No, No Neptune or How I Wondered Through Broken Years of Youthful Despair

I sometimes think that my writing is barely better than that of mediocre high school student who has been forced to write an essay…..

At other times I think that my writing is about to earn a Pulitzer Prize in literature….

I rarely think that my writing is anywhere in between.

I do not generally deal

in happy mediums.

I

am all about reaching the Olympic highs and

plunging to the

shadowy depths.

Hello there middle ground and what have you to offer? Are you really a happy medium? Or are you a sad, perhaps even melancholy medium? Do I want to trod down the middle road of emotions and opinions and thoughts and life and love? Scaling and falling is more exhilarating. There is true insanity in total self assuredness. The one person I knew well who lived without doubt was my mom. And she was

Crazy.

Not: oh, you’re so craaazy! but certifiable. Insane. She though she was fine, that everything was peachy and the rest of us were maybe a bit off.

(Which do you prefer: abuse survival, drug/alcohol addiction recovery, acute panic disorder or depression? I’ll try all four if I get to mix in great soaring leaping dancing joy and triumph and ecstasy. Called living with your choices, my man.)

So I roam my mind and find wide open spaces full of doubt to crawl around in and explore. I search high and low and feel high and low and I am the self I seek. The ever present vanishing mystery of blue crimson awareness. Color blind and radiant and intensely weird. But I do love donuts. Run. Run. Run.

I walk awake in my contradictions ever mindful now of who I am. Which gets me to the point of it all — those many younger years of cluelessness. I was like a pinball, bouncing around all over the damn place. Oww it hurt sometimes but I didn’t know the cause of the pain. Here now, there later, back here and then off again and forth and fro and hither and yon and flotsam and jetsam.

A soccer player. A hot shot journalist. A development director. Making sandwiches. Selling furniture. Bank clerk. Proofreader/copy editor. Student. Teacher. Chico, Sacramento, Boston, San Francisco the fucking moon. No no Neptune. I was a man of many identities and many locations and many ideas and no ambition and varied goals. I supped at love and romance and didn't so much fall as was catapulted into love. A love that encompassed and erased all I knew and wanted out of romance. I was so

lucky

because

I found my one true love and still

today

am with her.

If not for that miracle and a patient and loving father I'd be in another place perhaps very dark and lonely and devoid of mirth. There would be crawling worms in my brain and I'd be exchanging needles not ideas and oh golly Miss Molly....

Young man.

I was

So the key point from above was that this fellow here had no ambition and no plan for tomorrow and verily at times no common sense. Just did. Self aware in superficial ways. I was -- at one magnificent point -- well on my way to success in a career in which I lived quite happily. But then I chucked it into the dustbin and wondered and wandered mindlessly aimlessly lessly. I did.

Only by love and luck did life yield a second career and later an offshoot of that. From there family and stability and grace. But still I find in myself no solid ground. I am greatness personified and I suck big time and I am whatever I feel at the moment and my feelings are like the tide. At midnight. In a turbulent storm of purple raging clouds of destiny. How I love being a life in this world. How I have misunderstood for so long. Wayward youth indeed. Not quite purposeless. But did I learn from it? Eventually a resounding yes! I say. (Exclamation point quite appropriate, mind you.)

And that's the story of, that's the glory of love.

Joi de vivre.