A Cowboy

It's my birthday today...it's an odd thing, thinking about the world before I was here, all those many billions of years, no sunny jimmy, no dumps either. But I've been here for awhile now, walking around on this spinning rock, some times I've actually been conscious and aware, a lot of the time I've been sleeping, or inebriated, or crazy with hormones. Today I feel fully alive and awake. The air is brisk, dead leaves are everywhere, the wind is out of the north, the lake is choppy and full of action.

I put on a shirt today, it's kind of a cowboy shirt, I just grabbed it said out loud to myself, "I want to be a cowboy." Then I thought about how being a cowboy was probably one of the first things I "wanted to be." There's a family picture of me, on one of my early birthdays, with a cowboy, a six-gun, perched atop a rocking horse, a big shit-eating grin breaking across my face. I was quite well outfitted. Just to make sure the sunny/dumps dichotomy was in force early on, I also wanted to be an Indian and I remember being on a trip out to Colorado on a family vacation and I ended up with a full Indian headdress which I wore proudly, yellow and green feathers blowing in the wind, I was probably practicing my Indian love call. Of course, on the road trip, that headdress ended up flying out the window of our speeding car...I probably cried over it, realizing my Indian days were over.

There's lots of things I've wanted to be: Cowboy, Indian, Baseball player, Football Player, Basketball Player, Rock Star, Holy Man. I tried my hand at some of these, I can't say any of them really worked out. I'm just me, here, now, wearing my cowboy shirt, thinking about what could have been, what could be...thinking I'm one year closer to something, one year farther from something...