The door closed and the lock slid into place, and he concealed himself in the safety of his own room, his own world. This world of his often acted as a shelter, protecting him against the tumultuous storms that plague the life of a young person going through dramatic changes as their life progresses. However, this is no longer the case. This world of four walls was no different than the world outside; filled with unnecessary items that clutter, pollute, bring joy and grow in volume as life carries on, often passing us by before we even realize. His reflection on this world showed a life that went from innocent and carefree to something drastically different, a world of terror and turmoil. When his parents would knock on the door, to bring him out of his world, he would always free himself. Except, one day he did not answer; his own world had eaten him alive. A world that no one else could possibly know and one that no one ever got the chance to know, because this world had a population of one. That world has now crumbled and fallen into the void, washed away; leaving a forgotten place that is now and forever, vast and empty. No one will ever know what happened between those four walls, or what caused it to happen. However, it was all explained in a letter scrawled across a piece of paper, it only said two words; “I’m sorry.” The day it happened, it was not the actions that placed the gun barrel past his lips and between his teeth, and it was not his finger that pulled the trigger. It was the words that were uttered behind his back, the words that travelled up and down the hallways of school tormenting like a cut that keep tearing itself open. These words followed him into his own world, and it betrayed him. It was the words.
There is a story, one that we have all heard it at one point in our lives; a tale as obscene and demented as the tortured mind which it surrounds, the post-modernism myth of Vincent van Gogh and his ear. Well, for those who have not heard it before, it is a story that quite literally bleeds romance as it tells of van Gogh, his left ear, and a prostitute named Rachel, whom he loved and obsessed over. While the version that most of us know is largely fictitious, it tells the story of how van Gogh took a razor in hand gruesomely hacked away at his left ear, cutting cartilage and veins as blood poured from his head as though it were a spilled glass of red wine. Then, with his ear in hand and a bloody nub on his head, he put the severed, blood speckled appendage in a brown paper box mailed it away to her by Pony Express. He did all of this, self-inflicted pain, bodily harm, and emotional trauma all in order to display his love for a woman that was so dear to his heart. While these actions of van Gogh are without a doubt morbid, psychotic, and on some distant plane, insanely romantic as they reflect a bizarre display of love and devotion, they also represent something that is too often left out in many relationships. As humans we too readily revert ourselves to clay, falsifying who we are by molding and shaping ourselves into something new, something different from what we truly are. Too often in our search for love we are too willing to change ourselves, rather than finding that person who will accept, admire, and love us for who we really are, and not who they want us to be. We do this because we are scared of commitment, we do not want to make ourselves vulnerable, bearing our heart, soul, and bones. Instead we hide it all away in a suit of flesh so that no one can see what we truly are, because we are haunted; haunted by the relationships we see in popular media, those of our past, and those of the humans that surround us. We have seen hearts break as though they were a stick under the sole of a boot, and spirits crumble like an ancient rock face at the ocean’s edge. People break-up and people divorce, but what is worse than either of these, is never taking the step towards that relationship to begin with. For all of the madness that filled his heart and the insanity that rang in his skull, this is where van Gogh was correct, and what makes him one of the greatest romantics of all time. Without hesitation he embraced his madness and insanity, he let his love fill his soul, and harnessed his emotions and without a second thought he took action to portray these feelings, which resulted in the removal of his ear. He did not care whether or not Rachel knew his name or even that he existed, he did not care. He ignored all those failed relationships that laid around him, some of which were his, he plugged his ears with paint covered fingers when people said they did not believe in true love, he had no fear of making himself vulnerable if it meant that he had a chance for happiness, all that he knew was that he was in love with this woman, and he wanted nothing more to be with her, and so he took a chance.
There he sits, in dark swamp green lit corner of the bar, why would this day be any different than that fell before it? There is no reason for it to be. So, there he sits seemingly staring vacantly at the wall as his fingernails, rough as the grain of wood, pick flecks of paint off the walls as though they are dead skin from a summer day spent in the sun.
With each fleck his aspirations fail, and thoughts that are not his puncture the veil of his mind more and more, until it is tattered as though it is the identifying flag of a vessel that has sailed through tumultuous seas, never to reach its destination. These thoughts are perpetuated by the voices of his loved ones, family and friends, and the ghosts of his past.
These voices are pushed down through his skin like a needle and injected as though they are a lukewarm drugs, blazing a trail through his veins and weaseling their way into his brain to cause real damage. The voices of these specters echo about his skull like a ricocheting bullet, controlling the actions that steer him on the road of his life.
No matter how hard he pushes the gas pedal down to the floorboards, he still drives the same roads, unable to escape words that are not his. There are always there no matter how he tries to distance himself from them and keep himself on the outside, they are whispered into his ears like secrets until there are tears in his eyes and he is dragged back to where they want him to be.
His view alternates between the wall smattered with blood red paint and the bottom of a pint glass until his vision is foggy and his mind is clear, voices silenced. Head heavy with alcohol his fingers free a flake of red paint from the wall that looks like a heart. He attempts to blink his vision clear but the fleck of heart remains.
Taking it as a sign, he puts his money down for his drink and drops the heart of paint into the half-filled empty pint glass and leaves. The fleck floats on the surface briefly like a leaf on a pond, but the heart is heavy and soon is sinking to the bottom of the glass, but the alcohol dissolves the heart and all that it could ever have before it reaches the bottom.
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During the summer of 1969, two years after the iconic Summer of Love, the culmination of the counterculture movement was at hand and with it came the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, or more commonly Woodstock. This event was a music festival that occurred from August 15 to August 18 in Bethel, NY which is located in Sullivan County, just southwest of Woodstock, NY in a neighboring county. The event was advertised as “An Aquarian Exposition: Three Days of Peace and Music,” that took place on Max Yasgur’s 600 acre dairy farm.
Over this three day period of time, 32 different acts performed for a crowd of nearly 500,000 people; performers such as Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Ten Years After, and many other noteworthy artists and musicians of monumental influence. Those that attended created a utopia for a brief period of time, and in their blissful state they established an image, but only to be destroyed months later at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival which ended not only 1969 but also the generation of free love.
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair is widely acknowledged as one of the most important and pivotal moments in the history of music, and was voted by Rolling Stone magazine as of the one of the 50 Moments that Changed the History of Rock and Roll. While there have been other Woodstock festivals since, the original that took place in the summer of 1969 is still referred to as the Woodstock. While other music festival have been created and grow ever more popular as time progresses and music changes, they all live in the shadow and try to perfect that which was created during those “three days of peace and music.”
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“Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and where to.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is Friday August 15, 1969 and the Greyhound bus clumsily cuts the wind as it barrels down the highway in perfect unison with the speed limit under a night sky that is the perfect shade of prison blue tattoo ink. The engine roars and exhaust is spewed from the tail pipe like the words of a dusty poet that has just pulled into town and is looking for a place to rest his weary bones and get a drink. As the bus makes the journey east on a long ribbon of asphalt towards the city of Philadelphia, PA., those in the metal confines of the bus feel the road under the tires and are jarred by every little blemish in its surface as they ride on a stiff suspension system. There is an incessant hum that rolls about the cabin like an angry nest of bees from the wheels kissing the road, and the occupants of the bus try to pass time by befriending those sitting around them through quiet conversation.
On this bus packed full travelers rubbing elbows and smelling one another’s breath and sweat, there are people returning home, families vacationing, people on business trips, and people traveling for any number of reasons. Whatever the reason might be, they all have the same destination ahead of them. One of these travelers is a seventeen year old male, just shy of his eighteenth birthday and adulthood; he has nothing with him other than the clothes on his back, the small amount of money in his wallet, and an armful of records. Sitting eagerly upright in his seat his feet dance and tap to a song rattling about in his head as he takes in his surroundings and glances out the window. He looks just like every other youth of the time, dressed in what he feels is the high fashion of the time, consisting of a t-shirt and dark gray bellbottoms with black pinstripes. However this is in fact not the case, this young man drumming his fingers energetically and sporadically on the records on his lap, one of which is Ten Years After’s album Shhh, is not just any youth, it is Bob P, and he is on his way to Woodstock.
In the seat next to Bob is his friend Greg, who like Bob is dressed in clothes equally as fashionable, the only difference between the two is that he is in college, a few years older than Bob and has as much hair as he could grow in a year. If it were not for Greg and his level of maturity, there is no way that Bob would even be seated on the bus making his way to Woodstock to see bands that he and Greg had bonded over the last couple of years; bands that until this point they had only ever listened to on their record players. In a way Bob looked up to Greg, though he would never have admitted to him, because Greg knew what was cool; he knew what bands to listen to, and he had a guitar and a drum kit, which was enough for them to fill Greg’s house with a cacophony noise as they attempted to cover songs by The Rolling Stones, The Monkees, and various other bands.
In the west, choked in the exhaust fumes of the bus is Canton, OH, a small town that was a manufacturing center located at the end of several railroads, and a place that Bob called home for most of his youth. He lived with his family in a two story suburban upper middle class household that was kept pristine and in order by his conservative parents that could give Ozzie and Harriet a run for their money as the ideal American couple and parents. His father worked as the human resource representative for U.S. Steel, while his stay at home mother pampered the entire family would wake him every morning to get ready for school.
It is hard to believe that with all of the freedom that laid before him on not just this road to Philadelphia and Woodstock, but the road of his life, that just a few months ago he was in high school, and was only able to graduate because his father paid off his biology teacher. However, Bob owes more to his father than just the fact that he is the reason he graduated, but also that it is because his father is the reason he was able to find out about Woodstock. This is because Bob’s father read newspapers as though he were a chain-smoker with a fresh pack of Marlboro Reds; throughout the week he would read the local paper and The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and every Sunday after church he would go to the local bookstore and purchase The New York Times. It was in one particular edition of The New York Times, the Arts and Entertainment section held an advertisement for the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Bob repeatedly read the advertisement as though it held the meaning of life, immediately he knew that he must attend and picked-up the phone to tell Greg about Woodstock, and days later both had their bus tickets and a six-dollar ticket to the last day of Woodstock so that they could see Ten Years After. However, while so much had changed for Bob within the last several months of his relatively young life, he could not even begin to fathom the life altering changes that lay ahead of him punctuating the next six months on road of his life.
As the bus cruises through the night towards Philadelphia, however Bob’s wanderlust mind is as far from home as he will ever be, it is not even focused on the bus, and instead is focused intently on the Woodstock stage that will put such iconic figures as Jimi Hendrix, Crosby, Stills, and Nash and Ten Years after on a pedestal. Out in front of this pedestal constructed of amplifiers, cables, and instruments he will be located in the midst of the mass of people that have all ventured to experience and share music that will wash over them in great floods. Even with his mind elsewhere the fifteen hour bus ride is unbearably long, and eventually as Saturday morning, August 16 begins to give way to the afternoon, Bob and Greg find themselves in finally in Philadelphia and that much closer to their destination of rock and roll nirvana.
In Philadelphia the two spend the afternoon at Bob’s aunt’s house with his cousin who picked them up from the bus depot, a real wild child that raised hell wherever she went, and that Saturday was no different. The three of them spent the day in a tangled mess of noise and motion as their restless teenage souls did the only thing they knew how to do, and subsequently turned his aunt’s and cousin’s house upside down. They listened to and watched various news coverage on Woodstock, and were astounded and excited by what they were hearing about the mass amounts of people making their way up country towards Bethel, NY. The accounts they heard told of great migrations of people ranging well into hundreds of thousands and increasing with every hour that went by, as they all made their way towards the stage. If they were not getting fanatic over the news coverage, they were listening to the albums that Bob brought, particularly Shhh by Ten Years After so loud that the walls were pulsating and the neighbors were complaining and threatening to call the police on the spastic trio. Eventually, after she could no longer handle the trio of rapscallions, Bob’s aunt yelled at his cousin to get them out of the house because they were driving her to the brink of sanity, so the trio piled into the car and made their way back to the Philadelphia bus depot. But, not before they used the car as an outlet for their perpetual youthful energy as they whipped up and down roads, and even took it off road as they drove eighty miles an hour through a cornfield.
After a brief three hour bus ride the two finally found themselves in awe as they arrive at the massive cathedral like New York City bus depot, and that much closer to their destination. Neither of them had ever seen anything like it. They had never seen so many transit buses in one place in their life, and as they walked through the bus depot that bustled with life of people all going to different destinations they passed various shops and places where people could relax between bus rides. As they searched for their next bus they saw hippies and dozens of other people dressed fashionably and more often than not had long hair and wore a new skin of mud, people that had obviously already been to Woodstock and were back now. Finally, after a half-hour search they arrived at the bus they needed to be on next with tickets in hand, only to find out that not only their bus had been cancelled, but all of them had been.
It did not take long for massive disappointment to set in, and the realization of exactly what was occurring to dawn on them. They knew now that the only way that they had of getting to Woodstock was no longer an option, and while the thought of hitchhiking briefly flickered in both their heads, they knew that that was not a viable option either. This is because the roads leading to the Woodstock Music and Art Fair were clogged with vehicles that had been abandoned as people got fed up with the traffic jam that the hundreds of thousands of people trying to get to the stage had created, it was Gordian knot of motor vehicles.
Thoroughly depressed at the failure of not being able to experience Woodstock, Bob and Greg did they only thing they could think of doing, they called their parents to tell them the awful news. However, their parents did not interpret the news as bad, in fact Bob’s parents, after breathing a sigh of relief that their son would not be taking part the activities of the counterculture, laughed at his failure and told him that it was undoubtedly for the best and a few hours later they were on a solemn bus ride home.
A few weeks later after returning home, Bob legally became an adult as he celebrated his eighteenth birthday, and still feeling the massive disappointment of not attending Woodstock weighing down on his shoulders, he made a brash choice of tearing the seemingly useless ticket into confetti and threw it away. This is a decision he would regret for the rest of his life. Now that he was back home in his upper middles class suburban dwelling in Canton, OH, he was also back under the thumb of conservative, idealistic, wholesome parents, and he was finding himself unable to cope with it. He was beginning to rebel as he realized more and more that he was nothing like his parents at all.
After missing the spiritual experience that Woodstock became, the defining moment of rock and roll, and one that he felt should have defined his own life, he went on searching for his own Woodstock as he explored his repressed life. He searched for it as he went about the mundane tasks of his day to day life. However, human beings never have just one moment in their life that defines them and molds them into who they will one day become, they have several that punctuates the road of their life. The first for Bob was not Woodstock, but occurred in the months after his graduating from high school, Woodstock, and his eighteenth birthday.
During the upcoming months of Bob’s search for himself and the defining moment of his youth, parents had moved to California for work while he stayed behind in Canton, OH and started college where he was perpetually late for class, if he was even able to wake himself up on time to attend, and eventually dropped out after a semester of utter failure. From here the next stop on the road of his life, he found himself living in a small cluttered apartment with the girl who he was dating for a period of time in which he would have sex for the first time, begin smoking marijuana, try LSD, and dabbled with various other drugs. This period of time ended with a trip to Florida with a college friend who also dropped out, in which their only means for travel was hitchhiking, and Bob eventually running away to California by the end of 1969 and the peace and love generation.
While he may not have felt it at the time, he had a moment of self-discovery during these months that would define his you for the rest of his life; he had found his own Woodstock. This moment would also set him on a path towards other defining moment of his life.
I was not always a feral child roaming the woods naked, covered in mud, and doing as he pleased. I was once a well behaved child that minded his Ps and Qs, was always quiet, and always did as he was told. But, when I started to talk more, and later draw and write, people would tell me that I was weird, morbid, immature, twisted, and so many others.
The thing is, growing-up I have always been in between things, never sure of what to do, where to go, or what was real. Every morning when I would wake-up and roll out of bed, I would just follow where my feet would take and do whatever was there when I got there; this is not to say I was without ambition, it is just that I have always just been very open to things.
As I got older my parents and other adults would bark and growl at me, afraid of something different, they would tell me to grow-up and to act normal. I tried. I truly did, but nothing would stick for long and I would revert, back to the same way that I was before. The thing is, you cannot obscure and alter your personality, no matter what that mask will fall and the man behind the curtain will be revealed.
This is not to say I did not try, one time I did. It was at night, and after being told being told by numerous people to act like an adult I did the only thing I could think to do. I scooped my brain out of my skull, picked the dirt and mold off, washed it with warm water and soap and dried it, inflated some of the areas that needed air, and ironed out all the wrinkles.
With my gray matter clean and smooth as though it were ancient marble, I was ready to be an adult. I was trying to be an adult, but it was not working, I could not do it. I was miserable. So, I took my brain out again and kicked it up and down the streets for a day, put the wrinkles back, lost it to a dog that ran away with it, spilt some coffee on it, and then put it back. Some things just are not meant to be.
I still live my life this way, it is viewed as immature, bizarre, and irresponsible by my mother; I am not sure what my father thinks of it, you see he does not talk to me much, I am not even sure if he thinks much either. Whenever I try to talk to him he just give quick little gunshots of words as replies, it is not me, that is just his natural demeanor, a man of stone and time; sometimes I try to think about what goes on in his head and I just wind up in need of a drink. But, regardless I am me and that is all I can be.
(This is a first rough draft of my most recent story, so I apologize for shoddy grammar and spelling and such. It may undergo some changes later, but I have other things that I am working on at the moment too i.e. going over some papers for school and another short-story. So here is this.)
For the majority of his career he had written for several major newspapers, and spent his early years as a journalist moving from one newspaper to another; from the Las Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, The Maryland Gazette, The New York Times, but never for the Wall Street Journal, he felt that that would be too pretentious. He spent years of his perpetual existence working as a news- hound at these different newspapers, chasing leads and catching stories.
Most of the time when people think of a journalist, they think of a person that so often thrusts themselves into the thick of things, headlong directly to the frontlines; in fact, he did that the majority of his career as a journalist. He was always there, right in the thick of things, getting the stories that were always relevant, and telling them with a talent that to this day goes unrivaled. Throughout all the times in the history of the world that needed to be told to the masses, he was there writing it, ready to tell the world about it. He was there on April 14, 1865 at Ford’s Theatre watching the play Our American Cousin when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, on August 9, 1945 at 11:02 PM when Fat Man was dropped onto Nagasaki, Japan, he was right at the center, ground zero, as the one of only two nuclear bombs ever used in warfare was detonated, he was even there on the streets of Kuwait on March 20, 2003 when Operation Iraqi Freedom began, and he was there at all other events throughout history of the world that have been drenched in the blood of the human race.
Not sure if I am one to give out tips on writing, but if you find yourself struggling with a character, as in developing them or figuring out what they would do in a certain situation; I would recommend putting them in a very mundane situation, what will they do at the grocery store, what will they buy, do they have a list, a cart or a hand basket, or what is their morning routine, or even write their obituary, how will they be remembered after they are dead and gone. Just some tips.
Patterns are important, they are a part of who we are, a routine. I know, that I have a set routine I go with about my daily life, and the activities I do have even smaller routines that I do daily. Showering, cooking, putting on my shoes, even how I go down the stairs; it is how I learned to do things growing up. I have many routines, it was how I was taught to deal with my dyslexia by teachers and my parents and grandparents; if I did not have the routines, I would just struggle and not get anything done at all. Now, these patterns are simply part of me, I do not even notice them. Because pf this, I always find my self counting things; utensils as I unload the dishwasher, bricks or cracks in the sidewalk, how many carts are on a train, how many red cars I drive past, and so on and so forth. I remember one time when I was little watching Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and watching the counter on the VHS click and count the seconds…for the whole movie. I mention all of this, because of something that just occurred to. I am awful with remembering phone numbers from my memory, while I can remember names, birthdays, how to get back to a place after one visit, and so many other things phone numbers escape me all the time. Ever since I was little I had a little book with phone numbers on it in case I needed to call someone, but now I have a cellphone, so that is not needed anymore. But, in doing this I have lost something. I know longer need that book to dial a number, some numbers I used to dial so often that I eventually no longer needed the book then anyway. I remembered them by a pattern, the trail of the keys that were pressed to dial. That is how I remembered my grandparents, from the bottom middle key to the top, across the left, down one, and over the lower left corner, and up to the top; how I remembered my cousins number as well, middle key, up one, over to the left one, skip to the top left, and then the bottom row. I remembered a couple other numbers this way too, but they are gone now, my grandparents have passed away, my cousin has moved away, but I still remember these patterns.
When writing dialog, it is best not to think to much. If you think too much and worry about if it sounds casual and human or not, it will not. Do not dwell on it, just write, and in doing so it will unfold like a conversation between two old friends, but in your voice as you are telling it. However, every word you use is important, it is valuable, just like a dollar you are investing towards something that will not only make your life better, but also for all those around you. Write your dialog as though it is some great quote uttered by Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, or Lenin…or Lennon. Just be wabi sabi with it.
“What?”
“Oh, never mind…not really worth repeating at this point…”
“Alright…are you sure?”
“Yeah, it was not that important.”
“Hey, this is not the end, we will still see each other. I promise.”
“How can you say that? You are running away from everything! I would never have thought you would do this.”
“…I am not running…”
“Really? Then why do you have a one way plane ticket to Spain in the pages of the book he gave for your birthday last year? ONE WAY!”
“You looked?”
“Do not even try to put that on me! You had been leaving that damn book out for days with the ticket poking out, waiting for me to find so you did not have to approach me about it.”
“You…you don’t understand.”
“How could I?! You never talk to me about anything anymore, ever since he-“
“Don’t you dare say it!”
“What?”
“Don’t say it.”
“Oh come on! He died! He is gone, he overdosed and killed himself. How is my not saying it going to make it any different?
“I don’t know! It just …works for me, makes me feel as though he is still here.”
“Well he is not, you keep dwelling on this, it is not your fault. At this rate, the way you are going you will never move on. You cannot keep him alive like this, he was already dead, long before he even overdosed, the only difference is now he is buried.
“…”
“I am sorry to snap at you like that, but…I love you, and can’t watch you suffer any more than you already have, not over him. I know he was your best friend, but he was a plague to you, and me. He held you back for years, he got you into it, almost destroyed you on more than one occasion, every time you shot up with him. You remember? You almost overdosed twice!”
“Yeah, I know…”
“I love you, and I am here for you always…I never left you.”
“Mhmm…I know. Thank you. I am sorry it is just…it is just that I got clean and he didn’t.”
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Story goes there were a lot like her around the town
Ripped dress
Red rimmed eyes
Bites all the way up her thighs
‘Course they paid ‘em what...
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I wanna break something, and it's a high probability that it's going to be your fucking face.
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GPOY
This is me every day.
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age is just a number.
swirling soap around my fingers, my mother cries.
i can feel the steam from my past growing inside my mind.
“What am I... -
Pistachios are hard enough to stop just being sober.
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Meh
I don’t particularly give a flying pig about things I used to love. Everything is dull and grey. I just want one night free of doubt and sadness.
