Dale Clarence Peterson: Fists, Fists Full of Fire

Fists, Fists Full of Fire

“The first great book was a little girl’s handprint on the wall of a cave.”

What does it mean to live with fire? To be greeted every morning with a big bag of wet sand on your chest? To have to put all your strength into pushing that bag of sand off and then to have to walk across live coals to find your pants? Pulling up your pants is exhausting – cold sweat runs down your spine. Sitting in a pool of fear and throwing fists full of scalding caffeine down your throat until you can focus, focus just enough to remember that you wear glasses? Wrestling demons of self-doubt, sometimes even self-hatred – demons with screaming eyes of self-hatred – before you can find those glasses?

Every mistake and fuck-up you have ever committed running on a never ceasing loop through your brain? Especially the fuck-ups. The really bad stuff, the behaviors, each one of which basically ruined your life until you beat it back with a fury born of some kind of faith? Each one gaining in volume with each loop? Knowing that none of those actions were intentional, but more a Tourette’s response and you were still held totally responsible for. All of them stacked one conjoined to the next and responsible, in bulk, for the failure that is your life

Shoving some calories that you don’t even taste into your face, because you know, with absolute certainty that you must – or you will pay for it later in the day if you don’t. Without that push of glucose, your hands will start to tremble, your heart will begin racing and a daylight nightmare of anxiety will engulf your very soul. Eat or find yourself locked in a closet filled with snakes.

And yet, despite all of that, you shed that skin of destructive bullshit and begin to make something worthwhile of the coming day.

Then … then … the knowledge that you must exercise. It hurts. It begins with pain, the pain crescendos into something … wait! A change begins to slide into the day, somehow the pain becomes a challenge. Now challenge is something you are expert at. Life itself has been a constant challenge. We got that one down. We, the shitty self and the angel, do not know the easy path. The challenge becomes a song. Starting low and distant, the song builds and the exercise becomes – breaks like a tsunami – into a chorus, into a huge choir of hope.

HOPE!

ANGELS WINGS OF HOPE soar into the scene. For now it has become a brand new scene. The tragedy that was the fitful attempt at sleep and became a drama, the opening scene of a cheap soap opera that was the act of getting out of bed, into clothes and the breaking of a gut gnawing fast. Now it is a new scene which has the potential of becoming the saga of a hero. Into a poem that could run down the ages and become legend.

Not that it really could, or will, truly become legend. It is all merely hope.

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” The Gods repel this hate. False! This is Satan and false! Hope is the nectar of the real Gods. Hope is oxygen. Life begins with hope. Death must be greeted with hope that is stronger yet. Hope is what gives value to breathing.

With a new day’s focus on a horizon of possibilities built with logs saturated to dripping with the most flammable, highly combustible, blood of dragons is a pyre. A pyre waiting for a spark. The tiniest spark of hope. A fistful full of fire, mixed with a fistful of hope plus faith, thrown with split-the-arrow accuracy directly at the center-base. A bonfire instantly explodes.

WAIT! “What’s going on here? Man! That’s a lot of heavy stuff, there …… Well, I know it is. It certainly is. Singular? Unique? The author is nuts. Well yup, that’s true. However, you can’t be extraordinary if you’re ordinary. And, I don’t think it’s possible to be truly extraordinary by mere intention. That’s called being weird. The difference between exceptional and being weird, is that those who are actually extraordinary, don’t know it.

It’s like the difference between passion and desire. Desire is something that is felt, something that is sought after. Passion is something that exists. There is a person and there is a passionate person. But, in fact, with the passionate person, the person disappears and all that truly is, is passion. Or, with passion, there is no person, there is only the passion.

Passion throws fists filled with fire, by the fistful, at the passion’s target. The thrower, the pitcher, simply must throw that fire. Fire burns, fire gives bright light, but it hurts – fire is painful and must be expelled. However for the extraordinary, most often also called the insane (or, read: mentally disabled), every time the arm is brought back to the side of the body, the hands fill with fire again – and then again, and again, and again.

It MUST be expelled

thrown at something

when it hits

life explodes – a meteor strike

and the wonder flairs (flares)

solar flairs

sometimes beautiful

sometimes devastating

always real

flying, flying, soaring

ripping space and time

Why? Must I come back down? Must I return to the dirt and toil of another day? Sun flairs or the tar pits. From one directly into the other. Over and over and over. Sisyphus. Immortal, but exposed for eternity. And all I meant was to give love. I only wanted to bring light to the darkness.

And, the waves come and take wiping away my castles.

And, then there is nothing.

(Author’s Note: I realize this is a heavy piece and I have debated for a long time, whether to post it or not. After forty years there is one person, a single person, whom I trust in all things; that is my wife. I read this to her and asked that question. Without hesitation or even explanation, she said, “Yes”.)