Fun While it Lasted

Stare at a screen and wonder why you can't write any fiction anymore. Haven't finished a story in 18 months. Started many, worked on them, hit a wall. Then wonder why it matters. It's therapeutic? It's a thought organizer? Sure. So is pacing and talking to yourself. So are video games, you used to play them more and look forward to them but other than Overwatch twice or so a week the enveloping open worlds and RPGs and exploration and losing yourself for hours at a time is over, somewhere between the bald marine dudes and the shitty storytelling of Final Fantasy XV and the time commitment of Monster Hunter: World you just gave up. And you have before but this time it's permanent, months on end of it that lasted longer than the college depression that scared them away, for instance. Used to enjoy listening to 200+ albums a year, inundated with music at all times. Listened to about 25 this year so far. Saving money. Music is lessened. Writing struggles. What's the point, right? Nobody reads this blog, it's all you've written in 2017 and 2018. 100k words spread out over pithy, self-deprecatory posts, auto-biographies you swore you'd never write. Deep, dark secrets and rambling, incoherent prose. It takes 40-50 job applications to make progress, right? You've done 8 now in the last month. No dice. This isn't OkCupid where for some reason it doesn't take messaging 40 people to get a response like most men, it takes 8-12 for you, I guess constructing sentences is a big leg-up, but it didn't help you get the job and you still have no degree. Two year degrees are pointless too, right? Like the writing. Browse Indeed website and feel depressed. Would like a pay raise, $12 an hour is too low for the car and health expenses that pile up, half the people in your life make more than you and half the people you know are working two jobs or are on Medicaid or rooming with 4 other people to save money, so maybe you can't complain, you're like the mediocre, unknowable middle-ish. Then again you applied for second jobs too and got no call back, and you joked about being the end of things with your partner because where is the time when you're at a job 60+ hours a week.

Good enough to write a polite email or a high school essay that you'd look back on and hate but not good enough for anything else. Every time someone corrects you, you feel stupid, and you know you are, no specialization, no experience really, just the knowledge accumulated from thousands of books and articles and journals and stats and trivia, barely enough to get by, if at all, people compliment you on your intelligence but it's easy to sound smart citing facts like Peru has the highest percentage of Chinese population outside of Asia and Australia of any country, whoopdee fucking do, learned that stat one day when Fifa 14 generated a Peruvian-Chinese player to sign for your team and you got curious, I guess that's all you have, curiosity. Curiosity doesn't win Jeopardy, or impress people with knowledge, but then what's the point of impressing? Jane Eyre feels eons ago in 6th grade. Stereotypes. White school, Charlotte Bronte, Shakespeare in 5th grade, none of it matters, Shakespeare simultaneously funny and trite and horribly outdated, like all things, gender a punchline, it's funny looking back realizing he was considered crass pop art at the time, now he is a legend. The Beatles were generic pop at the time, rock-and-roll invented by black musicians and co-opted by white people before it could get popular. Who knows why things last. Blade Runner has more going on than most movies, but it's not rocket science and it bombed at first and there's a very 80s scene of sexual assault. Gao Ming wrote a century before Shakespeare, condemned to the circumstance of Chinese language, even though the country's GDP would dwarf almost all others, much like nearby India did, for centuries still. Imperialism robbed him of anything more than a Broadway adaptation in the 1980s. Water Margins, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West all written before Don Quixote, the latter is the most important novel of all time, you know, that's what they all say, they being the product of growing up in the west, it's ok but Journey to the West is way better, its wit puts the already silly chivalry of Don Quixote to shame, religious allegory wraps its tendrils through rollicking action and an overwhelming scale. Condemned to Chinese language and Buddhism again. There are no women in either story. There are almost no women in Blade Runner 2049, the theatre attendance was 4:1 in favor of dudes, data split in pairs as if genderqueer isn't a thing, expectations are wild but maybe just not being killed as a trans person would be a fair one. Guess you should tell the British in perpetuity to fuck off, but it's not like we're much better. Where were we? Oh yeah. One more application, one more blog entry, one more hit to the bank account to pay for a class that will bore your mind. An application for academic forgiveness that $2.5k dollars and a year's worth of time are riding on. No pressure. A rejection condemns you to so much more school and money spent you don't have. The bank account is lower than it has been in forever. You keep siphoning money from it and it dropped again to a new low just this week. Even if you wanted to, Europe is impossible right now, Japan or Korea are too, stuck in a cheaper part of the world like SE Asia or the Caribbean or the Midwest, and even then the time is limited and the aggressiveness and savings would be substantial, the flight alone would blow through most of it, and it would be the last hurrah. That's it. The former location is rad, the middle is ok, the latter is the same place you've always been so fuck it, why bother? I guess that's true of anything. You thought you'd get two more trips in before you turned 30 and end it then and there way back in the day. You're not going to end it but the two trips aren't happening, no more trips are happening, that's that and it's over, resigned to slowly spending all your money until probably around 2019 you are completely out and have to tell everyone it's over, essentially, any socialization or fun, no savings to fall back on, left living paycheck to paycheck. That's if the car gets through 2018, if not, well, then it'll be over by summer, and it will have been fun while it lasted. You guess that was true of life for awhile, maybe through grade 4 or so, fun while it lasted. Same with the music you no longer listen to, the video games you no longer play, the writing you no longer finish. The pizza you ate last night was fun while it lasted. Waking up at 4am to heartburn, not so much.