Why I write, notions aside.

I am an old man with a young story, aging like whiskey in its sacred oak barrel, I have fermented and fomented, and grew bolder with age as time confesses while nevertheless, the truth as I viewed , manifests its facts…messy, God awful messy as they are, precisely as I wished.

As a young man, I found myself in a wayward hinterland, battling with the neighborhood, its citizens and another much closer. Nearly killed once…then twice… I stopped counting, as it mounted, creating me.

On return, life’s struggles ensued. Family members casting long shadows, myself yielding to the brittle nature of the human spirit when you wish to dance while finding it impossible to discover the correct tune…ever scribbling on bar tabs your own lyrics. Who could I trust became a salient inquiry. Where was the answer when I beckoned, peering into the interiors?

I lingered for a time, my late twenties mostly, hiding out in the New Orleans that care forgot, deep in a quaggy of despair, wives coming and not long after, the most recent after 25 years, vacating, vanished like ghosts, haunting as it was.

I am a father to five, a decent dad to a few. Something akin to a distant trumpet to others, all I love, two I simply don’t like. I think they share those beliefs. Parenting like cage brawls and late night reading of children’s parables, creates images and mirrors…and…