Fire By Sea

Don’t really like doing it, y’know. Don’t like to think of myself as a follower. But there comes a point when it has to be done. Just drink it down.

I’m talking about drinking something day in and day out until you start to change from the inside. Maybe it tastes good, or tastes great, or makes you cry about things you want to feel but just can’t because you shut that part up long ago. So you just shut up and drink.

Some people don’t know what they’re drinking. It just has flavor so they do it. Some people have gagged on some bad shit so they don’t drink the same shit as before. Some people don’t drink at all. They swing their heavy burdens like a pendulum, unaware of Kool-Aid, or too numb to taste anything.

My Kool-Aid isn’t sweet, and it’s not always tasty, but I can’t stop drinking it. I’m hooked. And here it is: a heart full of love once usurped but now restored. A tempered mind, not a heavy one. A love for art and love without fear.

Here I am again, in the sandbox, writing. God knows I’ve done my best to avoid doing it because I’m so damn afraid of shit actually doing something with it, like motherfucking enjoying it. Wait stop let’s go in to that fear, unearth it like a fossil, dust ir off and try to be so scared.

My earliest memory of writing.

I don’t really have one. I mean, like every kid I learn to do it in kindergarten and practiced like every kid. I think it was fourth grade, though, where I spent my spare time (jeez was it fifth grade?) writing a story about the characters from the video game Gauntlet. I remember telling my peers that I had “written myself into a corner” as if that was something cool to do. But I remember I was trying to create my own story and that’s the important part.

The fifth grade poem

Mr. Roman wasn’t my teacher, but he was a cool guy. He was next door and we went over there for story time. We had assignments to wrote a poem and I wrote one with the opening lines “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” Not too original, I know, but the rest was pretty decent. Mr. Roman read it aloud to the class and they liked it. He didn’t tell them who wrote it until afterwards. I felt pretty good about that.

So everything I’ve said so far is not out of the ordinary, or even interesting. But keep reading.

Eighth grade, a turning point

Can you imagine an essay on lockers winning a school-wide writing contest? That’s a pretty fucking mundane subject if you ask me. But I won the contest. It was announced over the school-wide intercom in the morning to the whole school. I got a body shock when I heard the news because my life was pretty shitty at the time due to … well that’s another story. Anyway I got called to the office to claim my prize — a $500 U.S. savings bond (or was it $50?). They needed my social security number in order to issue it to me so I called stepmother to give it to me. The bitch was livid. She was pissed that I won something. I got the number though, and the savings bond, but that was confiscated later and I never recovered it.

That shit crushed me, I’m embarrassed to say it crushed me for 25 years. And I’m writing this right now with the intent to cast it away.

So go away, evil memory. You have no power over me. I own my voice and I’m going to use it.

Other wise I’ll just die and I’m not going let that shit happen anytime, like ever.

“Sorry, XXXX, there’s no more pizza left for you. The kids vacuumed it up.”

“So, how do you motivate your child to surf? I can’t seem to get mine out there. My older one resisted, too, but now he’s all into it.”

“I feel kinda bad I brought so much junk food for the kids. Do your kids eat this stuff? Is it okay if they have some?”

“Thanks so much for inviting XXXX over for a sleepover. Now I’m going to go give him a peptalk.”

“Looks like you guys played Monopoly last night. How did that go?”

Whew. Good thing I didn’t follow my initial script.

I am a writer.

That much I know, still know after 25 years of shuttering it. Dammit.

So now what?

Am I a poet? A novelist? An essayist? A blogger? Is blogging legitimate enough to even count?

Novelist seems most practical. It’s not as naked as poet. I can craft character around their story, and weave my philosophy throughout.

But here’s the rub: I have NO idea how or where to begin. A book told me to just start writing, so here I am.

The only idea I have is to describe my ideas in small expository babbles, then build story and metaphor around it.

As far as creating characters, dialog, descriptions of shit, a goddamn narrative…I’m like total WTF.

And, go —

Making friends with people when you’re middle-aged and of good stature and evolving status is tough. But take that and try to make friends with people who are rich and famous. And artists to boot.

For me, it’s complete “let the Universe set the course,” which I don’t mind at all. It feels right and natural, and if things go great then all the better. If things don’t go perfect, then, as perhaps a Muslim would say, “it is the will of Allah.”

Then there is the other way of doing it — practically forcing your way in. Offer to do this and that with the kids, to make camping trips with multiple families, weekly — perhaps ritual — hikes on Fridays after school. “Anything I can do to help?” kind of mentality.

Now I’ll be honest here. I like my Universe method, mostly because it never perturbs my soul. But I wondering if I need to be more aggressive with this. Maybe proactive is a better word. The truth is — the contours of my life have always felt best when everything is in balance.

So The Way to look at this is to think: hey, these are special people and I can’t go about them using such cavalier methods. The Universe dictates, but what if the Universe is giving me signals to step it up a bit?

Anyway, the point of this word barf more about balance than it is about making friends with rich and famous people.

I’ve never experienced a production that forces me to feel the pain of humanity so much as Les Misérables. Hope crushed, love lost, children without the gift of innocence — all brushed with disease, desperation and despair. And death.

For some reason it feels perfectly normal to cry out loud when watching it. You can’t not feel the heartache. I felt it, literally, in my heart — a dull, steady ache for people I’ll never know and would never wish such pain and suffering upon.

Tonight I sat through the film in a theater with my wife and daughter, who brilliantly portrayed Fantine as a high school junior. She (my daughter) took us out to see it and had been patiently waiting as we sorted out our messy lives to make the time to go. The emotion of her watching a musical so dear to her, and to be away from the art that defines her livelihood, was a little Les Mis-ish in itself. She actually ended getting sick in the car with a migraine.

A part that stood out to me was Jean Valjean’s love for Cosette as her father. I feel the same love for both of my daughters, in both similar and different ways. A daughter is the greatest gift a man could ever ask for.

I came, I saw, I loved.

Rough childhood, tough adulthood. Made it.

There’s barely enough time to unlearn.

Fear sucks when love dashes off.

Became who I was all along.

Your music has had a profound influence on my life, so now that I see you practically every day, it’s hard to articulate myself beyond casual talk about the weather. Plus, you weird me out. I can’t put my finger on it but it’s very odd behavior. You have to admit that.

Anyway, I have to get this off my chest: your music. I’m not really sure how I started listening to you, but it happened in 2004-05 when I lived in Alaska. I had just moved there to follow my wife who was homesick. We had three children — the youngest then who’s your son’s classmate now — and we lived in my mother-in-law’s house. It was tough to be there to say the least. Cold, dark, maddening and definitely not Hawaii.

Your music pulled me through. It kindled warmth within my soul and made me feel good inside. It’s the way you emote such an organic, earth-toned, living, thoughtful, emotional presence. And I’m not being cliche by saying that, brah.

You probably don’t care to hear this, but I’m going through some of the songs that really stand out over the years of listening to you:

• B***e — serendipitously, that’s my youngest daughter’s middle name. It’s short, sweet and exotic, just like her.
• S*** P**** —  the oddness of it all makes me slightly uncomfortable about surfing, which is what it’s about…right?
• C************s — My youngest daughter was only 3 days old. I carried her onto the plane as we returned back to the Big Island (she was born at Kapi‘olani). My wife was not on the plane yet. This song played only when I was with her, in its entirety, all the way down the slow-moving aisle traffic. I was alone, holding my ultimate crown jewel, and nothing else mattered in that beautiful moment. And the song fit us in every way.  When my wife returned, the song was pau.
• P*****s — makes me think about my dad, at least when I had some internal, unresolved issues with him. It’s him at his worst and you’re singing a song about him! Felt great to have that to listen to.
• J**T — I got this from archive.org and listened the everything very carefully. There’s a track that reminds me of an old girlfriend I had once, and how young naive and immature she actually was, after stepping on me of course.
• [Soundtrack] — it’s brilliant and my children adore it. There’s one particular sad song that resonates for me the way a sad cello song would cling to a melancholy mood.
• F-*** B**** — my favorite song for a long time. I don’t think it means anything but it’s so alive! I once asked my son on a long drive home to play this song at my funeral.
• T** N*** — it made me cry. I’ve thought the same thing but never had the courage or platform to articulate why those people can report such deeply painful news without as much batting an eyelash.
• M* L***** G*** — I ponder this all the time. How do you raise and nurture someone so pure and beautiful and young, someone wo deeply and inherently attached to you?

I could go on and on — haha — but I’ll stop. I’ll talk to you for real when I actually have something awesome to say. Maybe you’ll be a little more approachable when I actually get to that level (or at least near it).

In the wake of a personal family tragedy, I’m seeking a paradigm shift — to become a positive, loving, productive, creative soul.

I now realize that I’ve shirked these virtues for most of my life due to painful experiences with people from whom I was supposed to learn love but got the opposite instead. Living numb and feeling-less is catching up to me and it’s time to change.

It starts with intent, then education, then mindfulness and practice, of course. I look forward to the future I have ahead of me and my family, and to overcoming and actually letting go of the people and things that I’ve succumbed to for so long. Just numbed out.

There is no other way to live. I’ve been around too many negative, unsuccessful people to know better. It’s as if positive people avoid me because they know.