The Monthly Rag

Hello there. I’m Sean–a thirty seven year old male, heading my way to thirty eight in just a few short months, and I’m alone.

I sometimes think it’s simply because my better years are pretty much over, or that my looks (to those who considered them appealing) have faded off, or just that my OCD has made it impossible for anyone to stick around for longer than eight months to a year. I’m sure factors from all of these categories are responsible to degrees, some a bit more than others, since out of my entire circle of friends from high school onward, I seem to be the only one who can’t a relationship together.

Do I choose the wrong people, or do the wrong people choose me?

Memories of females past haunt me as I lay in darkness, trying to shut my brain down to sleep. A few, in particular, delve the deepest and the worst. We don’t pick and choose our favorites in this lifetime, they just seem to mutate and grow into the objects of our ultimate affection and need. And it always seems that the select who become the most important are inevitably the same individuals that abandon us in the most cruel fashion.

That’s been my case, at any rate. I have a particular trio: the “trifecta of heartbreak” I like to call them, who seemed to vanish with one last act of betrayal or entirely without an explanation at all. That isn’t to say there aren’t others I miss, of course; some even terminated by my own will that I look back now on and kick myself for doing so (hindsight is 50/50, they rightly say). However, it’s what you desire most that eventually eludes you, and in the end it always comes back to the trinity who I let get the closest. Their images spin endlessly around my memory and hang like a thorn laden leash around my throat.

I’ve been a recluse for many stretches of my later adult life (middle age something fierce), so dating sites have been tried, random hook ups from friends, blind dates, etc. None of these ever go right, and the resulting experience generally leaves a disdain for humanity hanging in the nearby ether. Things were so much easier in my youth; working on an underground newspaper and doing movies, being involved and around my peers and contemporaries. Those days are long gone now, probably indefinitely. Poverty, failure, and a broken mind repeating an aberrant code have replaced the creative drive and confidence of what once was. This doesn’t help attract the opposite sex, I’m afraid, and the opposite sex seems, at this stage at least, to be just as messed up on their end of things.

It’s a bizarre crossroads of the impossible. Younger girls are part of the self centered social network age (not to exclude the neurosis of modern men, however, since I don’t date them my wrath remains aimed squarely at generation narcissistic bitch), and trying to impress one of them with a dead newspaper gone web blog or 52 minute movie that didn’t make a cent back in profit just isn’t going to happen. Hell, I don’t even drive a car–a great deal of females would rule me out just for that alone. The one’s my age? Forget it. They’ve been divorced once or twice already, have kids in tow, and chips on their shoulders that put mine to a crying shame (and trust me, the having kids part isn’t the problem. My last ex had four of them, and they were the highlight of the entire debacle).

While my physical reality deteriorates, so do my options. And that’s the curse of growing old in a nutshell I believe–watching life take away what it used to give. It’s a tragedy we all get to experience sooner or later, unfortunately, but I was hoping I still had a little bit longer to build the nest I always dreamed I’d roost. As it remains, I limp forward into an uncertain future, hoping that perhaps better fortune will find a shred of mercy. I’m certainly ready…and going by the recent past, a little more than certainly due.