What you wish you were

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Jeremy, what’s your secret weapon?

Well, after college, with nothing better to do, I went through my soul with a fine tooth comb. I named and grew well acquainted with all my least desirable traits. The real problem children. Narcissism. Misplaced ego. Enabler of my own appetite. Down to the bad knee. Up to the shimmer of ideals like distant stars, that I will never be smart enough to obtain.

Instead of sequestering them to my childhood, denying their constant, steady presence, even to this day within my adult character, I listened to their demands, we talked through their needs, walked for days and worked down on our knees pulling weeds. I remember these late summer night walks I would take with my two dogs, both stark black animals, I am back, I’m there, hearing the metal scrape and wind-chime clink of their leashes coming off, the quick thud almost hoof beaten rhythm of them chomping out into darkness. Disappeared. I’m standing there licking my lips as they are eaten by an evening. Not a single shred of doubt in my mind that the moment I take a step forward, they are at my side.

I coupled my narcissism by seeking in my friends, my dogs, my animals, the same beauty I beheld in myself. Responsibility doesn’t care how pretty or how good you are. Just consistency. And ego, ego makes a fine hammer, but a hammer makes a shit screwdriver. Ego is only as good to you as the particular job you apply it to. It’s a tool. You also need a box to keep it in. We need you to set it down a time or two and use a different problem-solver. And my hunger. Well. I do a lot of things by hand, work labor and activity and exercise into my daily plans, and always attempt to couple the movement with some function. Firewood. Gardening. Landscaping.
And I walk. A lot. All the time. Pairs exceptionally with someone who talks. A lot. All the time. Foot stomping around a piece of land is its own form of diatribe.
Walking helps settle me.
Ironic as that might seem.

So there’s my secret weapon. I interjected ideas, activities, pursuits into my life that may have not seemed so attractive to me on the surface, because of how they paired well against, or countered altogether, my most dangerous traits. Not eliminated, mind you, certainly not destroyed or even lessened. I’m still a narcissistic, ego-driven, over-eating, over-drinking, over living life and throwing it in your face, asshole. When I’m alone. On a walk through the woods. Or late into an afternoon huffing and puffing somewhere along a hike. I get it out, I say it, or write it, but I don’t fight it, I let what is in me come forward, and allow myself to take a good long look at it.

We all have this little ‘but what about me’ butthole inside of us.
We just don’t all let it speak for us out loud in public.

That’s the purpose of writing. Maybe no other purpose, than letting steam out of a kettle.
You’re not going to skip over who you really are and land on being the better person.
Can’t go around it. Can’t go under it. Can’t go through it. And you can not turn around.

We’ve got to climb.
Who you actually are.

Not what you wish you were.

Years break down

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Forty five minutes on a sixty five year stump. Hands hurt.
Everything passes through them. Curled fingers on folded palms
grown out of vein wrapped wrists on click elbows. A stump like that,
that old, the very base of the very tall, will not part for a five pound splitter.

Barely dented. No splinter. The full abrasive weight felt sharp hard
vibrated in your hands. The stump takes none. It all falls on you.
That is five minutes in. Only you don’t know there’s forty to go
and you hurt clean up through your shoulders already.

But there is always a better tool. A heavier hammer. An independent wedge.

And a clearer head now knows the time and height and density
and fibrous energy and twisted splinter chorded towers. A mind
that now knows every one of sixty five years breaks down into hours,
and hours to minutes, and seconds begging roots dig deeper
in the earth to find good water, stumped trunk run up higher
above the heads of others in seek of weather
with lightning dentures that roll like thunder
and bring Prometheus’ fire to the forest
and burns us to make us stronger.

Never been anywhere other than the front yard of the lady
who just lost her husband, in the house up the road. Until
carried piece by piece in the back of a jeep
by the boy from down the street. Me.
Three iron wedges in and hitting it still not splitting it,
still, from the opposite side. Feeling each hit in his fingers.
Every one of sixty five years.
Each individual second within the whole of forty five minutes.

By the time you feel the full weight of time,
you’ll know, because your hands will hurt.

Of Man and Mirrors

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

At first, self awareness always feels like the world is ending.
But that is not what is happening here.

We are witnessing the birth of our first population-wide form of self-awareness.
We glimpsed ourselves as a species. And it has given all of us an identity crisis.

This is not the end of the world.

It is the cultural equivalent of what most animals do when seeing their reflection for the first time. These are the birthing pains of new consciousness.

A great reckoning of Man and mirrors.