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?"