Lies My Parents Told Me
It's cold in the far end of the trailer I sleep in. There's a silence in the poorly insulated metal shell that barely qualifies as "silence". It's a quiet placed on you, the presence of the wood panel siding, laminate countertops, and MDF cabinetry placing their signature on the absence of sound. It's a silence that announces every sound right before it happens, and ushers it off stage as quickly as it can. Every creak of my bed as I come to, every mild sniff of cold, stale air, and every protest the structure cries out for my dwelling inside it- each sound builds a silhouette around the loneliness I feel here, and builds a more detailed mental image of the emptiness of this home.
It's lonely, being broken. A lot of people misuse that word to describe themselves. Emotionally stunted teens in their confusion consider themselves broken because they don't know how to temper their impulses enough to stop harvesting consequences they dislike. Men who lack the mental capacity to mature, women who can't find themselves outside of trauma they've endured. They use that word like it's a battle scar, something to make them more interesting. They think being broken is something that sets them apart in a way that will still help them get what they want. That's the difference, though, isn't it?
Words have meaning, though you wouldn't know it by listening to most of the people I hear talking on TV or in the movies. Imagine you have a hammer. In the course of using it, the shaft breaks, and the head goes flying behind you. "Well.", you might say. "I guess it's broken." Broken. What makes it broken? That's simple- it can't be used for what it was meant for any more. It doesn't cease to exist. It isn't a more distinguished hammer by being in pieces. Lady hammers aren't going to flock to how unavailable it is...but. Well. You get the idea. Shitty metaphor, point stands.
I pour the coffee I made while waxing philosophical over semantics and make my way to my battered, off-white, floral patterned hand-me-down couch. I sit there, somewhat blank in my thermals, alternating from coffee to newly lit cigarette. I look down at all the stains on this couch. I don't know where most of them came from, if they were from me or my aunt before me. The couch looks kinda ratty, but it's functional. It can weather the stains we've unknowingly thrown at it and still soldier on keeping my ass a couple feet away from the light brown carpet I'm rubbing beneath my bare feet. That's what all those people are. They're stained. Not broken.
It's cold in here, and we're midway through May. This is the South. It shouldn't be hitting freezing temperatures at night this time of year. I can't afford to keep the heat on most of the time through the Winter, to hell with having to keep it on through Spring too. The coffee helps warm me up, and helps get my brain back online. I need to focus. My philosophy days are past. I'm no academic anymore. I'm a broken man with very real bills to pay. I'll start with groceries, I guess.
This store is nice. It's a little dirty, the lights are a little dim, and it's usually fairly empty, but those are all the reasons I love it so much. I'm sure the owner wishes it were a little nicer, a little more busy, but it's serving it's purpose. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I see people like me here sometimes. Broken ones. You can see it on them, if you know what you're looking for. Or rather, you can ask yourself a question to reveal them. I walk by them sometimes and ask, "Is that the person their 8 year old self wanted to be? Is it the person their 18 year old self wanted to be?" You can tell. There's some....look. Some aura, I guess, though I don't buy into all of that. You see some people, and they're happy with the path they took. Maybe it was a path hard fought and won, or maybe it was one paved by their wealthy parents, or whatever. Regardless, you can tell when someone is walking on their path.
In the same way, you can tell when you find a lost child in the woods. Hidden somewhere in dirt stains on T-shirts, wrinkled faces, and defeated posture, there's a kid. This is a kid who, like every kid, had hopes and dreams. They wrote papers about who they wanted to be when they grew up. They researched what they would need to do to get there. Then they figured out how much it would cost. Sometimes they forgot about the dream after falling to the charms of some attractive boy or girl and the allure of a 30 second life sentence. There's one path but infinite deviations, and it doesn't matter how or why those kids get lost, just that they do. Of course sometimes they come back. They find the path, or even begin a new one. Often times, though, they end up in the brambles and having to learn how to live there. Scrounging for food, for love, for shelter, with time these kids forget that there ever even was a path. Sometimes those poor kids find each other and, rather than making their way back, they establish little survivor colonies in huddled trailers and broken homes.
These once children, now old men sit squat on the back of their pickups as they saw their fathers and grandfathers do. Generations weighed down by labor and hardship gave way to generations weighed down by the expectations and curses of plenty cultivated by those before. Surveying the Walmart parking lots of their hometowns like sharks out of water, these people never had a chance to imagine their path before their embittered parents kicked the scaffolding out from under them.
I spent so much time when I was in college (a rare thing for people from my town) wondering what exactly the meaning of life was. I wasn't....or I'm not....religious, so that threw out the easy answers. So full of hubris I set out to answer that question for myself. "Surely...", I'd unconsciously thought, "...I'll be the one to figure out what so many before me couldn't." Funny thing is, I did.
The meaning of life is to have a dream, then to build it. That's it. Words have meaning, remember? The meaning of anything is to do what it alone seems to have the unique and exceptional capability of doing. A hammer hammers things. An ice cream scooper scoops ice cream. That's their meaning. And while animals can certainly have actual dreams, humans are alone in vision, planning, and constructing what our minds create. We hear music in our heads and put it out into the world with our hands and voice. Wonders of art and architecture, math and medicine, war and peace are all the dreams of those who constructed. That's what humanity does. It's who we are.
"Everything has a purpose.", my Mom would say to me when I was frustrated or disappointed as a kid. "Everything works out in the end." Those were the words of a broken woman comforting herself, I think. Lies she told me to hear herself say out loud to make them real. It's the lie told by those who either have never brushed with brokenness, or those in denial of their broken state. The maxim of a cracked hammer-head being used as a doorstop.
My path was to be a musician. I was going to sing my songs to crowds of people who needed to hear my words. After that I was going to be a scholar, still bring my words to the people, but from text rather than stages. And then it was no shortage of other incomplete blueprints until I found myself here in my early 50's, pathless and in the brambles without enough time to begin paving again.
See, that's what they don't tell you, your parents and your teachers and your public children's television personalities. They don't tell you that you are breakable, and what will break you is losing your purpose. There's no objective "purpose", to be sure. Your purpose can be raising a family, forging an empire, walking the stars, or becoming the star yourself. It doesn't matter what the purpose is, only that you have it. It can change, it can bend, but it can never leave or you will find yourself cold in some shoddy home, alone, suffocating in the silence of your failure. Drowning in whatever the absence of fanfare is. And at this age, what can I begin to build? Should I marry and have kids now? Should I go back to school? Should I learn some new trade? Begin my career as a musician proper?
Sure. Those are options. I'm not naive. I know people make it work. But those are the exceptions, not the rule. The rule is this hunched over old lady in an oversized tattered grey Fruit of the Loom T-shirt, baggy jeans, and tennis shoes that had to have been discontinued before the beginning of this decade looking through permanently reddened misty eyes at a world who hasn't forgotten her because that would imply that it ever knew she existed to begin with. The rule is this camo-capped bushy haired ginger kid grinning with pure pain and malice as I step by him to get to the self-checkout kiosk who will likely bring more lost children into this world before disappointing them the way his father before him did, if he hasn't already. This fucking town is full of dropped sullen eyes and shoulders that just won't sit up. The next town over is lousy with the half-sawed lumber of young aspiration and haunted by the dull humming sound of despair creeping from the cracked lips of the hopeless with every labored aimless breath. I've seen from the windows of the ivory tower and I know how easy it is to ignore the dirt-covered broken because they blend in with the earth itself from up there. I've seen the purposeful, the raised chins, the accomplished, and I thought I'd be one of them. I thought I'd forge my existence in such a manner as to show my mother and father that something whole could still come from something broken. But the rule is that there is a floor to the fuck-ups and wasted time, some ambiguous inconsistent breaking point where a person can no longer reasonably hope for some exceptional redemption and you might live a decade or two before you even realized you've crossed that threshold.
Or. Maybe I just need to stop thinking so much when I'm out in public. Somehow. I shuffle my way moodily back to my struggling Toyota Corolla, throw the food I could afford into the trunk, and drive silently home, back to the quiet, empty home. "Home". I turn on the TV to ward off some of that silence, trading one evil for another. Crunching boxes of dinners for one into my yellowed freezer door, crumpling bags into the bag-drawer, and feeling a bit jittery but drained, I decide to nap on the couch. Maybe that's the problem today. Maybe I just didn't sleep well. I know I'm feeling a bit dramatic, so maybe that'll comfort the lost child in me. Sitting on my couch, I hear a slight cracking noise as my ass finds it's way a lot closer to the light brown carpet I'm rubbing beneath my newly scraped-up bare hands.
It's lonely, being broken. A lot of people misuse that word to describe themselves. Emotionally stunted teens in their confusion consider themselves broken because they don't know how to temper their impulses enough to stop harvesting consequences they dislike. Men who lack the mental capacity to mature, women who can't find themselves outside of trauma they've endured. They use that word like it's a battle scar, something to make them more interesting. They think being broken is something that sets them apart in a way that will still help them get what they want. That's the difference, though, isn't it?
Words have meaning, though you wouldn't know it by listening to most of the people I hear talking on TV or in the movies. Imagine you have a hammer. In the course of using it, the shaft breaks, and the head goes flying behind you. "Well.", you might say. "I guess it's broken." Broken. What makes it broken? That's simple- it can't be used for what it was meant for any more. It doesn't cease to exist. It isn't a more distinguished hammer by being in pieces. Lady hammers aren't going to flock to how unavailable it is...but. Well. You get the idea. Shitty metaphor, point stands.
I pour the coffee I made while waxing philosophical over semantics and make my way to my battered, off-white, floral patterned hand-me-down couch. I sit there, somewhat blank in my thermals, alternating from coffee to newly lit cigarette. I look down at all the stains on this couch. I don't know where most of them came from, if they were from me or my aunt before me. The couch looks kinda ratty, but it's functional. It can weather the stains we've unknowingly thrown at it and still soldier on keeping my ass a couple feet away from the light brown carpet I'm rubbing beneath my bare feet. That's what all those people are. They're stained. Not broken.
It's cold in here, and we're midway through May. This is the South. It shouldn't be hitting freezing temperatures at night this time of year. I can't afford to keep the heat on most of the time through the Winter, to hell with having to keep it on through Spring too. The coffee helps warm me up, and helps get my brain back online. I need to focus. My philosophy days are past. I'm no academic anymore. I'm a broken man with very real bills to pay. I'll start with groceries, I guess.
This store is nice. It's a little dirty, the lights are a little dim, and it's usually fairly empty, but those are all the reasons I love it so much. I'm sure the owner wishes it were a little nicer, a little more busy, but it's serving it's purpose. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I see people like me here sometimes. Broken ones. You can see it on them, if you know what you're looking for. Or rather, you can ask yourself a question to reveal them. I walk by them sometimes and ask, "Is that the person their 8 year old self wanted to be? Is it the person their 18 year old self wanted to be?" You can tell. There's some....look. Some aura, I guess, though I don't buy into all of that. You see some people, and they're happy with the path they took. Maybe it was a path hard fought and won, or maybe it was one paved by their wealthy parents, or whatever. Regardless, you can tell when someone is walking on their path.
In the same way, you can tell when you find a lost child in the woods. Hidden somewhere in dirt stains on T-shirts, wrinkled faces, and defeated posture, there's a kid. This is a kid who, like every kid, had hopes and dreams. They wrote papers about who they wanted to be when they grew up. They researched what they would need to do to get there. Then they figured out how much it would cost. Sometimes they forgot about the dream after falling to the charms of some attractive boy or girl and the allure of a 30 second life sentence. There's one path but infinite deviations, and it doesn't matter how or why those kids get lost, just that they do. Of course sometimes they come back. They find the path, or even begin a new one. Often times, though, they end up in the brambles and having to learn how to live there. Scrounging for food, for love, for shelter, with time these kids forget that there ever even was a path. Sometimes those poor kids find each other and, rather than making their way back, they establish little survivor colonies in huddled trailers and broken homes.
These once children, now old men sit squat on the back of their pickups as they saw their fathers and grandfathers do. Generations weighed down by labor and hardship gave way to generations weighed down by the expectations and curses of plenty cultivated by those before. Surveying the Walmart parking lots of their hometowns like sharks out of water, these people never had a chance to imagine their path before their embittered parents kicked the scaffolding out from under them.
I spent so much time when I was in college (a rare thing for people from my town) wondering what exactly the meaning of life was. I wasn't....or I'm not....religious, so that threw out the easy answers. So full of hubris I set out to answer that question for myself. "Surely...", I'd unconsciously thought, "...I'll be the one to figure out what so many before me couldn't." Funny thing is, I did.
The meaning of life is to have a dream, then to build it. That's it. Words have meaning, remember? The meaning of anything is to do what it alone seems to have the unique and exceptional capability of doing. A hammer hammers things. An ice cream scooper scoops ice cream. That's their meaning. And while animals can certainly have actual dreams, humans are alone in vision, planning, and constructing what our minds create. We hear music in our heads and put it out into the world with our hands and voice. Wonders of art and architecture, math and medicine, war and peace are all the dreams of those who constructed. That's what humanity does. It's who we are.
"Everything has a purpose.", my Mom would say to me when I was frustrated or disappointed as a kid. "Everything works out in the end." Those were the words of a broken woman comforting herself, I think. Lies she told me to hear herself say out loud to make them real. It's the lie told by those who either have never brushed with brokenness, or those in denial of their broken state. The maxim of a cracked hammer-head being used as a doorstop.
My path was to be a musician. I was going to sing my songs to crowds of people who needed to hear my words. After that I was going to be a scholar, still bring my words to the people, but from text rather than stages. And then it was no shortage of other incomplete blueprints until I found myself here in my early 50's, pathless and in the brambles without enough time to begin paving again.
See, that's what they don't tell you, your parents and your teachers and your public children's television personalities. They don't tell you that you are breakable, and what will break you is losing your purpose. There's no objective "purpose", to be sure. Your purpose can be raising a family, forging an empire, walking the stars, or becoming the star yourself. It doesn't matter what the purpose is, only that you have it. It can change, it can bend, but it can never leave or you will find yourself cold in some shoddy home, alone, suffocating in the silence of your failure. Drowning in whatever the absence of fanfare is. And at this age, what can I begin to build? Should I marry and have kids now? Should I go back to school? Should I learn some new trade? Begin my career as a musician proper?
Sure. Those are options. I'm not naive. I know people make it work. But those are the exceptions, not the rule. The rule is this hunched over old lady in an oversized tattered grey Fruit of the Loom T-shirt, baggy jeans, and tennis shoes that had to have been discontinued before the beginning of this decade looking through permanently reddened misty eyes at a world who hasn't forgotten her because that would imply that it ever knew she existed to begin with. The rule is this camo-capped bushy haired ginger kid grinning with pure pain and malice as I step by him to get to the self-checkout kiosk who will likely bring more lost children into this world before disappointing them the way his father before him did, if he hasn't already. This fucking town is full of dropped sullen eyes and shoulders that just won't sit up. The next town over is lousy with the half-sawed lumber of young aspiration and haunted by the dull humming sound of despair creeping from the cracked lips of the hopeless with every labored aimless breath. I've seen from the windows of the ivory tower and I know how easy it is to ignore the dirt-covered broken because they blend in with the earth itself from up there. I've seen the purposeful, the raised chins, the accomplished, and I thought I'd be one of them. I thought I'd forge my existence in such a manner as to show my mother and father that something whole could still come from something broken. But the rule is that there is a floor to the fuck-ups and wasted time, some ambiguous inconsistent breaking point where a person can no longer reasonably hope for some exceptional redemption and you might live a decade or two before you even realized you've crossed that threshold.
Or. Maybe I just need to stop thinking so much when I'm out in public. Somehow. I shuffle my way moodily back to my struggling Toyota Corolla, throw the food I could afford into the trunk, and drive silently home, back to the quiet, empty home. "Home". I turn on the TV to ward off some of that silence, trading one evil for another. Crunching boxes of dinners for one into my yellowed freezer door, crumpling bags into the bag-drawer, and feeling a bit jittery but drained, I decide to nap on the couch. Maybe that's the problem today. Maybe I just didn't sleep well. I know I'm feeling a bit dramatic, so maybe that'll comfort the lost child in me. Sitting on my couch, I hear a slight cracking noise as my ass finds it's way a lot closer to the light brown carpet I'm rubbing beneath my newly scraped-up bare hands.
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