Hero

I didn't really have heroes as a kid. If you'd asked me about it in high school, I would have said I had something more like anti-heroes - a lot of people I didn't want to be anything like. 

There was one friend of mine, a few years older than I, who was a gymnast, a boxer, and kind of a decontextualized mountain man. A unique individual to be sure. He joined the Marines and ended up in Beirut when the barracks was blown up in '83. He survived. I'd enlisted on the delayed entry program by then as soon as I possibly could. I think it was my sixteenth birthday. Anyway, he was probably my first hero.

That same year, I heard Black Flag for the first time. The music was raging angry energy and the closest thing I'd ever heard to what I felt inside. It was a revelation. The singer was this tormented maniac who yelled his guts out and obliterated himself during performances. He wasn't faking it. His name was Henry Rollins. He became a hero of mine too. 

Over the years, I got to meet him a few times and see him perform. I wrote to him and was thrilled to receive his responses. I went to see him do his thing again last night. 

He's 61 years old now. He didn't scream out any demons up there but he did talk a steady stream for more than two hours from the moment he took the stage. He was obviously older. I think I've seen him at least once in each decade - his 20's, 30's, 40's, 50's and now 60's. It was great to see and hear him again, but it was startling and sad too. 

Time runs out. It happens to everyone. It's happening to you and me right now. Ready or not. Finished or not. Started or not. 

We all know it but somehow manage to avoid realizing it most of the time, probably so we can do more than lay about in a terror-stricken fetal position. Every now and then though, clarity.

I remember this image I saw years ago in a documentary about the treatment of animals on mega farms. These chicks, the absolute picture of innocence, riding a ridiculously fast-moving conveyor belt with its terminus in a grinder. That ride, the entire span of a life.