Rotting

Little did you know how much your body rots away at the desk where you park yourself 9 hours a day because you have to because it is your job. Whiffle ball, hours of it, legging out singles and doubles and waking up the next day sore, and even the day after that sore. If crystal and liquid intelligence peak in your mid to upper 20s then surely physical form does too, it's all downhill from here, days of soreness and forgetting and missing your turn and needing more stopping distance. The joys of aging are no such thing; pernicious, life is.

Nobody Ever Told Us

Nobody ever told us how many passwords we'd have to memorize.
Nobody ever told us how long to keep the tea bag in the hot water.
Nobody ever told us that the only way to avoid debt was to avoid education.
Nobody ever told us that skunks like hanging out near warm air like the kind that dryer vents expel.
Nobody ever told us how hard it'd be to diet and exercise.
Nobody ever told us that everyone gets lonely once in awhile.
Nobody ever told us to dust the cinder block window sills in the basement where the spiders collect.
Nobody ever told us a constantly running computer would keep the room much warmer.
Nobody ever told us all the answers would be online.
Nobody ever told us how to be happy.
Nobody ever told us how to love.
Nobody ever told us that the gas burners on the stove make scrambled eggs so much faster than electric and why would anyone want electric?
Nobody ever told us that the grass needs early spring crab grass treatment and late spring weed control.
Nobody ever told us that being a child involves having too little control and being an adult involves having too much.
Nobody ever told us to keep drain cleaner.
Nobody ever told us that the bullshit we mastered in school would be the same bullshit we used at work to construct an email to the boss about why the numbers don't quite add up.
Nobody ever told us how often to change the mattress.
Nobody ever told us that the calculus would be lost like the old toys you had as a kid.
Nobody ever told us there would be a vast emptiness when the think pieces stopped being written about your generation and moved on to the younger crowd even if they were never good or positive.
Nobody ever told us how it is to feel old.

Surrounding

Many a great person - if 'great person' can truly be an accurate turn of phrase - have claimed that they ascended to some level of success because they surrounded themselves with good people. This is a worthwhile goal, in general, particularly if the good people one surrounds themselves with represent a variety of backgrounds and viewpoints. However, it provides a sort of negative 'coming to reality' moment for the present author, as, given that the present author is not one of these good people and will never be chosen as such, the present author is perpetually condemned to never be in touch with a great person.

Distractions

By allowing oneself to be distracted by destitute hobbies, such as, for example, video games, one can spend an inordinate amount of time not pursuing their goals via the talent one does not have, thus preventing any sort of disappointment or failure. Thus, it can be said that to continually distract oneself from one's goals and desires is to successfully avoid the reality of lacking any ability to achieve said goals and desires.

Optimism

It has been demonstrated that having optimism about something coming in the future, or looking forward to something coming up, improves one's mood measurably. It could be derived, then, that constantly having something to look forward to is to one's benefit. However, given that the predominant state of future occurrences is one of failure, one wonders how one could aptly maintain optimism about future events, given that such optimism would be routinely displayed as false.

Prolonging the Inevitable

It has been said by people who are smarter, in all manner, than the present author, that to prolong the inevitable is a waste of one's resources - that the anxiety we build up before an event is worse than the actual event itself - and that trying to prolong something that is assuredly going to happen is of poor practice, and we should thus seek to resolve the event on its natural course, and have it all be over.

One also wonders, then, if this is a universal statement; thus one could aptly conclude that trying to prolong life, given the inevitability of death, is also a waste of resources.

We Used to Pretend We Would Be Happy

April changed over to May, you know. You made me promise to move somewhere like LA and send a pic of a sunset on the beach or a sunrise with a coffee or just me being able to wear regular clothes in the middle of January. That was years ago.

April changed to May, you know. You wouldn't guess with the weather. But the weather is boring and to perpetuate the dialogue is something I don't wish to do. You used to talk about seeing the world, or maybe at least Paris and London and Seoul.

April changed to May, you know. The pills rattle around their bottle in the pocket of my khakis, nobody asks me what the noise is and if they did I would have no answer, for to medicate is to be weak and sickly and wrong. America medicates. I've been at this job since 2009. That long, really? I used to tell you how one day I would quit and get a job where I could actually meet people and make friends and then I was almost 30 and it didn't matter because two decades of a wasted life can be three before you know it.

April changed to May, you know. Mother's Day is coming. Perhaps something nice will come in the mail for my mother and other mothers and then you can forget how I messed up something and left a stranger with an odd communication and necklace and wondering who was who. Maybe one day you'll get away from your city and your family and we can talk about how you love the snow and I hate it.

April changed to May, you know. There are people driving cars that were born this century now. The flowers outside my front porch bloomed and then fell to the ground and the bees no longer swarm their purple visage that has been engulfed by gravity and lies discarded.

April changed to May, you know. Maybe this would be the year. The year where things changed. The year where we travelled, the year where we made friends, hung out, made memories, had fun. You told me life sucked and I agreed and we laughed and I drank alcohol and took benzos and tried to go into a coma but all I got was a shitty headache.

April changed to May, you know, but what's a change in name, anyhow?