Ya, that right there.
Fuck, how many times have my knees hit the floor?
So many. I have crawled through life more than I have stood on my own two feet and walked.
I remember one night with the Giant, up in the attic of his double bricked house. It was crazy negative 30 Celsius freezing outside and I needed a smoke so he took me on high and lo I had a smoke and it was good, until it wasn’t. My knees were not hidden by the shirt of his that I had picked up off the floor to cover my nakedness with.
I told my girl the next morning, “he looked at me differently after he saw my banged up knees”.
She called me a performing pony and said I had the joints to match, and I do.
My knees are always bruised, swollen, scarred, knicked.
Bygones are bygones and just boy bye. He couldn’t handle me at my best, my most well behaved.
“Fall down seven times, get up eight” ~ Japanese proverb…
“then run like hell away from whatever keeps tripping you and find some level ground to walk on” ~ me
The alternative is learning to fly. But that holds its own dangers, just ask Lazarus.
I have often been humbled before god.
The penitent man shall pass, and I have passed through, never over, always through.
It’s the only way out.
And sometimes we just have to let our knees hit the floor and crawl.
Jim Morrison chanted “Break on through to the other side”.
What if I told you being bored wouldn’t kill you, neither would being sad or being alone.
I know it feels that way sometimes, I have felt that way.
A sadness so profound and crushing in the sheer weight of it that I thought I wouldn’t ever be able to breathe again, much less live or experience contentment let alone happiness and joy.
Alone isn’t the terrifying part, its loneliness that is the scary monster in the middle of the night.
It’s dealing with the loss of the way things were.
“It’s having a thing and losing it that’ll kill ya” Cold Mountain
Inman asked a blind man what he would give for 5 minutes of sight. The answer was nothing.
Loneliness and it’s kissing cousin, nostalgia. When we forget that the past has passed and we cling to the phantom limbs of what was because it was so much better than the here and now. But it ain’t, thinking that way is gonna kill you too.
I spent a lot of time drunk and high as a teenager. Dealing with loneliness, isolation, abandonment and I was a shitty person because of it. I earned my loneliness. I made myself a pariah with my shitty behavior and I poured substances into the chasm left and so it went. And like any shitty cycle, it had to be broken. I had to be broken, my knees had to hit the floor and I had to crawl out of there. And I did.
I know now that I was denied alone time for so long that it became something I crave and covet.
Equal and opposite reactions.
Besides, with the internet, I know if it gets bad, and it does, a voice is not far off.
Like the panic button in a sensory deprivation tank.
And with this knowledge, I float.
We all float down here.
You can float too.
