Rewrite.

This whole rough draft rollin' thing has got to stop.

I'll look over the entries later and want to change so many things, but I don't because I decide… meh, it's already posted. Fuck it.

Yet, all they are is potential. They need to be cleaned up and crafted much more tender.

"Writing is rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting…" I once had a professor say. But, if you're any type of writer, you've already understood that and heard it about a million times. It's one of those cliches that gets thrown around like a battered whore in an orgy.

Still, it's got validation. So why the fuck ain't I listening?

Tralfamadore.

Its 5 am. Again, I'm going to forsake correct grammar, punctuation, and capitalization for the sake of not having to retype what I'm about to copy and paste into this box. When I write, I open skimpy little Notepad on my MacBook and just write. I don't take the time to bother with those nuances. I almost always correct it later. But at 5 am, when I just want this shit out of my head and somewhere else, it's going to be another day for rough draft rollin'.





Post Number Ten, Part One.
----------------------

The thing about being on a perpetual loop, is that you don't always realize when you've transitioned to a new curve.


I had no idea i was feeling depressed today until i found myself listening to sinatra in my car. he never fails to creep onto my speakers when somethings got my heart strings all snagged.

music was my trigger theme of the day, anyway.

until i heard a song that sounded like something i'd heard at a wake, i didn't realize grief was a card in my hand. the piano chimed and suddenly i was standing in a pale yellow room, looking down at my pale yellow friend. the couch had been replaced by a pew, and i'm surrounded by friends in two rows, watching a slide show of christopher in his life. in his glory. in something that he would never be in again. precious moments that were meant for a scrapbook on a dusty shelf are suddenly a somber montage of what someone used to be. i feel as if my face is being pulled down into my throat, and someone puts a hand on my shoulder. it doesn't matter who. we all feel the same.

today snuck up on me, to say the least.

the transference shakes me down and i escape to the front porch to smoke a cigarette. i was there. the colors were there, the feel. in the corner of the frame i can see my friend kristen talking with a family member. i can't conjure a clearer image then that, because i could barely look at her that whole weekend. i couldn't stand to look at the manifested grief of losing your brother, your best friend.

the casket is in the front left, but its out of focus. i tell myself i need to pull myself out of there before i go over and really look down into it. i need to walk out of that mind chamber before i have a melt down that leaks onto the outside. just focus on the concrete under your feet. it might be the same color as the casket lining, but at least it's defined in the present.

its almost been two years. i didn't know grief could hang that tightly for so long.

ah well, you live and you learn, i suppose.


Post Number Ten, Part Two.
----------------------

its now 4 am. its been a few hours since i finished writing the last entry. but i miss him. there are so many things that i wonder about. would me and him still be close? would the rift between me and kristen still have formed? what would those relationships be like… if he were still here?

the past haunting me is appropriate right now. i'm having trouble letting go of the way my life was and embracing the way that it is. a lot of it has to do with friends. i've got great friends, new and old. but its hard to keep them all in the same bouquet.

there are people that i've lost touch with. ones that have cycled out of my life, yet i don't have nights where i can't sleep because i grieve their absence. it all has to do with time and slide. those ones that slip slowly out of your grasp, you don't entirely comprehend that one day they will fully be gone. you don't want to.

"i just don't want you to turn into one of those people that i talk about and say 'yeah, i know him. we used to be best friends…'" i said that to a dear friend, once.

"nah, thats not gonna happen."

it did.

but it was slow. and it was gradual. and other people took his place, and other events filled in the spaces.

but christopher… he was yanked away from me. it wasn't my life or his life that took us in different directions. it was the absence of life. it was someone on a cell phone, in a car, not paying attention.

i use my cell phone in the car. i don't pay attention. i could fuck up worlds.

one of the things i struggled with the most directly afterwards was how unfair i found it all to be. maybe i still find it unfair. grief this strong two years afterwards surprises me, so why not anger too?


its 4:34 am. i can't think of a soul that would be awake to talk to this about. when the accident happened, there was a huge group of us bound in the camaraderie of casualty.

now, almost all of them have cycled out of my life.

so even if someone were awake to talk, who out of those people would fully understand anyway? they'd know what its like to miss someone, both empathy and sympathy would abound. but they still wouldn't know what its like to miss christopher.

Meh.

Today, I don't feel like being fancy and lookin' for a picture. Hell, the entry below isn't even gonna have correct punctuation and capitalization. Fuck it. Rough draft rollin', son.

Now, ramble on and down you go.

________________________________________________________


Frame click pause play snap crop.

my hand cuts through the mechanical wind and the car is speeding through lights and shapes and life.

things are accelerated. they slow down. i'm looking down a stick, squaring a ball into a pocket. i'm laughing at sarah, head bent back in joy. i'm smiling at nothing else besides the feel around me.

frame. click. crop. and the moment is frozen behind that angle. my action is stopped by that corner, but god damn you should see the colors in that box.

acceleration pushes the artificial flow into my palm. fingers rip at the matter and catch nothing, but they're moving to the rhythm of the song and picking up all the pricks of the wind so it ain't no thang.

ah lately, lately… what have i been doing lately? being depressed, thats for damn sure. its so odd to see yourself go through some of the hardest times of your life during some of the best. last week i drove over to my friends house in a fit of tears, wondering.. ah god, do i really show up like this? isn't this just a little fucking tiresome?

a few days later, i'm buzzed and laughing and framing away in the taste of a perfumed smoke, laughing away the moments with those i love most. my tears are miles away, evaporating on the freeway they were shed down.

doesn't this all just revert back to that age old cliche, life is a roller coaster? ups and downs, baby. but my roller coaster is all bent into itself. i'm on a perpetual loop. actually, fuck a roller coaster. i'm one of those cheesy carnival amusements that just sends a little caged car around a circle track.

somehow, that appeals to me more. i'd rather be surrounded by flashing lights and people staring up at me while contently eating cotton candy then people vomiting at the thought of riding me.

besides, i'm from jersey… isn't one of my proper settings a boardwalk?

Delicacy.

Life is so delicate. Each small part that fans into the entire bloom can be manipulated by the smallest breeze. Mood, setting, character, theme, plot. The wind blows by and the pen changes course.

Twenty two years. It's only but a quarter of the life that is still yet to be lived.

More and more, I find myself marveling at my surroundings and pathways. What gets me most are the changing people, the groups of players that filter in and out of each chapter. Some beginning to fade away like images in a distant mirage, and others calmly planted as their own oasis. No matter which they are, each one has still tread across my being. Their presence has forever altered the composition of the landscape. The trace of a footprint here, a word drawn in the sand there, the undeniable marks of a struggle somewhere in the distance. They themselves blur into the heat of oblivion as I continue to wander, but I'll never stop stumbling upon their tracks.

As I wander, they all see me on a different set. My costume is changed, the tone of the script altered, the theme is all blown to who the fuck knows what. I stand in front of them all as Carly, but a different version. My oasises have watched me shed my skin time and time again, even if they didn't know it. But the others…

George Tingo. He lived behind me from second grade all the way to high school. We used to make my barbies have sex, pull them apart, then bury them in my side yard. Frightening how children can conjure such a beautiful metaphor.

Lauren Kehoe. She was my best friend in 5th grade. We were both in the ugliest, most awkward stages of our lives. We felt outcasted, but had not the maturity or sight to realize it. Yet the deep recesses of human nature caused misery to seek company.

Tom Lodge. We dated for six years. It started at 13, and for a girl that feels as deeply as I do, falling in love when you can barely even spell the word is a dangerous gambit. We grew around each other, but not within each other.

Kristin Palladino. A best friend for all of middle school, some of high school. By ninth grade, you couldn't think of one boy she hadn't made out with or let feel her up. We used to find her parents sex toys and photos in the basement. I heard she just got out of rehab.

There are so many countless others. These four stick in my mind for right now, and they aren't even people that I met during the most defining years of my life. Those are still too fresh. They haven't receded into the fragmented melt of my past.

In the present, I can only be thankful. As I struggle to fit into my own skin, the ones I am surrounded with now are a blessing. As I've said before, growing up is fucking hard. But the sand trudges lighter if you're surrounded by good traveling companions.

For right now, I've got those.

Passion.

I once had an established journalist tell me this:

"I just do my work. I don't do it like: 'I don't feel like writing… or, I feel like it.' It's crap. Thats kids stuff."

That statement resounded within me. It took me back to all of the times when I felt blocked, when my flow would come out in clumps and pieces instead of a coherent stream. I thought to myself… in those moments, I just didn't feel it. Does that mean I don't have this in me?

"It's a skill, a profession, a craft. As a freelance writer, you just can't afford to have writers block."

A skill. No doubt I've got a little more then the average citizen, but is that enough? Not at all.

"If you don't feel a passion for it, it's just gonna be words on a page."

Passion. Passion isn't just the key, its the ring that holds all of the keys.

But what is it that I'm passionate about, is the question. Finding a niche is going to be one of those keys in the set that determines whether I can turn my writing into something profitable. And it has to be something that other people will give a shit about, too. I can't keep writing dumbass, descriptive prose about my emotional exploits, thats for damn sure.

Do you look for certain causes, subjects, emotional cues? Or do you not look at all, because it will just find you?

All questions that are awaiting to be answered, because there is a comforting end to that first statement:

"...Thats kid stuff."

Cause after all, I guess I am just a kid still.

And while I'd like to end on that note, I feel the need to share this quotation by the wonderful Mr. Paul Wilkes:

"Your writing evolves probably like your philosophy of life. It gets simpler and simpler if you allow it to. You don't try to be fancy, you don't try to knock the socks off of everyone with this one."

Let Go.

Growing up is fucking hard. Its all going by in such a blur. Twenty-two, where did that come from? When did I get here?

The points that have led me up to Mitch, my bottom barrel's brother, grabbing me by the face and saying:

"Carly. It's Chris. Chris. You need to let it go."

Where did they go?

It's so hard to be honest with yourself. If I look at myself in an honest light, what I see in the bags underneath my eyes isn't as flattering as the stage lighting of what you want to see.

My synapses are aroused right now. I'm sitting on the back of my porch, staring at the light of the setting sun wrapping itself around the long leaf pines of Carolina. They're swaying ever so gently. They are beautiful.

And you know something else? I suppose I am beautiful, too.

When you begin to see yourself in that honest light... it's all there. But is it harder to accept the flaws or perfections? I'm not quite sure. Both of them come with a bittersweet taste.

I need to let it go.

"Carly, you're a fantastic girl. He thinks the world of you. But he does not love you that way."

I can feel myself breaking free. Breaking into this new life that is building around me, untangling chains and beginning to clasp new ones. It's frightening. But the kind of fear that makes your adrenaline flow so air light through your veins that your senses are heightened and you are aware.

On my back porch, in the dusk of a southern sunset, I am aware. My self is beginning to kick in, ever so slowly. Am I an ego, or an id? It all depends on the moment.

"It's never gonna happen. You know this."

Honesty. Maturity. Objectivity. All the small aches that conjure growing pains. Glass across the skin before your new one sets in.

Home.

A few weeks ago, I found myself in my old stomping grounds of Delran, New Jersey. A quite Philadelphia suburb, where ten minutes west takes you into dilapidated row homes and crumbling strip malls and ten minutes east sprawls you into rolling fields of corn and cows. A bizarre mix of ghetto and country, where the wife-beater, chain wearing boys used the word "yo" and "dawg" every other word while raising their confederate flags.

It's my childhood, that place. My developmental years. I drove up there in the midst of a breakdown of epic proportions, even for me. Crying half of the eight hour drive, wanting to scream for a quarter, and in a dull trance for the rest. I drove up there a blob of anxiety and depression, and was thinking:

"This is just how I am. I've always been a mess, I'll always be a damn mess."

But then, I saw old friends and photographs.

Seeing old friends is always good. There are so many things that slip your mind, that you forget into the depths of those holes that you put into your brain. It's just like Adam Wisnuski used to say:

"I bet we did so much cool shit that we can't even remember."

(And that was in high school.)

Back then, we laughed about it, cause you could remember almost all of it, but the concept was funny… but now, it's not just a concept. When you sit and reminisce with those you grew up with, you realize… holy shit, those moments are really falling through. All of those things that occurred when we were just forming. The events that have shaped your personality and molded your spirit. The ones where you didn't think twice and you rarely ever questioned.

At least, those were most of my experiences for me. And when we did question… well, fuck. You definitely shouldn't of been doin' it then.

I looked around at the faces of my youth and thought…. yes. This is what has helped me to where I am today. I am who I am partly because of these people, right back when. Characters in my story, and wonderful ones at that. It made me realize that what this blog could potentially be, is a rough writing of chapters. Chapters in a life that is beginning to form. A life that has already been clipped into so many distinct parts, people, and phases.

I mean, the cycle of life is just a series of cycles, after all.