep breath, averting eye contact with anyone, and approach the door at the front of the building. Slipping out, I proceed to smoke a cigarette and reconsider my life choices.

A few puffs in, a girl walking down the sidewalk turns her head towards me, makes an “o” face, smiles, and laughs in apparent lunacy. Even given the tell-tale signs, it takes a moment for me to realize who this is, as I’m not accustomed to seeing her in anything other than her fast food costume.

It’s Psycho.

A pretty girl of perhaps seventeen years of age, she’s been a coworker of mine for the last two months or so. She’s prone to dramatic outbursts of energy which marijuana either serves to quell or exacerbate, depending on the day. As she walks up to me, I ask her why on earth she’d elect to come here on her day off, and she doesn’t hesitate to tell me that she’d much rather be here than home.

Then she bears all. Cliff’s Notes of her life story comes rushing out in firehouse fashion.

She tells me how her father and step father have both raped her. How her step-father would frequently do so when she took a shower. How her father would hold her and her nearly half a dozen siblings at gunpoint when any of them left the house. She explained how he’d walk behind her, keeping the handgun under his shirt, pointed at her back.

One day, she finally called the cops on him, and that’s how she escaped that fucked up circumstance and the state of South Carolina and came to live with her mother and her mother’s wife here in Ohio. Her mother who, while not physically abusive, at the very least, isn’t much of a mother, either. Her wife? Evidently a total bitch.

I know she’s not lying about any if this, and so it blows me away how she tells me all of it so casually, without teeth clenching, devoid of teared-up eyes. She just says it matter of factly. As if to say, hey, this is just what happens, isn’t life crazy?

It fucking breaks my heart. I feel myself crumbling inside.

It’s no wonder she has issues with men. It’s no wonder she gravitated towards that negligent and selfish bitch, May, who takes delight in lying and excuses her habit of constantly cheating on her girlfriends and obsolving herself of guilt by referencing her “abandonment issues” and other psychological glitches.

Shitty relationships is all Psycho has ever seen, ever known, and the familiar provides comfort, which is a more reliable source of psychological security than the risk of the unfamiliar, however much higher the odds of attaining happiness might be.

I was again reminded how some parents just shouldn’t be parents, which immediately brought my mind back to the circus of amphatamine-fueled midgets occupying the dining room on the other side of the window to my back.

Had my assumptions been too harsh?

When I was a teenager, I suddenly reexperienced — as opposed to simply remembered — something that had occurred earlier in my youth. This kind of thing had happened before, but this particular instance was different.

I was at my friend’s house, in the bedroom he shared with his four other siblings. It was a rare instance in which they were left alone, unsupervised by their strict parents, and apparently all the energy they’d been forced to repress had built up a surplus so that when they were finally alone for a brief period, it all exploded.

They were running around like lunatics. The youngest, a boy, climbed atop the toy chest, wrapped a blanket around him and lifted a flashlight high into the air with one hand, pretending to be the Statue of Liberty, and began singing the Star-Spangled Banner at high volume.

Given I knew what was coming, this must have happened before. I dropped to my belly, scooted beneath one of the bunk beds, and awaited the inevitable. I didn’t have to wait long until the door burst open and in came the father with his belt.

For all I knew, maybe it was the same with these kids. Maybe their parents were as insanely violent as my friends father was, and now that they were unsupervised, the volcano of energy erupted.

When the cat is away, the mice will play.

Maybe I just don’t understand because, unlike them, I had loving and present parents. It’s true that my mother and I had serious issues up until maybe my mid-30s, but it’s clear as day to me how lucky I was — how lucky I am — and certainly in a relative sense.

Many boys have fathers that are abusive, negligent, or altogether absent. I can say without hesitation that my father is and has always been my favorite fucking human being ever. I could never hope to express how much I love the man.

So yeah, I’m lucky, so maybe I’m just being ignorant given my different, personal, historical context and I really shouldn’t be mad at those untamed circus monkey children that invaded our fast food dining room.

Later, I was talking with Brian, another maintenance guy, back in the stock room. In the midst of conversation, he tells me he thinks I’d make a good father. This is a strange coincidence, as I’ve told him nothing about what occurred that day or the shit that had been going on in my head as a consequence.

My immediate response was that he shouldn’t say that.

I tell him that I’ve finally settled into the thought of being alone, and that it probably suited me best. I need my alone time, and that never went iver well on the rare occasion I had a girlfriend — it sure as hell wouldn’t make me suitable for a wife and kids, and at 45, I’d dodged all that thus far.

Come August, I’d be quitting this job, hopefully landing in a better-paying one, and moving into a trailer close to my family where I’d likely live alone until I die. I was good with that.

Maybe I’d get a cat, that was it.

I calmed a bit and thanked him, and confessed I’d been told that before, but it always perplexed me. Plus, I’m not sure I’d want to bring a kid into this world, particularly given it’s trajectory, at least as I see it.

He tells me that this mentality is part of the reason I’d make a good father.

Then he jokingly says this conversation almost seems like a flashback sequence. That we’ll both be looking back on this moment sometime in the future and laugh at my reservations.

“Oh fuck no,” I tell him. “Please, please don’t say that.”

I’ll settle for a cat. I’m just fine with a cat.

Highs & Lows of an Isolationist Bastard.

I have had an extremely low people tolerance since as far back as I can remember, and I’ve always felt guilty about it. It doesn’t matter who the people in question are, either; if I’m around anyone long enough, I begin to feel drained. Not only that, but I feel a sensation akin to someone who is claustrophobic being pushed impossibly hard into a corner. The pressure is unbearable; the sense of discomfort, relentless. It’s like my soul is being crushed, like I’m suffocating, and if I don’t run away to the freedom of silence and solitude I might lose myself.

I need to reserve space and time when and where there is no need to attend to the needs of others or serve the interests of a person or a place I’m employed at. I need to be left alone in an environment that I control. An environment that is mine.

This is how I recharge my social batteries.

I’ve always been rather nocturnal, too, enjoying the alone time that comes when darkness falls. Before I began engaging in what I call “active insomnia” in my teens, where I would get up and do things until exhaustion hit, I was constantly a practitioner of “passive insomnia.” Though in bed with the lights off, with eyes open or closed, I was awake, thinking or daydreaming as a kid until I tired myself out. In my teens and twenties, I’d have the lights on and I’d read a book, watch a movie, write, engage in artwork, or just stare into space and think, think, think without interruption or distraction. Often I’d listen to some music, look at myself in the mirror, and lip sync, pretending I was the lead singer in a band.

Now? Now I either drink and smoke pot or vegitate before YouTube or Netflix. I used to be so much more productive in my solitude and I enjoyed it so much more. Of course, I was consistently thoroughly caffeinated, too, which probably, at least in part, explains that increased productivity.

In any case, this people-tolerance means that after an average work shift, I’m pretty much done with people. It sucks that I’ll refuse to hang out with friends I truly value or cancel plans I naively made with friends because, when the time comes, it turns out that I’d been around people in general too much and simply couldn’t take it anymore. And I know how impossible it is to get my frkends to understand this about me and to not take it personally. And I know it sounds like a lame excuse, but I honestly feel as though this is simply how I am, how I’m wired, and there’s not much I can do about it.

I’m introverted. I’m hypersensitive as hell. This is simply how I operate.

When I’ve tried to battle against this and hang out with friends anyway, I’ve been irritable, angry, downright ragey — that, or I just shut down, withdraw, inevitably leaving early or pressuring whoever took me there to take me the fuck home. On weekends, I’m always reluctant to go out as well, as I won’t have an opportunity to be alone for such a wonderful stretch of time for another week.

This has irritated friends, ruined friendships, and has certainly played a role in fucking up the rare intimate relations I might have with a girl. Anne understood this about me, anticipated and accepted when I wished to be alone, but I could feel it bothered her, and that made me feel guilty as fuck. It wasn’t her fault, of course; she was just doing her best to make us work. When she tossed around the idea of eventually moving in together, she said she knew we’d have to have a room or place I could have all too myself. Perhaps yet another reason I should have fought to hold onto her.

Any long-term, live-in relationship would require me having a study. That’s right: a study. Fuck the “man cave” bullshit.

I often wonder if I could ever make a true relationship work, being how I am, who I am, particularly given how long its been since I’ve actually tried. I’ve tried to write off the possibility entirely, but dreams and the unprompted meanderings of my waking mind seem persistent that the desire for intimacy with a woman is there, that its something I need, whether I like it or not.

Is it just my nature to constantly wage war with myself, are these extreme contradictions within me as immortal as they are persistent in their nagging, or could these opposing forces within me actually be reconciled?

My Own World.

“I don’t hate people, I just feel better when they’re not around.”
— Charles Bukowski.

Since as far back as I can remember, I’ve preferred to be alone whenever I can manage it. As a kid, I remember it frustrating my parents quite a bit, and for at least a short time they would get upset with me, urging me to hang out with friends.

As I got older, I’d spend a lot of time in my room, alone, engaging in writing or artwork, and once I moved out of my parent’s house and began living with friends, they would often joke how I nearly lived in my room. That if I had a coffee maker in there, they’d probably never see me at all. Even when we lived in the two houses in that college town and Sandra would throw her absurdly huge parties, I would ultimately retreat to my room — until others followed me and I eventually felt inspired to return to the party, mostly because I accepted the futility of isolating myself given the circumstances.

The first time I lived alone, it was in an efficency apartment a short time after breaking up with my last girlfriend over a decade ago. For a long time I loved it — until the mixture of weird events in my life and concerns over bills grew to a peak and I decided to approach a friend of mine, Nick, Sandra’s brother, who I had previously lived with. He had just gotten a divorce, was living with his father, and seemed incredibly depressed. I had started hanging out with friends on the weekends, bar-hopping with them in the aforementioned college town, and told Nick we should look for an apartment together there. That he should join our little bar-hopping group, too.

He did. We did. And for awhile, it seemed to work. Over the course of a few years, however, I came to the conclusion that I was the kind of person who needed to live alone. While the circumstances ultimately unfolded in ways I didn’t intend and would have never desired and there was a rather trying period of struggle, ultimately I landed myself in the one-bedroom apartment that I live in to this day.

I’ve remained satisfied with my decision, too. I love it. I’m in control of my environment. Toilet paper goes under, not over. Put something in the fridge, it stays there until you eat it. The only dishes I ever have to clean are my own. No worries over roommates having parties or of people unexpectedly hanging out at the house. I also have to rely on myself more, as there is no one else to depend on. Its my space. My lair. My personal freedom and responsibility.

On my lunch break or the smoke breaks I take at work, I usually hide in my car, reading something, writing something or just staring off into space, enjoying the solitude as I imagine or contemplate. I can finally catch a much needed breath, bathe in something closer to silence and return to myself at last, and that’s never something I can entirely manage to do around people, even those closest to me.

I don’t know why I’m this way. Is it my introversion? The sensory and emotional overload I continually experience, evidently due to my status as a Highly Sensitive Person?

Sometimes it sucks, because a part of me wants to get in a relationship again, and relationships, in my limited experience and constant observations, don’t tend to tolerate a lot of alone time. And in the end, I know that as much as I want to be close, I need to be free. To be me. And it seems I can only be my true self, or a closer approximation, at the least, when I can isolate myself and drown in my own world.