The Quarter-Life Crisis Syndrome

don’t get married unless you’re sure about you. 

What the hell is this shit about?

Today

woke up at 12pm, then 2pm for real. I texted back a girl I was on a break with. Then I was researching something for work. I made myself a turkey sandwich and proceeded to eat it. “Walk or early dinner” a friend texted. “Walk” I answered. Friend picked me up 20 mins later and we walked around the resevoir (i spelled it wrong but I dont care). came back and played candy crush (satan made up that game). Made healthy dinner with intermittent gulps of sparkling water. picked up friend from lax. went to diner for food. talked, laughed, kale is trending. why? dropped her off at home. wanted to ask if she had my sunglasses but she looked tired. came back home. wanted to do more work but got stuck, watched elegy but then masturbated but then went back to watching elegy. cried a little because i could relate. drank half a bottle of prosecco while doing so, masturbation included. wanted to watch another movie, forgot what, sipped more french champagne, then wrote here. it’s 4:02am. 

I Want to Cuddle Fuck Mindy Kaling.

I have literally watched all the episodes from The Mindy Project in the span of two and a half days and don’t regret a single second of it you son of a bitch. 

I saw a girl in plaid. She was coughing up a lung. She was also wearing black boots. She was lying in the alley covered in a blanket trying to sleep as Christmas shoppers passed her by. She had a white pit bull hunkered down next to her. There was a cardboard sign that read, “Got Money?” There was an acoustic guitar behind her. It smelled like urine in the small cramped space she was huddled in. The dog had blue eyes. The girl was blonde. I did not see her face. She was a runaway and had a tattered leather jacket draping her guitar. I gave her two dollars. I went into a coffee shop and thought about the girl. I never think about these girls shuffled into small spaces with cardboard signs who ran away from some midwest town. But tonight I thought about this girl. I sipped my coffee and when I walked back onto the cold, I did not think about the girl anymore. I thought about what I was going to buy for my sister living in Berlin. 

I spoke with Jen on the phone. She had somewhat of a heavy accent. That turned me off. I talked to her for maybe five minutes and in that time, I found out that she was married twice. Her first marriage was when she was eighteen with a girl. It lasted eight years. Her wife passed away from leukemia. She then married a nice intelligent man. She made it clear that it was her choice. Her choice. But that in the end, it was not what she wanted. When she told me that her wife had died. I said I was sorry. And I felt a very strong urge to cry. I did not know her nor was I very interested in her but at that moment, I felt that she had gone through something very sad and I felt this sadness for her. It sounded like she loved this woman very much though she did not express much. It seemed like she would still be married to this woman, if she did not have leukemia. If she was alive now, I would not be talking to her and I would never have written about this. And the sadness would never have existed. It was the one and only time I spoke with her. 

“Hannah”

                                       

            I ran into Hannah, who was a hair stylist for the photo shoot, sharing some blow with the models in the dressing room. I met Hannah a couple of years ago at a bar. She was another depressed type, really messy like. She was short with black hair and brown eyes. Her face looked sort of mean because of the way her eyebrows were shaved into thin sharp little arches. And she always wore thick heavy make-up and had oily skin, which for some reason, translated to meanness to me. The features on her face were almost smashed together and tight as if her face was a personification of her tenacity, take no bullshit attitude, which she exuded. The one thing I distinctly remembered about Hannah was the way she spoke; slow and lazy with a valley girl twang subdued with bass like she was on Codeine except when she had bursts of energy in which case she was on coke, but in both cases her eyes were always half closed like she was tired or indifferent. She ran away from home, which was Kansas, when she was fifteen, shaved her head, freight hopped cross country, became a park ranger at one point, carried a pocket knife for protection, and, for kicks, decided to be hooked on heroine, but only for a year or so before heading off to rehab after a black man offered a hit in exchange for head.
            One of the last times she was high, she was passed out for a day and a half outside a music festival and came to when Radiohead was on stage singing “How to Disappear Completely.” She said it was the most depressed she’s ever felt so she stopped dealing and moved to Los Angeles to become a hairstylist.
            She was now working in a chic hair salon in San Francisco under a two-year apprenticeship before getting her own chair. I met Hannah in Hollywood. I was fantastically high that night and she helped me so that I wouldn’t vomit on the bathroom floor. Ten minutes after smoking some pot to mellow my frenzied high, we were shoving our tongues down each other’s throats for a good half hour in the back of her car. She straddled me while I was grabbing her ass and then worked my way towards her tits. She moaned something good into my ear, so much so that I could feel my wetness even through the booze. After that night, we kept bumping into each other by chance at random events, bars, and stores. It was as if fate was telling us to make something glorious from this recurring coincidence though nothing between us shared any commonality except for maybe our penchant for alcohol. So we had dinner a couple of times, met for drinks a couple more, and had sex somewhere in the middle. But nothing transpired out of this oddly lasting sporadic companionship except for my perpetual fascination with her historical dysfunctions that shaped her present personality, which kept me in suspense as I anticipated its collapse as it merely teetered. She was something toxic, and wholly captivated me by the balance she maintained.
            I was catching up with Hannah or rather she was catching me up. She was telling me how she finally got her own chair and how Los Angeles was bullshit and that San Francisco was much more mellow.
            “I’m gonna tell you something. I hope it won’t freak you out.”
            Before I could answer she said, “Nah, you don’t strike me as the type who’d care so much.”
            She poured some champagne into my fluke. Then she went onto say, “I was at a bar in Chicago one night. I had this shitty day at work and just wanted to relax and be alone. The bar was an older crowd mostly blond bimbo types with their tits dripping over their silk blouses and shit looking for a rich husband. That kind of scene, you know?”

            She lit a cigarette, while changing the song on the stereo to Bowie.
            “Well, this one lawyer guy, forties, oldish, comes up next to me and starts up a conversation. At first I was like, ‘fuck off,’ but then we ended up talking for the rest of the night and he turns out to be pretty decent. Well anyways, he asks me if I would sleep with him for money, flat out. And it was funny the way he asked like he was asking to break a twenty or something. And I got to thinking about it and thought ‘hell, I never slept with anybody for money. I wonder what it’d be like.’ And I couldn’t have given a shit about the money I just thought it was something I could do, so I said sure, why not. So we go to this hotel. I fuck him and it was actually a decent fuck, you know? Wild. And he was a total gentleman about the whole thing and didn’t make feel like or a whore or nothing. He left two bills for the fuck and that was that. And well, at the end of the it all, I thought I could cross that off the list of things to do in life.”
            She inhaled on deeply on her cigarette.
            “Do you think I’m a weirdo for it?”
            “No.” I smiled, “Although I never realized that it was one of those things that was on the list of things to do in life.”
            She stubbed out her cigarette fast and hard.
            “It should be,” she said with a satisfied grin stretched across her face. “It’s a trip.”
            I drank the rest of the champagne. It was Lou Reed now; “Ride a Swan”. Could’ve been worse, could’ve been Radiohead, could’ve been a heroine junkie getting fucked by a black man outside a music festival. But Hannah never did, and because of that, she never disappeared completely. 

Sometimes it’s a funny thing being on this planet.