Life

Harbour

You no longer the man, that’s a bitter pill to swallow/All I know is I’m wallowing, self-loathing and hollow…

It all seems so festive from here. I’ll bet the air is filled with competing music bleeding into the promenade from the various bars and restaurants. I imagine new couples still in a whirlwind of new emotions basking in the welcoming glow of the neon lights. I envision the embers of older romance being sparked by the electricity in the air. I imagine the escape this area provides; the veil of serenity lightly shielding all that awaits after the parties and the sweet smells and the pleasant breezes. I look on from my world of worry onto a whimsical harbor where everything is new, the Wheel rotates seductively on the pier, and the setting sun bounces rays off the river, making everything seem more vibrant. And as I make my commute from one deflation to the next disappointment, I see it all so painfully vividly.

The pearly white beams and twinkling golden hue of the MGM stands amongst its surroundings as the centerpiece of a reclamation project. Its perch, slightly above the other buildings situated in the valley of the National Harbor, dominate the eye from all that surrounds it. It’s exorbitant. It’s opulent. It’s immaculate.  And I fucking hate it.

That damn building is omnipresent. I see it when I leave for work. I see it when I come home. I see it FROM my home. I see its glow, continuous and confident, refusing to be dimmed by short days and long shadows. I see the Wheel meandering about lightheartedly, while its patrons look onto the frigid and congested urban sprawl, memories no longer focused on having to navigate it daily. The moment is fleeting, but in them I can’t help but to long for living temporarily, and not the Sisyphean task of simply surviving.

As the traffic crawls along on I-495, I routinely glance over to see something jubilantly defiant in its existence and juxtaposition to all that occurs around it. I see a happiness that I can’t seem to find and an assuredness that I grasp at futilely. I loathe what I see because I loathe the unforeseen obstacles placed between us, and because of this, I envy something that I don’t even have a full view of.

I’m enamored with a dream, a promise that is often unfulfilled and underwhelming. What I believed to be solace and protection only exists to exacerbate what I feel. What was supposed to be an oasis from a distance is really more of the norm up close. There is no momentarily escaping life, because life’s only escape is permanent.

But that’s how it works, this pesky, nagging depression and self-doubt. It can make things seem whole and pristine and exorbitant and opulent and immaculate. It can fill you with resentment for all the happy people, happy things, and happy places, jealous such pleasure doesn’t exist in your own psyche. It’s neither healthy nor rational. It’s absurd to torture myself by envisioning this place as if it were simply a laminated postcard hanging askew in a drafty dungeon. Furthermore, it’s embarrassing to long for a place that I never found to be anything but a source of great annoyance…

The air is filled with a mishmash of sterilized pop songs and asinine teenage gossip. New couples aimlessly walk hand-in-hand, oblivious to others that have to swerve into fresh manure to get around them. Their love is fresh and broadcast for the world to view and like and comment on with each filter and pointless caption. Older couples sit at restaurants sipping Pinot quietly as they both make fruitless attempts to recapture what has long been dead. They retell the same stories and traffic in the lives of their friends, as if attempting to flee their own shared misery. I imagine this place as the Phoenix of hipster racism and undeserved vanity flying across the water from the charred remains of a city that once proudly flaunted its diversity. As I walk among it all, I’m oddly comforted. What I deemed to be whole is comprised of a bunch of pieces as broken as the rest of us.

I’ll be back 2018 to give you the summary. A.J. Armstrong is the creator of The Fly Hobo and His World of Oddities

My Last Post About Women Ever, Part III: Faded Pictures and Old Playlists

burning heart

Is it weird I still think about them? What about the fact they routinely pop up in my head in the form of wistful nostalgia? How about the fact I still have pictures of them in my phone, even though some of them were two or three cells ago? Would you judge me if I told you I still pull up those pictures from time to time? Or that I stare at them longingly, wishing I could somehow relive some of the moments that continue to play on in my dreams? And the damn songs. Those songs all of them ruined because they send those complex emotions rushing back to me and make me relive the memories so often. Sometimes I sift through those pictures and replay those songs in my mind silently, some more somber than others…

“As she turned through the pages, a tear rolled down her face/I could see her reminiscing…why her life had to be this way…”

I was in love with her at 12. By then, she lived 688 miles away in a city I had just left but loved just as much. I grew up with her and fell for her temper. We fought so damn fiercely, I knew that passion would eventually be channeled into something mature and timeless. I just KNEW it would. The song doesn’t really speak to what I felt and what I wanted her to feel; she just used to sing it off-key on the couch when I visited her. That picture of her smiling at me while an Ebony Magazine sits open in her lap always conjures up the love I have for the summer of ‘99…

This one loved the song “Like You” by Bow Wow and Ciara. I sit and look at my phone, amazed that somebody so pretty then could become more beautiful years after that youthfully ignorant pose that smiles back at me. I remember that song because it blared from her phone and I knew that someone she was more interested in was calling. The bridge is a run-on sentence that ended with what my heart screamed silently at her: IAin’tNeverHadNobodyShowMeAllTheThingsThatYouDoneShowedMeAndTheSpecialWayIFeelWhenYouHoldMeWeGon’AlwaysBeTogetherBabyThat’sWhatYouToldMe- and I believe it- cuz I ain’t never had nobody do me like you….

I still hate the man on the other end of those calls, even though I never formally met him. The fact my feelings were embodied in a song reserved for another dude pissed me off. Despite it (or because of it), that drove me harder to live out those lyrics during our aimless drives in my Ford Explorer…

Love can be either a continuous melody or a painful bookend, which is why Ms. “Like You” will forever be remembered by a Ghostface Killah song, too. Not even a song, actually; the instrumental to said song…I had some SHIT to say. Is love really being up late writing angry lyrics over a Ghostface track? If you’re angry enough…it makes sense to you, trust me. The “Back Like That” beat played in some shitty iPod headphones while I scribbled a message I desperately wanted to shout in her face…

Jay-Z’s “Dear Summer” made me a stalker. The copied-and-pasted Facebook pictures of her posing in her dorm room made me weird to the people that didn’t understand what love really is. If they knew, then they had to know why I wanted to stalk her. With that song playing over and over from an iPhone 3 perched in the bushes situated below her kitchen window. She would never notice my actual presence…but she would absolutely feel a certain discomfort at the amount of weird things happening around her. Simple things like me gluing the hair in her combs to her bathroom mirror in vague messages. Or weird, square-shaped patches missing from her beige pillow covers. Or her Twitter account being followed by @ImUp_IAmAlwaysUP_AndWatching_You. Thank God that’s not a long song, my Dear [Redacted]…

The next image is hard to look at; it’s harder to describe the impact such a passing moment continues to have. She stood in front of a fountain- one I walked by daily to a building that had professors that changed my life and women that made life hard and a department that dared me to be great- and held me like she was in love with it all without her really knowing so. My Little One.  The single mother that was both thirsty for knowledge and unaware of her immaturity. When somebody so young is the anchor of her entire family, her saying her ringtone for you is “No Better Love” is special. I couldn’t even come up with a decent quip for it; it’s awesome, period. I hear that song and just imagine she still smiles whenever it gets played. It’s my only bridge to a past that easily could have been my forever. Maybe it’s my ego whispering to me that I will always matter within those three or four minutes. Maybe I just like the damn song and misremember how special it really was to her. Whatever. I don’t miss her. Nope. I’m not trying to convince myself at all…

Man, she stole MY song and made it OURS. That motherfucker. That humble, pretty, stacked motherfucker. I played a song I loved and she loved the song and now we love the song. “Time of Your Life” went from being something that elevated my mood and made me smile at the ridiculous nature of day-to-day life to becoming a burgeoning couples’ mood music. Her pictures are explicit so I won’t describe them (but I damn sure will keep on looking) but what the hell…?

This last picture is always hard because I never know how to feel. She deserved better from both him and I. I never knew what she was telling him when she laid in his apartment and I’m sure he never knew about our conversations. The only picture is one I snuck while she was looking at the video to our song, too drunk to even notice the flash. Did she play our song for him? Did she introduce him to the music video with her head so perfectly nestled under his chin like she did with me on my couch? She was never mine; she was either under me or him and the influence. I wonder what that kind of tugging did to her psyche, but I never asked. I just kind of waited for her to blurt it out in her weaker moments…

“8 doobies to the face…fuck dat/12 bottles in a case…nigga, fuck dat/2 pills and a half-weight…nigga, fuck dat/Got a high tolerance when your age don’t exist…”

My Beautiful Mistake makes those words seem so surreal. Who gives a shit about growing old when living in the now is so much more pleasurable? She had no concern to even know she would forever be suspended in that nonchalant pose. I wonder so many things when I stare at it. It feels ominous and dark; it’s also telling and intimate…

“Got a high tolerance when your age don’t exist…”

Timeless photos…

A.J. Armstrong listens to a lot of Drake late at night and tends to reminisce hard; this post was supposed to come out two days earlier. He is also the creator of The Fly Hobo and His World of Oddities