Goodbye to Being Normal

Be Somebody

My whole life I never wanted to be normal.

I carried it with me like a sickness. Terrified I was one of them. I vomited at the very thought.

I looked around at all the normal people I was surrounded by growing up and was repulsed.

They were fat.

I would do thousands of situps until my back ached every Day. I could not be like them. They didn’t seem to peel the layers of life back deep enough, happy to just tread water at the surface, I wanted to dive.

So I plunged into books I barely knew how to read. This normal world just wasn’t enough for me. My mom tells me as a child I would grab the star wars novels I don’t know the ones with Darth Vader on the cover or something and just stare at them trying to read it. I just wanted to enter a new world. Must be why I write. Or we read. Isn’t that what we are all trying to do.

I was also obsessed with the character of spiderman. He seemed normal to all the normal people around him. But he had this burning fire of a secret that he knew he wasnt. He had this whole identity who he really was that he could plunge into. It seemed like if you could have that, it would make normal life more bearable. While you were forced to endure it. Surrounded by sheep, always staring at the fence.

I remember writing over and over in my childhood notebook “Be somebody”. I didn’t know who yet but I had an image of it. I prayed relentlessly to God to become it. And as I’m clicking clacking this out I am smiling because I really do think I became it. Thank God for the Day.

One afternoon in school an English teacher slipped me a note. I still remember her handwriting. It said: “Day, I know how different your mind is and you must feel like an island at times, and I see it, but this is your power and you don’t fully realize this yet.”

I read it twice in class. Again on the bus. Again under the covers with a flashlight like a map. Somebody saw it. Somebody outside my own head said it out loud. The blonde kid drowning quietly in the back row had been heard.

I’ve been an island ever since. Stopped pretending it was a problem. Islands have their own weather. Islands are where the tourists go to feel alive again.

That fear of being normal still burns bright in me. I am not so dull to not realize that. Why else am I up at midnight ferociously typing these words out sending them into space tomorrow morning. Fear is not your god. You need to find a way to douse it in lighter fluid and gas and let the spark catch and let it fuel the rocket. Im burning my way up and the rattle is giving me a fucking headache so one sec let me sip ahhh red wine tonight…. My head levels.

Okay back to what I was saying. Some nights the page stares at me and dares me to dive deeper. Tonight is one of those nights. You see I grew up in middle America frozen tundra midwest. I grew up around farm fields, applebees, and open roads. Not many dreamers around. It was settlers, my family settled here and while I am glad they got my ass to America I always wondered why they stayed. I chalked it up to natural selection. If you are dumb enough to stay in a place like this you deserve it. It just seemed to me that the people I was surrounded by had lost the controller on free will. Or the button broke for them. They forgot the map is bigger than this. There are more missions than this. There is a whole world out there and IT IS SINGING MY NAME. Everyone else had their earbuds in. I tried to hush it for so long. Assumed I was destined for the life laid bare in front of me. It didn’t make me hard though. I just didn’t want to fuck this life. I wanted to taste something I had only seen in visions that came to me in the deep of the night. But I knew she was out there. I knew this life was waiting for me to taste her lips. (Spoiler Alert: I found it and her lips taste like ocean salt, freedom and sunlight)

In school I seriously wondered if I was some kind of alien. The talks of going to college, and working with their Dads or some finance banker or something with a desk four walls and a chair.

I would splatter my brain on their styrofoam panel ceilings if that was the life I was sentenced for the rest of my heartbeats on this planet.

And so I did what any 18 year old kid who didn’t know what do with their lives. I fell into a path I thought I owed. It ended up with me working in a Jail. Making all the normal people smile. I was a man made of saltwater trying to live inside a winter wonderland. My soul whispered at first how sad it was. I felt the tears run off my heart and into the pit of my stomach. Surrounded by Demons screaming into bleached concrete walls, eventually my ears unclogged. The whispers became an all deafening ringing rage rattle howl my brain could not handle I was going fucking crazy how the fuck did you end up just like them. WE WERE DIFFERENT DAY. YOU KNOW WE ARE. HOW HOW HOW.

The pain gave way and it birthed in me a new bravery it seemed to the outside world. Give the boss the middle finger and quit the job. Charge into the world. Fly to Hawaii. Live the Dream. Write my way to victory. Travel The whole world. Become Day!

But really the fire that started when I was a kid fearing being normal became too hot for me to handle anymore. So I decided the world should feel my heat too.

I no longer fear being normal. Being normal just wasn’t destined for me… maybe it is for you but probably not if you are reading this. Maybe you too grew up staring at the fences. Maybe you howled at the moon. Maybe you were the kid in the back of class scribbling Be somebody into a notebook nobody ever found.

The kid finally has his answer.

He grew up. He moved to an island. He’s writing this from a balcony at midnight with the Pacific singing to him, a cigarette burning down to the filter, and a woman in the next room who laughs like a getaway car and tastes like the answer to a prayer he started writing at seven.

The prayer worked.

Well I hear you and I have a place for you. We make the world blush over here. The fence isn’t real. The cage isn’t locked. The teacher was right.

Do you Dare?

GOD BLESS THE WOLVES.

God Help The Rest.

(Message me if you want in on the Founding Wolves Monthly Physical Letters)

(Wolfpack LlNK IN BlO (sheep to wolf, Archives, and Player One: Wolf Ascension)

-Day