A Young Life Crisis: Part One

A Young Life Crisis

Part One

Today is my birthday and I feel older than ever. My bones creak as I get up, unhinged and in need of grease. I try to drink the warm milk near my bedside but it tastes sour and chalk-like in my mouth. My nasal passages are blocked with phlegm. Everything hurts-my bones, my neck, my back. If one drinks from the cup of life at a young age, I must be drinking the grinds at the bottom of the stein; my younger life a visage of what I use to be; some phantom whom I don’t quite understand anymore; who’s looks and good luck seem to avoid me. I kick the James Patterson novels that lounge around my floor as I look for my giant, sun-blocking sunglasses to defend myself from the morning which seems to be poking its nose through my blinds. My corneas are so sensitive. And tell that kid next door to turn off that gosh darn devil music! And boy, oh boy, do I love Glenn Beck, let me tell you.

Of course I’m being overtly facetious about all this-cute one might say-about the fact that I’m getting old. I’m still overtly young, twenty three to be exact, but as I remarked to one of my younger brother’s friends, “shit kind of goes down after you turn twenty-one.” And I was being honest. What does one really have to look forward to after that birthday, at least birthday wise? God, I can’t wait till I’m thirty, I mean, really? Does anyone actually say that? I’ve known people who have rushed into adulthood, sometimes with their diapers flapping around their ankles, unprepared for the harsh reality that is about to become THEIR LIFE, but I have not heard anyone say, damn, forty sure sounds sexy. We all want a wife and kids and a house and a little dog that don’t bark to god damn much but does anyone really want the age that actually comes along with it? I remember in my last relationship what scared me the most was not the serious incline it was taking-god I would embrace that if I had it again-it was the fear of me being thirty and bald and with some kid I want to understand, be the cool dad, but he looks at me like the Marlboro Cowboy, all scrunched face and what-not. Would I just be an image of the young man I use to be? Shit use to keep me up at night. But that was nineteen, this is now.

I don’t mean to sound like an Elliot Smith record about all this, even though I love the man, but it’s a question that plagues me this very second as I type my subconscious on the page. This past year I’ve come to understand that success should not be based around other’s expectations because in reality how can one gauge success or modernity or even happiness? It’s impossible. You can be dirt poor, exhausted, in some house that is falling apart; the god damn roof is caving in, man; have someone you appreciate and care about but be confused about how to show it, still be fucking up, but be strangely happy. Your life is going nowhere but you know that it’s going in the right direction. The direction that you picked out for it. Or you could be on the cusp of “starting,” after a year of set backs and strange trips, finally be taken seriously, I mean, when did this start, weird, people shaking your hand all firm and actually listening to what you have to say, and be able to talk about books and art and music without saying it’s “fucking amazing” or “life-changing” or even worse “better than what you got,” be someone of style and grace, be finally leaving that hellhole of a job that wasn’t really a “job” to begin with, start your life according to your degree, be the fabrics of going somewhere, yet feel strangely empty. Like Houdini after he took that punch, my insides feel like they’re about to burst if I don’t do something.

I’m not regretting my life at all. I’m not on the floor, comatose, after taking a fistful of sleeping pills. This is not “Dear God, It’s Me, Jameson.” I’m not walking the razor’s edge. I’m just looking at myself, on my birthday, and wondering is this it? Twenty three, living in my parent’s basement, I swear to God I’m moving out sans September, sleeping on some makeshift futon that kills my back (the back thing before was so not a joke) while some gum plant that my parents left, no, insist stay next to my bed rains foliage upon me during the course of the night. Is this how I pictured myself right now?

Over the course of the last year I spent a lot of them time trying to write, trying to write something. This was my knee-jerk response to the relative failure I was feeling otherwise; this coma-year will be the production of something great. And I have started about five different novels, ideas I have started off very high on, but have scraped them all. Because they suck. They are terrible. I want to write something real and funny and dark and the things I’ve been writing are none of those things. I have achieved levels of poise sometimes though; there are things, poems, which I’m really proud of. And my “Short Term Memory Loss” still makes me crack up even though it’s fucking scary as hell. My wonderments make me question, though, do I have what it takes? Did I ever have the talent or was it just my younger expectations, set sky-high, drunk off the aspect of being in an environment that cultivates this type of growth confuse me or trick me into believing I had anything? I use to scoff at people who tried to write or act, things that came, at least I believed, came easy to me; I use to giggle watching them, god those deranged souls who could not see or their hubris would not allow them to see the inevitable: they did not have what it takes. The amount of Acting Majors or Creative Writing Majors I encountered who, to be frank, were not any good, was staggering. I would view them like amoebas; these small, ghost-like things that populate your existence but one does not stop twice to think about them unless they are interested in examining miniatures.

To me, I had it all. I succeed academically in everything I’ve ever tried (except for science, god damn you Marie Curie) and haven’t really broken a sweat. I could be successful in a professional field, have a good, scratch that, great looking girlfriend and be able to pursue my creative fields (acting, writing) on the side until the success of these creative things, which I really enjoyed, would be able to support me. I would have it all. I really thought I was special, not ordinary special, but tremor-inducing, earth splitting open, ohmygoodnessherehecomesdownthestreet special. I was really a dick to be honest.

There’s a story I like to tell about me auditioning for Even Stevens and how I believed that I would get the role, but previous to auditioning, being warned about this Shia Lebouf kid. “You gotta watch this kid” or “he’s something special, I tell ya” people were telling me. Upon meeting him, this sweaty, nervous, lispy kid, I literally laughed in his face. This is the kid I have to watch out for? Pssh, out of my way, mortal. The humility of the story is that I didn’t get the role, as you probably well know, and that Shia kid has gone on to make out, literally dry hump, Megan Fox on screen and be the next Gordon Gekko in Wall Street Two. Such is life I use to regard.

It’s a made up story, sorry to those who believed it, I was having a lot of fun at your expense-I use to go home and laugh about how many people actually believed the story-but the realness of my lie, if there is such a thing, is staggering. I believed not in the story but that in some ulterior universe this story was probably true. If I actually had the opportunity to audition, the audition might have went the way it did most likely, but I believed, at least part of me did, that I would of probably got the role. This cracked view of myself has choked me for a long time. It might be that my mom patted me on the head too much as a child (she most certainly did not) or that I ate too many Wheaties one morning, but I’ve believed that success is something that was bound to happen to me, not matter how long it took, it was going to happen. Once again the definition of success is brought up, but here, in my mind, it is the most definite. I would be respected and one of the best and “people know me” as Ron Burgundy would say. Whether that field would be writing, acting, or plain fornicating (why not all three?), the field itself was not as important as the result, fame.

Now, I’m not saying that I’m an advocate for celebrity. In fact, I fucking hate celebrities. I literally want to vomit in my mouth when I see the Kardashians on television or read about some MTV Reality “Star,” we have come to use this star word a little too lightly if you ask me, getting her own spin-off. These people contribute nothing to our society yet they are the pillars of what is important or famous. No, I didn’t want any of this. I wanted to be respected in my community by the people who actually mattered; the people who read and wrote religiously, fellow actors, people who create art. I wanted to be “that guy” who people talk about within certain confines yet remains slightly illusive. I would do only pictures I cared about, important plays, write stuff that affected others as it affected me. I did not want to be a popcorn salesman; I wanted to protrude myself in the realm of realness and wade about. In other words, I wanted Ryan Gosling’s career, kidding, but not really though.

Now, where am I going with all this? I don’t know exactly but being not entirely sure is what excites me. I know that this will be an in depth discussion of me: as a person, who I am, where I’m going, what I want, what I want to change, what I can’t change. If art is life, then my life right now must be a Pollack painting, with paint and cigarette buds and human fluids spewn around. I don’t want to be neat and organized, per se, but I want to know me. What has drawn me to this self- realization is exactly what I feared as a young man: old age. It’s creeping up behind me and if I don’t straighten up or discover something about myself, it might overtake me and slump me in a chair that I might never get out of. This is just the beginning, people.