with my poems in…
All of this reconnecting with my past is tough sometimes.
It's not that I'm not happy – thrilled to death, really – to find so many of the people who used to be my life and watch them reassemble and become part of my present-day reality. Maybe I'm pissed at myself for the amount of time and energy I wasted. Maybe I'm disappointed in the realization that the vast majority of them likely never knew how much I appreciated, enjoyed, respected them. Maybe I'm bitter in the realization that most of them wouldn't have cared then, and probably don't now, and are probably a little squirmy about having run back in to me after all these years. I always was a strange bird, never quite fitting in to one clique or the other, but moving along between and among them as the mood and situation took me.
I was always old for my age. I like to think that I had more…insight? appreciation? for what was going on around me back then, or even just for the fact of being 11, or 9, or 15, or 22. Maybe I did, at least in the sense of “more than most,” but ultimately…I didn't. I didn't know, didn't appreciate. So many days went by wasted, so many days when I could have changed the world, just a little bit, but didn't. And now…well, now time is going by, isn't it? According to the averages and given my lifestyle, I'm much closer now to being done than I am to being started. That pisses me off, and makes me feel like I'm running out of time.
On the one hand, I don't feel “old.” On the other hand, I've always felt old even when I was a kid. I didn't understand people my age then, and I'm not sure I understand people of any age now.
When I was a kid, I hated the powerlessness and restriction. Now that I'm an adult I realize that it never goes away. They say this is the freest country on earth in history, but I'm not sure how free any of us really are.
I've had the great good fortune in my life to be a part of two uniquely creative and vibrant artistic scenes. In both, I'm confident that the people who actually were participating in them had no idea what a novel thing of beauty and power they were part of. What a shame…but then, would self-awareness have killed the magic? Does the theory of unintended consequences apply there? I don't know.
I think of the ways that magic is poisoned; I'm thinking right now of a guy I went to school with, Jeff. In a sane world, we likely would have become friends. Both musicians, both highly intelligent, both full of fire and passion. But the poison his parents put in him got rubbed the wrong way by the poison my parents put in me, and instead I spent a few years getting bullied by him until the day I caught him unawares, with no witnesses, and clobbered him. Was the last time I ever saw him.
What a waste.
Is it endemic to the human condition, that we should be so blithely unaware of our own beauty until it's long-faded? So many simple things taken for granted. You can't be careful on a skateboard, a wise man once said. But must we insist on being so blind and deaf to the beauty that surrounds us every day?
I resent the passage of time.
I close my eyes and such little things, small moments that nobody else involved is likely maudlin and self-absorbed enough to remember. Some of them are my own, and nobody else's. My parents have no idea how many times I ran away from home; my friends have no idea how many times I ran to them but could never bring myself to take that last couple of steps, for fear of rejection or fear of acceptance…and in acceptance, changes in my life that I wasn't sure I was ready for.
I used to be about the least forgettable person you could meet…but I get the distinct feeling that most of the people I'm re-meeting now have only the slightest notion of who the hell I am, if they remember me at all. There certainly doesn't seem to be any great spike in visits here, for instance. Is it that they don't know, or that they don't care? Or is it that even now, my inability to keep my thoughts to myself drives them away? Or is it the thoughts themselves?
If there was one word for my life, it would be “lonely.” I was lonely when I had so many people who wanted to talk to me that my parents had to change their phone number. I've been lonely, to some degree or another, in most of the relationships I've ever been in. There's a constant and unshakable feeling of being misunderstood, misinterpreted, misconstrued. Like I'm running around with my life story tattooed on my forehead, but it's tattooed in a language nobody can read.
What does it say about the world, that in every relationship when I've been respectful and loving I've been dumped…but when I've been an obnoxious and even abusive bastard, the relationships last for years? What is it about people, that the worse you treat them the more they seem love you?
What does it say about me as a person that so many people thought that I was destined for greatness, and the best I've managed so far is a few fairly decent gigs as a musician years ago, and abject failure in financial terms from start to present?
I think about all the times I walked alone from my house on Lovers Lane over to Star World or Crossroads Mall or a friend's house, walking along and along, down the rail tracks by the old Upjohn building on Milham Road, sometimes with my little brother or Andy Simmons, but most often just by myself. I think of those things and realize that one of the things I miss most about Michigan, strangely enough, is walking out there by myself on a winter night through the snow, sometimes at ridiculous hours of the late night and early morning, and the strange quality of sound that you can really only get in the middle of the night in a sleeping suburb covered in a few inches or a foot of snow with nothing to keep you company but the fat, lazy flakes drifting down through the night.
I think of all the times I sat on the hill above the ball fields at Northern, watching but never participating, not even as a fan…just watching and wishing that I might be part of that, but knowing that if I even tried the best I could hope for would be a grudging tolerance for the sake of politeness.
I think about noticing at a very young age that people seemed to like me just fine one on one, but as soon as there were three or four of us, I was the outcast.
I think about all the times I've heard people run me down when they thought I couldn't hear them.
I think of the outrageous number of women I seduced…and the fact that I haven't had so much as a date in nearly ten years. Sometimes I think I used up my affection allocation before I was old enough to drink.
But mostly I think of the beauty. The beauty of kids laughing. The beauty of having a friend, even if it was just for a few hours. The beauty of sunsets over the water in South Haven, and the impossible clarity of the stars there at night. The beauty of a room full of classmates bored and restless in the depth of spring. The beauty of a lover responding to my touch. The beauty of a great, if largely unrecognized, band of musicians pouring their souls out for beer money and a dream. The beauty of leaves crunching in autumn. The dark beauty of being the only one OUTSIDE walking by your homes on a cold winter's night, seeing those lights and that warmth and wishing that I could ever know what those things were like…and yet, strangely appreciating my own unique position for its own beauty, a beauty that only I knew. The beauty of trudging along in the cold and dark, knowing that behind THIS blackened window, sleeps someone I admire, behind THAT blackened window, sleeps someone I fear, and then here behind ANOTHER blackened window sleeps someone I love, and I walk and I trudge and I see the windows and I wonder why not me? Why can't I, just once, be the one behind that blackened window, safe and warm and loved?
And the only answer is the sound of my boots crunching through the clean new snowfall as the world goes on around me.
I was never a kid. I'm not sure how to not hate my parents for that. I'm also not sure how much blame they bear for it – after all, they didn't ask to have a son whose mind was generally running about fifty times the speed of anyone around him. Sometimes I think I was born having a midlife crisis.
I wonder how many of the people I went to school with or otherwise knew growing up, so many of them rejecting me out of hand as that weird kid who can't afford cool clothes, ever suspected that I loved them all? I wonder how many of them figured out long before I did, that my 'angry young man' posturing and rejection of their cliques and trends and priorities was really just my way of refusing to hope for their acceptance?
I wonder how different my life would have been if just one of them had loved me back? Not that I resent or blame my life on anyone who didn't, but sometimes…I wonder.
If you happen to be one of my younger friends – one of my theatre kids, for instance – and come across this, please do me a favor: take a minute and look around and appreciate and enjoy the beauty that surrounds you and that's inside of you. So much of it is fleeting and transient, and I'd hate to think that one day you'll look back and curse yourself, as I do, for not seeing that beauty when it was still there. It's just as beautiful in the rearview mirror…but it's far, far harder to hold.