How does one become a butterfly? You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar. – Trina Paulus
Let me ask you a personal question. What was the worst decade of your life?
Gave this some thought. Lived life like a leaf, floating on a rare swift rapid, swirling before stagnating in a still pool. Then blown somewhere new. Repeat and rinse. Three things in a row never going right. But that’s okay. Wax on, wax off.
A part of me wants to look at that period between entering high school and exiting the military. Don’t get me started. 1960-1970. Ten years of having no ideas other than ‘I don’t want to be here.’ And ‘I wonder if anybody will ever love me.’
Loved the music. Please don’t let me be misunderstood.
Study the journey. Don’t remember much illness, can’t imagine I missed many meals or even that many hot showers.
Second thought – hands down – honors must be awarded to August 1996 for starters and August 2005 on the back end. 8/96-8/05.
Is that nine years? I am no mathematician.
Got to Florida in August, 1996. In the year of our Lord.
Oh, my God. The SENIOR TOUR MEETS WILD KINGDOM.
Miami Vice on one coast, Matlock and Golden Girls on the other. It’s all pretty much Mickey Mouse in between.
Always wanted to see Florida, so I have been saving these words about Florida by the esteemed poet James Dickey since I found them in the October, 1974 issue of PLAYBOY. Which I was just reading for the articles. Oh, to be in my twenties again. I think, not.
I think I’m not soon likely to have better place to use Mr. Dickey’s fine prose.
A bridge, and a caged rattle. An attendant at a tourist reptile farm is bouncing a red balloon off the spring-tensioned, back-coiling head of a rattlesnake. The snake strikes the balloon and the customers leap back from the cage wire and giggle.
In a lagoon are lying hundreds of alligators, sprawled on the land of Jericho over and under each other, lolling in the water, half-emerging from the locked scum as in the true, the evolutionary Eden. They bring the Everglades: The vast river; and the ponderous heads gaze up – only the eyes out of the water – with an aesthetic appreciation known only to the Lower Forms of life, for strangely birds. Someone says, I can tell you, Jack, that the alligator is one beast of which it can be truly said that if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.
My life took a turn in the Sunshine State.