St Louis vs. The Alters

I'm sure by now, everyone knows that our Cardinals did indeed win the World Series. If you lived here, it would be a pretty big deal. It is for everyone we know and encounter. There are parties and celebrations and easily 95% of the population of St Louis was glued to their tvs last night. This includes actual baseball fans as well as the me toos who only care when it's their home team. These people don't really seem to understand a ton about the game and honestly don't care about the sport. But they're sure as fuck wearing the shirts and watching the games using terms like "ours" and "us".
Where were Jennifer and I?


We were at the movie theater watching the decent though not spectacular adaptation of Augusten Burroughs's memoir, Running with Scissors. As in most cases, the book was better, but the movie was interesting and watchable if not always faithful.
But the interesting thing is that as I waited for Jennifer to join me at the ticket taker, I saw a small group of people waiting to see Marie Antoinette. They (and this grouping was comprised of members of both sexes as posers know no gender.) were lamenting that they were unable to watch the Cardinals win the World Series. One girl repeatedly stated that she "could not believe that she was missing the game."
Now, I listened to these people talk enough that I could discern that were not in fact waiting for other, presumably more commanding people to arrive, possibly with guns, that would invariably be held to their heads, effectively stopping them from watching the game that was, in fact, broadcast on free, national television.
Now last I heard, going to the cinema was optional. There is no obligation and they actually charge you money to walk in the door. So why in the everloving fuck would you come and pay 17 dollars to watch a movie when you'd rather be in front of any of St Louis's 5 million televisions watching this "momentous occasion" for free?
Neither Jennifer or I cared about watching this game as neither of us like baseball and neither of us care to pretend to care for the sake of showing "team spirit." If you did, more power to you, but at this stage of my life, I barely have the energy to participate in things I genuinely care about, so spending time watching a game that meant nothing to me was not in the cards. Ha ha, no pun intended.
But all of this left me last night at 2 am, wondering why I'm like this.
Sometimes it would be nice to not have so much on my shoulders. During college, I never once got drunk or high. Now I didn't really have any moral objections to either. It just sort of never occurred to me. Now, I have a medication-induced gastritis that really doesn't allow me to drink enough alcohol so that I can get sufficiently drunk. I've never thrown up because I drank too much.
Now, I've always been on the neurotic end of things. I worry about things that normal people just don't. I just can't relax enough to enjoy any of these activities. I don't particularly like being around drunk or high people, because it brings a degree of unpredictability into the equation that I am always painfully aware of. It's like I spend the entire party in a flinch, waiting for someone to piss someone else off and start a fight or god knows what other sort of unnamed offense. It's almost as though I feel like if I am sober, I can somehow bring reason to the table. I don't really trust other people to control the situation and bring the sort of stability that I need in order to be able to react. So I stay alert and vigilant, which really doesn't make for all that good of a time.
Occasionally, I'll get a little tipsy, but generally, only when I get to control who is there. I think this likely comes from some sort of persecution complex coming from childhood or some other Freudian concept.
But god damn, sometimes I wish I could relax enough to enjoy the things that everyone else likes. Whether or not they're actually happy or having fun, it sure seems like everyone is having more fun than me and frankly, I just don't know how to fix that. That said, while I've never been drunk in public and I've never been high at all, I have been in a major Hollywood movie. I've had these weird fucking experiences that seem to vary in degrees of goodness or badness, but all ultimately lead me to my conclusion that somehow, I am living a vastly different life than everyone else. I'm no better or worse than anyone else, but would it really be that hard for me to be normal? I mean, shit, how often does someone meet an obsessive compulsive, agnostic, psychologist/comic book writer who at one point was a Hollywood extra?
The bottom line is that uniqueness is somewhat overrated. It doesn't necessarily make you happier because being unique says nothing about the overall quality of your experiences. You aren't better or worse, you're just different. And difference sometimes brings aloneness.
I dunno, does that even make any sense?
Journals and blogs are weird because they sometimes take on a life of their own. This was intended to be a post about how we were doing something totally different last night from everyone else in our city. No judgements, no deep thoughts. Just the facts. And somehow, it evolved into this rambling, jumbled essay that oddly enough, makes me feel a little better, which is weird when you consider that I was only superficially aware that anything was even wrong in the first place.
I guess there's something to be said for filterless writing.