Thursday, July 19, 2012

What I Did On My Summer Vacation Part 1

The universe is a crafty mother-effer and no matter how many times I think I have my future pegged, my cards dealt, something comes along makes me play 52-pick-up. My whole life, I feel, has been this constant state of motion, never stagnant, never still, like the glacial rapids I used to drink from as a teen.

From the moment first started doubting my place in the world, a precocious and feisty ten-year-old, I started to assume that every person has their doubts and dreams and the universe can only look out for so many people. Why was I special? Why would I be any different than the thousands of people who believe they are special in the world.

Now, I'm not going to regale you with some bullshit about everyone having their path, and "The future belongs to those who believe" crap. Yeah sure, some successful broad somewhere said something that inspired someone to do something but that broad got just as lucky, or worked just as hard as everyone else out there. 

Being a privileged caucasian I can't ignore how lucky I am to live the life I lead. When I say privileged I mean having access to clean water and a roof over my head, in no way do I mean monetarily wealthy or tangibly rich. At the same time though I hustle my ass off for the life I lead, as pauper-esque as it may be. 

Now, no matter how many times I get kicked in the proverbial balls, I find theres always a painful or nauseating lesson to be learned by the nut-punch I've just been dealt. Hard lessons are the way I've lived my life and I've gotten my fair share, from my relatively screwed up family situation, my random and unfortunately hilarious health problems, to my early ejection from childhood idealism and fucked up stories of love and loss. 

The upside to being bashed in the face repeatedly by my fairy-god-bitch is that there always seems to be something amazing and beautifully connected that comes along and takes away all the pain, turns me upside down and forces me to see the silver lining in the world at large. Bitch though she may be, my guardian case worker throws me a lot of bones.

After parting ways with what I now see as a completely insecure, manipulative emotional trainwreck I had to deal with being alone again. I had lost my friends. I had lost my music. I had lost my spark. I had lost myself. I now knew I was capable not only of loving someone, but of being loved, a concept I had never fully grasped in the past. 

Most of my friends had abandoned me, most of my work leads had moved on, most of my happiness had been drained, I had thrown myself into what little work I could find loading gear and running tech errands for a small production company I worked for off and on. Lamenting to my friend Ashton in Michigan how much being in Vancouver feels alien to me and the city I had thought of as home didn't feel like it anymore. The road, we agreed, feels more like home than anything else we'd encountered. 

Luckily a barrage of work hit me in the last few weeks, twenty hour day after twenty hour day hauling and pushing gear. My new roomates never saw me for more than a minute or so here and there. It was great because it kept my mind off some things that had been bothering me recently.

My hostile personality and adventurous spirit had alienated many of what I had considered good friends away from me. My absences on the road and locked in a controlling relationship had allowed other people to fill in my spot in my social circles, and my friends to forget why they had me around in the first place. I stopped getting phone calls for gang vocal sessions with friends who would have normally called me up first. Success in some of my friends lives, as deserved as it was, had pulled them away from me and they were now socializing with a more "elite" group of individuals. The "scene" had struck while I was away and I called "Bullshit" and was suddenly excommunicated.

So when roused from sleep at nine AM one Sunday morning, groggy and sleep deprived as usual, I was eager still to head to work and forget. A brief break in the day then sent me at the very last second to do a load in at a club for a few bands. I arrived uncharacteristically late, sweaty and generally looking like a pile of shit. The universe was kind of being a dick.

Until moments later...

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