The mass exodus from the current world you live in, that moment everything clicks into place on what it means to grow up just a little bit more. That sensation is like waking up hungover. Your life so far being one drunken night. Spinning out of control, too many blurry spots to really connect how once moment led to another.
It's hard to guess how many you'll alienate before you figure out it's not working.
10.4.11
8.4.11
In the age of changes and fuck ups
When you have time to sit and breathe; reflect, if you will; there might be that realization that it's time to make some legitimate changes to your life. Usually in these times it's also easy to have thoughts dawn on you that haven't surfaced in years.
Sitting on my back porch, playing endless amounts of The Beatles on repeat, smoking cigarette after cigarette, I knew it was time to change. This whole life on fast forward thing is just tiresome. To have story after story about guy to guy to girl to guy is an annoying song and dance. The redundant "man I was so drunk last night" line echoing over and over again.
The plan to quit drinking came from a two night stint of stupid mistakes. The precipice of depression waiting for me. One night leaving me angry, then another sitting on a porch rambling at a friend about my life's mistakes. He could only reply to my wailing with "just stop". That is what I needed to hear. No real advice. No interjections. Just stop.
I guess it's helpful knowing there's someone else out there not doing the same as every friend I have. Someone who will be just as fun while sobriety kicks in. Someone to make fun of me. "You drunk yet?" being the text I get other than "How are you? Holding up ok?" Because I'm not really. But I'm not drunk either.
Losing track of emotions is the first step when you decide to take away a coping mechanism. I sit and try and remember what I used to do before I discovered the liquid socialization. My honesty juice. My self-esteem booster. The only answer is the lack of all of that I had before. So changes continue. Be more honest, courageous, happy with myself.
While this may sound more like something to go into an AA journal, but it's important to keep track of all your stupid emotions. So fuck it.
Sitting on my back porch, playing endless amounts of The Beatles on repeat, smoking cigarette after cigarette, I knew it was time to change. This whole life on fast forward thing is just tiresome. To have story after story about guy to guy to girl to guy is an annoying song and dance. The redundant "man I was so drunk last night" line echoing over and over again.
The plan to quit drinking came from a two night stint of stupid mistakes. The precipice of depression waiting for me. One night leaving me angry, then another sitting on a porch rambling at a friend about my life's mistakes. He could only reply to my wailing with "just stop". That is what I needed to hear. No real advice. No interjections. Just stop.
I guess it's helpful knowing there's someone else out there not doing the same as every friend I have. Someone who will be just as fun while sobriety kicks in. Someone to make fun of me. "You drunk yet?" being the text I get other than "How are you? Holding up ok?" Because I'm not really. But I'm not drunk either.
Losing track of emotions is the first step when you decide to take away a coping mechanism. I sit and try and remember what I used to do before I discovered the liquid socialization. My honesty juice. My self-esteem booster. The only answer is the lack of all of that I had before. So changes continue. Be more honest, courageous, happy with myself.
While this may sound more like something to go into an AA journal, but it's important to keep track of all your stupid emotions. So fuck it.
10.1.11
STUMBLING TO FINISH LINE-INTRODUCTION
Mistakes are an integral part of any person's life. Without mistakes, we don't know how to really live. Right versus wrong, other than the obvious of “don't kill people” or “don't steal”, is learned mainly through trial and error. Everyone learns things differently and sometimes the mistakes you make don't necessarily have to be extreme, but mistakes are made none-the-less. Your late teens and early twenties are the biggest times for mistakes and self realization.
I knew at a young age I liked writing. I wrote in journals and wrote silly short stories (most notably in my mind, an extremely morbid story about a stalker in the early 1900's when I was in seventh grade). When I was little, and many times after that, my grandfather told me to write what I knew. He meant that I shouldn't try to write something I couldn't be honest about, as in writing about a man and his life in Iraq or something. Unfortunately, I was quite young and had a very strange thought process (seriously, I thought Santa couldn't exist because my mom knew how to spell his name) so I took it to mean that I had to experience as much as possible in order to write. I guess that's not so terrible, but when Hunter S. Thompson became one of my heroes in late high school, I decided to throw caution to the wind and start immersing myself like an anthropologist into any and every subculture I knew existed in my school and tried to understand the inter workings of every person's mind in these groups. That, mixed with my own young mind and its developments, lead me to getting in quite a few mishaps and shenanigans.
Let me preempt this with a warning: this is not a self help book. I don't believe in them. Yes, advice is nice, but in the end, you need to figure this shit out on your own. This is merely an account of my mistakes and my just throwing it out there that no mistake (other than the aforementioned killing someone or something just as bad) is really the end of the world. You're going to screw up. You're going to hurt people's feelings. You're going to get fired. You may even spend a night in jail. Still, you will survive and hopefully look back on things with a smile and know you learned from everything and not look back regretfully.
I knew at a young age I liked writing. I wrote in journals and wrote silly short stories (most notably in my mind, an extremely morbid story about a stalker in the early 1900's when I was in seventh grade). When I was little, and many times after that, my grandfather told me to write what I knew. He meant that I shouldn't try to write something I couldn't be honest about, as in writing about a man and his life in Iraq or something. Unfortunately, I was quite young and had a very strange thought process (seriously, I thought Santa couldn't exist because my mom knew how to spell his name) so I took it to mean that I had to experience as much as possible in order to write. I guess that's not so terrible, but when Hunter S. Thompson became one of my heroes in late high school, I decided to throw caution to the wind and start immersing myself like an anthropologist into any and every subculture I knew existed in my school and tried to understand the inter workings of every person's mind in these groups. That, mixed with my own young mind and its developments, lead me to getting in quite a few mishaps and shenanigans.
Let me preempt this with a warning: this is not a self help book. I don't believe in them. Yes, advice is nice, but in the end, you need to figure this shit out on your own. This is merely an account of my mistakes and my just throwing it out there that no mistake (other than the aforementioned killing someone or something just as bad) is really the end of the world. You're going to screw up. You're going to hurt people's feelings. You're going to get fired. You may even spend a night in jail. Still, you will survive and hopefully look back on things with a smile and know you learned from everything and not look back regretfully.
16.12.10
Never Never Land (redone, descriptive essay)
When the stars couldn't stare back one more night, I felt empty. The night sky, my best friend, was turning its back on me. I had no winking eyes to give me comfort. Their cloud eyelids closed to me, just crying, sobbing onto me. My tear drenched clothing dripped onto the static ants walking by. It was freezing that night. Every breath I took, I had to chew and swallow in order not to choke. The cold metal bars of the fire escape dug into me like claws of a bear as I smoked cigarette after cigarette, hoping to suspend time, to keep the night lasting forever. I shivered, holding myself close, unable to go inside for fear of missing something, anything out amongst the city.
A crash-bang stole my attention, a brief moment of infidelity to my city as I stole a glimpse inside. The fire was mischievously jumping in the fireplace as my two roommates threw knives at a dartboard, drunkenly swaying as if on a rocking boat. The knives were shakily thrown and would hit, CLANG, and miss and fall to the floor, THUD, followed by a hideous sickly laughter. The ghostly glow of the television played with the fire and created extra friends to sway in tune with my roommates on the wall, mocking them and their throws, every once in a while jumping to show off their agility even while drunk.
Back outside, around me was the city with its shimmering lights, the ominous structures in the distance mocking me, reflecting what the stars could do if they really loved me; bursting to the brim with people, it's overwhelming noise attacking me from every which way. In this place, darkness can never truly exist, silence is just an afterthought. Below me on the sidewalk, the twitching malfunctioning cyborgs struggled to find solace from the rain; the tiny, frozen daggers of droplets slicing through their clothing and their cicuits. Cars drove by, angrily yelling out incomprehensible expletives by their owners command and racing each other to get to their important destinations first.
Even in that rain, I could still smell all the food from my neighborhood restaurants, like the Pied Piper’s music wafting up to me, calling to me. After nearly a month without really eating, my stomach lurched with want. The hunger clawed at my insides. I lit another cigarette, letting the smoke fuel me, to essentially feed me. I let the steel wool smoke fill my throat and lungs, scraping it's way down; clearing my mind, letting me think once more. When the city sparkled back at my own confused self, I had nothing but my memories. They dripped slowly from the IV of my mind, reminding me of what I really was losing. One thought after the other, dripping and getting lost with everything else. I grasped with desperate hope to each memory, trying to organize them, keep them in order, but when you really try to organize your thoughts, it all gets jumbled in a never ending mass. And that mass, all mixed together, is left for your brain to decipher and choose which ones are better than the other and it all just gets lost in the tundra, but it can't really be a tundra when all of this is going on. It's just suffocating as the two dimensional world closes in around you.
One drip brought me back to the night I left home. I was the rebellious version of Wendy and like a kid in an after school special, giving my parents the figurative finger as I flew out the window (hopped into a car) with Peter and one of his lost boys. Laughing as we flew, on a high from the impending freedom.
The next drip brought me a few weeks into living there. The thump, THUMP, THUMPING of our landlords music infiltrating our every pore, making sleep impossible. With all of us staying up all hours of the night, we were just wandering through a waking dream. In our sleep deprived stupors, we started to come up with fantastical ideas on how to use the apartment. The fire escape was now our smoking patio. Our fireplace also became a stove of sorts, camping out in our frozen apartment in the wilderness of the city, cooking our food like mountain men.
When Jason's dad had come to visit, he brought the house a bit of a strange gift, a set of throwing knives. We were super excited until: 1.We realized we both didn't know how to use such things and 2.There was no where for us to practice to learn such things. One excessively ridiculous night, however, we came up with a glorious plan. We took a large piece of cardboard and nailed it to the wall, then on top of that, put up our dart board. In our infinite wisdom, we believed this would be the best way to protect the wall. Then we began to practice, kind of. Our throws were terrible, ricocheting off of the dartboard, and coming back to almost hit us. We made gashes in the cardboard, going completely through, into the wall. That side of the room started to look legitimately like frightening horror movie style murders had occurred there. It was wonderful.
The next drip took me to when I finally got a job, for little while. My boss was Lizzie, known affectionately by her friends as “Lizzie the Lezzie.” She cared less about my less than pristine ability as an employee than about how she wanted to show me her side of San Fransisco. A whirl wind of driving and outings. One in particular being the night she brought me to a lesbian bar and made me dance with someone because I was “too cute to be straight!” she screamed across the bar.
As I sat out on the patio that last night, feeling the rain and the cold; watching the lights flicker in the distance; hearing the cars blaring by; I could think of how I had to leave in less than twelve hours and every part of me was lost. This city, my only real experience with freedom, my only hope for a break from stagnancy, was all I had. Three months of starving and endless wandering was all I needed. Going back to my home, the only home I ever knew, was something I needed, yet dreaded. It's not wrong to want to go where no one knows you. And it's not wrong to not really want to go back to where everyone knows you. But my heart ached to remain in this world of never ending childhood and yet my only real view of what I truly wanted as an adult. I knew this was it.
Now, four years later, I still want it. I'm not without want for somewhere new, I need to feel like a naïve child, wandering senselessly, unaffected by danger, worried by nothing, by my own time constraints of discovering everything. I am empty, broken. Sure, it may be selfish, but no relationship can sustain my never ending wanderlust, I will never veer from the need to travel to the new never land. I am Peter. I will never be Wendy again. I don't know what age is the “norm”, but for me, the night I turned twenty two, everything began to fall apart all over again. New realizations and epiphanies hit me in every which way, paralyzing me, causing me to double over in non-sensical emotional outbursts. There are only so many understandings of these hopes and dreams. And to realize that epiphanies are only the small part of it. Because it's moments like these you now understand what it means to have an autoclave for a heart. And that numbness, that empty feeling inside isn't senseless. You're not lost in selfish bullshit. The leaking coming from you isn't wrong because it's some sort of emotion again. You're not blank. Numb isn't real. It's a lack of what you need/want. Because you're not broken for knowing that your whole existence feels wrong.
A crash-bang stole my attention, a brief moment of infidelity to my city as I stole a glimpse inside. The fire was mischievously jumping in the fireplace as my two roommates threw knives at a dartboard, drunkenly swaying as if on a rocking boat. The knives were shakily thrown and would hit, CLANG, and miss and fall to the floor, THUD, followed by a hideous sickly laughter. The ghostly glow of the television played with the fire and created extra friends to sway in tune with my roommates on the wall, mocking them and their throws, every once in a while jumping to show off their agility even while drunk.
Back outside, around me was the city with its shimmering lights, the ominous structures in the distance mocking me, reflecting what the stars could do if they really loved me; bursting to the brim with people, it's overwhelming noise attacking me from every which way. In this place, darkness can never truly exist, silence is just an afterthought. Below me on the sidewalk, the twitching malfunctioning cyborgs struggled to find solace from the rain; the tiny, frozen daggers of droplets slicing through their clothing and their cicuits. Cars drove by, angrily yelling out incomprehensible expletives by their owners command and racing each other to get to their important destinations first.
Even in that rain, I could still smell all the food from my neighborhood restaurants, like the Pied Piper’s music wafting up to me, calling to me. After nearly a month without really eating, my stomach lurched with want. The hunger clawed at my insides. I lit another cigarette, letting the smoke fuel me, to essentially feed me. I let the steel wool smoke fill my throat and lungs, scraping it's way down; clearing my mind, letting me think once more. When the city sparkled back at my own confused self, I had nothing but my memories. They dripped slowly from the IV of my mind, reminding me of what I really was losing. One thought after the other, dripping and getting lost with everything else. I grasped with desperate hope to each memory, trying to organize them, keep them in order, but when you really try to organize your thoughts, it all gets jumbled in a never ending mass. And that mass, all mixed together, is left for your brain to decipher and choose which ones are better than the other and it all just gets lost in the tundra, but it can't really be a tundra when all of this is going on. It's just suffocating as the two dimensional world closes in around you.
One drip brought me back to the night I left home. I was the rebellious version of Wendy and like a kid in an after school special, giving my parents the figurative finger as I flew out the window (hopped into a car) with Peter and one of his lost boys. Laughing as we flew, on a high from the impending freedom.
The next drip brought me a few weeks into living there. The thump, THUMP, THUMPING of our landlords music infiltrating our every pore, making sleep impossible. With all of us staying up all hours of the night, we were just wandering through a waking dream. In our sleep deprived stupors, we started to come up with fantastical ideas on how to use the apartment. The fire escape was now our smoking patio. Our fireplace also became a stove of sorts, camping out in our frozen apartment in the wilderness of the city, cooking our food like mountain men.
When Jason's dad had come to visit, he brought the house a bit of a strange gift, a set of throwing knives. We were super excited until: 1.We realized we both didn't know how to use such things and 2.There was no where for us to practice to learn such things. One excessively ridiculous night, however, we came up with a glorious plan. We took a large piece of cardboard and nailed it to the wall, then on top of that, put up our dart board. In our infinite wisdom, we believed this would be the best way to protect the wall. Then we began to practice, kind of. Our throws were terrible, ricocheting off of the dartboard, and coming back to almost hit us. We made gashes in the cardboard, going completely through, into the wall. That side of the room started to look legitimately like frightening horror movie style murders had occurred there. It was wonderful.
The next drip took me to when I finally got a job, for little while. My boss was Lizzie, known affectionately by her friends as “Lizzie the Lezzie.” She cared less about my less than pristine ability as an employee than about how she wanted to show me her side of San Fransisco. A whirl wind of driving and outings. One in particular being the night she brought me to a lesbian bar and made me dance with someone because I was “too cute to be straight!” she screamed across the bar.
As I sat out on the patio that last night, feeling the rain and the cold; watching the lights flicker in the distance; hearing the cars blaring by; I could think of how I had to leave in less than twelve hours and every part of me was lost. This city, my only real experience with freedom, my only hope for a break from stagnancy, was all I had. Three months of starving and endless wandering was all I needed. Going back to my home, the only home I ever knew, was something I needed, yet dreaded. It's not wrong to want to go where no one knows you. And it's not wrong to not really want to go back to where everyone knows you. But my heart ached to remain in this world of never ending childhood and yet my only real view of what I truly wanted as an adult. I knew this was it.
Now, four years later, I still want it. I'm not without want for somewhere new, I need to feel like a naïve child, wandering senselessly, unaffected by danger, worried by nothing, by my own time constraints of discovering everything. I am empty, broken. Sure, it may be selfish, but no relationship can sustain my never ending wanderlust, I will never veer from the need to travel to the new never land. I am Peter. I will never be Wendy again. I don't know what age is the “norm”, but for me, the night I turned twenty two, everything began to fall apart all over again. New realizations and epiphanies hit me in every which way, paralyzing me, causing me to double over in non-sensical emotional outbursts. There are only so many understandings of these hopes and dreams. And to realize that epiphanies are only the small part of it. Because it's moments like these you now understand what it means to have an autoclave for a heart. And that numbness, that empty feeling inside isn't senseless. You're not lost in selfish bullshit. The leaking coming from you isn't wrong because it's some sort of emotion again. You're not blank. Numb isn't real. It's a lack of what you need/want. Because you're not broken for knowing that your whole existence feels wrong.
29.10.10
Dead Rise to Screen
Seven years ago, Image Comics released the first issue of “The Walking Dead”. Written by Robert Kirkman and drawn by Charlie Adlard, this long standing comic goes where it seems most zombie stories are afraid to go, long term survival. During an interview, Kirkman stated he wanted to write “the zombie movie that never ends,” and now that he has recently released issue #75, it seems he is doing just that and succeeding.
This Eisner Award winning comic series follows Rick Grimes, a sheriff from a small town who wakes from a coma to find the world he once knew completely different. Zombies have taken over and his family is nowhere to be found. He goes on a mission to find them but, as opposed to most zombie stories, the story doesn't stop when that story arc ends. He finds his wife, Lori, and son, Carl camping out on the outskirts of Atlanta with a small group of survivors. Since then they have traveled through Georgia, losing and gaining members, trying to find shelter, food and general safety.
“The Walking Dead” breaks away even further from the norm when eventually the zombies become more of a backdrop to the characters and how they adjust to their surroundings. Kirkman and Adlard successfully convey every sort of reaction anyone could have in this situation, ranging from suicidal tendencies to violent desensitization. It is both an amazing zombie apocalypse story as well as a fantastic examination of human response to horrible circumstances.
AMC will be premiering the first episode of the television adaptation, with Kirkman as an executive producer, on October 31st.
This Eisner Award winning comic series follows Rick Grimes, a sheriff from a small town who wakes from a coma to find the world he once knew completely different. Zombies have taken over and his family is nowhere to be found. He goes on a mission to find them but, as opposed to most zombie stories, the story doesn't stop when that story arc ends. He finds his wife, Lori, and son, Carl camping out on the outskirts of Atlanta with a small group of survivors. Since then they have traveled through Georgia, losing and gaining members, trying to find shelter, food and general safety.
“The Walking Dead” breaks away even further from the norm when eventually the zombies become more of a backdrop to the characters and how they adjust to their surroundings. Kirkman and Adlard successfully convey every sort of reaction anyone could have in this situation, ranging from suicidal tendencies to violent desensitization. It is both an amazing zombie apocalypse story as well as a fantastic examination of human response to horrible circumstances.
AMC will be premiering the first episode of the television adaptation, with Kirkman as an executive producer, on October 31st.
Haloween Costumes: Sexy or Scary?
Halloween is coming up. Which means little kids running down the street looking for candy, Spirit stores are cropping up everywhere and girls of every shape and size showing up to parties in essentially their underwear.
It is the one time of year where it is acceptable for these girls to show up in stripper attire to any party or even walking down the street. Leah Taylor, a student here, said, “
So what costumes can you expect from these girls? With almost no movies with outlandish costumes, it's kind of up in the air. According to Pamela Stompoly of The Costume Shop in North Park, “People are going to be creative this year. It's all very random.”
For the girls, we might see a few Neytiris from Avatar or Alices from Alice in Wonderland. For the most part, it seems it will be a slew of the generic costumes. You can expect to see scantily clad angels, devils, cops, girl scouts, maids, nurses, cats … any noun you can really apply works.
Some of the more strange new “sexy” costumes to pop up this year are Capatain America, Optimus Prime, and the Cookie Monster.
Stompoly says to expect plenty of burlesque inspired costumes.
For the men, Stompoly has gotten requests for an Aztec warrior and a few Johnny Depp style Mad Hatter costumes. “All guys like to be Spartan warriors or pharaohs,” says Stompoly.
The Costume Shop also specializes in make-up. The costume Stompoly is most prepared for is the zombie. “About two weeks before Halloween, people will come rushing in for zombie make-up.”
Another strangely common request she gets is “smurf make-up.”
For the most part though, this Halloween looks to be a great one for Leg Avenue (the leading company in sexy costumes). So keep your eyes peeled for the more creative of the “sexy” costumes. Who knows, maybe you'll see a “sexy” pumpkin.
It is the one time of year where it is acceptable for these girls to show up in stripper attire to any party or even walking down the street. Leah Taylor, a student here, said, “
So what costumes can you expect from these girls? With almost no movies with outlandish costumes, it's kind of up in the air. According to Pamela Stompoly of The Costume Shop in North Park, “People are going to be creative this year. It's all very random.”
For the girls, we might see a few Neytiris from Avatar or Alices from Alice in Wonderland. For the most part, it seems it will be a slew of the generic costumes. You can expect to see scantily clad angels, devils, cops, girl scouts, maids, nurses, cats … any noun you can really apply works.
Some of the more strange new “sexy” costumes to pop up this year are Capatain America, Optimus Prime, and the Cookie Monster.
Stompoly says to expect plenty of burlesque inspired costumes.
For the men, Stompoly has gotten requests for an Aztec warrior and a few Johnny Depp style Mad Hatter costumes. “All guys like to be Spartan warriors or pharaohs,” says Stompoly.
The Costume Shop also specializes in make-up. The costume Stompoly is most prepared for is the zombie. “About two weeks before Halloween, people will come rushing in for zombie make-up.”
Another strangely common request she gets is “smurf make-up.”
For the most part though, this Halloween looks to be a great one for Leg Avenue (the leading company in sexy costumes). So keep your eyes peeled for the more creative of the “sexy” costumes. Who knows, maybe you'll see a “sexy” pumpkin.
Never Never Land
The night before I had to leave, it was raining. Giant droplets pelted me on the fire escape, drenching every article of clothing I had on. It was freezing, I had to chew every breath. The cold metal bars of the fire escape dug into my spine as I smoked cigarette after cigarette, hoping to suspend time, to keep the night lasting forever. Inside, the fire was roaring as my two roommates played video games. The glow of the television giving me the slightest bit of ghostly light. I could see inside the window at what I was losing; the dart board, the fireplace, the silly knick knacks piled high. I would miss this place, my own personal Never Never Land. San Francisco. I had more adventures there than anywhere else in my life, and that apartment especially was one of my favorite places to be.
The day I moved in was similar to my last night. The rain drops felt like tiny daggers piercing our clothes. I had just turned eighteen and had just essentially run away from home. Like a kid in an after school special, giving my parents the figurative finger as I hopped into my crazy boyfriend's car and sped away. When we got to my new home, a duplex on the outskirts of the Sunset district, I could tell I was going to love living there. Our apartment was the second floor, and luckily my minimal amount of belongings were able to be brought up in one trip. The apartment was huge. My friend, Will, had already been living there for about a year, so the apartment was already full in a very 'early-twenties-boy' style. After no one but a twenty-one-year-old boy living there, it was a mess. The worst was the shower. Every bit of grout was black. The smell was as if, well, you know. But it was my new home and to me, it was beautiful.
As a few weeks went by, I started to understand my surroundings. I had started to walk through the city every day, looking for work. I would wake up early, well early to my standards at the time, so at about 10AM. The city seemed to sparkle at me as I walked through the streets. People walking down the street would smile at me. I was in heaven. The air smelled better, the sun shone brighter (even when it was foggy), the food tasted better.
After wandering the city, pounding the pavement and trying not to get lost, I would get home around 8PM and be exhausted. Will and Jason would usually be sitting on the couch, playing video games and planning on how they could fit a pool table in the apartment, and more importantly, how to get it into the apartment (fun fact, they never figured it out). At about 10 every night, our floor would start to vibrate and bounce with the overbearing sound of bass radiating from our downstairs neighbor's apartment. This was probably the only real down side to our new home. It was our landlords apartment, so we couldn't yell at him. The techno beats would echo in every part of the apartment, killing our eardrums. He would start it promptly at 10PM every night, then finally stop it at about 3AM. There was no escape.
With all of us staying up all hours of the night, we started to get a little loopy. The next few weeks, in our sleep deprived stupors, we started to come up with fantastical ideas on how to use the apartment. The fire escape became our smoking patio. Our fireplace also became a stove of sorts, so we could have hot chocolate and roasted marsh mallows most nights. The best thing we used was our dart board. When Jason's dad came to visit, he brought the house a bit of a strange gift, a set of throwing knives. We were super excited until: 1.We realized we both didn't know how to use such things and 2.There was no where for us to practice to learn such things. One excessively ridiculous night, however, we came up with a glorious plan. We took a large piece of cardboard and nailed it to the wall, then on top of that, put up our dart board. In our infinite wisdom, we believed this would be the best way to protect the wall. Then we began to practice, kind of. Our throws were terrible, ricocheting off of the dartboard, and coming back to almost hit us. We made gashes in the cardboard, going completely through, into the wall. That side of the room started to look legitimately like frightening horror movie style murders had occurred there. It was wonderful. We would practice three nights a week, throwing to the beat of the music below us, rarely hitting the dart board, most of the time even missing the cardboard.
When Jason's mom and dad came to visit, we had just been there for a week. His parents were wonderful people, sweet in so many ways, and still intimidating. Jason's dad was a military diplomat and he lived up to what kind of thoughts get conjured in your mind, mustache and all. His mom was just very sweet, until you let your guard down. Then she would use that opportunity and say anything to completely throw you off, joking or not. That visit is when me and Jason's dad really bonded. The second night they were there, we brought out the cards and beer. As we played poker, I felt something I had been missing for years, this sort of family camaraderie. As the night progressed, I started to get tipsy. I also started to win. Jason's mom, getting drunk faster than the rest of us, lounged in a chair giggling to herself. Jason and Will started to get bored with the poker game and sat next to her, making fun of her alcohol induced rosy cheeks. When the night ended, it was just me and Jason's dad playing. I won the last hand and I was absolutely excited, and kind of drunk. Jason's dad, sober as a judge, just smiled at me as I jumped up and down. I could tell he was laughing at me, but it was a nice sort of laughter. As everyone went to bed, it finally dawned on me that he had let me win. I blushed to myself and went to sleep, knowing he did it to make me feel good in that sort of “fatherly” way.
After the first month of living there, the charm started to wear off. The techno keeping us awake all night meant I was waking up later and later to go find work. After I would get home from searching for work each night, I would search Craigslist for hours hoping to find something. I was running out of options, and running out of money. I had gotten to the point where I wasn't able to afford to help with buying groceries anymore, and while Will didn't care, Jason started to get annoyed and told me I couldn't eat “his food,” that his mom had bought for him, which meant I had no food to eat. I started to live off coffee from a local Starbucks who felt bad that they couldn't give me a job and about two packs of cigarettes a day (Will barely spent his money so he would buy cartons of cigarettes for the house and tell me to smoke them so they wouldn't go stale, which was a total lie. I think he just felt bad that I was struggling so much.) About once a week I would steal a handful of cereal or a hot pocket in order to not fall over from lack of food.
Finally, one night after searching endlessly, I found an ad for a canvassing job with Environment California. It didn't look like a job I wanted at all, but with rent being due soon, I had to take what I could get. It was exactly as I had suspected. We would meet up at 5PM every day, walk around different neighborhoods asking for money to support our cause, then meet back up and tally up the money, then be done at 11PM. This relieved a little bit of the tension in the house, but not to the point of saving my relationship with Jason. I had started to sleep on the couch and fight with him endlessly. Most nights, I would get home and go out to the fire escape and smoke until he finally went to bed, then set up my “bed” on the couch. He would leave for school before I would wake up and I wouldn't see him until I got home from work, thus the cycle would continue.
My boss took pity on me. Her name was Lizzie, known affectionately by her friends as “Lizzie the Lezzie.” After work one night, she asked me to come out with her and her friends to a bar. I told her I wasn't 21, but she didn't care. She let me use her passport which, surprisingly enough, worked. The bar was a lesbian bar and full of dancing hipster girls. One of Lizzie's friends bought me a drink, which I sipped slowly, letting the burning sensation coat my throat as I took in my surroundings. After standing against the wall for a half an hour, Lizzie came up to me, already drunk, and started hassling me to dance. I tried to say no, but she insisted by yelling, “You and your boyfriend are on the rocks. Besides, you’re too cute to be straight!” She pushed me into an Australian girl and I started to stumble around in a slightly dance-y, “epileptic on meth” sort of way. When I got home, Jason was waiting for me. He had my things from his room and told me we should stop pretending we were dating anymore. The fantasy was almost over and the lost boys were finally starting to grow up.
I continued to struggle after that. The job was getting worse by the day and I wasn't getting nearly enough money from it to afford much more than rent. I was spending more time out on the fire escape every night, smoking and writing, trying to remember why I had come up in the first place. I still loved San Francisco with all its crazy and excitement and I still loved my apartment, but my money issues were starting to outweigh the fun. I tried calling family members, begging for advice or any connections to work they might have had up there, but it proved useless.
I was scrambling around when my grandmother called me to let me know she was loaning me three hundred dollars so I could pay my rent and eat a meal. She just told me, as kindly as she could, “Just don’t tell your mother.” I felt so guilty about it that I could barely enjoy the fact of having another guaranteed month in the wonderfully cold San Francisco. I spent the entire time trying to get to know every inch of San Francisco. I can honestly say this is when I truly fell in love with the city. I wound up seeing parts of the city most people wouldn't and met people I never would have had a conversation with if I had had a consistent job.
The homeless people of San Fransisco are the friendliest people I have ever met. There was one 14-year-old girl who had been living on her own since she was 11. She talked to me for an hour while we waited for the rain to let up in order to walk where we were going. It started with her asking for change, and when I told her I had nothing, she wanted to become my friend and let me know how to get food for free around the city. The next, and my last, week in San Francisco, I was able to eat two decently sized meals a day.
At the end of March in 2007, I finally broke down and called my parents. There was nothing left for me to do but admit defeat. My relationship with Jason had fallen apart, my friendship with Will was extremely strained, I was weak with malnutrition, and I had no way of paying for the next month's rent. My parents, who had originally felt that if I failed it was my own fault and I would have to get myself out of trouble all on my own, panicked when they heard my voice on the phone. According to them, I sounded weak and distressed. I had been crying, but I had no idea how bad it was. My mom calmed my down and promptly said she was going to get me. When I got off the phone, a small sense of relief, and a huge sense of regret filled me. I was going home to warmth and food and friends, but I was leaving. I had gotten so used to San Francisco, feeling at home with every person who walked down the street.
As I sat out on the patio that last night, feeling the rain and the cold; watching the lights flicker in the distance; hearing the cars blaring by; I could think of only one thing, "If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!" I wanted to stay in Never Never Land forever, but it was time for Peter Pan (that’s me) to grow up. It was time for Rufio to take over (that being Will) and for Hook (that’s Jason) to keep terrorizing the rest of the Lost Boys. The adventure was over for me and it was time to go home and … marry Wendy or something? (Or at least give all the thimbles back)
The day I moved in was similar to my last night. The rain drops felt like tiny daggers piercing our clothes. I had just turned eighteen and had just essentially run away from home. Like a kid in an after school special, giving my parents the figurative finger as I hopped into my crazy boyfriend's car and sped away. When we got to my new home, a duplex on the outskirts of the Sunset district, I could tell I was going to love living there. Our apartment was the second floor, and luckily my minimal amount of belongings were able to be brought up in one trip. The apartment was huge. My friend, Will, had already been living there for about a year, so the apartment was already full in a very 'early-twenties-boy' style. After no one but a twenty-one-year-old boy living there, it was a mess. The worst was the shower. Every bit of grout was black. The smell was as if, well, you know. But it was my new home and to me, it was beautiful.
As a few weeks went by, I started to understand my surroundings. I had started to walk through the city every day, looking for work. I would wake up early, well early to my standards at the time, so at about 10AM. The city seemed to sparkle at me as I walked through the streets. People walking down the street would smile at me. I was in heaven. The air smelled better, the sun shone brighter (even when it was foggy), the food tasted better.
After wandering the city, pounding the pavement and trying not to get lost, I would get home around 8PM and be exhausted. Will and Jason would usually be sitting on the couch, playing video games and planning on how they could fit a pool table in the apartment, and more importantly, how to get it into the apartment (fun fact, they never figured it out). At about 10 every night, our floor would start to vibrate and bounce with the overbearing sound of bass radiating from our downstairs neighbor's apartment. This was probably the only real down side to our new home. It was our landlords apartment, so we couldn't yell at him. The techno beats would echo in every part of the apartment, killing our eardrums. He would start it promptly at 10PM every night, then finally stop it at about 3AM. There was no escape.
With all of us staying up all hours of the night, we started to get a little loopy. The next few weeks, in our sleep deprived stupors, we started to come up with fantastical ideas on how to use the apartment. The fire escape became our smoking patio. Our fireplace also became a stove of sorts, so we could have hot chocolate and roasted marsh mallows most nights. The best thing we used was our dart board. When Jason's dad came to visit, he brought the house a bit of a strange gift, a set of throwing knives. We were super excited until: 1.We realized we both didn't know how to use such things and 2.There was no where for us to practice to learn such things. One excessively ridiculous night, however, we came up with a glorious plan. We took a large piece of cardboard and nailed it to the wall, then on top of that, put up our dart board. In our infinite wisdom, we believed this would be the best way to protect the wall. Then we began to practice, kind of. Our throws were terrible, ricocheting off of the dartboard, and coming back to almost hit us. We made gashes in the cardboard, going completely through, into the wall. That side of the room started to look legitimately like frightening horror movie style murders had occurred there. It was wonderful. We would practice three nights a week, throwing to the beat of the music below us, rarely hitting the dart board, most of the time even missing the cardboard.
When Jason's mom and dad came to visit, we had just been there for a week. His parents were wonderful people, sweet in so many ways, and still intimidating. Jason's dad was a military diplomat and he lived up to what kind of thoughts get conjured in your mind, mustache and all. His mom was just very sweet, until you let your guard down. Then she would use that opportunity and say anything to completely throw you off, joking or not. That visit is when me and Jason's dad really bonded. The second night they were there, we brought out the cards and beer. As we played poker, I felt something I had been missing for years, this sort of family camaraderie. As the night progressed, I started to get tipsy. I also started to win. Jason's mom, getting drunk faster than the rest of us, lounged in a chair giggling to herself. Jason and Will started to get bored with the poker game and sat next to her, making fun of her alcohol induced rosy cheeks. When the night ended, it was just me and Jason's dad playing. I won the last hand and I was absolutely excited, and kind of drunk. Jason's dad, sober as a judge, just smiled at me as I jumped up and down. I could tell he was laughing at me, but it was a nice sort of laughter. As everyone went to bed, it finally dawned on me that he had let me win. I blushed to myself and went to sleep, knowing he did it to make me feel good in that sort of “fatherly” way.
After the first month of living there, the charm started to wear off. The techno keeping us awake all night meant I was waking up later and later to go find work. After I would get home from searching for work each night, I would search Craigslist for hours hoping to find something. I was running out of options, and running out of money. I had gotten to the point where I wasn't able to afford to help with buying groceries anymore, and while Will didn't care, Jason started to get annoyed and told me I couldn't eat “his food,” that his mom had bought for him, which meant I had no food to eat. I started to live off coffee from a local Starbucks who felt bad that they couldn't give me a job and about two packs of cigarettes a day (Will barely spent his money so he would buy cartons of cigarettes for the house and tell me to smoke them so they wouldn't go stale, which was a total lie. I think he just felt bad that I was struggling so much.) About once a week I would steal a handful of cereal or a hot pocket in order to not fall over from lack of food.
Finally, one night after searching endlessly, I found an ad for a canvassing job with Environment California. It didn't look like a job I wanted at all, but with rent being due soon, I had to take what I could get. It was exactly as I had suspected. We would meet up at 5PM every day, walk around different neighborhoods asking for money to support our cause, then meet back up and tally up the money, then be done at 11PM. This relieved a little bit of the tension in the house, but not to the point of saving my relationship with Jason. I had started to sleep on the couch and fight with him endlessly. Most nights, I would get home and go out to the fire escape and smoke until he finally went to bed, then set up my “bed” on the couch. He would leave for school before I would wake up and I wouldn't see him until I got home from work, thus the cycle would continue.
My boss took pity on me. Her name was Lizzie, known affectionately by her friends as “Lizzie the Lezzie.” After work one night, she asked me to come out with her and her friends to a bar. I told her I wasn't 21, but she didn't care. She let me use her passport which, surprisingly enough, worked. The bar was a lesbian bar and full of dancing hipster girls. One of Lizzie's friends bought me a drink, which I sipped slowly, letting the burning sensation coat my throat as I took in my surroundings. After standing against the wall for a half an hour, Lizzie came up to me, already drunk, and started hassling me to dance. I tried to say no, but she insisted by yelling, “You and your boyfriend are on the rocks. Besides, you’re too cute to be straight!” She pushed me into an Australian girl and I started to stumble around in a slightly dance-y, “epileptic on meth” sort of way. When I got home, Jason was waiting for me. He had my things from his room and told me we should stop pretending we were dating anymore. The fantasy was almost over and the lost boys were finally starting to grow up.
I continued to struggle after that. The job was getting worse by the day and I wasn't getting nearly enough money from it to afford much more than rent. I was spending more time out on the fire escape every night, smoking and writing, trying to remember why I had come up in the first place. I still loved San Francisco with all its crazy and excitement and I still loved my apartment, but my money issues were starting to outweigh the fun. I tried calling family members, begging for advice or any connections to work they might have had up there, but it proved useless.
I was scrambling around when my grandmother called me to let me know she was loaning me three hundred dollars so I could pay my rent and eat a meal. She just told me, as kindly as she could, “Just don’t tell your mother.” I felt so guilty about it that I could barely enjoy the fact of having another guaranteed month in the wonderfully cold San Francisco. I spent the entire time trying to get to know every inch of San Francisco. I can honestly say this is when I truly fell in love with the city. I wound up seeing parts of the city most people wouldn't and met people I never would have had a conversation with if I had had a consistent job.
The homeless people of San Fransisco are the friendliest people I have ever met. There was one 14-year-old girl who had been living on her own since she was 11. She talked to me for an hour while we waited for the rain to let up in order to walk where we were going. It started with her asking for change, and when I told her I had nothing, she wanted to become my friend and let me know how to get food for free around the city. The next, and my last, week in San Francisco, I was able to eat two decently sized meals a day.
At the end of March in 2007, I finally broke down and called my parents. There was nothing left for me to do but admit defeat. My relationship with Jason had fallen apart, my friendship with Will was extremely strained, I was weak with malnutrition, and I had no way of paying for the next month's rent. My parents, who had originally felt that if I failed it was my own fault and I would have to get myself out of trouble all on my own, panicked when they heard my voice on the phone. According to them, I sounded weak and distressed. I had been crying, but I had no idea how bad it was. My mom calmed my down and promptly said she was going to get me. When I got off the phone, a small sense of relief, and a huge sense of regret filled me. I was going home to warmth and food and friends, but I was leaving. I had gotten so used to San Francisco, feeling at home with every person who walked down the street.
As I sat out on the patio that last night, feeling the rain and the cold; watching the lights flicker in the distance; hearing the cars blaring by; I could think of only one thing, "If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!" I wanted to stay in Never Never Land forever, but it was time for Peter Pan (that’s me) to grow up. It was time for Rufio to take over (that being Will) and for Hook (that’s Jason) to keep terrorizing the rest of the Lost Boys. The adventure was over for me and it was time to go home and … marry Wendy or something? (Or at least give all the thimbles back)
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