30

Ostensibly 30...

Hemingway once said, "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." Well consider me in need of a tourniquet.

I guess everything one day converges in a blossom of all that's come before. I'm the third generation of calloused hands, but mine aren't near as rugged as those who've come before me. Not to say that I don't know how to lift my weight, but comparatively this world laid me on a pillow, like it did with most of my generation. I will say this, I'm a good mix of what's come before. Mom's side was of English descent and the man fought over the skies of Germany, toppling the "Thousand Year Reich", spent two years in a Statlag Luft Nazi prison camp, came back and built our ranch with his own bare hands, and virtually controlled what could very well have been a mess of a situation when he returned. The old folks in my hometown still tell me how much I look, talk, and move like him. 5'10" stature and an iron jaw...dark eyebrows. The other, of German descent, worked the land in all it's harshness in the unforgiving North Texas plains and drank too much. He fathered my own father and his two sisters and left the world before he was probably meant to. I feel the same weaknesses in my blood that drove him off the road. He was hard, and he was hard on my father, which made my own father hard. My father and mother, because of their own intricate lifelines were both humbled and gracious for the life they were given. They gave life to me, and in my blood rests their lessons.

Quiet and loud. It's always been quiet and loud. In my head.

I was born on the same day as the Jonestown massacre and I think maybe God works on a balance. Like He did after the war...and all wars. Maybe I took a place that was vacated that day. Not too many people have that aesthetic on their day of birth, but I do. Not that it means anything, but not that it doesn't. My father bought me a gun on the day of my birth. November 18, 1978. 10:10 pm...lucky, "make a wish" baby.

When the smoke clears and I feel the rabid animal calm down that has been running through my internal systems for as long as I can remember, can I see where I've come from. I think something snaps and focus floods the view. I've forever been a pack animal, running with the moon's cycles (alone and sometimes with the fleet-footed), and I've had my "dark night of the soul." My own la noche oscura del alma...then humbled by some sort of light from the places we can't see in this life. Not too sure if I'll have another, but I do know what I know because of it.

I have no tattoos. Only scars that I earned, and I like it that way. I'll be as clean going out as I was coming in. Sometimes I find myself turned inside out like a dumpster, opening to the world the ugliness and repulsive things that I don't like, and others I'm too goddamn charming for my own good. I've been in love three times in my time...or what most people would consider as such. But only one almost broke me. They all had their significance, sure...but there's only one that I can't seem to shake. There's only one that haunts me and leaves me incensed. Couldn't navigate it the way I wanted, and it felt helpless. So ridiculously helpless.

I've been blessed. Blessed in the way a desert sees rain, or a farmer reaps a harvest. I've been blinded and ungrateful at times...disregarding these blessings, but they always seem to unearth themselves in a manner that makes me feel like I'm living a movie outside of reality. All I have to do is look around. My life has never bored, and when this gift of life was passed to us by the powers that be, isn't that all you can really ask for? Boredom is humanity's greatest enemy (a fitting co-pilot to pride), and I've done a bang-up job of keeping it at bay. Even in this post-modern world. But I could bleed on that over wars and wars of nothing and nothingness. There were times when I felt my innocence was raped in a red light. When a dark alley felt like the best place to call home. I could turn a nuclear war on it's head behind my eyes, and it's come close, but I duck it somehow. I think God gives us the grace to forget that which causes us to give up. At some point you get reeled in from the depths, like showered convalescence from a nurse. Even if by a shoestring.

I knew at a young age that things were going to hit me hard, and that I would feel more than maybe I should, like a slender skiff caught in a gulf storm, but that's what makes me who I am and I don't make apologies for that. None whatsoever. I have found that the fates place lighthouses in your view. Angels on Earth who walk amongst us. They hand us swords and scrolls to navigate this mess, and I am resigned to believing that EVERYONE has them. It's our own choice to pay attention to these signposts. To breathe their message and let it nourish us...to ignore or take heed. It's also my belief that we are given the opportunity to play that role. To impart, and advise. It's the way the universe perpetuates it's existence. If we didn't know our way, or have those who tell us the way, it would collapse on itself. Luckily, enough of us have decided to take heed and allow the pillars to hold us above sea level. It's how we're all connected even when we don't have the slightest fucking clue as to why we're here. It really is the universe's great secret...told to us in all its magnificence. In it's simplest form. Each other. That's the secret. It's hard to understand and simultaneously, to ignore. We go wayward, but we're always pointed back.

I've been told to share my gifts. I've been told to express what comes to light. I've been told that if you have a story, then open up your mouth and say it. But I've tried to avoid sanctimonious self-promotion. In an effort to avoid the dirty underside of all that I've seen in myself. Life isn't always pretty and neither are we. Like a foghorn blowing through the night exposing our whereabouts when we try to keep them hidden. Everybody turns their head and we shy away.

I've had a trying test of patience, and I think that is the great lesson that whoever is running this show is trying to teach me. Gratefulness and patience. I think that is the singular lesson that I'm meant to learn. Because it goes against every instinct that I naturally have. I think it's the nail that will be driven in my chest when my heart stops beating. Because it's so hard to resign to it...it's what I need to learn about my life. It's my great teaching. My personlity is one big whiskey-soaked, shit-stomping song that breaks beer bottles on the bar and waves them in your face. It's been told to calm down and let cooler heads prevail, but it's awfully painful sincerity has carried it this far, and I won't shake it without a fight. Trouble has been a good friend of mine...no doubt.

But the world gave me a big hug on my thirtieth...and it told me, point blank, that I still have a few laps to run in this big race. No matter what I've convinced myself of, or doubted in that time.

I hope and pray that someone out there is burning a candle for me.