Leo and Brian

I'm a sad drunk - enjoy.

            My dog died a week ago yesterday. In two days, the beloved cartoon dog of my childhood, Brian, will have died a week ago. In some sick, twisted, and bizarre mindset, my own, the symbolism and reality of my childhood died a week ago today. Somehow, these two dogs became me, one a physical and earthly embodiment of my innocence and the other an imagined representative of my youth. Both died within forty-eight hours of each other, one on this planet and the other in the infinite universe of creativity that I could never think to comprehend.

            It was fitting, the deaths, as one month ago I faced the creature himself when I was involved in what should have been a tri-fatality accident. Right then and there, at the moment of impact, staring into my predicted dark eternity, I had died; in one dimension physically and the other mentally. Thankfully, yet tragically, I was a being of the latter. People joke and make levity of the experience which changed my outlook on life forever, and although I play along, I face the aftermath of that misery every day, every night, and every second that I walk this planet. I’m gratefully forced to wake-up every morning to parents who almost lost me; parents who cried they would take their own lives with the unbearable news of mine.

            With these miserable words, I leave you on a positive note. A note, literally, that has held a place on my desk ever since I grew old enough to understand, or understand my ignorance of, the afterlife:

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

-          William Ernest Henley