Now that it’s been two years since I created this blog, where do I go from here?

Looking back, it’s interesting to see how things played out.  When I first started out in 2006, I blogged under the assumption that I would be eventually be attending law school later that fall.  I thought the name “Habitation of Justice” was a suitable name then, and the blog would have basically been a chronicle of my adventures in law school, as well as my subsequent journey into the legal profession.  Since I was so focused on getting everything in place so I’d be ready in time for school, I rarely posted for the first year.

Eventually though I had to defer my enrollment when my hopes for a scholarship fell through.  The deferment lasted a year, but nothing had really changed by the time it ended, so I had no choice but to withdraw.  I made one more try by attempting to go to school part-time at a local university instead, but eventually those plans fell through as well.

When it seemed like my whole future had collapsed, I eventually became fixated on making money off my blog, and spent the rest of 2007 working towards that end.  I devoured everything I could find about making money online, getting more and more frustrated because most of what I read were actually tips that I had already read off dozens of other sites, so I ended up reading the same fricking material over and over again.  Yet this was an idea I wanted to work so bad because I hated my job, and the allure of being able to live off the Internet was a really strong one.  2007 was all about establishing my blogging identity and doing whatever I could to bring in the traffic I needed so I could turn my blog into a money making machine.

That of course also met with miserable failure.  I had a huge identity crisis to deal with in that I just didn’t know what my blog should be about, and I knew I had to find a niche I was passionate about but still could make good money in.  I dabbled in doing paid reviews and other gimmicks here and there, but nothing really met with success.   All I could do was burn with envy at those who had become wildly successful with their own blogs, and nothing I could do could even remotely come near to their level of success.  The kicker was reading about a 19 year old weenie punk of a teenager who was raking in tens of thousands of dollars a month by running fake review sites containing hidden affiliate links.  They seemed to make money without even trying, and they did it with impunity.

Eventually I just gave up.  2008 began with me resigning myself to the fact that I would never get anywhere in life, much less with my blog.  I had no skills, no talent, nothing I could offer that could make this whole endeavor worthwhile.  The initial hope I had during the beginning of the year quickly dissipated as my health started to deteriorate, and I sunk even lower in despair and loneliness, fearing that I would forever be trapped in a dead end job and a dead end life.

But then somewhere along the way, in the midst of all that self-pity and despair, hope once again began to spring eternal.  The more I thought about law school, the more I began to believe God was doing me a favor.  I was happy enough to accept that such was His will, but what I was NOT happy about was being strung along for over a year when I kept asking and begging for confirmation that I was going down the right path.  Yet when I think about it, maybe it took so long to get an answer because I was meant to learn something in all that, and who knows what kind of chain of events that whole experience set off too, which I may not ever truly realize the depths of until later on in life.  They say sometimes the journey itself is more important than the destination, and I think that wise proverb applies here as well.

I also started to realize that part of the reason I had such an identity crisis was because I was trying to mimic other people’s lives (and subsequently the successes they enjoyed.)  I was trying to fit the square peg that I was into the circle of life, and as long as I continued to do that I’d never be able to move forward.  When I finally began to accept that my life was being defined by a complete different set of standards apart from the world’s own, I started to feel much better.  And my blog at long last began to take coherent shape.  My journal here is ultimately, a personal one, a catalog of both my physical and spiritual journey through life.  And that is probably what it will always be.

It also occurred to me that the driving force of my personality was my humor.  It was both sardonic and sententious, expressing an outright disdain of life’s petty silliness and the world’s stupidity, especially those of Christians who should know better.  Laced in sarcasm and saltiness, my voice was a fire breathing one, crying out in the wilderness that is the Internet, and because of it I would alienate all, and yet somehow, I would also allure all.  My life was nothing else, if not a paradox.  Here the laws of physics come to an end, and the laws that only God can control begin to take hold.

I still dream of a life of self sufficiency, where I no longer have to be tied down to one place, but can travel freely and live freely, (writing about these experiences on my blog of course), and doing those things that never would have been possible had I had a wife, a family, and a house that surely would have kept me chained down with obligations I doubt I could ever fulfill.

That’s why I feel the road calling out to me.  It beckons, with its hidden dangers (as well as hidden promises.)  There may soon come a day when I will don my leather jacket, and ride my Black Stallion to wherever that highway takes me, hoping to find that spiritual and physical dwelling where true justice reigns supreme.

The Habitation of Justice.  

It’s over, I’ve lost.

After 23 years of rejection, heartaches, unrequited love, enduring the rude, cold treatment of every women I’ve ever been interested in or in love with, I’m tossing in the towel.

My latest failure took away whatever remaining hope I had. Even though we seemed to have so many specific, rare things in common, I only managed to hold her interest for maybe 5 minutes before she decided I just wasn’t worth her attention anymore, and blew me off without warning.

I guess that’s it then. I’ll never experience what it’s like to hold hands with a girl, to kiss her, to hold her in my arms, to tell her how much I love her and care for her, and have her tell me the same. I will be single and alone for the rest of my life, and I’m sure all my enemies will gain immense satisfaction in knowing I will never be happy.

Ah well, I won’t get mad about this. I’ll just get even.

After all, if ya gotta go, go with a smile!

HAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!!

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of hot babes.”

Happy Independence Day!

It seems fitting that my credit card balance would be cleared in time for today’s celebration, and hopefully by this time next year my car and college loans will be paid off as well. Hard to believe my credit card debt was as high as $8,000 only a few months earlier, partly because I had to pay for the costs of new hearing aids, but I just kept furiously paying it down as much as I could, until by some sheer miracle the balance finally read zero for the first time in 4 years.

Once my car and college loans are taken care of as well, I’ll be completely debt free and enjoying a near perfect credit rating, especially since I will have paid off the car loan at least a year and a half ahead of schedule. So, debt-free, no ugly history with exes, no kids to complicate things, stable job with superb medical benefits, and I drive a sleek black fully loaded SUV. Girls should be lining up the door here, and yet nobody wants me. At least nobody sane that is, and just that one criteria seems to eliminate a good portion of the female populace.

*Sigh*

That’s part of the reason why I want to travel, and once my debts are cleared I’ll have to decide then whether to throw caution to the wind and quit my job so I can roam the country as a working nomad. I’d like to believe that there’s a place in this vast nation of ours where I can truly feel like I belong, a place I could finally call home, because it sure as #@$%ing hell isn’t this sewage dump of a New York town. I’m never gonna know for sure though until I start putting myself out there.

At the very least I’d be free from the shackles of a dead-end office job, with no ties to anything and the freedom to pursue any course I desire, and embark on any adventure I wish. Maybe then I’ll finally find…. her, and by then I wouldn’t have to worry about the trials of a long distance relationship, because I’ll be able to go to wherever she is. Unless of course, she’s in Australia.

Ah well, for now I’ll just celebrate this little victory over VISA, in the hopes that this will signify the beginning of my very own personal independence.

I recently watched the entire miniseries of John Adams last weekend. Tres Awesomeness, dude. John Adams is unequivocally my hero, primarily because there is just so much about him that I can relate to.

For one, he had a big mouth. Seriously, he couldn’t shut up for nothing, and it got him in all sorts of hot water. He always spoke what other people could only merely think, and for that he was much maligned by his peers. He wasn’t one for small talk and idle chatter either, his words always cutting right to the point, and if you didn’t like what he had to say, well that was just too damned bad.

He was also a plain and morally upright person. He didn’t care for riches or showy displays of affluence, preferring to dig into manure to help grow his crops than count money. During his diplomatic mission to Paris, he was offput by the decadent lifestyle of the French, who loved to party and engage in all sorts of lewd behavior. His rejection of their immorality and his headstrong pursuit to secure French naval support put him at odds with Benjamin Franklin (who was perfectly fine with having several mistresses) as well as the entire French court. Eventually he was unceremoniously dumped and forced to travel to Holland, where he remained until the American war ended.

But perhaps what I found most appealing about Adams was his wife, Abigail. It was she who kept his foibles in check and gave him sound advice when he sorely needed it. She was truly, as he once fondly referred to her, his “ballast.”

As for myself, When I look at my own life, especially absent of my own Abigail, I can feel myself teetering on the brink. Those who think my blog is over the top sometimes, you really have no idea. It’s all I can do sometimes to keep myself from going absolutely ape nutty and raging against all of mankind, to such an extent that I wouldn’t merely put people off: I’d make them deranged with fury and determined to see me shipped to the South Pole, preferably without my clothes. In a way, I’m just a fuse looking for a match.

It feels like I’ve been dropped in a world that is not my own. I can relate to no one, and none can relate to me, especially when it comes to women. When I’m confident, women see arrogance. When I’m nice, women see weakness. When I’m raging against the machine of life, women don’t see a wild animal that can be tamed, but rather a lost cause that needs to be committed.

The disconnect could not be any more severe, the rift any more wider. As each passing year goes by where I find myself without my ballast, I can feel myself unraveling, getting more and more bitter and filled with despair. I’m beginning to truly believe now that I have been born into a world to which there really is no better half who is able to tame this wild animal, and foment the love that I have longed for all my life.

If that is how it must be, then be prepared: you will see a side of me that will make Dante’s inferno look like Disneyland in comparison. The world will soon see what it’s like to have a John Adams, minus his Abigail.

Ok, so I’ve been playing around with OKCupid for the past couple of weeks, sifting through literally hundreds of profiles, trying to find someone, ANYONE, with a good head on her shoulders that I could talk to. I’m so lonely.

I actually did find a few nice ones though. Pretty, morally upright girls, one of who mentioned her distaste for OKCupid’s lewdness (she gets 20 points for that) and her love for 80s music (she gets 5000 points for that).

They were all active and visited the site on a regular basis, so I decided to send them a friendly email commending their profiles and asking them if we could be penpals or friends.

I got completely blown off by everyone. 2 weeks of obsessively checking my inbox every ten minutes to see if they responded, and… nothing.

Now before I start going off and calling them rude, icy-cold hearted spawns of Satan and earnestly hoping that they would spontaneously combust and explode into a fiery pus filled death, I’m willing to concede that all the women I contacted just lead busy lives, and may not have had time to get back to me yet.

Therein however lies the reason for why I might be royally screwed.

I’ve been thinking about this: these girls seem happy enough, living busy and productive lives, with loving families and a large circle of friends. Why would they need me then? Unless of course, they’re only interested in a sperm donor to help them make babies, in which case once the child is born they would then go back to refusing to acknowledge my existence (except for the paycheck, which they’ll happily take of course.)

But let’s pretend for the sake of argument that women are not that conniving and evil. Or rather, let’s assume the women I contacted are basically good and caring folks. But the fact is, their lives are so busy they simply don’t have time to give someone like me a chance. They may check their inboxes maybe once or twice a week, meanwhile I’m checking my inbox once every ten minutes. I yearn for companionship and wubs so badly, but for them it doesn’t seem to be a priority at all. If we ever had a relationship, they could wind up being aloof and distant, meeting me only when they can fit it into their busy schedules, while for my part all I can do is cry into my pillow at night, knowing I’ll never be truly loved. Truthfully though, it would be a severely unbalanced courtship, where I would yearn for her more than she’d ever yearn for me.

It’s times like this when I really start to despise this Internet thing though. I know people would say get off of it and start putting myself out there, but it’s not really that simple.

For those who don’t know, I have a profound hearing loss in both my ears that severely crippled my ability to have a social life. As I grew up, my attempts to participate in conversations and groups almost always resulted in embarassment. I would miss key bits of phrases in a conversation, and when I would try to contribute, people would end up laughing at me because I had completely misinterpreted what they were talking about. It never failed, and it wasn’t long before my intelligence itself would be questioned too. People would just assume I was an idiot and thus unworthy of their attention. Eventually I just drifted away and no longer tried to socialize anymore. My hearing loss certainly played a large role in my becoming a loner, though I still did ok in tightly knit groups and in one-on-one situations. But whenever we went someplace noisy (which was all the time), it really crippled my ability to engage in conversations with the people I was with. Part of what makes it so hard is that when you have a hearing loss, you can’t passively listen and pick up voices easily. You have to exert a considerable amount of mental effort to follow a conversation, and after a while you can get pretty fatigued.

That’s why I gravitate to using the Internet all the time. Here, conversation is easy, and people can’t see me at first so they can’t quickly pass judgment on me because of my disability or looks. Unfortunately though, I made it my whole world, and it’s not a world I want to live in anymore. It’s all MySpace and Facebook silliness topped off with a generous load of unhinged insanity.

Statistics say most couples find each other through friends and family. All my friends though have drifted away, and I’ve been cut off from 99 percent of my family. My parents ironically enough don’t have any friends either (well at least not any with single daughters my age.)

I could go back to school, which would be the easiest way since they are popular dating mills (or to save money, I could just hang out on campus and pretend I’m a student.)

Or, I could join interest groups like a photography club, but I don’t know. Same thing with church, which I really can’t stand (specifically the local ones here). I’d go if I knew there’d be a lot of girls there, but I’d have no interest in any of the church services (except maybe the singles group.) Charity organizations might be a good idea though.

Still, this is a pretty big hole I’m in. I may have to consider the real possibility that I am never going to meet anyone, and that life will continue to conspire against me to ensure that I will always be alone. That’s one of the reasons I want to travel so much. There’s something romantic about the idea of a lost soul travelling around America, looking for the girl of his dreams. Someday, maybe.

In the meantime though, I’ll be checking my inbox. (checks again… still nothing, *&^%$#@!!!!)

One of the reasons it’s been so difficult for me to find dates is because I don’t have a very active social life (which is to say, I have no social life whatsoever to speak of.) I used to have a close knit group of friends that carried me through high school and beyond college for a while, but eventually we began to drift apart for various reasons, until one day I found myself living the life of a loner again.

I was never one for attending social gatherings though so I could maybe gain some new friends, mainly because there were, well, people there. And I hated people.

Ok, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I hated them, maybe that I just didn’t get along…no I hated them.

Unfortunately, if I was ever gonna meet girls then I was gonna have to go where people were, sooner or later. With a mindset like this, it’s a small wonder why I was always holding out hope that I would meet someone at my job instead. After all, I’m forced to be here, and there were people here too, soooo….

For the longest time I used to entertain fantasies of meeting the girl of my dreams at work, so much that it started taking on a life of its own. I even nailed down what she would look like too: deeply tanned skin, big brown eyes, and luscious brown hair. She would be as sweet as an angel, maybe assigned somewhere close to me so we’d run into each other on a regular basis. Things would be strictly platonic at first, but before I knew it she would eventually warm up to me… and love would blossom out of nothing at all.

Out of nothing at allllll….. Out of nothing at… *ahem* but anyways, that’s how I imagined it. From that we would eventually become engaged, get married, and live happily ever after. Oh how I prayed and begged God that this would all happen for real. My fantasies here were so vivid that I could have weaved a cheap romance novel out of it. Probably could have made some cash from selling it too.

I had been churning over this latest fantasy of mine for a few months, when something weird happened: we got a new coworker assigned near us who had… deeply tanned skin, big brown eyes, and luscious brown hair. I swear you couldn’t make this stuff up. Our department doesn’t attract a lot of young workers to begin with, so just getting another coworker around my age would have been odd unto itself. She was a year older than me, but single and beautiful, and had a mellow, pleasant personality about her. In her previous job she worked with kids who suffered from various disabilities too. It was perfect! My dream was actually coming to life!

Except she hated me.

Well, she didn’t really hate me. She just had no interest in me whatsoever. I tried everything I could think of to woo her too, all in the futile hope that eventually, sooner or later, she would warm up to me in very much the same way her alter ego did in my fantasies. I kept her company when things got quiet during our late shifts. I helped her out whenever she needed to learn something about the job. I helped her find her keys when she had lost them and was freaking out over it, and at her request I burned dozens of her CDs into MP3s so she could use an MP3 player she bought for the gym (even though she didn’t have a computer). I changed my hairstyles, clothing, and yes, I’m ashamed to admit it, during my low points I even tried using TAG body spray (I’m suing those bastards for false advertising by the way.)

Yet despite all my efforts, when it came to asking her out to lunch, or even just coffee, she had no interest at all. The more she blew me off, the more I pined for her love. After a couple of months of this I eventually gave up. I decided I would continue being a nice guy as always, but I resigned myself to the fact that she would never be interested in me. I was just a pathetic loser who could never be good enough for her. My fantasy was not to be.

And that might have been the end of it, except that shortly afterwards she fell madly in love with another coworker, and within a few months they were engaged to be married.

My fantasies were coming to life after all… but for somebody else. Honestly, mere words could not convey the state of my emotions as I watched some little bastard boy enjoy what I previously could only experience in my dreams. Every day I had to come in to work and see those two nuzzling noses or holding hands at a picnic table (just as I envisioned it), and it was all I could do to keep myself from screaming at the top of my lungs and stepping on the gas at a nearby red light hoping an 18 wheeler would plow into me.

The best though was when the wedding itself was soon coming up, and she asked me if I had any suggestions for wedding songs she could use. I ended up making a CD of what I considered to be my most favorite love songs, songs I probably would have picked for my own wedding too. From what I heard my CD turned out to be a big hit, though I wouldn’t know, since I wasn’t invited.

I’m not one for bitterness though, so here’s a toast to their new life together. May their imminent divorce be appallingly messy and violently ugly.

No seriously, I do hope they’ll be happy together, I guess. I don’t begrudge anyone getting married, but for the love of kindness, did it really have to F*&%ING play out EXACTLY like I imagined it???

When I saw that, I guess I went through something of a system shock. My feelings went numb and I succumbed to a state of deep depression. In a way, I had given up on life. I no longer took care of myself, no longer went out as much as I used to. My clothes would get worn and start showing holes, but I didn’t care. I started suffering from health problems, but still I didn’t care. It wasn’t uncommon for me to sleep for 12-15 hours a night, and even then I just had no energy to get out of bed at all. I used to be punctual and on time for work, but I became so lethargic that if I ended up being only 10 minutes late, it was a miracle. It was becoming a regular tradition for me to hit the supermarket the night before my days off from work, stock up on groceries and DVDs from Redbox, then head home and hole up in my bedroom with my tub of popcorn, TV and laptop, where I would stay unmoved in my jammies until it was time to go back to work again.

I became utterly convinced that God hated me. After all, He wasn’t going to simply ignore my prayers here. Nope, He was going to twist and twist and twist the knife in so deep that it would all but ensure my psyche would never recover from this. It was almost like He recorded my fantasies and decided to orchestrate it in real life so that someone else would become the beneficiary of it, right before my very eyes. I mean really, what were the odds of something like that happening, down to even using the same collection of songs I dreamed would be used at my own wedding? (Which I say at the risk of sounding like a weenie girlie boy.) About a billion to one??

Why? Why did I have to endure that? Why did God have to hurt me like this? I know I can be a wiseass and all who deserves to get smacked around every now and then, but this was bafflingly cruel. It’s part of why I’m so slow to get out of bed every day, because I absolutely dread what new punishment He might have in store for me. My pathetic life must be a source of constant amusement for Him.

But… and before you Christian dweebs start berating me here, let me be quick to note that I don’t really believe this now. I know there’s a purpose to everything, and I’ve seen enough to know that for whatever reason God is keeping me safe from a lot of the evil that’s in this world. I guess that goes to show what a foregone conclusion I must be, that in spite of the complete embarrassment I experienced, I still believe God c
ares for me and has only my best interests in mind. Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome?

Still, this one really got to me in a bad way, and even now I’m still nursing the wounds. Just when I think I’ve put it behind me, every now and then somebody will stick a finger in the wound, like when I run into her and she talks about her “husband” (just hearing her say that makes me cringe.) Ironically enough, the most recent jab came from my mother, of all places. My Mom never knew I had a thing for this girl, even though she met her a few times at work. One time we had a conversation afterwards and Mom said, “She is SUCH a sweetheart, Linc! How come you can’t meet somebody nice like her? She would have been PERFECT for you!!”

Poor Mom. She had no idea why I ran out after hearing that and started ripping and chewing on the grass on the front lawn.

Ah well. I guess the only thing that will make the pain go away for good is when I finally do meet someone for real. It’s hard to imagine even after all that how I could still retain hope that somehow, somewhere, she’s out there waiting for me, but I do. I guess I’ll always be a romantic at heart, no matter how loopy I get.

I still fantasize about meeting her though. But trust me, I have learned my lesson. Now I imagine meeting her in scenarios that are so outlandish that they cannot POSSIBLY happen to me in real life, much less to anyone else. Currently I fantasize about meeting her as part of an undercover operation I’m doing for the CIA. Oh, and I have superpowers. And the girl of my dreams is an alien from another planet who gets captured by the U.S. government. We fall in love and I spring her loose, then steal the USS Enterprise starship and together we make our way to the Alpha Centauri system, where we spend many steamy, romantic evenings on the paradise planet of Gimmegoomajamjam.

Let’s see y’all beeotches try to turn THAT one into reality, yo!

I am a square peg trying to fit into the circle that is life.

At least that’s been my feeling lately. I’ve always had an eclectic personality that precluded me from being able to fit in anywhere, whether it was a church, a social club, or any kind of informal group that shared a common interest. While it made me unique, I do think there is such a thing as being TOO unique, ya know?

Not that I minded being a loner too much, but I hated the fact that my life (with all its eccentricities) all but guaranteed that I’d never find anyone who could really understand who I was as a person. Sure, they might be able relate to one aspect, but then find another aspect of me so totally foreign to them that it scares them off. And trust me, I can be a very scary person, indeed.

There have been times when I tried to simply fake my way into a community’s good graces, but it never seems to last long. Whether it’s trying to cheer for a sports team just so I could relate to their fans (Let’s go Mets!! LET’S GOOO METS!!! LET’S GOOOOO… ah they suck), or whether it’s trying to relate to the Deaf community (where I’d be shunned simply because I’m not deaf enough), or whether it’s feigning “getting slain in the spirit” at a holy roller church so as not to draw suspicion from the congregation, there just seems to be no place on earth where I could truly feel at home.

I’m either too conservative or too liberal, too Christian or too atheist, too normal or too weird, too smothering or too distant, too emotional or too cold. Whatever it is that separates me from the rest of humanity, I either have too much of it, or not enough.

Is it ever going to be possible for me to meet a girl who could understand me through and through, or at least enough of me so that I don’t completely freak her out? Or am I really destined to walk this earth alone until death finally puts me out of my misery?

I believe I can survive without a large support group of any sort, but I don’t think I could carry on without the love of a good woman who could be both my lover and best friend. It seems sappy, but of all the agony and suffering I’ve endured in this life, this one always hurts me the most.

Oh well… there’s always castration.