But hopefully I'm not really a witch

You know, if I ever found myself being accused of a witch, I think I would wait for a moment when I was alone, probably on Death Row, and sing either Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah—and the whole thing, too, every single verse he wrote—or, or possibly and, U2’s Yahweh. They would both fit, though Hallelujah has a certain hopelessness to it… well, not a hopelessness. A futility. Like Johnny Cash singing Hurt, kind of, he’s run his course, “did my best – it wasn’t much,” and now it’s done, and what can you do but sing? Yahweh is more along the lines of “I walked this road, I know it was the wrong one, please show me where to go from here, I’m lost and all I can see is You now, and I’m scared but still full of love.” …or something.

Anyway. With any luck I’ll never be accused of witchcraft, which is just as well because my voice rather sucks. With any luck, I’ll figure out just what it is I want to do, pretty soon. I don’t have the drive or the inspiration that I used to. It’s strange, it seems almost like my heart has closed itself. I can’t touch that part of me, the deep well of something resembling sadness, something touching pain, and something a bit like ecstasy. It was where I reached for words, for the flow behind the words, and sometimes it gave me tears. Now I laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and the worse life gets the harder that laughter comes, the more it hurts, the more I need it. Like someone replaced a drug I needed with some other drug that I’m now addicted to.

The thing is, now I’ve got no direction. I don’t need a career, I don’t need money, I don’t need a nice home and a car. I did fairly well without them for a fair portion of my life, ne? But I do need a direction. I want to just take to the road, live every Anarchist’s dream and one of mine—spend the rest of my life in a cabin in the woods with no one bothering me ever (maybe decades later someone will find it and be really, really confused), or bike around the continent until I find a place to rest. But I also want to help people, in a major way; I also want to write, and to express in words what this life has taught me, because I need to; I also want to sing, but that’s something I can do anyway from a bike. It’s not easy, or at least not as easy as singing normally, but I can and have done it, for miles at a time. Gives your lungs quite the stretch.

And then there’s the song “Lemon,” also by U2. This song makes more sense if you know the back-story, but it’s beautiful even if you don’t. The first time I heard it, it touched my heartstrings in that way that only Bono really can—I mean the rest of the band too, but it’s his lyrics, the rawness beneath the words, kind of, and his voice singing them—and I nearly cried. Maybe I did. I don’t remember now. I remember the video, Mr. MacPhisto, the devil in a rock-star with a microphone, clinging to that last strand of humanity, he doesn’t know why anymore, drifting from the shore… I don’t know how to put it into words. Maybe only Bono can. Maybe death is an easier loss than insanity.

Remind me never to have a family.