I was released and put on parole shortly thereafter, and my wallet and umbilical cord were returned to me at the gate. I rode, then, through the lights and the snow to the west County house that I was to live in for the first years of my life. It was colonial-themed, perhaps, and had many fluorescent bulbs and cereal boxes and a porch-step out front. I slept there, early, often.
To those who think, the world is funny. To those who feel, the world is sad. I tried both crying and laughing, respectively. I liked laughing better.
My first waking-life car-trip introduced me to adventure, and my first major accident (the two may or may not have been related) introduced me to humility (nonchalance). Both have proven invaluable in the tedious attempts to define myself.
I had a sister in St. Louis, Sarah. St. Louis sister Sarah was a bigger baby than me. Things changed. And so, in search of opposites and job opportunities, we left ying on the doorstep and picked up yang in Jacksonville FL, a dot on the top of the shaft of the state.
In Jacksonville, I played professional football and learned all about dinosaurs. I was a much better walker than my months-old sister, and I could talk and write like GWB. Shit was on high. We took our first real vacation then, too, and I saw that the world was longer than Elkington Road and wider than Washington U.
I moved, thereafter, to Orlando, where the walls are made of stage-set particle board and the sky is made of water and where ten year olds pay adult ticket prices for just about everything. I lived there for most of my life. Elementary school and high school were there, and undoubtedly still are. Friends were there, and undoubtedly still are. We traveled much, as always. In the spirit of non-comprehensiveness and invention (which have twisted like the twin-carts of Dueling Dragons through the story thus far), I will leave detail up to your imagination. I don't have the ambition or brain capacity to recap, and I'd totally throw off your cognitive dissonance with the most of it.
I left for school on my fifty-second birthday, flying into one end of wide Grafton County NH, and busing to the other. I took classes in every department early on in, touching at astronomy and psychology and government and creative writing and classics and history and everything else in the curriculum guidebook. I like government the least, and so I gave into my most masochistic impulses and majored in it. I am trying to add writing as a secondary. College presented many new relationships, and I've made great friends, and I was happy, generally.
I spent time in Spain and the rest of Europe Junior year, and experienced city life for the first time. I've decided to consider the peace corps, or at least living abroad for a time. I'd like to see the world in whole before I'm dead, and Facebook maps puts me at 21%. I live to be a hundred, and keep up this pace of mine, and it should be easy as ice.
I've decided to write, I think, as a profession. I've spent so much time mired in indecision, and I stood in the entry hall with its every door open so long that the draft began blowing some of them shut. I don't want to be tethered down. I want to be able to express myself. I don't want my life's ambition to be a corner office overlooking the park, or a fifty-two room supervilla in the Hamptons. I want not necessarily something more, but something else.
The good life, someone said, is one in which you learn a lot of about something and a little about everything. Writing, I think, will afford me that eventuality. I get to travel, and I have an excuse to keep buying books. Win-fucking-winsome win.
A funeral, my Pop and best friend, my role model and neighbor, brings me back to the west side of St. Louis County. I leave you, and end this post, at a maple desk on plastic wheels in a Courtyard Marriott at Creve Couer, MO, the town whose name means "broken heart." Thanks for reading, living, breathing, and more soon!
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