Roll The Bones

For the better part of the past decade, I worked as a journalist and traveled around the world to visit world-renowned racetracks, where I would drive borrowed supercars at ten-tenths and try to avoid hitting a wall, with varied success.

Every day I rode shed-built motorcycles on Los Angeles freeways, lane-splitting through rows of standstill cars with inattentive drivers as my bikes leaked oil, rattled like desert snakes, and spit fire through poorly tuned carburettors. Every day I went to the gym for a two-hour workout, not because I wanted to be balanced or healthy, but because I wanted to know that I could knock the teeth out of any asshole at any back-alley bar, and because I wanted to prove wrong the childhood bullies who poked fun at my chicken legs and called me “Bones.” I paid too much money for a lot of meaningful tattoos, and I paid too little attention during a lot of meaningless sex—a perverted prioritization of a young male.

I let myself get lost at the bottom of a bottle of whiskey when my father was diagnosed with cancer and died, and after six years of sobriety I again gave myself over to drink during the unraveling of a beautifully misguided relationship that languished past due under the auspices of a true-and-fated love. 

I was a young male, and I am better for it. 

Those easy, careless days of moral ineptitude are behind me, and my life no longer looks as it once did, no matter how hard you squint. There are no more motorcycles in my garage, and the cars I drive are old and slow and perfectly fine.

I am employed by a family-owned flour mill and spend my days at my desk,  writing witty emails with half-baked bread puns, or at a local bakery, taking pictures of fluffy sourdough loaves.

There is no more space in my life for posturing in shows of strength or violence, and my body is cherished as is, potbelly and all. My heart has softened and is more accepting of love, and it begins to glow when the most unlikely woman looks into my eyes and says that she wants to spend our lives together. 

Too often the young male took it too far, in the name of a damn good time, and again and again he refused to acknowledge that his heedless lifestyle and his deluded decisions had consequences and impacted the lives of others.

At times he knew that all he had to do was show up, but he didn’t. He put himself first and kept moving as fast as he could to feel just about anything, but once those feelings sit, they settle.

All the young male can do is grow up, learn from those experiences, and try to be better tomorrow and every day that follows.

Because every day should not be lived like it is your last, as the young male does, and you are allowed to be a growing, changing, flawed thing.

Never once during my time as young male did I truly consider what I was willing to risk or what I was risking it for, but rather I gave myself to the fevered dance of danger, living impulsively without enough thought or care, cheating death to chase one more fleeting moment of supposed masculinity.

Those memories are fading, growing smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror as I drive toward a more appreciative, dependable, and gentle future, and for the first time in my life I know what I am willing to risk or what I am risking it for.

I am Chris Nelson, and this is “Roll the Bones.”