The Decline

I am aware all too much of my recent decline. It is not necessarily a bad thing to discover one day that you are in a steady recession. It will often inspire exciting change. I believe it comes from being too comfortable in one setting -- a sort of content humdrum that reflects in your personality or your work, as well as in your projects or your relationships. You are aware of your own potential and there are months and seasons where we keep the bar steady and shine our brightest. Inspiring others to do the same is what exhilarates the concept. Then one day, you notice that certain areas of your life have become sloppy but in repairable and tolerable ways, yet still leaving you with that next day feeling of having slept on someone’s couch. My decline started the instant I thought I had no more tasks of immediate importance. Once I had all my ducks waddling around my happy gazebo, I settled in to a slide of contentment and where I may be giving all my genuine gusto around my work and my loved ones, I am definitely not giving it my all in the areas that are supposed to make up my soul. With the home front nicely manicured, a reckless and irresponsible change of scenery is the only sensible option at this point. I will soon board a plane headed for scattered parts that include Chicago, Alabama and Nashville all in the spirit of living as the ceaseless houseguest for two weeks. With nothing in disorder and the spirit of a small town youth bound for a big city college, I am saying no to contentment, choosing to wonder once again, and live out of a suitcase among loved ones for the ushering of the New Year. Switching off the lights, locking the door and returning to a thin layer of dust over the pause placed on the contemporary. The luxury of stability almost insists on the liberty of temporary vagabond status. To shake the feeling of sleeping on someone’s couch is actually to sleep on someone’s couch. My decline reflects not just in the confession of this column, but also in the column itself. Ordinarily, I enjoy writing personally and publicly to feel what I am unable to feel when I am alone. My passion and sincerity has become my vapid practice. I find that I am clicking away, paying little attention, trying to look busy at Starbucks. It makes no sense whatsoever to be so absent from your passion when you truly have the world on a string. I am pecking away with little or no emotion, simply writing because I know I love it -- because I still have to eat. I could not be bothered to do more than run a brush through my hair and pile windbreaker layers over my plaid pajamas for the nonchalant stroll to Starbucks. Sitting at a sidewalk table with dead eyes in the approach of Christmas, I am seeing the jostling tension growing in the usually lax main street. The hostile exchanges between pedestrians and motorists, and the occasional barfly gloom among the Dean Martin Christmas classics have nothing to do with me. My inability to feel emotionally affected by the sneers of housewives dragging a couple of tiny apes in their tow reveals the dissention of passion. The decline is unfounded and downright socialist. It is the American way to desire more and outwardly live an insatiable desire for life. Time is the one commodity unable to replace and foolish to negotiate, and I am deeply troubled with the decline. And so must begin the vagabond furlough. Perhaps the life of a tramp in satirical fashion is what is necessary to make the keys clack for a good reason. Perhaps with things so tidy and organized in California, there is nothing outrageous to observe and wonder, or any zany obstacles to offer new life realizations. I want what I love to have purpose. I do not wish to mechanically love just anything and allow myself to spin monotonously. My daydreams and my expressions, my creation with passion are all on the decline. It would only sadden me if I did not care. Noticing and concerning are steps to ensure the seasons of change soften into the next. I am all too aware of my senseless decline. It seems that only the dramatic are able to thrive and progress in the hassles of life. For them, their wonder is the child’s captivation in a theater -- blooming only in the most spellbinding of circumstances. Others are taking the plunge as well. Although only some of their thrusts are relatable in travel, many are spontaneously pulling triggers on all forms of impulsive personal advancements. Mine has become a peculiar way to reinvent ones own position, but my circumstances necessitate a blasé wander in order to fixate again on story and expression. The laptop my bindle and the likelihood of an actual can of beans, revamped are the rustic boxcars for the mile-high happy hours soaring towards a blank leave of absence. The spirit is heading towards a boom against the recession that was on the verge of depleting my senses. In the fight against your decline, I hope that you find the senseless and impulsive action that raises the bar back to its proper setting. Pursuit of American excellence; the impulses entice while encouraging the old notion that something crazy might just be crazy enough to work. From here, I can only pack…

It Happened One Night at Pepe's

In the year of America’s bicentennial, President Gerald Ford was receding to newly elected Jimmy Carter, Steve Jobs gave birth to Apple, and the two-dollar bill was circulating for the first time with far out results, and a gunshot that ended in homicide was the catalyst that echoed a yearlong state of terror in New York City. One night, in Southern California, two brothers left their post at their family-owned Mexican restaurant in a Sunbelt of the retired citrus lands. The brothers found their success in the sixties and good fortune returned their nephews safely from Vietnam, but the year of 1976 could not secure their good fortune much longer. One night at Pepe’s Mexican Restaurant, the misfit staff of cooks and register jockeys found out what a keg of beer and a parking lot in summertime truly meant in the nineteen-seventies. It is an unexpected love story of carefree serendipity that became a word-of-mouth sensation for the rest of the year. The cover photo for this column has a date of several years later, but no one would ever need to know that. The palms and the building stand exactly as they did that one night -- a silent landmark commemorating a time in a generation that lived by its own infamy. As far as anyone there was concerned, the whole world was there that one night at Pepe’s. That dorky fat kid, who used to live down the street with his mom and dad, wore his favorite jeans and t-shirt and barely got his used Dodge out of the garage, but he made it all the way with The Bay City Rollers blaring on his speakers. In the parking lot, the kid let the music declare his spirit until his car battery died, and he discovered that everyone had finally seen him for the cool person he really was -- and he talked to just about every girl in his class that one night at Pepe’s. Long-distance friends in their thirties found the kid’s music to be the perfect backdrop to their reunion -- the reason for their summer. They were finally together, and they were both childishly eager to teach the fun-bratty youths of fast food the way you properly tap a keg. The couples’ misdemeanor behavior resulted in their dinning on stoner genius created by the kitchen that would never be on the menu again, and they were finally able to let go of their breath after holding it for far too long. Being ensconced in the high school atmosphere took them back to a time when they knew each other exactly as they did that one night at Pepe’s. A decision to take the band from prom up the coast to Seattle came to five best friends that night. The kind of decision you can only make over a keg of beer after your senior year with a crappy job in a burger shack. The boys took their vans back to their folks’ house and returned with all their instruments, using two parking spaces to remind everyone why they are soon to be gone -- and taking the summer with them. Unless you were using the lone battered payphone to inform others of the happenings, you were not making any calls. It was imperative that those missing or close to leaving work for the day knew of the potential in the night. The night held everyone to an unspoken obligation to keep the good times legendary and the right characters involved without attracting any outside elements that may ruin the most amazing, spontaneous and secret night of the year. The warm pink and peach sunset of an endless California summer gave way to the scraps of gusto held back by anyone -- a night forged without a concept of calendars. The overhead lights of the parking lot made a dim stage of the middle of the avenue and an eclectic ensemble performed for a night without status, league, or practicality. New friends made, troubles shelved, exciting decisions formed, and anyone who forgot about the possibility of realizing dreams found their memories again that one night at Pepe’s. The marvel of a cobwebbed accident that is by no means a calamity happens for no reason, other than to inspire the hopefulness that things can be different and beautiful at the same time. Only the greatest of changes and the biggest steps forward seem to be born on the most memorable of nights. Lives entangled in a social supernova that, without catastrophic incident, glowed with vivid life and burned out naturally of its own accord -- a social oddity as rare, and astonishing as a celestial one. There was not a single cop or firefighter or square figure of authority in sight that one night at Pepe’s. The brothers returned to a multitude of rumors and hearsay -- mostly exaggeration from the stuffy citizens of the neighborhood. The brothers found the cash register packed more than it had been in months and everything was surprisingly more orderly -- and nothing was going to shift interest away from that. Not a single thing, on photo or paper, can account for my stories or hold up in court, but I heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend that the summer of seventy-six was the stuff of summer legend. It was the all-too-real principle of what happens when yearning spirits accidentally come together in a cosmic force of carefree togetherness. I heard it all happened that one night at Pepe’s…