Coffins & Cradles : The Elusive Masterpiece

Somewhere, you’re buried six feet under in a wooden coffin of Emotion and Self-Deprivation. The soil is thick of worms and gravity. The weight of the world is compressing on you from all sides, and you’re the one holding the shovel. You’re the one digging your hole, making it deep, making it the perfect rectangle you always imagined it would be. And for what? 

So someone can read that clever line you picked out for your own tombstone. You’re so smart. 

You don’t get it. Yet.

Now, the message you wish to share with generations to come is forever etched into that granite. Innocent onlookers will get to read your wit for years to come. Your body will eventually decompose, and you’ll be nothing more than dust in a box, but that intelligent line you thought up for years will never be lost. 

Sure, the memories of you will eventually fade with the memories of the minds you shared while still alive, your time will pass. But that one line won’t.  

Even when careless teenagers step over your grassy heaven on some Halloween night, searching for fright and sex, even when the lot next to yours is finally being filled and all attention is wavered to that red carpet that surrounds the brown box, you’ll still be there. In some way or another. Motionless. Timeless. Dead, physically.

That line is your Masterpiece, your Moonlight Sonata, your Raven, your Nevermind. It’ll withstand the storms of time. But for most of us, this Masterpiece eludes us like ideas of musical notes in the wind, always present, and always just out of reach. Only the truly wise can realize their Masterpiece. But most of us are fools.  

Fools of a feather.

But that doesn’t stop the hungry from striving. It’s out there. It’s visible. We can almost hear the faint notes of our ideas as melodies. A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere. We’re piecing them together. Forming our chorus. Forming our bridge. Like a puzzle that takes a lifetime, you’re just trying, always trying to find the match. And then another, and another. 

That line, oh that clever little line in the granite. Six feet above your forehead. Your final Masterpiece. 

But this eludes you. 

And without that line, no grave is ready to be dug. No shovel is needed, despite your best efforts. That coffin can only close when you’ve created a line so original, so witty, and so heavy that it withstands the storms of time. You get it. 

Now hold on.

With a coffin seven-feet long in a grave six feet deep under a granite stone with a line so clever that it stands the sands of time, you’re living forever. 

But do you really want to live forever?

The energy required to survive and endless existence is enormous. Like a treadmill that never stops, a memory that never fades gets old. Too much of anything is exhausting, like pop radio, or Sarah Palin. Imagine a day without the night, or a night without the day? An endless Ground Hog Day, or an endless moment that never moves on. Never shifts. Never un-focuses. Living forever would be a one-chord song where the beat never changes, or a one-word story that spans millions of pages. Over and over. 

All work and no play may make Jake a dull boy. But what about all play and no work? Such an uneven keel would cause the universe to fold in on itself. All Life, or All Death could cause a rip in the space time continuum. And you don’t want to mess with Marty McFlys 1985. 

Maybe, just maybe, that grave needs to hold your body down. Six feet under with dirt and worms above, maybe, just maybe, that clever line you’re already thinking about needs to elude you. Notes in the wind. 

Finishing your Masterpiece may not be a good thing.

The 26th Mile : Creation Rock

The following is a small piece of the fictional novel
 The 26th Mile

Coming Spring 2014

Creation Rock

When you’re the only one not in motion, you stand out. I stand out. In an amphitheater of a hundred steps or so, surrounded by Pennsylvanian bedrock and dozens of fitness freaks on a Sunday morning, it’s hard not to. Everyone is running. Jumping. Or pretending to do so. Like cocaine addicts hyped up on Red Bull, this world has gone mad. 

There’s a leathery middle-aged women in Inov8s hopping stairs in spandex and delusion. Each hop adds hope that next Friday night some white-toothed male will bang her head against the backboards of the bed. Wailing inconsistently into the night. Then there’s a top-heavy muscle man in five fingers and hair gel doing pushups. His ambitions are ironically enough more trivial than his leather-couch counterpart hopping stairs. He’s not just trying to impress some bland minded bimbo with a Corona and lime at the bar, he’s trying to extend the length of his dick with biceps of testosterone to overrule his male buddies. Dominate Male Monkey Motherfuckers in five fingers.

I look for rhyme or reason in this mess, but there isn’t any. Just a bunch of stir-crazy adults searching for Zen, or something of great importance. Just like me. What I’m searching for isn’t exactly the same as these freaks, but I guess I can lend a hand to the idea that we’re all out here searching for something, and what that something is, nobody knows. It’s as elusive as our goals and ambitions. The ones we’ll never achieve but we have them anyway. 

Goals that we share with our friends and family to make us feel special. So people think we’re bound for something big. Something great. But we’re not. It’s all a big lie, and we know that. But we like to believe our little lies, because they make us feel important. Like parking lot attendants. We wear our little ambitions around on our sleeves like we’ve already accomplished them. We like to live in our potential, we just never reach it. Like badges in Boy Scouts, signifying our intent, only never getting there.

Back to the steps. The shady red steps with the massive rocks on each side that make you feel so small, so insignificant. I sat. Just sat. No movement. No intentions of moving, running, or hopping anything at all. I just, sat. The world was moving enough around me, why should I need to move at all? With the sun peeking over the stage and hitting my skin, I couldn’t help but think back to what brought me here in the first place. 

At the dawn of some great decision, some great idea, or at least I felt that way, this is where I came. Searching for a resolution, an excuse perhaps to explain the events of the previous year. Like those leathery middle aged women searching for dates and rapes, I was searching too. 

And like them, I was lost on a never-ending stair master with no Off button. There’s no end in sight. As much as I didn’t want to care, I didn’t want to play this game, this never ending pursuit of happiness. Lies. I was drawn to it despite every effort. Every last effort of not caring. I had to care. I had to care because She did. And She loves me. And I love her too. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, watching leather run up and down these stairs. Watching beef flex and smile. What a waste.  

There has been a theft, I tell you, because I haven’t always been this way. This lost. This confused. There was a time when I knew every step I would take in a day, every corner, and every angle of every situation. There weren’t any grey areas of the unknowing. It was all knowing. Like God. And then it all changed. It was all lost. Gone. Away with the wind. 

The strange thing was I knew it when it happened. It wasn’t like I just woke up some morning this stupid. I saw the wind carry it away. Whatever “It” is, or was. It was like a feather in the wind. One moment it’s sitting on your shoulder, the next it’s carried off and away, down a few blocks, over the trees and the mountains. Gone. Just like that.

And to off the strangeness and the frustrations, I don’t even know what the hell I’m talking about. What’s lost, I have no idea. What’s gone over those mountains, no fucking clue. Just a piece of something I knew that’s gone now. I can feel the void of rationality, I guess that may be the best description of what I’m feeling. A void. 

Which is probably what these fitness freaks feel. Maybe they used to be crack addicts or doll collectors. Then they turned those strange, dangerous habits towards flexing every minute of every day to transform that mush in their obese bodies into machines. I wasted a moment wondering what they thought they’d find at the top of those stairs. Zen? A Soul mate? Money? Fame? Fortune? A parking lot? What a waste. 

Like my life.

Maybe I just finally reached the moment in my life where I noticed the disorderly state of my life. We’re born into perfection, or so it seems, and each day we just progress further and further away from that orderly state. Like the universe. Each day is tainted with microscopic bubbles of imperfections, and eventually they all add up enough for you to see them. Like pennies in the back, accumulating over time. One day you have one penny, several thousand days later you’ve got enough to really go out and eat and drink. Only this works the other way around. 

This goes backwards. And as of the present day, no time machine has been invented for us to go back and rewind all the faults to make them right. We’re doomed to a life where our mistakes must be lived with. And the older you get, the more of those you notice. Like pimples on the face of a overly-stressed teenager kid. Don’t worry, your grade in Concert Band II will not make or break you. What happened in the past will always remain, and there’s nothing anyone can do to change it. But that doesn’t stop you from wanting, or trying. 

Consider me some genius. I don’t know shit about Physics. But I can at least be delusional enough to see what I want to see, we all can, and do this on a daily basis. You check yourself out in the mirror before leaving your house. Everything looks good: Check. The fact is that you look like shit and if you didn’t you wouldn’t be looking in the mirror in the first place because it wouldn’t matter. You’re starting from the bottom and trying to work your way up, hence the mirror, the daily evaluator of your progress. But if you really were a hot piece of ass you wouldn’t need progress, hence you wouldn’t need the mirror. These are the little things in life you don’t think about. But I do. And in times like these, I feel the need to educate. But we’re done now.

Back to my point, Delusion. Now, I’ve been fairly successful at this art for my entire life. It came so naturally I didn’t even notice my talents. It was like breathing, easy and simple. It didn’t take any night classes at the local community college, no boot camp instructors screaming incoherently in my face. I could see the sun as a welcoming burn to my eyes, and convince you of it too if I felt like the challenge. Strippers weren’t sinners, they were artists to an blind crowd. Baby-Mommas trying to make rent. Life was whatever I felt like seeing. It could be sunny or rainy. 

But then She changed everything. And now I can’t exactly play stupid anymore, which is frustrating. She became my mirror, and just like that, I saw the piece of shit I really was. Brown and moist. Pathetic and stinky. The sun did hurt my eyes, and those leather couches sliding down the strippers poles really could’ve done something else if they wanted to. Like me. Strippers everywhere will hate me now. But we see what we want to see, until some immovable object moves us.

She moved me. 

She made me see the natural order of the world. The distorted chords of yesterday where now finely tuned. Everyone was looking for something. Everyone was wondering aimlessly around in their lives, gazing into night fires, hoping an answer would fall out of the flames and land gently at their feet. We’re all the stars of our very own VH1 reality hit show. We live in a filtered world of Instagram pictures, and we’re all the world’s best photographer. 

Like the mirror, if our lives really were that perfect, we wouldn’t need the filter. But without it, life was just a horse-pill too big to swallow. When She made me take the filter off, I could see that the leather couch climbing the stairs was no hotty. I could see the gel oozing down Muscle Mans face. There’s no photographer here. No one is filming you workout. So what’s the need for the gel, or the fake tan just to go and be seen working out? #filter.

No. I couldn’t be oblivious anymore. I couldn’t see sunshine and daisies in dead weeds and roadkill. The flattened Skunk you can still smell, even in death. Life without the filter was depressing, but it was real. She made me see that. And despite the change of view, despite the sunglasses coming off and un-filtering the world around me, here I sat. Motionless on those red steps. Watching a leather couch age and a Muscle Man who’s eyes were beginning to burn of sweaty gel. What a waste. 

I can blame Her for my current state of confusion. I can say it’s all Her fault. She opened my eyes and forced me to look at the world in another color. You see a lot more details in color. And when I trace this back to the genesis of this idea, this train wreck of a thought, as much as I’d like to paint this pretty picture of a man coming to grips of love or lust on the top of some beautiful mountain in the sunset, that’d be a lie. 

It all started over some wasteful tears and half a bottle of Parrot Bay Rum nearly three years ago, before She existed in my life.

The 26th Mile

When you've run 25 miles, one more mile is a long way to go. Talent doesn't carry you that last mile. Hope doesn't cary you that last mile. That mile is left for the heart. That mile is left for others. No one runs the last mile of a marathon for them self. They run it to find Something. They run it because of all they've endured to get to that mile. That something can only be found after 25 miles of pounding and sweat. We're all searching for Something, and in that last mile, we all find what we're looking for. 

Coming this Spring: The 26th Mile. 



Stay tuned for small tasters of the book to be released HERE.