Ronin

In feudal Japan (1185–1868), a Rōnin , 'drifter' or 'wandering man', was a samurai who had no lord or master and in some cases, had also severed all links with his family or clan.

For most of my life I have been lucky enough to know what I wanted. For a long time all I wanted was to write - like write anything I could think of, and then eventually, when I had an idea that was good enough, to write novels. I wanted this so badly that when I really decided to take it seriously it consumed my life. It's all I cared about. I lived an intense life of relative isolation for someone in their early 20’s. I hardened myself, reasoning that eventually a time would come where I wouldn’t have the same fire, the same energy to get that heavy creative lifting done. I would say I became a master of myself in this time. My entire identity was wrapped up in my drive and focus on the goals I had. Nothing would stop me. I knew my strengths and my limitations, but I wasn’t afraid to grow and push past my barriers to achieve my mission. By the time I was 24 I had published my first book. But while one mission was complete, I still had 2 more books to go before I finished my epic crime story that contained everything I’d thought, up until that point, about crime, society, class, and culture.

Over the next few years I would go on to publish several more books, eventually fulfilling my series’ imperative. But given their rather lacklustre reception and a general antagonism I felt from the literary community at large - I started to become disillusioned with my own pursuit of greatness. I started to feel the rather heavy and humbling acknowledgement that, despite my efforts, intelligence and drive - when it comes to a successful creative career those things are sometimes not enough. I wasn’t willing to posture or pose or really put myself out there to perform the relentlessly aggressive and entirely shameless self promotion it takes to really break through in the arts. I did not want to glad hand people, or compromise my values by postulating to those that I considered to be a bunch of well to do elitist pricks. Not that they would have me anyway.

Along the way I met T. Someone unlike anyone else I’ve ever met in my life. We not only had about 90% of the same interests, but we also liked and understood those things in the exact same way but from diametrically opposed backgrounds. We immediately spoke the same language. For the first time in my life I was able to feel what a friendship based on true creative alignment and collaboration felt like. Our conversations and creative jam sessions were so much more internally rewarding than anything else I’d ever felt in my life. I had had best friends before, but this was something uncanny. It was a divine friendship - something that felt ordained by god. This was my guy and against all odds we’d found each other - perfect counterpoints. Over the next decade we’d collaborate on an entire world of in-jokes, ideas and stories. In the early years of this friendship it was simply that, a friendship. He was a musician and I was a writer. Our few real differences brought unique perspectives and history. T and I hung out and had a ripping good time and supported each other in our individual endeavours, and most of each other’s delusions of grandeur as well. But we were also there for all the hurt. All the heartbreak. All the bad times. Which made the good times twice as sweet. We carried each other through hell some days. He was a hero to me, someone I looked up to and greatly admired. And when it was my time to take the lead, he had my back.

Then, as I was coming out of my reclusive shell of a writerly identity - I fell in love. I fell in love with G. The next 3 years of my life softened me. They made me very husbandly. I wrote and followed a modified routine, and was still a young man who liked to party. But the love I felt in that relationship is, still, I think the deepest authentic love and connection I’ve ever had with someone. It gave me peace. It gave me clarity. But it was at odds with my ambition and ego. As much as I found a purpose and meaning in that relationship, and as much as she saved me from myself - once I was strengthened by that love I felt an intense power to go out and take the world on. I started thinking that my relationship had caused me to lose my edge. That my loving softness had made me weak. I wasn’t sharp anymore and I hated that. As a pushback to many other things, dissatisfactions in my life; I started an investigation into a broad network of what I thought to be inner city corruption on a grand scale. As I pulled away from love I fell into and into a manic, feral even, pursuit of what I thought was something that could set me apart; a deliverer of justice that needed to be served. It became an obsession. I didn’t realize I was losing it all. I was losing that mastery of myself one piece at a time to the lesser emotions of a fanatically driven person. My ambition. My ego. My spite at all the perceived causes for the failures of my creative career. I kept telling myself that what I was doing was for the greater good but in reality it was about me validating my own intelligence and ability. In the end my inability to let go of my ravenous pursuit? My inability to move on and embrace self love and acceptance? Well that stubbornness destroyed the relationship with G, the only person I think has ever actually accepted me. I realized this almost as soon as our relationship had ended, and wished I could revert my decisions, but was I too prideful to admit my mistake? No, too afraid to apologize and ask for forgiveness. Failure is something I’ve come to accept in life. G was, and is, such a beautiful, intelligent and talented person that I recognized I did not deserve their love and had squandered the opportunity to find peace with them. I felt I deserved punishment. And boy if I am good at 1 thing, it’s punishing myself.

When I woke up from the self induced fever dream of obsession and paranoia nearly a year later; T was still there. We drank some beers and talked about it. I took a long hard look in the mirror and realized just how selfish I’d been, and understood all that I had sacrificed for nothing. The dossier, the casefile of my investigation, 26 gigs of blood, just sat there. Useless. Despite all I had learned, and what I could prove, the intricate web of corruption and lies that I’d uncovered? No one gave a shit. Not the journalists I talked to. Not the City Councilors I spoke to. Not the Cops. It was simply too complex and involved too many figures and themes that either scared the shit out of people, or bored them to sleep. Forget it Ax: It’s Chinatown. Shame. I was filled with an intense shame and regret for my abandonment of my virtuous true self for the embrace of this vindictive and angry person who wanted his pound of flesh. When I woke up with the blood all over my hands I told myself, not for the first time and not for the last, that I had to be better. That I needed to put my own selfish ambitions aside and look at what skills I had and how they could be best applied to the community at large, or more immediately my friends and their endeavours. From there I was occasionally filled with a glorious purpose. All my innate talents and the skills I had developed in the isolation of my autistic routine and chaos of bartending had turned me into the perfect work horse mercenary spare body for just about any instance. I started to manage bands. I started to produce shows. I published other people’s work. I got politically active. I had a purpose. I had a role. I was someone you called when you wanted to get something done. And that felt pretty damn good.

Flash forward 7 or 8 years. So many rock shows. Rock tours. Afterparties. BBQs. Skateboarding. More investigations. Political action. Too many beers and joints to count. Friends made. Enemies thwarted. Friendships broken and mended. Loves had. Loves lost. Traumas overcome. Therapy, consistent. Several epic psychedelic experiences. 5 bones broken. Softball games played. World traveling. Education upgrades. Career change. An entirely new community, with new friends. A global pandemic. I wrote and produced radio plays. Found new roles. New positions of leadership. New friends. New Purpose. I found a new type of self mastery in my identity of big brotherness in my community.

Then in the early months of 2022 a few things happened. T was getting out of what I had considered to be a particularly bad relationship for him. A relationship that robbed him of his autonomy and drained him of his vigour. In the wake of this I had wanted us to move forward into the light - to a higher path - to really take the stories we’d spent nearly 10 years crafting and do something serious with them. Hell, quit the cigs and reduce the beers. Earlier that year, after I got Covid the second time, I went to a park with him and had my first beer in 3 weeks and I told him: we had to be better. I didn’t want to just waste my time and energy floundering in delusion. I had to grow up and move beyond the grandiose fantasy that we’d painted our lives as in our 20’s. I wanted to embrace reality. I think I understand now; that the wake of trauma created by the end of his nearly 7 year relationship had taken a deep psychological toll on him in a way that I don’t think I could quantify fully until recently, and I regret that my empathy did not extend that far at the time. I was too focused on what I want. Living out my own penchant for main character syndrome. Without getting into it too deeply; I feel that he had taken our celebrated mutual past time of alcohol and substance use to a place where he was making entirely uncharacteristic decisions that I didn’t agree with. However, he had always been someone who, under the most intense pressures and rigours of intake, had his shit together. So I took pause and allowed him his requested grieving period to be an absolute wrecking ball piece of shit. I didn’t love it, but we’d been through so much together that I felt deep meaning and purpose in our relationship to the point where I was willing to let him grieve however he wanted.

It was around this time that I began to reconsider what my priorities were once again. I had miraculously found myself at 34 years of age with a solid professional career, relatively removed from any immediate responsibilities (I had decided to retire as a band manager for my own mental health), in therapy, thriving, and finally feeling like I was a bit more of a master of myself again. Yet, for the first time in a long time I didn’t really have a purpose. My day job, corporate text garbage man, was just a thing I did to make money, it really didn’t define me. What was my purpose? What did I want? I knew I wanted love. I wanted the relationship that I could build and share with someone else where we spent the rest of our lives loving each other deeply and taking whatever came at us together.

In the years since that early love with G, I had spent most of my romantic pursuits attempting to recreate the dynamic that existed between G and I, and utterly failing. It was too unique a love and she is too intelligent and dynamic to reasonably think someone else could do what she does. Yet, based on a deeper understanding I have now through a lot of time and therapy, I see that that early love was an anomaly, because most every other relationship I’ve had has been fraught with some sort of chaos and drama. The thought I have had about this for a long time is that I’m a damaged and complicated individual and that any normal person would get a good look at me and not want to have anything to do with me. That’s why, I told myself, it didn’t work with G. So since then I’ve chosen partners that are fraught with chaos and past trauma, because at some level they understand me in a way other normal people can’t. I believed that maybe if I could help fix someone else, they would help fix me. I’ve since come to realize that while help is always appreciated, we really need to do the hard work of healing by ourselves. I take ownership of my own decisions and recognize that I am a considerable factor in the failure of every relationship that I haven’t found success in. Friendships and Romance.

I’d been single for about a year. There had been dalliances and friendships with benefits but at the advice of my therapist I needed to figure some shit out before I went and fucked mine or anyone else’s life up. She’s a good therapist. I think at that time I had figured some shit out. And then, honestly when it just felt right, I fell in love again. It was, in its inception, an exciting, curious, aligned, and caring love. They told me that they’d be there for me and we’d work through any problems together. They wanted to make comic books with me and learn about the medium. It made me nearly cry tears of joy to feel something that deep in connection to another person again. However, things would change. Considering it’s still pretty close to the bone, and for matters of good taste, which I wish she had been willing to consider, I’m not really willing to get into the nuts and bolts of our relationship, but I’ll tell ya this - I thought I had found the one. Let's just call her K. I used to joke in that year of being alone: The only way I’ll get into a relationship is if I like hanging out with someone more than T. It’s crazy how the winds of time and place shift. As I was falling in love with K, T and I’s relationship was on a downward spiral. I look back on it now and it’s like an eclipse was taking place.

Flash forward a year and a bit. K and I’s relationship has had its ups and downs, and if I’m being honest, in retrospect I should have known better than to continue it after several unfair ultimatums were issued. It started to become unclear whether or not she had any actual capability to make space for 2 people in the relationship, support me or work on our problems together. She was always in some new crisis. But she told me she loved me and, like I said, I thought I had found the one I wanted to build that life with. She had convinced me of that early on, and said she was committed to dealing with the rigours of a relationship. Anyone that tells you, or thinks that, relationships that last should be a breeze or effortless? I don’t think they have a clue about how the human heart and head works.

One of my best traits, to a fault, is that I am willing to endure. When things are hard and bad, I’m there willing to take it, because I believe in whatever it is I’m taking a stance on. At this point in life I recognize that one of my greatest strengths is taking an absolutely legendary ass whupping mentally, emotionally or physically. I will eventually get up, spit out my teeth and say: that’s the best you got? At this point T has not backed off his double barrel shotgunning of bad decisions, and honestly had started to lie to me a lot and be generally disrespectful. It was a literal out of the blue slap in the face that pushed me fully into doubt about his rationality. I was no longer willing to tolerate his delusions or enable his bad decision making. I had let go of my fantasies and accepted the obnoxious truth of my reality, and no longer wished to entertain impossibilities that were generally harmful to not just him, but people in our community. When I say harmful I don’t mean criminal, I just mean not cool or decent. Leading people with charisma, but offering no real instruction or guidance.

Then an incident happened. It wasn’t illegal. It just sucked. T was supposed to be accountable to something. He wasn’t. He’d lost a bunch of people’s money and refused any accountability. Our community as it was, all just went to shit. I, through my own anger and desperation, took some measures that I don’t necessarily regret, but really wish that had never come to pass. I ratted him out to his Mom. I reached out and shared my concerns. I knew that was the nuke to our friendship, but I didn’t care anymore. I loved him as a brother and I thought it was the only way out. The only way to maybe save him from himself. In the months leading up to this incident I had pushed back on T’s newfound psycho goblin demeanour in the softest way possible, but it all just led to brushoffs and avoiding me. In the end I made the decisions and actions I did knowing it would likely severely sever our friendship forever. And it did. The last time I talked to him in person was late July 2023. I asked him about the big problem with the money he had and he just denied it and brushed it off. “Yeah we’ll see about that…”. I think a part of me appreciated his blustery stubbornness, it was something I’d always liked, but in the face of all that was happening it really hurt that he couldn’t just be honest with me. That summer I went to Europe with K, and was still reeling trying to process it all. She didn’t want to hear about it - just forget him and move on - is what she said about my now former best friend and closest creative collaborator - which made her later abandonment of our relationship easier to understand. I was sitting in the Port in Split, Croatia, listening to a song that bonded T and I and I tried to share it with K and she just scoffed at me and told me she hated the song because that musician had hit on her once. It really hurt to be dismissed like that. I recognize now that because I was so entwined in my relationship with K, and because my partner had no space for my emotions, I did not properly grieve the end of T and I’s relationship. Shame. Toss another fuckin’ log on the fire."

Let's do another time jump. Around May 2024. T and I haven’t spoken in over a year. K had broken up with me 2 days before my birthday, and then 2 months later hoovered me in and convinced me that we should be together again. She made promises to never abandon me again. We made agreements on what we could expect out of each other in the relationship. Still, I was cooked. I’ve been working a stressful job. I’ve been trying to figure out what I actually give a fuck about. K’s behavior has fried me. I’m as far away from self mastery as I think I’ve ever been. My community as I know it is fractured. I am a shell of my former self. I expect nothing from K and she delivers on that. I give everything and she still says it's not enough. She tells me “all my friends think you’re a fucking loser and they don’t know why I’m with you”, and I really miss T. I, stupidly, wonder when I’m ever going to find that peace and love that I first felt with K again. Again the intense details of our relationship are not for public consumption, but it’s as simple as a set of double standards and hypocrisy. She, in the end, refused to be accountable to our agreements - she could do whatever she wanted, but I had a set of rules to follow.

I think you can see how in love I was.

It rolls around to November of 2024 - and suddenly I’m single. The relationship is over. It went down in flames. I would have liked for it to end peacefully, but she was practically physically unwilling to be accountable for anything and in the end after two and a half years just deleted me from her life. I woke up and I felt as alone as I have ever been. No matter what, at the end of any other relationship; T was there. And in the wake of T and I’s relationship ending K was there. And yes, I have a community still with friends and family still - but I had no one with the immediacy of intimacy and connection that I had with those 2 people. And for the first time in a really long time I was alone and contending with the fact that I just didn’t know what I wanted anymore.

Although I don’t like to think that I have ever really served any master - I have tried to serve those people that I care about, the people I love. I loved T like a brother in the deepest possible way. I loved K like I wanted her to be my wife. When those relationships ended? I was lost. All I wanted was to build my life with her, and it was over. Then all I wanted was my friend back, but that would never happen. I was treading water.

As the passage of time goes; there are less people that need what I’ve got. I’m kinda a relic in many ways. A lumbering anachronism of a person who maybe only ever existed in his own mind. I love having a mission. In my daily life I want to be a man of action. In private I want to be vulnerable, Human and openly loving people in the most peaceful and loving way possible. I love giving love to other people, but at a certain point I need to face the big question: Can I love myself? My entire childhood and young adult life I was told that my value and worth lay in what I did. If I did not act, if I did not do, I was worthless. My entire value of myself was once wrapped up in my own ego, but I chose to discard that. It became: what can I do for other people? I want to sacrifice myself at times for the things I care the most about, and in the absence of my own personal cause; it becomes the people I love.

I think to love someone is to also know them deeply. After the past 5 years I’m left scrambling. Do I even know myself anymore? Part of my journey and path at this moment of wondering is: what do I want to do? Any answer to this question can only come after the acknowledgement that I have lost myself. I acknowledge it. I’m not the writer I was. I’m not the bartender I was. I’m not the partner or friend or band manager I wanted to be. My world has changed and so have I. I yearn for purpose and intimacy but have been unsuccessful in finding it. I am Ronin. A wandering Samurai. Many skills. No purpose. So much fight left in me but without a cause.

I still can’t help but feel like I’ve let everyone down. Shame. Like I was supposed to stand tall and be the person I thought I always wanted to be, saving my friends, relationship and community. Instead I just watched as it all burnt around me while I was helpless to do anything to stop it. Handcuffed by my own complicity and what felt like fate. I couldn’t help but feel that I would have given my life to save it all. I should have died on the line. I’ve endured a lot of hurt in my life. But, as long as there was purpose I didn’t feel it. As long as the love was strong enough, the fight was worth it. When my friends were there by my side I felt ready to take any punishment for the cause. But I don’t have a cause or a purpose or a love. All my friends are taken care of, so now I know all there is left is to walk. And perhaps I’ll walk hot. For those who know what that means it's a serious affair.

I’ve painted this deeply intimate, and somewhat grandiose portrait of my past few years, to explain that I’m seeking a deeper intimacy with myself. An isolation of movement, surrounded by a culture that is not mine. Where I am the lonely traveler. The Man with No Name. The Hungry Ghost. All my ego and ambition and drive to be recognized is meaningless if I don’t actually know who I am or what I represent. And in these trying times, as capable as I know I can be; I’m fucking useless if I don’t know who I am and what I want.

The pictures of me with people I have loved but will never be with again, haunt me. But I share them because that was a part of my life. And I miss loving them.