“And if the night runs over/And if the day won’t last/And if your way should falter/Along this stony pass”

1.

The average lifespan of a white American male is 78 years old. I am 37 right now, which means I’m screaming towards middle-age. The halfway point.

You know, if I’m lucky.

It’s been a rocky road, though, so I don’t expect that I’ll get to live out that average. Not because I’m a fatalist. Quite the opposite, in fact. I suspect my last words will be something along the lines of “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me” or “Really?” I don’t expect the end to come.

But I also recognize that it will. Probably soon rather than later. I’ve run my body at high speeds since the time I can remember. When I was in the sixth grade, I was the sixth man on our basketball team. My coach, Bucky, never put me in the game until the second quarter (unless things were going wrong early).

I was a caged tiger on the bench. My whole body would shake. Tremors. I couldn’t sit down. I would wave towels. Scream. Holler. Yell at the crowd. The refs. Anyone. (I received ten technical fouls as a sixth grader.)

When I finally got into the game, I was a hurricane. I was everywhere. Semi-controlled chaos. A flash of brilliance and a pop of mediocrity. All at 100 miles per hour.

After one game, a parent walked up to me and said: “I’ll tell you this Brad. When you go in the game, something always happens. It’s not always good. But something always happens.”

2.

A writer is a very specific kind of person.

We need to understand the kinds of things that make us human, which doesn’t mean we have to understand humans very well. Although these kinds of middling skills are certainly helpful as well. I’ve never much worried about those skills, though. I decided upon a different tact, one that took my unique motor into consideration.

I sprinted into the darker sides of the world, always searching for that towering ledge. The one that edged just out of the light, somewhere. Never quite sure where it ended. Only certain that it did somewhere.

The places where people say that want to go, but don’t. Because that biological instinct to not die kicks in. The Selfish Gene. I don’t know if I have that particular type of gene within me (although I am here so maybe it’s not nearly as fearless as I think.)

I didn’t simply slide the sweet bonds of normality off my arms and creep into the darkness. I gnawed the shackles off and tore forth into that world.

You are only a lamb if you act like one, I thought. Which wasn’t entirely the truth.

3.

I drove my car into a temporary retaining wall going 40 some odd miles an hour when I was 29 years old.

This was not an accident. The details of the evening, as with many details of many evenings, are not important. What I did before that, at least in terms of that night, are nothing I hadn’t done many nights before and would do many nights after.

On this particular night, my motor finally died. I thought for good. The tank was empty in a dark way that words will never adequately describe. I was a shell, the air inside me sucks out leaving just a paper-thin skin ready to crumble into dust at the slightest touch.

Tigers are solitary animals. They hunt alone. They eat alone. They are ferocious attackers, ripping out the throats of larger prey and mauling the smaller.

But when they are old or feeble or weak or dying, they become a different animal. Ferocity fades and they become something else, hiding from the brutal world they once ruled.

They know when it is time to go. On their terms.

4.

I look in the mirror these days and see someone I don’t recognize. The salty beard. The tired eyes.

This image doesn’t bother me in the way that I hear so many people talk about their bodies. I’m not sad that it looks different or doesn’t do everything it used to do or doesn’t cooperate with me. These are biological inevitabilities that slide away from my vision without much of a thought.

What bothers me is that I am closing in on the day when I have fewer sunrises in front of me than behind me. (Maybe I’m already there, he said in the first section.) What bothers me is the person who stares back at me isn’t the person I want it to be. The story I set out to tell isn’t finished.

It keeps getting…sidetracked. There’s always another thing between me and it. Another construct in the reality that stops me.

Stops me in a way that just a few short years ago wouldn’t have even registered on my radar.

5.

I am 37.

Not an old 37 or a young 37. There are no such ideas. I am not particularly interested in people who are older telling me that “I’m not that old” or people who are younger telling me that “I’m not that old”. They are both quite wrong. I am exactly that old. Their perception of my age is irrelevant to me.

Age isn’t the issue. I am 37, but I have willingly and with reckless abandon gone to the places that most people specifically try to avoid. The places where people are taught not to go. And I went there full throttle. Defiantly. With no care that tomorrow would never come. Not even sure today that I wanted it to come.

Yet, somehow I came back. Maybe I knew instinctively where the edge was and I stopped. Maybe I got lucky. I am not smart enough to know the difference, really. But I did make it back, and this world doesn’t seem to fit me now.

Maybe I should care less about the carelessness that I see around me. The ways in which we damage each other in ever-so-subtle ways, an erosion that over a lifetime reshapes and reforms us. Or the casual ways with which we forget that there are others in our sphere, our life. It seems, much of the time, far more violent than I have ever been.

I think it see it more clearly because I’ve learned to slow the motor over the years. Maybe. I am happy for that. Even if the fallout means that I’m searching for that last wooded area. The one where I’ll go on my own terms.