On Turning Thirty Seven

UPDATE 3-11-2009: I am unprivatizing this in memory of Heather Davis Palamountain.

There was a time when I would look at a blank sheet of paper and be dazzled by all of the sweeping pen strokes that I could make on it to communicate in poetry or prose how beautiful the world was to me and how my imagination was pure, unadulterated magic. Other times, a bagful of new slices of vinyl and a couple old record crates would be hours of bliss spinning unrelated tunes into a heady blend of rhythmic madness to compliment the visions of hope and promise I was immersed in. Still other episodes whirl around me like a slow-motion vortex of a thrown deck of cards: spending hours tinkering away on keyboards, drum machines, samplers, and songs to try to capture the threads of beauty and the essence of emotions I was surfing; stretching and sweating through high mountain passes or deep desert gorges with a handful of companions and everything I needed for days on my back, with wind and wilds and wonders accompanying me; years of being ecstatically in love with bright spirits of friends and the notion of forever being completely attainable — within easy grasp in this moment or the next. Or the next.

Once upon a time I promised myself to fight the inevitable loss of my childhood innocence. I wanted to keep something of the joy of being a youth; when you didn’t know everything (but you thought you were grown up when you didn’t let on to this) and the world seemed to be full of intrigue, adventure, challenges, fun, love, liberty; in short, life. On turning thirty seven, I have come to the conclusion that yes, it is: it is not the world that has run out of these things — it is me.

The older I get, the more I despise myself and what I have become, what I have accomplished, who I am present tense. Yes, I have tried my best (mostly) and been as good and respectable and hard-working and self-sufficient as I have been able to muster throughout my short existence, and I have slain many demons on the way here, but I have run out of stuff to really look forward to, things that really lift my head up from plodding step-by-step through this thing called life to take a long, starry-eyed look at the horizon and go “there! I’m going there and nothing can stop me!” The obstacle that impedes me is…well, me.

2008 has been a banner year for bullshit, and friends and family are proud that I have made it this far, and “bounced” well through the impedimentia, but honestly, the damage has been done, and there is nobody I want to burden with the psychic trauma that has built up over the course of the last, oh, thirty seven years, and that I have finally turned to face to try to boogie board my way out from under the wall of ghosts and echoes. This is not a cry for help or casting a baited line for sympathy; if you have a surplus, wander over to some poor asshole’s emo My Space page and dump a comment or three. This is between me, myself, and I, and I can at least put it up on my blog for posterity.

Earlier this year, I had a loaded shotgun barrel in my mouth, and I was ready to pull the trigger. The gods that may be saw fit to make me start worrying, then laughing hysterically as I wandered the house trying out different locations to see where I could blow my head off and make the least amount of mess for cleanup. Bathtub, maybe…no, shower stall, no the other shower stall; perhaps the garage..no wait, out in the alley where the city would have to clean it up. After about 15 minutes of this nonsense — and yes, it made a huge difference knowing the safety was off and that there was a slug in the chamber — I realized that yet again, I failed. People who have never been suicidal just don’t know how embarrassing and humiliating that is. The real scary thing to me now is that I was sober at the time.

It’s really, really fucked up to lose the love of your life, your job, and your self-respect all at once. It isn’t something you forget easily, even though you smile and joke and say you’re okay and keep partying like it’s 1999. You can’t drink your way out of a drinking problem; you can’t fool yourself when you have to fall asleep alone and humbled in a one bedroom studio packed with 1/10th of the shit you used to have and you look around and wonder why you took this and stored that and let her have this other thing and threw away something else. When you are reduced to looking in the mirror and always lifting the beer can to your reflection and saying “oh well, nice ride, you suck, deal with it tomorrow” you also know that you are postponing the inevitable: facing up to my own responsibility in these matters. Taking things for granted. Assuming the status quo will not change. Believing that things will change for the better, just not right now so I don’t have to put any effort forth.

September is always a really horrible month for me. There are some shiny stars — like my father’s birthday — but mostly it is a minefield of hurt: starting with my birthday and wondering where my biological parents are to wedding anniversaries to murder anniversaries to the death-of-Bela anniversary; its a metric shit-ton of crap I would just assume forget. When this time of year rolls around, and the leaves start blowing across empty parking lots, and maybe the first sprinkles of rain scud across the county, and pre-carved jack-o-lanterns start appearing on the shelves of Target, I have a hard time reconnoitering the memories and significances that I have been a part of, that define who I am. Although I am supposed to be inspirational and one-of-a-kind and thee Froggacuda, each year that passes wears me down a little more, and when I force myself to look out to the years that are to come, it looks pretty damn bleak to me. That’s why every September I have a little ritual: I listen to both Holly Costner’s Birthday and the Justin Robertson 12″ Mix of the Sugarcubes’ Birthday; I light a single candle for myself and look through it to try to reach my bio-mom somewhere, if she is still amongst the living, and I listen again to my eulogy of Chris Bela Feher, which is the best thing I have ever done in my life. Most people put traditions around wonder and happiness; I put mine around the day that I was brought into the world — unasked.

I don’t write poetry anymore; I did that religiously for 15 or more years, but stopped once I had to get serious about paychecks and bills and buying houses in Las Vegas and Georgia. When I was unemployed, I did punch a lot of it into this WordPress site because I needed something to do and it felt cathartic for a moment to burn the journals after I had salvaged what was worth keeping. It is somewhat interesting to me that with all of the Internet at your fingertips now that content is still king, and when I was younger I sure produced a lot of mediocre shit for the search engines to gnosh on.

I don’t really DJ anymore; not for real audiences on college radio or house parties or clubs as I used to. I haven’t even made a mix worth sharing in years; the stuff I have done will appear sooner or later here on the WP blog for posterity’s sake, but posterity is really what I am after. They aren’t very inspiring. Sortof like the poetry. If you don’t monkey with it for a while, they become like ex-flames: romanticized to be better than they really were.

I don’t do art or go on hikes or draw or even build Lego multi-wheel fantastic Star Wars-esque transports anymore; I just don’t have the time to make the time to eke out a space to dump out even a unopened box with instructions that I could Zen out to and build. Much to my parents dismay, I still have unopened boxes from Christmases ago that I haven’t put together, although I still ask for them around the holidays.

Life has become a never-ending series of rush jobs; get up, go to work (thank god I have work), get shit done, grab some food, get home, pay bills, weep at the overdraft charges, drink myself to sleep, alone, have horrible nightmares that I am about to be fired or dumped or otherwise run over by impending karma; lather, rinse, repeat. Hello thirty seven.

So, being the eternal optimist that I am, I am going to try to make a little tweak in my existence to see if this helps or hinders: I am going to reduce my alcohol intake greatly and see if this adjusts my world view. My problem is that when you take one simple step like this, everyone I know is going to ask questions, give unnecessary encouragement and observations, and otherwise be a big fat unwelcome pain in my ass. So here is a pre-emptive Froggacuda fuck you. One thing that I am learning at this ripe old age is that my relationship with alcohol has been the most comforting and constant lover I have had these last 15 years, and has seen me through to this point quite well, thank you. From sneaking Jack Daniels out of the Nickel’s liquor closet to a pair of well-timed left-behind MGDs on a Santa Barbara pier, from an 18 pack a night in a cabin in Georgia to buying a housewarming gift of a kegerator this very year, it’s all going to hell. Without me for the time being. I guess thirty seven is time to grow up.