Talk about writing on a seriously uphill curve. It is Super Bowl Sunday and I am not watching. I have recently stopped smoking pot and believe me, that is a first. I think every time I have sat down to write, I have been high. Looking back, I can’t think of a single exception and how is that for an admission? It is has been very difficult for me to write for at least a month and I want to tell you why.

I have been really troubled about my writing for months now. It isn’t that I have been purposely dishonest or anything contrived like that. So much of my life has been about shielding myself from others, this line I have been afraid to cross. I confess to enjoying getting compliments about my stories, afraid that I if I completely stripped away the veneer of having my shit together, I would lose you.

I have been having an incredibly difficult time for quite a while now. I can’t seem to get a handle on high blood pressure readings and it has twisted me up and wrung me dry. Around a week ago, I took a tiny little pill that goes by the name of Remeron, a deadly little fucker that plays with brain chemistry. The idea was that uncontrolled anxiety and depression are causing my elevated BP. This little keg of dynamite is no bigger than a mosquito, but gets a hold of your soul like King Kong on steroids. You are instantly no longer yourself, a complete stranger, even with an unchanged image in the morning mirror. My medicine is now in my writing and it is from my heart to yours.

The fear of death made a home for itself in the little body of a nine year old boy, who suddenly lost his father to a heart attack, back when they were pretty much a guaranteed killer. In 1954, when you were alive long enough to get to a hospital, you usually never came out. I was so young and the fear from that one night, all alone in my bedroom, listening to my mother’s cries from down the stairs, burrowed itself deep inside me.

I always considered my 54th birthday a liberating milestone because it meant I managed to survive my father’s time here, entering uncharted emotional territory. I know for certain that I was different from all my young friends at the time it happened. I remember my first day back in school and being painfully aware of all the kids whispering about me when I walked down the aisle to my little wooden desk in the classroom. This feeling of being a part from everyone else has been carried within all these years. Even outliving my father seemed like living on borrowed time, making a massive withdrawal from the Bank of Life, frightened about the invisible remaining balance.

I am completely convinced that sharing deeply personal stories with you is the most potent kind of writing I can do. We all have so much in common and it crosses age, ethnicity and geography. For so many of us, our death is such a terrifying prospect that we bury it somewhere and make sure to lose the directions to find it ever again. If you don’t mind, I have very recently made a decision that I want to wrestle with the endless array of bogeymen locked away in the closets of my consciousness. In the spirit of honesty, I just poured a short glass of wine and I am crying. I am crying the tears of truth.

We are all wired so differently and I happen to be one of those introspective, reasonably intelligent, sensitive people. I remember writing about my motorcycle trip on the mainland, which was an incredibly rich, creative time for me. One of the entries had to do with feeling like Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp character. He was this kind of bumbling fool that touched upon the insecurities and self-consciousness many of us feel. Dropping the bike repeatedly and continually making wrong turns were only part of my feelings of insecurity and fear on this two wheel journey of self-discovery. It felt like something I had to do and I survived it and very, very quietly became my hero for taking so many chances on that ride.

Everyone of us, whether we are twenty or seventy, are goddamn heroes.

There is so much I look forward to sharing with you. Thanks for listening.