august, again

strange times.

mostly I'm too busy to remember to miss a lot of things, and a lot of people, but sometimes when I get home earlier than usual I feel intensely, terribly lonely. I'm sure I'd turn to drink if I were of a certain disposition, but mainly I turn to writing and watching baseball. so it could be a lot worse.

I'm always compulsive about the things I care about, and that's bad enough in and of itself, but it's worse when it's the only thing I care about. there aren't a whole lot of people in this state I'm interested in hanging out with, and I can only force myself on the ones I do like so many times a week. for their sakes. so the other things I care about, the books and games and shows, get a lot of attention, and I know so clearly that it's a problem, that it's separating me from the world, but I can't do anything about it. my internal clock wants me home at 7 PM to watch baseball. I'm honestly afraid this will be at least a big a factor in me never having any guy care about me as my general physical plainness and lack of confidence.

the people I share the most of my life with are concealing things from me, and that's normal and natural and all, because nobody knows everything about anybody, but it makes my stomach hurt. it makes me anxious. I feel like there are things I've been marked unfit to know because I can't understand, and I feel like people are tired of me and the way I am, and I don't know how to fix it. I don't care about a whole lot of people I've actually met, so always-just-missing the ones I do care about hurts a lot.

in less than a month I'm leaving the country for four months. any billion things could happen in those four months. I'm looking forward to them.

my work this summer has been awesome, as jobs go. but I don't want my work to take over my life. I'm on a career track that very well could do that, and I don't really need any help in not having time to spend with people. I wish my career track was "travel around South America for a while, write about mountains and baseball, then come back and be able to make enough money to live by writing books forever." someone find me an internship with that company. my Spanish is falling behind where it was in May, though. someone find me a Venezuelan to practice with.

I don't know, it mainly boils down to me not caring enough to keep hanging out with people I don't really like, thereby being stuck in my own house too much, knowing a whole lot about things that interest me and not feeling like I have anyone to talk to about them. add in some Mountain Goats, you've got my summer in a nutshell.

I will try to shake away this disease.

I am still dreaming of your face, hungry and hollow for all the things you took away
I don't wanna be your good time; I don't wanna be your fall-back crutch anymore.

I think I'm done now. I think I'm good. I think we're friends and I am okay and I will miss talking about life and road trips and the best goalies in the world with you, this summer when we don't see each other, but I will be fine. I think I've made my peace with you; you are absolved.

finals are hard to focus on when you know you have a real-world job starting in 13 days and you're going to Tennessee in a couple months and you might have an awesome camera waiting for you at home, and you're gonna see your family and your best friend soon and you're gonna see Pittsburgh soon. it's really hard to give a fuck about a political science class you never gave a fuck about anyway. at this point there's a good chance I'm going to write Wilco lyrics as the answer to every question and just peace out after half an hour.

You wake up suddenly and look up at me. When you say my name your voice is low and sleep-roughened, uneven. "How are you feeling?" you ask.

I am feeling like you are going to be the end of me. I wish I could get you out of my system the way I got the alcohol out a few hours before, however painfully. I am feeling shaky and small in the clothes you lent me, and I'm feeling both too young and too old to deal with this, sick at my stomach and sick over you.

"I'm feeling better," I say. "Although I've felt better."

What a twist. Since September I've dreamed of leaving your place in the morning, walking home light and high on your kiss and your smile. I did not anticipate that when the sunlight hit my reluctant eyes on Beacon Street, I would be cripplingly hung over, unsteady and leaving you sleeping untouched on the floor.

for a second they're as young as they ever were

what's weird is when you write a sentence that you think is absolutely gorgeous, something you've articulated that taps into something profound up in the clouds, and then you read back over an old story and you realize - you've pulled it from something else, without even thinking.

it doesn't make it any less cool, though, in a way. you've still gotten it from somewhere in the course of human events, something that resonated with you.

I haven't written here in a while and I don't expect I will again, although who knows, I've thought that before. I'm working a pretty legit job this summer and going to Ireland in the fall. I'm trying to make sense of a lot of things and I keep buying dresses, for some reason. I think maybe I want to go to Peru and Ecuador and teach little kids how to write and hike through the Andes.

two weeks from tonight I'll be with my family in a hotel in the suburbs. night after that I'll be home. in between now and then I have to take three finals, write one long-form news feature, get drunk at least twice, go out to lunch with a lot of people, and go to Fenway one last time for the year 2011. I'll also be turning 20. bring it.

things you might not know

- Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac were both sportswriters at one point. Kerouac played college football and Hunter once had an in-depth discussion with Richard Nixon, whom he despised, about the NFL and obscure Super Bowl plays. He still hated the guy, but came to respect his knowledge in that area.

- Apparently, there are "summer" and "winter" suits, or at least there are in Kentucky.

- All you need to successfully drink whiskey are determination and the right role models.

- A lot of times, the Boston Globe's lead national or international story is from the New York Times. Doesn't that suck?

- Movies almost always disappoint me because all I ever want from a narrative is good character development, and it's pretty hard to really develop more than one character well (or at least to my standards) in an hour and a half or even two hours.

- The White Stripes just broke up, denying me the certain life-altering experience that would have been seeing them live. Via Rolling Stone, here's the end of their statement to their fans:

"The White Stripes do not belong to Meg and Jack anymore. The White Stripes belong to you now and you can do with it whatever you want. The beauty of art and music is that it can last forever if people want it to. Thank you for sharing this experience. Your involvement will never be lost on us and we are truly grateful."

Fortunately, I work in an office full of people who love good music. It's gonna be all Jack'n'Meg until 2 AM tonight.

stop me if you think you've heard this one before

you know what's bullshit? "the longer you have to wait, the more prepared you'll be when you finally find the person who's right for you."

bull. shit. the longer you have to wait, the more nervous you are that you don't know what the fuck you're doing and everyone else does. the more convinced you become that you are completely undesirable, because people who are less interesting or less attractive than you get all kinds of guys, so there must be something deeply, unchangeably wrong with you that you can't even figure out. the more everyone else develops a backstory and a set of ex-whatevers they can refer to, and the more you have to lie and make things up. the longer you have to wait, the farther behind you are, and the less likely you are to ever catch up or find anyone who likes you the fucked-up way you are. that's all.

attack of manbearpig

just walked a mile in what weather.com says feels like 10-degree weather. some of the snowbanks up the street are taller than me. I could literally disappear into them. Boston is a polar ice cap right now, snow-cover-wise.

you know what else Boston is? it's built on a landfill, same as San Francisco, or most of it is anyway. where I'm sitting right now, this whole part of town, used to just be the Massachusetts Bay. and if there's ever an earthquake of significant magnitude in New England, close enough to the city, the loosely-packed ground under this dorm will liquefy and the whole Back Bay neighborhood will sink into it, anywhere from a few inches to several feet. that includes Fenway Park, and that includes everywhere I've ever lived away from home. there have been earthquakes out here, too. nothing in the last hundred years to compete with the West Coast, but out on the Cape there was one in the 1800s that they felt in New Hampshire and western Mass and all over.

get to the edges of the country while you can, yo. New Orleans is sinking as the water's rising, the next great coastal earthquakes could cripple San Fran and Boston. there's great stuff out here, come see it before we all have to move to Kansas.

earth science is the only science that's ever been remotely interesting to me, you see (besides space'n'planets, that is...and dinosaurs...okay, applied science can be awesome, it's just bio/physics/chem that I hate). how the Midwest is flat like it is because it got rolled over by glaciers during the last Ice Age, how New York and New England are actually rising upward, 18,000 years later, as a result of those glaciers retreating off of them. how it was probably a volcano in Mexico that got the dinosaurs, and you can still go see the crater.

100 percent unrelated to all this, MLB Network named Andrew McCutchen the best center fielder in baseball today. my boy. I couldn't be prouder of him and I think they're right. kid's going places.

my dad and I were discussing the Pirates a couple months ago and he was being pessimistic as ever, and I said, "well, my great hope for Walker and McCutchen is that they end up Red Sox, so I can still watch and love them." he said, very earnestly and seriously all of a sudden, "no, you know what? my great hope is that they win the World Series as Pirates in 2014, and Neil Walker wins the Series MVP." and he walked away.

the moral of this post: Boston may be hit by an earthquake and fall into the bay before the Pirates win the World Series, but that doesn't mean I'll stop believing.