It’s hard to forget. Twice a day, the medications, and every time I want to eat something I’m staring at the ingredients and wondering how accurate these percentages are. Milligrams are real. Percentages are derivative of a whole, representative of a ratio. To switch things up, some ingredients from some parts of the world are in grams. Suddenly, I need to know the diet models in the different countries for anything resembling accuracy. Or I could ignore it as most people seem to.

This is cumbersome.

I remembered an old friend, one who only spoke what he meant to me, and I looked for him. A man that went by Mad Anthony Wayne, and who the Internet hasn’t seen since 2011. I read some things I wrote at Cams in St. Petersberg, now closed, when he performed, and I always looked forward to seeing him because he decorated time with that full contact 12 string, which at some point would become an 11 string. He used to box, and there was boxer in him. He also used to work with troubled kids – a counselor – and close to his retirement, he just ‘threw it all away’ and started playing guitar full time.

He was, at least in my memory of him, uncompromising, and a flame of truth that swept across fields of dead brush. How romantic that sounds, but if you think about it, truth burns. It hurts, not because it’s true but because we expect something else. It’s a rare time when the truth fits comfortably where we think it belongs. Tony’s truths hurt to hear because they hurt him, but they carried a piece of him that made it all triumphant somehow, even in some of his darkly sardonic lyrics.

So, as far as I know, Tony has left this mortal plain – he was older than myself by 20 years or so – and all that I can tell you about him I summarized in a paragraph. He gave me good advice that I ignored for good reasons and with no regrets, but he did let me know I had that choice. And that’s why I remembered him. Because he gave people choices that they thought they did not have.

I’ve tried to do that over the years. I can’t tell if I was good or bad at it. This is where people trot out how good they were at things, etc, but really, to say I have done much more than fumble with half-stabs at meaning through life would be dishonest. Sure, I thought I had a plan. I’m pretty sure you have a plan or have had plans. Rarely do we get to see a plan through, and if we do, then we might be disappointed by the anti-climax.

It’s all a subjective mess. We inherit that honestly from reality and we are subjective messes negotiating with other subjective messes, our most common connections being some form of subjective mess or the other. Do you like green more than blue? Go stand against that wall, please. Oh, on your head please. Yes. Yes, thank you…

The subjective messes aren’t static. They are dynamic subjective messes. Something that connected can separate later because people’s subjective messes went in different directions.

And after all of this, I look at the world and wonder if I grew cumbersome of it, or if it grew cumbersome of me, or whether it’s not cumbersome at all.

As I have said, it’s a lot to process.