To The Redwoods
One thing about hangovers is that they sure are a lot easier to deal with when you're young. And one thing about wisdom is that it sure is a lot easier to know the importance of being a fully conscious human being when you're old.
As a young man Mars wanted to rip the heads off people and shit down their necks. His hard-nosed hostility and disgruntled alienation from the world had come at a time and place over which he had no control, when one day he came home from the third grade with a prescription for eyeglasses a school optometrist had given him and our mother refused to accept it.
"Marshall, you don't need glasses." Mom had told him. She believed in Christian Science and rejected the notion that one of her sons had been born with defective eyes. "Your eyes are perfect, honey, and they will heal themselves."
As a result, Mars had deeper character defects than me. His bumptious and contentious disposition got him into more verbal arguments, and his erratic behavior made him more moody and unpredictable. But we both had itchy, out of joint feet.
We lacked the experience and wisdom to cognately recognize and understand the reasons for our mutual disillusionment and disconnection from the tenets of ordinary society. While I harbored less bad blood towards people and the natural order of things, I felt equally unfulfilled and unsure about what to make of my life. To make matters worse, I lacked self-esteem and moral integrity, a one-two personality punch that made me a very selfish young man.
At that time in our lives we saw life through the same distorted and disenchanted lens of the typical washed-up high school jock, a down and dirty world of the good, the bad, and the ugly, where using our physical attributes and attractiveness to get what we wanted was all we had left and as such all that really mattered. And with very little integrity and empathy for others we could care less about who got hurt along the way. Ourselves included.
The morning we got on the Greyhound bus bound for Arcata Mars and I were down and out identical twins trying to find our place in the sun. At least that's how I felt. I wanted to get a degree in journalism and work as a journalist, a profession and career I thought I might be good at and maybe even proud of. I needed to escape my past, what little there was of it, which had recently turned into a series of misguided starts and stops in an unstable no man's land of fickle missteps and mistakes. Let's just say the word quitter had my name on it.
When we said so long to Gary and stepped on that bus my heart sank and soared at the same time. We were on our own, two drifting peas in a pod embarking on a hard-and-fast adventure to an unrealized and uncertain future. We sat down side by side in one of the middle bench seats, waved one last goodbye to Gary through the side windows, and hit the wandering road.
