Where the Time Went IV (the message)

Make no mistake: you are not alone, you have not been abandoned, you have not been forsaken, you have not been left to die. It's up to you what you want your future to be.

Chris

Until you figure that out, you cannot affect anyone else's in a meaningful and lasting way. You don't even have to love yourself to at least see the future. Your futures. You are old, just like me. Aged beyond your years too early, just like me. Scarred beyond belief, just like me.

Chris

Our responses to it have been diametrically opposed in the now, but I was just like you.

Chris

Pain is inevitable, physical and spiritual, inevitable the same. Pain does not have to color every aspect of your life. It is not the boogieman. See it, know it, embrace it, splow it out, and keep it moving. It will be your acquaintance from then, until now, and on until the day you die.

Chris

We've both learned death seals nothing. The scars don't evaporate. Minds don't change. Facts don't change. History does not adjust for you and your happiness. So find your own. Make your own. At some point, you have to stop looking back and look ahead at what's in front of you instead of where you've been, who you were, and what you did for answers.

Chris

Spoiler alert: the answers aren't there. You already know everything that's happened. You already know your potential. You already know you are misfit amongst the trash of humanity and far too intelligent to pretend without wincing and dying a little more on the inside each time you muffle who you are to wallow and rub shoulders with the lost beyond repaired

Chris

The rut dwellers, the routiners, the folks that are happy with status quo because "at least nothing else can be blamed on me for trying"

try

Don't be afraid.

Chris

It is flat out terrifying. You've had your wake up calls and bells like the thunder on the surface of Jupiter and his storm systems large enough to engulf several Earths. You've heard them and you still shut your blinds and tell yourself it's fine... just a Summer squall... it'll pass... just a few inches of water...

Chris

Wake up darlin'

It's not too late.

Chris

You've got to stop burying yourself alive unless you truly need to die. Not "want", need. Must. Have to. Everybody wants to die at some point in their lives. Some of us, myself included, want to die several times over in a single day and/or kill everyone on the face of the Earth to be alone in life and therefore happy, by any means, and complete in an enforced (and extremely costly) peace.

Chris

What you choose to do will echo for decades through not just your life, but several others. If that does not sway you, before you give up on what you clearly do not know with any certainty whatsoever because YOU'VE LITERALLY NEVER DONE IT OR TRIED WITH ANY MORE TENACITY THAN YOU WOULD GOING TO A DRIVE THROUGH AND FINDING IT CLOSED AND GIVING UP ON EATING FOR AN EVENING give it a chance.

Chris

Give it a chance.

Give it a chance.

Give yourself a chance.

Chris

Has it ever occured to you that maybe, just maybe, this time around, you should give yourself a chance and tell the "I know myself well enough and I'm not going to waste my time" version of you to, for once, give the you that has lived and experienced a real relationship a chance to actually go find herself. You change as time passes. Your old rules of thumb don't apply anymore.

Chris

Your first boy is a man. Your second boy is about to enter Kindergarten (time will fly).

Chris

Why delay any longer to get yourself right? Truly right? You are out of time to pussyfoot and pretend you can make it up as you go. You must grow up. You can still be a big kid, but it's time to bring that child, that inner, fuggit I'll do it tomorrow, fuggit I have enough time for one bump, fuggit I don't care today, fuggit I'll just reschedule, fuggit fuggit fuggit I can do everything and anything I want, you into the bigger and much more important picture of what you want to be.

Chris

Stop putting it off. Stop placing that responsibility on what happens to you. Stop giving that power away. Stop having a reason why things don't happen and start building.

Chris

Start keeping schedules. Start keeping goals. Start planning. Stop reacting and start being active in your own life. You can't afford to drift anymore. You cannot just be in your bubble. That bubble burst a long time ago. You are crowd surfing on an empty infield and the band left four years ago, but they still haven't swept the venue and the stadium shut down right after the show.

Chris

Those aren't people's hands, you've been lying on the ground in weeds six feet tall with now indigenous wildlife occassionally coming by while you hum tunes that haven't graced an ear since the place was littered with ticket stubs way back when. Wake up.

Chris

Time is running out. Take control of your future or don't. Keep convincing yourself you're alone or don't. Continue to tell yourself lullabys of the past or see a future for yourself. Continue to howl at ghosts for wounds that have bled out and scarred over or walk into tomorrow scarred and stronger because you can help someone else get through those horrors in a meaningful and lasting way..... or don't.

Chris

Your future is in your hands.

Chris

The knowledge and the power therein encapsulated in your history can and should be paid forward to your sons. Remember that the next time you tell me I don't love them. Prove to them that you truly love them. Don't prove it to me. Prove it to yourself.

Chris

I have nothing to prove to [][][][][][][] or [][][] (and the crazy thing is I've never even met your eldest son and I know in my heart I have nothing to prove for him to know that I love him - you figure that one out, my pirate queen), but you do. Show them; don't talk about it and weep over it when you're restless and drunk. Show them.

Chris

Don't show me... show them.

Prove it to yourself.

Chris

I love you. I don't just live for me. I live for my little sister, for you, for the people you care about, for your family, for my friends, to bury my father and mother and see them underground, for the people that are fighting similar battles and losing wars, for breathing in nature, for recording history, for music, for things that only I can create because I am YES a unique instance of isness amongst the billions on this overcrowded planet, and yeah sometimes just for me to get high and laugh for a day or two or a month because if I'm going to be stuck on earth and never see space travel I may as well dream about it and make up some fireside sci-fi stories to share because that's fun!

Chris

Live and live well. Die and die alone. Die well and live alone? Good luck. Live well and die alone? That's even worse.

Live well and die well. They don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Stand Up Act 12

Stand Up Act 11

Dysfunctional weather is becoming unbearable.  Life is unbelievably unpredictable at its root.  People are the problem.  You can wake up to a fabulous morning and have a wonderful shower and your pets were so well behaved through the morning hygiene routine they've actually made you a fresh sunny side egg on dry toast with a light coffee and a teaspoon of jam with three crackers and a pinch of parsley from the window box.  You can head down to your car where you inexplicably have more gas than you did the night before when you parked it and your mailbox has five dollars in it because why the hell not.  Your watch is five minutes fast, but you're ten minutes ahead of schedule anyway driving down to the metro station to take the train into town because suburban life is where you're at and the sun is beaming right above and slightly to your right along the drive, but clouds are providing enough shade to turn that eyebrow searing ball into a calendar photograph of light and deeper blues like an angel just mowed the sky and crystals of fresh cut sunshine are filling the nostrils of your eyes.  Your parking space is taken, but there's an entire row of empty spaces right at the metro entrance and you glide on in

and slam your hand in your own door and drop your phone and crack the screen.  The year long train pass you just bought is still at home thirty minutes away tucked in your wallet and the teller at the ticket booth inside the station is occupied outside of the booth talking with a police officer to a homeless man who appears to be shouting about how he has a right to sit in the station if he's bought a ticket if he isn't sleeping so you have to squeeze through the turnstile behind another guy who enjoys it a little too much and keeps standing way too close to you on the platform while you wait for the train to come, glancing at you sideways just long enough for you to feel it every time you glance away and you consider, hand throbbing, to turn back and go home before you realize your car keys are not in your pocket.  Which is about when the guy with the baby strapped to his chest and the double wide stroller sidles up to you just in time for the train to arrive and one of his three little mouths to immediately begin wailing with just too little time for you to try to sidle away and hopefully get a more favorable car, but you've hesitated a little too long, with a single step back, to allow a massive crush of other downtown hats to clog the train's entrance and with standing room only your tie gets stuck in a teenager's lattice of straps covering their high country winter-pacolypse knapsack and a cloud of fast-food hash, bacon, and cheese burps.

Just like that, a perfect day, a perfectly normal day goes straight to hell because life is unpredictable and people are the problem.  People are the problem including yourself.  That's fine.  I can deal with that.  I'm an adult and all of the years of dealing with family members and friends and sometimes enemies and strangers and acquaintances has lead me to a place in life where sharing a bus bench with someone who has the worst body odor I have ever had the pleasure of quaffing actually does not phase me so much as it brings me to a place of curiosity.  Is that odor being generated by dark magic?  Were they hexed in another life or did they run over a gypsy in a night of drunken driving a week before and the gypsy's son is still learning how to cast curses and the best he could manage was a stink hex?  How many days do you have to skip showering to reach an all star level of odor like that?  I've had my streaks, but hot damn that stink is transcendent.  Why are you on a bus right now?  I should've walked.  Why didn't I leave earlier so I could walk?  It's only 6 miles.

I can deal with the unpredictability of life due to people.  It's unavoidable.  If you don't get in your own way, someone else eventually will try to, whether they intend to or not.  What I cannot deal with is dysfunctional weather.  Global warming is completely screwing up my life.  Not, you know, in the sense that I have to move because my beach front shack is slowly being swallowed by the sea or out of season hurricanes have destroyed my high rise condos or winter flooding ate my car, but in the sense that I have no idea what to wear or what the hell to do in what order.  Gardening is a big part of my life.  It keeps me calm.  It keeps me peaceful.  I never have moments while gardening where I want to grab a plant by its collar and strangle it with the fabric of its own shirt until its eyes bulge out of its head and then drag it to an open window and hurl into the busy freeway below and cup an ear for the thud and splash.  I've never had the urge to shout at a plant until my vocal cords rupture and blood fires out of my nose and mouth and paints a wall canvas.  Gardening is a wonderful and peaceful and calming elemental thing.  Sliding my fingers through soil and plucking weeds, and wonderful quiet conversation while the wind whispers and maybe a little rain dots us all while the sun shines and we can laugh and smile at each other, but not with this backwards weather running all over everything.

Is it going to snow?  Who the hell knows.  Is it going to freeze tomorrow?  Who the hell knows.  I love sleeping.  Do I try to fall asleep with the windows open or closed?  Is the air temperature going to feel like the actual temperature or should I account for the wind kicking up to gale force speeds for absolutely no reason at all around 2 A.M. and wake me up in a hot sweat underneath too many blankets and then freeze my skin right through to the muscle as soon as I swing the blankets away to dry my body sized wet spot on my mattress.  Do I shower again at 2 A.M. or do I wait an hour and itch and scratch wind blown dry skin all night because I fell asleep again before remembering to close the windows and pull the blankets up tight?  Sleep has gone right down the tubes because even if the windows are closed and the right number of blankets and under sheets are in place there is still the very very good chance that the thermostat is set to the wrong number because it snowed the previous morning, warmed through the day, and then dropped again in the evening, but did not get cold enough to require the use of hot forced air to remain comfortable and now hot air is blasting all over my face and my lips are drying out like Sponge Bob underneath a heat lamp.  What is going on, planet Earth?

I'm getting old.  I've got back problems, man.  My hip hasn't been right for nearly half a year now.  You would think that I would know when the weather is about to start doing strange things simply by putting a stethoscope to my knee and a tuning fork on my elbow and turning around three times.  I should know when a miniature Nor' Easter is on the way down my street simply from all of the accumulated aches and bumps and "shoulda gone to the doctor, but still can't really afford it"s I've sucked up over the years.  I'm getting old, but I'm not old yet so I'm still learning how to listen to all the tiny little signals that hint at things like walking with a hobble all day because the gummy tissues in my ankle are going to be swollen all day because that's just what they do when it's going to be cold and rainy and there's nothing you can do about it except try to smooth it out into a young man's confident strut or at least hope that's what it looks like when people see me from across the street.  I'm a young old person so I don't have the practice yet and with weather spinning every which way I have no clue how I'm going to feel throughout the day or if I'll need to have the pain killers in my night stand for when I wake up or if I'll need four shots before bed to stay asleep because something bizarre is happening outside my window and stabbing knife edge pain will wake me up at some point during the evening without liquor blanketing my nerve endings.

I may not necessarily need stability from people.  Asking for stability from people is a lot like asking a dog to not bark.  Ever.  It may be able to shut up for a while, maybe most of  a day, maybe even a few days straight, but at some point its going to have that dream where a squirrel falls out of a tree and lands dead in its face and they'll lock eyes for a moment to figure out who will make the first move while John Wu doves rise from the long grass and samurai flick wisteria flower petals tumble through the breeze and it will bark so loud it wakes both of you up from a pleasant mid-afternoon nap.  What I do need is stability from nature.  I need to be able to know that I can hang up a jacket or put away a pair of pants or hang up my boots and blankets without fear of some ridiculous blizz-nado howling through the middle of my street at some unreasonable hour after a fine afternoon at the basketball court and catching pneumonia in my sleep.

"Why are you late for work today?"  Well, I left my windows open to listen to the first crickets of the Spring and a thin layer of frost covered my apartment and all of my joint and back injuries from the last four years flared up at once and when I woke up my face was stuck to my pillow with snot and I couldn't get out of bed for half an hour because of shooting pain throughout my body.  I took a good long bath with some Epsom salts and by then I was about an hour late so when I walked out to my car in a jacket and sweatshirt and gloves and scarf I got about halfway there before I started sweating bullets because it was on its way to a high of 65 so I had to walk back up to my apartment and change into something I wouldn't completely sweat through by the time I got here because I haven't showered in two days because its impossible for me to tell when to shower specifically because I never know if it will be a waste of water because I may sweat out a few gallons in my sleep and my pits still stink despite the bath so I had to make sure I wouldn't smell too bad by the time I arrived, because with my nose stuff up the way it is, I can only assume based on the length of time... "the day's half over, go home!"

Come on, nature!  Get it together.  This trickle down effect of dysfunction breeding dysfunction into my life is a no go.  Figure out what you want to do and let me know so I can get things in order in my own life and at least rely on the fact that it will be hot in Summer, cold in Winter, chilly in fall, and crisp in Spring.  Enough with this spin the wheel of seasons nonsense.  I can't get anything done when I have to keep changing things around to accommodate you.