Go your own way

I am a hiker. A lover of mountains. I have hiked every mountain in the Las Vegas valley except the radioactive one. I hike off trail because fuck what everybody else does. I go my own way. I have ridden rock slides down the side of a mountain like a wave. Still not sure how I am alive. My mantra hiking is “I’m not a pussy, I’m not a pussy, I’m not a pussy.”

Have I fallen off the mountain? Fuck yeah. Misjudged a little 4 inch ledge once and ended up dangling off the side of a sheer cliff clinging to a tiny baby tree poking itself out of the rock. Somehow I pulled myself back up out of sheer will because those jagged rocks 100 feet below looked fucking painful. And we must remember we are all here because of one thing: I do not like pain.

I think I have reached the top of the mountain. Or at least it looks that way today. I have climbed up. Now how the fuck do I get down from here. Where am I. Where is the car. Can I make it back before darkness falls or am I camping another night.

It might mean going up a little higher to find the way down. It happens. Maybe I can take the rock slide. Maybe not. That is the thing about going off trail, you never fucking know if you are going to make it out alive.

This incident. The rape. The fight. The surveillance. The courts. The paperwork. This has been the mountain I have been climbing.

Once, I was driving past a mountain and the person with me pointed up to a cave and said, “That would be insane to hike.” I said, “It was, I almost died on that one.” He instantly thought I was a badass. Nope. Just stupid, fearless, and lucky. And not a pussy. Never a pussy.

And here is where the move on crowd comes in. They are the people sitting at the scenic overlook in their air conditioned cars sipping Diet Coke, telling the exhausted climber who is still clinging to the cliff face to just get over it. They never hiked it. They never fell. They never had to haul themselves up by a tree branch to avoid splattering on the rocks below. They do not have dirt under their nails or bruises on their shins. But they have opinions.

So I stand here at the top of my mountain looking down. There is clarity now. Maybe I do need to get back to the valley. But I still have ledges to cross. Dangerous ground to walk through. I might have to murder a rattlesnake. I might fall off a ledge. I might spend another night in the dark. I might get sidetracked and end up spelunking in some cave I never planned on.

The journey is not over, but I can breathe up here. And the song that once made me less suicidal, and I hate admitting this, was by none other than Miley Cyrus. The Climb. It made me cry early on when they played it in a Zoom meeting at work three days after shit went down and the email got sent. For better or worse, that is my song. Sung by a child who sounds like a squirrel on crack.

Post script: the homes guy who lived on my couch is gone. He stole a bunch of my guitars and pawned them for $25 a piece. I hand built them.  The bastard then blamed me he didn't get more money for them.  I might press charges. Gotta make some new guitars.