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Love Was When I Loved You, One True Time I Hold To, In My Life We'll Always Go On

2011-01-19T00:57:00.000-08:00

--"My Heart Will Go On", Celine Dion

There's an episode of Friends where Phoebe is mad at Ross for something he did in a dream she had. It's funny because she gets all worked up over something that never really happened and there's nothing he can do or say to make up for it until she admits that it wasn't anything he did in reality, but something he did in a dream.

I go through the same dilemma sometimes. Sometimes it more what I perceived an individual did to slight me than the slight itself. I mean--it's all perspective when it comes down to it. What a person does isn't nearly as important as how we react to it, right? For instance, a friend could insult me today and I could laugh it off whereas some days (most days) I could really be stung by it. A lot of different factors can enter into the complex equation of how a moment will affect us. More importantly, seemingly random stimuli can alter whether or not a given memory actually stays with us. Chance encounters, snippets of conversation, &c... are all fair game to be retained if the stars align in a particular way.

That message seems to lie at the heart of the book I recently finished, Jonathan Tropper's This Is Where I Leave You. It tells the story of three brothers, their sister, and their mom, coming together to sit shiva for seven days after their father dies. They're all in the thirties and forties. Most of them are married. Some of them have kids. But they all haven't seen each other in years, even decades. Normally, this would be a recipe for some great angsty family drama. While the novel does have it fair share of drama, it also mines weaknesses of the human condition for some pretty gutsy (and hilarious) moments of humor. It's the kind of book you feel embarrassed to read in public simply because it has the audacity to both make you laugh and make you cry.

Our guide through the seven-day journey through hell in a hand basket is Judd. His wife recently left him for his boss, following a pretty devastating miscarriage. And just to ratchet up the hilarity is the fact his wife Jen tells him she's pregnant near the beginning of the book. As aforementioned, such details don't exactly spell out comedy gold, but Tropper has a gift for seeing the drunk leprechaun at the end of every thunderstorm.

One of Judd's key personality traits is, much like Phoebe, he likes to daydream about people he sees in the street, on the road, or even in Church and imagining what their life is like. More specifically he likes to imagine about women he sees and what their life would be like if they were to start dating, get married, have kids, &c... What's great is that for every relationship he imagines working out, he has one that ends in disaster for whatever reason his imagination can surmise. What's also great is that he proceeds, still much like Phoebe, to base his behavior around them on these daydreams as if he absolutely knows for certain that this will be their future together. While I wouldn't go so far as to sat these visions take up the bulk of his day Walter Mitty-like, it is a key trait to unlocking what makes Judd tick.

A lot of us, if our husbands or wives, boyfriends or girlfriends, were to leave us right before our dad died would probably be imagining a better life being out there, right? And this better life for a lot of us would probably include an upgrade in the significant other category.

near, far, wherever you are
I believe the heart does go on

Another major motif in the book which I like and which ties into Judd's personality is the fact a lot of the characters make decisions in the book based on prior histories with other characters. Old flames have one last fling with one another after not seeing each other in twenty years. Brothers hold grudges over events that happened in high school. Hell, a relationship develops out of nowhere simply because two of the characters have been neighbors. It's amazing how many people make what looks like to be the wrong choice because of nostalgia, because of a memory of how things used to be. More specifically a lot of the characters make decisions because they want to bring back the old days when everything seemed to work out in the end, to replace present day where almost everything is fucked up in one way or another.

That also goes to the point that sometimes the decisions we make in our lives are mercurial and aren't based on reason. I hate to give her credit, but Breanne had it right when she told me all those years ago when she said that more than fifty percent of the decisions we make aren't based on logic. She said that more than fifty percent of our decisions are based on emotion, on instinct, on what our gut is telling us to do. And this book seems to postulate--indeed, its main focus seems to be--that memory is directly tied up in everything we do. The characters may not remember everything as it happened. Some of the characters even have conflicting versions of the actual account of the way things went down. Yet they sure all remember how it made them feel and they sure all know how it apparently affected the course of their life to come. Every one of them harbors a decision or two that followed wherever they went, a decision that at the time was made in the heat of the moment and ended up closing certain avenues while opening other ones.

Deep in the heart of the all--in Judd's mental wanderings, in the last flings of high school sweethearts, in the blossoming of new romances--is that love is tied up also in memory. Tropper seems to throw out there that love, like memory, might be subjective, that it isn't a genuine article at all. He puts forth that love may be flimsy at best, subject to the same twists of circumstance that makes some memories permanent and others fade away. More than anything he says that everybody is capable of love; that it relies on instinct and going with the flow of fate more than anything else. And because of that people are capable of being in love with more than one person at a time, that there isn't anything wrong with loving your husband AND still being in love with the guy with whom you had all your firsts with. He seems to be saying it's okay to still love your wife even after she's cheated on you with your boss because, hey, you fell in love with her once. He wants to say if you're capable of loving someone in the best of times, you should be capable of loving someone in the worst of times too.

Love and memory. They're all tied in together. For just because your father dies doesn't mean you stop loving him. Or just because your family has grown up and apart, and aren't the family you once shared the dinner table with, doesn't mean you get to ever stop loving them. Or, finally, just because you stop being that person you used to be with that certain person he or she used to be doesn't mean the feelings you once felt for another are no longer real or go away.

People are entitled to how they feel forever. Loving the memory of someone is just a good a reason as any to continue loving them now, I say.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

But I Would Walk 500 Miles, And I Would Walk 500 More, Just To Be The Man Who Walks A Thousand Miles, To Fall Down At Your Door

2011-01-18T01:02:00.000-08:00

--"I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)", The Proclaimers

I've been thinking about buying a new pair of cowboy boots.

I know--cowboy boots aren't exactly everyone's cup of tea. Plus, wearing them in California isn't exactly a common occurrence, but ever since I had my first pair gifted to me about seven years ago I've thought, somehow in some way, they work for me. I mean--I'm not exactly known for my overwhelming love of shoes. I don't rush out and buy a new pair every year. Overall, I'd much rather have a good pair of shoes that goes with everything, or at least what I normally wear, and lasts a long time. I don't need to know what everyone else is wearing. Hell, I don't even need to know what goes with what. I like what I like and I don't necessarily feel the need to have seventeen pairs of shoes for seventeen different occasions.

Cowboy boots fit the bill.

Mostly I'm just looking for something to reward myself with after getting this new job. For almost a year now I've had to curtail my impulsive purchasing. Rather than buy everything I wanted when I wanted, I only did it half the time, which is my version of self-control. And high on the list of things I wanted to buy this year were cowboy boots. Before it always seemed like a splurge rather than a necessity since the chief reason I want them is to proclaim my desire to be somewhat different than the teeming masses who go out in the world. Yet somehow I felt wanting to be different was not truly a worthwhile reason to spend northwards of $150 on a pair of shoes. There are other ways to verify my uniqueness, ways that don't require me to spend a day's wages on a single item.

and when I'm dreaming, well I know I'm gonna dream
I'm gonna dream about the time when I'm with you

I don't know what it is about me that equates being different with being myself, but I feel like there's a part of me that's forever stretching to display all these different sides of me in order to get someone to notice me. I've never thought of myself as someone who gravitated towards the spotlight. However, deep down, while most of us don't need fame exactly, we're all searching for some type of recognition. Like Radiohead said, we want someone to notice when we're not around. We want to make an impression on the people around us, good or bad, just to assure ourselves that somehow we matter. And it can be showcasing our talents, or befriending a thousand people, or even something as simple as wearing a specific type of footwear, but we're all searching for that next best thing that will get the world to see us for who we want to be.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

The Handshake, Seals The Contract, From The Contract, There's No Turning Back, The Turning Point, Of A Career

2011-01-13T00:38:00.000-08:00

--"Everything Counts", Depeche Mode

Come Monday I shall be back among the gainfully employed. I was recently offered employment through DSS with Honda for a long-term assignment. I'll be doing what I basically did at my last job with Eclipse/Fujitsu Ten. As a Credit Analyst I'll be in charge of maintaining different businesses' credit lines, collecting on overdue accounts, and staying on top of any potential problems that may arise. The pay's more than good and while the long-term designation as opposed to permanent designation is somewhat worrisome, even that isn't enough to detract from my excitement at being back to work again.

The only aspect of going to work on Monday that might diminish my enthusiasm is the idea of losing all that free time. I wouldn't recommend being out of work for a year, but my "sabbatical," as Miss Flib called it, did me some good when it came to recharging my batteries. I didn't have to worry about who I would have to haggle with or contend with the next day. I didn't have to come home stressed out about that day's worth of work. And I didn't have to make sure to stay rested and refreshed just do it all over again the next day.

I do need structure in my life just to keep me sane. But there's something to be said of living your life unfettered for extensive stretches of time. I'm just sad that this stretch is quickly coming to an end.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

She Looks Like The Real Thing, She Tastes Like The Real Thing, My Fake Plastic Love

2011-01-11T05:51:00.000-08:00

--"Fake Plastic Trees (cover)", Molly Tuttle

When it comes to music one might say I possess eclectic tastes. From country to j-pop to alternative, there isn't a style of music I haven't at least given a fair shake of trying to get into. And while I haven't embraced every genre of music equally, I can safely say that when it comes to a musical library that spans all eras and all types my library is one to be reckoned with. I don't say this with any ounce of arrogance. I know I'm not the musical gourmet; I don't claim to have the best taste in music. But I am rather proud that no matter who I'm with I know I can at least get along with whatever they're listening to--be it classical, christian, or hip hop.

That being said, a guilty pleasure of mine has always been a good cover of an already established hit, especially when that cover is being done by a relative unknown. I adore discovering somebody just getting their foot in the door by tackling a song that some would claim to have already been done to perfection by the original artist. While it's true that a good cover would have never been born without the original recording, I'm of the opinion that, yes, sometimes the copy can be better than the original. I mean--when I first heard "Silver Springs" being done by Stacee Dupree, I would have been hard-pressed to give you definitive answer as to which version I thought was better. Or when I first stumbled across Mary Lou Lord's version of "I Don't Want To Get Over You" by The Magnetic Fields I actually thought it was her song. It wasn't until later that I heard the irrepressible original. Indeed, some of Mary Lou Lord's best work have been covers and she still manages to be my overall favorite female singer/songwriter.

When it comes to a lot of different areas I'm not one to stand on ceremony. To me it really doesn't matter who did it first. I just want to know who does it the best. Sometimes innovation isn't as important as refinement.

That brings me to Molly Tuttle, a teenager from the Bay Area of California with a background in bluegrass and folk music, and her awesome rendition of "Fake Plastic Trees" by Radiohead. It's no big secret that I love bluegrass music and the musicians who perform it. It's also no secret that I hold a special place in my heart for individuals who show a talent for the arts at an early age. Molly Tuttle fits both of these criteria. Not only can she play the banjo and the guitar, but she has an uncanny singing voice that is almost pitch perfect. What may come as a surprise is that I've never been a huge fan of Radiohead. I've never disliked them per se, but it has never been an all-encompassing need to delve further into their back catalog. One could say that admiration for them pretty much began and ended with "Creep".

You can imagine my surprise when I instantly became enamored with this version of their "Fake Plastic Trees" the other day. Not only did it make me feel like I had missed out on an absolutely great song when it was first released, but it gave me a new appreciation for what makes Radiohead, well, Radiohead. Yes, part of the intrigue to this version of the song was that the voice behind it is a tad more pleasant to the ear that Thomas Yorke (That's another thing, I'm a big fan of female singers as opposed to male singers. I always have been.). And, yes, this song is more clearly defined than some of the others in their repertoire. But I think the real reason I feel remiss that I never appreciated this song in its time is expressly because I've been playing this cover version of it with great frequency in the last few days.

That's what I like best about covers. They can point you back to the inspiration behind them while at the same time stand on their own as a work of art. A good deal of people will tell you that a cover will never be as good as the original because it lacks the authenticity of its first performer or of its creator. I say, however, that there is an authenticity to taking something that holds true as something monumental and making it your own... as long as you completely make it your own. I don't abide people who change one facet and claim that they redid it with their own shine; those works can be truly qualified as being pale imitations. But when someone of genuine talent takes a monumental work and pays homage to it by applying their unique gifts and perspective to it, then I believe something as great, if not greater than the original, can arise from the combination. After all, to borrow my friend Casey's remark when we had this discussion tonight, "just because you're the person who invented French Toast doesn't mean you're the only one who can perfect the recipe."

"Fake Plastic Trees" may have been a song that didn't need perfecting when it was first recorded by Radiohead, but like anyone who ever made a great cover, Molly Tuttle perfected it anyway.

Enjoy the song.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

And I'm In Pieces, Baby, Fix Me, And Just Shake Me Till You Wake Me From This Bad Dream, And I'm Going Down, Down, Down, Down

2011-01-10T01:03:00.000-08:00

--"Baby", Justin Bieber

I went into watching Country Strong expecting a feel-good movie. Usually when one purchases a ticket for a movie set in the heartland or in the South one can expect a plot involving the triumph of the human spirit or some other uplifting message. While Country Strong does have its moments of inspiration one will certainly walk away feeling very much shaken by what transpires.

I shan't give away all the plot turns that lead me to say that, but I will speak on one aspect that especially affected me. Tim McGraw's character, the husband of Gwyneth Paltrow's character, Kelly Canter is a man whose been let down one too many times by his wife. I don't know if it's the proper aspect to be admiring, but he does a remarkable job of portraying a man whose disappointment and frank distrust of his wife's ability to recover ultimately lead to a tragic choice. On one hand, you want to hate the guy because while he still wants to be her manager and friend, he has basically frozen her out of ever being his wife again--at least how she used to be his wife. But on the other hand, Kelly's mistake is a huge mistake marriage-wise and you kind of sympathize with him for being so distant from somebody he used to love deeply. It's a delicate balance to maintain and he manages to carry it off well. You feel him emotionally starving his wife, but you also feel why he does it in every scene in the film.

and I just can't believe my first love won't be around

That got me thinking all the way through dinner with my friends and on the way home afterwards. Sometimes couples grow apart because it's the natural order of things. Other times it's one incident that changes the relationship forever. One fight, one wrong choice--and you can instantly fall out of love with someone. I mean--the romantic idealist in me doesn't want to believe it, but I have to admit that given the same set of circumstances encountered in the film I might have been led down the same road that Tim McGraw's character was.

That's what makes Paltrow's arc so convincing. You feel the helplessness of a person whose life fell apart in the matter of one moment. You feel her struggling to get her life together even while almost everyone around her doesn't believe she has it in her any longer. Most of all, you feel that she honestly could survive her journey back if her husband would simply back her play. When he doesn't time and time again you begin to understand that however this film ends it's not going to be pretty. More than that, you begin to understand that sometimes strength isn't the courage to overcome adversity.

Sometimes courage is the strength to recognize that there are some obstacles that can't be overcame, some challenges you can't win, and to press on regardless.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

It Turns Out Freedom Ain't Nothing But Missing You, Wishing I'd Realized What I Had When You Were Mine, I'd Go Back To December

2011-01-04T01:10:00.000-08:00

--"Back to December", Taylor Swift

A tradition Lucy and I share is the idea of a "present-to-be-named-later". I don't know about anyone else, but I have a real problem with patience when it comes to waiting for gifts. I can't tell you how many times I've asked for something from my family or friends only to be driven mad with anticipation. Conversely, I can't tell you how many times somebody I know has wanted to surprise me for one of my birthdays or Christmas with a gift they think I will appreciate, only to discover I've already purchased it for myself weeks prior. I never much saw the point in waiting for an artificial day upon which to show somebody you care. If you think somebody will like a little trinket I would think it would be okay to send it to them, in honor of their birthday or what have you, immediately even if their birthday is still weeks or months away.

Tired of bumping heads over the issue we came up with the system where birthday gifts can be sent as early or as late as one wished, as long as we were both sure that the effort (and delay) would be appreciated. Rather than guess blindly at what she might or might not have picked up for herself, and rather than hint around the question, Breanne knows she can basically cash in her birthday or Christmas gift "to be named later" and tell me exactly something she has just seen that she wants me to get for her, and vice-versa.

That's how come I'm getting my brand-spanking new copy of De Volgari Eloquentia as my Christmas gift from her only this week. Hell, I didn't even know I wanted it until January 2nd. Rather than flit around searching for something I didn't have or try to deduce something I might like it was a lot easier for her for me to tell her much I wanted this game and how she could count it as my end-of-the-year gift. Another nice thing about this arrangement is the fact I could have held out for a couple of months, holding my virtual coupon for the same duration, until the perfect gift showed up on my radar.

I know--some may complain that it defeats the whole purpose of demonstrating how well you know a person by being able to suss out their perfect gift without their consent. My theory is, though, that we've both done a lot of the head-scratching to come up with that impossibly flawless present for one another. We've spent years playing along with the scenario. More to the point, we've missed as many times as we've hit with our selections. It's not as if I mind the mild disappointment in her voice; none of us our perfect in our assertions of another human being. What I've found is that by waiting a few weeks or even jumping the gun a few weeks it all but eliminates the disappointment of a bad gift. As long as she doesn't mind it isn't spontaneous, I don't mind it either. And it's all worth it when the present arrives and each of us knows it's something the other truly clamored for without hesitation. It's worth it knowing that there's absolutely no chance the other will be disappointed upon its arrival on their doorstep.

I'll trade that moment of pre-arranged joy for the romance of an impulse buy any day.

----

I remember once upon a time when I had delusions that the hope of something better was my prevailing train of thought. It was December of 2002, a few months after Breanne and Greg had gotten married, and about six months into what would turn out to be eight months of not speaking to her. I don't know--even though it wasn't that long ago considering, it feels like it was ages ago. We were both stubbornly refusing to make the first move at reconciliation, each believing we were in the right. At the moment, now that the anger has passed, she probably had more right to dislike me than I did her. Ditching your best friend's wedding isn't something I'd be eager to forgive and forget so easily either.

I remember thinking how it was the first time in a long time that I wouldn't have to get Breanne a present and what a good feeling that was. I mean--I'm not much a gift giver in the first place. Most years I only buy gifts for my parents, my brother, and her. Some years that list expands to include friends like Brandy, Casey, and, of course, Toby), but those four people have been the heart of my Christmas list for decades now. Taking her off the list was empowering. It afforded me the sensation that I had the control in the situation. I had the courage in the situation. If she didn't want to be my friend any more then there was no need to waste any more time in trying to make her happy any longer. I don't know--I reveled in my newfound independence from the one person who I had to account for it seems like every moment of every day.

Never once did it occur to me to use the opportunity as an excuse for re-establishing communications. Never once did it occur to me that the holidays provided the perfect alibi to re-building our friendship back up from the ground up.

I was very spiteful at that moment in time. I admit that. She was very spiteful too, though, if I do say so myself.

This behavior went on for the weeks leading up to Christmas. I was resolute in my vow to not give Mrs. Holins-Meier one thought during the holidays. It was still a few days from New Year's Eve, but that truly became my resolution. I wanted to start the new year with the notion that Breanne would not be a part of it or the years following. I wanted to be okay with my decision as quickly as possible. I needed to be okay with it as quickly as possible because I knew, given the option, I could dwell upon it for weeks and months if I allowed myself to wallow just so.

I told myself she was an anchor. With her gone I could finally find somebody better upon which to spend my energy. Without her sucking away my time, there was at least the possibility of finding somebody much more suited to me who wouldn't put me in that position of feeling abandoned for half of a year.

It was the aforementioned conundrum of knowing what you're getting for Christmas before it arrives or being surprised completely. I knew what I was getting with Lucy because I knew what she had brought to me in the years prior. There was no mystery in what she brought to the table nor mystery in what I had to give up in return. But in 2002 I had hope that I could forge some other type of relationship with somebody new. I had hope that there was a new relationship out there that would not cost me so much in return and one that could reap even more benefits to my well-being.

However, it was around Christmas or at least the days leading up to Christmas where I just started to miss her. As she likes to say, I started to miss her something fierce. The novelty of not having her in my life began to wear off. All that was left in its wake was the sense of isolation and abandonment that had been bobbing there the whole time, hidden by my false sense of bravado. In fact, the novelty of the situation became its own worst enemy. Frankly, it stings to know what it's like to have somebody of Breanne's import in my life and to go without it for a year. It's like losing out on Christmas altogether for a year, as if the entire holiday just vanished from the face of the planet. I never told her at the time because we had other more vital things to discuss when we finally started talking again, but that Christmas was probably one of the saddest I've ever been through.

At least on two different occasions I almost called her.

One time it was just before midnight on Christmas Day. I know it's not exactly tradition to wish somebody Merry Christmas going into December 26th, but I was determined not to talk to her on the actual day if I had to talk to her at all. I didn't even know if she'd be up, but my rationale would be at least she wouldn't be with her family at that point. I wouldn't have to go through the embarrassment of talking to her daddy or mother. Sure, I might have had to deal with Greg answering the phone, but I still only felt the bitterness and anger of a jealous man towards him so it didn't matter so much to me if I woke him up. I chickened out, though, because my misery didn't exactly seem the right tone to launch into asking her for her forgiveness.

The other time was just after New Year's--around the fourth and fifth--where I had convinced myself that I was in a happier mood. I told myself I was in a better place, where I didn't sound desperate to get her back and where I could effectively give the impression that I was actually contrite. But this too fell through because I lacked the conviction of a man who thinks he is doing something for the right reason. I knew the only reason I was even considering calling her was for my own selfish interests. For all I knew she was better off without me fucking her life up and to ask her to take me back in would probably set her back a few steps (even while it would have set me upright once again).

By that point I came to the realization that holding out for something better was foolish. If something better comes along it's going to find you regardless of what your current situation is. I didn't need to sever ties with something that, up until recently, had been the most positive influence in my life to establish a position for something even more positive to find me. I knew what I had with Breanne. I knew the risks. I also knew the rewards. There was no sense in forgoing that on the belief that my "true" love would come along to replace all of that. It's not as if I was in a horrible pit of despair being friends with Breanne. How I felt even on the worst days going toe-to-toe with Little Miss Chipper doesn't even compare to the worst days with the likes of Tara and DeAnn.

I believe that's what clinched it for me and why I ended up patching things up with Breanne a few months later. I knew what I wanted by then. Rather than feeling embarrassed for offering up my need for her so nakedly to her, I felt the conviction I've always felt when asking her for something that was sure to bring me no end of joy. When you know what you want and when you know the one person who can give it to you without hesitation, it's not wrong to be forthright in expressing your desires. People like Breanne like to know they're appreciated and that they can make you feel better about yourself.

Yes, it's good to be surprised by people entering in your life that you had no idea they would be coming. I mean--everyone's a stranger to you at some point. But my feeling at the moment is that it's even better to recognize the people in your life that you always want in it, and to let them know at every possible that all you want for Christmas, your birthday, &c... is anything and everything they are willing to offer you.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

They Said, I Bet, They'll Never Make It, But Just Look At Us Holding On, We're Still Together, Still Going Strong

2011-01-03T03:02:00.000-08:00

--"You're Still The One", Shania Twain

I'm not one to usually make resolutions. I don't believe in them and I probably never have. I don't much see the point of making a promise to yourself that is nigh impossible to fulfill, only to beat yourself up later about it. As I learned from Jim Carrey's Yes Man, "When you break a promise to yourself, things can get a little dicey." I never want to be put into that position. I want to, more or less, be able to say that I only make promises I believe I can make good on.

Granted, my track record for finishing endeavors I've begun in good faith isn't exactly exemplary. My novel is still three-fourths of the way from being completed. I never did take up those curling lessons I've always meant to do. And I still have yet to go on my cross country road trip. However, the one project I've always prided myself on keeping on schedule is this blog. I've always maintained that, if nothing else, I would continue to put effort into keeping this project going on a fairly consistent schedule. Whether it's getting off my butt and putting up a new post, or motivating the girls to keep up their end of the bargain, I've always kept resolute about maintaining california is a recipe for a black hole for as long as possible.

A good measure of my adhering to this vow was the pace at which new posts would be posted here. In the first few years we had an absolutely amazing pace. I believe that new posts were being written at a rate of four to five new posts a week. Indeed, in the first two years of existence we crossed the two hundred posts a year barrier quite easily. I don't know what it was--perhaps we had a plethora of stories to tell that y'all hadn't heard before. Or maybe it was just the initial excitement of a undertaking just getting off the ground. Whatever it was, I believe I speak for us all when I say it was just easier to hop onto my computer to jot a few paragraphs down. And occasionally, should the need arise, it was even easy to plop down a fifteen to twenty page story.

Eventually, though, that pace became slower and slower. Even with the addition of Marion to the rotation, around the third and fourth years we were only writing around four posts a week. While we still approached two hundred posts a year, I don't think we broke the barrier in either of those years. At least for Breanne and I, it became obvious that all our best stories had already been written up here. Personally, I'm a person who relies on letting people getting to know me with the same few dozen of anecdotes I'd stored up. With those already disseminated, I quite frankly did not have enough new anecdotes to relay here.

Besides, I never liked this becoming a blog that acted more like a diary than a journal. I'm a much bigger fan of writing my life in hindsight rather than as a current event.

Which brings me to the current era this site finds itself in. As you can probably tell, the posting here has become more and more sparse. Currently we are posting maybe three posts a week, if that. Again, I speak for all of us when I say that notion just makes me feel terrible. It's as if we all spent time raising this kid and then just neglected it in its formative years, just as it was beginning to come into its own. That's no way to nurture anything or anyone you supposedly love. Remaining true to anything or anyone requires more dedication than that, if history has taught me anything.

That being said, I had originally meant to write this announcement up yesterday, but found myself unavoidably occupied (yet again). What I wanted to say yesterday was that I was making my first resolution in years. More precisely, I was making a resolution for myself, Lucy, and Marion. I want to make 2011 the year we get back to writing five posts a week or, at the very least, four. I want this a place readers come to almost every day to find something new waiting for them.

Therefore, in best resolution format, I am making a resolution to see two hundred fifty new posts in the calendar year of 2011.

I don't care who does it. I don't even care the length or depth of them. I've never said any of our posts have to be a certain length or involve certain topics. I just want it back to the old days where we all wrote something every time we thought, "hey, that would make a good idea for a post." Instead of leaving it for later, I want the three of us to go back to that semblance of focus where we wrote our ideas and memories down as we were reflecting on them in real time.

As Barbara Kingsolver once wrote, "There is no perfect time to write. There's just now." Well, 2011 might not be the perfect year to write, but it is now. As of today, there have been 1,086 posts written here. By December 31st, 2011, it will read 1,336 if I have to fly down to Macon and South Bend myself to get those gals motivated... or, heaven forbid, they have to fly down to Long Beach to get me off my sorry ass. This site is too important to let it linger in apathy.

That's my resolution and I happen to think it's a good one.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Kyrie Eleison, Down The Road I Must Travel, Kyrie Eleison, Through The Darkness Of The Night

2010-12-15T03:02:00.000-08:00

--"Kyrie", Mr. Mister

Sometimes I'll hear a title--for a song, a movie, &c...--and my mind will instantly jump to how awesome that would be for a person's name. I mean--I've wrote before how I thought Whiskey God would be a kickass first and middle name for an individual, a girl especially. While I still hold to that truth, my tastes don't necessarily run strictly to the unique and ostentatious. A myriad of songs and films exist that have piqued my ear for awesome sounding names.

The latest I heard was when I was watching The Sing-Off yesterday. A group from the University of Oregon sang a cover of Mr. Mister's "Kyrie Eleison" as their guilty pleasure. Now I vaguely remember the song when it originally came out. However, at the time I was in elementary so my impressions, good or bad, of it are minimal at best. As I sat listening to it, though, my mind came back to what an interesting title for the song "Kyrie Eleison" was. I could not imagine how I had gone my whole life without ever running across this melodic turn of phrase. Sure, it's Greek in origin, meaning "Lord, have mercy," but to me it almost has a Celtic feel to it. What I kept coming back to was how it would be a perfect name for some sylph of a girl in an old sea shanty or something. For me it evokes that old standy image of a girl wistful and forlorn on some cliff somewhere.

Granted, a lot of phrases evoke these same emotions, but it's not often a name can elicit these selfsame feelings. I don't know--I just find it amusing that I'm forever on the lookout for these small wonders that other people can overlook. I also find it amusing that something so miniscule in relevance can provoke such a pronounced response in me.

Perhaps it's my blessing and my curse that I get so emotionally stimulated by something so flimsy in its construction.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

I Wake Up To The Sound Of Music, Mother Mary Comes To Me, Speaking Words Of Wisdom, Let It Be, Let It Be, Let It Be

2010-12-11T02:53:00.000-08:00

--"Let It Be", The Beatles

Back in high school I wrote a story involving a rather large cast of superheroes. I was very much into the idea of superheroes back then and it was only natural that a majority of my narratives revolved around their exploits. Most of my influences were other comic book heroes, plots, &c.... It was a simple affair to draw inspiration from all the other stories I read. However, there was one character whose genesis came from my love of music and the idea of music as a stabilizing force in one's life.

Her name was C.C. Harmony. Her back story played out much like the idea of the Lost Boys from Peter Pan fame. Somewhere in the world I imagined there existed an island where certain abandoned, abused, or otherwise neglected children could escape to through magical means. Once there the children ceased to age and were bestowed certain powers and abilities appropriate to their particular interests. The name of the island eludes me at the moment, but I remember the number of inhabitants were in flux except for a dozen or so children who simply refused to leave the island permanently. Foremost among them was one C.C. Harmony, a girl of unknown age, but on the outside looked no older than twelve. She had dirty blonde hair with a prominent red streak running down the front of it. She also had light blue eyes that were almost as clear as water. Other than that she had no distinguishing features except for the ever-present earphones nestled on her head.

She had three main powers. One, she could fly--as far and as fast as any jet plane. Two, she could shoot energy blasts that could send a villain flying into the next block or through two or three walls. Three, she could put up a force field that could block both bullets and energy beams alike.

And powering all of these wonderful powers? The music that she listened to through her headphones. The longer and the louder she played her music from the discman that was attached to her hip, the stronger her powers became. Sure, it was an homage to the Marvel hero Dazzler, who had similar abilities, but the genius was in the details. For you see, she didn't just listen to any old thing that she could get her tiny, little hands on. Her discman always played the same set of songs, songs she had listened to when she had escaped whatever fractured former life she used to have. And not only would she become empowered by the music from her youth, she would be affected by it too.

What could have been just an interesting character device became an apartment continuity element for her. Much like how I title every post that I write her with lyrics, each scene she was in was heavily influenced by whatever song happened to be playing in her ears. It became one more way to characterize her and to ground what could have been a fantastical creature in the world of the here and now. It humanized her in a way that was simple and immediately accessible to the reader.

----

I don't know--maybe that's just the way I think of music. It's not something you're supposed to do casually. It should be an interactive process whereby the sounds changes you and challenges you. Much like C.C. was empowered by the familiar strains emanating from her headphones, so too should music embolden you to feel that sense of being alive every second of every day. And rather than just listen any old ditty that comes on the radio you should develop a symbiotic relationship to the groups you favor. They shouldn't just fade away into obscurity from neglect. If you have a favorite song, a favorite band, a favorite genre--you should embrace their particular strengths. Rather than ever be afraid of associating yourself with what isn't en vogue with your circle or in your area of the world, you should be proud of your tastes because they're your tastes.

That's a lot of what informed C.C.'s character, the idea that if you give up your beliefs that you lose something intangible. She didn't have powers because the island gave it to her. There was no one to tell her that music was her touchstone. She had that belief from the day she was born. And she didn't give music the ability to assist in her efforts, that was always a part of her even before she got to the island. She saw for herself what a guiding force music in her life could be, what a touchstone to her makeup as a person it could be.

I take music in much the same way. Everything around could change--the people I associate with, the places I live, the philosophies I espouse--but as long as have my favorite songs within reach I know I'll remain intact. My soul and music go hand in hand because most of the life-affirming choices I've made and most of the monumental events that have transpired in my life carry with them a very distinct soundtrack. I don't ever forget what I was listening at the time something happened to me. I also don't grow tired of the songs of my youth. I don't know--maybe I'm afraid to let any music I used to listen to fall into neglect.

For much like the children from that island, neglect is something I tend to see as more profoundly devastating than outright hatred. At least with hatred there's a sense of involvement involved in the emotion. With neglect it's pure indifference, which is a far worse fate. And when you start down that path of neglecting the music that used to inspire you, transform you, and motivate you, it's only a short road to neglecting the other aspects of your life that provide you any sense of joy.

C.C. was much more than a character to me. She embodied a philosophy of mine whereby music, indeed, did have the power to change the world in a measurable way. In some small sense she was my acknowledgement that music had changed me in a measurable way... for the better. And much like C.C. and that island of hers, there would be no going back to a state of what I was like before I had found music.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

When You're Strange, Faces Come Out Of The Rain, When You're Strange, No One Remembers Your Name

2010-11-29T00:14:00.000-08:00

--"People Are Strange", The Doors

I've always known I was a little off. From a young age I developed habits and rituals that other people never seemed to understand. As I've matured I stopped calling them rituals and habits. Slowly but surely they morphed into my so-called "rules". Whatever, they're called they still rarely fall into the category of normal behavior. And over the years they still have drawn a curious, sometimes suspicious, eye.

It wasn't like I was completely clueless that such behavior would set me apart from the rest of the crowd. Indeed, there were times where I invited the singling out. However, most of the time, I wished I was better suited to fitting in, that I wasn't such a slave to my proclivities. Sure, I remembered having the realization that I was weird and from that point on just going with it. What never happened was my waking up one day and just deciding to gain such a reputation. It's my belief that it was a part of my character from day one; that I was born to the life as soon as my parents had me.

And it wasn't like it was always such a bad thing. On more than one occasion my tendency to forsake common sense or reason itself has provided a wonderful excuse for otherwise inexcusable behavior. When people expect you to act in an independent fashion you're free to act independently most of the time.

What it had been for a long time was a lonely state of being. When you set yourself apart, it's hard to all of sudden admit to others that you now want to be a part of something--even if it's only temporarily.

----

All that changed when I basically got to La Salle. I mean--it's all well and good to call Tommy, John, Paul, and Phillip; my friends from St. Rita's; my "friends," but at the time I thought I knew what the word meant. Up until that point I thought the main point of friendship was the idea of companionship and loyalty. Indeed, they are strong components, but it wasn't until I matriculated from junior high that I began to understand what getting to know someone well and becoming friends actually meant. People like Dan, Peter, Chris, and Omar I believe I got to know really well. More to the point I got to know their idiosyncrasies really well also. They were never something consciously given away; they were more byproducts of fate. If one spends enough time in the presence of someone else, the tiny secrets one keeps have a tendency to dribble out like so much drool. It's not something we choose; it's something chosen for us. It's my belief that who we are is a lot easier to reveal than it is to hide. It takes effort to mask or screen our character. It doesn't take any effort at all just to be ourselves.

That's what I think went on in high school. Once I was there it wasn't such a big deal that I was an oddity--at least not as much as it was during my time at St. Rita's. Once I was in high school I grew into my skin, so to speak.

That same rationale became even more pronounced once I met Lucy. Once you get to know someone as well as I know her, it's second nature to pick up on all the rituals and habits she thinks are okay but honestly surprise the hell out of most people. For instance, I learned early on in our friendship that she has a special relationship with the color orange. She takes her devotion to the color orange as seriously or more seriously as I take my devotion to the number eight. Visiting her parents' house and seeing her room and her bathroom--it's everywhere. Okay, it's nothing as ridiculous as her having her entire room covered in orange, but when the walls, the bedspread, and even the window frames are that particular hue you know there was deliberation somewhere.

Also, I know it doesn't seem so weird now, but it really weirded me out that she has an official nap day. It's just odd to me that someone can set aside one day a week for thirteen straight years to take a four or five hour nap in the middle of the day. I mean--I love naps, but I can only take them here or there. To devote fifty-days out of the year to the activity is, yes, admirable, but there is a hint of zealotry there too.

And don't even get me started on Toby. The hands thing, where her hands have to be pristine twenty-four hours a day, was quite a shocker to me. Coupled with her Monk-like obsession with cleaning her bathroom two or three times a week, and she's the closest I've come to meeting someone with OCD.

It's took awhile to accept these revelations as fact, as I'm sure it took both of them some time to come to grips with the strange obsessions I seem to have. Yet over time it's become like second nature to hear Breanne go on about some new orange serving dish she got or go on about how she broke her record for longest nap. It's become barely a blip on the radar hearing Marion cleaning her bathroom (again) while she's on the phone with me. It's the nature of the beast. When you accept a person truly into your life as something more than an acquaintance, you accept all of them. It's like Breanne says, "you can't unbake a cake." You can't separate what you like about a person from what you find odd about them; they come packaged together through and through.

And what's more, I used to think I was alone in feeling isolated. I thought I was the only one who had habits they just couldn't explain. But ever since knowing the girls, ever since getting to high school and beyond, it's gotten easier for me to see that all people are strange in their own ways. More than that, I've gotten to the point where most people's passions stop seeming all that inexplicable to me. I tend to roll more with the punches now when people reveal their likes and dislikes to me. It's becoming more and more where I'm understanding that it takes different strokes to move the world.

Sometimes too what I once thought was foreign and unexplainable starts to make sense to me the longer I'm around the influence. For instance, ever since I've gotten to know Toby and her statistics about just how many germs live on how many surfaces in a typical household, you can bet I too wash my hands in hot, not warm, water. As she says, it's the only way to be sure along with soap that your hands are germ-free. Or, even more succinctly, I've taken up a lot of Breanne's suggestions which stem from her minor weird habits. When I need to soften up ice cream I now stick it in the microwave for ten or fifteen seconds like she does. Or when I need to cool off a dinner plate that's fresh from the oven or frying pan I stick it in the freezer for a minute or two like she does.

The gods help me--after being around Breanne, those two habits just make sense to me, even though at the outset of our friendship they seemed particularly peculiar.

The point is, yes, I'm weird. But so is everyone else. And rather than trying to rid myself of my odd habits and even odder rituals, I guess I've embraced my outcast status to the point where it seems I'm adopting other people's odd habits and even odder rituals.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Girlfriend, Oh, Your Girlfriend Is Drifting Away, Past And Present, 1855, 1901, Watch Them Build Up A Meteor Tower, Think It's Not Gonna Stay Anyway

2010-11-26T07:20:00.000-08:00

--"1901", Phoenix

Sometimes it's rather easy to get fooled into believing I'm the only one writing a blog. I write these stories that involve all these people I know and posit that my account is the only account of the events as they occurred. I'm not saying I don't know I'm biased, but it's rather easy to forget objectivity when all I ever get to read and reminisce about is the movie reel of my memories. I know I'm biased. I know that I forget certain key aspects of the milestones I've been through. All I can say is that everything I write here is represented as an anecdote, sometimes dressed up for dramatic purposes and sometimes incomplete due to my shoddy memory.

Lately it's been called into question whether or not the other participants of my stories would see things quite the same way. Well, I'm happy to report that, should any of you have lingering concerns, I'm no longer the be-all, end-all when it comes to sources of information concerning that period in my life. Almost everyone I know has some web presence. As you know, you can always contact Lucy and Marion here or at their Twitter accounts. However, I'm here to let you know that there are other sources you can ask.

----

Tara, the girl I once forgot how she looked like, I recently discovered is writing her own blog. It's entitled The Guerra Girls and mostly concerns her two young daughters. She doesn't list an e-mail address, but it would be quick work to discover one linking from this site.

And DeAnn, my most recent girlfriend and the only girl I ever lived with, had a blog too, but I think it's recently been abandoned. However, if one is truly insistent about gathering her take on me, our history, or anything else under the sun, she does list her Facebook account publicly--DeAnn.

----

A caveat here--I don't actually keep in contact with either Tara or DeAnn. I believe the last time I spoke to Tara was a month after I started dating DeAnn. And I believe the last time DeAnn and I exchanged letters was a few years back. Therefore, I'm not telling you to rush right out and bother either of them. I don't know--I just kind of wanted it out there that the people in my life have their viewpoints too and that their lives continued to flourish and change after knowing me. It's a little easy for me to forget that simply because I stopped talking to them or living with them that their lives don't just suddenly end. When I write these pieces about them here, sometimes it sounds like they're merely characters in my biography, that all they ever are to me are secondary personalities whose only purpose is to reflect back upon me.

It just isn't true.

Every story I relate here is just that, a story. They're almost always taken out of context. They're almost always tailored to illustrate a message. But what they aren't are finite things. Most of them do not have a recognizable beginning, middle, and end. Indeed, most of the dust-ups, meaningful conversations, or important events are almost always precipitated by months and months of build-up and are almost always followed by months and months of fallout. It simply wouldn't be manageable to put every little detail involving these steps into my post here. It would just be impractical.

It's also important to me that you readers know that most times the people who know me reflect very little about our time together, whereas I tend to obsess. I'm equal parts happy for DeAnn and Tara for moving on and sad at the ease with which they did it. I glance through their pictures. I read through their posts. All I'm left is with the idea that they've moved on and the notion that in grand scheme of things I was but a momentary blip on their radars, barely worth mentioning.

So, yeah, sometimes it makes me feel awkward that I spend so much time spilling stories here about two young woman that I saw for a time and most times they spend very little time talking about me. Yet it's no more awkward than it needs to be. I'm not trying to hide anything here. I'm not trying to fabricate stories about them that casts them in an evil light. And it's all because I know that were I to say anything malicious or ill-conceived they're swimming around in the same waters as I do. I also know that if they ever get a hankering to come looking me up it would be an easy task to come find me here as it was an easy task for me to come find them at those two places.

If ever something I say comes into question concerning them, now you can go right to the source and ask them if my memory is their memory. Accountability is very important to me, especially when it comes to the facts of the matter. I mean--if this blog was mostly opinion after opinion as most blogs are then, yeah, it wouldn't matter so much if you could verify my sources. But because this blog is more or less about the story of my life, it should be reassuring to know that there are other witnesses that can be called into testify. That way I can rest assured that the truth will get out, whether or not it has been lost to me along the way.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

She Don't Put On A Show, For Nobody, Not Even You, She's Gonna Sit Alone, Why Would You Ever Make Her Feel So Small She'd Just Disappear?

2010-11-24T02:21:00.000-08:00

--"Little Rosa", Letters to Cleo

I recently purchase Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games and read it the same day. I had been getting recommendations over the last few months from various acquaintances, but didn't believe it was going to be something I would enjoy.

Was I ever wrong.

For those of you who don't know The Hunger Games is:

a young-adult science fiction novel written by Suzanne Collins.... It introduces sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives in a post-apocalyptic world in the country of Panem where North America once stood. This is where a powerful government working in a central city called the Capitol holds power. In the book, the Hunger Games are an annual televised event where the Capitol chooses one boy and one girl from each district to fight to the death. The Hunger Games exist to demonstrate not even children are above the Capitol's power.

The entire novel is violent, disturbing, and quite often shocking in its brutality. I mean--I wouldn't blink an eye if the same plot elements concerned adults, but the fact that the violence described often involves children as young as twelve it really made an impression on me. Like Lord of the Flies before it, there's something truly fascinating about stories concerning what happens when children are left in an environment where there are no consequences; where, indeed, violence is not only okay, but encouraged. It gives you an idea what society would be like if a semblance of order were not maintained.

Various critics have flocked to the novel's anti-war and anti-government bent, but for me I came from the novel that it was more speaking out against any situation where the strong oppress the weak. Granted, that's a huge spectrum of society to be criticizing, yet the author does a great job of personalizing the theme. When you read about the stronger districts' candidates banding together to deny the weaker districts' candidates food, tools, and much-needed medical supplies simply because they can you feel the injustice in a system where inequality is the law of the land, even if it is only in a game show/reality show packaging. When you read about how some kids due to their personality and social connections are granted boons like water and shelter from generous sponsors during the games, and how other kids hailing from the poorer districts receive no such gifts, it make you want to scream out in frustration at a system that is rigged to make the supposed rich get richer and the poor even poorer.

But I think the gravest message the novel gets across is the strong will always dominate the weak simply because they can. When twelve-year-old Rue, the youngest of competitors, is run through with a spear by one of the stronger competitors, you don't feel sad because she deserved to die any less than any of the competitors. You feel sad because she is described as the smallest competitor, as the youngest competitor. You feel sad because there was that skulking suspicion that she never had a prayer from the very beginning. You feel sad because you feel the inevitably of her demise strictly due to her physical stature and experience.

We've all been bullied before. We know how the drill works. However, that doesn't change the fact it feels amoral in some way. Personally, I know what it's like to feel that feeling of helplessness when somebody more aggressive or more willing to push their agenda upon you decides to torment you. More importantly, I know what it's like to impose my will on somebody weaker-willed than myself. In either case it's always the same; you're either the guy climbing over somebody to stay on top or you're the guy being climbed over. At that age there is no such arrangement that a stronger individual will assist a weaker individual if the two of them aren't already friends. In high school the order of the day is to constantly assert your authority by showcasing your competitiveness and your willingness to belittle someone.

However, I believe the book would lose a little something if the characters were merely a few years older. Bullying still happens once you reach your twenties, but I think it's less prevalent. People at that age learn to assert their authority in other ways. In most cases it isn't as important to raise yourself up by putting others down. More often than not it's more of achievement to raise yourself up without limiting someone else. I think that takes real strength.

That's why I think the book's great for its intended audience. It really captures what it's like to want power, to use power without a thought to anyone else, and what it's like to be powerless--three conditions that every teenager goes through.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Sometimes In The Midst Of My Worries, I Feel The Need, But It's Painful To Me To Look, I Look Out The Back Window, And Watch You, I See You Disappear

2010-11-13T03:36:00.000-08:00

--"About The Picture", Smoosh

Speaking of Little Manhattan, I was watching it again tonight. I'm telling you I feel like watching that movie every single time the McRib commercial comes on. My response is almost Pavlovian--it's that consistent.

I found myself watching the sequence in which Gabe and Rosemary go to visit the prospective apartment in the Village. Basically, they sneak out of their respective households during a summer day without telling their parent where they're going and what they'll be doing. They spend the day riding the subway farther than either have been by themselves to go visit a promising new apartment for Gabe's dad. After that they ride his scooter all the way along the Hudson till they get home. Not only is it a charming scene of a burgeoning couple just finding their feet, but it's a sequence that I've always appreciated for its simplicity. It isn't like they run away or the end up going somewhere impressively far. They manage to stay in the city and probably are only gone for six hours.

It's the idea of getting away that ties it altogether and makes it one of my favorite parts of the movie. It's the picture I have in my head of what first love is supposed to look like. Doing all these small things together that from the outside seem rather plain, but to the people involved end up being a lifetime memory. It's one of those moments that make you feel confused and wonderful and happy all at the same time. Indeed, I'd put the experience up as one of those moments that everyone should have the pleasure of going through.

----

As some of you may know, I never had one of those moments. I'm what some call a late bloomer. I never even started seriously going out with anyone until I was well into college. As a result I missed out on all the confusing, maddening experience of imbuing all those tiny moments with significance. For me, the first moments going out with Lucy or Tara were pre-planned moments where I was already driving and able to make reservations at places to eat. They certainly weren't the organic surprises of fate that childhood romances seem chock full of. They certainly weren't anything I would call a "you had to be there" moments in my life.

This isn't to say that my moment were any less significant to me, just that what should have been a phase I grew into was instead the phase I started with. Whereas everyone got to see this film we call love from the beginning, it's rather like I walked in somewhere in the middle.

And I would have to say that I've always felt the absence somewhat. Indeed, that's why Brandy thinks I'm so many of my favorite themes in music, movies, and plain stories revolve around the themes of coming of age and/or first love; because I feel the emptiness so thoroughly in my own life. She believes that every time I grow enamored with a movie like Little Manhattan it's because I'm trying to live vicariously through them to fill in the holes of my own lack of childhood flirtations and puppy love. For the most part I would have to agree with her.

Falling in love when you're already in your twenties just isn't the same as falling in love when you're ten or eleven or twelve. That's the age it's supposed to hit you like a freight train. That particular train just never came for me, I guess. When I write a story like The Carisa Meridian, with the eleven-year-old protagonist falling in love with the ten-year-old girl down the block it's because I want that life. A lot of my stories end up being like that--adolescent and young adult individuals all reminiscing Wonder Years style about growing up emotionally as well as physically.

It's also why Epcot believes I get so fixated on befriending people around the fourteen-fifteen mark because it's the age where I believe that I wanted to be in love so badly and it just never happened. I mean--the evidence speaks for itself. Going in order--I met Jina when she was twelve but I didn't start having feelings for her until I went to go meet her on her fifteen birthday. The same for Breanne--I met her when she was thirteen, but I didn't allow myself to feel anything for her until she was well fourteen. Tara--sixteen and I was madly in love with her right away. Even DeAnn, as the oldest, was only nineteen when I met her and we started going out.

And that's only the people I actually started liking. If you go through the list of friends I made in the last few years the same pattern emerges. Carly? I met her when she was fifteen. The same thing with Toby. There's something about that age that just draws me as well as appearances might draw something.

Somewhere along the way I just equated making a new connection with folks of that age. And since I can't go back to being fifteen, I do the next best thing and ostensibly only let new people into my life who are of that age.

to myself I know
it's all about the picture

I know it's a silly criteria to fixate on, but it's kind of my version of a mid-life crisis. However, instead of hitting me all at once once I got into my thirties it's a condition I've had most of my adult life. One part of my mind knows I missed my opportunity to fall in love that first time when I was that age, but another part of my brain keeps trying to get a second chance at it. That's why I keep flying out to all these places to "hang out" with girls half my age. That's why I keep trying to keep in touch with my friends here who fall into the demographic--not because I'm solely into them for them, but because I'm into what they represent. I want that second chance and that's the only manner in which I know how to get it.

Hell, the closest I ever came to having a whole day with a girl when I was the appropriate age was the day I got lost at Epcot with, ironically, Epcot. The day back in 2001 when Brandy and I scampered around that particular Disneyworld park is as close to having those tiny moments when I was fifteen with a female human being. The only problem was I wasn't in like, let alone love, with her. I'd only met her that day so, as special and as memorable as that day was, it hardly qualifies as one of those sweaty palms "I'm all confused" type of experiences everybody else can relate to.

Nope, I was robbed of that forever. My feeble attempts to get them back can do nothing substantial to change that. Having a Toby or a Carly in my life now, while good, just isn't a replacement for what I imagine the experience would have been if I had had it then.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Wake Up The Dawn And Ask Her Why, A Dreamer Dreams, She Never Dies, Wipe That Tear Away Now From Your Eye

2010-11-09T05:52:00.000-08:00

--"Champagne Supernova", Oasis

SUNRISE ALONG SHORE
by E. Patrick Taroc

Fair heart, another amber Sun
And another day without you
At that hour alighted anew,
At that moment made its coming.
Saddened, this letter I begun
That I might allay this numbing
At having none to share that scene
Except she my mirror can glean.
And so penned these words of woe
That, by chance, my own might wane--
Far too long they within remain
If left tacit beneath my tears.
My sorrow I felt forced to show
To you, who still now quells my fears
By reading these unsteady lines,
And myself, who for you now pines.

I would like to hear you once more,
But an ocean severs us two;
To journey those paths we once knew,
But no common road spans the break.
Yet these phrases shall reach your shore
And their message you shall not mistake:
One shared sunrise I left you then
And one sunrise I'll share again.

(11/27/94) Copyright 1994, 2010 E. Patrick Taroc

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

And Love, Such A Silly Game We Play, Oh, Like A Summer's Day In May, What Is Love, What Is Love? I Just Want It To Be Love

2010-11-04T02:32:00.000-07:00

--"Love", Matt White

The first time I heard Matt White's "Love" was in the film Little Manhattan. As soon as I heard it I knew I liked it. It had this light jazzy sound to it that complimented the movie well. Plus, the lyrics with their focus on how love is this indefinable quality that's filled with joy paralleled my own viewpoint on the subject. I made it a point to track down the title and artist of the track so that I might place in regular rotation on my playlists.

But the biggest selling point of the track was the movie itself. It went so well with the film that I just associated it as the main musical theme of the story even though on the soundtrack it isn't listed as such. I mean--they never exactly play it repeatedly throughout the film and it doesn't provide a key turning point in the plot. It's just a pleasant sounding song that really caught my ear upon my first listen. And, since I really am still enamored of the film, I continue to be enamored of the track it spawned for me. For me this song is part and parcel of the larger film it came from.

who can tell me? I am lost.
I just think that I am strong.

You can thus imagine my surprise when I heard McDonald's recent use of the song to advertise their McRib sandwich. Now I'm a huge proponent of the delectable offering, but it honestly irks me that they have appropriated this particular song for their own devices. Normally I don't mind so much the relative ease with which one song can be used for multiple purposes. I myself am tickled most of the time when I hear a song I haven't heard in a while pop up in a newer advertisement. It's also kind of cool when a song that was made popular from a movie in my youth gets recycled in a newer movie. I always think how it's wonderful that it gets exposure to a younger generation than the one I hail from--kind of like passing the torch of classic ditties down.

But damn it all, "Love" is and always should be Little Manhattan's and Little Manhattan's alone. They are just some songs that are synonymous with one particular place, one particular moment in time, or one particular element of one's life that it's rather sacrilegious to ever think of them linked to something else entirely.

I wouldn't say it spoils the song for me, but it definitely calls undue attention away from where people should first encounter in. Admittedly, it isn't misused entirely in the McDonald's ad, but it definitely lacks the "awwwWWWwww" moment it has when it's first heard in the film. I believe that's what annoys me, that people's first impression of this song is going to be from some food advert instead of in its proper context of as the backdrop to an excellent coming-of-age/love story. For an entire group of people it's going to be a song that's dismissed because of its commercial use instead of being something to be cherished like it is for me.

I don't know--I know it's just a song. But when a song takes on meaning greater than itself the way this song has it's almost like losing a bit of the magic when you know other people are experiencing it the wrong way. For me it's like seeing the ocean at night driving by in a car when you're half-tired instead of in its full glory, standing on the shore under the noontime sun. It's like having a steak cooked by Applebee's instead of a steak cooked at a proper steakhouse. It's taking a plane trip to the city ten miles away from you instead of the other side of the country.

Sure, they're both the same song, but the context in which it's heard is the thin line between making a memory that will last a lifetime and a memory that lasts only minutes.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

I'll Send You My Love On A Wire, Lift You Up, Every Time, Everyone, Ooo, Pulls Away, Ooo, From You

2010-10-25T05:10:00.000-07:00

--"Black Sheep", Metric

I routinely watch The Amazing Race. I don't recall exactly during which season I became a fan, but I've been watching for awhile now. It never fails to amaze me how exciting and entertaining each episode manages to be without the artifice that so many other reality shows possess. Usually by the end of the race I'm rooting for one or two teams based on the strength of their personalities and on the strength of their character.

It's true. I don't like watching the teams that do nothing but scream at one another. While it might make for much more dramatic television it bothers me when teams that do nothing but bicker get ahead in the game. It's no fun for me to contemplate we might live in a world which rewards badgering one's friend, relative, or significant other to motivate them. I tend to feel better when there's one or two teams that seem to get along and still maintain a competitive spirit. I'd like to think this would be the kind of team I would field if I were to participate--which I almost did.

The team I like the best this season is a father and daughter team named Gary and Mallory. He's an entrepreneur and she's Miss Kentucky 2009. Yes, there is a bias because ever since I visited that state it's made an impression on me. However, they really are the most wholesome and just positive team on the race. I mean--if you're going to watch a show about teams of two having to endure physical, intellectual, and sometimes interpersonal challenges you need people who are easy to root for. Mallory--well, Mallory is just a hoot and a half, as Lucy would say. She's so peppy and amazingly endearing to everyone, including the other teams. I don't know if she has an ounce of guile or rancor in her. And Gary is patient and soft-spoken. What amazes me most about him is he's fifty-three years old. Yet he's keeping up with men and women half his age. I'm not sure if that has more to do with his hobby of running triathlons and marathons, or if it's more to due with his persistence. The man just doesn't know when to quit or give up. Separately, I'd root for each one of them, but together they're going to be a force to reckon with this season.

hello again, friend of a friend
----

As aforementioned, I once had aspirations to compete in The Amazing Race. My friend Carly and I went so far as to fill out the applications and send them in (at least one of us did). At the time I was excited at the prospect of being able to roam around the world and be on a show that I truly enjoyed. What I was also looking forward to was the idea of getting to know Carly better because, at the time, we'd hung out a couple of times but had never had that test that all good friendships go through, a road trip. In our case it would have been an extended road trip.

At the time I thought she would have made an excellent partner to go adventuring with. Not only is she young and in relatively decent shape, she also possesses that daredevil attitude that every eventual winner on the show seems to have in spades, which is more than I could say for me. As much as the height challenges and possibly the eating challenges might have slowed me down, together I think we would have made for a decent team.

Where I think we might have run into problems would have been the dynamics between us. While relations between us have always been good, I really don't think of Miss Flib as someone who I would trust immediately with my life. I didn't realize it at the time, but that's what basically is the main criteria for choosing a partner for the race. Physical fitness, mental toughness, and a positive attitude all are factors, but what I see now is that choosing a partner should have been a bigger deal to me than it was. Carly's willingness to entertain the idea was the extent of my interview process and I realize now it shouldn't have been the only factor in making my decision. I have no doubt it would be fun to run a race with her, but I'm not so sure by the end if our friendship would have been the better for it. There's a lot I still don't know about her and a lot she still doesn't know about me, which is why I say that trust issue may have interfered a bit with us running a decent race.

Surprisingly, I don't believe I'd want Breanne to be my partner either. I trust her with my life, sure, but there's a lot to be said about what we're like when we get together in person. I know us well enough to know that the pressure of the situation and the way our personalities mesh would cause problems between us. We really only have two speeds, calm and easy or full throttle at each other's throats. I've spent enough time with her to understand the difference. When we're on vacation with each other, when we're visiting with one another, that's calm and easy. That's nice. When we're competing either with each other or against each other, that's full throttle. As sure as I am that our relationship with one another is rock-solid, I'm also sure that it's not always a pretty picture. Competing with her on the race would not make for a pleasant time as much as it might be more memorable for the pairing.

Honestly, I believe the best pairing at this time would be Toby. She's my closest friend after Breanne and, unlike the Georgia native, she and I have always maintained a much more easy approach with one another.

Thinking about it--our biggest disagreement so far has been this nuisance about her isolating herself from the rest of her friends as she begins her college career. But even then it's not like I've been wanting to throttle her or anything. She doesn't cause my venom to rise nor does she stress me out at times.

The content of one's character is often hard to define. It's a huge assortment of values and philosophies that have to be wrangled out of a person's actions. Often times what one says and does gives little indication to what one believes. That's what misunderstandings tend to occur. Misunderstandings do lead to fights. That's why I believe Miss Frisson and I would make a capable team. I'm just not so sure there would be the stress of disagreement that plagues most teams. We tend to see eye to eye with one another and I know she would back me up as I would back her up. And like Breanne, I trust her implicitly.

We might argue, but it wouldn't be game-changing like an argument between B. and I would be. I'm fairly confident the level of disagreement between us would ever rise to a fevered pitch. The most Marion and could muster would be a dull whisper. Like everyone I've mentioned in this post she has a fairly positive attitude. Her catchphrase is "Don't postpone joy," after all. She has the smarts, the athleticism, and the patience to make a willing competitor. Lastly, like Carly, I think I would relish the opportunity to get to know her better. And I know I would definitely love having a story or two that includes me and her together in them.

Who one picks to be their ideal Amazing Race partner might not be up there in terms of importance as one's ideal spouse or one's ideal best friend. However, I think it can tell you just as much about what qualities you value and the kind of company you choose to keep. In my case, I have the luxury of having a person who matches up well with what I believe the race requires out of you and a person who would make the whole experience, well, amazing.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

And I Don't Want To Change Your Life, But There's A Warm Wind Blowing The Stars Around, And I'd Really Love To See You Tonigh

2010-10-22T04:46:00.001-07:00

--"I'd Really Love To See You Tonight", England Dan

I'm in the midst of a crisis here. I'm debating whether or not to see Paranormal Activity 2 later today. Normally I wouldn't even hesitate going out to see a horror movie because they don't often scare me that much. I've been through all the horror movies relatively unscathed because most of the time the combination of the supernatural effects and overwrought acting are enough to bring my disbelief to the forefront. Most of the time when I leave the theater I leave the movie behind me.

Yet that didn't happen with Paranormal Activity.

That movie scared the fucking crap out of me.

Literally two or three weeks after I saw the movie I was still frightened to go to sleep at night. Of any horror movie that one was designed to push my specific buttons. It didn't have a cavalcade of CGI effects to distinguish it as a movie. It didn't have people who seemed to be reading from a script. Most importantly, it dealt with what happens to you while you were asleep. If there's one subject matter that unnerves me it's the idea that anyone or anything can disturb you while you are sleeping. That's a huge fear of mine, being attacked in my sleep. Paranormal Activity is just scene after scene of a couple being severely attacked in the middle of the night.

hello, yeah, it's been awhile
not much, how 'bout you?

I'm not like Lucy. I can't hear or watch a ghost story and remain unaffected. As much as I love to hear them, if it's told well there will be repercussions for me.

That's where my conundrum comes in. Just as at St. Rita's when I would check out Strangely Enough, a collection of possibly the best "true" American ghost stories ever written, and its sequel, The Strangest People in the World, I do enjoy being scared. Reading all sorts of ghost stories and supernatural tales is a hobby that Breanne and I do share. I just can't stay away even though I know it's going to bite me in the end. I'm just like those kids whose parents tell them not to watch anything scary before bed because it will keep them up all night. I have both an attraction and a fear of those certain kinds of stories.

I know what's going to happen. I will have to go through another couple of weeks of being afraid to sleep in my own bed. I'm going to be calling all my close friends to talk to me until I get drowsy. I'm going to sleep more often with the night light on. And for what? Just so I can see if the sequel lives up to the original? I don't know if that's a good enough reason to put myself through such hell.

And yet despite my best efforts not to give into temptations, I know myself too. Somehow, some way, I'm going to convince myself that it won't be so bad this time since I know what to expect. I'm going to talk myself into being brave for those few hours and then have it all shatter when I get home.

Sigh. Tonight's going to suck. I just know it. LOL

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Oh, Atlanta, I Hear You Calling, I'm Coming Back To You One Fine Day, No Need To Worry, There Ain't No Hurry, Cause I'm On My Way Back To Georgia

2010-10-18T02:32:00.000-07:00

--"Oh Atlanta", Bad Company

The first time I tell anyone my milkshake story it tends to be met with disbelief. Most people assume that the milkshake I was privy to near Monticello was good, but certainly wasn't the best milkshake ever made as I claim it to be. They relegate my assertion to a mixture of fond recollection and my general sense of dramatic exaggeration. No matter my protests I can never fully convince them that my evaluation was and still is a fair assertion of my critical faculties.

While it might be true that in most instances I remain the least unbiased individual on the planet, in many instances that is exactly what I am. Milkshakes, like a great many subject, is a matter of taste so a certain bias does creep into any evaluation of them. However, I am fairly confident that had any of my harshest critics sampled the aforementioned example they would have tasted the unmatched quality like I did that day back in April of '86. Nostalgia does not enter any long-held conviction I still possess regarding my memory on the subject matter nor does my flair for fondness for creative license. That milkshake stands on its own, heads and tails above any other milkshake which has been made before or after it.

When one stops to contemplate it when you critique anything; be it films, food, or novels, there must be examples which stand on either end of the quality spectrum. There always has to be something which exemplifies a particular matter at its best and something which exemplifies something at its worst. Granted, applying the moniker "best ever" or "worst ever" does invite incredulity on the part of spectators, but for everything that is good there has to be everything is evil. For everything that is topnotch there has to be something beneath contempt.

I just happened to find the best example of a milkshake ever poured, plain and simple.

----

That brings me around to the topic of Atlanta. Like that milkshake, it too is something I haven't experienced firsthand in many years. Indeed, coming up this December it will have been sixteen years since I first visited and in April fifteen years since I last visited. And yet I still think of Atlanta as being one of the most charming cities I've ever been to. I'm well aware that every city I've been to in the last twenty years since I started seriously traveling have had their own charms and their own unique selling points. But there's something about the certain Southern city that clinches it for me as being the best example of what a city in that part of the country is supposed to be like. I don't know if it's the people, the history, the architecture, or the general mood of the area, but I still ache to go back one day when I get the whole "agreement" business behind me.

True, part of my affection for the city has to do with the company I kept while I was visiting, but even taking Lucy out of the equation I think Atlanta would remain my top choice for Southern cities one must visit at least once in one's lifetime. I mean--I like Louisville and all. And the gods know I'll never forget my time in the environs of Wheeling, but those places and all the other examples of Southern cities I've been to don't hold a candle to the gem of Georgia. It's like comparing apples (peaches?) and oranges. There are cities in the South and then there's a true Southern city.

That's what Atlanta is to me, a true Southern city.

same old place
it's the same old city
what can I do?
i'm falling in love

Yes, I do possess a bit of nostalgia for it because my visits there did take place during a happier time in my life. And, yes, I could be overblowing how beautiful and, well, majestic everything is there. Every city has its darker corners and every city has its less than photographable areas. Atlanta is no different. I'm not suggesting that every part of Atlanta means as much to me as every other part. What I am suggesting is that the city as a whole means something to me. It means something to me getting a bit of barbecue at one of the places where barbecuing was perfected. It means something to me to be walking down the streets of one of the oldest cities in one of the oldest cities in the United States. It means something to me being around a people who are so polite, helpful, and just plain friendly when put in comparison to the rest of the country. It means something to me to look up at buildings that hold their gravity and memories in every cracked veneer. It means something to me to say I was in one of the most exceptional cities I have ever visited.

I haven't visited every major city in the U.S., though I'm trying to. I haven't even contemplated how much more beauty there is out in the rest of the world. All I can place Atlanta in comparison to are the cities I've already seen. As much as Boston remains my favorite city and where I feel most at home in, Atlanta will always rank right up there in terms of cities I consider eventful. Boston might be old, but I don't consider it to be as graceful, as majestic, as breathtaking as Atlanta. Boston is like the hometown that feels comfortable and safe and inviting, while Atlanta is the City--full of history and spectacle and definition. It's much the same for every other city. They all have their selling points, but Atlanta by virtue of having only seen it the two times holds the key to my heart as being a paradise still not fully explored.

And maybe just like the milkshake it holds so much hope for me because I keep anticipating the day when she and I will be reunited once more.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Sometimes You Make Me Feel Like I'm Living At The Edge Of The World, Like I'm Living At The Edge Of The World, "It's Just The Way I Smile," You Said

2010-10-14T16:06:00.000-07:00

--"Plainsong", The Cure

Most people don't have a favorite dinosaur. Hell, most people haven't given enough thought to even have a few contenders for that title. I, however, once upon a time gave it serious thought.

When I was about eight or nine my brother used to have small plastic dinosaur toys that were similar in their plastic feel and construction to toy army men. They had all the usual suspects--the stegosaurus, the pterodactyl, and, of course, the tyrannosaurus rex. Yet my favorite of the bunch was always the lowly triceratops. It may have been reading that triceratops were well capable of taking down a tyrannosaurus that led me to choose them, but even before reading that bit of information I knew that they were the dinosaur for me.

and then you smiled for a second

That's the thing with having favorites. It doesn't have to have any rhyme or reason for me. I'll often pick something on a whim and come back later with reasons why I took a liking to them. I've been doing it all my life. Be it dinosaurs or bands or food--there are just times where I don't want to mull over a decision for hours and pick something because it's the first thing that catches my eye.

However, eight times out of ten they end up sticking around as my favorite precisely because I can find reasons to back up my decision. Yes, I know it's a backwards process, but it resembles a lot my creative process. Usually I find the gloss first--the title in the case of my writing, or what a thing looks or sounds like in other cases--then, after I've had some time to research, I get down to the meat and potatoes of the thing. I don't know if it's because I have an innate eye for spotting something I'll like from far away or if it's simply a case of impulsively becoming smitten with something only to be forced to defend my choices later on. It's probably a bit of both.

All I know is that I'm a fan of anything that can make me smile, even if there is no sound reason for me to like it all. I believe in first impressions. And I especially believe in first impressions that later turn out for the best... mostly because it makes me look wise all along. LOL

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

You'll Find Out Just Who Is Your Friend, Don't Be Sad, I Know You Will, But Don't Give Up Until, True Love Finds You In The End

2010-10-12T02:47:00.000-07:00

--"True Love Will Find You In The End", Mates of State

I know it's the last thing you expected to see here, but just because we're not talking right now doesn't mean I would forget. I mean--I most of all should know that if a friendship is real then you've got to keep the big picture in mind. Momentary setbacks aren't what's important. It's the idea that two people, when they build something real, it should be built to last a lifetime. It should have reasons why it can't be torn asunder; it should have reasons why it needs to be fought for.

And, frankly, I can think of eighteen reasons why this, whatever this is, is something I think is worth fighting for:

1. You reintroduced poetry into my life.

2. We shared a near-death experience together.

3. A person is defined by the company he keeps and it would say a lot about me if I were to lose you as a friend.

4. I see a lot of what I was in what you are now.

5. I feel like we've only just begun.

6. Hearing the word, "gosh," just isn't going to sound the same coming from anyone else.

7. Your family has already made me feel so welcome, it would be a shame to lose them too.

8. You're one of the best motivators I've ever met.

9. You're far more talented than I am and I'm a person that likes to be surrounded by talent.

10. I'm really dying to know what happened to Ilsa now that you're at university.

11. I would miss those freckles.

12. I'd rather not have my last memory of you be a bitter one.

13. We've known each other too long for it to have been a fluke.

14. I refuse to believe that I'm that easy to get rid of.

15. You gave me hope when I was feeling like so much of it was wasting away within me.

16. Nobody can replace your smile.

17. You never made me feel out of place and I never made you feel like the ugly one.

18. You're eighteen years old on the outside, but have about eight hundred years of wisdom and insight on the inside. That's a rare find.

Happy birthday, Marion...

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

And I'm Not My Perspective, Or The Lies I'll Tell You Every Time

2010-10-07T03:43:00.000-07:00

--"Absence of God", Rilo Kiley

I was reading earlier today about how Cyndi Lauper did not play "(Goonies R) Good Enough" in concert for almost twenty years. Now the article I was reading didn't get into specifics, but I have a skulking suspicion that it had something to do with her being embarrassed of a song she wrote and performed in her youth. I imagine that she didn't want to be recognized for an effort that, frankly, no longer defined her. I also imagine that it took the two decades for her to acclimate herself to the idea that that particular song was and still is part of who she is as an artist.

It's the same with a lot of us. We earn these reputations for certain traits in our character at a young age. These reputations then follow us around for a good number of years regardless of whether the actual traits themselves persist. For instance, in elementary school people saw me as the strange kid in class, which more or less is a reputation that has dogged me for a good number of years. Now I'm not doubting the validity of such a claim--admittedly, I do have my weird tendencies--but it is a moniker I have never quite been able to shake. Another appellation which has been applied to me is that I only am attracted to young Caucasian girls--most time with the emphasis being on the young part. That too is a legend that I've spent a good deal of time and energy trying to downplay.

It's not shame which prompts my efforts to keep these labels from being spread around. I would have to say that in both cases the labels were apt. However, I would have to further say that they were more true once upon a time than they are now--which is the part that never quite gets added on.

And so, just like Miss Lauper, I just find it easier to not mention either nuances of my character as being real. Upon first meeting, it's not like I'm going to say that I'm the weird guy who has only ever dated young women in their teens, but that would be true. It's just not the image I want people to portray. Most of the time I like people to get to know my other facets before I trot out those deeper parts of me that more often than not have lead to arguments and misunderstandings.

I mean--yes, eventually if I get to know a person enough I tend to let those proclivities come out into the open, but it's not everyone I feel who gets to see me in my entirety. The labels I used to suffer through all the way through high school are ones I tend to like to put behind me because they're not the labels I believe which best define me at this point. They're not the bulletin points I would hit if someone were to ask for a summary of me.

They can't be. What they are are qualities that were once central to my viewpoint once upon a time. But over time their place in my universe got usurped by qualities which became much more prioritized and valued. In the end, who I am can never be entirely summed up by naming all the things I used to be.

Everything that people could say about me--whether it be my obsession with Avonlea to the fact I'm still friends with people almost half my age--are just songs in my catalog. Hearing one isn't going to give you a complete idea of me. It's only when you listen to the entire history of what I've produced that you begin to hear exactly what my "sound" is. And while I won't deny that there are songs I'm prouder of than most, I will say that there isn't a song among the bunch that I would get rid of if I could. Personally, I like who I am at this point. That wouldn't be possible if I attempted to gloss over the more unfavorable songs in my repertoire.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Keep With Me Forward All Through The Night, And Once We Start The Meter Clicks, And It Goes Running Through All The Night

2010-10-06T04:09:00.000-07:00

--"All Through The Night", Cyndi Lauper

I never got read bedtime stories as a kid. At least I don't remember the practice being enforced in my parents' household. I think our parents taught my brother and I to read at an early age expressly for the reason of being able to entertain ourselves with books. Consequently, I never got to live through that whole experience of being comforted at night by one's parents patiently waiting by the bedside until I fell asleep.

I've always thought that had a lot to do with my being a horrible insomniac. Whenever I got scared late at night (usually of ghosts) I never felt comfortable running to them to come help me. Somewhere in the back of my mind that my concerns wouldn't be taken seriously. At that point I would have two choices--try to tough it out in bed, waiting for whatever malevolent creature was out there in the wilds of the hallway to come get me, or stay up to watch television. As you can tell by somewhat voracious viewing appetite I usually chose the latter option.

Maybe it would have been different if I had had someone who I thought was willing to stay up with me. Maybe I wouldn't have felt so alone on the other side of midnight if I knew somebody who would've broken their slumber to comfort me. But I didn't.

Yet I never forgot the experience of being scared and on your own when the whole world seemed to be dead to you. I don't think it's a feeling I'll ever forget (even as I am writing this at 3:28 in the morning). And because of that I was in the rarified position to be there for someone in a way that someone was never there for me.

As she's written about countless times, Breanne used to have a problem with running away from home a good deal of the time. I'm not here to expound upon the reasons why since those are articles best left to her to articulate. I can, however, speak about the practice's effect upon me. Being someone I deeply care about, even from early on into our friendship, it usually fell to me to try and talk her back home. In those instances where she would not answer her folks' pleas to return back to the household, I was practically the only one whose phone calls she would actually take. And I know I was the only one she would regularly call of her own volition when she would go on these jaunts through the city.

You could say it made me that voice in the night for her. She wouldn't have admitted it at the time but I think she called me precisely because she was scared of being alone. She used to tell me that she was calling because she needed somebody to talk her into going back home, but more often than not that's precisely what she would end up not doing. We'd talk for an hour or two, she'd make her way to her friend's house or a relative's house (or sometimes not). The only criteria that would remain the same would be the fact that she would not get off the phone with me until she felt safe.

I used to believe that it was a little too much responsibility for someone to take on in the name of friendship. After all, I had never encountered anyone else whose duties as a best friend included making sure that their friend had a warm place to sleep that night and access to a hot meal the next morning. I had never run across anyone else who had to fret their friend being startled by phantoms of misbegotten rapists, murderers, and other such criminals every time he encountered a prolonged moment of silence in the conversation. I used to think it was too big of a job for one person to handle. If she died, if she was hurt, if she was never found again--it would be my fault. I would receive the lion's share of the blame.

I used to tell her and her parents that her leaving home was their affair. I told them that I didn't want to be their middle man. At least in the beginning that's what I told them.

Then one day not long after I had been looking after Breanne for a few months it hit me. This isn't what one friend does for another usually. It's far too much of a burden for a common, ordinary friend. What the task resembled and what I began to think of it as was what an older brother does for his sister. He covers his sister even while he's still there watching over her to make sure she doesn't get into any serious trouble. He's the one who stays up on the phone for her because she feels like he's the only one who "gets" her. He's the one who is able to reassure the parents that, although she doesn't feel comfortable coming back just yet, he's making sure that that's the decision she'll eventually arrive at.

Most importantly, it falls to somebody who more resembles a brother to be there when she just needs a voice on the other end of the line to reassure her that she's not alone. Because it doesn't matter whether or not he thinks she's being foolhardy and reckless with her life. He can't physically be there to rein her in. What he can do is be the reassurance she needs to stay sharp while she is out on the street. What he can do is not let her fall into despair like he did when he was young. Perhaps he never actually read her stories while she was walking through the neighborhood at eleven, twelve, or much later at night, but he did tell her stories of what he did that day. He did make up stupid jokes about what a wicked brat she was. And, of course, he sang to her every request for a song she ever made of him.

It was the least I could do. Especially after I started understanding what my updated role was, I finally could see that more than recriminations, more than passing the responsibility on, and more than I-told-you-so's, Breanne just needed to feel like someone was on her side. She needed to feel like somebody understood why she was angry and hopeless and confused. And rather than brush aside her concerns like they didn't matter, she merely needed someone to stay up with her until she was ready to go to sleep, once she had that feeling of safety again.

I stopped minding the late-night phone calls. All of a sudden it became more worrisome on those nights when her parents would call me worried and she didn't call. It stopped being a chore I wasn't sure I was up to undertaking to a responsibility that I bore with a certain sense of urgency. It's one thing to feel you have a friend who you're constantly bailing out and it's another thing entirely to feel like you have a sibling you're worried about. At that point I didn't have a choice, I only had an unbreakable link to somebody for the first time in my life.

After that, that's when I started that whole, "Good night, Breannie mine, with your eyes so bright, tears so silvery, and my kisses still wet on your cheek," thing because that's just the kind of thing that a brother would say to his younger sister. And it became our little signal that everything was right between us.

Indeed, that's a good deal of what she still is to me, the younger sister I never had. And to this day I still end of the majority of my phone calls to her in the same manner... no matter what time of the day it is. She'll always have me to be the person who is always with her when she's feeling lost and alone.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

I Can't Wait To Say All The Things You Can't See, All The Things That Make You Better, 'Cause I Can Say All The Things You Can't See

2010-09-30T16:21:00.000-07:00

--"Like U Crazy", Mates of State

Another new week, another Nick Hornby novel to read. This time it's a novel called How To Be Good. This time it's a book centering on what one does when you have to rethink a decision one makes, especially when it comes to sizing another person up. Or, more specifically, according to Wikipedia:

It centers on characters Katie Carr, a doctor, and her husband, David Grant. Events take a turn when David stops being "The Angriest Man In Holloway" and begins to be "good" with the help of his spiritual healer, DJ GoodNews.

Suddenly, Kate's decision to get a divorce seems ill-conceived in light of her husband's conversion. All the reasons she had to loathe the man seemingly disappear overnight. Consequently, she appears to be malicious for holding onto her stance that the marriage still isn't worth saving. That's the moral dilemma of the book. Is it okay to rethink a decision that's taken years to arrive at when the circumstances change in an instant? And is even such an immediate change possible, or is it more likely an aberration that will soon correct itself?

As aforementioned, I tend to make up my mind on people rather quickly. That's why I could identify with Kate's struggle. It's not easy seeing people in a different light after forming a rock-solid opinion about them. It's in my nature to label people a certain way, good or bad. And it often takes an act of the gods to forsake this original opinion. I too tend to not believe in instant conversions. I too tend to believe that anyone can be on their best behavior for a little while only to settle back into the norm of their character, whatever that is.

People are who they are. With some people it doesn't take long to size them up.

----

I once went out with this girl from Santa Monica in 1997. I remember thinking online how eloquent she was and how much I was looking forward to meeting her. We met up at the Cheesecake Factory near Santa Monica--I believe it was technically closer to Westwood. We ate. We talked for a couple of hours. All in all, she seemed a very pleasant person.

Later she took me back to the condo she was housesitting for/caretaker of. She was kind of a live-in caretaker for a severely retarded teenager. Basically, while she was home (and not in school) she was in charge of feeding, changing, bathing, &c... this kid who couldn't do it for himself. At first it was awkward for me to sit there and watch her do her job. I don't know--I've just never been good with situations where I feel uncomfortable just being a witness. And watching her work just made me realize that I could never do anything remotely close to her job. I would have neither the patience nor the fortitude to be able to do those kind of tasks day in and day out.

What it did, though, was see the girl I was with in a new light. She had that patience. She had that fortitude. She had enough strength in her character to do that kind of job without complaining one bit about the difficulty or the stress it might have been putting on her. You could say that seeing her for those twenty or thirty minutes changed entirely how I saw her. She went from being a decent date to a date that was actually memorable.

Eventually after the twenty or thirty minutes I was there, the kid she was taking care of grew agitated at my presence. She offered to let me go as it would take another hour or two to calm him down. She didn't want me to be bored just sitting there, she said. While I wasn't in any rush to get home I conceded her point.

I left, agreeing that we should definitely meet-up again sometime soon.

Thus, I wasn't surprised when she called me two days later, asking if we could meet-up again. I wholeheartedly jumped at the chance. I mean--I wasn't exactly dying for a date, but it isn't very often that I met people I got along with as well as her. I went driving off with the impression that something special was going to happen that night. Little did I know that would be the last time I would ever see her.

Now, I've been accused of being a little impetuous myself. I've driven ninety miles just to have a fifteen minute fight in person with somebody before. I've flown out to Philadelphia for a week just to meet up with somebody for a day. I've bought things, destroyed things, and stolen things in the heat of the moment. It isn't without merit to say that I get when people are being impulsive. I completely know where people are coming from when they are acting out their passions. Of anyone I know I have the most understanding when people get emotional over something because I've let my emotions get the better of me time and time again.

However, there's a thin line between getting worked about something and just plain going overboard. While I may not be the best judge of what constitutes going over this line, there are some instances that are irreproachably over this line that it defies common sense when certain individuals cannot see for themselves when they've crossed it. Going into that date that night was one of those instances.

When I arrived at the agreed upon meeting place I found it a medium-sized two-bedroom apartment a couple of blocks from the house she was employed at. In the interim between our first date and that night she had asked her friend if she could borrow her apartment for the night. It made sense. There really wasn't any privacy back at the house since, firstly, the boy's parents were home at that time and, secondly, there was no telling when another one of his emergencies might take place. Moving the location to a more private setting seemed like a good idea to me at the time as well.

It was only when I looked closer at the surroundings that my spider senses started tingling. Waiting for me on the kitchen table were all my favorites. I'm not talking about some of my favorites. This girl had gone to the trouble of tracking down and buying everything I'd ever mentioned I liked. From my favorite soft drink (Mountain Dew) to favorite candy (Reese's Peanut Butter Cups), from my favorite sub (Seafood & Crab) to my favorite movie (The Wizard)--She had basically put together an undeniable shrine to the legacy of me. She had meant it as a pleasant surprise engineered to be deeply sweet and, I suppose, kind of romantic.

All I remember, though, was that it scared the crap out of me.

I mean--I'd known this girl all of three days. Yes, I'd told her that I liked everything that was waiting for me on the table. But, no, that doesn't give her my permission to ambush me with it all the second time we met up. Maybe if she had had Mountain Dew and the Peanut Butter Cups I might not have been so put off. Yet taken in conjunction with the movie, the sandwich, the CD, the muffins (chocolate chip), the soup (clam chowder), and the dessert (Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookie Dough Cheesecake)--it seemed truly obsessive to me. I had heard about people like her. I'd even been accused of being in the same stalker league as her. But until you're staring face-to-face with true craziness you really have nothing to compare it to.

In that instant I formed an immediate and eternal opinion of her. Right or wrong, with one night's worth of effort she severed any emotional connection I might have had for her.

I didn't leave right away. I gave her some time to explain her behavior all away. I waited for her to tell me it was some kind of elaborate joke, that she was only pretending to be that far over on the crazy school. Yet all she did was continue to strengthen my suspicions of her. First, she started talking about how I was the first guy she had dated in almost two years and how great we were getting along. That wasn't so bad. What was bad was how she invited me to go meet her family the next week. That was kind of moving fast, but still in the realm of plain eagerness and not stalker-type behavior. Then she added that her family lived in New York and that she would be willing to pay for me to fly with her over there. That's the kind of crazy talk that I just wasn't prepared for. And if that wasn't bad enough, she then started asking me how soon she could the rest of my family.

In all my life I've never gone out with another girl who wanted to meet my family before two months of knowing me. Wanting to meet my family after two dates is just unheard of. And what's more she would not let the issue go. In the four or five hours I stayed that night she brought up the issue at least six times. Sure, they were introduced in various ways, but there was no disguising that this girl was in a hurry to progress the relationship faster than it had any right to be.

She basically scared me off from wanting to have anything to do with her after that night.

I went to work the next day entirely convinced that I would not be seeing her any more. Sure enough, she left a message on my answering machine that we should meet up the upcoming weekend. Instead of calling her back from work like I had been doing, I decided that I would wait the four or five hours until I arrived back at my house again. That was a mistake on my part. Instead of waiting for me to call her back, she proceeded to leave a total of twenty-two messages on my answering machine in those four or five hours. They ranged from sentiments like she was thinking of me, to her thinking about our trip to New York, to asking about meeting my family again, to finally genuine sadness that I wasn't calling her back right away.

I called her back very upset. I told her that if she had any hope of us going out again she would have to wait for me to call her back. The combination of the last few days, of starting off with such high hopes for her and being so totally let down had just taken their toll on me. I admit, I wasn't very nice to her during that conversation. I'm sure I dropped some F-bombs liberally throughout the conversation. I didn't care. I had had enough of her. At the very end of the conversation, in fact, I believe I told her not to hold her breath for me to even call her ever again.

And for the next three years I proceeded to avoid Santa Monica and its environs on the off-chance that I would bump into her. I didn't need that kind of aggravation. Also, I was just deathly afraid what she was capable of if her disappointment and sadness over me ever turned to thoughts of vengeance and retribution.

----

It's taken me a long time to ascertain the humor in the situation. At the time it happened I was annoyed more than anything else. To me it didn't seem fair that I could be so wrong about a person. I think a part of me was just upset that my initial impression of her had been so incorrect. Up until that point I thought I had good instincts about people I chose to go after. After all, I had been right with Breanne and I had been right with Tara. It just didn't occur to me that everyone I would go out with wouldn't turn out to be an immediate success. I thought, at the very least, it would take months and months of getting to know someone for the inconsistencies between our personalities to shine through.

Now that I look at it, though, that girl might have been crazy and I might not have ever seen her again after that night, but I think I could have been a little more gracious with her. While it's true that one's personality doesn't ever change entirely, that isn't her fault either. She is who she is. I shouldn't have taken out my annoyance with the situation out on her. I'm sure if she could have scaled back her willingness to please she would have, if only not to scare me off.

Yes, I was entirely right about the content of her character being somewhat incompatible with mine, but just because you can see a person's true colors doesn't mean you always know the right course of action. I'm still learning everyday to take those initial impressions I receive about people and to form an appropriate response.

Also, I think I've learned more about what it's like just to want to make another person happy. While I might not ever go to the lengths she went to, I believe I have more empathy for her plight. It's not easy to want something or someone so much you're willing to make these grand gestures. You can never be quite sure if the gestures you make will be completely welcomed until after you've made them. Her only problem wasn't the gesture itself. Her problem was that she made the gesture before she had gotten a complete opportunity to see for herself how I would react.

If there's anything I've gotten to know over the years is that it takes years to feel comfortable with someone to make a grand gesture. More importantly, it takes years to make someone comfortable with you for them to be willing to take a grand gesture for what it is, an undeniable expression of your love for them.

It's not something you can build up to in a day (or three days, as the case may be). And, much like being good, it's not something you can fake your way through.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

I Don't Believe In Anything So You May As Well Forget About Me, It's Time You Took It Upon Yourself To Go Join The Other Team, Forget About Me

2010-09-28T11:57:00.000-07:00

--"Let's Go Bowling", Camera Obscura

It's not often I try new foods. I've pretty much been set in my ways for a couple of decades now. It isn't that I'm not willing to experiment with the tastes and foods I already know--I'm still up for that next cut of steak, that new style of St. Louis Ribs, and another take on trout. It's just that I've tried most foods by now and I don't plan on adding any more to what I eat.

Thus, it was surprising that I ate an entire plate of mushrooms which had come with my Mongolian Beef last Friday. Up until then I had refused to eat mushrooms altogether. I don't know--somewhere along the line I had tried mushrooms on pizza I believe. After that I just had it in my head that I didn't like the stuff. It didn't matter that I'd never tried it prepared any other way. It didn't matter that dried-up mushroom isn't exactly the best indicator of all the flavor that it has to offer. All that mattered was that I had given it its one opportunity and it had blown it.

Honestly, if I really thought about it I'd have to say my aversion to mushrooms had more to do with the rule than the actuality. You see when I form an opinion I believe is flimsy I often invent a humorous rule to validate it to others. I don't like eating fries with ketchup? Why, that becomes I don't eat foods that rhyme together. I don't like eating most vegetables. Why, that becomes everyone who ate vegetables one hundred fifty years ago is dead now. Therefore, if you eat vegetables you will die. And, as aforementioned, I never much cared for mushrooms. To that I invented the belief that mushrooms killed the unicorns and, as well, if you eat mushrooms you would surely perish.

With me I believe if I reiterate something enough times I began to believe it myself. I mean--I know unicorns aren't real, but a small part of my mind just from hearing it repeated so much must have believed my rule about not eating mushrooms. I don't know how else to explain never having tried it again after that one early incident for almost thirty years.

Mushrooms are delicious. Hmmm. Well, at least those mushrooms I had on Friday were. For whatever reason I saw through the lunacy of not trying something new simply because I had mandated some silly rule about it. It just occurred to me that mushrooms were something I had made my mind up early on and never gone back to update my opinion. I have a real weakness for that kind of mentality I'm afraid. I form a first opinion about a great many things and never stay around to form a second or third opinion.

It makes me wonder what else I've missed out on for the sake of sticking with my gut instincts and, of course, for putting entirely too much stock in the code of rules I've crafted seemingly out of thin air. Deciding what I believe in should be a lifelong process and not one that happens in an instance.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Shake Your Love, I Just Can't Shake Your Love

2010-09-22T03:51:00.000-07:00

--"Shake Your Love", Debbie Gibson

Sometimes I think Brandy had the right idea--fall in love young then have one of you die soon after. I know it's a horrible idea to even contemplate, but part of me believes any other trajectory is doomed to failure. In fact, it's been an idea which has been percolating in my head for some years now. Even as far back as 2004 when I first began writing The Carisa Meridian I had the main character ruminating on whether it was better to pine for a girl he knew all of six months or to grow up with her and come to find out their lives were progressing in different directions? Time just kills anything pure and noble about love--that's what I believe sometimes.

Think about it. On one hand you have my friend Brandy, who loved and lost at an early age. She gets an inordinate amount of sympathy for having somebody in her life she cared about deeply. More to the point, she receives praise for keeping the torch burning for someone who's never coming back again. Hell, you can include me among that number. I mean--that's the definition of true love for some; falling in love with somebody at first sight, losing that somebody, and then swearing off loving anybody else. That's true love in its purest form. That fits the bill of any definition of romantic love. People don't get down on her (often) for still pining away for Joshua; it's loyalty at its most reverent.

Yet when I relate to people that I've basically fallen for someone who can and never love me back for some ten years now, all I hear is that I should move on. It reminds me of that one poem I wrote long ago:

That I should move on they say
As if I loved her merely then
But not now and never again.

The only conclusion I can draw is that I'm looked down upon for the duration of my relationship. Brandy and Joshua, because theirs was a brief period filled with all the highs of falling in love and finding each other's best characteristics, cannot be assaulted because all one ever hears is how wonderful their time together was. Also, by its brevity, their relationship is unassailable because no one is willing to besmirch a love cut short too soon. But they possess no such qualms about a relationship that, because of its length, has seen the trials and tribulations of the rockiest of journeys. Every ship looks pristine a few miles from port, but if you take a look at a ship that has actually been through the roughest of storms it's going to show some wear.

And when that wear inevitably leads to that ship no longer being considered seaworthy, I guess people are well in their rights to call the ship a blemish on the horizon.

I beg to differ though. While I would never dare place what I've been through as being more characteristic of what real love is compared to Brandy, I believe it has its place among valid accounts of what knowing true passion for someone is. I think there is something noble about getting to know someone faults and all without forsaking them. And while we might not be together in the strictest sense of the word, I'd be upset to hear if anyone said I loved her any less simply because we didn't end up getting married or sharing a house together.

We had our time in the sun just like Brandy did and, similar to her as well, the fortunes of fate intervened to put an end to the time. It doesn't mean my heart doesn't ache just as much for those first few years. It doesn't mean my heart doesn't still believe she was the best thing to have ever brightened it up once upon a time. It doesn't mean my heart doesn't still long for her as much as it ever did.

And I know she still loves me to a large degree even though I can't hear it everyday like I used to... just like Brandy knows the same about Joshua.

It's not my fault that the person I gave my heart to ended up living long enough to break it. In the end it doesn't matter whether you spend two years or fifty years with somebody you love. It doesn't matter if you can hear them say they love you back. Hell, it really doesn't matter if you believe they love you less than you love them. All that matters is you love somebody, anybody will all your heart for as long as you can in whatever way you can. Life should be about the love you give and not about the love you get in return.

Brandy still believes in that idea and I'm proud to say so do I.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Just Because They Seem To Understand The Way You Feel, It Doesn't Mean That They Feel The Same Way Too

2010-09-21T02:49:00.000-07:00

--"Heavenly Nobodies (live)", Lush

speaking of music...

I've recently begun reading Nick Hornby's newest work, Juliet, Naked. I've read most of his other novels meaning it was pretty much a no-brainer that I would be picking this particular novel up. So far it hasn't disappointed.

Juliet, Naked, according to Wikipedia:

is a novel by the British author Nick Hornby, released on 29 September 2009 by Riverhead Books. It tells the story of Annie, the long-suffering girlfriend of obsessed music fan Duncan, and the object of his obsession, fictional reclusive singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe. The plot revolves around the release of Juliet, Naked, the first new Tucker Crowe release in over two decades.

But more than that it's a gentle ribbing and exultation of the way music and musicians creep into our lives. You see, Duncan isn't just obsessed with Tucker Crowe; Duncan is fanatical about Tucker. The way he pores over the minutiae of Tucker's albums just about mirrors how every one of has looked to a particular song, a particular album, or maybe a particular musician for guidance. I mean--Providence knows I've been guilty of instilling meaning into songs that probably were accidental at best. One only has to look at my previous post to see that I imbue a good deal of significance in the soundtrack of my life. It's perfectly natural to want to believe that a song, as with any work of art, is speaking to you about your life. That's kind of the purpose of art.

Where the novel excels is showing how some of us take this idolatry too far. When certain people start losing the ability to see the significance elsewhere and start believing that the only messages that matter come from music, that's when the problem begins. Some of the best scenes in the book are where Duncan or others go through these great upheavals of fortune without so much losing sleep and yet practically throw themselves off cliffs when the hear the album in question, Juliet, Naked. It's a decent commentary about how the critic in all of us sometimes is stronger than the artist in all of us. It's far easier to react to somebody else's contribution to the world than to contribute something ourselves.

take no heroes, it's no good
they don't stand up to you
just take the bits you think that you can use

I know I'm a critic at heart. I like to review restaurants on Yelp! I like to review music, movies, and television shows here. A lot of the writing I do is in response to something else I've seen or heard. My process dictates that I glean as much truth as I can from the world of entertainment. Far more than the news or daily events in my life, I gain my insights from art. From these insights I post my own truths, I suppose. It's been the process I've worked by for as long as I can remember.

And in the course of growing to appreciate music and film and television, I freely admit that I've grown attached to certain entertainers. I too could be accused of a little hero worship by wanting to believe that certain singers or certain actors hold the answers to questions I've been asking myself for awhile now. My perspective is that I can't be the most intelligent or most intuitive person out there. Because of that, I'd like to believe that certain people who are more open about their ideas and who possess the intelligence to flesh these ideas out can become artists and can manage to share this knowledge with the rest of us. I'd like to believe that there are some among us that have all the answers that can make sense of our lives.

Because the truth is it's easier to believe someone can tell me all the answers in a four-minute ditty than spend the time discovering the answers myself. It's easier for someone to tell me how to do things right or wrong than spend the time absorbing the same knowledge through simple trial and error. It's easier for someone to feed me than cook for myself.

Yet, as the novel suggests, it would seem that there's a danger to getting all your insights from one person. When that one person is inevitably discovered to not have all the knowledge of the universe, there's a danger in believing that everything they've produced is a fraud. We're so hurt at the betrayal that we discount everything that has given us hope before.

But the way I see it, no, it isn't good to believe that an individual, a band, or a particular celebrity has all the answers. No one is that smart or in tune with the way the universe works. However, everybody has some things figured that we might not. Everybody we come across can fill in a little bit more of the puzzle for us. And while we shouldn't worship any man or woman as a god, I firmly believe all of us can learn a thing or two from everyone else. As long as we can keep doing that, learning as we meet and get to know people, I don't think we will be in any danger of growing dependent on someone else to guide us completely.

We can all be guides to everyone else, just as we can all be guided by everyone else. No one person knows everything, but between us all I don't think there isn't anything we can't come to understand or know.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

You Could Be My Silver Springs, Blue-Green Colors Flashing, I Would Be Your Only Dream, Your Shining Autumn, Ocean Crashing

2010-09-17T02:35:00.000-07:00

--"Silver Springs (cover)", Stacy Dupree

Recently Janet from The Art of Getting By sent me a note through Facebook on her "15 or More Important Albums". These weren't her favorite albums--just the ones she felt a strong connection to or the ones for which she has deeply attached memories.

Normally I don't involve myself in memes or lists one is meant to pass along, but when it comes to music putting a list together like that I thought would be a challenging exercise. I mean--much of my history like many people out there comes with a soundtrack attached. For me the only problem would be how to narrow it down to fifteen or so albums and coming up with reasons why these particular albums resonated with me.

Some of these picks are obvious, some not so obvious, but in their own different ways each one hold a piece of my history.

----

1. Legend - Bob Marley & The Wailers This is the one album I closely associate with DeAnn. It especially brings out memories of those three years when we were together as a couple and living out in Rancho Cucamonga and Fontana. I still can't listen to "No Woman, No Cry" without thinking of DeAnn.

2. Songs of Innocence and Experience - The Blake Babies True story--I bought this album for ninety-eight cents at the local Blockbuster Music before they closed down. Apparently, they had mispriced this album and were forced to sell it to me for the sticker price. I still consider the best album I've ever bought for under a dollar. It was the first album I could remember where I loved and not just liked every track. Every track speaks to me about different things and each track has a whole different sound than the previous one. If there's one album that encompasses the gamut of human emotion, this is it.

Plus, "Rain" is still one of my favorite tracks by anyone. If I ever make a movie "Rain" will be the track that I open it with, that's a promise.

3. Take-Offs & Landings - Rilo Kiley My favorite album by my all-time favorite band--how could it not be on the list? It wasn't the first Rilo Kiley album I ever bought and it certainly wasn't the first Rilo Kiley album I ever liked, but it's still my favorite. Great lyrics, great musicianship, and the delight of discovering a kick-ass band just coming into their own.

It was because of this album I started going to Rilo Kiley concerts. Without that the last six years would have turned out vastly different for me. I wouldn't have met all the people I've met because of Rilo Kiley and I would have travelled the country about half as much. Most of the new cities I've visited I went to go see Rilo Kiley and check out their baseball team.

And, yes, "Pictures of Success" is my still my favorite song of all-time.

4. Staring at the Sea - The Cure The first CD I ever bought. The Cure was the band I listened all through high school and I knew that when I bought my first CD player, this would be the album I would be getting first. I still play it every now and again because so many of my high school memories have a Cure song attached to them.

5. Rock Spectacle - Barenaked Ladies Tara's recommendation to me and a band that still holds up till now. "Jane" and "Life, In A Nutshell" are two songs I must have played a thousand times while she and I were together. "Jane" especially is a beautifully written song with lyrics that deeply affect me because they might as well have called that song, "Tara," because the lyrics still fit how I think of her... when I think of her.

6. Don't Be Cruel - Bobby Brown Ah, 7th and 8th grades at St. Rita's, where I went for elementary school and junior high. I listened to a lot of different music in those days, but for some reason the whole New Edition/Bobby Brown musicscape come to mind when I think of those days. Plus, I think this is where I think my affinity for R & B started from.

7. Pop! The First 20 Hits - Erasure This album reminds me of the time at USC, more specifically of the times hanging out with Dan and Peter whenever they were back in town. I really only have two periods in my life where I went to concerts all the time. One of them was the 2004-2008 when Rilo Kiley was touring all the time and the other was 1994-1998 when I would just travel all over Southern California with Dan, Peter, Tom, and some other guys from Crown Books.

Erasure still was my favorite concert of that time period, though.

8. Hi-Five - Hi-Five I must have sang this whole album to Breanne over the phone at one time or another. If you ever want to hear cheesy singing at its best just put this album on anywhere near me. I get downright unhearable when I'm belting this album out. You haven't lived until you've heard my rendition of "I Like The Way (Kissing Game)".

Of course, that all changes when I'm singing "I Can't Wait Another Minute" for or to her because that will always be our song. I don't know--when I think of love songs that's the song I think of. It's so heartfelt and true that I can't imagine anyone else coming up with a song that speaks directly about how it feels to be so lost in someone that you just can't stand it.

9. Their Greatest Hits: The Record - The Bee Gees
Breanne's favorite band so they're my adopted favorite band too. It's simple; I think Bee Gees, I think Breanne.

10. Blue - LeAnn Rimes The first country artist to get me to like country. Breanne tried for years to get me to warm up to country music, but I resisted. That is, until a little song called "Blue" stole my heart. I had never heard such pretty song tied to such a simple melody. It was all downhill from there.

I wouldn't say Country is my favorite style of music, but it's right up there with all the other genres I listen to.

11. She Like Electric - Smoosh After I went through my bankruptcy and period of unemployment, "But Now I Know" was the song that rang true for me. It's message that we all have to grow up sometime and that it's impossible to protect ourselves from being hurt every second of the day is one that I still reflect on to this day. A great song from this great album.

12. Out of the Blue - Debbie Gibson There's a very specific period in my life where my brother Francis and I literally went to our cousins' house every week to spend the weekend or where they would spend the weekend at our house. For some reason I remember hearing a Debbie Gibson every time we rode there or every time we rode back. I don't know the year; I just know what was playing on the radio.

13. Biggest Bluest Hi Fi - Camera Obscura Camera Obscura are currently my second favorite band right now. And for good reason. Not only do I think of Tracyanne Campbell as one of the prettiest voices in music today, I also consider Camera Obscura to be the best working music group currently still playing music.

When I moved down to the South Bay this is the one group that I remember being a big part of it. Whether it was playing this record when I was looking for apartments or going to see them in L.A. within months of moving down here, Camera Obscura is the music that has pretty much defined my time in Harbor City and Long Beach.

14. Team Boo - Mates of State Toby's favorite group and the album that pretty much sold me on them. I'd heard of Mates of State for a few years, but I never had an opportunity to listen to them. Then Toby sent me this album with its delicious harmonies and almost whimsical lyrics, and I was hooked. Every time I listen to them I feel compelled to just sigh and let out a little, "Gosh," in honor of my youngest friend.

15. 50 Number Ones - George Strait Another country album and another doozy. This was the album that I got a good listen to when Breanne and I were in Chicago. In fact, I clearly remember "The Dance" as being one of the songs that I played the night we had the meeting room to ourselves at the Sheraton and danced for what seemed like ten hours.

Then I remember listening to it again when we were taking the L back to our hotel on one of our last nights in the city while she slept on my shoulder.

George Strait is a golden god among men and 50 Number Ones should be the soundtrack of everyone's life. For a week there I know it was mine and my friend's.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Don't Get Me Wrong, If I Fall In The "Mode Of Passion," It Might Be Unbelievable, But Let's Not Say "So Long," It Might Just Be Fantastic

2010-09-07T10:11:00.000-07:00

--"Don't Get Me Wrong", The Pretenders

from a recent entry on Yelp...

I love trout. There's no getting around it. When I think of eating fish, it's trout that leaps to mind. If a restaurant doesn't serve trout I seriously reconsider even ordering fish or sometimes seafood altogether.

That being said, it takes a lot for a place to impress me with their trout. I mean--I've had it all the way up and down the California coast. I've had it in places as far-off as Seattle and Boston and Chicago. I don't believe a fish exists that I'm more familiar with how it should taste than trout. For every place that I've sampled a delectable morsel of this freshwater fish I've probably tried a dozen places where I've been gravely let down.

Let me just say, Fish Bonz is one of the good guys.

Their Cajun trout is spot-on sublime. It possesses a good deal of flavor, is pretty hefty for the price, and still manages to squeak in under $9. There isn't anything I can complain about their version of my seafood staple. The fries and cole slaw it comes with also happen to be perfect accompaniments, neither overpowering the fish nor being weak-tasting or forgettable.

I love small seafood places that can offer great deals on their fish. I love places that know seafood doesn't have to be a high-class affair where you break out the china and crystal. I'd much rather eat at a place like Fish Bonz that can bring fish to the people off the street, people who are just looking for a good meal while they're out and not a black tie affair.

I can't say any more about this place except to say that now that I've found it there ain't nothing in the world that can keep me from coming back again and again for their simply awesome trout.

----

One of the best things my parents ever did for me was take me and my brother to all sorts of restaurants. Unlike some of my relatives I had a pretty eclectic culinary education. I'm not claiming I'm the most experimental eater out there, but comparatively I've gotten the opportunity to sample a lot of different cuisines thanks to my parents.

Yet one of my most favorite memories is when my parents, mostly my mom, would take us down to the local Sizzler for lunch. That's where I fell in love with trout as my preferred fish. Before those visits I really didn't like fish much. Aside from the occasional fish sticks and fries we had for dinner, I just couldn't see much of the point of fish. It wasn't the smell like most people complain about since I can't smell. I just found fish rather boring. Because of my inability to smell I tended to gravitate towards foods with a high amount of flavor or seasoning. Fish just didn't meet this requirement. More than that, fish tended to be either dry or severely undercooked, at least in my household.

Then I tried trout for the first time at Sizzler's. Not only did I enjoy it immensely, but with every visit I find it consistently good. Unlike fish at home or the other places my parents had taken us to, I could rely on the trout at Sizzler's being the buttery, lightly salted heaven that I had had that first time.

It gave me hope that other seafood might approach this level of appeasement. Frankly, it opened what up until then was a slowly shutting door on opening my palate to something I thought I would dislike for the rest of my life.

suddenly thunder showers everywhere
who can explain the thunder and rain

I believe that's the reason I like trout as much as I do, because it reminds me of a time where a new world was opened to me. Sure, I might go a little overboard with the trout fanaticism, but without that remarkable fish I might have remained a closed-off individual like I am in other aspects of my life. I truly count seafood as one of my favorite types of food. That condition might have been drastically changed if I hadn't discovered trout.

Besides, I have to give credit to where credit is due. When I find something or someone that has such a huge impact on my life I'll pretty much be a fan for life. That's what I am, a trout fan for life.

And proud of it.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

There Is A Wait So Long, You'll Never Wait So Long, Here Comes Your Man

2010-09-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

--"Here Comes Your Man", The Pixies

"Gosh. There was never an instant where I felt betrayed by anyone. I guess it was more of a choice never to let anyone get the opportunity to do so.

"I mean--I had my chances. I took my shot at surrounding myself with a cadre, like a little child surrounding herself with a blanket. But the blanket never quite felt right. Didn't need or want it. It felt unsettling in the worst kind of way. It felt like I was giving in to what was expected of me rather than what I wanted. That's a feeling that just doesn't become me, I can tell you that much. It's like wearing somebody else's clothes and trying to pretend they fit you.

"Besides, that was always my sisters' deal. They had that popularity vote shored up. That meant I never had the need to compete with them in that area. I was content to let them have it. There's so many other treasures to claim. Why stomp all over their area of interest? We never came up with an explicit agreement to do so, but for the most part we try not to be competitive with each other. We're just not the petty or jealous types. At least I'm not. I was content to let them have that as they were content to not knock me for not wanting it. It's weird how that works, that utter lack of puzzlement at somebody's indifference over that which you hold sacred. You can't make somebody see the rainbow; you can only look for it yourself and only on your own time."

There was a time last year when I got caught in that thunderstorm in Kentucky which almost killed the both of us that I felt it. I felt like discussing that peculiar habit of mine with Toby because it was one of those life and death moments where people truly take stock of their lives, really examine the course their journey has taken them.

We were discussing how people intersect with one another and how strange it is that anyone runs into another human being long enough to make a lasting impression. More specifically, we were ruminating over how, comparatively, she had few people she called friends. She was defending her position, saying that it was more of a choice. She had her close companions. She didn't want for any more.

While I considered myself lucky to be counted among this number, it worried me that she was so jaded at her age. I tried to remember if I was so cavalier at that age. I couldn't remember. All I knew was that, looking at it from the other end of the spectrum, it didn't sit well with me to abandon all hope of being well-liked and respected by a good number of people. I mean--if you gave it your best shot and still ended up with only a few you could count on that would be one thing. But to not even try? That was like saying your character wasn't good enough to warrant any attention whatsoever. You were just a dull, insignificant individual and that was all. It's a shameful attitude to go through life with. Frankly, it made me sad to believe that I was sitting next to someone who disregarded her significance to such a degree.

I didn't go so far as to inquire what was wrong with her, but I did voice my curiosity.

"But you still go to parties, right? I've heard you talk about attending some in the past," I asked.

"Yeah. I'm not a complete introvert. Yet for me the social significance isn't found in who I met or who I attended. I go because it suits me. If I feel up to it, I go. If I don't, I don't. I don't have the desire to be seen or to put in face time with my peers or merely to get out of the house. Socializing like any other activity is best done in moderation and only when there is sufficient bliss to be gleaned from it. If I get the sense that I'm going to uncomfortable, it's just not worth it to me.

"I see these same people. I realize that the manner in which someone acts outside a more formal setting is different than the way she acts in a more formal setting. Once you've seen one side, it isn't difficult to imagine how the other side lives. I know you act like this in a class room. It doesn't blow my mind to realize you cut loose once you're on the outside of boundaries of that same school. We all like to have fun. We all need the company. I just don't think some of us need to have company to have fun all the time. Other people do and that's okay.

"That's just not me.

"Gosh. Case in point. I went to this one get together a few years back. Jack had invited me. In a moment of weakness I acquiesced to his invitation. I hadn't been to a party in a few weeks and I had received notice that I was missed by a few people that I did consider myself close to. Once there, I hung around for a few hours. I laughed. I sang. I gave my best effort to be in-the-moment Toby. I did my best to not postpone joy like I always do. And I must say that I was smiling and I was genuinely happy for those few hours. It doesn't hurt me to be with others. I don't frown on the experience of interaction as much as people give me credit for.

"Yet what I recall most about that night is wandering off with Jack to the back of our mutual friend's house and just looking up at the stars. I recall remarking to him how the whole sky was like a giant waterfall and all the stars misty spray threatening to rain down upon us at any second. And it wasn't because I considered that moment more beautiful or anything; it's because I considered that a genuine moment shared with a person who would understand the significance of the moment as opposed to people who could only take my words at face value. There's a certain serenity of spirit when you can look at the world with a panoramic view instead of a more specific view.

"The party was fun, but it just blended into the dozens of its ilk I've attended. The sky on that particular night from that particular vantage was unique. That was something I was glad to not have missed. That was something I consider myself fortunate to have experienced in its full glory."

take me away to nowhere plains

That was the kind of person Toby is. She always looks for the direct route to satisfying her soul. Often times that takes her away from the things of Man. I always joke with her that in another life she could have been her generation's Walt Whitman. Or maybe she'll be this generation's.

While this doesn't necessarily put her at odds with my own philosophies, it still manages to surprise me at how she can maintain such a distance from society and yet maintain a genuine fondness. But it's more of a fondness a person has who's visiting a zoo rather than the fondness one feels for visiting relatives or old friends. She has this disconnect with the rest of the world that, I guess, works for her. I suppose it gives her the dispassionate viewpoint of someone who sees the world at large but doesn't consider herself a part of it.

I could never do that for while I have anti-social tendencies I still crave what the world has to offer for the most part. I don't consider myself a naturalist like she does so it doesn't matter to me how close I consider myself to nature. People are all I have to feel an affinity towards. I don't have the luxury of taking or leaving society in general. While it's great for me to get way from people now and again--like traveling for four hours in the backwoods of some Kentucky glen while thunder, lightning, and rain come in a torrent all around me--it's nothing I would like to live in.

Some people can find a home in such wonder and splendor.

Me? Eventually it scares me to live life so raw, so close to the bone. I don't think people were supposed to be that enamored of the world at large. There's always that element of being just a bit frightened of one's surroundings that's instinctual about the human experience. People I can figure out. People I can adjust to. There are just some aspects to nature and its awesome power that doesn't elicit respect in me, only abject fear. I doubt I'll ever grow that attuned to what the wind and the water, the sun and the sky have to offer. I mean--I admire the fact that I know a person who can so live her life to the point her moods are affected by the beauty all around her. It doesn't mean I seek to emulate that relationship.

Like Toby says, I have no reason to compete with her in that area. It's one of those differences that lends itself to healthy debate between us, where we each can appreciate the other's viewpoint without having to put it down.

I just know that if shove came to push I would much rather live surrounded by the things of man rather than the things of nature. I reserve the option to escape from the things of man every now and again, but you'll find me more homesick for the trappings of the city than the country.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

You Are So Beautiful To Me

2010-08-30T16:27:00.001-07:00

--"You Are So Beautiful", Joe Cocker

BEAUTIFUL
by E. Patrick Taroc

“Am I beautiful?” you ask me
As if any other reply
Could be returned but yes, you are--
More beautiful than most by far.
“But,” you ask, “where is this beauty
To be found? When can it be seen?
Most importantly—to me, I mean--
Is the eternal question why?”

“You are beautiful when you smile,
When your dimpled cheeks crease your face
Like tiny ripples on the ocean--
A hushed tempest of emotion.
And that beauty lingers awhile
When I see you laugh like you've won
A long five-hour marathon
While others are just starting the race.

You are beautiful when you cry,
When the world is proving too rough
For little 'ole you to handle;
Through your tears still shines a candle.
Grace is not ours to question why;
That's God's question to bear
For me waking to your brown hair
On my pillow is proof enough.”

Copyright 2010 E. Patrick Taroc (08/28/10)

Oh, Once In Your Life You Find Someone, Who Will Turn Your World Around, Bring You Up When You're Feeling Down

2010-08-26T02:26:00.000-07:00

--"Heaven", Bryan Adams

I met Jina first in December of 1992. We bonded over our shared love of Avonlea, thought we didn't quite get off on the right foot since Jina called Sara Stanley, my favorite character on the show, "boring." However, once that small faux pas was behind us, we got along swimmingly. I found her intelligent, funny, and possessing a strong sense of spirit that I find lacking in most individuals. If anything, I thought Jina and I would be best friends forever. It's her that I immediately hit it off with and not Breanne.

I didn't meet Breanne until July of 1993. We got along fine, but at the time we met I was still infatuated with Jina so I treated Breanne like the writer she was. I thought she was going to be someone who contributed to my 'zine, Our Magazine, and nothing more. I mean--I kept in touch with a lot of contributors, but none of them save Lucy did I eventually consider a close friend. We joke about it now, but the truth is we were both put off by each other in those first few months. I found her stubborn, quick-tempered, and rather vain. If somebody had told me that she would be the one person I would come to depend on for just about everything, I would have told that somebody he or she was crazy.

I guess that's the danger of basing your future with a person around a first impression. First impressions are often misleading. Well, that's not true, I still find Jina intelligent, funny, &c... but I no longer feel that sense of connection that we once shared. My opinion of her didn't exactly change. The only thing that changed was the circumstances surrounding her.

My mistake with her was attempting to move our interaction with one another to a level that it was never meant to go to. I was an idiot, plain and simple. I mistook my burgeoning fondness for her for something resembling love. When she didn't reciprocate my gut reaction was to destroy everything that the two of us had built up. I gave her little choice but to give up on me. Again, I think I was led astray by this notion that she and I were meant to be together forever. This idea that it was our destiny to end up lasting for all time made everything I did at the time seem justified. When you build up this picture of how everything will turn out it's heartbreaking when this other person cannot quite see the same picture. That's what happened between Jina and me. We started off seeing ourselves one way, but gradually I saw us moving on and she didn't.

The same wasn't true about Breanne. I didn't think we would amount to anything in those first few months. Indeed, it wasn't until Jina and I had our falling out that those ideas of ending up together started being focused on the Little Miss Chipper. I mean--I liked her. I thought she was a good writer. I liked talking to her. But even in those early days she and I would have screaming matches that would make me consider just cutting her out of my life. It seemed every other week we would find a new subject to disagree about which we would blow up into a shit storm that wasn't truly warranted. Fight after fight left me with the impression that she and I would just never be that close despite how much she made me smile during all those other times.

Taking a look at that, that should have been one big clue about how Breanne and I were fated to end up together. Whereas Jina and I had one huge fight that caused us not to talk for ten years (!), Breanne and I have been pretty much fighting all our years together. Yet one fight has never been enough for me to back away completely from her for very long. The longest we have gone without talking to one another in the seventeen years we've known each other was eight months. Eight months sounds like a long time and it probably is, but it's nothing compared to not talking to someone for ten years.

I don't know--I just think it's funny that the one person I pinned all these hopes to ended up almost fading into obscurity a mere three years after I met her and the one person I was sure I wouldn't see after a few years ended up sticking around for almost two decades now.

It gives me pause about the theory that we're destined to find one and only one person who will change everything. Or rather it gives me pause that we're capable of recognizing such a person right from the get-go. I mean--you hear all this talk about people knowing they would fall in love with a person upon gazing on them from across the dance floor. They have no qualms in their heads that it's their destiny to be with that person. I have yet to meet one of those people myself. Everyone I know it's always been the same; the people who stick around in their lives were the people they didn't think much of at first. It's always the people who snuck up on them in their daily dealings that ends up becoming indispensable and not the person they put the effort into. Call it a quirk of fate or the gods' having a little joke at our expense, but nobody seems to roll the pass line right from the get-go.

What I can buy into, however, is the idea we do meet the one person who has the power to change our life around. It happened to me and I've heard it happen to other people. It's not so hard to put faith into the theory that certain people were put into our lives to transform them into something better. I mean--if we had the power to better ourselves eternally I don't think there's a single person who wouldn't choose to do that on their own. Sometimes we need others to kick start out lives into overdrive. Sometimes all it takes is to find one person who believes in us when we don't quite believe in ourselves all the time.

They don't even have to do that much. They could just leave a message on your phone at four in the morning saying, "Don't give up, Patrick. Please try again." They could call your parents to explain all the stuff you can't explain to them personally. They could just IM you just to say, "Hey."

I know I'm blessed to have someone in my life who means so much to me. I guess I'm just thinking how astonishing it is that I overlooked her for so long. It's true what they say; sometimes you really can't see the forest for the trees. That's the difference between something that's meant to last and something that isn't--the difference between Jina and Breanne--one thing falls apart despite all your efforts to keep it together and the other endures no matter what happens to try to kill it.

If it's meant to last--if a person is meant to be with you for the long haul--there's nothing that can be done under the sun to change that. I'm stuck with Breanne... and that's a good thing.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Our Last Wishes Know We Cannot Chase, One, Played Calm, The Song Strings Belong, But Please, For Keys, I Turn To Hear You Sing A False Reprieve

2010-08-24T12:56:00.000-07:00

--"An Anniversary Away", Reverie Sound Revue

In a few days it will officially be ten years (!) since I first moved in with DeAnn. First in Ontario, then later in Fontana--we stayed together for about fifteen months. Some of the days were better than others, but on the whole it was a very trying experience.

At the time I thought she would be the only girl I ever lived with and, so far, it's proven to be true.

I can't place the blame on her, though. The bad taste I have in my mouth regarding with living with someone you're romantically involved with might stem from my own proclivities. I am probably a hard person to live with. I know in the time I spent with DeAnn during those months there were stretches where I just didn't want to be around here. Even having my own "study" wasn't enough to subdue the feeling of being trapped with her 24/7. It didn't help that I also had to see her at the office. I don't think any relationship which is rocky to begin with can stand up to the pressure of seeing that same person at work and at home.

It lead to a lot of arguments that had nothing to do with the subject of the argument and everything to do with the weariness of having to deal with the same person over and over again. It's brought me to the conclusion that were I to live with another woman I'm involved with it will be after serious consideration. If there's one thing that living with DeAnn taught me it's that the surest way to doom any relationship is to move in to soon with a person. I don't think I was ready for that step at that age. I don't think either of us were. And maybe that was a sign in itself that the foundation of our wanting to be together wasn't really strong, but a part of me believes that if we had just waited everything might have worked out.

If I live with someone else it'll be because I can't imagine spending a second away from them rather than the idea that it's the next logical step. I want to be able to say that ten years after moving in with someone that, incredibly, the desire to keep right on living with them is still there.

That's the kind of anniversary I'm looking forward to next.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

What's Written In Sand Disappears In The Rain, With Life You're Never Sure How Close You Came, It's Turning To Dust, It's Turning To Gold

2010-08-14T06:58:00.000-07:00

--"Days", Sambassadeur

I had the opportunity to look through my senior year yearbook yesterday morning. Leafing through, it surprised me how much I've forgotten of those formative years. Every other page had me remarking, "I remember that," in mild surprise. It's remarkable that in seventeen short years I've managed to obscure some of the facets of my life I used to think vital to my existence.

For instance, a lot of pages journal my exploits in campus ministry and public service. I used to be the poster boy for volunteerism and peer guidance. And while I was never overly religious, I believe I was a lot more spiritual in my youth. I even went so far as to meet the former Archbishop Roger Mahoney in recognition of my efforts on behalf of campus ministry. It was a different time and I think I was a lot more centered on believing in something greater than myself even if that concept did not fit the construct of God or some higher power. Having that sort of philosophical foundation used to, at least partly, define who I was.

It's no secret over the years I think I've gotten more self-centered and less concerned with the way fate, fortune, or divine intervention has either assisted or hindered me. I stopped believing that what I did directly affected the world at large and, conversely, what the rest of the world did affected me. Somewhere in the intermittent seventeen years I started changing my world view to be less concerned with how everybody reacted against one another. Somewhere in those years I started to realize that, in the end, what we do only matters to us and whether or not we're happy.

I also noticed how much more involved I was with the school at large. I mean--this ties into the aforementioned point, but it also speaks to how much more active I was in some kind of community. Aside from my friends, I don't really have a group of people I actively seek to enrich. Yet I don't think this is so far out of the norm. Most people my age don't really belong to a collective of people outside their circle of friends. Gone are the days of the sewing circles. I don't know a single person who belongs to a book club. The only people I know of who actually belong to something are people like Lucy who are actually involved in various charities and foundations. Aside from that, I don't think I'm alone is saying people just don't go around joining clubs for the hell of it. Indeed, I would even classify my involvement in my board gaming group benefits me more than my benefiting them. I don't run around actively boosting them--not like at La Salle where I would get involved with activities and truly participate to make the club better for having had me.

I see all the clubs listed below my name in my senior year picture and I can scarcely believe I divided my time helping out so many different groups.

----

Marion was talking to me on the phone a few days after she got her senior year yearbook. Everything to her was so fresh and new. A lot of the stuff she was relating to me had only happened a month or even a few weeks prior. It didn't occur to me at the time, but to her she wasn't talking about history yet. Not really. To her senior year was something that was present tense. She still was this person. Those events and activities she talked about were still affecting her, were still helping shape her.

I wonder how long it will take for the present tense to shift to past tense. I wonder how long it will take her to reach the point I am at, where everything that happened in high school stops being an influence on her and only continue to exist as something that molded her once.

I don't know--I'm getting to the point where school in general stops being this great ghost that haunts me. I still have my specters of the past, but they're starting to originate more from my personal persona than my school persona. People always tell you that school and high school specifically changes you forever. Well, it's done it's damage already. I'm starting to see that what happened there can't hurt or help my any more.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

I've Liked You For A Thousand Years, I Can't Wait Until I See You, You Can't Stand To See Me That Way, No Matter What I Do, No Matter What I Say

2010-08-11T03:40:00.000-07:00

--"Scott Pilgrim", Plumtree

When Scott Pilgrim vs. The World opens this Friday one can expect me to be there. I have been anticipating this movie for some months and I'm glad it's finally coming out. I mean--this is right in my wheelhouse. It's basically a romantic comedy with farcical elements and a very radio-friendly soundtrack. I also appreciate that the whole premise is predicated on video game tropes since it's been well-established that I'm of the generation that grew up playing video games in both arcades and at home. Plus, there is no way I'm missing both Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, two of my more favorite up-and-coming actors, playing off each other.

But I think the surprising thing about the movie is how much I already appreciate it--even before seeing it. You see, without Scott Pilgrim, the film, I would have never chanced upon "Scott Pilgrim," the song. And without that I would have never discovered my new favorite old band, Plumtree.

As I usually do, I went spelunking for how the comic book which the film is based on came about. That's when I read that the author named his character after an obscure 90's Canadian indie band song. 90's? Canadian? Indie? There just isn't anything in that description that I dislike. I immediately had to know more about this song and this band. That's when I discovered Plumtree which Wikipedia describes thusly:

Plumtree were a Canadian all-girl indie pop band... [which] formed in their hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1993 after meeting through their music teachers. The original line-up included Lynette Gillis (aged 14) on drums, Carla Gillis (17) on guitar and vocals, Amanda Braden (15) on guitar and vocals and Nina Martin (16) on bass and occasional vocals.

yeah!

It was love at first listen. The Plumtree sound hails from that decade when Grunge was everywhere and sophisticated lyrics weren't as important as attitude and plain musicianship. "Scott Pilgrim" has only six lines of lyrics which are repeated, but damn it all if it doesn't stick in your craw hours after you've listened to it. The guitar work, the disjointed harmonies, and the passion with which the track is played all beg for your attention. It's the same for the whole album it comes from, ...Predicts The Future. It reminds me of all those classic 90's bands I used to listen to in high school--Lush, Letters to Cleo, The Sundays, The Cranberries. It's definitely not the polished emo fare we have these days.

So you see, I'm already vested in the movie because it had me hooked at its soundtrack. It's my theory that if they can spend this much time nailing the musical vocabulary of the picture, then they'll probably spend as much time making sure all the other facets are up to par as well. I really can't wait for this movie to come out.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

The Way That You Look At Me Now, Makes Me Wish I Was You, It Goes Deep, It Goes Deeper Still, This Touch, And The Smile And The Shake Of Your Head

2010-08-04T02:31:00.000-07:00

--"A Night Like This", The Cure

When I wandered in from the hotel hallway I didn't know what I was expecting. I had left Breanne sleeping in the bed while I had gone exploring the rest of the hotel. Rather than wake her I had decided to go wandering, which was pretty much my standard routine when I don't have anything else better to do. I wasn't gone that long--twenty minutes at the most. When I came back I fully expected her to still be sleeping.

No such luck.

I came through the room door hearing the distinct sound of someone running the shower. But as soon I shut the door behind me I saw her peek her head around the bathroom door. Her chestnut brown hair wasn't even wet so she must have been just about to get in.

"I was about to get ready to come find you, sugar," she said lazily.

"Well, here I am," I answered her.

"Hold on one second. I'm coming out to you."

I made my way to the bed, all white and disheveled, and waited for a few moments. Normally, I would have been curious at the messy state of the linens since she's usually the one who insists on making the bed every morning, but I had other concerns on my mind. Besides, she probably would have made them right before heading out to meet up with me I rationalized. I didn't really know her schedule that well. Most of the time she would get ready first and tidy up when it was my turn. For all I knew she had little pixies do all the heavy lifting while she sat on her ass supervising.

"There, all better," I heard her say, coming out of the bathroom. She had on her Athens t-shirt and pair of red shorts from the night before. I watched as she made a beeline to sit next to me on the bed.

"It wasn't nice of you to leave me all alone this morning, Eeyore. Not nice at all," she announced half-heartedly, the hint of a smile on the corners of her mouth. "I woke up reaching for you like some anteater sniffing around and you were nowhere to be found. It was very disconcerting."

"I'm sorry. I didn't want to wake you. You looked so peaceful. You know how I get, once I'm up I'm up for good. There was no reason for both of us to lose sleep."

"You have a point. Maybe next time leave a note or something, you know?"

I saw the look in her oceanic blue-green eyes. It was her usual mix of playfulness and stubbornness. It always reminds of the look my mom gives me as if to say, "it's fine for now, but let's not do that again." Rather than try to boss me around, which would inevitably lead to confrontation, Breanne has this habit of couching her commands as quasi-suggestions. I mean--if she really wanted to she could have told me directly to leave a note, but, as she says, I'm not her employee. The prevalent attitude is that we're supposed to be equals--even if it doesn't always work out that way.

The trip up to that point had been everything I could have hoped for. Three days with the woman you probably have loved the deepest in your life isn't something you complain about. But, as she herself says, you can only be you--no more, no less. My nature is to worry when the other shoe would drop. I had gone into the trip assuring her and assuring myself that there wasn't anything that could dampen my spirits. I was determined not to let the doubts and insecurities about the ethical implications of what we were doing ruin our time. Yet the more time I spent dwelling on it, the more it seemed that somewhere somehow we might be treading into murky waters. And that thought and others like it were beginning to occupy more of my time the later in the trip it became.

"Will do."

What we were doing didn't break any laws. It wasn't going to lead to anyone dying. On a cosmic scale it was insignificant, but on a karmic one it had serious repercussions.

Looking at her, though, she looked happy. Wasn't that the important matter to focus on, I asked myself. She'd been so sad for the months leading up to this vacation. Her and Greg weren't getting along, and she's the one who suggested that taking a break from who she had become might, indeed, be a good idea. She's the one who said that perhaps remembering the kind of person she used to be might just be the cure to whatever was ailing her. I traced the smile on her dimpled face with my eyes. There wasn't a hint of mawkishness there. All there was a relaxed demeanor and a pleasant lilt to her every feature. Asking anyone, you'd be hard-pressed to convince them that this was the face of someone who was torn up inside or someone who was wracked with guilt.

"So, Mr. Patrick, what should we do today? Do you have any bright ideas?" she asked.

"Not a one. Never have, never will."

"That's good to know. We could go check out some museums today. You mentioned you wanted to do that some time. Today's as good as any."

"Sure, we could do that. Let's do that."

I had practiced out in the hotel what I was going to say to her. I had a mental list of all the concerns I had. I knew it was going to ruin the rest of the trip, but I thought it best if we cleared some of the air. Mostly thought It best if I let her know that I wasn't a complete bastard, that I was fully capable of accepting some of the responsibility for what we were doing there. It was only fair since, as they say, it does take two to tango.

I watched as one of her pliant bangs slid in front of her brow. Like I had done a hundred times before, I gently brushed it away from her face. The act itself was simple, yet it brought me no end of contentment once my fingers made contact with her skin.

She, in turn, placed her hand over mind and glided both of them down to her cheek. Then, she kind of leaned into my hand softly.

"Breanne?" I asked aloud.

"Yeah?"

"There's something I've been meaning to ask you, but I don't quite know how to phrase it."

"Well, you can't go swimming without getting your face wet, as my daddy says. You might as well just ask away," she replied with her head still in my hand.

I had a decision to make. What I said next could make or break this trip for her. On one hand, I could regurgitate possibly everything she'd be worrying about all along. She could come to the realization that what we were doing, what she was doing by being there with me, was a mistake. The whole trip could come caving in around us. And on the other hand, I could let it go. We both could go on believing that the world outside didn't exist. We could pretend that she wasn't married and that what we were doing wasn't looked down upon by any civilized or even decent human being. I could go on letting her be happy for the next four days just be leaving the spell unbroken.

I wanted to be the better person. But the way she looked up at me just then made my decision for me. It wasn't even a contest really.

I've done a lot of acts that I'm not particularly proud of. I've said words I wished I could take back, lashed out at people I should have never raised a finger to, and overall just been a complete idiot. But there have only been a few times where I'm not exactly sure which side of that line I fell on. That day in Chicago was one of those days. I'm not sure if I came out a better or worse person for keeping my mouth shut when so much of me wanted to spew unpleasant thoughts. The only thing I know for sure is that it preserved the whole mood of the trip. It's the one time I've spent with my Breannie where we were just in a state of bliss the entire of time. All I remember of that trip is how much we laughed, how much we danced, and how much we just realized how happy the other person made us. And I remember that day as being the one time all of that could have changed by my speaking my mind.

"Hell's bells, Eeyore, what is it? What is it that you want to ask me?"

"Oh, I was just going to ask if staying inside this lovely hotel room of ours and ordering room service sounded like a good idea to you."

I listened as she shook her head in disbelief. This was quickly followed by the unmistakable hurricane sound of her laugh.

"What do you mean? You want to order in breakfast, darling?"

"I'm talking about the whole shebang--breakfast, lunch, dinner. I think it'd be fun if took full advantage of this room's charms and just made a day out of it."

"You're serious."

"As a heartbeat."

That was the extent of our conversation. No mention of unpleasantness was ever made. I took a perfect chance to get to the truth behind the song and dance we were in the midst and let it waste away. Sometimes all it takes is seeing what's so right about a situation to make you think twice about altering even one bit of it... even if it is for the best in the long run. There are some times where looking at the big picture will just ruin things. There are some times where all you want to do is look at the small picture, some times where all you want to remember seeing is the look of her face.

"Then I know the first thing we're ordering, sugar."

"And what's that?"

"Ice cream--and lots of it."

That's how we spent our morning, not in the midst of tears, but in the midst of more ice cream than any two people have the right to eat.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Don't Unplug Me, Or Just Shut Me Down, Please Just Love Me, With Your Steel Heart, I'd Reboot You, If You'd Look At Me, With Those Cold Eyes

2010-08-02T02:38:00.000-07:00

--"Don't Unplug Me", All Caps

The problem with fighting with one's friends is that it never ends well. No matter what the root cause or who started what, fights with people you care about inevitably lead to truths that probably weren't worth revealing. I mean--I'm not talking about the tiny quibbles that blow over in the span of a day or so. I'm speaking about those knock-down, drag-out fights where two people don't speak for months (or longer). Those are the fights that kill, those are the moments that spoil the soul.

And the problem with me is that invariably I can't see the fault ever being mine, which I realize is a problem with a lot of people in these situations. But it isn't even that I refuse to admit it and am being simply stubborn; I honestly can't ever wrap my head around the concept that anything I do is wrong. Maybe it's from having such a malleable sense of ethics in the first place, but whatever it is, it's sometime been a problem in my dealings with the world in general.

I'm especially bad when it comes to people making decisions about their own life that would invariably take them away from mine. I'm not too keen on people seemingly wanting to get away from me. Epcot says it's because I have abandonment issues, which is probably true. However, I feel it has more to do with the fact that I never feel like people feel the same way I do. I always have this sense of isolation that I'm the only one whose ever felt the way I do at certain times. I have this sense that the way I look at the world is unique and not altogether healthy. And when people find out--when they find out, I mean--they get all weirded out. That's why they leave. All I can do is protest vehemently and not altogether nicely. I feel like I want to punish them for thinking I'm strange. I want them to suffer for making me feel like a weirdo when the truth is that a lot of my oddities are self-imposed.

----

When people like Toby say they want to take a break from me and from all that we've built, I take that personally. I take that as an affront to what I have to offer her. I mean--she's probably right in saying that it's only temporary. But you can never quite tell about sabbaticals. People go off to take a break from everything they've ever known and they just might find they like this new place better. It makes me nervous that I truly am expendable. It makes me feel she's learned she can from me and is discarding me like so much garbage.

What I really at times is a way to preserve how people feel at certain moments in their lives. I get the sense that if we could only "go back to the way things used to be," I could actually be happy forever. Nothing good ever comes of overhauling the way one person deals with another--not all at once, at least. I've found that when the change is gradual it tends to be for the best; when it's immediate and all-encompassing it tends to be for the worst. Think about it, nobody up and decides to a full-blown commitment. Most times you're lead there. But when people part, it's mostly due to a rash decision or some kind of emotional outburst. Yes, people might be lead there too, but it isn't nearly the same. You don't have to repair somebody wanting to get closer to you the way you have to mend yourself when somebody decides they don't want to be a part of your life.

When Toby says that she's "turning off" the life she used to have, it bothers me. I'm not something you can turn off. This isn't something you can turn off. As much as I wish I could just walk away cleanly and come back to my feelings like that, I'm not so easily capable of such stoicism. I tend to get hurt a lot when other people make decisions for me, decisions that concern me.

Yes, I get pretty temperamental when I'm upset. And, yes, I tend to take it out on those I should be playing nice with, but I don't how to deal evenly with something I consider somewhat monumental. Even if I can leave somebody without ever saying good-bye, it's only because I know they're coming back. When I have to mean it, when I have to say "good-bye" for real, I'm incapable. Because if it were my decision, I would never leave the people I really care about. No way. There are so few people who truly touch your life in such a way as to make it livable. Why on Earth would I choose to give that up? Why on Earth would I ever sit by and watch that walk out of my life?

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Well, Baby, I Surrender To The Strawerry Ice Cream, Never Ever End Of All This Love, Well, I Didn't Mean To Do It, But There's No Escaping Your Love

2010-07-27T01:53:00.000-07:00

--"Accidentally in Love (cover)", MissAlissa15

It's been mentioned before that I tend to write more than a few pieces backwards. When I say backwards, that is to mean I don't start with a central idea or even any semblance of what the bulk of these paragraphs will contain. Nope, I'd say about half of the time I write blogs or anything personal I'm writing from the starting point of somewhere else. Most times that means a title (or a song lyric if it's something for this site). But other times it's even more insidious.

Take for instance tonight. Tonight all I have going for this blog is the idea I wanted to write a blog somehow referencing the video below. I don't know what I wanted it to be about, but I know it had to employ this song somehow. It's both a song I like and the new cover of it by MissAlissa15 just reminded me how much I used to love listening to the Counting Crows.

That's all I got. That's all I have to work with.

But if you think about it, it's the way I rationalize a lot of my decisions. I get a good impression of something or someone, and I just go with it. Maybe I don't follow my passions to the degree that Lucy does, but I've been accused of being impulsive a time or two. I really think a lot of life, mine especially, simply isn't planned out. We don't get a map of where we will end up or how to get there. Most of the time we get a starting point and then are told to make our own way. Some of us strike out for a definite destination. Others of us like to stumble around for a bit before taking stock of our bearings. There's no sense in deciding how we are to proceed without first figuring out where we want to proceed to. That's my theory at least.

If you think about it, it's the way humans are built. Take, love, for instance. A lot of people endeavor to discover their perfect mate. They conjure up a laundry list of qualities and attributes that they wish their perfect partner to possess. But when shove comes to push, most of us end up with people in the most roundabout of fashions. We have the basic understanding of what we're looking for--a starting point, if you will--but the process of finding someone special is often fraught with stumbling about the dark. Actually, the process most often involves denying we're feeling what we're feeling, and then suddenly surrendering to the moment. There is no grand scheme--no rhyme or reason; there's just feeling and acceptance.

That's the way I tend to approach writing sometimes. Sometimes I don't know where I'm going. I just trust that there's an idea worthwhile in the journey and that during the course of that journey I'll dig it out. So, yeah, sometimes all it takes is a song to set me off placing words on a page. But by the time I reach that last paragraph I think the promise held within that song has been revealed. Or, if you will, the song or lyrics for me is my marble block and it is only through the process of blurting out whatever pops into my head that the sculpture beneath is revealed.

Sometimes following one's passions is both the process and the goal.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Come Out Upon My Seas, Cursed Missed Opportunities, Am I A Part Of The Cure? Or Am I A Part Of The Disease?

2010-07-22T01:11:00.000-07:00

--"Clocks", Coldplay

Breanne has extended me a most generous offer of coming to work with/for her over in Macon. And as much as I want to just dismiss it out of hand due to my many concerns, there's a strong part of me that is at the moment considering it. I mean--I'm not having much luck here and it would be nice to have her close by for a change.

Never mind that the summers there are horrible. Never mind that it breaks one of the big stipulations of our long-standing arrangement. I could use a job right now. Right now this is the only job that on the surface seems to meet my criteria of being a so-called "sure" thing and of being somewhat near my expected salary. Also, you know, the food there is great. It's not like I won't know a single person there as compared to somewhere completely new and foreign to me. And I really can do the job she has lined up for it. Hell, I could do it in my sleep.

Nope, what my wavering simply falls down to is that I've never lived anywhere but California. I've also never lived that close to her before. These have always been two aspects of my life that I thought best just to leave well enough alone. I've never once complained about California being worse off than any other part of the country. The weather's nice, the food's nice, and I know a lot of people here. I've also always firmly believed that perhaps Lucy and I wouldn't be such good friends if we were in each other's faces all the time. I believe maintaining the physical distance between us is one of the tenets to our long-standing friendship, that ability to have some space from one another when either of us feels it's necessary. With that gone I'm rather unsure how everything else will shake out.

I've talked long with many of the people I know about what I should do. What they say is that it isn't exactly the moving that concerns me; it's the idea that this will uproot everything I've ever held life to be. I won't have my family around me. I'll have to learn where everything I need is located. Hell, I'm going to have to learn all sorts of appropriate behavior over there and I already don't adhere to many of the conventions that are acceptable here. Over there my strangeness would even be more magnified because at least in California I can mingle among the other crazies here. They all say that the leap might be good for me if it comes to that.

I say that I'm still praying that it doesn't.

I don't want to go over there and find out that I don't like it. I especially don't want to get stuck there for awhile and not like. Also, I'm scared to death that if I do go over there she and I will just fall apart under the pressure. Aside from the tension of suddenly being in each other's lives a lot more, there'll be the added pressure of her sort of being my boss. That's not something I'm keen on exploring either. I've never been friends with my boss before. I've been friendly to them, but never what I'd call close friends.

I don't want to lose our friendship just to find a new job. As much as I would like a new job and need a new job, finding a replacement best friend/little sister would simply be an impossibility.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

And If I Could Reverse It I Don't Think It Would Be Worth It, I Know In My Heart I Would Never Let You Tumble To The Ground, No I'll Never Let You Go

2010-07-20T02:30:00.000-07:00

--"Fell Down The Stairs", Tilly and the Wall

My friend Slicks recently informed me that plans have been made to bring One Day to the big screen. It will star Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess as Emma and Dexter, respectively.

I'm ecstatic that they will be filming this adaptation of what has quickly grown to be one of my favorite novels. However, I'm very much paranoid that it will not live up to the source material. So much can go awry when making an adaptation and I have already grown so attached to the particular view I have of everything contained within the book's pages. I'm worried that should the tiniest detail not live up to the perspective by which I read the book my suspension of disbelief shall waver. From the subtle shade of Emma's hair to the way I pictured Dexter's face screwing itself up in some scenes--I have a lot invested into the way I see the story playing out.

Yet nothing is more paramount to me than the idea that the story line in all its triumphs and tragedies be preserved in its entirety. I don't want to see any of the heartache softened or the crescendos muted. I know some of the book's lengths will possibly have to be sacrificed, but the overall arc simply must play out the way it plays out in the book. With books like this, with their patterning after the whole scope of a human being's life the temptation will be to see it as either a gradual ascension or descent. But such a trajectory does not fit with the theme and motifs of the story. One Day is about two people who really see the scope of life and not just in one direction. With every bout of success there is a dash of loss to go with it; and with every milestone of tragedy there's some real growth to accompany it. It would be a shame if any involved with the film were to whittle the twistiness of the pair's path into something more linear.

I'm especially worried about Dexter. As I was explaining to someone before, the magic of Dexter is that he's atypical of characters of his type. He starts off as this pretty boy college graduate who basically has success, fortune, and fame handed to him. But rather than have him suffer this cataclysm of misfortune, and rather than have him get his comeuppance, the book does something trickier. Dexter goes through a slow fade of everything he ever wanted. He doesn't lose his success, his fortune, or his fame overnight. He loses a bit at a time by committing smaller mistakes of pride and arrogance. That's what I found compelling about his character. At the end of the day there isn't this one regret he can point to and say this is the day it all started going downhill; there's just a bunch of days where he wishes could've turned out just a bit better. This mirrors more closely the typical human experience. This is the quality of the character that I hope they preserve.

I mean--Emma's story isn't any less difficult to maintain. It's just that Emma's slow suffering and eventual rise to some kind of peace is more ordinary in comparison. A lot of movies have that person you're rooting for, that woman who suffers indignity after indignity, feeling trapped by a life she never thought she'd fall into. A lot of movies have characters who don't or can't aspire to better things because they feel undeserving. And a lot of movies have these types of characters slowly draw themselves up in order to soar by the end. That's Emma's arc, which I admit would be run of the mill if it weren't for the fact that it's put in direct comparison to Dexter.

Honestly, that's what I think that makes this story so unique. The two of them are never in the same place in their lives--even after they get together as a couple. They're never complete in sync emotionally, romantically, or even intellectually. And yet they still manage to find each other through their seeming incompatibility.

True, they spend a lot of time complaining about how the timing's always off between the two of them. Yet in the end, even though the timing isn't quite right and even though the stars never quite align for them, they push through to each other anyway. They realize there's never going to be a perfect time to do what they want in life or to be with the person they want to be with; you've just got to make the best of what you got. Most importantly, they learn that with the things that matter to you or should matter to you, you just can't wait. You really have to go out there and grab whatever it is you think will make you happy before the thing (or person, sadly) isn't there anymore to be grabbed.

This is why I'm hoping they don't mess with one beat of the novel's story because anything less than that pitch-perfect kind of tone and sentiment will be a great disservice to a pound-for-pound masterpiece of a literary romance.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Oh, Oh, Oh, Who's That Twisting? Who's That Crunching? It's Oreo Action For Oreo Munching

2010-07-10T04:02:00.000-07:00

--"Oreo Jingle"

I love their jingle, but my secret shame is that I can't stand Oreos. They never tasted right to me. I don't get the chocolate cookie and I certainly don't get the creamy middle. I've always been a straight-up no-nonsense chocolate chip or peanut butter cookie man. I probably always will be.

I remember growing up people would always peddle Oreos as being the end-all, be-all of cookies. I'd go over to my friends' house and there they would be. My friends' moms would offer me a cookie. They would present me an Oreo. I would thank them out loud, but inside I'd be thinking, "That's not even a cookie. That's a damned Oreo." It just goes to show what good marketing and advertising will do for you. While normally I'm the first individual to buy into the hype, if the ultimate product is inferior then I quickly lose interest.

There's no way around it. Oreos are just bad cookies.

that's one bad cookie

They're hard. They're dirty to the touch. And they taste sweet, sure, but the cookie part just becomes this black paste in your mouth while the creme just is all sorts of sweet awfulness. It's just a bad-tasting cookie on all accounts. And while I would never turn down anything that remotely qualifies as a dessert (Got to keep that dessert stomach of mine happy, don't you know?), you'll never catch me buying a package of Oreos. I can honestly say that if I never eat another Oreo it will be too fucking soon.

And what brought on this little rant against a veritable institution? I went looking for my favorite cookie growing, Keebler's Peanut Butter Deluxe, a nice, soft cookie with large chunks of peanut butter, and found out they had discontinued it. To say the least I was disappointed. If you'd been around me in the late 80's, early 90's that's all that would be in my parents' house. I always made sure that there was a package or two around, lying in wait in case my dessert stomach hit the E mark. If anything was an institution it was the cookies that literally had more peanut butter than cookie. If anything deserved to be revered as the cookie of a nation, it was those heavenly baked goods. If anything deserved to be discussed thirty odd years later, it's my favorite cookie.

We live in a shameful world when people are still eating Oreos and I can't even get one stinking Keebler Peanut Butter Deluxe cookie.

Sigh.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Summertime And The Livin Is Easy, Fish Are Jumpin', And The Cotton Is High

2010-07-08T02:42:00.000-07:00

--"Summer Time", Renee Olstead

Certain activities I've come to expect from my summer. One might say I've gotten spoiled by having the same routine. Some time during May or June I take a trip to visit one of my friends or else take a trip with one of my friends. If it's an even year that trip is usually to Boston; if it's an odd year that trip is usually to a city I've never visited before. Some time during the week before the trip I buy a pack of new socks and underwear (LOL) and I usually pick up the new Dresden Files book to be read during the course of the trip. The week after the trip I usually start going to baseball games in earnest. And some time during the summer I usually stay for a week at Kerri Ray's near Santa Barbara.

But before that I used to have another routine for summer. Back when I was a kid the thing my brother and I used to do was stay over at my cousins' house. They had the pool. They had the "bonus room." Sure, they probably stayed over at our house just as often, but those times aren't as memorable as when we went over there. I suppose that's because it just blends into all the other times I've been at my house. I don't know--there's a big part of me that still associates summer time with being at my cousins' house as much as vacations. They're both synonymous with having a good time with people I like.

I believe this has a lot to do with the fact that I don't really have those long-standing traditions of going away with the guys for a week here and there during the summer season. Even as kids, I always hung out with my school buddies more during the scholastic year than in summer. Summer was more my time and less time to associate with people I associated with school. I admit, a bit of this changed when I got to high school and met people like Dan and Peter. We used to hang out a lot during summer, but it's a testament to my prerogatives that as soon as they moved away, no real plans were ever made to get together during summer. I never took special care just to visit them, just as they never took special care to visit me. In the scope of things summer's always been that personal season, where I go where I want to see who I want.

This summer's been hard for me. Being unemployed has changed a lot of how I view summer. This summer especially was supposed to something special. This summer I was supposed to go see dear Toby graduate. This summer, as a graduation gift, I was supposed to drive her up from Louisville to Boston. This summer I was supposed to take that great unhindered road trip. Part of me believes this is still the reason why she's so stand-offish with me right now. And part of me thinks that combined with how much I've had to change my routine already is making this summer feel off somehow.

I don't get to go where I want with who I want to be with. I feel more trapped at home more than I usually do.

I also believe this has a lot to do with the fact I look forward to my week away all year. It's my one week where I get to explore the rest of this great country that I normally don't get to see. I mean--I love California. However, it doesn't get me any closer to visiting every state before I die by wasting a year without going away. It doesn't get me any closer to seeing a baseball game in as many stadiums as possible. It makes me feel like I've been locked away for at least 2 years now without a break.

But mostly I feel like a wasted opportunity to solidify my ties with Toby. The whole silent treatment has me worried I blew it by not visiting her. Part of me believes that had I visited this year we could have been lifelong friends like Breanne and I are. After all, I visited that one within eighteen months of meeting her. I then visited her again six months later. And I really do think those two visits shored up any doubts that either of us might have been having that the whole friendship was going to work out. If, if, if... I visit Toby next year, that'll be two years since my last visit. The other thing is it will probably take place at Notre Dame, where she won't have the time to pal around like she would have been able to this year. It won't be the same.

I feel like I wasted my opportunity.

I guess that's what going to visit my cousin all those times during those summers long ago. It was what bonded us closer than most cousins do. It's what visiting Breanne during that summer of 95 did; bonded us closer than most people who live on opposite ends of the country are. It's what visiting Tara or Jina or whomever during summer did; it brought us closer together. Because that's what I really think summer is to me; it's a chance to reaffirm friendships that I think may be in need of reaffirming. It's not a time to let them lapse or fade away, which is what I'm afraid what this summer will be remembered as.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Jane, Divided, But I Can't Decide Which Side I'm On, Jane Decided Only Cowards Stay While Traitors Run, Jane, Jane

2010-06-30T02:16:00.000-07:00

--"Jane", Barenaked Ladies

When I told Casey and Laurel that my parents were selling their home I'm sure they didn't how I wanted them to feel. Honestly, I didn't know how I felt about the decision. I still don't. On one hand, I haven't lived there in almost five years and the majority of my time there was thinking about either how to get out or feeling sorry that I was compelled to move back. On the other hand, it is the home I think of as my childhood home. Even though my family and I had at least three houses we lived in before that one, the house in Sierra Madre is the one I spent most of my life in. Hell, it's the one practically everyone I've ever met has been to at one time or another. It literally is the one place I thought I could always come back to.

I just don't know how to feel about it because you're supposed to have let go of your childhood home a long time before this. Many people don't even have a family home they can come back to because their parents have already moved long before their mid-thirties. I feel like it shouldn't be a big deal. I feel like it shouldn't bother as much as it does.

And yet it does. I don't know what I expected, but I'm beginning to think that I expected that house to be there for the rest of my life. I think I expected it to be always around somehow. And I'm kind of thinking I dislike my parents a bit more for deciding to sell it out from under me. It's almost as if they betrayed me by selling off a piece of my childhood, a so-called security blanket that I never knew I had. And I know it's crazy to believe this was done as a direct affront to me, but it still doesn't lessen the sting.

That's why when my friends decided to take me out to karaoke bar on Saturday night to cheer me up I found the only song that fit my mood was "Jane" by The Barenaked Ladies. Not only is it a song about feeling ambivalence, but it's also a song about obsessing on something innocuous that for some reason gets under your skin. That's how I feel about the house. The house is my Jane, something I shouldn't give too hoots about at this stage in my life.

And yet I do.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

But I Can't Live Forever, I Can't Always Be, One Day I'll Be Sand On A Beach By A Sea, The Pages Keep Turning, I'll Mark Off Each Day With A Cross

2010-06-29T02:41:00.000-07:00

--"Calendar Girl", Stars

I finished one of the best novels I've read the other day. One Day by David Nicholls on the surface sounds like something I would've liked if it had been recommended to me. However, I actually heard about it from having read the author's previous effort, Starter for Ten (another good book if you've ever read it).

From the product description:

'I can imagine you at forty,' she said, a hint of malice in her voice. 'I can picture it right now.'

He smiled without opening his eyes. 'Go on then.'

15th July 1988. Emma and Dexter meet for the first time on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways.

So where will they be on this one day next year?

And the year after that? And every year that follows?

Twenty years, two people, ONE DAY. From the author of the massive bestseller STARTER FOR TEN.

The whole concept of visiting the same pair of friends on the same day each year just appeals to me. Not only does this afford the author the space to develop his character naturally, with the ups and downs of the awkward period between college and settling down, but it also allows him to gloss over having to detail all the mundane bits in between. Some of the best passages in the book are when some innocuous detail from the previous chapter ends up affecting Dexter and/or Emma for chapters to come without them realizing it originally. Conversely, there are other passages where these same two characters believe they are in the midst of really shaking up their life, only to have it turn out that nothing of much import comes of the big decision they have made. Even if the novel only had its conceit going for it I probably would have read it.

But what the book also has going for it, and what I think is its chief selling point, is that it has two of the brightest, if believably flawed, stars in Dexter and Emma. It's been awhile since I read a book that had two compelling characters at its center. Dexter, with all his boisterous confidence in his twenties who ultimately learns to shed some of his arrogance, and Emma, with her huge dreams and small self-image, are a suited pair. Both the author and audience know that from page one. On the surface the novel is a romance between two people who should've been together from the first moment they met, yet who spend the next couple of decades realizing this for themselves. But beneath this framework is the real theme of the book. The book is less about how these two fall in love and more about the process of merging who they are and who they will become. It's about reconciling all those dreams people have of what their life is going to be like with the realities of what their life is turning out to be. Mostly, it's just years of frustration and second-guessing interspersed with moments of great joy and sadness, all the while relying on your dearest friends to pull you through the malaise.

and I'll laugh about all that we've lost

I'm serious. If you're expecting this romantic comedy like When Harry Met Sally... or Sleepless in Seattle, two films this novel gets compared to, you're in for a shock. One Day is moderately darker than those two stories. There's a lot of heartache, even genuine tragedy, contained in the pages of this novel. Indeed, by the end of the book I found myself in a rather sad state at Dexter and Emma's ultimate fate. It wasn't that I didn't see the ending coming; it had more to do with the angst I felt at the circuitous route their journey had to take. I mean--the novel wouldn't have been half as good if the journey was shortened, but it makes for a very sad tale indeed when one realizes how much time Dexter and Emma waste in acting on their convictions. But, alas, that's the human journey in a nutshell. It's about people who think they know what they want but are clueless about as to how to get there or if even there is worth the trouble.

It goes without saying that I recommend this book. Buy and read it now. Hell, buy two so you can give a copy to somebody you care about. That's what I'm doing.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Baby You Know My Love For You Is Real, Take Me Where You Want To, Then My Heart You Steal

2010-06-25T03:34:00.000-07:00

--"More, More, More", Andrea True Connection

1996

Dear Breannie,

I'm answering this letter fairly quickly so you simply must forgive me for its expected brevity. You know how much I detest short letters. You also know that of anyone I do so relish the opportunity to bore you to death (LOL). I don't know--it's currently 3:12 in the morning and I'm not entirely sure tonight is a night for letter writing. Letter reading definitely, but maybe not letter writing. Perhaps I might have to continue my efforts on another night if this letter turns out as short as I believe it shall.

That's cool you can go to baseball games with your day. Every time I've gone to a game with my parents they always ruin it. If it isn't wanting to leave early than it's the fact they never really know the rules to the game. I can't tell you how irksome it is to have heathens accompany one. It's like asking deaf people to go to a rock concert with you. I guess baseball just isn't their thing. It's gotten to the point where I just stopped asking for them to come with you. I really would rather go it alone than have people who don't really love the game like you or me to go with me. And I just know how you feel about your moods being affected by whether or not your team loses or wins. I mean--I don't expect everything to be perfect in order for me to enjoy the game, but it's just like having the right company with you. Everything is so much better when the game is actually good and exciting and you're with people who all want to be there. That I totally believe can affect your mood positively (or negatively). It's one of the reasons I like going to baseball games when I'm not feeling so hot. It's therapy, actually. It's therapy and theater all wrapped into one neat package.

We really should get out to a game some time.

I don't really have a view from my window here. As you know, all you can see is my backyard. Most days all you can see is Alice chomping at the bit and chasing after something or other. Still, it is rather nice back there. If it weren't for all the bugs that can and do get into my room I'd almost call it serene. At four in the morning I can't see anything right now, but I suppose I could take a page out of your playbook and recall the scene from memory.

Someday I'll have a view worth describing to you. Someday I'll be able to take a look off some balcony or window to tell you of the wonders that are spread out beneath me. It's weird; I never really put much stock into having a good view. It just never seemed important to me. But reading your letters and talking to you on the phone puts me in the mood to stop more often in order to take a peek at the world surrounding me. You're forever going on about how inspired you get by something you saw in a moment. It makes me want to be a more perceptive individual, B. Sometimes I think I'm too oblivious to the world around me in a way that most people aren't. I think you called it awhile back when you said that there are times you think I would rather paint the world I see rather than look at the real world around me. I tend to get more relaxed when I imaginate (LOL) a scene rather than draw from the scene I'm already in. I'd rather fix everything into how I want it to be than subjugate myself to the constraints of reality. Maybe that's why I have such a fondness for landscapes because I'm forever drawing them in my head as well. Certainly I never call up the scene of my backyard when I'm searching for something to inspire me. Hell, I tend to call up the scene from your balcony more than I recall my backyard in situations such as those.

I'm that way for a lot of my ideas. I tend to draw from other people's personal lives than from my own when I'm picturing stuff. I see house down the block when I need a house to describe in my stories; I never use my own. I tend to base characters on friends of friends or people on tv rather than my own friends or family. And, yes, I tend to see your vistas when I need to set scenes in my head. It might be a form of self-deprecation since I always say that my own life is too boring to ever capture into words, but it's more likely that when I populate my stories or what have you I have this desire to fill them with objects, people, and places outside of my own experience. I want them to sound foreign, exotic even. Granted, the lives of your people in Macon isn't exactly Vienna or Africa, but it's foreign enough to be exciting for me. Does that sound weird, Breanne? I just can't think of somebody who writes about their own life extensively if he isn't writing a memoir. People tend to gravitate towards stuff they haven't lived before or at least very much. New and exciting is what sells tickets, not old and stuff, I guess.

As for Tommy's, I had it the other week. It was delish. LOL But seriously, I don't know how I'm ever going to get you to try one. You're just going to have to get your ass over here, I guess, little gal. Personally, I think it's worth the trouble because once you taste the greasy goodness of an old-fashioned Tommy's burgers you won't ever want to go back to substandard chili burgers ever again. Sometimes I really wonder how people like y'all out there do it. How do you live without places like Tommy's and In-N-Out? It's like going without water as far as I'm concerned. I would know because ever since I started working at the bookstore I haven't had much opportunity to get down to Tommy's. They really need to build more of those like now. Shit, all I eat these days is like Subway, Round Table Pizza, and McDonald's. It's crappy. Well, the Subway isn't because you know how much I love them Seafood and Crab sandwiches. They're like heaven in a six-inch loaf of bread.

Speaking of putting too much stock into ordinary objects, I realize that, yes, your prophecy is coming true. These letters have taken a bent towards me describing a food every other paragraph. Pretty soon you might be right and these things will turn into nothing but food, food, food for every sentence. I just think that food is the great equalizer. It's like music. Everybody has their own story about the food they grew up on, the food they like, and, most importantly, the food they're currently digging on. Everybody has their opinions about what makes what they eat good and everybody is dying to share those opinions with everyone else. I couldn't give a rat's ass about what people do for a living. I couldn't give a fig about people's politics, philosophies, and, yes, religion. But talk to me about a good restaurant and I'm your boy. Life's too depressing to talk about subjects that lend themselves to conflict all the time. I say the world at large could do with more talk about the topics that we all can relate to. And what's more relatable than food? Nothing, I say. Nothing at all.

And you know what else food is good for? Allaying thoughts of disappointment. When the world seems to be passing me by, when my friends seem to be all moving away or, worse, moving on without me, I can count on food. When people are acting pissy and when friends are just seeming to be not so friendly, I can count on food. After all, very rare is the day when I walk into a place like Subway and just have a bad Seafood and Crab. At least that never disappoints me; it's always good. My relationship with my family and with my co-workers may go up and down, but there is stability in my favorite food places. I can count on them.

That's not true. Some places have started to suck recently. Shakey's isn't as good as I remember it when I used to go there in eighth grade a lot. But aside from places like Shakey's, most of my favorite foods are still comforting me after all these years.

Well, you know my stance on sleep. It doesn't matter if it's the radio or tv--something has to be on for me to fall asleep. I can't just do the whole sleeping in silence bit. And it's not because of the whole being afraid of the dark or that death is out to get me. It's more that I can't seem to get my mind to shut itself off. I need to tucker it out before it'll get any rest. My whole body might be screaming for sleep, Breanne, but if my mind just isn't exhausted then this whole sleep thing just doesn't work. I especially can't sleep if I'm thinking about how differently my life seems to be turning out from what I expected it to be. That's what has been lately keeping me up at night. I just lie there, thinking about how all of this was supposed to turn out differently, thinking how I wasn't supposed to be twenty-one-ish and still living at home. I keep thinking about how my degree was supposed to be my ticket out of Sierra Madre and onto better, brighter things. But mostly I just think about how stuck I feel in that same old bed in the same old room I've inhabited for five years then. I don't know why the five years thing bothers me so much. I know a lot of people my age (not your age, of course) who have been in the same room for fifteen, even twenty years. I don't know--I guess I just have this wanderlust thing going on where five years just seems like an eternity to be sleeping in the same bed in the same room. Especially when you're alone, all of it feels like you've been doing it for your whole life and you might be doomed to do it for another lifetime. And I just can't seem to assure myself that any of it is going to get any better. I wonder how the happy people like you do it. I really want to know--how do you forget your problems when they loom so large and stick in your face all the time like mine do?

Dancing won't help either. That's right out of the book.

This helps, I guess, so there is that.

I never got the distinct impression that either of my parents wanted me to be just like them. I always got the impression that they somehow wanted me to be better than them; like being exactly like them would be a failure on my part. Maybe that's where I get this whole self-deprecating trait (or wallowing as you call it). My parents never seemed to think they were worthy of being admired by the population at large and I inherited that same trait. I've never been like you, one for the spotlights and the attention. I just want to make myself happy rather than try to entertain or enrich everyone else. Fuck, I can't even do that right. I can't imagine what I'd do if I was actively seeking other people's good opinion of me.

I guess if we were smart we'd swap parents. Yours could have the kid who doesn't cause waves and is perfectly happy being ordinary, but accepted. Mine could have the girl they always wanted who really, really likes to shine in everything she does. It would be a good trade. Sometime I get the distinct impression my parents like you better than me anyway. You're nicer to them than I am, that's for sure. And I think they think that you appreciate family more than I do, which might be true too. I know for one that my mom would've relished the experience of raising a girl. Three males in one house wasn't the picture my mom had in my mind when she saw the family she was going to have in her head. I wonder if she's really disappointed with the way her life turned out in that regard. Maybe that's the thought that keeps her up at night if she's anything like me.

As for you, I've only ever got the impression that your parents adored the way you turned out. Minus the occasional bout of wickedness, you're like the perfect kid. I can't tell you how much of a gift that is and one you shouldn't dismiss out of hand. I would know--it's a different ball of wax when your parents think they can always improve you. I know they mean well, but all I hear is that I'm somehow deficient; that I somehow need improving in the first place. And that really isn't a thought that people should grow up with their whole lives. People should grow up that their parents--hell, their family in general--really do see the best in them even if it isn't true. People need someone in their corner, cheering them on, even if it's all bravado. People need to feel that support from an early age, otherwise they get to be like me, feeling like they're mostly on their own in this whole affair. I'm glad I get some of that feeling of you've got my back from you, but I could do with a little more of it my life sometimes--either from more people or more from the people I already have.

And it's good to ponder things... in moderation. As aforementioned, I try to ponder more of what's actually going on in my life if only because I do so little of it most of the time. It's good to get at the root of what's really eating you up inside. Most people seem oblivious to what the root cause of their concerns are. And most people dig only inches below the service. Personally, I like people who dig a little deeper every now and again. They're the rare creatures in this world--even rarer than unicorns (who still love mushrooms, by the way). I don't know if I could ever be intimate with a superficial person. It even bothers me to talk small talk with people I like. I couldn't imagine having to do it for the entirety of my relationship with a person. It'd be like trying to walk a tight-rope on stilts; eventually I'm just going to fall far on my face. And I like that I can bring out this side in you, Breanne. It's my good deed for this life. You know what they say, if you can even save one soul from being too full of herself then you're one step closer to seeing the face of God. I don't know if they actually say that, but they should. And don't worry, you'll never be somebody I get bored of.

You're too cute for that (LOL).

Do you know what I find funny? I can sit in my bathroom, sit on the toilet, and fall asleep with my head on the sink. It's that close to the toilet. I'm looking at the bathroom now. I'm contemplating just trying to fall asleep there. It's especially good when it's summer here because it really is the coldest room in the guest house. There's plenty of days where I'm just taking naps there because the rest of the house is just too hot to even consider sleeping in. And I know you know those days where everything is so scalding hot that all you want to do is just take a nap. Well, that's where I take mine. There, now you know my secret shame. I fall asleep on the toilet AND the sink. I bet you don't meet too many people who can make the same claim, now can you?

We can go anywhere you like any time you wish. You know me, I'm always up for going somewhere. It doesn't even matter where mostly. As long as you've got good company you've got yourself a good trip. Then we'll broaden those horizons of yours. We'll broaden them right up. Honestly, I don't even think they need all that broadening. I think it's more that I see traveling as a rite of passage. One's first trip without your parents is a distinction that I think more people need to get done as early as possible. People need to stop associating vacations as being family vacations. Vacations are supposed to be deeply personal. One is supposed to be vacating from all those nasty buggers that distill the spirit and tax the mind. If one's family is the cause of your distress, then why in the hell would you want them accompanying you? I don't know--I just think it's important for people to take off from their normal lives every chance they get to. And if that chance includes the opportunity to party down with someone you care about then it's win-win. I mean--yes, when I think about us as us it includes all this correspondence and chats. But it also includes two pretty kick-ass trips to Georgia for me. It's just like when I think of Dan or Peter, it includes all those trips into the city and to San Francisco. You go on trips with your friends; it's just what you do. I suppose it's like saying you have a good baseball team, but you don't win the World Series. I would seriously question any friendship where the idea of spending an extended amount of time with them scares me off. If I can't see myself going on vacay with someone then I seriously question the solidity of my relationship to them.

I also kind of use it as a litmus test of someone's commitment to me. I mean--I fly everywhere for a lot of people if I feel the connection is true. I flew to West Virginia to see Jina. I flew to Maryland to see Tara. I flew to Georgia. And I really judge how strong people feel about me by the fact if they ever fly out to see me. I'm just saying. I guess I could turn the question right around on you, if I asked you to, would you accompany me somewhere? Anywhere?

You know what's playing on the radio right now? Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child O' Mine". This song always makes me smile because I remember trying to dance to it in seventh grade at my friends' Paul and Phillip's birthday party. They were identical twins and I remember that party they invited the whole class over including (gasp) girls. It was one of my very first boy-girl parties that I actually showed up to. I remember Casey, one of my classmates, asking me to dance and this just happened to be the song that was playing. All I kept thinking was this really wasn't a song you could dance very effectively to. I wasn't thinking about how pretty she looked (which she did), I wasn't thinking about how nervous I was (which I was). Nope, all I kept thinking was how strange my movements must appear because I had no idea as to what to do with this song. I guess that's what people do when they're thrust into unfamiliar situations; they latch onto something simple to keep their minds off the bigger, scarier picture. I mean--if I stopped to think of what I was actually doing I'm sure I would've come apart at the seams. Or worse.

I should try to call up the radio station to see if they'll play the song again. That was fun remembering that night. Do you remember that scary feeling dancing with a boy for the first time? Or were you always Miss Confidence? I have a skulking suspicion you were. People don't change much in that regard from when they were kids. If you were brimming with bravado at an early age it really doesn't go away. I just wonder what boy had the courage to ask you out because I've got to tell you that if I had been in your class growing up, you would've been the type of girl who would have intimidated the hell out of me. More than that, I was the type of guy to allow you to intimidate me all you wanted. That's why that aforementioned story starts out with Casey asking me to dance because, to be honest, the thought just wouldn't have struck me to ask her to dance. Especially not to "Sweet Child of Mine".

I'm a bit of a ball juggler. Hell that sounds dirtier than I meant it to be (LOL). There's a lot of projects that I start and putter around with as I'm doing other things. I try to get things done as they happen, but sometimes the worst thing I can do is just give up on a project entirely. I figure if I play around with an endeavor it'll get done eventually. So, yeah, I have a lot of ideas I've tinkered with that I'm still tinkering with many months or years later. That novella you seemed to enjoy was one of those ideas that sort of got completed despite itself.

And I think it's a great idea for you to go to school out-of-state. I was supposed to go to NYU instead of USC, but I let the cost intimidate me. Hell, that seems to be a motif in my life, letting things intimidate me. Somebody once told me that the cost of doing the right thing is never getting to do the joyful thing, which I believe is a shame. It might even be untrue. I think I would've enjoyed NYU. A lot. I think it would've been one of those edifying experiences that I simply missed out on. It's an opportunity I'll never get back. Sometimes I wonder if it really was the cost that scared me off or if there was deeper-seeded desire to derail myself. After all, going to New York and failing would've been a more humbling experience than staying here at USC and, well, failing. At least here I still had some friends and family to cushion the blow. Over there it would've just been me with my balls hanging out in the air. If I failed there, it would have been a momentous failure. Do you think that's why I ended up not going, to save myself the embarrassment? Or it could have just been that I really do hate that city as much as I say I do? LOL But, for you, I think getting out of Warner-Robins would be beneficial. I don't even care where you go. Something different would do wonders for you. If it even helps you the tiniest bit to round you out into an even more inspiring person I believe it would be worth it for you. You should do it. You should definitely do it.

Okay, let's do it. Let's run off together! You just pick the place and tell me when to meet you. It'll be all so Before Sunrise of us. Except in the end, you better show up and not leave me hanging. That would just suck. Part of me thinks we'll never get it done, but, truthfully, this isn't an altogether out there request. We could even get this done later this summer if you were up to it. I'm not even kidding. If you could make it out here we could just go out to San Diego, Arizona, Denver--I don't even care where. I'm up for that if you're half as serious as you claim to be. So let's do it.

Well, I lied. This letter turned out to be longer than I thought it would be. It's amazing what you can do when you have insomnia and are fired up enough. I ended up pushing through a letter the size of a small baby, I'm afraid. But I think the weariness is at last starting to catch up with me. I promise this shall be mailed off with tomorrow's mail and then you can tell me once more what I should've expanded on and, yes, cut out. I still don't get this whole business of editing letters. It's not like I'm writing you an essay. I'm writing down my thoughts as they happen so there really is no cause for self-suppression. It is what it is, I'm afraid.

Oh 'twell! That is all. I thank you for your time and look forward to your next correspondence.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

P.S. - Good night, Breannie mine, with your eyes so wide, tears so silvery, and my kisses still wet on your cheek.

2010-06-17T04:23:00.000-07:00

--"Pollen and Salt", Daphne Loves Derby

Do you remember the first peanut butter and jelly sandwich you ever had? I certainly don't. I mean--ask anyone--I'm probably the biggest fan of peanut butter you'll ever meet. I have been known to take an ice cream scooper in order to just eat two scoops of peanut butter in a bowl. Despite that, I cannot even hazard a guess how long ago it was when I had my first taste of the good stuff. Whether it was before I knew words or after, before or after I started going to school--it's all hazy to me.

I find that there are just some things which are uplifting and good, which put a smile on your face for simply existing that you cannot imagine a time they weren't in your life. It's like trying to imagine when the first time you heard music or the first time you walked outside into a perfect day. You know what they're like know because you've seen your fair share of them, but you'd be hard-pressed to recall the first time you experienced them. It isn't like your first kiss or the first time you rode a bicycle. Plenty anniversaries exist with which you can celebrate, but there are some inalienable joys that don't come with origins or anecdotes. They've just always been there and probably always will be. These joys have been filling a hole in your life for so long you scarce remember there was a hole there in the first place.

Now imagine what it's like when something like that gets taken away. Imagine what it would be like if there were no peanut butter in the world and you'd know how I'm feeling about now.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

When I Say Out Loud, I Want To Get Out Of This, I Wonder Is There Anything, I'm Going To Miss, I Wonder How It's Going To Be, When You Don't Know Me

2010-06-15T02:10:00.000-07:00

--"How's It Going To Be", Third Eye Blind

As far as girlfriends and break-ups go I'm batting .500. I've been dumped exactly twice. I've been the dumper exactly twice. In both cases, it fell to me to be the one who offered the opportunity to remain friends. While that offer hasn't always been accepted, I'm coming to terms with the fact that when it comes to forever I'd rather believe in the concept than not believe. I'd rather be the one who is gracious enough to at least put the notion that two people can stay in each other's lives despite their history together, despite the drama, and despite an individual wishing and hoping there could still be more between the two. That's just the romantic idealist in me.

It's strange because I don't place regular friendships under the same blanket coverage. I've walked away from a lot of friendships that weren't romantic in nature. I did it with the folks at St. Rita's. I did it with the folks at La Salle. I did it with the folks at Crown Books. About the only people that it never occurred to me to step away from were the people I befriended at Bally's. Perhaps I haven't spent too much time in their company yet, but so far they haven't become more of nuisance than a nourishment to my life. On the whole I usually find it rather easy to walk away from most people.

But there's something about when I find that romantic spark that defies the idealist in me. It's almost as if I have this rule that once two people connect in that matter they stay connected. I refuse to believe that kind of love dies. Even if two people fall out of love, a good part of me has to believe that the bond between them stays viable.

For a long time I used to question why I have to be this way. I used to puzzle why I can go forgo most friendships, but once it crosses over into a relationship I tend to never say die. I believe it has a lot to do with Jina, the first girl I ever was close friends with and liked romantically. There was a time there where we were as close as any two people can get. Then I went and fucked it all up after she rejected me. I went ballistic. I burned all her stuff, everything she ever gave me. I took it the way I used to take things, thinking first with my temper and not my head or heart. All I could see was the pain she caused me and little else. I didn't care if I ruined things with her because, as far as I was concerned, she wasn't worth keeping around.

Then a funny thing happened a year or two down the road. I started to miss her. After the sting of rejection had faded, I started to realize that I had let go of somebody good and decent in my life. Even if we could never be in a relationship, I started to realize the friendship we had was something special in itself. Especially in comparison to the friendship I'd forged with Lucy almost concurrently, it was like looking at two pictures of the same thing, just taken at different angles. Jina was the girl I'd approached kamikaze-style, guns blazing, who never really stood a chance under all that pressure. Breanne was the girl I'd moved too slowly with for fear of fucking things up again. And yet because I didn't let my temper get the best of me (or her just being as stubborn as I was), I'd managed to hold onto the one I was sure I was going to drive away and drive away the one I thought would last forever.

It really is funny how things like that work out. The people you're sure of as being compatible turn out to be not so and the people who you possibly think you're never going to be seeing again you're still talking to almost two decades later.

I never gave up on Jina, though. She became the one who got away that I really wanted back. Somewhere in the back of my brain I started to concoct the idea that if our bond was true then I'd be talking to her again someday. I even wrote about it here in the early days of this blog. Even then I called her the one that got away. Even when I was talking about the horrible affair of burning her effects, writing her evil letters full of spite, and basically hating her with a passion, I still had it in me to say that despite all that there was still a chance she and I would reconnect someday. It's that strange mixture of hope and hopelessness that formulated the idea that from the point on I would never give up on anyone I started dating. Even if the relationship might end in tears and flames, I knew I was never going to separate myself from them completely. Because of Jina I don't have a box to compartmentalize somebody I was intimate with like that. Because of her every woman I have a relationship with now has to be someone comfortable with the idea of me being in their life for the long haul because that's how I think.

I mean--just look at the facts. About a year after being all miserable about how I'd pushed Jina out of my life forever I found her again on my blog of all places. She still wanted to be friends even after not talking to one another for a decade. That just reinforces the idea that when a connection as deep and as true as ours apparently was, it lasts. It may not last forever like I believe, but it certainly lasts longer than some cynics might posit. Sometimes picturing how it's going to be without a person is more horrible than picturing how it's going to be if you have to deal with them as an ex. That's what I believe anyway. I just believe that I'd rather have an ex I'm distanced from, but still can keep in touch with than lose somebody who was dear to me once completely.

I suppose I just can't imagine giving my heart to someone and then having to ask for it back. When I give something like that it really is a gift that isn't returnable.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Go Waiting For The Stars, To Come Showering Down, From Moscow To Mars, Universe Falling Down

2010-06-08T05:29:00.001-07:00

--"Star", Erasure

One of the long-standing tenets of our friendship has always been the idea that we can call each other twenty-four hours a day even if the reason for the call cannot exactly be classified as an emergency. I've used this caveat for many inane calls in my day--from calling to ask if Breanne thought I would make a good zombie to calling to wake her up on many a quarter-birthday and three-quarter birthday. I used to drive her crazy because I would call on the smallest of whims whereas she has always felt that her calls were more warranted in nature.

However, these days the extent of our calls usually lands in the more typical category. We call to catch up. We call to discuss something deeply personal that's affecting both of us. Very rarely does this clause in our friendship agreement ever get utilized. The only time it does get utilized is on nights like tonight where I'm leaving a friend's house after 3 a.m. and I'm a little wary of trying to drive home somewhat drowsy. I mean--I'm usually great at driving home late because I'm a night owl anyway. Yet there have been nights where I just didn't feel like risking out. On those nights it really pays to have a friend who is just getting up as I'm winding down for the night. When it's 3 a.m. here and I'm driving back on the North 405 I'm confident that Little Miss Chipper is just getting up for her morning jog. It's usually no problem for me to just call her and have her talk to me while I'm driving. Even if means pushing back her jog twenty to forty minutes, she's usually game.

I don't know if she's exactly saved my life on those occasions. She certainly has given me a sense of security that I'm really not alone out on the road when I'm driving home that late. Somebody's going to know if I don't make it back safely. Somebody's going to care if I'm still out there at that hour.

It's the same thing I used to do for her when was running away from home as a kid. There'd she be walking out of her house at four or five in the morning, and she'd call me to ascertain if it was a good idea or not. I'd tell her nope and she'd still leave anyhow. But then when she inevitably came back the next day or the day after, she'd tell me that it mattered that she told me when she left and where she was probably headed towards. She'd tell me that it mattered somebody was worried about her right from the get go. Whereas at four in the morning none of her other friends would be awake, I'd still be doing something at one in the morning here. Or, what was also a common occurrence, I'd be awake here when she'd call me from a pay phone at a relative's or friend's house. I'd talk to her from here to attempt to convince her to go home once more. And whereas most people would fail to change her almighty stubborn mind, I had a pretty good success rate at pointing her homewards again.

Maybe there's a reason we had that point in the friendship agreement highlighted from day one. Perhaps that we knew with the difference in time zones and our penchant for crossing in the middle of the night we were in the perfect position to provide a service for one another. Perhaps the foundation of our friendship is that we sometimes function as the rotating guard mentality, whenever one of us is feeling scared and alone, and is starting to lose hope against the night, the other is up and alert to cover the other. When I'm feeling sleepy or worried or grumpy, she's just the rooster to startle me into staying awake for a bit longer until I'm safe in my bed again. And when she was feeling lost and lonely, I was still chugging along after midnight to be some kind of lighthouse to let her know that there's somebody out in the world watching out for her.

I just like knowing there's at least one person who'll take my call during those hours when everyone else won't.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

It's Clearer Inside Of Me, Who I Will Always Be, Opening Up To The Stars, Crystals And Mystics And Scenics And Memories

2010-06-03T02:26:00.000-07:00

--"All I Ever Wanted To Be", Lily Frost

Yesterday I turned in a submission for The Boston Review's Thirteenth Annual Poetry Contest. It'll be the first writing contest I've entered in ages.

I probably have no hope of winning, but that's alright. I wanted to actively put my more serious, less blog-related, work out into the universe. Now I have. It's not that I dislike writing this blog and associated promotions thereof, but, while a faithful audience, the audience for a three-man blog is rather limited in scope. I'm nothing if not curious to ascertain what the world at large views my more serious work as. I had planned to only enter their short story contest since that really is my forte. I'm really nothing much as a poet. Hell, I'm not even the best poet on this site. Yet, as Breanne says, you've got to get your face wet if you want to go swimming. Starting off with poetry, utilizing my worst skill as a writer, is my version of getting my face wet. And, really, if I wanted to be honest, I'm not all too confident about allowing others to see my works just yet. I want to put my name out there, sure. However, I want to put my feelers out beforehand.

I used to be more confident. I used to be like Lucy is about things. I used to submit stories and poems on an almost weekly basis to whatever contest, call, or query would have me. I even published a few stories and poems in collections and publications most people have never heard of. I used to get by on sheer brazen pluckiness alone. I felt unstoppable. I felt like I was shooting off a shotgun of talent, eventually something I wrote would hit something. Eventually somebody would take notice of what my imagination had to offer and I would be well on my way to becoming the country's greatest living writer. I was sure of it. Indeed, one of the first ten poetry collections I submitted to picked my poem as one of the hundred best they had seen that year. Needless to say, I let that distinction get to my head a bit. And with every small victory, every tiny glimmer of reassurance that being published gave me, I started to think that my future was being set right before my eyes. And soon confidence turned into its evil cousin, complacency.

I never stopped writing. I couldn't stop that even if I tried. What I stopped doing was looking out for opportunities to improve my gamesmanship. I stopped seeking out ways to improve what nature had gifted with me. After college, after I got that silly piece of paper saying that I was dedicated enough to specialize in Creative Writing, I thought I was done as far as maturing artistically went. I thought I had learned everything there was to learn about my craft. Or, more precisely, I thought having a degree in Creative Writing was like having a degree in Math or Business. I thought it was all the proof I needed to earn a living doing what I love. What I failed to comprehend was that you can't put a degree on art, on creating art. Many writers better than myself never went to college, or even high school. Conversely, some of the most noticeable hacks out there have matriculated from some of the more prestigious universities in the world. A piece of paper don't mean crap when it comes to pouring out your mind's fantasies onto the computer screen. It doesn't make you any better; it doesn't make you any worse. All it says is that you learned how to give and receive criticism. All it says is that you learned how to write for a deadline. All it says is that you learned about the craft from a practical point of view. What it doesn't say is whether or not you have that drive to push a project to its completion. It also doesn't say if you have that spark of inspiration which keeps you up at night because you know the idea is so utterly magnificent you're afraid you'll forget it. It doesn't magically bestow the sense of patience that real imaginative fiction or poetry demands of you.

That is my problem. All the way through school I was either the best writer or one of the best writers in my class in terms of creativity and imagination that I took it for granted that I was that damn good. It wasn't until I got to USC that I realized that there are people who were every bit as good as me (and better). But what is else, there were people out there who flat out wanted it more than me. Everyday I saw people who put in the time and the effort to make themselves better, while I coasted on the laurels of the talent I possessed once upon a time. And even when I saw my peers pull ahead of me in terms of advancing their careers in writing, even when I saw what had to be done to take writing seriously as a calling, I still was complacent about the whole affair. In the back of my head I kept reassuring myself I would be "discovered" somewhere down the line by someone. It wasn't up to me to launch myself into writing full-time; it was just a matter of time. I didn't need to do any more than I was already doing.

I fell into what my screenwriting instructor calls the drawer mentality. I thought the only effort I needed to put in was to get the pieces written. I didn't need to do all the other stuff--the querying publications, the entering national contests from these selfsame publications, the making connections with people who held the future of my writing in their hands. I fully tucked my work away in binder upon binder and, yes, placed them in drawers upon drawers. I really did have the mentality that somebody somehow was just going to come knocking on my door, look inside those drawers, tell me I was an awesome writer, and publish those stories and poems immediately. As Ilessa once told me, I took the writing itself seriously. It was just the other responsibilities of being a writer that I let slide. It's the same way I am with the writing itself. I'm very loathe to self-edit or revise. I honestly think my first effort is "good enough" because for my first seventeen years my "good enough" really was better than everyone else's best efforts. What's the point of trying extra hard when the standard effort still got me A's, still got me published, and still made me feel like I had the juice to make my dream of being a writer happen? It'd be like paddling a boat when you thought you already had a motor going. It was just unnecessary work.

But now after a decade (and some) of really not doing anything with my time but telling people I wanted to be a serious writer, I'm actually putting myself on a plan to become a serious writer. Yes, I know it's one contest. But I'm already in the process of seeing what other avenues I can explore. I'm seeing what publications I have a reasonable shot of getting published in. I'm taking my baby steps into a world I should already be into my adolescence.

And that's my fault. I let talent and confidence make a poor substitute of diligence and dedication. It's not a mistake I'm eager to continue making. Will I become the country's best writer now? Probably not. But I think I'm well on my way to becoming at the very least a writer I would be proud to read someday.

And that's all that matters.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

I Couldn't Explain When I Said You're A Pain, I Never Knew Another Way, All The Times That We Saw Falling Down Every Hall

2010-06-02T02:56:00.000-07:00

--"Twins", The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

I've discovered that there just isn't upside to fighting with close friends. Before it used to be important to me that I was right in a given situation. If I thought my ideas, my opinion of a matter could possess some validity, I would fight tooth and nail to see that the people around me would come to see perspective. It didn't matter what I lost or who I hurt. In the end being right was more important to me than keeping peace. Hell, I've even been of accused of escalating disagreements to fights in order to prove I was correct. I was the very definition of the ends justify the means.

But now I'm starting to see there's a little something to giving a little to get a lot. I still like to be right; that's the stubbornness in me. However, now I'm somewhat more eager to keep the connections I have and lose some face instead of fray the connections but keep my pride. Everyone says it. They all tell me that I've lost a bit of the temper that used to characterize my approach to arguing. No longer do I have murder in my heart and revenge in my mind. Sometimes I can even see the utter pointlessness in furthering a difference of opinion when the subject of that opinion is of no consequence. Sometimes I can even walk away from the table, calm myself down, and come back with a vastly improved outlook on matters.

Yet even with my newfound approach, there are still times where I hurt the other people in my life more than the situation calls for. I think today qualifies certainly in that category. There are still times where if I can't end it with the other people saying I was correct, then by God I'll end it with putting that other person in tears. Sometimes that's the only way I get any satisfaction.

Sometimes I really hate the fact that not only am I stubborn, but the fact that I'm exactly this stubborn. Sometimes I really hate the fact I'm more than willing to trade a moment of getting satisfaction for a couple of weeks, sometimes a couple of months, in somebody's doghouse.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

You Can't Always Get What You Want

2010-05-25T02:09:00.000-07:00

--"You Can't Always Get What You Want", The Rolling Stones

Most of the time I'm wary about getting hustled. I am very paranoid about people trying to fool me or persuade me to do something that I don't want to do. The way I see it, almost everyone has an angle. There's no sense in believing that everyone is completely honest with you about their agendas. All it does is get you in trouble when the time comes for people to take advantage of you.

In that regard I'm very wary about people begging for money from you on the street. Hell, I'm even wary about people trying to sell you stuff on the street for supposed school fundraisers. I've been involved with too many scams that involved preying on people's sense of charity and their willingness to support children's educational efforts. In most situations where somebody is begging for money I'll go to extremes to not give them any. Yet I never tell them no. As my friend Jeff makes fun of me for, I usually tell them, "that's alright." They ask, "can you spare any change?" I tell them, "that's alright," making it sound like I'm letting them off the hook. The only way it would send less ritualized is if I were to add, "That's alright. Don't worry about it."

The reason I give them this answer is most people are conditioned to argue against a no, especially in a situation where they are asking for something they want. What most people aren't prepared for is when a person is sounding magnanimous about their request. Again, as Jeff puts it, I always manage to sound like I'm doing them the favor by telling them now. It's like I'm telling them not to go through the trouble of asking me. Save your energy, please. Don't go to any effort just for little 'ole me, as Lucy might see.

However, there was one instance of someone asking money from me that stands out as being a complete example of turning the tables on them. I was just leaving my parents' house with my cousin when we needed to stop at the gas station. As soon as I started filling up the gas tank, a vagrant comes up to me and asks for money. He was right in the middle of his pitch when he noticed my Boston Red Sox sweatshirt. Suddenly he shifts tactics, asking if I'd been to Boston in an attempt to make conversation so he could butter me up. I know what he was thinking, he was thinking that by getting me talking and being friendly with me I'd be more inclined to give him some of my change. Instead, I launch into a five-to-ten minute diatribe about Boston and the fun I have there every time I go. While I'm waiting for the tank to fill up I'm describing the towns I usually stay in while I'm there, how great I think the T is, going to the Sox games, eating at the restaurants, &c.... By the end of the conversation I can tell it is I who have him in the palm of my hand. My suspicions are confirmed when the tank is finally full and I'm putting back the gas pump. That was his opportunity to ask me if there was any opportunity to ask me.

But I don't like him talk. Rather, I just thank him for listening to my "Silly stories about Boston" and suggest that he go visit there again soon. He tries to make a meager gesture with his hand to ask for money, but I just nod. I just tell him, "Oh, that's fine. You don't need to ask me. You've done enough just by listening to me." Again, rather than let him have the power by feeling I owe him a little something; I just turn it around by making it seem like I'm letting him off the hook of having to do me a favor.

That's the best way I've figured out to combat somebody pressuring you into situations that you're uncomfortable with. Treat it like they're putting themselves out and wave it off.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

And So It Must Be And So It Is Written, On The Doorway To Paradise, That Those Who Falter And Those Who Fall, Must Pay The Price

2010-05-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

--"Stars", Les Miserables Original Soundtrack

Leave it to Glee to kick start my Les Miserables fanaticism once again. I admit, I was trudging along through my life with a scarcely a thought about that musical until the May 18th episode of Glee had to go and remind me just how much I love that play. There was a time where I was listening to one of its many soundtracks (Tenth Anniversary, Original Broadway, Original London, &c...) at least once or twice a week for many, many weeks in a row. But in recent years my devotion has waned as new interests have taken its place.

The thing about having a favorite piece of entertainment is that such devotion never really goes away. It sort of just simmers in the background until such time where the tiniest spark causes it to reignite into a full-blown conflagration. For me I just have to hear any number from the show and I usually start listening to all of them during the course of the next few weeks. It's just the way it is. It's just the way I am. Whenever I'm watching one thing, something inevitably gets me to thinking about another thing. Then that second thing becomes a priority in terms of having to go back to it. Another case in point, I was watching The Big Bang Theory the other day and they mentioned Firefly. Well, as soon as the episode was over I had to go right ahead and watch an episode of Firefly. As soon as I have the thought, I have to put that thought into action. Or, as Breanne likes to say, it's one of my many, many rules that I have to follow.

In that regard I am very much like Javert from Les Miserables. He's not my favorite character, but he's definitely the one people say I resemble the most. The way he doggedly pursues his aim without being distracted, the way he has this black-and-white sense of what is good and evil, the way he'd rather die than rethink his perspective--these are all reminiscent of some of my worst (and best) character traits.

One trait Lucy and I share is the fact is we're both stubborn. That fact has been mentioned many times here. The difference between our brand of stubbornness is that hers stems from a sense of being right all the time and mine usually stems from a sense that that's the way I've always thought about a subject or that's the way I've always accomplished doing a task. Even when I can concede that another way might be a better approach, I'll still stick to my guns just because "it's a rule." From the way I set the microwave to all sorts of eights, to the way I have to watch shows and movies "while they're fresh," even the "double or nothing" rule for straws--a lot of my quirks stem from the fact I started out doing a task one way and I doggedly must repeat the action the same way every time thereafter. But what makes it an idiosyncrasy is that after I decide this is the way certain things must be done, I'll invent a rule to give some sort of meaning to my decision.

Basically I work backwards. I'll decided what I want to do first and then I'll come up with a reason why it had to be done that way. Woe betide anyone who takes up the challenge of trying to get me to change my ways. That's where my stubbornness comes in.

And just like Javert it's lead me to some heartache and misery over the years. There has been many opportunities, many friendships lost over the fact that I must have all these facets in my life a certain way. If that way cannot be had or if something bars me from getting it done a certain way, I go on these kamikaze self-destructive streaks where I will absolutely plow through anything or anyone in my way to getting to my goal, even if that goal is all but rendered impossible. Or, as it's played more precisely out, I will go full steam ahead with my efforts towards a certain accomplishment and forgo anything and anyone who doesn't assist me in that endeavor. I'm very much the sort who labels people as those who are pushing me along or those who are just standing in my way.

And just like Javert it's usually after I've done what I set out to do that I realize that sometimes I've paid too high of a cost to get it done. That's when I usually come to the conclusion that what I wanted wasn't worth the sacrifices I made to have it. But by then it's usually too late. By then the only solace I can find is that I, indeed, got everything I wanted... even if it meant losing everything and everyone I really needed.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

I Wanna Know What Love Is, I Want You To Show Me, I Wanna Feel What Love Is, I Know You Can Show Me

2010-05-15T01:19:00.000-07:00

--"I Want To Know What Love Is", Foreigner

I was in Irvine earlier today visiting Casey and Laurel. Laurel's been staying there for some undisclosed "problem." Well, I wouldn't call it undisclosed; it would just be undisclosed to me.

That's the deal with me and hospitals. I don't like going there. In fact, I avoided going there for two days, before going to see her. I mean--Casey told me the entire time that it was no big deal. She kept telling me it was nothing to worry about. However, I figured after her third consecutive day, paying a visit was the only right thing to do. I didn't want to know what she had, though. As long as everyone kept telling me that it wasn't anything huge, that Laurel wasn't dying or anything, it really does me no good to find out the particulars. It just makes me worried and unnecessarily scared. It's the same thing that happened when my grandmother and uncle were in the hospitals just before they died. People kept wanting to tell me what was wrong with them, but that's the last thing I wanted to know. Even knowing the problem, I can't help with it. There's no point in ever telling someone who isn't immediately involved with treatment what's wrong with a person. All it ever does is give a name to something that should be kept furthest from a person's mind.

I mean--I went and saw Laurel because she's become a regular person I see. But it just hurts me to see people who are that sick, sick enough to warrant a stay in the hospital. Barring a situation like Jennifer, where she literally had months to live, I would much rather congratulate a person after they're better and doing fine than come see them when they're not doing so hot. It's enough for me to know that they'll be getting out. I don't know--I guess I would have rather skipped seeing people's weaknesses, their frailty. It just reminds me of my body's weakness and my own body's frailty. Seeing Laurel like that, pinned up and poked with various tubes--it was like seeing Jennifer again just before she died.

It's a sight I don't ever want to see again. Not if I don't have to.

The one good thing to come out of it (besides the fact I was there to hear the good news she'll be getting out tomorrow) is something small that Casey told me while she and I were alone in the hospital cafeteria. She told me she had been there since Wednesday, the entire three days. She heard the same news from the doctors that I did, that it was nothing to worry about. She even got the suggestion to go home and that they would call her when they got better news. But Casey just stayed there, by the hospital bed when it was visiting hours and she was allowed to be there, and taking naps here and there in the hospital lobby and even in her car when she wasn't allowed in the room. She stayed because that's where Laurel was. She stayed because she didn't want to be apart from her.

People always talk about never leaving another person's side. It's a comforting thing to say. Yet when it comes right down to it, people make the choice to keep a comfortable distance. They tell themselves it doesn't matter if I'm here or not. It doesn't matter if I come home for dinner everyday. It doesn't matter if I spend every weekend with the person I'm with. People need their space, right? Casey has this crazy idea that it matters more when you do have that choice to be there for someone when you don't have to be. I tend to agree with that statement. Yes, I hate hospitals, but damn it all if I didn't try to do the same thing with DeAnn when she was in the hospital. Most people I could take or leave, but when I'm with someone I've done the whole sleep in my car, be there first thing in the morning, &c... That's just something you do when you love someone that much. Sure, Laurel was asleep a good deal of the time and probably didn't miss Casey all that much while she was out. But the important thing to know was Casey missed her the whole time.

That was the good part of going to the hospital today. It's been a long time since I've been around people who seem to have the relationship game all figured out. And I guess that's the redeeming part about hospitals. Being around so much pain, so much sadness, does tend to bring out the most human, the most loving side of people. That's the slice of life I like to bring back with me when I do step into a hospital--not the other stuff.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

And Then She'll Ask Me, Do I Look Alright? And I'll Say Yes, You Look Wonderful Tonight

2010-05-13T16:46:00.000-07:00

--"Wonderful Tonight (live)", Eric Clapton

When I came out of the hotel bathroom on that April day in 1995 I wasn't expecting the sight that awaited me. I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting. I suppose you could say that I wasn't expecting anything except to sit down on the bed till we had to leave for dinner. Furthermore, to illustrate just how little I was expecting, I had gotten fully changed in the bathroom into a t-shirt and jeans before coming out.

Breanne definitively had not gotten changed during my time in the bathroom. I found her lying on the bed, covers off, still in her bra and panties despite the fact that she had had ample time to dress in the interim. I don't know—when she had come out of the bathroom in the white hotel towels I had just assumed she would get ready soon after. Neither of us had made that instruction implicit. It's not like I had told her, get ready because we'll go to dinner right after. Both of us were tired after three days of being out on the road walking and this was our first real opportunity to relax on an honest-to-gods bed so perhaps I should have known that she might want a breather that day. Yet I can only go by past behavior. In past behavior with anyone I had never found anyone just waiting for me in solely their delicates.

Nineteen years old and, yes, that was the first day I'd actually shared a hotel room with somebody of the opposite sex.

It was the first time for a lot of things on that trip besides the obvious. Aside from my family, it was the first time I'd spent four consecutive days exclusively with one person. Even on my last trip to Georgia I had had some kind of buffer with Breanne's parents. This trip, however, it was pretty much just me and her the entire.

As comfortable as I was around her it just never occurred to me that we could just walk around half-naked in front of each other. I was not aware we had reached that point in our relationship.

I still remember what she was wearing too. It was this white bra with orange floral prints on it. If there's one thing I remember it's those orange prints because during the walking she had mentioned how she tries to wear something orange everyday, even if it's only something small. I remember thinking, just like St. Patrick's Day, well, there's her something orange for the day. And below she had on a pair of modest black panties, nothing too revealing or sexy, but damn it all if she didn't look adorable like that. And it wasn't like she was posed or anything. Her chestnut brown hair still looked disheveled as it dried. Her oceanic blue-green eyes were vehemently locked in on the tv set and paid me no attention at all. She looked approximately the way I probably looked watching tv. If anything she looked comfortable at that moment in time, in that exact place. Going by posture alone it would've looked like she and I had been hanging out in hotel rooms like this for years.

“I feel like I'm overdressed for this party,” I announced, sitting down on the bed beside her.

Giving me a quick glance up and down, she replied, “Hush. You're fine, sugar. I'll be getting ready shortly.”

I turned towards the television myself. She was watching Pretty Woman on one of the basic cable channels. I didn't go for the obvious question of whether or not she had seen it already. That too we had gotten into a whole discussion of obvious questions being met with obvious answers. Or as she'd put it, that kind of question ranked right up there with asking if somebody was cold when they were plainly shivering or asking if somebody could walk when they were plumb knocked out on their lily-white ass on the ground. What I almost asked was if she thought I should shed some clothes just to make it less awkward.

But it was relatively obvious there was only one person present who found the situation awkward. Before I could ask the question, she piped up again.

“I apologize for my state. I just didn't know what I should be dressing for. First day in the city and you were mentioning you wanted to go some place nice. I wasn't sure how nice we wanted to go.”

“Nice enough. Is there a dress code in the restaurants around here?”

“Not that I know of, but I'm not sure how fancy we're talking about here.”

“It's up to you. We could go somewhere where what I'm wearing is fine...”

“Or what? Somewhere what I'm wearing is fine?” she laughed.

“Hey, there's nothing wrong with what you got going on there, Breanne. Nothing at all, “ I answered back.

For a long time I'd thought she was pretty. From the earliest days of her e-mailing me current pictures of herself or sending short videotapes of typical days in her life, I had known she was one of the prettiest girls I'd ever known. From her dimples, to her slim figure, to just the way she carried herself whenever she knew people were watching her, I found it easy to believe that she had been complimented on her physical beauty from day one. What it took me a long time to understand was that it wasn't a put-on. She didn't spend hours making herself pretty. She didn't cake on the make-up. Hell, she didn't even spend all that long looking at herself in the mirror. If there's one thing that spending three days waking up next to someone in a rather small tent it's whether or not somebody can make themselves presentable with limited resources. For the last three days not only had she managed to make herself look presentable, she had managed to keep herself looking pretty despite no showers and very wrinkled and often slightly dirty clothing.

It could have been have the fact I was at last looking at her from the right side of fifteen, as we had just celebrated that birthday a few days back, but I have a skulking suspicion it had more to do with the fact that she could appear magnificent under any circumstances that led me to the conclusion that my friend simply was beautiful.

I didn't know how to say it any better than that. Around that trip I stopped kidding around with the childish descriptors of “being cute” or “being pretty”. It was around then she really turned out to be something special to me, someone of real astonishing physical loveliness.

I watched her stand up unceremoniously and move to the other side of room. She was smiling, no doubt congratulating herself for thinking up something incredibly clever and wicked for me. When she reached the other side of the room she stood their plainly, hands on her hips, her hair spilling just below her shoulders.

“Ain't nothing wrong with this?” she asked.

“No. Nothing at all,” I answered her.

She then took her hands to the side of her head. She started ruffling them through her brunette mane, the whole time with her eyes still locked on me. I watched as she shifted her weight on her legs to her left side. She looked a bit more defiant, a bit more sarcastic in her stance.

“Or this, Eeyore?”

“Nope. Not at all.” I grabbed the remote from the nightstand to turn off the movie. I wanted to give her my full attention.

Next she spun around, allowing me to see the smooth shape of her back, the delicate lines the encapsulated her unique physique. My eyes traced their way up from her in-step, up her thighs, the contours of her butt cheeks, the small of her back, the nape of her neck, everything. It was like watching the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty. There simply was too much to take in on a single viewing, too many places your eyes wanted to wander. To do any real justice to the task, you had to be diligent. Diligent and thorough.

“What about this?”

“Can't find anything wrong with that either.”

I knew she was teasing me. She knew she had a power over me that defied all common sense. It'd taken me a long time to get over my apprehension in letting her know she had me in the palm of her hands when it came to how I felt. For a long time I tried to downplay just how much in love with her I was. Whether it was a question of her age or the fact she really was (and still is) my closest friend, I didn't want to commit to saying or revealing something that would cross over the invisible line I had drawn for myself. I didn't want to take the extra step of allowing all my feelings for her to be known. From the moment I let her know that I, indeed, reciprocated the feelings she had for me things between us had gotten a lot simpler and a lot more complicated at the same time. Before when I had thought she was merely playful, she had now turned into a different beast entirely. She had turned into someone who rather enjoyed torturing me mercilessly.

She turned around to again face me. She then walked the few steps till she was right beside the bed and me. Leaning over as to give me a full view of her cleavage as well as to place her face maybe six or seven inches from mine, she asked me again, “Nothing wrong with this?”

I wanted to pull her down onto the bed. I wanted to do a lot of things, actually. However, the larger part of me was curious to see where she was going with all this teasing. I mean—we'd had a lot of fun in the tent, but it certainly wasn't the same conditions we had here. The last few nights the only light we had was mostly moonlight and the far-off lights of whatever rest stop we happened to be at at that point. The last few nights the quarters were kind of cramped, which necessitated a proximity to one another that I would never quite complain about, but it also didn't lend itself to any sizable displays of showmanship. It was what it was, two people alone in tight quarters, conducive to a very specific type of evening.

That night at the hotel, well, the sky was the limit. I wasn't about to put an end to the night's festivities out of sheer tradition.

I watched as she stood up again, still next to the bed.

“I was thinking, sugar, that maybe we should order in tonight and save the 'good' dinner for tomorrow. I only have my one pristine evening dress and I reckon it would be best if that's the one I wore when we drove back tomorrow, you know?”

“You want to stay in tonight? But what happened to spending two good days in the city?”

She started to curl one of her brunette tresses.

“Hell's bells, all I have are the dingy clothes in the bag. I have nothing really suitable to going out on the town tonight except the one dress.”

“Whatever you wear will be fine, Breanne. Nobody will care.”

“That's not true. I'll care, please, thank you.”

“I'm sure you'll look fine.”

“No, I won't. I'll look beat. I'll look like the wrong end of the ugly stick, as my daddy says.”

I stood up next to her by the bed. I placed my hand warmly on her bare shoulder where I could feel some of her hairs barely tickle my hand. I didn't know what I was going to say. I only knew that it bothered me some that she could think that something as silly as clothes could detract from her natural beauty. To me that was like worrying about the trim of the house when the rest of the house absolutely sparkled. To me there was nothing she could wear that would ever lead me to believe that the ugly stick had come anywhere near her.

Sometimes I believe that Breanne intentionally discounts the way she looks for my sole benefit. She knows that I'll defend my assessment of her till the day I die. Even knowing that she might be fishing for compliments, I'm still inclined to this day to give her what she wants. It bothers me that much to hear her, to hear anyone, say she doesn't measure up. She has her flaws, but the way she presents herself, the way she handles herself isn't one of them.

“I know you've heard me say this a thousand times, Breannie, but I honestly think you're one of the loveliest creatures that has ever graced the Earth. I don't just think it's a question of whether or not you're beautiful, but of how much more beautiful you are in comparison to everyone else around you. I think you just blow everyone out of the water, it's that bad.”

I watched as she smiled. She then started cupping her breasts in her hands and squeezing them together.

“You just like these,” she announced matter-of-factly.

“I like those, and that,” I said pointing to her still unkempt mane, “and those,” indicating her lit-up blue-green eyes. “And I especially like those,” nodding towards the precious dimples that were making themselves known. “If I had to make a list of everything that I liked about the way you looked it might well go on for forty pages, Breannie. And you know how much I hate making lists. There would just be so much to list down. It would be so extensive that people might think I was shopping for body for my very own Frankenstein monster... or should I say my very own Breannestein monster.

“You're just too sexy for the world,” I laughed.

“And it isn't that you're only hot or sexy or whatever. It's that you're just gorgeous without even trying. I mean—I've woken up next to you for the last couple of days and I can't think of anything else I'd rather wake up to than this face. It might be cheesy to say, but I really could stay awake just to watch you smile while you're sleeping. Just like I could stand here now and just watch you stand here like this doing nothing, just being beautiful. You want to believe that the whole world is going to look down on you if you're not wearing the right thing or if you something looks a little out of place. It's just not true, though. Everyone can see just like I can see that you something that transcends whatever you have on or whatever mood you happen to be in. You have something indefinable, ephemeral. It's this inner grace that doesn't allow you to appear anything less than what you are. It's this inner fire that just raises everything else about you despite the changing tides of the day-to-day. You're tired for one day. You're cranky for one day. And you might feel less than your best for one day. But you're beautiful eternally. You're sublimely and completely awe-inspiring to me, Breannie. There isn't a day that I don't see you, that I don't think of you, and I'm completely lost in love for you. You make me that weak all the time. You should know that by now and, if not, I should tell you that everyday because it's true.”

it's late in the evening
she's wondering what clothes to wear

She paused as the smile gently worked itself from her face. Apparently, the cavalier attitude of the evening had been broached. Now we had progressed onto something substantially more serious in the evolution of our conversation. Breanne has never been one to let things slide lightly. She may be a lot of things and she may give off the impression that she only lightly considers her actions, but I know her better than that. I know her well enough to know that everything you say to her does sink in. Even at fifteen, she possessed enough mental acuity to let every word I had just sink in wholesale without questioning their veracity.

“You're just saying that because I'm indisposed at the moment. If you saw me at my grubbiest, you might well change your tune, Eeyore.”

“I doubt it.”

She faced me once again.

“I don't doubt that you very well could mean everything you said just as I don't doubt it's coming from a good place. What I doubt is if you really believe what you say or if you're attempting only to make me feel better. I don't need false compliments to make me feel better. I've never had. I know what I look like and it sure ain't perfect.”

“I never said you were perfect.”

“Close enough.”

“I'm sorry if I gave you the impression that I thought you were perfect. I'll try better not to give you that impression next time, my Breannie,” I laughed.

She let the meaning of what I said sink in before she continued with a slight smirk on her face.

“I don't care what you think of me because I know it's good. That much is obvious. I don't care if you think I'm the most wicked child on the planet or if I'm the saintliest of creatures. I don't care if you think I'm as ugly as a lopsided duck or as beautiful as a dish of ice cream on a Summer's day. All I care about, darling, is that you tell me plainly what you're thinking. I don't need the hyperbole. I don't need you to fan my already mile-high flames of vanity. I want to know what you're thinking without holding back AND without exaggeration. If I'm not looking my best, it's okay if you tell me. I won't hold it against you, you know?

“You're the one person I've always counted on to go and tell me thing straight. It wouldn't do for you to lie to me now even if only to make me feel better. If you want to go out tonight, that's fine. I'm sure it'll be a hoot-and-a-half. Just don't tell me I'm going to look gorgeous or beautiful or what have you because that won't be the truth. I'm a big girl now, I can take being seen looking better than some, but less than average. I can take one day off from being one of the prettiest girls in the room. What I can't take is you telling me what I want to hear because if I can't trust you, then who can I trust?”

I just shook my head. I took one good stock of the young woman before me—the fifteen-year-old young woman in her white bra with the orange floral print on them and the black panties, the young woman with the unruly hair and slightly saddened eyes, the young woman who I had had the privilege of calling my best friend for almost two years at the point—and I told her exactly what I felt.

“If you trust me, then trust when I say that you're beautiful. You're beautiful, you're beautiful, you're beautiful. I don't know how to say it any plainer than that. And trust me when I say I couldn't lie to you about that any more than I could lie to you about how much I love you. There are just some things that I'm just not that good at pretending. No matter how much it kills me, I just can't pretend to see you as anything less than my most beloved beautiful creature and I just can't pretend to love you any less than I do.”

“That would be the lie. That would be me not telling it to you straight, Breanne.”

She searched my face for a minute for any trace of sarcasm or guile. She tried to find the chink in the armor of my resolve. Finding nothing, she had no choice to believe that I was sincere when I said she would ever be my idea of beauty.

She took my hand and placed it on her heart. Not saying, she just left it there for fifteen seconds maybe while she locked her eyes on mine. I don't know what she was trying to tell me, but I had a good idea of what she wanted me to believe. Her eyes told the story that her mouth couldn't say. Even though she might not ever fully believe she's as sexy or as lovely as others have claimed her to be, from that moment on I knew she believed that I believed. From that moment on I knew she believed me when I told her she could trust me on that issue.

“Let me find something appropriate and I'll take you to dinner tonight, darling. How's that?” she said, finally letting go of my hand.

“It sounds like a plan.”

Finally, just before she went back into the bathroom to freshen up before getting changed, I told her something I should have told her right from the beginning of the conversation.

“Oh, Breanne, did I mention you look lovely tonight?”

“You might have mentioned it once or twice,” she slowly replied before shutting the door with a good laugh.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

And I Should've Known, With A Boy Like You, Your Middle Name Is Always, I'd Always Want You, Uh-Huh Yeah

2010-05-11T00:48:00.000-07:00

--"Always", Rilo Kiley

Apparently, my dad's favorite basketball team is the Celtics. That came as quite the revelation on Mother's Day. I mean--you grow up with the man. You see him support the Lakers, even go to a few game with him and the rest of family. Then after, oh, about thirty years of believing his favorite team is the Lakers he drops the bombshell that his favorite team is their cross-country rivals, the Boston Celtics. Further, he states that's he's loved them as a team since he was growing up when all they used to show was Celtics games and not Lakers games.

Perhaps that's where I got my out-of-blue love for Boston, a city for the longest time I hadn't even visited yet still admired from afar. Perhaps it's genetic for me to be enamored with sports teams from there. It was always out of my hands; I had no choice in the matter.

What I find funny is that, here's my dad, living in Los Angeles and he's just like me, rooting for a team that he can't see their home games. He can't really belong to a huge following of fans that he can go watch the games with as one of a community. He can't really profess his love for the team for fear of reprisal from the diehard Lakers fans. And yet he maintains his decades-long enamoration of them because once you fall in love with a team--just like once you fall in love with a person--you can't ever fall back out of it. As Breanne says, you can't unbake the cake at that point. You're committed and that's all there is to it.

The only thing left at that point is stick with your guns and just love the dirty bastards with all your heart, come what may.

I'm proud to say that I'm glad I share this trait with my dad because the alternative, the fair weather fanaticism that is prevalent in Southern California just doesn't suit me at all. I never much loved jumping on and off the bandwagon and, apparently, neither does my dad.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Cold On A Mission, So Fall Them Back, Let 'Em Know, That You're Too Much, And This Is A Beat, Uh, You Can't Touch

2010-05-05T02:06:00.000-07:00

--"U Can't Touch This", MC Hammer

Baseball hasn't always been the only sport I watched live or kept up with religiously. Over the years I've experimented with being both a basketball and football fan as well. While those never took to any sizable degree, there was a long stretch back in the mid 90's to the early part of the new century where I kept up with the National Hockey League. Like baseball, I liked the fact that it didn't involve someone scoring and, unlike football, I liked the fact that they actually played more than a single game a week. If I wanted to my friends and I could go down to Anaheim to catch a Ducks game (I never cared much for the Kings at all).

I remember at the time my favorite team was the Vancouver Canucks and my favorite player was Pavel Bure, otherwise known as The Russian Rocket. He literally was the fastest man on skates I'd ever seen, which led to him being up there season after season in the goals scored category. And I remember thinking there's something pure about the way a hockey game is played. There weren't the thousand interruptions that plague a basketball game and, unlike even my beloved baseball, a hockey player really had to know how to go from offense to defense in the blink of an eye. Also, people may discount the fighting aspect of the sport, but there is something instinctual about protecting one's teammate that every sport carries with it in some way; hockey's just more upfront with this aspect than most sports are. Whether it's the eye-for-an-eye beanball tactics of pitchers in baseball or the benches clearing moments in almost every sport, rallying to arms for your team is a badge that hockey players happen to display more proudly than most athletes.

And I wasn't the only one who thought this. The other big hockey nut with whom I used to attend games with, Jennifer, used to tell me the fights were the best parts. Not because she enjoyed the fighting, per se, she used to say, but because they were so spontaneous and yet predictable at the same time. You didn't always know from the outset that a fight would break out, but if there was one to break out you definitely could tell which two would be doing the fighting. You could see the jawing, the checks that were applied just a little too diligently. After awhile, it became second nature to see the two individuals who would eventually come to blows. By then it wasn't a matter of if a fight would begin; it was only a matter of when.

We used to argue over and over of who the best fighter out there was. That became a matter of contention just as much who the best defenseman was or who the best scorer was. It was a matter of pride to declare your affiliation for a particular enforcer because it labeled you as a particular type of fan. Did you love the goons, the guys sent out to send a message preemptively? Or were you more in favor of the true enforcer, the guys who got sent out only after the other team had shown their intentions of hurting one's own star player? The reason why the players fought as often as they did was of tantamount importance as to how they came out in their fights in the end. It wasn't enough for a player to be known as the best fighter; the validation came as much as with their code of ethics as their prowess with the fist and elbow.

Everything you do has to mean something, Jennifer used to say while we were at those games.

----

It's telling that after Jennifer died hockey just lost all flavor for me. I mean--I haven't been to an honest-to-gods professional hockey game since 2002, and that was like four months before I found out Jennifer was even sick. Sure, the strike interrupted some of the fervor I once held for hockey. If there's one thing I can't stand it's when a sport denies its fans a full season, regardless if the blame falls on either management or players. But for the most part I stopped going because there really isn't anybody I can go with who shares the same passion for the sport that Jennifer and I once had. When I imagine my small circle of friends as it stands now, there's not a single one of them that I can think of who could elicit the same types of conversations and discussions that she and I once shared. It just doesn't mean enough to other people, I guess. That, in turn, makes it mean that much less to me.

If I want to go to a game with somebody I'll always have baseball. I've been to many games where the conversations were less than stellar, but where the game was enough to keep me entertained. When I think of going to a hockey game, I guess I expect something different in terms of an experience. Like Jennifer used to say, going to a hockey game has to mean something; I expect something much more than merely being entertained.

You could say she ruined hockey for me forever. Yet I see things differently. I hold hockey as something almost sacred now, it will forever be associated with perhaps the wisest person I've ever had the pleasure to know. And the fact that silly, little game was one of the common grounds we could enjoy together places hockey as one of the best pursuits that I no longer pursue. Simply because it doesn't mean as much to me these days doesn't mean I don't hold it in high regard still.

It will always mean something to me even if I never go to another game, just like she'll always mean something to me even though it's been quite awhile since I saw her last.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

There She Goes, There She Goes Again, She Calls My Name, Pulls My Train, No One Else Could Heal My Pain

2010-05-02T01:11:00.000-07:00

--"There She Goes (cover)", Sixpence None The Richer

I'm still a little under the weather so this is going to be a short post. I still wanted to share this before I forgot it.

I started feeling kind of sick on Wednesday, probably brought on from staying out a little too late the night before without adequate coverage from the cold one. I'm usually loathe to wear jackets, sweaters, or any other such nonsense. Sometimes it bites me in the ass like it did on Wednesday.

I wake up that morning feeling nauseous. I even proceed to vomit a little as I'm waking up, which is not the feeling you want first thing in the morning. In fact, I was feeling so bad that, instead of waking up properly, I went back to bed. My throat hurt and my chest was congested. Those were two things I did not want to deal with right away. I figured I'd wait for a couple of hours, then I'd assess my position then.

Unfortunately, Lucy did not have similar ideas as me. I heard the phone ring and a familiar voice on the other end of the line.

"Can't talk right now. I think I'm kind of sick."

"Awwww, are you okay, darling?"

"Not really. I threw up the first thing this morning. Now I'm just trying to give it a few hours to see if it goes away."

I should have known something was afoot when she didn't reply right away. I should have known that wicked mind of hers was crafting something sinister in the meantime. When she did get back to me, however, it was worth the wait. It definitely cheered me up for the rest of the day.

"It might be morning sickness. You could be pregnant...."

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

I Ain't As Good As I Once Was, I Got A Few Years On Me Now, But There Was A Time, Back In My Prime, When I Could Really Lay It Down

2010-04-23T02:59:00.000-07:00

--"As Good As I Once Was", Toby Keith

FOR BREANNE ON HER THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY
by E. Patrick Taroc

You were asked when you were your best--
Was it when the fire burned bolder
Throughout a younger head and heart
Only innocence can impart?
It's true most men would be impressed
With wry tales of the wicked lass,
Clad in mischief as her cuirass
And stout chips upon her shoulder.

I confess to those countless years
Spent shining down upon us all
Being branded in recollection
As some proof of your perfection.
Although, while the next birthday nears
With the speed you once blazed down your street,
I doubt your climb is now complete;
Your final britch has yet to fall.

I shall say for now and forever
You're still the drink I want to stir
At thirteen or thirty, with smiles
Or tears that trickle for miles.
You're still the one they call clever
Despite what your time here might tell
For you're still as bad as all hell
And as good as you ever were.

(04/23/10) Copyright 2010 E. Patrick Taroc

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

A Million Words Couldn't Say Just How I Feel, A Million Years From Now You Know, I'll Be Loving You Still

2010-04-21T03:39:00.000-07:00

--"Nobody Knows", The Tony Rich Project

There exists a few audio cassettes of me singing classic 80's and 90's R&B songs. Precious few have heard them and if you ask me directly I'll probably disavow their existence. In fact, I'm pretty sure the magic number has been limited to such that I could count it on one hand. Also, I'm pretty sure there is only one person in the world who can actually play them whenever she wants. As far as treasures go, they're not all that valuable. The tapes probably cost me less than five dollars. The price was mostly done in the short spurts of ten or twenty minutes during which I recorded the songs as well as the monologues that bookend the song. But as far as one person doing something foolish to express a heartfelt, then they're certainly priceless.

I remember the first one I gave was well back in 1996. We'd already been friends for almost two years by then. We were also well use to sending one another little care packages in the mail, which sometimes included special greetings or short monologues about what was currently going in our lives. It broke up the monotony of writing e-mails and snail mail back and forth. It also served to have something permanent as to the sound of each other's voices.

Well, around her sixteenth birthday, it occurred to me that it would make a sweet present if I sang of those significant love songs that approximated how I felt about her at the time. We always joked that we had the worst singing voices, yet on the phone it would sometimes end up that we would mockingly serenade one another with whatever song was popular at the time. It wasn't so much that I loved the way her voice flowed (or her mine), but there was something sweet about her saying those words, even in jest, to me. The way I looked at it, she was saying it to me. That's all that mattered. People may joke and kid around with songs, but there's a bit of truth in lyrics when they're directed towards someone. That's my theory anyway. I certainly most of what I sang to her on those nights. I mean--why not? If she didn't like it, I could always pass it off as me joking around. If she did, then it was that much easier for me to muddle through and for her to digest.

1996 was the first year I dared actually save it for posterity for her. Before then it was a matter of my being worried that somehow my feelings might change. By 1996, though, I was fairly certain that they weren't. And I thought I could give her another present, yet something as personal as a tape of me talking and singing directly to her, she would have to know that's not something I just do everyday.

And it still isn't.

"Nobody Knows" just happens to be on that first tape. I must say my rendition if pretty crappy. I don't believe in key and I think I fumbled the words more than once. The important thing, she says, is that I went through the whole thing. I didn't laugh. I didn't try to sound all cutesy. I sang it straight and true, and I let it stand as it was--one person expressing how he felt for another.

I don't send her a tape every year. That'd be stupid. But every couple of years I'll send her another tape for her birthday. It's always four or five songs, pretty obnoxiously sweet songs that most men have no business singing, but I always manage to sneak in when I'm at karaoke or something. I believe that's what gets me through karaoke nights, aside from the alcohol, the fact I'm always singing to a certain someone when I do sing. The embarrassment is mitigated when I can fool myself into thinking it's dedicated to someone. I don't feel as much as an idiot when it feels like I'm just saying something I already know to be true in my heart.

Sure, for a long time I've gotten her some fairly worthwhile gifts--a watch last year, a necklace a few years before that, &c...--but it's my contention that somehow she appreciates the tapes more. They're more unique and I think they feel more like something I would do.

Even when like this year as she's turning the big twenty plus ten and I'm feeling down on myself that my unemployed state leaves me ill-equipped to honor the achievement to the degree she deserves, I know I can always make and send off another tape. I mean--I'm kind of angry that I can't be there and I can't send her anything huge without busting my budget to show my undying affection her. By now, however, I suppose she knows. The only thing I can do is perhaps sing a little song that puts into a few words what trinkets, tokens, and object d'arts usually vocalize for me. The only thing I can do is perhaps remind her that there's a part of me that remembers when she laughed at my first tape... and also remembers that she's kept that one and all the rest of them neatly tucked away in one of her dressers till this day.

If I can't buy her something nice this year, the very least I could do is do something nice for her I believe.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

I Watch The Ripples Change Their Size, But Never Leave Their Stream, Of Warm Impermanence

2010-04-19T02:00:00.000-07:00

--"Changes", David Bowie

And for our 1000th post...

I was stuck as to what to write for our thousandth post on the site. I mean--I never really did stand by for much pomp and circumstance when it came to tailoring my posts. Sure, I've attempted a few acknowledgements when it came to this site's birthday of September 1st, but I don't think there was much fanfare when we hit our five hundredth post or anything like that. I don't know--I just never saw much cause to deviate into congratulating when any of a certain group of magic numbers was reached. It wasn't like any of us were planning to stop upon hitting such a goal. It wasn't like any of us were expressly shooting for a specific number either. Hitting one thousand was inevitable in my view.

However, like when we hit our five year anniversary, I am kind of proud and nostalgic for just how much has been preserved here. It's a little humbling to think that the girls and I have written enough posts to occupy somebody's time for the next three years even if they were only to read a post a day. It's also a little astounding that any of us had this much to say at all. I mean--none of us write really short posts and the volume with which we fill these pages isn't exactly a ten-minute job. I love that, in some small way, we left a piece of ourselves with everything we wrote and never held back. I love that, despite everything people say about blogs to the contrary, this wasn't a one-trick pony where all we did was describe in mundane detail what we did that day or what we were thinking.

I love that everything that has been posted here has meant something to one and sometimes all of us.

And yet...

----

I just finished reading the latest novel in The Dresden Files series entitled Changes. I have loved this series for some time now. It's one of the few set of novels I can count on for being entertaining, exciting, and altogether captivating book after book. If anything it's because I could count on the same familiar elements--the same characters, the same save-the-world despite losing a piece of yourself plots, the same sense of tension--that I keep coming back to the series. Other books may come and go, but I know every April I'll have a new Dresden to occupy a couple days (I bought the book yesterday afternoon and finished it tonight).

There's a risk, though, that with anything that has such familiar concepts that the writing could get stale and the action start seeming typical. I admit, there was a part of me that was wondering what new insights, new twists Mr. Butcher could bring to the series after eleven novels. Not that it would have stopped me from reading, mind you, but it would have definitely colored my view of this novel in relation to the ones that preceded it. I would have still liked it, but I would have thought it may not stand up to when I first started finding about Dresden, Murphy, and the rest of the gang.

That is, until I read this book. I get the feeling Butcher wanted to shake things up and shake things up he has. Oh, let's count the "changes" that were wrought in this book:

Harry's home burns down
Harry's office gets blown up
Harry's sometime lover/true love gets killed
Harry accepts a deal with the Faerie Winter Queen Mab

And, oh yeah, Harry finds out he has a secret eight-year-old daughter that the mother never told him about

Butcher took what could have been a rote twelfth installation to his #1 series and turned it into a whole new jumping-off point. It's kind of fitting to make the twelfth novel be the game-changer because it has that connotation of a new year turning. Despite my not knowing what's going to happen next, I am really excited for next year's novel because it'll be like starting from scratch almost. All the old rules may not apply any more.

In one sense, it'll be familiar, but in another I think the changes may breathe even more life into the series.

time may change me
but I can't trace time

----

And I think that's what I'm going to color this thousandth post with because I have a skulking suspicion that california is a recipe for a black hole may be in store for some changes, some much-needed and some not so much. It isn't going to be anything drastic. I just know that there's a lot happening in our lives that may affect what you normally see here.

For instance:

Toby has asked to scale down her involvement while she adjusts to her new life in South Bend so we might be losing Marion for a few months in the midst of Summer and Fall.

Also, Breanne might be moving away from her hometown of Macon so you might be hearing more about that in the coming weeks. Plus, you know, there's that whole thing about hitting twenty plus ten this Saturday.

As for me, I might be moving as well and that's going to open a whole can of worms as far as what I write about since I may be moving away from most of my family and friends here to start afresh in a town where I know no one.

Changes are afoot, and after a thousand posts I'm starting to realize that's not a bad thing in the slightest.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Oh, You Humor Me Today, Calling Me Out To Play, With Your Telescope Eyes, Metal Teeth, I Can't Be Seen With You, You Freak

2010-04-09T02:45:00.000-07:00

--"Telescope Eyes (old lyrics)", Eisley

"What are these for?" I asked, holding up the oversize black eyeglass frames.

It was my first time seeing Toby's room and of all the interesting things to catch my eye that'd been one of the first. I tend to keep the places I live very spartan in terms of decor--a few books here, my one Monet print, and various bits of paper strewn about. However, the first thing I noticed about her humble abode was the outpouring of colors and collection of eye-catching objects spread throughout it. I glanced around for a few seconds, taking it all in, but when my eyes finally did focus in they focused in on the odd-shaped glasses with no lenses in them.

"Those were a gift from one of my teachers," she said, taking them from me. Placing them on her delicate face, she did her best to make her face seem profound. "How do they look on me?"

"Your teacher gave you a pair of useless glasses?"

"Gosh. They're not useless. I've been told by my parents they're very sharp," she laughed, once more taking the glasses off and placing them on her desk.

I shrugged my shoulders and continued to look around the room.

I've always had an involved history with the wearing of glasses. When I was at St. Rita's, there were only three people in my class of thirty that wore glasses. Two of them were my friends and one of them was a girl named Rachel (not my Rachel, but a Rachel). I didn't think anything much of it at the time, but it definitely set them apart as being against the norm. I never made fun of them for how it altered their appearance. Somewhere along the way, though, I must've subconsciously taken note that glasses were something that set you apart for whatever reason and didn't necessarily ease the process of fitting in.

At the time I was very keen on fitting in, being one of the only minorities in an otherwise homogenous group of caucasian students. I already knew my personality was kind of out there, being long ago labeled the weird guy of our class and embracing the label with a decent amount of modesty. I sure as hell didn't want to add to that reputation by wearing something that would've marked me as being entirely different from the herd. I already felt alienated half of the time I went to school. There was no need to put this emotion into effigy with a set of glasses. I didn't make that a credo at the time. I just adopted that mentality somewhere along the way.

"No, I don't think the glasses look bad," I said halfheartedly. "I've just never met anyone who willingly wore glasses when there was no reason for them to. I've just never met anyone who had cosmetic glasses."

"I think glasses are fun, mojo. This pair certainly is. I feel more renowned and famous just by having them on, I can tell you that much," she said, trailing me around while I poked into more and more of her belongings.

Right then my own glasses began to weigh heavily on my face. Most of the time the fact I wear glasses when I'm anywhere but home doesn't register with me. They kind of fade into the background of pressing thoughts after awhile. After all, I need them when I'm driving which, as a Southern California native, I'm doing about 25% of my day anyway. I need them when I'm sitting in front of a computer for too long, which I tend to do a lot. You could say that half of my day requires the use of glasses in one form or another. Yet it always manages to surprise me when I'm in the middle of work and I catch something out of the corner of my eye, only to see the edge of my frames peeking into view. My brain startles as if to ask "how did those get there?"

"I don't think they're that much fun."

"You don't like your glasses?"

"Not hardly."

"Why?"

"I've got no real reason to like them. Honestly, if I had my eye, I wouldn't wear them if I didn't need to. In fact," I said. I proceeded to take my glasses off. I placed them atop her dresser very carefully. I then turned around to face her. "There's no real reason for me to wear them here either."

"Gosh, it makes you look so different. It's like removing the headlights from a car," she laughed.

"In what way?"

"You know, they're small most of the time. But if you take them off, you notice right away that they're missing. That's my view of it anyway."

"So my glasses are headlights, huh?"

"No, my glasses are headlights," she replied.

I never wore glasses all through my time at St. Rita's and most of my time at La Salle. My eyesight was good, if not great, during this time period. Every eye check-up I had said that I had nothing wrong with my vision and didn't need glasses. It was great for me because it was one less thing I was required to keep track of and it was one last thing that I had to fret self-consciously about.

There was a brief period in high school where my eye doctor told me I could wear glasses to rectify a small problem in my left eye. Yet it was basically like wearing a piece of transparent glass--I think it was only 5 off of 20/20 vision in whatever direction was necessary. Eventually trying it out for a month or so made me feel like a spectacle so I stopped wearing them. At the time I thought that would be the last time I would be compelled to wearing them. I don't know why. Maybe I just had the idea that my body would continue to function as it had for the previous sixteen or so years. Or maybe I just had the typical notion that I was invincible as so many teenagers often do.

It wasn't until 2004, in fact, that I started wearing them full-time. I started to notice my vision getting blurry while I was working at Bally's. Sitting in front of a computer for 8-10 hours a day as I had been for the previous four years had finally caught up with me. I was told that if I was going to continue to do so I would need glasses.

I was crushed. I hated the thought of wearing glasses. Now I would need to be wearing them in public for most if not all of my day.

I sat down at Toby's desk after I had looked around for a bit. At the desk I started to play around with the glasses. Toby sat at the edge of her bad looking at me with a careful glance. She has this way about her that lends the idea that she has about half-a-dozen ideas going on in her mind at the same time. It's this mentality that I think gives her such a considerate amount of perception about other people and about herself. Glasses or not, she's one of the few people I've met who can see right into the heart of a person and take what she wants out of the results. She's not an analyst like Epcot is, but she can be very empathic when she needs to be.

The other thing I've always like about her is the fact that she knows what it's like to be on the outside looking in. I usually was placed in that position by circumstances, but not her. Toby's always maintained her distance as a conscious choice, as a decision to set herself apart from everyone else. I'm just weird even at the best times. Like most true visionaries or artists Toby likes to think of herself as a breed apart from the masses. Yet we always meet in the middle as a couple of people who understand gravely what it's like to be going at this whole life thing without much support. We've always held it in our hearts, that for the most part, we go through our days very much alone. It's nice hearing somebody else come up with the same truths about being independently-minded that I've always held as tenets of my existence.

After awhile I got tired of her just staring at me without saying anything.

"What? What is it?"

"I was thinking that as soon as you stepped off the plane at the airport I've only seen you in your glasses. That's the only way I've known you."

"So?"

"So you're sitting over there still thinking about how weird it is to be wearing glasses. Meanwhile, all I can think about is how different it is to see you without them. And this is only after being around you for a day now. That's what I think the great thinkers liked to call a 'schism of perception.'"

"Schism of perception?"

"Sure. For you, you went, what, thirty years without wearing anything on your face. So the four years you've been wearing glasses is the exception to you."

"And?"

"And I've only known you for three years and every picture you've sent me of you has you with your glasses on. My reality up until today was the idea that you've always worn them. Gosh. It surprises me is all how different things are based on the limited information we're presented with. That's all I'm trying to say."

I'm just like you
I know you know

I saw her point. I'd only known her for three years, but they all had fallen into my glasses-wearing period. To her, that was the reality of my situation. Anything that came before that--if I had once had purple hands or an extra ear once upon that--would always be the exception to her. My existence as it was when first we met would always be the benchmark upon which she would base any and all of her perceptions of me. On the other hand, people like Breanne (and myself, I guess) who had known me before I had started to wear glasses would always use that as the basis of their analysis. In the scope of things, because I had gone through my formative years without the aid of glasses, I will forever think my natural state is not wearing them. I will forever think that I look weird in them and that it makes me look dorky, geeky, or whatever else you will (Come to think of it, Breanne's position about my glasses has been that she likes me in them, but that's only because she has an unspoken fetish for guys in glasses. LOL).

I can't say that I've hated my time in glasses. Especially with my most recent pair, I've grown comfortable wearing them. For the most part I've accepted the idea that they are a part of my existence now. However, subconsciously I believe that from the very first day I started wearing them daily I was no longer the same person I once was. It's like I lived in a group of perfectly sighted people and then was excommunicated to glass and contact wearers. And I've never really felt completely like me from that point on.

It's why to this day it could of annoys me on a basic level to see people I used to know as not wearing glasses suddenly sporting them now. It only serves to remind me of how I was tossed out from that happy home, never to come back again. Yes, it is only a matter of perception, but how we see ourselves is deeply rooted on the image of us as a little kid. In some respects, on the outside we may look all grown up and worn-out, but inside we still see ourselves as that nine or ten-year-old best self that we remember as being the funnest, brightest, and blissful time of our life. For me at least that was a kid that didn't wear glasses. By putting on my glasses, it reaffirms the fact that I'm not that kid any more. I'll never be that happy again. I'll never have that much fun again.

I took off my glasses. I then picked up Toby's obnoxious pair and put them on. Seeing through the non-existent glass took a little getting used to. I adjusted shortly, though, and turned towards my contemplative companion.

"Better? I'm not freaking you out any more?" I smiled.

"Gosh. That's much better. If you want you can keep that pair for as long as you like. I'll let you," she smiled back.

At that time I only put them on as a joke. They were large and garish, making me feel especially aware that I had a heavy pair of glasses on. Yet that's the normal way I feel whenever I first put any pair of glasses on--that I'm ridiculous and that I'm not a person who really wears glasses.

But in reality I think I'm just balking at the fact that my body's gone through a lot of changes in much the same manner as my brain has. I'm not the same non-glasses wearing kid I used to be. I have different priorities than that person. I have different ideas about the world. I don't even have the same hopes of fitting in like I used to be. It would be nice to think I retained a lot of that boy in me because it would mean that I had a lot of my priorities figured out at an exceptionally young age. That wouldn't be the truth, however.

The truth is the picture Toby sees is closer to the picture of me that is "real." I'm more of the thirty-four-year old glasses-wearing romantic idealist than the plain ten-year-old idealist.

I spun around in Toby's chair while I gave the glasses a test spin as well. When I stopped, she still had that look on her face that she had finally figured something out about me. She got off her bed, silently stepped over to me, and took my hand in hers.

"Can I tell you something, mojo?"

"Shoot."

"I kind of like you better in your glasses. Gosh. Even before I knew what you looked like I always figured you as someone who wore them. And now that I've seen you in them it's hard to picture you not wearing them, I can tell you that much. You have nothing to be embarrassed about. Trust me."

I took off her grandma glasses and put mine on. She took back her glasses and put them on as well.

"There, now we look like ourselves," she said simply.

And she was right.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers