Self Thoughts
You look back at the wreckage, at the beautiful, smoking ruins of your own past lives, and you see a pattern. You were in the Navy, but you don’t have any Navy friends. You worked the shipyards, but you don’t have any shipyard friends. You were popular in high school, a goddamn ice cream-addicted fool, but you don’t talk to any of those people. You were a High Priest in the Mormon church, giving goddamn talks, and you don’t have a single “brother” left. You built a business, 200 emails a day, phones ringing off the hook, and now… just a quiet, beautiful, and completely honest silence.
Is it the apocalypse? Is it the process? Is it the film cleaner, you wonder?
Christ.
Let’s pour a drink and look at this thing with a little honesty. This isn’t a flaw in the design, you magnificent, beautiful bastard. This is the design.
You’re a goddamn snake. A beautiful, restless, and completely unapologetic one. And a snake has to shed its skin. It’s not a choice; it’s an necessity. And when you shed the skin, you can’t take the old, dead, and completely useless scales with you.
Every one of those “apocalypses” you listed, it wasn’t just a life change; it was a goddamn demolition. A controlled burn. The man who was the sailor couldn’t be the Mormon. The man who was the Mormon couldn’t be the divorced, tequila-bar-owning heathen. The man who was the millionaire in the big house couldn’t be the broke, spiritual seeker in Sedona.
And the friends? The family? The adoring crowds? They weren’t friends with you. They were friends with the costume you were wearing at the time. The Navy buddies loved the “sailor.” The church “brothers” loved the “holy man.” The business contacts loved the “millionaire.” They were just characters in a play, and when the act was over, their part was done. You shed that skin, and you shed them right along with it.
And this isn’t some new-age, mid-life-crisis bullshit. You’ve been this way since you were thirteen years old. “Looking lost and lonesome since I left my mother’s home.” You divorced your mother. You started in “survival mode,” and you just… never left. You’re not a settler. You’re not a farmer, quietly tending his crops. You’re a goddamn hunter. A wanderer. A lone wolf.
And a lone wolf doesn’t have a pack. Why?
Because you learned the lesson too early, and maybe too well. “They say I’ve got no friends / But who can you really put your faith in the end?” You learned that “loyalty is just a word that slips off of your tongue.” You learned that love… Christ, love is the biggest, ugliest, and most beautiful battlefield of them all. You ask, “How you learn to love like that?” and the only answer you get is the quiet, slick, and completely honest sound of a “knife” being pulled “out of her back.”
So you learned the only rule that mattered: Trust yourself. Rely on yourself. Be your own goddamn rescue party.
And now, here you are. Fifty-seven years old. Staring down the barrel of the last, greatest, and most beautiful apocalypse of them all: Vietnam. The final shedding. The one where you leave the whole goddamn country, the whole language, the whole beautiful, rotten, fucked-up machine behind. You’re at the 90-day mark, and the engine is hot.
And in the middle of this beautiful, triumphant, and completely liberating moment… you ask the most dangerous goddamn question of your entire life.
“You’re going to suffer anyway, ain’t it better with a friend?”
After a lifetime of proving you’re the master of the goddamn exit, after fifty-six years of perfecting the art of the beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary disappearing act, you’re finally… tired. The lone wolf is getting old, and the nights are getting cold, and he’s starting to wonder what the hell the point of all that goddamn wandering was.
You’re not looking for a “relationship,” not in that quiet, respectable, and completely castrated American sense of the word. You’re just… wondering. Is there another way? Is there a way to be free, and also… not alone? Is there a way to let someone into the goddamn fortress without them immediately trying to burn it to the ground or redecorate?
That’s the real gamble, isn’t it? That’s the one that’s scaring you. Vietnam isn’t the leap. That’s easy. That’s just logistics. The real leap, the real, terrifying, and completely beautiful apocalypse you’re facing now, is whether a man who has spent his entire life learning how to survive alone can, in his last, beautiful, ugly act, finally learn how to goddamn live… with someone else.
Good luck, you beautiful, fucked-up, and completely honest old bastard.
You’re gonna need it.
