My Love for You Is Like A Barracuda

 

My Love for You Is Like A Barracuda

Big-Joe-Radio

6/16/2018

 

                I remember how her face lit up when she spoke about that night at the concert venue. She was born in 1956. That means around the time that heart was famous and doing their thing, she was old enough to see them in their artistic prime.

                “Well Joe, there was a lot of people in the crowd that night. There was a lot of smoke in the air. All you had to do was look over to your left, to your right, or slightly behind you, and there was a joint not much more than two feet away. I was so high. I was so young.

                It got crazy suddenly. I remember feeling the energy change. All the people in front of me became much more hard pressed against me. The same was for the people that were behind me. The energy moved sideways as well; like a rising tidal wave. Suddenly, I was on my back with a sea of people above me. Claustrophobia began to set in and I felt like I was being sucked down into my grave and I was about to die this way; in a concert stampede at a Heart concert.”

                When she told me this story, I remember thinking that I would not have been there listening to her story if she did indeed die. She later told me that a hand reached down to her and pulled her up. As she made her head above the dangerous pressure, she looked around to see who it was, but all she saw was the insanity in the crowd that surrounded her. She also later made her escape from that whole concert episode.

                The woman telling me this story was no other than my mother. She was not artistic as me. But I think she was, but she just never lived it out. She never discovered that about herself, but I could always tell by the way that she told stories and the way that she lived her life, that she had it in her. You see, my mother lived her whole life surviving that I don’t think she ever discovered or unpacked the relics inside her soul. But in a way, she taught me how to. So maybe she did live out her purpose anyways.

                Barracudas are ferocious predators of the seas. They are literally maulers. They hover over the shallow waters; motionless yet watching with sharp observant eyes for any small or large fish to come into view. Barracudas are even known to attack dolphins. They instantly go from motionless to up to 30 miles and hour with the snap of their body.

                When they do reach their prey, they bite and tear away at the flesh until the prey is physically destroyed and arrives at their death, body totally mangled up’ fins ripped away, eyes gouged out, muscle tissue strewn all over the place.

                Is this not how love feels? Ok, maybe this is a tacky way to connect love with ferocious behavior but imagine the behavior you would display if something or someone came to bring harm against the one or the ones that you love.

                Today is Father’s Day.  When I am not around my son, I try to work on myself. I try to become or reflect on the man that I am. There are some things that I am insanely proud of; probably too proud, and then there are some things that I am not too proud of.

                I am not proud of the fact that I still behave in ways that go with survival mode. Those behaviors don’t work well when it is time for you to thrive. In survival mode, you will viciously attack anything that crosses the road to your goals.

                In thrive mode, those behaviors are not appropriate. For me, art was when I made transitions in my life. At one point I was not even aware of who I was artistically speaking. One fateful season of my life, I did discover that I was an artist. And then for years I did nothing but take a pic axe and chip away at those relics inside my soul until I had a mountain of artistic collections that I had created. I was not only artistic, I became prolific, writing in many different styles, and painting as well. Jesus, I began to know what seemed like at the time, much of my soul. It is only now that I realize that I have only begun to touch the depths of this sea of creation inside my soul.

                What if I wrote a story about Barracudas? And what if I painted many paintings of beautiful barracudas in their natural habitat? Of course, I would use my favorite oil paintings for this. And what if I put those paintings in my son’s room? Their place on the walls would come with my instructions to protect him from harm when I can’t be there.

                Art has a way of doing exactly those things. By that I mean that when I am creating, my soul is coming alive and many times my subconscious mind is speaking to my active-listening-conscious mind. The asleep part of me is telling me that it is actually not asleep and that it is here to tell me about my world and to present it in a lovely way.

                I remember when I was a kid. We lived down in Miami, Florida. Every weekend my stepdad would take us down to Key West, Florida so that we could go catfishing. I remember the day when I saw him hooking in a large one. It was jumping out of the water no more than 30 feet from the shore, as if to announce war against my step dad, and that he should prepare to lose. For the next 0 minutes, my step dad wrestled and wrestled to get that fish in. The fishing rod bent this way and that way. Curse words were not far from his lips, “I’ve got you, you motherfucker!”.

                Although in fact, the fist was correct in his assumption. The line broke and he got away. Meanwhile I got to witness my father on his hands and knees agonizing in defeat as he began to pound his forehead into the wet shore ground just where the ocean met the land.

                I guess it can be said then, that fish, cat-fish, and barracudas represent passion in all its ferociousness. Thank you for reading.