Foreward

romantic: noun

1: a romantic person, trait, or component

2: Romantic  : a romantic writer, artist, or composer

Rarely does one stumble across a doctrine that combines both of their core ways of thinkings. At my heart, I’m an idealist. I hope things when they are good stay constant. External changes frighten me. As a kid I remember wishing that 2006 would never end so when I turned 21 I could go out and buy a brand new 06’ BMW M3.

After doing a little research, I realized I too was a romantic fatalist. Romantic in the sense of how I love to be in love with someone but also fatalist: I know that this too shall end. They’re two opposite ends of the spectrum but they meet around the back and kiss.

I came off the precipice this morning of almost sending Eros that message. I didn’t want to come off rude. I didn’t want to come off push. I didn’t want to come off. Perceived differently than my intention. I truly had realized how far into the Marianas trench I had fell when quitting Prozac and subsequently quitting Eros.

Insert between

fatalism: noun

1: a doctrine that events are fixed in advance so that human beings are powerless to change them

2: a belief in or attitude determined by this doctrine

But after my time in Phoenix, I became a fatalist. Everything he had an expiration date. Life, love, work, hell even my own happiness. And I settled into that. Through that it was a constant tug of war between the hopefulness that if nothing matters than why worry about anything at all and the notion that if nothing matters than why do anything at all? I spent the better part of my twenties in this shell. I wanted to feel the pain of loss again, yet I was too infantile to allow it to happen.

Then I quit the Prozac. And my life went down the shitter at light speed. I grew further and further away from myself, my hobbies, the people that I loved. I wanted nothing more than to sit in my house play my stupid zombie game and drink an ungodly amount of Four Roses nightly. Just like a pumpkin, you can only hollow out so much of it before you eat at the rind that keeps it all together, and boy had I tried.

Early in June, my old roommate had moved to Phoenix and it gave me a chance to go back. I’ll never forget watching the twilight rise over the East Valley as my 14 hour journey came to a close. Phoenix was the last place I had felt alive. Like something did matter. I mattered. It was the place I began to fight for what I wanted. And I had let go a lot of my inhibitions fighting for those things. Inevitably I had lost and wound up back in Texas. But here, was where I had truly began to expand. I drove further West to Los Angeles by myself for a camera repair and caught up with a new friend. And I was reminded that even in the mundane life I was carrying on about in Texas, I was still capable of adventure. Capable and greatly desiring risk, change, thrill. Isolationism, but as a form of solace.

I returned home and got on a new medication that truly began to change my life. It put me back in the gym, it had me watching what I ate, I even tried to quit drinking. And for a brief three weeks I had felt like I once had back in college. But as the Rebber luck would have it, I turned back to the bottle, back to the laziness, back home not carving further out of myself.

But a series of missteps during that had me reflecting. If I was to climb out of the hole, I’d have to look up and not down. Which leads me to last week. While driving to the office, yet another mundane Thursday morning I saw someone leap. Straight off an overpass to a demise I didn’t witness for certainty. Overwhelmed, I took the day off. I tried to eat, tried to drink yet nothing could get my mind off it. The night before I had made a leap of faith by reaching out to someone and by the next morning, that too had met its timely demise. Saturday I packed up for a wedding. A wedding of a girl who I used to know all too well. Time had marched on for the two of us. And nothing shocked me more than to see her happy, wed with two stepchildren and pursuing a career in nursing. As I drove home from Houston that Sunday morning it had hit me. If we are truly meant to meet our end, why not go out with a cigarette in one hand and someone you love in the other. Why search for meaning? The meaning is just yourself.

With that, I had felt the earth beneath me move. Not only with my current life but also the past. If everything truly ended in a blaze, my only regret would be withholding almost 10 years of raw words that I all too often left unsaid. Too often I’ve guarded my inner sanctum with high walls and a moat. But now it felt like under the weight of the world those very walls were crumbling, filling in the moat on their way down.

Inhibitions asunder, I am releasing almost all of the works from 2016 thru 2023(ish) in their original unedited form. Only names and years were removed to provide some anonymity. Take a look behind the curtain of this old dog stuck in a 27 year olds body, who’s finally allowed himself to exhale.