Captain’s log, entry twenty. This will be the last one for a while. Not because the ship sank. The ship has sunk several times. It turns out I am the kind of captain who keeps showing up at the dock anyway, holding a soggy map and asking whether anybody has seen my boat.
Maybe there is a book after this. Every man who has been through enough eventually says, I should write a book. Most of them are wrong. I have a master’s in creative writing, so when I say it, I am only mostly wrong.
So consider this the summation. The closing argument. I have delivered many closing arguments in my head over the years, as regular readers know. This is the first one I am delivering out loud, and the jury is you.
Let me be clear about the crimes that put Captain JC behind bars. You picture jail as a place for masterminds. Bank robbers. Men with tattoos of other men’s names. My charges were a store-bought vape, purchased from a store, possibly with a receipt, if I were the kind of man who keeps receipts, and a speeding ticket. Somewhere out there is a criminal who has done real damage, and he is free, and he is not even vaping. I like to think he is eating dinner right now with a clear conscience and a full bank account.
I got beat up in jail. Twice. Once could be bad luck. Twice suggests a pattern, and the pattern is me. I would like to tell you I fought back like a hero. What I can tell you is that I have now been punched by more people than I ever sold anything to, and I was in sales for years.
After jail came sixty-eight days at a behavioral health facility. Sixty-eight days is not a stay. It is a semester. I should have gotten credits. I came out knowing everyone’s schedule, every flavor of pudding, and exactly which chair in the common room catches the afternoon sun.
While I was away, my car was impounded. Then I lost it entirely. Nobody warns you about this part. The car does not wait for you. The car does not write letters. The car does not care that you were busy being punched and counseled. It simply sits in a lot collecting fees like a tiny metal landlord until one day it belongs to somebody else. I now ride a motorcycle named Liberty everywhere. In Alabama. In every season. Liberty, I have learned, is beautiful in October and deeply humbling in a February rain.
My credit got ruined. I used to think of my credit score as a number. Now I think of it as a weather report for a town nobody wants to visit. Somewhere a computer looked at my name and quietly whispered, Absolutely not. I respect the computer. It is the only one in this story that was honest with me up front.
My bank account was turned off. Not closed. Turned off, like a lamp, as if somebody walked past my financial life, noticed the light was on, and thought, That seems wasteful. I lost access to my own money, which is a sentence I did not know was possible until I had to say it out loud to a woman behind glass who had clearly heard worse and was not impressed.
And then the big one. I lost custody of my daughters, temporarily.
There is no joke here. I looked for one. I turned this part over a hundred times like a rock on a creek bed, hoping something funny would be crawling underneath. Nothing was. There was only the word temporarily, which I am holding onto with both hands. Temporarily is a door, not a wall. I am knocking on it. I will keep knocking, politely, persistently, and in the proper way, for as long as it takes.
For longtime readers, this is not the first time I have ended up somewhere with locked doors. I was in a psych ward in 2009 and again in 2011. At this point I am less a patient and more a returning customer. I should have a punch card. Buy nine stays, get the tenth free.
So here is where the captain stands after all of it. No car. No bank account. Credit score in the basement, feeling around for the light switch. Two jail fights, one long behavioral health semester, two old stays from years gone by, and a custody matter I intend to see through. Charged with the high crimes of vaping and driving a little too fast.
And I am still standing.
Picture Eminem at the microphone, sweat on his forehead, staring down the whole free world like it owes him money. That is the feeling. I am not going to use his exact word here, because this is a Christian site, and because I have been punished enough this year. But you know the word. Put it in front of the free world and you have the general mood of this paragraph.
Then, because I am a Christian and not just an angry man with a motorcycle, I set the microphone down and remember who actually runs the world. It is not the bank. It is not the credit bureau. It is not the impound lot, though the impound lot clearly believes it is.
I have spent twenty entries telling you about the people God sent. Billy, who answered the phone. G, who showed me the ropes. Brandon, who brought the chicken and the smile. Tish, the counselors, Jamee, Stormy, and Rachel. A childhood friend in a dream. A sponsor who kept showing up. Every time the ship went down, somebody threw a rope. I did not deserve most of those ropes. That is what makes them grace.
Joseph was thrown in a pit and then a prison before he ever saw a palace. Paul wrote a good part of the New Testament from a cell. I have only written twenty Captain’s Logs, but I am working on my output.
So the captain is going below deck for a while to rest, regroup, and maybe write that book. Hopefully one with a better ending than, and then they turned off his bank account. If you have read this far, thank you for sailing with me. Bring your stories and your favorite songs. The best part of rock and roll was never the guy with the microphone. It was everybody singing along.
“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
Romans 8:28 (KJV)
Captain JC, signing off. For now.
About the author: JC is a Birmingham-area musician, writer, and founder of We Rock Network. He has been through some things, and he is still here.
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