I have been sitting and wondering about my pasts. Yes, plural, because none of us has a past. We all have pasts. We have all tried to re-invent ourselves, haven't we? We thought we were losers in elementary school and tried to make a new statement in junior high..excuse me, middle school now is it? When that didn't work out, we tried again in high school...but nothing really worked. Maybe not until we went away to college, where no one (hopefully) knew us from the earlier years, where we could lie and lie and try so fucking hard to be someone else finally.
May be it worked, maybe it didn't but the true test came when you tried to carry that new persona into your adult life with family drifting back in to "tether" you to one you desperately didn't want to be anymore...so, like most everybody, you slid back to the person you were to begin with and time passed until you were ashamed of the creature of your own invention...when you shouldn't be.
Then there are people like me. I haven't really changed as a person much since childhood. I have gone the route of changing locations until I fit with the territory. I am probably a more refined (not in the genteel, sophisticated sense...more like the weaponized sense) version of myself - angrier, colder, more calculating and less forgiving, more empty if that is possible, than my younger, still idealized self.
So far the locales have continually softened, which is a regression. Easier-going places and people are harder harder to fathom, to tolerate because for the most part, I don't know how to believe them. We are all just savage, but some like the sheep's clothing wayy toooo much.
There was something very honest about Vallejo, and Oakland, and Richmond, California - ghetto towns, mostly, where I learned everything! When someone smiled in your face, you knew the difference between a friend and a person that was just about to take all you have, up to and including your life. I have the knife scars, etc., to prove my credits for the Master's Degree I earned in those streets. I have the dead friends littered along my memory lane that root my education in reality...
But now the question is: How does one honor that past? It's easy to act like it was awful, like it was unfair, like it was a terrible thing to happen to anyone, especially a young kid orphaned by alcohol, depression and lead poisoning...But truth be told....it was fun! It was exciting in ways that cannot be explained to those who didn't experience it - I knew I was alive because I didn't die in that instant before! How many people hear the rushing of their own blood in their ears and feel the cold, sickening rush of adrenaline pouring through their veins, making them as acutely aware of their every surrounding as a coyote tracking some pampered pet. The sudden impact of knowing that, if you had to, you were capable of trading someone else's life for your own - the truth that most pretend they are too civilized to even consider...
And that deserves honor from me. I survived things most will never imagine, and have outlived friends and enemies and family when I should have been laid to rest long ago. Survival is a prize, granted to people for only so long, and it has to be held high like the Word's Championship Belt, because sooner or later, everyone goes down to defeat....on any given day........
So, I hold my pasts in high esteem. I put on the clothes of a civilized member of this place. I go to work like everyone else, "socialize" like most everyone else, you know, be "normal" as much as I can. I honestly love my family, maybe more than most, because I know how quickly everything can be taken away.
And I know I am only here, doing the things I do, writing the things I do, making the music I make, doing the jobs I do, and all the rest...because of who I really am underneath.
Can you say the same about your pasts? If not, it is time to make peace with them, before they kill you.
What a nasty day outside, have you looked?
No comments:
Post a Comment