As my mom’s drinking and my grades became worse, I decided on my own to move back to my father’s house when I was starting the tenth grade. It did not help my grades any, but it did remove me from the negative impact of being surrounded by drunk people all the time. By this time, I had all but stopped reading, but had grown very fond of listening to music, and most especially the rock music of the Sixties era. I found myself attracted to some of the hard rock of the eighties, as well, but the music of The Who, The Stones, The Beatles, Cream, and Jimi Hendrix was what really reverberated with me.  I began to study the musicians of this era, and developed an interest in the music that had influenced them. Through all of this, I developed a very deep interest not only in music history, but in playing music as well.

 

 I mowed yards all summer that year and earned enough money to purchase my first guitar. “John”, and a mutual friend, had already been playing guitar for awhile and taught me the basic chords and a few songs. The guitar became my passion, and I played incessantly.  Through the influence of Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, as well as the guitarist friend of mine, I learned about the early blues music of the forties and fifties, and began learning how to play those songs. For some reason, the blues struck a chord with me like no other music had before, or since. There was something in the lonesome, plaintive sounds of blues that moved me in ways that music had not done before. I played in a rock band for the remainder of my school days, but constantly learned and collected all I could about blues music. The guitarist who was in the rock band with me shared my interest in blues, and we taught each other as we went. Our musical relationship lasted for many years. There has never been any art form that I pursued with as much fervent zeal as the blues. To this day, I find myself enthralled with it, and still learn new things about old players constantly.

 

 

 

  It was also during this time that I found an interest in Eastern Philosophy thanks to discussions that “John” and I had been engaging in. “John” had gained an interest in Zen Buddhism, and he and I began having in depth discussions about the subject. I had never really given philosophy or spirituality much thought at all, although I had read the Bible and considered myself Christian. In one of our discussions, I asked him to lend me a couple of books on the subject; my intent being to find things that I could pick apart and show “John” the “folly of his ways”. The next evening, “John” brought me a stack of books to read. In that stack was The Tao Te Ching. I was flummoxed upon reading that book. I returned the other books to “John” having only skimmed a couple of them, and asked if he would mind me holding on to the Tao Te Ching for awhile. His biggest mistake was saying “Keep it as long as you want”. I read it from cover to cover many times over, and found myself building up a collection of different translations of it. Through my studies of the TTC, I learned of Chuang Tzu and his book, and began collecting different translations of it as well. Those two little books have remained, like blues music, a constant in my life ever since. (A year and a half after “John” told me to “Keep it as long as I wanted”, he asked me one day, “You still got my Tao Te Ching, mother f***er?!?!?!”. I gave him two copies to make up for my trespass.)

 

   I took a job in a warehouse that “John” was crew leader  at, and started frequenting the regular Sunday night blues jams in the city when I turned twenty one. John had become a heavy drinker by that time, and along with his drinking, being in a blues club once or twice a week, and the shadow of my mom’s problem hanging over me, I began to drink heavily as well. I started drinking when I was twenty one years old, and drank fairly heavily until I was thirty two or three. In the interim, there were many bad decisions made. The one thing that remained constant through it all was my love for blues music. Even in the darkest days of my drinking, I still found solace in the plaintive moans of the blues. I began playing solo acoustic gigs in my spare time. “John” quit the job at the warehouse, and I remained there.

 

  We kept in contact with one another until I met  my first wife. It was the one time when I should have listened to “John’s” advice, and I ignored him. My first marriage was the single most important factor in what became my drunkest and darkest time. I quit playing music, writing, and reading, spending most of my time drinking. Guitars and equipment were pawned as she bled the bank account dry of what I wasn’t spending on beer. The relationship had lasted three years.  When we finally split up, it was “John” who was there to help pick up the pieces. He invited me to move into his apartment and share the rent, and found me a job, once again. “John” was still drinking heavily, however, and hence my drinking did not slow down.

 

To be continued....

   The seventh grade was the first grade I failed, landing me in summer school and in a seating arrangement that sat me right across the aisle from “John”. We hit it off fabulously! Silliness and jokes. Disruption of class. These became our specialties. So much so, we were separated by the teacher, “John” in one far corner of the room and me in the other. For the first time in my adolescence, I actually exchanged phone numbers with someone, and we began communicating with each other regularly. We were fond of the same types of music, and liked the same television programs. The eighth grade was spent with me and “John” as the evil twins of our little middle school. We wreaked fun-loving havoc, playing harmless jokes on other students, and having ourselves removed from classes. In one of the strangest ironies in my life, my eighth grade year schedule was almost identical to “John’s, with the exception of one class.

 

   Little did I know then the effects that “John” would have on my life. The only thing I knew at that point was that this was someone who saw through the transparency of it all as plainly as I did, and we could talk to one another as real people, unconcerned with our “images” “John” was the first real friend I had ever had.

 

   High school came, and “John” and I floated occasionally in and out of one another’s existences. I moved back to the city to live with my mother for a time, and had all but lost contact with “John”. At that point in my life, the city held a greater appeal to me for many reasons; the biggest of those being that I could meld easily into the sea of people around me, going virtually unnoticed, and hence unhindered in my existence. I lost interest in reading for a time but continued writing poetry and listening to various types of music.

 

   My home life at Mom’s was very chaotic. Mom had began taking in boyfriends who drank too much and then hit her. I witnessed several of these beatings, and intervened in a few. Most of them took place away from home, leaving me to deal only with the bloody, drunken aftermath.

 

   Many days as I walked home from school (or, more precisely, from skipping school; which I had developed into an art form), I would walk to a park near our house and wander along the river there, enjoying the sensation of being lost in a sea of people who did not know my name. We were anonymous to each other, exchanging smiles and mutually admiring the trees and sky. Often I sat on the levee that ran through the south end of that park doing nothing but watching the river flow languidly passed me. The silence there on the levy, broken only by an occasional car horn, soothed me. “No talking required, son,” the river seemed to say, “feel free to sit here all evening with me.”

 

    To be continued....

 

Chapter Two: “Curioser and Curioser”

 

 

  I read an interesting synopsis  a few weeks ago at Colo’s blog concerning Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and how seemingly unaffected Alice remained throughout the whole wondrous affair. That is how I spent my childhood, for the most part; aimlessly drifting with a mild sense of amusement, but extremely and curiously detached from it all. I honestly do not have very many fond memories of my childhood or adolescence. It happened, I was there, and then slowly, like a feather thrown into a warm Texas breeze, it drifted slowly away from me. 

 

   My life was lived in the pages of books. I found no need for the pomp and circumstance of hanging out with people my age and doing things that I knew would only lead to trouble. My father did not have to keep watch over me in fear of me doing some crazy thing like most parents of adolescents do. In fact, he would goad me trying to get me to go to events such as High School football. I flatly refused for I had no interest. I read books, listened to music, and watched television. I had “friends” with whom I communicated and associated at school, but I had no social connections with anyone outside of school, whatsoever.

 

   I did not do well in school. I did not like the idea of having someone grade me on my abilities as a student. By the time I entered into the sixth grade, I had already asserted within myself that I had no use for school, nor had I any use for the hierarchical system set forth within the social “cliques” of school, or the broader spectrum of society at large. More and more, I became reclusive by choice. People genuinely liked me, and I had absolutely no social problems with other students (or teachers, for that matter), I just refused to be stuck into any mold by someone other than myself. I did not realize it then. In fact, just now as I sat here writing that out, is the first time I have consciously come to that conclusion about myself. I think that I saw the whole spectrum of interpersonal relationships with people, not necessarily from an anti-social viewpoint, but rather from the perspective of one who just found it useless. It was transparently empty to me.

 

  One interesting event happened to me in the sixth grade. It was then that I met one of the most simultaneously positive and negative forces in my life; one of the most singularly instrumental people in the changes that would take place in me for years to come. For the purposes here, we will call him “John”. The event that first introduced me and “John” has always been an area of dispute between the two of us, and if I were to remind him of it today, he would still vehemently deny that it ever happened.

 

   In the playground at the school that he and I attended, there was a long rock wall along the outer perimeter on all sides. (My favorite place to sit during lunch break.) One day, I was sitting on the wall, reading a book from the library, when a rather tall, lanky fellow sauntered up to me and took the book out of my hands. “What ‘cha readin’, pussy?”, he asked. “May I please have my book back?” I asked him with a rather sarcastic tone to my voice. “I think only pussies read. I don’t think you can make me give it to you,” “John” was taunting me. In any event, a fight did not ensue. I relinquished ownership of the book to him, and told the principal of its whereabouts. I know “John” remembers the incident, but I also know it embarrassed him later on in life. That was my first encounter with “John”, and the last contact I would have with him for awhile, other than passing each other in the hallway.

 

   My grades got progressively worse, as I inwardly rebelled against school and social order. I scraped through the remainder of the sixth grade, managing to make few acquaintances along the way. Summers were rather uneventful for one who was a school age child and had no social contacts. Family events, helping my father with things around the place, and the occasional game of catch with my step brother and his friends were about it. Mostly, if there was no work to be done, I could be found reading, or enjoying my new found hobby of writing poetry. I had written poems at an earlier age, but had never actively pursued it until the summer before my seventh grade year. And so, the summer passed, and I entered the seventh grade.

 

To be continued....

 

   For one brief moment in this life, I had no name. One infinitesimal second as I came kicking, screaming, and crying into this world and breathed its air for the first time I was free of the shackles of identification. I was nothing more than a human infant, with no name and no expectations of my surroundings. I do not remember that moment so I can not speculate on my feelings at the time. I often wonder, however, how it must be to be nameless and un-burdened with the limitations of our identities. For one brief moment, I knew this feeling, as did all of you.

 

  Most of my life has been spent trying to recapture and understand that feeling. Perhaps my back pages hold some clue….

 

 

 

Chapter One: Out of the Tunnel

 

 

   The first words I can remember speaking were on August 27, 1975, my fifth birthday. “How old am I today, mommy?” Thus began my long journey into consciousness and the ensuing struggle to cope with and understand this burden that is laid upon all our shoulders (and quite unfairly so, I might add). From the moment I spoke those words (I remember it quite clearly, seeing the world suddenly come into focus as if I was stepping out of a tunnel with part of me wanting to go back in) I have questioned. I learned to read quickly and became rather enthralled with the written word, voraciously consuming any and every book I could get my hands on, and examining language and its usage. I wanted to understand this thing we used to communicate, to know what made it tick. I also garnered a deep affection for humorous words, becoming a huge fan of Dr. Seuss and the like.

 

   For the most part, I had a rather normal childhood. I grew up in predominantly middle class areas with a father who was a truck driver and a stay at home mom (although she didn’t really “stay at home”, but I’ll get to that later). Mom had had two children between my brother and me that had died shortly after birth. Doctors told my mother that to get pregnant again would either result in her death, the child’s death, or both. When mom became pregnant with me, she refused to take the doctors advice and have an abortion, and eight and a half months later, your friendly “wayfarer” poked his inquisitive little head out into the world. The ironic part of this whole scenario was that out of the four of us, I was the only one who went full term (my brother was born two months premature). Mom always tells this story with a twinkle in her eye, and calls me “her miracle”. Mom and I have always shared a relationship that is more akin to best buddies than mother and son.

 

   I did not see my father much. It’s not that he was being a bad father, he was working. He drove a truck all over the state, delivering steel so that there would be food on the table for me and my brother. Often times, dad was gone for days on end. Mom was lonely. Mom began to drink; I’m not sure when this happened, but I am certain that it was out of rebellion both against her Pentecostal upbringing, and her young marriage. While dad was out on the road, mom would go out drinking, leaving my brother and me to fend for ourselves. I can not count the times dad came home unexpected and found my brother and me alone at the house. The time that dad came to the bar and found me sitting at the table with mom when I was ten years old was especially bad. When I was eleven years old, it became too much for my father to handle and he divorced my mother. My life changed forever.

 

   Up to this point, I had lived in a large city. I was reared in the city and had urban life imprinted into my being. A few months before my parents’ divorce, my father had purchased a plot of land in a rural area outside the city of my birth. We began building up the place, creating a homestead for my father, brother, and me. I was in a dream world being in a place with wide open skies that at night were full of magnificent stars. I had experienced the country, had been in the wide open Texas prairies and known the beauty of it before this. The idea of calling it my home was at once pleasing and disconcerting.

 

    In the interim my father had started dating, and ultimately married a woman who had a son that was almost exactly the same age as I, about a year after the divorce. I was rather unaffected by this change, or so it seemed at the time. I adjusted well, having someone close enough in age to me with whom to romp and explore our new surroundings. The first summer we spent in our new country surroundings is still a magical time in my life, although I only remember shades with no details. The real test was looming, however; the beginning of the first school year I would spend in a rural Texas community.

 

   A city kid who had just witnessed the separation of his parents, the remarriage of his father, as well as going through the culture shock of moving into a completely alien atmosphere; I stood on the precipice of what would become the most formative period of my life.

 

   At this moment I was, in a way akin to that nameless person I was so many years ago; kicking and screaming and breathing the air of a new world that I had no idea of.

 

 

peace, wayf

 

 

 

 

Those who were here when I posted my autobiographical posts remember the fondness with which I spoke for the Tao Te Ching. I have decided to devote time to creating a personal interpretation of the TTC that will be uniquely mine.  

 

   In order to do this, I will use the Verbatim Translation of the Wang Pi text (the oldest known “Bamboo Slip” Scroll) that is found in the “Definitive” Tao Te Ching by Jonathan Star, I may at times also refer to existent translations which I will annotate and acknowledge at the time. I will also be simultaneously writing a commentary on some of the most basic ideas found in the Philosophy of Lao Tzu. This is not done with intent for publication, as I am definitely not a scholar in the Chinese language, nor am I a Taoist Sage.  This will be done in the spirit of a person who has a great affinity for the Taoist philosophy of the Tao Te Ching, as well as a love for classical Chinese poetry. I am not attempting to break any ground with it, but merely endeavoring to render a version which speaks closely to me and my own experience of it. As Jonathan Star notes in his introduction to his “Definitive” edition: “In the end, a 'definitive' edition is one that defines your own experience, that speaks to you in your own voice, that is so close to the mark that it becomes your  own.”

 

   As yet, I have not decided if I will post any of the interpretations on a blog; I may post all of them and I may post none. The act of interpreting the book, for me is just a good way of developing my personal view of the philosophy it represents. It will also serve as a nice reminder to me of this particular period in my life. This could be an on-going project that lasts the rest of my days, and it could be over and done in a matter of months; at any rate, it will be time consuming.

 

   I still have plans on posting on this blog regularly (although perhaps not quite as regularly as I have in the past); it will be nice to have this little journal handy to keep track of my thought processes at key points in the work.

 

   For beginnings, however, I would like to go back to mine for now. I want to go back and revisit my journey up to this point here in the pages of my blog. It is with this in mind that I have begun revising and expounding on my autobiographical posts from a few months back, and will begin posting them here again. I think this will give the people who have just found my blog a good sense of who they are actually corresponding with as well as give me a little more insight into my reasoning behind the current project. For those who have already read it, I understand if you don’t read it again, although it will likely be expanded and have more details about the people who I have come in contact with along the way.

 

   And so, as I embark on this newest leg of my journey, I can only say that I hope I will keep the interest of those who seem to be interested.

 

   The autobiography will begin in the coming days…

 

peace, wayf