Don’t play the player (part 1)

About three months ago I broke up with my boyfriend under the guise that he was way too needy. Though he was,  this was just me dipping in the excuse bin. The real truth was that I suspected he was cheating, but more than that, I just couldn’t get down with the shape of his cock. It was one of those odd looking things that curved. It’ looked like  he’d been jacking off along a set-square his entire life, causing the head of his dick to take a ninety degree downward diversion from the shaft.(Inadvertent judder).  Yeah I know a little bit shallow. I could have lived with it but add in the other factors and shit just wasn’t working out.

In one of those coincidental events that are ever increasing since the rise of Facebook, I started dating and by dating I mean fucking, this new guy who recognised my ex’s picture from an album on my FB page. So it came up in conversation and it turns out that the guy was messing around with my ex when we were still together. BUSTED BITCH.

Now given that I really wasn’t too broken up over the end of this relationship I normally would have shrugged my shoulders and let it go. The thing with my ex was that we had tried to maintain a friendship which was working out ok for the most part. That was until he asked me to meet up for a drink last night.

I walked into the bar and spotted my ex and sat down with him. Next thing this guy comes and sits with us inducing the  ’what the fuck’ lift of my eyebrow. He was the type that if you gave him a trim and a proper fitting shirt would be quite hot, bubble butt and great legs, my major weaknesses, so I didn’t react at first. “This is my boyfriend [---],” My ex told me.

Now I was pissed. He couldn’t have informed me of this little party before we met?

It became obvious as the night progressed that my lack of knowledge about this guy was entirely premeditated on my ex’s part. It wasn’t that I was meeting the ‘new guy’ that was bothering me it was the deliberate manner in which I was trapped into the situation that pissed me off. It quickly became obvious that my ex had no real interest in this guy and that it was a jealousy trap. You know the ones. Where your ex gets you in a room where he’s all over some other guy in an attempt to invoke your green eyed monster thus realising your huge mistake in breaking up with him. Riiiight!!!

Normally, I would have sat around for a few rounds and just excused myself for another ‘meeting.’ But…I don’t like being manipulated even when it’s brazenly obvious. My ex was out smoking and the new guy told me he was going to the bathroom. I saw my shot. I knew how to play this game to. “No problem, I’m heading up for a smoke to,” I told the new guy and walked him to the bathroom on my way upstairs. From the line at the toilet I figured I had a ten minute window for payback. I ran into my ex on the stairs.

“Where’s [new guy]?” he asked.

“He’s playing pool, come with me while I smoke.” He took the bait. We went outside and I fawned an air of disquiet.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

I went off on a monologue. ”Dude, could you not have given me a heads up about [new guy]?… this is hard to watch… still have feelings… this situation is really hurtful.”  You’d think I scripted the whole scene. I suppose I did at least choreograph it. My ex came close pushing his body against me and backed me up against the wall.

“Dude your drunk.”

“I’m not drunk,”

“Yeah but remember [new guy], your boyfriend. I’m not into that.”

“I still want you,” and because I could feel the beat of his pulse against my leg, I knew he was telling the truth. From the corner of my eye I could see that [new guy] was standing in the doorway watching this whole thing going down but I pretended not to notice. I could have easily pushed past my ex but I kept myself in position long enough for him to reach up and grab my head toward his for a passionate kiss that I let go on a second or two longer than necessary before breaking away.

“Dude not cool, not cool at all…” glancing at the door I saw [new guy] turn and head inside. Turning back to my ex I just muttered “once a cheat, always a cheat. Fuck you!”

I’m Pretty Sure I’m an Alcoholic! And I Don’t Really Want To Stop.

I’m having a hard time reconciling what is quite a personal conflict at the moment. If I’m honest with myself I have a drinking problem. It’s not like I have to wake up and go digging in the recycling for the dregs of last nights empties. Rather, when I start drinking I don’t want to stop. When I’m sober I feel like I’m living under a veil of dilution. Everything seems so intangible like there’s a thick layer of dust that prevents me from truly feeling anything and I live in a cycle of actions that are not quite my own.

When I start to drink though this changes. I can feel, things connect, the viscosity of my filters begins to lessen and I feel like not only can I connect better to those around me but also to myself. It’s like there’s the real me deep inside that is confident and knows his own mind, but better still can support it and is respected for it. I think I mentioned earlier that I’ve always been a person of little confidence despite being able to chameleon this at times. My sober mind edits my tongue, my emotions, and seems to internally chastise me. I want to please everyone and so fall into this submissive routine of silence and compliance accompanied with a persistent disquiet.

If I was one who could have a few drinks for social lubrication and call it a night, there would be little problem,  but that is rarely me. More often than not, I will end up in the blackout that guarantees the night before I will have propelled into a state of extreme emotionality, blubbering my eyes out. This is not always the case during these blackouts, sometimes my Hyde comes out and I wake up with a sore hand or perhaps a black eye or cringing when a friend calls to fill me in on just how badly I berated someone at the bar the night before.

What I can’t reconcile is how to live with either extreme… Currently I’m not a very frequent drinker, perhaps once or twice on a fortnightly basis normally in a binge syle. If I wake up not entirely sober from the night before it’s common that I’ll will procure more alcohol and proceed to get drunk again, though normally not with the same severity as the night before – somewhat like a pendulum where each subsequent round becomes less than the one before it. What I’ve discovered though, is that the longer I go between drink sessions the more extreme the indulgence is when I do begin to drink.

So why not just stay sober always?

When I don’t drink for a long period of time I become so mentally calloused from the inadvertent self analysis and monitoring that I spiral into a depression that is more detrimental than any bout of drinking has ever been. I have sought counselling for this in the past but have always been instructed to stop drinking at take anti-depressants that become as habit forming and excessively numbing to the point I’m just an unfeeling shell. At times I have even considered suicide as a way not to deal with either extreme. However, that is just not in me I’m not enough of a coward for that and just keeping praying for a better way of dealing with things.

My Laptop Is Judging Me!

So I recently left a comment on Kristen Lamb’s blog when she questioned “Are we born to create?”  At the end of my comment I mentioned that this blog was brand new and essentially testing the waters till I figure out how to navigate the nuances of blogging in general. Well, after a comment on my comment, I got to thinking why am I hesitating about what I’m going to post. Originally I’d set up this blog as a way to journal some of the experiences that I’d had while living in the United States and for some reason this got stuck in my head. Suddenly, because I had stated somewhere on this page that this “blog” was going to be a story in a blog I wasn’t allowed to post anything else. Why do we impose these unnecessary restrictions on ourselves or is it just me?

I’ve spent the past few days not writing anything and perseverating over how to structure this blog so it makes some kind of sense. Talk about redundant. Primarily, I started this blog to motivate myself to write anything and somewhere in the midst of that I allowed myself to be edited by the process itself.

It’s my laptops fault. It see’s what I’m doing. If I change something it’s going to know and will somehow contact the one other person who at this point has read the crap I’ve put on here.

Thanks to Wayne Borean author of You aren’t a Writer if you don’t Write for putting things in perspective.

So for any visitors who may peruse this blog in the future, have you had similar experiences of self editing that have been counter-productive to your initial intent. Also if you are looking at this right now and check back again in three days, this post may have changed. That’s the beauty of the edit button bitches…

Sliding Doors

When we arrived at the bus station I was unceremoniously dumped on the pavement. “There’s no place for parking and we’re not going to be paying the extortionate rates they charge in centre city.” Mum got out the car and offered a caustic hug. I couldn’t be too surprised given my parents disapproval of my trip. I’d quit Uni at the Winter break to go in search of something bigger. I needed to explore and examine myself, remote from their judgement. In hindsight, I can’t help but think my parents were a bit jealous of my undertaking. It wouldn’t be for another year that I’d actually sit down and calculate the equation that was my parents life. (Married in June – my oldest brother born in December + devoutly catholic family) x 1960′s = Repressed parents forced to embark on a life less chosen.

“If you quit now you’ll never go back, you’ll never get a degree. You’ll end up like the rest of them, wasting your life,” barked mum at the time. By ‘the rest of them’ she meant my brothers… We all had quite a tumultuous relationship in our family, hardly Rockwellian. I think dad just grunted and went back to his can of ale. Well I’d proven her wrong. Over the next few years I would go back to Uni again, and again, and again. Despite the effort and more credits than any one degree is worth I still don’t have that damn piece of paper. It would have been significantly more cost effective to just have the shitty piece of parchment forged. Whether or not I’ve waisted my life, I think that’s still yet to be seen. Anyway the goodbyes had all been said already and there was nothing much left for me to do but… well leave. So I hoisted the backpack over my shoulder and cursed myself again about the upgrade.

As I entered the bus station I turned and watched my parents pull away. The glass panels of the automatic doors slid across my face and my own reflection stared back at me and I didn’t, rather couldn’t, recognize myself. It was true I had just had blonde streaks put in my hair but this unfamiliarity was not cosmetic. I can only describe feeling suddenly aware. Though looking back now I still looked like a child, the reflection that stared out at me from the glass, was, for the first time, an adult.

The sensation started in my neck, a vibration that resonated across my back and cascaded down to my toes. It was fear. I turned away from the glass and away from my past. It was then that I truly understood change, it scared the shit out of me and I loved it.

Leaving

It was excitement that woke me up the morning of June 10th 1999. To ensure I was perfectly organized I’d packed and repacked multiple times in the week leading up to my departure date. Hours had been spent strategically organizing the one rucksack (albeit huge) I was taking with me. Compartments had been tested in multiple scenarios till my luggage had been jigsaw’d into place allowing for the most efficient use of space. I admit there was a certain amount of pleasure that came from my almost OCD packing. I had almost convinced myself that there would be a special luggage examiner whose job was not to check for potential hazards but rather to assess the quality of ones packing. Best one gets a free first class upgrade. This was the thought that went through my mind as I stood out of bed into the carefully organized piles I’d emptied from my rucksack the night before and fallen asleep before repacking them.

SHIT!! 

“MUM! What time is it?”

“We’re leaving in ninety minutes, you better hurry up.”

The rest is blank. It wasn’t till we were in the car driving to the bus station that my memory returned.  Panicking, I started to go through a check-list in my head but this bloody awful iron taste in my mouth was distracting, so I gave up. I went over the basics; me, check; passport, check; plane ticket, check; unknown contents of luggage, check.

Oh my god, did I shower?

Faceless

It had been months in the planning, of enacting scenarios in my head of what my summer in the States was going to be like. I can’t fully explain the excitement I felt. I was 18 but to most back here in the UK I was considered a bit of an old soul, someone who never really fit in despite all my efforts. Faceted is the only word I can describe myself as back then. Aspects of many groups appealed to me but never the whole, and so, I would present whatever facet fitted the situation; the scholar, the bad-ass, the geek, the partier, the rebel, the lover. Yet none of these things was ever able to draw my full commitment and it manifested in an awkwardness that, now I am back home in the UK, has horribly resurfaced. I even tried my hand at being a poof yet the physical repulsion I felt the first time I gobbled a cock made me think otherwise. ‘Better left in my head.’ an aspect of me that lay dormant for a few years before resurfacing with a vengeance, but there will be more about that later. Back then I never truly knew who I was which is not to say that now, almost eleven years later, I have any better clue. Seems there are just more facets to complicate things.

The beautiful thing was that I now had an opportunity to be whomever I wanted to be. Fantasies of assumed persona’s had been part of my build up to visiting America for the summer. Hey, I was only gonna be with these guys for a few months, who the hell cares what I tell them right? But fantasies were all these assumed persona’s were ever going to be. How much my experience participating in Camp America was to affect me was completely unfathomed as I packed the rucksack acquired through pseudo-sponsorship (I was lucky enough to be ‘in good’ with the head of the warranty department at a well known brand).

Confounded

So I am having a hard time figuring out the manner in which I want to engineer this blog. I’ve been looking around some of the posts by other users and I now feel more confused. Do I present this in a linear fashion? But what if I forget something? Re-edit? Do I scale things out? Don’t really know…

Perhaps in the near future I’ll take some time to actually figure out the finer points of this thing, but for now I’m just going with what’s in my head. We all have to start somewhere and I suppose the beginning is as good a place as any.