Out Of The Dust And Into The Fire, Into The Stars

I had plenty of occasion, believe me, to wonder what the hell I was doing with my life. How was is that I found myself living in a garbage scow of an apartment building (crammed with shitheels) that had the nerve to call itself Christ Is Risen Estates? How had I acquired so much confusion?

I, who abhorred complication more than anything, had nonetheless allowed complication and chaos to overrun the quiet, orderly routines that I’d always believed would keep me sane. I was being ruled almost entirely by irrationality, and I could no longer sort out what I wanted or trust my urges. One minute I would believe anything was possible, the next it would all seem utterly impossible.

I more or less forgot how to feed myself, and would go days without eating. I routinely got lost in my own neighborhood, and any attempt to venture out into the city was an unpleasant and unpredictable adventure in disorientation. In the middle of the afternoon on a gorgeous summer day I would find myself looking at revolvers in a gun shop in someplace called Coon Rapids.

I don’t know. My mind was always elsewhere. It always is. Don’t ask me where, specifically, or even generally, it is, but it’s decidedly elsewhere. I’d say I was having a breakdown –that I was, in fact, brokedown– if the whole thing didn’t strike me as such a fascinating adventure, if I wasn’t so keenly aware of the oddness of it all.

Sometimes it almost struck me as magical, as if I’d slipped free of the material world. Some nights I would laugh myself hoarse at the absolute wonder of it all.