Comfortable Purgatory

 

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I am just meant to be alone. Its hard to be alone in life for some. Some might be frightened by it. Most I guess. I wouldn’t know. I have earned my solitude though and the few attempts I have made lately to try and connect with someone and share my ideas of life have resulted in my realization that I a have some sort of condition. I truly hope its undiagnosable because that would mean other people have it..THATS how much I like my solitude. 

When I was a kid I felt  out of place within my own family. I later found out I was a bastard so that added up and evened out the sense of imbalance I always carried within me like an awkward pulse. I needed eyeglasses quite badly but didn’t even get a proper eye test to prove I had 20/200  vision until I was in the 6th grade. This didn’t stop me from playing sports and riding bikes and functioning, I wasn’t some kid in a basement they slid frozen pizzas under the door  to in the Ozarks or some shit. I was quite active. Blind as a bat and pale as a ghost but it served me well. Good eyesight and staying home was very much not a good idea for me then. I think half the reason I survived my childhood is because I was born and raised in Queens, NY and when the true dysfunction of my family proved itself I was easily shipped off to Ireland for the summer or stayed with a nearby uncle when my father was removed from my house, or my mom attempted suicide. If I was from somewhere more rural I think I think i’d have to join the military (if they would take me with bad eyesight and full front dentures ) or I would have gone to jail for something which would lead to a  lifetime of repeat offenses more than likely, or I would have died from drug overdose, or been murdered. I wouldn’t have made it 30. I know that. 

So I Queens  a  debt of gratitude for  that and maybe thats why I like my job taking care of a  few slices of it. The job allows me to pretty much be alone, or if I do work with someone they are usually  uneducated, welfare to work types that ultimately make no impact on my life other than reminding me that things could always be worse. Like George Carlin said…the poor are there to scare the shit out of the middle class. I think I would rather be around the broken tools of society though because I pretty much hate people, especially the ones that are like me ( white, working class, commuting, work-a-day Eddie six-packs or Johnny Paychecks and what not). The women that married these  types are a different story altogether. They frighten me in their every waking moment of sweat panted supermarket shopping and minivan retrieval of their kids. 

I like ethnic people and the immigrant vibe of Queens I guess because I feel like one even though born here to immigrants. The diversity in the hoods. The train commutes. The observation of people in general. The awareness of how big and diverse the world is and how much I love returning to my studio apartment to write and draw and masturbate about it once I escape it daily unscathed. 

I always feared having a child because I over think everything and always imagined having one that  was handicapped. The one time I got a  woman pregnant was in my early twenties and as much as i stressed it I was preparing to do the right thing  and she lost it. The one time I came close to marriage was with this same young lady who loved me and wanted to but I turned my back on her and abandoned what was probably the one true love I ever had. Her mother jumped in front of a subway train when she was 7 as she left her in a department store with her grandmother playing in racks of clothes and staring at jewelry in cases. One day she sat on my lap and handed me a box. In it were three rings. Two were mangled and twisted and the most horrible things I ever saw in my life. On was a silver graduation ring from a secretarial school her mom graduated in the early 70′s. She was a  single mom  and was trying to get her life together. The other was some silver ring i couldn’t even figure out what originally was. The third was a white gold band with moons and stars on it. “she wasn’t wearing that one” she said. So I picked it up and put it on my pinky and it  fit perfectly. She said I could have it. I put it back in the box. I think that was the only moment in my life I ever fully connected with someone. But even in that moment I knew I had alot of things to get done with my life and I was so filled with some fateful, nervous, damaged, selfish, unfair, meant, independent and bastard driven sense of myself I ultimately ruined that  relationship and friendship by my desire to be alone. 

Funny thing about it is, when I write this, I smile in contentment. Like some  tainted angel that gets off on his ability to fly. Not necessarily bad or good. A holy terror of a thing. A limbo. A comfortable purgatory. 

EjcO

11/13/11