The Innocent Beginnings:

The hardest part was over now. I'd decided just where and how I'd be setting the stage for this grand escape. Now it was just a matter of getting there. Florida was a place where I'd spent a good portion of my metamorphosis into adulthood. It was where I'd met Frank, and most everyone else I'd ever considered important to me. Most of them were still there, clinging to whatever vestiges of hope they could, and making a damn good run at life too. I'd always been proud of them and that would never change.

This trip was to be different though. I'd be abandoning the bastions of safety I'd normally associated with the place. I wanted something wild, something dangerous, something that could threaten and challenge everything about me all at once. I wanted the hammer that could smash me to pieces, looming just over my head. We all knew the feeling. We'd all been there at some point in our adult lives. Now was the time to confront it, to conquer it once and for all, and show that it could be done.

I'd settle for nothing less, not this time. It was time to feast on the bones of the world and suck whatever I could from within. I'd come starving and leave so disgustingly full that I could have dropped dead in a moment of satisfaction. It was a trip designed to shadow every perception of fulfillment and happiness I thought I'd ever known. When it was over, I knew I'd emerge triumphant and waving my hands high. Dreamers dream, this has always been true, and now I intended to live it.

While I was sitting there, staring at the screen of the laptop, my first class ticket reservation staring me in the face, I had to wonder: How did all this actually happen? Sure, I'd been advocating just this kind of quest before, but how had it come to reality in such a sudden and violent fashion? I fished for another cigarette and leaned back to think about it.

I would have liked to say it was some long, hard, road of excess and binge drinking that had led me to this point - it would have seemed far more fitting and appropriate - but that just wasn't the case. The truth was, in all it's ugly and horrid glory, that this didn't come about from some stimulating conversation or some mind numbing decision to run around and deny myself nothing.

It was born of watching, of sitting around on patio porches in the heat of summer sipping Shipyard Export Ale, watching everyone around me blindly bumble their way into the future and decide "This is good enough for me, I think I'll stop here."

I'd spent the whole summer content to grill burgers and sip on beer. I'd just separated myself from a relationship that had been a cluster-fuck of half-truths and a bunch of slanderous horseshit, with myself. I'd waded out of the muck and expected to find the world as I remembered it: Alive. Vibrant. Brimming. You cannot fathom my confusion with what I saw sitting in front of me.

Everyone I knew, those who'd lived life with that same, unfettered, passion for indulgence, debauchery, and excess as me, were suddenly sitting down and talking about things that made no sense to me.  These were people who'd walked beside me in the hailstorm of chaos, swearing an oath of blood and fealty to the ride of life, promising to settle down for nothing less than everything...and they were talking in strange alien tongues.

"Yeah. She's not perfect, but enough for me."

"I know it's wrong, but whatever, it's good career advancement."

"I can't stand living here, but I'll deal with it I guess. At least it's quiet and nobody bothers me."

I, and I wasn't joking, started referring to it as 'The Summer of Blasphemy'. These were those I'd once considered the most die-hard of dreamers, those who would cling tightly to all they wanted, even if they understood they'd be going down with a ship. We'd always been a band of warriors, roving the universe with a 'take no prisoners' mentality.

After that summer of just sitting around and listening to them? I felt stoned - the kind with rocks - drunk, beaten, and exhausted. They'd sipped from the chalice and decided one drink was enough for them. They'd tasted blood, but never gotten the proper frenzy for it all. They were blatantly admitting that what they had wasn't what they wanted, but it was enough for them.

The whole thing was traumatic for me. I sat around for hours, chain smoking and sucking down bottles of Whiskey, trying to find some way to break the tailspin. I was more worried the attitude might be infectious, that I too would become another frightened, dull, old, man wheeling himself through life at the end of days bitching about the days of real tattoos and when skateboards had wheels.

That, was not a dream. It was a fucking terrible nightmare. I had promised myself, in the days of my youth, that I would never be 'old'. Sure, at the time I took that as a 'live fast, die young, party hard, and don't look back' sort of mentality. It was the early promise of a pine box and a six foot hole and, in those days, it had great appeal to me.

It took a long time, and a lot of drugs, for me to understand that I was going about it all wrong. Life was a crazy wave that I wanted to ride well into the shore. I wasn't content to stand on the beach or rush my way into the dirty. What I understood, after all that time, was that I wanted to remain youthful in my drive to devour everything there was in the world. Everything and anything that could, even remotely, tickle my senses - even in disgust - I wanted to experience it.

Those who'd stuck by me through those times, I had always assumed would be taking the crazy ride with me. We'd drank more than anyone we knew. we'd spent more summers stoned and twisted than most adults I've met since, but the thing that really separated those times from something that was just some wild, drunken, drug orgy? We were living, real-honest-to-greatness living.

We weren't the kind of people who got high and sat around watching movies like Dazed and Confused or Cheech and Chong's: Up in Smoke. Sure, we enjoyed these movies as much as the next person, but they were far too casual for us. We were die hard users, and when we took on the Dragon, we chased it across the land.

Now, staring at them across the patio table? It was all I could not to wretch in disgust. Sure, they had a right to their desires of contentment, just like I had a right to my nauseous feelings about it. Still, I said nothing to them. With each passing word though, each promise of 'settling down', I found myself more and more resolved to step away from the idea as a whole.

The whole thing had come to a head sometime in August. I'd been getting ready to take a trip out of town for a friends wedding. The three of us were sitting around, sipping drinks and feeling disgustingly full on steak. The day had been remarkably cool, a welcome change from the heat wave we'd been going through, and we were all just sitting around smoking cigarettes and talking.

"What about you?" My friend Paul had asked me. Paul and I had been friends since grade school. He was a skinny, little, twig of a man who wore thick glasses and often sported a spray on tan. Today he was wearing a black button down shirt and a worn pair of jeans. It was the most I'd seen him look anything like the man I'd known in awhile. I remember thinking he must have picked out his own clothes, or his girlfriend was out of town.

"What about me?" I pretended to have no idea what they were talking about and tried to buy myself some time by draining my beer in a series of long gulps.

"Ever see yourself, you know, getting married, settling down, giving up the old life?"

"Fuck no." I replied. "Why the hell would I ever give up on life? You're starting to sound like a used car salesman." I grabbed a fresh beer out of the ice bucket and twisted the cap off. "I've put a lot of good miles on this one and been down a lot of hard roads, it hasn't let me down - an I doubt it ever will."

"That's pretty sad man.." Chris commented. Chris an I hadn't been friends as long. I'd met him when I'd made a trip back up north years ago when Paul had introduced us. "You don't think you're going to get lonely like that?"

I scowled at him for a moment and I watched him shrink back into his beige, corduroy, jeans and white tennis shoes. Chris was quite a bit bigger than me, but I'd always been able to cow him with a few harsh words. He was going to college to be a High school Teacher and I remember thinking, on more than one occasion like this, that the poor bastard was going to get chewed apart by sharks.

"Like what?" I asked him, even though there was no need. "By sticking to my principles and riding the life, hard and fast, off into the sunset? I don't think any man could be lonely like that." I took another haul off my beer.  I could tell Chris was thinking about correcting me and I sat forward, shooting my finger across the table at him. "No, Chris, I don't. I'll live life by whatever rules I want, and I'll be happy and have my life full of all the god damned freak show clowns I can handle."

I was in no mood for this kind of talk and neither one of them seemed to notice it. I'd never, ever, been one to dig his toes into the Earth with the idea that anything was ever 'good enough' for me. I didn't think I should have either. Sure, there were times when I had to put the chase on hold and buckle down to handle the mortar fire of life, but there was no need to do that every day.

"Seriously.." Paul chimed in, sitting forward on his elbows like he always did before diving into some tyrannical babble about meaningless bullshit. It was funny how you could come to know exactly what someone was going to say before they even got the first word out of their mouth. "You can't keep on living like this man. We're only saying this because we care. Don't you think it's time you let go of that old idea and grew up some? Maybe got a real job, and thought about starting a family?"

I was beside myself with mourning and grief for these two. They'd once been some of the toughest bastards I'd ever met. Now they were just worn and faded Effigies to their former selves, a disrespectful homage that stood as a testament to times ability to pound ambition out of you. It was like hearing the victims of a serial rapist stand up and defend their attacker.

"Jesus you two.." I stared, my eyes wandering back and forth between the two of them. "Your Stockholm Syndrome is just plain depressing. Can we trade that in maybe? If you could trade up to a case of Stendhal maybe, or, at the very least, some kind of, non-terminal, stupidity that might render you both mute so I don't have to listen to this garbage anymore, that would be great." I leaned back in my chair and kicked my feet up on the glass table, crossing them at the ankles.

I understood that life would be different for everyone, that was the whole point behind it after all, but I simply couldn't wrap my head around the idea of giving up on everything you had ever dreamed of in the interest of procreation and stuffing some round shape in a space, hoping it would be enough to keep any leaks from springing up in the dam you'd constructed. It just didn't make any sense, and I wasn't about to be convinced of it.

"Have you two ever thought about how fucked what you're saying is?" I asked them sharply, screwing a fresh cigarette butt into my lips and using the last bits of the old one to light the end. Sitting forward enough to raise my eyebrows at them, I continued. "We go through life, taking the bull by the horns and steering it wherever we want to go, and because you two suddenly are worried about being alone and destitute - both of which are really impossible if you're actually living life - you're willing to just piss yourselves away and adopt some new face to wear? What the fuck is that about?"

The irritated tone in my voice wasn't something I could have easily hidden, but it was in that moment I realized just what was going on. We were all getting on in years, pushing our thirties, and in our time that was well beyond the points we all should have had kids and been married by now. They were feeling the squeeze of what they felt they should do, rather than what they wanted. It was vulgar. It was repulsive. It made me sick to my stomach. I pushed out of my seat, arms flailing wildly at the air.

"Where are you going?" Chris asked, making a motion to stand up and follow me. I stuck my hand out as a silent gesture for him to wait.

"Whiskey." I replied calmly. "If I'm going to sit here and listen to you two entice the vultures, then I'm going to need a strong spirit to keep the vicious things away. I'm too young to have my bones picked clean in the desert."

This whole thing was getting too surreal. People didn't actually think like this, nobody willing took up the gallows just because it was somewhere they could hang for awhile...did they? The question was cause for alarm and panic like I'd never felt before. To know such things existed in the world, that such haunting thoughts could creep up on the those around me I'd considered Titans, I wasn't ready for that an I could see it giving me nightmares for weeks.

Throwing some ice in the tumbler I poured a healthy amount of Jameson's over the top of it and even took a quick tug from the neck of the bottle. Feeling the fire hit my belly, I felt comfortable enough to join them again but first, I offered a quick prayer offered up that maybe these two were just high on sun  tan lotion and didn't really know what they were talking about anymore.

"You're going to kill yourself if you keep this up." Paul commented as I came back out on the porch.

I took one look at him and saw his eyes weren't really full of concern. He didn't believe what he was saying any more than I believed he'd ever be happy half-assing his way through a marriage. I took a sip of the drink and stared him down for a second. "Better to die from living, than to waste away from doing nothing,"

I passed the clipped retort back at them as I dropped back into my seat and made the decision right then, right there: This wasn't for me. Maybe it was for them, maybe it was there place to find some semblance of complacency in something they'd both said they'd never want. They were only human, after all, and it made sense that sometimes things just got too real. Sometimes the ideas of solitude got heavy for everyone, so I could understand how it had happened...but that didn't make it right.

They were content to be men, to live among men, to shackle themselves down to these things. I could accept that for myself. It threw everything in contrast and, in that moment, I knew what I had to do. I had to stop living among men and get back to living among the Gods and Beasts. I needed to turn the volume up, make the colors brighter, devour anything that got in my way and fashion some way to turn myself back into a proper cosmonaut.

At that, precise, moment though? I needed to get drunk as fast as possible and cop out of this discussion under the guise of needing a nap.