Prodigal picks his Poison...

Don't need nothin'
But a good time...
How can I resist?
Ain't looking for nothin'
But a good time...
And it don't get better than this!

Words to live by...or so I once thought.

My favorite music of all time is 80's Glam Rock, also known as the Hair Band era. I came of age during that era; grew my hair too long, drove my car too fast, and played my music too loud. That music and the lifestyle it espoused spoke to me in a way nothing else ever did...we were immersed in an MTV-driven world of screaming guitars, scantily-clad chicks and outrageous parties, and it seemed like the ride was never gonna end. All my rock heroes were living it up in a display of hedonism that put the fabled 70's rock scene to shame, and I just ate it up. I wanted to live like that too, and I surely tried, but living in the suburbs of Philadelphia with very little musical talent, no money, and no connections to the L.A. scene meant that I was going to have to lower my expectations a bit. I dreamt of being like them and I took every opportunity to do so...I partied as hard as I could and I didn't care about much more than that. I became as hedonistic as my limitations would allow, and my friends & I had one heck of a wild time doing so. I began to believe the things the lyrics were telling me, and I found myself wanting those kinds of hard-rock romances, the epic power-ballad tragedies, and the wild all-nighters, no matter the real-world consequences...because, well, there weren't any. The chords faded out, the lights went down and the credits came up at the end of the video...and then the next headbanging anthem began. No consequences...not really, anyway.

See, that's just the thing; rock stars of that genre generally didn't write the realities; you would've been hard-pressed to find more than an incomplete handful of songs written about the horrific hangovers, the withdrawls, vomiting blood, getting STDs, and going so broke as to be indentured to your own record label...not to mention being ripped off by every shyster agent in town because you were too drug-addled to pay attention to your finances. Oh no no...they wrote about tears falling and getting shaken all-allall night, and about going away mad and making love in the rain. They had angel eyes and American thighs; they were dirty-rotten-filthy-stinking-rich, and their chicks were so danged pretty it should've been against the law. Those kind of songs are much more fun to air-guitar and sing along to than songs about real things like emergency adrenaline shots pounded through your breastplate as you lay in a puddle of your own sick on the floor of a no-name hotel in a no-name town at four in the morning.  Of course, none of those kinds of things happened to our rock heroes as far as we knew...until Vince Neil wrapped his Pantera around an econobox, that is. But even that event, while certainly tragic, didn't have much impact on the glam-rock scene or our opinion of the lifestyle. In fact, several years later the scene was even wilder and it was as if it had never even happened. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of thing that can distort a young, dumb, and impressionable mind into thinking things like 'I'm untouchable' or 'I'm indestructible'. Think back to your own teenage years & early twenties...how many bad choices did you make back then and wish you could take back because the world at large led you to believe something utterly foolish? Yeah...me too.

I wasn't entirely a stupid person but I certainly was stubborn and self-confident; never gave much thought to the future because on any given day I was usually doing okay, and tomorrow was just gonna have to take care of itself when it got here; I was too busy having fun. I truly believed that while I wasn't in college like alot of my former classmates, and while I wasn't on my way to a 4-bedroom 'burb-crib with 2.5 kids, a dog & an in-ground pool, I was still doing just fine in the world I believed I had made for myself. My buddies and I had chicks, cars, jobs, and money to party on and all the free time to do it in so what did we need anything else for?

Don't need nothin',
But a good time...
How can I resist?
Ain't lookin' for nothin',
But a good time...
And it don't get better than this!

Ahh, but I I did, and I couldn't; and I was, because somewhere deep inside I knew it could...
The problem with living a lie like that is that, when all you hear is the proverbial devil on your left shoulder because you have no time or care to listen to the proverbial angel on the right, you're only going to hear more lies because that's all you're open to. I shut God out because I simply didn't want to hear anything about crooked paths or narrow gates; they don't usually lead to parties, you see. But like all things in life, nothing lasts forever and the party has to run out of intoxicants some time, and this one was no different. Found myself empty, burnt-out, and still broke after the last beer went belly up and the last car peeled-out down the street. Once the dust had settled, I had gone separate ways with two of my three former party-hearty buddies, and only a lifelong and storied history has kept the first and, as it turns out, last buddy around after all this time...and I'm glad we're both still here today, because, among other reasons no one else would believe some of the stuff that went on. ;)

This post literally came to mind in the span of an eyeblink earlier today after another old buddy from an even earlier (but much more wholesome) time posted something up on Facebook about turning 40 and the changes he'd begun to notice were taking place in his life. Specifically, putting away some old Def Leppard posters and whatnot because, while he still loved the music, he wasn't in 'that place' (my words) any more at this point in his life...and it hit scarily close to home because I too have found myself doing the same sorts of things; not simply because I wasn't 'in that place' anymore, so to speak, but, more to the point because I've been in prayer lately for the Lord to begin showing me things that He doesn't want for me in my life anymore. I had begun weeding some of the more offensive songs out of my iTunes a week ago, little by little, based upon being convicted by the Spirit that certain songs really have no uplifting Christian value to them at all, such as most of WASP's and Type O Negative's libraries. The kicker was that I had wiped my entire Poison collection out of iTunes Sunday afternoon just past for that very reason. Three day later a friend writes a post about doing the same kind of thing...albeit for what initially seems to be a totally different kind of reason, but which, when examined from a longer view turns out to not be all that different at all. We're both at different places in our lives now than we were when that kind of music was much more important to us than it is today or ever will be again.

 I'm a deeply-nostalgic kind of person; I have some very fond memories of a strange and sometimes unbelievable life, and I'll never let go of those; they remind me of where I came from and how, by the grace of God alone, I came to be who I am today. I still love that music from a melodic point of view and probably always will but I no longer aspire to the things it preaches or the places it led me, and I no longer need or want it in my life. I've been very very blessed by God to find a way out of that lie and to a place where it has indeed gotten better than "that"...by far. ;) As glam-rock era singer Jeff Keith of Tesla once sung...

"...Thank you Lord, for thinking about me; I'm alive, and doing fine."

R.

Ridiculously early intermission...

I've been working on a second, more thorough post to truly kick this thing off with but it has been very difficult to write so it's taking longer than I initially thought it would. Meanwhile, several other post ideas have been running through my mind for awhile now and I've already lost a few so I've gotta back-burner that one for a few more days, especially since one hit me today like a bolt out of the blue and I just had to get home and bang it out before I blew it. Sometimes, timing truly is everything...so, without further ado, Prodigal picks his Poison........

So now it's come to this...

...nothing for it but to get right to the point. I am, first and foremost a born-again Christian, but I didn't start out that way. I'm the product of a twice-broken, unhappy suburban childhood home, a misspent & intoxicated youth, and an interrupted midlife; in other words, pretty normal by today's standards. The Lord has blessed me to survive all of that, a pair of failed career choices, a handful of self-inflicted dumbshot wounds to the head, and colon cancer; and now, on the doorstep of 40, I've been inspired to put some things down on paper, so to speak. Most will be thoughts and questions about my Christian faith, although I reserve the right to talk to myself and mumble in virtual form on occasion.

So, welcome to the inside of my head. I hope you find your stay a pleasant one, and I hope the Lord blesses our time together.