Pancakes

 Sometimes you get clear memories locked in the folds of your brain - moments where every detail, the time, day, place, etc. are indelibly etched upon the gray matter in your skull.  But other times, there are just... impressions? Like, in my random travels across the internet, I saw a picture of a vintage bottle of "Golden Griddle" pancake syrup - and suddenly, I had a flood of emotional memories hit me.  Nothing exactly specific, but I remember in my childhood, this was a brand of syrup my mother often bought, and whenever I see it - I remember mornings where she cooked me and my brothers breakfast - and that every prsent bottle of sweet stuff sat on the table.  She always seemed to have so much fun cooking up stacks of those pancakes for us - and, of course, the ever present favorite of us boys, bacon.  My younger brother and older brother used to have "competitions" to see who could have the last piece of bacon left at the end of the meal.  We'd be finishing up and my brother would proudly chomp his "last piece of bacon" that he saved, while we were all bereft of the deliciousness.... only to have my other brother pull out a small piece he hid under the edge of his plate, and smugly eat it.  We'd all giggle.  We still joke about this to this day when we all get together for a meal.  It's one of my favorite memories about my brothers. 

But it's amazing how a little thing like a bottle of syrup can bring back memories and emotions of happy, good times.  I am really thankful for those moments in my life, and for the fact that I can recall them all these years later and still smile. 

A Broken Record

 I talk about, like, the same five things all the time. I suppose this is just what happens as you age and you hone in on what you like and/or what you're good at.  I used to want to be a raconteur of varied means and versed on so many topics, but frankly - it gets exhausting after a while.  I'm not trying to impress anyone or prove myself to anyone now - I am what I am. But in my youth, I always felt a need to prove that I was more than I seemed to be.  People often underestimate me just by looking at me, and what once annoyed me is what I like most about myself now.  I think I still have the ability to surprise people, but I don't have to try as hard.

I'm feeling a little extra tired and run-down tonight; I had a big IBS flare up earlier this week, and those just wreck me.  My labwork for my kidney transplant was in the toilet earlier this week, and I'm chalking it up to being sick.  I hope.  Though I will spend the next month in exteme anxiety, wondering if this transplant is going to give up the ghost sooner than I though.  I had a conversation with someone this week about getting the a/v fistula in my arm reversed; they asked what I'd do if I needed to go back on dialysis again.  If I got it reversed, I'd have to get a port in my chest for a temp cath again, and then probably surgery to get another fistula placed somewhere else.  I really don't want my other arm, my left arm.  But if it's between dying and that, I guess I'd have to live with it. Sigh. Always seems like I have a lot of hard decisions and difficult possibilities to contend with.  I handle them all right on my good days, but when I'm not feeling my best and I'm mentally weaker than normal - I feel kinda downright awful.  Hopefully I bounce back soon.

I just wanna express the ever present wish of my heart, one that I'm sure others with ESRD share, I just wish there was a cure for this disease. One day, a treatment that could regrow the nephrons of my kidneys and I could have normal, healthy, fully functional kidneys again. I wouldn't have to take massive doses of drugs to keep me alive - ones that prevent the kidney from being rejected by my body's immune system, but produce some really awful side effects.  One day, I wish I could just wake up, free as a gazelle leaping through the tall grass, breathe in fresh air, and function again under my own auspices.  But that will never happen in my lifetime.  I'm going to die from this, and my life will never be as it once was long ago.  I have to accept that.  I also have to remind myself that in spite of my struggles, I have lived a pretty extraordinary life, and that I know I will have left a mark on this world in my time in it.  Some people never get the moments I've had, even with all their working organs.  I just wish it wasn't so damn hard sometimes.

Winding down, falling apart

 I was playing guitar this afternoon. I have noticed significant impairment in my fingers over the last few years as neuropathy has taken its toll on my body.  I have a much harder time feeling my fingers, and they do not move as quickly and responsively as my brain would like them too.  It's a minute difference to most, but as a guitarist - I notice it a lot. I feel clumsy on the fretboard, I cannot play as fast as I once did and I am more unsure of what I play than I was in my youth.  I'm trying not to let it get me down - I'm no longer any kind of music or performing professional, so the defeat is really just a personal one here. But it's a small reminder of how my body is breaking down slowly, and how someday I just will not have control of my facilities any more.  For someone who technically was not supposed to live this long, I sure have lasted a lot more years than I thought, but there's a little bit more wear and tear on me than other 43 year old folks. So I take my blessings where they come, and remember that my impaired ability to play the guitar is better than some people will ever play in their life, and I should be grateful I even got to do it at all in the first place. Music has always been its own reward.

Pieces of Yourself

 I've written a lot of missives on the internet since I started using it in the Dark Ages.  Most of them are still out there - and I have this tendency to be very open and honest about what I'm feeling in that moment, so of course there are some personal things I look back on and I have to cringe about a little.  Some of them, well, were written in very prominent and public places. But that's how I felt at the time - I have to remind myself that no one is perfect all the time, and sometimes things you mean with all your heart change over time.  But there's nothing like having things you've written be on one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, and lingering there long after everything you wrote about kind of crashed and burned.

But that's who I was then. The guy who wrote that still lives in my heart, but most decidedly in the past. And I'll never be upset I wrote and shared those things when I did.  Too often we float through life not saying the things we want to say.  Maybe it won't mean anything in the future.  You hope it will, but there's always the chance it won't.  But I know "the risk always lives". Sometimes you roll the dice and the outcome stays with you.  Other times, it was a beautiful moment that fades away like so much else in your life.  But the important thing was that you were there, you did it, you etched it in stone, and then cast that stone into the river of life.  Most people just sit on the river bank, wishing they went down the river on a raft with Tom and Huck.  I know I built that raft and took a ride on the mighty Mississippi - if only for a while, and that it was unforgettable and something that shaped who I am today.

What do we build on the wasteland?

 Sometimes I wonder what it is exactly people are fighting for in certain battlegrounds.  Fights these days, especially online, seem so esoteric - a war of words that relates, somehow, to events happening in the world, but it's an endless spew of trash thoughts and words between two sides who somehow have lost sight of any goal they are fighting for and the only goal is to momentarily score a "win" with a witty bon-mot or worse yet some terrible insult invoking words we should have banished to the dust-bin of history long ago.

What do you plan to build on this wasteland, when the dust settles? Is the culmination of all these meaningless battles just a wasteland that we actually have to live in? The "it's the internet, it doesn't matter" mentality has lead to this point in our history... and it's just kind of disgusting to live in.  The consequences of our digital actions have reached a head, and we're experiencing real world effects of this tomfoolery. 

People have been saying it for years, but social media is truly reaching its apex of implosion.  What once was a decent way to talk to friends, family or strangers who liked a weird hobby of yours has become a cesspool.  I'm just as guilty as the next person; my love of conversation and sharing ideas led me to the internet at a young age; I'm approaching 30 years of using "the internet" and I've watched it just become this aching tower of excrement, precariously placed, and for a while refreshed every couple of years, but the last decade has refused to relent and the tower of shit built now has no support.  It's going to collapse soon, but instead of falling digitally... it's falling in reality. 

I hope that when the dust settles - we can all gain a little bit more clarity, a little more humanity, a little more kindness, a little more of a reasonable approach to life. We're all different, and there's no clear or one right answer to these things, but something has to change.  Or it won't, and we'll doom ourselves to the reduction of our species to something base rather than the greatness we once thought we could achieve.

Maybe I just need to eat lunch, I get cranky.

To all the lives I've lived before

 I have been many different people in my years on this Earth. Don't get me wrong; I've always been distinctly me, and at any point in my life you could see... well, me in that life. But you're always a bit different in different stages and areas of your life.  I came across an old photo from about 20 or so year ago of me - I and I remember myself then.  It's amazing when those emotions of who and where you were at that time come back from something like a photo.  Anything can trigger the recall, though, a photo, a song... a particular food, a certain smell.

So you dwell in that moment, with the "old you" and part of you relives that experience in an instant.  I mean, days, weeks, months, years compress into a tiny moment in your conciousness and hit you all like a hammer.  I know I've made plenty of mistakes in my life and that often we look at the past and think of those mistakes and/or things we miss... and some people think about changes.  I do too - of course the big one in me is wondering what life would have been like if my kidney disease was caught before it destroyed my native kidneys.

But it's all moot - all the experiences I had, all the choices, good and bad, have led me up to this moment on this very day. And... well, I like who I am now.  I like me.  I'm not perfect, but I think I'm okay.  And if things happened any differently... I wouldn't be who I am now.  This is who I was meant to be, better or worse.  I think maybe I'm better for it, though.

Life begins at 3AM in the International House of Pancakes

 I wandered into the International House of Pancakes once, a long time ago.  It was getting close to 3AM; we had been up all night drinking in the local watering hole, and had decided that our night wasn't over.  The bars closed at 2 AM but we lingered, of course, finishing a pitcher of the rot-gut beer that was on special.  The bartender, Eddie, seemed only mildly annoyed as we didn't cause a scene like some other of our peers, who were busy trashing not only themselves, but the general area around them as they were ushered out the door.  We, however, lingered back by the rear of the place, in a few stools towards the end of the bar.  We finally drained the pitcher at about 2:30, and Eddie was only too happy for us to leave by that point.  The jukebox had long been turned off, but the echoes of The Allman Brother's "Back to Where It All Begins" still rang in my ears.  Our driver hadn't had a drink since about 10 PM and was pretty pissed at his sobriety - but yet was still game to drive us down to the IHOP.  We chose the IHOP over the Denny's down the road that night for reasons unknown, but sometimes fate steps in to make decisions for you that you can't comprehend.

The old triangular shaped building was hopping that evening; the place was full of post bar revelers like us, but we managed to get a table - I sat down in the far end of the booth, next to the window and that little caddy full of different flavored syrups.  I spent an inordinate amount of time staring at the Strawberry Syrup while my compatriots ordered dishes like "Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity".  I got an omelette. Bacon and cheese.  Nothing too complex.  It was the hashbrowns I was looking forward to, in all honesty. This was the days before such things were outlawed, and cigarettes were broken out over cups of black coffee.  Conversation flowed; we were young, and the world was at our feet. We talked of things that mattered, and mostly things that didn't matter, but we felt so alive doing it. The room was full of such chatter, and it all overlapped each other in a cacophonous symphony of hopes and dreams. There were notes of other emotions in there; relationships on tenuous edges, hearts broken, losses felt.  They all hit my ears, and stuck in my brain even though I didn't know these people.  Except for a few other tables, filled with people I did know, either well or casually.  

 I knew a lot of people at that time in my life, and I often floated between many different and dichotomous groups of friends.  I saw a table with some other friends I knew; I excused myself to use the rest room, and I went to relieve myself of the literal liters of beer I had drank only hours previously. (I'll digress here this was a common and mundane action to me at the time, and it was only years later that I learned how precious an ability it really was to be able to micturate, but if you've read my writing before you know why)  When I was done in the tiny washroom, with the weirdest door lock in existence, I wandered back out to the table of other friends I spied.  They were raucously celebrating the end of their night, which occurred at a different locale than the bar I spent my night in. My presence was celebrated with a lot of warm hellos, and I'm sure I tried to tell a joke or something witty. I don't really recall what I said.  We laughed a bit, the waitress growled at me when I was in her way (I'm still sorry about this years later, servers deal with a lot of shit, especially late night, but I was just a large man blocking her way then...) but I do remember seeing a crew of young folks walk in, presumably after a night similar to all of ours.  It was a mixed group of boys and girls, but of course, I spied one girl who walked in before the others.  She had brown hair and brown eyes, and was wearing an old ripped band t-shirt. Sometimes people just catch your eyes, and in your young lust, you fall in love immediately.  In an instant, I dreamed of talking with her, being witty, charming, saying the right things.  Laughing together.  Sharing a cigarette and talking about the most important things in the world. Holding hands.  Listening to her talk about her life, hopes, dreams. Doing things together.  These all flashed in my mind so quickly - and then, I put them away as quickly as they came.  They walked past on their way to be seated.  I turned away, back to my friends.  We never even looked at each other. I don't know who she was.  

But it's amazing how your young heart can dream up such possibilities and hope in an instant, only to file them away and return to whatever you were previously doing. I went back to my seat, finished my black coffee and ate an omelette at 3:30 in the morning, in the late 20th century. My life went on, confusingly, aimlessly, but with great hope and great expectations. Yet, here I am... over twenty years later, suddenly recalling this moment. This inconsequential night, among a string of many nights and many adventures, and I have to laugh about how my life may have started at 3 AM in an IHOP and I didn't even notice until I was an old man.

So this is life

 So this is life in January, 2022.  I don't know if it's just me because I've had covid and a bum kidney transplant, but so far this year has just been about me feeling sick all the time.  But more than that, I sort of feel like the world at large is depressed and kind of breaking down.  I watched a movie from 2009 last night - in my mind it didn't seem like it came out that long ago, but it was 13 years ago now.  The world was a different place, at least for me, then.  There's a lot of problems now with the covid pandemic, supply chain problems, income inequality seeming to reach a boiling point.  It's just a different climate in the world overall now, and I just wonder how long I can endure it - and how long others can endure it.  I know I could use a big win right about now, but what pains me is that I think literally millions of others need a big win now too, and we just don't have it in the cards right now.  This is a hard time for everyone - I just hope we can all hold on and maybe get some light back into our lives again.

Nineteen Years

 On New Years Eve, 2002, I was rushed to the ER in an ambulance - with a raging and out of control blood pressure, I had lost vision in my eyes.  I had been sick for quite some time, but had no real idea what was wrong with me.  I'd been diagnosed with so many things in the previous month, most of them being of a mental nature.  It turns out my kidneys were dying, and I was in renal failure.  By the time I got to the ER, they were completely dead and I started kidney dialysis that night.  This changed the entire course of my life, and here I am now - nineteen years later, still alive.  This is kind of a miracle - so many people with ESRD just... die.  Even with dialysis, even with kidney transplants, the life of a person with ESRD is not easy nor normal.  Yet somehow, I have navigated it and been able to live a life.  Some might even say a remarkable life - I know I have looked back at the last 19 years of my life and marveled at some of the things I have done.

My survival has only been able to happen because of the generosity of friends and family.  These people have lifted me up, carried me and made me feel worthy of being alive.  My survival has been the result of an army of people offering up their time, love and care over so many years.  I'll never be able to pay back all I have been given, but I know I try to pay it forward whenever I have the chance.  I think the greatest thing I ever got from losing my kidneys was an absolute tidal wave of love in my life.  I am one of the lucky ones; the fortune in my life has been built with kindness, and generosity, and that is the kind of life I have been happy to live.  I am grateful to be alive to feel the love of my family and my friends, and I am so beyond grateful to be alive to bask in and share in the love with my children.  My Jack and my Josephine are the truest light in my life - they make me laugh and love harder, every day, more than I ever thought I could. Being their father is my greatest joy - and, again, I often think about how I could not be that if it were not for so many people.

So thank you for giving me life and reason to live for nineteen years. People who are close to me, and even those who are strangers who have supported me over the years - I am in your debt, and I mean this is all of my being when I say "I love you."

It was good

 Sometimes you hear a song, or a piece of music, and your mind and soul are transported back to a time in your life where that music was, perhaps, ubiquitous. Or just the time you associate with that song. That unique, transportative quality of music is something that draws it to me and keeps it near my soul - I was listen to a random playlist recently, and I heard the tune "Good" by Better Than Ezra come on.  The song was a post-grunge one hit wonder, but I remember it being on the radio all the time the summer of 1996 - the year I was 18 years old.  I'd freshly graduated High School by the seat of my pants, and I was eager to start a new life, and becoming the "adult" I always wanted to be.  That kind of promise and hope really only comes with the inexperience of the age, but that summer I had a car, I had a part-time job working at a Roller Hockey Rink, and a pocket full of dreams.  The world was my oyster - and cruising around the little part of the world I lived in with my radio blasting really fueled that.  I still remember the warm breezes of that summer - I'd been accepted to and was going to college in the fall.  I had already made some new friends at college orientation (which took place the day after I graduated High School) and the future seemed so bright.  Some of those friends I made on that one overnight orientation are still some of my best friends today.  But that song... it was always on the radio, and in 1996 - radio was still king.  We still listened to radio, and our collection of CDs.  We even still listened to tapes -  I remember getting to college and meeting kids who had collections of taped Phish and Grateful Dead shows.

But every time I hear that song, I remember that carefree summer - I remember the roller hockey rink, I remember thinking that it was a new start for me.  I could leave the insecurities and weirdness of young High School Steve in the dust, and create a cool new guy for the world to like.  Of course, as time showed me, I was already all I ever needed to be for people to like me, I just had to learn to like myself.  You can lead a mule to water, but you can't make them drink.

But I hear that song - and old 18 year old Steve pops up inside me, and I wonder how so much time has passed.  I don't know how I could be creeping up on 30 years since that moment, and I think of everything I've experienced and endured since that time.  I'm just glad I remember what it was like to be young, dumb and hopeful.  My dreams have changed and shifted; some came true, others never manifested - but I think I've lived a life that I am proud of and thankful for.  I got a lot of things that I never knew I wanted, and I've experienced so much I never thought I would.  Here's to always hearing the music, and may it always remind me of the time in my life that it underscored.  I'd be lost without the musical highway in my wake, the music that has scored my unconventional life.