Flesh, Bone, and an Overflowing Genre Collection -
I turned 30 this year, and the rest of the world continued doing what it is doing regardless. Next June, I will be the more insignificant 31, and hopefully some things will have changed for the better in the world. Hopefully, I will be further down the path.
Why life doesn't turn out quite the way you thought it would in high school:
This post is dedicated to my friend Scott and his wonderful mother. They are two amazing people who are at a nexus point in their lives. Scott turned 16 last weekend. His mother recently had cancer-related surgery and is still undergoing treatments. Before this all happened, she was the most kindhearted person I have ever met, and during the treatment rollercoaster, she has shown unbelievable courage, resolve and inner beauty unmatched by anyone or anything I have ever seen.
Someone once said "Love has erased all of my concepts." This is the evolution of a person to a parent, something that I have never experienced. But I've witnessed it here, in the lives and actions of my two good friends.
When I was a love-struck teenager, I was convinced that it was going to happen soon after high school. I would get a 'foot-in-the-door' job, a little apartment for starters, and me and my future wife would make some babies and start a family. Well, my life went a completely different way than I had expected.
For starters, I didn't marry my high school sweetheart. Instead, I spent the last year of high school beginning my long descent into adulthood. After some rather traumatic experiences, we split up, and I spent the next few years roaming the city and looking for something to believe in.
Intoxication was something I experienced early on. Then I found another outlet through the influence of my friend Jason: Poetry. We wrote poetry with our very blood. We stayed up for days writing long, drawn-out and hopeless theses on life in free form. We ranted and raved and worshipped the flesh of all the women we met and touched and struggled against the world of conservativism and politics. Poetry was not something I ever planned on. About the closest thing to poetry I wrote in high school was a few lines in a violent and gory poem about cannibals and freaks.
Along with poetry came a veritable smorgasboard of lifestyle choices. I picked up the coffee habit, because it helped keep me up nights to write poetry. I smoked more than a pack a day (Camels, Chesterfields, then later picked up the pipe). Cigarettes were always there - they were there during high school, and they continued to be there until I quit smoking over a year ago.
After high school, celibacy was one of the things I used to keep from getting emotionally involved with women. It is easier to feel close to someone when you share personal space. And although my heart and soul craved that kind of closeness, my mind was terrified of going down that path. After the traumas of high school, I wanted to see what the world was about. Everything I had known up to that point was dissolved, gone, unattainable, and who really knows what they want at that age? I thought that being close to someone else would blur my world view, and so I detatched from the need for companionship. That lasted a couple of years.
At some point, my raging male hormones ate through the wall of sensibilities I had created. I opened up to the idea of 'dating,' and the next few years were spent being social, getting drunk a lot, having my heart broken in large and small ways and writing more and more poetry. My friend Mark and I began performing noisy poetry/guitar sessions every Tuesday night at the poetry bar, and I had an alter-ego that frequented the underground nightclubs as well.
At some point, I realized the futility of all this time-wasting and started to focus more on my creative abilities. Music has always been a motivating force in my life. So has spirituality, so I started reading about world religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, the Taoist philosophy, Ceremonial Magick, everything I could get my hands on that was not rooted in Christianity. I developed an intellectual smorgasboard of religious and occult facts, figures and ideas, but I never 'became' anything. I never tied myself down to one system of thought because that simply goes against everything I am. A nomad. A traveller. An independent spirit.
So what happens when an independent spirit meets a girl and discovers that he's loved her for years? I struggled, danced around the idea, played with the what-if's, and at some point broke down and realizes that, if I'm ever going to do the marriage thing, the family thing, then T is the person I really ought to be doing it with. So I got married, after all.
Along with this relationship has come a number of influential factors. Through living my life with T, I've discovered that kids can definitely grow up differently. Everything I didn't do, she did. Everything I did do, she didn't. While my parents were moving us all over the country, she was staying on the same dead-end street we are living at now. It's interesting, rich, and ultimately the most meaningful decision I have ever made. And I'm still learning things from day to day.
One thing I wasn't prepared for, and this is something that my parents demonstrated all the time (and I thought was exclusive to my parents): Marriage isn't like a trip to the Land of Oz. While it can often be the best thing, it can often be very difficult. I suppose it depends on what your mutual goals are, but money also plays an important role in any long-term relationship. Since we don't make a lot of money, our resources are limited and we can't always do what we want. But we push on, and we get done what needs to get done. And we enjoy what we can. It isn't always an adventure, but when it is.... nothing can beat it for sheer thrills.
I'm glad I married someone that can put up with my eccentricities. I simply do not know anyone else on planet earth that could put up with my media collection, my obsession with music, my computer uptime, my occasional lapse in hygiene. I can also be as weird as I want to be without fear of too much criticism, which is what every teenage boy wants out of life. We married in 2000 - the dawn of the century, standing at the foot of Sandia Peak with a Religious Science minister. Our marriage vows incorporated many traditions and religions, much like our relationship. And while it's been a little rocky here and there, I appreciate and enjoy it all -the good and the 'bad.'
Life is not what it was supposed to be. Especially when played from the hip, not by the book. Yes, a good christian boy might do the right thing, finish school, get a good job, vote republican and marry a good christian girl. But how predictable does life really need to be? Who do I need to please, myself or everyone around me? And I don't even know the half of it, because I'm not even at the halfway point of my life. I have no idea what will happen tomorrow, but it won't be scripted, that's for certain.
posted by novachild @ Sunday, September 05, 2004,
