Transcendental Scars

Above: "Desert Eye"

"Hey ah na na
Ignorance is spoken
Spoken
Hey ah na na
Confidence is broken
Broken
Hey ah na na
Sustenance is stolen
Stolen
Hey ah na na
Arrogance is potent
potent

What I see is unreal
Ive written my own part
Eat of the apple, so young
Im crawling back to start"

from Alice in Chains, "Rotten Apple"

The summer of '08 is winding down, the abysmal and pathetic ride coming to an end. The awakenings, the losses, the barely noteworthy life changes that turned hope and disappointment into confidence and resolve. I guess you could say my priorities are now pretty straight, pretty simple actually. I have a daughter, I love her and I will be there for her. That's all there is to it. So what about everything else?

In the last three months I have seen almost weekly landmarks, little Deja vu's, snippets of things that were reminiscent of some point in my life over the last ten years... and they progressively retreat, further and further back.

Last night I was walking around my neighborhood at like 7:30pm because I really had nothing else to do. I wandered into the movie theatre to watch the new batman... "dark night'. I can't remember the last time I did that, you know just randomly walked into a movie, not so much because I wanted to but because I could (although, it was a great movie). The odd part is that I used to do it all the time, excessively so. It wasn't unusual for me to be running a random errand, and then just dissapear into a movie theater, maybe even a couple times a week.

About six weeks ago I started swimming every other day(-ish) and after a couple weeks of that, I started craving salad and raw meat. Okay, so I always crave raw meat, but fucking salad? Maybe say about 4-5 years ago when I was cycling a lot, and prior to that when I got a lot more exercise than I do have recently, I did occasionally crave stupid shit like broccoli, cucumbers and oil-vinegar dressing instead of ranch.
I started revisiting--touring--spots in Bellingham where I used to hang out in college, and it smells and tingles just like it did then, kinda like I was there in time, only now I'm there as two. I've even kinda lost friend, and in an uncannily similar way to how I found him.... through someone else. I won't go there right now.

These are just a few examples of little habits, life quirks that used to be... then for some reason, went away. Now they are coming back mostly in the reverse order of their disappearance. I started making a list, its two pages long now (and private so I won't post here)... but its fucked up how many things in my life changed for the worst, now are starting to trickle back in. Its like my head has been slipping into some alternate universe for the last 10 years, and now I'm swinging back.

I am not religious, and besides telling people 13 is my lucky number (which it is) I'm not superstitious either--but I could swear its a sign of a kind of rollback to... well, what? The beginning, the beginning of the end? the end of the beginning? Maybe this is just what it feels like to have your soul torn apart, chewed away, left for dead and then to suddenly start healing. You know, like getting skin back after getting burned. It certainly hasn't been withoug the scars.

Funny... I still have the scar on my finger from getting bitten by my pet piranah the day I moved to Seattle from Bellingham. I suppose, using this totally asinine logic that if I get bitten, by something or somebody, it will be that I soon retreat to hamsterland in the clouds.

I wonder what that scar will look like.

Today's Random Google Query: weather frightened boy
Silent Boy: He Was a Frightened Boy who Refused to Speak - Until a ...
STORY TIME: The frightened boy-DAWN - Young World; November 10, 2001
Frightened Boy Scouts huddled in tent as tornado killed four