If I were a twenty years old and viewing myself now from the outside I’d probably think that I’d done pretty damn good, and if thirty year old Ben Now and twenty year old Ben Then could take a walk around the streets of Capitol Hill here in Seattle where I live and I could point out my apartment and the record stores where I scored old Santana and John McLaughlin records and ate Ethiopian and tempura and hung out with my bohemian friends who aren’t a bunch of selfish flaky fucks but are fabulous people and all in an attempt to show my old self that what I’d experienced before wasn’t me I’d think, hey you, mister self styled artist, you got to a place you wanted to get to even if the world isn’t queuing up outside your apartment for appointments to adore you, but still you made it and it’s a long ways from where you came, thousands of miles and days, all with conscious effort to move, to make distance, to become.

And yet if the twenty year old were placed inside I don’t know if he’d be happy that there was still a trace of the old personality, Ben Then, the old me that walked high school halls stricken with acute fears, wanting so much to be famous and aggrandized and talked of as a giant in whatever field I decided to dominate because I felt utterly ignored for every minute in those halls and those fields and clung to those who’d give me the time even when they’d ruin it but at least it wasn’t solitary confinement. Yes, the memories are still there from growing up on the farm, the loneliness, the traces of a fat kid that haven’t been wiped clean despite the years of wonderful friends, personal success, almost 10,000 miles of road running, day after day of what any reasonable person could reasonably call success and I guess I wanted to outrun myself, to keep pushing, to sculpt away, to erase, to patch up, to accumulate as much distance as necessary to become, to alter all I could so that eventually I’d be unrecognizable to Ben Then, and as we walked around the streets of Capitol Hill and I’d introduce myself and explain who I was and my now long time Seattlite point of view and surprise Ben Then with the stranger I’d become and we’d do guess work how many degrees of separation there are between us even though we’d both know that there were no steps but an analog transformation that was seamless and tell him the story of how I eventually crossed the transformative finish line and that would explain why I was now a stranger. But it hasn’t happened. At least I still don’t wear that damn baseball hat every day.

To my friends I’ve made no secret of the fact that “my life began” when I moved to the west coast as a 22 year old and that everything that came before was just unfortunate preamble. I don’t mean to be maudlin, that’s just how I feel.

Your twenties are about who you are. Your thirties are about what you produce. Those are the overriding themes by decade of personal development. The psychologists say so.

So this is who I am. And still Ben Then stretches around in my skin. What to do with him? How to put him to work?