the one place i can never go
When I was a teenager, I wanted to be haunted by something, damaged by the
world in a way that would fill me with a sense of world-weary wisdom, a
rehab gravitas, scars on my palms. To get to that point I did a lot of
stupid things. There’s only a couple of these things I actually regret,
mostly because I was too chickenshit to really follow through on any of
them, and in that sense I’m pretty much the same today as I was when I was
eighteen. Everybody else I know took all the blows that I was owed, and
all I have now is the stories of how they fell, and how even now I am
jealous of that loss, that damage, their names only spoken with an
over-the-shoulder glance around the room and then a breathless hush.
People who vanished forever, swallowed up by the legal system or the grave
or the wilderness. People who left scribbled spirals in per-week hotel
rooms with shattered acoustic guitars and little pieces of tin foil.
People who joined convents, or ashrams up in Oregon, or militia groups in
Latin America. All of my old friends have become what I always wanted, and
I have become nothing.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #