anthem of a poignant reality

There are days when all those secrets and issues come back to me like an extended, slow, acid flashback.

There was something boldly experimental and oddly personal about me back then. 

The only way I can explain it is that I was fearless. I had nothing to lose because I had been less than nothing.

I was living by my heart, mind, wits, and passion. I’d developed a truth that mattered to me as much as anything I’d ever been involved in, and I wanted to apply my intellect and strength to making the world a better place.

I spent the next twenty years playing the role of the semi-conscious hipster, chronicling the intense, beautiful, brutal violence of all those people who got burned by life and had to make up for bad decisions and lost time. Even though I thought I was being sensitive to the emotional complexities of living in the world during that period, it was difficult for me to capture what was real vs. what I fantasized about.

So, I stuffed most of those pages in a folder labeled Yesterday’s Cheap Thrills and focused on what was selling in those days: self-imposed angst, exploitation, lowbrow pulp, etc.

But no matter how inventive and honest I was or how hard I worked at tweaking and amplifying the language to satisfy the Aesthetic and Thematic requirements of those clumsy submission guidelines, I could never get past those tricky, neon-light gatekeepers.

Maybe because those sad, silly stories had too much pain and not enough art.

Maybe because they didn’t possess the kind of ecstatic beauty that most editors climax over.

Or maybe because they just sucked.

Beneath all my noise, I had moments that could be described only as exceptional, and I could do so much good.

And even if the only thing I’m remembered for is my encyclopedic knowledge of the angry and the marginalized, I still tried to sneak something heartfelt into the conversation every now and then and ask the mystifying and alluring question of whether or not under the persona was an ambitious man that worked diligently at hiding it.

The answer may be finally in.