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By Mark D, May 25, 2011 9:06 pm

I turned 30 earlier this year. Hip Hip Hooray, throw out the confetti. I’ve been single for just about 3 years now. After my last long relationship ended, I wasn’t sure what I wanted. So I pretty much ended up screwing up my chances with a few different women that I dated. Now though I am amazed at the number of people I know that are getting married or engaged. It’s sort of depressing in a way. I always linger on with the thoughts of what if a bit too much. I wonder if there is someone that can just move on and never even think of the past. Would that even be a fun way to exist? Shouldn’t your past success/failures help determine future choices?

It somewhat amazes me the twists and turns my life has taken. For some reason it has never gotten into my head to get married. I mean a lot of these are people are marrying people they’ve known for such a short time. Like I said, most of them I dated/knew within the last three years. Do you really know if you want to spend the rest of your life with someone after 2 years? I only had two relationships hit the three year mark. I can’t imagine spending the rest of my life with either person.

At least on the bright side I had a fun discussion with a friend to cheer me up. It’s weird, sometimes I find hope in the oddest places. Especially when the person themselves aren’t exactly the cheeriest of people. It shouldn’t be too surprising, considering how much I love irony. I think if I keep going on this topic I’m going to seem emo as fuck and a constant whiner. Sometimes I just feel like shooting the shit about my real life.

To make up for it, I have a story about the time I went Jersey Devil hunting. So we were 3 cars and about 18 people with a few copies of Weird NJ looking for Indian Cabin Road. Now I don’t think we found the right place. What we did find was an unpaved road in the middle of nowhere in which the trees slowly but surely took over the road. Now we had also read that a pickup truck with a crazy hillbilly and a shotgun patrolled the road. So we drive in, get halfway down the road and see some pickup truck headlights turn on and start coming at us. We turn around and spin out of there as fast as we could and scattered.

Using phones we got back together and headed back to the entrance. This time my one friend had the brilliant idea of leaving the cars behind and WALKING down the path, that way they could hide if someone came down it. I got about a quarter of the way down the path and decided fuck it. I’m a city boy, and when your in the pine barrens and all you see for miles and miles  is trees, you sort of get scared shitless. So me and my significant other walked back to the cars… just in time to see a pickup truck headlights coming towards us.

We duck onto the side of the road, but the truck sees us and stops. All we hear is “hey y’all” and I’m ready to piss myself. Thankfully he follows that with “Are y’all looking for Indian Cabin Road too?”. It ends up that the guy was a Weird NJ fan from outside Baltimore and was looking for the same thing we are. Me, never willing to let a chance go by, convinces the guy to fly up and down the road hooting and hollering and pretending to shoot them. It worked perfectly and he scared my friends shitless.

Which was all good and well, until the cops showed up at our cars wondering what the fuck we were doing out there. They were about to start busting my chops because I didn’t have an ID, until the 15 other friends of ours came stumbling out of the woods, and the crazy pickup guy almost ran over a cop. It was a fun night.

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By Mark D, May 16, 2011 6:28 pm

I suspect I’m not alone in this either. I’ve been working on and off for the last decade, and I’ve absolutely hated just about every job I’ve had. I don’t want to go back to school, because one of the small joys of life is not going to school. I’m not good enough to be an actual writer. Not charismatic or funny enough to try filming myself in skits. Not talented enough to do any number of things. It sort of sucks that my two favorite things (writing and history) have almost no way of paying the bills.

I look day after day in the classifieds, and basically what I see are a bunch of jobs that I have no interest in. It’s not just a matter of pay either, I’m more then used to surviving at 7 bucks an hour.  It’s a matter of being somewhat happy at a fulfilling job for once. I realize a good number of people are unhappy with where they are working. Hell, just about everyone I’ve worked with has been unhappy with where they were at. The two jobs I liked I actually managed to get along with the guys I was working with. Of course the one job my best friend left the job and it got boring. My other job they decided that they were going to make everyone part time, or you could take a severance package. So I left.

My reason for writing this isn’t to whine. I just feel like I’m not the only one sort of floating out there in the sea of unknown. I think there’s a lot of people out there like me. I’d love to hear from you and your thoughts. Or feel free to call me a loser asshole and pathetic, I’m not exactly picky. I think it also helps that I was a bit brighter in my life then my dad, who spent most of his 20s doing drugs and being an alcoholic. He only got married because he got my mom pregnant. I’m pretty sure it worked that way for all my uncles on that side of the family.

It just seems that there should be something more to our lives then just survival. I just seem lost out in the world, without any idea what to do other then survive. Just being a cog in the system and doing something I hate just doesn’t feel like it’s cutting it anymore. It’s like we went to school just to train us how to work a shit job and not question authority. It’s probably my own fault. I probably should have went to college and gotten a useless degree in something or another while taking my time to get it. In the long run one of the probably bad decisions I’ve made in my life. Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if I never dated that crazy girl from Jersey. That choice was one of those first ones that in my mind I wonder what if?

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By Mark D, April 19, 2011 2:20 am

Wow, I really can’t believe this got to 300 posts, although it did take a bit longer then I expected. Believe it or not my original hope was to post at least once a day. But my job really only left me at home for about 3 hours a day, and sometimes it can take a lot longer then that to write. I’ve also twice taken time off from writing, just because I was either burnt out or just couldn’t think. The one time it was really depressing because traffic increased by three fold during the month I wasn’t writing.

I tend to be scatter brained depending on my mood. That’s one of the main reasons this isn’t a blog about just one topic. I mean sometimes I’m amazed that Dom or any of a number of SBN guys can wake up on a daily basis and do stories on the same team day after day after day. I start to lose my mind if I write too much on one subject. I think it’s been very rare that I’ve written on the same topic multiple days in a row, unless something pisses me off.

I think I’m definitely getting older (my 30th birthday is a week away) and stuff just doesn’t piss me off as much anymore. I might be calming down. Or just wait until the elections start coming around again, especially if Sarah Palin is somehow considered a meaningful candidate.

I don’t know what the future holds for this blog. I never knew what the future holds for that matter. I didn’t even know what to do with this blog when I first started it. I just had a website that I was paying money for and figured might as well get some use out of it. I never thought it would be anywhere near as “popular” (for what it’s worth) as it is today. I enjoy writing to no one as much as I enjoy writing to 50 people a day. I do love comments too, and I allow anyone to comment. Once I’ve approved a single comment from you, you will never be moderated again.

It’s too bad that the internet seems to be getting away from writing. When I first got online back in the early 90s, there were no videos. Hell there were hardly any images (I remember setting my Netscape Navigator to not download images) let alone the graphic intensive insanity that some websites are now. I do realize I’ m a bit of a hypocrite on the matter because of my own videos, but their popularity keeps me doing them.

So hopefully if this is your first visit or your 50th visit, you understand my thanks for you taking the time to read the chicken scratch I’ve posted here.  I hope you keep coming back for an interesting look at a rather interesting world. Or if not, I hope you enjoyed at least this post. Especially since it was rather pointless. But sometimes you just gotta celebrate, and this was as good a time as ever to celebrate.

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By Mark D, April 11, 2011 8:22 pm

I’ll never forget the night I first met her. Or at least hopefully I won’t. I’ve taken a good number of concussions over the course of my life that kind of makes my memory completely sporadic. We had talked for a few weeks before we met and really hit it off. Shared the same interests, the same hobbies. When I saw her though my jaw dam near hit the floor. She was absolutely stunning and then some. And me? I was my normal mess, probably a mistake. We went out and then came back to my place and relaxed. It was probably one of the best nights of my life in recent history, and I still try to savior every moment of it.

In the end it didn’t work out. As normal I blame myself just because I tend to screw up a lot. But when I first laid eyes on her it was that feeling people talk about. The idea that I might spend the rest of my life with someone popped into my head for just about the first time in my life. Although it might be because I’m getting older now. I have quite a few ex girlfriends who are engaged/married or basically living with someone they will marry. Meanwhile I haven’t had a long relationship in a while, so that might be some of it too.

The sad thing though is that some day I probably will forget. It seems to be one of the worst things about me. Every single horrible moment of my life I can remember in vivid detail. To make matters even worse, sometimes when I do think of times I’m happy or reminisce, I end up thinking of sometime or something that I really hated. It’s like no good memory can stand alone in my mind, there’s got to be these horrible horrible moments floating around.

I don’t normally talk about myself too often, but I think it’s not being fair to readers. If you come here and enjoy my writings and opinions, I want you to know what helped to form them. There’s too many people who put on a shtick and pretend just for entertainment purposes or to get popular. The whole reason that I write here today is because I always tend to rant about these same things in conversations with friends. My one friend who moved to the west coast not too long ago said reading my blog was almost exactly like the conversations we used to have.

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By Mark D, January 30, 2010 7:31 pm

Is anyone really surprised the divorce rate is as high as it is? Just look on TV or any movie you might watch and take a second look at it. All you ever see 99% of the time are relationships which overcome everyone and the partners are soul mates. Just being with them is bliss, and nothing could go wrong in life as long as they are together.

Not saying its total horseshit and maybe you do find that soul mate. But the chances of it really happening are about next to nothing. Instead of looking at a relationship as a plus in life, people look for a relationship to solve all their ills in life. Your going to be the knight in shining armor that saves me from my miserable life. Yet we are all human, we are all flawed. There are going to be ups and downs, highs and lows. Sometimes people will grow up and change. There is nothing in this world that will cure all your ills. Not money, not fame, nothing. With all the money you could ever imagine, if you were unhappy you will once again find yourself unhappy just with money.

People date, get married, then find that nothing in life has changed. Suddenly a fight or a few fights and your even lower then you were in the past. Its no longer about the ups and downs of life, a roller coaster, but that instant gratification. Once you get that instant gratification the cycle starts over. Not saying that people should stay together no matter what, but take your time. Your not going to be the same person when your 20 when your 30.

Everything in life, has its ups and downs. Some days are going to be good, some days bad. That’s life, take it or leave it. Your not going to see that in some movie or some tv show. The ones who come closest without being anywhere near usually end up with rewards.  No relationship is going to take your life from bad to good. Your going to be expecting too much from a single human being. Putting that stress on someone is just asking for trouble.

I’ve been in that situation. I was working a full time (and then some) job at a junkyard. My gf at the time was off. I’d come home and take 2 hours to take off my boots because I was so exhausted. She’d want me to entertain her and then she’d usually end up spending all my money. In the back of my mind I thought that no one else would ever love me or care about me. It ended up being a mistake of huge proportions in my life. I lost basically three years of my life on what was a lost cause. Not only was I unhappy, but everyday became more and more of a struggle to do my work and try to somehow keep her happy. I checked in on her once, six years later. She still doesn’t have a job, still lives at home and I could only imagine how she’s torturing her current boyfriend who apparently lives not far from me. Someone who knew her told me “I’m sorry” when they found out I dated her for a bit.

But what have I done? I’ve made the same mistakes time and time again in my life. Maybe I could have be in a relationship that’s a few years old now. Instead I always go for instant gratification and never learn. Time and time again I’ve gone for someone that has somehow managed to make my life worse then it already was. I just always shut off the logical part of my mind and any warnings I hear that say this is bad. You should always at the very least trust your own warnings, and definitely listen to friends. I guess in the end when it comes to that type of stuff I just haven’t evolved. I’m still the 16-17 year old kid without a boyfriend and something like 15-20 rejections. But then again I also say I’m just a grown up kid in a lot of ways. Maybe thats another.

I promise, tomorrow I get back to something a little more interesting.