|
Tencer
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Gender: Male
Interests: Reading (fav authors: L.M. Montogomery, Ray Bradbury, Lois Lowry & C.S. Lewis) Writing, Acting, Singing, Composing, Video Games (Zelda, MYST, Katamari Damacy) Art, Photography, Anime/Manga
Occupation: Student
Message: message me
Member Since:
4/4/2006
|
|
| It’s always the prettiest lies that cover the ugliest truths.
Pretty photographs on display in glossy yearbooks cheerfully ignore the other four senses. The bad taste, putrid smell, deafening sound, and piercing touch of those rampaging years flow past me as each page turns and I find my face— there— looking away from the cameras or into them, a smile so jolly, so fleeting. Click. The photo is taken and in the hands of yearbook staff that try to place it in the most decorative and creative way among other “matching” photos of similar topic.
No matter how many people encircled me with outstretched hands, I always felt the perpetual loneliness of a silent chilled echoing corridor in front and behind me. In the shadows of night there were moments of hesitant delight. My eyes, even in dreams, would glance over my shoulder, always waiting for the goodness to end.
It says a lot when a person treasures the good things in life. It says even more when a person tosses away the glowing riches of bright moments like eggshells into dark plastic trash-bags. I find this second sort of person the most loathsome. They giggle, ruling their social worlds with golden scepters, smashing the fragile heads of emaciated children as they prattle on and on about their nightly outings with their friends who “should be known by everybody who’s anybody.”
I am a no one really. I am a nobody with a face my swimming pool of genetics bequeathed me and with a name my parents labeled me when I was born. “Hello! Your name is…” and then slap on the bottom I come crying into the world so wet, so small, so cold. The world is a scary place at the beginning. I suppose I wasn’t strong enough to handle the turmoil of a childhood lived, for the most part, out of the classroom.
How do people become strong? Are there natural-born leaders who lead the masses with their unheard-of charm and sharp intellect? Are their men with the charisma and dashing good looks to make the women swoon and worship the very mud-paths he trots upon? Glamorous women leave the womb, mascara in hand, lipstick tattooed on their lips, waving their tainted (but bleached) pearls before the cheering drunken masses of Maledom (who she thinks are all swine, but sleeps around with them because what good is a goddess without a worshiper?).
The congregated good-time smiles unabashedly declare prom kings and queens. The popular “in-crowd” puts everyone else on the outside by its mere existence. As the DJ sweats it out in the misty, much illuminated darkness filled with the cologne, perfume, and freshly laundered clothing, I’m not even thinking about the Prom. Insincere nudges for me to go to the prom “because it’s your Senior Prom!” never rang so false or trivial.
“Go if you want… I just don’t want you to regret not going later” rang a little clearer, a little truer, but remained off by a few octaves. At that moment, I don’t even realize that the end-all moment is happening. A blissful obliviousness must have taken over. I might have been running around my neighborhood trying to loose weight because of sneerings and jeerings that constantly bounced around my mind; it was the only reason I could come up with for so many people either loathing me or ignoring me completely. I could have been writing furiously poem after poem until I didn’t feel the pain surfacing inside me anymore.
That pain—that overextended, dry ball of cloth in my throat combined with the internal bleeding of the soul—lasted from the end of fifth grade to the beginning of my Freshman year at College. Some hands held me and bandaged me and encouraged me. Too few “good Samaritans” came my way, however, and I found that it was just after such restored faith in the world and her people, the jackals would attack me, either head on, or from the back.
Most of my life I’ve been holding onto the pain. When someone stabs you in the side, your gut reaction is not to forgive him. That feels like you’re approving the deed and want him to come back and stab your other side. Letting the gathered bitterness out of your life-jar is never easy. I want the clean refreshing of water within my soul not the acid of soul-parching sour lemons.
Yes, there will be more wounds, more healing, more things to let go. I go back to the high-school auditorium with it’s high-school folding seats and high-school memories and watch the performance of You Can’t Take it with You. Maybe not after death, but most certainly during life, we are all carriers. Perhaps that is why we don’t take our earthly possessions with us after death; we get so tired lugging the important, and kind-of important, and not-really important things around with us that as soon as we get released from their grasping clutches, we only want to rest in peace.
The show is over; I’m mobbed by friends remembered and friends stored back into the cob-webbed recesses of my mind. My life-jar, filled to fast, overflows… the friends wave goodbye, slowly the life-jar’s water evaporates slowly and I am taken back to a place that feels more like home than home. Worlds begin and end in a day, so we must hold on to what we have while we have it. A Tree does not give up her children leaves without fighting to her very last breath. The vivid colors must be the bleeding of her life-jar; trying to give every drop of blood to her children, she forgets herself amidst the chilling world.
I am learning, the more water I give from my life-jar, the more abundantly it flows. Vinegar no longer resides in my soul: Water, so refreshing, makes all the tribulations of the past years worth it. Forgiving the wrongs— whether the wrongdoers care, or even know they did wrong by me— and experiencing joy and hope and glistening moments of refreshing without the hindrance of malice make it all worth it; worth it all. Each day is a precious gift filled with new life, adventure, and chances to make right what was once made wrong.
There are no troubles in tomorrow; blank pages, unwritten futures, beckon the traveler on. No one knows what lies beyond the next bend in the road. | | |
| This is something I wrote for Honors Writing Seminar
Guilty
A response to Edgar Allan Poe's "The tell-tale Heart"
When you are guilty, you feel as if the walls of a dark, dark room are caving in on you and your flashlight just went out. Worlds can explode and universes collapse but still, everyone's eyes are looking at you.
I am not guilty. I feel no guilt. One might say that my incapability of feeling guilt automatically means that I must have committed some crime in my “shady” past that would give me reason to know that I have no guilt. This may be true, but I am not guilty.
There is a quandary of language that follows: "When he says 'I am not guilty', does he mean 'I did not commit a crime, and therefore I cannot be proclaimed "guilty"' or does he mean 'I do not feel any guilt for the crime I committed.'?" Only God, the Angels, and I can tell you if I am truly guilty or not; and I say "I am not guilty."
There was an eye--- a "vulturous" eye--- that kept me awake at night. It had a mind of its own, watching and waiting for something to come around, to find my secret. Buried beneath the floorboards were the pieces of the puzzle I had created and I had dissembled all with the wink of my eye.
There was film over my pale blue eye. The film, a piece of relic's past, still antsy, still watching after so many years of watching. When the walls click at you, like ticking bombs, and the floor-boards are unsettled, a madness slowly creeps in like a wet man out of a storm. Every moment becomes heightened to a tension so taut that neck-muscles snap like guitar strings, and clenched fists ache from hours of wide-eyed paranoia. A cold stare makes one feel icy just as a warm smiling eye can become a hearth to the soul and an ember to the heart.
He killed me. He killed me; that must account for something. The pieces he showed them were not his. They were not calling for him. A point of view is not only key, but the door, the hinges, and the house around as well. You see, you cannot see what you have not seen. When the eye of the mind is put out, all sorts of interpretations can be made, and too much can be lost in translation.
I am not guilty. I am sound, though I contain no mind, nor body. There are noises in the rafters, in the walls, in the floors. I am not guilty, but I never said I did not make noise.
| | |
| Each person,
Each and every person,
Truly Dwells within a moving
Breathing thing
Called a body.
Who a person really is
Is not the seen
but the unseen
within the seen.
Love at first sight
Cannot be love,
Because at first sight
One cannot see
The unseen stars
That dwell under
the cover of night,
Within vast caverns.
It takes excavation
On the part of the explorer
And willingness
On the part of the explored.
But so many people have “lovedâ€
a music box,
Without ever trying to open it
To hear its music.
Our lives are filled
With too many unopened
Music boxes collecting dust
On our cluttered shelves.
We are too busy searching for
True love
True friendship
True happiness
That we never think to
Explore who’s in front of us.
And now,
I ask you,
“How many people
Do you really know?
Do you know even one?â€
There love, friendship, and happiness all go—
Down the lane—
“They were only empty walking shells anyway,
I never hear them sing.†| | |
| We had an awesome Jam Session Today!!!
here are the results!
First we played "Masquerade Ball" With Jen Fehskens, Alex Tercero, and Daniel Patrylak on guitar and I played the piano and sang (though we are going to get Jen to sing one of these days [a.k.a. "a.s.a.p."].
http://media.putfile.com/Masquerade-Ball-new
Then we coerced Dan to play his amazing song "Crowded Room." He wrote the song, sang, and accompanied himself with his guitar as well. It was quite awesome. Rumors have it that Dan is a better song writer than John:
http://media.putfile.com/Crowded-Room
After Dan did an awesome job, John almost left the country, but before that he was also coerced into playing another song. He performed his newest song "Summer Rain." He sang poorly and accompanied himself semi-welly:
http://media.putfile.com/Summer-Rain-11
Shane Lester was awesome enough to record us today.
The people who were lucky to survive the Jam session without completely decimated ears were: James Bardsley, Melissa Novak, Nikki Williamson, and Ellon Scherer.
There is supposedly a Showcasing of Musical powers @ The Richmond Classroom next Thursday night, Sept. 28. | | |
| True friends love you so much that they are willing to forfeit their friendship with you so that you will be better off. True friends don’t come and go with the tides, wash in and wash out. True friends aren’t fair-weather friends, they are all-weather friends standing by you in the storm, holding their arms out above you so that they will get struck by lighting, not you. People sell out their few priceless real friends for an abundance of thrift store friends… you get what you pay for, but that doesn’t always mean you get a refund if you ask for one. True friendships are formed when you are willing to be a true friend before the other person is willing to do so. Stop selling out your one true friend for a dozen that when combined don’t even make up for half of the friend your real friend is.
Now that I’m in college it’s like “Myspace” playing out in real life: people want to add as many people to their “friend’s list” as they can, not really caring how well they know these people. People are thrown out of their normal social environments. They need comradeship, and they seek it out in other people, not caring what the price is that they have to pay. People are willing to assimilate themselves into a world that a few days ago would have been alien to them all for the sake of “fitting in.”
But when people try to fit in, what exactly are they doing? Imagine an enormous jig-saw puzzle with one piece missing. You are a puzzle piece, but your edges just don’t match the space. You cut your edges and sides to fit into the puzzle, thus making it complete. You smile with those around you feeling a warm fuzzy feeling of belonging, when all along you can’t see that the entire puzzle is a picture of the ground, and your piece somehow stands out from the rest of the pieces. Your face, the one you cannot see, is the one missing piece of the cloud jig-saw puzzle lying only three paces to the left of the ground one you are now in. You were supposed to be a bird, but you settled on painting your face brown to be a piece of dirt. But at least you fit in now, right?
So many people go into new social environments with one of two attitudes.
The first is that over-enthusiastic gleeful attitude of benediction:
“I’m going to be the star of the show!” “
“People are just going to be on their hands and knees begging me to sign their autographs.”
“I’m the life of the party and everyone knows it.”
“I set the trends.”
“I’m the one everyone wants to be friends with.”
“I’m always the MVP, the first picked for everything, the last to be made fun of.”
This social giant knows that he will never walk alone down strange alleys at night. He will always have gads of friends circling him, chatting with him, laughing with him, and emulating his every gesture.
The second attitude is that in-the-shadows-of-night-without-a-moon-to-see sort of anxiety that creeps under goosebumped-skin:
“No one likes me.”
“I’ll be alone.”
“Everyone hates me.”
“I’ll be lucky to have one friend… and even he will hate me.”
“I’m the one that is always picked last for everything, the last one asked to go to fun things, the last one noticed, the last one talked to, the last one to be cheered up, the first one to cry inside around a world that shouts at me ‘Get over yourself!’”
I think I hold things inside, the inner monologue of a wounded soldier who never really was brave enough to defend himself from the ceaseless barrage of the jagged daggers of words spoken in whispers, and shouted from across rooms by people who thought I couldn’t hear, or didn’t care if I could. I am that second person, walking around with the emotional baggage of a lifetime, trying to play another deck of colorful emotions. It’s always the slight of hand that fools people, that makes them take three steps back when they see the laughing kid stop laughing, stop talking, stop looking anywhere but down− down to the colorless ground.
Somewhere in the midst of all the drugs and the drinking and the sex that happens here people loose themselves, trying to follow the instruction manuals of pop culture: television, the internet, friends. Friends are the oldest interactive pop culture influencers and imposers. We all try to act like “peer pressure” is something of the past, like we are “better than that” now, like we’re “older” now. People try to find themselves, forgetting that they knew who they were before the music got too loud and the images got too bright. They are looking for something that they already had, but they have cut off their arms and legs to fit into the jig-saw puzzle that called them so alluringly, and now they ask themselves, “Why can’t I move? Why doesn’t this feel right?”
Don’t compromise. Don’t settle. Don’t sell out your true friends. You know who you are, you’re just too afraid to stand up in the crowd of people sitting down, because that would mean you would have to be different, and that people would look at you and they just might judge you. They might laugh at you. They might even despise you. They might all look away from you. But as you stand up, the miraculous happens: someone else across the sea of sitting bodies, sees you, and they slowly rise to their feet too.
| | |
|
|
