March 8 2015

Part 2

Bookends

1215 hours

So, moving along…I have only ever loved two people in my life. There have been others who found a place with in my heart, but just two that fit my definition of love. Love is an objective and devastatingly amorphous ideal. It is an ideal and a sentiment bandied about with far too little sincerity. People love to shop. They love Pistachio ice cream or Filet Mignon. They love their first through fifth wives and they love their best friend's wife despite the love they proclaim for the best friend. Love is a jaded and bitter bed fellow and despite my disdain for it, I have to admit that in the equation of my life, love, with all its good, gross and disparaging connotations, was the primary function defining that equation. I have loved, but two individuals, and those two men were, and I suppose are, the bookends which support the volumes of my life.

The first I loved as a brother and for a long while desired as much more, but painfully lost to being just my brother. The love between us, that I desired, did not fit into his equation. The second man, I just loved. Names are of no importance just yet. There's time enough for that. Time is all I have left, it seems, and far too much of it.

It's difficult to know where or how to begin working the proof of your life. Do you begin at the end and wander your way back to the start, struggling beneath the shadow of your often cloudy memories? Or, should I begin at the beginning, when I was simply X =, still an inequality untouched by the variables that shape us. If, it's a mathematical formula; then, I think I need to begin at the beginning, but preface that self-deprecating leap into self-explanation by stating; that my love for these two men, defied all attempts of cancellation from my equation by life's twisted variables. I still love them today just as un-conditionally and with my heart just as naked and stripped of judgment, as I did so long ago in the beginning of our journey. I am the sum of the proof of my love for them. I am both the physical and if you will allow it, the spiritual embodiment of my love for them, wrought in the battered and torn flesh and blood which makes us members of the set humanity.

The beginning is or should I say was a dark place. The beginning is or was only one of several beginnings really. I feel like I am rambling. I am rambling. I feel like my words are neither true nor false or sensible by definition, but that will just have to be the way of this project. I re-read the first little chapter and the words sound so distant from how I'd speak or describe the world. What have I become? Have I become X= once again? I guess now, with so much time at hand, I can finally see the beauty of things. I can see and admire my great Willow and the clean pure river it watches over. No, maybe I always saw. Maybe, I just tamped that stuff down the same way I tamped down the bad stuff. What a waste.

I am, or became, well we all were and are part of a population of men who spend their lives hidden in the shadow of civilization, fighting and dying and suffering so, that the rest of you, the weaker members of our set, the set Human, can live good lives. We were soldiers. We were soldiers in many variations and manifestations, some good, some bad and a hell of a lot of gray. I find it strikingly ironic that Badger communities are cetes. To be a Badger, and many men considered me more Badger than man, is to be a part of a cete. To be a Badger means that you will die to protect your cete. So I died. I died more times than I can count. I suppose we all died. We died in droves. We were are soldiers, mercenaries, all men who put the lives of our set, the set Human before our own. But, mostly we suffered. I suffered. Oh, how fucking bitterly I…

But, I was talking about the beginning though, and lost my way. I don't want to cave in to my anger just yet. Losing my way has always been a problem for me, especially losing it to my anger. But, back then I always had my bookends to corral me in.

In the beginning, I was alone, and now in the end, I am alone. I suppose my equation has come into balance. I am alone and my life is now bound not by love or duty, but by the simple and immeasurably old, rhythms of nature. After bedding down my horse, regardless of the hour, I sleep and awake with the sun. I make coffee and sit barefooted and shirtless, regardless of the temperature, on the top step my little porch and sip it in the silent creeping pink shadow of the false dawn. I take it, the coffee, with a little milk and sugar now. It's a sort of concession to my new life. Black is for work and creamy sweet for breathing in the crisp air of a new day.

Take a note. New days are not a given. This is a lesson that I learned from a very young age. No man is so entitled and I cherish each and every one. Coffee finished, I retreat inside and eat a meager breakfast, just cereal and some fruit dictated by the season. I have to eat properly, or so my physician claims, because I have done my body a horrible injustice over the years and I now have to pay the price and monitor my blood sugar. Life's trials are so demeaning. Finally, I dress and tend to my chores. My horse is fed and watered, his stall mucked out and refreshed. Then, I traipse around several crotchety chickens and an ornery rooster while gently and repeatedly nudging aside a goose that flew into my yard a year ago and simply decided to stay while spreading their feed and tidying up my yard. It's always the same, day in and day out. I care for my new family and then, when the mood hits me, and my house is in order, I sleep. I nap. I nap at the house, or sometimes ride out to my Willow tree. But, this is the end. I was supposed to go back to the beginning. There's time enough to detail the end.

It's the beginnings that you don't hear about. The world likes to hear about how men like us end their lives. They like to, maybe, need to hear how we dove onto a grenade to save a dignitary, or dashed into machine gun fire to save a brother, or succumbed to drug and drink, and emotional fragmentation before finally taking true charge of our own equation by erasing it from the history of our set, set Human. It happens. I've fought that monster all of my life, so I know. I've stood at the brink and stared into that abyss of self-gratification, which with one tiny step will free you from the never ending pain you suffering. I'm a Badger though, and I had, have my cete to keep safe. No room for selfish delusions of freedom.

It's the beginnings though, that go untold. It's the beginnings that you rarely get to hear about. You don't want to know that your heroes began as simply X=, it's too frightening of a truth. It instills guilt in you to know that what or a man that began as X= has been rendered into X=B, if X is a man and B is broken. You like to keep your hands clean, and your need for that sterility is the primary function which dictates our lives and creates our equations.

Salem: March 8 2015, 1543 hours