Introduction, in June.

I could never explicitly tell you why things changed, but they just did.

It all started in June, the month of scorching sun and hot rain.

Everyone says this ‘thing’ about the sun being closer to the Earth, causing these nasty wicked solar winds to blow early in the morning. 

What a fucking place to live. Too damn hot. Too damn wet. It’s 8:00am and I’m already sweating. 

I lived with my parents and that was wonderful for the time being, until I really had enough of the cramped feeling and the

“Eat, eat, drink, drink.”

I was done sleeping on the couch and so was my back and neck.

And then I wanted to be alone again.

I’d go over to my grandmothers for coffee in the afternoon and what-have-you, to talk to my grandfather about the Vietnam War and that pretty hooker who taught him how to catch bugs and make his bed.

My grandmother would make me coffee and offer me things I didn’t need and I would nod and believe that I would need them. Taking these things, to have them rot away in my car.

I’d drive, drive around everywhere because my home was filled with little bugs that could really never hurt me. Giving me the feeling of dread and loss, the bugs did— and made me think of pins and needles in my brain when I saw them at night. Walking around my apartment like they wouldn’t go. To which they never did.

Things just don’t go bump in the night. Bread isn’t just eaten around the edges. My mouth isn’t that small. 

One night, I reached out across my desk for my glasses and three of the little things walked over my hand as if it were some sort of bridge. 

So I broke the lease and let go of my connection to that little place that I loved so much.

I remember many long nights there. Many drinks. Many hungry nights.

I hadn’t been there too long. Only about a half-year, but jeez did that feel like a lifetime. 

The summer solstice neared, the days grew longer, the nights shorter. 

I remember sitting, accomplished across the floor on the first day, listening to music and smoking inside. 

My apartment downtown was my friend, but he grew sick and infested. A great time for the both of us and I do miss you (apartment) from time to time. 

As time grew I knew that I couldn’t go back, because this complex fear of going back would mean more bugs before my eyes and many more nights alone with them. They could reasonably do anything they wanted to me while I slept with my mouth open. Crawl in and out, clean my teeth, travel down to my stomach and back. 

They aren’t very friendly or hospitable and they also carry many diseases. Terrible things. Terrible, perfect looking things.

So I read a book on divinity and complexion and figured out that I fear bugs because of their strange mechanical appearance.

Wouldn’t that be the weirdest thing? Because my fishing rod is mechanical and it is lovely and also a piece of machinery.

Fishing, in July.

Weekends were for fishing with my cousins and the day after fishing always felt like my last. Those days were usually Sundays, so driving around as I usually did, was extra sentimental because I knew that I’d be braced with the job and more expenses on Monday.  

Monday is the worst word in the English dictionary. It wouldn’t be so bad if I was unemployed.

Unfortunately, hating Monday is a relatively normal thing. It has always been. The dawn of man most likely hated Mondays because it meant hunting deer or something. And it probably meant a lot more because it was a means of surviving until Tuesday. Hating Monday is sort of like hating traffic or sitting next to someone who smells bad. Regular.

I wrote this back in June. After a long day. 

 “The sun is beating down on me from the skies and it is incredibly hot in Saint Petersburg, on a Monday, on a fucking Monday. On this fucking Monday the boss decided to put in a work order that made me lose my lid, because now more than ever, on this very Monday, blood is running through the top of my head and around my cheekbones. Monday is filled with nannies that don’t have jobs anymore and have a sort-of lust for killing on the road that cannot be satisfied with fucking. Fucking Monday. Monday is wild and weird, when you never stop working, because Monday means death to your Monday. Capital ‘M’ in Monday is for the Mildew that cannot go away when the sun comes out, capital ‘M’ in Monday is for Mortuary, where I will spend my very last Monday on earth. Why does Monday have that capital ‘M’? Well, because it’s Monday, of course. And Mondays will persist to the working man for an eternity.”

Anxiety can be a great tool when writing. But I've grown bored of being alone. This sort of thinking is almost woman repellant. Fixation is almost a bad thing. Shit, even the word is weird. But amidst a crisis in life, it is so easy to get fixated with something. Bad things, like people walking their dogs or the thought of bugs crawling all over you when you sleep. 

Incorrect women can also be a poor target of fixation. After the smoke clears, when you get your bearings and when the fixation goes— the woman might not. 

And then you're stuck with a timebomb. 

Crazy women and unlovable men like me come together like magnets. This subject is unfortunately overplayed in most writing, so I’ll keep it short.

I get vulnerable, hungry, and bored, and for whatever reason, this headspace is the Bat-Signal for grade-A crazy chicks with schizophrenia. 

In fact, I’m still getting calls from a girl who rides the bus to Walgreens to call me on a payphone. 

 Ridiculous. 

Anyways… Where was I? 

Right. The effects of fixation and anxiety—

That slow little pin begins to push into your skull, driving you quite mad.

You definitely don’t want to be the guy with a frown on his face, not in this world. 

Tiresome is all, and gee does it get old. 

I don’t crave the sea because I spent a year on it. It generally behaves the same way under circumstance and varies in color based on who you ask. To me, it's always blue. 

When I see the sea, it looks back. I feel that we know each other and act like we can coincide together on an evening. Like divorces or ex-lovers, Sea and I have some time together, as it took from me, I take from it. No kids. It was a clean break. That is just how we operate now. 

 The sea looks great on weekends. It doesn’t look as good on weekdays. It’s not forgiving and it's grueling and never-ending. The bites on Mondays feel better than the ones on the Saturdays. I guess, in relation to a ‘Sex-Life’ — you’d expect the electricity of something so unexpected for a Monday to jolt you with the dopamine of spontaneity. Just like sex with the old woman outside the regular programming. 

The fish bite every once in a while. 

I’d like something bigger than the usual trout or catfish, but the event is much greater than the prize. This activity is one of the few things that eases my mind from the loud and unrelenting world. So much to care about, absorb, digest in life, but on the docks— my mind is sort of quiet. I don’t care about what I’m wearing or the amount of women passing through. There never is any girls, and the ones that do roll in, are big and weird looking. 

We went to John’s Pass and waded out underneath the bridge. I believe that this was on a weekday. The sun had been gone for about thirty minutes and my jeans were soaked and rolled up to my knees. Constricting the life out of my legs, wearing one of the most uncomfortable fabrics when wet. In life, wear wet jeans with a goal like catching a fish. That will teach you a lot about being patient. 

On that night, wind carried from the gulf blew under my arms, I was at peace, amongst my cousins. Life is golden in these moments. Nothing bit except a big and dumb sailcat and that was okay with me. 

Lures and bait. Buying this dumb new rod as an ‘in’ to the sport. I shouldn't have done that. Big waste of money and an impulse buy. My uncle had about a million that I could've used. And the thing sucked anyways. 

But I caught a few on it, so it did its job and fulfilled its mechanical purpose. It fulfilled its purpose, being the cheap plastic piece of shit it is. 

It sits in the back of my cousin’s truck. 

Fishing has made me appreciate a certain convenience that I condemned at one point in my life. When I shop around at Walmart or the bait shop, I geek on things that clip to my belt, or hang from my hat. Little hooks or pins that dispense weights and lures, just things that appear tacky… Yet prove to be useful in certain situations. I hate digging around in the tacklebox for things, especially with something freshly on the line, yeah, why not buy a glove that clips to your belt?

When I pick this chintzy stuff out, I am never worried about being perceived with it on my person. Because as I mentioned before, there aren’t many people to impress on the dock. No girls to gawk at your clip-on sunglasses or belt-clip pliers. 

Asides, your appearance means nothing in the light of a big fish.  

Fishing has shown me that when you find something special, the world closes out. Nothing matters except the love for it. 

When you’re binded like that— wear funny t-shirts. 

Who gives a fuck. 

Argument, back in June.

I had spoken to this guy who had seen me at a low point back in January. I don’t really mind him, but he has an ego like a professional wrestler or something. I don’t really get along with the overly-Macho, but he wasn’t bad. I’d driven him and his girl to a party, unfortunately ending up as the dedicated driver. 

 

He’d drank and drank all night long. The party was sub-par. But instead of embracing the socially confused— I decided that talking to him, sober, was probably the safest decision I could make. Anxious, outward, and gay people aren’t my forte. I have a hard time relating to any of those things 

We got on the subject of a mental state he had seen me in the last time we’d seen each other. I had to recall, but then I remembered when he and his lady had visited me back in January. It was cold out and I had just gotten denied publication from Marrow. I was most likely a mess. 

It is sort of funny thinking about it though. I certainly chuckled when he said

“I w…was really worried about you, man.” 

He should have been, rightfully. But he went on to say

“I looked like a man without purpose.”

I followed up with,

“Wrong.” “Too much of it.”

He hadn’t known that I wrote in the passionate way I do. There was no use explaining that to a drunk guy. I can’t blame him for being worried. 

When we went back inside he slammed some more beers and I ran to the bathroom with two shooters stuffed in my pants. I got them down as quickly as I could, looked at myself in the mirror, and let a big wave of sullied soberness disappear into the night. My favorite game in the world is pretending to be sober. The lips start smacking for conversation, the dick hardens to about fifty percent, and the scheming begins. 

When I’d found my stupid brute again I walked in on him explaining some niche mechanical component of a Nissan bike. To which I approached quietly like a game hunter on the trail of some sort of large obnoxious prey. 

“The 970x is a better exhaust, man. It growls and gets the heads turning.”

He says.

“You will literally have to pull the bitches off of you…”

To any man who thinks this way, I salute you. There was one point in my adulthood that I thought the ‘Fonz’ type, douchey guys you see on TV died off in the last two generations, but I was clearly wrong in thinking that. They are right under all of our noses. 

After the night ended, that “Purposelessness” statement kinda stuck so I’ll give him that. I’m not published yet, so in a sense it sort of stings— 

If I saw a man walking around with a bottle of wine in his coat pocket with no reasonable explanation on why he was doing so, I’d probably be worried for him too. 

Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I would've celebrated him. Life is hard.