You know, I have never in my life been on a second date with anyone. The three "relationships" I've been involved in have all prettymuch taken flight from the first date when whoever the girl was prettymuch threw herself at me and...well, I was too blinded by even the slightest amount of attention to hold her at a distance. Other than that, anytime I've ever gone out with someone, however casually, after that one time I get the usual "lukewarm shoulder"--a sort of kind but obvious disinterest. Apparently, something about my personality is completely and utterly unappealing to all but the handful of rabid psychotics who experience a sudden and very thorough (anhd, on my part, very irresistible) attraction to my lame ass. I've long since stopped believing that it's just because I'm phenomenally ugly or far too weird-looking: it's taken me years, but I've finally come to realize that I am most definitely not a "hunk," but neither am I loathesome--I am, to put it simply, as average as can be. My personality, on the other hand, is completely unwired. I'm loud, brash, oftimes annoying, either too reserved or too forward, far too honest, and far too simple. A long time ago someone whom I didn't care about or have even the slightest interest in told me, "Pegritz, you are like a chunk of radioactive waste: you burn hot as hell, and no one can get too close to you without getting sickened." She totally meant it as a joke one night when we were just hanging out being stupid at Cal U, and then I thought it was hysterical...but as the years have passed I've slowly come to realize that there is a LOT of truth in that statement. I am, apparently, a very hard person to like, or to find interest in, or whatever the hell you want to call it.
So...the question stands: what can I do about it? The answer: Not a goddamned thing. Thirtytwo years of mostly being ignored and making up for it by building up my own ego to the size of a small moon have influenced my mind faaaaaaaaaaaaar too much to even consider altering it. I am simply what I am: I've tweaked as much of my personality as I can in order to deal better with the world, but there are some things whose code is so fundamental to the OS of my mind that the only way I could remove it would be to completely start from scratch--give myself complete amnesia and begin life all over again as a 32-year-old baby. Uh-uh. Ain't gonna happen. In many ways, I'm completely satisfied with the way PegritzOS works...and I refine it every single day to make sure it crashes less, is more secure, and just simply runs better in order to do the everyday things I need to do to get by. By now, the only functions left over that don't quite work the way I'd want them to are so buried and integral to the system that to remove them or even attempt to fix them would be suicide. Best just to learn to live with them.
Which is hard. Hard as fucking hell, sometimes.
The first step in the process, though, is to completely stop even casual dating. There's just no point in it. Wasted time, wasted money. I'm better off writing and composing fresh jams, drinking ocasionally for the express purpose of temporarily lightening the load of existence, and just wondering about through life on my own terms, enjoying the world as it presents itself to me and ignoring the allzumenschliche urge to share it with anyone--because to do so would entail me becoming someone I'm not, and warts and all, I AM THAT I AM, god of my own hell, Pegritz the Evening Star, who has found by hard experience that it's better to rule in a lonely, unfettered hell than it is to serve some crazy-ass woman in a warm, comfortable heaven that is doomed to fall anyway. If I'm a radioactive lump of Kryptonite who will poison everyone who comes near it, fine--at least I can radiate on my own terms and not have to pass myself off as some kind of leaden chunk of reliability or whatever the hell it is that most people look for these days. Funk dat shit.
It's hard sometimes, but what choice do I have? As Lucifer put it best in Paradise Lost:
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same[?]
No wonder the Romantics bent their collective knees to the Miltonic Satan. When all their luculent hymns of love and their blather about grace inevitably got crushed beneath the feet of unassilable reality, who else did they have to look up to but the ultimate failure, the angel who wanted to be god but certainly couldn't be? who fell on his ass in grand defeat but shrugged it off like Rocky Balboa hopping up from the mat to declare, "OK, I see how it is...well, what the fuck, hail horrors hail and all that shit: let's just build a paradise of our own here in the Pit and raise our collective middle fingers to the Big Cheese of Reality!"
I can totally get behind that sentiment.
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doktorvox is still a candyassed heartbreaker because he "didn't get to" Numan's "Bombers," bu that's allright--Thomas Dolby was good enough and, hell, by that point I was feeling fit to fall flat on my face anyway!
