Highs and Lows

Greetings from scenic Greenfield, Indiana. I've been traveling like crazy this week, as evidenced by my previous entry about Niagara Falls. This trip wasn't nearly as happy though.

I had just gotten some fast food at about 7 on Friday, and I was in the car with my mom about to go play some songs at a local coffeeshop when my sister called us to say she was taking my father to the emergency room. I abandon my original plans, and we had no sooner walked through the door of our house than she was calling back. The news was not good. My dad was having a heart attack. So we threw some clothes into bags, put the dogs in the car, and took off on the 7 hour drive to Indiana.

My sister continued to call us on the drive down, and each time, I was full of dread when the phone rang. After we had been driving nearly an hour, we found out that he had six blockages in his heart: One 100%, one 90%, a 40%, a 70%, and two 65%. They were taking him in to give him a balloon angioplasty, which opened up the 100% and 90%.

They're going to give him an MRI soon to get a better look at his heart and decide if they need to do open heart surgery to fix the remaining blockages. I'm fucking terrified and I hate being here, but there's nothing I can do. I just have to wait and watch.

I wrote a song this morning.

And here are the lyrics. It's based on a dream I had two nights ago, thought that one was actually about a Goodwill owned by the devil. I decided that title was a little too ambiguous. I mean, really, The Devil's Goodwill? Sounds like a totally different song. So here you have it, the first song I've written in over a year that was completed in a single setting.

The Devil's Pawn Shop


I found half a screenplay
in a row of dusty typewriters.
It read like something I'd seen
a million times before on every TV screen.

The clerk spoke up from across her desk.
She said "You should read the rest.
Yeah, you should read the rest.
Oh, it will take your breath away
and shake you to your core
with what it has to say."

Then she flashed me the wickedest of smiles
And I caught a glimps of the devil that dwells inside her.

But I knew I had to read the end.
So she bared her yellowed fangs again
and said "Do we have a deal my friend?"

Life's unexpected little adventures

Yesterday at 5 PM, I was sitting in my favorite local bar with my best friend Andy, drinking a couple of beers and bullshiting after a jam session. It was a good time, one that I've had more times than I would care to count. As I'm watching South Park on the television, wrapped up in reading the subtitles, Andy is reading a text message from his girlfriend on his phone. He looks over at me.

"Hey man, wanna go to Niagara Falls?"

"...What? You're serious?"

"Yeah, Jess wants to go."

I look up at the clock. It's somewhere around 6:30, on a dreary Monday evening that was threatening rain and thunder. I thought about it for a moment, weighing my options. I could either go visit a gigantic waterfall, or I could leave them to have a fun road trip and stay home playing video games and watching movies I've seen a dozen times over.

"Alright. Let's do it."

At this point, I had been up for a little over thirty five straight hours. I wasn't really tired, but I figured if I had to, I would sleep in the car. We finish our beers, pay up, and go outside to wait.

Jess pulls up to the bar and picks us up. We drive around, making preparations for our journey; picking up cds, grabbing a bottle of Captain Morgan's pre-mixed Long Island Iced Tea and a case of water, and picking up Jess's friend Laura. These things done, we hit the road right around 7.

The rain had finally come, pattering down softly on the car as we whisked our way through the gathering darkness, passing many familiar places and playing stupid car games like the Punchbug game. We have modified the game to include many other reasons to hit our fellow passengers, like Cruiser Bruiser, Grand Am Slam, and the dreaded Mitsubishi Punchy-Pinchy. We passed all the familiar landmarks that I know from my trips up to the Seneca casinos in Salamanca, NY: Ridgway, Johnsonburg and its awful paper mill,  Lantz Corners, Bradford's Zippo lighter museum/factory. Andy and I were taking pulls from the bottle once in awhile, but the girls decided against it.

The road into New York is very distinctive for me. As soon as you cross the border on Rt. 219, the road immediately falls apart, riddled with potholes and large cracks in the pavement. We stopped at the gas station where my parents buy cigarettes to use the bathrooms and stretch our legs. At this particular gas station, there are wooden Indian statues, and Laura insisted on getting her picture taken with them. Andy bought a carton of non-filter Heron brand cigarettes, Jess bought a pack of Monarch menthols and a lighter leash, and as we were leaving, two drunk men were talking to us about how Andy and I should be paying for the things the girls were buying. "You know, if you're with them, you should buy their stuff." I didn't catch the rest of the conversation as I decided to go to the bathroom at that point. When I came out, my companions had left the store already, so I went outside to find the two drunk men standing around a dollar bill on the ground. I looked at it and said "Hey, you dropped something."

"Oh, it's not ours. It's hers." One of them points over to Laura. "I don't want it!" She says as she gets in Jess's car. Jess takes the dollar from him and we get in the car. Once we were on the road again, I find out the rest of the story. The bill had been sticking out of Laura's back pocket. One of the guys tells her about it and says that it's going to fall out. So she pulls it out and throws it on the ground. I smiled. It seemed like something I would have done if I were in a certain playfully apathetic mood.

Around this time, we start playing twenty questions to pass the time in a way that wasn't just staring off into the darkness in silence. It turns out that I'm not very good at that game, but it was definitely enjoyable. I stumped everyone by choosing to be nothing, and with sixty questions they couldn't figure it out. We stopped at a cemetery to find a tombstone that looked like a tree, then drove on. By now we were past the casinos and the road had become unfamiliar to me. I was beginning to get excited.

We finally arrived somewhere around midnight. Andy poured the rest of the Captain into a water bottle and we stepped outside into the chilly unfamiliar city around us. We went into a hotel to use the bathroom again, and Andy, Laura, and Jess went into the gift shop and bought matching hoodies that said New York across the front. I looked down at my dirty yellow and black Stearns rain jacket and felt kind of left out. There was another wooden Indian statue in this hotel, so Laura and Jess took another picture while I bought a one dollar lottery ticket. It wasn't a winner, so I tore it up and threw it away.

We left the hotel and walked to a park by the river, following the trail that led to the falls. Once we were within a few hundred feet of them, I began to feel the spray hitting me in the face, cold and refreshing. Once we were in view, it was beautiful. The water roared and rushed past us on our left, the Canadian side of the border's many tall buildings glittering beyond. Directly in front of us, the American side's tall buildings glittered back. I kept imagining it as if it were a part of Fallout 3, in ruins. Somehow, I feel like it would have been even more breathtaking that way.

It was around this time that I really began talking to Laura. While Jess and Andy were off making out or something, we stuck together talking about all sorts of things. She told me a little about growing up in Paris Island, North Carolina and I told her about stomping my sister's pet bird to death. We had made our way to another area of the falls, and right then, I was happy. I mean, here I was, five hours by car from home. In a new place, talking to a new person, loving the experiences I was having. I felt good. It was almost like I was a normal person.

Finally, we decided to head back to the car. For awhile, we couldn't remember where we parked. Then we caught sight of the hotel where I bought the lottery ticket, and from there it was a breeze. We drove to a nearby Denny's to get some food. Our waiter was an extremely cool black man whose name I didn't catch, but he was very patient with us in our near-delirious state.

We were laughing like jackals almost the entire time we were in the restaurant. I ordered two slices of toast, Jess got a grand slam, Andy got a double bacon cheeseburger, and Laura ordered pancakes. I sat there, drinking my coffee and smiling while they all talked about one thing or another. Jess and Andy got up to go to the bathroom, leaving Laura and I to look at each other from across the table. She picked up the creamer container and looked at Andy's coffee, contemplating. "I just wanna pour it all in there." she said.

"Go for it."

"Do you think he'll notice?"

"No, just do it."

So she does. We laugh about it, then I grab a little bit of salt from the shaker and dump it in. Shortly, Jess and Andy come back. Our food arrives, and the waiter gave me four slices of toast instead of two. When I tell him that he gave me too much, he just smiles and says "I know, I gave you extra." We continue talking and laughing while we eat. We start talking about Canada and how we wish we had our passports so we could cross the border. At one point, I remember saying something like "Yeah, stupid Canadians, calling ham bacon and stuff. I hear they even put salt in their coffee." Laura starts cracking up. I look at her calmly and say "What are you laughing about?"

We finish our food, leave the awesome waiter an $8 tip, Laura pays for my toast and coffee, then we start the long journey home. I tried very hard to stay awake the whole time, but at some point I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up to us pulling into a Country Fair shaped like a barn and Andy telling Jess an awful joke that our friend Mason had told, centering around a play on words with Uganda as you're gonna. Andy and Jess go inside, leaving me with Laura again. I found out that we had both pretty much woken up at the same time, with the Uganda joke. We talk a lot, until Andy and Jess come back, then the conversation pretty much stops. I begin noticing a trend, where we have great conversations when we're alone, then it's basically silence when anyone else is present. I ponder this as we leave.

The rest of the ride home, I didn't say much. I was too worn out, drunk, sleep deprived, whatever. Jess, Laura and Andy were talking a lot, and the girls were reliving old memories as I thought to myself that I am basically just an observer, there to absorb the tragic stories of others. As we passed Lantz Corners again, I thought about telling everyone about how that's where my brothers died, but decided against it. I sing along to most of Everything Went Numb by Streetlight Manifesto, and just drift around my head until we arrive back in Reynoldsville to drop Laura off.

As she's exiting the car, I thank her again for paying for me at the Denny's. She slaps me on the arm and says "No problem. We're friends now." She shuts the door and we drive off into the night. Fifteen minutes later, I am being dropped off in front of my house. I thank Jess and Andy for a great time, then go inside to pass out.

Part of me didn't want to go, when Andy first mentioned going to Niagara Falls. I don't really know why, in retrospect, but I almost turned him down on the offer. I am very glad I didn't. This is the kind of thing that I need more of in my life. I need to get out there, do new things, go to new places, talk to new people. Long story short, I need to live. And yesterday, I did just that.

Returning to writing

I don't know how much this applies to everyone, but whenever I am particularly struck by a work of art, be it music, a book, a film, a painting, I want to emulate it. I don't want to outright copy the work, or even take little pieces of it and reassemble them into something "new". I want to create something that will strike someone like I was struck. I want to make an impact, to say or do or show something that will make someone stop and think.

I still remember reading The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman for the first time, and how much I loved it. I had always loved reading, mostly Goosebumps books and things of that nature. But The Golden Compass was something different, the way that it resonated with me. I was eleven years old. So I began writing. I never really finished anything I started, being so young, but I remember showing my sister a page or two of something I was calling A Heart Blackened. It was some generic murder story that actually began with the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night..." She read it and told me that it was good. This was all the encouragement I needed, and so I continued. I never finished the story, but I kept writing.

I became sidetracked from writing for a long time once I began playing music, though I did finally manage to finish a story when I was sixteen. I still wrote, but that was mostly in the form of keeping an angst-filled blog. Music had become my passion, and I wanted to affect people the way that the music of others had affected me. I started a novel two months after I turned eighteen, wrote twenty pages of it, then forgot all about it for four years. I recently rediscovered it, thought about the plot again, and decided to start writing it again. Work is slow while I go back and fix the pages I had already written, but it's coming easily again. I don't know if there will be anyone who reads it and connects with it the way that I connected with the work of Philip Pullman, but I don't care so much at this point. I certainly hope it does, but it's not the main motivation behind my writing.

Music is still a major driving force for me, but the other night I watched Pulp Fiction for the first time in years. I saw it through new eyes, appreciating all sorts of new things about it that went by completely unnoticed when I was a teenager watching it. It was somewhere around the time that Bruce Willis was running down Ving Rhames that I decided that I wanted to write a movie. So that's what I'm doing now; Working out a first draft of a screenplay for a Lovecraftian horror film with psychological overtones, tentatively titled The Obelisk. It's an interesting medium to work in, requiring a little less description, more dialogue based. I have been enjoying it quite a bit. I doubt that it will ever be filmed, but I may get enough ambition to one day assemble some actors and some cameras, and put things into motion.

So yes, dear reader, I am still writing. In fact, much more than I have in years. But none of it is ready to see the light of day. When it is, perhaps I'll post some of it.

I AM A RESPONSIBLE FUCKING ADULT!

...proclaims the 21 year old with no job, no driver's license, and is currently living with his parents. But it's 2 PM local time, and I've already cleaned my bedroom, done the dishes, and cleaned out my ferret's cage. So I didn't cure cancer or anything spectacular, but baby steps, people. Baby steps. Considering I've spent the past 3 months in a lazy stupor, I feel pretty good about myself. Hell, some days I wouldn't even be awake yet.

More Embarrassing Stories From Childhood

1) I AM MORTAL COMBAT!

I was something like four and a half years old when Mortal Kombat came out and boy, did I love it. For a few months, I was glued to my Sega controller, shedding the blood of every opponent on the Easy difficulty setting. I ate, slept, and breathed Mortal Kombat. My favorite characters were Scorpion and Johnny Cage, and when one of my siblings managed to pry me away from the TV, I would pretend to be fighting Liu Kang and Goro in our backyard. Sometimes I would be Scorpion, but mostly I was Johnny Cage. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mortal Kombat, the character Johnny Cage had a special move where he would do a split and punch his enemy in the groin. One day my dad saw me in the backyard, doing my best to imitate this particular move. He found it amusing to the point that he actually encouraged me to perform this attack on one of his coworkers at a company picnic.

Everyone(except the guy I punched in the dick) laughed uproariously, and I thought that I had genuinely just done something awesome. From that point on, I became the scourge of the household. My sister's male friends were all afraid to come over because they knew I would be lurking behind the couch or in the stairwell, just waiting to do my Johnny Cage impression.

2) First Blood.

This is another story I have no recollection of. I am told that when I was two years old, my sister had a pet parakeet named Kiki. Anyhow, Kiki was my sister's pride and joy. He would sit on her shoulder while she took showers, chirping things like "Kiki pretty bird?" over and over with more indignance until you finally answered him. Kiki was also kind of a bastard, and hated every member of the household but my sister.

Well one day, Kiki got out of his cage somehow and was hopping across the living room floor. Trying to be a helpful little brother, I bent down to pick up the bird and put him back where he belonged, and that's when the trouble started.

 

My sister was beside herself with rage and grief. Her two year old brother had just stomped her beloved pet bird to death in front of her, so of course she was crying and screaming. "You have to do something about him! He's going to grow up to become a serial killer!" She bawled as she slammed the door to her bedroom.

So far I've managed to make it through life without killing anyone. So eat it, sis.

TL;DR

Just words tonight, folks. Probably not even any jokes. But I feel the urge to write, and my topic is religion. I grew up in a very non-religious household. So far as I can remember, the first time I stepped foot into a church was for my grandpa Lauren's funeral, when I was not much older than five. I felt nothing while looking at my father's father's lifeless body. I understood that the crying people around me were going to miss this man dearly, and I felt bad for them, but I grew up four hundred miles away from the man and only got to spend a weekend with him in life. I was too young to understand the enormity of what had happened to bring us all together that day, and I certainly did not understand the building we were all congregated in. I spent more time in churches this way over the next six years, at weddings and funerals of relations I never knew, people who shared blood ties with me, but no experiences and no familiarity.

My first stint with religion began on March 15th, 2002. I had turned thirteen only eleven days previous. On that day, my brothers Matthew and Ryan were taken from this earth in a violent one car accident with a drunk at the wheel. I remember being awoken in the small hours of the morning by a knock at the door, two hours after the crash. I found two policemen there, asking to speak with my mother. Matt and Ryan were no strangers to trouble with the law, so I just assumed that they had been arrested, and went back to awaken Mom to this bad news. I went to my bedroom while she talked with the officers. Suddenly, the thought that maybe something more serious had happened crossed my mind, but before I could pursue this line of thought, I heard a terrible, anguished wail tearing out of my mother's throat. In that instant, I knew what happened, and I will never forget that sound.

Suddenly, I was faced with the harsh realities of death. I saw it in the strained, grief-stricken faces of my parents and sister, felt it in the rare, consoling hand of my brother in law. But I was numb. I could not react, one way or the other. I felt nothing in my heart. Occasionally, a stab of grief would pass through me, like when I heard their obituaries being broadcast on the radio, but then some unknown mechanism would clamp shut again, and oblivion settled back into my chest. It wasn't even bad; bad implies that there is something there to be labeled with an adjective, and there wasn't.

It was after the funeral that I "found" Christianity. I had inherited Matthew's leather-bound bible, and I treasured it. I read from it every night, gloried in its onion-skinned pages, and prayed to a merciful God to keep my siblings' souls before drifting into sleep. This lasted maybe a month or so before I left behind my new found piety.

Over the next seven years, I found new gods to worship, and a flock of fellow believers with whom to pray. These gods were music, art, and a thousand other more fleeting notions that I would follow with all the eagerness of the zealot, but none of the substance of the truly holy man. I began to resent all forms of religion as I learned of the atrocities committed in God's name over the centuries, and I don't think I ever forgave God for taking away my brothers before I even had the chance to know them. I was bitter. I shunned the church and all its promises of salvation and eternal life, branding them lies meant to sway the masses into a lull of complacency. I even declared that there was no God. Instead, I focused my time and energy on playing music. My prayers were now in the form of drum beats and guitar riffs, my altar was my guitar amplifier, my saints were men with names like Jello Biafra and Thomas Kalnoky.

I laughed in the face of the ignorant believers, especially the old. I took a sadistic glee in the notion that these people knew their time was almost up, and in desperation they were turning to some mystical force that would forgive their sins and welcome them upon death. I denounced them as fools and sheep, with no inner strength and no sense of accountability for their actions. Just duck into the confessional once a week, and everything was just fine. I continued this ignorance for seven years.

It was death that once again brought me back to religion. On August 15th, 2009, my dear friend of nearly six years, Joshua Michael Giles, was run over by a car and killed in the middle of the night. Finally, death had struck a grievous blow on me. I was devastated, and the merciful numbness that had allowed me to get through the death of my brothers did not return to me.

I was at work that day, a Saturday. It was just me, my father, and my Saudi Arabian boss in the building when I got the call. I ducked outside to hear over the noise of the powder compacting presses, and barely kept my composure while receiving the news. I hung up, and it was when I told my father what had happened that I broke down crying. After giving me a half hour or so to work out my initial grief, I was taken home. Later that night, all of us gathered at his house, and I cannot forget that vigil. I popped the top off of a beer, a Magic Hat #9, and read the fortune: "How did You get like This?"

Again, I was destined to walk into a church for a funeral. It was not this that brought me back to religion; I could never agree with the faith that I had gone so many years of my youth despising. But it was then that I felt death in all his terrible power for the first time, and an aching emptiness welled up inside me such as I never though possible. It was different from the numbness I felt at my brothers' funeral, more acute and much more painful. I dwelt on the fragility of life, its fleeting and brief nature, and it nearly drove me mad. I couldn't stand that we humans had been placed on this planet to lead futile lives brimming with suffering, only to be snuffed out and cause more suffering in that final act.

One day in the middle of September, as I was sifting through a storage room at work in search of oil rags, I came across a box full of books. Among them was the book that changed my life. It was The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by a man named Sogyal Rinpoche. I took it home, though I did not begin to read it until probably December.

When I finally did get around to reading it, I was blown away. The book begins with Rinpoche as a small child, accompanying his master, Jamyang Khyentse, as they are fleeing Tibet under the Chinese occupation. The journey was hard, and Rinpoche watched two of the monks they traveled with as they died. His description of the deaths of these monks struck such a perfect chord in me that the book had me completely enthralled and eager to learn as much as I could about Tibetan Buddhism. The book goes on to explain basic practices and beliefs of his sect of Buddhism, all of which I drank in with the thirst of a man lost in the desert. The words resonated inside me and filled my heart in a way I had never felt before. I finally found religion, after all those years of disavowing it as society's band-aid. It waited patiently until I was ready to receive it with open arms, and then, by chance or fate, religion had found me at the edge of my blackest despair. I was saved.

I took up the practice of meditation, and through it I have found a measure of peace, that grounding that all religions seek to impart upon their followers. It is fleeting sometimes, and the path I have chosen is a long one, fraught with countless obstacles. But no matter how deep my sorrows, no matter how little distance I have covered on this path, I retain that grounding, and it is my strength. My church is now the Earth, in all of her splendor and mystery, and my God is everything.