I’m stuck...

In the years that come and pass, things come to fruition, whether they are gilded with golden fingertips, or if they are enclosed with ugliness. Lessons are learned, drama is settled, but some things are built to last, built to be mad at the world, delirious with grandeur, but fuming with anger. Especially in a young person's life when the years are so few, and the speed of which they move is everso quickening. Ambition, love, maturity, optimisim, ethics, morals: these all surface in the beginning and resonate. Life caters to your choices, your way of cracking the case. But never does it do you any favors unless it is seen as somewhat deserving.

I'm writing this now because, I myself am scared. I'm sick to my stomach, dreading the idea of things faltering, becoming maddening at sight. I have ambitions, I have needs, I have my own set of morals established under contexts of which are necessary to create. In words fewer than the ones I've used, a single listless word known with bitterness in tone, I'm stuck. Stuck in Jell-O, stuck in a glass Coke bottle, stuck in that bacon grease jar that you keep underneath your sink...stuck, stuck, stuck. Stuck in the modern-electricity-solar-powered-overwhelming world of death, taxes, and the obsoletion of jazz music, of long, sleak cars, of boxy television screens, of Paul, John, George, and Ringo living in my radio, of a president wanting to make a difference and having his life taken from him in response, of black and white movies, and of men wearing suits and ties like they were sweatpants and a hoodie.

It hurts thinking that time is passing and with it comes the death of others there to witness, to experience, to retell those stories to kids like me who are so hungry, they would rather push the future away and stare at those pictures of the past. I want nostalgia, I want ambition, I want something pure and awesome and geniune, instead of wondering what sort of chemicals have been stuffed inside a loaf of Sunbeam bread. I want to get married and drive a Plymouth and come home to my beautifully colorful house, with my family jumping in my arms. I want to place my hat on my son, with it being too big for his little six-year-old head, and have him smell the inseam, knowing his father was working hard all day to provide a good life for him. I want the little tabby cat to brush against my pant leg and lick his paws clean. I want to open a bottle of High Life and plop in my chair at the dining room table and scoop mashed potatoes on my plate. I want my daugther to sit across from her brother and make faces with her spoon at him, while they crack up and I join them soon after, with their mother giving me that wonderfully pleasant look of...of what? Of no regrets, no coulda-woulda-shouldas? I want to retire from the dinner table, after having helped my wife with the dishes, giving her a few playful shoves and a dollop of soap on her nose. I want to go into my office, located in the perfect corner of the house to where the children won't run on top and my wife won't throw her heels on the floor when she's concerned on what to wear the next day. I want to look at my typewriter, gleaming in moonlight, and rub my fingers against the keys. I want to create that pleasant, beautiful story in the typewriter, the one that will change the lives of so many who can relate, reform, and redeem themselves with it. I want to see my name bulging out of cornershop windows and shed a tear while I watch. I want to indulge in beer every once and a while when it comes to celebrating. I want to watch my son learn how to drive my stick shift and knock a tail light out backing out of the driveway. I want to watch my daughter marry a wonderful person and have them shake my hand with intensity. I want my wife to kiss me goodnight every night, even when I'm traveling for business. I want her to wink at me from across the living room, when my feet are propped up and I have the little yellow notepad sitting crooked in my lap, and the pen in my hands is moist from ambitious procrastination. GOD! I see this life in the movies I watch, in the books I read, and in the culture I indulge in, and it is not a culture of this time. This is a culture of many years ago, years when Mantle was swinging a hot bat and when Stephen King was a college student at the University of Maine. The 1960's, my wonderful audience, was the time of life when it seemed enriching, harnessing, carelessly unpredictable, and exciting. Geniune feelings and emotions not botched and bothered with social media and the political hoaxes that make up our climate now. I acknowledge that there were faults, but the turning point is only as powerful as the people who remember. Faults that turned into history books, that turned into entire libraries housing information.

I'm stuck, my fellow peers. Stuck in the sick realization that I can't relive this era. I can't smell the fresh, unpolluted air of America. All I know how to do is write those stories and tell them to others. It's the only thing I know how to do and do right. To dwell is to enrich as is to settle is to find no pure happiness. My theory may be unsettling, but why bother sugarcoating?