I don’t mourn the life lived, only the cycles that inexorably, disgustingly keep themselves crashing at my gates. Tidal and circumspect; like a locked groove in endless unpredictable motion, spin me into oblivion and suck. These days I don’t cut my whiskey with soda for taste, I do it because it goes down just the same way and that’s a damn waste of good whiskey.
The precept happens when one irks the psyche, spilling true understanding down upon the soul like tainted honey from a dead hive of bees. My psyche in this case was suddenly irked when it was discovered that my one-year-old marriage had been sabotaged almost from the beginning and by one of my oldest of friends. This kind of ecliptic blow is not unknown to me, it happened when one of my girlfriends suddenly became bi-polar, when another of my friends offered to kill an ex for me and then ended up in a Missouri penitentiary for life, when my best friend in 2nd grade was run over on his big wheel while I watched, when I knew I had fallen in love with a musician woman half my age half way around the world and I was engaged, when I finally connected to a beautiful woman then left town to be with a crazy one, when my favorite cat hung itself on the stereo cords and I didn’t bother to get out of bed to check, when I proposed to a woman who was smart enough to parse the truth that we simply shared a biological function together, when I realized my most influential participation in a band was breaking up because the friend songwriting genius was a secret heroin addict – when I realized I could have fulfilled my dreams if I had just taken a chance to believe that I could. But this is not a diatribe on regret; it’s not a treatise on lost permeation, or a missive of bitter revealings. This, my friend, is the life lived and utterly enjoyed; because nothing stands so firm like awesome, courageous, ephemeral life. I was so lonely once that I took my pants off at band practice, because I was in a band with 3 gorgeous women and I couldn’t figure out how to get any attention from any woman anywhere. I laugh now, I strut and spout about the moments I should bury deep inside my self-consciousness, moments I should hope to exercise with lasers and scalpels, but instead celebrate because I wear the absurd and disconsolate close to my chest; because when there is nothing but sheer locution and pain my mind wanders to the absurd, disjointed and wonderful moments that will always remain unexplained.
Once I used the promise of endless years left to live to justify the times I ignored my intuition, the moments I felt myself shuffling through predictable scenarios in my life. The first heartbreak decades ago, coming home from tour a day early to an empty house and being batted against the temple with the knowledge that she was at his house. I used to focus inward, wondering what I needed to learn about humans and nature, about myself or the intersexual relations I futured and fostered.
So now when immutable fact suddenly transcends into chaos and all judgment becomes tenuous I put on Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth, hoping to reach some harbour, some balance in mind and soul. My old friend and compatriot, creating some semblance of comfort in a world utterly gone mad beyond duct tape and chewing gum. Shifting randomly like the dust and cat hair on my foyer.
We met through a work mate – a wonderful woman who was married to a musician I admired greatly. It seemed like ecstasy and bliss wrapped in the most delicious pastry. We both had such similar stories - a son each, single parents for years, the struggle and heartbreak of living life into the void and all the while providing and describing the shape of the world for our most precious cargo. Her appetite was insatiable, like kissing the whip, I was unable to sustain the meteoric assent. I held each moment precious and sacred, the ceremony was at SF City Hall, with my one witness and long time friend still left in SF from the desert, her with 3 close friends and both our sons in attendance. This was by design and in full consciousness as neither of us trusted the institution or the examples we had been provided as youth. Delicate and simple, but it came apart all too soon. Soon the confession of infidelity and dissatisfaction; the unknown interloper who crashed into our probate of partnership drilling deep into the cloth of trust and loyalty. It washed like white hot lava into my brain but we had so much love and purpose that we continued, through counseling and explosions, through accusations and depression, both of us equally ministrating the pain and hurt from perceived incompatibility and discontent. It seemed to work, biting at times, harshly furious and overwhelmingly ugly, but those moments seemed to give way to peaks of solution and tight bond. It’s never the same, it’s more than a game, can’t take it away, can’t kill all the shame,……
Working with what ever was there, eating shit or making cakes was really the same.
It started with a work incident, I manage 16 people and we all work together well.
Our workplace was under an earthquake retrofit, something quite common in California, and then asbestos was discovered. We were asked to evacuate. The shit started to go down, differing accounts of safety precautions, crazy inferences, and I raised my voice because I felt I represented some important people – namely the incredibly hard working souls who are my Team. I wrote and sent an account of the incidents that transpired so there was no mistake. But – it flew in the face of liability and status quo; it made fault where there was reported none and the result was my undoing among my superiors at work and peers that facilitated my projects. I stood alone, suddenly – irrevocably. My training rescinded and expenses unpaid I decided to use the fare I bought to travel back to a place I once lived anyway, Chicago. I met with old friends and had an amazing time with strangers. I played music and enjoyed spontaneous commiseration from the most unlikeliest sources, I once again felt inured. Still the heart beats and regrets nothing, using all nuances to sway the soul into mirrored being, opening probabilities and launching hope anew. Ugly horrible hope. A woman I had been close to for nearly a lifetime took me in and made me whole and then supplied the undoing to my current life, volunteering unasked information which made all the mysterious pieces of the marriage infidelity fit together. Making me realize one of my oldest friends – the man who witnessed my marriage for me, who I have known through 3 lifetimes and 2 different locales– decided in a sober and deliberate way to have an affair with my wife, that was the missing link. Complicating matters, I now had no one to commiserate with. All of my dearest friend were also friends with this jackal but did not know the difference, yet. Should I break them? So many questions. Suddenly thrust back into the home life a new twist develops, bug bites, welts and bruises form on my wife even as I confront her with the information about the crushing reality that the man who I entrusted to witness and stand with me during my marriage ceremony, whom I had know for over a decade, willfully decided to succumb to the most pedestrian interplay. Her wrenching admission under confrontation seems to be reflected by the four dozen welts on her body. The best man screws the wife of the best friend. Some kind of access channel soap opera, off-off-Broadway play, a Montel Williams rerun. She leaves but under the guise of multiple insect bites I mysteriously do not receive. Confronted with the truth she belches forth and reveals herself, coloring the ground and immediate geography with stench and deception revealed.
Affronted, this powerful epiphany strikes me to the core and also seems so achingly familiar. The hurt, the promise obliterated, the broken crucible of hope.
Faced with deliberate misconstruction of facts about risk to my peers,
I speak the truth at work and anonymous emails assail my character, the institutions of the heart continue to dissolve; what I scarcely wanted to believe in becomes every fear I imagined, couching itself in the trappings of human frailty and posture. Tonight I clean a house, washing, sweeping and flossing the most mediocre of tangents in an effort to distill emotion into reasonable order. It does not come, it does not reveal itself and remains the elusive prefect of unattainable delusion. I take interest in how to learn of course, blinding myself to perdition and faith so that this night can pass into the next. The whiskey helps for now but I dread when its effects wear thin and ragged, lament the moment when all blur meets mental arsenal forming unmitigated clarity. My character has a voice built on recompense, meaning there is nothing outside of my soul that can actually disable my compassion. Is that really choice – or is it simply survival?
Travel far and wide reader, reach for the rings that might be impossible, you have nothing at all to lose. There may be a time when all substance levels itself on your head, crashing about your ears as if you were a giant and the mind you use is among the thunderheads; trying to make distance and reason collaborate with unfeeling chemical reaction. Tomorrow I will again awaken to the sun, it’s rise signaling the inevitable birth and instigating the next 24 hours of revolt. I scale sheer facades in time, claw at insubstance and peer into the maw. I will not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rage at close of day, be sure of that from me.
It never sleeps but it never tires,
and it never fades, after all these miles.
And If that's what it costs..... to shoulder it, it should be more than that,
it should be more than that,
how can it not be more more than that?
and if only I could win you away.