We reach an age, I’m sure, where we look back on our life and ponder the things we could have done differently. There’s probably an appropriate age to do this, but I’ve been doing this my whole life. It’s the curse of this anxiety ridden body. Wondering if missed opportunities may have paid out better in the long run than the comfortable path I chose. Course, there are things I wouldn’t change, because they led to something amazing in my life. (I’m talking about Shaun, of course.)
Of course, there are the paths that could have been taken and I opted not to. Not to the comfortable path, but because there was no positive payoff at the end of them. Of course, I came to realize these decisions as the focal point in what I called my Nietzsche stories. I mention these stories from time to time. And I visit that world quite often, while the stories haven’t grown since I last wrote “Gravediggers.” This morning, though, I woke up to the memory of a car speeding down Juniper Avenue as Iggy Pop played on the radio. In the backseat, a twenty-something version of me lay convulsing.
Of course it’s not me me. I’ve never once OD’d on anything. And I never hallucinated a conversation with Iggy Pop.
Revisiting Boroughs, Texas for the first time years, awoke some voices that I haven’t heard in a while. So I grabbed my copy of Ecce Homo and thumbed through the pages. In part because the Nietzsche stories derived from a character’s love for the philosopher. I sewed in paraphrases from Nietzsche’s work in the stories, often in the narrator’s voice. Because, I’m sure, had I not gone to college, I might have been a pretentious junkie of some sort.
A lot has changed since I penned the first eight or so stories, most of them being combined into one single story. And it’s strange how the Jeanna character morphed into a new beast all together as our relationship drifted and ended and rekindled into something less than but more.
I knew that the narrator and Amie never stayed together. Amie died by accident then by suicide. On stage and as an afterthought. But I wonder where the road would have taken them if they had tried a little harder. Wonder if he would, at some point, in his thirties, happen upon a cute, blonde librarian with an affinity for Star Wars, Doctor Who, and all things nerd.
And I wonder, if at any point, he’d read more than just Ecce Homo. Guess there’s only one way to find out.
Chapin City Blues 