Sunday Archive XI: A typical Rant

Here’s a standard GS rant from March of 2006.  I don’t think I ever front paged it… Probably because it’s boring.

So I’m sitting here at work in the final stages of the worst hangover since that time in college when I challenged an idiot savant to a game of chess-for-shots and he cleaned up the board in, like, 22 seconds, and I drank a whole bottle of bourbon and went on some sort of exchange-student molestation spree, then couldn’t eat anything but lettuce and Jell-O for days and threw up acid death in a huge black trashbag that I carried to all of my classes.

It’s in this similar state. Now that I’m convinced I have bowel cancer, that a memory from my youth comes rushing back.  Instead of blaming the booze for the cancer, which is logical but, also, self-defeating, I blame this incident in 1990 when I walked across a radioactive spill on the campus of the National Navy Medical Center in Bethesda.

Of course, I don’t have bowel cancer.  But I figure it’s a great lead-in to my fear that I’m socially dysfunctional and have become proud of it.

The incident, which has nothing to do with anything, really, and is just one of those strange thoughts that flashes into your brain as you throw up whole slices of oranges and coffee in the office trashcan, took place while I was in high school.  Back then, instead of booze and broken women, my drugs were Jolt Cola, Pixie Sticks, Super Big Gulps with a “suicide mix,” and liquefied Sugar in the Raw rubbed on my gums and injected into my eyeballs by 14 year old proto-goth girls who loved anal sex.  Those were innocent times.

In a rare moment of volunteerism, I signed up for the Red Cross and selected the posting nobody wanted – “Seven West,” the wing at the Navy hospital that tended to all of the dying folk.  AIDS people, cancer, Navy boys who had entire aircraft carriers fall from the fourth floor of their apartment building onto their heads.  I got to watch a man in his final death throes – AIDS contracted from a tattoo.  It’s the reason I don’t have tats today.  His agonizing death was quite a show, and went on for a few minutes while a couple of nurses did what they could to keep him from totally freaking out.  Just hold him down, try to do some shit, but, otherwise, he was cooked.  It was messy, too.  I saw just about everything, and they even let me take blood!  In the midst of death and ruin, just about ever law was broken.  Medical supplies, medication, you name it, all stolen openly.  Openly as in you could shout down a hall, in front of doctors and officers and families:  Hey Bob!  Grab the morphine for tonight!  We’re gonna get fuuuucked up!

Seven West introduced me to death, greed, sorrow, corruption, twisted sex, and the proper way to set up a blood transfusion on the fly.

I’d imagine, in this new and horrible world, things are very different.  I know, for one, getting on the campus is no fun.  In 90, I rode my bike up through the back gate – never any guards – and tooled around the entire place.  I went along steam tunnels, boiler rooms, visited the morgue, got on the roof of the tower, explored the power plant and crawled through the “secret” tunnels that connected several of the buildings.

So it was under these conditions that I was walking around during lunch and I ran across the radiation spill.  Warning signs and tape had been set up, but a detour was going to make me late.  What’s a troubled high school kid to do?  I walked through the shit, foam and all, and came out the other side to the amazement and horror of the clean up people.  My high school response was simple:  I gave them the aggressive “fuck you” look.

I can currently see through walls and lift cars with one hand, but that’s a secret.  Also, I melted a man yesterday just by thinking it.

So, that’s the lead-in to my concerns regarding social dysfunction.  See how subtle and organized this article is?  You wish you could write like me.

I have numerous very good reasons to be awkward in social settings, but what concerns me is my ever-growing ability to be just fine with it.  It’s not just that I’m “tired of the dating scene,” which is what fat women and crazy chicks write in their personal ads, it’s that my heart isn’t in it.  I want to cut to the chase and get to the mmm-mmm, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.  Really, the only thing I miss about having a woman around is the terrifically crude and cathartic release of sex.  Even then, to my dismay, I’ve learned that many women don’t know what they’re doing.

I have occasion to chat up women now and then but I’m really thinking:  What did I get from Netflix tonight?  When at a woman’s house, there’s the sad thought:  I miss my bed.  I miss my routine.  It’s time to rewatch Space: 1999.

And – hold it – I’m just talking about the first season.  I wouldn’t give up sex to watch the second season of Space: 1999.  I don’t want you thinking I’m pathetic.

Friends worry about me.  They say I need a woman because I’m entering into the Die Alone phase of my life.  So I’ve formed a quiet little lunch bunch of social castaways who, like me, have never maintained a relationship longer than 15 months.  We drink, we talk, we share great thoughts.  There’s freedom in a world without sexual tension, in a world of self-loathing and despair.

But it’s not enough.  The natural drive to possess and conquer kicks in whenever there’s a hot waitress, or a local barfly drinking her anorexic life away.  I go stupid, but it’s never the charming, endearing sort of stupid.  It’s irritating and bizarre.  I become a nutcase, rambling on about TV shows and history, completely removed from any sort of reality.  That might have been the bee’s knees for the troubled rape-victims looking for solace in college but those women are far from me.  Now my target audience is the solid 30-something crowd.  Responsible, cynical.

I’ve realized that part of the problem is extreme discomfort.  A sort of nervous twitch that comes from one, singular problem:  I really hate people.  I always have.

Now, I have friends.  A close group.  I make new friends.  I’m bound to the weird and the crazy and, post-30, most of the weird and the crazy have become refined creatures.  The artists and the ones who manage to maintain a satisfactory financial comfort level are the type of crazy you want to look for.  The middle-class Patrick Bateman’s.  Great people. It’s 9am, let’s go get drunk then drive around the Beltway till sunset.

I also seem to bond will with the artists.  The people who follow their drive to create…something something.  In the midst of their frenzied need, though, they remain generally functional and entertaining.

Hey!  You should meet an artistic, dysfunctional woman, then!

Yes, I know.  But it’s back to square one:  I just don’t want to work for it.

My most successful relationship – the 15 month one – was with a dreamy, nutball lesbian who danced and sang and was just a total screwball.  I loved her to bits.  But, I had to put her down.  She’s buried next to my beagle out in the backyard. I know, I know. It’s illegal to bury dogs in the backyard, right?

Sometimes I miss her, because she was an expert in hand to hand combat and small arms.  These are other values I look for in a woman besides “able to fuck right” and “not stinky.”

But then, and now, I realized that I’m just not happy in a relationship.  I lose my ability to adhere to a routine and continue at my necessary comfort levels.  Like when you visit a friend and stay on their couch for two weeks.  Every relationship has felt like that to me – I’m on the couch, I’m tiptoeing around the kitchen, I can’t shit right, the friendly neighbor is constantly alarmed that I’m there, there’s only instant decaf coffee and, as the two weeks move on, he becomes increasingly desperate to send me on my way.

Not that I’m a confirmed bachelor, as they used to say in the 50’s (it really means “flaming queen,” by the way), just that I have such high standards that I might as well be a cunty queer, as they used to say in the 90’s.

My history professor always told me:  “It would have been an easier life if I had been born gay.”

Have I, then, simply lost faith in myself?  Why do I become so weak when women are around?  Why that mindless, reptilian need for conquest that drives me to make a fool of myself?  When can I finally become the quiet, sinister guy in the dark corner who orders pitchers of scotch and does not get stupid even if the 22 year old goth-hippie-alterna waitress celebrates Nudist Day?

The guy who mows our lawn told me that 40 is when you get the pussy – more than you can dream of.  He told me that when I turn 40, if I’m still single, I’ll be able to wield the ultimate power of the lifeclock and feed off of wave after wave of divorced, lonely women looking for a long term relationship.  His warning was that I need to dump them all after three months.  Savagely.  Stay away from traps and just fuck away.

It is with that idea that I maintain sanity in the face of the uncontrollable reptilian thoughts.  Soon, they will come to me.  This may be disillusionment, but I think it’s an idea that has merit and is worth exploring.  All I have to focus on now is the art of becoming a sinister spymaster in a dark corner.  And getting treated for radiation sickness.

My detractors are correct:  I am a sociopath.  But I like to think of myself as a “functional sociopath.”  Like Hitler.