All my words

Realizing that you are objectively physically attractive, followed by the crushing realization that you’ve been living life on easy mode, socially, for the better half of your life.

My baseless opinion: most people would be better off putting nothing but water on their face for their whole lives. That is my routine. That is also my hair routine. 

Here’s one of the reasons in-person smash tournaments are cool: you get to watch your friends fight. Each other, invaders, fight themselves. Everyone, at some point, ends up “on stream,” on display, like a gladiator in the center of the colosseum, where you must endure the shouts of the crowd and the judging eyes of hundreds or even thousands of peers at once.   For many, a “last hit” game 5 set, on stream, deep into a bracket, affords the most fear and exhilaration they can feel in their normal adult waking lives. I know it is that way for me.  

When I am in an especially good mood, make me write it down. That’s where the good stuff comes from.   When I am in an especially bad mood, make me write it down. That’s where the great stuff comes from.   Run your fingers through my hair and massage my neck. I don’t care who sees. If I am sleeping past 8 AM, tell me what time it is, and if that doesn’t work, feed me coffee. You can also use music, light, or Louis CK. When I send you words, highlight the ones you like. Ignore the ones you don’t, do not dwell on them. These things are cheap and I can produce them infinitely.   From October to March, my hands are always cold. Hold them whenever appropriate.

On the 10th day of the retreat, the “noble silence” is lifted, and we can speak words to the people we’ve been sitting with for the past 10 days, and immediately all the men are best friends, smiling and laughing and chumming it up as groups of 3 or 4 materialize before my eyes. I round the room's perimeter sipping tea. It’s the first day of school all over again. A few crucial minutes have passed and I am now an outcast. I have outcasted myself and I will likely continue to outcast myself throughout my entire life. I see conversations with temporary strangers as a game not worth playing. I can't help but think to the end of them before they begin. So I continue on in noble silence.  

Here’s how to hand over your phone and your car keys to some stranger named Francois because you’ve accepted the conclusion which many alcoholics and drug addicts have come to accept at some point in their lives: you cannot control yourself.   Here’s how to wake up at 4 AM and walk down a dark snowy mountain path into a a dim meditation hall with about 40 fellow adult runaways and sit on the floor and cross your legs and just become aware of your breath.   Here’s how to practice Noble Silence, 10 days of zero communication with any human other than yourself, down to even laughter or facial gestures, which actually isn’t very hard for you since that’s your default way of being around strangers anyway.   Here’s how to do absolutely nothing, all day, for about a week, until you decide you can’t take it any more and sneak your notebook out of your bag and start scribbling deranged messages to yourself on white pages in the bathroom — which is definitely breaking the rules, bu...

On my trip to Idaho, I noticed the feeling that there was some objective missing or that I was missing out on something big and girl-related, being out here alone like this.   I was thinking about school field trips. The way I felt on those trips as a teenager, hours away on weekend-long journeys or pretty much any time I was more than a couple hours away from my home without my parents.   And I realized that on just about every single one of those trips, age 12 to 18, I was mentally preoccupied, maybe even obsessed, with some girl, some fantasy where the change of scenery would inspire a change of heart or at least some kind of change in my willingness to articulate my feelings. Nobody ever taught me How to Get Bitches. Nobody ever sat me down and told me the truth and justified it until I believed it.   And I was too pathetic to even try, so my feelings only manifested in elaborate mental fantasies which never made their way anywhere near words on a page because I was t...

Twenty bona-fide PNW Men: tall, white, warmly fitted, physically able, outdoorsy-looking men in their early to mid thirties. The type who enjoy the outdoors but do not work outdoors, if you know what I mean.   North Face, Patagonia, Columbia, all of them.   Neat, respectful and generically handsome, like straight out of an ad for REI, it’s a wonder these men find themselves stuck on this mountain with me.  

This memory haunts me monthly: I'm lying face-down on the thin single bed in my college freshman dorm room in Spring 2017 screaming insanely into my pillow while the roommate of my Current Female Romantic Obsession sits beside my thin, pathetic, writhing body. Mandy, my manic pixie dream girl, feigned interest in 17-year-old me, several years before I understood how it worked, so of course I failed to capitalize and simultaneously developed a terrible romantic obsession towards her, just as heaps of fresh acne appeared on my baby face and destroyed my confidence to ever face and talk to her. Unlucky. It took years to forget. Various sexual partners who I mostly saw as “practice” left me jaded, exhausted.   I even muted or blocked her on social media, despite outwardly amicable relations, I could tell that constant reminders of her existence were weighing heavily on my mental health.   But the reason the memory of this one particular day haunts me is because of how pathetic I m...

Here’s how to pack your things into bags and throw them in your car and completely disappear for no real reason at all. Here’s how to tell your family where you’re going and why and assure them that it’s not a cult and try to articulate something meaningful about your current mental state you can barely explain to yourself. Here’s how to kiss your girlfriend goodbye and cope with the feeling that you’re deserting her, stranded in metropolis, and that you’re selfish for leaving for so long on such short notice.   Here’s how to drive all day long and not turn around.   Here’s how to decide that your 1999 Honda Accord can’t make it through the increasingly violent snowstorm which has suddenly materialized around you, many miles from the nearest exit, deep in the middle of Nowhere, Eastern Oregon, and go into panic mode and turn onto “Old State Highway,” putting a metric fuck ton of trust in Apple Maps, finding Old State Highway to be horribly paved and narrow and treacherous as t...

In these notes I recall haunted memories which have followed me through my life. When I write them down, I take control of the narrative. I own it now. By the time anyone learns of it, I have mentally conquered the situation.   I fear that this habit of writing and editing and sharing may come off as self-indulgent (especially when I speak of my experiences with women) or attention-seeking. This is not so. This is me repenting. This is my version of going to church and confessing my sins to some pedophile behind a closed window.  This is how I cope.

I am so detached from my former self and life that I finally no longer care what you think of me.   I have been journaling furiously for the past couple years and I am ready to share a little bit of what I have written.   Don’t worry about me. I am fine and always have been, even when I say I’m not. If concerned, read like it is fiction. That’s how I read everything now.  If you no longer wish to see it on your precious timeline, feel free to mute or unfollow. I won’t take it personally. It will not resonate with most. That is OK.  

I won’t spend another sunlit day on Earth caged in this box staring at this screen taking meaningless calls with meaningless people doing meaningless things with their meaningless lives.   I don’t want a raise. I don’t need a little more pocket change to spend on my fewer and fewer hours away from this nightmare so I can become a “senior associate” — a virtual hall monitor.   I didn’t choose this life. I settled for it. Everyone here did. I coped by telling myself there is some creative aspect to my work, but that was a lie. Nothing creative is produced by this agency.   I’m betting on myself now. I’m betting that I can make something more of myself and this life and never be imprisoned in anything like this ever again. I’m also betting on Washington Legislative Code Title 50, which states that as an individual who has worked at least 680 mother fucking hours during his or her base year and was FIRED from their job is eligible to receive unemployment-insurance benefits fo...

Unfortunately, writing must be done in solitude. I have been able to find a healthy rhythm on planes squished between two anonymous adults I haven’t even looked in the eyes or said hello to, because we have no relationship, and we will never have a relationship, but near by anyone I “know,” it is impossible. Nothing honest comes out   of me when my reputation is at stake.

i used to get bad acne as a teen and i never really got over it. every time i'd get close to someone’s face, look them in the eyes, a significant part of me is thinking: they’re seeing how sick i am. they’re seeing every acne mark on my face and they’re seeing the darkness under my eyes, the dryness of my lips, the general lopsided-ness of my face, seeing the same obviously physically sick creature i see my self.   it’s something i’m eating. actually, it’s probably everything i’m eating. most kids who starve themselves are trying to lose weight. i was trying to starve whatever bacteria in my stomach caused acne. and when i would fast, the acne would actually go away. but then what? are you going to reintroduce foods to body, one at a time, slowly, for years, unable to eat with your friends because you’re a constant science experiment? I considered that and chose acne instead.  

It’s that person you knew a couple years ago. I want you to know that I am sorry and always have been.   The ghost of what I did to you still haunts me on a monthly basis. I am well aware of how cruel it was. I feel like I dropped you out of a plane.   I’m sure many supportive people have told you this already, but I want you to read it from me: you did nothing wrong. There is nothing about you that made me do what I did. I was the problem.   I have a bad lifelong habit of pretending to be happy and content in situations where I am not. Instead of finding a way to stop pretending, I just disappear.  I do not want a response. I just want you to know. You were not the problem.  

I stopped at a Pizza Hut on my way back from Idaho in hopes of rekindling some sad childhood memories. My family came here quite a few times because we were poor but I was a big fan of the food, so it made no difference. The buffet table remains a staple of The Hut but it is 1pm on a Monday, so it remains un-stocked and I am the only one in the entire restaurant. A couple young women work slowly in the kitchen and don’t seem to hate their lives as much as the urban fast food workers do.   It must be dreadfully slow out here in Baker City, I don’t say to anyone out loud. It is barely a town. Barely a neighborhood. It’s a few gas stations, a few houses, a McDonalds, this Pizza Hut, mostly an endless stream of vehicles flying by at 90 MPH on their way to a place that’s real. These girls don’t much work here, they just guard this place, collecting income and biding their time until they can move somewhere with people, I hope. I am starting to feel not alive in this Hut so I must get go...

when i heard people were ‘watching porn’ i thought that was it, people just liked ‘watching porn.’ i had never seen cum before. the first cum or ejaculation or whatever I ever saw was my own. i was horrified. it was a life-shattering surprise. more surreal than any dream. an unprecedented surge of adrenaline, like i had just killed a man. i’m not exaggerating. i had no idea what the fuck just happened. i would not say that it felt ‘good.’ I immediately thought: god, i’m never doing that again.  

I’m getting so sensitive. I can barely stand to order food from make-it-your-way joints like chipotle or subway or panda express any more.   I can’t look at those people on the other side of the counter as they scrape that big metal spoon across that big metal tray and hand me my $12 modern food slop with that painful customer service smile.   I look into their eyes and see no remaining trace of human dignity. I look into their eyes and wish that they weren’t here, wasting the most fertile years of their life behind the counter of this Panda Express, short-staffed, yelling about fried rice and broccoli, on this dark Sunday afternoon in Boise Idaho.   I wish that machines did this. I wish the machines were required to ask me if I wanted to donate 12 cents to the St. Jude’s Children’s Fund, so I wouldn’t have to look at this tired human being in the eyes and say “No.”

is because you know that this can’t last. circumstances, relationships, people; always changing. take some pictures so you can take that occasional stroll down memory lane with perfect 21st century clarity.  

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. I know nothing about anything.   When I see friends talking about their anxiety meds I so badly want to say: You don’t need medication. You need therapy. You need to learn to feel when your heart rate is increasing and mark your triggers and dedicate time to figuring out why those things make you anxious. And then when you face them again with that preparation they will be a little less scary. Then a little less so the next time, and so on.   You need to become better acquainted with your body. It’s a machine. You have a lot more control over it than you think.   You don’t even know that you’re taking the easy way out, trusting your doctor. Your doctor is taking the easy way out too - you're not getting to the root of it. But I don’t say any of this. It’s not my place. It’s just the conclusion I’ve come to as a person who used to suffer from sharp bouts of anxiety and spent a lot of time thinking about why and has mostly resolved the issue, ...