*I wrote most of this in May 2021, but the fucker didn’t “publish.” So I cleaned it up and hit publish again. Guess I’m doomed to unfinished thoughts.

I don’t know what I thought I would be doing at 39, or 40, or wherever it is I fall on the spectrum of ages. I never had direction or compass; I knew I would grow up and hit 30, and surely by then something would take place, but where or what, or when, I don’t know. In my youth, I would sit in my room for hours listening to music and reading books, and I got lost in those books, lost in stories, lost in music; I mean irretrievably lost. You could say that time of my life was the perfect alchemical solution, inert, waiting for a catalyst.

In 1991, when I was between the ages of 9 and 10, I was friends with this kid named Aaron Primmer and he had a sister, Alisha. She was older, 16 or 17 I think. She was your typical cool 16 year old girl - her boyfriend wore a leather jacket and flannel, she was sarcastic to a fault, she owned CDs instead of tapes, she drank, she smoked, she cussed, and thought kids our age were a pain in the ass. Alisha had the Nevermind CD by Nirvana, and I think I had only just seen Smells Like Teen Spirit once or twice on MTV, enough to know they were the coolest thing ever. We would sometimes wait for Alisha to leave, and we would sneak a listen to her CD. I was hooked.

In any case, as I got older - say between the ages of 12 and 14 - I felt so uncomfortable with myself, with my family, with my surroundings, and my “situation”, that I felt like an outcast thoroughly and completely. My friends were slowly turning on me, and girls weren’t at all interested. And while a lot of that is to be expected, and whether it was a chemical imbalance, a situational thing, or who knows what, I became suicidal with thoughts of self-harm frequently consuming my mind. I was probably as low as I ever got in my entire life. And then Kurt Cobain committed suicide. I was 12 when it happened (April of ‘94), and it devastated me. Looking for any excuse to hurt myself, I carved “Kurt” into my arm with the shard of plastic lens from a pair of sunglasses I’d smashed. Again, in reflection, I guess it was some kind of plea to the dead not to leave; some kind of acknowledgement of his passing; some kind of evidence that there were other things wrong in my life. One thing my behavior was not was an arm set out on a table, examined, weighed against potential consequences, worrying what people might say. Like an irrational 12 year old, I thought I’d be able to hide it from everyone. I couldn’t hide it for two hours.

I wanted to hurt, obviously, but it was more than that. Nirvana was supposed to be my first real concert, my first band t-shirt, my first collection of posters, the cornerstone of my musical choices. Nirvana should have been my general smart-assed, unconcerned disinterest and angst that was literally just months away from informing my entire teenage life. And that was all sealed indefinitely with Kurt’s death. I know it seems silly, looking back - real silly - but what I desperately wanted died in 1994, and rather than feeling some kind of connectedness to the world, feeling like I at least had some anchor out there, I ended up carving the name of a dead man into my arm. The last part of the “normal” me died.

Yeah, I get it. That sounds a little too heavy for a 12 year old kid; maybe sounds like fanciful retrospective thinking. However, and in fact, the death of the Nirvana front man was the the death of the normal me, and it was irrecoverable. As the days became months became years, I no longer had anything that resembled an anchor, or for that matter, a direction in which to drift. I did have other interests - I had heard Marilyn Manson’s first album Portrait of an American Family some time in 1995, and so I was already a huge fan when Antichrist Superstar hit the scene in 1996. Marilyn Manson ended up being my first real concert at 16. I was also a fan of Nine Inch Nails, thanks to Pretty Hate Machine. And of course there were all the other groups like Tool, Slayer, Metallica, and Morbid Angel that stayed with me to the present day.

Yet that leads me back to the present, and I wonder, “Wasn’t I supposed to be doing something with myself by now?” Maybe it’s this pandemic wringing it out of all of us, make us stop to think where we are vs. where we “should have been”. Had Kurt Cobain received drug treatment and continued forward with the band, perhaps I would have had that string to the normal world. Instead, I lost interest in mainstream music and became obsessively interested in Satanism, cults, and death; serial killers, criminal psychology, the “bad guys”, horror films, etc. I was a morbid kid to begin with, and I most definitely fell down that rabbit hole headlong in 1994.

That same year (at least I’m fairly certain), my uncle David gave our family his press pass to drive into the Iowa State Fair - I mean, literally, drive your car through the crowds and up into the fairgrounds. The entire experience remains one of my fondest. I want to say we parked up on Expo Hill over by the Cultural Center, out of the way, in some kind of roped off area that probably no longer exists. As evening rolled in, we went back to the station wagon with our day’s haul and my parents opened a cooler full of little ham sandwiches (with butter, mayonnaise and cheese), a bag of chips and cold pop. We couldn’t afford the fair food, and frankly, this was better.

Like the brooding soon-to-be-teenager I was, I remained in the backseat of the car with a Walkman blasting my new favorite tape and reading these little pamphlet books that the John Birch Society guy was handing out. If you’ve ever seen one, they were published by a company called Chick Publications and featured little comic style illustrated stories with titles like, “The Gay Blade,” or, “Big Daddy?”, or, “Doom Town,” and the best way to describe their subject matter was to cross a Mad Magazine with a Hustler, and throw in some scripture. So here I was reading about giving one’s self to the devil, facing eternal damnation and having unmarried sex while listening to Slayer’s Seasons In the Abyss. One song screamed, “Close your eyes, Look deep in your soul, Step outside yourself, And let your mind go, Frozen eyes stare deep in your mind as you die!” or, “The final swing is not a drill, it’s how many people I can kill!”

Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is I launched into my teen years on the heels of Devil worship because Kurt Cobain had to go and kill himself. And now look at me - an unrepentant gun owning social outcast maniac burnout loser who your kids pay to scare them in his downtown basement. I get so drunk sometimes, I knock over tables and piss all over the floor in the men’s room. I haven’t made any friends on Facebook - no “catching up” with that crowd of fuck stick dick wipes who I never liked to begin with, and no checking in from the other crowd of shit smears that forgot who I was because I stopped getting wasted on weeknights. My old best friend won’t even talk to me at the grocery store (he’s a comedian now…), and my other old (albeit more recent) best friend stopped talking to me after he joined the circus, got kicked out, got married, got divorced, came back to Des Moines and got pissed off in my face because I had a girlfriend…back in 2007. Yeah, what?

“And then one day, you find ten years have got behind you, no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”

Fuck man. I’m buying vinyl my parents used to take for granted and I close my eyes, turn up the $10k system I’m running and think, “What have I been missing,” while kids are finding the reissued repressed 180 gram 25th Year Anniversary Nevermind and saying, “Yeah, Nirvana’s pretty cool I guess...” And all those years, and all those tears, and all that heartache, and all that joy, and the summers in the backyard in the sun, and hanging out with the adults, and being a kid, and growing up with your friends, and chasing around the neighborhood on bikes, and then in cars, and kissing a girl for the first time, and then your first real girlfriend, and your first concert with a band you thought were gods, and those sleepless first nights at college in the dorms when the kids you met were just as ragtag fuckin’ dumb and horny and looking for cold beer and reading comic books as you were, with their doors open and loud music playing, and you get home when it’s all done and you start working somewhere, and then you start working somewhere else, but “serious” this time, and then, but then …

And next thing you know, the grandma and grandpa you absolutely cherished are dead. Your dad is a living lobotomy with someone else’s lungs; a complete stranger. The unrelated adults you once revered are all bitter, angry, lost - or dead - or worse: you see someone that used to be so fucking full of life, so cool, telling stories while smoking cigarettes in the kitchen with an ashtray full of gunpowder as a “surprise” for the newcomers, and then one day you run into them at Hy-Vee, and they’re bent over a shopping cart, bloated and puffed up twice their size, and their skin is peeling off in vast swathes, and their eyes are desperate and red around the edges, and their mouth is smaller, their teeth loose, their hands shaking, and in a quiet voice they say they survived cancer, again, and the kids are all fine, all grown up, all moved on, and boy are they glad they got to see you...

And dude, that’s fine, that’s what being alive in 2022 looks like, and shit happens, man, and life sure as shit goes on…

But more importantly, that’s what being 40 looks like. I’m at an age when I might have another 40 ahead of me, or not, but definitely not 50, or maybe, who knows. But the best half is over, and now the lonelier half, the one where I don’t have any kids to impart this to, the one where my older friends are dying, and the friends that are my age will start dropping off, little by little, ever so slowly, until one day, when I skip my forty-year high school reunion, someone calls me and says, “Oh hey, so and so’s dead, you know, your ex. Thought you should know.” And I say, “Who the fuck cares?” but that’s not what hits me - it’s the 58 years behind me, and the fact that my heart beats real hard up the stairs, and laughing sometimes hurts, and cold Iowa winters begin throbbing in the hands, and there aren’t “friends” really, anymore, and “work” is winding down (or in the case of my generation, not), and people don’t really care about smoking a joint and putting on Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, or Nirvana - that’s boring old bullshit from last century. And yeah, too fuckin’ bad. Buy a Corvette, or whatever it is old fuckers do in 2040.

So…I guess if you’re reading this in 2040, or fuck, 2025, why don’t you do me a favor and scrawl, “Looking for a good time? Call Lefty at 669-244-7447” on the bathroom wall at the Iowa State Fair. Maybe when I’m dead, someone will paint over it and for just a second, they’ll stop, read it and think, “Hmm…I wonder who Lefty was?”