Water...
In my lifetime the first person I knew to be in into Rock music was my cousin Charles. He was my dad's first cousin, but younger that my dad by maybe 15 or so years. Charles was at one point a talented Baseball player and a drummer, but the characteristic that defined him over all other things for period of my life where he was present on a regular basis, was his alcoholism. There's nothing good to say about it, and it doesn't reflect well on my childhood that from age 11 onward I was the main person in my household who would have to humor his inebriated mood swings and disenchanted solitude.
I know he was proud that he'd influenced me musically, in so much that I never hesitated to embrace the power of music outside of what had been coded as culturally-appropriate for a young black kid in in the 80s and 90s. My passion for music became a path for him getting to hear things he otherwise would not have, and many a time the payment for the general labor he would undertake for my parents would be rendered via his drunkenly strong-arming me into giving him some of my cd collection. This was before audio ripping and CD burners were available, and he was biased against cassettes.
There were periods of sobriety where he and I would talk and I would be genuinely happy to take one of his late night calls. I can't even remember what was worth talking about. But the simple fact that there was a period when we spoke and he was actually sober was a radical and positive change, brief as it was.
By the time I went away to college I'd gotten better about asserting myself, and had also gotten to the point where I'd used Columbia House and BMG to expand my collection of CDs, primarily Hip Hop at that point, to the point that I was happy to give him some of the CDs I'd ordered that had underwhelmed. My tastes had gotten so obscure by the time I got home from college, he didn't have an inclination to ask me for anything. I'd become a musician in that time, and was working my way through building a songwriting craft. It was at that point that the men who had been around in my adolescence on their own terms, actually made an effort to support my pursuit of muse.
My father bought me a 4-Track recorder one Christmas. My stepfather gifted me a combo (bass) amplifier to play my acoustic electric guitar through. And Charles had come into possession of a Bass guitar, which he didn't give to me, he traded for CDs. By that time I had also spent 10 months running a record store in college, so I was sitting on a lot of music, so it was an easy trade. Then I put a few hundred dollars into repairs to get that bass in working order. Eventually it would find its way on the Four Track recordings that I would circulate to my dad, and he played them for everyone he could find, to my chagrin. Charles was as encouraging as my dad when it came to my music. It's tragic I never really ever got to hear him play drums. He only ever made it to my house a couple of times, and I wasn't able to really get a chance to jam with him. He wasn't that enthusiastic about it, as I'm sure it had been decades since he'd actually played.
Music became my vice in life, alcohol was surely his. I often think about how much more healthy my childhood could have been, and how ambitious I would have been if the people I grew up with, who I knew to be musically inclined, would have been compelled to share their talents with me. In the case of Charles, could that have helped steer him away from habits that were no doubt going to contribute to his demise some day? When I first heard about the troubles of Malik B. aka M-Ilitant of the Roots, and how they inspired the song that this post is titled for, how substance abuse had derailed his prospects in life, it spoke to the lifetime of enabling I witnessed with my cousin, the way people would contribute to his vices as an inexpensive way to get him to do hard labor they were unwilling to have done by a stranger at market value. Because of a lifetime as a witness to all this I can credit Charles for my willingness to follow my own muses musically, and my sobriety outside of the occasional social drink for special occasions.
More often than not, my cousin Charles was the most generous person I knew when it came to giving of himself, but for some reason unbeknownst to me, he leaned on a destructive vice to pass his idle time, and it was not good for his spirit. In a horrible turn, I found out he had a week to live, at best, on 10/27/23, and by 1AM 10/31/23 he had passed away. It happened before anyone from my immediate family, or those that I knew to be close to him, could gather their thoughts and muster the will to see him in hospice at home, medicated for the pain, because, like my father, my maternal Uncles, and my cousin Joe, Cancer had taken hold of him. Pain management for terminal abdominal cancers that have spread typically necessitates heavy opiates and can render the patient incoherent. Which brings us back to the song at hand because they give you the strongest possible dose of the pain killer as frequently as they can without causing you to OD. It's not how any of my kin wanted to go out, but for those of us who survive them, let alone those of us who were at their bedside, it was the only way for them to go peacefully. Because they no longer had a choice, something else had already sealed their fate.
I was once of a mind, which I considered dark humor in my youthful ignorance, that if my mortality were to be truncated and my days shortened, I would indulge all the things I'd forgone. Having lived to see how naive that viewpoint is, and how cruel the irony stung when I was witness to End-Of-Life care, I disavow myself of that sentiment wholeheartedly.
The emotions in this song are a whirlwind of all sorts.
Such is life.
It is what it is and everything is everything.
What was it Bruce Lee said?
