Knocking on Heaven's Door

Not sure what was stranger, the fact I overheard Dylan's Knocking on Heaven's Door on the musak at my new temporary home, the Sahara Hotel, or watching this silver haired old man with his wife in one of those sit down scooters and the rest of the family who all seemed quite confused with the new arrangement of closed down public parking structure on the backside entrance of the hotel, shit what did I know, I was not even aware there was any other parking, figured valet was the only way to go, did not get the memo about driving into the parking structure from the front of the hotel. Anyway, this family of four who look to be from humble means were waiting around as the valet driver pulled up in a brand new Chrysler Magnum with 22in rims. total g style kind of ride, not exactly what I was expecting but maybe he just hit his mid-life crises, I began to wonder how they would get the scooter into the trunk of the car, usually people will have a large van or some sort of bicycle like rack to set the scooter on, but this scooter came apart just like a well defined puzzle or mountain bike, the seat came off, the battery was detachable, steering handlebars collapsed, then the father and son lifted the nice flatten down scooter into the trunk and they were on their way, just something I had never seen and in my semi permanent sleep deprived state, the entire event felt very out of the ordinary as the father and son jumped back into the Magnum, dad revved up the engine, then made a quick exit.

Well, today is it, the apex or bottom of the valley depending how one looks at it, as for myself today happens to be nothing more than another night, in another hotel, the sin city orphan without any real place to call home anymore, a damn stranger in my once home town, sent off to an undetermined detention of limbo without a bedroom, a personal address, or customized parking space, but one thing I have learned through this period of transition is how great of a job I did in surrounding myself with family and friends I really never took the time to get to know as people, as human beings, the fact that my individuality and stubborness keep me from being offered help, going through a relationship breakup and feeling really lonely, isolated, and uncomfortable,being somewhere safe, routine, and predictable was something that had been taken for granted, one less thing to stress over in the day, a home to go to, a friend/lover to share the day with, a well designed cocoon to insulate oneself from all the stress and horrors of daily life, which ever direction they might come from, so now those walls, those buffers have been torn down, nothing left to do but take life head on again, can't slack off, no more hiding behind that brick and mortar stone castle, quite a safe vantage point to take down notes as the war waged on in all directions.

I'm not much of a talker, unless I get really twisted on drugs, but then it is tuff to get me to shut up and over the years, most of the time, learned to reel in those fresher, deeper, and more personal words and or emotions, just for the sake that I either get to heavy, outlandish, or hit nerves that some people do not want activated. Henceforth, the blog, besides the blog, I realize just how much I have shut others out, not from spite or anything negative, probably only due to the fact I did not want to expend the energy in establishing an entire network of relationships, my closest friends keep me on the party trail enough as it is, add a few more friends from other cities throughout the states and sometimes I feel like I am out on tour with no end in sight, still much better to be surrounded by those who are actually human beings with insight, stories, and true compassion for degenerates like me who on the best days comes off like a slick con man and on the worst is only a few stumbling steps away from the hospital gurney, choose life.

Been listening to The Arcade Fire a lot lately and I may have talked about it before, but rarely does a band resonate like their release "Funeral" a great soundtrack to my internal feelings for the past month, not a total downer trip, like let's go off and slash our wrists or take a header off the Stratosphere Tower but this catagory 4 set of rapids have become a raging river of emotion, my feelings about being single, moving in another direction, taking the past ten years of my life and zip filing it, then archiving the entire experience onto some external drive of memories that over time shall be occassionally accessed, that no longer happens to be the current software version, this new software has me a bit confused at the moment, a tightrope to be walked upon and down below is an abyss where light bends then is absorb never to be seen again. So there is some solace in friends and music whom without my life would been cut short much earlier. I can remember my 21st birthday, when I jumped off or rolled off a cliff, thirty or fourty feet down toward the ocean, luckily there was a walkway for tourists or whoever that broke my fall, unless I would have probably ended up on the rocks, a broken carcass awaiting the tide and the scavengous seagulls to come clean out my eyeballs from my face. Alcohol tends lead to such tragedic conclusions, that night had plenty on tap, but moreover outside of a real twisted relationship with a female neighbor and a steady diet of binging provided the perfect cover for someone who preferred to live in a constant state of drunken drug stupor, I wanted to walk death's fine line in those days, the end, to be engulfed in a vaccum, to not care to live and okay with dying, even today still feels weird to recall a constant desire to kill myself, not that I could take a gun to my head, maybe a knife the wrists, but I decided to strap myself to a bullet train of hate, anger, and self destruction, could have been the early nineties that went so downer with the likes of The Jesus and Mary Chain, Nirvana, and fiery angst of Public Enemy and Jello Biafra, The eighties crash landed in a nuclear implosion and if you did not jump off the ship by now, life became relagated to a minimal service sector job, cashing your check at the liquor store, and then gettting stone drunk, while making calls to either get drugs or laid and if you were lucky, both.

What the hell even happened in the early nineties, Bush I, Clinton, economic collapse, personal failure, where was college, the four year program, that nice middle or upper middle class job, the internet was this tiny little infant, all those tech giants of today, nothing but mere start ups and those who saw this digital kingdom on the horizon before the masses, today hold the keys to that kingdom, for everyone else just the memories of years gone by, the wine, the roses, trade them in for the coke, the prescription pills, and the medicinal marijauna club, is this all the residue we get, we deserve, have to claw after, on a never ending daily basis, due to either fear or some engrained mentality of not be able to syphion off of the American economy and today, the global economy. I was one of those latter types who still believes in not selling out, even though to get where I am today in my life have done it so many times the faint idea of it, reeks of hypocracy, I wish no harm to most of those around me, there are those of nothing but pure disdain and dark clouds do I wish in their path, yet they are few, the human race is intriguing, how it still goes on, how we have not killed each, and why we as a race still feel the need to be petty over things primarly driven by personal desires, don't really know where to go with this now, going overboard again, feel better though, the primary reason I bang on this keyboard, thankful to live in such a unique and story filled city as Las Vegas as well as to be surrounded by friends, people, and events to make me marvel at how some people make it through a day without killing themselves, someone else, or being murdered themselves. Enough for now, Ciao