It’s midnight and one minute. My whole self feels so weird, anxious, tense, surreal….maybe just too much coffee–I can’t tell. I flew out of Chicago this morning to head back to Hays, America so I can graduate from college. It would be lame of me to say that “it seems like only yesterday I began my college career, blah, blah, blah…”

I drove through the country this evening and encountered my first winter storm for the year, fuckin’ a…I listened to three hours of Christian Talk Radio to keep myself awake and angry. I sat down on my bed and felt as though the last week were a dream, a blur in my vision. My apartment was surprisingly clean and dull. The air was calm and quiet to a fault. I want to lay down to sleep (because I am dead exhausted) but I am quivering with animosity; or maybe just complacency. I feel I have began the distancing process of my hometown: Hays. I have a new home, and it is not here. Don’t get me wrong I don’t hate you Hays, we just…are going our separate ways and I feel…like we’ve lost touch with each other. Don’t worry, you’ll find another who will experience you as passionately as I have, with unconditional love and high expectations. You were good to me, even when I hated you. You nurtured me even when I spit on you. You raised me from birth.

My womb: Hadley Hospital

My first memory: pure whiteness. A calm, serene blanket of white envelops my existence, and I feel the presence of people watching me. I am lying in a sterile tent in the hospital with pneumonia, I am only 1.5 years old. 

I remember resting up against a large cottonwood tree by Thomas Moore Prep. The cotton would drift in the breeze like snowflakes and I would catch them in my hands and place them in my father’s palm. He would smile at me. The sun was setting. The sun was always setting when I was a child. This was my second memory…I think. I grew up fast and slow; in happiness and fear. I drew all of the time. I went through notebook after notebook of drawings and “stories” with my pencils. I would cry after a laundry detergent commercial with Snuggle the Bear was over. My dreams haunted with isolation and demons. My home always simple yet bold. Warm yet scary. I swear there were ghosts in the last house my parents raised me in before they left Hays. A women from Zimbabwe went insane in my sister’s bedroom. She came out with her glowing white eyes and her black as night skin starring at me as though possessed by Lucifer himself. She stacked all of my sister’s dolls in the middle of the room, and screamed for hours. I always had a lava lamp on, I didn’t like the dark. My mother would wander the halls at night sleep walking and talking to who the fuck knows. I would sleep in the basement in the summer to keep cool and my brother and I would hear loud banging from upstairs (and the toilet flush) while no one could possibly be up there. I would spend hours playing with a stick in the backyard, writing songs in my head–mostly in a classical format. Every Sunday I was forced out of bed and into a pew. I either slept or would day dream while the sermon was dumped on us. We always had a roast on Sundays, always. I hated Sundays. 
Middle School was a disaster of making out, rainbow suspenders and after school detention. I started smoking at age 11. I loved to make people laugh. I stripped in class for two dimes once. I would hide cheeseburgers in my friends’ lockers. I was overly emotional, full of angst, and probably really annoying to any observer outside of my posse. High School was pointless. I either slept through class or ignored what was going on, but some how managed to get above a 3.0 every year without trying. I was obsessed with skateboarding. It became my life, and my friends’ lives. Every afternoon we would get a snowball from Cerv’s and watch a skate video, followed by hours and hours of rigorous skateboarding and bleeding. We had more fun than I could have ever imagined. We had to deal with the police at least once a week for “stunt skateboarding”. This spawned my total disgust for cops. I never partied, or drank or did drugs in High School, I was in my world and was relatively happy. I fought with my mother quite often about what I would consider petty bullshit. I always said when I was done with high school I was going to move to LA and start a new life. I graduated in confusion and without passion. I was bored and without a vision. 

My family moved to Texas when I was halfway through my freshman year in college. It was weird to see them go; usually the college kid leaves for school, but my family did the exact opposite. By this time I had been engulfed in a drug-induced haze for a year and it only grew from there. I would take whatever I could get my hands on, or whatever was placed in my hands. You name it. I had so many psychedelic experiences that I began to confuse reality with unreality. Don’t get me wrong I had many, mind-blowing experiences which changed my life for the better. It gave me vision and clarity; just not right away. I fell into depression and should have died at least twice. I drank heavily, but who didn’t. Lets just say I had a long-term relationship with a lover by the name of Mary Jane, and she introduced me to all of her fucked up friends. Two years had came and went in a scream of pure insanity, overwhelming bliss, and cold isolation.

I don’t know when exactly it happened but it did. IT HAPPENED. That moment in one’s life when they feel a calling, an epiphany, clarity. Hays, you were so beautiful and new. I began painting vigorously, it was as though I was born to do it. It felt so right. I remember my times with Adam. We would walk the dike in the early afternoon with his dog Marley. We would talk for hours, and it was always rich and spontaneous. We would smoke joints and watch the trees blow in the wind. We were so alive. Summer came and went. I finally went to Hollywood and decided I never wanted to go back. One evening in August I went to a party next door with my friends. I met this cute girl named Krystal. I wasn’t sure if I would ever see her again. She came into where I worked, just by chance the next day. I gave her my phone number on the back of a Mr. Goodcents sandwich card. I called my brother because I felt like “she was it”. I started dating another girl a month later: Krystal was taken. It was an utter disaster. 

(Break)

I had been playing in a band called My Uncle is a Cannibal for a little while now and we had a show at Chuck’s on February 16th, 2006. I saw Krystal gazing at me from across the bar. Her eyes pierced my entire being through the hundreds of people between us. I know now that what Krystal wants, Krystal gets; haha. Long story short, we did what we should have done long before that fateful night. I got arrested for the third time in May on my way home from my brother’s high school graduation in Lubbock, Texas. Fuck Texas, and fuck Oklahoma too. She bailed me out, and I saw her giggling from the other side of the glass while I signed my paperwork with the officer. I asked if they wanted to take pictures with me for fun. They thoughtfully declined. I always smile in my mugshots. Here I am now sitting in my room alone; it’s so cold and quiet in here. November 2007. The last year has been full of happiness and love. Peace of mind. Beautiful experiences, amazing conversation. Awesome friends and creative endeavors. I reunited with an old friend of mine that I grew up with. He is like a brother to me. I played music in two fucking awesome bands and danced my little ass off. I am finally confident, and I no longer loathe myself, but love it instead. I am deeply in love and not the kind that one might see in a movie. My life is so full of deep experiences, but the fact that I chose to disclose these particular ones tonight expresses my existence right now. Such is life–there only is now and these are the moments that I am thinking of RIGHT NOW. I have no regrets, except that I wish I had been more thoughtful. Tonight I shall die and be born anew tomorrow. My yesterdays but a dream, blurry and disorienting, my tomorrows: a velvet underground song. The day I absolutely despised as a child has become my favorite, as with my taste. I am not even close to the person I was growing up, but that is truth itself: I am not any THING. I am not any ONE. I am all the ones I have been and all the ones I have not. I am wrong and I am right. I hate you and I love you. I will miss you Hays. Will I cry for you, I don’t know. Will I long for you, I don’t know. Will I call upon you one day for a conversation, maybe a song from your heart, I don’t know. I know you won’t forget me, because I am you as you are me. I am not pushing you away but setting you free. You are not a town, but 23 years of loss and gain. Consider this a poem to you, Hays. I wish to you all the best, because you have given me your best. Peace.