home is where all the threads of life tie together, where the four sides of nature’s harmonic simultaneous 4-day time cube unite. it is where the ghosts of christmas past, present and future come out to haunt evening dreams.

it’s hard to track exactly when everything got so small. after graduation i always knew that main street would never be as big, that the three stoplights in my town would never have quite the same relevance. of course that’s all true, and it’s been true for years. i remember driving home the first time i had a car to bring back from college with “elderly woman” blaring on the radio. of course everything has changed: that is what you expect from your home town.

but your home itself? what i didn’t expect is that the front yard would shrink, that the house would get smaller, the driveway shorter, the world more closed in. the fruit trees are long gone, the pea trees with them. the flowers are all dead, the rows tilled, the evergreens overgrown. yet it is my childhood in this front yard. it is still there, buried somewhere in the tangle of shrubs and bushes and trees. my innocence is not lost, just misplaced. or so i insist.

this christmas i was asked my most vivid christmas memory. memories, like most things, are fleeting. i cited my first and, to my memory, only christmas in my parents’ house with both sets of grandparents present. i was like five and i got monopoly and there was a debate over whether i would be allowed to play it since the recommended age was something like eight and up (my side won out). my cousin remembered there being a hell of a snowstorm, and some other things that i think happened at a different christmas entirely, and it was a great study of perception.

this christmas my cousin’s kid figured out there’s no santa the same way i did: outsmarting the parents. pretty classic stuff. amazing to watch a five-year-old’s mind function like that. in this case it was that one spouse gave a kid a magazine subscription from “mom and dad” and the other one gave it from “santa.” oops. mine was when i asked my mom for a desk at pamida and thanked her when i got it from santa — and she said you’re welcome. i remember that. apparently next i went down to ask my dad if santa was real, and he goes, “do you really want to know?” ha!

by now i’ve survived to 27. one-third of my life ago, i was in this basement on new year’s while the love of my life absconded with my best friend. two-thirds of my life ago, i was upstairs in this house, then still my parents’ house, at least for that one last year. there’s plenty before and in between: a night on the golden couch now behind me hiding out from tornadoes; evenings hyped up on mountain dew spent throwing bouncing balls and darts around the basement; swedish music and heartbreak in my old bedroom; love and loss on the phone and in person downstairs.

i spend most of my time never thinking about things like this. there’s plenty to keep me busy in the day-to-day: work, politics, cagefighting, the usual bullshit. even things that matter: good food, better booze, travel — going places and eating things, my raison d’etre, if you will (and i will). it is easy to put these things aside. i’ll call my parents next week, my grandparents next month, whenever, whatever, i’ve got to go. whenever we talk it’s always great and i always feel bad and i always think i’ll do better next time and i never do.

that’s why it’s important to sew the threads together, from time to time. it’s been two years since the last time i was back, or since the last time i had more than 48 hours, anyway. two years ago i had swine flu and there was four feet of snow. two years before that there was also four feet of snow and a presidential election to be won. even on my trips back, before, there was always something.

it’s been five years since i moved to the east from the north. five years ago i sat in the other house consolidating my life from many tubs into fewer tubs. this time around i sat in the house looking at other people’s lives, consolidated into a suitcase. it’s an emotional event. this time, i found a letter from my mother to a one-year-old, and it read like a letter from my mother to a 27-year-old. poor coordination, but great fine motor skills. weird that i can type 150 wpm but catch baseballs with my forehead.

lately i’ve grown fond of joking about how you never open the college tub. there’s alot of emotional events in there. and it takes some time. but the thing is that it can actually be incredibly rewarding. it takes a while to get past the nostalgia and the regret, but just like the dead flowers, tilled rows, and overgrown evergreens, it’s the place where my childhood is kept. the lessons from the college tub, like the lessons from this basement, define me to this day — for better or worse.

indeed, memories are fleeting. from the moment i stepped off the plane and past security in omaha, i started thinking: walking from the airport in charleston to identify a girl i’d never met but loved just the same; waiting at that same security checkpoint in omaha nine years ago for the girl who would break my heart. these moments. i have a weird memory involving my uncle in an airport that to me feels like detroit and looks like reagan-national but was probably st louis; i almost passed out in jfk once; i’ve been sleep-deprived and confused in japan, sweden and france; and i’ve explored southwest iowa at 3,000′ in a mooney. these are all great, but there’s something about waiting at the gate.

the things you remember. the things you forget. i am filled with memories. these are the threads of my life, so often forgotten, remembered only when i come home. and then:

you aren’t who you think you are when you’ve been drinking.

yes, but, i protest. yes, well, i equivocate. yes, ok, i must eventually concede. that is the damnable thing about the past two years, is in the midst of all this raison d’etre i’ve forgotten to take a few steps back and feel feelings. gonzo is all about getting a new perspective, and some of the best nights i’ve had, the best moments of truth i’ve had, came with some chemical assistance. nothing will replace the day and night and day i finished the burn, stayed up all night playing catch and ken griffey baseball, and walked home with my feet in the dewy grass in the middle of town. the problem arises when the new perspective becomes the only perspective.

If he didn’t drink, he would be somebody else. Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn’t mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.

there’s something about balance in all this. coming home is about re-tying the threads of life, sacking up and opening not only the college tub but the high school and childhood tubs and the grown-up tub as well. it’s about memories and life and sometimes death and remembrance. it’s about faith and the future and the past and the howl of the wind through the flue of the fireplace in the basement where i grew up and about me and everyone i love and have loved and will love.

there’s nothing i cherish about this town and i would do anything to avoid it most of the time but i realize when i return here that ultimately i would die without it.