Meet me in St. Louis, Louie, but get directions first.

I had to fly to St. Louis recently. I say "had to" because nobody goes there by choice. Don't get me wrong... there's nothing wrong with St. Louis, it's just... well, it's not someplace else; any place else. St. Louis is that other place. The place you go when you can't be where you wanted. Or at least that's how it seems to me. I suspect people who live there will feel differently, and will have stopped reading by now, in a huff. Of course they should... I mean, who the hell am I to cast aspersions on a city I've only been to once now? Anyone reading this should know to either ignore my opinion entirely, or at least take it with a healthy dose of sodium (chloride, not pentothal).

They say that "all roads lead to Rome." Well, if that's true anywhere it must be doubly so in St. Louis. I assume that all the roads in St. Louis lead to Rome, because I can assure you that none of them led to where I wanted to go. I performed more U-turns than a female sheep rolling down a hill. (Wait for it... ba-dum-bum!) My brother, who was driving, finally resorted to the most extreme of measures and stopped to ask directions. I don't know whether our route was especially difficult, or whether the people at the Stop-N-Go were just shocked to see a grown man stop and ask "how do I get there from here, and by the way, where is here?"

Oh, we were there for a funeral. Not at the Stop-N-Go; they're full service, but there are limits. No, we were in St. Louis for a funeral. My uncle, my father's brother, died. His was one of those ends that had been coming for a long time. There was no shock, no surprise for anyone. Uncle Sam (yes, I have/had an Uncle Sam) lived for seven years with the cancer that took my father in four months.

I liked Uncle Sam a lot. In a way that's kind of strange, because I had seen so little of him in my life that I really didn't know him. I'd like to chalk it up to my having a "sense" about people, but I don't. People, to me, are closed books. Oh, and they're still wrapped in cellophane and stacked on a shelf where I need to ask for help to even get the book down, but I don't, because I'm not good about asking for help, even with the small stuff. That said, I believe I felt I knew Sam because Sam was one of those people, one of those men, who spent his life in life.

What?

I know, I know... Lemme 'splain.

With me at any given time there's the guy I'm trying to be, the guy I'm trying to show to others, and then—somewhere hidden safely from view—there's the real me. Whoopy, right? I mean, that's most of us, isn't it? Heck, most of you who like to go around believing that you're showing the world the real you have just crafted a mask out of "hey world, this is the real me." Pretending to be real is the mask you wear. And that's cool. There are plenty of worse masks out there. (How about the, "Hey world, I like the taste of human flesh" mask?)

But Sam. Recognizing that I didn't know the man well and that I'm mostly full of shit most of the time, I think that Sam was one of those rare individuals who really lived as who he really was.

I heard a lot of nice things said about him at his funeral. Now sure, funerals are not generally places where people jump up to tell you all the worst dirt they have on the deceased, but I'm inclined to believe what I heard. One of the most, no, the most memorable thing I heard said about Sam was that when he talked to you he was more interested in what you had to say than in what he himself had to say. That struck me as a wonderful trait, probably because it is so patently lacking in me. Half the time when I'm on the listening end of a conversation my attention is 100% committed to planning my next comments. The other half the time, I'm asleep.

Yes, I suck. I'd love to be like Sam in this regard, but I'm not.

The funeral was beautiful. Sam's children, my cousins, both got up and spoke about their father, and his best friend shared some comments as well. I couldn't help thinking how much I hoped that people would speak as well of me when I'm gone, but neither could I kid myself that they would. That's not false modesty; I'm not looking for disagreement here. The reality is that—by my own measure (the only one that really matters for me)—I am not living up to the potential I believe I have. I feel as though I'm sleepwalking through my life, and while it's a pretty good dream most of the time, there's a part of me that yearns to wake up, shake off the lethargy that's gripped me for far too long, and really live.

Or maybe I just need another cup of coffee.