Breathe
an excerpt

Prologue
I don’t want to tell you some kind of bull about how I saw, went and conquered. I didn’t. In fact, that’s farthest from the truth.

You see, life is out of control. Anyone who thinks they have a hold on life is telling lies or smoking something. See, life is this crazy, moving, fluid thing that you just have to go with. It’s like a giant speeding out of control bus crashing through downtown during rush hour. Not only that, but this giant, speeding, out of control bus is something which you foolishly decided to latch yourself onto, with just a thin span of rope while you teeter threateningly atop a skateboard. So your goal is simply not to fall off or get spattered across the windshield of some car. Thus, any obstacles you come in contact with, you’ve got to deal with at that moment, or else you’ll cut off your own head or end up dragging something with you. And trust me, those things always come back to bite you. Or hit you. You’ve got to go under obstacles, through them, around them, over them and sometimes, you’ve just got to smack your way through.

And that’s not even the real danger. The real danger is when that crazy out of control bus finally slows to a stop. If your hold on it is too tight, then you’ll find yourself spattered across its windshield. But if your hold is a little too loose, if your rope is a little too long, then you’ll end up flying over the bus, after the bus has stopped. At that point, you’re already dead; you just don’t know it yet.

I don’t know which is worse. I’ve seen both angles. Sometimes I’ve found myself wondering if there was really any point in ever latching onto the bus in the first place. It’s then that I realize that I wasn’t actually involved in the decision process at that point.

Just someone else to blame; that’s what we like to do.

Well, sometimes, you just have to take the blame, take the ride and see where you end up.