Post-Undergrad part 3

Milton was not living the bohemian existence that he had at once envisioned for himself.
He was a lowly failing novelist and no luck journalist, and he had trouble identifying himself as a writer at all anymore. He remembered himself as a young man of 19 (he was only 23, yet he didn’t feel any youthful exuberance) having daydreams, more like delusions, of himself as a cutting edge underground artist. Maybe playing in an obscure art-noise punk band that got rave reviews by all the hip reviewers on their blogs, or perhaps writing scripts for new abrasive television shows that would only have a chance of being played on HBO if anywhere, or a writer, writing great pieces of literature that only a few would understand and even less would love. He was beginning to accept his mediocrity, and his impotence in the face of becoming what he truly desired to be.
Instead he was nothing more than a civil servant, 1/10 of what he used to be. He had been through so much in the last few years. He had loved and lost, picked up and kicked drug habits and graduated school with a decent bit of honor, and yet he couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that he was in some way a coward, the opposite of the great heroes of literature that he admired.
“Hamlet I am not,” he thought, nor Ulysses, nor Atticus.
He was bored and had some extra cash on him from the weed he had been selling. Though he loathed the idea, he called up Bob and asked him if he was interested in heading to a strip club he knew of in Brockton.
To his astonishment, Bob had a date.
“A date,” Milton said, “That’s great,” barely hiding his disgust at the idea.
Milton slammed his phone back of the hook without bidding his friend farewell. The heat rose in his face and a dip pit had formed in the most compact area of his bowels. He felt for a minute that he was going to violently vomit.
He paced around the room with magnificent exasperation, literally working up a sweat as his worked his way up and down through the monotonous repetitions of step. How was it that Bob, fucking pizza boy Bob, has a date? Was he lying? No, Milton thought, for all his defects of character, Bob was not a liar.
Milton tried to calm down, he ordered himself a pizza and opened up a bottle of Beck’s. He through on a movie, some trash with Lindsay Lohan that was on the television, and felt himself compliantly tuning in as if to fill the time. He rolled up some weed into an empty hollowed cigarette and quickly puffed away.
The joint had not offered him solace and comfort as he expected. Instead, his thoughts of paranoia became more apparent, Bob’s potential for sex all of a sudden a metaphor for his entire existence.
Flashes of guilt and hard memories raced through his mind.