thee_blacklisted

Lost -- I've been thinking a lot about this word lately. I feel like I'm always lost, but moreover that I'm not happy unless I'm in some way or another really, fucking, totally, lost.

Take my third grade birthday. I ran away for a whole day. I was really upset about something. A promise of some sort had been made, then broken. (I have always hated that more than anything.) I got on my bike and I just started riding. I was furious, and I let the rage fill me up, let it move my legs my feet my arms, riding furiously away from my safe, identifiable neighborhood into directions I'd never knowingly been. I moved well past the borders of the school bus or the drive to the supermarket or to my friends' houses. A left here then a right there, and hours didn't just seem to pass they did pass, until the ire finally left me--or, more accurately, was supplanted by other emotions, 'til I was like 'Whoah, what the fuck has really happened here, where am I?'

I wasn't a rageful kid, per se. I've never been a very angry person, or if I am it's so hidden, so stuffed down, I don't know about it. But I have always sought to escape from where I am, thinking there has to be some place, some situation better than this one, some state of mind more refined and pleasurable and less this, less here and now.

FUCK THE HERE AND NOW: that could be my mantra.

When I finally and miraculously pedaled back home, my Dad wouldn't speak to me. That was much worse than if he'd smacked me around or something -- I mean, I yearned to connect with him. You know, all kids do. And not to be Dr. Phil or whatever but it seems like so much of when we fuck up is about that kind of need to connect, to get SOME sort of attention from one of your folks, even if it' the worst kind that is weirdly better than nothing.

I used to pray that my parents, who seemed so strange to me they must be aliens, really WERE aliens. And one day our people would come get us to take us home, nabbing us up into the night sky. I used to pray to be whisked away from Cleveland, just sucked up like in Close Encounters, swooshed into a spectacular smoke swhirl of lights and incredible otherness.

I loved swimming and I absolutely adored being on the swings in recess; those were the closest things I could find to flying. I liked that combination of nausea and excitement you could get on the swings or at an amuseument park. I would dream about doing the breaststroke down the street, that if I did it hard and fast enough I could float up into the stars.

I used to PRAY to leave my body. Anything to not be here. I remember thinking 'This Is Not My Body!' from a really early age, and having brief episodes where I really did leave it. I'd sort of float around in the ceiling and it felt like when you jump into a big lake in the summer, where there are patches of warm water and then these weird blotches of cold water that felt like ghosts. I knew not to tell anybody abou thtis shit, though and for fifteen years didn't tell a soul. (When I finally did, it was in a record review in my old fanzine 'Chemical Imbalance,' and not a soul ever talked to me about it I think they just thought I was crazy.)

I would get lost in the music, from as early as I can remember dancing around in the living room to Casey Kasum's countdown on the radio, or to my older sister's 8-tracks when she wasn't round. I would get lost in books about space travelers. There was a great series called "Malcolm Mooney Space Traveler" or something and I read those obsessively. I read comic books and wanted to be a superhero. I really really wanted to have a freak radioactive accident do some of that shit to me.

I figured Jesus was a superhero, kind of. And maybe if he was the son of God, I could be too! I just didn't know it yet, and one day God himself would come and yank me out of my life. Then I'd feel really bad and really stupid for even thinking that.

I'd do science experiments on my own which were about capturing time or creating a city that levitated in the air on magnet power or which were about trying to blow things up which was my version of art when I was a kid. I didn't understand that there was a separation between science and art, I thought they were essentially the same thing.

I read about alchemy and that sounded right up my alley so I spent much of third and fourth grade in the basement trying to make gold out of mica and lead and breaking open thermometers to extract the -- you know, what is that stuff called... mercury. I loved playing with molten metallic balls of mercury, because surely this stuff came from space. And space is where I belonged, I knew it.

Maybe part of why you want to get lost is so that you can be found. It's the Phoenix trip, the Lazarus thing, "Amazing Grace," etc. I've done it a handful of times in my life, in various ways, not all of them on purpose or consciously. The buzz of it never lasts long enough, though. Just like when people stop calling you a wunderkind, because you're 35 and you're no longer the youngest person at the rock show but people look at you like you must be there chaperoning your kid and either way you're probably a pervert...

Anyway, that's what I have to say today. Sorry to be so long-winded but I hadn't posted in 4 days so I felt lik eI had to make up for it, you know? And it may not be obvious, but yes I did snap out of my little funk!