Donnie Casto II
The average observant eye, this man was at best a prototype. Three times in his life, he had faced death and survived. Perhaps it was a spiritual blessing from the Cherokee roots that flowed through his veins. Maybe it was his Nordic temperament to survive the coldest and harshest things life could throw in his general direction. None of that is important. He was a second hand; pawn shop being that defined the essence of the classic outlaw hit Highwayman. And while not a robber, sailor, builder, or a pilot he had been rebel, fiend, saint, and sinner. He roamed the spinning ball of water and dirt seeking something that justified the life he had been living.
By the eye of the casual random window dressing flesh calling themselves a human being, who mistook the rat race of buy, sell, and fit in the man in this story had been by all rights an epic failure. So many times this man had willingly fed not just his right hand, but his very essence to Fenrir wolves of the world. “If we all deserve justice in this life, then do we not all deserve a chance?” he often said. He was a soul plagued by excess. And excess to find or experience something he never could quite define or pin point. Be it the whores he kept in his bed on lonely nights, the drugs offering the great awakening, or even the next bottle of booze he could swill to just avoid pain, he never met the divinity that the world offered him in each of these excesses and vices.
One day, as time marches on, as it does for all mankind, he found in care three great treasures that were conceived in tandem by a woman of the line of Hades and Loki. While those sea blues were an ocean of potential and possibility; he wasn’t in those early years, astute enough to see the hurricane of destruction these eyes of this woman held in the horizon.
Throughout his life, this wandering gypsy had been destroyed. Nothing cuts as deep as one’s first heartbreak, the loss of a treasured friend, even the depths of addiction couldn’t defeat him. Something inside of this man, like Thomas Anderson accepting he was Neo, refused to let this man stop believing in that pull of the great divine magnet that always seemed to whisper in the guise of a distant friend even a stranger, “Get up, just one more time.”
Normal is not a word in the lexicon of someone whose treasures are on loan from a system that preaches justice and fairness at the price of the one who can bribe the king with the most. And such it was for this wandering dark troubadour who the gods in dreams revealed great promises at the expense of loss, tears, and unfortunate things. Normal was one when the second treasure through tears and eyes of anger, confusion, and resentment would ask of this man not leave or return to the high tower of which you set me free every two weeks. Between a boiling rage and an urge not to give in to weeping in arms of this particular treasure, was a bad trip, a overdose of reality that no seasoned sage of the mind or spirit would want to relive. Yet, everyday he was faced with once again feeding his hand and his heart to the wolf. Hoping for a victory in which the magnet would shift the tides.
