I was eight years old when I first watched a man being humiliated.

He was a distinguished man in a gray suit with gray eyes and gray sideburns under a full head of black hair and I remembered how people who he didn't know would stand up when he entered the club. Honesty and success are a cursed combination that carries within itself the seeds of the bearer's demise. The wolves never miss the stumble of that particular prey. His fault was that he had the courage to admit that he had made a mistake. The wolves wasted no time. I sat with him eight years later while I was still young though older in at least years and asked him why. He told me manhood was a chronicle of journeys. Men who take the journey of responsibility say yes to power. Men who take the journey of responsibility say also yes to tragedy. He was always prepared. What was important was that you showed grace and dignity under pressure. That was the measure of a man. He then looked at me and asked me what I thought about life. I told him it was better to lose at life then to stand at the sidelines and applaud every time somebody else wins. He laughed and then he smiled. and then he told me my first journey was probably just around the corner.

My first journey took me beyond the night. Beyond the night lay the city. And if you ever arrived in the mornings you could sometimes see the city wreathed in dust, magnificent in its murky selflessness. But I always came at night and the streets peeled away as I went along them and the city went along with me and the darkness went along with the city hissing silently as it filled the vacuum of my going. The second story flat with the wooden balcony engraved and etched and slightly teetering took me in. The rains came down and the water mixed with the dirt and ran down the window in muddy rivulets and dripped into the street below. Past the street were other streets and beyond them stretched the city. The dawn came with downtrodden apathy and could only turn everything gray. I stared out my window to where the darker gray of the city melted against the sterile gray of the coming morning until the window misted over from the heat inside and the city was lost to me and I was lost to the city.

After the first journey there were other journeys that were less of parting and more of wisdom. They taught me how the vastness of the universe feeds our insecurities because its size so easily humbles our transience. Thus we believe in progress because its hollow glory seeks to hide us from the terrors of the beyond. They taught me that that opportunity doesn't come sit on your lap like a merry lass from Devonshire. They taught me that justice belongs to those who would claim it. They taught me to disregard facts and to look for patterns and rhythms. Facts are misleading while rhythms give you a sense of timing. Times of pressure will always separate the men from the boys but it is the sense of timing that separates the winners from the losers. They taught me that a path followed to its end leads nowhere.

A path followed in the city always leads somewhere. The city is the Man's new frontier. It will be the scene of his final battle and it will be the scene of his second coming. It is here that Life rears its head high carefully sculpted by hands of genius - the craggy cliffs in their hands awash with flash floods of nostalgia. It is here that tests of manhood will come in the form of slivers of moonlight reflecting awkwardly off brazen empty beer bottles cramped together as if expecting an air raid. It is here that broken snatches of merriment will barely carry through to you over the light breeze ("…. If a girl you'll be a whore, If a boy you'll go to war….") It is here that something will die as pale moonlight reverently falls on her reflected yellow face - sad eyes past a shadowed cheek resting on gracefully entwined fingers. Man will imagine that for a moment the night is over, onward hurries the dawn of promise past its scattered islands of loneliness and that it will always be a new day beyond her balcony. And for man it will be in the city where through their ignorance they will have cheated us all of the glory of the end.