le quatrieme julliet

"J'aime les beaux filles...," I replied in haste to the 30 something overtly gay balding man who attempted to demonstrate his intellectual superiority to the smoke filled room of five acquaintances at 6 in the morning. Only after leaving the room and stepping into the elevator did I realize the ambiguity in my statement. "Of course filles means girls in French, but the adjective beautiful should have been conjugated belles, not beaux, as would have been the case if I were referring to something masculine," I thought to myself, gliding down 20 some floors of overpriced condos in the Gold Coast of Chicago. It had been a long night full of escaping from reality through alcohol and mary-jane, I was bound to make a mistake in trying to recall the French I'd studied years ago when I actually had a head on my shoulders and a future full of promise. And as the sun came up, I realized yet another Saturday night had passed in which I fell back down the rabbit hole and swam in the sea of debauchery with "lost souls" asking for another free shot, finding my way into yet another V.I.P. area of another club full of fabulously shallow people wearing fabulous threads.

The sky's are alight tonight 360 degrees around my third floor balcony. The horizon is hardly visible. A dense haze resides in the spaces just above the tree lines. Golds and whites and greens and reds and blues streaking the night, responding to a lit fuse with a high pitched howl and an explosion, a celebration of our independence from England, from the monarchy, from the reigns of tradition and oppression. Sadly we didn't gain independence from taxes. A snare drum, a high-hat, a sultry sex kitten diva describing how the music makes her feel free....on what tangent am I diverging? Why I finally hooked up the decks, the ones and twos, the turntables, the extensions of my violent urge to create in every way shape and form. "I wanna get you....I wanna get you....I wanna get you....off my mind," whispers the next vocalist as the soundtrack to my night fills the headphones, a mix created as a test yesterday evening.

It's been a hell of a weekend....so much has happened and yet tomorrow might be just another day. I can see a small group of people standing on the rooftop just across from me. A mix of about ten, evenly distributed amongst guys and girls. I can imagine at least one of the couples is dating, the others possibly friends or acquaintances. They're enjoying the 360 degree spectacle as I type away, allowing inattention's demands to guide me through the swamp that is my mind. Three straight days of drinking and sleeping does that to a man. I'm not so much envious of the rooftop residents right now. I could be. I definitely have the resources to concoct some reason or another why they've a better disposition in life, why I got the short end of things, and why it is that I'm always the one that's alone. I could then allow this emotional insanity to overwhelm any residual feeling of calm and happiness left over from a weekend shared with true friends and a loving family. I could allow myself to tear up, to tear up the sheet of paper on which I am writing, to scream loud in anger, "Why me?" I could probably come up with a thousand different explanations for why it is that at this very moment I feel the way I do, blame this moment on one from 10 years ago, on someone other than I, on a poor upbringing or on a father whom I've not known since I was 5. I could, in fact, do any number of things that would set me up for having a poor attitude tomorrow, possible even the next day. I've been known to embrace such madness for months at a time. I could just as easily search deep to the source, to that infinitesimally small point at which such a path comes into fruition and attack, thus avoiding such a disastrous outcome derived from simply looking left and not right. I could because I can, because I have active choice at any given moment...because I have free will and a will to overcome, or else I wouldn't be writing right now, rocking out to my first mix in nearly a year, realizing that I have potential, that I am a sappy story in motion, told eloquently, spontaneously, miracuously recovering from a past I was destined to survive.

Alone and alive.

july 4th 2005.
10:26 PM
Chicago, Illinois.
planet earth.