I Am A Straight Guy

A story in the day of a straight guy.

I wake up and immediately urinate. I emit thuds and groans of sorts as I barrel towards the kitchen, adjusting myself through my boxers. My three roommates are all at work, so I get the day to myself. Great. I love alone time, it gives me time to work on my art projects. I’m working on a large drawing depicting three large figures grabbing onto each other and being grabbed on by out-of-frame beings as a way of representing the attachment people have to each other and how those attachments situate ourselves in an open field, a tabula rasa. I’m also writing about myself as a project my therapist is making me do. So here I go: I’m a twenty-seven year old het guy, graduated with a degree in Media Studies from the University of Chicago back in 2019, and now I live in Oakland, California. I feel as if I’m drifting somewhat in life, waiting for roots to wriggle out of my orifices and drill into the concrete beneath. Life has been a series of relationships, jobs, friendships, events, road trips, disconnected and observant walks around the city, things that get distilled into crude writing or poetry. My media studies degree taught me to analyze culture and media, to use various lenses to understand the shifting, animated world around me. I deeply understand the tenacious hold that our handheld addictions have on us, bringing the noxious yet domestic domain of the television into the public, creating microcosms of noxious, personal domesticity on the public bus, in the workplace, classroom, and park. And yet, I am personally unintegrated. I was able to draw vast networks of meaning and connection, depict nodes, nodules, nets, and write essays on Tony Soprano’s mental health and the depiction of therapy in 90’s media, so why can’t I disperse my own body into that expansive network I once dreamed of in college? Why can’t I disappear into a system, my spirit spreading itself onto the ticker tape as it goes ‘round and ‘round the spool as my masculine identity protects the whole structure, my wife and children included as dolls spinning happily as I swing around like Spiderman inside the idyllic snow globe world I’ve created?

I have some ideas why. One is that I’m extremely conflict averse. My mother and I fought like animals when I was younger. Her emotional intelligence was brought down to that of a middle-schooler by trauma, and my own maturity artificially forced upward by the duress of my parents’ divorce at fourteen. We were like two teenagers embroiled in a years-long blood feud over who gets to have the controller in Halo 2. In all my other relationships, I learnt that conflict would result in abandonment, or being ripped away. Every time my mother detected conflict in my life beyond her control, she would pull me out of school, step in, and resolve it for me (usually by reprimanding adults she perceived as “bad people” and using her parental privilege to control or remove the lesser adults (teachers, people with different perspectives on parenting, or family members) around her). These instances of self-removal that were out of my material control led to the destruction of a potential growth of autonomy in my psychological framework. I began to see my life as if it were “on-rails”, fated, with pockets of intensity only found in the infatuation of teenage romance, masturbation, video games, sci-fi escapism, and later, psychotropic drugs in college. I’ve resolved things with my mother, reader, so don’t worry. I’ve been able to form meaningful relationships and friendships, and I seem to be vaguely growing and expanding as I try to date women. Instead of seeking maternal comfort in women, I now see them as people, like me, who have their own set of issues and narratives that will likely bump into mine, and through that, we will respectfully intertwine our souls into each other using non-violent communication and eventually have a child named Maximillian. I’ve always wanted a son named Maximillian. It’s like you get a million sons in one.

I’d like to continue talking about my personal issues, though. I don’t feel satisfied with where I’m at in life. I have a decent job. I like one of my coworkers’ bodies. There is little conflict. My roommates and I don’t talk to each other much, but we do sometimes go out for drinks and black out at the club. I even have sex pretty often. There is this one girl, for example, let’s call her Amelia, after my mother, that I met at a Major Lazer show. Show was awesome, by the way. We met in the crowd, and I impressed her with some comedic dances, sharp comments about the crowd in there, and subtly mentioned Diplo being in Major Lazer, which she found impressive, because a lot of people don’t know that it’s not just one guy, but actually three men creating a powerful amalgam of reggae, moombahton, and EDM. She was dancing so sexy and was wearing a little black top, and her skin looked incredibly soft. She smelt like flowers too, which is pretty common for women, but I still fall for it. I was able to get her number and have sex with her at my house. She seemed pretty sexually liberated and wanted to put stuff in my butthole, but I wasn’t emotionally ready for it. I think that probably links up to some of the issues in my life. One being that, both literally and emotionally, I won’t let myself get fucked. The way I dealt with my mom controlling my life was that I became very good at controlling situations, people, and myself, resulting in a sort of dissatisfaction. I have no connection to true chaos, only a simulated version of spontaneity that usually involves sex, spending money, and clubbing.

This all leads me to my present. A present where I am making art, going into myself, trying out different clothes, and seeing how I can carve out a life for myself in this crazy city. Hell, I even wore a dress the other day after “buying it for my girlfriend” at Nordstrom Rack. I tried it on in my room and looked in my mirror and felt incredibly turned on. I’ve started writing more, exploring my past, wondering about my future. I made a pact with my one female friend, to whom I am not attracted, to start volunteering to help people. I’m mostly left-wing and I think that there’s a lot of poverty in the world that we could all help out more. The future is bright. Kamala might not be perfect, but she’s going to be the first woman president, which is fucking awesome. I hope I don’t have some incurable personality disorder that makes me perpetually blind to my own problems, resulting in a muted, cyclical life that stagnates until I shrivel up. My natural masculine impulse is to expand! Grow! And when the time comes, impregnate my beautiful, intellectual, and tall wife. I think what I really want, deep down, is to be famous. To be known, and to be seen. For my contributions to touch people, to be remembered. I imagine myself on a stage all surrounded by a sea of sparkling faces smiling up at me, nodding. I do this performance just to go back into my house, into a loft area where my wife is reading some Miranda July book I checked out but got uncomfortable reading. Her smiling, rosy face glittering in the moonlight of our loft area, our children asleep in their separate rooms.

“How was the show, honey?” She asks, while smiling.

“It went well haha, I feel like a faker though,” I respond and sigh, and plop down next to her and hold her stomach, hoping for our third.

“Why? It’s just imposter syndrome baby, every successful person feels like that sometimes.” She strokes my hair and unties my Converse for me.

“I feel like a faker because I made this all up. I’m writing you into existence without your consent. I’m a 27 year old loser living with more losers. I even spruced myself up earlier and said I had a decent job. I don’t. I was working at a fucking pizza place, a nice one, and I made good tips, but yeah. My degree was useless. There was so many holes in my story because I’m not a good writer. I don’t know what I’m doing. I think I got some of it right while talking about my mommy issues but then I just started fantasizing about having a wife and being some kind of vague performer. I imagined myself as the guy from LCD Soundsystem for some reason. I’m living off unemployment. Which like, it’s cool cuz a lot of people are struggling post-pandemic and I still have a lot of life left or whatever but sometimes it just feels too late. Sometimes I want to crawl back into the proverbial womb and play Overwatch for years. I don’t know what expanding means. I don’t know how to broaden out and focus in on specific areas of my career. I couldn’t be a manager or anyone higher up. I’m not really in control of myself and I don’t seek to lead others, only in reactive moments like when a dog snaps at her young for straying too far away. I’m like a rabid dog decaying in my apartment. It’s not all bad. It can’t be. I have a few buddies, and we like to go out to movies and stuff. It’s hard to see it though, man. It’s hard to see the poetry every day. Sometimes it just feels like time running out, numbers fading, comparing myself to others. I want to be an alt Instagram girl with 400k followers who just gets money for free. I want to be a Senator. Even if it’s boring, it has to be fulfilling. To believe that you are doing good, making change. I want to live in a delusion. Not this delusion, another one, I-” my wife cuts me off.

“Fuck you. You don’t get to do this to me. You made me, and now you have to take care of me. You can’t just give up and go back to your old life, where you hid for years. Look what you’ve made for yourself. You have a fucking house, Alex. Yeah our parents helped us out with the down payment but we have a decent house in the Bay Area. It’s somewhat suburban and you know I hate most of the moms on our street but we are living well. We have real passion. We have conflict, we have changed together. We love our children and our children love us. You made something of yourself, you sold fifty thousand copies of your fucking book. I like your book. Your wife actually likes your book and your students like your book. You have an online following and people in their twenties make weird para-social memes of you and your work. Your media studies degree panned out. Like sure you’re a professor but you wrote a riveting book that blended theory and your personal life and people enjoyed it and maybe it changed something in them. You have made a dent. Isn’t that all we can do? Make a dent? You can’t be so selfish that your selfishness inverts and you start thinking you can heal the world, Alex. I love you. I love you so much. We can’t throw this away, we have responsibilities. And I don’t want to throw it away. I’m 34. They say that this is where it gets interesting! This crossover period from our twenties to middle age, we have vigor and curiosity and more obligations, leading to more satisfaction. I’m bisexual. The kids go to a good school, a smaller public one and they have friends. I know this happens to you every once in a while. you want to reset, you want to pull out and escape back to some imagined past where you were more free or more young, but I need you. You need me. We choose to need each other because we are building a life together. I love you,” she starts to sob and I hold her on the futon.

The moon looks massive in the sky outside of our loft window. Her sobs let up and she snuggles her head into my RVCA hoodie. I stare out into the distance and my mind feels like a song, coalescing and dissevering up thoughts and memories and feelings. I remember flashes of my childhood, teenhood, and young adulthood. I remember my dad criticizing me often, forcing his music taste onto me, extinguishing further the potential of my self differentiation just so he could get a chance do to things over again. I eventually stopped resenting my mother for getting custody of me after the divorce and fading him out of my life. He overdosed years ago. I regret not getting over my hangups with him but I’m working on it in therapy. My mom is an amazing grandmother who lives in a neighboring suburb in the East Bay and she takes Ariel to Aerial Yoga and Max to his extracurricular writing workshop for teens. Paulina and I volunteer at the museum and role-play during sex often and we pleasure each other and pleasure ourselves. I let her do stuff to my butthole. I love my hybrid.