Thoughts from a Bad Neighborhood
It’s hard to write sometimes, well, sometimes it’s hard to write much of the time. It hurts, it’s painful. Why? Because it’s real. The written word is one of the few true, faithful real things I have ever known. My love affair with the written word goes far back to my preteen years hiding in an abandoned train yard boxcar with paper and pencil scribbling my thoughts, hopes and dreams. Unlike the boxcar in which I was able to hide from the world around me, the writing never allowed me to hide, it wouldn’t co-sign my bullshit, it put me, at that young age already a veteran at hiding out, on front street so to speak. Front street was that corner life forced you out onto to bare your soul to the world. I’ve since learned in my life that my thoughts and understanding of my life and the world around me evolve and grow, then devolve, hopes get dashed and dreams broken. Yeah, maybe a sad way to look at this shit show called life I know. Maybe not. I’ve always been a student of the dark underbelly of life, the back alleys and corners of the room have always attracted me, watching those who think no one is watching them. I have a theory that those who play sad are actually pretty happy deep down inside, those who play happy are the sad ones. A theory not exactly arrived at by trial studies or scientific investigation and with even less scientific value it’s more by irrational thinking I arrive at most things, but it’s my theory nonetheless.
The writing is hard, it’s painful, it can be brutal, so I try to ignore it. I sleep it off, I beat it back with sex, porn, self-abuse, masturbation, I fight it with binge eating until I’m simply too fucking fat, stupid and depressed to write. You name it I’ll use it to fight the write off. I fill my days and nights with idle bullshit hoping the words and the thoughts will leave me alone. It’s hard because I love it and I hate it. I love when I get the words down just right and they actually mean something enough to make someone feel something real and share that which needs to be shared and otherwise likely would never be. I hate it because it scares me, scares the living shit out of me, because I know when I put my hand to pen and pen to paper or fingers to the little black keys it makes me think, it make me remember, confront my demons. The thoughts in my mind alone are enough to drive anyone insane and likely get me fifteen to twenty years in lockup, let alone be forced to think of them enough to have to write them down.
The writing forces me to think of things I never wanted to remember, those very memories and secrets I deliberately left behind, stuffing them into the deepest darkest recesses of my mind hoping I would one day wake up and find out they were all just bad nightmares. Those nasty little words, sentences and paragraphs force me to confront all that I’ve seen, experienced and emotionally attached my psyche to. It forces me to confront the boogeyman and those little fuckers we call the ugly truths of life because, well, the reality of life can be made up of ugly truths. Emotional vacancy, spiritual bankruptcy and moral detachment is so much easier and has always served me so well by giving me the easier, softer way out. I like that way. Because face it, as much as I like to think myself different, a strong soldier on the front lines of good vs. evil, I’m just like so many other jagoffs out there in the world, I want to easier, softer way out. I don’t want to have to live life on life’s terms, fuck that noise, that shit’s for Joe average citizen. Yeah, the long and short of it is life’s terms suck. It hurts, it’s painful so I run from it, hide from it, yet, it always seems to find me.
I’m one of those rare creatures who knows how to be a chameleon, who wallows in it. I can change color and disappear into the chaos of life on a moments notice and you’ll never be able to find me again. I’ve done it. I thrive on chaos. Passive aggressive? Not. I’m strictly, purely aggressive, that’s how I’ve lived this long. I can fade away like a shadow on glass a roach into the carpet, no one can find me if I don’t want to be found. But the writing, it will always find me, it always has.
It’s something I know, something I love, something of which I am intimately familiar and well, take it from the source, I’ve never mastered the art of intimacy it has never been one of my virtues, just ask any ex of mine. I’m more the emotionally vacant, conveniently moral albeit loyal, well maybe not sexually, (ooh that hurts), but the truth can be a mother fucker, the strong silent type if you will. It’s the writing that puts me in a space, a place a moment in time, a state of intimacy that no one else can, a world I wish I could stay forever. It gives me the nourishment I need to sustain life the water in the desert to quench my thirst, it provides the oxygen I need to live. It scares the living shit out of me. Writing brings me to the purest place I have ever been, and take my word for it, noble and pure I am not. My brain is a bad fucking neighborhood to be in, my thoughts, enough to make the stiffest one on Viagra to wilt like last nights lettuce.
As much as it hurts as sharp as the pain can be the writing keeps my alive. Whenever I’m done I breathe easier. I guess something is going to hurt and if the pain is going to produce some result what the hell, it is what it is.
My thoughts, hopes and dreams were innocent back then, so was I, far more so than my life turned out to be. I think I left my innocence back there in that boxcar.
It’s been a rough few years, maybe it’s time to get back time to get back at it.
A Gypsy Road 
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