The Clock.

So, it’s been a while since I have shared anything on here. But it’s Monday, so, why not. Over the summer I wrote a lot about anything, but I always had this one idea. This story about a guy looking back. A guy who sat down one night and wrote about a moment in his life that had passed him by. I let this idea brew for a long while mainly because I did not know where to go with it. I loved that idea though, of looking back and seeing something again, but living in the present. Yet, no matter which way I spun it, the story could never be happy. As humans we are flawed in looking back so often on the bad and not the good. I don’t know what this story is meant to serve, or what the purpose of it is, but it is a story about a human. A guy, who is looking back. It isn’t happy. Nor was it supposed to be. I think there was something deeper and realer in the story this way. I hope you enjoy it.

He was tired.

He could feel the heaviness weighing on his eyelids.

Shit. He could feel it brewing behind his eyes.

It had been a while since he had slept well. Most nights were restless. Tossing and turning between the sheets hoping to find some sort of serenity.  Searching, hunting down, that one spot where he could find an escape.

A place where he could close his eyes and leave the world behind, even if only for a few moments.

“Tonight,” he thought, “maybe tonight I will get some goddamn sleep.”

 

The Words.

I told her that I didn’t want to do it my whole life.

I told her that I wanted to try writing at some point in my life.

The feint, dim, yellow light shone over the table.

It was an exact replication of the light that sat on my desk. Its shade was a mix between brown and maroon.

It was almost a clay color.

But as we sat there, her eyes looking back into mine, it was almost as if I had no fear in admitting I went wrong somewhere in my life path.

I had no fear in saying that what I was doing was just filler.

I wanted to write.

 

Things We’ve Loved & Lost

I wrote this over the summer. I recently had a friend tell me again that I need to keep writing. This summer I spent a lot of time writing and put on paper a lot of words. For me, that was enough. The words never seemed to stop and when they did it was strange to me. I was at a loss for something. I could not find the words to say and when I tried I would simply force words out of me and throw them onto a piece of paper that I would only crumple up and throw away into the trash bin. The thing is this: words come when they please in my mind, but not always do they come to be placed on paper. I write in my head every moment of the day. I write out a scene and a dialogue or how I would describe something. Each and every time I sit on a train to go into New York City or to go to the airport, I look out the window and I try and write out the monologue of a character seeing the brush, fences, and broken buildings pass. I try and spell out each word so it would flow so perfectly. 

But sometimes those words do not come so easily. Sometimes words aren’t meant to be placed on paper. Instead, they are sometimes meant to dance around in our heads and tread gently on portions of our brains just to keep them fresh and new. 

This piece was based on a dream I had once that haunted me for many nights. It was a reoccurring nightmare that I would have. It was a story where I would just drift above and see this story unfold. I would see a person lose everything and be left with something amazing. I would wake up and wonder why that would happen. I would wonder how someone could push on after something like that. I never finished because the words ran short and the inspiration fell through. 

I truly did want to finish this and maybe one day I will. Maybe one day it will be someones favorite story. Then again, as it is, it will always be someones favorite story that was never finished.

I simply wanted to share it.

It is a story of love and a story of loss. It is a story about having everything and then having nothing. It is a story about how our life unravels before us and how we never see it until it is, sometimes, too late. It is a story about how our life never really stops and how our life never really begins. It is a story about the past, the present, and that weird little moment in between called the present.

It is a story about a little girl who grows up with her father after her mother passed away during her birth. It is a story about the moment she realizes her father loves her more than anything, but cannot love himself anymore after living a life without the thing he needed the most. It is a story that tells of the struggle of trading one world for another without ever agreeing to it. It is a story about how to love and how bad it can hurt and how difficult it can be to stand up again after your legs have been taken out from underneath you. It is a story that is written for that single moment when Layla sits next to her father, Eric, and tells him that she loves him and that he has done just fine… and that it is OK to love again, to live again, to be happy again.

As it is… It’s just a story. And humans love stories.

I hope you enjoy it, and sorry for the absence.

 

Things We’ve Loved & Lost

1

Eric had rested his fingertips against his temple. His elbow was positioned on the ledge of the car window and his eyes trailed blankly along as pine trees passed by just outside of the window.

 

Sidewalks.

Each step I took along a long, dark, road was one step away from the past and one step closer into the future. I turned around and looked back at where I had just came from and realized just how far I had traveled in the span of half an hour. My eyes traced the sidewalk as it thinned out and curved around a slight turn. Headlights of a car began to peer around the corner and before they met my eyes, I turned around and continued to walk.

“Three miles,” I thought.

It would be 2.4 miles, actually.

The walk was calming and I found myself rambling, just emptying my thoughts and views through a phone.

It is funny how it works out. How we have these ideas, or thoughts, but we cannot fully describe them or put them into perspective until someone else, or something else, does it for us. We see a scene in a movie, or hear a verse of a song, or a paragraph in a book, and then all of a sudden we think to ourselves, “That is what I have been trying to say.”

This happened on my said walk.

 

You Live Only Once. Not You Only Live Once.

Walking out of the movie theatre today, I mentioned to my friend, with whom I shared this man date with, that it was almost August. He noted that school was going to be starting soon and how summer had passed almost completely by now. I told him not to fret because he still had two years left to go. For me, I only had one year left in my college career before I would move on and embark on the journey of life after schooling.

“That is crazy,” he said, “but I still don’t know what I want to do with my life.”

“Neither do I,” I conceded.

“But you are practically student teaching.”

I shrugged my shoulders and made a sound to acknowledge his comment.

“I always wanted to be a writer.”

 

Bliss.

Oprah said that running is the greatest metaphor for life because you get out of it what you put into it. But it is also the greatest metaphor because you are always constantly moving towards something, or away from something, just as in running. You always run to, or from, something, even if you do not realize it. When we start, we are all afraid of what lay ahead, but when we reach the end we wish we could do it all over again.

I run because it is what I do when something is eating at me.

I began to run because I could not stop moving. I am like a shark, if I stop moving, thinking, doing, I die. My thoughts consume my mind and soon I am submerging myself in thoughts and the thoughts of thoughts. I sit idle and let the details shred through me and slice at me. When I first stopped running I slipped into a very dark place where I simply did not exist. I was alive, yes, but I was not living.

I was doing.

Now, I run because it is an escape. My feet hit the ground and I never know how the run will go.

Maybe I will run for seven miles, maybe ten miles.

Or maybe only a single mile.

I run because at some point in the run you realize what you are thinking. It is hard to have so many thoughts on your mind and run at the same time. Your eyes flash from car to car as they pass and then again to the road ahead. Maybe you glance down at your feet and watch them pace in front of you. If you run with music then music fills your ears and helps to drowned out the many sounds that surround you. With each step a thought leaves your head and eventually you begin to realize the burning pain in your thighs and calves. In time it is just that single thought and the pain. The pain, eventually, subsides because you only wish to delve into the world of that single thought.

It becomes your mantra.

You lose yourself in the process and you soon realize that your body is just doing. There is no thought, just step after step after step.

When you run, it is hard to feel sorry for yourself.

When you run, it is hard to feel anything.

I await that rush endorphins to be released from my spine and spread through my blood stream. My cardio is no longer jacked up, and neither is my breathing. My legs feel like they were brand new. I await that runners high. I wait for that feeling when I am in complete bliss and I can just run without fear of pain in my chest, heart, back, or legs. I entertain the thought of running forever because in that single moment I am OK. There is nothing on my mind and nothing weighing heavy on my thoughts. It is my nirvana, my place of solace and my place of equilibrium. But when I established that moment as my place of equilibrium I presented myself a problem: I cannot run forever.

A lesson in life is that you cannot run forever: physically and metaphorically.

We are simply not built to.

When we run, we run to, or from, something.

And when we run, we run to, or from, something.

It is the physical act of trying to distance ourselves.

It is the mental act of trying to find a place where the only thing that matters is what lays right in front of you. Whether it is a road, a gravel path, or the muddy trail that runs adjacent to a river, that single inch in front of you is all that matters.

Running teaches us that we take many paths on our journey.

One day we take one path, and the next we try another. Each path presents us with a new opportunity to see things, or a new challenge. The road may be smooth, but long, and it tests our persistence. Or the road may be rough and winding to test our threshold and strength. The road itself is just as important as the act of running. If we run fast through the trail by the river, we miss the beauty that lay all around us, but we reach the end. If we run slow down the empty road, we take in the minor details, but take a bit longer to reach where we desire to be.

It is the epitome of life.

We must find our path by trying many paths.

We must find our ideal pace by trying many different speeds.

We must find the music to accompany us by having different songs push us.

We must find the right way to prepare, and the right way to rest.

We must find the perfect way to start.

And we must find the perfect way to finish.

No one has ever drowned in sweat, nor will anyone ever.

I run, not because I want to race, but to find out what I can do. What I can endure and what I can tolerate.

How much pain can I handle before I cannot run anymore?

How far can I push myself before my legs begin to stress and develop slight fractures.?

How much weight can I carry with me on these runs?

How quickly can I liquidate the thoughts on my mind and release myself to the solace that is the trail that lay in front of me?

Each run, itself, is a metaphor for life.

But it is not until I am running that I realize and can fully live that metaphor.

That metaphor of life: to only deal with what lay in front of you.

To take it one step at a time.

To visualize what it will look like at the end, and never forget where you came from, but to know, that somewhere out there, there is a finish line.

And when you reach that finish line you will be able to rest; that you will be able to stop.

At that finish line you will be able to look back and say “I did it” and remember each step along the way.

Where we can remember what the fear felt like when we took our first step.

Where we can remember what it felt like to explore a new trail on an impulse.

Where we can remember what it felt like to have those endorphins release and feel bliss.

Where we can remember the pain.

Where we can remember how foolish we felt for never wanting to start.

Where we can remember how great it felt to finally reach the end.

 

God Made Man.

(I wrote this a while ago. I found it today and reread it. I made some changes to some things, and essentially updated it.)

Maybe I have had too much time over the past five to six years to chip away at what I believe it means to be a man. Maybe being in college has helped this viewpoint progress at a quicker rate, as well, but then again, if there is one place to see what to do, and not to do, as a male, it is probably at a New Jersey college.

This is a sporadic writing, and I am writing this because I want to. After all, that is why this blog is here to begin with, no? And frankly, this has been something I have wanted to write for a while.

Too many guys grow up nowadays thinking that to be a real guy, you need to be ripped out of your mind or slay through girls as if you are, as comedian Daniel Tosh helped me to label, the one Spartan fighting off massive hordes of Persian hookers. Maybe it is the idea that you need to be tough, and be able to take a hit. Maybe it is the belief that no emotion equals no flaws, making you the ideal man who can stone face any problem that stares you right back down. Maybe it was the father who worked in trucking his whole life, or the mechanic dad who has a hard exterior that forces the next of kin to grow up with that shell of armor.

Either way, I have prided myself on developing my own views for what it means to be man; what it means to be me. I grew up in a strict household, but I was not forced down a path to grow up. The only thing, indeed, which was forced upon me, was a sense of respect for those above you, and the ability to maintain a level head, and a sense of manners. So that is where I will begin:

 

Alone.

The other day I was driving a coworker to get something to eat after he had spent the night out partying and I realized something about who I am as a person and what built me. He came back around 1:30 in the morning, right as I had finished talking to someone special on Skype, and his first question was, “Dude, are you hungry?”. I replied, “yes”. Normally, I tend to write off my late night hunger as boredom, but that night, my stomach was not telling me my hunger was out of boredom, but, instead, out of sheer hunger. So, there I was in my car very late that night driving on an empty road with him in the passenger seat. He lowered his window and was about to throw a piece of garbage out of my window. I stopped him, and said to simply throw it on the floor of my car because I would pick it up before some random person would if he were to litter it on the ground. He admitted that he normally did not litter, and that he did not know why he was about to do that.

 

Wolves Part II

(This is a follow up to a previous post. If you have not read it, you can find it here: The Wolves.)

I recently received fantastic news.

 

The Monaco Essays: #2 “Mob Wives”

So, the next assignment was “Mob Wives”, but I have never seen the show. I asked for a redo, but instead was met with a challenge to my creativity. Little does anyone on Earth know that I cannot write fiction for the life of me. Stories interest me. Tales do not. So, mob wives will go no further than this paragraph and as the title for this entry. Frankly, I do have a lot to say, but not a lot to write. And that humors me.

So, how can that be? How can I have a lot to say, but not a lot to write? I don’t know, really. I guess that this piece is just a filler. For now all I have to say is that summer has started (kinda?). I can wear my Sanuks without socks, throw my sunglasses on, wear shorts again all day, and feel my skin burn slightly as the sun hits it in the afternoon. With summer comes my new job working on campus. It has been somewhat of an awkward feeling, actually, knowing that I am not about to go home for three months and isolate myself from everything and everyone and get back to neutral. Instead, I get a week of solitude in my newly abandoned dorm and then move into a new building where I will be living until the end of summer. Summer is here (again.. Kinda?), so now what?