Train Your Parents

My brother Kane hardly visits anymore.  He used to come out for Thanksgiving at my folks house but as the place became cluttered where milk crates line the floor and Amazon boxes perforated the brick, man made walls, the less he showed up.  It could be that he just found the niche he was hoping for out in Nebraska with his wife or maybe every time he is shown sight of the house he once grew up in, his analness sprouts up.  It’s not like he has tried to ever fix the situation.  Both my brothers, who do not resemble each other, one olive skinned like myself and the other paley white with brown straight hair,  both the same height though, have never tried to fix the situation but they rather use the out dated, retrograde, action of complaining. 
    “It’s a shit hole.”  Sean will say.

Detached

Sometimes I think it would be better if my parents were divorced.  Yeah, I have had plenty of friends who had divorced parents.  They always complain.  Not just about the break-up and the tragedy that ensues throughout, not just the splitting of the parents but the dissolve of the family, but mostly about their own selfishness.  They have to divide their time to appropriately visit both of them.  They think that if they didn’t and if they just lived with the most convenient one then their other parents would be gorged with jealousy.  But I rather know the truth, that mine don’t love each other, rather then be confused on their relationship.  My friends actually know through legal documents that their parents did not love each other anymore but mine are still mixed up in civil court.  It’s a day to day pain.  Some days it seems like they have talked a lot even though I never hear it.  Others it is just a constant storm of bickering that has lasted ten years.  It’s an answer that none of us brothers can answer.  It has startled us in the decrepit regards.  I have only seen my parents hug as a joke.  My father squeezed my mom and practically chuckled like love is supposed to be a societal figure rather then an emotion.  This has led me to relationship disrupt that includes being afraid of public displays of affection and social awkwardness when around my girlfriend.  I get scorned because of it and it feels like this is the root of my emotional problems.

Pecularity

I hardly ever have friends over.  If I was to hang out with anyone either it would be outside my house which had nothing but a 3 stone sidewalk, in my backyard where there is a trampoline and a decent size yard or which was the usual, went over to other people's houses.  This was because I was embarrassed of my household.  Either my friends would get creeped out by the humongous amount of junk which included at the front door a piano that has never actually been used except as a table for family pictures and un-used accessories like flashlights.  That was just the first impression you would get from entering the house but if you looked to the right you would see a stair set full of books and boxes which were around my whole house and maybe a few jackets which were my moms or my sisters.  And to the left was always a couch that was completely bare because sitting areas were the only part of the house that was in constant use.  We never turned off our living room television.  You could drive by at 4 in the morning and see a light flashing from our giant, paned window.  I was always confused when people would say before entering their house, oh hopefully you don't mind if it is messy, because they never were.  Not the messy that I was used to.

Furor

The mayor of the town of Justen was old.  Older then all the settlers.  He was in his late fifties but looked much older.  He had gray hair sparking from the side of his head but the middle of his scalp was completely smooth.  Michael didn’t try to comb it over like he used to before he won the election 12 years ago.  He has given up on all of his morning routines, late night rituals to look the best he could.  When he won the election, the one he was fighting for 6 years to the former mayor, he lost all the motivation that is brought with the territory of politicians.  He needed to look like he cared about his position but no one wants to elect a glamour queen.  You need to look normal like an every day citizen to win these sorts of ballots.  In a small town like Justen, the mayor is a bona fide celebrity for his first years.  Parades are extravagant and everywhere the mayor goes, the town follows.  It’s when you put all your purpose into making the town you once loved better.  All of his policies, to lower taxes and bring jobs all went into effect immediately into obtaining office.  It takes some time for these things to actually show any proof but once it did, a year after signing the bills, the rest of your mayorship is just watching the experiment take flight.  Most of the citizens were on board because who wouldn’t be.  Lower taxes meant that they got more money from their personal paychecks and more jobs meant that their family could easily expand into the rural life they have always known.

Parasite in Death

When my grandfather died, the shit hit the fan.  We went over there everyday, my family and I, and paid our condolences.  It was a whole distant family affair.  All of my dad’s brothers and sisters where there with their kids.  We went there every day for 5 days straight just so we could all be together and watch him decay.  My mom would bring food for the family because we didn’t just go there and watch him but we would eat lunch and dinner there.  We all just stood around and waited from him to stop breathing.  He was in his late 70’s and has lived a rather bland life.  He was in War World II but because of his nose bleeds when he piloting planes, he was put into the demolition crew that would just blow up already downed planes so no one would steal out intel.  Then he worked for a post office, dropping off letters.  But he mostly took his love of crafts.  His bedroom was filled with model planes that he built and painted.  There was hundreds hanging from the ceiling.  Also he has built his own model T car that he kept in his garage.  That was his life in a nutshell.  He didn’t talk to much or really expand on anything.  He would tell stories at time but none memorable enough to stick out.  He was simple and plain. 

Discombobulated

Tomorrow is Daylight Savings.  I usually work at 2 in the afternoon but on rare, weekend, occasions I work at 7 in the morning as well.  Tomorrow is one of those nifty rarities.  It’s a good thing I’m have such a good excuse to be late because I’ll genuinely need one.  We just got to the shop.  It’s Dakota’s fathers sound cancellation panel factory that has one hundred pound barrels of glue and tough foam boards that line the thirty foot white walls.  Floating stairs that have no railing lead you up to the second floor.  On the second floor, away from the equipment and flammable material is where we usually jam.  My best friends Adam, Jon, Dakota and I have recently started a band named “The New Born Babies” as a joke to poke fun at our amateur musical capabilities.  We went for the stylish indie-rock that we grew up to love.  Dakota was the only one who knew anything about guitars and the complexity of sound that goes behind making music.   He know goes to school to be a sound engineer. 

Confronted

When I first learned how to ride my bike I was already a late bloomer.  I was in fourth grade.  My parents wouldn’t let me ride it on the other side of the main road splitting up the two subdivisions.  I was segregated to only hang out with children on my side of the subdivision known as Indian Ridge.  It was incredulous because I didn’t care who I hung out with as long as they were in my grade or higher.  My friend Joe lived two streets over in an area we all called the horseshoe because two roads connected in a semicircle.  I didn’t go over there too much because the farther you went south, the tougher the neighborhood got.  The roads got worse and the street signs were either knocked down or vandalized with spray paint.  Wonder Lake hit a wave of youthful hatred during the early 21st century.  I didn’t participate in violent demands so I didn’t like being confronted by it either.  One time, while walking home from the park all the way at the south end which only had one basketball hoop with no net, a swing set with no swings and one of those vomit inducing circular contraptions that you swirl around on with friends.  I had three kids follow me that were 2 years older then me.  Yelling at me saying they were going to kick my ass.  I have gotten this before because my dad worked at the local school so they thought it was an easy target and an easy way to get attention.  I never ran from threat so I just ignored them and continued walking.  They did nothing like all the threats I ever got.  They just like to pick fights but never engage in them.  I dealt with a lot of situation like this because I rather give the energy to worry to someone else.  Physiologists say that all humans have a mechanism called fight or flight but it still as never switched on. 

Long Gone

It is peculiar to se one of your friends just go.  It doesn’t matter how many goodbyes you could say or even how long you knew about them leaving, it still seems sudden and startling like a dog running away or a grandparent passing away.  Even though Wally has been planning on going into the Marines for a year and a half, after the first shock from the news, it slowly faded and seemed like it would never come.  So much could happen in a single year that who knows if he would even keep his word or be mentally stabled enough to confront such verbal punishment and physical demand.  Wally is a nerd like me.  My first impression of him while I was started working produce at Meijer was that he was a thirty year old mentally handicapped adult but soon did I figure out that he was my age and relatively brilliant.  He was a gamer like I was and not just a casual gamer or someone that just got into them for the new Call of Duty game or Madden but has been playing them for at least a decade.  That is dedication to a subculture that I was specifically fond of.  He also had this geeky charm about him and would embrace the hell out of it always quoting video games and would constantly be open about having in depth conversations about certain video games.  We would break down the game play, the story, the originality, and most importantly, what the developers could of done better.  Not only was he obsessed with video games which directly tied me to his side during long eight hour shifts at Meijer but he was also has written poetry so he knew the crucial strength of words and he knew a great amount of philosophy which was a subject I was starting to take great notice too.  We would spend hours on topics of pride such as what was better 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons or 3.5.  But sometimes we would partake in novelist discussions.  He wanted to start one about how we were all controlled by computer engineers.  One guy created us as a program to harvest energy.  I would talk about my novel and how the government was using technology to rid us like parasites and only keep who they deemed worthy.  We both loved science fiction and how it could ambiguously come true.  Science fiction was like a prophecy and we thought we could blindly use our intellect to predict the fallacies of the future.  We wanted to write the Future Testament and praise technology and redeem the human as a sacrifice to them but we undoubtedly never did because thus conspiracies would look bad to a piece of property owned by the government.  But the best conversations we ever had, the ones that have probably changed me from a novelist to a general writer our the ones where we meticulously picked out the pieces to the puzzle of life.  
    “Why is red red?”  Wally said one day.

Broke

My mom, dad, and sister Sheridan were in the car driving back from a grocery store.  We were shopping.  It was early September and I just started community college and I picked up cigarette smoking and was indulging in pot smoking.  It was a month before my brother Kane’s wedding reception.  He already got married in Germany over the summer with just his wife, Michele, and him. 
    My mom told us how he was coming out. 

Paulies

Summer were always the same.  It was time for me to shed the convenience of a friend who lived a street over and move on.  I had two friends, Colin and Lucas, who lived on the other side of town which was about a half an hour walk away.  We would always wake up around nine, I would then call Lucas to meet me up at Paulies for an early lunch.  He would then call Colin which then you would get his father, Scott, on the phone.  You would have to plead to him to wake up his son.  It was then Lucas’s duty before getting to Paulies to go and knock on his door and make sure that he actually got up.  His walk was about five minutes shorter then mine to the town square so it just made sense.  The town square only consisted of a few small town basics.  A weird super market that was named after the town, Wonder Foods, a video rental store, a used car dealership and 3-4 bars. 

Criminal Justice

I’m in the backseat of a yellow Monte Carlo.  Possibly one of the most attention-giving cars out on the street besides a rarity like a muscle car.  Anyone would be able to spot it and easily identify it because it’s obnoxious.  I sat on the right side next to Dan Musser who was in blue jeans and a black band T-shirt.  He had brown curly hair down to his nose.  I had hair in my face as the wind from the right passenger window was blowing in.  It was Gage Miller’s turn so we put Anarchy in the U.K. on our Ipod for the second time tonight.  The first time was when it was Joe’s turn who we just recently dropped off.  He gave us his camera so we could take pictures of our damage.  He began sitting on the door while Adam was going at least thirty miles an hour down a subdivision road.  We were previously were here three hours ago but going the other way.  This is where the night started and where it would end.

Tent #4

One time when I was in 6th grade I got invited to my best friends brothers graduation party.  I hung out with them daily because not only did we have the same interests (skateboarding, trampolining, and video games) but I could literally see there front yard from my backdoor.  If I was jumping on my trampoline I could see when they got home and what they were up to all the time.  It would only make more sense for me to be over there instead of stalking them. 

Tent #3

Colin’s parents just got home with his kid  sister in their arms.  We were to rambunctious to stay in the house so we had to go in the back to the tent that was already pitched before I got there.  I think it was there the whole time and they only put it away when it started to snow.  Tents always seem out of place unless you are camping.  I just got up from a nap after passing out watching an uninteresting, long, sluggish movie titled “XXX.”  The noise of the minivan’s sliding door closing woke me up because my mom had the same car.  Still puzzled from the departure of my dream, I just stood up at their sunken faces.  A six foot man, resembling a lumber jack with the representational beard to mach holding his blond haired girl between his arms who was passed out from the long down while he was very close to his stocky, brown, curly haired five in a half foot wife who was drowsing off.  Late night at the opera house again which is where she worked and frequented often.  My eyes felt flourished, 2 perfect hours of sleep kept me in a trance of relatable starvation.  I needed to do something but we were advertently being kicked out at the same time.  What do you do in a TENT?  My childhood rage was almost getting the best of me and I began to become irritated by accepting his sleep over invitation. 

Tent #2

Jackie and I decided to go on a walk after diner.  We strayed away from our camp fire and burrowed into the thin stalks of bushes behind our tent.  It was to early in the Spring for anything to be quite alive yet, so these thin stalks could easily be trampled even if it was truly by mistake.  Then we got on a path which just was encroached grass.  We hold hands inconspicuously and marvel in the clear sky above us.  The blue that we were familiar with starting turning to that shade of purple that you only see on t-shirts.  The path took many turns throughout the camp ground and led us past oak trees that canopied over us.  Being on the ground level, the trees looked rather far apart but looking up they all seemed to touch at some point in their crown.  We could see the mosquitoes hovering around us but not one of them bit.  It was to early in the year to do such devilish things. 

Tent #1

I wake up with no intentions of where I possible could be.  Vinyl fabric surrounds me and I’m laying on a wrinkled gray tarp covered in un-zipped sleeping bags.  The sun was radiating my fortress and I when my common sense started coming back to me I wondered where Joe was.  Well he left the zipper door contraption open and ants were beginning to march towards our collection of munchies.  I could trace back the line to the origin of entry.  It felt like bugs were beginning to become everywhere.  I saw a spider stare at me from the corner of the slope right over where I woke up.  And I felt the mosquito bites still stinging me from last night.