Dear Dad (8 page)

EXPECTATIONS OF OURSELVES

Expectations of ourselves is the only thing that stifles us. I have managed to live the first forty years of my life without a burdening guilt of accomplishment. I look around and see other’s my age, stressed out about work and family. My sister, who is four years older, is living the American Dream at any cost. It’s a competitive world and if you have not reached certain milestones that people think you should achieve, you feel like crap. Then, there are the people who drop out of society and slowly deteriorate, by use of drugs, alternative lifestyle and abandoning any kind of dress code. Dress code? Did I just say that?

I still live in a converted school bus. 95 percent of people who know about it or have visited are cool with it, but then the five percent look at me like I’m crazy. How can I live this way? They ask. Do you have running water? Where do you go to the bathroom? There is fear in their eyes. If it was hard, I would have abandoned ship years ago, but I’ve been living in the thing for fifteen years. In fact, I have a girlfriend, two cats and a Beta living here also. There are trails that jut off into the woods, I burn my trash (God forbid!) I have a little garden that got washed away by the last heavy rainfall. It’s like living in the last frontier, like Alaska. When I was young, I thought that living in a school bus would set me apart from others and give me an artist edge, well, I’m still waiting for that dynamic shift. It seems that age and social acceptance go hand in hand and I find myself now wanting what every other American consumer wants. I see a new Porsche driving by and my jaw drops a little. I can smell money a mile away. Why is this? I just want money to leave me the fuck alone, but I’m still striving and thriving and apparently haven’t killed my ego with enough drugs.

I watch old movies from the 60’s and 70’s and people were so relaxed. Like, watching Madmen, every scene someone is smoking or holding a glass of whiskey. In the 20’s you could get gunned down in Chicago. It was common day for murder to be lurking somewhere. Now, people are worried if they have the best ranked app for their Android. I’m somewhere in-between, not quite tech savvy and not quite ready to gun down the squirrels in my backyard.

Living a alternative lifestyle does nothing artistic for me, except giving me the essence that I’m slightly not mainstream. It’s just life at the end of the day and I feel it’s on automatic pilot. Do we really have control over the big picture? Can we just switch careers overnight, change lovers, change diet and ways we think overnight? If you can and have, that’s great, but social classes are hard to skip around in. Most people can’t wake up one day and say they want to be in the upper-middle class today, instead of Low-income. Have you ever been to a food bank? It’s like being a fat goldfish around a bunch of Piranhas. No one gives a shit about you, except for the eighty year old lady signing you in. In fact, my Aunt is a hardcore alcoholic and I hadn’t seen my aunt and uncle for over ten years, since my aunt freaked out on my dad for raising her rent on the commercial property that he owned. Anyways, the time I did go to the foodbank, my uncle was there. I couldn’t believe it. What a slap in my perception of social class?! Of course, I hid behind the tower of week old bread until he left, but I was stunned that my aunt had drinked them out of the Middle class.

I guess life can feel like one big grab bag sometimes, and I missed the opportunity to reach my fat little hand in there in the beginning of my adulthood. Now, it’s every person for themselves, especially on the internet. Do you have anything you’re selling on the internet, like a book, music or art? People are all over social media, trying every method mentioned under the web. The digital marketplace is scary. It’s beyond competitive now. On one hand, it’s great that there is room for everybody’s product, but on the other, everybody is doing it and the market is flooded with it. I guess there are ways to find quality out of the quantity, by ranking and rating systems, but it’s still scary.

Whatever happens, stay with it and produce a little something everyday and it will add up to a substantial amount. If you wrote a thousand words a day, five days a week, that’s more than 250,000 words, which could be two good books. Whatever, just do it and you will feel good about it. I Love you.

I’M AN EMPTY SHELL

I’m an empty shell. I am influenced by everything. Some cutting-edge scientists have done tests with water, by placing water in a glass, next to a person in a room. The person is either mad, happy or sad. After the person expresses their emotion for a certain time, the scientist place the water under a microscope. The water molecules will be altered. If the water was in the room with the person expressing anger, the water’s molecules are jagged, sharp like icicles.

Humans are 85 percent water. Throughout the day, I am barraged by media, violent rap music spewing from cars, sex on sitcoms, angry stares from the city transit. We are essentially giant drops of water with emotions. We slide down the waterslide of life, being pushed, smeared, even evaporated by the stress of life.

I have purchased a water ionizer. Our bodies, when born, are alkaline. Throughout the years of crapy food and stress, are bodies become acidic, which leads to disease. This machine converts tap water, which is roughly 6.5 acidic, to 10 PH alkaline. After a day or two, I can feel more energy. It’s hard to explain, but it’s a buzzy feeling, subtle but apparent. My body went into detox mode and I felt flu-like symptoms for a couple days, because my body was acidic. After a few days, I’m back to normal and feeling great. No, this is not a water commercial.

Emotions are powerful. I believe that I am still suffering from drama from a past relationship three years ago. The subconscious holds onto that shit and processes it at its own speed. I have post-traumatic stress from going to a shitty day job with horrible alcohol withdrawal shakes and fearing losing my job so much, that when I went back to say hello a couple years later and suffered a panic attack outside the kitchen door. The subconscious remembered that fear.

I went through a time where I thought I was playing with death and coming out the winner. I dumped on people’s feelings and did crazy stuff blacked out. I starved for days on end in a dark room just drinking. Showering and taking care of easy daily chores became unbearably hard. I was so depressed that I stayed in that dark quiet room and dreaded the arrival of my girlfriend at the time, even though she was bringing more beer. The only peace of mind was being the only one awake at four in the morning, when the rest of the town was asleep, and had my secret booze stash and was left alone.

Today, I am healthy and strong, but there is a part of my spirit or soul that is tarnished from those experiences. I didn’t come out the winner. And, what I thought would make me stronger, actually made me weaker. I am trying to catch up with society now, because I don’t want to die.

IN AN HOUR, I MIGHT NOT EXIST

In an hour, I might not exist. There is a parallel universe out there with me doing everything I didn’t do in this one. The Subverse, I call it, which holds the echoes and shadows of our existence, which linger together, and awaits the Mastermind to reformulate another Reality out of the pieces. It’s clever, this Subverse that we cannot see, playing with our actions and accumulating strength from the layers of minutes we express. If I bounced a ball on the floor, somewhere in the depths of the Subverse, there would be a little thud sound, like a beating heart. If I yelled, it would sound like a gust of wind through dormant Cherry trees. If I cried, it would be as miniscule as a squeak of a rocking chair on the empty porch of a haunted house. I like playing with the Subverse. It reflects back to me someone I don’t know: Myself.

I live where I live. There is one comedy show played on the hour, every hour. It is unreliable though, like VHS tape that has been in the sun too long. I try not to watch, but it is my imagination against the comedy, and comedy is easier than facing my thoughts. It’s not a “Dumbing down” effect, it is human nature to find the path of least resistance. So, I sit here and smile at the screen with a coarse lip of aggression and wait for the thing to short-circuit.

Billions of us strive for food, sex & status, but the bloody mechanism misses you. One time, we made it up the hill and looked out over a fake Eden and breathed a sigh of relief, but we rolled back down the hill like drunken scarecrows and was dealt with Life. I miss you and I in the memories that lace, like brilliant jet streams, in the Subverse. Like a black hole that consumes the smallest light particle, we ran the course and laughed and loved and held the memories secret against aging and irrelevance. It was our secret, this Love, that had fueled wars and famine and too many babies being born.

After conflict there is relief, like drinking a beer in the sun after a long night on Crack on the frozen streets of the city. There will be another day to start over, again and again, a blank canvas awaiting your smile. It’s come to the point where life will suck back into itself, like the ebb and flow of a giant moonlit ocean. You will see all your loved ones again, before they are swept out to sea.

THAT SORT OF THING

I’m packing and driving away soon. It’s been too long, in fact, I lost myself the last time and it’s been impossible to find myself now. I remember the heat waves blurring the road and the needle on the speedometer climbing, approaching infinity. There were no confessions, or remorse. In the act of motion there is only a true sense of freedom. Visions of angels appear in the distant horizon, the sun licking its flames, preparing for another day and the moon hovering low like a menacing eye of dreams. I’m not tripping. This is what you and I deserve. Remember how invigorated you felt after staying up all night laughing? Has it been that long ago, that it resembled another person? Then, that’s been too long. When did paying bills become the new slavery? I work very hard not to clock in at a nine to five. In fact, the more I learn about myself and my capabilities, we all have these capabilities, I rebel against conventional work. I’m becoming eccentric, I hope. There’s a big difference between eccentric and crazy, but I don’t care if I catch both. I’ve been shown a new defiance towards life in my dreams, the jetfuel whispered its blue flame on my bed sheet, if I remained still it would have burned me alive, but I moved and kept moving, until I was out in the vast expanse. And there are not many places left in the World of vast expanse, except in our minds, like a prisoner with his imagination. You can take my body, but you can’t take my soul. That sort of thing. We met when it was early dawn. You had been laughing hysterically, running your soul through the Mill. I hugged you and we embraced something together. It was our youth and everything happened all at once, then responsibility peered in and tapped on the window, like a cop with a flashlight busting two teenagers making out. I watched your face turn down. The spirit inside recoiled and you went to work. Of course I followed. But what the hell. No one remembers your hard work for too long, there are things to do with our lives that have more meaning.