Starlight, and a Little Whiskey

hello, stranger -

today is an anniversary of sorts, for me anyways.  not that it’s worth celebrating, or even really matters too much. i’m just including it here because if you’re going to take anything worthwhile from whatever i write to you, its probably a pretty good reference point of where i’m coming from. it’s the Friday before Christmas, and on this special day i’ve poured myself a little whiskey and am sitting out underneath the stars to put pen to paper, in yet another attempt to sort things out for myself out here. and on this particular night, it will have been nine years to the day since i lost my life.

not that i actually died, of course.  and it’s probably a little melodramatic, and even ironic, to say it’s my life i lost when, in fact, that was the one thing i did actually have left to take with me from the east coast that was worth a damn - not that i felt that way about it at the time.

but all the rest of it - the business i was building, the family home, my friends, my name and reputation, the two little kids i'd ever come to having my own, and just about everything else i ever cared about or tried to build - yeah, all that was all gone. poof, just like that.

in all fairness though, the ship had been listing pretty badly for at least a couple years before that fateful day.  but I’d been working myself ragged towards some form of redemption, trying to put out all the fires and plug all the holes.  and then on this one Friday, just when things were looking like the skies might finally clear up and all that hard work was going to pay off, a giant torpedo came cruising in for a direct hit and blew everything to hell.

i’m not going to go into any details here - everyone has their tale of woe, they're all different and mine isn't particularly special.  and i can tell you from personal experience there are few things more dispiriting than sharing the most painful details of your tortured past with someone, only to realize you are boring them shitless.

but more importantly, this isn’t about the past.  what’s happened has happened, and it can’t be changed.  that’s about as true a statement - and obvious - as ever there will be, even though i think it’s only human nature to live in denial about it from time to time. or at least it's been part of mine, anyways.  and even though there’s plenty of valuable lessons to learn from previous mistakes, i’ve been digging around out here in the desert long enough and have come up with enough answers to know better than to waste any more time on it.

and this isn’t about the future either, by the way, since we are living in an age of ridiculousness that runs so deep that i can’t even begin to calculate where the bottom is.  if you’d told me back when i was a kid riding a BMX and building forts out in the woods that this would be the world we’d inherit when we grew up, i would have laughed at you and told you you’d been watching too much sci-fi.  i would have told you the adults in charge would never let that happen.  now it’s finally beginning to dawn on me that there aren't any adults in charge - and maybe there never really were.

which brings us to now.  or, to sound a little more woo-woo with it, “The Now".  the moment we’re experiencing in the present - as if there were any other to experience - not the laments of the past or the fantasy of the future, but this thing that we’re going through at the present, this thing that i have so desperately needed to learn to appreciate and do a better job of staying focused on.

when i washed up out here in this lonely desert town i was completely adrift.  and i guess in a lot of ways maybe i still am.  maybe we all are, in our own ways.  but you know - better than most, i’d say - that the more we get torn up and lose our way, the more we have to struggle and fight with the raging seas that seem so intent on putting us under, so sometimes just keeping your head above water is victory enough.

so consider these posts like a message in a bottle, a little reinvigoration of our connection from time to time, as i face the storms out here, and you deal with your own weather back home.  and hopefully they will serve, too, as a gentle reminder that even though we are drifting in very different seas, it’s part of one big ocean, and i’m still out here if you need me.

until then though, cheers from underneath this starry sky on this cold, lonesome night in the desert, powered by starlight and a little whiskey.  enjoy your holidays, be good and say hello to the ocean for me.