"This is the strangest life I've ever know."
Jim Morrison
My brain has gifted me with a lovely crisis. This crisis centers around something that was brought to my attention when I was about 5 or 6 years old. My one of my parents' closest friends was a renegade in our community. Jeanie was a woman fierce, strong and outspoken. She and my dad really got along as fellow rebels. They seemed to have a mutual admiration for the other's flare in speaking out against the bullshit, The Man, societal norms, and conventional thought. No matter how many people were in the room, they always had a similar look in their eye, like they were the only ones in on some joke amongst everyone's cluelessness. They were anti-establishment although they thrived in their fields of real estate and advertising that were ruled by Squares and people caught up in the money and excesses of the 70s and 80s. They were not hippies, they were intensely free spirits. They did not march to the beat of their own drummer, but grabbed the drummer's instrument, threw away the sticks, and beat it wildly with their fists with a rhythm that blew the doors off. Jeanie grabbed me when I was little and pulled me close. Booming her raspy hip voice under wild curly hair with a gigantic Cheshire cat smile framed by round dimpled cheeks, she said something she repeated many times and elaborated many ways throughout my first twenty-five years, "We Tauruses have got to stick together. We are kindred spirits, Man!" As I look back, I know she recognized this lovely crisis. "You're sensitive. That's a curse AND a blessing! It's a blessing because you really feel things, Man! It's a curse because you really feel things, Man!!!" She would then go on to explain the many gifts and tragedies that would befall someone of my disposition - a sensitive bull that had the world tuned up as loudly and intensely as possible, barreling headlong into the blaring volume of all my senses.
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