Story
hey, remember that post in which I said I hated reading aloud? Fuck that shit, I'm awesome. I finally bucked up and signed up to read some of my work in writing club this Wednesday. Hopefully, someone will take a video of it :D
Whiteknuckle
Every time I pass a lake, a field, or a river, anything large, and open, every fiber of my body aches for something big. Some explosion, some quake, a waterspout, a crop fire…anything. Nothing happens here. Three days ago a kid got shot in the head and it was the only ‘local’ story in the local newspaper in the last two years. And he didn’t even die. All of the churches in town are prattling on about it being a miracle, and I’m in bed reading a book about places where things worth remembering happen and memories can be made.
My mom works at a supermarket and gives piano lessons and my dad runs a construction company and tries to write poetry. My sister is so full of drugs that it’s a wonder some addicts or problem teens don’t try to kidnap her all the time. I wish that would happen, too - kill two birds with one stone. I’ve taken up graffiti just to pass the time, and spend hours upon hours thinking up designs that people waive off as petty vandalism on their way from doing nothing at home to doing nothing at the market to doing nothing at work to doing nothing at home again. I suppose it’s fitting that they should think of my work as nothing as well.
My high school has nothing worth doing - just a basketball team that won some important tournament fifty-seven years ago. I have friends there, but they seem to be under the impression that this town is great, simply for its emptiness. It’s one place on Earth almost completely cut off from the rest - no department stores, no fast food, no movie theatres, no famous people, no x, no y, no z…no fun. But we get along somehow. Somehow, I manage to stomach their constant attempts to ingratiate me in their perplexing enjoyment of this emptiness.
Somehow, I don’t collapse in on myself every time we go down to the river and look through the rocks for fossils, glass, beads, bones, shells, and all sorts of other worthless things that we will never find.
And somehow, they put up too. Everything I’m telling you I’ve told them, sometimes with tears and sometimes without. Gabby shrugs me off every time, always saying that I’ll find something eventually. Keep looking; that could be part of the fun. Kyle sings to me - it’s always a different song, and I fall in love with him a little bit more each time. Erica agrees with me, but then gets drunk (always creating some adventure for herself, at least), and I just sit there through all of it, wishing I could be the alcohol coursing through her veins, if only for the fact that it’s going somewhere. In a way, I sometimes wonder if I’m even a part of this world any more.
So I wish for chaos - I wish for everything to end, for minds to be turned inside out, for the world to flip in every way possible. I want to be able to sunbathe in the Marianas Trench, to give birth in a graveyard, get cursed at by the Pope…anything new. Anything new.
I wish to be completely removed from my time. I’d love to go back to ancient Greece and fight some lions. I’d love to watch Jesus march to Golgotha and get crucified. And I’d love to go forward and see the world end, even if I couldn’t come back. I think that, really, experiencing something like that - some world-wide conflagration, some attack, something in any disaster movie - something that would show me human nature at its worst. I think I need something like that to make me able to appreciate this lull. I need to be hit in the head, to have someone die, to be offered a scholarship to somewhere far away, to be in love fully, to anything.
All I do now is nothing. I’m not depressed, don’t get me wrong. But I know that there is absolutely nothing that I could do here that would matter a week later for anyone other than the people who live here. I don’t care about that and I don’t care about them. I care about people who are really alive. People who know about the outside world, people who can’t see from one end of their town to the next.
I was telling a half-truth earlier when I said I wish to be completely removed from my time. More accurately put, I wish to be completely removed from my life. Not life in general, just mine - I want to be someone else. Someone who can find me and change my life. Some artist, some musician, some hypnotist even, someone, anyone who can make me see beauty, chaos, death, fear, silence, sleep, activity, love, life. It’s all the same in that it’s all nowhere near me.
I want to live in turmoil so I can wish for peace. So I can remember how life is now, how life was, and pine for my ignorance. So I can know what it’s like.
Whiteknuckle
Every time I pass a lake, a field, or a river, anything large, and open, every fiber of my body aches for something big. Some explosion, some quake, a waterspout, a crop fire…anything. Nothing happens here. Three days ago a kid got shot in the head and it was the only ‘local’ story in the local newspaper in the last two years. And he didn’t even die. All of the churches in town are prattling on about it being a miracle, and I’m in bed reading a book about places where things worth remembering happen and memories can be made.
My mom works at a supermarket and gives piano lessons and my dad runs a construction company and tries to write poetry. My sister is so full of drugs that it’s a wonder some addicts or problem teens don’t try to kidnap her all the time. I wish that would happen, too - kill two birds with one stone. I’ve taken up graffiti just to pass the time, and spend hours upon hours thinking up designs that people waive off as petty vandalism on their way from doing nothing at home to doing nothing at the market to doing nothing at work to doing nothing at home again. I suppose it’s fitting that they should think of my work as nothing as well.
My high school has nothing worth doing - just a basketball team that won some important tournament fifty-seven years ago. I have friends there, but they seem to be under the impression that this town is great, simply for its emptiness. It’s one place on Earth almost completely cut off from the rest - no department stores, no fast food, no movie theatres, no famous people, no x, no y, no z…no fun. But we get along somehow. Somehow, I manage to stomach their constant attempts to ingratiate me in their perplexing enjoyment of this emptiness.
Somehow, I don’t collapse in on myself every time we go down to the river and look through the rocks for fossils, glass, beads, bones, shells, and all sorts of other worthless things that we will never find.
And somehow, they put up too. Everything I’m telling you I’ve told them, sometimes with tears and sometimes without. Gabby shrugs me off every time, always saying that I’ll find something eventually. Keep looking; that could be part of the fun. Kyle sings to me - it’s always a different song, and I fall in love with him a little bit more each time. Erica agrees with me, but then gets drunk (always creating some adventure for herself, at least), and I just sit there through all of it, wishing I could be the alcohol coursing through her veins, if only for the fact that it’s going somewhere. In a way, I sometimes wonder if I’m even a part of this world any more.
So I wish for chaos - I wish for everything to end, for minds to be turned inside out, for the world to flip in every way possible. I want to be able to sunbathe in the Marianas Trench, to give birth in a graveyard, get cursed at by the Pope…anything new. Anything new.
I wish to be completely removed from my time. I’d love to go back to ancient Greece and fight some lions. I’d love to watch Jesus march to Golgotha and get crucified. And I’d love to go forward and see the world end, even if I couldn’t come back. I think that, really, experiencing something like that - some world-wide conflagration, some attack, something in any disaster movie - something that would show me human nature at its worst. I think I need something like that to make me able to appreciate this lull. I need to be hit in the head, to have someone die, to be offered a scholarship to somewhere far away, to be in love fully, to anything.
All I do now is nothing. I’m not depressed, don’t get me wrong. But I know that there is absolutely nothing that I could do here that would matter a week later for anyone other than the people who live here. I don’t care about that and I don’t care about them. I care about people who are really alive. People who know about the outside world, people who can’t see from one end of their town to the next.
I was telling a half-truth earlier when I said I wish to be completely removed from my time. More accurately put, I wish to be completely removed from my life. Not life in general, just mine - I want to be someone else. Someone who can find me and change my life. Some artist, some musician, some hypnotist even, someone, anyone who can make me see beauty, chaos, death, fear, silence, sleep, activity, love, life. It’s all the same in that it’s all nowhere near me.
I want to live in turmoil so I can wish for peace. So I can remember how life is now, how life was, and pine for my ignorance. So I can know what it’s like.