The Beginning (a very good place to start)

Chapter 1:

My life has been one of many happy endings and devastating beginnings. Life is experience, a sequence of events immersed in the flavor of emotion. There I sat, listening…listening to myself think. I was in my favorite coffee shop wearing an old leather jacket I had gotten for my little brother only to find out that it was too small for him, so I wore it. It had Airforce badges all over the arms and a big Harley Davidson patch on the back. On this particular night the coffee house I was sitting in was conducting a poetry reading, it was a perfect concoction of coffee grounds, local brews, cigarette smoke and lifting verses of poetic mood and cultural feeling. I allowed all of this to drift to the background as I sat there listening to one of my favorite soundtracks, I love soundtracks. It’s more than just a classical album, it’s a link between the movie and your life, it makes everything you encounter like a perfect scene accompanied with your own personal refrain. I watched the flow of hipsters, art geeks and outcasts while I sat there in silence by a window, sipping coffee and enjoying the diversity of their opinion. You may overhear an argument on the more elegant flavors of pipe weed or more sophisticated brand of cubans. You may hear praise for a particular band called the Arctic Monkeys ( a band that is pretty typical within the musical tastes of the college student coffee house regulars. Don’t ask me why.) or hear someone berate Starbucks and accuse them of being too “Mainstream”. I sat there trying to define the word “hipster” and wondering if there was in fact something to this cultural phenomena. It’s in these moments that my mind begins to turn to my own human existence and if it’s worth putting into a book, I am unsure why my mind makes such a fuss about writing one, they are rather exhausting and time consuming. But for whatever reason, I finally gave in and with a sigh and another swig of my coffee, I began.

My particular experience was not unlike the rising and falling voice of the poet on the stage behind me. But is this not how beauty is born? Through the fear riddled point of adversity? I am one among millions of struggling teenagers trying to determine where I am supposed to go, trying to discover that one note of clarity in a tidal wave of confused and twisted notes and lyrics. To fully explain what I mean, I must go to the beginning. Well not my beginning but the beginning of my best friend, who also just so happens to be my little brother.

I grabbed a jar of cookies that someone has brought, gosh I loved chocolate. Thats one of the nice things about going to the hospital for anything, there is always a huge supply of meals and desserts generously given to the family in need, this was particularly nice for me because I loooooved chocolate or “ chock-ee-at” as my 2 year old mouth would say. My little brother was due to be born that evening. I didn’t know it then but as soon as I set eyes on the little punk, I was attached to him forever. I was destined to share some crazy adventures with that blued eyed brown haired little ball of fun, it didn’t matter what we did really, just as long as we did it together and it was something that fought the suicidal, slogging repetition of the norm. Many would refer to us simply as: The Johnson Brothers. Like any fantastic duo of superhero and sidekick ( I can say this because I am not only older, but also the one writing this book. ) we thrived in high stress situations. An example of this is one where he (as he describes it ) saved my life and the life of my best friend, he has always been a bit of a drama queen but for the sake of argument we’ll say he saved my life. Around the time that I turned the ripe young age of 11, Dad bought two fourwheelers. To him they were things designed for utilitarian use only, to us they represented freedom wrapped up in engine parts and four wheels. There is absolutely nothing so beautiful to an 11 year old boy than a couple of fourwheelers and miles of rolling hills, valleys, and creek beds. Me and my buddy grayson took one fourwheeler and micah took the other, we made it our life mission to explore every flowing river and grass covered hill in the miles of country surrounding our farm. Grayson driving and me behind, we speed along the tiny trails slicing between the giant hills that had so captured our interest before, but were now just a green blur beside our speeding tires. And then, a sharp right and up a hill grayson went, up, up, up! We were almost to the top when our fourwheeler sputtered…no power. Our fourwheeler cutout and we found ourselves at the top of one of those crazy rollercoasters, the few seconds of suspended waiting before the rollercoaster technician hits the switch and you plummet down the railed freefall. That fleeting feeling of weightlessness before your heart bangs into the roof of your mouth and your stomach decides it’s one of those girls in those horrible, brightly colored, 90s hip hop dance workout videos, just a ball of exuberant, estrogen filled energy, bobbing up and down in those tiny workout suits. At the bottom of the hill was a sheer drop, like someone had taken a gigantic shovel and decided that particular piece of earth wasn’t needed. Before we could reach the bottom and possibly fall to our deaths or extreme bodily pain, “Whaam!!”, Micah had put himself and his octane filled steed in between us and the cliff we thought we were destined to careen off of. Thank goodness because having to tell dad that we jacked up his fourwheelers would be soooo much worse than falling to our deaths (I am kidding but not really). Thanks to Micah, we made it home with only minimal injuries to both us and dad’s mechanical work horses. The next little fiasco was one where the tables turned and I saved micah’s life.

A couple years later, Dad and Mom decided that putting a pool in during the heat of Texas summer would be a fantastic idea, and it was! What they didn’t know is that to us, it opened up all kinds of interesting possibilities that just had to be explored. From, makeshift high dives ( a four wheeler, a ladder and couple two by sixes), to backyard scuba gear ( this was done by tying weights to our feet and putting buckets over our heads ), to even higher high dives ( ok we jumped off our roof..), and then finally, the rope challenge. What is the rope challenge you ask? It is a simple feat of manhood that is done by navy seals during their training. You simply tie your hands and feet together and someone pushes you into the pool. Micah tied my hands and feet together, kicked me into the pool and as soon as I hit the water my body said: “Oh crap”. There I was, struggling in the water until I figured out how to swim like a dolphin. I made it to the other side and was cut free. Without thinking I tied micah up and shoved him into our 9-foot deep in and expected him to come to the same conclusion, just swim like a dolphin. As you might expect…he didn’t.

In Navy Seal training it doesn’t matter whether you make it through “Hell Week” or the other 90% of your training, if you can’t last two minutes under water and various other heart wrenching ways they try to break you under water, you can’t become a seal. Some will make it through Hell week and just fall apart when it comes to high stress situations under water. I saw the same panic in Micah’s eyes that I had read about in the Navy Seal books I loved. Micah sunk. He couldn’t swim and he couldn’t breathe. It took me a couple minutes before it dawned on me that he wasn’t exactly coming to the surface and wasn’t exactly moving toward the other end of the pool, in fact the only direction he was going was down. In a panic I dove in and grabbed my brother, desperately trying to swim up carrying him and the ropes that bound him. In the movies it’s always so easy to grab someone underwater and swim them to safety. Well… I’m calling bull crap on that theory. It is incredible how heavy a person becomes underwater, especially if your muscles happen to be cramping up from your own rope bound swimming adventure from a few moments prior. it was probably a few seconds but in my mind, it could have been a long twenty minute fight to the pool steps at the far end well out of the reach of the pulling fingers that were depths of our 9-foot deep end, at least that’s how it felt as a 13 year old. We made it to solid land safely and laid there for about five minutes unable to move, all you could hear was sputtering and heavy breathing.