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Charleston, West Virginia My Life Story On My Own Writings

The Heart Protector

Did you know your Heart has a friend who follows him through life with only one goal- to protect? This friend is called The Heart Protector.

When you get heart broken or betrayed The Heart Protector can sink into depression. Where did he go wrong? How did he let his friend down?

Maybe he learns something, makes sense of his mistakes & goes back to work.

Or maybe he’s not sure what he did wrong. He moves into a state of hyper vigilance to ensure this never happens again. He builds new walls thick and crusty. The Heart lives inside these walls & starts to be deprived of light.

The Heart Protector builds walls in many ways. He may become paranoid & carry a magnifying glass looking for tiny red flags. He may become cynical & tell himself Love doesn’t exist. He may even reach the point of believing that Knights & Unicorns never walked the earth.

He can make you critical. Pointing out flaws in anyone who gets close. He can make you queasy at the thought of one day walking hand and hand with someone wearing matching pajamas.

He gives you reasons to reject people before they reject you. He fills your legs with adrenaline and tells you to run. Run to the river and drown yourself. He has a million ways of protecting his friend.

Recently my Heart Protector has been too tight & its hard to sing. I can’t catch my breath. I don’t want to go out and see people. I do it anyway but a part of me stays inside. I don’t want to write songs because there’s nothing to say. And no one to hear me.

I don’t know what I am supposed to have learned from my experiences or what I did wrong. I don’t know how to not let the same thing happen again. The Heart Protector is in a state of confusion. What to do? What to do?

So like the genius I am I’ve been trying to learn songs to make other people like me. My friend Arthur plays Sweet Home Alabama with me and Country Roads take me home. We play a gig which requires carrying 500 pounds of equipment for miles with the help of a grocery cart, setting up, playing for two hours, taking it down & carrying it back home. We make about 3 dollars each. I’m a bit worried about survival.

I can only hope popularity will help me survive. I want to reflect the culture back to itself so people will like me. Confederate flags are popular here. So are guns, knives, dicks, motorcycles, alcohol, drugs and nature.

Downtown Charleston West Virginia
A West Virginia Birthday cake. Do you see those two round cakes above it? It turns out they were boob cakes and I ate a slice when offered having no idea what I was eating. I am still trying to come to terms with this.
The view from a West Virginia bar. If you combined this pic with one of a man driving 100 mph off a cliff in a motorized easy chair while high on mushrooms it would pretty much sum up the area.
Giving a redneck hello to a guy(?) in a bar. My Yankee friends always assume the people down here are close minded. They don’t understand they are weirder than fuck.
Burning a red candle in a desperate attempt to stave off the cold. The mug is resting on a tin of chewing tobacco.
I finally had to decorate my bedroom because it was feeling too much like a prison cell. The theme is Friends. I am now expecting Dinosaurs and Elephants to come into my life.