whatever

Don’t tell the debt collectors but I’ve been hiding in the country. Taking some time with my family to figure out who the fuck I am. I think I’ve got that question pretty licked. I’m the inevitable, given the givens. I am what I said I wanted to be, and I am who went and did and said all those things I did and said. I’m the one who has seen at least three dozen good plans turn rotten and wither and I presume it is from the radiation caused by my mental illness. My personality, if you will. I just can’t tone it down.

I am a narcissist and I have always been one and I am only mildly repentant of this this social faux pas on the grounds that everyone else around me is so flamboyantly fucked up as well that I am forced to admit that even my transgressions are normal, it is only that I see them so loudly and intensely that for me they are everything. Everything I have ever done has been about me, for me. Judge away. This trait renders me impervious to shame from ridicule unless it comes from within. I chose a lifestyle that suited this after finding that time and time again it was a worthless effort to ally myself with others. I find managing all of the feelings involved extremely boring.

But what kind of future am I going to have like this? With my stupid blog, some pictures of my work. The years go by and I feel more and more like a tired and sad old clown. Everywhere the writing is on the wall: Get a Job. I don’t think anyone really believes I can make it as a tattoo artist. Everyone is a critic. And no matter how good I feel I’ve done I always see this whisp of disappointment, this hope that it could have been that much cooler. I panic.

And I panic at night.

I can’t afford for this to not work. I can’t endure another failure. Another change of course. Another hasty retreat from Chicago. I already riddle myself with shame for all the other botched careers.

Fuck it. Whatever right? Worst case scenario I’ll be the VA’s worst nightmare. A public record of the life that could have been saved any number of times by them had I ever been treated like a real veteran but instead ends as a statistic because he ran out of options and he was scared of the world.