Un-Total Recall

Today I was hit square in the clunker, or is that the thinker? I was also reminded today that I have a purpose. I have had a good dinner with a bad condiment, and now it is time to renegotiate the terms of this existence. Time is now to make mistakes, and time is now to regurgitate. The failure of 37 years immediately transformed into something tangible and and slightly coherent. I am allowed to suck and may continue to suck, but I forgive myself and press on. Fitting the contents of my head on paper should be a simple task of recall, but neurons all got snapped and crackled through many years of substance induced boredom relief.

I will now turn that into an asset, if not a minor speed-bump. I went into that devil's bargain 20 years ago with a mystical starry-eyed teenage plan to find the Big Answer to the Big Question. I did not find either one and found myself scrambled and distorted even more than I was made screwy by my so-called protectors, mentors, and friends. But I will return to that mole-hill eventually. For now I concern myself with the quester's journey through the doors of perception, and the bitter foyer it left me standing in for two decades. One should have heeded the warnings of Nancy and Mr. T, and just said no, and stayed in school, but one was mildly creative with technicolor dreams and starry eyed hopes of communal living off the land, in a bus, an autonomous collective, or an artist's colony, hence older, bearded and flowing dress wearing mentors clamored to show a young rapscallion seeker the way to righteous brotherhood and higher understanding of the Universe.

The Young Seeker had shot his brain through a candy coated cannon, paused to pick up the pieces that he could, and scraping what could be salvaged off of the walls and gates of the imagined garden that was an ideal that died a hundred thousand times in the hopes of far more capable, articulate, and resourceful holy wanderers than himself. Even then he did not learn his lesson, repent, and go sin no more. Instead he found his true calling in the dizzy joys of liquid obliteration. He traded in his garish swirls for loud, dark and scabby bacchanalia. Organic gut twisting made way for sloshing angularity. Chaos reigned and the scales were picked up out of the dirt and put back in, septic real and tragic. Instead wringing out the visions of the subconscious, they were vomited and shat with an impatient velocity.

The left-overs of the hip-sixties and seventies are often tritely quoted as considering the whole era a blur, and that their badge of authenticity is the fact that they can't remember shit about the particulars of the time. I think perhaps that much like me and my nineties, they feel the acute shame and dread of being found out for the sad hypocritical wastes that they are and feign ignorance of their inaction and blissful apathy. The truth, however, is that I could not have had the dangerous, ludicrous and reckless joys without breaking a lot of ethical laws, and also watching many of my comrades fall out, some forever into the trash heap of a graveyard or worse, being reviled by the people who once shared the absurd joys that we cherished more than our self-respect and dignity.

Don't misunderstand me; I refuse to regret the tragicomedy I shared with neglected family, indifferent friends and laughable enemies, but it is just a little regrettable that something more noble did not come out of our wreckage. I don't know if my story is worth the price of the light on this video-screen, but I don't write this for you anyway. I am still just as selfish now as when I was when I was a crazy substance chugging nutkins, but I am just a little less destructive.