What The Hell Am I Doing

Synopsis and thoughts on my prodigal son reconciliation

BABY, how’d you end up here….Oh BABY, how’d you end up hereeeeeeee

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - This Ain’t It

How did I end up here again?

I ask myself this question more than a few times a week, and listen to this song weekly.¹ After trying to “vibe it out” in other places², I found myself back in my hometown, about a hop and a skip away from where I spent most of my formative years. Consequently, the road up my drive is pointing towards the local cemetery, just across the major state highway. Not just any cemetery, mind you, the cemetery where most of the men and women I grew up with - who raised me from a young age - are dead and buried. Welcome to Blue Mountain, Arkansas, my hometown.

It took me a long time to figure out that my family, and the South collectively, was strangely fascinated with death and honoring those who are dead. Before I had moved away, I just thought this a normal part of life everywhere. It isn’t. If you are not familiar with it, we have an event every year where we place flowers on graves and honor those who have died. For me as a child, and a young man, this was a pretty big event. This event was just a few weekends ago, but for reasons I grapple with here, I was not in attendance.

When I was young, trying to make sense of all the death, I visited the cemetery many times. I went there in the rain, in the cold, and even very drunk at one³ time. As you can probably tell, I went when I was in some sort of sticky situation or had some big life change. Since I returned, about a year ago, I don’t think i’ve personally been to the cemetery once. Whether that’s a lack of respect or just because of my frenetic schedule, take what you want from it. I just think I like hanging out with the living more.

When I was younger, I was good at talking⁴ but not very good at following through with the talk. Or it would be the opposite of what I had said. Those were my 20s. Needless to say, I did not have great personal relationships. I also tried to talk to the dead in the hope that they would understand my judgement, my struggles. As if I could convince them I’m doing the best I can. I still have the thought that everyone who has passed sits around a coffee table and judges my actions from above.

I’m trying to lead by my actions these days. I don’t think I need to talk to the dead folk because I’m hoping that my actions simply speak for themselves. I led myself to many inevitable crucibles trying to talk my way out of things. The crossroads of my sanity for example. My felony convictions another. So maybe I should just shut my mouth for a change and put in the work.

---

“Oh I knew Darlene, she was very pretty. Where is she these days?”

“She died a while ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

This answer has changed over the years. Not in substance, but more in form and the feeling it gives me every time. The defining feature of this lapse into abnormality has been time. Time has not healed all wounds, but time has sure helped calm the visceral reaction I feel in the pit of my stomach in talking about my mother since 2005. Juxtapose that conversation with this next one:

“God showed me fire, and that everything south of I-40⁵ would be engulfed in fire.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes, so if I was you, I’d get north of it. Maybe Branson.”

“Okay, well thanks for telling me.”

- Man picks up his bag of live bait minnows -

“I am a prophet, and God’s word is living through me. The called prophet.”

- Man turns the corner, exit stage right -

These were two conversations I had as a small shop owner in rural Arkansas today. I had gotten into the second conversation by talking to someone picking up live bait who had mentioned an asteroid coming to earth. I had heard about it, but only because I had a friend/contractor working for me that had told me about it.⁶ So prior to this exchange, he had already told me about the lasers in Alabama and how the SpaceForce would be destroying the asteroid. But apparently not all of it.

I don’t pull these conversations to shame or speak detrimentally about either of these people or their views.⁷ In fact, I wish I could have the convictions⁸ the “prophet” had, rather than being not quite resolute in anything anymore. I wish my mom wasn’t dead so she could meet my son. I use these stories as an example of a life that I used to loathe - the family ties, the use of religion and prophecy that is so commonplace in the South. It all used to bother me, so much so to the point of a self-imposed exile in my 20s.

These days, I don’t seem to care as much about either prior trepidation. In all the time I could spend trying to pick apart the problems with whatever place I was born into, it’d be easier to just let it be. Maybe I’m tired of fighting. My mother died twenty-one years ago, and holding onto that loss gave me quite an entitlement mindset. I played the game of life like I had a chip on my shoulder, when all I really had was a dead mother and a lot of dead relatives. Big whoop. It was easy to indulge myself when I thought I was owed something.

My back-and-forth with religion has been ongoing throughout most of my life. I was raised Catholic, even though my mother and family members were not. Then I was Pentecostal, then agnostic, atheist⁹, and finally back in the Catholic church. I’ve always found religious theology to be fascinating, but from an outsider view. The rest of this is better reserved for another article.

The American rural south is dynamic because it combines deep family roots and religious fervor into a sense of complete belonging. It takes a simple life by other peoples’ standards and changes it into something more. It does not shame and vilify the lack of outward movement and exposure; it insulates this ignorance¹⁰ and provides a purpose for those looking for one from their own particular ecosystem. The uniqueness of this in comparison to the other regional cultures in the United States cannot be overstated.

Of course this is just my opinion, by my observations. They are colored by my touch-and-go relationship with Arkansas. I don’t necessarily find this to be exemplified in the native Arkansans that adhere to this dogma; rather, it is best studied in experiences of those who have moved here to Arkansas from other places at different times in their lives. I lived in Ohio for a good portion of my childhood and traveled to other places, including Arkansas. It gave me a somewhat disdain toward staying here when I was adopted and moved in 2005 after my mom’s death. Some of it was aspiration for other things, but most of it was an arrogance that would later be snuffed out through the criminal process.

So, to really get at the heart of how I ended up back in Blue Mountain Arkansas, there needs to be an inquiry in how I left here in the first place. As I said, aspiration was a part of it. The lure of the unknown and ability to have a living family in Colorado were big parts of that aspiration. I also thought I was meant for big things, like making lots of money and being able to support myself without coming back here as the embarrassed prodigal son.¹¹ This was supported by idealism, which is tightly wound with arrogance. This arrogance was a “better than you” mentality, but it was also an arrogance that I would not be satisfied if I ended up here again. Anywhere else had to be better than this place! Anywhere else that did not have roots stretching back to the 1800s in this particular geographic area. Arrogance that my family history could just be wiped away because I was too fragile to live in the same place all my relatives that raised me were dead and buried.

More than anything, I think the lessons that moving back to this place have taught me are many. The most glaring is humility. With that humility, I could never deny who I was at heart. There was something different about going to a school where my graduating class was thirty-two; about jumping over a barbed wire fence to go fishing with your buddy in the heat of the Arkansas summer; about knowing most everybody or their kin within a thirty mile radius. This was all lost on me until I was in other places in the world, craving the comfort of home.¹²

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“You know, you should stop and enjoy it.”

“You don’t need to eat so fast.”

“You’re not present enough.”

“I was young once, and I wish I had told myself to slow down once in a while.”

“Wow, that’s a lot on your plate.”

“You have other things to worry about, don’t get caught up in this.”

Here’s where the knife, er mic, drops:

Life is trivial and fleeting, and we are trying to figure out how best to rationalize our own existence.

Whoa.

Pretty heady huh?¹³

I returned to Arkansas this time with a different goal: the build something that would help others and provide for my own legacy and my children. I don’t act as an apologist for myself anymore, so I think I don’t need to explain why I am doing what I’m doing here. But if you’re interested, like I am, I think this goal has to do with cramming everything I can into my life each day, like I’m some sort of possessed and rabid secretary/Gene Simmons hybrid. That goal originated from a fear of lifeless eulogies at my funeral and simply being forgotten tomorrow.¹⁴

Maybe its because I have a fundamental know-how that death is imminent. Maybe thats why I act like a man obsessed to build a legacy. Maybe time really is fleeting, with another diagnosis or capitulation soon incoming. Maybe I was always destined to return from whence I came, instead of forgoing it to make it somewhere different. Maybe I was just not good enough to enjoy the world’s bountiful harvest of ideas, images, and philosophy and take my seat there. Or maybe I matured and figured out that my biggest impact would be in the smallest of corners, my corner. Maybe that’s all it ever was, the overarching lesson that I have learned within the multitude of pages on lessons in the book of my life.

So what am I doing here?

In the place that I watched my family disappear like a roadside truck-stop on the interstate you pass at 75mph.

Where I have watched friendships fade away like rain on a proverbial windshield - effortlessly and benign.

Where I drove aimlessly searching for an answer to something I didn’t even know to the question to yet.

Where the magnolia blooms dress the sides of roads like chic antebellum clothes.

Where I cried uncontrollably for hours in a hotel room writing a eulogy for the one person who showed me what unconditional love really meant.

…

To all that, I answer:

I’m right where I need to be.

For now, that’s good enough for me.

“So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.”

-Isaac Asimov, Nightfall

Thanks for reading!

- J.R.

1. It’s a good jam. Peep the vid.

2. Colorado, other parts of Arkansas, Ohio, Berlin, Italy, the UK, Cambodia, and Vietnam to name a few.

3. or two

4. Many times to my own detriment

5. Major East-West Interstate in Arkansas, just north of where I live.

6. He now lives in California for reasons I will not disclose.

7. For all I know, he’s right and I’m just someone else in the history books.

8. Not felony ones

9. Boulder CO baby.

10. This is using ignorance not as a pejorative jab, but just the simple definition of not knowing anything else.

11. That made me laugh writing that, because indeed that’s exactly how I think about a lot of this.

12. Living abroad for multiple years made me miss small things in American and Arkansas life - making conversation with strangers on the airplane; free wifi nearly anywhere you went; the lack of smog and other pollutants; the adherence to air conditioning like it was water of life itself; somewhat predictable food and meal templates; showers that worked consistently - and many more things that were just comfortable.

13. I jest

14. I understand how ironic this is, given that I won’t also visit the same cemetery to honor the legacies of those who have passed. But the pushback on that is this: how great really is it to honor those who have died yet only to be a living piece of shit yourself?