A Mullet Birthday Cake

September 15, 2009 09:45

I wake to the sign of slow steady rain on the aluminum security cages that house my windows, reminiscent of an old honky-tonk piano that for a moment I think I’m waking up in my childhood above The Hondo Bar circa 1976. It’s only the ear needle piercing scooter alarm from Chinese Satan’s own personal stable that matter of factly puts me back here in Canton.

Technically I am forty two years old today, despite trying to convince my Baby Doll that because I was born on the other side of the International Date Line that it’s actually tomorrow. “Don’t start with that nonsense!” she love taps me with THE look from those big amazing blue green gems she calls eyes. I humbly submit in the hopes of keeping peace in order to get a piece.

Actor, dancer, movie bad ass, and mullet champion Patrick Swayze has died today. Everything I learned about being a bouncer was from watching his movie Road House twenty seven times. A small part of me hopes that this is another internet rumor. As the tribal drums of social networks managed to kill the poor bastard off once before. Fame is a cruel mistress who can turn your fans into your premature pall bears with a flick of a switch these days. The man deserved better than that while fighting pancreatic cancer. By the power of his feather hair he appeared over the summer to remind folks, “I ain’t dead yet, bitches!”

In some ways it’s fitting for my birthday. It’s a gentle hot syringe reminder that though I might be out of the country and my mind in some cases, I too am very much alive despite that I have out lived many of my archetype heroes and enemies.

How I have hung long heavy flag on the holy alter of the number 42. It oddly stems from the quizzical inside joke of the late great Douglas Adams and his Hitch Hiker Guide to the Galaxy, as being the answer to life and everything.

If my ego and self delusion was any bigger I would need a hat the size of Texas. To engage the world from a center of the universe perspective has allowed me to survive unspeakable cruelties and heart breaks only to leave me broke and dancing alone to the beat of my own busted drum. It’s only by wrestling with that beast with in me and temporarily subduing it long enough to let true love in that I know there is more out there then my own little head trip about the significance of my own meaning, that 42 is indeed not the answer to life and everything.

In my early twenties I expected to die by the time I was 25. Imagine my same surprise and dull horror that when I made it to my 25th birthday. This of course didn’t stop me from trying harder to go out John Belushi style, young with a beautiful corpse and a wasted life legacy that would have been merely a blip on the emotional radar of people who claim to have known me.

Ten years of virtual sobriety and fat clean living have brought me to this cross road in my life and like most introspective space cowboys I’m trying to process it in a way that will hopefully keep me around a bit longer.

Patrick Swayze died at 57. I hereby declare that my next life target. Crom, you will grant me another fifteen years. I will have to earn it I know. I will have to take better care of this fat ass body I’ve managed to customize into a tired, bloated, achey, stretch marked, tub of lard. I must return to warrior weight and health less I be worthy of these next 15 years. Forces beyond my control have carried me this far, all I ask is that we take it a little further down the road to the year 2025.

For this is my birthday present to myself, Roy Batty ala Rudger Howard ala Phillip K. Dick ala Blade Runner ne’, “I want more life fucker!”

This is a delightful tropical storm that I’ve allowed to roll though all the open windows. It is significant of the time post 9/11 America eight years ago that a storm rang in my birthday as well, with a few in-between.

For a moment that ego beast climbs on top of my skull and laughs maniacally, “ME! It’s mine, all for me!” I can only smirk and swat his primal ass down my back side as the sun pokes through the gray and reminds us both that this is not about US, but about something much bigger. What the fuck that is I couldn’t tell you, nor should I.

My life is a work in progress, like most of my thoughts and deeds. Just on more step around the Sun.

Great music plays over the speakers quickly followed by bad. Now this I have to accept as my doing, for I’m the deaf and dumb DJ that loaded those songs into the system. I laugh a little at the nostalgia factor and reminded why these pieces of schmutz are on my system. Songs are the file folders to my addled memory and for the length of having to chew on this pop bubble gum hit from the early 80’s I am transported to that time when this song ruled the airwaves. When this puberty infused Disc Jockey had 50,000 watts of power at his naïve finger tips and drew heat from the general manager and programming director for playing these “teeny bopper shit records on the radio!” Unknown to them I was used to having adults yell at me, so I soldiered on and played the things that the other kids like me wanted to hear. To think back to that magical time and kid myself that those radio signals are still traveling through the eternal confines of space and time, “gives me chills that are multiplying…”