With fifty on the horizon, this morning on my way into work, Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ came on my satellite radio, and for the 4:18, it was 1985, I was seven years old, and at my best friend’s house on 2nd street. The fourteen-pound boombox was on the counter, and we were two Gen-X caboose boys, home alone, moonwalking on the kitchen linoleum. We were Bad… Can you relate, or am I the only one? 

I’ve been asked multiple times, “What possessed you to write the 99% fictional novel, Replacing The Headlight…?” So, a little about me. I spent most of my growing-up years on the south side of Fort Worth, Texas, and to a lesser extent, in and around the Ozark Mountains. My grandparents on my father’s side were avid gardeners and would literally plan meals around what was ready to harvest. My grandparents on my mother’s side were wheat farmers and cattle ranchers. Agriculture always had a farmstand in the back of my mind. In my early twenties, I moved to the Oklahoma City area, picked up a kitten on the way, got married, and started a family. You may notice this theme a little in my writings. After surviving multiple tornado adventures, including the May 20, 2013 (E)F-5 and countless smaller ones, my wife had her fill of this type of weather, so we moved to Northeastern New Mexico and have been here ever since.

For almost a decade, we’ve been ‘Micro-Farming’ aka ‘Market Gardening’ on our four acres in New Mexico. In the summers, I juggle attending semi-local farmers' markets, within 100 miles one way. We certainly didn’t make ourselves millionaires from this, and I still work full-time as a nurse with an emphasis on geriatrics and hospice care.

In June of 2022, while running my farm stand at one of the farmers' markets, an unexpected incident occurred. I wasn’t prepared for what took place before my eyes. Externally, it wasn’t a violent or assaultive matter, but internally, it ripped at my heart. She…somehow climbed into the far back corner of my mental attic and retrieved Pandora’s box of my teenage memories, insecurities, awkwardness, and lack of self-confidence. This stupid, yet innocent young doppelganger dredged up all of it. She ripped the lid, covered with nearly three decades of dust, right off and dumped the chest of my memories out onto the ground! I couldn’t pick them back up, and nobody could see what I was looking at or understand my tears. I was seventeen again, and the damn mirror was a lying bastard… As a husband and a father, my mind went into some really stupid and dark places. I shit you not! 

After a while, the CAT 5 was downgraded to a tropical depression. Note the key word in the last sentence. I decided to get some counseling for the mental traumas, from multiple sources, that were still scattered on and around my feet. As crazy as it sounds, I was ghosted by multiple counselors after either an initial email contact, phone call, or 1:1 session. This really happened! Eventually, I found a counseling clinic that was willing to see me on a regular basis. They assigned me, a 45-year-old married man with children, a twenty-something, fresh out of college, single woman empowered with her bachelor’s degree. After a couple of sessions, she looked me in the eyes and said, “Statistically, your issues aren’t that bad. There are many others out there who are facing much worse things in their minds. Why are you so upset?”

I never went back…

I don’t recall the exact triggering moment, as I do in other things in my life, but I decided that if I could not dip into my mind and start cleaning it out. Then I would spill it out on paper and maybe try to come to terms with it that way, and this was the conception of the 95% fictional novel “Replacing The Headlight.”  

Now scroll back to around ten or twelve years old, a far more innocent time, at least on the surface. At this age, I became somewhat obsessed with the idea of time travel. Movies and TV shows like Back To The Future, Disasters in Time, and Quantum Leap, more than likely perpetuated this obsession. I can remember, at those tender ages, riding my bike down to the local library just to check out real physics books in hopes of eventually learning…whatever it was I needed to learn…to build a time machine. Although I came up with some interesting theories on how one might actually accomplish leaping from fantasy to fact, the reality of it never went beyond the time I spent pondering it. 

In all honesty, looking back to my childhood and teen years, the idea of time travel was my personal drug of escape from the two rough and mentally caustic homes; this only child bounced back and forth between to appease the custody desires of my mother and father, doing absolutely everything I could, just to keep them happy. That said, it doesn’t matter how much you shovel from one wheelbarrow into another; you can never fill them both. Talk about an ode to joy, being reminded quite frequently that I was the rope that bound these two souls who hated each other together. This did not bode well for the maturity of my confidence and decision-making development during those crucial years. The blank wall adjacent to my bed was no stranger to the blurred stares of my eyes. 

This novel is predominantly 90% fictional but inspired in many aspects from my life’s viewpoint growing up then, and now as a father looking back as well, especially from chapters 3, 4, and 9. There are many things I wish I could go back and tweak as a mentor, blessing some of you, and pleading with others to take a different path, or at least to just take a pause and deep breath. The emotions of yesterday will feel different tomorrow…

To my friends that I haven’t met yet. My goal in writing this 85% fantasy, is that maybe one in a hundred of you will find a gem or two in it and go on to live a better life. In doing so, you will make the lives around you better as well, whether it be with a garden, the humanities, or something else altogether. If that happens, then the struggles I saw, and which gave me inspiration to write, will have been worth their endurance. 

THANK YOU! For all the support I continue to receive regarding this project. The budget for it was about what 3 "Bomb-Pops" from the ice-cream man would have cost, in the summer of '85. Seal Larson