It’s all strange.
I’m slowly trying to get a life again after taking myself out of the equation for years. Looking for people more up than down, more smart than dumb, more communicative than un, more unmarried than married.
That part’s working, it’s fun, but it’s a strange ride, especially since everyone I’ve been meeting is 34 and younger. Even if I am young-at-heart, I tell ya. These “kids” think, “Well, it’s only 10 years.” Yeah. And 220,000 hours. Just shy of 14 billion potentially life-altering anything-can-happen seconds. I’ve changed so much this WINTER, let alone the last decade. Age isn’t just a number, it’s an entity. It’s just not a be-all end-all, but it can’t just be dismissed. That said, I like youth. I’m just bridging some mental gaps, is all.
So, I sit back and listen to the “But remember when!” stories of sin and madness, and wonder when I stopped telling my own tales of old with such passion, or when they fell away from me so that I forgot to tell all the details, the details in which you find the devils and the gods.
Is it just that I can’t tell the stories like I used to when my co-criminals were around? Is it that I need my enablers of old to remember just how far we bent the rules, or to fill the air with the palpability of the experience ?
Is it just that I don’t care, I don’t need to sell the stories of my debaucheries anymore? I’ve been there. I’ve done it. I’ve lived to grin about it and still grin about it. My sins were doing just fine hangin’ in the closet.
I don’t know. But sometimes I wish I had the stories all dusted off and ready to go again, just because they were fun, and no matter how far you grow away from it all, that fun always comes back in a momentary flicker when you retell the tales. So many of those times, I just don’t remember enough of anymore because I stopped having a need to tell the stories.
You think, when things are happening, when you’re on the ride of your life, “I’m never EVER going to forget this!” But then a decade passes, and with it all those day-to-day fears and pains and failings and losses, more good times, more first times, more last times, and more and more and more.
Suddenly, that unforgettable and indelible memory is just another good time had on just another good day. Maybe this sunset from that mountain trumps  the one you thought you’d never see better than. Maybe they all do. Maybe it’s the immediateness of experiences that matter, not the memories thereof.
I don’t know where my precision memory went. I don’t know how I’ve forgotten so much of that which I said I’d remember forever.
But it doesn’t sadden me like it might have once.
Because I think there’s a lot more fun to be had. I’m remembering how much fun I used to be. Lordie. Y’all best watch if that girl wakens from her decade of distraction.
The stories were good, though. All the old stories of getting caught, dying not to be caught, and anything else that comes with bad behaviour. Concert stories, like the time we got to watch a couple fucking during an entire Econoline Crush set. In daylight (which I actually blogged about: part one, part two). Or any number of a million stories from my ultimate party year spent swimming in pitchers of beer in the Yukon — from Cookie the Native and his helping us get to know the dreaded Rocky Mountain Bearfucker the night I needed serious medicating after being thrown from a horse, to when three of us virtual strangers spent a night camping on the Midnight Dome in a swirl of pot and beer and the Best Conversation Ever while Green Day and Nirvana battled it out on the nearby car stereo, us all sprawled on our backs mesmerized by the heavens. Or all the stories of me hanging with strangers in distant cities, like Montreal Phil in Toronto when Someone Put Something In My Cigarette before we hiked through 18″ snow to Tim Horton’s. Don’t even start me on local stories.
Something in me, though, feels like THOSE times are forever gone. Those people, forever changed. Those places, out of reach. That girl, gone, daddy, gone.
I like hearing others’ stories. They make me smile. I was that excited about my sinful past once. My friends and experiences then still make me smile like that. If a knowing grin crawls across my face during others’ regaling of Badly Behaved Times, it’s because my own correlating experiences have started flickering on the projector of my mind.
But too much has happened since then. Too much has changed.
Sometimes, reliving it now feels akin to the desperation shown by men as they try to trump each others’ injuries and dangerous experiences.
But maybe reliving it now isn’t about a desperation for another time. Maybe my problem with reliving it now is how many years have passed between when I last had Regular Good Noteworthy Times and now. Maybe I’m still not having Those Times. Maybe it’s me.
Maybe it’s just that I’ve finally got to realize I can be that chick with the awesomely fun and popular youth, the girl with the troubled decade starting at 25, and the chick who’s come out on the other side. Maybe there’s a way to amalgamate them all, be them all, and embrace them.
I don’t know, but I know I’m not worried about it. I’m assuming I can, and will, find a way to comfortably balance all the aspects I think make me a pretty interesting package. I don’t want to lose any parts of who I am or what got me here.
And I hope I further explore this lack of need to share all my old sin stories of the past. I once would’ve rushed to tell them all, as if it were some badge of honour. Lord knows I tried to behave badly, and succeeded, within my always-known limits.
Sooner or later, we all need to grow up.
But just a little.