Change again, a brief history
May 20, 2008
I remember being a kid and making a promise to myself to never stop playing with legos. I remember being sure that when I was older, much older like twenty or something, I was going to drive a VW Bug.
Then I was twelve and prayer was effective. Really effective. I mean I'd only make a basketball shot, or hit a fly I was swatting at or even have a good nights sleep if I said a silent prayer.
A few years later I was hiding drugs and alcohol from my parents. Spirituality had faded like legos had faded. Nothing was quite as important as being liked, being cool, or at least being wasted.
Then I was seventeen and I could love any girl that loved me. Looks didn't matter, nothing mattered if someone would just love me. Anyone. What was wrong with me?
I remember going to California, must have been a year later... I told Travis that if I didn't see him again there was just one thing to take from our years of friendship. I told him if he forgot everything else about me, just to remember that I'm absolutely positive there is more than this. This body, this world, this is all just a shadow of some magnificent spiritual mystery. I had been using a lot of drugs.
A few years later came the military. I had just finished boot camp. My hair was short. My shoes shined. My shirt pressed. I went bowling, and right there in that very bowling alley some asshole civilian had the audacity to wear BDU pants. An insult to the uniform. I couldn't believe it, he would never have the pride that I had. Less than six months later I was smuggling drugs from across the Mexican border back to base in Texas. “The class 9 is open“ meant I still had drugs to sell.
A few more months and I'm in South Korea, convinced that I'm possessed, or god, or both. I drank a lot then, quite a lot. Only twenty years old and getting drunk before work. I embarrassed myself more in that year than I care to recount.
A year later I was back in Texas. I bought a car, an almost new two door. I started hating the military passionately. In between selling and ingesting obscure pharmaceuticals I developed a plan to get me out of the service. Kinda not really scott freeish. I guess the car got repossessed.
A few more months and I'm being accosted by potential rapists by night while “staying up“ by day. More drugs, some guns, a lot of homelessness, and a pile of paranoia. Within a few weeks I'm stripping the electronics out of a car right under a street lamp at three in the morning. A couple hours later me and some sort of mercenary gangster without a hint of an actual birth name are evading arrest at over a hundred miles an hour. In a minivan. Weeks later many of the people I associated with in Long Beach are shot dead.
Within months I'm driving around some strange mid-western town with two singing crackheads.
Another year. Now nothing is more important in this world than money. Well, money and drugs. And girls. I buy a new sound system for my car. I host parties all the time. I spend eighty dollars on a striped shirt. I buy jewels for girls. I drink wine and eat drugs constantly. In less than a year I quit my job and now I want to walk across the country. That fades, and I end up in Salt Lake City.
A year of bars and restaurants and movies and parties and lots and lots of books burn by fast. Real fast. now I'm going to straighten up and fly right. My life has been one big crazy haze. It's time to go back to Virginia and go to college. Really stick with it this time. Stop fucking around.
Less than six months later I've quit school and I'm headed to Colorado. God doesn't exist. Money does not represent worth, value, or even labor. Money is a framework from which emerges endless opportunities to take advantage of people. More books. In a few months I'm an athiest, a socialist, an anti-imperialist. God is a fallacy and money is an implement of exploitation. Ideology astounds me. Blows me away. I want to travel around the US and interview radicals and fundamentalists.
Now a pile of money and a yacht in the Pacific seems right up my alley. Until then a good book and plenty of sunshine might suffice. I've been called fickle before.
Tags for this piece: slc denver travel virginia change california