I just went back and read through that book of poems that I self-published about two years ago. It was a real trip down memory lane. Which is exactly why I wrote it (well, that and so I could go to amazon and type my name into the search field - its a weird thrill). So I could capture a really important transformation point my life. But, like not just capture it. To memorialize it, and put it up on this pedestal, warts and all.

It’d been quite a long time since I read it. I’d gotten myself into thinking it wasn’t really that good lately. I do that about a lot of things I make. Where I get a certain distance outside of their field of gravity, and I kind of forget why they were so damned important to me in the first place. And I don’t know, I mean, I think I’m a million times better of a writer and person than I was back then, but it really felt so incredibly good to read it. Because there was just this real sparkling honesty captured in that book. Some parts of it anyway. Some of it still seems murky though. But even within the murkiness, or within the sometimes blazingly obvious writing, like I really did catch something important there.

I don’t know. I mean, it’s probably nothing to most other people. But it’s really something to me, and there were just parts of it, reading it, that made me want to laugh and cry, and it just felt exactly right. That like whatever happens, I’m there. And that book was like this big flare I sent up when I started living my life really according to the path that it demanded of me.

But yeah, back to that honesty, I think this line from Ludacris sings in the third verse of that Usher song, “Yeah!” says it all:

Forget about the game I’m a spit the truth, I won’t stop till I get em in they birthday suits.

I feel like I really got them “in they birthday suits” when I wrote that. And by them, I mean of course me. There were some parts of that book which really rang true right now especially, even though I’m at such a different point in my life. I mean, I know it’s only two years, but so much has happened since then. But I think this book was a time in my life where I really started to reformulate the story that I told myself and the world about who I was and why I was here. And it was really something to see the roots of things which have now grown into quite nice little trees…

I should really put together another little book like this for myself, a little record of some of the landmarks I’ve seen since, and signposts pointing on down the road. I can’t wait till one day, when I’m an old man, I’ll be sitting around somewhere, looking through all these weird little books and things that I wrote for whatever reason, and mutter to myself something like:

“Motherfucker! Bastard knew it all along! It was all right in front of him the whole time!”

Something like that. With of course the “bastard” being the young (now) me, running around this way and that with reckless abandon, or at least semi-reckless abandon some of the time.