The realization that all of your actions speak louder than your dreams and desires.

A shaky personal code that says you never strike a woman and you are good to children and old people and animals.

A time in your life where you could not eat meat of any kind, for moral reasons.

Many seasons carrying the books of Castaneda and Hesse and endless readings on Buddhism and a search for some higher spiritual truth.

All the while spending your twenties and thirties in bars, often on the floor, looking for that next confrontation, the next challenger, searching for and craving rage as if it sustained me. Rage is not a condition, but a substance. The fuel.

Claiming to embrace some imagined peace while living for and searching for violent confrontation. Always and endlessly.

Always an unwelcome visitor, always the problem that walks in the room. Always the one to be contained. Always the one kept at arms length.

Even now, old enough to know better, but no wiser, I still tell myself the same fabrications. What I claim to seek and who I claim to be will never meet the reality of who I am.

At what point does the person you wanted to be, in youth, no longer exist. You simply learn to accept.

Are your desires a lie or are they slowly quashed and beaten down by the reality of your existence, until you become only who you are.

It’s always just one more. It does not matter what, it’s just one more. Tomorrow I’m going to kick this. It never matters what “this” actually is. Tomorrow I’m going to be a better person, less likely to react without thought or fear.

Listening to Janes Addiction – “I’m gonna kick tomorrow…”

Take out the chemicals and the same anger and violence and rage remains. I’m tired of the process of healing. For some there is no healing it, it is better to come to a realization of who and what were are.

Acceptance. It’s that simple.

It is my hope my headstone reads, “He wanted none of this.”

Would that be another lie? I think I enjoyed it, truth finally be shown the cold light of a December day.