A “Dreadful Selfish Crime”

A “Dreadful Selfish Crime” is a song by Robert Earl Keen, who is a Texas Singer, I have come to enjoy. While listening to this song I came to the blind realization that I too, might be guilty of a dreadful selfish crime.

Maybe it is just that time of life, when one looks back down the road of years he has travelled. I see a lot of good, but also when the rubber hits the road, there has been a lot of slippage, and detours from holding a steady course.

These many changes of thought and direction have all piled up on me so to speak, in one traffic jam in my mind. Now all the voices from all those moments,have collided. They speak to me and seem to suggest that I should have looked another way, and gone down those roads, which are now forever shadowed in the darkness of “What if.”

There is no turning back . There is no time machine which will allow me to recoup, regroup, and replenish all this wasted energy, which have taken me no where. And the Beatles sing a verse of  “No Where Man” , haha the mind.

I suppose the selfishness of it all, comes from the trampled hopes, of not only myself, but of others, who hoped I would have taken the bull a little more forcibly by the horns, and been something more than I have not become.

I guess I could blame it on a lot of things. But really, at the those little moments, and their points in time now past, I honestly thought things would progress into something more than they did. They say it takes money to make money well in some ways that is true, in others it is just an excuse.

Instead it has always been just out of my reach. Ideas came, were presented, rejected, then only to resurface in a similar form from those, who rejected it. I guess, if it ain’t nailed down, they had every right.

I could have confided in someone with the knowledge of the road, and all the books, and properly applied theories. I did not know where to turn or who to ask. I could have asked for advice from my significant others. Nope, did not think of it in the heat of the battle, in the forest and its trees, I stood stoically alone.

Now, It is like I am out there, next to that traffic jam, running in place, while all those little voices in my mind are yelling at one another. Funny most of those little people look like me, and the others are faces and voices of the people I love, trying to be heard over the roar of the little me’s. All of them have valid input, in each of their own right, and the direction they are coming from, in their moment in time. Some of them are louder than others.

Sorry my look a likes took precedence.

“Me I’m just the same lost in a crowd
Lookin’ for the rain in a thunder cloud
I have moved around but it don’t matter though
One thing I have found there are just two ways to go
It all comes down to livin’ fast or dyin’ slow. ”
There is still a glimmer of hope, although the light is getting dimmer, like the power is getting low.

Maybe it is just me, rusting.
__________

© 2006 Texas Tortilla Factory – Mike Vauthier