The Butcher is in, Sort of ...

 I have tried, and tried, and tried to force myself to spit something out of value, something that I can hold up to the light and not watch as it disappears beneath its own negligible lightness. I have tried, and I have failed.

When I bolted from the increasingly claustrophobic confines of my previous weekly writing gig over at the Nonalignment Pact, I did so in part with this project in mind. I wanted to create a venue for myself, the Unspeakable, and anyone else I knew, barely knew, respected, loathed, and/or basically had something I thought could add to a blog that simply worked as a vehicle for the contributor to flex his or her creative chops. 

The framework around here is tentative at best, and at its worst, things around here get pretty goddamn sloppy around the edges. We have been lucky enough to have a reasonable number of posts from a decent number of extremely intelligent, thoughtful, hilarious, brilliant, and talented writers. 

We have received input from New Zealand, Chicago, Houston, Austin, Boise, and Minneapolis, as well as a fucking boat out in the Gulf. I have been eternally grateful for it all. 

But the Unspeakable and her very strong and consistent work notwithstanding, there has been little activity around here in the past few months, which only enlightens upon the fact that I have been a totally worthless asshole around here, and thus, I apologize. 

I have been crippled by forces that I know all to well, some of which I have mentioned in previous posts, and many with which I am more than familiar but hardly close to sharing with anyone at all.

Consider yourselves lucky. 

I have had many interesting and worthwhile experiences in my life. Learned hockey on a frozen pond in Massachusetts. Traveled the Atlantic on a massive French ocean liner. Crossed the Channel on a hovercraft. Saw the D-Day beaches at least five times (as well as watched my father fall into an allied bomb crater in order to take the perfect family photo). Cut my own hands on a rusty chain swing over another crater in a Paris park. Traveled to the Canary Islands and bought beer as an 8 year old out of vending machine. Had my picture taken with a chimpanzee, who I now know was undoubtedly forcibly extricated from its murdered mother and brought into indentured servitude by tourist preying scumbags. Moved back to my hometown where I had the distinct pleasure of walking to school in thirty-below weather. Moved with the family to Houston in an August heatwave, stepping out of the car and into an Dante-esque inferno from which I have yet to escape. Learned about trust, terror, many forms of self abuse, sexual abuse, rock-n-roll, love, hate, marriage, fatherhood, homeownership, divorce, acrimony, rebirth and salvation, the whole shooting match, all in motherfucking Texas. 

Yeah, I learned that Texas, despite all the legal and political wrangling or otherwise, is, was, and will always be its own country. And here I sit, open-hearted ...

Yeah, here I sit, and try to tell you something to make to you connect with me in one of the few ways I am comfortable throwing it out there. From a great, cold, and digital divide. 

That's why when the phone rings, and rings, and rings, and ... I never seem home. Yeah, I know, the lights are on ...

My mother once told me, in one of her brutally frank if not entirely satisfying moments of unwelcome honesty, that she suspected I might suffer from a mild form of brain damage. Oh no, don't take it the wrong way, John, I mean well. 

Perhaps she did, though I am still racking my brain as to how this helps my self esteem to know that my mother thought I had brain damage. 

She said that to her it was odd that I was never very ambitious, that I was the kind of guy happy to simply sit back and let life happen, or something like that. 

Guess I am. I mean, I am no go-getter, that's for fucking sure. I never set foot in college, never cared a whit for the backslapping advancement of corporate ladder-climbing, never had the slightest desire to keep up with the SUV driving assholes next door, the Joneses. Never, ever. 

See, I pretty much made a pact with myself. If I survived past 25 it would be a fucking big-league miracle. 

I'm 41. 

I'm still trying to figure out who the fuck I am and why I matter. 

Kids help define that a hell of a lot. Being a dad is quite a dip in the perspective pool. 

I still pretty much hate who I am, have fairly regular bouts of almost no self-worth, and yet, being a dad means no one fucking cares about me. Which is a good thing. 

It's good because what matters is that I give these kids in my life (mine, hers), all three beautiful, brilliant, spirited, and creative children, a stab at this toilet life that comes with a pair of very sharp fangs. We all know how bumpy the ride is, it's our job to make sure these little fuckers are armed to the teeth when they have to go out there and face the very, very ugly music. 

And, boy is it ugly. 

My mother, gone forever, turned me into something worth a shit. My dad, an amazingly talented athlete and an intensely gifted artist, gave things to me as well. Good and bad. Both of them, really. It's not the time for finger pointing. Dad and I, not real close. It's complicated. We barely know one another. 

This electronic world, Tron as C calls it, is such a cruel mistress. For me it's like a glowing wonderland of brain-crack, a window into a world in which I hold almost no trust, a world in which a distance is a welcomed enterprise, and yet, a world that that is not a world at all, but more a dream that lies before me, through which I can travel at will and still come back when the road runs dry. 

I am going nowhere with this, which is par for the course. 

We need life in here, at the Butcher shop. 

We need new life, sure, but what we really need is more life from this little chunk of the Butcher netherworld. I have fallen far behind. Far behind from nowhere, which is a place I have known my whole life. 

But then again, what do I know? I have brain damage.