I must have re-written this stupid sentence a dozen times already. That’s how incredibly frustrated I am with my inability to truly speak about the way I feel. That happens every time I try to put into words how I truly feel about myself. It’s not easy. There are a lot of conflicting ideals at odds and the man in the theater is sort of content to play all side against one another. It’s borders maddening. It is compounded by my inability to articulate it accurately. I’ve spent a few months now in a state of latent metamorphosis. It’s painful and arduous to pick yourself apart so you can start to rebuild. During moments of my reconstruction I’ve repeatedly asked myself “Is this shit even worth it?” “Am I getting any fucking where?” The smallest setbacks send me reeling. The bigger ones? I near catastrophic failure. The almost mute whisper of “I’m fucking done” reverberates into space. It makes me want to clutch my bleeding heart and throw it into the snow. In some ways I’ve already done that.

“You’re being hard on yourself”

There is a reason I am. Not being hard on myself or holding myself accountable has led me to where I am at the moment. Sometimes delusional about my own progress, sometimes excited about how far I’ve come. I’m my own worst enemy and I’ve been kicking my own ass pretty good for a long time now. Every time I stop to see how far I’ve come, I’m less impressed by the distance.

I don’t what else to say. I just had to get that off my chest.

It had been a week since Maui and I had our world views torn asunder by a short Asian man wailing away on a Fender Stratocaster like he had exorcised the Devil himself from between the frets of his guitar. We needed redemption. We needed a miracle. Looking back, we got neither.

The morning of our return to the Hideaway Maui called me to make sure I was a)Alive and b)actually going to show up that night. We had invited a group of friends that consisted of Maui’s co-workers and one or two of my friends. I may have failed to mention that at this particular point in time in the history of the universe, Maui for all intents and purposes was our singer. I always honestly felt he was a good singer when he was in his range. We had practiced a few times before the show that night and we were totally convinced that the night would end in rounds of applause, women shrieking and tearing their clothes off wanting nothing more than to be close to such musical genius, bartenders waiving bar tabs and bringing copious amount of tequila and rum in the empty skulls of our foes who dared make light of our new found musical path and chose to ridicule it.

I might have been over-estimating…Naaaahhh….

With what I believe, if memory serves me right, a 3 song set which consisted of 2 originals and 1 cover (STP’s Interstate Love Song) we arrived separately at the venue. I, wearing my Stoner/Alcoholic Fashion forward jean shorts with a semi-respectable shirt with minimal stains and Maui….fucking MAUI…arrived wearing a goddamn black turtle neck. Fucking baffled didn’t even cover how confused I was. Maui had much better fashion sense than me but what in the devil’s red dick was he doing wearing that?!?! The mental picture still haunts me to this day. As I sit here and type this I cannot stop shaking my head. That boy there….damn shame.

We strolled into the bar like 2 Desperados in from the harsh terrain of the wild west, except Maui had on a turtle neck which I cannot stop talking about now. Our friends were already in waiting and they sat right up next to the stage area. There was Rick “The Devastator” Lee, a strumming Prometheus bringing the flame of Mount Olympus down to us mere mortals to warm our cold hearts by. We signed our names on the sign up sheet and next to mine I actually put an exclamation point as if to say “I MEAN IT MOTHERFUCKER!” And there I was, still wondering what type of drug Maui had ingested to make him think that it was totally cool to wear a turtle neck to a blues bars open mic night, taking sips of my beer and thinking “I might have a coronary right about now. That would stop the show. Then I wouldn’t have to play! YAAY!!!”. While I looked for stimuli with which to trigger a minor heart attack, they called our names. DAMNIT! We were so early we were the first ones to go on. SHIT!

As we sauntered up to the stage like a pair of fashionably challenged oafs, our friends gave a light smattering of applause to welcome us up there. I sat on a stool and Maui grabbed another. That’s when I noticed that there was an actual camera recording the entire event. The little red light on the camera looked more like a laughing demons eye and the lens a portal to all things I feared. Not only was I going to do this one time in front of people, there was a chance the hilarity and subsequent tragedy of this entire moment would be forever imprinted on a form of celluloid that could makes it way into the hands of….god know who. My bid to be President seemed to fade with that moment. Nevermind the alcohol abuse and dabbling with substances of questionable legality; those could still be explained away and BAM, I’d be drinking chardonnay out of a globe in the oval office. But this? How could I explain this???

The honorable Rick Lee presiding as Justice of the Peace announced our names over the microphone. The sentence was final; PLAY OR DIE* (*not really die).

We took a quick look at each other, gave each other a nod and proceeded to strum while Maui began to sing. In less than 4 bars into the song, I realized something terrible was happening. It was awful. An injustice so egregious I would forever remember the lesson it would teach me. The sting of that moment was seared into my chest like a Tiger Uppercut from Sadat.

Two guitars being played at near full volume…and neither one of them in tune with the other. It was like listening to a dove murder a kitten. Wrong on all levels. There was no stopping the show. There was no slowing down. Like a drunk desperate man laying on top of the ugliest girl from the bar he could rustle up at last call, we plowed through the set trying to not to look anyone in the face. It was a moment so utterly wrong that typing this is giving me indigestion.  Were as I would normally dissolve my Alka Seltzer in water, this moment calls for popping them like pills.

It wasn’t until the final song, the STP song, that Maui decided not to strum along anymore. I played my part while he sang the vocals and we both made a last ditch effort to walk away with some form of our dignity in tact. When we finished, we looked up at the audience, at the ugly girl we took home at 2am and the faces betrayed very little.  We had promised these people musical pornography and instead we delivered a haphazard snuff film. There were some obligatory claps here and there and I think someone whistled but it was the dive-bomb whistle that people make when you’re trying to find the right onomatopoeia to say “Wow that was fucking unreal in a really bad way”.

If looks could neuter I would have no chance in 100 lifetimes to conceive any offspring. Our friends encouraged us but we knew…we ALL knew…this was fucking horrible. And then I looked and saw the camera with it’s unblinking eye. Somewhere in the dusty recesses of a dank lifeless room lies a videotape that if watched, will kill you in 7 days. We played the soundtrack to that video.

Redemption would come one day in the future. But that is a story for another time.

HAHAHA I’ve always wanted to say that.

I can deeply appreciate the extra-terrestrial geography of a drunken mind, if only because to navigate it takes in my opinion the right amount of gusto coupled with the appropriate amount abandon. Caring without caring. It’s a delicate balance. It’s as though one were tight-rope walking the line between love and hate: between divine and scientific. It’s as though finding a world subject to the limits of the mind and finding that those oceans were vast because the mind behind them was open to all possibilities.

“…if life was like the open sea, then let truth be the wind in your sail” - Talib Kweli.

Quietly, during a moment of solitude, I prayed for the first time in years. I wasn’t asking for salvation nor forgiveness. It was a sub-sonic Thank You to…I don’t know who. I can’t honestly say I’m a Believer but the prayer felt appropriate because of my setting. It was a satellite moment for me: transmitting gratitude across stars and nebulas, hoping my message found the right receiver. It was a moment I was thankful for. Being in the company of the ones you love the most knowing that just a week before all of that could have been destroyed. It always keeps a part of the mind sober no matter how many times Absinthes’ Green Fairy babbles her narcotic lullaby’s in your ear.

A mid-tempo salsa song that I couldn’t recognize played in the background as the barista lit the sugar cube ablaze, readying my next glass. In an audible haze I began to think that every song I heard that night would be on a jukebox at my funeral. I was in love with the moment. It could have all ended right there. No complaints. But as the fog lifts momentarily you realize that so much of life is still ahead of you, teeming with moments like this.

No, the funeral will have to wait. It’s time to start my life.

Again.

But at the very least I will have amassed a more size-able collection of songs to play when that funeral finally comes.

New Orleans, and the French Quarter in particular, is a place where one can imagine becoming a famously wretched drunk of an author. I pictured myself plenty of times sitting on a balcony with a ceiling fan spinning above and whose structural integrity was suspect at best, sipping from a glass with 3 fingers worth of my favorite Rye Whiskey and just the right amount of ice cubes clanking around while I oafishly assaulted a broken keyboard trying to hammer out my next thought onto e-paper. It would be a lonely life, isolated with the very thing that tortures all solitary creatures: their own thoughts. The endless “what if’s” and “If only”‘s bouncing around an otherwise empty skull. No endgame in sight. No resolution to the cyclic thinking. It could very easily be my life. Could very easily had been my life had I not been given a moment for redemption.

There would be one temporal coordinate that I could from then on point to and indicate “that’s when I changed my life”. It started with being honest, first with myself and then with the woman I loved the most. It was brutal, it was devastating and it was heart wrenching. For years, I had been keeping up a series of lies. It would be easy to admit that it was infidelity but that wasn’t the case. I had concocted a fantasy world and made the woman I loved believe it. I made her believe in things that had never happened and never would happen. The same writing and creative talent she so lavishly praised about me, I used to create and maintain lies that would devastate her. But the day finally came, as it always does, that being honest was the only way to get out of the cycle. Whether I would be dead or alive was still a matter not decided.

To be continued…

It’s an awesome story really. So awesome I can’t even put into words but if you put your forehead to your monitor I’ll do the same and we’ll see if I can transmit my adventure to you telepathically. Ready? Let’s do this…

What’s that? Got nothing but a smudge from your greasy forehead touching your screen? Figures. You were always bad at this. Plus my monitor isn’t greasy because my skin is made from pure silk. It is literally listed as being the equivalent of an Egyptian cotton 650 thread count sheet. My hugs feel like marshmallow jackets and my breath smells like a whiskey rainbow WEEEEE!!!!!! But seriously, I can’t help it that you are mentally underdeveloped. Noooo I didn’t call you stupid. DID I?!?! Naaaahhhh, you’re just imagining things.

Anyfuckingways, since it’s obvious most of the world has yet to develop anything comparable to my superhuman cognitive and telekinetic abilities I suppose the burden is on me to relay to you, the reader (i.e. defendant), my adventure through life during these past couple of months. I know most people tend to describe their journey as being on a roller coaster or even the lamer description of  a “doozy” (which I personally don’t believe  is a quantifiable measurement).  No, my story is more on the level of those supermarket love novels.

There will be PASSION….ROMANCE…BETRAYAL….FAILURE….TRIUMPH…AND FLATULENCE!!!

I smell a Pulitzer Prize in my future! It might just be the flatulence but I’m pretty damn sure it’s a Pulitzer Prize. So give me a minute to stretch my literary wings and look out below, I’MMA BE DROPPIN BOMBS!!!

But seriously, I’ll be updating this thing more often. I SWEARZ!