An American Cowboy

Originally written September 24, 2006

The song remains the same.

I tried to walk away from it all. The responsibilities I left behind, that I just had to let go.
The lifestyle it presented was simply unsustainable. Every day it got harder and harder to pull myself up out of bed. Every day I knew I was one step closer to losing it all, my grasp on all that separated reality from the world I had created was slipping, jeopardizing what I earned, what I deserved.

One of the consequences of going back in time, going back through the looking glass and calling out everything that justified you calling yourself the big bad, the consequence is that nothing ever comes easy. But we are capable of extraordinary talents when pressed into service.

Friday night we saddle up, cowboy hat owns the night. Head on down to the almost ready to be gentrified Tsim Sha Tsui on the dark side of the bay. There you arrive at the Aussie bar just before the New Orleans jazz band comes on stage. Like a seeing another westerner wandering around my neighborhood, the context of this arrangement is not lost upon me. I walk into the bar and that familiar scene washes over me. Alone, I take up a stool at the end of a long table. The bar begins to swell as the band takes the stage. Four old Chinamen and an Aussie with a mic.

In walk the Fins, and my table is full with my new found drinking buddies from the far north side. There we sat listening to the band run through the same set they must have played every night for twenty years. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the drunken Aussies singing “When the Saints Come Marching In” as loud and as drunk as the night would let me.

You think this is a coincidence.

In the morning I pull myself out of bed and it took everything I had to go play golden boy at the law school. For this was the first meeting to form the student government. With great power comes great responsibility. And I was in possession of neither. The first thing we had to do is cause confusion and conflict within the room without drawing any heat towards the white man. If the room is in a state of chaos, in that lack of direction they look for someone to put out the fire and bring light to what must be done. You prey on that vulnerability. In the end, the group appoints you to the committee assigned to draft the constitution for the new student government. My words are the law for college republicans across Kansas. My words, my creation, reflected back upon me for decades to come.

What do you want? The same thing you want. To do what you cannot. To remove those in your way. And it’s only the beginning.

Later on in the afternoon, I found myself wakeboarding in the South China Sea. I turned to my friends as our boat circled around the islands in the harbor…I told them with a stella artois in my hand that my friends back home, words would never be able to describe to them the sights that I have seen before me. In the most perfect scene outside of Ireland herself, the sun stretching, glowing as if the clouds were red and orange themselves. The ocean, the lights of the apartments built into the sides of the mountains, the jungle covered hills surround us in all directions. With the food and sangria plentiful, the soundtrack to a nip/tuck episode playing around us, wind coming off the ocean and the most beautiful sunset I’ve seen since Paris. If this would be the end of my days, it would have been fitting for a king.

You control what you can. You create the situation to reflect your own agenda. You bring about the change and never wait for it to come to you.

To be the big bad…it is not a choice, it is who I am, it is who I have always been, it’s a life beyond what we can be comfortable with. Riding into the sunset, wind at my back, I got the night on my side. I’m a cowboy; I’m wanted dead or alive.