#1

Disillusionment is a mistress all too pretty to refuse. My generation seeks their meaning at the end of a tunnel or the bottom of a bottle and seems to believe that to find anything of significance you must first lose everything of your upbringing, you must shed the skin your parent so ill-knit in the womb to that you that only drugs and heartache can outline, your limits the final furious master to which we all must bow in your headlong rush to oblivion. The precipices our parents so faithfully tried to rescue us from are gleaming with the maw of the endless, experimentation in laboritories steaming with the sweat of sex and smoke and all of it a desperate fuck off to any morals chaining us from taking the plunge in a headlong dive that will finally make us feel those feelings our elders tried to hide by honestly telling us what they were. Tyrants they were, evil overlords who took delight in pointing to a book made of dusty gibberish and a way of life so unreal it existed everywhere we looked, and our youth took its prevalence for some kind of cruel joke, a malicious dictator shoring us to beaches with waves of rules, rules, rules, and when our journeys always bring us back to the most basic of truths we gloat and show off battle scars in wars we sought out for the sake of being able to gloat like schoolchildren about who kicked the most ass and whose weight was the most corpulent with the wisdom only experience can offer, and never did or do we think to take the older generation at their word for their world cannot possibly be our own even though nothing new be under the sun except sons scorning suntan lotion just so the burn will have the feeling of control. And that is why I write, in an effort to break the mold of futility so engrained in my friends, honest Truth-seekers who refuse to believe what they’re told unless they can see it with their own eyes which question every answer and blink away moderation as the liquor of those who aren’t brave enough for excess’s pluralistic pleasures, we all in our cocky youth laughing as these smiling families whole and white fence picketed burying their secret pain that we dared to shove into the faces of anyone who will listen and even those who didn’t because screaming diplomacy is better than transparent honesty. Our generation has drugged itself like the needle of the man masquerading as the hippie and cackling with delight as our tragedies are embraced as comedies and we laugh and we laugh and we cry and we say at least we got to cry. Where the few and far between tears that burst through our constructed dams are the only sign of life we can cling to since we have cast off true happiness as that ideal available only to the stupid and the naïve, that sect of society who is so damn happy why are they so happy they MUST be lying they must be pretending so I’m going to pretend harder and I dare anyone to crash and burn as much as the fire in my eyes and under my feet fueling me as I flee away from all that I have known to discover what everybody else is saying and call it as my own because I smoked it, I drank it, I slept with it, I dared to follow in the steps of pioneers and blaze a trail at the bottom of their footprints and exult in joy that I was discovering something, the chorus of all our yelps of ecstacy eclipsed by the community we found in individuality, the sense of peaceful death as our final breath chokes out an I told you so cold as the grave. I was blessed with an escape from such a cycle of endless self-inflicted torture I believe so I could prophesy to those left behind, so the light of my words in some hopeless cry in the wilderness can tell those outside of the box that the box they escaped was a trap, it was a lie to put them in a box even smaller than the one they had left by selling their psyches a vision of perfection achieved through following druggies and musicians and lost souls into a black hole that drowned them in a delirium all too pretty with that dastardly mistress nicknamed disillusionment but in the vernacular of my generation more self-deceptively called discovery. And so from here I sit and write and memoir-ize my words and my self and my stories in a spilt chaos of phrases and words and philosophies and beliefs all too comical with their urgency but dreaming of a time when we can all see the comedy of life and not diminish it to the pathetically small scope of a tragedy, that we can all feel the freedom to laugh and love and not be self-conscious because it’s silly, that we can defeat death by using the only weapon that will kill it, that spell of ridiculous and insane feeling known as love that squirms my generation in its seat because it’s so freakin’ sappy it can’t possibly be real and so what is indeed too good to not be true ends up by the wayside, discarded for its sheen surely borne of shtick and not shine. And here we go and these days all blur together in a soup as tasty as it is meaningless. Writing a vomitorium of words onto a page unlined and therefore untethered and therefore dead but the kind of living one can only gain from dead things, like that leaf of that palm tree that is still alive yet which stares from high above down at its discarded, scorned, scorched son soaking on the ground and curled up brown and gross on the concrete in the noonday sun that oven-bakes 24 hours a day here in the concrete jungle of my front yard. Which may as well be the front yard of a stranger, familiar with the haunt of youth fatal with a metaphor overused in cliché, dipped doubly. Starts and beginnings, that’s where I ended before I continued from that impossibility known as the present, that sulfurous beast who absorbs these days in increasingly criminally microscopic amounts with the burdening glory newly discovered  in what used to be called mundane but now is miraculous and I wonder how much this gift may not sometimes be a curse or perhaps it is a curse masquerading as a gift but more likely it is a couple who is so in love with each other that their completely opposing traits compliment their selves to the point of a blazing fire that enraptures all who dare to stare at its magnificence, to risk the peril of becoming lost in the biggest mystery of all time. Am I lost? Better question, what is lost and why are so many people so eager to define it for the purposes of saying they’ve found it? If you know you’re lost, how lost can you possibly be? Silly question, one with a retardedly obvious answer – if you believe knowledge that you’re lost puts you ahead of the game in any way you truly are deluded, drowning in the same water as the rest of us and shouting your victory about your discovery like it will keep the sharks from ripping the flesh from your bones. The only real news of any import is that you are found. So there I was, I was lost, and like a fool I was enjoying it, with the likes of Drake and Rocky keeping me company, grinning behind the flash of lighters and fires that sliced their features into compartments promising the illusion of control through the indulgences innumerable we all three delighted in over trips both of the mind and of the road. I can’t blame him or her for anything that occurred but my brain can, and like a cat with no particular allegiance to any owner and laughing at the real owner of this cranial domicile it meows and wanders where it will, clawing up the walls of friendships faded deeply into the memory of regret and remorse and purring like a deceitful menace that my more debase nature indulges at a whim. For where could I have possibly gone without the assistance of these two partners in crime whose loyalty was so fierce it protected even them from questioning me in my descent into darkness so bright we all mistook it for light. Even when you don’t believe in the spirit you know it exists when you feel it leave your body under the influence, when your awareness suddenly disconnects from your head and you’re standing over there but you reside right here. It’s quite disorienting but naturally it is exhilirating for those of us with a predilection for experimentation. It doesn’t particularly matter if it is pleasant – it was new, and it was something different, and in the motony-colored glasses we all so eagerly wore it was the new Eden, the promised land of adventures awaiting behind every snorted line or every toked bowl or every popped tab. This was living, this was experience, this was knowledge, these paradigm-shifting trips were my gateway to a realm I had never seen before because it didn’t really exist except in the corners of my mind, locked behind doors to which only drugs held the key, and now that I am once again free from them I question whether or not they should have stayed locked up.