Whiny White Guy

“This is the springtime of my loving…,” as Robert Plant puts it at the beginning of The Rain Song”. It is looking increasingly like tonight’s Red Sox game will be rained out, according to my pal @Surviving_Grady on Twitter. So I’ll have to, out of habit if nothing else, find something else to say today. Or not-it’s not like the fact that I don’t post will affect anything or anyone.

My loving? More like midwinter, frankly. I never imagined that sex, something that you spend so much time seeking as a young man, just becomes pointless as you age. Sad.

Wait, that’s not true. Not entirely. This feeling has been boiling around in my head for weeks now. I’m going to try and express it here. I’ll try to get it right. I probably won’t.

Ahem.

It’s not so much not seeing the point of sex, as not seeing the point of pleasure. It doesn’t seem worth the work to get it. I am obsessed to the point of mania with just surviving, not going broke, making sure there’s enough food and enough to drink and enough in the bank to provide for such things. There isn’t any room for anything else, in my brain or in my day.

Anhedonia is the technical name for it-the marrow has just been drained from life. Life is just existing, not living.

This isn’t anyone’s fault-I don’t blame my family, my friends, anybody-not even myself. I have made the choices I have made willingly, and now I have to live with the consequences. “Nobody’s fault,” as Plant also once put it, “but mine”.

There is a part of “The Watchmen” when the character Rorschach (Jackie Earl Haley) intones a line about the city looking to him, crying, “Save us!”. And I look down, Rorschach says, and I say, “No.” It’s part of an ongoing theme in the book and the movie-that humanity is just too greedy, and foolish, and stupid to be worth the heroes’ efforts.

I have lived a long time while clinging to the notion that there has to be something better-once I pay off this bill, or if I won the lottery, or if x happens, THEN I will be happy. A realization that has come upon me like a sledgehammer in recent days is that suddenly, for the first time, I don’t think there is something else. This is it. This is how it’s going to be. Even if I solve the six things bothering me at the moment, there will be three more by the time I have those six settled. So I look at the rest of my life, and I ask myself if anything will make me happy? And I look down at myself, and I say, “No”. I’m too greedy, foolish, and stupid to be worth rescuing.

I must say again, emphatically, that I don’t blame anyone but myself for this. I wasn’t trapped into anything. It’s all on me.

All this is not a pleasing revelation.

TMI? Yes. Moving on…

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According to Twitter, again, the Red Sox are now reportedly claiming they are going to start tonight’s game on time, despite what appears to be nearly constant rain. We shall see.

In addition, Tim Wakefield’s back has apparently flared up again, and it appears we are so desperate we might let Paul Byrd pitch for us. In a major league game, no less. Le Sigh.

I pine for the days when we had “too much” pitching.

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@VelveteenMind, a blogger who is both more talented and, apparently, more imitated than I, Twittered about a problem she had with someone plagiarizing her work. She got the offending post removed, and an apology from the thief.

It made me wonder how I would feel if I were the victim of such a thing. Perhaps I’m the victim of it right now-maybe you’re reading this on a Chinese web site that has been brilliantly pirating all of my work and reselling it on the lucrative “Whiny White Guys” market.

Yeah, I doubt it too.

I think it’s a little bit flattering, despite it all, to have your work seen as having enough value to be worth stealing. Then again, all evidence to the contrary on this site, we bloggers do put some thought and effort into our posts, and people shouldn’t claim it as their own.

Although I maintain, if you’re stealing my drivel, you need to steal a better class of material.

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