The Christmas Eve Liffe Sucks Post

I took the easy way out. My eleventh grade English teacher told us to live by carpe diem. Bukowski told me to roll the dice. I went along telling all the other lost souls I ran into the same thing. They found themselves and so did I except, I wasn’t able to live with mine. No matter who I am or how badly I try to show my true self, the Army will always come first.
Now don’t get me wrong, the Army has done a lot of good for me. I have been able to learn so much, meet many great people (and many that can burn in hell for all I care) and got to do a decent amount of travelling but enough is enough.
I don’t want security. I don’t want to play it safe anymore. All my risks in the past have been calculated, now it is time for me to get my shit together and be ready for 2012. Why 2012? Well, it is the year I break away from the Army. I will return from a tour in Afghanistan and finally dive head first into life. There will be no safety net, no parents to pull me up. Just myself and the few friends I have had along the way. Will I publish a novel? Graduate college? Hell, be able to pay for my apartment? I have no fucking clue and that excites me the most.
I don’t care what happens. Become a thirty year old bum, a bestselling novelist, the biggest manwhore on the Pitt campus, it doesn’t matter because I will be putting 100% of MYSELF into it all. If the military version of myself is outrageous well then what is to come will be a riot.

What is written above is a piece of shit. Seriously, that there is me trying to force my feelings out on paper. A list will suffice.

Goals: 2010-2012
-Submit and publish Soldier’s Sideline.
-Complete Whore of Alexandria and most of Heaven Ain’t Close.
-Learn to play guitar (and some damn good acoustic versions of songs).
-Learn to play piano (thanks to Ben Folds).
-Become a student of the art of the pickup.
NOTE: As I write this, my nephew has been passed off at me and my sister’s boyfriend thing’s son is harassing me to do “magic” tricks and show me his. He is in the fifth grade and annoys the hell out of me.
-Pay off all my debts, to include my car and possibly pick up a new Mini Cooper.
-Get accepted into Pitt’s writing program.
-Find a nice three to four bedroom apartment in Pittsburgh. Need room to party, be creative and get Clinten’s music career to pop off.
-Furnish the aforementioned apartment with some great shit and a fully stocked bar.
-Shop my first novel and see where it goes from there.


I have known these things for quite some time but it just took me over an hour to list all these goals. Kids played a part. My parents kept disrupting me. A few of the females that I have been talking to have been knocking at my walls and I find myself having to keep getting up to make myself another drink. Life gets in the way of these goals and I fear that they will never happen. I will be just like everyone else; trying to escape this town only to find myself living in my parent’s home, working some dead end job and telling everyone I am just waiting to get my life back on track and get back to school. I fear that the fact that nowhere in this dribble does it mention anything about a relationship, a steady girlfriend, marriage. No I only want to study pickup, write, drink and experience all those freshmen girls as a 26 year old freshmen myself. Yet, the thing I fear the most is waking up one morning in the reality I have been fleeing for years.