Some people have a sign-on and a sign-off phrase – maybe this would help, or maybe it could be some running joke that I always begin with my disdain for writing, the world, and everything.
Or, I might try: Hello Beautiful World.
I’m not depressed, generally speaking. And I’m only suicidal over one person, but that doesn’t really matter. Either/Or my life doesn’t.
I suppose as I trudge up the stairwell, I do find myself justifying my existence, asking, or rather telling, the shadows, “What, I’m just supposed to concede that my whole life is a failure and my existence is meaningless?” And I laugh, because, well, I know enough men in their 40s and 50s who would laugh at someone as young as me whining that my life is over like a teenage girl would.
It is the strangest thing: Finding new meaning from very thin plot points, or trails, or insignificant moments. Every time you age two or so years and you hear someone talking about being who you were just yesterday, you laugh because you remember exactly the place they are in when you were that age, and it is so affirming knowing that the thing that they are worrying about, universally get’s solved in 18 months, and yet for your thing to still hold such weight. I’ve come to accept like, nah, it’ll be fine, just wait until tomorrow, you’ll see.
But it isn’t “weight” so much right now as weightlessness. My life doesn’t have any weight, or importance, or meaning. I’m a greying child star who’s gotten fat and is clinging onto his youth to no avail.
Vanity aside, although everything works out, you lose a lot of what you had when you were younger without realizing it. There still is an inner child in me that is still very young, almost too young, like a baby more so than a child.
Someone told me that your 20’s are your childhood, your 30’s are your teenage years, and your 40’s are when you finally actually feel like an adult.
So maybe at 28 it is a natural end of some second-childhood that one becomes disillusioned from for no good reason other than puberty.
It is strange, I’ve aged an awful lot in the past two years. I think it has to do with eating meat, weight gain, and being a closet smoker for the past year. And a part of me feels good, like I am coming into my manly body or physique. And the other part of me just feels (and look) old.
So anyway, I’m not depressed. I’m just having to look harder for the redemption of imagination in the world. Because at some point, a red car is just a car – The Great Gatsby is just a book. But that doesn’t mean that there is no story. As I said, the plot is just thin.
So maybe deeper books, longer walks, more or less God; I’m sure something will redeem life. I’m not depressed. Or, if this is depression, then I was dead in the year 2022. It’s mild. I think a lower medication, which affects dopamine, is part of it, but the hope is that it will recalibrate, and I won’t lose my marbles. Sometimes you have to lower the stakes to increase the stock market.
Probably not a good look to be writing about pedophilia a couple of nights ago, even if I’m posing it as a biological tendency juxtaposed against a cancel culture obsession our country is currently going though. Obviously it’s not cool, and shouldn’t be normalized or anything. I feel very lucky to be trusted around teenagers, especially when I believe I am a genuinely good role model and influence on the students I teach. But as a writer, my job is to ask questions. And keep my job as a substitute teacher.
I’m such a good example that while I was giving a lead in a Marijuana Anonymous meeting today, a student from the school I sub at recognized me, and I recognized them.
And another “student” from the high school we both attended, who was two years younger than me was there and I got to give him some experience, strength, and hope.
I had the most sobriety of anyone, and I had a lot of good stories and advice, perhaps even wisdom for those people whom I was in a past life.
The guy I knew from high school, who was two years younger than me, had the same goatee I had when I was his age. And the teenager (who graduated), had been playing guitar with a broken heart in the halls just like me when I was their age.
I’m proof, it works out, even when it doesn’t.
I remember people. It’s wild when someone comes up to me, telling me how much I’ve changed their lives because of something I once told them, and I have no idea who they are, and I have to act like I know why, even when I don’t.
Ben Bonkoske 