My Enlarged Prostrate

I have long feared that my sins would return to visit me, and the cost is more than I can bear. Benjamin Martin "The Patriot"

These words strike and ring more disdainfully to me more than they ever have.
As I watch my daughter grow from infant to toddler and beyond, I can not help but pray that she does not do all of the selfish things or experience all of the selfish and self-indulgent arrogant philandering and behavior that I dished out.

I listened to a young man just the other night, brashly speak in front of his fiance and my wife of exploits that pale by comparison to my own; I sat quietly, and later my wife asked why I was so quiet gently stroking the dewy glass of beer at our table, and with a simple glance from my sad eyes, she knew.

My past is racy - and I am not proud of it, though I must admit I was then. Like an unstoppable hormonal rage, I played the roll of biker, rocker, and playboy, as if the ramifications of any and all my actions amounted to nothing. I hurt people, mostly women.

Without going into too great of detail, I can tell you that I have sewn my wild oats and scorched the earth behind me. I have seen many tears. I have had stalkers. I have nearly been run through with a kitchen knife. I fell from grace and after 9/11 it hurt.

The culmination of all of my sins hit. I became reclusive, not wanting to associate myself with anyone, disappearing back to a land where I was infinitely successful. I believed that trying to off myself was a good idea. I believed that sleeping around with reckless abandon again was the only way of reclaiming my lost youth, and that led to alot of additional anguish.

Stupid. Sad arrogance.

It has been said that to reminisce and to be discouraged by our past is a waste of time, and I believe it to be true, but as old pictures come to the surface from some long forgone box and explanations droll onward, so to does a personal history - living, breathing coolly on orange embers.

My daughter, not even two, giggles at the lion's mane of hair, the rage of my unwrinkled youth, the people in some of those pictures.

She does not know yet of my successes and losses, and my rotten ways - about which, though I fear the day, must tell her. And explain why people tick one way and tock quite another. I must tell her of the wrongs in my addictions. I must tell her why I can love her mother - my wife the way I can and do. And why her mother and she are the most important people in the world to me.

I am not proud. What is there after all to be proud of? I have lost whatever was gained then, and was stripped to nothing, and because of that haughty history, I stand apathetically as a sociopath, not remembering people's names and not wishing to get involved in their pursuits. I make jokes to cover my iniquities; my "funny" is a grossly exaggerated defense mechanism. I force myself into pseudointellectual profundities to cover my stupidity. And exercise to cover my flabby sloth and miscreancy.

I ask for your forgiveness.