Life Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be
Sometimes you almost turn 40, and sometimes it snows in April
Sometimes it snows in April / Sometimes I feel so bad, so bad / Sometimes I wish life was never ending / And all good things, they say, never last
- Prince, “Sometimes It Snows In April”
One night when I was 18 and a freshman at Providence College, I was standing on an overcrowded, stalled Amtrak car on a snowy night, somewhere between Hartford, DC, and hell. I had just lived through a month where, I had symbolically denied the Catholic church three times to my friends, while attending a Catholic college. There’s something about the cataclysmic effect of becoming a “woke” black man while learning about the Crusades, while black people are less than one percent of a religiously affiliated institution of higher learning’s racial makeup that pretty much allows for that to happen. Every college kid has a revolutionary awakening, and this happened to be mine. Given that my attachment to religion was the only attachment to mainstream values that I had left, I never was the same.
While thinking about all that had transpired, I had an exploded white Bic pen in my hand, and I sloppily wrote the following in smeared black ink on the back of my mid-semester transcript that entertainingly spelled out the alphabet (A-B-C-D). “I want to change the world. But nobody actually wants that. I don’t tell people this because I’m afraid of what they’ll think of me, but I’ll write it here so that, if I don’t make it off this train, at least the world will know who they missed out on. ‘I’m a freewheeling anarchist, a helter-skelter punk rock noise machine turned up to 11, a terminator on the edge of panic. The literal street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm, 10 pounds of dynamite in a three-piece suit. Catholic Antichrist Superstar, in the flesh. Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.’”
Fast forward 20 years, and the world that I believed I was destined to rule is the world in which I live. Of course, I don’t run anything on my ideal planet except for the body in which I live, which is incredibly problematic because, well, I meant every word I wrote when I was 18. I’m almost 40 (39 for 36 days) now, and I can adequately tell you that I’ll probably live to be 78 because I know that what I’m feeling right now is a mid-life crisis.
At some point in the midst of my 20s, I gave up on believing that culture, economics, and humanity in general would plunge down deep enough to reach the space where I have spiritually resided in Dystopia for the past 20 years. A large part of me occupies the last house on the left of the baddest street with no name, where everything goes bump in the void as the bodies hit the floor.
And then, Trump happened.
November’s election was frightening for me because my emotional and creative core resides in a realm that I have carefully curated where very few others allow their minds and souls to tread. Deplorable humans and social parasites like Donald Trump live near here, but not quite here, which needs to be stated. When I wrote that I *knew* that Trump was going to become President it’s because, given that I’m so close in proximity to these people and their stuff, I understand the dynamic forces that occupy their realm. The Internet has been available and dominant here the entire time, stirring the most extreme of passions and extracting the strongest of these emotions to inform underground culture with a level of brutal honesty-as-poison that, once it is exposed to the mainstream, attracts, then spiritually or physically destroys on contact.
Having lived around said poison for two decades, I’m impervious to it. I’ve effectively separated my body from my soul at this point. Thus, my spirit can be full of this sickness, and it can run roughshod throughout much of my nature, but not destroy my body. Thus, unlike others who live where my soul resides, I can put clothes on my body and say the words that allow me entry into the mainstream, left-of-the-middle and just right-of-center world. However, my emotional self is out there with the libertarian and alt-right minds and ideas, churning poison, preparing the foulest of air to be breathed via culture into a once-”pristine” universe.
I cringed as I watched the mainstream media standing outside of my metaphorical front door, setting up temporary shop in my mental home neighborhood for two years. My body became exhausted as the body count of literal humans and the essences of so many more began to line my streets, making it hard to think, act, react, create, and ultimately exist and live my best life. It was harrowing to watch people’s faces evolve from normal visions to melted away clones of psychedelic Salvador Dali paintings, disgusted by the realities of a side of life that I knew far too well.
Sometimes as of late, I’m astoundingly depressed because I wish that I had done more to prepare the world for what it has become. So many people who have served as mentors in my life have told me to “be the change I want to see in the world.” Since I was 18, I’ve had five mentors tell me that, and instead of representing being the “Master Blaster of Dystopian Disaster” that I always wanted to be, I opted for the more benign take on that which ends up with me at 39 wondering just what exactly in the whole entire hell has happened?”
More often then ever before, I find myself singing Prince, Wendy, and Lisa’s magnificent words from the three decade-old song “Sometimes It Snows In April.” I feel “so bad,” and I do wish that “life was never ending,” if only because I feel so strongly about having missed my calling in life again, and again, and yet again, and now that the universe has created a space for my best self to thrive, I want to be able to enjoy this moment. Moreover, as I wrote when I was 18, I want to change this world. Well, maybe not so much change it (Donald Trump beat me there because I took myself out of the race), but guide it and allow space for everyone, and everything to thrive.
Sometimes you almost turn 40, and sometimes it snows in April.
