Shady Dreams

A Lifetime of Tomorrows...

2009-06-26T08:31:00.003-05:00

To me he was like the Marlboro man.

He was rugged and dirty and cool and I just wanted to be around him. I wanted to smoke like him and drink like him and have dirt under my fingernails just like him. I wanted to have scabs like him and ripped jeans like him and, when no one was looking, I wanted to swear like him. I loved it when he called me “buddy” or “champ” and when he ruffled my hair with his calloused hands. And the few times that he put me on his shoulders I swear I could almost touch the moon.

I can’t really say that I remember him leaving but I definitely remember the void it left having him gone. But it wasn’t because I had endless memories of being pushed on the swings or building model racecars with him, it was because I had so few memories of him that I put so much stock in the ones that I had. I wanted new memories, sometimes more than I wanted to wake up in the morning but suddenly, with no one really caring what I thought of him, he was gone. Here today, gone tomorrow.

And all the tomorrows after that.

I thought of him a lot over the years that followed. I began to grow up and started learning the lessons of life and love and the unforgiving nature of the world. I wondered where he went and why he left. I wondered if it was because of me, or because of him, or because the responsibilities that having a son were just too much to handle. I wondered what he was doing. I wondered if he was still rugged and dirty and cool. I wondered if he was still like the Marlboro man.

I called him from time to time over the years, my ears to the street listening for the sound of his footsteps getting closer. I would catch glimpses of him in crowds of people, in store windows, down grocery store aisles, but I could never quite reach him. I missed him some days, hated him on others but no matter how badly I wanted to forget him, I never quite could.

I’m far from the little kid that I once was but every now and again when my mind quiets and the volume of life comes down a few levels, he comes into my mind. I mostly wonder what happened to him, if he remarried or had another son, or if whatever plagued him all those years ago still plagues him today. Every so often I type his name into the search field on the Google home page and stare at the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button. But I never click it though, an act that I can at least partially attribute to the fact that I guess I’m never really feeling all that lucky.

Early in the morning yesterday, while the sun still struggled to find its place among the clouds, I got an email from and old girlfriend of his. She told me that over the course of the last few years he’d been evicted from four apartments, that the only thing that overshadowed his drinking problem was his gambling addiction, that he had severely burned his leg in a work related accident, and that he owed a lot of people a lot of money. She said that she worried about him and that he was such a sweet guy but he just couldn’t figure it out.

I finished reading the email and looked at the ground, staring into the grey concrete swirls that made up the train station. Images of him sitting on a bar stool in a rundown tavern, smoke drifting up from the cigarette hanging out of his mouth, staring into the digital face of the poker machine in front of him. For an instant my mind flashed back to when I was high above the earth, perched on his shoulders, a thousand feet tall. I never wanted to come down. Ever.

As my thoughts drifted back to the present, my eyes focused on the crushed butt of a Marlboro Light lying on the concrete. I lifted my head and stared into the crowd of people that had gathered to wait for the train. I surveyed them, my eyes scanning back and forth until I saw him. He was far from me with his back turned, his cowboy hat tipped, walking away into the rising sun one last time.

When the Heavens Cry...

2009-06-19T07:57:00.001-05:00

The rainclouds set in around the skyscrapers of Chicago and the lack of summer weather has the heavens crying for a change. The city streets are covered in a tidal wave of umbrellas as wet loafers, galoshes, and the people wearing them run for cover through the morning mist.

But even despite the rain, it’s so good to be home.

It’s amazing to me to look out at the city through the glass and steel and concrete playground that I’ve worked out of over the last seven years and see life from atop the clouds. I see Chicago’s neighborhoods laid out before me, ripe with opportunities, beckoning to anyone with a dream to come and spin the wheel of success. It’s a good life for a mostly good man in a city that’s nothing short of all good.

But as I traveled the country over the last few years I’d always had this nagging feeling that I was missing out on something. I was always wondering where I was heading and what I was looking for and if, in fact, I would ever find it. The scenery changed a lot for me. The concrete jungle of Chicago gave way to the sweet tea and lazy days of the South which eventually gave way to the dilapidated row homes of the once thriving Charm City. I spent the better part of each month running to catch planes and losing myself in thoughts of buying a one way ticket and just disappearing. But not because I wanted to run or because life was too hard or because I just couldn’t handle the pressures of accountability, I dreamed of a one way ticket because, for once in my life, I just wanted to live. I wanted to live the life that I dreamed about when I was a kid. I wanted to finally find Neverland and hang out with the Lost Boys and Wendy and John and Michael. I wanted to sit on the beaches of an island far, far away from the perils of adult life, and emphatically wish upon a star. Because, as I suppose we all do, I had oh so many wishes.

Author Louise J. Kaplin was once quoted as saying, “Adolescence represents an inner emotional upheaval, a struggle between the eternal human wish to cling to the past and the equally powerful wish to get on with the future.” And that rings so true for me. I look to the future, as far as I can possibly see, and off in the distance, although I can barely make it out, I think a see an upgraded version of who I am now. But when I turn my head one hundred eighty degrees in the other direction I find myself face to face with the demons that I’ve spent so long trying to fight. They scream words like “worthless” and “failure” and “fuck up” and although I plug my ears with my fingers as best I can, it sometimes brings me down. Life sometimes brings me down.

At the end of the day, when I lay in bed and count the shadows on the ceiling, my thoughts always turn to Haley. I wonder if she’ll ever be convinced that I’m not the monster that her mother made me out to be and I wonder if I’ll ever capture my dream of a father/daughter dance. Because that’s all I really want to do. Dance. Dance with her as we dance through life. Dance atop the rainclouds that cover the city of Chicago. Dance until the moon sets inside the depths of her brown eyes.

Dance.

Where the Sidewalk Ends...

2009-06-17T08:36:00.001-05:00

From a sidewalk bench I peered out into the Annapolis inner harbor and watched as boats came and went. Fishermen and business men and the occasional trophy wife tied knots and threw ropes to shore and ducked under swinging sailboat booms that promised instant concussions to whomever they made contact with. The June skies were lazily clouded over and although the scene in front of me was essentially serene, my stomach was knotted and I couldn’t shake the feeling that all was amiss.

So much had changed for me in the four and a half years that had passed since I put down the bottle. My life had gone in so many different directions that my internal compass spun round and round without regard to the cosmic pulling of due north. I fought battles both inside and outside the ring and sometimes, when all seemed lost in the frenetic chaos of life, I didn’t know if I would make it.

The world’s chokehold seemed to be getting tighter and tighter and it was getting so much harder to breathe. The duality of the man was ever apparent as I fought to be a father and ended up with a daughter who professed her hatred for me. The duality of man was ever apparent when, through tears and the sniffling of the world’s cutest nose, that she told me that she wished I would stop fighting for her. And it just doesn’t seem fair to me. It just doesn’t seem fair to me how doing the right thing can sometimes feels so absolutely fucked up. It doesn’t seem fair that for Haley to someday love me she has to hate me now. It doesn’t seem fair to me that my package has a “damaged goods” stamp on it and the character defects that plague my being seem to preclude me from finding love.

But I’m 31 and I’ve lived an amazing life and I know, without a doubt, that life is unfair and that nothing that is worthwhile is easy. So I push on and push forward and continue to put one step in front of the other with a confident swagger. I don’t know where I’ll end up or even where the sidewalk will end but I’m confident that someday it will. And when it does, I’m going to put my feet up, and know that I rode this thing called life until the wheels fell off.

The Enormity of Life...

2009-06-05T07:55:00.001-05:00

The city wakes with the sounds of taxi cab horns and the rattling diesel engines of passing CTA busses. The sun pulls back the curtain of clouds that has kept Chicago in a pre-summer haze and the little bit of sunlight that touches the sidewalks is enough to make the city collectively thank God for the changing of seasons.

As I maneuver my way through the maze of commuters dashing through DON’T WALK signs and dodging suburban drivers, I can’t help but think about the previous twenty-eight months. I’ve missed Chicago with ardor and passion since the day I first left in beat up rented U-Haul truck. I’ve missed the way the city lights sparkled like manmade stars from a distance as one nears it from the Dan Ryan expressway and I’ve missed the glass and steel and concrete that makes Chicago an inimitable architectural wonderland. But most of all, what I’ve missed more than anything else during the years that I’ve been away, is the unique ability this city has to extract authenticity from character-- because for as notably beautiful as this city is, it is as equally unforgiving at times. And on days when life seems to be throwing straight rights directly at my chin, it takes me back to a time when sobriety was laughable. Yet here I am, almost five years later and the vodka-flavored tears that I cried all those years ago seem far, far away. Times have changed. Tim has changed. Chicago has changed. But the struggle for significance in a world that measures by status remains constant.

I still struggle with my own failures as a man, as a father. I still struggle with a litany of character defects that sometimes damage the very fabric of the lives around me. I still struggle with the fragility of my own humanity and sometimes curse myself for so distinctively wearing my heart on my sleeve. But as I grow, as I continue my sometimes epic passage through a life that it oftentimes far from ordinary, I become more patient. I’ve started to learn that wearing life like a loose garment can have positive residual effects in a countless number of ways.

I guess I’m not sure what’s next at this point. My heart is still broken from having to say goodbye to one of the few people that I’ve actually let myself love and even though I’m home, it’s still an adjustment. I combat my emotional fatigue by diverting my attention deep into the pages of raggedy paperback novels and Facebook status changes but at the end of the day, when nothing is left but the sounds of a city that’s finally settling down for the night, I feel the enormity of life.

Because, as it turns out, life is big…and I am small.

A Man Under the Moon...

2009-06-03T11:16:00.000-05:00

I lay in bed watching the blades of the ceiling fan spin shadows around the room. The rain falls softly outside, dampening the ground just enough to see the sky in its reflection. The last day of May slowly comes to a close and my life, it seems, is forever changed.

I’ve finally made it home.

Running back into the arms of the city that I’ve pined for since the day that I left, it feels so good to be back where I belong. But like many of the good things in life, the decision to be here is wrought with sacrifice. It’s bittersweet. It’s far from the triumphant homecoming I envisioned before I left and when I lay my head down on my pillow at night, I can still feel the dampness from the tears I’ve cried.

When I moved to Baltimore, or I guess it would be more correct to say when I was about

to leave Baltimore, I met a girl. I met a girl and the first time I saw her smile I knew I would love her. I met a girl and the first time I kissed her I knew I did love her. I met a girl and in the blink of an eye I knew that I wanted to be with her forever.

But, as it all too often is, forever was too short.

Because what was good for me, what was right for me, was, ironically, wrong for us. So, after almost a year, through a raging waterfall of crocodile tears, we said goodbye to each other. I put away pictures and packed up the things that reminded me of her and in just under a week—I was gone. My heart ached on the trip home although I tried to lose myself in the moments along the way, but honestly, it still aches now.

Even at thirty-one, after what sometimes seems to be a lifetime of experiences, I can’t figure out why life is the way it is sometimes. The task of putting one foot in front of the other can seem intensely arduous when ones heart is broken into a million little pieces. I think of her often and when night begins to fall upon my city, where the buildings hold hands with the sky, I wish that life had more do-overs.

I’ve only loved two women in my lifetime and while one of them continues her journey for significance just outside the borders of Charm City, the other gets married next week. I find myself touching knees to elbows as the reality of those to colossal relationship failures erode the faith that I once had in finding true love. Or maybe it’s not finding it that’s so hard, maybe it’s hanging on to is where the true battle lies. There was a poet in the sixties named Henry Rollin’s who was once quoted as saying, “They say true love only comes around once and you have to hold out and be strong until then. I have been waiting. I have been searching. I am a man under the moon, walking the streets of earth until dawn. There's got to be someone for me. It's not too much to ask. Just someone to be with. Someone to love. Someone to give everything to. Someone.”

I can feel the pain with which he writes and like Rollins, I am a man under the moon walking the streets until dawn. I walk and think and ignore the enormous feelings of failure that sometimes hit me when I think of the good things I’ve lost. But I continue to walk, even on days that I don’t want to, even on nights when the moon is hidden by clouds.

The Thoughts of a Weathered Soul...

2008-03-18T15:08:00.000-05:00

The sun has risen and set on my thirtieth birthday and I stand at the beginning of a new decade. My thoughts race, as they often do, and the uncertainties of what lie ahead have me wishing for simpler times. My hiatus from the solace I find in the simplicity of a Word document has left me with emotional baggage that is threatening to exceed my cranial weight limit so I finally give in with hopes of purging the depths of my weathered soul.

I’ve gone from Chicago to Atlanta, from Atlanta to Baltimore, and from Baltimore to the beginning of a quarter life crisis. The unfamiliarity of my urban surroundings have me missing the consoling shoulders of friends that have married, gotten dogs, and begun to live out their lives by using sentences starting with “we” instead of “I.” I’ve come to a crossroads of sorts, feeling like subject matter for a John Lee Hooker song. I feel lost in space, wondering if the clarity I was searching for in my twenties will continue to elude me through my thirties. I wonder, often so, if I will ever discover the secret of NIMH in the rat race of life.

When January came to an end I celebrated my third year of sobriety. And although I was tremendously grateful for the gifts that it has given me, I celebrated it with a deep sense of discontentment because I feel like I have stopped evolving. My character defects seem to have resurfaced with a relentless fury as the man that I am trying to be and the man that I am seem to have reached an Old Western-esque impasse. I struggle with my own insanity lately, with the idiosyncratic nuances that comprise my uniqueness. I fight the lawlessness of a creative imagination that doesn’t stay chained to the present. I fight the monumental feelings of inadequacy I have from years of being “less than” and the fallout comes in the form of a tireless and static melancholy.

In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “The world breaks everyone ... those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” I read his words and I don’t know if I am very good or very gentle or very brave. But I do know that lately I feel trapped in the world’s headlock and it’s getting so very hard to breathe. My vision slowly fades as the world tightens its hold and my mind flashes back to a different time, a time where I was young and fearless and where the silver lining of life was still polished. I miss staring at my shadow on sunny summer days and pretending I was twenty-two feet tall. I miss spinning the globe and stopping it with my finger and vowing I would someday go to where it landed. I miss the scared feeling I got when I thought about holding the hand of the girl I had a crush on.

But those times have changed.

Because life is constantly changing. The changing is constant. And the change that comes with the death of an entire decade has me yearning for the comforts that stability brings. So I fill my dishwasher and hang my pictures and curl up in my bed and do my best to infuse familiarity in foreign. But it’s hard. Because in addition to not knowing how to navigate the City of Baltimore, I’m not quite sure how to navigate my thirties. But I will put my best foot forward and continue to walk because the world has not broken me yet.

The world has not broken me yet.

When Niagra Falls...

2008-01-03T15:18:00.000-06:00

“Sir, as a representative of the Canadian government, I am refusing your entry into Canada.”

I stood there with a blank look, similar to the one of a baby seal about to get clubbed. And even though the words were coming out of his mouth with a brooding sense of finality, they refused to register behind the bone of my thick skull. I pleaded.

“But sir, I am not the person described in the four pages you hold in your hand. I grew up and while doing so I made mistakes, some of which cost me my freedom and some of which still haunt me to this day. But regardless of how you view me as a person, which you’ve obviously based solely on the papers you hold in your hand, the fact remains that I served every minute of time for each one of those crimes. I paid my debt to society. I suffered the ramifications of those actions.”

His eyes glanced from me down to the documents and back to me as he calmly spoke.

“Sir, look at these charges. Assault. Resisting arrest. Felony eluding. Burglary. Domestic violence. Criminal trespass. The list goes on and on. There are nineteen charges listed here. I cannot, nor will not, allow you to enter Canada.”

I sighed audibly, exhaustedly, and looked around the room. What was I doing here, in this No Mans Land, ostensibly stuck in the small amount of space between the United States and Canada reserved for, apparently, extensive background checks.

The room was brightly lit with windows on all sides allowing the perfect view of both where you wanted to go, and where you came from. The icy water roared violently over the cliffs of the Niagara Gorge before settling down in the Maid of the Mist Pool 170 feet below. The city of Toronto looked peaceful in comparison, gazing down from its perch above the falls, alive with neon blood and casino money.

I scanned the room and settled my gaze upon the five guys huddled in the corner of the room.

“Sir, with all due respect, I ask you to please reconsider. I flew here this morning from Atlanta to meet those guys at the airport in Buffalo. My best friend is getting married and we came here, all the groomsman, to spend a rare weekend together as friends, to gamble, to go out, to celebrate one of the last nights we’ll have together. Look at the dates on those charges. ’97, ’98, ’99, and 2000. I haven’t been in trouble in almost eight years. How can it be that the decisions I made as a confused adolescent be in any way indicative of who I am now?”

The papers ruffled in the mans hands as he looked directly into my eyes.

“Sir, you can return to Buffalo and talk with the consulate about obtaining a pardon. If you return here with a pardon, you will be allowed to pass through. However, should you try to return through the border at any time without that pardon you will be deported, and as a result, you will never again be allowed to step foot on Canadian soil.”

My cause was lost and the sooner I realized that, the better. For me, there would be no bachelor party, no afternoon limo, no hotel overlooking the mighty Niagara Falls. There would be no secrets to keep, no pacts made to cover up the results of my friends blatant inebriation, and no way to get past a past that still finds a way to punish me eight years later.

I fucking hate authority. I hate cops and rent-a-cops and Mounties and security guards’. I hate jails and Customs and police stations and background checks and prosecuting attorneys. I hate the piece-of- shit public defender that convinced me to take the plea bargain that stuck me with this obtrusive felony. I hate fact that I have nineteen charges on my fucking rap sheet but more than anything, I hate fact that I am powerless to change even one of them.

The gray skies outside the building turned even grayer and the Canadian customs agent told me to meet him outside where he would give me my passport and show me how to return back to the States.

I felt like I was sixteen again, and out of all my friends, I was the one with the fake ID that didn’t work. I felt like the guy who goes out in downtown Chicago on Saturday night with sneakers on and can’t get into the club his friends are going to. I felt like I was somehow letting everyone down, like life was laughing at me and reminding me that regardless how many Windsor knots I tie, no matter how many limos I ride in, at the end of the day, I’m still me. I’m still a criminal and an alcoholic, a coke addict and a liar.

I slowly walked away from the counter and over to where Tommy and the rest of the crew were standing with apprehensive faces. The look I wore on mine said it all and with a few short sentences, I explained what had happened, that I wasn’t going with them and that I was sorry. I gave them each hugs; hip-hop half hugs full of attitude and understanding because each one of them knew it could have just as easily been them.

I walked away and through the double doors of the building, into the parking area where my rental car was parked. The wind whipped angrily under the canopy that covered the search area. Bits of icy snow fell sideways. Canada seemed like Oz, a place that I would never be able to get to no matter how hard I tried. I was angry. Unbelievably angry. I wanted to take my rage out on Mounties and anyone else who wore a fucking uniform. I wanted to show them what a criminal really was. I wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, to hit the gas on the SUV go out like a gangster.

I started the car and drove over to where the customs official was waiting. He pointed in the direction of Buffalo while handing me my passport, telling me that I had to stop and check in with U.S. officials before I could get back into the states. I took it, rolled up the window, and drove away without saying anything. Fuck him and his high horse and his French fucking last name. My life is mine and I own every bit of it. I am a criminal and I’m proud of it. I took the road less traveled and paved that motherfucker. I did my time, I paid my debts, I explained to my nine year old daughter why her daddy left. I stood trial both literally and metaphorically for all that I’d done but at that moment I felt no vindication, I felt like a loser.

I drove the short distance to the guard shack and handed the officer my passport and paperwork. He asked me why I got refused, I told him because of my criminal record and he told me to pull around the corner and park.

I slowly pulled forward and bits and pieces of my past came flooding back. I thought about the guys that I had hung out with and how a couple of them were now dead or in prison. I thought about the police chase that landed me a felony, about the .380 semi automatic that I carried with me, and the kid that I jacked for eighteen dollars. I thought about the youth that I had wasted fighting an enemy that lived within.

I thought about my parents...

(To be continued...)

There's No Place Like...

2007-07-30T16:36:00.000-05:00

“The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”

- M. Scott Peck

The month of July begins to come to an end and August knocks on summer’s door. Time passes as it always has, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, propelling me forward into a future that seems undeniably uncertain. I struggle with my transition, missing the Second City with each beat of my heart, silently counting down the days until I can once again call Chicago home. I wander through the city of Atlanta and feel like a visitor, a trespassing city boy stuck in a smorgasbord of rural molasses. I absentmindedly search for love in the acquisition of things but find that the black hole inside of me has yet to get any smaller.

Evidently Mercedes doesn’t make band aids.

So in the early morning hours as the airport begins to awaken, I sit and think and type. I yearn for an emotional revelation, a sudden calming of my animated subconscious. I hope and pray that with each click of my Japanese keyboard I might somehow find myself closer to the solace that seems to have been lost in my move. I reread things I’ve written about rehab and the early days of sobriety, words that helped soothe the pain that radical change brings with it. I read the struggle I went through and can still feel the tenacity I used to keep my feet shuffling forward.

Still though, I am deeply uncomfortable.

Because even though long ago I vowed to never, ever live a life of mediocrity, the sacrifice of comfort that comes with the pursuit of happiness can sometimes be all too painful. Change can be all too painful.

In Atlanta, things move more slowly, time moves more slowly. I constantly think about where I am and where I want to be and come to the conclusion that I need to work harder, to work faster, to work longer. Because there are really only two fundamental choices in life: choosing to accept the way things are, or choosing to change them.

So I choose to change them. I choose to not give up, to not grow complacent, to accept change and antagonize it when I can.

Marylyn Ferguson once wrote that “It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between that we fear… It's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold on to.”

Right now Linus’s blanket dries and I contemplate spending the nickel and asking Lucy for some advice. I don’t know the next move and the uncertainty of which direction I should lean has me catching a few punches on the chin. I’m discontented with where I am. I’m hungry. I’m restless. I feel the growl of the pitbull inside me and my veins pulse with oxygenated blood. I attack the gym with a ferocity that had lately been dormant and hit the heavy bag until my knuckles bleed and my arms shake with exhaustion. I push myself through the pain, through the walls that stand before me, hoping, praying, wishing that I could fast forward to the time when I’ve grasped all that I’ve reached for. But I know that this thing, this life that has me laughing and crying and wondering isn’t a destination, it’s a journey, a long walk down an unpredictable road.

These last two and half years have gone by in the blink of my sometimes black eye. I’ve been chasing my childhood around, never quite catching it, but chasing it nevertheless. I chase it because I miss it, because like so many others around me, I didn’t know how good it was until it was gone, I didn’t know how much it meant until it transitioned into a distant memory.

Change is hard and when I think about it, I know it always will be. There’s comfort in habits, in familiarity, in the commonality found in friends. There’s a part of me, of everyone, that know that when Dorothy clicked her heels three times and spoke those infamous words, that she was absolutely right. There’s no place like home.

Even when it’s changed.

The Tragedy I desire...

2007-05-18T07:34:00.001-05:00

“There are two tragedies in life. One is to not get your hearts desire. The other is to get it.”

--George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

I’ve often thought about Shaw’s words and wondered what he meant when he wrote them. I’ve thought about tragedy and desire, about want and will and what it means to aspire. I’ve thought about the heartbreak of addiction and the obsession of self, about the desire to heal and the seismic difference that loss can make in a life.

I desire much.

I desire, perhaps, much more than I should and sometimes my heart beats solely for the comfort and solace it finds in the small glimpses of hope scattered throughout the years. I hug my grammatical teddy bear, seeing the reflection of the boy I once was in the black and white syntax. I write to placate my soul, to comfort it with soothing verbal chamomile. But for as much as I think, for as much as I try and simplify the complexities of life, I cannot decide which of Shaw’s tragedies is greater. Because for me to say I desire happiness, I first need to define it, I first need to identify the molecular make up of my pining.

So I close my eyes and dredge the bottom of soul.

And up come little bubbles of lucidity spelling out desire with words like fatherhood, legitimacy, and perseverance. I swim through the placid waters of understanding, stopping, treading, trying to figure out if all that I want is all that I’ll never have. I reach for the stars and find that when they shine outside the retinas of my beautiful daughter, they aren’t nearly as luminous.

I look at how far I’ve come.

I see how small steps have led to great strides and for a brief second, I am proud. Proud of what I’ve done and who I’ve become. But the moment is short lived and the restless feeling that keeps me pushing the limits and fighting complacency with every muscle fiber in my body kicks in and once again I see the task at hand.

For my desire, you see, has been neither realized, nor lost.

I am still a part time father with a full time problem, an alcoholic with a defective nature that keeps me selfish rather than selfless. I spend my nights alone, thinking about where I went wrong, where I lost my way, and it dawns on me that I may have never known the way in the first place. I’ve fought to get ahead for so long that I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to stop.

I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to stop.

The world spins so fast sometimes that I wonder if one day I will wake up and Haley will be grown. And it will be too late. And I will hate myself. And I will hate myself. I shake my head and my diseased thoughts become more real. I begin to sweat, to feel the lump of failure rise up in my throat and I silently curse the keyboard I type on. If she could only feel what I feel. If I could only feel what she feels. If we…the words linger on the cusp of my subconscious and I question whether or not I want to write them.

Because sometimes writing them hurts and reading them impales.

The tragedy of not yet getting my hearts desire makes me feel weak and incompetent and futile. But it also makes me wonder. It makes me wonder what I will do when I finally do achieve what I desire. I wonder if I will be good enough or strong enough or patient enough. If I will love enough or leave enough or live enough to be the rock that I’ve conditioning myself to be.

I don’t know whether or not Shaw was right when he wrote what he did and I suppose it’s possible that I never will. But until my dying day I will continue to march, with one foot in front of the other I will continue to march.

Because, perhaps, it is the endless journey that I truly desire.

I Will Not Hatch...

2007-05-02T13:34:00.000-05:00

“The hens they all cackle, the roosters all beg,
But I will not hatch, I will not hatch.
For I hear all the talk of pollution and war
As the people all shout and the airplanes roar,
So I'm staying in here where it's safe and it's warm,
And I WILL NOT HATCH!”

--Shel Silverstein

The pace of life slows for a minute and I watch as the sun begins to rise over the tip of South Florida. The waters of the Atlantic Ocean begin to glisten as they throw specs of light back towards the sky and the wind blows softly, a subtle reminder of Earth’s infinite mysteries.

I gaze out towards the open water and things begin to come together. I am instantly aware of the battle that’s been raging between my frontal and occipital lobes. I am immediately cognizant of how angry I am, how badly I would like to fight someone or something. I realize that I’m scared, that I’ve been living with an unprecedented fear and that it’s been slowly draining my resolution.

I feel pixilated.

I feel uncertain and unsure and undeniably unresolved. I feel like Atlas, relegated to holding the heavens apart from the earth, forever bearing the weight of the world on my shoulders.

I am afraid.

Afraid of falling short, of failing, of letting go. I’m afraid that if I let up, if I let up for even a second, that I will lose it all. That life as I know it, that all that I’ve worked for in the last two years will be taken from me and I will again be who I once was.

I’m afraid that I’m losing Haley.

I think back to when she was little, to when I could hold her and she barely covered my forearm. I remember the way she looked at me, her brown eyes staring up at me, the rest of the world slowly fading away during the times our eyes were locked. She made me feel. She made me. She made…

The ocean continues to wake and the steady slapping of water on beach grows louder. The tide grows restless and the mighty sea begins to expand, forcing me to retreat to higher ground.

I squint my eyes, closing them tightly as I force myself to continue to admit my fears.

I am deathly afraid of growing older and running out of time. I am afraid of sleeping, of missing a chance or an opportunity, of not being smart enough to recognize a window. I’m afraid of not being strong enough, of not being able to persevere through the infinite pool of stormy waters that represent my relationship with Haley’s mother.

I’m afraid of success.

I’m afraid of admitting my fears, that by doing so I will somehow cause them to come to fruition. I’m afraid of crying. Of being a father. Of drinking. Of losing my sobriety in a moment of weakness. I’m afraid of my weakness.
I’m afraid of being weak.

The sun shines in South Florida but it’s hard to feel its warmth. I think about my fears and know that I want nothing more than to be the best, to take everything in my life and push it to the edge of possibility. I want be better than my best, better than what was expected. I want to be for Haley and Kayla what they are for me. Strength. Passion. Aspiration. I want to be a shooting star in a sky full of stagnant constellations, a man of strength and integrity and honor, a leader. A soldier. I want to be a soldier

I try be fearless, to walk through life with my chest out, to walk tall. But I am afraid.

I am sometimes afraid to be me.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

--Marianne Williamson

From Within a Dark Wood...

2007-04-23T14:06:00.000-05:00

“In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”

- Dante, The Divine Comedy

The sun begins to rise over a sleepy Georgia and dark things become green again. The mountain in the distance begins to stretch and yawn as it readies for another day of king like majesty. My fingers bounce from consonant to vowel and back again as I try and bridge the gap between thought and paper.

April has just about come and gone and life in the South has become a reality. Though my journeys to Chicago have been frequent, my soul aches for friendships that have now been reduced to telephone conversations. My life takes twists and turns, as all lives inevitably do, but I’m finding it hard to adjust.

It seems the straight way’s been lost.

My fingers begin to move faster as I give in to the pain. I type furiously, not caring, not slowing, not stopping.

My knees grow weak as news of Baby Mama’s shotgun wedding threatens to dismantle my tenacity. The progress I’ve made over the last few years with two little girls who literally make my sun shine seems to reverse before my eyes. Haley turns angry; challenging my authenticity as a father and in her simple mind, there is no excuse for my absence. She brings tears to my eyes with words born only partly of original thought--the rest being borrowed from her mother. There is nothing I can say though, nothing except I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I hang up the phone and throw it. I scream. I curse. I flex every muscle in my body as I try and regain my composure. My eyes tear up and I force them shut, determined not to cry. This is what I am. This is what I am. This is what I am. A disaster, a wreck, a motherfuckin’ joke of a man. I am a criminal, a drug addict, an alcoholic, a cheat, a liar. I fuck up good things and sweat failure. I take beautiful things and scar them. I abuse. I abuse. I abuse.

I use.

I want to use. I’m sorry. I want to fight. I want to feel knuckle on cheekbone so my ego is no longer the only thing that’s bruised. I want to cry. No. I want to die. No. I want to be somewhere else. To be someone else. I want to be someone else to someone else. I want to be significantly other and a significant other. I want be significant. I want a deep fucking breath of fresh air. A deep fucking breath.

So I take one and stare at my fingers. My knuckles are scarred, holding secrets from the last twenty-nine years. My hands, like me, are calloused and worn, creased from years of making fists.

I slow my mind and continue to breathe deeply. I inhale. I exhale. I think about where I’m at. I think about where I was.

Consider your origin; you were not born to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

-Dante, The Divine Comedy

I consider my origin but I don’t like where I came from. I find myself wondering if I can scream loud enough for heaven to hear me. I find myself staring at the sky clenching my fists and wishing, hoping, praying, for serenity, for guidance, for strength to see this through. I pray, no, I plead for perseverance, for the iron will to take this last round of punches.

I think about all the things that give me strength-all the things I’ve read and heard and picked up over the years and replay them in my head.

“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't how hard you hit; it's about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done. Now, if you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hit, and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you are because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain't you. You're better than that!”

Rocky Balboa, Rocky Balboa

You, me, or nobody is going to hit as hard as life.

I think about that and it rocks me to my core. Life right now is hitting harder than, perhaps, it ever has but I need to keep moving forward.

Regardless, I need to keep moving forward.

Sailors and Soldiers...

2007-04-03T08:42:00.001-05:00

I wake to the sound of the El Train rumbling and pull the shades to stare out the window. The sky is dark, the morning sun still stretching and yawning, and the city seems forever wrapped in a blanket of comforting blackness. Fifteen floors above Rush Street, from the plush luxury of The James Hotel, I look down at the world below and know that it’s good to be home.

I stare out the window and let my mind wander.

The transition of the last month has been harder than I’d hoped and I miss people and places like I miss summer vacation. My dreams have been riddled with cocaine and vodka and for the first time in long while, I think about drinking. I think about white lines and clear bottles and escaping reality. I think about throwing it all away, about tossing up my middle finger with a defiant yell and tipping a bottle until I touch knees to elbows. Because after all this time, after twenty-six months of living a substance free life, I still feel broken. I still feel that I have these immense and imperative character defects that are somehow hindering my ability to be truly happy.

My situation with Haley and Kayla and the broken system that I find myself inevitably trapped in hurts me when no ones looking. I feel used and abused, like I’ve been the emotional punching bag for Baby Mama and only exist to fill her perverse need to hate me. I feel resentful, unbelievably resentful of the fact that I have left everything I know to live in a state that doesn’t offer me southern comfort, rather, an offensive loneliness that makes me doubt my ability to see this through.

For the first time in a long while, I feel unsure.

My hands are shaking and the fists that I’ve used to fight through the first twenty-nine years of my life are bleeding from the knuckles. I’m sick and tired and feeling sick and tired and wishing, with the very fiber of my soul, that I “can accept the things I cannot change.”

But it’s hard for me to do and I find myself wanting to destruct, maybe even destroy. I have this unquenchable thirst for something painful, this salvage and predatory desire to push myself past the point of exhaustion, past the point of reason, and into the realm of impossibility. I can no longer drink away my pain and sniff away my cerebral throbbing and because of this, I sometimes know not what to do. I feel boxed in from living an excessive life, for having an all or nothing mentality and right now, while I try and type myself into a place where I can achieve some sort of understanding, I feel all of that nothing.

I am broken. I am completely broken and hurting and hating and wanting and wishing that this motherfucking storm would pass and the seas would calm.

I’m a soldier, not a sailor.

Pain and Nothing...

2007-03-27T08:04:00.000-05:00

Even in the South, the world spins as it always has, changing seasons, days, and fashion trends with each one of its slow revolutions. Georgia is still foreign though, losing me in its winding roads and towering oak trees. The glistening sun shines endlessly, a welcome retreat from the shivering cold Chicago winter, but for reasons I cannot pinpoint, it’s hard to stop shaking.

I drive and think, my head nodding slowly to the sounds of neo soul. Musiq Soulchild sings through the Bose and my mind takes me back to a time of when I know I loved a girl. I think about her sometimes, sometimes more than I’d like, wishing I could recapture the feeling I had the first time that I saw her. I think of the first time I kissed her, the way her lips felt when I touched them, and the dampness of my shirt the first time she cried on my shoulder. I remember how broken I was, how fucked up I felt for leaving my daughter. I remember how scared I was to love her, how scared I was to let myself get lost in a feeling.

And I remember the day she left.

I remember the sound of the car as it drove away filled with boxes and memories and things that defined “us.” I remember the salty taste of my tears as I sat on the kitchen floor and cried. The fantasy I had been living was over. The time in between our first kiss and our last had finally grown sour and I was empty and lonely and tired.

So I drank.

For all the reasons that one drinks, I drank. To remember and forgot and feel and not feel and numb and cover and deal with the ocean of sadness I was treading water in. I drank because anything, even a fabricated existence, was better than feeling that sting. I would look in the mirror and see the Grand Canyon. I would go sleep at night to wake up in the morning but everyday, every motherfucking day, I prayed that my life would end. The realization of my failures had caused my heart to dissolve.

I drive and remember and it still stings, though not quite as bad. Times have changed, my lifestyle has too, but my pain, the bits and pieces of what’s left, defines me. I will never forget her or that time in my life when she made my heart beat. Because life is a give and take, sometimes I give, and sometimes I take.

“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”

-William Faulkner

Gone...

2007-03-27T05:42:00.000-05:00

Evening settles in and my thoughts turn to her. I think of her more often than not and sometimes the guilt that I feel erodes my resolve. She causes tears to swell from the depths of my tortured soul as I think of missed birthdays, bike rides and ballet recitals. She encompasses all of my successes and failures as a man and a father and with the batting of an eye, causes my heart to bleed rivers. She is the answer to, and reason why, I am who I am. She gives me strength at times and weakens me at others, but until I saw her, I knew not what love was.

I fall asleep at night under the cosmic expanse of the heavens and I miss her with each cell in my being. Renegade tears escape from their optical prison and soon the pillow that holds my head is damp with parental infidelity. I wrap myself in the memory of her laughter trying to warm my frostbitten core. I tell myself that it will all get better, that the dysfunctional epidemic that I have afflicted myself with will all end someday with a father/daughter dance and a butterfly kiss. But my lies are white and the blackness of night makes them hard to believe. She is miles away and I feel the distance. I feel the distance. I feel the distance like the shores of the soundless sea feels hurricanes. I feel the distance like a piano feels a note played in err because my soundtrack is so, so wrong.

I think about her smile and how it has the ability to change seasons. I think about her hand in mine and wonder when I will feel it again. I wonder when I will feel it again.

Complicated...

2007-02-13T07:52:00.000-06:00

Day has long since turned to night and the wild blue yonder is dark. City lights flicker in the distance, a sparkle of hope to prove that the world is still there, and I fly east through the darkness, to a home I already miss.

My tears have left me though, replaced instead with a static melancholy that proves to me over and over, that this is, indeed, real. My days in the Windy City are numbered and soon, two weeks before I turn twenty-nine, this Midwest cowboy will saddle up and ride south. I will say goodbye to a city and a lake and a tower and stiffen up my upper lip while trying to deny my emotion, and turn my back on Chicago.

And part of me is angry. Or maybe not angry, maybe just frustrated. Frustrated that I will again go through a life changing event, a turning point, a defining occurrence, unaccompanied and alone. I’m frustrated to walk all the way out of my comfort zone with nothing but my bare knuckles to protect me. And maybe, when I think of my life without its most integral components, when I think about not seeing the sun part through the skyscrapers in the morning, I find that maybe, just maybe, I’m scared.

I’ve done things in my life that were scary, or unbelievably hard, and I’ve done things when I’ve been terrified. I possess the ability to push through my fear, to accept it, to use it as a stepping stone towards success but it doesn’t make the anticipation of the unknown any easier. What it does, though, what it does is make me miss things. And people. And times and places and moments. It makes me long for romance and passionate kisses and ex girlfriends and times in life when having a pair of familiar eyes to look into solves all of it’s problems…if only for a moment.

Robin Thicke performs inside my head, his voice giving life to words I could have written myself. “I wish I could lose, all of my blues, I wish I could stop putting my blues on you, I wish I could love, like nobody loves, I wish that my goods outweigh my bads enough…but I’m too complicated.”

I’m too complicated.

Because even though the sounds of the El train rock me to sleep under the glow of the city lights, inevitably, before the sun decides to shine the next morning, I find myself in the back of a Towncar heading towards O’Hare. I watch the city below me grow smaller with each vertical foot and I’m left with feelings of, “I wish I would have…” and “I really should have…” I think back to the days when I first came out of rehab, when the frozen city listened to the sound of my hollow footsteps. I walked the streets alone, thinking, wishing, hoping, hurting and praying that the valleys would pass and the peaks would once again come. I would stare at Lake and stand still while it stared back at me with its bluish hue, looking incomprehensible in infinite vastness.

I once again look towards the future and realize that doing so is futile. I cannot see past what is right in front of me and it’s possible that if I could, I wouldn’t really want to.

“Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others...for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day, I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.” - Albert Einstein

A Tale of Two Cities...

2007-01-29T21:02:00.000-06:00

High above the clouds the Windy City grows smaller in the distance. The snowflakes blew sideways against the plane as it struggled to take off this morning, angrily slapping the frigid metal as it labored down the runway. Old Man Winter had finally shown up.

The cursor blinks at me against the white backdrop of Microsoft’s virtual paper. It waits patiently for me to form sentences from thoughts, to find a way to turn my broken heart to words. But I stare and think and don’t type, cant type, wont type, because each sentence causes the lump in my throat to rise. Each letter brings tears closer to my eyes and I do not want to cry. I cannot afford to cry.

On March 1st I will leave Chicago.

I will leave Chicago. I will leave Chicago. I will leave Chicago. Four times I type it and it still seems so wrong. I live Chicago. I love Chicago. I bleed and breathe and bask in Chicago. I fell to my knees in the shadow of the kingly Chicago skyline and admitted how absolutely marred and broken I was.

I was comfortable in Chicago.

So today, on my two year anniversary of life without vodka, I fly and fight tears as I think about the upcoming change. I will leave the city I love with all my heart and head south, relocating to Atlanta, Georgia to take my career to the next level. I will leave all that I love, all those that I love, and start a new life completely alone.

And it hurts.

It hurts in my soul, in the marrow of my bones where the deepest hurt always resides. I think about my friends, about Rico and Wayne the Painter and Tommy and A and all the people that have made a profound impact on the man that I turned out to be. I think about the Chicago summer and Sundays at the beach. I think about all the days that I spent walking and thinking, working out my life one footstep at a time. I think about the vastness of the Lake Michigan, about the feeling I get when I ride down Lake Shore Drive on my motorcycle, and the day that I went to rehab.

I will do this though, regardless of the pain, and I will do it well. I will not falter. I will walk tall and achieve greatness. I will build a future for Haley and her sister upon a foundation of sacrifice and I will humbly strive for excellence. I will fight through adversity as I always have, dancing, bobbing and weaving as life throws jabs and left hooks. I will do what I have to do like a man, like a father, like a soldier.

Today I type for resolve, for strength, for the confidence to leave all I know pave the road less traveled. Today I type to find closure. But the more I type, the less I know, and the only closure I see is of the door that leads to Chicago.

Because when I was eighteen and I left for the first time, I left because of pain and problems and an eerie premonition. Four years later I returned, a prodigal son of sorts, beaten and broken from pushing the limits far too many times. I returned a tyrant and an unmanageable despot, a pit bull off his leash ready to maul whoever didn’t understand what I had been through. I raged. But as time wore on and I slowly began to heal, I shed my skin and became a new man. I learned discipline and perseverance, acceptance, humility, and honesty. For the first time in my life I was able to embrace my imperfections and flaws as critical parts of what I aspired to be and vowed to heed the words, “To thine own self be true” in all that I did and all that I do.

And I guess that’s what I’m doing. Being true. To myself, to Haley, to Kayla, to my parents, and to my friends. I was given a shot while working at a restaurant five years ago and I took it. This will be no different. I’m a criminal and a drug addict and a high school dropout and an alcoholic and my success is bittersweet. I’m a complete anomaly and not a day goes by that I don’t think about it.

I don’t deserve any of this but I will take it. God has walked with me some of my life, carried me for most of it, and now, I think, he stands back and guides me. I will miss my friends, on nights when the slow Georgia summer keeps me up. I will miss my lake, my city, my concrete jungle but I will not be sad. Pain breed character, character breeds success and success, well, success secures futures. My boy said it best though...

“Here we go it’s my shot, feet fail me not, this may be the only opportunity I got.”
-Eminem

All My Life...

2007-01-17T15:13:00.000-06:00

All my life I wanted to be grown up.

But suddenly one day, I was. And in what seemed to be the blink of an eye, the days I spent staring at the ceiling of a concrete cell in place far away from the streets of Chicago was nothing more than a distant memory and an entertaining story. The hardest times of my life had softened a bit and stormy waters gave way to eerily calm seas. One day I woke up and the nineteen year old would-be father who wore baggy jeans and a pierced eyebrow had turned into a promising young entrepreneur.

All my life I wanted to be grown up.

But suddenly one day, I was. And the sixteen year old child who had lost his virginity to who he thought would be, undoubtedly, the absolute one true love of his life, had found himself older, broken up, and still mystified by the perplexities of love.

All my life I wanted to be grown up.

But suddenly one day, I was. And I found out that life doesn’t have a rule book, that winning is everything and the world, in all its vastness, owes me nothing. I found out that sex is intricate, that I am too, that kissing really is the best part, and romance is more than a literary grouping. I found out that being a father can hurt, that being a daughter sometimes hurts more, and that being a son of a dead beat dad puts it all in righteous perspective.

All my life I wanted to be grown up.

But suddenly one day, I was. And in the time it took me to figure that out, precious moments had slipped away. The voice of my inner had child grown faint and I felt a profound melancholy that shook the very fibers of my being.

All my life I wanted to be grown up.

Today I Pray...

2007-01-12T07:03:00.000-06:00

God, grant me release from the oppression of my ego.

The Eyes of the Blind...

2007-01-11T08:19:00.000-06:00

The window of the Boeing 747 is open and a glimpse outside to the world below reveals the grandeur of the mighty Mississippi. It winds around bends effortlessly, carefully carving the countryside with its opulence before finally disappearing into the reddish glow of the beautiful Midwestern sun. I’m high above the Land of the Free but imprisoned by my thoughts.

The familiar smell of fermented grapes fills the air as the man sitting next to me opens a five dollar bottle of white wine. It’s a cheap remedy for an expensive problem and the smells takes me back to a time, not too long ago, when bad days and financial worries were remedied by alcohol’s soothing hug. My mouth waters, a knee jerk reaction that Pavlov would be proud of, and I can’t help but think that Maui and a Mai Thai would do me just right...even though I know it would do me so wrong.

In eighteen days, God willing, I will celebrate two years of sobriety. In two short years I’ve broken every limitation and boundary and expectation that was set for me and proven that futures can change, that for those of us that choose rebellion as our majors in the school of life, the world is at our fingertips. I’ve proven that old dogs can indeed learn new tricks, that people can change, that ‘fuck you’ is a valid response to anyone who doubts one’s ability to change.

But it hasn’t come easy and I fear that my greatest attribute, my ability to never give up, to never settle, to always take it to the mat, may just be my biggest downfall. I type from the plane today and I am absolutely exhausted. Issues with Baby Mama and Haley dominate my frontal lobe and my search to maintain metaphoric clarity leaves me fruitless. I say the serenity prayer in my head over and over, hoping that serenity will somehow find me, but all I can think of is left hooks and right crosses. I want to fight, to box, to sweat, to go toe to toe with everyone and everything that stands in my way but right now, as twilight turns to night, it becomes clear to me, that I may just want to fight myself. Because nothing is ever enough. There is never enough time or money or counseling sessions or AA meetings to fix my fucked up thinking. The character defects that plagued me for years seem to grow exponentially and I’m in dire need of some antivenin to repress addictions ferocious bite.

The plane banks subtly towards the South and I’m lost in thought.

The days turn to months, the months into years, but never in all the days, months and years have I felt that I know so little. I do less talking and more listening, less rationalizing but more justifying, less intellectualizing but more thinking only to hit my knees at the end of the day in a state of intrinsic confusion.

But maybe that’s okay.

Because sometime between getting on a plane two years ago to go see a guy about a thing and right now, my life has dramatically changed. I’ve become a father in more ways than just definition, and a friend and a writer and a def poet and somehow, while learning the fundamental association of the words humiliation and humble, I’ve become a man.

Helen Keller once said, “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”

It’s ironic, I think, that sometimes even the blind can see.

Next Years Voice...

2007-01-02T06:19:00.000-06:00

“They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them for yourself.”

Andy Warhol made that observation sometime during his tumultuous and controversial life. And if I had to venture a guess as to when he made it, I would have to say that it was sometime during the iconic 1960’s. It was in the sixties that Warhol revolutionized art, ironically, mass producing depictions of mass produced products, minimizing the role of his own creative insight in the production of his work. He wanted to be an enigma, to be misunderstood, to be ambiguous in his aphorisms and observations.

So years later, high above the lush trees of America’s hospitable South, from a high-rise building overlooking the city of Atlanta, I type and reflect, wondering if it’s time or me, that has done the changing. I admire Warhol in a sense, or at least I can empathize with him, and, at times, share his passion to be misunderstood. The ending of one year and the beginning of another has me thinking about where I was, about where I am, and about all the time in between there and here.

2006 was an amazing year, painful at times, but amazing nonetheless. I grew into my sobriety some, finally finding solace in my alcoholism. I came to terms with the fact that I was and, for all practicable purpose, always will be a drunk and a drug addict. I will never drink normally or socially or acceptably and really coming to terms with that fact and consequentially, forgiving myself for it, was one of the major obstacles I faced in the past year.

I look at this blog, at what I’ve written over the past two years, at the bits and pieces of me scattered throughout cyberspace and I’m overcome with emotion. I’ve been angry and sad and hurt and fucked up and embarrassed but all the while, through tears and tantrums and typographical errors, I’ve kept my fingers moving.

And times have changed. Or maybe I changed them.

But whatever the case may be, there is something unbelievably different about me. I think that I understand exactly what Andy Warhol was saying. I think that I’ve begun to change things and I think I’ve begun to do it because time wasn’t doing it fast enough. Time was doing what’s it’s always been meant to do; ticking, moving, creeping, crawling, catapulting me into the future at the rate of sixty minutes an hour. But what it wasn’t doing, what I was able to recognize, was that it wasn’t making me a better father or friend, it wasn’t easing my pain or helping me to recognize what was defective within me. It wasn’t making me successful or more athletic or pushing me to challenge the standards that society set. It was only stealing away precious moments that I could have been spending writing and rewriting my future.

So here I sit, in the final few days of 2006 and I feel the fire within me burning. It burns like it did when I was kid, when I challenged everything and spit in the face of formality. It burns hot and fast, the ambition of a ridah turned corporate thug. It burns from kindling made of long nights in county jails, repercussions of a hazardous youth, bad decisions and cocaine raps. Fuck society and labels and anyone who challenges what I’ve set forth to do. This year will be different. This year time will pass but I will not wait for it to change things. I will do all that I’ve aspired to do and I will do it all with a confident humility.

“New Year's Eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights”

- Hamilton Wright Mabie

“For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice.”

-T.S. Elliot

Confessions of a Prodigal Father...

2006-12-21T06:31:00.000-06:00

The frozen tundra of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains passes below and sadly, I wave goodbye to the West. A weekend filled with movies theatres and roller skating rinks has me smiling as I remember but I’m overwhelmed with sadness as, once again, I say goodbye to my little girl. Father Time continues to try and undo what little progress I’ve made and as I pass through clouds, both literally and figuratively, I fight a losing battle against crocodile tears.

There are no words to express the failure I feel when I stare into the eyes of my soon-to-be nine year old and see the pain that she’s been through. The wall she’s put up against a father that left her hurts me at levels that transcend expressive emotion but I can’t blame her, so I don’t, and I continue to try and be the father I aspire to be.

I begin to shake as I type, tears welling in eyes that have seen their fair share of pain too. In twenty-eight years I’ve found little that’s been able to rock my fearless resolve, but the lingering thought of failure, the thought of not being able to truly be worthy of the forgiveness of my own flesh and blood, has me hunched over clenching my stomach. I’m sick with remorse from living a life that was so wrong for so long and I can’t seem to find the instruction booklet to troubleshoot malfunctioning maturity. I try and type through my pain, laboring through home row with staccato movements and the reasons why I drank become profusely lucid. Because what I feel right now, this feeling of profound barrenness and defeat is almost completely unmanageable. She means more to me that what I thought was humanly possible and I earnestly pray that someday, that someday soon, we dance together under a moonless sky.

I reread what I’ve typed but my soul still hurts and it seems that it’s far from purged. The onset of Christmas has me wearing my heart on my sleeve and the recent failure of what I thought was going to be something good confirms my sentiment; all that I am is all I can be but sometimes, it’s just not enough. I strive for perfection, end up far from it, but never stop reaching for the sky. I live in a world where adjectives and nouns parlay with verbs to help me try and find the right way to express who I am.

I feel with intensity, longing for love and friendship and fairy tale endings.

I do everything I can to not be realistic because being realistic is the most frequently traveled road to mediocrity. I will not be mediocre. I will never stop trying to be a father or saying that I’m sorry or striving to be better today than I was yesterday because I will not, I refuse, to be bound by the status quo. I will realize my dreams and live them because what I’ve come to know is this; today, right now, is all I have.

I only get one shot at this thing called life.

My pain is real and when it comes from my daughter, it makes it so hard to breathe. I love her more than she could ever know and when I fall asleep under whatever sky I happen to find myself under, I can’t help but wish she was there. I still dream of someday being Bonnie and Clyde and raising our middle fingers together. I dream of long days and even longer nights and talking until there is no more to say. But most of all, I dream of the day when she looks at me and tells me its okay, that this indescribable pain that I’ve carried with me since the day that Greyhound Bus took me East while my heart stayed West can finally be laid to rest.

I will fight for that day until the day I die and God help anyone that stands in my way. I will never tire. No matter how many days and how many nights I have to persevere, I will do so and I will not lose faith.

Babygirl, I will not lose faith.

The Fact in Fiction...

2006-12-19T22:46:00.000-06:00

It was winter in Chicago and the cold grasp it had on the city caused me to hug myself in a feeble attempt at warmth. Evening had fallen on top of a lazy Saturday afternoon and the rush of Christmas shoppers filled the banks of a busy Michigan Avenue. The Hancock building commanded respect from all those who ventured to walk by it and WaterTower Place held promises of outrageously priced holiday cheer.

I walked and thought, taking in the city as the smell of gingerbread lattes and candy canes filled my nostrils. People laughed and joked, despite the cold, carrying bags that advertised things like its own size and color. Chicago seemed to have gotten used to shopping without seeing the familiar green stripes of those wonderful Marshall Fields bags. But for people like me, people who miss old Chicago names like Comisky and Fannie Mae, red bags with white stars will just never cut it.

I looked around me and Chicago never felt so real, so absolutely magical. The Windy City held character that was unsurpassed amongst all its peers and although it was dubbed The Second City, tonight it definitely felt like the first. It was one of those nights that only comes around when Christmas knocks on Decembers door. It was one of those nights that made you feel like a kid again, like you could tie a towel around your neck and jump from your top bunk and fly straight to Neverland. It was one of those nights where the city was alive and breathing and people could see it. They could feel it. I could feel it.

I had nowhere to go, nowhere to be, no clock to punch and no schedule to keep. I walked the sidewalks of Michigan Avenue for no reason in particular, just passing time and being alive. I glanced at my feet while I walked, watching K Swiss meet sidewalk over and over, then looked up and continued my stroll.

We locked eyes and, in a moment, I knew. It was if time had stopped in the City of Wind and I realized that all the things I had dreamed about and thought about yearned about and heard about were coming true at this very moment. She looked at me and it was as if God had granted me my own personal sunset. From across the street she stole breath and stopped hearts with just one blink of her eye. She did absolutely nothing but stand there but I had never seen absolutely nothing look so absolutely beautiful. I was mesmerized, rocked to the core by a girl I had never even met.

The light turned green and the girl began to walk. Slowly moving her hips in a way that only girls know how to do, she effortlessly and, presumably unknowingly, expanded the distance between us. The butterflies in my stomach exploded as I realized that she was essentially walking away so I returned to my stroll, albeit a little more brisk, keeping pace from across the street.

She was intriguing in the way that black dresses and smoky bars and jazz music are intriguing. She was old school sexy meets new school trendy and with each click of her heel, my fantasy went further. I wanted to know her, to sing the words to her favorite song with her. I wanted to give her flowers and candy and make up stupid little poems about her. I wanted to sleep next to her, to wake up with her, to trace the outline of the small of her back. I wanted to know her middle name and what movies made her cry and the date of her first broken heart.

She stopped to look in a window, carefully pondering something I couldn’t quite see. She tilted her head right, then left, then simply turned and went back to walking.

I wondered if she knew I was watching, if she could feel my love struck gaze. I wondered if I was crazy, if letting myself succumb to the hopeless romantic stuck inside me was at all a good idea. But as I watched her walk, causing God Himself to muster a smile, it became clear that in that moment, within those few small granules of the sands of time, was buried the keys to unlocking romance.

Imagination.

Choices and Change...

2006-12-12T21:12:00.000-06:00

The lazy breeze strolls across the tops of Ft. Lauderdale’s sandy shores, methodically introducing the waves to the beach. The skies cloud over as the heavens begin to softly cry and I breathe in Mother Nature’s perfume to sooth my restless soul.

I’m uneasy tonight, unhappy with the decisions I’ve made throughout the day, wishing I could go back and operate with a little more patience. I seem to revert back to my old self at the most inopportune times, accentuating my deepest character defects in moments of selfish relapse.

I’m frustrated tonight, frustrated and angry and ten seconds away from typing a sentence composed entirely of four letter words. I’m tired of searching and being and looking and not finding and trying to go the extra mile only to end up miles from where I thought I was going to be. I’ve grown wearisome and cynical and somewhat jaded from years of relationships that never seem to be what they appear to be. I’m overloaded with emotional baggage and looking for a place to dump it but tonight, right now, as the rains pick up and the thunder claps, I don’t know where to put it. Always being the one that is leaned on when I could use a little leaning has me ready to touch knees to elbows. I cant be more than what I am right now and although I try on a regular basis to be better, to try harder, to not falter, to be consistent, the deafening scream of my inner child’s tantrum has me wishing I could escape, if only for a moment. Because the difference between me and the rest of the world is that my reality never stops. The temporary moratorium found at the bottom of a bottle of Effen is no longer and option and my pain and my circumstance and my struggle are constant and absolute. I volley my parental dysfunction and my relational inconsistency and my addictive personality back and forth and forth and back until the migraine it has caused has me ready to vomit.

I just want to shut down…to be in the arms of Haley or Kayla or the girl that’s been occupying my thoughts but the closest thing I get to the fulfillment of my wish is the down filled comfort of J.W.’s Mariott’s pillow top bed. And I wonder how long it will last. How long I will feel like this and be like this and think like this and type like this because like this people, like this, is getting real fucking old.

The winds crack the branches of the palm trees below and it’s somehow completely satisfying. I’m tired and angry, tired of being angry, but too tired to be anything else. I want closure and explanation or five fucking minutes for someone to explain what fuck is going on but as I stare out into the endless darkness of the Atlantic Ocean and listen with all my being, I hear nothing. I hear nothing because there is nothing to hear, there is nothing that the ocean, as ancient as it is, can tell me that I don’t already know. After all, there are only two fundamental choices in life. One’s choosing to accept things as they are or one’s choice to change them.

It’s that simple.

The rain let’s up for a few brief moments while I stare up at the sky and ponder what choice I will make…

I just pray that I make the right one…

The Good In Goodbye...

2006-11-29T22:25:00.000-06:00

My plane flies higher and higher into the vast blue expanse that puts the separation into my anxiety but, as I inevitably knew it would, my morale sinks lower and lower. I seem to constantly caught in planes that fly me further and further away from girls that I long to be near and as the “Live Music Capitol of the World” becomes a not too distant memory, I already miss your kiss.

I have memories of memories and the inconsistency of love has me falling hard and fast when perhaps, it should be a little more soft and slow.

It seems that it’s only taken me two days to figure out what I’ve been missing for four years and as I look out the window at the passing clouds, I cant help but think that life is sometimes all too cruel. Because last night, as you drifted off to dreamland and I used the rhythmic beating of your heart to lull myself to sleep, I already knew that I’d miss you. I already knew that I’d be hunting and pecking from a plane at 37,000 feet for the right words to capture the attention of someone who’s so vividly captured mine. I sort through my mental thesaurus in hopes of coming up with an adjective to describe how I feel when I’m with you, but I fall short for fear of being unoriginal.

Because life and love and laboring through loss didn’t come with an instruction manual. All it came with was a “no refund” clause and a “better luck next time.”

Irony and cynicism at its finest hour.

The plane rocks and sways with an unforgiving bounce, jarring thoughts from the corners of my mind. I type with sincerity, with the tangible passion of a twenty-eight year old love struck Romeo. I find myself laughing softly at the fact that I found a girl who makes me think of Spring at the Four Seasons Hotel and wish I could find an amazing way to tell her she reminds me of Christmas morning.

I never really saw the good in goodbye and wish that riding off into the sunset was actually an option. I want storybook endings to real life scenarios and I want eyes that smile for me when I can’t find the reason.

I watched you get ready this morning, transcending the plane from beautiful to magnificent, and couldn’t help but think that God got pretty close to perfect when he made you. I walked with you, listening, learning, laughing, taking in each and every moment so I could bring it home with me. I ate good food with great people, heard music while making some of my own, and forgot about the rest of the world, if only for a night. I remembered what it was like to look at someone with complete adoration, to be interested in every word that comes out her mouth, and what it’s like to pay attention to details-- like the fact that you don’t drink coffee.

So I continue to look, blinded and hindered by the fact that I don’t do mediocre, that I don’t do half-ass.

If all I had was the time that I spent with you and our lives took us in other directions, I would remember each and every second of it. You put a glimpse of color in my black and white and for those brief seconds that my lips touched yours, you made crazy sane.

I never really saw the good in goodbye.

A Soldiers Confession...

2006-11-14T19:57:00.000-06:00

November continues to make its way towards Thanksgiving, though its Christmas, it seems, that overshadows all else. Holiday cheer can be seen in the store front displays of the historic State Street Marshall Fields and peppermint lattes accompanied by Starbucks Christmas compilations fill the mouths and ears of the Windy City’s preseason shoppers.

The days grow ever shorter as daylight savings time robs us of what little sun we have and as the holidays approach in steady succession, as Rico puts it, “it’s now officially couples weather.”

The adjustment of living alone again has me feeling the holiday blues a little more strongly than I usually would and I can’t seem to shake the feeling that I’m missing out on something. I focus my attention on other things-- work, travel, the gym, trying to become Rico and The One’s legally adopted child, but I find that all it does is distract me for what is never long enough

And it makes me wonder.

It makes me wonder why I spend so much time unconsciously obsessing about something that is so extraordinarily out of my control. Common sense and reason tell me that the words ‘twenty eight and single’ have a nice ring to them but my heart watches ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ and longs for the day that I have a marriage just as comically dysfunctional.

I lost The Italian Job because, as it turns out, ecstasy pills and vodka aren’t the social lubricants I once thought they were. I lost her because my inability to deal with my own shortcomings and failures as a basic human being at the core level caused me to refuse even the most fundamental criticism.

I was a vortex of selfish thinking.

But now that my center isn’t quite as focused around the reflection I see in the mirror each morning, I notice that my quizzically short attention span tends to linger a bit more on the possibility of a partner. I notice women in airports and bars and gyms and three seats in front of me on United flights and I wonder if one of them is the one, if it’s one of them that will fill the void that The Italian Job left three and a half years ago.

I listen to all of the mainstay adages that people with girlfriends offer. Things like, “It will happen when you least expect it,” or “It won’t happen while you’re looking for it” or “everything happens for a reason,” but all it does it force me to nod and smile and say okay while trying to keep my middle finger under control Because what these people fail to remember, what they’ve long since forgotten is this: When you don’t have it, you cant control how bad you want it. I don’t lie in bed at night and intentionally focus on the empty spot beside me but I can’t say that I don’t know it’s there. Not having Haley around to remedy the blues that loneliness brings makes my plight even harder to live with and lately, as the seasons change to make way for a merry Christmas, I realize that I’m a mess.

The holidays for me embody everything that I don’t have. With no girlfriend to impress, no daughter present to spend Christmas morning with, and a group of friends whose lives continue to take them farther and farther away from the city I love, sometimes it’s all I can do to hold back my tears. I keep my chin up and shuffle my feet, bobbing and weaving, trying to stick and move through the tough times but my eyes are starting to swell and I’m running out of breath. Some things are getting undeniably better but the things that matter the most to me, like Haley and my fortitude to not replicate my father, remain painstakingly stagnant. Her mother robs me of what little pride I take in the strides that I’ve made and even though her comments regarding my disappearance from her life should glance off me, their machine gun like repetition have finally pierced my armor.

I honestly don’t know what else I can do.

I don’t want her to thank me or hug me or pat me on the back but for fucks sake, understanding what I’m doing and not interpreting each move I make as a devious scandal with ulterior motives would be a good motherfucking start.

When Haley was two I left and not a day has gone by that I have not vilified myself for it. I continue to say sorry, to her and her sister and her mother, but there is not a single thing in all the universe that I could do to change the choice that I made. And someday, God willing, I will be forgiven. Someday, God willing, Haley will look at me and tell me that it’s okay, that she forgives me and knows that I’ve tried, that I’ve loved her more than the sun is bright, and that everything will be okay.

But until that day, it will hurt me from the inside out.

So when I lie in bed and stare at the concrete ceiling of the condo I call home, I think about Haley and I look next to me for someone to hold on to and no one is there. And for that brief second before I exit my dark reality and enter into a land where everything wrong has been made right, I feel my heart breaking.

Nothing will ever change the fact that I am a soldier and I will continue to march until my legs give way and when that happens, I will continue on my hands and knees. I will ride this motherfucker till the wheels fall off, after all, I promised Haley I would.

But I will always write who am I, I will always pour out all that I am into a twelve point font because it purges my wounded soul.

And without it, I could not be.