I’m in the third set of my leg press trying to focus on banging out a few more reps when Johnny Lee rolls through my headphones and I get distracted by memory.
Johnny says he doesn’t know where it started or where it might end and by the time he pushes through another chorus of Looking for Love I am 23 again.
Line dancing is sweeping across the country and I am in a bar called Denim & Diamonds learning how to 2 step.
Got one woman facing me and another holding my shoulders behind me and trying to move the correct foot based upon when they squeeze my shoulder.
Not long afterwards I’ll be in wedding in Texas and the 2 step lessons will come in handy. One of the girls I dance with will squeeze my bicep and say she isn’t worried about my being able to catch her if she stumbles.
Fast forward some years later and I’ll help a midwesterner keep from stumbling and receive another bicep squeeze.
My reverie ends with the song and legs that tremble when I try standing upon them.
Leg day is wrecking me in a good way. They ache and I shuffle to the locker room cuz this 57 year-old prostate wants to work out too.
I think my arms are bigger than they were at 23, but not nearly as defined other than when I am mid pump.
Twenty-three year-old Josh pushes up from the past and asks the current version why he let this happen to us.
“Shut up kid, you didn’t appreciate how easy you had it.”
This Is Who We Are Now
Present day me growls “this is who we are now, go back to sleep, the grownups are talking.”
I bounce back and forth between here and the Substack undecided upon where to focus my efforts and whether to crosspost or keep things separate.
A little of both is happening and I am mostly ok with it. There is no rush to make a final decision.
I jumped into the fire for a few on the final day of August and let myself burn. Thought about my apartment in Fort Worth at length for the first time in a long while. Thought about getting ghosted and how some people are happy to Schlatter you for their new tasty delight.
Let the anger run for a few and then saw a familiar visitor and smiled. I was always right…Every damn time.
Sometimes that doesn’t matter and you just accept that life really is a long and winding road. You don’t know what will happen and trying to control that which can’t be controlled is fruitless.
I ended up laughing at myself. I have done things and been through moments I never could have imagined or predicted.
****
I thought I saw the dog a few weeks ago. Stood staring in the dark thinking about how his black fur made me invisible at night and called him.
“You know I think Dad helped me that night. I know you were determined to bust through the door of your brother’s room. I don’t really remember hearing you, but I heard you were enraged strange men were in the house. Thank you for protecting us.”
There was no response and I asked myself if I was losing it. “You think your father helped prevent you from crossing over, why not believe in a ghost dog.”
That made me laugh.
There have been lots of good things this last year but there have been quite a few hard moments. For a bit the hospital stay was among the most humiliating things I have been through and then I just didn’t care.
I don’t want to do it again, but if I did I would approach some of it differently.
The beauty of almost dying is I know I have another gear in me. I know even when things feel lost I can go harder and deeper. I can call upon something I suspected existed in me but had never experienced.
That calls to some of you. Some want to know what it means and are torn by what would have happened if I did check out. It would have been final call at the bar and there would be no encore.
I stumbled across a post I wrote called The Screaming Woke Me Up and clicked on it because I thought it might be about that night and I wanted to revisit it.
Some of it reminds me of my father’s funeral and how some memories of the day would creep up and surprise me long afterwards.
Well, I’ll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
But that’s not unusual
It’s just that the moon is full
And you happened to call
And here I sit
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I’d known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall
Diamonds & Rust– Joan Baez
It is eight days before we hit the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
One of my oldest friends was working in the towers. He was there on an extended assignment working in Cantor Fitzgerald’s office.
This time every year I think about how I had been tentatively go to Internet World at the Javits Center and how my old friend and I had talked about going to Windows of The World together.
My trip got cancelled and even if it hadn’t I probably wouldn’t have been in the city on that day.
But I remember so many things from that morning, one of which was calling his phone for hours, not knowing he had flown back to LA days before.
For a short time though I was thinking about whether I was going to have to go out to look for him. It was a relief when I found out I didn’t need to.
Spent an hour talking with him yesterday and told him I might still call him the day of just because.
It was a good conversation and we laughed hard as old friends often do. Everyone should have the kind of friend that you would fly across country to search for and vice versa.
Some moments are blurry and some are crystal clear.
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