As Hard As We Try
What a month. People are dying all around me, and somehow, in the dregs and treachery of muddy and complicated life, I find a way to keep sojourning onwards towards the magical whiff of the tradewinds.
What a gasp this life is.
We try to identify the key factors to the pathos of the script, and the major players who could venture inside the minds of the characters we require, but in the end - we wing it. We fart it out - and the script escapes us.
It's all too sad to think about sometimes - how fast we go. We are here to gaze at the sun, if only for moments, and then, like the harsh winter season, we are all but forgotten in pastures of promising bluebells, spring smiles and sundresses of the future.
We are a whiff of something lasting - but we are a momentary gas in the ether. Poof.
My friend lost his father yesterday. Yesterday. In a span of a 24 hour block, his mentor and moral rock is fucking gone. Cancer. Disappeared. And we are left here, sorting through the pieces of this faded, musty and jumbled life puzzle.
The annals of time click on towards whatever they click to - Freedom? An exploded clock. A release.
The other night, the Ottawa Senators were playing Philly. The Sens pulled out a deep-seated victory but in the game, my old friend's brother Kent Huskins was playing defense for Philly. I saw him on the screen of my living room tv, and he was a pixelated version of a childhood memory. I used to play hours of backyard basketball with Kent's older brother Brad. Brad was a great friend. Kent would sometimes show up in their Almonte pitch, and leave Brad and myself with a few wacky laughs.
And here I was, watching my old pal's brother on my television set - wondering if I could somehow get back to that backyard basketball innocence.
But I can't. I'm stuck in the cruel, cold light of day where the age lines crack in the faces of everyone I know.
I see now why it was so appealing for Lou Reed to skip the life completely. Skip it. The angel may ride with hunchbacked children, but we still hold out hope for that angel to grace the freeways of our misty, gray existence.
Skip the heartbreak and the hurt and the constant mountains of fucking up.
As hard as we try. we kick against the goads.
We are goats - headbutting the fences of our own mortality.
But like the figure in the photo, we venture onward. We long for the moment where the scales fall from our eyes on the road to Damascus.
And amidst the shit and the fight and the rain, I feel your breath. You are still here. And so am I.
We thought we lost you.
Welcome back.
