Messy

Life is messy.

It’s easy to get overcome with emotions and moments of passion and not realize what they are or why they take a hold of you. People are complicated, though it’s easy to simplify them as well and almost a necessity. Judgements are made instantaneously and usually carry with them enough weight to crush potential relationships before they even begin. This isn’t new. Youth and inexperience give way to old mistakes made a million different ways. People tell themselves that they’re young and invincible, but how many believe it? And if they don’t believe it, how do those old mistakes keep getting made?

Life is messy.

People carry their burdens with them and guard them vicariously. It’s a new generation, though the vices they seek to use as therapy remain the same. Free love isn’t new and there’s a good chance that promiscuity has existed just as long as the organs that provoke it. What makes the youth of today different from the baby boomers? We have thousands of ways to communicate with one another, though the mystery still remains, the mistakes -however common- still get made. As the divorce rate climbs past 50%, it’s a strange world that has more broken families than functioning ones. Free love was once empowering and now it remains only pragmatic and everyone seems to be well acquainted with how doves cry.

And yet empathy remains hard.

We lock our burdens away, we wear them as armor and although they affect the way we think -sometimes for the worse-, we take salvage in them. People lock themselves up in their minds in a depressing sort of self-centeredness that makes it sometimes easier to assume that you’re alone than otherwise. It’s not a new thought, it’s obvious that your own problems are given more weight than the problems of others...

But life is messy.

And people are complicated.

It's easy to say isn't it?


Nothing new.

Yet it seems that no matter how complicated a person is, everybody seems to understand everything about everybody. When others do something the explanation is strong and simple, when you do something you just feel weak and the story is complicated. Shaped by failed relationships, we repeat the same mistakes that we once deemed inexcusable, we either give in or we shut in and neither side wins but both think the other has lost.

But life is messy and people are complicated.

Pussy Problems pt.2: Of Bitches and Blunts

She had very beautiful hands.

As she removed her class ring and immediately started breaking up the marijuana that had brought her to the car in the first place, that was the main thought that permeated through Mark’s mind. It wasn’t about her ass, which judging by the way it fit into her black tights was firm enough to bounce a nickel off of. It wasn’t about her tits, which were accentuated just perfectly with her v-neck and fake sterling silver charm necklace. It was her hands. Soft, freshly manicured, and daring him to imagine how they’d feel--running through his hair, running up and down his cock. These were the hands of Venus and they were turning him into the creepy bastard every man became when confronted with a beautiful woman.

“Uh...do you want to talk?”

The girl simply shook her head, talking was not a part of this ritual. She had to have been used to it, he assumed, a girl that could properly roll a blunt was a hard thing to find. They were usually taught by guys and considering the whole seediness of stoner culture--it wasn’t a long leap to imagine that the empty dutches and altered state of mind had lead to empty panties and rash decisions. Mark wasn’t going to lie, he was intimidated by her--she was probably a lot more experienced than him both in regards to spliff rolling and in regards to random stoned sex.

Of course, that was on him--making the leap that smoking with a girl alone was a guarantee to having stoned sex.

It was bad to assume that every girl who smoked weed was fucking like a rabbit coming out of two weeks of solitary confinement, but this was 2011. The Sexual Revolution had come and gone and it had left the United States filled with would be whores--who couldn’t even really be called whores. The plain truth was that it was simply easier for girls to get laid than it was for guys. Pussy was power and women knew this from a very early age, Mark had to just look at his own life to affirm that saying--of all his accomplishments the loss of his virginity ranked disproportionately high up there.

She worked both her hands and her tongue perfectly as she rolled the now thick dutch. He had seen his friends roll up countless times, but never had it been so goddamn sensual. Was he just imagining it? She seemed so passive and carefree as her hands began at the tip and worked their way gently down the shaft of the fattie. Every second or so she’d lick with an enthusiasm and skill that would send a priest into a cold shower. Finally, she looked up at him with her big brown eyes...

“Do you have a poker?”

And there! The silence was broken and his live doobie rolling sex doll was looking at him expectantly. Did he have a poker for her? Oh, if only she knew. Still, Mark disconnected his headphones and handed them to the girl. She poked and she packed and she roasted. Soon, she raised the thick and hardened object to her mouth, puckered her lips and sucked until it was glowing red.

She knew exactly what she was doing.

She had too.

Pussy Problems pt. 1

"Many a good man has been put under the bridge by a woman."

-Bukowski

Charlie was desperate.

Yes, desperate was the perfect word--even though it was completely cliche. Charlie was a writer or at least that’s what he called himself, he hadn’t produced anything in months and that was the source of his desperation. Things just didn’t seem to be working out and all he seemed to have was a composition book filled with scrawlings, a dead end job filled with monotony, and a hapless existence that had left him broke and woman less.

Until he wrote something.

He hated the fact that he just simply couldn’t produce. He had tried all the methods that had worked for him before this dry spell--he had listened to music, he had drank, he had smoked, he had even delved into psychedelics and he hadn’t even been greeted with bad work...simply nothingness. It almost felt like he had reached his plateau, that he had crashed face first into the glass ceiling that was his potential and had been left with nothing. His talent expired before it had a chance to be used, his life dream over before he had even reached his mid twenties.

It was depressing, pathetic and the worse part was knowing all of those things made him want to write even less.

He was a writer who simply couldn’t write and as if he couldn’t feel anymore cliche he also found himself sitting in a Starbucks staring at a blinky black line as he pondered what would come first--a suicide attempt or something at least pretending to be inspiration.

“Charlie?”

He woke up from his self depreciated daze to stare at the voice who had called his name and then immediately regretted doing such. Not her. Not now. Goddamn it!

“Corrine, shit, what’s up?”

Corrine. If he called her the one who got away he’d be completely wrong--she’d be the one who didn’t even really start. Just one of the unrequited loves that introspective writers who lack charisma seem to pick up between the ages of 13 and 15 where low self esteem, high intelligence, and teenage awkwardness all blended into a cocktail that turned good kids into twisted and ugly men who were incapable of writing anything.

But Corrine looked beautiful.

She looked beautiful and charming and here Charlie was uninspired and vapid. It was as if the universe had some law that made sure that you never ran across a past love at your best, but really was there a best with Corrine? She had seen how desperate and how flawed and how weak he was. There was no way he could put up a front with her--she knew the truth. He couldn’t be cocky, he couldn’t respond with a joke--she knew. Fronting to a girl that had broken your heart was a lot like fronting a guy who had knocked you out--no matter how brave you were, they knew how you looked while unconscious, they knew they could take you, they knew that they were stronger.

“Heh. Nothing much, what about you?”

What could he say? That he had a dead end job, that although he had achieved nothing but praise he simply couldn’t take advantage of his one talent? That he was doing poorly in school and in general poorly in life. Really how could he face her? How could he face her beauty and her charm when all he had was fragility and desperation.

“Eh. Same old, same old, actually I was about to leave...”, he said fumbling with his cell phone checking a text message that wasn’t there, “But, really, it was great seeing you!”

She smiled at him.

Fuck her smile, the same smile that made him think--maybe he had a chance. The smile that sent him to some (500) Days of Summer fantasy, that fucking retarded smile that made him as weak and as powerless as she knew him to be.

“I’ve missed you Charlie.”

No!

He tried to prevent himself from saying it, he knew that once he did he could never take it back. His life was filled with enough problems as it was and he didn’t need to be bringing in Corrine to make things more interesting. He had to write! He had to do something! Talking to a girl who had established no interest in him and had left him heart broken just seemed like a poorly thought out decision.

And yet, he did it anyway.

“Yeah, me too...”

She smiled, her charming smile and then pulled out her fancy phone.

“We should catch up, we were best friends in high school and I heard you got published a few months ago! It’ll be fun!”

Numbers were exchanged, hugs were given, and then as soon as he exited the Starbucks Charlie exploded in curses. A writer who couldn’t write involving himself with a woman that had left him emotionally stunted--it could only end in complete and utter shit.
And still, he couldn’t write.

The day had left him with nothing but discomfort and the night had lead him to his friends front yard. Blunts were being rolled, beers were being bought and the strange balance between misogyny and philosophy was being tested.

“I saw Corrine today.”

And his friends knew immediately what they were in for and that they didn’t really want it. The emotional roller coaster that they were obligated to go on simply because of loyalty and friendship.

“Yeah?”

That was really all they could offer? He had just said something that had crushed him with emotional weight and all his friends could do was say “yeah?”. It was insulting, infuriating--

“Yeah.”

What else could he have said?

One friend exited the car, lit up the blunt and smiled his cheshire smile as the medication was passed and everyone in the small circle attempted to do their best Sigmund Freud impression.

“So, Charlie has a pussy problem,” one friend offered passing the blunt to another--

“Yeah, his problem is that he can’t get no pussy.”

They all cackled. Male friendship was odd in that regard, while females spent their time being openly sweet and secretly vindictive--men made fun of each other and yet remained fiercely loyal. He supposed that was the difference between men and women, men were at least capable of loyalty and they gave it away fairly easy. A woman required chasing and taming and all the emotional bullshit that made men like Charlie weak and unsure.

“So, Charlie, what is the problem--the pussy or that you’re a pussy?”

That was the grand question, wasn’t it? But, Charlie didn’t know and he knew that more thought would only lead him to doubting himself even more. He simply medicated and then went to sleep, woke up and then went through the day much like the last. Every twenty minutes or so he’d write a text message and then delete it and all this while staring at the damnable computer screen and thinking of her damnable smile.

He still could not write.

And he still couldn’t think of what the problem was.

Short Stuff

Prom night.

Considered by many to be the apex of adolescent memories. A time where innocence is traded away and adulthood is gifted to teenagers wrapped in tuxedos and transported in overpriced limousines. Like many boys his age, Chad Munteanu dreamed of magic occurring on his prom night--and like many boys his age he was greeted with disappointment when that night came. As he waited in his date’s house he felt the judging of her mother’s eyes, the glare of her father as he seemed unsure if Chad was capable of protecting his little girl. Chad, for the most part had been dealing with such discrimination the entirety of his life for a matter he could not control.

Chad, like millions of Americans, happened to be born short.

From the moment he began schooling he was subjected to the countless acts of discrimination modern day American’s tend to ignore out of convenience. Chad‘s mind is riddled with various memories of his ‘vertically challenged’ state and unfortunately they’re very rarely good memories.

“One of the earliest memories I have was when I was about seven years old,” Chad who stands at about five foot five said with his distinct and contrasting deep baritone voice, “My father, who happened to not be height impaired took me to a carnival and I wanted to ride the bumper cars…we waited for thirty minutes before the engineer sneered at my dad and said,” Chad paused as he put on his best ’hill billy’ accent “Sorry, your kid is too small for this one!”

Tragic stories such as the one told by Chad have been sprouting up throughout the United States since it’s inception. This has a large part to do with the fact that there has never been any reputable short person portrayed in the media. The only reliable leading man below 5’9” is Tom Cruise, who routinely wears lifts, married a tall Australian woman, AND is also considered no less than ‘batshit insane’. Other short role models include the trollish Danny Devito or the imperialistic and generic super villain Napoleon Bonaparte. Short people have consistently been chastised for ambition (The Napoleon Complex) and mocked for their lack of athletic prowess by many due to these media perceptions.

Furthermore, it is hard for short men to carve a future for themselves. Living in a constant state of competition for mates with their tall counterparts. Much like how the media has portrayed short males as Napoleonic batshit insane trolls. Truth of the matter is that women do not seek short men. The social struggles one has to go by choosing an inter-height relationship is often enough to ruin said relationship. While many in society have accepted inter-racial couplings and legislation is being fought for today to allow same sex couplings, there has been no struggle for legislation to welcome short marriages and the actual relationships between a short man and a normal sized woman has been characterized as nothing short of awkward.

Let’s go back to the scene at Chad’s date’s house. The mother judging the height impaired young man who had managed to steal her daughters affections, the father trying his best to intimidate the boy in a purple suede tuxedo. As the seventeen year old girl walked down her stairway and she stood next to Chad a look of panic was etched on her face and a look of rage was plastered upon Chad’s. The normal prom night greetings were exchanged, pictures were taken and fixed upon countless computer screens as they made their way through facebook. The two remained silent with their respective expressions remaining on their face until they were alone in the limousine.

“I can take them off if they bother you…”

The words however were empty to young Chad who had endured seventeen years of mocking and was ill prepared to handle it coming from this young lady. He grimaced as if he had just drank an entire gallon of liquid soap and shook his head so quick you’d think he was suffering from Tourettes.

“Keep on the damn heels, it’s fine.”

Chad has a dream that one day, short little boys and tall little girls will be able to go to a dance without having to coordinate shoes or purchase lifts. It is up to the nation to make sure that it does not remain a dream, at least forever.

Motherhood

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."

-Oscar Wilde

When I was in tenth grade my mother walked out on me for the first time.

2006 was the year that I really began noticing women for the first time and as such it was also the year that the most influential woman in my life left it. Much like I had spent the entirety of my high school career searching for older brothers, filling the void that my mother left was also very important. My mom was special in the sense that she provided me with that uneasy confidence that I could do no wrong. It’s a mother’s job to do that for young boys, to pat them on the shoulder, to tell them that they’re handsome and that a constant menagerie of women would be lining up at their door any moment. I suppose that’s what made my whole relationship with women uneasy, my mother mocked me at sixteen for my virginity, she popped anti-depressants regularly, and I was often the one telling her to stop smoking weed.

My mother began leaving my home periodically around that time, I ended up dealing with the first real serious dejection and heart break around that time as well…

Thinking back to my valued highschool days I remember a girl in my AP European History class. She was extremely pretty, pretty to the point that even now I’m a little nervous thinking that she’s going to read this work and know I’m talking about her. She had the same little hipster traits I would find myself in love with for the next four years: she was artsy, intellectual, confident, a little bit of a smart ass and much like every relationship with women I had ever had…most of our talking was done through the written word. I could always weave a sentence much better than I could speak it, I appreciated the backspace button on my keyboard, the pause between IM’s…

Regardless she knew where she stood with me.

She knew I was the loud, obnoxious, and somewhat charismatic dorky kid who had never touched a girl and feigned confidence. She knew I found her ridiculously attractive and she also knew that humoring me provided nothing but enjoyment.

She rejected me pretty easily and with little effort when I finally did convince myself it was worth a shot.

It was a testament to her that there was no feelings of resentment, that we both knew where we stood, that I’d be a foot note and acquaintance and that she’d be a myspace or facebook for me to creep on. A story for me to tell and exaggerate.

It was a testament to the fact that my mother was much less tactful than a fifteen year old girl that I was filled with such resentment when she left. My mother left me with nothing but hate, she was a story for me to seethe with and I was a myth for her to gain sympathy from her friends. A story for me to hide and be ashamed of.

I have forgotten or perhaps refuse to remember how significant of an effect my mother had on me. I’ve replaced her with the female teachers who mentored me and told me my writing was amazing, the same women who I had burdened with another son silently, whom I expected to feel some sort of magical concern for my deeds. Perhaps because I came from a ruined family I will spend my entire life trying to build a functional one. Collecting my older brothers to come with me and guide me into battle. Collecting my mothers to nurture me and build confidence in ways my father could not…

The girl from my AP History class became a mother herself recently. Today she commented so eagerly on my choice of career, she patted me on the back with her ‘like’ of my status and my excitement for the first day of school. I imagined her using the same voice she used when she would seductively tell me ‘goodbye’ and when she would pretend to care and laugh at my jokes…

Were some people built to be mothers? To have the strange skill to build confidence and be the most magical people you know? Was it just because she was a mother that I put all this weight in her statements and attempts at small talk…

Or maybe as a man and more so as a man without a mother my own opinions and visions of what a mother is supposed to be is twisted.

The Island pt. 2

“Chad! Yo, wake up!”

I had found myself asleep on the beach--a practice that I had almost made into a ritual over the course of the last three months. The beach was special in that regard--it made being homeless seem easy. More than once I had thought of just living on Miami Beach, begging tourists for beers, fighting seagulls for pieces of bread, and just sleeping on the sand and bathing in the warm night water. Unfortunately I found myself better than such actions. One of the truest things I had ever read in a college textbook was the fact that men -from a very early age- already have an established sense of self worth that cannot be effected by the actions of others. We have a very strong sense of where we are on the food chain, we can doubt if we’re right…but we’ll either settle for less or be happy with more. A man’s required amount of respect is very apparent from the day he finally decides to stop sucking on his mother’s breast.

I fumbled over and stared at my friend, squinting my eyes in the state of drunkenness mother nature gives to you as soon as you wake up. The eerie feeling of knowing exactly where you are but having absolutely no sense of where your mind is at…

“What man?”

“The waves bro! They’re coming in super strong, let’s hit the water! It’s hot as fucking balls right now.”

I blamed Muse on the fact that moments later I was jumping into waves and getting pushed around by the ocean like the 125lb mound of flesh I was. The idea that when I was with my friends I was Invincible was directly perpetrated by them. The fact that we could fight one another, run up and down for hours getting beaten up by the very forces of nature, and eat fattening foods and still say I was fine. It was directly their fault.

It’s sad to say, but almost every bad decision you will ever make in your life is enabled by your friends.

You don’t think it, there is a joy with believing that every decision you make is your own. That you’re a leader and everyone surrounding you is a follower. Being pushed around the waves, I couldn’t help but realize how false that was. The waves were dictating my movements, but we were clearly in different classes. Isolating yourself from your own comrades is a very real practice as we’re all inclined to think that we’re either lower or of a higher class than the people we hang with. We compare every aspect of our being to the people we consider allies and we pick things we’re better at than them to hold on to. The people on the beach were better looking than me, they were making more money than me, and they were overall happier than me -- but I was smarter than them, so upon my own little island I sat content.

I thought as I continued to chase waves under the illusion of friendship that I was always isolating myself from them in some ways.

When I laughed at their jokes but really thought of my own troubles; When I disvalued their own relationships and hyped up my own shallow nonexistent ones; When I belittled their life experience and marginalized their sadness in comparison to my own. A personal obsession with being right, a sad fact was that even though we had taken this trip to achieve some sort of communal enlightenment…I was being selfish.

The truth was that examining my own island on my own was far more important than being on an island with four other just as confused men.

I rose from the waves, breathing heavily. My friends continued chasing after the crashing torrents with the utmost fervor, but I guided myself to the beach and plopped myself down on the sandy towel I had brought with me. I cupped my face with my hands and then turned my gaze to the sea…

Alone on the beach, Soldiers Key never felt so small.

The Island pt. 1

Far away.

That was the whole point of this trip, to get far away from everything that was holding us back. To get away from the streets that had plagued our vision for the last ten years, to get away from the women who had plagued our beds and left our hearts in ruin over the course of our lives, to get away from the problems we couldn’t name and the solutions we couldn’t find. It was a stupid plan, get on a boat and head right on to a private Key five miles out. Chase Mahi-Mahi and dreams for no reason other than the fact that we needed an experience of substance to supplement our lives that took haven in caves of monotony.

I was running away, running far away.

What issues was I trying to escape? Was I mad like the countless other boys pretending to be men? Mad that I had one parent who didn’t know how to raise his son and another who wanted nothing to do with raising her son? That I had been chased down a dark hole filled with heart ache and mistrust, that I had been nurtured and breast fed utilizing lies and deception? Your parents are your models for God, they’re both loving and vengeful. We spend our lives trying our best to please them and then revering them when they get old but it becomes extremely hard when you’re exposed to their all too human qualities. When your mother is a manic-depressive compulsive liar who is more content to run away than to face her problems. When your father is a headstrong blue collar man who is raising and begging three children for approval whilst struggling with the fact that his father had never given him anything resembling it.

I hadn’t been taught much by anyone in life, but I had picked up on enough bad habits to make a nun blush.

“Chad! We’re not that far from Soldier’s Key, right?”

Soldiers Key.

One of my earliest memories of this tiny little island five miles away from Key Biscayne is catching Barricuda with my brother. I never understood why people were scared of ‘Cuda and that’s more of a fault of my own twisted life experience than anything. It was an invicibility that could only be bred in childhood, when me and my brother spent an entire day baiting and making the feared reef predator our collective bitch. It caused me to laugh when I would watch Animal Planet and see people who had limbs bitten off by the fish, they were the fools. They had been chased down and maimed by a creature an eight year old boy was capable of neutralizing.

“Yeah, we’re almost there man, ‘bout three miles out.”

My friends were running for different reasons…

Escaping failure was very different than being confronted with success. One of us was escaping our own mistakes, the other was escaping his own future, the other was escaping heart break.

“I need to get fucking laid right now man, for real man, I know it sounds fucked up…but a good piece of pussy? It’ll set things straight man.”

That was a lesson I had to learn.

Because, I wasn’t chasing pussy, I had spent the entirety of my romantic life looking for a good woman. She didn’t exist. There are some women who can make you feel exceptionally amazing with their bodies and souls, but these are the same type of women who will take pleasure in ripping out your heart. Men, for all of our false bravado and degeneration are the loyal ones, the ones that generally feel love. A man is skilled at providing, physicality, and introspection -as you’ll never find a woman who knows more about herself than a man does about himself-. Women were skilled in lies, deception, and damnation.

It’s strange that the prescribed teenage solution to having a problem with women is to simply find more women.

The island came up on the horizon…

Whether what we were trying to escape could be escaped, whether our sadness could be propelled away in only a few hushed breaths from the sea breeze, whether our sins could really be washed away on the ocean shores--didn’t matter.

As we had already traveled five miles out looking for redemption and answers, there was too much time invested in enlightenment to turn back now.