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I’m living with my girlfriend now. It’s strange. And good. In Lompoc, at her house, an hour north of Santa Barbara. After what seems like an eternity of being alone. It’s fresh and wild and satisfying.
Ironically, my father is in a worse condition. Back in Santa Barbara. He’s doing oral chemo and soon radiation. I’m here when he needs me. I’ll be visiting town two days a week still to walk dogs and see my folks.
It feels a little dreamlike to be moving further away from my parents, after 18 months near them, seeing them until six months ago multiple times every week. Before June, 2021 I hadn’t lived with my parents in almost twenty years. I’d been living in New York City, and before that the Bay Area. I’d been the writer in the big city, the troubled, semi-wild, intense man who chased his dreams and abhorred convention.
And prior to that I’d been the anarchic, self-absorbed alcoholic who’d done things defiantly his own way, meaning always the hard way, the lessor-taken path. Through chaos and destruction, ravenous anger. The man whose parents had thought him dead so many times in the drinking years, just waiting for the call from the police.
But that call never came.
Instead I myself got the call, metaphorically speaking. The call from my father, him saying without saying for really the first time in my life that he needed me. It’d always been me who needed him. So distant we’d always been—separated by vast oceans of generational differences, culture, ethics, an understanding of what love is.
Somehow—thank you sobriety, thank you age, thank you painful life experience—I was able to answer that call. God—or whatever you want to call it—helped me pick up the phone. Or perhaps He just showed me how, or pulled the curtain back exposing the path.
And so here I am. Writing. Walking dogs. Going on runs in Lompoc, surrounded by Highway 246 and green fields and mountains, pink-orange sunsets, a loving woman. We’ve got a dog and three cats. Bonded hearts. Joy. A little bit of emotional struggle.
There’s never been anything easy or obvious to me about being alive, about existing, about being a human being. It’s all a mystery, really. Like feeling your way blindly through a jungle in the pitch black of night. Not in a bad or scary way—though, sometimes, yes, this, too—but more like in a complex, magical, semi-sinister, profound way.
All my life I’ve been groping for answers to Why I’m Here. Who am I? What does any of it mean? What is the point? Why live? Why does anything matter?
This feeling produces a smile on my face. I feel it now, warm and familiar. Life may be a four-letter word, but it’s still brilliant; it’s still the best goddamn thing around.
My current mantra is: Be in the moment. Exist NOW. The past is long gone; tomorrow is uncharted. What brings me joy in this precise moment is knowing that, despite my demons (we all have them), I am forging ahead; I am facing What Is each day I awaken and act with free will. Man stares into the abyss and the abyss stares back. We all die. This makes life precious. And precarious. There is a steep Cliff we all move towards.
It’s up to the artists to not avoid but to face that cliff, all the way through.
To leap, even. Isn’t that the point of creation?
Just seeing this, Michael, so moving. 💞