Intro (trumpets in the background.)
I am of German, Swedish, Cherokee, and Scotch-Irish descent. I am the offspring of Vikings, savages, and Druid priests. I am a modern-day stereotype.
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AAAIt all started when I realized there is no justice other than my own conscience, that right and wrong are mere words to categorize opinions, and that the Theory of Relativity is as relevant to my life and the meanings I associate with it as it is to astrophysics.
And then I wanted to die.
AAAOne night when I was sixteen, my mother and I were driving into town, and I told her, probably out of the blue, that sometimes I think about killing myself, and when I said sometimes, what I really meant was most of the time. She looked at me and said, as threateningly as she could, “I don’t ever want to hear those words come out of your mouth again, do you understand me?” I didn’t kill myself; I just daydreamed about it. I wanted to walk up to the I-35 overpass bridge about a mile from my house and stand on the side-rail of the bridge and take a swan dive off and feel that rush of pure air and it would be so dark I wouldn’t even know when I hit the pavement. That’s not how I would choose to do it now, though.
AAASo I still kept looking for some greater meaning, other than to live because that was too simple, and I stuck with that disappointing Christian God thing for a few more years. I’ve never been very good at abandonment. At this point, I had been one of Jehovah’s Witnesses for about six years, in which Biblical doctrines were inculcated into my every ounce of flesh, all 2080 of them. I read the Good Book and forced myself to think in union with it. It was either that or God would kill me at Armageddon. I didn’t want him to have to do that.
AAAI looked to Walt Whitman and H.D. Thoreau for help. My only real friends had been dead for over a hundred years. I tried to fondue the teachings of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Transcendentalism. That didn’t go over very well. Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t fond of homosexuality, oh Captain. Empty, bitter, lonely, and confused, I threw myself into my schoolwork, determined to learn something pertinent to the questions no one could answer.

AAAWhen I graduated high school from Ottawa, Kansas, I packed everything I owned into my car and drove to Joplin, Missouri, home of Bonnie and Clyde. I had four friends there who taught me that a good herbalist can cure cancer, so I stayed for a couple months, sleeping on couches, floors, trampolines, porch swings, and in my car. I decided that even college would be better than that, so I moved to Lawrence and started school at the University of Kansas. Weary of math and science, I wanted a challenge that went beyond the logic of numbers and formulas, so I majored in Fine Arts. My family had been rooting for Environmental Science, or even English, because only dead artists ever make money. So, much to their dismay, I made appalling progress as a visual artist. It was actually self-therapeutic; I was able to turn many of my emotional issues into dark and brooding art projects, then inflict them on the rest of the class during critiques.
AAAI started missing meetings frequently at the Kingdom Hall, the local J.W. hangout, where they meet three times a week to talk about God-stuff. I hardly ever participated in the door-to-door ministry anymore, and when I made one of those brief cerebral priority lists, number one was always, “Art! I mean, God, God is the most important thing…,” mentally slapping myself. I was raised to be utterly selfless, to surrender all desires to the will of God and to let him be my puppet-master. Apparently God is a White-man-giver. He creates people with free will, but he wants it right back.

AAAEveryone wants to know what love feels like. As a Jehovah’s Witness, the purpose of dating was to find a mate. And people get really horny so they get married at seventeen. Well that’s just stupid and I never fell for that crap that if both people love God and apply his principles any marriage will work. I prefer preventions to cures and identity before intimacy. Anyway, I always thought it would be a good idea to marry my best friend. This belief still prevails in my romantic fervor, even though I no longer accept the institution of marriage as a necessity or even an admirable pretense. But because I’m really narcissistic, I always fall for my best dude friends. We get along so well, and we have so much in common, not to mention that a few of them happen to be hotter than a bonfire in hell. It always fails and I get left with a broken heart and a best friend who feels awkward around me for a few weeks. But one of these times I swear it will be the right one at the right time. Maybe today.

AAAThen I met the Desert Rat. Oh, beautiful punk rock boy living on the streets of Vegas, with your floppy high-top Converse All-Stars, patchy black jean jacket, merging the look of a nihilist with the spirit of a monk, I mulled our conversation over in my head a million times and looked for you again on Massachusetts Street for two years just to walk home disappointed and listen to Black Flag alone.
I still think about him sometimes.

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