Daily Writing Prompt: List the people you admire and look to for advice…

Bitterness and sweetness duel as I swill my morning coffee. I am now treading back through time, back through the meadows of sweetness and into the chapters of bitterness. Here in the muck and nettles was when I needed advice.

I do not admire many people if anyone. Should my approval disdain the assessments of my copious scrutinies, the former slaps the latter in the face and says, “Stop! I like this one!” And if my approval permits entry to my affections – an event akin to the Battle of Waterloo – admiration is quicky foregone and love catalyzes where once there was nothing. In my life there is a pattern of forging deep bonds and passing over what is shallow.

As I write these words, stormy black clouds are approaching me. Entering the dirty windows above my desk, each one bears imagery. Imagery from a bloody past. My chest tightens, because I know where I am about to go. I am entering the revisitation of a past where a civil union was barbarously rent. Human flesh transmogrified into demon-like antitype. A young boy with a benign smile stood among them, holding out his heart, he still welcomed them in their transformed state. Then they brandished spears. There was no hint of kindness as the brutal metal glinted. Lovelessly, they thrust the boy through. Those bearing his own surname danced in his blood. And with a new cloak named ‘violence’, they cloaked him. What remained of his life was 1 part reason and 99 parts torment.

Advice is for directing. Counsel is prepared for those in advance of determining a course. Humans do not always need advice unless they are constantly misguided by themselves or by the advice they have taken. Lust yields poor advice, therefore I do not follow it. At a certain time in my life lust was all I could follow. The pain that had filled me up is all I wanted to share with the world. And so, that’s what I did.

Prior to this season in my life, which we will revisit, because the clouds above must be emptied, I admired my father. He was an award-winning Jaguar mechanic. Crazy, right? Who wins an award for working on cars? The special ones. The passionate, zealous, diehards. The people who do things in a way that cannot be emulated. He was a savage when it came to working on cars. Whereas a typical mechanic would have to go through the diagnostic rigamarole, before going under the hood of a car, his sensory perception had already, a) shortlisted the possible problems, b) compiled a list of tools down to the sizes of sockets, c) calculated if the parts would be in-stock, or if he would need to put the car in his specially assigned secondary bay, awaiting arrival of the parts, and d) told the service manager what else he would be able to fit in for the remainder of that day.

Watching him work was sweetness. Despite the wizardry, he hit his salary ceiling early in his career, and his prolonged exposure to the physicality of the job damaged certain parts of his body.

After this I lost myself. Violence and darkness poisoned me like the ingestion of a cyanide capsule. The well-ordered life of suburbia’s genuflection to vanity became a funeral march. My heart became a haphazard alchemist, alternately mixing sadness and hostility in an attempt to yield happiness. Who was I to escape life’s hardships? My youthful expectation was disappointed to find that my flesh bled like everybody else’s. Immunology with its lofty scientific ambition could not tell me why I wasnt immune to the lowest forms of existence. So I scorned the clinicians, and I sunk.

I became unrecognizable inside and out. I was doing things – violent things that I didnt understand. As I spiralled I realized my identity had become completely unmoored from the harbor I had been socialized into. In the turbulent seas of the loss of oneself I found the final bosses waiting in bitterness to consume me. he was there, yes, satan and the hordes of his demons. They wait where you cannot find them. Until trials have diluted your willpower to one last gasp. Life becomes a repetitious rolodex where from A to G and L to Z you simply want to find death’s number and dial it. In the physical realm I feared my loss of control to the point where I thought I might snap and kill someone. On the other side of the veil, where celestial bodies perambulate, they wanted to kill me.

On that anonymous night, from the bedroom of a house belonging to a cousin I no longer relate to, where the precipice before me was too much to bear alone, I rang Katie. She was one in whose embrace I formerly trusted- where once I knew myself. Believing there was not one jot of good left within me, I asked her, “Katie, when we were together, what did you see in me? What did you like?” The advice I needed from her was that there was still reason to live.

Just now, having emptied their deluge upon me, the clouds consolidate and drift eerily away until I summon them again.

I suppose that is the chief difference in my life now. I used to be subject to the clouds according to their natural will. Now, I control the clouds. There is of course the matter involving the battle between the little boy and satan with his hordes. We shall dispense with that another day. But for now I must satisfy one remaining champion from the title.

Walking across the crude, unimpressive, cracked parking lot of the garden center I was employed at, I uttered a prayer to the Almighty. “I desire to climb trees.” I could feel Him listening to me, thus I expected something to come from this request…

*a few years pass by; bitterness turns to sweetness*

You see the pictures. You learn about the job. Then you hear about the body count. It’s a jarring progression synonymous with the daily rigors of the job itself. Ascending a rope to enter a tree is a physically and mentally fraught process. You leave the comfort known to all ground-dwellers. Depending on the purpose of that ascension into the canopy, variable terrors await your mind. Danger is always present. All of the variables are never fully controlled by the climbing arborist.

Precise training is hard to come by if one desires to be a climbing arborist. Training is a common barrier to entry for any occupation. For tree climbers it’s not only a barrier to entry, but a gatekeeper dictating what level of technical proficiency and practice the arborist will go on to have. If the trainee has somehow sourced high-level training, if they are able to retain and apply what is taught to them, they will be exalted to a steady career. Likewise, if submitted to poor training, every imaginable shackle will be placed upon the trainee’s learning, dooming them to imprecision, and unnecessary toil.

Which is why meeting E.J. was like giving a drink to a traveller stranded in a desert. My greatest hopes were satisfied during my apprenticeship under E.J.. His practice as a climbing arborist is storied. Watching him is like being subjected to an industrial symphony combining balletic delicacy, Chopin’s melody, and textiles. I’m sure over the years I have asked his advice on certain topics. Mostly I shut my mouth and tried to absorb as much as I could from the champion.