Halloween 2020
There are times during these tumultuous times when I feel, and re-experience, the horrid days of my life, my very young life, among my family of origin. My first impulse is, still, to run away: feet don’t fail me now! I have, however, found so much depth of understanding to not merely the events of my childhood, but the entire atmosphere of uppity depravity into which I was born and somewhat bred, and then escaped during my adolescence. My flight was accompanied by fight, and I do prefer duking out a problem to flying away from it. Sometimes, though, a person has to hold that punch. Sometimes, the punch is best used at a later time, for a better fight, for a more noble reason. Sometimes the liars have to do themselves in; and sometimes you have to tear away the mask that conceals their ugly hate-filled faces. The picture of Dorian Gray is a beautiful sight compared to what hides behind the disguise.
Sometimes you must live out the lies told about you, and that patience is of infinite worth. Timing is everything in life, and timing is everything in winning a fight. The fact that the sneering hypocrites, in their uppity depravity, steal words, phrases. styles of clothing, even hairdos from the quiet, decent nobodies of America —to mimic — that fact is a truth that must be celebrated. No longer do the immoral relativists strut their indecencies in front of the cameras. They hide them behind costumes of propriety that they wear year-round! Here is the ultimate goal for anyone who is surrounded by the intolerant: do not waste your breath on the condescending bigots. Do not squander your power on their powerlessness. Those people are liars and frauds trying to look — like you!
It’s a gross irony, is it not? That the people who wish you dead try to look and act like the life-affirming person that you actually are. I’ve been verbally wished dead, by blood relatives who went on to die appalling deaths, and then I found a way to forgive them. Those miserable beings did not deserve my forgiveness, but I did not deserve the burden of carrying all of that pain with me to the resplendent path that stretched out before me — my life, as I’d always dreamed to live it. There is the wildfire of freedom to be found in the forgiveness of wrongs, even crimes, committed against you by ghouls wearing the big pearls and sumptuous tweeds of sophistication, but who are, to their very rotten cores, rotten phonies.
During the autumn of 1975, I was driving a jalopy along the country roads of northern northern New Jersey. I was tearfully seeking a direction, seeking solace, seeking a bold new path with my rather young life. I was but an orphaned child, trying to understand how this youngest of eight children had become vilified and hated by all of her older siblings, except for the oldest one, a brother whose courage taught me the meaning of love. Unbeknownst to me, scurrilous vicious lies had been told about me by the woman who had given birth to me, but was incapable of love. I could not yet see that the family members whom I’d trusted and loved, did not know me or love me. I was unaware that they’d callously and quite easily cashiered any remaining shred of human dignity to curry favor with a woman intent on destroying the world around her, including them.
It took me many years to comprehend their blindness, born of savage weakness. Behind my very vulnerable back, I was being rubbed out, like a Mafia victim, by my own kin. I was struggling to breathe the fresh air of honesty, the saving grace of truth. I took to the road in a borrowed car. During that tear-filled drive along that wooded road, I heard a song on the car radio. It was a song I’d not yet heard, and it is one that I’ve never forgotten. Indeed, this phenomenal ditty by Michael Martin Murphey became not only an inspiration in my life, it became inspiration for my writing, for perhaps even a Western or two. The story of “Wildfire” is best told by the writer of the song, Mr. Murphey. It’s how your mind, asleep, can create a world wherein you can not only dream, but soar. With so many ignoble untruths about good, brave, and honest men and women being plastered all over the computer screen, every single moment of every single day, take a break from the miasma of hate-fueled vengeance. Listen to a song that never gets old: Wildfire. I don’t necessarily care for the intro, and ending, of the song, a piano composition inspired by the Prelude in D-flat, Op. 11, No. 15 by Alexander Scriabin. Somehow, however, Russian composers and Westerns fit together like a cowboy on a magic horse. Dmitri Tiomkin would have agreed!
I didn’t care for that long blond hippie-hair of Mr. Murphey in 1975, but I try not to let appearances distract me from the inner kernel of talent, and truth, within a musical artist. The lyrics are simple but starkly profound, in the finest tradition of writing, especially writing Western. The dynamics of the singing by Mr. Murphey are solidly performed, from the heart, with the sort of tender sincerity that led to the success of his many subsequent songs. There was, in America, back in the mid-1970s, a sense of hopelessness that had trapped this nation in a paralysis of will that miraculously got broken by 1980. The spirit of America then moved with the force of forward movement, otherwise known as action. I was very much on the move during that era. A suitcase filled with a few sets of clothes, a box of tea bags, a pair of high heels, and a pair of sneakers defined my existence. Within the past few years, I have been, once again, on the move. I unexpectedly re-discovered that glorious sensation of living with the spirit of liberty. I felt that grand lightness of being that comes from living out a dream, making a reality out of a fantastic fantasy that’s been yearning for so long to come to life.
I learned anew the spirit of adventure. I felt, anew, the wildfire that is, and has always been, a fundamental part of my being. How long had that abandoned part of my self been waiting for me to return to it, to come for it, and ride away, like wildfire? Let the wildfire of freedom come alive within your spirit, your heart and your soul. That magic can never die, if you believe in it with all of your wondrous love, and serenely defy the evil wishes of the uppity depraved among us who feast upon death — amidst the miracle that is life. With a thankful tip of my hat to Mr. Murphey, I’ll be riding Wildfire . . .