a distillation of the human experience

I've ignored some Really Important Life Lessons:

1. Embracing your uniqueness at the risk of losing family/friends.
2. One person can make a difference.
3. Inevitable loss of innocence.
4. The necessity of sacrifice.
5. Growth through pain and rebirth.
6. The value of having a dream.
7. The redemptive power of art, beauty, or nature.
8. Resisting bullies.
9. Seeing both sides of the story.

Ignored them because I was more concerned with testing other's willpower and self-control and feeling spiritually dangerous than with going through the process of figuring out if one person can affect history.

So I left town.

I was torn between destiny and true love in a universe parallel to ours where the mysteries of the past were revealed, and a new legacy was born.

There were jobs now and then. Knife thrower's assistant, coffin maker, potato chip inspector, and golf ball diver.

But enough was enough.

Next came my brandy-drinking, Newport-smoking, trench coat and black jeans period where I obsessed over the Mutability of the Universe and engaged in small, bitter games instead of tackling some of the Really Tough Existential Questions like:

1. What, truly, brought me to the brink of blasphemy?...

2. What demons made me so emotionally uncandid, and are they still chasing me?...

3. Was that self-harming emo beauty with the laissez-faire approach to sex really my last chance at love?

Then I got, like, kind of empty.

Became detached and sullen.

Grew my hair below my shoulders.

Slept on a stiff cardboard box and tattered foam covered with thin blankets on a concrete slab under an overpass, subsisting on Mussolini's boyhood diet of vegetable soup and unleavened bread.

I'd wake each morning with the disquieting feeling that I was in constant jeopardy; like one of those no-name dudes in a spaghetti Western. Some felt it was because I was saying goodbye to my innocent personae; while others preferred to reserve judgment until I sobered up from my pipedreams.

The truth is I was a mass of neurotic doubts and it was becoming more difficult for me to maintain a lot of the continuity that came before me, so I did what any red-blooded, passive-aggressive ne'er-do-well would have done under such a fucked-up situation. I got drunk. Every night for six months. So drunk, that one night I apparently stumbled into one of those all-night "houses of worship" and allegedly converted my ass to something. God knows what, but the following morning, after I crawled out of an old, rusty cast iron bathtub, I was told by this weird, rough-looking dude who called himself "The Right Mufti" that I was now a member of the People Who Love People Church and, as he raised a pocket-sized, vinyl-bound book into the air, he shouted, "As the Greatest Book says, 'knock at thy door and ye shall be taken in!'"

That's when thee's door was busted down by a couple of DEA agents brandishing submachine guns, who arrested the "Right Mufti" on charges of the production and distribution of methamphetamines and ephedrines.

This is when I closed thou's door forever on binge drinking and began dedicating my life to working out that tight little problem of learning how to reinvent myself without compromising my newfound moral principles.

And now that I've aged into a damaged, angry, lovable hustler hero, struggling to keep my rage in check and attempting to control my temper and my volatile, unstable impulses so I can face the final initiation into adulthood by sifting through the complexities and sadness of emotional truth, I find that my run-on sentences do the 40-yard dash in 4.38 seconds and I'm not so quick to tumble into bed with profoundly lonely chicks with long hair, tight clothes, fake nails, heaving, well-implanted breasts.

It's funny.

I used to think I was the only one with banal frustrations, the only one shouldering terrifying responsibilities and overwhelmed with disillusionment and doubt, the only one holding onto adolescent sarcasm and tempted by hubris and despair.

But clearly, I'm not.

I'm just another broken butterfly that's been stung by a bee and can no longer float like a butterfly, trying to pull Fred Astaire out of a top hat and settling for a rabbit's foot, and hoping I can at least learn not to ignore the Most Important Life Lesson of all:

10. There is no glory in being another study of so many things disintegrating.