Ready To Die

7/11/16

In the hottest, brightest hour of a summer afternoon, in the brown eye of Texas, I foolishly engaged a young gang of high-schoolers with an embarrassing game of full court press. Full court press is basketball jargon for any non or semi-athletic readers such as I. In the two hours that followed, I was eventually privileged to a dark vision of light closing as various Texas heatstroke victims no doubt witnessed before their early, mournful funerals.

But first, some proper introductions. My name is Theo D’Spader and like my fictional hero, Spider Jerusalem, I hate you all.

If you’re still reading, you are most likely asking yourself why I’ve started a live journal adding to the millions of meaningless, narcissistic entries and blogs occupying space on an overpopulated, poorly utilized digital highway. If you are already familiar with me, you must especially wonder why someone who has recently committed social network suicide is starting an auto-biographical journey with cyberspace. Perhaps typing this will provide me with startling self-realizations that will allow me to accurately answer that question, but (and I’m putting my foot down on this one) you must possess what nobody tangled in the sticky off-white inter-webs of “online” seem to have these days…

Patience.

Up until recently, I’ve spent my life chasing and crushing dreams so well I’d be in the hall of fame (if chasing and crushing dreams was something you could do professionally). I’ve spent the whole morning and most of my afternoon removing staples and magazine clippings from my bedroom wall left behind by the ex-fiancé: a collage wall that has mocked us both far too long. For her, she painted our bedroom with colors she picked out, then spent hours painstakingly making a collage to gaze upon with me, only to be asked to move out a few weeks after. More on this later… Long story short, the deconstruction of some of the last visual remnants of my failed engagement were long over-do.

Let’s not get distracted. Not yet. Why am I writing this? Why am I starting a live journal and why should you read it? What gives me the audacity to, out of the blue, don myself a writer and demand your attention?

Patience.

I am not well educated. I spent my childhood and pre-teens consuming more drugs and criminal experience than most people do in their teenage years, twenties, thirties, and forties combined. It’s a boast I’ve heard frequently, although, my boast is, unfortunately (and, admittedly, a bit pridefully), one of the few truthful ones. I’ve spent my life believing and being told I am creative (just as many young drug addicts are told), and so, lacking equipment for movies and music, I set off to become a creative writer in high school.

For a brief time, I was part of a creative writing team. We workshopped. We held public readings. We did all that coffee-shop, neo-beatnik bullshit. Once upon a time, I was considered a promising writer with a unique voice, until the day I was on trial for plagiarism and, shortly after, was asked to change schools due to poor attendance.

For the record, the plagiarism thing was a misunderstanding and albeit a good story, it is not a part of this one.

I haven’t really written since, and in this time my brain has devolved. My vocabulary has shriveled up like coke-dick in the face of a beautiful stranger. My grammar peaks at the skill level of a hurried text. My confidence has run out of reserves and my thirst to be a creative has dried like the grass outside my window. My spark has dimmed…just fill in the rest of this paragraph with more cliches to this extent.

Not long ago, I quit music (the profession I’ve been chasing since my exile from the creative writing room). I halted with disgust the pursuit of my foolish, un-blossoming dreams and, unlike the other times, this act of self-disobedience felt (and still very much feels) permanent. Deep inside my not-too-old but quickly aging bones I feel the five stages of grief have finished their cycle, signaling a lack of return.

Patience.

Fresh air was needed after hours of removing memories and shared interests of an expired relationship. I had planned to shoot a few hoops this afternoon, nothing serious. I had no intentions of revealing my age and sedentary lifestyle to a bunch of tiny-humans-to-be, who could each individually overpower me.

But I did, and as I staggered back home from my intense afternoon scrimmage, in the decadence of adrenaline, a light bulb illuminated overhead in the space previously occupied by the tightly constricted nuts of athletic high-schoolers: Non-fiction “blogging” — a way to express myself with limited creativity while dipping my toes, gently, into the freezing lake of writing. The appeal, quite frankly, comes from tasking my idleness, thus silencing the hellish voices within.

Grammar will be piss-poor. Structure will be absent. Narrative will be self-loathing and unoriginal. But, in the absence of social media and real life friendships, I begrudgingly find myself lonesome and detached, longing for a new passion to burn wildly within as it had in my younger years.

The one thing every writer has is the ability to talk or write at great lengths about themselves. Even in my most celebrated of pity parties, I can, and will, come up with words to describe my all-important turmoil. And so, if you have made it this far you certainly have the patience of a monk. I’m jumping ship into the murky waters of blog-world and it’s sink or swim.

Join me as I recant the numerous, endless ways life perpetually cuckolds me.

Never yours nor mine,

Theo D’Spader