It's a Long Road Home

Thoughts on Getting There

In matters of sadness pertaining to the heart and soul, the only way out is through. There are no shortcuts. There are no early Exits or TSA PreCheck lines. There is only the road before you.

Unless you are okay with the death of your dreams.

I turned 54 last week. You look around at 54, no matter who you are, and ask, “How the fuck did I get here?”

I realize that many of my friends and family have let their dreams fall away like the memory of an old lover’s perfume. People settle. They compromise. They let their gym membership lapse and tell themselves Maybe it never mattered that much in the first place…

And with each telling of that story they lose part of the whole they once were. This is how we become different people, by trading the wind beneath our wings for the asphalt of a world we have been sold as real. The real world is hard, ugly, afraid, pregnant at 19, expensive, loud, judgmental and spends its days on its knees giving money a blowjob that never blows. It’s an endless khumbaya of synthetic celebration at the altar of someone else’s soft-centered ideas.

If my life is anything, it is an experiment in rebellion against these weak notions. I may not die with all of my dreams fulfilled, but I will die with all of them held as close to my heart as they were when I was a child.

As I was writing They Who Feed on Shadows, I realized that I was settling. I was abandoning the most difficult part of the story, and in the process, confusing myself and my readers. To tell my family tale I’ve got to go back to the beginning. I grew up in a house with two mothers and two fathers, and each one of the four is like a comic book character. If comic books were based in hospitals, horse barns, wild weed gardens and dark, forgotten living rooms with low lights, yellow paint, Persian rugs and slightly out of tune pianos.

The current era of modern history that I was writing about with Dale Colgrave at my mother’s side will return. Unfortunately, I promise you this. But to get there properly, I’m going to have to go back to the start. The origin story of my universe.

That universe is called The House, The Stone & The Dead Man. Essays and stories will be labeled accordingly. Mixed in will be short stories from other vignettes of the American experience.

The shit thing about giving up on nothing is that you can end up with a cluttered house. So this is a note to say thank you for hanging in there as I organize for a better tomorrow.

JM