It was her bedroom:
we all stayed over
and were young.
I remember seeing my face
contorted in the mirror,
freckled with shy lips.
My friends
busied themselves about me,
studying the imperfections of beautiful women
who were sung girls.
They pushed their hair
and lips every which way
at my sides,
busying themselves
with reassurance
while I—undaunted,
but not inordinately beautiful—stood silently
and thought them lovely.
Love is the warmest breeze—
Sailing with the deepest breath
Tugging at the summer dress
And it’s not that
the dress lies flat on my knees;
Or that the sail doesn’t catch a breeze
Because I’ll tell you
My summer dress has been tugged at last
And the sail is hanging at half mast
You’re not a zombie. You toke it and you smoke it and you drink it and you
think it, think things like the zombies in the songs about people like you.
But you don’t look like them; you can’t be like them. You hang with your
non-zombie friends who are just like you but really not like you, who talk
like you and walk like you. You and your non-zombie friends, who when we
talk about what you do and why you do you deny you do at all. I’m sober,
you say as you walk up to one of non-zombie friends with a 20-dollar bill in
your hands, and I sit there and don’t think I’m stupid like you. You who is
so smart and so sweet and so caring and so stupid as to throw everything
else away for the high because you like the high and your friends like the
high and why not get high? Why not get high? But hey, if you don’t want to
it’s cool because I kinda like you even though you know you are lying and
you want me to be like you so you don’t have to throw me away too. I wish I
could be like you, but I won’t throw me away for you because even though I
like you I like me too. You and your non-zombie friends. You lead such
normal lives, you fool everyone by looking so damned normal, and you do it
on purpose so you do I know you do. Maybe you are normal, because isn’t
normal what the majority’s doing? Maybe everyone’s used to everyone because
everyone and their mother does it too, they toke it and smoke it, drink it
and think it those thoughts just like you, they dress like you get in to
messes like you skip their classes like you but they’re not like you. They’
re not like you. And anymore you’re not like you either. You wear the mask
you and your friends like to share, and I put up my barriers like I do when
I don’t trust you but I do trust you, when you’re you. But you’re not
because you’re like your non-zombie friends now, having fun like they do but
we had fun too, you know. We had fun when you were you. I’ll make you a
deal. Don’t be like me and I won’t be like you and that’s OK so long as you’re
like you, OK? Just so long as you’re really you.
“Love.” There’s an odd word. Well, as far as I can tell there are two popular ways of starting out a speech. The first is to check Webster’s Dictionary for a definition, then repeat what you found.
“Webster’s Dictionary defines love as: You stupid moron. How dense are you to be looking in a book for a description of one of mankind’s deepest, most important feelings? Do the world a favor and stick your head in the center of this book and slam it shut as hard as you can.”
After three days of intensive therapy I was ready to begin writing again, this time using the second most popular way to start a piece of writing: Word dissection. That wasn’t much help either…
“Love.” Well “Love” can be split up into two words, lo and ve. Lo, as in lo and behold, is a word used to attract attention or show surprise. And ve isn’t in the dictionary. However, in Spanish, lo and ve, used in a sentence means “to see.” To see? Actually kinda neat, really. From what I’ve heard people in love see each other for what they are, so it fits quite nicely. Although it could also mean to see the years of bitterness and resentment that are bound to follow, it’s really all in the interpretation.
And now I’m confused. People should need a license to use the word “love” in a sentence. And a diploma to use it in a body of writing. Or at least some type of certification class.
What was I talking about again? Ah yes, love. Well, I’m not sure that I’m the best person to even attempt an explanation of the feeling, because I’ve really never successfully completed the whole “in love” cycle. In fact, I’m pretty certain that I haven’t even started the whole “in love” cycle, despite numerous attempts with several different girls. The cycle usually involves two people, and stuff. And the stuff is different depending on the people.
You know, I can’t really describe the “in love” cycle. A writer should have at least a little experience in what he’s going to write about; like they always say, “Write what you know.” I, however, do have extensive experience in the ‘trying and failing’ cycle.
Imagine two people, Frank and Perl. Frank is a sweet guy with a bit of an eccentric streak, which, quite frankly, is what makes Frank Frank. Perl is a quietly beautiful woman who is content to sit back and take life in. She hates it when people spell her name P-E-A-R-L, because that’s just not how you spell her name. These are qualities that are irresistible to Frank. Frank waits in the shadows for a chance to strike up a conversation. After much watching and waiting a window of opportunity opens. Frank is armed only with a wavering confidence and a small glimmer of hope. His only companion is Joel, his personality.
Joel does the same job all personalities do. He makes judgment calls, devises life strategies, thinks of clever things to say, and basically does everything not directly related to primary life functions. As Frank is approaching Perl, something goes wrong. All the lights at his station go out. By the time Joel realizes that foul play is afoot, it’s too late. Someone storms in the room.
“Clayton, how did you get past security?!”
“Oh, I have my ways. Surrender control of Frank to me or accept the consequences.”
“You fool! We’re about to attempt contact with Perl, if you take over now…”
“Exactly. Mwahahaha!”
Clayton, Frank’s other personality, assumes control of Frank just as he approaches Perl. Within seconds Frank says something bizarre and inappropriate. Perl, confused and disgusted, runs back to her circle of friends with a new story to tell. Clayton escapes so he can seize control at an inappropriate moment another day. Joel eventually comes to and tries to perform some damage control by reminding Frank that there will be other chances, but Frank doesn’t care. In a week or so the feelings of defeat lessen, but not by much.
And that’s what makes life odd. You can be completely normal one second, but throw something in that upsets the balance and all hell breaks loose. Here’s what happened when I called up this one girl to try and get a date for a dance (Just in case she wanted to remain anonymous, I’m changing her name to “person.”)
Valentines Day, 7th Grade:
Me: Uhm, erh, hiya.
Person: Hi. Who is this?
Me: (Uh-oh. I wasn’t counting on this. Name, name, name, what the hell’s my name again?) Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have the math homework wouldja?
Person: Hold on, let me check.
Me: (Phew. Ok, think, think, think. Steve! Yes, it’s definitely Steve!)
Person: I think it’s 234 1-13.
Me: It’s Steve.
Person: Oh, hi Steve!
Me: So, would you like to go to the dance with me?
Person: No.
Me: OK then! Well, see ya.
*click*
For my first actual attempt at breaking in it actually went pretty well. Luckily, there were three Steves in the seventh grade, so when the person asked me if I had called the next day I said “Nope, why?”
That was the end of that. A full three years later I tried forcing someone to love me again. Of course, that ended quick. I would try to be funny around her, but I was too uncomfortable to actually make her laugh, and I ended up looking stupid. Not your average stupid, by any means. I had actually began to act Ludicrously Stupid, which is a level I never want to reach again unless I’m paid. I walked up to her and, aggh. It’s easier to document it:
Person: Hey Steve, what’s up?
Me: (Say something witty… c’mon… think…) Hey! It’s, uh, it’s you! Howya feeling on this fine Wednesday morning?
Person: It’s Monday.
Me: (Change the subject quickly) So it is! Well, anyway, how was your Christmas?
Person: I’m a Jehovah’s Witness.
Me: *nervous laughter* I knew I recognized you, did you visit my house last Thursday?
Person: What is so funny?
Me: Oh nothing, I was just thinking of what a pleasure it was to meet me. I mean you! I mean, oh, I’ve got to go pee-pee now, excuse me.
*sounds of running echo through the hallway*
There were a few more of those encounters, but they all follow the same patterns. I think I’ll skip straight to the ending. I told this person that I loved her, and she laughed. Either she thought I was joking, which is understandable, or there are sinister forces at work in her mind.
Well, I wrote this piece two years ago, and it seems that nothing has changed. I could read this piece all over again it would play out exactly the same.
And you know, I still really don’t mind much at all.
My face is hot but my feet are cold.
I’m choking on the emotion
I won’t let myself feel,
Wishing my mother was here,
That I had a father to speak of.
Because one is not two.
I hate that I’ll remember seventeen like this:
Responsible and overwhelmed;
Dying and living each minute.
Wanting to do nothing,
while knowing there is so much left to be done.
I’m overwhelmed and there is too much,
she says.
She is the me looking back and caring.
And I cry.
I entered the week as an Indiana Jones figure. I arrived a day late to the student council leadership camp, having been stuck the day before in a Miami airport returning from a week of liberating the children of an exotic third world island. The camp had been informed Sunday night that I would be arriving the next day, since I had called ahead to say I was getting back late from Haiti.
I got there shortly before lunch on Monday, and when we ate in the cafeteria of the college which was hosting the conference, everyone was eager to hear about my adventures once they realized I was “the guy from Haiti.” I had taken along a selection of my photos from the trip and promised to show them to several girls who asked to see them.
That spring, when I was informed that I was being sent for a week of camp, I was nervous—council members are notorious for being snobby. I worried how well I’d fit in and, more importantly, if I’d have much fun.
It was this immediate interest in me, however, that calmed my fears. Here was a group of ninety-some student leaders who were well-respected and liked in their schools, mostly because they respected and cared about others a great deal. They intrigued me, and it meant a lot that they were interested in me as a unique, idiosyncratic person.
I guess that I often look at the social misfits in school as misunderstood, but I learned during the week that the most popular and esteemed students also face this problem. I went in expecting a gathering of stuck-up preps, but left the week wishing I could stay just one more day.
One of the reasons for the great week was that most of the girls at the camp were attractive, if not downright hot. It’s well known that were Gallup polls to be taken for high school elections, looks would be a leading qualification for the girls. The ratio was in favor of us males, nearly three to one. We basked in it. We were suave as heck: opening doors for the girls, jotting them notes, taking empty lunch trays. I still hear their delighted squeals when they looked out their second-story dorm windows one night to see all us guys on the lawn crooning, “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling,” and I see our smiles as we returned to our rooms, telling each other, “Tomorrow we’re gonna get a piece.” We never did, of course, although a couple guys were rumored to have gotten a kiss, but we kept pouring it on, and the girls, unaccustomed to such treatment, soaked it up.
It was during this week that I encountered my first truly appreciative audience. My second night there, Tuesday, we had a camp-wide coffeehouse in the college’s basement pub. After several Chicken Soup selections and a couple genuine pieces—songs backed with guitar strumming, mostly—I sat on the stool before the mike and kicked off my turn with Poe’s “Annabel Lee” from memory, which I followed with a reading of Dick Allen’s “The Cove,” and my own “Embracing, though Little Wiser.”
I felt as if I had exposed my soul to the world in an act of complete trust and had not been let down. I had let the cat out of the bag—I am human, too—and my audience had remained bona fide confidants.
On the closing night, we held vespers. I read “Israfel,” another Poe poem, followed by the poem I had written the night before at the prompting of several new friends. The poem focused on how my childhood dreams to be a knight had matured with me to a deep appreciation of the beauty that already surrounds me. I talked about my trip to Haiti—about how the children were beautiful if you looked into their wide eyes, and how radiant human life is. I reflected on my time in Haiti and at the camp to show how beauty transcends usefulness and exists because life creates it.
A youthfulness pervaded the camp throughout the week with its hormones, idealism, and unhindered enthusiasm. The world was ours to conquer in love, and we as leaders of a new generation had the power to do it.
Earlier the day of final vespers we held an outdoor relay competition. Donned in my green shirt like my teammates, I was ready to do my part in the food-eating relay. One of six team representatives would run up, grab a random food item from a plastic grocery bag, and shove it down his throat as fast as he could. We could only have a drink once all the food was gone.
I picked the pack of peanut butter on cheese cracker sandwiches, and opted to throw three in my mouth and then worry about chewing. My body struggled, with little success, to make enough saliva to handle the mouthful of dry crackers on demand. Caught up in the excitement and frustration, I started shaking. I was fine, but my hands and body shook to the point that I worried one of the counselors.
It wasn’t until later, when the school year began again, that I realized how weak our beauty is, how vast the gap between reality and our dreams. I believe the world is ours to turn upside down; beauty needs only the eyes of a beholder. But I cram too many crackers into my mouth, and I shake beyond my control.
You’ve taken me for the fool again—why don’t I ever learn?
Lessons taught and lessons learned haven’t amounted to anything
Why do I let you walk all over me?
Sometimes the good outweighs the bad,
But when it’s all said and done I’ve cried more than I’ve smiled
Every minute that my eyes are open is a minute that I’m breathing for you
God, sometimes the pain is so intense I can’t breathe
God, sometimes the love is so intense I can’t leave
But I need to know what to do
I’ve never been good with words, but it seems you’re good with lies.
I picture myself center stage in the most enormous and fantastically beautiful theater in the world. Its walls and ceilings are covered in impeccable Victorian paintings of angels in the sky. A single ray of light shines down upon my face, shining through the still, silent darkness, and all attention is on me and me alone. The theater is a packed house; however, my audience is not that of human beings, but rather the angels from the paintings on the walls come alive, sitting intently in the rows of plush seats. Their warmth encompasses my body, and I know at that moment that it is time to begin.
I open my mouth. From deep inside my soul a melody flows out of my chest, off of my tongue, and finally caresses my lips with the sweetest touch, and my song fills the air with a boldness like that of the glory of the angels. The sound of my song is that of unfathomable wonder, a voice as sweet and smooth as the face of a child. I sing and sing and sing my heart out, and I wonder and wonder and wonder in awe of the sound that is coming from my mouth and my throat and my soul, and I sing with more power than I have ever felt before. It takes over my entire body and the adrenaline surges like I never imagined it could surge. My whole world is aglow.
For those precious moments, everything is right, and then I am alone. The angels have disappeared, yet the stage is still mine, and suddenly, from out of nowhere, a piano begins to play. I can’t see it, but I can feel it in every cell of my body, and my voice again takes charge and rushes out to court the empty notes of the piano. The two become one, and never before have the theater’s walls heard such awesome music. In this enormous theater, I am alone, but I have never felt so fulfilled in my life. I look out to the very last row of empty seats, but there appears a man. A moment of shock and fear is quickly overridden by a quieting peacefulness. The piano stops playing, leaving my voice the only noise in the arena.
The melody I sing slows down to a soft and calm ballad that I sing wholeheartedly for the man, all the while with a locked gaze into the man’s eyes. His eyes are a mirror. They show me myself. They show me my beauty—my beauty on the inside that I never allow myself to see. He shows me who I am meant to be. The ballad ends. There is silence, but a continuous locking of eyes. They are the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen—more beautiful than in my dreams. The silence continues, and my feeling of peace continues, until finally I say, “Yes, I understand.”
In an instance He is gone. I take one last minute to breathe in the emptiness of the stage and to imprint the experience in my mind where it will stay forever like a fountain from which I will draw happiness. Then I pull myself back into reality. I walk off of the stage, down the steps, through the empty audience, and out the back door of the theater which has changed my life. I walk outside into the new world that has been created for me.
Gym class was never a whole lotta fun for me. I knew that I wasn’t going to be an athlete, the other kids knew I wasn’t going to be an athlete, and the coach knew I wasn’t going to be an athlete. With all this knowledge floating around, I still had to move the ball and make it go that way, very fast. So I would approach the ball, and make it move in a general direction, at an adequate speed, which was good enough for me. I was still beaten up.
You know what I’ve got issues with? The gym propaganda. There’s tons of it, leaking out of the mouths of teachers, coaches, celebrities, committees, activists, presidents, and the like. They say over and over again that sports help children develop self esteem, as well as help them live happier, healthier lives. Well, my question is, why do over half the students in my gym class sit with a depressed look on their faces? They look at the ball go by, scratch a little, look up at the clock, and look at the ball go back by the other way. If they’re not going to enjoy the athletics and aren’t going to even try, then give these kids another option.
Eg. Instead of actually playing baseball, kids can watch “Pride of the Yankees.” Instead of playing hockey, there’s air hockey. A nice alternative to football would be foosball.
Why do aerobics when you could simply watch Cindy Crawford do them for 45 minutes?
Old Coach Curko, there was a coach. He could tell who wanted to be in gym, and who didn’t. He put all the boys who could, and wanted to, play basketball on the full court. He put us boys who really didn’t like gym all together on a half court with some partially inflated relic from the Carter administration. So we would talk about computers and politics, and at least attempting to shoot a basket once in a while. Of course, whenever we did try to shoot a basket it would bounce off the bottom of the rim and end up in the full court. Then one of the larger boys would kick it at us and shout something about us being of homosexual orientation. And the cycle would begin anew. We boys on the half court had fun because there really wasn’t much pressure to do well. The kids who were on the full court had a nice, hard game of basketball. Of course, the Constitution states that all men were created equal, whether they like it or not. So in the spirit of equality the administrators try to have everyone playing on the same field. It’s a great intention, but not the best reality. Case in point: Dodgeball.
Now there’s an interesting sport. We used to play it all the time when we were kids. It’s a method of relieving academic stress for some kids; in other words, gargantuan monosyllabic idiots got to peg the smarter kids with inflated balls and get away with it.
A basic game of dodgeball went like this: Ten of us would line up on one side of half the gym, ten on the other. You would have to peg the kids on the other side of the gym to get them “out.” Our coach at the time was a very nice guy under normal circumstances, but he also liked to see kids getting hit with inflatable balls. He would demand that some of the bigger kids try for head shots, just to make things interesting. “That’s head shot number two!” he would shout.
I could never really throw the ball very fast, or very accurately, or very far, so I would just try to avoid getting hit. Eventually I was the only one on my side of the gym, which is when the other kids decided to throw all their ball at once in the hopes of scoring a hit. Dodgeball has some interesting ties to medieval gun battles. A bunch of men loyal to one lord would take one side of a battlefield and a bunch of men loyal to another lord would take the opposite side. The guns weren’t very accurate and didn’t have a very good range, but if there were a lot of people on your side, and they all had a gun, someone on the other side of the field was bound to die.
Am I mad at the gym teachers? Not really. They’re out there doing their best to keep everyone physically fit. They also seem to be out there doing their best to keep everyone mentally unstable, psychologically unbalanced, and borderline psychotic, but physically fit.
And if you don’t have your health, what do you have?
A young man ponders a reflection of imperfections. Suddenly enlightened, he appears to himself as extraordinary, not dampered by the burden of imperfections. He proclaims the freedom of not being perfect. A revelation that reveals that the machine known as man and the rat race known as society is encumbered upon by imperfections. They rule all.