Butt(e)

This past weekend my mother and brother came down from the AK to Montana. The bro's a senior in high school, so, naturally, they come down to the old country to check out colleges, University of Montana specifically, and I'm committing tangency. Anywho, the "old country" is Butte, Montana. My family lived there 15 years too long. Now, I don't want give Butte a objectively negative front; Butte has character, it's a community with an identity and a sense of pride, and, generally, the people there aren't bad by any means. Nonetheless, I've resided in three other places which, simply, fit me better. The bottom line is that Butte wasn't and still isn't a place I enjoy myself, not my in my other three kin members minds, just me.

Now that the context is set, let's take a look at the main event, a restaurant dinner party with my mother and five other sets of parents, parents of old and left-behind hockey team friends, who've known me from my diaper years, and I've haven't talked to or seen them in this kind of setting in nearly, to lay a number down, four years, since my last hockey game in a Butte Blues uniform.

Immediately I'm overwhelmed, and I don't know why. I'm becoming that fearful, insecure child of old. I don't know what to say so I start with the generic: "How have you been?" "How's life.?" Something like this and that ten times over, and all I can think is that I don't want to be here, all these eyes are judging me, what do they think of me being back here?, do they know that I can't stand it here? I was stressed. I was tired. I may have even been unhappy to be there, I cannot even remember and it was less than a week ago. And yet, I may have been refreshed, I think. I was reliving my old life that I've come to think that I dislike. Pardon my ambiguity, but I can't say how or why I dislike Butte, but I know what I know in my heart, and pardon my sensitivity. You know what, I think That, truly, was a bad day, a bad weekend, and I may have even understood a portion of my Tragic Sense of Life.

Back to, after two hours of old people conversing, eating, and drinking, I was beat, done, finished. I thought about nothing except the negative, and I did not express or vocalize it until my mother and I were alone, finally, at last. Yeah, we sure did talk, or maybe it was just me. A rant it was, still stressed and tired, and nothing seemed to feel better. I couldn't find anything to think or say which implicated that I was somehow satisfied to see my old "friends." I was trapped in pessimism, and I hated it, and it is what it is. The next day I went home.

I've been back here in snowy ol' Bozo for a week or so, and life is good, peachy-like. But not because I hold Butte in contempt, it's that I've had some time to leave my little negative bubble and think back on what happened that weekend with those people. And now that I've had some time to reflect, I don't think one thing that happened last weekend was truly negative. All those people had nothing but nice things to say, but I couldn't accept it then. I suppose I can now, but it's sad that I had to be so negative to realize the real thing. I was doing it to myself, the tragedy was brought on by me in that period, that weekend. I 'spose you have to know bad to differentiate it from good. Is that what the Tragic Sense is, that you must know what it is to know badness, to suffer. You must suffer or cannot know goodness. That just seems unfair, but it is what it is and that's the way things are, I think.

The only problem that I see is that I was suffering that weekend over nothing. There was nothing to complain about at that point in time, but how then could I feel that way? I think I'm just angry at my past, but life goes on, right? It does go on, but it depends on how much you let go of it. I think that you have to learn to let go because then you can let go of those bad memories, moments, and experiences.

The only thing we must learn is how to hold onto the goodness, but can we if life goes on?