My father's birthday is tomorrow.  It is the first after his death, but I will spend it the same way I spent the last eight December twelfths ... not with him.  He asked me to visit him not long before his death.  I never considered it.  I had a job.  I couldn't go.  I was stupid.

          It is a stupid job.  Convenience store clerk is not a noble or important job.  I sell drunk people alcohol, smelly people smokes, horny people condoms, and hungry people food.  They are mostly stupid people, but I was even more stupid to think that my job meant anything at all.  My job is even more stifling now.  I can't escape how pointless and disgusting it is.  I can't escape that I let trying to "survive"  keep me from what is important --- people.

          Every day is a lost opportunity.  Thoughts cross my head.  An idea for a story or article starts to bud.  But before it can set, it is jolted lost forever by a beeping register.  An idea on someplace to go or something to do pops up, but I can't do it.  I have to work.  I have to sleep so that I can go to work.  I don't think I'm being conceited, although its quite possible I am., but I feel like I am here for more than this.  This is not supposed to be my life.

          To be honest, I am completely miserable right now.  Everything is wrong.  It is all tied up together, with my father as a consistent thread.  I hate my job, which not only is pointless, but is also brainwashing me into mortgaging my life away.  I hate this town which does all the same, as well as throwing in the knowledge that the existence of this place robbed me of eight years with my father.  I hate my family.  They never fail to impart silently their disappointment in me for throwing my life away.

          Most of all I hate being alone.  Every  attempt to change that one self-destroying fact ends leading back to the beginning.  From college I escaped to Cedar Point.  But there my friends were too busy with their complicated love lives.  So from there I escaped to Lexie's apartment.  But she too had her messed up love life.  She did all she could, but living with a troubled couple is living as a ghost.  So I escaped from there to an apartment I got with Jennifer, but almost immediately Shane virtually moved in.  Again the ghost came up.

          There is a saying "man can have only one master".  It is true in many forms.  You may have many friends, but you can only have ultimate commitment to one.  I know that, and I feel that.  That is why I guess I knew living with Lexie and Keith wouldn't work.  That is also why Shane couldn't stay far away, and why it would revert to them and theirs, with me as an outskirt.  That is why I know that plans with friends are nothing but pipedreams.  Lovers come first, and loners never at all.