Everybody Knew but Me

Do you ever have those nights where you lay in bed and you think about one time in your life? Just one. You think about what it means, and what you can or did learn from it? Maybe you didn’t learn anything from it; it just feels like you should have?

I was lying in the room I spent a good deal of growing up in the other night, and I don’t know where it came from, but I had a flashback to a night when I was sixteen. I was in my parent’s basement with a girl I knew from work named Annie. I had never had a girlfriend up to this point and I was really hoping that was going to happen with Annie.

You know Charlie in High Fidelity? Annie was kind of like my Charlie: the kind of girl I thought I wanted to meet (which, honestly, meant to a sixteen year old me that she was hot), and “she liked me, she liked me, she liked me…at least I think she did,” and in hindsight I can see that she was awful. If I had never heard that she thought I was cute, I would have never attempted to humiliate myself, by trying to go out with her, but, as it goes, she did think I was cute, and I did hear about it.

We started hanging out. We spent most of our time with her friends who were like her and were mostly rich preppies, dumb jocks, and cheerleaders. They listened to Limp Bizkit, and Kottenmouth Kings, and drove $60,000 cars their parents bought for them. I had nothing in common with them, and I hated hanging out with them. Eventually, I got her and a couple of her friends to come hang out with my friends. That didn’t quite work, either. Just about everyone in my life could see the kind people they were except me. The one time we hung out with my friends it ended with Annie’s friend, Jessica, crying, and her other friend yelling insults at everyone, and an awkward twenty minutes of me driving them home early.

Despite everyone asking me why I was hanging out with her, I plugged on hoping it would all be okay soon. I never did kiss her, though. I wussed out every night I hung out with her, which was probably my subconscious holding me back more than it was being a wimp. On the last night we hung out I walked her to her car and we just stood there having that awkward moment before a first kiss. I chickened out again and she got in her car. I finally got the balls and asked her to get out of her car for a second, which she wouldn’t do. She said we could do it later. Embarrassed, I said, “Okay, well, I am going to go inside and hang myself now.”

She told all her friends about me trying to get her out of the car, which led to me getting made fun of all day at work. I was too embarrassed to keep trying.

Anyway, the night I was thinking about was when the two of us were laying down in my room. Something was in the air, something heavy, and it could have been romance for all I knew, but I started spouting out some feelings. They had to do with fear mostly, I mean I was sixteen, seventeen, and soon high school would be over and I was getting on in years. I was afraid of the future and that was what I was telling her, and she had no idea what I was talking about. She didn’t understand how someone could be afraid. I didn’t know how to explain fear to her, and I felt a little silly, but mostly I felt confused. How could someone that age not feel at least a little fear? I began to realize that she was not really in touch with reality. Maybe she was too sheltered, or was ignoring it, but I felt kind of sorry for her. At least I knew what fear felt like. At least I knew it was something to be felt, and was real. And I know now that that particular fear has been conquered, and I know how much I have learned while doing it. I know now that since I have moved on to much bigger and scarier fears in my life, that it is necessary, and that I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I wasn’t afraid of certain things. I know that if you are unable to feel fear then you probably aren’t able to feel a lot of the other things life is.

And life is a lot of things.

She got married about three years later. Her husband was an ex-boyfriend of hers at the time I was attempting to date her. I met him a couple of times and they are a match. I wonder how you can get married without a concept of what it is like to be afraid? Of course, now that I write that it seems like a lack of fear would make it pretty easy, and maybe that is better. But maybe it is like the back-up quarter-back syndrome where the first-string guy goes down and the back-up QB does an incredible job for the first few weeks because he doesn’t know how hard it is supposed to be…but it does eventually catch up to him.

I guess what I can get out of that night is that I am glad I am a person who feels. I am glad I have had ups and downs and know that I always will, that at times I will be afraid, but, at others, so happy I could pee. I am glad I don’t blissfully float through a naive life waiting for the human experience to catch up to me.

I'll Sing Along Forever

I am posting because B-lyn told me to.

I was listening to the Bouncing Souls and decided to write a little thing about them, because while I was listening to them I was thrown back to three years ago. Also, for me, the Bouncing Souls and March will always be linked together like two fingers wishing for luck.

I left and came home from my mission in March 2002 and 2004. The coming home was far and away the harder of the two. I hated it. I hated it for a lot of reasons. I won't go through them because that is not what I want to talk about; the fact that I was a sad mess should do just fine. First, lets go back in time. Now entering flashback story mode: Doodle-a-doo Doodle-a-doo Doodle-a-doo Doodle-a-doo Doodle-a-doo...

1999-2001 The thought that we needed to maybe start taking life a little more serious started to make it's way from the back of our minds and struggle to be closer to the front. And reject it though we may, it was going to get there too. Some of us started to try and be serious and get a move on in a positive direction, and others (the group I belonged to) didn't. The main catalyst for this "movement" was that we were going to be nineteen soon, and are we going to go on this mission? and if so, we need to change so that we do it right. There was nothing around me that could really reach me and convince me to move on. One thing that really held me back was I knew that because of certain things I have done and was doing that road might take me a long time and I didn't have the heart for it.

Thanks to some great friends I started to make my way slowly and not very surely, but I started to put in some effort. Still nothing had really reached me in a way to help me give it my all. I went and bought a CD one day, and I got a free compilation CD with it. There were seven songs on it. Track six was "True Believers" and track seven was "The Gauntlet" by the Dropkick Murphys. It is weird to me today that they were both on there right next to each other because both of these songs became an anthem for that period of our lives and helped me through it. A few of us were in to the Bouncing Souls during this time, and I don't remember if the new Bouncing Souls record had not come out yet or what, but I hadn't heard "True Believers" yet, and when I saw it on there I was happy because the CD wasn't a total waste.

I don't remember the first time I listened to it, and I don't know when it exactly happened, but it was really the first thing that reached me. "Now you can fight or you can run/hide under a rock till the war is won/play it safe and don't make a sound/but not us/we won't back down." I wanted to be part of the group that wasn't under the rock. I realized I really didn't like being under it. I found that I was so much happier actually putting up a fight. I still listen to this, and when I can't listen I sing it it my head, when I fail or think I can't do this anymore and want to stop trying so hard, and it reminds me that it is better to be a True Believer in all aspects of life and take my licks than hide and not try. So while in the big picture punk-rock wasn't really the most important thing at the time, it was the song that helped me realize that believing in something, even if it is just life, isn't just thinking about it, but doing something about it. And life is better if you give it a purpose.

?

When meeting new people I usually get asked what I am studying. When I answer creative writing, eight and half times out of ten the sub-question, "What are you going to do with that?" then follows. Ten times out of ten I want to answer become a doctor or start a restaurant or coach women’s volleyball or tell them they have three guesses. I suppose it is not that stupid of a question. I guess you could write about sports for the newspaper or essays for some magazine. There are novels and poetry. What pisses me off about this question is that I don't know the answer.

There are three ways one can go about deciding what he or she wants to study. The first would be to decide what you want to do for a career and then study the courses to help you do that. Second, just start taking different kinds of classes until you find something you like. The third, and the path I chose, would be to find what would make school the least miserable and go with that. When I found that there was actually a creative writing major I knew that it was what I wanted to study, and I knew where I wanted to study; of course that school didn't have a CW major so I went to a different school. I realized after that I definitely wanted to be a writer.

Now, I am not naive (at least I like to think that I am not entirely) and I realize that the chances of me being able to be a full-time writer are slim, and that I will more than likely always have a job that doesn't have to do with writing at all. "But this is America," you say, "you can be anything you want to be." Or so they say, but remember, only one person out of millions get to be the American Idol. So if your dream is to become the American Idol, at best you have a .0000005% chance of accomplishing your goal. There are more writers than American Idols, but I am sure you get my point. I am confident, however; I am just trying to find the line between reality and stupidity.

I learned quickly not to answer this question with an I don't know, because then the asker (usually a stranger) either gives me a weird look that says, "How can you not know?" or tries to help me figure it out by giving suggestions. Thanks for being nice and all, but shut up. I have also figured out that saying I would like to write stories is not acceptable either.

"What kind of stories? Non-fiction or fiction?"

"Probably both."

"What would you write about when writing non-fiction?"

"About when I was in the peace-core and lived in Yemen for a year," or "My triumph over brain cancer."

"Really?"

"No."

Only a certain kind of person has their life all figured out and laid down nicely waiting for them to get on with it at twenty-three. Shame on you for making me think that I should be one of them.