from December 23, 2006

We are not unique in our experiences, but they are unique to us. Each of us lives and breathes these experiences as if we were the only kids to ever have their hearts broken, to ever have lewd lunch conversations, to ever sneak out to commit acts of dubious origin and questionable legality. We act as though these experiences are one-of-a-kind. And, though they are not, they are genuine. They are true experiences, and they evoke rather different responses in all of us. They fill us with hope. They fill us with sadness. They both urge us forward and pull us backward. These experiences and memories, as generic as they are, are the most important things we've got. Our lives are like cheesy romance novels. Most have the same basic plot and structure, but the differences lie in the decisions of the author. We are the authors of our lives. So what have we to do but write?

Looking Back

From my sophomore year of high school:

I became popular only after showing that I was the strongest kid in the class. I was one of the most athletic, and I always have been. I can;t lie about liking sports. It just feels good to run around, even now. I didn't show my strength in sports, though. I beat people up. I did it for laughs. I did it for FUN. I was awful. I'm sickened by the way I used to torture poor John Moran with his lisp and dyslexia. Damn...But if it hadn't been for a major life change, I probably would still be that way, and I wouldn't be half as wise as I am today. A change in schools doesn;t seem like a big deal for a nine-year-old with no friends. I didn;t think it was at first. I was the same as always. I was quiet, rambunctious in my own respect, and I had short hair. It wasn't a good thing. That hair was probably the worst of things. Children are very superficial, and it is not by their own choosing on most occasions. These children were different. I got such a beating that first week of school. Boys weren't afraid to hit me, and girls would never stick up for me. I looked like a guy. I acted like one. Everyone thought I was nuts. I became severely depressed for the next 3 years, and I gained a lot of weight. It was a lot for me. Part of it was probably puberty, but part may have been the 6 pack of coke and bag of chips I was used to eating every day. I wouldn;t eat sometimes. I'd get sick, and then I'd binge. I'd sleep for almost full days, and I would be constantly absent and late to school. I never wanted to go. I contemplated suicide at ten years old. It's hard to imagine. Nobody understood. I was a little kid. I couldn;t possibly have a true traumatic situation on my hands. I'd get beaten up and taunted all the time. Even my best friend deserted me. I had no one, but I learned. I learned what an awful person I had been. I had done these exact things to other students, even more helpless than I, and the fullness of it hit me like a ton of bricks. It didn;t take long for me to realize my errors. I was always good at that. I was at a different level of thinking, and I was able to comprehend abstract things very well, a skill of which most fourth graders know nothing. In retrospect, I was very smart, but I was also very stupid for believing that I was the only one with that kind of problem. My brother had the same problems. He was older, and he knew it all. But we never got along. I couldn;t trust him. My parents were adults. They weren;t accustomed to the new age problems. I didn't believe they had ever been in these situations before. I was only half right. My dad was a bully. He indirectly admitted that through his years of telling me that it was okay to stand up for yourself when no one else would. He would encourage us to beat sense into people that deserved it.
That was a fatal flaw of his that I can't forget, and he knows that. But I wouldn't change any of it if I had the chance. It's all helped me. That is my past, however remote it may seem now. That story is who I am. Ninety percent of my philosohpy on life, my reason for living, the basis of everything I have ever done and will do has been shaped by the events that occurred in those 3 years. I've learned a lot about myself in my life. I know a lot of things that I have never told anyone. Nobody knows very much about my past, and that is probably in part because I never told anyone much, and it is also in part that I have a hard time distinguishing one event from the next. They all play together in my mind like scenes from a movie. Things seem condensed, but they happened every day. It was a true nightmare, but it was an effective lesson for me. It was probably the only thing that could have shown me reality. I was always one for the hands on experience of things.

English Teachers Will Hate You...(2004)

The full title of this piece is actually "English Teachers Will Hate You if This is Your Paragraph Structure... (Yet I Did This for a Reason)", but that takes up a lot of space.
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The photograph...God, you can't help but think about that picture--stare at it for hours. You don't know how to feel about it. I mean, are you happy or sad? Is it possible for one to desperately desire to laugh and cry and scream and sleep all in the same breath? It seems that the picture forces everything inside of you to boil to the surface, and nothing is left afterwards. Gone. Evaporated. Empty yet fulfilled. You don't know what it means, and the more you think about it, the less you understand it. If you've ever wondered why some cultures fear the taking of a photograph, let me suggest that you peruse one rather closely. It's haunting. You see yourself or your friends frozen in time, unable to be anything but what you are they are at that precise moment. A piece of life stolen from you and bled onto a glossy sheet of paper...Sometimes that hurts when you lose what the picture is trying to convey. It hurts to feel that sometimes you can never again have what you see directly in front of you. It's draining--and it's a rush--and you can't help but feel it when your mind refuses to believe that anything else exists in the presently minute atmosphere of your reminiscence. You have to think to breathe because all of your energy is dedicated to satisfying the conflicting desires of your soul. You want the pain to stop, yet forgetting means it never existed. All the structure collapses.; all the walls and fortresses erected for the protection of your most fragile pieces burn in a grey flame whose essence can be felt and breathed in times subsequent. The mental chaos spawned in such moments foils the order intended to be conveyed in the photograph. The single, purified, mint-condition occurrence becomes clouded and soiled with human emotion. No longer cold, inanimate sheet and ink, its faces wail to you. They speak the things that you cannot. They bring forth your tears and allow you to move on. You may stare at that photograph for 1 or 1 million moments, yet it is all the same to you. You close your book, hide the faces that made you feel what it is to be alive, and all the while that you go about your mundane, monotonous existence, that shiny sheet lies there in waiting for your return to once again pound and sear into your soul the ultimate fact that you are alive.

An Antediluvian Approach (2004)

Skimming through some of my old notebooks, I noticed the myriad of quotations and excerpts from literature which fill their pages with hopes, dreams, tragedies, and, indeed, life itself. Almost all of these adages and axioms had been procured from the internet with its glorious database of famous (and some not-so-famous) phrases. As I progressed in my perusal, something caught my attention in an epiphanic way: Every word, every line, and every single page--though written in inks of various colors--contained quotations, not made sterile by the technological norm known as Times New Roman but given passionate meaning in their imperfectly handwritten form. Looking back, I noticed the erasures, the scribbles, and the tattered pages of yesteryear. In those minute presences, I saw somewhat of a diary of my life: At times, my penmanship appeared flawless, reflecting a confidence and charisma with the ability to transcend even that which we call "time"; and yet there were periods when it seemed that each word--each letter--became agony to produce. But as I trudged onward, the lines began to flow more smoothly, my mistakes gradually became fewer, and my state of ease returned with full force.
I could have simply "copied and pasted" every line from a website and printed it into a neat little booklet, glibly labeled "Quotations." But I did not. There is something one feels in writing those words with one's own hand that makes them truly one's own. Even though they may have been brought into this world by another, they have the ability to become part of one's very soul when one lives them and knows them. Words cannot remain mere words when they are made the focus of an individual's being. They amass new powers incomprehensible even to him whom it overwhelms, and in those powers lies the essence of mortal existence: If ever one must endure a time when the world is brutally frigid and sterile, all that need be done for remedy presents itself in a transferal of power--a personification of dormant or lifeless words who then act as angels, lifting one out of his misery and bringing him to unsurpassable felicity.

Two Related Pieces on the Jazz Age (2005)

"The Gatsby Age"

With the culmination of the Great War occurring in the autumn of 1918, it seemed that Woodrow Wilson and his battalion of Progressives would merely have to bide their time until the nation surged forward into a burgeoning new age, one teeming with the venerated philosophy of Manifest Destiny and idealistic social movements; yet the abrupt armistice and the absence of a climactic victory left Americans seething with both unfocused agression and contempt for the generation which initially drove the United States into international conflict.
The essence of Francis Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby lies in comprehending this malignant amalgam that led the generation of the "Jazz Age" to reject the formerly esteemed values of idealism, faith, and moral purposefulness in favor of materialism, iconoclasm, and irresponsibility. Fitzgerald's deified Gatsby reflects directly the societal transformation from wholesome, moral, and religious rigidity to licentious pleasure-seeking and polytheism with regard to material possessions and certain human beings--such as Gatsby himself. Yet Gatsby also personifies the omnipresence and might of that heavenly virtue that serves as his primary impetus in the novel: hope.
A supernatural aura surrounds the mysterious, unidentified Mr. Gatsby in the novel's introductory chapters, instilling in the reader even before his presence is formally and directly acknowledged the concept that Gatsby is comparable to a mythological deity. Like a disciple of Jesus Christ in the period subsequent the Ascension, the reader becomes much like a disciple of Gatsby, attaching to him respect and magnanimity--or at least the accompanying notoriety--through insinuations and secondary sources, never once having encountered the man in the process of formulating those grandiose assumptions. The attendants of Gatsby's magnificent social engagements also traverse his kingdom without a glimpse of their Almighty entertainer, maintaining a superficial appreciation for their earthly provider, and in the center of the circuitous quandary that guides even these disciples of material polytheism to a state of indifference to their human god, lies Jay Gatsby.
As the mortal sin of pride eternally befalls those bombarded by power, praise, and prosperity, it, in turn, mesmerizes the "Great" Gatsby himself. The range of evidence offered to the reader includes even the minutest intricacies of arrogance, as well as Gatsby's psychologically catastrophic perceptions of his own temporal omnipotence. Though comparable to the Lord in several distinct manners, the fundamental difference exists in this point: that Gatsby, no matter how seemingly majestic and infallible, was inevitably human and subject to the worst tendencies of the race. Driven by his fiscally contrived sense of power, Gatsby believed that his might would allow him to transcend time and to recreate for the better his past moments of defeat and anguish, transubstantiating them into realities of exuberant, celestial felicity.
It was in this defiance and rugged individualism, which would eventually come to characterize the American 1920s, that Gatsby the god thrived, for indeed, the qualities themselves represented the most revered and most widely accepted ideologies of the time. However, just as the microcosmic deity of Gatsby tumbled into the ashen abyss of excess, so the deteriorating American society would spiral chaotically into the depths of destituteness and crash inevitably with the full force of its ignorance.
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"The Loss and Gain of a Literary Generation"
(basically a revision of the abovewith sources and shit)

With the culmination of the Great War occurring in the autumn of 1918, it seemed that Woodrow Wilson and his battalion of Progressives would merely have to bide their time until the nation surged forward into a burgeoning new age, one teeming with the venerated philosophy of Manifest Destiny and idealistic social movements; yet the abrupt armistice and the absence of a climactic victory left Americans seething with both unfocused agression and contempt for the generation which initially drove the United States into international conflict.
Forged from the fires of moral controversy and indignation subsequent this First World War was a literary generation whose collective works would epitomize the malignant amalgam that led the generation of the "Jazz Age" to reject the formerly esteemed values of idealism, faith, and moral purposefulness in favor of materialism, iconoclasm, and irresponsibility. Though the government was apt to characterize the United States as an outstanding component of an economically and democratically beneficial victory over a tyrannous Germany, the writes of the Lost Generation (an appellation attributed to Gertrude Stein) harnessed the potency of elementary prose in an effort to rebel against the ideology that they believed had provoked American to belligerent status (Meade 26).
In novels of grim reality and psychologically twisted social lives, these master craftsmen placed disillusioned protagonists whose patterns of behavior had led them to a microcosmic depiction of the very dilemma faced by the entire nation (Dunmenil 191).
Rampant sexual overtness, as well as bewildering social crises, consumed the lives of the era's most legendary characters, seemingly content in the gloom and monotony of their daily lives, yet lashing out in unspeakable manners against the expectations of society. Perhaps the most profound example of moral decay exists in Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbit, in the character of Paul Riesling, whose misery and guilt intermingle, allowing an otherwise average, disgruntled man to perform the ultimate act of human indecency against his wife, securing him a three-year sentence in a state penitentiary (Lewis 292-301).
Though the abominable act performed by Riesling arguably escapes the consideration of other protagonists of the period, similar societal discontent and individual apathy and excess surround the fabricated lives of human beings whose very real situations seemed to epitomize the tortured American spirit of the Jazz Age. F. Scott Fitzgerald's deified Jay Gatsby reflects directly the societal transformation from wholesome, moral, and religious rigidity to licentious pleasure-seeking and polytheism with regard to material possessions and certain human beings--such as Gatsby himself. Driven by a fiscally contrived sense of power, Gatsby believed that his might would allow him to transend time and to recreate for the better his past moments of defeat and anguish, transubstantiating them into realities of exuberant, celestial felicity. Even in the brevity of such a description, the magnitude of Gatsby's tale is apparent; for as Gatsby himself desperately yearned for this nostalgic yet illusory conception of life, the entire American nation, ranging from the disillusioned reactionary government to the jaded, frustrated general population, seemed to long for the same sense of security (Miller 194-196). Hoever, the ultimate tragedy befalls both the fictional members of society as well as their non-fictional counterparts, damning each to a fate rendered necessary by the collective actions of his respective society. Just as the microcosmic deity of Gatsby tumbled into the ashen abyss of excess, so the deteriorating American society would spiral chaotically into the depths of destituteness and crash inevitably with the full force of its ignorance.
It would be an immense undertaking to discover the primary motivations of the often indulgent yet pacifistic members of the Lost Generation if not for the magnificent fashion in which they have elucidated the context of their dismal narratives. Undoubtedly the spokesperson against the abominations of all things concerned with war, Ernest Hemingway not only made evident the agony and bitterness of which the atmosphere was comprised; he lived and breathed that torment through his own experience with the Italian army during the Great War--an experience (detailed almost factually in A Farewell to Arms) that provided him with ample details of the most horrid sort, whose blatant animosity brought home to the people of America the atrocities of war in a language that they could comprehend (Meade 173-199). Portraying quite accurately the contempt for belligerency shared by these contemporary authors is the following passage from one of Fitzgerald's disillusionment novels, Tender is the Night.

This land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer...See that little stream--we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk it--a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation. (Fitzgerald 97)

Accompanying the monumental shift from moral and social propriety to indecency of the most profound sort was yet another transformation evoked by the presence of the writers of the Lost Generation, whose contempt for the antiquated Victorian style of prose as a symbol of the rigidity of thinking that led the American nation into the Great War, culminated in the rise of the modern style of writing (Meade 261). Much acclaim was awarded these manipulators of the vernacular, for in defyng the convention of the past, they accomplished a far more encompassing result in allowing all walks of human life to enjoy the pleasures of literature without having to decipher the hidden meanings of "outdated" and "irrelevant" works (Miller 341).

Perhaps the most sobering eccentricity regarding the descending society of the 1920s lies in the disheartening reality that also enveloped the fictional society created by the somewhat prophetic writers of the age. The ultimate conclusion is undeniably morbid: that once the course of events had been set in motion by the disillusioned, reactionary response to the culmination of World War I, both the individual prowess of the common literary figure and the national renown of the United States would spiral irrevocably into damnation (Dumenil 342). However, an iota of hope, shining as brilliantly as the comfort and security of the green beacon at the edge of Daisy's dock, presents itself. For though the literary beings are but dismal creatures in their lives of utter predestiny, doomed to be manipulated and sentence to whatever whims to which their creators have succumbed, the uplifting aspect of humanity is that of the power to resurrect itself, becoming more glorious and more powerful than even the most accurate of prognosticators could have imagined.

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I'm sure a bunch of those citations are bullshit.

The Hero with a Secret (written 2005, essay contest)

Misleading it may be to regard one individual with higher esteem and with greater admiration than another, for some tend to believe that idolizing another human being falls nothing short of self-deprecating. However, the intent is not to make a god out of man; rather, the man is to become the model and the stepping stone for another man to become an even greater man, a being whose charities and charismas become elaborated, celestially evolved versions of their former selves. The self is not lost amid the torrents of a personality crisis, but, having been given direction and purpose, swims toward a distant yet glorious goal.
As my personality fought its way through the societal wars waged upon my soul, my guiding light had always been my older brother Darrell. His virtues were and are classically admirable, yet there is a uniqueness--an understood individuality--about them. They do not bombard the psyche with awesome profundity or spiritual arrogance; rather, they are presented subtly and with the utmost reverence for a higher purpose in life. I cannot describe with perfect acuity the myriad ways in which this man has, through palmary accomplishments and sanguine efforsts to bring about harmony within in his home, developed in me my own zeal for a successful and charitable life. Yet, since this assignment requires me to do so, forcing my mental agility and verbal talent through the gauntlet of objectivity, I must relinquish all apprehensions of sounding childish and try to convey what sanctity surrouns the man I have presented to you.
Direction provides an individual with the proper focus for the talens he has nurtured and gives him a finite power of the major components of his destiny. Through repentance, penance, and the most bitter pain, my brother has found his direction and his purpose in this world. He no longer wanders about from task to task, searching for the man he shall become; rather, he advances himself further on the path of righteousness and self-betterment daily, leaving behind all traces of former vices. He bows not to the temptations to which other men so easily succumb; he is fixed in his ultimate purpose to make use of his life for the greater good of God and man.
Respect and respectability must accompany one another if they are to be of any use to an individual, for without respectability, a man is forsaken and ignored by others; he is broken and defeated even before the battle has begun. Yet, without repsect for both his superiors and inferiors, a man can fall nothing short of dictatorial and inhuman. However, I see in my brother the proper combination of these qualities. He is peaceful and benevolent, yet he commands and pays respect so naturally that he is automatically and instinctively a leader of men on all levels. His intelligence serves to educate the ignorant, his confidence serves to bolster the spirits of the emotionally destitute, and his optimism serves to inspire hope in the most hopeless and most pathetic of souls. I would contradict every world I have thus far spoken if I were to say that the latter of the categories was not my home and my classification for the longest period.
Humility and righteousness also seem to me qualities correlative, for the benefits of humilty are nothing without zeal for justice. My brother is content spending his hours toiling outside of the spotlight, allowing men more adequately equipped to handle such pressure; however, he is not content to let those same men despoil the chastity of justice and violate the decency of democracy through opposition and trickery. He speaks out against the guilty in his community, not to gain prominence but to inspire in others the quality of moral fortitude. Yet, through all of this discreet preaching and indirect proclamation, his eyes are not fixed on the mundane rewards offered by this life: He is focused on his path toward a heavenly kingdom, determined to bring about the will of God in the world.
My eyes swell with tears when I think of a man so close to me in morality yet so far removed from me in the physical realm. The distance between us has often been disheartening, for his home itself is the seed of turmoil in our society. This home has tortured my mother with its unforgiving discipline, provoked in her a bitter hatred for cruelty and injustice, and left her alone on those nights on which she had most desperately needed her son. Yet, this despicably volatile atmosphere has not only brought out the aforementioned qualities from a state of sepulchral dormancy; it has also tested and refined them into the heavenly models that they are today. My brother's home is at 99 Water Street in Wilkes-Barre in the sixteenth cell on the D-block of the second floor inside the Luzerne County Correctional Facility.
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No way that was going to win anything...

A View From a Window (written Sept. 2005)

I find it fascinating that, during the course of events of quite a short period of time, one's deepest pleasures--the instances in which the heights of felicity are discovered and reflected upon--may, in fact, become one's most abhorred fears, permeating the atmosphere with sepulchral gloom and draining the individual of all ambitious pursuits. The occasions have been many when I have gazed through the dusty panes, longing to experience that transcendentally pure feeling of occasions past, though each attempt to do so proves more futile than the last. For my window is not merely a window into the world; it is a window into the world that stripped away a sibling's soul and drove out from him the desire to maintain his being. It is a window to my past--a window to my sorrows.
Looking upon the pavement where once stood the magnificent product of his labor, I see no Camaro, nor do I see any trace of the boy whose heart generated such fond memories of this automobile. A gap exists in this area as a gap exists in my heart. Both car and man are broken, far removed from their respective societies and regarded as if their very existence proved detrimental to civilization.
I avert my eyes; I persevere in my attempt to regain philosophical homeostasis, yet my tears detain me. I gaze upon the outside world with blurred vision and marred heart, just as he must gaze through that miniscule opening, significant as a window made of stone. My anguish inhibits my sight. These clouds, these trees, and these homes mean nothing, indistinguishable from any other blobs of grief to my eyes. I cry. I cry as if these tears might reveal to me the shadow of what used to be, as if this fantastic deluge could sprout my pridian reality.
My tears begin to dissipate with the stabilization of my breathing, and for the first time I see through--or rather on--this window something previously indistinguishable to my clouded eyes: a photograph. In this I see his face; in this, I see my epiphany. As much as I may brood over and contemplate his absence, his very presence is my ultimate impetus, for I am confident that as I gaze upon the world in search of his precious face, he must as well be gazing through his window in hopes of reaching mine.
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This was the first assignment for my Senior Writing Seminar in high school, and I believe the title was the only prompt, though there may have been a random picture of a chick staring out of a window in an attic. My brother's arrest was still fucking with my head at the time, and it colored almost everything that I said and did for several months subsequent. I was rummaging through my room and found my notebook from that class, and it's rather interesting to see this piece, when the fourth anniversary (sounds painfully cheery when put that way...) of Darrell's arrest occurs this July. I still feel the same way when I see pictures of times past, which is why I am fascinated by them and hold them dearer to me than almost anything else in my possession. I'm pretty sure I wrote something about the power of photographs for the annual literary magazine that year, and this piece probably prompted me to do so.
I really miss purposeful writing.