The music plays and the familiar melody and words remind me of who I was and I am but doesn’t answer who I might yet one day be.
Please come to LA to live forever
California life alone is just too hard to build
I live in a house that looks out over the ocean
And there’s some stars that fell from the sky
Livin’ up on the hill
Please come to LA
She just said “No – boy, won’t you come home to me?”
Maybe I’ll always be the rambling boy in a perpetual state of transition, never settled, always moving and doing something or maybe not.
The prior post got picked up and celebrated in a few different places and now I have some new fans and a reminder that once it wasn’t foreign to be mentioned and or talked about because I actively pursued being noticed.
Crazy Little Woman In A One Man Show
I am halfway between Los Angeles and Dallas with the ocean behind me and longhorns in the distance with the sounds of Howard Stern encouraging the boys from Def Leppard to do a live version of Pour Some Sugar On Me.
Turn back the clock just a tiny bit and I am riding down the Sunset Strip on a Saturday night with college friends and we’re among the few who don’t have the hard rock long hair and leather look.
Doesn’t matter because there is music, alcohol and energy fueling the midnight marauders wandering around. Don’t have to say much, just smile, nod and take the occasional sip of beer.
Those who sometimes tease me about being able to carry a conversation know I can turn that off and let silence speak for me, especially back in those days.
Not because I feared speaking with girls but because fewer words provided fewer opportunities to say something they considered reason to move me from column A to that spot in C.
But those days are so far behind me it doesn’t matter and the boy I was can roam through the echoes while the man I am now occupies the present.
These days you get it all or you don’t get it and that is how it rolls.
“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Somewhere beyond memory and moment the music moves to a Moody Blues song that is particularly apt for the present and future and I wipe the memories of those who talk with their hands to what I need to do now.
Every part of me hurts and there is a familiar ache that won’t disappear through stretching, Advil or Scotch.
Got no choice or option other than slam my body into the door until it breaks or I do. Got no way to go around or avoid the moment, can only go through.
So I look at the 18 year-old and tell him I can’t do it alone, I need some help. I can’t do what I used to do but I can do what I need to.
He shakes his head and asks if I ought to rethink it and I quote Tolkien and tell him to have faith.
“Sometimes your will is the only thing you can trust to see you through. Plant your feet when the waves come and move forward when recede.”
He shakes his head again and I recognize he seems the human part and doesn’t see me as Superman anymore.
It is not the first time, nor will it be the last.
Hell, I remember being the son who recognized his parents might not know everything so there is no surprise that my children would do as all children do.
Still I know a few things that they do not and if he follows my lead and lends the hand of youth I need it will be enough.
At least I think it will, can’t rely upon the Magic 8 ball or look at a disjointed and fragmented flow of words upon a page as proof of anything.
So we plant our feet and hold our breath then the water covers our heads.
Maybe this is a metamorphosis or maybe it is not.
Whatever it is, transition is a word that must be included in the silent description.
One step into the unknown, forward we go, always forward.
