Broken Bones Taste Like Broken Bones.

You ever feel like you're on the cusp of evolving, mentally I mean? Like you're about to transition into the next phase of meta-physicality (sic?) only to cringe at the thoughts and uncertainty? Does rock music save your soul, or are you listless in your own body, a ripened carrion ready for the plucking?

I've felt this way consistently, and right now it feels like I need to make a move, or else I'm going to become one of those people who are twenty-seven, and sleeping in their parents house without a job.

I look down inside myself constantly, and wonder what it is about me thats so scared to complete surrender, and just...grow up.

Rites of passages. Are they detrimental in some one's chemical mixture? Without them, are you forever doomed to be a wallflower, melancholic and obtuse?

I've been furiously at work trying to write the best I can. To produce the best quality I know how, and I sit back and look at these short stories. Each, and every one of them are a chronicle of who I am, in some way or the other. Of where I've been, and where I've wanted to go.

And I'm a quarter of the way through, and I look at everything...and I see how naked, and empty I truly am. How wide my world might be, it's empty. I feel like I haven't accomplished anything, and mean so very little to anyone.

When I was younger, all I wanted to do was pursue academia in it's rawest form. To backpack Europe, and study at Oxford. Have a collection of degrees, and the like.

When my family lost our car, and I realized my parents had never made a plan for me to go to college, I realized that I actually am not any different from anyone else. There isn't anything unique here, there isn't anything that you'd want to buy into. I'm less than just like you: I'm the person at the back of the bus reading a book, that you wouldn't have noticed, except he cleared his throat.

You get two sides of the coin growing up. One being that this is America, the Land of Opportunity. Dig your nails in the sand, and eventually you'll find a pearl.

The other side is that it's nearly impractical to believe in that other side of the coin. That chances are, you're gonna wake up balding and forty with three kids, a nag wife and a third lean on your mortgage. The cars on the fritz, little Anthony has an ear infection, and your Boss has been slowly cutting back your hours, all while the price of bread, cheese, milk, fruit and gas has reached the glass ceiling you wanted to crash through when you were 22, full of piss and vinegar.
And you sit there with life passing by you, and with great fervency, you claw and clamor at your receding hairline. "It's time to go to the store" yells that God damned nag wife. You have to sign off an Ellen's school slip that informs you you'll be paying $150 dollar for her to accomplish what she should have done for fucking FREE all year long in school: fucking pass, and pay attention. Danny's in detention at his repository school, because he just has so much anger.

And a part of you is jealous of Danny cause he gets to express it. You sit here in a mental melt-down, screaming silently "If something doesn't break, I'm just gonna go fucking insane."

You can't leave your wife, because for the rest of your life she gets to do what she does now: sit on her ever bubbling, ever fattening-fuck ass while you get called an idiot by a purple faced goon with a Polo tie, for 31,000 a year. You CAN'T fucking leave her, because she would continue to draw alimony, and 35% of your check, because of the (ironically) three tax deductions you popped out, which, if they didn't all have your failing intricacies, you'd be quite fuck certain they weren't anything less than a milk man's child.

You coulda bought rubbers. You coulda tossed down 400 bones, and still had your youth. You coulda, shoulda, woulda, and now you're up shits creek because "it was spur of the moment", or your wife cooed into your ear, "Come on, Daddy. Cum in me. I want to feel you explode."

Who knew thirteen seconds would haunt your ass until the day you die.

At least now you get to have sex with that barren waste land on birthdays, Christmas, and Anniversaries.

So whats the point, I wonder, sometimes. Why do we allow ourselves the mental repudiation of calm-like-a-bomb domesticity? Sometimes I can't even blame Scott Peterson for taking Laci out to the Lake.

Theres a reason why Bob Dylan stands magnanimous amongst us mere mortals. Theres a reason why "On the Road" is like divine deliverance, and Jack Kerouac was the vessel in which this Holy Scripture was imparted unto us.

There's a reason why rock and roll courses through our veins, and theres a reason why theres that one girl you can't ever get out of your head, no matter how many beers you drink, and subsequent girls you fuck JUST TO ESCAPE that lingering doubt, of what could've, should've, and would've been, had there been an ounce of courtesy from a high power.

Eventually you stop caring who comes into power, and you lose touch with everything except whats right in front of you, and whats right in front of you isn't so fucking grand. The will to fights not even a fathomable option, but God damn, that fetal position looks so comforting. Like a revelation womb, without a uterus or fallopian tube anywhere near you.

I'm tired of running around like a chicken with my head cut off, and I'm tired of being scared of taking chances. I pray for determination. Do you pray for salvation, or the strength to get through just another work week.

Nothing scares me more than knowing theres no end in sight. That I'll be old and useless, if I'm lucky, before I can retire. Humans weren't meant for that, and I really think it's about time we changed that.