(Phaysis)

I have the singular ability to embarrass myself, which is convenient because it saves you the effort. The way I beat you to the punch by deprecating myself, I consider that a service I excel at. Like mama always said, if you can’t say anything good, say it about yourself, because for every finger you point there are three others pointing back and a thumb pointing off to the side. Just kidding, she never said that. She said she was proud of me, which counts in matters of the family.

In other news, alcohol is a helluva drug. I don’t drink often, but when I do, I drink dos drinkos. Or something like that.

2010 sucked shit. Did you know that? It had great promise, it did. End of the worst decade of my life. But you know what? I somehow ignored those promises and let them pass me by. I withered and shrivelled some, and then I whine about being alone. I’m the cause of my own misery. Did you know that? So what hope do I have in 2011? It’s just a year. It’s just another span of time, and the quality of my existence is not affected one iota by the name of the year. It will pass with or without my attention.

I have all the answers. I do, I have them. I know how to make myself and my life better. But I can’t take advantage of the answers. Too fucking proud to reach out and bring people in. I learned years ago that I have an unwelcome habit of making myself unwelcome by inviting myself along to the social whatevers. It was a painful, painful lesson, and I lost face from it. It’s best to go it alone unless I’m explicitly invited. But here’s the other edge of that blade: if the world doesn’t know you’re waiting on the call, it will be more than happy to let you stay alone while the more interesting people go off and do their things.

In the small world of small towns, small schools, and small groups, it’s easy to notice who’s alone. But the world at large, with all its billions of social circles, cliques, and ecosystems of people, the fact that you’re alone will never, ever be noticed, because to others, you may look like you’re too busy with your own little circles to join theirs. Which is, sometimes, the farthest from the truth.

So fuck 2010 for the embarrassment. And fuck 2011 for the solutions it won’t provide.

In high school, I ran with a group of guys who, in retrospect, I call “The Four Horsemen”. Greg, Steve, Doug, and I, with our gaggle of girlfriends and anciliary characters. Doug was the last of us to join our group, with me the third. I met Greg in bowling class, and Steve through his friendship with Greg; I’d join them for lunch because they were nicer than most. Doug I met a year later in drafting class; a loner, he’d go off to not eat lunch down by the DECA snack bar. Finally, after enough harrassing, we got him to join our ranks and we all proceeded to do adolescent nonsense at each other’s houses.

I think it was my 18th birthday or somesuch. Maybe a sleepover. My mother, preparing for a houseful of hungry guys, made a huge pot roast with all the trimmings for dinner. It got loud and raucous, as we were wont to do sometimes. Occasionally we’d attempt to outgross each other. Stuff guys do. And so the meal went.

I took a bite of meat and chewed for what seemed like forever; there was gristle or inedible fat in my bite, so I reached in, pulled it out, and set it on the side of my plate. Without missing a beat, Doug, who sat to my right, reached down, picked up the chewed-up wad of beef fat, shoved it into his mouth, and commenced to eat it until it was gone.

It was then that I knew that my friend, Doug Marshall, was the Devil.

Run forward to the end of that year. I had returned home for the holiday after my first semester at college, and I would hang out with these guys, all high school seniors at this point, as much as possible during the holiday break. Doug’s family was gone to north Arkansas for the holiday but he had to stay behind due to his pizza delivery job, so we went to his place a lot. Can’t let a buddy stay way out there alone with no parents around, right? Call it charity.

The Marshall compound was, by my standards, a rather sizable house with a pool, hot tub, pond, patio, woods, and fireplace miles beyond the farthest end of South State Line. It took a considerable amount of time to get out there depending on which path you drove — there was no such thing as a quick run to the store. You could drive the longer, normal route, meaning you took Highway 71 and Line Ferry Road, or you could go the quicker, fun way, which is the network of twisting, half-paved, half-graveled unimproved county roads beyond South State Line. We took to the fun way as often as we could.

One night, three of us were hanging out at the Compound. Steve was on the phone in the game room, Doug was loading up the fireplace in the den, and I was in Doug’s room dubbing off CDs onto tape. Doug walks in and tells me he and Steve are going to go collect some firewood. I nod at him and return to my dubbing.

An hour later, I hear the faint sound of the outside door slam, and Doug stumbles down the hall and into his room, barefoot, dazed, out of breath, and with his forehead covered in blood. “Shawn, c’mon, let’s go. We just had a wreck.”

We jumped into his mother’s car and headed back up South State Line. “Where’s Steve? Where’s Steve?” I asked.

“We went to town and picked up Jennifer.” Jennifer was Steve’s underaged girlfriend. Their dating was forbidden by her parents, given their age difference, so she would have to sneak out after they went to bed. So by now it’s obvious who Steve was calling. As we went, I could make out the faint shape of Steve and Jennifer hobbling towards Doug’s house. We picked them up, and went up to examine the wreckage.

The wreck was at a quick dog-leg in the gravel road where a large oak sat inches from the outside of the curve. Doug’s silver econobubble looked like it was breaking quantum physical laws by sharing spacetime with the tree, like the tree was growing through the front right corner of the car. The driver side of the windshield was spiderwebbed around the impression of a head, steering wheel bent at rough angles. Doug clutched his chest. The driver seat was twisted at the right shoulder from where Steve flew into it from behind before crowning himself on the dash. Luckily, Jennifer was buckled in the back next to Steve, so her injuries were minor. The front passenger seat? It didn’t do so well, either. Anybody sitting there would’ve been pinned and damaged for life.

I don’t know what caused the wreck. Don’t know if Doug was up to his usual risky behavior. Maybe his headlights were off while going fast, trying to prove he could drive the familiar road blind. Maybe he swerved to miss some sudden wildlife. Maybe it was a random patch of ice. Who knows for sure anymore?

But I know that it was Doug’s bald-faced white lie that saved my life. If I knew they were going in to town, I would’ve dropped my tapes in search of adventure. If I knew that “collecting firewood” meant “going to pick up Jennifer”, I would’ve been in that passenger seat. But the Devil lied to me, and as a result I live able-bodied, twenty years almost to the day later, to tell the tale.

I never really thanked him for his betrayal.

It’s a Saturday night, and I feel the biggest urge to go to the coffeeshop and hang with my peeps. Go up, have something to sip on, feel the vibe of being a known face in a known crowd. Get a groove on and feel accepted by the company I keep.

But no matter what I try, that ain’t gonna happen.

See, the problem is that Epoch ain’t Mojo’s. Understand? The scene is completely different. Back during my Mojo’s heyday, I usually found myself surrounded by enough of the kind of people I appreciated, respected, wanted to be with. Even on the quiet nights, there was still a familiar face here and there.

But not so much at Epoch. Even though there are clumps of people there with familiar faces (old Mojo’s regulars notwithstanding), thing is that I find it difficult to want to be with these newer faces. Make sense? The taste, the consistency is far different, and for some reason, I just can’t think of myself asking names and seeking out their company. Y’know?

Maybe this is what getting older is leading me to: settling on a dwindling subset of my waning social life.

So, what do you people who’ve managed to move on do to keep your social circle fresh and growing?

Ten years ago this week, with $600 in my pocket, no sleep in 24 hours, a carload of stuff, and a headful of hope, I waved goodbye to my hometown and moved to Austin. The urge was long in the making, but the plan came suddenly. I was to move to Austin to chase the dotcom dream and push my life into new directions. I’ve recounted this story time and again, but now a decade has passed. It is at this ten year point that I officially declare myself an honorary townie, an Austinite. Sure, unlike the students who breeze through this town, I’m here to stay, so technically I’ve been a townie since I moved. But I need to say it, make it official. For good or ill, I am an Austinite.

So. A decade, all in one place. That breaks all of my prior records. Most of my life has been spent in Texarkana, yes, but it’s all split up between 2 years after birth, 8 years growing up, a year after college, 2 years after Greensboro, etc. It definitely beats my 5.5 years in Arkadelphia and 5 years in Lubbock. So yeah.

But has it been a good ten years? Has the whole Austin experience been all I’d hoped? It is with equal parts shame and reality that I have no choice but to say “No, no it hasn’t.”

After moving here, those first six months were heavily influenced by Serendipity. She had her hand in everything I did, every new relationship I started, every accidental decision I made. Those were heady times, and everything was new and sudden. Horizons stretched out beyond my vision. Every wrong turn showed me something new. Every wander around town gave me a new vista to take in the wonder and spectacle of this ever-growing land of a million souls. So much possibility was at the end of my hands.

And then Serendipity left me stranded like an unprepared fool. The dotcom boom went to bust and pulled the rug out from under us all; party over. The thrill turned into survival, but there was an immediacy in it; it was either sink or swim. I had to wonder where my next meal was coming from. For an unsteady while, it really was ramen daily. It was donated coffee. It was two smokes a day. It was burning through meager savings. It was sweating the rent. It was five dollars in gas. It was day labor. It was 7-Eleven. It was data entry. It was pizza delivery. It was shitty joe-jobs where I could find them.

But as beat dead as I felt, I was still alive. When finally the stable work appeared again, when finally I nursed my economic wounds and regained stability, even though I felt dead inside, I held onto the stability like my life depended on it. I learned that I demand stability; I can’t hustle and work it job to job, game to game. I’m not that kind of person; that’s not my personality. It’s not in my skillset to move from gamble to gamble and roll with the punches. I’m a factory floor kind of guy.

So in that respect, in seeking stability, I grew up quite a bit. It’s what adults do over time, I guess: turn in their chaos for a piece of stasis. There’s no risk in the weekly fourty, and it provides me with the opportunity to do stuff that I wouldn’t have done if I, for instance, were working three part-times and relying on selling art to make rent and a car payment. Stuff like, I dunno, buy a house, plan a vacation, raise kids, support a wife, save for retirement. Stuff the stable people do.

But I’m not doing any of that stuff. I feel like I should be, but I’m not. My state in life allows me, but I’m still longing for the random, the accidental, the non-static. Or at least I’m waiting for it. I’ve grown up enough to afford my toys, but I still haven’t matured into something dependable. I have no dependents, nor do I want them. At 38, I think it’s rather late in my life to push for kids; that clock unwound years ago. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have a partner, a Significant Other, right?

Funny, that, because when I first moved here, my gregarity was in overdrive. I met people, exchanged contacts, introduced myself even if the encounter never went beyond the first conversation. But when everything fell down around me, I closed up and became the man I used to be. Solitary, a loner, alone. And moreso now than ever, I’m still alone. Sometimes blissfully, but usually painfully. So in that respect, this has been a decade of decline. I’m still surrounded by over a million souls, and all I have to do is reach out again. It should be that easy, right?

There has to be a way to balance the stability I demand with the immediacy I miss. I’m dreaming while snoozing at the controls, and it’s as if I need a pinch to wake me up to take a breath. I really, really don’t want to jinx myself and end up living on the dole and the lam, but I need something to shake me up again. I look back and all I see is the sad dream of squandered potential.

So this is my life, the big experiment that is moving to Austin. It’s funny that the grand design, among my group of friends back home, was that we would all pick a date and use that as the “Great Mass Exodus to Austin.” One by one, though, they dropped out as life threw them curveballs, and I alone made the run to first base. Fitting that this play would echo my time here, that the walk around the diamond would be mine to walk on my own. You’d think that I’d be at the home base by now, but if the Pitcher isn’t paying attention, if the shortstop doesn’t care, if the outfield isn’t watching, why should I even bother stealing bases?

Serendipity has left the ballpark.

Aries (March 21-April 19): Most of what you say today will be silly and half-baked, which is only a slight departure from your norm. However, today will be special: your words will trigger others into calling you out and making light of your speech, and you will become frustrated with communication. Fear not, however, because having your words laughed at for their ill timing and poor choice will be offset by your time alone at the end of the day. Sleep on it.