We'll Keep Marching To The Top Of This Tower/ Love Is A Tower

A good friend recently discussed the balance of good versus evil on her blog (thanks for the insight Rach - good post), and the got me thinking. A lot of what she discussed had to do with choice. And choice can be a bitch, let me tell you.

I know my own heart, and I know I struggle with certain things. I want so bad to find what I have sought out that, when it comes close, my heart wars with my mind - chivalry, love, goodness versus self-doubt, jealousy, worrying. The good in me wars with the bad. And I have to choose which voice to listen to, the heart that wants to be free or the head that knows we've been down this path before, and left a broken man.

I am not a broken man. But... sometimes I can't help thinking there's a little Roland of Gilead in me, the Gunslinger. I've joked, and been serious, too, before about slinging lead in my songs. More than that, though, is the one-mindedness, the determination to see the tower, to climb to the top and conquer whatever is there.

And thanks to my boys in Pearl Jam, I get the reminder that Love is a Tower.

So, am I Roland, pursuing that which is forever seemingly out of my grasp, in the distance and dying as I march on, my Tower of Love? And, for those who have finished the Dark Tower books... have I been like Roland in other ways? In the beginning? At the end, if and when he finally gets his tower? In the early years, with Susan?

There is nothing wrong. Everything, or damn near, is right. I just hope I can fight my head, and conquer the tower of Self-Doubt, so I can storm the Tower of Love, and claim that elusive son of a bitch as my own. As someone who's involved said recently, it's about time. For her and me both.

Now then, with that out of the way... if Roland is all impulse, but slow-witted in the books - more mathematical than imaginative, more stoic than romantic (though very romantic in his own ways), is there a way to escape his curse? I have no desire to live for the chase... even though life is about the journey and not the destination, this should be but the next (albeit big) step on that wonderful walk/run/crawl/leap.

All this is just philosphical psycho-babble... my musings on a busy but boring Wednesday afternoon. Things are going well and easy. I just don't want to hold on too fast or too much, too soon, too hard, too loose, too little, too etc, too etc, too etc.

I just want to take this one to the top of the Tower (the Love one, not the others), and finally get - and SHARE - my passionate love affair.

So God, if you ARE at the top of that Tower? Throw me the key, man. She's earned it and maybe I have too.