^that is a flailer song if ever I have heard one.. as well as a damn good tune
ANYWAY. On Nov. 21st, I celebrated 24 strange & eventful years on the face of this planet, roughly 10 of them devoted to doing as much as I possibly could to have a good time and avoid consistency & function as though they were plague-bearing vermin. I don't remember how I spent my birthday last year, but here in the Palmetto state it was a relatively tame affair spent at Golden Corral with Christene, followed by a trip to the store for a tall can of Icehouse (which I am finally drinking now) and a scratch ticket. After that, we watched "Seraphim Falls," a B-movie with A-list stars from the early-to-mid 2000s, and then I quite passed the fuck out for ten or eleven hours.
Life here has been like that. Tame, I mean. A beer, a couple of pills if they're around.. movies. Walks. Nostalgia--though for what, I don't know. You can read my first post ("Howdy") and see exactly how my mind worked during that time. I thought I was going to die. That part I didn't so much vocalize, but it's true no less, and understandably so. I have been lost for a long time, wandering my home county, surviving, feeding my various habits. Building bridges; burning them. Making good friends, only to watch them die or go to prison. Some of them have returned--from prison--but many are gone for years yet, some until 2020+. I came into this life young, very young for a kid raised basically in the suburbs with a confused but caring set of parents. I was home-schooled until eighth grade, and had minimal contact with the outside world, spending much of my time playing guitar and computer games, or reading books. If you're surprised at all by my ability to think and communicate in spite of my chosen lifestyle, you can thank my father for giving me impossible reads like "The Stand" by Stephen King and "Mexico" by James Michener (I believe that was Michener) at the age of seven.
By the time I reached public school, my time spent in Guitar chat rooms and exploring the immense wealth of musical knowledge on the web had made me a fan of such bands as Morbid Angel, Thorazine, Blind Guardian, Iced Earth and many other high-intensity metal bands (as well as a whole MESS of bands in between that I won't even begin to try and name on this blog). I was an A.D.D. kid with too much time invested in "rounding," and not enough time spent playing, too smart for my own good and finally becoming social at thirteen.
My home town was about as ready for me as I had been for it.
I went NUTS. My educational career lasted until about a quarter into my Freshman year, when I decided that eating mushrooms was more fun than doing my work in class. If you have ever fried, you know how hard it can be to hide from an inquisitive teacher (and vice principal, once they figured it out). At that age, too, drugs were tantamount to heinous and weren't tolerated well by the school district.
After that, I joined a heavy metal band and discovered amphetamines in a Marysville trailer park, two things that had basically nothing to do with one another but that happened relatively side-by-side.
That's about when my cycle began: build it up, burn it down. It had a lot more to do with drugs, I think, than I care to admit. I don't often think of those times, in those terms. I look back on my younger years and I see my problems in their adolescence, rather than their infancy or conception; I see me in my truck, a phonebook full of street people blowing me up for bags, a pistol under my seat. I often overlook the missed band practices, the home that housed my wondering family, the suddenly empty bed and the excuses. The lack of a rhyme or reason as an escape from reality, rather than as reality itself. Throwing up my middle fingers before they became stuck that way.
Back before people stopped telling me how much potential I had.
Back when life was fresh and exciting, before I wore out my freedom and the shouts and cries of rebellion in myself and among my peers had been reduced to the whispers of a tightly packed apartment filled with the strung out and homeless at 3 A.M.
Back when I believed in what I was doing.
Back when I had my blood family behind me.
Back when I had a fire burning inside of me.
Back when my father was my friend.
It has been a strange experience, seeing my life from this vantage point; something that I was convinced was flawed but entirely beautiful, a rare thing seldom appreciated in the right lighting by the people who witnessed and lived it themselves. I have never had so much clarity of sight, nor the desire to really look back on the true substance of it; just the demi-glamorous veil I had hung up around it. How long, I think, before I am blind to the true problem once more? Will I build something grand on these foundations of epiphane again, only to set fire to it?
The twenty-first was my birthday, and it was also the day I discovered I'm coming home. South Carolina has served well as a sort of "breather," a step back from the smoke and grind of my other life, but I see now that getting here and cleaning up was not the test; it was preparation for the real challenge, and the pains I went through to make it happen were a demonstration of just how desparate I was for the chance to pass. There is so much I have done on the street, so much I've given away to it, that it's become tired and not at all the freedom & wild, unbridledness of spirit that I remember.
There IS beauty in my experience, and I have resolved to try and capture a little more of it for you all in my blogs; it is not all thieving ass holes and robbing stores. No, that was certainly a part of the latter days of my addiction, which was a time of great sadness and self-discovery now that I have had a step back and a deeper look into it, but there was amazing freedom well-spent from time to time getting to know true fellowship and the thrum of the undercurrent of street life, the pulse of the world unseen. But there was something in the past that made all of the sacrifice and taboo worth it, something I had for a matter of years that I lost along the way and will probably never get back outside of capturing it as best I can with my written word for all of you. It is, as I said, a thing of the past. I have come to realize that those days are gone, and that now nothing can truly compare to the victories and sweetness of letting it go. My sister, Ryann Garner, was like me; in fact she may have been something wilder entirely, a pretty but beastly girl who wasn't afraid to fight or rob or declare war on whatever it was that stood in her way. She did a number of years in prison on more than one occasion, and she is now married and expecting a child with the man she loves. That is something that I would like to know, now; a life that isn't conditional, something that requires true work to build and grants years of happiness rather than a number of hours. I wonder what her awakening was like? Maybe something like mine, I like to think.
So we'll see what Washington has in store for me when I come back, though I think that it's probably something entirely different than what it has given me thus far, and it will require some discipline and probably a great amount of humility to accept it. I know that I have created adversity for myself, but I know also that I am not beyond redemption. Until next time, blogdom.
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