No pretty pictures, folks. This one’s serious (as I’ll allow myself to be).
Ten years ago tonight, at just about this time, I threw a wrench in the whole machine. I began sticking things where they didn’t belong, and turned my back on all my best friends from high school. All but one, and he didn’t manage escape unscathed. None of us would ever be the same.
I was also a miserable mess, traveling the country for weeks at a time, and fielding multiple rumors of the shenanigans back home. I saw an opportunity, and I moved.
I got a divorce before things could get really hairy (on both sides of things; perhaps fuzzy is a better word). What followed were three years of debauchery, substance abuse, and my induction into the world of Splatterpunk, The goal was to not survive, but I did. I hear everyone else did as well. I wouldn’t know; I don’t have social media and no one would want to talk to me if I did. I don’t blame them.
Ten years later, I’m on my seventh year of a new marriage, I’m a stepfather, and a grandfather eight times over. I’m on my fifth year of sobriety; from alcohol and hard stuff. Weed isn’t a drug. Get over it.
Anyway, it all began with a simple word; a question from son to father: When?
A twelve pack of Blue Moon later, I knew the answer to that question.
When I sobered up the next morning, I felt the same. It began.
It was almost like committing suicide inside a rotating circle of friends, and then making the hugest fucking mess in the process. Like, covering them all from head to toe in guts and goo like in the first season of The Walking Dead. I was an unwelcomed atom bomb smack-dab in the center of the word friendship itself. The last ten years was the rollercoaster curse tied to all the lies and deception.
I’m finally happy again, but it cost me everything; both metaphorically and literally. Everything.
It’s strange looking back. It was like being reborn, but stuffed into an older man’s broken body. You don’t get those years back, my friends. That’s part of the punishment for crossing the fence. Partaking of the farmer’s peaches has its repercussions, dear reader, regardless of how long it took him to realize he had a crow in his goddamn orchard.
Some of them peaches were good, though. Many different trees, and the fruit varied with each. Man, the insanely honest book I could write on Gen X intercourse fantasies. It was like research. Hank freakin’ Moody, but I digress. Nobody wants to read about middle-aged sex-capades, and I don’t want to write them. It was like some Motley Crue video shit, to be sure. I did what the first decade of MTV taught me to do, and I passed with flying colors.
What? You didn’t know there was going to be a test at some point? Did you even study?
I had a white wolf for a pet when I was stationed in the Army at Ft. Huachuca. While away, my wife (att) got rid of him, because he could smell the skank on her. He jumped all the fences on his way up into the mountains, and knocked up every female dog along the way. I did that same thing, but bi-pedal, and probably way less selective.
One last hurrah before I moved to Queens, wrote a bunch of bullshit, and drank myself into oblivion alone and forgotten. That was the original plan, and it all went into motion one decade ago tonight. Everything that happened along the way was collateral damage.
But it didn’t end, though. It’s not over. The last leg of the adventure took a bit of a twist, and now I sit here; anxious to see where this road leads. Well, I know this road leads to the coffin, the end, but what kind of road will it be? Boring and paved, or loose rock with tight curves and no posted speed limit? How much more punishment can this beater take?
To be continued. Whatever you get from this piece, just know that the person responsible for those feelings is still around to do so because of a drunken, “Infinity Gauntlet” moment. In the blink of an eye; a journey laid before him unlike any any he’d believed.
Man, if anyone can make ‘leaving your wife’ sound like the freaking Hobbit, it’s me. It’s a brag, but a very humbled one. I’m sure Bilbo apologized to everyone he ever Stung, but that didn’t make him anything less than a murderer via the victim’s point of view. Every hero is a villain in someone else’s story.
At least I had/have the nuts to sport my black cape with pride. I owned that shit ten years ago, and I own it to this night. Own it. To that, I tip my hat to the cursed witch who scratched me. Debt paid, regardless of which currencies she finds acceptable.
I think I’m going to like who I am. I just need a little adjustment here and there. My last life. No continues. All out of quarters. Arcade closes in five…
My new princess has a thing for villains. I’d say, “Screw the plumber,” but someone beat me to it, and it was implied at the get-go. I hold no ill will to anyone involved directly or inadvertently, and I gladly hold all blame. If my life on this evening is the conglomerate of multiple punishments for various betrayals and infidelities, then beat me, daddy. Make it hurt.
Your nightmares are someone else’s wet dreams, and vice-versa.
What a long, strange trip it’s been.
The Gonzo Wolf 
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