I don’t want to die bored. I don’t want to die tired, or even fat and happy. I don’t want to die when the cold wind slaps my body to the ground, my world upside down. I refuse to die still, or dried out with a permanent frown. I just can’t die tonight.

I want to die on fire. Electric. I’m going to explode my worth in all directions. I plan to light my world ablaze and die alive.

So I will take what I want, and do who I please. I’ll eat the flavors of every corner and always pull over to touch the water. I do not take the easy route, but I will take my time.

And after every mile I’ll absorb every experience, until I bubble and boil and burst my way out.

Guilt hovers like a storm cloud when it comes to doing the things that we want to do. Not what we need to do, but the little moments in life that fill us with indescribable happiness. And not that I don’t feel happiness and liveliness throughout my day-to-day, because that isn’t a fair assessment of the life that I’ve spent so many years building. However, the routine of everyday life can breed monotony, and a feeling that you want to live. To truly grasp what it means to be alive, and experience something so filled with magic that you can almost believe in forces beyond those of the natural world.

It’s called enjoying the fruits of your labour. It answers the question of why you put in the hard work that you do, beyond simply surviving. You work to provide. Shelter, food, power. But you also work in hopes of escaping the often torturous malignancy of a brain that seems to work at the opposite end of a rope during a never-ending match of tug of war.

And for me, magic in its purest form is music. On weekends, after a long week of work, I put my favourite records on the turntable and sit in a small loveseat that I purchased for a mere 40 bucks on marketplace. I crack open a beer after the needle has been placed on the grooves, and the music starts and I close my eyes. It’s magic. It’s a time machine. It’s a world of endless possibilities, where a man can come to a fork in the road and explore multiple possibilities.

I can see a world where I chased my dreams of being a rockstar. I’m standing in the cold like I did so many years ago. I have a guitar case in my hand, and a fake leather jacket draped over a chequered plaid shirt. There’s an ominous January wind coming off of the river that in later years will fill me with dread, but on this evening, it does not because I’m playing my first rock and roll show.

I can listen to the music of Bruce Springsteen and feel my blue collar veins like roots from my family tree. Each story impactful and meaningful. The realisation that perhaps I’m one of the less fortunate dreamers from a rock and roll song, but also that maybe my life is as important as it gets. Like I said, the music is magic and the soft burn of the alcohol as it descends my throat into the pit of my belly, makes me feel lighter, like a feather but also heavy, depending on my mind set when I decide to crack open that can.

I tell my wife, “We need to see the boss live.” She agrees, and although there’s much discrepancy in our tastes in music, Bruce Springsteen is not one of them. She loves him, and we sing along to Badlands, and Adam Raised A Cain, and Prove It All Night in the car as we drive through town. Her as much a character in one of his songs as I am. Some days I look at her and see us as the two young protagonists of Born To Run, singing “I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul.” And then some days I look at her sad and defeated, living a life that isn’t so much living but just a conscious shadow walking through life feeling unseen and unheard. I think she resembles more the love interest in Racing in the Street, than she does Wendy from Born to Run. “She sits on the porch of her daddy’s house but all her pretty dreams are torn, she stares off alone into the night with the eyes of one who hates for just being born.”

Then the day comes where I buy tickets to his show in Montreal at the Bell Centre on Halloween night. Because of illness and fatigue, the show has been postponed a full year, so the rescheduled date has finally arrived and I can’t believe it’s here. I came so close to selling the tickets many times with a belief that the show would never happen.

We wake up that morning, get the kids ready for school, and then drop them off. They’re sad that we’re leaving and that storm cloud of guilt is hovering so close to my head that I can feel individual strands of hair meeting it like an electrical current. But we never take time for ourselves, and it’s been longer than I can remember that my wife and I sat alone in a car and acted like two people who fell in love before kids and mortgages entered the picture. “I promise this will be the only year we won’t take you trick or treating, okay?” I say to my kids, who are understanding. Their grandpa is going to take them, anyway. They aren’t going to miss out on Halloween.

We drive to my in-laws’ place to drop off car seats and tell them a couple of last-minute things about their few days with the kids. My mother-in-law smiles and says that she raised kids before, and she’s pretty sure she can handle it. She tells us to have fun and to drive safely.

After that, we grab coffee and we hit the road. We have a 10 hour drive ahead of us, but the day is young; the air is warm, and the sky seems undecided about whether it wants to provide us with sunshines, or hard rain. Before the drive is finished, we’ll get doses of both.

It feels strange just the two of us alone in a car. It's like a first date. She places her hand on my thigh and smiles at me. I can feel the poison being extracted from my body and in those moments on an open road with a warm cup of coffee, I ask myself, Why do we fight? We’re living similar lives and going through similar stresses, and that should bring us closer together, like the music of the boss does. When you find something that you have in common, you hold on to it; you bear hug it into submission, because if it gets loose, everything feels empty. So, again, I ask. Why do we fight?

For the first few hours, we don’t play music or the radio. We just talk. We’re excited about the concert because it’s been ten years in the making, but we’re trying not to get too excited until we get closer to our hotel, and until we actually get into the arena.

And even when we’re not talking, it isn’t an uncomfortable silence, it’s just silence where our heads are saying, Wow, there actually is silence in this world. It’s peaceful. I like it.

A few times, I can see her through my peripherals, and she’s smiling. She’s smiling the way she used to smile when I had a microsecond when I was going somewhere. When I’d get up on a small stage in a dingy bar with my acoustic guitar and my words and close my eyes and sing. I’d open them and she’d be at a table with friends and a drink that usually featured one, if not several colours of the rainbow, and she’d just smile.

Then, when the show was finished, I’d order a pitcher or two of beer and feel good. Feel happy that even if my music didn’t change the world, that at least, I put it out there. That was all a person could do.

And after we were both good and drunk, we’d stumble our way back to my apartment, and feel all the things that a person should feel. Those things that make you realise as clear as day that there is life and there is living.

And as the years go on, those smiles don’t appear as much. Those pleasures go through periods of such brevity that you forget how special that connection can be. And I don’t think that a concert will save a marriage, but I think Springsteen has been the soundtrack for our entire relationship, and that sitting together, just the two of us and hearing a 50 year catalogue in the space of three hours will let us escape into a place we used to go so often when we were younger.

The drive isn’t without its complications, because of heavy traffic and a GPS that ceased to work during crucial moments of finding our hotel, but we do arrive and we get to the show when the doors open.

My wife isn’t feeling great because she doesn’t always travel well, and the added stress of the last hour of driving had her feeling weak and sick. I was getting nervous as the show approached that she wasn’t going to enjoy it, or that she was going to throw up and have to leave.

But she powers through. We find our seats and wait for the show to begin. I still feel that heaviness sitting in my chest like an inability to relax and enjoy the moment. The anxiety is there like it so often is, but I’m still hopeful that the show will allow that feeling to subside. That it will truly allow me to live in the moment and nowhere else.

She still looks sick and unhappy that she’s making me unhappy, but I’m not. I just want her to enjoy the show and not remember it, only for the way she was feeling.

7:30PM, the show begins. We’re behind the stage, but we have full access to the huddle and prayer that the band gives before each show, and we get to see Springsteen walk on stage to a roaring crowd of over 20,000 people. All those years, saying that I needed to see him live and wondering if I ever would, because the rock stars from the 70s are now in their 70s, and like the boss says, “once you get older there are a lot more yesterday’s than tomorrows” fade away. Because there I am, watching him count off the band 1! 2! 3! 4! And the music starts, and it’s life. It’s life in its purest form.

It takes me three to four songs before I get over the shock of staring down at one of my biggest musical heroes, but once I do, it’s magic. My wife begins to feel better and I can see her staring down at him with a look of awe on her face. The pain is going away and is being replaced with magic.

As the band goes into Atlantic City, I can feel myself going back to the first time that I heard the song. Just a university student who’d recently started buying Springsteen albums. I was in my room listening to Nebraska when the second song came on. From the first seconds of, well, they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night. I was gone, baby gone.

I showed it to a friend I was playing music with and then showed it to my wife. And I was like, this is it.

This is what?

I don’t know, but this is it.

During those shows where my wife smiled at me, the way she did during the early stages of the drive. It’s all there. I’m here now, but I’m somewhere else too. I raise my hands with the crowd and I look around and I see stories. I can read them in their eyes. There are hardships in those eyes. There are worlds of people who kill themselves to survive. I can feel it.

There are two old men sitting next to us, perhaps the same age as the band, maybe younger or older. It’s hard to tell. But they’re seasoned in this world. They close their eyes and move their heads and they’re lost in it. Then when the encore comes, and it’s time to dance with the lights on, they get up and sway like they’re in their living room all alone. But it’s wonderful, it’s thousands of people doing the same thing. Our lives so different, yet so much the same, in that we all seek respite from days and nights of hardships. We all seek those moments where we live, not only exist. Where we’re using our time and living in it.

And it’s there. I can feel the weight getting lighter and the air going into my lungs easier. And I know that there are things I’ve done that I’m not proud of. There are moments where perhaps I would have chosen another path and seen where it took me, and I wonder, but doesn’t everybody? Is there anyone on planet earth that is happy with every choice they’ve ever made since they were old enough to make them? I doubt it. I sincerely doubt it.

But with music, is the power to understand that the world is filled with people who go through hardships. And the right music will tell you it also, Ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive. And that I wanna spit in the face of these badlands.

There are lyrics that tell us I’ve done my best to live the right way, I get up every morning and go to work each day. But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold. Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode.

But the same song can also tell you: There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor. I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm.

The songs are about hard times, but hard people too. That you can feel weak, like you’re going to explode, and that sometimes your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold, and that’s life. That’s life in all of its pain and glory. It’s right there. It tells you that you need to feel pain to understand the beauty of an evening without any of it.

That you need to come face to face with yourself, and especially a version of yourself that is bent on tearing down those walls that keep your sanity intact. But the songs will also tell you that the bad doesn’t always win.

Throughout the three hours of that show, I felt life the way it was meant to feel. Not always, but the way it feels for the people who lay down their lives every day, and who need a moment to say, yeah, this is fun and I’m not the only one who feels this way. There are 20,000 people here singing these songs and closing their eyes and drifting away into a world where the bad is put into submission by the power of community. By the power of love. And even as someone who is neither religious nor spiritual, you can’t deny something higher than ourselves in the rhythmic swaying and dancing of a sold-out crowd who all understand the difference between existing and living. Who are choosing, if only for a short while, to fully live and to fully experience what it means to feel your heart pound in your chest, to feel the blood flow through your veins, to allow yourself a moment where you can be vulnerable. Cry if you want to cry. Dance if you want to dance. Sing as loud as your heart desires because that is what magic is for.

And on the drive back, we listened to Springsteen music, and we reflected on an important evening. An evening where we spent time not just as mom and dad but as two adults who loved each other long before our lives changed, and wanted to make sure that it was all still there. And it was.

Sometimes we fight and ask if we’re only together for the kids. But it was nice to get away and realise that we do love each other. That we could still eat a romantic dinner on either side of a small table and look at each other and talk.

And then after another day of endless miles of open road, we finally made it back home. And as soon as the door opened, the kids came running out, hugging us in excitement and we know that our life is hard but it’s rewarding, and although there are days and sometimes weeks where we’re likely not doing much other than surviving, there is always magic around the corner. You just need to find it, see it, and make sure that when it comes, you’re living in it.

Stifled, burning embers extinguished, spark-less, lifeless and caged

We wither away, rotting, rotting like we too are being consumed

By more than what life has thrown, by a society igniting matches

Then shouting down that we burn too brightly, stomp him out, make her cease

Fire that cannot be controlled shall be removed, taken elsewhere

To burn through centuries of kindling in far away places

And the government, they hope the smoke never seeps home

That all that remains is dust, stomped down so deep we forget what it felt like

To briefly be burning, alight, consumed by more than cast away decay

But even specks sparkle in sunlight, if the wind wafts in just right

We may float, illuminated by the source of all heat

Remembering what we could be, before the boot crushed us beneath it.

Ashes to ashes, flame begets flame, suppressing fires only makes the burn

Uncontrolled, unceasing like how one may yearn

Simply to live untethered to social niceties, to clocks

That yield and rank us too much, always creating shocks

At how young a fire can be, how kindling doesn’t need a century’s suppression

As youth carries with it one’s first oppression, the boot’s first footprint.

Each morning is a gift, the light unfolding in steady breaths over the landscape, reminding me that time is finite and precious. A part of me feels this ticking inside, a reminder that seconds slip through my fingers the sand of an hourglass. How easy it is to forget! I scroll, I wait, I post, I wait, I watch, I wait. I let moments dissolve in the glow of a screen or the lure of idle worry, but something in me whispers, insists that these choices bear weight. I’ve made the choice to cut the cord to the inanimate world. Who likes what, and who shares what, who know what or learned this and has to publicly show they are better than others.

It’s all a blink, this life we’re given. One day I’ll be someone’s memory, a face in a photo, a story shared by someone who remembers me through their own lens. That’s what it is, really; whether we’re here, vibrant and alive, or a flicker in someone’s mind, time hums along, never slowing. Time cares not for our accomplishment, our titles, our successes or failures.

So I ask myself, what matters? How should I spend the gift of now? I think of the people I love, the quiet morning sun, the sounds of life around me. There are books I haven’t read, places I’ve never seen, parts of myself still hidden even from me. The idea that I’m a work in progress, that I might never “finish” but can still keep moving, creating, is somehow freeing.

No, I don’t want to waste a single day, hour, or minute. I want to feel the wind through my fingers, dig my hands into the earth, speak truth even when it feels like I’m shedding armor and vulnerable to the world and those around me. There are too many shades of life, of feeling, of connection, waiting for me to just begin. My time … and your time is now.

Woulda, shoulda, coulda. When I leave this life, I do not want any of these words to be on my lips.

Let other people speculate other paths I could have taken or life decisions I should have chosen. Just know this, everyone:

I live to make a difference. I do not live to preserve the status quo.

I play to win. I do not play to not lose.

My life is an action verb, not a nondescript article.

The only “if” in my vocabulary is this: If my life is short or if it is long; let each of my days be filled with accomplishments to help my planet.

So, instead of beginning my last words with “I woulda” or “I shoulda” or “I coulda,” let my sentences start with “I tried to” or “I vied to” or “I died to.”

Why be alive and not live? Why throw away the magnificent opportunity to live out our lives. The gift of life should not be wasted. We mourn when any life ends. We mourn in a different way when a life lived ends. A life lived for God, a life full of love, is a life that is celebrated. If not on Earth, it is in heaven.

I run through life and deadlines

I squeeze every inch of time out of my calendar

Please stop telling me to slow down

I want you to run with me

Chase me on this journey we call life

I’m willing to make everything happen

I’ll lose sleep and my body to make time for living my life

living our life

I don’t need you to go my speed

I just need you to keep following

to intersect our orbits

I’m never going to stop running in circles

but I’ll treat our collision points with passion

I’ll steer myself to run along the path you walk

I’ll love you

but I will live first.

must be as Godly

a feeling

to be Good

at what one does

not

metering out in

the mendacity

of mediocrity

with the toll

of late fees

that which,

with every blunder

come due

(I don't mean

like death...

but you know

...like taxes)

every act done well

is as an hour

saved

...I know

having seen

many a cigarette

stamped out...

that these ashes

are but a coarser

form of dust

the kind formed

where meditation

met its match

and lost...

11.03.2024

Daylight… saved, spent, wasted? challenge @Mariah