"The field's too big"

Ok. This is going to sound rather 'dramatic.' 

I would describe my life as a series of retreats. 

Explain.

All through my life I eventually drop any new activity I start. 

Why? 

I'll get to that. 

Let me take you to an earlier time. 

I quit soccer after one practice, one fucking practice. Why? Because I wanted to play with a coffee can full of soon-to-be dead crayfish that my brother and the neighbor scooped from inside a ditch at the bottom of the hill along a highway bordering my neighborhood. When asked why I didn't want to go to soccer, my response was "the field's too big." It was a convenient excuse, and that was all it was. But it was one my dad and my mom both wouldn't let me live down. And neither am I. Not here. That's the theme. "The field's too big."

While I don't recall the decision, my mother said I wanted to learn the violin. It may have stemmed from a then-popular Charlie Daniels song. That says more about my age and my cultural orbit at the time than anything else. I gave it a really shitty go and just gave up. Zero motivation, no energy, no imagination, no drive, nothing. I recall countless times my violin teacher at the local university scolding me for not practicing and, well, I remember specifically my brother attending one and being a very bad influence on that session. He was notorious for his corrupting influence. So many times I didn't want to play a game and he'd simply rough me up until I would concede to hit a stupid foam ball back and forth across our short hallways, using the two rooms at each ends as goals. He'd rough me up if I simply didn't want to wrestle or get punched in the arm over and over and over. His game or pain, no option. 

So that was one retreat, from classical music instruments. And of course that quickly became a retreat from the topic as well to cry about my victimhood. I'm a victim of big things: big fields, big instruments, big brothers. 

Retreat.

In my earliest years of grade school I was completely uninspired, just going through class, not wanting to participate, showing very little interest in my verbal responses when called upon, and getting called out for approaching class exercises with this blase' attitude. But at one brief moment getting others' attention was all that I cared about. This time another kid was being a bad influence on me. Aaron Wrigley did something that made the girls laugh as the whole class was standing in a large circle around the perimeter of our classroom, and I thought to myself, "Hey! I can do that! I WANT to do that!" If I could just be THE class clown, then I'd make it. And so while my course grades held in the A-B range my 'conduct' grade was an F. The teacher wrote on my report card 'the F stands for funny' and described the particular way in which I was being called out for trying to stand out by being a cut up, full of slapstick and goofy showboating. I came home with my report card and bawled my eyes out at the grade. I kept screaming to my babysitter that 'F stands for fuck!' and sat worried that my dad was going to beat my ass. This is coming from a child of maybe 6 or 7 mind you, and as they say, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. My mother cussed like a sailor and catastrophized everything to a shocking and very public extent. Like momma, like son. 

Out on the parking lot-as-playground, I would stand next to the parking bollards and talk to myself as the other kids ran around in team activities. I just simply lacked the energy or really the desire to play with any of them or engage in kicking the ball. Once again, the field was too big. 

Fast forward to high school. The few pieces of art and poetry that remain are absolutely morose, goth-before-hottopic, and, well, edgy as fuck--pictures of Jesus with a swastika tattoo on his forehead crucified on a swastika, poems about dying. At some point, I think it was the summer between the seventh and eighth grade, my world changed. I was changing. My clothes didn't fit. I was met with lots of jeers about my clothing and comments about my body. I was even depantsed while wearing some goofy fluorescent clothing, which was one of the outfits my mother purchased for visiting her dying father in Arizona. I never went, but I was left with the clothes. I recall when we picked mom up from the airport, she wept, and not one of us addressed her sadness or showed any affection. She was wearing suspenders and wreaked of her Giorgio perfume. Sad. I hated those kids after that brief spring in the seventh grade, living through a very awkward growth spurt into adulthood. I stopped dressing a certain way. I stopped mingling with that crowd of kids. Essentially, I was just some isolate with a streak of hate so deep that I'm surprised I didn't take a gun from home and shoot up the school. In fact I would have that very dream, that very dream, the next year, at high school, and I would continuously imagine ways to destroy hundreds upon hundreds of kids, some with productive lives ahead of them. I thought I could time gas bombs to go off a few minutes after the bell just above all the locker bays. Odd really, I suppose the institutional design of public education rubbed me wrong. I believe I stopped urinating in public some time around then as well. This wasn't a conscious decision. It was partly directed by the way we all inherited a school day with little time between classes and restrooms that were utterly dismembered to prevent smoking. Stopping smoking was apparently more important than shitting behind a door. I'd sit at home night after night, weekend after weekend, staring at the TV, the walls, the images in my mind, high as fuck on pseudoephedrine tablets purchased at the gas station, chewing at my ego, spitting out depression, rocking back and forth, being a complete shut in. It's no wonder the one girl I liked in high school, Jennifer McElligot, wanted nothing to do with me. Funny looking back on that. My best track record with dating women comes from those with no father or no concept of one because hers was such a runaway loser, alcoholic, or simply dead. Jennifer's dad had left her mom and her siblings. He didn't stay in touch. He wanted nothing to do with her. But my god, she was all I ever wanted, big ass and all. Damn, she looked good. And the one time she called me and dropped the big hint that so and so broke up with her I simply brushed off the comment because I was too proud to ask her out then, Mr. Fucking Cool, after she had turned me down at the beginning of the school year. And that's where our personal lives stopped intertwining. Once again, "the field's too big." Her big ass wasn't though. Damn.  

Sorry Jennifer. I do hope you're doing well. I think about you sometimes. The last picture I saw of you was from Jon Brown. You were dressed in a Spiderman costume with the mask off. You still looked beautiful to me, and I was pleased that your live-in boyfriend was balding like I was back then. Schadenfreude? Sure. 

But something happened one night after a hefty bong rip. I had a series of deep, philosophical epiphanies. I saw the death of my family and my pets. I wept. I jammed out to some music, I was rocking back and forth in my bed like the autistic freakshow I've always been and somehow, somewhere I stepped away from the sadness regime, just briefly. 

That lasted about 9 months. Then, after a girl who I thought was interested in me, stopped calling, I popped on a CD and listened to a song about looking for someone. And this giant wave of sadness washed right over me. I did hold on to my academic and career hopes. I was hell-bent on being a doctor the arrogant and naive cocksucker that I was. 

"That's a big field Jay bird. Are you going to retreat?" I'll get to that.  

My career aspirations didn't last either. I was quite talented at biology, holding down a B+ in what was one of several 'weeder' courses for the pre-med track. I ran into my professor outside as we crossed the street at the same time. "Hi Dr. Aspinwall!" I said. "Hi," he replied in a tone that immediately relegated me to his periphery. Crushed. What in the hell was I doing here? What do biologists do anyway? I could have gone to his office hours and discovered all sorts of things. I thought they took water samples and looked at shit under microscopes. I had no clue. This was as the human genome project was just ramping up, and I had no clue, not a fucking clue, of all the interesting and rewarding things that biologists do, their neat machines and fancy computers, none of that. Retreat. After another stoned epiphany I realized I just wanted to write and was ready to leave school. 

Retreat. 

That didn't last either because nobody in my family could bear seeing me quit school. My great aunt and godmother came to visit me with her new husband and implored me not to quit. There, as I sat with my grandparents, my great aunt, and Jim, her new sugar bear, around my grandmother's table I conceded once again--another retreat. This one was a retreat from a retreat though. Fancy that. I returned to school the next year, and this time with my mother's help, in a new profession, one focused on writing. All the better that she helped. It helped her land a career, the pathological liar that she was, she still was quite talented as an executive secretary, and all that despite being a cusser, a catastrophizer, and a smoker. They called the field of study 'communication.' And if there was any field so broad and all encompassing as to be called 'too big' this was it. 

Ah yes, another retreat. 

I gave school another go. Bouncing from major to major, I didn't seeing any real promise in any of it. What I was suffering from was a complete poverty of vision, and I simply lacked the desire to make a life for myself. This was a retreat from responsibility. Why? I didn't want to think about professions. I took a course called 'business and professional communication' and I can tell you that I was the one person in the class who seemed to really have no concept of what he wanted to be. Facing this decision depressed me like I've never felt before. Others, dressed for their after-school internship or job had real visions of a future. Some of them are probably doing well now. Not me. I had no real concept of what I wanted to be. Hell, even in journalism I sorely lacked the chops to interview. Writing, editing, fine. Interviewing? I might as well have been flinging poo at some of these interviewees. If there were trip wires and landmines in anyone's life I'd step on them EVERY TIME. I was that kind of filth. I'd print out pictures of deformed children, child pornography, anything I could do to be the craptacular edgemaster once again. I was retreating from responsibility, personal life, decorum, setting fire to EVERYTHING. Why? Well, I guess the field of journalism was also too big. 

Retreat, pussy, retreat. 

By my senior year of college I had to settle into a degree, and I had plenty of hours in Communication, so I finished. That was after an aborted attempt at a master's in business administration and a subsequent one at management information systems. The MBA fell apart after I fell in love with my MIS course. That fell apart after I couldn't log the computer time with a CD-ROM drive so I could work on a JAVA project. Nope, all the computers were taken by Spanish students who wreaked of cigarettes and chattered in their lispy Spanish. Last minute, I went to my cousin's house to use his computer with a CD-ROM, but he was engaged as a dungeon master in a rather large table topgame in the other room. I couldn't focus. 

Retreat. Actually, that JAVA course reads as a withdrawal or 'W' on my transcripts. 

My mom was still helping me talk to people at this point, and she arranged for me to talk to an in-law who happened to work at Intel. He put me in touch with a computer scientist at SLU who walked me through a typical degree track. Three years in and it was like I was starting all over. 

No way. Fuck that. Retreat. 

The recruits in Communication fell into two categories. In one were the professionals, those who were genuinely good at some aspect of the field like marketing, advertising, consulting, being actually engaging public speakers or simply normal. These folks were pursuing internships in said fields. Then there were those who wanted an easy degree just to get by and probably use their contacts outside of school, through family, or in a sorority or fraternity, to find work. Then there was me: the guy standing next to the parking bollard, mumbling to himself, alone. Dramatic, I know. Ok, I managed solid grades, and at least I had retreated from thoughts of mass murder. A noble retreat there. Owing to my A-B grades and my F for 'funny' I ended up landing a Master's teaching assignment, and a Doctorate as well. How I survived my Master's I don't know, but when it came to the dissertation that 'I don't wanna!' voice came screaming back with a vengeance the likes of which I hadn't experienced in some time. So when I was left with nothing but writing, writing, the one thing I thought I was good at, I just gave up. If I could think of my topic as a 'field,' yeah, you get the idea. It was too fucking big. 

Retreat. 

So here I am. Staring at this page, reflecting negatively, critically on my life with no marketable skills from those college days nor drive to do anything. And what's saddest and this is what bugs me the most is how my shitty self-identity is contagious. I've become a sadboy punching bag. Other people feel the same way, if not at first, eventually. Women yell at me? Retreat. Job too hard? Retreat. House searching too mentally draining? You know the drill kid: curl up in the fetal position and cry about having to think about shit or do shit you don't want to do. Retreat, retreat, retreat! Court disaster, fuck shit up, break your favorite toys. Why? I guess it comes down to control, and being depressed the one thing I can control is that sadness. No, not happiness, just simply my sadness. It's the one constant in my life. Happiness is a chemical. But that sadness there, it's existential. That shit runs as deep as that shit may flow. 

Think about this. 

I spend just about every waking hour watching cooking videos and I cook virtually every meal for myself. You'd think I'd be good at cooking. Once again, no, not really. I'm not that good at cooking, not by a longshot. Under other circumstances I'd be retreating from this as well. But in this case I don't. Why? Because the thought of standing in line for food fucking embarrasses me to no end. Of course worse is going out to a restaurant alone. Loserville: population one.

Retreat. 

And the one thing keeping me alive is a kernel of instinct that keeps me from killing myself. Otherwise, that would be my final recourse. Loserville: population none. 

"Sadness rolls down hill." I wrote that in September 2015 here. And it just so happens to roll down into a windswept field that is way too damn big. 

Retreat.