My so called life

I had planned on this journal entry to be something about holidays.

In a way - it is.

Lately, I have been having a real struggle in my mind over the holiday season. Mostly because holidays seem to act like mile markers in my life. So, it is in this way that holidays make me sometimes melancholy. They make me look at my life and at where I was last year on the same holiday. They make me wonder where I will be next year on the same holiday. Sometimes I feel like I am behind and sometimes I feel a little ahead. But, for the past few weeks I have felt something akin to uneasiness. Like my life has no focus. or maybe like I am focusing on too many things at once leaving everything undone. Like I am forgetting things or letting people down. Like I am letting even myself down. Afraid to make promises for fear that I can't keep them. Afraid of believing promises for fear that someone else won't keep them. Drowning. Struggling. Fluctuating.

Sometimes I struggle and feel a little embarrassed because I am 33 and sometimes have to worry about money and keeping a roof over my head. I feel embarrassed because I don't fully know what I want to be when I grow up. I feel embarrassed because I don't have all the answers. I feel embarrassed that the answers that I come up with aren't so promising that they will ever assure me money or a roof over my head. They seem to be answers that say to me to just live. To live for today. To experience. To quote Kerouac and London until people want to kill me. I wonder if it is okay to live in the today and am a little scared that the answer that I come up with is always " yes." Always.

Tonight I sat in an easy chair talking to a stranger in a small apartment just a stone's throw away from downtown Nashville neon. I sat there watching him smoke pot and play his guitar. I read a bio on Merle Haggard while he sang songs. We took turns singing "We're not the jet set" . We bonded over Iris Dement and The Big Lebowski. It was nice. It was real. It was in the moment. Here is this guy - a classic country, rockabilly rebel with pompadour hair, western shirt and more ink than a tattoo parlor. He's sitting in a tiny little apartment picking out songs and waxing poetic about how great Merle is. He thinks that country music has gone to shit. He does a lot of dates all over the country, town to town - yet he isn't living like a rock star - or even a country music star. I was thinking about them - the country music stars - in their big estate homes and meanwhile he's eating Sonic take-out dinners. He has three snowy channels on his TV. He is unassuming and unapologetic. He was kind to me for no reason. His CD player skips during the good parts making every singer sound like Mel Tillis. He is surrounded by photos of his little girl who lives far away and collected odd furnishings. His CD collection contains more Buck Owens than you can shake a stick at but right there in the middle is the Violent Femmes. He doesn't drink anymore because he gets mean and because he has seen what it can do to people. He apologizes when he curses in front of women. He hangs his Kay guitars on the wall like beautiful religious shrines. He said he dreams of owning a white farm house with a green roof. He is from Macon but says he never wants to go back. He was raised by foster parents. He admitted that he only wants to be accepted. Validated. Loved. He admitted this to a total stranger. I nodded in understanding.

I was in awe of him and what he is doing to follow his dream. He had character. It has been so long since I have met anyone around here with character.

It was good to meet someone in this town like that. I had lost faith. God, had I lost faith.

It was also great to feel like there is something good and pure and honest in struggling.

I came home to an email from a friend. We had been talking about aging and how sometimes we are dumbstruck by how fast our lives are moving. How we feel like we haven't done enough or perhaps we will never get to do enough. Does it matter that we aren't married? that we don't have kids? that we don't know where we are or where we are going? Does it matter that later on, we might regret the things we do today? the things that we don't do today?

He said to me, "Sometimes I watch children and their parents and try and gauge the age of those parents and compare my guess to my age. I imagine scenes, frames of some possible life: a wife with a taut round stomach and a slim neck; a wide-eyed car handle-high wonder sponge in the passenger seat next to me, after-work after-school obligations and TV tray dinners and quiet couch moments after the tucking-in. The result is a sort of double melancholy glow. I'm a little sad that I haven't tasted, felt those scenes, but at the same time the thought of all that leaves me kind of gray. So, yes, I do get anxious about the slippage of time. I wonder where I'll wake up next."

I thought that was absolutely beautiful.

Earlier in the evening , I worried about paying the bills and whether I can love and be loved and if it is okay for my passion to turn on at 5:00 each day causing me to stay up late into the night to create and to learn and explore. I worry about these things a lot. They sit on my shoulders. They sometimes keep me awake at night. They sometimes force me to sleep at night just to dream.....to escape the gnawing of them.

And now, it is fifty six minutes past midnight and I feel like it is okay. It's okay to worry and to have good days and bad days and to be embarrassed when I fail or don't have the answers. It is okay to feel like God is speaking to me through the Rolling Stones as they wail "You can't always get what you want.....and you'll find sometimes....you just might find...you get what you need..." It's okay to hear messages of deliverance in rock songs and to see answers in the melodic twanged swirl of late-night moments. You have your sermon on the mount. I'll have mine.

Because it's my life. Every second that comes and goes. Every breath taken in ecstasy or agony or worry or wonder is my breath. It comes from me. It comes to me. It assures me that I am alive and that I need not wait to start living. The living is now. These are the moments that I will look back on - for better or for worse. These very moments, these tiny little fragments of time and memory and conclusions and inconclusions are going to add up to what I will be.

What I will be when I look back and say, "That was my life."