The blog returns today with inflated hopes buoying a heavy heart. Only two events of significance happened in my life since I quit writing about it, and the first shattered my world of three-and-a-half years.

My roommate left me for a white girl on a cold, dreary Monday morning before Thanksgiving. I had never been dumped before but saw this one coming. White girls, as I learned very young from the movie Legends of the Fall, are like the water that freezes in the fissures of a rock and breaks it apart. You cannot blame the water any more than you can blame the rock, although the rock would be fine if it weren’t for the water and I would still have my roomie.

As he drove away in his company truck that they somehow allowed him to keep, I turned up “Stronger” by Sara Evans on my iPod and jogged to the gym as usual. Even the endorphins could not lift the fog engulfing my state of mind. My life felt utterly empty, primarily because he took all the furniture with him but also due to a pervading sense of meaninglessness. I tried to focus on picking up the pieces still remaining in my life — apartment, job, girlfriend — but they seemed so trivial. Sure I found the girl I might marry, but how does that bring my roommate back?

It doesn’t. He is not coming back, no matter how many dick pics I send him. This leaves a gaping hole in my existence, and I mean that 100-percent figuratively for those who always suspected me of being the catcher. But life, as randomly as it unfolds, has a funny way of balancing itself out sometimes. The second and only other noteworthy update on my life offers a glimmer of consolation.

I wrote a book. In the final year of my 20s, I absolutely had to write a book. It was the boner that would not go away. And now that I am finally ready to blow my load, I want to do it on you. I want you to see it, hold it and taste it. Rub it on your chest like an ointment, and let me be close to your heart. Because this book is close to mine. I took all those blog posts you no longer see and made them better. I elaborated and added new stuff. Then I jammed all these incomparable stories and musings under the umbrella theme of examining our 20s, a decade when we could all use a little help.

Imagining just one person reading this book, anybody really, makes me happy on a strange new level. And then what if two people read this thing? What if someone not related to me buys it? These thoughts spark an excitement for me probably similar to what normal people experience during the birth of their first child.

I have such a scattered brain and bizarre way of processing things around me, which some find entertaining or at least interesting. The downside though has always been a mild but perpetual unrest pecking somewhere inside my skull. Writing this book gave me a peace that I had never known. Actually, writing it sucked. Dorothy Parker nailed it when she said, “I hate writing, I love having written.” Finishing this book, spitting it out of my consciousness and into the ether far away from me, was the part that brought the peace.

Hopefully that feeling spills over to other facets of life as I enter my fourth decade. Metabolism drops, peanut butter prices rise, and roommates move away. Nothing good in life lasts forever… except maybe a book, right?

 

 

Writer’s note: If you spend any amount of your finite time reading the absurdities in this blog, we are either friends or highly compatible strangers. Thus I feel close enough to ask for your email address below. The only email you will ever get from me is one blog post per month for the rest of my life, until you click Unsubscribe. Thank you.