I meet Sarah T and Chris at a noodle house. In the midst our conversation about my job -- a perennial topic I try not to lean into heavily, as it will reveal both my brokenness and that of the system in which I work -- Sarah says in self-deprecation that we're boring. We would at least be boring to those outside our no doubt rich inner lives. We are hardly venturing to new horizons regularly. She grants how adventurous Chris is, but only when it comes to food, in contrast to how she will always order the same dishes because she knows she will like them and doesn't want the pressure of culinary explorations.

Chris orders something new.

Sarah orders her regular dish -- I don't get the specifics, but I doubt they matter to the story. I order my same ramen, coconut curry, chicken bowl, though I briefly hesitate over the chicken pad thai, not ready to commit to such utter daring.

I have recently made my main project an anthology of essays of my travels, based on entries and articles I have written. I have been some places worth noting and seen things off the beaten path (a Bigfoot Museum! UFO spotters! A haunted ax-murder house! Las Vegas!), but it felt like toddling after or toward a woman I love or loved; I was not the bold one, just the sometimes-reticent companion of a passionate, cosmopolitan woman. It barely seems to count if I went against my will and might have rather been at home.

I am an author of strange books, it's true, and some would say that is an fun fact to mention at parties, assuming I would be invited. Yet, I am a prolific and underread author, so that, too, seems a weak argument for being an exciting person. If I were interesting, wouldn't I be better read?

I can rattle off the story of the Flatwoods Monster or the Dyatlov Pass Incident, but this is esoterica and not the sort of conversation most people find fascinating up close or for long. There is a chasm between knowing eccentric information and being eccentric oneself.

Behind my niche knowledge and calling, I am dull. I stick to an early bedtime these days, as my mental health quickly erodes with days of poor sleep. I don't often go out on school nights, to Sarah's bemusement. I rack up at least 11,000 steps on my fitness tracker daily. I track my calories. I haven't been poor in seven years. I do not struggle much. Even my mental illness is such a low level these days that my therapist and I mostly talk about my personal relationships. None of my political stances are outrageous and my activism is fist pumping and quiet donations, not locking arms to block traffic or shouting down fascists.

We later fall into conversation about Charles Addams, Josephine Baker, and Edward Gorey -- all of whom we far less boring at our ages, being spies, sleeping with Hollywood, wearing ratty fur coats and seeing the same opera every night. There are causes now for noteworthy lives, but we are not living them. We are working comfortable, middle class jobs that provide us softer of shackles. We are not making ourselves the people on whom books will one day be written. This is conspicuous, as I already write books, sometimes about myself.

I don't know that notability is Chris and Sarah's intention. I don't personally need a biopic, unless a concrete war finds our shores and my people need a smartass writer to add to the revolution. (They rarely do.) I would, though, do all possible to see my creations live on in people's imaginations. Let me be regular if my art can become outrageous.

I doubt there are many teens who strive to become boring adults, but it is statistically far more likely than becoming rock gods or star athletes. I don't know that who I was twenty years ago would feel that I had used the time well. "Hey, buddy. You never pursued becoming an actor, really. You kept writing. You have some books out. Nobody much reads them. You have a cute, smart wife and fewer abandonment issues. (Oh, yeah, you have abandonment issues and a chemical imbalance. You should probably work on them as soon as possible.) You teach exactly the sort of kids you just graduated to get away from. You are remarkably good at that. There isn't much else to report."

We are not dancer-spies, seducing enemy agents for intel. We are not famous, wildly polyamorous illustrators of macabre cartoons. We are not journalists touring the world following wars and chart toppers. I can't compare myself to these people, exactly, because to make their decisions, I would have to be them, in their contexts. Yet I have my context and I am doing little with it beyond slowly chipping away at the wall between literary recognition and me. I am aware I am placing my unadulterated life against their hour of highlights, but I won't be around to edit this story when it is done. I'm thirty-eight, an age I would have once thought not long ago was ancient.

We think of the people we would be in tumultuous times, where our mettle is tested, but we won't likely be in these situations. In absence of a tide to swim against, we become flabby and comfortable. Conservatives talk about how kids today are coddled, as every generation has said of that which followed, and that we should draft them so that they can know suffering. I wouldn't want that, for myself as well as those coming of age, but there is a lack of purpose. We function under a corrupt and failing government, but many have thought they have too (and were likely right, but this feels more right). We do this as bookstore clerks, IT guys, teachers, vet techs. I feel I fight the system from within, but it is mostly through trying to tell future inmates that they are being scammed by bureaucratic racists who want to use them as slave labor, as they have done for generations, and my students never believe me. I do not otherwise fight the power, since the slacktivism of reposts does nothing more than to alert fellow couch warriors that there are problems in the world that are being inadequately addressed because no one wants to get off their asses.

I will be quoted long after I have died, which is not a solace, as I tend not to be quoted in anything I consider an accurate context. I've quoted literally thousands of people while writing, and I have read little of their works. I will not be remembered and, if anyone cared to dig into me, they would find this prodigious, two-decade journal, much of which was initially self-importance and pretension (I was twenty and everything about me was important). I don't imagine I will have a biographer, who will pore over the notebooks I refuse to discard in foolish hopes that someone will one day care to decipher my scrawling code. I don't even have a Wikipedia entry, though I am continually bemused to note that both Google and Alexa know I am an author.

As I have harped upon, I am not read. Death wouldn't change that, since I cannot flatter myself that I am my generation's Herman Melville (or even John Kennedy O'Toole). I don't feel a sting about this, really. I am resigned that I will keep writing and publishing, no matter. My writing is not exactly about being read any more, at least not presently. I write to be seen. I have not, to my knowledge, found my audience yet, and may never.

I never put in the work that would be required to become this interesting person. At sixteen, I thought I was spellbinding by dint of purple hair and quirky interest. Even being one in a million meant that there were over seven thousand people just like me, and I was nothing as rare as that. Among my thousands of twins, surely one of them had the connections or climate to become something greater. Other people have struggles or privileges I could never have touched. Whenever I had the chance to exploit a connection, I usually considered it a point of pride that I didn't, because I was an idiot.

Most people I know have not come close to achieving their dreams, unless their dreams were both specific and relatively humble. From my high school, I know a man who became an esteemed luthier and shaper of ouds. There may be seven thousand of those in the world. I wouldn't know because it is the sort of discipline I can appreciate only in knowing it exists, not in having any use for his services. However, I can name only him. I wouldn't know if there were someone else of his ilk within a thousand miles. I know a globe-trotting photographer-doctor who is as lovely as she is kind. I do not know the steps between being a Polish immigrant who came into my high school and being this. I know several other people who seem unique, at least from a distance, while I seem as commonplace as dirt.

I know failed or minor actors by the dozens. I know aspiring authors by the truckload. I know people who aspired to greatness and did nothing much to work toward it. I've taught a hundred future Kobes and Jay-Zs, none of whom want to get up early to exercise or practice their verses in their free time.

I know a novelist, or she would call herself this, whose only connection to the artform is being seen on park benches and the sofas of independent coffeehouses scribbling in notebooks. The notion of ever sharing what she has written is much too crass. She slept with her professors because that was the experience a writer of her caliber should have, and I am sure she charmed them with incisive assignments about the human condition. She never tried to be anything more in this life. In her mind, she is supposed to accumulate these heartbreakingly brilliant novels that have never been proofed or edited. Then, she will leave a clause in her will that they are all to be burned in the fireplace of her latest philosopher lover, a request that will be ignored, obviously. Then, postmortem, she will be realized as the greatest thinker of her era. She will be much too dead for this to count for anything. Without much effort, she gets to harbor a foolish dream, as it presupposes she can only achieve it dead. I almost envy that ego delusion.

I don't think this is maturity as much as the resignation that come with age. I have met some of my heroes and it was a thrilling experience the first time, but they gradually became only people. I knew enough of their life, in my parasociaal way. I know the hurdles they passed through, but there is a whole new set for me, and I have cleared more than it seems without yet seeing a finish line.

I spent so much of my life thinking I was interesting without simultaneously becoming interesting. I rebelled in the most sanctioned, anodyne ways. My personality is mine, more so since I acknowledged the neurochemical imbalances. My personality is not, as it once was, references and arrogance hiding someone who didn't think he was good enough. I am goddamn good enough, but I also understand that this doesn't matter. I am relatively minor, and this is likely the way it will remain. I won't be lionized. I certainly won't be reviled. I am too neutral for that. I am not broken enough for me to be thought-provoking on that level. Whatever made some of the most noteworthy people in history what they were, I lack that quality. I am domesticated. I am safe, and safe isn't exciting. Even my crises are trite.

I've never starved a day in my life. I've never been mortally wounded. The closest I came to death was a hallucinatory week or so subjected to mono. I have never felt a real pain My heartbreaks have been typical, even if my telling of them were slightly polished (wanted to be a liberated college student, wanted a romance with someone else, wanted to admit she wasn't bisexual). Without struggle, internal or otherwise, I am left yawn-worthy. You wouldn't make a biopic of my life because even I wouldn't watch it. (I especially wouldn't watch it, as anything about me causes me to wither away until allowed to be elsewhere.)

Soon in Xenology: This new year.

last watched: Angel: The Series
reading: Aliens: The World's Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
listening: Damien Rice