I pretty much gave up drugs and alcohol and partying altogether because, well, I think I outgrew that phase. The damage, I hope, is not irreversible and I can honestly say I feel a lot better off without them. I’m not going to waste anyone’s time ranting on how chemical experimentation is bad because frankly, I don’t think it is. Chem abuse, on the other hand (much like any kind of abuse) will heavily damage one’s health, mental health and especially one’s ability to cope with every single layer of reality.If you’re looking for a retrospective inventory, I’ve pretty much done them all and as far as the mind can undergo a downward spiral, I’ve pretty much been there, and by there I mean withdrawal, OD, alienation and numbing. I snorted, shot up, smoked and swallowed more chemicals than a paint factory.

The worst part about this shit isn’t the pain you feel, but rather the stuff you don’t feel. Emotional instability, self-loathing, despair and the unshakeable feeling that you don’t amount to anything and are missing out on so much. Sure, those only settle in after quite a bit, but they take a whole lot more to creep out of than it took for them to settle in.

Now I’m not saying these things should apply to everyone. I know plenty of people who can keep a balanced lifestyle while only indulging in soft drugs and social dabbles in alcohol, but I frankly can’t. I even know two or three people who have mildly succesful careers while entertaining a part-time hobby of shooting heroin, but I’m not one of them. I have an addictive personality and I’m terribly lazy. I’m the poster boy for procrastination and a common victim to my own biggest flaw: I give up on everything before it’s done. I have an incredible resistance to effort, an outstanding inertia when it comes to rolling downhill and a unique talent for misadventure.

I’ve lost a lot of friends, most of them because I was an asshole on more occasions than I care to remember. I spent a fortune I never earned on things my body consumed and believe me when I tell you only the first few experiences with each one were amazing. None were lasting and all were damaging, to some degree.

I think I smoked my first joint in the tenth grade, and by the eleventh I was stoned more than I wasn’t. But that’s not the root of the problem. No one cares how high you are or how long you’re high if you can keep up appearances and actually do something with your life. But if I step back far enough, that has nothing to do with how I spent – or, well, wasted – the last decade. Oh no. The root of my demise started in my pre-teens.

The dumbest kids are the smart kids who aren’t half as smart as they think they are.

It took a lot for me to learn we’re only as special as the things we do. Growing up, I always thought I was special. And I don’t just mean middle-class A-grade special, I mean -holy shit- I’m somekind of genius special. Looking back, I was kind of like the one-eyed douchebag in a land of blind idiots. I made the common mistake of comparing my achievements to my peers’, and about ninety eight per cent of my peers (according to Mensa, at least) were considerably slower than me in any process involving analythical thinking or creative endeavour. I was lazy, useless and not a particularly likeable kid, though, and no matter how well I scored against my overly tolerant reference system, I feel I was quite bland.

You might have had a similar upbringing. Upper middle-class parents in a predominantly working class neighbourhood. Even before my leap into a rainbow of pleasant toxins, I was inebriated with self-sufficiency and a lack of direction. Despite my dad’s best efforts to turn me into a mathemathician, I was content with proving him wrong a couple of times and letting him down a dozen. That doesn’t justify his turning his back on me, but it motivates it.

I started hating myself and being emotionally unstable long before it actually showed. I was never bullied while, conversely, I was never particularly liked, either. Most people in my final gymnasium years and all of high school mostly thought I was too weird to grasp, but that was only a facade covering up how boring it felt to try to be rebellious. I was just as annoying and unjustified as Holden from The Catcher in the Rye, which is probably why I was so annoyed with that smug little fuck when I read the book.

Moving on, I had a few crushes over the years, but my first and only love took the cake in my senior high school year. She wasn’t particularly bright but – I thought – she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. We were on and off for the next four years but she cheated on me five times. I took her back. Every. Single. Time. Really.

I did a lot of stupid things, but this one takes the cake. It’s one thing to forgive a mild adolescent indiscretion and a whole different ballpark of stupidity to succumb to the cliche of taking the early train home while your girlfriend is getting double-teamed at a New Year’s party. I’m not making this up.

That was when I pulled the trigger. Four months later I was shipping my ass away to Germany to start film courses when I picked up a nasty cocaine addiction fueled on whatever money my parents sent me for what they thought were clothes and food and videogames. Well, I didn’t let them down on the videogames part. I spent about three years doing blow off cases that read GTA IV and World of Warcraft. Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad.

Had they not divorced years earlier, news of that surely would have broken up a relationship that had already hung on the sole owning rights of a house too big to fill for more than a decade. Mom got it in the end, though she still struggles with the upkeep. I guess it’s true, the loneliest people live in the biggest of houses.

But I don’t blame my folks for what followed. I got an education too expensive to justify, one I certainly didn’t pay back to this day. After living abroad for what seemed to be forever, I made the incredibly bad decision to get back to one of the most uncivilised countries not torn by apartheid. And no, I didn’t get the cheating girl back. This story doesn’t have a happy ending.

The silver lining is, it’s not a tragedy either. Since I’m still alive.

What did I do next? Well, nothing to write home about. I went on with my debauchery and hedonistic tendencies, to recent times.

And while several isolated deeds I chalked down are worth remembering, my life as a whole is just as common and lowly as every loser you’ve ever met. That’s the bad news. The good news is life goes on, for better or – if it’s possible, worse. Long periods of depression intertwined with short bursts of make-believe happiness.

The good news is I’m finally putting an effort into not letting just every day go to waste. I don’t break my back working, but I have a job. I’m making rent – but I’m not getting rich either. Mostly taking it one day at a time. I learned a lot in this long, exhausting period of not learning much and though I let a lot of people down (pretty much everyone who was there to let down), I’m committed to staying on the straight and narrow just long enough to carve something of worth from this carcass. In the end, I can only make myself proud and if I manage just that, nothing else matters.

I’m sure my course through life is neither as low or as high as some people out there, but I’ve learned by now that I have only my modest dreams to chase and I have many, many flaws to patch up before I’m happy with myself. I feel like I’m taking modest steps towards what is finally a dream worth chasing, and I’m – again, finally – partaking in an endeavour that I’ll try hard to see the end of. I’m really sorry if I wasted your time ranting on the partial adventures of a sickeningly honest nobody, but it’s not an exercise in false modesty for me to say that I didn’t write this for the attention, but the cleansing value of letting it all out.

Thanks for reading.

I'll always try to remember I was there, if only for the sake of argument.

It’s the cruelest of cruelties, to hope that even someone as worthless as me can share an orange sky moment with someone else, so complementarily pure. That even below the beastlies of natures, Nature can shape a smile in the dirt. That something she says is so wrong can feel so right?
Of course it’s cruel, it’s so cruel I pour a glass of alcohol on top of an already full one, drowning the table and miraculously not shortcircuiting this keyboard into a mass of useless plastic. The fact that I’m not getting bolted could mean, to a more troubled mind (or my admittedly drunken one) that there’s a string of fate, or something similarly stupid.
If there’s somekind of a God, I figure, he wants me to write this. He can also suck my dick, here and now, at this crossroads of the infinite flesh failures.
It feels as if were yesterday when we were reciting poetry to one another and grinning in the car, or tumbling in the sand or crushing our oh-so-different skins against one another. The time since we last kissed or made out or she told me how she was born with this great need for affection and giving affection, it’s compressed and crushed into nothingness by the severals gallons of booze, tears and lost memories I call last night.
Because you see, I was almost there. I was so close to feeling OK, I felt OK in anticipation.

And that’s just stupid. My friend Dan asks me, while he’s picking up the laundry:
“How long has it been since you last heard from her?”
“Two days.”
“And you actually think you can lose a girl forever in just two days?”
I retort retardedly, shaking a glass of wine like it wasn’t filled to the brim with sulphites:
“No you dumbass, it just takes an instant.”
And then I drink. And I pour another one, dissolving my short term memory as well as my emotions and I feel barren and I forget everything until I get dragged into another “friends-want-to-fix-you-but-they-can’t” conversation:

Lexy: Do you really think alcohol can solve your issues?
Me: It’s not meant to solve them, it’s meant to eclipse them.

And it does. Every time I see the IKEA label shaped by the glass flux draining into my open mouth, I think to myself:
“Shit. I need more.”
So it’s about two bottles now, and counting. I’m surprised I can spell, then again I arrogantly submit to myself that shit – I probably have more of a clever, dry brain in this state than most of you have while sober. So fuck you. And then I pour more, because really, until you pass out, you’re still going to feel pain, if only a little.

All I can do at this pitfall in time is close my eyes and picture her delicate features, sad, catlike eyes and heartshaped lips and fool myself that she’s somewhere out there and that it’s OK if I stay away and things are OK for her. How much of an asshole would I be to try to pull her into this maelstrom of misery? I’d be like everyone else then.

Because really, when I think of planet Earth, and if, hipothetically, assholes could fly, the whole planet would be one big fucking airport.

I try to call her, but I can’t. Partly because I just dropped my phone in the toilet bowl, and partly because I can’t even dial her number and partly because I think of how lame the upcoming conversation would be. But mostly because I realise that by now, she associates me with everything that is bad and wrong about the human race. And there’s plenty. It’s guys that me that make it so hard for guys like you to get laid with sensitive girls. They just lost their faith in guys altogether.

You’re welcome.

But no, really, if it’s any consolation, you should know that I’m not indifferent to things. In fact, I swear it, by this fine cheap wine I’m about to drown myself in, we are not soulless. People like me get the first blood in the skirmish.

People like me bleed too. It’s just that people like me, much like people like you, don’t like to bleed. The difference is that while people like you stop the hemmorhage with bandages, antibiotics and the caring arms of their loved ones, people like me call a shady dealer, like I’m doing now, phone freshly pulled out of a piss-filled toilet bowl and carefully dried with an electric hairdrier, and moan:
“I need something.”
“Sure man. What can I help you with?”
“Nothing less than watermelon will cut it.”
And by watermelon we mean the warmest blanket in the world. The hardest aenesthetic the streets will give you. The big H. Morphine diacetate. Intravenously numbing to those hard of mind and weak of spirit, like myself.
I will henceforth medicate myself against the blunt realisation that I fell in love with the perfect girl and then lost her.

Strippers are more or less hookers in their headquarters. They’re the cynical, miserable, expensive coinflip of the game some call love.

I’m a serial loser at that game so when she asks me for another whiskey I go
“fuck off.”

Of course, she thinks I’m cute. That’s partly because sure, I’m not half as bad looking as the people who actually need to visit a strip joint and partly because she wants to squeeze me for all my money.

See, you’re not getting laid if you buy a stripper a drink. Not even if she likes you.  Oh no. You might settle at the end of her shift but that’s gonna cost you extra. Unless you’re that mythical guy who’s so slick he can get them for free (chances are you’re not), you’re going to pay a full hooker price after buying her a few drinks and pretending like you’re not utterly disgusted with the thought that she’s there, week in, week out, rubbing wet panties against a metal rod for the delight of the drooling working man who spends his hard-earned money on his standard 3AM pretend boner.

Street hookers are easier. You almost never see their clientele and it’s an upfront deal most of the time. In a way, it’s cleaner. Then again, I’m not here to fuck these broads. I wouldn’t pay for something like that – not because I’m cheap, but because if I want to throw money away on empty promises and expensive illusions, I could always start paying my taxes.

A fat and greasy figure stuffs a fat, generous bill in one of the girls’ panties, making sure to tickle her pubes just enough to get some shiny sweat on his nails when he pulls his hand out. In case you didn’t know, strippers stuff their tips into their underwear so their bosses won’t take it away when they finish working. I mean, those guys know better, unlike the depraved fools who clap when one of the girls rubs her oily tits with sketchy sensual gestures. I catch a glimpse of a dude getting a lap dance with his wedding ring clasped around her butt cheek. He’s jonesing for what his wife could never give him.

But that’s not me. She moves on to me and suggestively rubs her thumb against her index finger to suggest payment. So when I tell her to fuck off again, she meows and bats her eyelashes for a while before giving up. It’s half past pathetic.

What I like about strippers is not their acting – you can only fall for that if you really, really want to or you’re really, really dumb. You can’t act stuff like romance when you’re putting up a show for the desperate and the alone, because acting is about planting a new seed, not sucking the pollen that’s already there. I don’t even like getting lapdances. What I like about strippers is their pole dancing.

If you get to see a good pole dance, it’s like seeing good ballet. Actually, pole dancing doesn’t even come from the slums of decadent pay-per-view adventures of the drunken burgeois, but the circus.

So as I’m watching her spin and her panties fly like a boomerang and land straight into the ice bowl, I’m not thinking – she’s Whoever the Hooker with a Motion Promo and slippery clothes. I’m thinking she’s an artist. For two minutes there, she spins and she spreads her legs and does a vertical flip with no hands and it all reminds me of a suave acrobat fairy.

For a minute there, it’s not that I’d want to hit her like a locomotive – unlike every other male with a pulse on the couches around me. It’s about her waving her magic wand of a body and it doesn’t matter that she’s probably got more germs than a Bangkok public toilet, because for a minute I forget that and she’s just a silhouette performing for my eyes and my eyes alone.

And I know this because while all the other pairs of eyes are wet with greed and lust, zoomed in on her boobs and her ass and her fat, custom lips, I’m engulfed in a strange, blind admiration that makes me wish I didn’t have to come here to see this.

I wish I knew a girl who did it as a hobby and saw the spectacle without hunting down the naive and the generous. I wish acrobats were in town. I wish the drinks weren’t this goddamn expensive and I wish I didn’t have to pass through a redlit hallway to get to this show.

But I don’t, so I stay and sigh and when she’s done, the thin female figure I had earlier told to fuck off whispers in my ear that she likes me. I’m not seeing the dance anymore so she’s back to being a drinkmagnet and I’m back to being bitter.

Beauty and art don’t last much in this world, and when they do, it just serves to emphasize how hopelessly you have to dig for it and how rare and improbable it is. But without that, the world would be made of rich drones jonesing for hot callgirls and hot callgirls jonesing for rich drones.

I’m so. Fucked up. Right now.

The more urban it gets, the more blurry, the more colorful, the more initials and less descriptive. Oh man I love every second of this.

Things blur in. Blur out. It’s like staring through a caleidoscope. A pair of tits staring me in my, dilated, blown-out, strung-out eyes. Then they fade and we dance for a few hours and I turn into a fucking waterfall by the time I even realise I start sweating. It all whirls into the bathroom and I don’t ask for her name when she unzips my fly and starts keying her number on my phone and she’s got the perfect pair of breasts man, I mean, alright, she looks like she’s maybe five years older than me but about five million times hotter than anything I ever hit.

And while she’s down there, vacuuming my soul through her narrowing lips I’m thinking: “I really should stop doing this shit.”

I’m getting blown in a really uncomfortable club bathroom and all I can think of is an inventory of everything I did in the past three hours. I’m smiling – no – grinning- but beneath my grin I’m actually clenching my teeth really tightly. And sure, that’s because of the happy pills I took but it’s mostly because I’m really, really dissapointed in myself.

I’m getting waves and waves of heat and I cum all over her face and I’m laughing like a maniac and you can picture it – eyes blown out of their orbits,  and it’s the most wonderful feeling in the world, followed abruptly by the absolute worst loneliness and despair you can picture. Which is why, as she’s wiping away the thick, white cream decorating her face with the back of her hand, she finds the process eased by warm drips falling from above.

I’m crying. I’m really crying, and cackling with a grotesque bass and I feel like the loneliest, most broken thing in the world, until she holds me really close and my rythmic dementia gets silenced by her almost maternal shush.

“Everything is all right.”

“No, you don’t get it. It’s not all right. I don’t even know who you are.”

I swallow a bulge of nausea and I go on:

“–but I need you. I really really really do. Because without you I feel like I’m back in my childhood when my mom wasn’t there. Or back in my afterteens, when the girl I put four years and everything I thought I meant wasn’t there and she was just falling for that douche with perfect gums and a perfect body and a perfect life working on the perfect Porsche. I’m the most pathetic form of life ever to have lived on this planet, no wonder everyone dumps me for the perfect fix of a perfect life. I mean, what can I offer? A few cheap thrills, a few E pills, but after the smoke clears out, I’m a broken twenty-three year old sharing a flat with four other people who despise me and think I’m a wreck. Because I am.

I’m damaged goods, probably beyond repair, and that’s probably why I need you so much right now. Because in a half an hour, when I get home and shower and start putting this shit up on the Internet for all the world to see how absolutely gigantic a failure I am, I’ll still think that I could have fallen in love in a dirty club bathroom with a girl who’s name I didn’t even get. Knowing that, much like every other woman before her, she just wiped her mouth and vanished as soon as something better came along.”

I’m really really tired and I let her go and I rush out and I get into a cab and I get home and start typing away, knowing that all I have to look forward to is a succession of being held tightly then abandoned.

But hell, at least I’m smiling through all of this. Really. Because the truth is, I wasn’t ever owed anything. “Man up” I tell myself “there’s nothing wrong with being alone. Everybody is.”

Will resume later. Big Up homies!

Sunset Solitude by ~ZulufIsFail on deviantART

This journey, much like any other journey, starts with a single step. I don’t know why they still say that.
It’s Friday evening, I check my watch, it’s thirty two past seven and I’m stuffing my stuff into my backpack and choking some clothes under my elbow. My flatmate’s name is Shummes and he’s all excited cause he gets to bang his hotter than average girlfriend for two days straight while, I imagine him imagining, I’m probably puking my guts out at some freak party on the other side of the country.
I let him relish in his enthusiasm because quite honestly I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here. Funny, isn’t it? I couldn’t wait to get here last time I wasn’t actually here. I’m starting to get the feeling I have Perpetual Dissapointment Syndrome and another feeling right afterwards that strongly suggests such a condition might actually exist. If I’m wrong, I wonder if I can coin it PDS when they invent it.
He’s like “You’re gonna be late, homie.” And I’m like “just one more thing, bro. One thing left to do…”
I disappear into my room and snort a fat bump and run outside, brofisting Shummes and light a smoke and shapes become sharper as I slide into a cab and start ordering the driver around like I’m Napoleon and he’s the guy who wiped Napoleon’s ass. My pupils widen like I’m a cat staring at a bullet when I check the time on my phone’s display mainly because I’m spun as fuck and secondly because it’s something like four past seven and my train leaves six minutes from now.
A million drugs later, I’m on my friend’s couch and Fynn plays Battlefield to my right while Allister says from the left
“It’s over 9000.”
Fynn continues:
“Definitely over 9000.”
Jean concludes:
“No doubt about it. Over 9000 penises.”
Fynn concurs:
“Jean is correct.”
I’m trying to download something but I forget what exactly I only recall they said something about “over 9000”. An angel calls and I answer and I’m like “Thanks babe, I got this image in my head like you’re supposed to save me or some shit.”
The angel says on a kinky, smooth operator voice: “I can be your superhero and you can be my sweet damsel in distress as long as I get to wear my yellow spandex suit that really brings out my boobs.”