Dead before I hit the ground..

Completely miserable. Haven't slept well in days. Haven't cared what I look like in public or anywhere. Keep wishing that it would rain and hope that they play depressing songs on the radio. Spent my spare time trying to get as wasted or as blunted as I could so I wouldn't have to feel all of this and it only screwed me again. "This" this "phantom limb" syndrome like a person that has just lost a leg. This guy lost it before he knew what he had. Severed. Taken abruptly leaving a neatly cleaved wound to fester and cut short his chances in the "rat race." Sometimes you love something so much that it hurts to leave it, but you must. Sometimes it hurts too much to hold on to that thing you love. And sometimes you let go of what you love because it hurts, but then just sometimes... you get it back and live happily ever after.
I miss her a little, I guess you could say, a little too much, a little too often, and a little more each day. But this chapter ends begging the question "Does he ever get the girl?"

Elwood P. Dowd

Being honest isn't easy. Lying, "disguising the truth" is so much more pleasant, sanitized. People become accustomed to the person that you portray in front of your audience. I'm sure that professional actors/actresses could tell this better than I, but this is the story as I know it.

The air out here is frigid. I can see my breath floating away in steamy puffs. The numbers on my cell phone are 2:34. I remember distinctly saying "2:30 AM" and "where is she?" My memory is a bit blurry from the past couple days but I wouldn't forget what time to be here. The wind howls across the semi-lit walkway leaving my nose as numb as my thoughts. "Propped up against this wall at this time in the morning. I must look like a vagrant" I think to myself, wiping my nose on my sleeve.
I had met her two weeks before and she didn't seem all that dazzled by my theatrics, even now. We constantly had tried to "one up" each other on our nightly excursions. Emotionally unattached, just using one another as a witness to the reality that we were alive. Having just turned nineteen I figured that being jaded and tactless was the persona that was called for in this particular relationship.
Cutting through the thoughtful fuzz, foot steps thud overhead. Someone atop the roof covering the walkway under which I waited, yelling as loud as possible under the circumstances,
"DAN Z!" Recognizing the handle and having a passing thought that I should approach the voice with caution, but disregarding I promptly walk out from under the covered walkway onto the parking lot. Looking up to see if I can identify the obvious source of the voice, then replying "yeah?"
"Can you catch me?"
"What?.. Seriously? Your going to break your leg!" I reasoned to the voice.
Perched on the edge of the slanted roof, her dark hair fluttering about desperately trying to escape this madness, apparently intoxicated
"Stop fucking around! I'm gonna jump Dan!" She states unreasoning my reason. Instinctively opening my arms to try to "catch" her or at least break her fall. She leaps suddenly, awkwardly landing into my arms, and knocking both of us down to the asphalt.
"Shit."
...
"Dan, I think I'm gonna puke."
"Shit."
Rolling off of me urgently, onto her hands and knees, then vomiting all over a parking spot with painted stick figure of a man in a wheelchair. Looking on with a disgusted fascination, thinking "I am not going to get laid tonight." I ask the required
"You OK?"
"Fuck off. I told you to catch me." Her voice strained, trying not swallow. Considering this as a valid response I try to help her up and steady her drunken legs.
"What the hell were you doing on the roof?" I ask her a bit pointedly. To which she response' with a pained chuckle. Trying hard to be angry, I don't return the amusement.
"Do you even care? Tomorrow you won't remember this, and hopefully neither will I." She says to me without needing or wanting an answer. Pulling a flask from my pocket I take a hard swallow, and look down into her dilated pupils.
"I'm leaving in a few hours. We've got some shows in L.A."
"Well, Dan I won't be here when you get back. I'm getting as far as fucking away as I can get from this town." She says pointing a finger off into the distance.
"Ok. Well let me walk you home." I say trying to calm her down.
"No, Dan you don't understand. Do you?" I look away from her face trying to think if there was something to understand.
"I am not who you think I am Dan. The shows, all of this partying, and craziness. I don't want to pretend anymore."
"What? You were the one who always wanted to party after shows. Everytime I see you, your either drunk or high or both. Why?" I say waving my arms around for dramatic effect. Then she stands there for a long second looking at her shoes.
"Goodbye. Don't call me." She turns around and walks down the street trying hard not to stumble.

I never understood what happened that night. I always thought that everything was going along fine, then boom she leaves me. Now years later I think that I'm starting to understand a little. There is this frustration of acting up to a part in the script. Honesty is the big white rabbit that we have to acknowledge when no else is around.

Gimme twelve steps..

If wishes were fishes I'd never go hungry.
Being human I wish for anything that I don't like or that makes things difficult to just be different, easier. It seems to be that life a lot of the time is unfair and down right cruel. Is it any wonder that people will spend their entire life buying lottery tickets and dreaming about, and praying for the day that they will win. Then all their problems would melt away and they could just be happy. But money? Does this ever fix their problems? I am tired of buying into the idea that money = happiness. We, Americans, are addicted to the omnipotent dollar. People that win the lottery a majority of the time are more unhappy after they've won millions of bucks than before when they were living week to week, paycheck to paycheck.
In a nutshell don't wait for "your ship to come in" to be happy. Problems are the road to happiness. So don't wish all of them away.

My love
These words an offering to you

A drink of spirits and a dark soul this night
A candle on the porch in the face of a cyclone
Your guilt my love a severance of mediocrity
A hole in the reasoning of our conscience
It is the stinging whim of destruction

Your parents my love
Puppets on the stage of all his children
Controlling they jerk them about at their conviction
Some break the strings free to die in peace
Yet others tangle in their hearts
Disoriented without hope

So my love take your sugar pill
And forget the days we lived before
Put on your pretty shoes
And paint your face with the love in my heart
Live your years like the end will come
This the beginning of forgiveness and faith

The "wave" speech..

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Sometimes I am afraid that I will forget. I write down thoughts desperately and stow away keepsakes as if by compulsion. I sit by the river on nights when the wind blows through the trees and over the water, almost carrying my very soul away, and write down memories in my journal.
I wake in the middle of the night trying to remember something just out of reach. Some thought or face that has been lost to time and deteriorating brain cells. Is it possible to forget the beginning of the story? And if so can we ever remember the ending?