boys smell like oranges

Back when I started this blog, I thought it might be a good way to reinvigorate a dead project; ten months later, nothing in my life has changed and I am beginning to think the experiment has run its course.

While I have benefited from the experiences, interests, humor, and knowledge of many of the people I have ‘met’ here (however fleeting our acquaintance), the overall effect has been one of alienation. Much of this contact has only ever provided the kind of lens through which all my personal failures appear magnified. In at least one particular case, the closer the contact has been (opening myself up to and subsequently developing feelings for a local tumblrer), the more damaging it has turned out to be (had my heart stomped on then politely handed back to me).

This coming Monday will mark the tenth anniversary of my exile but I have almost no friends here. I have no self-confidence when it comes to meeting people, and the friends I made while learning German and studying at the university have since moved away or moved on in other ways that do not include me. The few friends I do have live as far away as Paris, New York, and Toronto and rarely have time for me.

I have the impression that those of my nearly 700 followers that still exist (and are not pθrn) have assumed that, like them, I am young, perhaps even a teen myself, when, in fact, I am old enough to have fathered many of the boys seen here (had I been more adventurous in college). Yet despite having lived in such cosmopolitan and potentially adventurous places as San Francisco, New York, Sri Lanka, and Munich, and despite having been ‘out’ since I was 17, I have never had a boyfriend. In fact, I have never even kissed another man because no self-identified gay man has ever expressed any interest in me and the ‘straight’ boys I’ve hooked up with didn’t want to kiss.

If perchance I were to live to be 70 years old, more than half the course of my natural life is now behind me. And I have wasted it. The dreams I had when I was young grew weak and crumbled under the strain of my need. There will be no love for me, no novels, no meaning for me to forge in the long dead fires of youth, no children through which to pass on my memes. Not because I have given up on life but because I have grown too old and too useless to care about what happens to me. I am, in every sense, just killing time.

Which brings me to my point (if I have one, if any of you are still reading this): don’t be like me. Don’t think too much. Don’t question everything to the point at which every possible answer becomes dissatisfying. Don’t take yourself so seriously that others leave you behind. Make your own meaning. Go do. Drive life into a corner. Suck the marrow out. Live deliberately. You won’t get another chance.