My goodness I can’t write to save my life. I used to be an above-average writer but the disconnect between how fast my hands can type and how fast my mind flits like Jesse on crystal blue persuasion just leads to fragmented and abandoned narratives.

I had a Walter White dream the other night.

That guy from Malcolm in the Middle and lately the Studio. It’s not surprising that Walter White beats out the Malcolm dad skating to Queen. Heisenberg is a bald bearded specter in my most potent dreams, the last frame I see before opening my eyes. I find myself identifying with him—a white, middle-aged father of two who made one bad decision, even if it was for what he thought was the greater good.

For him, it was selling out his shares in a company that went on to make billions. Yet he still managed to carve out a life and win a sliver of the American dream: a beautiful, if dismissive, wife, and a job from which he could never be fired. For me, it was moving to the toxic dump of America—where the internet flickers in and out for reasons no one dares discuss, and the water, and thus the food, the drugs, the very air, tastes like swamp and sulfur. The funk of five hundred ages. Fun fact: The water was so bad I carried a year-long yeast infection when I first arrived.

PART II

Yesterday, a coworker texted me: her husband’s best friend had killed himself. My first thought was that sometimes suicide is just common sense. Because in this world, even a middle-aged white man with a family, loved but not feared, respected only in passing—a man like Walter White, whose intellect and passion deserved recognition—can feel so disaffected that he becomes a monster, and in doing so, succeeds. He wins.

Whereas I failed. And I sit here thinking: well, that’s what I get for believing I was anyone, for believing I deserved anything.

I’m not vain enough to kill myself or others. Once, I expected the world to stand up and clap. I quickly learned I was deluding myself. What I deserved was scorn, derision, the cold dismissal reserved for those who tell the truth too bluntly—whether to their own reflection or to the world.

I am a hundred years old, and still, when I send out emails at work, I don’t even get to sign my full name. Because I don’t matter. I am the paper stuck to the bottom of the world’s shoe.

My brain, my perfect tits (still perky, still defiant), and my Puritan work ethic mean nothing more than this: I must learn to be alone. Forever. Until I die. From toxic swamp creek water.

The whining. Only white men can whine. September sucked. I need to work out every day and stop drinking in October. Experience pleasure in my body that doesn’t involve sex – a distant memory at my age anyway – or liver shredding liquor, sleep 40 hours a week, eat 3 healthy meals. Having power over others, expecting external validation is a fool’s errand for someone who looks like me. Though I do think storage units filled of cash I can’t spend would get me through the blatant disrespect I endure day in and day out as a Middle-Aged Dilettante aka as M.A.D.