We all have heroes. Some of us are more inclined than others to identify who our heroes are.
A hero can be someone close and
accessible: Mom, Dad, Grandma, an uncle or a schoolteacher; someone with a
tangible and absorbent influence. Lessons of nobility, character, integrity,
and wisdom transfer seamlessly as we find ourselves silently and
subconsciously striving to emulate those we admire.
Some carry a great place of importance
but are not as practicable or intimate. We lose the warmth we feel from a
personal hands-on assimilation experience. We can look to them, but the
complete means to receive all they offer does not exist. They are role
models, yet we are not accountable to them.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham
Lincoln, Joan of Arc, Susan B. Anthony, Gandhi, Beethoven, Jackie Robinson, Leo
Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Mother Teresa, and Isaac Newton could all fit this
description.
And there remains the anti-hero a. k. a. the
"bad influence". This could be that bad news buddy from school that
your mom forbade you to play with. Or that slightly older cousin who would
introduce you to a variety of forbidden fruits by way of Playboy magazines,
cigarettes, marijuana, and/or alcohol.
We can say the same of the distant pop
culture icons and bad boys we try to mirror for whatever reason.
With the latter, a desire for fame,
autonomy, and indulgence speaks to the heart as being the pinnacle of American
success. No rules; just a bubble of social anarchy, to live and die as one
pleases with a lifetime of fulfilling the desires of the flesh at will. In so
many cases and so many ways, we are driven.
We all yearn to find such people to
admire. We are codependent in a way.
I don't remember a time when music was not a
big part of my life. From a nebulous memory as a baby sitting on the floor at
my father's band practice, to sitting atop his shoulders and peering through
the cyclone fence at Jackson International Airport to get a glimpse of the king
of rock-and-roll Elvis Presley, to my fascination with shock rock pioneers
Kiss. There has never been a corner of my life without music in it.
As a teen, I became fascinated with front man
and lead singer Jim Morrison. I ingested every album, documentary, book, and
concert video about The Doors somehow connecting that fortune and fame
found Jim despite his eccentric ways.
Jim was not a great vocalist. To the naked
ear, his baritone crooning seemed dull. But you could not judge The Doors by a
mediocre standard. You either obsessed over or were outright repulsed by
them.
My admiration came not just in their skill
as musicians whether collectively or individually, but by their ability to
captivate, mesmerize, and hypnotize. Music was meant to be accessible. I
don't like being told I have to "get" something to enjoy it.
A melody of any kind should be easy and instantly pleasing. But The Doors
were the exception. I "got" Jim Morrison.
As trendy as his mystique was in the late
eighties/early nineties, it would not deter me from my pursuit to mimic a
similar visionary style. There was no containing my curiosity to discover the
existential secrets coded within his poetry and conversations.
He was a drunk who loved his altered
states, but he was also a shaman.
Throughout his music and in interviews he
often recounted the story of riding through New Mexico with his family and
coming upon a crash scene of injured Native Americans lying alongside the road.
The legend is that one- an elder Indian- made eye contact with Jim just as he
was dying and in that moment as his spirit was departing his body, he then made
residence in the tenement soul of Jim Morrison. Jim made no secret that this
was a foundational experience that went back to when he was just four years
old. It echoed repeatedly in many of his poems and songs.
There's no mistaking: He was an exceptional
personality. A military son born into a nomadic way of life, drifting came
naturally to him.
These things we know for sure. But what makes
him fascinating are the things shrouded in total mystery. Being inspired
by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, we know that he was an ardent
hitchhiker before joining The Doors. Yet we know little about what he
experienced while tramping across the Mojave Desert.
Was there a single experience to be
pin-pointed that made Jim the peculiar person he was? Was he actually the
"killer on the road" whose brain was "squirming like a
toad"? Did he actually "break on through to the other
side"? If so, what did he find there?
I resolved to know these things for
myself. Whatever levels of fasting, psychedelics, self-denial, or indulgence it
took, no price seemed to high.
But I questioned that judgement as I sat
shocked realizing that I had migrated westward and now shivered in front
of an impotent smolder. It was an empty moment void of any wishful euphoria or
acquired mystic superpowers. There was no stimulating way to pass the time as I
sat helplessly waiting for the sun.
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