If only I could get back those wasted years...

…things would be different, but no one could’ve told me that then and even now I’m not sure what I would do if I could start over, but I am sure of some things I would not do.

Every time I see a young, well-dressed fellow come out of the store & get in his car on his way to work it is me I am looking at, 35-40 years ago. I practically groan for that young man in me; I was going to be somebody! Make an impact, have an effect, a righteous purpose, a design, but the grand plans of my life were seriously uprooted by The Fool In The Mirror, never to root again in this life and I watched decades go by in a stupor, numbed by catastrophic personal events (and to be honest a number of doobies & numerous numbing drinks beyond counting aided immeasurably to my numbness) which I overcame but not in time, the damage was done. Such is life.

Had I remained in the Navy I see now would have been intelligent too; it is the only place & time in my life – six short years – when there was any sense of order; since then all has been chaos. Aboard ship at sea, or stationed in a two-year long vacation in Nea Makri, Greece could not have been more idyllic and all-providing at little personal expense, notwithstanding the irrefutable fact that in the military as always one was liable to get shot. But you are in Brooklyn, too. Anyway, not to digress too far as is the wont of NFTD, I’m back in the here & now, the only place one can really dwell without going ‘round the bend. That too is relative. My ‘here & now’ is a walk in the park compared to the here and now of a condemned man in the Huntsville Texas death house which is no place to be doing here and now…

I toss off the rest of my coffee and head out on the highway, no longer looking for adventure. To hell with a suit and tie job. When I was younger, over early ayem drinks one day in Carrie Nation’s, Vermont’s most nefarious watering hole, I told Hard Rock I was going to do a makeover, I’d buff up, put on a three-piece suit, wing-tips, blow dry, manicure, the works, and give it another shot (speaking of which, o bartender, mayhaps a libation for me and Brother Cioffi here who will spring for this round as he so kindly did the previous and will any subsequent…ah, where was I? O yes, in the past with Hard Rock Cioffi in Nation’s) and I would make a clean breast of it, an idea from which Hard Rock demurred. ‘Terry, the resume reads the same…’ I haffta laff and do and we, that is he, gets a pitcher of brew to go with our boilermakers.