Courage and Reason

You heard it through the window, the large back one above the kitchen as your mother idled, drying dishes by hand, so passe' now to think back on it. You heard them say that we were alone now. The neighbors sold out, moved out, and left our house alone on the block. You ran to your room where I was waiting, but I was already crying so you shut me up and told me to stop being a baby. We always have eachother, always. Right?

Two years later, your brother moved out, left, no trace. So what did you do? Well of course you took me back to when he was still there, still plotting his escape from the town that we all grew up in but nobody seems to want to grow old in. You took me back and we found his plans of escape and you tore them up so he could never leave you and your house feeling empty. And then you told me, you turned so seriously too and said,

"We're leaving first."
So what else else is there besides the days passed between here and Mexico? We can go wherever you want, just stay with me, and I'll never leave your side. We can even go back to that old house where your family lives.

We always have eachother, always.

Common Thoughts

"Huh, I think I have seen you around before, now that I look at you"

Yes, you live a few blocks down, you passed my street every day, you went to school with me for 12 years, you danced the night away at the end of Elementary School, Middle School, and of course Prom. You danced and I just watched you, every time.
"Yeah I knew that I knew you. You were always so quiet, but really smart and funny!"

I find it interesting that every boy you come across you can deem "funny." It kind of makes me wonder about all those boys you were dancing with all those times I sad there idly, yearbook in hand but too nervous to talk to you.
"Well that's crazy! You should have talked to me, you're so cool!"

That's a lie. We were kids. You're so "mature" now. Now the "thing" is to revel in that which was "lame" or "dorky" in the past. You hip kids love to remember the good old days and funny cartoons that you didn't even watch. I watched them, by myself and loving every minute of knowing that I wasn't going to ever become someone you would fall in love with. You don't know the fist thing about me, and after observing you for 12 years, and building you up in my mind to a position impossible to be bested by any other human, what do I have to show for it?

"...Well...Well, what do you have??"

I have you.
I have you in every subtle way you've changed into the person I always knew you'd become, and every way I can scoff at that. I'm jealous I never got to know you, you seem like a perfectly regular person.

"I don't know how to feel right now..."

Sorry, I'm a bit stiff from the tension, I've always found you attractive, but a lot of self loathing tends to cover that with resent. Perhaps, we could get lunch some time?
"That sounds good...did you really think I was anything better than you?"

Yes, I did. And frankly I still do.
"Well stop it, you're a really nice guy."

Whatever you say.

Hello Old Year

I've been lagging, it's the holiday season. It's my birthday, I'm officially a year older, fitting as the year itself comes to a close. Funny, how now most animals are packed tightly beside eachother for warmth now, thinking of making their young who will hatch in spring. Odd that my parents chose the opposite.

It snowed on the day I was born in that hospital in Houston that is no longer there. It didn't snow there again until this year. I feel that might be symbolic of my life starting over. I have come to grips with losing my grips.

I think once you feel in control of something the time is right for it to change so that you must once again begin from the bottom and think your way out. I think it's time I stopped being an accomplished teenager and started being a worthless young adult. I am inspired by my want for financial security and well-being for my family as they age, not by my musings of art or conceptual feelings of hope and change. I feel that if I can accomplish a lot very quickly, I can coast on for some time, trying to figure out what I genuinely want to do, not what will make me money.

I keep trying to find ways around the average life that every human leads, learn, work, retire, live off of what you earned when you could work while you idle your time until it's over. I think everyone tries to find their own way out, but everyone does this to some degree. Everyone dies. Everyone goes on to whatever there is (or isn't) after where we all are right now. And for the most part, everyone can handle that.

My parents told me, "God never gives you more than you can handle." And so far, that has held true. So far, every time I have been on the brink of breaking down and giving up, I've managed to make it through either by taking the high road, or being dragged by the feet to the finish line. I think I am invincible, as I have heard many at this age do, but not because I am special or can do anything. I feel like I could endure anything now, like this here, this life I am living now, is very nice, and I could have much less.

Very close to 19 years ago, I was a small baby in a hospital somewhere in Texas. Now I am a young man, firmly settled in Florida, eagerly awaiting the world to come at me, much like a newborn. I do not know what it is I am tense for, I do not know what to anticipate. All I can do is learn as much as I can about everything, and hope it leads me on to somewhere new.

At the close of the year, I am happy, I have grown. I feel it was a bit late, but I think I am always a bit behind. Luckily I look about as old as I feel. I think the cold air is a very tolerable annoyance, considering that I have a family to give gifts to, and a love to snuggle under blankets with. God has never given me anything I couldn't handle so far, so I'm taking the initiative to become an accomplished young man, before the cool weather leads way to spring, and a new round of fresh faced teenagers take up my old haunts as their own.

Brandon Flowers said
"...Someone will drive her around
on the same streets that I did...
So smile like you mean it."

Steady As She Sways

A horrible hopping, a terrible plague of furious leaping hysteria once found residence in the small town of Mulmark. The deziens, frenzied but calm, could not seem to resist the urge to simply bounce everywhere. They hopped from place to place, on tip-toes and bare feet as well as in boots and even some in roller blades. It was quite terrible.

The worst part was, the town of Mulmar, if you're unfamiliar with it, is located squarely in the middle of several large cliffs. The children were locked in doors and laid in beds and some parents even stapled their sheets down over their heads so they couldn't escape and bound away into danger.

One young boy, seemingly unaffected because he was on such a cliff when the plague struck town, noticed in great fright, several forms pogo-ing their way up towards his shady nap spot. At first he called out to them, asking why they were all coming towards him, but they all cried back in fear and expressed a longing to NOT be coming towards him. He found this strange, as they were still in fact coming towards him.

He hastily removed the bear traps from the open path, which seemed only to alarm them more as they made their approach. He stood confused and afraid, cliffside as an army of bodies rushed him, in an almost jovial manner.

What's really funny about this story, is that it was a hill actually. Not a cliff. So they ended up rolling down and laughing. This of course ended the jumping plague. It also spawned the rolling plague. But nobody ever did anything that life threatening by rolling, so what more is there to tell? Enjoy your evening.

The Effort Is The Thing

Welcome back to a past unwinding like vines, un-entwining, fingers that crossed laid lies upon lips and now come to pass are their venomous wishes. Twelve minutes past the hour and again you stumble upon the same room, same furnishings, same time. You spent three years in corridors learning facts, attribute that to a strategic plan from post-adolescents, (your parents), as comeback kids. They live vicariously through your brain attached to chords and chains, filled with buckets of stew and viles of blood of those hands who got dirty while yours remain gloved.

You pre-pretentious retro-scenester, you've yet to grasp the trends that cycle like a wash, worth about as much and not nearly as clean. Try and grasp, as fast as your idle hands can, a world that is vast and substantial, a time when winds were tranquil but medicine was not a staple of breakfast items and trying was almost worth trying. Can you fathom that? Tightly packed in your bubble wrap you must cut the chord and abolish the whorish schemes and deflated dreams of yester-year's teens.

Your efforts are a trifle, but the effort is the thing. Keep running through these halls, showing the cut and copy peer group who can scoff at whom. Stumble blindly if you can at all, and read books for the love of god, read books. Who would want to define themselves in a cycle that is even slightly below animalistic, repetitive, misleading and often self defeating? Those who choose to continue breathing make a constant statement of checking yes to the previous, so please, of this muddled mess, pull out what you can. Salvage our sullied doorways and create new exits for future feet to follow yours through.


"Stop dying, stop dying, that's the goal."
-The Fountain

Things to Get Better at

1. Drawing girls.

Subject: Alison
Time: less than 45 mins.

Self Evaluation: Fail.

Now Hear This!

From now on, every slight applied pressure will be felt.
Your fingertips even, slightly pressed to my exposed flesh.
The slightest force, only seeable on grid simulations,
Is now a tremor and a spear.

I will cringe and writhe when you strike me, however light.
But watch me swoon and sing, when you simply look my way.
Look how I'm paying you so much more attention
Do you love it?

I Has Teh Maths

Here, in this spot, years ago, stood a man.

He, amongst a crowd of naysayers, combined the unwitting and unwilling into a force that was unforeseeable, and truely unstopable.

They were not athletes, brainchildren, or artists by any means. They stood, unevenly dressed and gazes aside, waiting for something to happen. They were Apathy Associated, they were the Rain Chasers, they were the Purposeless. They could be found, individually, staring out windows into gray skies; or perhaps watching bugs toil through blades of tall grass. They were, in essence, human.

What combines in the minds of those destined for something greater? Do ties form and unite, through a common bond, or is it like magnetism, unseen but forcefully pulling together the strongest of emotions, letting them boil to the surface and over the sides until there is a flood and a whole room is painted in splashes of color?

How then, do you handle a funeral?
These people, kids, spectators of general existance, were tasked with finding the place to have a funeral. It had to be a hilltop, and raining. It had to be cloudy and gray but still light enough to see perfectly. There had to be many in attendance, but only a few willing to stand in the cold as the casket was lowered into the soil.

Rain Chasers, as they came to find themselves being known, found the spot, not morbid or straining to the eye, simply elegant in it's perfection of emotion. They found the place where all good souls should come to rest.

There, instead of holding a funeral for a life they'd yet to give up on, they planted a tree. They sat and watched as the rain grew it rapidly, as the clouds encouraged it to reach ever higher, and as it sat proudly atop the mighty hill.

Tasked, they were, with finding a place for something good to end.
Instead, they found somewhere for something new to begin.
Is there a difference?

That man, on this day, smiled. Those who would condemn the world, but never gave enough of themselves to try and change it, found their medium. They jumped into orbit and found they could become something fantastic and uncommon. He helped them see with new eyes, through means of old hands tossing fresh dirt.

A poet once sang,

"Oh, this is the start of something good
Don't you agree?"

Don't Want to be Forgotten

So, tonight was very fun, thank you everyone.
This Christmas season seems different, my father is right.
My family has expanded.
Literally, I have a brother, I'm getting a sister.
But what was once a loose group of friends, has become second family.
I love everyone who made tonight possible, and I think we all, (in our own jenna vs. andrew kind of way) feel the same.
I hope when we go on to do great things, we stick together, so that great things will happen in all different industries, all over the world.

Thank you all.
You don't know what you mean to me.

Like Violence, You Have Me

I have upon my wall, twelve clocks.
Each is set an hour ahead of the last.
I never know if I am late, should time have passed
I am unaware, uncaring, of these facts.

Solitude in blue hues, I find quiet quite calm.
I seek hopeless abandon, but find myself far from.
Quite quaint in my pinstripes, but afraid to dress down.
I am more known in the nation than in my hometown.

I grind between my fingers like mortar and stone
A phone, yet undialed, and a speakerless tone.
How unwittingly I play, a part set for a stage
And you love will greet me goodbye, in quite the worst way.

Sorry Dudes, My Bad (Part II)

sorry i kinda fell behind here, i've been really stressing over my finals.
aka i caught lugia.
anyone know where to find pineco? he's very difficult to find.

ANYHOW

the zombie stuff my art class did like two weeks ago was just loaded online by my teacher, so please enjoy. i did about 15 of the frames. it's...kind of jumpy, but for telling that whole story in less than 200 frames, i'm very happy.

http://www.youtube.com/user/FlaglerCollegeArt#p/a/u/2/wr5vddGi0rQ

Super Day

There once was a happy little rock.
The rock dreamed of being a balloon.
Strangely enough though, no matter how often he tried to jump, he just couldn't seem to get a hold on the floating aspect of being a balloon.

Otherwise though, he had it down.

One day a small child named Tyler found that rock.
Tyler took that rock home, painted it red, put googly eyes on it, and named it a name that it did not recognize.

That rock served as a companion and a trustee for several years, realizing a potential it had never even considered itself having.

Sadly one day, it got scratched, and lost an eye.
It felt like all was lost, it's newfound purpose sullied by sour conditions.

What my rock forgot, was that I loved it for what it was, an ear to speak into with no lips to reveal. I cared not for it's appearance as it slid calmly between my fingers. It never did become a balloon.

But in the process, it realized that being a balloon was silly.
Balloons get used and fade, where rocks are more prized for their age.
He would never be consumed by the atmosphere, or be mistakenly consumed by baby animals.

He sat contently, on a shelf of my imagination, observing from under his red coat, and oddly content with his lot in life. I hope I gave him purpose, because I certainly found solace in him.

Hello Love

So it's been a while since we had a sit down.
Hey, how's it going.
Fine? How surprising, fine.
Decent.
Adequate.
Nice.
No, I don't accept those answers.
I refuse to hear another blow off comment.
Tell me what ails you, because something does.
You seem sad, upset, distant, preoccupied.
Call it what you will, you evasive word bender.

Tell me what's eating you or I won't ask anymore.
But I will, it's my lot in life.
To prove that SOMEONE won't give up on you.
You knew that you kept too much in, and that's why others left.
But I'll stay just because of that.

Are you opposed to a little fun?
Poke some at me if it's an issue here.
I'll joke you out of your deepest secrets.

Come now, look it's been almost two years.
Now the only things I don't know are petty daily issues.
Not even worth your breath.

Now I am useless, but I suppose I'll still ask how you are.
When you're genuinely fine, it makes me smile.

Almost A Song!!

Don't let them devalue your disbelief
You were right about me, and my grievant speech
My shallow feet are moored in anchorage, respite
Finds me nothing better to do than pass my time
You're getting older
Now rest.

Don't speak a thing, I only drown it with nostalgia
My quickened speech is formatted to your tone
Don't let them tell you, I'm a prince if I'm a peasant
Don't let me hold you down, but please don't scream until I'm done.
You're getting older.

Beneath My Monsterous Gown

Fold your form slowly into the shadow of my wings
Allow my talons to provide your shelter
Do not let me cage you
Simply, let me save you from the world
I have plucked the feathers from my heart
So it may better serve your discerning palette.

This, I give to you.