Days Gone By

You will have to forgive me for titling this blog after what a perceptive reader would recognize as the initial episode of "The Walking Dead", but considering the subject matter this blog will likely cover, I feel this is both ironic and metaphorical. Or, at least, the best I can muster under the circumstances. I am far from a literary genius.

So I just turned 40, which I am told is a milestone that causes many people to lament and reflect. That said (and I admit we all feel our personal situation is unique) my path to this juncture in life has been anything but ordinary. Like many men in contemporary society, I have the mentality of a teenager, and my emotional development, what most in contemporary society would call emotional intelligence, never really developed in a meaningful way. In short, I might as well still be 21, mentality wise.

I just now have a career that a reasonable person could consider to be a "real job". For nearly all of my 20's and 30's I was resigned to relatively meaningless tasks for work with the service industry occupying a good 90% of my probably 30 jobs over this time period. I made several attempted forays into the educational space, with very limited success. I would do OK for a semester or two, then alcohol, drugs, women, or some combination thereof would derail me and I would be back to waiting tables or tending bar. I would often profess to those around me that I was still in school part time just to make it appear as though I was somewhat cognizant of my future.

I did manage to have a few independent living spaces over this roughly 2 decade time period, sometimes interrupted briefly with stints back in my parents basement, either when I had burned one too many bridges with the people I was staying with, or else I managed to piss away all my money and get myself evicted. Eviction is always an interesting process, and perhaps a topic for a future blog.

What was interesting about this period in my life is the steadfast resolve of my family to hold out hope that I was not entirely a lost cause. I ruined more than my fair share of holiday's and special events in my family over the years. I could go the modernized PC route of things and blame these events on addiction, but even now I am far from convinced that booze or drugs completely robs people of free will. I pretty much knew exactly what I was doing, I just did not care about the consequences. Gratification was what I was after, by any means necessary.

One important social fuck up that derails even the most dedicated partier that I managed to avoid was getting a girl pregnant or to be otherwise tamed. I have known many people over the years who were pretty much like me as far as mentality, until a pregnancy and subsequent child support smacked them back to reality, or they fell head over heels (at least temporarily) and they were scarcely heard from ever again. As for me, I had one what I consider to be serious GF all the way back at age 18. When that went sour, and by sour I mean it fucked my world up beyond description, I was never able to recover. From that point forward females pretty much just became a means to an end for me. Much like alcohol or drugs, they became just another avenue for temporary bliss. As to the pregnancy derailment? Trust me when I tell you that I have had more than my fair share of scares. I just somehow have managed to always dodge the bullet and my dice roll never landed on craps (that I know of anyway). I did have one girl so convinced that she served me with papers and I was forced by court order to have my cheek cells swabbed for DNA analysis. The female is question was calling me multiple times daily to rub it in my face. She was sure that she had me, and to be honest I pretty much thought I was fucked too. Though when the results came back and I was not the father, I am only partially ashamed to admit that I called her in one of the more vindictive moments of my life to profess "fuck you and your kid". Yeah, I am pretty sure I am going to hell for that one.

So what brought this unbelievable train wreck that is my life to a halt and a sent in new direction? I really can't identify a specific cause, but I can identify a basic timeline when things made a decisive turn for the better. I was on one of my stints in my early 30's when I was living back with the parents for another basement stay and I decided that I might want to give the educational system a try yet again. Try being a dude in your 30's taking classes at a junior college. It's a very soul sucking experience indeed. Because I was living with the parents at the time, it kept my otherwise booze and drug filled evenings relatively tame. I was taking a math course as a required gen-ed and I ended up bonding with the teacher and doing outstanding in the course. In subsequent semesters, I took only mathematics as my electives and I devoured one course after another. Trigonometry, calculus, differential equations, etc. all quickly feel to my brain. For whatever reason, I seemed to have a natural ability for this, though I must admit this seemed odd considering that back in high school I hated math and could barely pull a D. I drew so much attention from the faculty that when the time came to transfer to a 4 year university, I had the glowing recommendations from the mathematics department, and schools that were almost begging for me to enroll. So, skipping a few steps for another time, that was the turning point in my life. I have since gone on to achieve a masters degree, and I now work in the marketing sector and make well over 100K a year.

What has always annoyed me is that had I of just followed this same path when I was 18, I would be a roughly 25 year old guy right now pulling down this kind of money and I would be in the drivers seat for a life of relative splendor. I have since moved far away from my hometown, where my notorious reputation is known to nearly everyone to a clean slate where people only know me as the professional they see before them.

That being said, I have a story to tell about the life I lead before, how it has effected my present, and how it will shape me as I make my way into the future.

I am basically a 40 year old child, with only a rudimentary memory of the days gone by.