90 Days

Well, I haven’t done one of these hyper-personal and rambling blogs in quite some time and while there haven’t been any requests that they begin again, I figure I might as well tap out another. That’s all life is, isn’t it? Doing what you want to do and hoping there’s a point? That’s how I’ve always approached things anyway and I’m happy to confirm that it works about half the time. The other half, however? Well. Let’s not talk about those.

I’m happy to say that my new book has officially been released and is now out in the world. To be frank, this is a far stranger feeling than last year’s effort and I think a great deal of that has to do with the content. See, there was a definite armor attached to the first book in that there’s no way to feel fully exposed artistically when everything about you is cloaked in absurdism and dark humor. This book though? “The Beginning and The End”? Well, that’s a collection of the best short stories I’ve written over the course of my entire life. The cream of the crop. And they’re also stories that have helped me process little pieces of myself that are my own. Personal slivers, I suppose you could say. And while the entire reason I started putting poetry out on the web had to do with the fact that I needed to teach myself to be comfortable with the concept of people potentially learning a great deal about me, this effort felt different. The stories in this new book are in many ways a more real version of myself than even the one that wakes up every morning and goes to work. I don’t know how to explain it other than that. And as such, it’s the most professional version of my earliest stated mission statement of my writings: That I would only ever write what I honestly felt and how I saw the world, in the hope that there would be someone out there who knew in some small way what I’m talking about.

I suppose you could say this book is the literary representation of a man standing on an empty island, throwing messages in bottles out into an endless sea. And I’m proud of it. And I feel quite alright with the idea of so much of myself being out in the world. Life is short and I have more important things to let my anxiety worry about.

Speaking of! 90 days. Three months. That’s the amount of time I have left in the town I grew up in as, at the end of June, I’ll be headed out west to the rain and clouds of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. I’d be lying if the whole prospect wasn’t at least in some way existentially terrifying. Because while I like to think of myself as a super dangerous and daring man of action (sources cannot confirm), it would be quite accurate to say that at the moment I only live 11 minutes from the house I grew up in. Fortunately, that’s 4 minutes farther away from my previous living situation, so I think it’s safe to say that I’m completely and utterly prepared for being a billion miles from everything I’ve ever known. What’s the worst that could happen? I wind up homeless and murdered after a pompous millionaire runs me over with his Cadillac?

Well now I have to worry about that… Damn my imagination.

I am excited though. It just so happens that I’m unable to do much of anything without feeling crippling anxiety about it. I once sat in my car in the parking lot of a grocery store for fifteen minutes before realizing I just didn’t have it in me to walk into a place with people in it, so it’s safe to say that my mind isn’t always my best friend. But this is something I need to do and I know that. I need to push myself a little bit so that I can continue on my way. I don’t think there’s anything coincidental about the fact that I wrote my finest work (the as-of-yet unreleased “The Clear, The Cloud, and The Volcano”) in the aftermath of my month in Europe, or that so many of the visuals in that story were echoes of my time in Portland. Creatively, I need a little shock to my system. I need to experience aspects of life that are foreign to me here and leave behind the parts of my life that will only continue to calcify and slowly drag me down into the dark depths of a person I don’t want to be.

There’s so much good here in this little city I grew up in. But I’m afraid there are just a few too many memories and haunting dreams of how I once thought things might be. I owe myself a new beginning and there’s nothing I love more than dense trees and the smell of fresh rain. So Oregon is calling to me, and I no longer have it in me to deny the simple truth that I belong somewhere else if I’m ever to belong anywhere at all.

I’ll miss the friends I’ve made and the food of my favorite restaurants, I’ll miss driving down every road I know by heart and feeling the comfort that I’ll never get lost, and I’ll miss the constant joy of knowing that a visit to my parents is only ever a drop of a hat away. I’ll miss fight nights. I’ll miss hearing birds and knowing exactly who they are by their song. And I’ll miss living every year in the hope that I’ll be walking outside and suddenly hear the haunting call of a Sandhill Crane migration. There are so many formative things here and, as such, it’s definitely proving to be a bit harder to leave than I thought it would be. I’ve never been any good at goodbyes and I regret to inform you that growing older doesn’t make it any easier. But all we can ever do is ask ourselves to be brave and pursue the path our dreams lay out for us. Life is short… far too short to ignore a call like that.

Every day when I park in my garage, I punch the button as I’m leaving and that door begins to close. And it’s the strangest thing… for the past four years, I’ve walked the exact same way, at the exact same pace, so that I know exactly where I’ll be when that door goes quiet. In three months I won't be able to do that anymore. In three months, I’ll have to ask myself to take a different path and hear new things when step 19 hits. And you know what? After 31 years, I’m ready for that.

Goodbye.

And hello.