***

“Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your — your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action. As long as you gotta sit-down philosophy, you’ll have a sit-down thought pattern, and as long as you think that old sit-down thought you’ll be in some kind of sit-down action. They’ll have you sitting in everywhere. It’s not so good to refer to what you’re going to do as a “sit-in.” That right there castrates you. Right there it brings you down. What — What goes with it? What — Think of the image of a someone sitting. An old woman can sit. An old man can sit. A chump can sit. A coward can sit. Anything can sit. Well you and I been sitting long enough, and it’s time today for us to start doing some standing, and some fighting to back that up.”

– Malcolm X

Introduction: Youth
My friend Rob and I were traveling south on 6^th Avenue,  briskly moving away from our workplace, coffee in hand. The conversation had broadened from the menial workplace topics to the greater arc of our lives up until then. It had been quite a journey to where I was. Physically I had come full circle. Mentally I had traveled far away from where I started. The present leg of my life journey really started in the year 2002, but my youth defined the terms of my imprisonment until then. This roundabout route took me from New Jersey and eventually back to the city of New York (close enough to home, but with actual jobs). My journey was repeatedly marked with people telling me that I didn’t seem like I was from New Jersey.

Some people just don’t understand New Jersey in the geographical, or the metaphysical sense.

Being tightly wound is what the East Coast is all about, most especially my chosen stomping grounds of New York City and the state of New Jersey. Being tightly wound usually leads to outpourings of culture. Lethargic chilled-out stoners have rarely made interesting music, movies or literature. It’s the paranoid, high-strung drug addled-manifestos that have bent minds and inspired adrenaline rushes of fantasy. The tortured minds, if you will, have something to say. The contented go home and bathe their dogs and/or children.

For my money, I’ll take pissed-off political Ice Cube over family-oriented movie making Ice-Cube any day of the week. I would never disrespect the canon of O’Shea Jackson’s work, or the fact that he’s gotten to a place of comfort in his life that allows him to back off the gas for a bit and make things of greater entertainment value. It’s just that his family moves don’t make me want to rip the chair out from under me and throw it out the window like “When Will They Shoot’. Cube was a lot more tightly wound back in the day, and in my mind, far more culturally relevant. Laid back celebs in Bentleys may get all the attention, but they rarely make a difference.

There’s no place more ill-fitting for a tightly-wound malcontent than a New Jersey high school classroom. You can’t really go anywhere, can you? Unless you mean psychedelically, but even that I didn’t excurse on until my college years.

There’s a lot of unknowns, when a person is sitting in a Triginometry classroom, staring at posters of beautiful islands and wondering where they were in actual existence. The blue brick walls of the classroom were, in fact, as prison-like as the mentality of a lot of people in high school, inclusive of teachers and administrators. The perspective of administrators is adverse to the perspective of the malcontent – they are average people trying to pay their mortgages and raise their children. No matter how bullshit the administrative procedures, they’re generally not trying to fuck it up. The malcontent on the other hand, could care less, and would like to actively fuck that shit up for twenty three hours of the day and pass out in the gutter for the remaining sixty minutes.

On Friday nights, we’d stand outside in abandoned cul-de-sacs, the backbone of an expanding suburbia. At that point, there are no revolutionary ideas, because every idea seems revolutionary when lacking the depth of thought. You’d get a skewed perception of the world, the streets bathed in a the strange yellow of the towering street lamps and the fluorescence of a Seven Eleven interior at the end of the night reminds you that you can’t outrun the boredom, you can just run until your mind is so tired that it collapses on itself.

If the representation of teenage life in suburban New Jersey was a landscape portrait, it would be flat, with dulled colors, an overcast horizon and a lonesome farmhouse far off and to the left. If there was a glimmer of something different from my limited perspective, it was most definitely outside the frame, so much that you would have to take the painting and smash that frame to pieces so you could unfold the expanse of the canvas and actually see all there was to look at. Its part the place and part the mind that make the difference.

One refuge was the anger of modern music. I don’t know why I was angry but anger felt like something, where boredom felt like nothing at all, except maybe dying. The only problem with the misappropriation of any emotion is that you begin to apply it to the most irrational of situations. You don’t like me Cindy Hawkins? FUCK YOU!!!! I AM GOING TO DEDICATE THIS TOOL SONG TO YOU! I WILL TOTALLY NEVER TALK TO YOU AGAIN!!!

When you’re so pissed off about that sort of thing and you’ve become accustomed to being angsty, you tend to miss the good things that come your way, because love doesn’t feel good it FEELS LIKE ANGER!!!! ARRRGGHGHGHGGH!!!!!!

The only other honest refuge for me over the next few years would be a few good friends from school, but also a handful of older kids from my neighborhood who saw some good in me despite my tendency for self-pity and overall teenaged stupidity. For some reason, a group of three or four, inclusive of my older brother, would see me through those years and well into college with a lot of good times, and it was really the first experiences where, for whatever reason, I had some degree of unconventional acceptance, which may be the plight of the teenager in itself. Sitting in the back of a neighbor’s truck listening to Stone Temple Pilots for the first time and tearing down the strip of LBI with these people, the comfort and the freedom and fun were just all too much for any kid to deny. You could taste that ocean air and see the lights of Fantasy Island against the warm summer night, while not caring about a damn thing.

So at some point you’ll lie on your back at the beach and count the stars, and the immenseness of those moments are difficult to calculate with words and convey to a reader, even if that night sky could swoop down and swallow you whole, you might swim in it or maybe realize that no amount of psychedelics or greed or writing could ever replicate what you are feeling right there. But you’re probably not thinking that at all. You’re probably just stoked out of your fucking mind. The grains of sand will trail you on your way back to the house, your bare feet slapping on the pavement with a spare piece of gravel piercing the bottom of your feet every now and again. And you’ll probably go to sleep feeling like heaven or maybe like the waves that swept you up all day swimming in the ocean.

There was just no chance of me ever being a normal kid. I wanted to become one, in fact I thought I was a failure for a long time, trying to step into a shoe that didn’t fit. This exacerbated teenage angst into anger, as everyone else seemed to outgrow that shit and settle comfortably into the situations and areas that were hand-tailored for a white boy of my upbringing and social standing. God was having none of that shit for yours truly.

You’re checking your watches on the platform. Floating down Houston in your high end cold weather running pants. Making that dodgy left onto Broadway.

Right? Like it barely even happened. Keep going. You’re bringing tears to my eyes folks. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep – oh yeah that’s back too.

Good to see you Manhattan.

Maine is not for me. Not for a solo surfer on a mission to replicate a place and time that was definitely not this particular place and time. Circumstances had changed. Obviously the location had changed. What had started was an inspired journey into the unknown turned into a trip into the tedium of lonliness.

Six months earlier, I had broken up with someone, I had been living with them. I had not really been alone for a long time. I went to Puerto Rico and experienced being alone. It was great. The weather was warm. The rum was… fresh? The waves, though not giant and prodigous, were available.

That was the only thing that Maine had in common with Puerto Rico – the waves. Otherwise, the weather was cold, and there wasn’t anything to do past 8 o’clock in the evening. This was not my kind of town. I had received quizzical looks when informing others of the idea of hitting that coast. Lord knows I had made a mistake. A grave miscalculation. Trying to insert the past into the present. Never again. God dammit.

I was not a couple, a lover or a fiftysomething. I was adrift on an idea that never really came to fruition the way I had hoped. I did my best not to kill myself on the rocky coast, and eagerly sped home to New York City after a scant three days. Some places are best enjoyed in the company of others.

The only sentence that could possibly make its way through the clouds : “somebody get me out of here”

Call it a moral imperative. Ask anyone on a dating site and they will tell you they “love to travel” No shit.

The predisposition to wander isn’t new or unique to anyone. Now we have to decide how tightly we are to be tethered to the world we left behind.

Our mobile devices alluring in their appearance and functionality (fun little aside: “mobile” is a misnomer since most usage takes place in the home). Slick to handle, near impossible to put down.

Even on the road, we are accessible. Conversations are neither dropped nor forgotten. Our availability is more a personal than technical decision. Decry it if you will, but if someone is incessantly texting on a camping trip, maybe they don’t get invited back. Just saying.

There are degrees to how people get away now. A lot of times I want to leave a place, but do I ever want to leave my friends? Never. Family, rarely – and only because they are that much closer than said friends. I don’t want to lose the thread of our lives, and now satiating the urge to get away and see different shit means a lesser degree of disconnection. As long as I remember the charger.

A lot of people hate this aspect of modern life but I love it. Probably my need for constant engagement, attention and sense of freedom. All hail the iPhone and the resulting device revolution.

It was one of those moments, where frustration and bewilderment give way to humor.

It is hard at times to arrive at the comfort of knowing one another. It takes effort, risk, and sometimes ignorance of the past. As we get older, experience informs us. We are more careful. We add complexity. We are human, it is common to assume we have a legitimate chance at controlling the outcome. Relinquishing control and taking the ride requires… well, courage. Allowing the ride to precede without you requires selflessness. It is hard to watch things go away and do nothing.

Ah, my point. What is my fucking point?

Some things really are quite simple, however, no matter how much we fuss or try to affect them. Loving something or someone is a natural human behavior. It is innate. What it requires is simplicity. Simplicity to get there, at least. Simplicity to appreciate it. And simplicity to simply love it for what it is.

Right?

That suddenly made sense to me, and I became hopeful again. I have missed my old friend.

It does. Don’t argue with me. Because kids care. Twentysomething is too close to adolescence. The hormones are still fading, yet still in effect. Fashion matters. Music matters. Style matters. Opinions matter. Relationships are a wild ride whose every twist and turn, no matter how minute, is story for the world to see. That is why the twentysomethings are the tastemakers of the era. They are caring. Constantly. And that is coupled with the opinion that the rest of us should be caring at about the same level, if not higher.

I get older, I give less of a shit. What’s happening to me? Am I just getting turned off? Some things still matter. Just not everything. I have to seek out my thrills nowadays.

The older I get, I want the surf and I want the road. Events and happenings are for people who lend more weight to other people’s opinions than is necessary. Right? I’m not even too sure on that one. All I know is, I’m making it without having to see and be seen. And then people I’m seeing doing amazing shit aren’t blowing it off for a cocktail party.

Pending that last sentence, maybe I am still the same jerk I was ten years ago. Cheers.

Once again, waiting on a friend gives a body time to think about things. Scribbling furiously in a notepad, somethings the thoughts come too quickly, the revelations even. In the light of the next day, they might make the heart go backwards in revulsion. That night, at that pub, they seem to be the exact answer to all the problems that have been tied around both head and heart for the past few days. Freedom is the only magnet nowadays.

He shows up, lady friend in tow. Old times are exchanged. New offers are tabled. The past month has been crazy, things have been slowly making sense but I’m still edgy. Not quite one hundred. Getting there, but call the facts the facts and at least do the favor of offloading the denial. It’s the least anyone can do for themselves.

The Oatmeal Stout in hand is the same one we drank on a road trip down to Florida. First time I ever surfed Floridan waves. Or rather, paddled aimlessly around in and into. A huge distance has taken place since then, about a decade – an almost friendship shattering spat, eventually reconnecting on an aimless walk through Manhattan, his departure to the West Coast. Fortunate enough to both sit down and have a friendship to show for it.

His lady tires eventually, God bless her for even listening to us drone on for the better part of an hour or so. He bids me farewell, and prompts me to seriously consider the offer to come out West and ride Mount Rainier. I am just as serious about taking him up on it. Staying open to the influence of others can be a bitch sometimes, but it doesn’t really cost you much in the long run. If anything, the experience puts you ahead of anyone that seeks the comfort of their own control. I got bitched at once for “trying to control everything”, and I’ll be damned if the lady didn’t have a point. Funny that oftentimes people aren’t around to see the effect of their own words.

Even in small ways, other people teach you things about yourself. Sometimes it’s hard to find those truths in the mess of everyday reality. Sometimes pulling out the lessons requires sifting through a shitpile of confusion and emotion. That’s what sitting at the bar can be.

People move fast. We make snap decisions and sort the aftermath. At least I have. Maybe it’s a delusion that I can accelerate my personal growth by going at life with speed and vigor. It’s likely up to someone else to decide. Somewhere in the heap of quick decisions, I made a wrong turn. For myself and other parties involved. Only time will tell me exactly what it is and where it went wrong. Time and a shitload of reading. One day I’ll be sitting there and the exact right line will hit me. This is why it pays to be well read – personal experiences and analysis can be way too slow, and we benefit the thoughts of those who have previously been at such a crossroads.

Tip the glass, it’s time to go. More on this later.

Luckily, Moose stepped in. By the time he turned around, Moose was shoving the other gentleman backwards while the shovee littered the air with anything profane that came to mind.

Moose led him to a back room. He supposed that someone wanted to know what he did to make him run so fast down that street. Either that, or already knew what he did and wanted an explanation or some form of retribution.

He was hoping it wasn’t retribution.

Moose led him over to a tiny desk chair and gave him a very small but powerful shove. He took it as an indicator that he should sit his ass down and wait for further instructions.

“Mind if I smoke?” he directed the question at Moose, but didn’t bother to wait for an answer. He tapped the soft pack, and one of the family poked it’s head out it. He nipped it with his mouth and felt in his pocket for a lighter.

Moose grunted at him and produced a sterling Zippo.

“Thanks,” he said, and lit up the cigarette. He handed it back to Moose warily, but Moose could barely be bothered to look his way any longer.

They sat in silence for a bit, then he heard a voice calling Moose from somewhere far way. Moose’s head jerked up and him started lumbering towards it. He stopped suddenly and turned.

“Don’t go anywhere. I don’t feel like running again.”

He nodded and Moose continued his trek across the large room, and was eventually swallowed by the other side

After a few minutes he came back.

“Your presence,” he said. And that was it. Suddenly his breath had taken on a hint of bourbon, but neither of them mentioned it. Moose grabbed him by the arm and led him away and across to the darkness.