Tap on Glass, Talk About Future

This Saturday, in front of friends and family spanning the strata of human experience, my old friend Phillip will be getting married to his college sweetheart, Alana, up in Spokane, Washington. I had the good fortune of spending a few cozy dinners with them while they were in Houston for various academic and job-related conferences. Of course I've known Phillip since I was in kindergarten, and I could tell that he was quite in love with her the first time I saw them together.

And against what I consider to be the insurmountable odds of my own construction, I will be standing up there, too, as one of Phillip's groomsmen. And when I say "insurmountable odds of my own construction," I'm not just trying to be wordy. I mean: I thought that between my rock-and-roll lifestyle, my complete emotional abandonment of Panama City Beach, and surrounding myself with people who are equally scared of commitment, I wouldn't be attending weddings in any serious capacity until I was 30.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't necessarily think it's weird for two people who are ready to make that sort of commitment to get married. I don't have anything against getting married. It's just a concept that is so completely removed from my own experiences and where I am in my own life that I have a hard time understanding the mindset that can lead to that sort of... I dunno, "leap."

And so it does beg the question: If I'm so unable to empathize with the married man's mind at 23, then where is my life taking me? Or, as they asked in all of my job interviews this summer: Where do you see yourself in five years?

I. Have. No. Idea. I've never been able to see five years down the road. Or two. Or even a few months. It's weird.

In fact, there's only been one future for me: The Distant Future. It was purchased for me by my mom and every person who ever told me "you'll make a great father one day" when I was depressed about my condition and needed a future to see. It's the American dream that Hunter S. Thompson was trying to warn me about. It's a two-story house filled with all the gadgets and accouterments and toys of a Family Man. And it's the only thing that has ever come to mind when people ask me about my future.

Seriously. When interviewers, counselors, whoever would ask me about my own thoughts on the future, I would conjure up what I believed to be my destiny and interpolate backwards. Where do I see myself in five years? Well, ten years away from being the father of a five year old living in Cypress, TX, or something. And rich, of course. The image of me pushing a lawnmower over a chemically green plot of suburbia while my kids try to kill each other with pool noodles is so incredibly (and admittedly) strange that, well, many of my friends are probably laughing their way through this very sentence.

I guess you could say there's a divorce between the future I've always envisioned and the reality I'm living right now.

In the past few months I've started a new job, marginally come to terms with the self-destruction of my most stable and enjoyable relationship to date, supported my family through some emotionally rough rigmarole, looked for a new place to live and, oh yeah, graduated. Any one of those events would be enough to get my gears spinning about my place in the world, but the wedding thing is really the icing on my introspective, hard-to-swallow Cake of the Future.

So now, in the wake of everything, I'm finally coming to terms with what may be the first hard truth about myself I've ever learned: I'm not going to be a family man. Or, at the very least, it's not going to come easy. I'm too damaged to commit. Too clingy to make hard decisions for the good of the family. Too invested in myself to pay dividends to anyone else. Too historically untrustworthy to be trusted anymore.

It's okay.

I know that I could become this person if I wanted. If I wanted to make that life a goal, I could drop every selfish habit of mine and work toward being an A-type Archetypal American Man. But it's certainly not going to just happen to me. More importantly, for the first time in my life, I'm coming to terms with the idea that it's okay-- and likely-- that I won't. For now I just need to work on my insecurities, my shortcomings, and try to maximize the different possible directions my life might take. Clarity will come.

But if the only vague future I've ever known is gone, then what am I working toward? A legacy? An empire? Fame? Importance? Being really clever? I don't care about those things like I used to.

For now, I guess I'm just working toward tomorrow.