I don’t have alot of strong childhood memories as in the general sense of what it is to be young and care free. Sure, like anyone, I have a specific highlight reel available for playback at any time but how it felt I cannot recall. I might as well be that little boy I once was right now in this semi-run down forty four year old body. I care not to rub a lamp and go back but I would prefer moving forward with a stronger sense of where I’ve come from.
Son of a hard working and hard drinking father who, himself, was the son of a hard ass verbally abusive alcoholic father. On my mothers side, though a daughter herself of big drinkers, I always looked at her like she was practically a saint. Hard working too, she taught Christian values at work as a teacher and at home amongst her three children.
I looked up to my two older sisters and took my place serious as the baby of the family. As a teen I rebelled the most and made life, in my eyes at the time anyway, the hardest on my mom out of us all. While my sisters were off in University or in the States I did whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, death metal music and anything that gave the finger to the way I was raised. I emersed myself in porn which was literature and magazines at the time before diving head long into sex itself.
Meaningful relationships mixed in with brief encounters has scattered the floor of my adulthood. Still killing more brain cells than I could recreate I became a man over night: the night I fathered a child. That slapped me the hardest in the face and for once inspired me to step outside myself and put another before me. Though in love with inebriation my life never changed so much as it did those first few days.
And through all the moves and career changes and different women and different doctors and different body changes I have remained that little boy inside. With blank chunks of memory and a patched up heart my quiet introversion as the stuttering student floats readily beneath the surface. The little blonde guy who always wanted to be someone else isn’t history; I wrestle with this stuff today.
Cynical, tired and somehow stretched to fit this 6 foot 4 280 pound casing, I am as much man as I am boy. No, I don’t have days where I get lost in the sun nor am I inside a fort with my friends writing this. I don’t yearn for slurpees and skateboarding magazines but what I do enjoy is my aloneness. I do enjoy feeling free, driving a vehicle, telling little people what to do and cashing cheques. These are some of the things that make me a man. I can wear cologne and wax philosophical but inside I am the boy and it perpetuates on and on and on.
Intertwined forever, one needs the other. I can’t move forward if I don’t know where I came from. They communicate, the man and the boy. They are together yet cannot be one. I am him and he is me.
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