Once again, I’ve deleted all of my precious content for your viewing displeasure! No more memetic funnies! I know that this likely displeases my meager 2700 followers who have been with me since the glory days of Tumblr predating December 2018, but this cycle has occurred time and time again in which I must erase the person I falsely believed I was to intimately share with you the person that I truly am through the glorious magnificence of the text-post! I advise you to sit tight through this age of decaying language (though some seem so welcoming to the rise of NEWSPEAK, it may be hard to suggest that it is in fact decaying).
If one must know of my emergent history, I warn you that you are likely to be disappointed because, frankly, I’m a complete nobody. I’ve been misguided in my early years by the church of Seventh Day Adventists while also subjected to the conflicting curriculum of a well-funded public school in Juneau, Alaska from 1998-2004 in which I was placed in the equivalent of a Krelboyne class for my unique ability of solving complex math problems and higher than average reading and writing skills. These talents would fade after my family had moved from Alaska to an old, conservative logging town in Washington. There was no “Krelboyne” class. I had to join the rest of the kids when I realized I was a complete outcast and very desperate for friends. I put all my chips not only on being the class clown, but the absolute class fool. And it worked! The curriculum was simple; same old things I’d been doing since the third grade. Eventually, I would be known for my academic achievement with a near 4.0 GPA by the end of the seventh grade. I was popular enough to my liking, I was good enough at sports, my math testing scores were literally off the charts, and I made it from the last all the way up to the second chair playing the Trumpet. Life was alright…
After this point, my father became obsessed with my grades and what I was doing with my life. He began controlling every aspect of my daily life more than he ever had done before. One thing above all really didn’t sit well with him – my absolute love for skateboarding. He would become irate anytime I would rather go skateboarding than take part in conventional sports or extracurricular activities. He associated skateboarding with delinquents, “hoodlums” as he would say. Though, partially right, he made the biggest mistake in doubting my passion for something. I wasn’t like your average skate-punk. Every aspect of it, the engineering, the physics, the whole thing about it was so fascinating to me. I developed a great talent for ramp construction when I was only thirteen. I was always building something either for myself or my friends. There was always wood available since I had spent a great amount of my childhood helping my father with various home remodeling, construction, and demolition jobs. In hindsight, I would consider this to be one of my greatest skills that I’ve let go to waste.
One of the things I’ve wanted the most in my entire childhood was a guitar. I’m not entirely sure why, but at the time I always had this idea that I wanted to make music and look really really cool doing it. My younger sister brought home this old junker acoustic guitar with a broken neck at a neighbors garage sale, though I think she really only thought of it as a fun toy. My dad adhered the neck to the body with epoxy and a 3” screw. I ended up using the thing and learning to play with internet sheet music and various “How To Play Guitar” DVDs. Over the course of a summer vacation, I could play a decent handful of songs.
Only a year or two later, I start a killer death metal band with some friends and we had a wonderful time playing every single venue we possibly could. We played together up until the end of high school, when we all realized we had different ideas of what we wanted to do with our lives. Three members went off to separate universities, one dropped out of school to acquire his GED and find great success through his cosmetic school which only left me. I was blindsided by this reality. I had no idea what I wanted and lacked the same opportunities. So, I did the only logical thing to me which was to continue playing music in various bands while also getting terrible jobs to supply the guitar strings. And skateboarding? What even happened to that? This was my routine until I was twenty-seven and could no longer justify my actions because I was no longer happy with the music and I was strangled by the forty-hour work week.
I didn’t start doing the things I wanted until I was in my mid-to-late twenties. I had trained myself rigorously to ignore those things for my whole life. I see why parents have that empty look in their eyes when you tell them what your biggest dreams are; they don’t themselves dream. They see it as an act of rebellion. The American Dream to them is to be complacent in a system of corporate slavery. As long as you can have access to co-pay, why question anything in the world around you? It’s no wonder that since this point, my relationships with family and friends have almost completely deteriorated. The abyss is my destination. And in the abyss there is great comfort in knowing that thoughts and desires can truly by mine to achieve. I take it upon myself to become acquainted with the darkness; appreciate its obscurity. The way the eyes and ears so easily deceive the mind and the soul of those who haven’t once confronted the abyss is profoundly sinister; how is it that one can learn to see and listen properly if one has never been before deprived of their eyes and ears?
Perhaps this has been a dark turn of events for my anecdote. Perhaps the ending didn’t wrap things up nicely. Perhaps if you hadn’t a presupposed formula for the way a good story should end, you could find meaning in the most mundane, most painfully human anecdotes. To me, the author, this is really to mark the beginning of the story. This is a story where age is not a constraint, because it is never too late for introspection, well, that is until self-actualization itself is eventually criminalized (it could be sooner than one would think). We live in a world where Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is seemingly demolished, but to me, I think it has been just turned on its side and a bit more difficult to determine where the top is when one is only beginning their journey.
turnnoffyourmind
yousharknotpass
theartofmadeline
stormborns
