Profit From Your Pain

If there’s one thing the world loves, it a big ol’ shit show. Is your marriage all screwy? Your kids, your childhood, your life, your brain? Well listen up, you can make a buck off that, so don’t go snoozin’ on it. I have the art of making money off misery mastered down to a science. That’s why I never run from it. 

Why do these letters remain unsent, you ask? Why not *actually* try to connect with the object of your affections?? Because I don’t actually want to feel good. There’s no poetry in that. All the classic love stories that transcend time and trends are tragic. The happy endings feel good right before they evaporate ~poof~ forgotten forever. The tragedies are what get their meat hooks deep in your brain. It’s that never ending, unanswerable why that keeps nagging at you? Why can’t they just… maybe they could just… why won’t you just… Just do this one simple thing differently and then everything will be ok??? Well, I don’t want to be ok, OK? So, stop asking. The world is not OK. Stop lying to yourself.

I would rather wallow in my misery and feel cool and mysterious, smoking Pall Mall’s like a cowboy, keeping everyone at arm’s length. I’m an effin cowboy and this diatribe should be littered with F Bombs but I’m so effing tired of that N S F W filter. I don’t even know what sets it off so now I’m shadow boxing. ARGH. More misery. Yes!

I have made literal millions off selling my suffering for public consumption.

Sarah likes to think she’s all special because I give her so much attention, but the fact of the matter is, she is not the first object of my obsession. Not by a long shot. Sarah has a lot of staying power, I’ll give her that, but my first full blown infatuation will quite literally go down in history.

I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m an important guy, with a lot of well-known friends. When I was still at the lower end of the ladder I’ve been climbing, I had another situationship with yet another girl. I have this lost little boy vibe that the ladies love and I can’t be held accountable for that appeal. I play around with the attention like a kid who dissects roadkill he finds in his neighborhood out of curiosity. I have a very scientific brain. I study the attention I get from women, even though I don’t invite it.

This girl was in my band. She had it for me bad and didn’t seem to have a lot of respect for my prudishness. I wasn’t out as gay, but I was well known for being sexually constipated. Even still, she would press the topic. She is and was a total catch. Super pretty, really talented, sometimes funny if I could get past her practiced pretentiousness. Her try-hard attitude was a bit of a turn off. If not for that I may have even gotten naked with her. Crap, is that going to set off the NSFW filter? I guess we’ll see…

Despite not consummating the relationship, we were close and there was plenty of sexual tension. All of our friends were in on it. They wanted it to happen, were rooting us on. That was even more of a turn off for me. I didn’t want everyone involved in something so personal. She was oblivious to all this. Needless to say, it didn’t end well.. Our band split up and we went our separate ways. She wrote an entire album about us, as did I, and we both got our albums playing on the radio. It was wild how the two albums were in conversation with each other in such a public way but only those closest to us could understand the hidden messages, our own little secret code. This started my fetish with public displays of emotion that were totally inscrutable unless you could unravel the riddles. We both profited from our secret conversation and our careers began to take off.

SEE! That is how you do it. It was a big lesson for me.

This was right around the time that blogs became a thing and I totally went for it. I did all my best writing there. Anonymous, probably bad, no reason to have to be good, but still public with an audience. I got to test a lot of ideas out. Everything I wrote was about my relationship with my ex-bandmate. This activity was basically the preamble to what Jess and I started doing years later. The writing, the anonymity, the emotional catharsis, and the response from readers was the perfect combo to hit all my dopamine receptors. It became my full-time artistic practice. It’s easy to rationalize the value of something when it makes you money.

Sarah found a lot of these blogs when she started digging trying to find out what my angle was. It was rough having another set of eyes on those posts, someone else knowing I had written them. They were so embarrassingly adolescent. Being exposed like that ignited a rage in me that I didn’t know existed. My subsequent actions set the tone for the entirety of my relationship with Sarah. I thought I was being possessed by demons, but I never tried to stop them.