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There Is No Bridge Between The Past & The Present

When you hear the saying “Burning a bridge”, you might think of the connection between two people being severed due to a falling out. Consider the purpose of a bridge; to allow access on both sides of a chasm. What if “burning a bridge” symbolizes the permanent severing of every connection between the past and the present? Time is a linear pathway, it neither negotiates nor compromises nor changes its direction and it favors nobody. As a drug and sex addict, I tend to get nostalgic about the times I would spend at gay bars, old friends I used to get high with and the hours of chaos with “the homies”. I was living like a savage with the temperament of a shy introverted, overly cautious mindset, like the stereotype of a nerd. I couldn’t have been more out of place, yet there I was, hanging out with the kinds of people who commit crimes and do short stints in jail.

As someone who grew up in an upper middle class family and environment, I didn’t have what it took to enter into that world, nor did I have any buisness involving myself with such people and their illegal activities. Looking back, I was extemely lucky not to get caught up in any life altering consequences. The insanity of the addict mindset even as a sober and law abiding citizen is that you sometimes crave the old days and the old ways of thinking. “The Fun Days”, when all that mattered was that sweet angel of meth coming to invade your veins and take you far away from the pain and off of the planet. Back then, I couldn’t live life and I couldn't understand it. With time you can gain perspective, but with space you can lose it too! Warnings from the past fail to echo, like sirens to a deaf person. No one likes getting older except the young who want to grow up too quick, while they neglect what they already have, it passes them by fast. Meanwhile, those of us aging quickly wish we could get back the ignorance and carefree attitude of youth we once had.

Step back into the ring to play the young man’s game and you might get beat down by life. I know my limits because I’m not a tough guy. I’m a former punk that just wants to hang up his boxing gloves and sit in his rocking chair with his lemonade. Yes, I still have my wild streak but it’s been faded and softened by years of experience and hardship. Behind every grey bearded old man is a rebel who still lives, but I’m not that either. I don’t belong in a retirement home or in front of a judge, I’m somewhere in between. Part of getting older is realizing that you don’t have the strength to fight the whole world anymore. Sure, you still resist or even struggle against some things, but that’s not your default demeanor by any means.

Reality Versus Fantasy

It was just yesterday that I started fantasizing about a female companion who might be able to scratch a certain itch I have. Then I started thinking about all of the fun things I could inhale, sniff or swallow to heighten the thrill of that experience. The places my mind wandered off to, if I ever went there it would be over for me and I knew it. There’s a reason I don’t go there again, it’s because I’ve already been. And even if I haven’t, why would I want to chance it? What’s the point of a good time if it ends with an empty bank account, a stained reputation and a stiff jail sentence? Some days I think I might just walk on that razor thin edge and “trip” into some dangerous fun. The problem is if I happen to survive, the tomorrow I’ll have won’t be as great as today was.

I always try to remember that a felony is often only one bad decision away. You could trace back the origins of most of your mistakes by looking at every decision you made that lead up to it. It usually follows a logical progression and pattern with many warning signs you either ignored or weren’t able to see along the way, each step bringing you closer to that violent fall flat on your face, but especially whenever drugs and the dope game lifestyle are the culprit. The results? everything you tried to build with hard work and patience disappears and the life you only wanted to visit becomes your new home. It’s like going to jail on vacation; it completely ruins the mood and you go back home with major regrets. That is my perspective, the one that I keep close to me at all times. When I lived that life before, nothing ever really went as planned. That was part of the fun, the appeal of the whole mess. But it was also the thing that bought me closer to death or an arrest.

It doesn’t matter if I’m not looking for trouble, I know how to make it out of thin air. The only ingredient I need is to act on some impulsive desire for adult entertainment in the form of drugs and sex. I just seem to have this way of “running into all of the wrong kinds of people” when I’m looking to have the wrong kinds of “fun”. I have some kind of fucked up magnetic energy that attracts assholes, druggies and prostitutes towards me, or maybe it’s just as simple as I know where and how to find all of these things and once I go to those places, the rest naturally falls into place, inviting me into a house of pain. A simple search for a beer, some weed or a little bit of sex for me turns into a nightmare binge. I simply don’t trust myself under those circumstances. I wish I could afford to throw caution to the wind and pursue any of my desires on a whim, paying people for services and products that would ruin my life if my activities were ever discovered by the wrong sets of investigating and prying eyes.

I never saw myself as trying to live up to some kind of image, I just genuinely enjoyed indulging in each one of my vices. The freedom to go crazy and get in my dopamine hits. Gambling was never really my thing but I suspect if I had the opportunity, I might find a way to get addicted to that too. But these are the things of the past and they don’t fit neatly into the picture or frame of my life anymore. For as much as I sometimes wish I could, I just don’t want to take the risk. Maybe if I manage to live until sixty, I’ll go for some wild and crazy binge into total dereliction and embarass the twenty-something year old reprobates wishing I’d grow up and stop embarrassing them. Maybe I’ll even manage to scare a few of them into going back to school because they wouldn’t want to turn out like me, how great would that be?

Childhood Sucks Too

I understand the whole “Glorifying lost youth” thing, but if we’re honest? It kind of sucked. It didn’t matter if you liked school or not, you were going one way or the other. I remember being as young as thirteen and thinking that school was a waste of time, “Just hand me a shovel and a paycheck and I’m good!”, I actually remember thinking exactly that for years. Not just when I had homework, but during recess, not just during lunch in middle school, but while I was at home playing video games, not just while I was dating my girlfriend, but even during the weekends in high school. I wanted no part in any of this nonesense that was forced upon me.

You wanna know something that really broke my brain though? Not only did I not dropout of high school like you might expect, but many years later after I had been working a regular full time job for a long time, I got so bored and sick of it that I finally said to myself “You know what? I think I’d rather go back to school instead!” and so I did. And now here I am, a guy who always hated school, actually kind of liking it even though it’s frustrating as Hell sometimes. I’m starting to learn from my classes that not everybody across the world has the opportunity to even decide not to go to school in the first place, so my original feelings on the matter make younger me look like an ungrateful little shit.

Not only is childhood so limiting that it’s nauseating, but you don’t realize how spoiled you really are and you think you know better. You were probably like me; blind to the privileges you had of not having to pay for anything essential. Not realizing that the things you hated the most, might actually be the very things that could save your life. You start to look back and realize that not only was your childhood self stupid, but your teenage self was also fake on top of being too dumb for their own good and even your young adult self was stupid, but the one thing they all had in common was that they were assholes and that you’re not. At least for now, anyway barring any new realizations. The safe assumption is that I’m the smartest that I’ll ever be but I still find that extremely scary for some reason. I thought I would never conform this hard in my life, but the reality of participating properly in society is that you voluntarily lose your edge.

Then I have to ask myself a very important question; “What use is an ‘edge’ to me anyway? Aren’t those usually for cutting things or falling off of?”. Was it only ever just a way to convine myself that I was smarter and stronger than anyone else, so I could feel special? “Did I really lose anything by giving up this ‘edge’ or did I actually gain something instead?”, that’s the scariest philosophical question even for me today. I am now so rebellious that I’ve rebelled against rebellion itself. I’m the Anti-rebel. I don’t know anymore if I should be proud or confused. Maybe the most rebellious thing I can do at this point is refuse to figure it out and just live my damn life.