I was typing in "where can I" when I noticed what most people are looking for...

...apparently some badass kung-fu Justice delivered with a smile and a mustache.

"I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both."

-- Soren Kierkegaard

(Reprinted from my previous blog)

God damn it.

I hate myself. I mean, I always hate myself. But now I have a specific reason to truly hate myself.

That was my chance, wasn't it? My chance to do what I know is Right...and I just couldn't.

I can think of a billion ways to rationalize my actions. I was polite. I was doing the capital "G" Good thing. I took the high road. I'm not a man prone to violence. But any way you slice it, I failed. I failed you all...and that moment will haunt me for the rest of my days.

God damn it.

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I don’t intend to live long. 

There’s an old joke, “What’s the best way to make God laugh?  Make a plan.”  I doubt that I will be lucky enough to be blessed with a timely demise.  Not that I really have a strong suicidal urge (not compared to the next seriously depressed person).  I simply don’t like the idea of being old and infirmed, embarrassingly relying on my loved ones to take care of me while I slowly lose my physical and mental faculties.

The reason for this semi-self-destructive diatribe is that I believe I suffered what could be a classic mid-life crisis at the age of 18.  I had been accepted to college and was preparing to go there in September.  But that summer, I decided to dip my toes into the craziness and try to revive my long slumbering barbaric yawp.

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Thomas Wolfe once famously said, “You can’t go home again.”  While I tend to shy away from clichés, I happen to think this sad adage about growing up and apart from our childhood selves has special significance in my life.  Halfway through high school, I moved to a different town and school.  While this is a pretty huge event in the maturation and formation of anyone, for me it didn’t just signify a change in zip code and social circles but instead it changed the way I thought about “home”.

I grew up in Lincoln, MA, but I don’t consider that my hometown.  Sure, that’s where my earliest experiences and oldest friends come from, but I never saw it to completion.  I never experienced all of the dizzying drama that the last two years of high school bring, never experienced the collective insanity of graduation with those people.  I drifted apart from so many of them, since high school is all about immediacy and I lived 2 hours away.  I don’t even know where half of my old friends ended up, what college they went to, or with whom they went to the prom.

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I peaked in sixth grade.  More precisely, I peaked athletically in the summer following sixth grade.  Well, perhaps peaked is the wrong word, as it implies that there was a steady improvement in my skill set.  Let’s just say that my athletic skills inexplicably spiked in the summer following sixth grade.

As previously mentioned, sports are not my strong suit.  My asthma put the kibosh on most running activities, relegating me to the role of embarrassed spectator in many a gym class.  My coordination wasn’t really evident—appearing less like a controlled movement of an athlete than the controlled spasms of an epileptic whenever any ball came my way. 

That's not even close to me...I never wore glasses! (From The Decemberists' album, "Picaresque)

My skills were non-existent and I was immediately branded as an outsider to the majority of my fellow male classmates.  I became an “indoor kid,” the kind that gets cheered for just finishing the race in a way that was meant to boost self esteem but really just highlighted my pathetic nature to the predators in my class.

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The greatest tragedy of my life is that I’m not a figment of someone’s imagination.

            My mind constantly exists in the world of fantasy, a world filled with adventures and daring deeds.  I desire larger than life scenarios divided along black and white lines of good versus evil.  I long to look out my window and see the skies peppered by brave men and women in capes and tights righting wrongs and beating the bad guys.  I wish to read newspaper headlines about some nefarious organization that doesn’t mean harm for ideological reasons based on religious fanaticism.  I prefer my shadowy groups lead by a man with a predilection to reptile themes and bungled attempts at global domination.  I want to find treasure maps, destroy ancient cursed relics, encounter creatures that exist beyond our planet, our dimension, or simply beyond the ken of our understanding.

            But that’s not the way this world works, nor the way my life has gone thus far.

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