The Worst Year of My Life Hasn't Been That Bad

I believe it was Ernest Hemingway who said that childhood ends on the day you go shopping for adult diapers with your father, and spend twenty minutes or so comparing prices.

This year  -- since I started this job in America last August -- by all subjective metrics has sucked pretty hard. No travel or new destinations. No romance and practically no wild fucking. No drunken adventures. Not even much money saved.

But objectively, I got a lot done. My father is comfortably ensconced in his assisted living place, and he can pay for most (although not all) of it himself. I'm three classes into a Master's Degree in Curriculum and Instruction with an Emphasis in English as a Second Language. I've made decent progress in the martial arts system I study, which mixes Thai boxing, jeet kun do, and escrima and kali.




Despite the occasional tangle with Amazon's censors, I'm still making decent money from my erotic thriller e-books, and in becoming thrillers, they're much more the books I always wanted to write (just with rather more fucking). I'm leading up to writing one about an English teacher fucking the wife of a Russian billionaire. I'll share that with you folks, should I ever write it.

The place I live now is the same kind of place where I grew up: small town America. Strip malls and fast food places. Mini mansions on one side of town and little shacks on the other. Surrounded by empty industrial buildings and scrap yards and farms and used car lots with huge flags flapping over them.

I didn't much like it then, and I like it less now, but there are things I like. Fresh air. Some great national parks to hike and camp in.
 

Now as far as my social life, I don't have one, but that's completely by choice. And that's a bit strange, I know. I've been invited out by several of my decent-looking female colleagues and I've always made excuses. My male colleagues invite me out occasionally also, but I also decline. I have not the slightest urge to spend time at bars or clubs. (I mean, I am 47, also.)

You could say that it's sobriety, sexual and otherwise, like my contemporaries Tucker Max and Neil Strauss, who now fly the banner of marriage, monogomy, and sobriety. But getting addicted to solitude isn't a good thing either (and I'll write about this later) but I think it's probably just a desire not to put any more emotional load on my brain. I visit my dad about once a month and spend the other three weekends by my damn self, reading, writing, or hiking. 

Anyway, one thing I haven't done which I wanted to is write much about English Teacher X. I was meaning to get all my old travel journals out and start writing down stories from my early backpacking years, but I still haven't gotten around to it. 

I'll try to do that in the next couple of months, because if all goes well, I'll be starting another job abroad in September. I'm working on finishing the documents now, and it should be a good gig. Things could still go wrong, so I'll wait until I have the visa to talk about it.