It was a big and bright and blinding board room with quite a bit of spaciousness to it. The walls had some generic artwork hanging upon them. It was the kind of low grade artwork anyone could find at their local big box department store.
I'm sitting on the other end of a mile long conference table.
I was in my fair to midland thirties. Unruly blonde thinning hair. Wild baby blue eyes that a long lost love once told me looked like robin eggs. My once upon a time favorite Jerry Garcia necktie was literally suffocating the shit out of me.
It was hard enough to breathe, let alone think in a linear direction.
Don’t ask me how I made it this far, but I had an interview for a side gig as a content writer at an up and coming weekly publication out of Reno. My resume was halfway full of shit, yet did just the trick. An essay I once wrote “On The Finer Things In Life" had gotten me this far in the process.
I started fidgeting with my tie on a quarter tank of espresso and an unbeknownst to me uncanny amount of anxiety. The blue collar wrapped around my neck was already stained Milky Way white with sweat.
I had no business whatsoever being in this board room for an interview. But let's be honest, I have a knack for making my way into certain places I don’t always belong.
So here we are.
“No college degree in the literary sector sir?” the editor in chief asked me from across a sea of bargain bin laminated cherrywood. She was squinting through her glasses at my resume, which read like a Cheesecake Factory menu had been drawn up by that red headed clown Ronald McDonald himself.
“No ma’am. I just have a knack for lighting things up.” I snickered nervously.
“So did you major in English or anything at all in the literary sector?”
I explained with little to nil patience, that at the time, I was in my eleventeenth year at the university of being self taught. And that I was beginning to show some true potential as a promising literary culinary arts major, who minored in the realm of creative writing and shorthanded flirtatious poetry.
“Aren’t you a little uneducated and past your prime to be applying for such a sought after position?” she asked. “What exactly do you want to be when you grow up Mr. Love?”
The question hamstrung my entire being for some odd reason, it was like anxiety itself had just sliced my achilles lengthwise and all the way up to my manhood. My nerves went into overdrive which flipped the kill switch on whatever confidence was left in the tank for the time being, as to not implode.
I didn’t know how to answer such a simple question.
I just sat there with a blank expression as the tie slowly squeezed the shit out of my dreams.
That was when an anxious anomaly from a gut feeling escaped me like a gentle sulfuric toxic breeze wafting in from a truck stop bathroom.
Yes indeed, I made not any phonetic sounds from my mouth, but I did break the ice of silence by breaking a whole lot of wind.
She waved her hand in a frantic demeanor from a mile away in front of her nose and asked me to leave the room.
“What do you think this is Mr. Love? Do you think this a joke? Good luck in your endeavors Hope you find everything you’re looking for. Thank you for applying, but we have decided to go with another candidate with more experience.”
"Thank you for your precious time,” I laughed while loosening my necktie and left the room. I made my way out of the building and headed to the nearest Mexican restaurant & ordered up three carnitas tacos and a margarita the size of a fishbowl.
Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville blared in the background.
The tacos came doused in a spicy salsa that would make even the devil bleed from every hellacious pore he's ever sweat from throughout eternity.
I sat at a picnic table in the Reno haze beside myself. I was so close to hell you could see Sparks.
What did I want? That was a damn good question.
My thoughts were interrupted by a timeless looking Italian woman dressed in black in the parking lot. She was struggling mightily to get some groceries out of her trunk.
A few young men walked past me with their neckties as snug as snug would not allow one to breathe. They walked right past her without paying her a lick of attention.
Fuck them.
As I said, she was wearing all black, and I wondered if she wore all black to protect her heart and soul from getting moonburnt?
So I left my tacos and margarita for the Gods of Honesty to watch over, and walked over to offer her some help.
She asked me if I could just get the door for her in her native tongue.
"Puoi prendere la port?”
I had no clue what she said, but her body language spoke volumes and I figured I should get the door for her.
So I did.
I sort of had to bang on the damn door though to get it to open, and as she passed through she said thank you with nothing but a big ole smile that would’ve made the man on the moon blush.
And this, I’ll be damned, but this did something to me. I came to discover in an instant what I wanted out of life.
And I’ll share it with you some of those things if I may without boring the crap out of you.
First things first. I want to finish my tacos & that margarita.
Secondly, I want to fish in the summer and snowboard in the winter, for the rest of my life, at least twice a week. I want take a trip to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Southern Russia to catch dragon sized trout using mice for bait before I die. And I want to ride powder for days on end in the Swiss Alps before before I go also.
I want my child to always feel and know how loved he is. Especially, if I am not around down the road. I want all children to be loved unconditionally. Hell, I want everyone on this godforsaken planet to feel loved in the unconditional sense.
I want to make my mother proud of me. And I want her to know that she did a damn good job at raising my stubborn and rebellious ass whether folks believe it or not.
I want celebrities and athletes to make a lot less money. I want teachers to get a whole lot more money.
I want every stray dog on the planet to find its forever home.
I want the younger generation to know that success and endless wealth is but a myth, and that unconditional love is the only currency that's worth it's weight in gold.
I want to know how tall wisdom has to get before it can ride the roller coaster of enlightenment?
I want my epitaph to read, he was a man of many creative hats with hardly any hair.
I want to go two weeks without having one of my cooks call in.
I want to sail around the world from sea to shining sea with the tradewinds of love forever at my back.
I want to distract people with uplifting stories and poetry, laden with love and hope during an election year instead of focusing on the back and forth back stabbing between greedy ass politicians.
I want to write like I mean it no matter how deep it gets.
I want all living presidents and sargeants at arms in this world to come together in soft parades to reveal intimate state secrets with the desire to better humanity as a whole, all the while confessing their own dreams of salvation for the inner improvement of their own selves.
I’d sincerely appreciate it if all international arms dealers came forward and tossed there weapons into the abyss of love while planting the leftover ammunition with the hopes of a new metallic flower coming into existence only to bloom into world peace.
I want to see revolutionaries in the streets of cities preaching the renaissance of consciousness and watch as enlightenment on the main stage reigns supreme.
I’d like for Wall Street cronies to surprise us all and escape from their venture capitalist ways as they run to the emotional stock exchange to trade in their materialistic bullshit in for a valuable lesson about the universal golden rule, all the while snake eyed oilmen down in Texas drill away for the eternal black gold that springs from the kingdom of self.
I even hope to one day see misaligned military chemists converted into golden age alchemists as they extract several megatons of lighthearted spiritual energy from the atomic rubble of war and greed and sensationalized news.
I want my funeral to be a bonfire with Widespread Panic and Led Zeppelin blaring loud enough for heaven to hear.
I want there to the most intense Wiffle Ball game ever played in the history of the childhood sport with slip and slides in between the bases, while the urn that holds my ashes sits on home plate.
And I want my loved ones to have the best damn time they’ve ever had, as they slide in to home plate scattering said ashes all over the damn place just to drift into the wind, all the while chowing down on the best barbecue brisket ever known to man.
When that day comes, and at said party, I want folks to sip on their Casadeamigos margaritas, or their sweet tea, or water, and say to themselves, “Wasn’t he just an absolute fucking mess with a heart of pure gold.”
Because I’ll let you in on a little secret, the truth is, I’ve always wanted to be an absolute mess.” Yet to be determined about that heart of pure gold part though.
And not that you care about this, I may never be what some consider a writer. But it's not going to stop me. Because I know what I don't want. I don't want to quit pursuing my dreams. So I'll continue.
I want to hug your neck and hold your hand through all the pain.
I want to lift up your spirits without ever letting you down.
I want to make things go boom in the night with you.
I want to hold doors open for everyone. Especially you.
I want to prove to you that chivalry will never die.
I want to show you what makes love stick around til the end of time.
And I want you to know that all the little things that matter to, and about you, matter to me. And I want to be the one who puts those little things into writing for the whole wide world to read. Maybe even bound by a book with the word love wrapped around it's spine.
And most of all…
As much as I don’t mind passing gas from time to time, I never want to wear another fucking tie again unless you want me to.
So as I finish up my tacos and paid the bill. It was as I started to head to the car to make my way back home, when I heard a small explosion in the mediocre high rise just above me, which startled me slightly.
Damn I thought. I hope no one was hurt.
Later I came to hear over the radio on my way home that no one was harmed, just severely traumatized. And apparently the cause for the explosion was because some editor in chief of a bougie up and coming publication tried lighting up a cigarette in a board room she wasn’t supposed to be smoking in after she interviewed a wanna be writer whose tie was way too damn tight.
What a joke I thought as I broke a little wind again and rolled down the windows of my soul to feel the moonlight on my skin.
Til the next time.
Yours truly & somewhat crazy,
Ryan Love
Comments