Time, Clock of the Heart (Lifestyle remix)

Sex Rehab. It’s a TV show, it’s a religion.

Terror is recognizing you in those people. And I know terror.

Even their simple, made for TV techniques, however, have made a difference.

This week it was Amber Smith that showed me something about myself.

She was having a session with Dr. Drew and her mother about her now-dead alcoholic father. Somewhere in there, she starts wailing about the years she lost in a bedroom on a drugged-out haze. The time, she pleaded. Where did the time go?

Early this morning, when I first began struggling towards consciousness, I had a very vivid realization. All of THIS—the drugs, the porn, the debauchery—it’s all a reaction to a gaping hole of lost time in my life that has yet to be filled.

I’m not going to get into right now, but there was a long, drawn out stretch during my high school years where I became very acquainted with madness, and eventually the cold specter of death.

In many ways, I was a most unwilling warden of a makeshift prison hospital. I was a teenager. I was dealing with one of the hardest things humans have to go through, and I was completely unprepared for it.

As a result, there is the aforementioned hole of missing time in my life. Compounded with the fact that I was raised by good, hardworking people not exactly versed in the art of parenting, the results have been profound, to say the least.

For one it explains my last two relationships in alarming clarity.

It makes me realize that to be happy in life and in love, I have to finally make some hard admissions to myself. Then I have to deal with them.

Decisions that I only wish the people that came before me had been allowed to make. That they even knew that such options existed.

This one’s for both of you.

2. "Do another line and unzip my pants."

I used to be such a romantic

I was reminded of that fact tonight when the movie “Valley Girl” popped up on WGN.

Long before the days of cocaine, group sex and choking chicks during hook-ups, I was a genuine romantic. Like one of those completely hapless schmos in bad romantic comedies starring that assshat Matthew McI’llneverspellhisnamerightsofuckit. Shitty flicks that I end up watching alone when they come on basic cable. Truth be told, I was damn near John fucking Cusack.

Now, I’m a dirty fuck-pig that jerks off to the most disgusting porn imaginable while snorting lines of blow.

So: What the fuck happened?

I think I could have overlooked all of the random relationship bullshit if it wasn’t for, you know, her. The college girlfriend that got away. The one I wasn’t WASP enough or Dr. enough to keep. The one I let really fuck me up good.

All of the stupid shit I did after she finally dumped me—the acid, nights spent in that dank fucking basement living with that evil man. I was so bummed the fuck out. I felt worthless and treated myself like shit. I just kind of shuffled through life for those years after it was over.

God, that night I talked that girl to my bedroom in a house in suburban Detroit. She had just turned 16 and I knew it. I was more than 10 years her senior. But in the end, I went all “Catcher in the Rye” and just stroked her hair while she slept. I’ll never forget the looks on my roommates’ faces when I walked her out the next morning. She looked no more that 12 under the harsh sunlight and without her mask of makeup.

There were years of just moving forward without really thinking, just existing, paying bills, feeding my face, buying the stupid shit I though I needed but only just held me back.

I just got emotionally hard, I guess. There are only so many empty nights of getting loaded alone a person can take.

I don’t expect love and affection anymore. I expect tension and confrontation and friction. And more than anything, I just want life to be as stress-free as possible. Snorting coke until I’m numb and jerking off to orgy porn is one hell on an anesthetic let me tell you.

My poor ex. All she wants is to love and be loved, like most people in the world. She has done and will do anything for me. And I treat her like shit. I’d rather have violent, slightly hostile drunken/drugged hook-ups with Sex Bomb. In short, I’m completely fucked up.

Enjoy the show.