Genetics...

At the Great Frederick Fair, there is a tent down by the tractor displays that sells old-fashioned candies.

And every year, I go there and buy a roll of Butter Rum-flavored Lifesavers, because they remind me of you.  You used to keep a roll in your car, and sometimes you would give me one, and so they remind me of you.  The version of you that raised me, and loved me, and schooled me hard, and whom I thought of as Father, with all the meek adoration of an ascetic at the feet of his Creator.

As silly as it sounds, I have to get them every year, and I love them, and would be wounded if I couldn't find them, because those little sweet rings of amber candy remind me - they remind me that I am your son.

Final Summation...

Goddammit I hate memory sometimes.

And everything it leads to.  Nostalgia.  Reminiscence.  A concrete sense of Self.  Rambling, confessional blog posts about supposed childhood sexual traumas.  And so forth.

After all that, after my whole humiliating confessional frenzy here in my last few posts (holy crap, was that all the way back in February??), I have to admit now that I'm not entirely sure my memory of these early experiences is even correct.  And I've wanted to write and post this explanation for a good while now, because those posts are still sitting there on the front page, like a severed head at a dinner party; but I've been alternately too busy, or, mostly, too embarrassed by the whole ordeal to want to return to it.  But I can't just leave that shit up there for anyone to read without any context or resolution.  I have to put this to bed.

So here's how it all started.  I was driving to work that February morning, and there was a discussion on the radio of how children respond to parental abuse.  I don't remember what it was exactly, but something they said reminded me of this childhood friend (I'm going to start calling him "Bill" just so that I have a name to refer to him by).  I hadn't thought about Bill in many, many years.  I remembered some of our experiences together, and I remembered his big, angry father.  And that's when I suddenly made the connection and realized, "Oh!  Bill was abused by his father!"  And everything else just followed from that.

I still believe that to be true; I believe Bill was abused (at least mentally and emotionally, if not physically or sexually) by his father.  But the rest of it, I must admit now, I am significantly less sure about.  I know that Bill and I "played doctor," but I don't remember all that we did.  I don't actually remember how far our sexual play went. And, I am forced to admit to myself and all of you now, I don't actually remember who suggested what.  I thought I did at the time, but I've since realized that's not true.  It was just too long ago now for me to remember it clearly.  It was so long ago that even the things I do remember clearly are suspect.  And through my research I discovered that I would be forced to admit something else, something much worse:  it is entirely possible that I am the one who abused him.

Reading through literature on the subject, I was surprised to find out that one of the more common, and yet least often discussed, forms of childhood sexual abuse is to simply educate a child about sex too much at too early an age.  (It had never even occurred to me before my research that this could possibly be considered a form of abuse.)  Sex is one of the most complicated and complex of all human interactions, and a 4 or 5 year-old child is simply too underdeveloped to be able to fully understand it (hell, a lot of adults are too underdeveloped to be able to fully understand it, for that matter); and so therefore giving a child that age too much information on the subject can often lead them to act out behaviors that they are not able to fully understand, process, or deal with in a meaningful way.  That's the basic idea.

My mother's policy was that if I was old enough to ask the question, then I was old enough to hear the answer.  And she was always very quick to let me know that if I ever had any questions at all, she would do her best to try to answer them truthfully and completely.  And she lived by that statement.  And I was a very curious boy.  I had a lot of questions.  And she answered every one she could.  So I remember that throughout my childhood, basically until high school, I always knew more about sex (among many other things) than any of my friends or classmates seemed to.  I was proud of that, actually.  It made me feel grown-up.  It made me feel strong.  And superior.  (Realizing now, as I type this, that this may have something to do with why I value intelligence so highly, in both myself and others.)

But in terms of my memories of my experiences with Bill, that throws everything into a new light.  I only actually remember one thing we did that was definitely Bill's idea, and while that was a little dirty, it also wasn't exactly sexual, either (we were naked, but there was no touching); it would fall squarely in the category of "normative childhood sexual play."  I don't actually remember what else we may have done, or who might've suggested any of it.  But I know that in my memories of all the other boys (and some girls) who came after Bill, I was definitely the aggressor.

The hard part to admit, is that when I suddenly realized that morning that Bill had been abused by his father, I didn't then "realize" that he had actually been acting out his abuse on me, as I originally wrote.  No, the truth was that I actually just assumed that was the case, and didn't recognize that I was making an assumption.  "OMG, Bill was abused by his father!  What do abused children do?  They act out that same abuse on others.  He must've been doing that to me when we played doctor!  So that's why I then went on to do it others; I was acting out his abuse on me!  That's where it all started!  It makes perfect sense."  And it does make perfect sense.  But that doesn't automatically make it true, either.

I still don't know what happened back then, and I probably never will.  But I have to admit that the much more likely scenario seems to be that I was actually a victim of childhood sexual abuse, but the abuser was my mother, not Bill.  And it seems much more likely that I was acting out my abuse on him (and all the other boys and girls that came after him) rather than the other way around.

Bill moved away before we even hit puberty.  I haven't seen or heard from him since I was a child.  I have no idea what his life has been like.

If you're still out there, "Bill," I hope you're okay.  And if you're not... all I can say is, I'm so, so sorry.

It wasn't my fault.  I was only a child.

Apparent Exaggerations...

Still need more time to write out the full story/explanation, but I did learn something that requires an immediate update.

I knew that the language I used yesterday didn't feel quite right.  It seemed inflammatory, and loaded with a ton of connotations that were not actually part of the experience I was trying to communicate.  But what other language was I supposed to use?  How else was I supposed to describe it?

Well, finally getting around last night to doing some very preliminary research into the topic of child-on-child sexual abuse, revealed the rather obvious fact that I'm not the only person in the world who has ever had experiences like these, and that as such, there is already a whole lexicon available to me to describe it, if I had only bothered to look.

I learned right off the bat that I was not, in fact, molested.  I was not abused.  What happened to me would be characterized as "Normative Childhood Sexual Play," even if it was a little more advanced than most.  The difference being, I was never coerced, or threatened, or manipulated, or made to do anything I didn't want to do.  All this friend of mine did was suggest the ideas; I went along with them willingly, even excitedly.  And I enjoyed them completely, to the point that I then went on to suggest them to all my other friends for the next 20 years.

What I went through was a normal part of growing up that pretty much everyone goes through at some point.  The big difference for me, was that it happened to me about 10 years earlier than the average.  I was regularly having sex in elementary school, and I was having the kind of sex that most other people don't even know about, much less start trying to engage in, until middle school or high school.  (Oddly, I steadfastly maintained my virginity, however technical, until I was much older; I think having so much sex as a child made my virginity seem more precious to me somehow, and I was determined to save it until I found someone I really loved.)

I still think my friend was abused, though.  It's the only explanation I have right now for how he could be so sexually aggressive, and adventurous, and knowledgeable, at such a young age.  And so it's still possible that, from his point of view, he was acting out from his history of abuse.  But whether he was attempting to abuse me or not (who knows how he would've responded if I'd said no), I wasn't abused.  I went willingly, and loved every minute of it.

And while I feel a lot better now, knowing that I don't actually have to wear the "childhood sexual abuse victim" label for the rest of my life, there's still a lot left here that I need to unpack.  I'm still not sure what all this means, or what I'm supposed to do with this new information.

We Are What We Remember We Are...

I realized this morning, that I was - rather technically, I must caveat - molested by one of my very first childhood friends.  And that this series of events was directly responsible for shaping a very large portion of my personality; of who I still am today.

I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this.  There's way too much story there to be able to tell it all right now.  But I had to at least get this much, the realization of it, the acknowledgment of it, out of me and into existence, before I forgot it again, or subsumed it in some other way.

I feel like I'm supposed to be upset about this.  But I don't think I feel particularly upset about it, at least not yet.  (There is a small part of me, however, that is upset at myself for not being upset about it, for whatever that's worth.)  I'd always remembered - and still remember - our "playing doctor" as being entirely consensual.  (As much as it could be, at least.  We were about the same age at the time, so technically, legally, neither of us could consent; but we were also the only ones involved.  So how does that work?)  So, I've never felt - and still don't feel - victimized in any way.  I feel no enmity or ill-will towards this individual, and never have.  And the parts of my Self that I can now suddenly attribute to my early friendship with this person (at least, the ones I know about) are not things that I've ever felt particularly bad about or wished to be different.  Nor have I ever felt a need to investigate their root, or determine their origin.

Which I guess is part of why it feels so strange to suddenly know where they all come from.  I received an answer to an absolutely massive question, before I had ever even asked it in the first place.  There's an almost vertigo to it; the sensation of it makes you dizzy.  A memory you've had for almost 40 years, and suddenly, from out of nowhere and apropos of nothing, one tiny little detail you'd left behind somewhere along the way comes back into focus; and it fits like a keystone into place with all the other memories it connects to:  that time, that place, those people; filling in a hole you never knew was there; and now you see it all so clearly, understanding it all for the very first time, after 40 years; and that realization leads to another, which leads to another, cascading down through your history like a line of dominoes, until suddenly four decades of Self have been re-written.  You understand yourself now in a new, better, more complete way, a more whole way, than you ever have before.  But you also know now, that you're not who you thought you were; and you never have been.  So, then, who are you?

That's kind of a lot to handle when it all hits you in a matter of seconds while you're driving down the highway late to work on a Monday morning.

So, yeah.  This one's gonna take a while to unpack, I guess.

Gloria...

It's a stupid song
Hearing it come on the music station in the restaurant
after the thumping House music that preceded it
I laugh
because it's an old song

a stupid song
so familiar song
My eyes close heavy, rebellious
all I can hear is the song
it comes back to me in the wave pattern
vibrating the memory loose
In the back of the old station wagon
Vista Cruiser
with all the other kids and cousins
on our way to Summer camp
windows down Summer wind lovingly whipping us
with salt sand scrub-pine lashes
making fun of the drivers behind us
SCREAMING this song

Top of our lungs
All of ourselves lost in THIS SONG

This stupid song

that I loved so much so long ago

playing overhead in this stupid hipster sandwich shop

with the sudden ocean-salt taste of these tears

being back there in that Summer

flying to Adventure in the Vista Cruiser

Nothing but open road ahead of us
As far as the eye can see

Screen Door Summer...

first days of Summer
early childhood
first, second, third year of school
when Summers first started to mean something

Free.

I am Free.

i remember
i remember those days
i remember that feeling
only remember
i remember one morning
early
seven or eight
both of us
myself and the day
just starting to heat up

i remember finding our front door open
wide open
propped open
because we'd just bought a new screen door
our first
to let the Summer in
i can still remember the sweet smell
of the soft blond wood frame of our new door
blending with the scent of suburban Summer wafting through
cut grass and pool water
dandelion and hot asphalt

i remember the sparkles of dust twinkling
through the enormous beam of radiant Sun
pouring through our open front door
flooding through our new screen door
pooling in two golden domino blocks
on the orange shag carpet

i remember lying down then
right there on the carpet
right there at our open front door
in my pj's
in that bath of light
and doing nothing else
doing nothing at all

i remember it was so warm
so comfortable
so wonderful
so perfect
i didn't want to leave
i didn't have to leave
i could lay there as long as i wanted
i had nothing else to do
all i had to do was whatever i wanted
and what i wanted was to lay right there
and let the blissful Summer Sun caress me all over
until there was nothing else

i remember i felt free then
absolutely felt it
for the first time
a sort-of tingle in the belly
like falling
or flying
the exhilaration of that new-found freedom
knowing i was free
knowing this was only the beginning
knowing there were months more of this left
months more to look forward to
the upwelling joy that knowledge brings
the surge of happiness at having nothing better to do
than drown in a pool of starlight

i remember recognizing
even then
that there was something special happening there
i didn't know what it was
not then
but i knew there wouldn't be many days like that
and there haven't been
this is the only one i can remember
anymore

but i'm glad i remember
it feels good to remember
it dulls the ache
left from wondering
if i'll ever get to feel that way again

We Become Merlin, Lord Of The Geeks...

the Man is no longer a Man
in this day and age
he is a strange Middle-Aged Boy
an Aging Adolescent
hair going grey
with the hours whittled away
on Xbox video games

the Man that is a Man
is of a bygone age
The Real Man in the films of old
Age-ed Anachronism
strong and proud and brave
standing tall to face the day
and keep the wolves at bay

that I am a Man-who-is-not-a-Man
a product of this modern age
has vexed my Heart and Soul
my Arrested Ascension
how can I always play
when a Real Man works all day
but really who's to say?

the Boy is also a Man
in our culture at this stage
in truth both young and old
Advancing Adolescence
we get to play our lives away
yet still have bills to pay
the balance of the middle way

I am a Boy and I am a Man
by internal and external age
work only to play is my road
an Admirable Aspiration
that I get to live My Way
a little boyhood every day
is the great gift of this age

Fuck it
I'll be okay

Goodbye, Mork...

I had to add just this one more, for posterity.  It's just too perfect.

Carpe Diem, My Captain...

I really don't understand why the death of Robin Williams is hitting me so hard.  As shocked as I was to hear of his death, I was (and still remain) almost as shocked by the depth of my reaction to it.  I mean, sure I've felt saddened by the death of other celebrities before.  I remember being particularly saddened by the death of Heath Ledger, and more recently, Philip Seymour Hoffman.  But I've never been moved to tears like this before.  Celebrities are, by nature, almost fictional characters to us themselves; always removed from our actual lives by cameras and screens.  (I think that might have something to do with why it feels so strange whenever you see one in person - it's almost like TV or a movie coming to life!)  And since we don't really know them personally, there's only so much their death can move us.

Or so I thought.

I don't know why this one hurts so much.  Maybe it's because I grew up with him?  Because I've enjoyed him so much for my entire life?  I remember the rainbow Mork suspenders I had when I was five years old.  (My first cosplay, I guess?)  I remember seeing Popeye in the theaters with my parents just a few years later, and loving it completely.  I have the same memories of Good Morning, Vietnam.  And Hook.  (Oh, Peter Pan!  Why did you have to grow up?!)  I watched Mrs. Doubtfire and Jumanji over and over, just because of the way it delighted both the boy and the man in me at the same time.

And I've seen Dead Poets Society so many times I can practically quote the whole movie.  I don't know when I'll be able to watch that one again now.  At the very least, I know I'll never be able to see it the same way again.

Maybe it's because it was apparently a suicide?  It's possible.  Might be the connection to my own mother's death.  But I haven't reacted this way to other suicides or overdoses, so why this one?  Maybe it's just the fact that suicide adds that final crack of heartbreak to the story.  We didn't just lose one of the greats forever; we lost him to himself, to his own demons, to his own sickness.  It feels like there must've been something that could've saved him.  It feels like it didn't have to end this way.  And it touches us all because, let's face it, haven't each and every one of us been there, or somewhere close to it, at least once in our lives?  But if we could survive it, then why couldn't he?

I think it's true that there are few things more sad in this life, than a funny man, with a broken heart.  His mentor, Jonathan Winters, knew that only too well.  But he survived it anyways.  It's too bad he couldn't be there to help his friend, who clearly needed him more than anyone knew.

Like so, so many of us today, I feel the need to pour my heart out to the memory of this funny man, who's been there my whole life, in some vain and desperate attempt to figure out just what in the fuck it means to live without him now.

Below, I've collected some of my favorites that other people have been sharing today.  Some are funny, some are poignant, some are heart-breaking.  But they all made me feel something.  And that's helped, at least a little.

Here's hoping it can do the same for any of you.

Every time I hear a siren I still say "that's my ride." Thank you Robin Williams. I wish your ride had not arrived.
— John Hodgman (@hodgman) August 11, 2014

Spontaneous tribute appearing at the bench in Boston, made famous from the scene in Good Will Hunting.

We mourn the loss of our friend Robin Williams, who always made us laugh and smile. pic.twitter.com/UOY8LTjVRA
— Sesame Street (@sesamestreet) August 11, 2014

"Robin Williams is not dead, he is just waiting in the jungle until somebody rolls a 5 or 8." -testingonetwothreetesting, via imgur



"One of the funniest people alive died from sadness." - chili1179, via imgur

Nanu nanu.
— SarcasticRover (@SarcasticRover) August 11, 2014

Come on in Rob. I got you.
— Jesus Christ (@jesus) August 11, 2014

The first comment on this image, from NancyNevada, I think says it all:  "When Peter Pan dies, don't tell us to grow up."

Goodbye pal.  Thanks for everything.
— Louis C.K. (@louisck) August 12, 2014

This was reportedly posted to Disney's FB page this morning.  Heart-wrenching.

"But doctor, I AM Pagliacci." That's the only way this makes sense. Can't stand thinking of him being that sad. #RIPRobinWilliams
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) August 11, 2014

And finally, this is how I always want to remember him:



Your barbaric YAWP! was heard around the world, sir, and inspired MILLIONS.

And you will always be my captain.

The Other Boy's Father...

As a young boy, I belonged to a tribe in the Indian Guides.  Think the Boy Scouts, but with a Native American, rather than Pioneer, theme.  Instead of merit badges, we received various colored and decorated feathers for fulfilling specific tasks.  Instead of "dens" and "den-meetings" we had "tribes" and "pow-wows."  It was run by the local YMCA, and looking back on it now, it was actually pretty racist.  A bunch of suburban white boys and their fathers dressing up in feathers and war-paint, beating drums and pretending to be Native Americans, back when we still called them "Indians" and thought nothing of it.  Though, at the time, I was too young to notice any of that.  I just loved getting to do all of the crafts, coming up with my Indian Name ("Howling Wolf"), collecting feathers for my coup-stick, and especially, getting to spend time with my father.  He worked two jobs and went to night school, so any time we got to spend together was very special.  But what I loved the most, was when we would go camping.

A couple of times a year, our entire Nation (a group of local tribes) would rent out a campsite somewhere, and we would spend a long weekend out in the woods, making crafts, telling stories, cooking hotdogs on sticks over campfires, and other typical Boy Scout-type things.  Over the years, I grew to be good friends with all of the boys in my tribe, and their fathers, and I would look forward to every opportunity we had to get together.  They felt like a second family.  And the weekends we all spent in the woods are, to this day, some of the happiest memories I have of my childhood.

I remember one night in particular when I was around ten or eleven, as we were sitting around the fire after our hot dogs and beans, and after our s'mores, and after the last ghost story had been told, and long after most of the other boys were asleep in their bunks, I was trying to stay up late, to be with my father (whose Indian Name was, tellingly, "Night Owl").  I must've started to nod off at some point.  I don't remember exactly how it happened, but for some reason it was another one of the fathers, Tom, who carried me to my bunk that night, rather than my own.  Tom was tall and gangly and rather nerdy, always funny and good with us boys.  I remember he was also very handy, good at fixing things and such.  He was a plumber by trade, and owned a local plumbing company.  I'll still pass a truck with his name on it on the road every once in a while.

The cabin was almost completely dark, filled with the soft sound of sleeping young boys.  Tom carried me almost effortlessly down the dark, quiet cabin, toward my bunk at the far end.  It felt strange, the way he carried me.  My father would carry me almost slung over his shoulder.  But Tom carried me cradled in his arms, like a mother would carry her baby.  When we eventually reached the back of the cabin, he very gently lifted me up and laid me down in my bunk.  Because I was on the top bunk, I was lying down almost as high up as he was tall, very nearly face-to-face.  After making sure I was situated properly in my sleeping bag, he reached out with an enormous right hand, and cupped my head very gently.  He lightly brushed the hair off of my forehead.  Still holding my head in his hand, he softly stroked my cheek with his thumb, and then whispered, "Goodnight."  

And then, still cupping my tiny head in his giant, calloused hand, he leaned down very slowly, and kissed me on the lips more gently than anyone ever had before.  It wasn't like any goodnight kiss I'd ever had.  It was unlike any kiss any relative or family member had ever given me.  Even to my young mind back then, it clearly most resembled the romantic kisses I'd seen on TV and in movies.  Lips slightly parted.  Mouth to mouth.  Very soft and gentle.  And he lingered there with his mouth on mine for a long moment.  Then he smiled down at me, stroked my cheek once more, and left to go join the other fathers around the campfire, leaving me alone with my thoughts, and the twisting fear in my belly.

I never told anyone.  I was old enough to know that sometimes men touched children in bad ways.  But I don't think I felt certain enough about what happened with Tom that night to risk getting him in trouble by telling anyone.  Maybe I was afraid I would be the one to get in trouble.  Maybe I just didn't want to risk hurting anyone in my tribe, my second family.  But I remember that I wasn't entirely sure if what he'd done was really wrong or not.  It wasn't actually sexual; just strange.  I know that it made me feel very uncomfortable, but that could've been just because it was so different from anything I'd ever experienced before.  For all I knew that was how he kissed his own son goodnight, too, and he was just trying to be nice to me and treat me like he would his own.  No one but my own family had ever tucked me into bed or kissed me goodnight before.  Maybe the experience only felt strange to me because it was so different from the way I was used to with my own father.

I never thought that Tom was gay.  He wasn't effeminate at all.  And he was married and had a son.  And even his son seemed unusually straight for an adolescent boy.  When another boy from our tribe and I had taken Tom's son out into the woods one night to show him what we did out there by ourselves, and to invite him to join us, he wouldn't.  He just walked away, and left us there, half-naked on the ground, under the trees.  Maybe he'd told his father about what we'd done.  And maybe his father was gay.  And so maybe Tom thought he knew what I was going through.  Maybe he was trying to show me that it was okay, that he understood, that he was like me.  Maybe he thought he'd finally found someone he could share his secret with; this dark and horrible secret he'd been keeping his whole life.  Maybe that night, in the dark, in my tiny eyes, he thought he'd seen some sort of recognition.  Maybe he thought he'd finally found someone who understood him.

I don't know.  I'll never know.

Keeping Her Secret, Postcards Home...

In the middle of our two weeks at Summer camp, we received a special treat.  We were allowed to kayak out to Santa Claus Island, an uninhabited spit of sand and tall pine in the middle of Rehoboth Bay, and camp there for the night.  There were about thirty of us boys, all around nine years-old, and six adult camp counselors to watch over us all.  We picked our campsite, pitched our tents, built our fire, dug our latrine, and spent the rest of the day catching crabs from the bay for dinner that night.  Late in the afternoon, I snuck off into the deep woods by myself to masturbate.  After dark, I was running through the woods with some other boys, our flashlight beams bobbing and strobing through the brush as we ran full speed, and I tripped over a root I hadn't seen.  Scraped myself up pretty good.  That was normal for me.  I was a spaz.  Always getting myself hurt somehow.

We ran back to the camp to get first-aid from the counselors.  As they gathered around me, shining their flashlights on my leg to check the extent of my injuries, one of the grown-ups whispered to the counselor who was holding my leg, "Dude.  Your arm."  I looked down to see something protruding from the sweatband he was wearing stretched across his forearm.  I recognized it as a rolled-up sandwich baggie.  I knew exactly what it was.  My parents kept theirs in the same type of bag, rolled up in the same way, in the secret drawer in our coffee table.  At night, they would pinch a little from the bag and smoke it from their tiny wooden pipe, and then laugh and laugh and laugh.  I can still remember lying in bed as a child, and hearing my mother's laughter echoing up from two floors below.  Sometimes, if she was already in her nightgown by the time the call finally came in, and she didn't want to have to get dressed again, she would send me out to meet her connection for her.  I would meet him down at the end of our cul-de-sac, hand him a check for the correct amount, and he would hand me one of those rolled up sandwich bags, filled with the fragrant dried remains of the secret plant that I wasn't supposed to tell anyone about, ever.  And I would bring it back to her and she would smoke it and I would smell the strong burnt odor and she would laugh and laugh.

The counselors had a Secret.  And I knew what it was.

I don't know if it's true or not, but at the time I felt like I was the only one who knew.  Even if any of the other boys had seen the counselor's stash peeking out from his wristband, surely they wouldn't have known what it was.  But I was Special.  I had grown up keeping this secret.  I knew the ways of this hidden adult world, and was comfortable there.  I like to think that when the counselor looked up at me with panic in his eyes after re-secreting his hidden eighth, that I said something like, "Don't worry, it's cool.  I won't tell anyone."  Because I wanted them to know that I was cool.  I wanted them to know that I was down.  That I knew what they were doing, and that I was perfectly okay with it.  I wasn't like all these other little boys who didn't know anything about what adults like to do to have fun.  But I don't think I actually said anything.  I was too shocked, and too afraid of getting in trouble.  I probably just pretended not to notice.  But I saw.  And as I laid in my tent that night, trying to sleep, I couldn't get out of my mind the image of the counselors sitting around our fire outside the tent, passing a joint the way I'd seen my parents and their friends do so many times before.  It reminded me of Home.  It was the first time I'd felt comfortable the entire time I'd been at camp.  The first time I'd felt like I fit in at all.  But no one knew that I knew.  No one could know that I knew.  So even though I suddenly, finally, felt like I belonged, to everyone else I was still just The Spaz.  And there was nothing I could do about it.

Back at camp the next day, we were encouraged to write a postcard to our folks back home.  I was only there for a two-week stay, so I'd only brought one postcard with me.  Trying to think of what to say to my parents, all I could think of was the counselors' secret.  The secret they and my parents shared.  So I wrote it all down on the postcard.  I wanted to tell my parents that there were people like them here with me, watching over me.  "It's okay, they smoke just like you."  I wanted them to know that I was okay here.  That we were all part of the same group, the same tribe, the same family.  The family of people who Kept The Secret.  And I was so proud of myself for being such a grown-up about the whole situation.  And I wanted to show them what a good, grown-up young man I was being for them.  After I'd finished writing out the whole story, filling the entire postcard, I went to hand it in to my counselor to put in the mail for me with the others, so pleased with myself.  And when he held out his hand to take it, I suddenly realized the horrible mistake I'd made.  This was a postcard, not a letter.  There was no envelope.  Who knows how many hands this would pass through between me and my parents?  Certainly other camp staff would see it.  And right there on the back was a detailed description of the secret I was supposed to be keeping.  That I was so proud of keeping.  The counselors smoke pot.  My parents smoke pot.  And everyone who saw this postcard would know!

I couldn't hand it in.  I quickly said I had to fix something, and ran back to my bunk, fear knotting in my gut.  I didn't want to get anyone in trouble.  Not the counselors, and especially not my parents.  I'd written it in pen, so I couldn't erase it.  But I couldn't re-write it, either; I'd used all of the room on the back.  And I didn't have another postcard.  And the counselor was waiting for me to hurry up and hand it in.  Everyone else had already finished theirs and were ready to move on to our next activity for the day.  Everyone was waiting on me.  I had to do something, but I didn't know what to do.  I had to hand in this postcard, but I couldn't hand it in with these words on it for anyone to read.  So I just started blacking out each letter, one-by-one.  Using my pen the same way we used our #2 pencils to fill in the bubbles on our scan forms when we took tests at school, I drew spirals over and over and over each letter until they were just a dark-blue scribbled blob of ink, and the letter underneath was completely obscured.  I pressed down hard, so that my marks bulged out on the backside image on the postcard, like braille.  It felt like it took forever, and eventually the rest of the group left me there in the cabin by myself to finish up whatever it was that I was doing that was so secret and so important.  Once I was finished, all that remained of my original letter home were the words "Hi Mom and Dad!" followed by line after line after line of big, fat, blue scribbled dots, and concluding with a quick "I miss you.  Love, Mike" squeezed into the lower right-hand corner, like an afterthought.  And then I handed it in.  And worried every day the rest of the time I was there that Summer that I might've just ruined my parents' lives.  What if someone could make out the words underneath my scribbles?  How could I have been so careless?

When I got home at the end of the week, my parents asked me about the postcard.  When it had arrived in the mail, they didn't know whether they should laugh about it, or be worried about me.  Once again, I'd done something strange, that didn't seem to make much sense, and that they didn't know how to take.  But now that we were alone, I could finally tell them the whole story.  And afterwards, I saw relief spread across my mother's face.  And then she kissed me, and told me she was proud of me for being so smart, and for doing such a good job of keeping her secret.

Neighbors...

Walking home from my appointment at dusk.  Walking down my street, in my neighborhood, on my block.  Group of kids in front of me, walking slowly, taking up the sidewalk.  I walk around them, between the parking meters and the parked cars.  Passing the tiny girl up front, she yells at me, "You best say 'escuse me!'  I got kids here!  An' you don't say 'escuse me??'"  I hadn't bumped into her.  Hadn't touched her at all.  Her kids, a boy and girl about five or six years old, were on the other side of her from me; I was nowhere near them.  She hadn't had to so much as move an inch to avoid me at all.  I had simply walked around her.  And now she's angrily demanding an apology from me, as if I had done something inexcusably rude.  Never in my life has anyone ever said "excuse me" for simply walking past me.  For bumping into me, or getting in my way, certainly.  But not for simply walking by.  Nor has anyone in my entire life ever expected me to excuse myself or apologize simply for walking around them.  She's deliberately provoking me.  And I don't understand why.  I haven't done anything wrong.  But I'm suddenly very aware that each of these kids is black, and I am white.  And this confrontation we're having is our neighborhood, to the core.  This is our home.

I've lived in my neighborhood for over fifteen years now.  This girl staring me down with angry eyes looks to only be about twenty, give or take five years.  It's possible that I was living here before she was even born.  I went to school in this neighborhood when I was a child.  I feel like this is as much my home as hers.  But she has no way of knowing this.  This has been a traditionally black neighborhood for over a hundred and fifty years.  Back then, it was the Freemen's quarter; the first people to settle on this particular piece of ground were freed slaves.  This has been a black neighborhood from the very first brick.  But a few years ago, it started to get very, very gentrified.  Rich, white developers came in and swooped up cheap properties, fixed them up with marble counter-tops and hardwood floors and halogen track lights.  Sold them to rich, white hipsters who wanted to live close to the burgeoning downtown bar scene.  Back then, I was the only white person living in my apartment complex.  Developers bought it and turned it into a condo.  We all got letters saying we needed to buy our apartments or find someplace else to live.  I bought mine.  Everyone else left.  And since then the neighborhood has been this uneasy mix of poor black living side-by-side with rich white.  And I've seen it.  Seen exactly this happening before.  But this is the first time I've experienced it myself.  She doesn't know me anymore than I know her.  We're both making assumptions about each other.  She has no way of knowing that I went to school around the corner, or that I've lived on this block my entire adult life.  All she sees is another doughy white, nerdy-looking hipster who had the fucking nerve to walk too close to her without showing her proper respect.

Things escalate very quickly.  "I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to be rude.  I just walked around you."  "You best watch who you talkin' to 'for I smack yo' fat ass!"  There's no good way to respond here.  What am I supposed to do?  Fight these kids?  Let them beat me up?  Why?  So they can feel better about themselves?  So I can feel better about feeling better than them?  And there's clearly no reasoning with someone who, within a matter of seconds, is willing to resort to threats of physical violence with someone twice her size for something as minor as stepping around them.  Talking about it any further is clearly pointless.  There's no reasoning with a bully.  I learned that lesson the hard way, long ago.  No choice but to simply end this as quickly and quietly as possible.  I turn and walk away.  To more taunts and threats thrown at my back.  Victory cheers for having driven out the interloper, the outsider.  For having proved her strength and dominance to the rest of the tribe.  For having earned back the respect I somehow stripped her of by walking past her.  I'm instantly ten years old again.  On the playground again.  Having my dignity stolen by a pack of fifth grade delinquents again.  Being called "fat ass" again.  Feeling like an outcast again.  Feeling scared again.  For the first time in fifteen years, I feel scared in my own neighborhood.  For the first time ever, I feel like this isn't my home, and never will be.  I will never be welcome here.  I let them make me feel like an outsider in my own neighborhood.  I let these kids make me feel scared in my own home.  I don't feel like I had any choice.  And there's some part of me that feels I deserve it.

The Pile...

Every year, my family "complains" that I buy them too many gifts for xmas.  That I spend too much money on them.

I've never really understood this, and always assumed that it came from some humble sense of insecurity they felt toward their own gifts-to-give that year.  (Which is ridiculous, of course; I have never felt anything other than overwhelmed by the volume of what we receive from them every year.)

Today, my father emailed me, and asked me, again, as he does every year, to be "modest" in my gift giving this year.  Then he said, "we know your heart is in the right place..."  Which, to me, implies that, however well-intentioned, he thinks I am doing something wrong.  When I confronted him about this, he replied:

Your heart is in the right place – you give…give…then give some more.  That’s what I mean…not wrong, just not necessary for those of us that love you and feel loved by you.  You are the most generous of us all.  Not just with your treasure Michael.  Please don’t be defensive…I love you dearly.

Dad...

I am not generous.  And this is not a sacrifice.

Every Christmas morning as a child, I remember I would come downstairs to find a pile of presents waiting for me, stacked up higher than I was tall.  That pile literally dwarfed me.  Year after year after year.

You held down two to three jobs at a time and went to school in order to provide me with that enormous pile of beautiful junk.  (Because, of course, the contents of the pile didn't matter half so much as the experience of the pile itself.)  You took out loans and lines of credit every year to afford it.  You worked hard, and you sacrificed, and you went into debt in order to give me that humungous mound of christmas treasure.

THAT is generous.  THAT is sacrifice.

I can't give anyone else that experience.  I can't even come close.  But I can try, at least.  I can do my best to give them just a fraction of that feeling of excitement and amazement that I got to grow up with.  Because that's what Christmas is to me.

Every year, I hold back, and only get half of what I want to get, or less.  I have never hurt myself financially, or gone into debt of any kind to buy gifts for my family or my friends.  I always have money left over to put away after I'm done my xmas shopping for the year.  I have never sacrificed to do this.  At least, nothing more than my time.

So, please don't think I'm being generous.  I'm only a pale mimicry of the generosity you raised me with.


ps - And I know it isn't necessary.  "Necessary" isn't the point.  If it was necessary, it wouldn't mean anything.  It is by the very fact of its un-neccesity that it is transubstantiated from a consumerist product, into a treasure that reads, "This is what you mean to me.  I Love you."

Sniff...

Standing at the sink, in the office kitchenette, washing the dried and crusted remnants of my workday's coffee from my mug, I had a moment.

I'm fascinated by those moments, when the most banal and mundane aspects of daily life suddenly collide with the profound, the mystical, and the transcendent.  They have an instant and unmistakable sense of Tao.  And this was one of those moments.  Standing at the sink, in the office kitchenette, washing a day's worth of old, dried coffee out of my mug, just like I do at the end of every day.  And as I stood there washing, the cleaning lady walked in.  An older, round-ish hispanic woman; really nothing remarkable about her at all, and normally the only emotional response I would've had to her presence would have been my usual feeling of white, liberal guilt at this reminder of my station, and my privilege.  But something else happened this time.  Something new and different.  Something I never could've expected.  Something simple, and ordinary, and yet utterly magickal.

Just a second or so after she entered the room, the gust of air raised by her entrance carried her scent to me, and I was instantly a child.

Ten years-old.

The beach.

A perfect Summer's day.

The sound of distant waves, crashing.  And gulls crying.  And children screaming in joy.

And a feeling I had forgotten.  A feeling of freedom and exhilaration and excitement and happiness that was so overwhelming as to border on the manic.  A feeling of certainty that these glorious moments of delirium were all that mattered.  There was absolutely nothing else to think about, or do, or say; there was but one single, solitary purpose to all existence, and that was to enjoy these moments, as much as we were physically able, for as long as our parents would leave us to it.  These were the best moments of our lives.  And even better, we were completely unaware of that fact.  Freed in the glory of our naivete, we swam away in the joy of "it can only get better from here."

Death and old-age were only abstract ideas, and things that happen to other people, or on TV.  Sex was still an exhilarating mystery, only just beginning to punctuate our daily lives with little electric sparks of sensation.  Work was something grown-ups forced us to do, and was to be avoided at all costs.  Playing was all that mattered.

Playing was the meaning of life.

And then I was back at the sink, in the office kitchenette, still washing the crusted stains of my amphetamine potion off of my mug.  In just a half-second, I had experienced my entire childhood, and then aged twenty-five years.  I wanted to cry.

I have no idea what that scent was.  Presumably, it was the cleaning lady's perfume.  Even now, as I write this, I can't recall the scent to memory; can't remember the sensation of it at all, but only the effect it had on me.  It's faded back into whatever dark corner of my mind in which it has slept for the past twenty-five years.  I don't know where I remembered it from, nor do I have any idea why it reminded me of my childhood, or the beach, or Summer, or the exhilarating freedom of having no responsibility.  And I guess I don't care at this point.

I can't ever go back.  None of us can.  I will never, ever experience those feelings again.  So I have absolutely no choice at this point but to feel incredibly grateful to have been able to experience them again, at all, for even a moment, as I washed my mug in the sink of the office kitchenette.

The Thirtieth Olympiad Of The Modern Era...

I know the Olympics are cheesy.  I know this.  But I can't help it.  I love them.

I love everything about them.  The spectacle, the melodrama, the simple poetry of humans from all over the world gathering together for the sole purpose of doing amazing things.  I spend every fourth year looking forward to them.  And when they finally start, it's like two weeks of Christmas in July.

It started when I was a kid.  The '92 Summer Olympics in Barcelona.  The summer in between my sophomore and junior years of high school.  The two weeks of our vacation at the beach happened to coincide that year with the two weeks of the Olympics.  As a teenager, I was living a nocturnal existence; staying up all night doing nothing, and then sleeping all day in order to rest up for another night of doing nothing the next evening.  There's nothing to do in the middle of the night in the small beach town where we stayed, and the TV in the cottage we were living in only got about six channels.  And, of course, the only thing on was the Olympics.  They played Olympic coverage almost all night.  (And all day, but who was awake to see that??)  I literally had nothing better to do, and a night full of hours to kill, so I started watching.

Late-night coverage of the Olympic Games at the time tended to favor the less-popular sports, giving recaps of the events of the day that hadn't made it into the daytime and primetime broadcasts.  Handball.  Water Polo.  Badminton.  Archery.  Women's Volleyball.  Sports that you'd never see on television back then.  And I found myself, quite despite my desire to be an apathetic misanthrope, getting really, really into it.  I fell in love with the stories of the athletes, and I cheered their amazing accomplishments.  And I felt a sense of pride in my country (a completely foreign and somewhat nauseating experience for me at the time, I assure you) whenever Team USA triumphed.  It didn't matter if it was a sport that I would never have cared about in a million years if I'd had anything better to do.  It was about being fortunate enough to witness humanity's best, doing their best - pushing themselves as hard as they could, striving to be the very best in the whole world - and having the results of all their efforts and hard work displayed on the single greatest stage we have ever constructed, for all the world to see, whether they fell short, or were victorious.  I was hooked from that moment on.

I've always been a drama-queen, and never more so than when I was a teenager.  And, as cheesy as it was, and is, it was also, undeniably, the greatest drama I had ever seen.  Have ever seen.  And that is in no small part due to the fact that it is not a story, crafted artfully from a fertile imagination.  Better than that, this drama is real.

Men and women from all over the world pushing themselves as hard as they can every single day for four years with the single-minded purpose of being the very best in the entire world at what they do.  And every four years the entire world gathers to watch these people, the best in the world, compete and crown their champions.  The best in the world.  None faster.  None stronger.  No one.

What a great fucking story!

And that amazing story is made up of countless other single, just-as-amazing individual stories.  Kerri Strug sticking her landing on a sprained ankle to win gold at the '96 Atlanta games.  The '04 games returning to Athens.  Michael Phelps at the '08 Beijing games winning eight gold medals, more than any other person has ever done before or since, and breaking his own World Record by more than two seconds!  (He set new World Records in six out of the eight events he swam in!)  And Usain Bolt in the same games, setting new World Records in both the 100m and 200m.  (Whenever I remember that, I can't help but think of one of my favorite scenes from the pilot episode of Sports Night.  As a runner half-a-world away is setting a new world record, Casey McCall, an anchor for a late-night Sportscenter-like TV show, calls his young son, waking him up in the middle of the night, and instructs him to hurry up and turn on Daddy's channel.  Then he says, "I'll call you tomorrow and tell you all about it.  But for now, you just watch him run.  He's not doing much.  He's just running faster than any man's ever run before.")

And those are my absolute favorite Olympics moments - when I see that "WR" flash up on an athlete's results, and I realize that I've just seen a human being expand the boundaries of what is possible, and push themselves to do something that no other human being has ever been able to do before.  It is literally awe-inspiring, and I absolutely love it.

And I don't care if that makes me a cheeseball.

Snow...

This is the only story I wrote on my vacation last weekend.



The biggest and best hill in town was at the VFW golf course.  Every Winter, families would gather there on snow-covered weekends and schools-closed snow-days to slide down that awesome hill.

I was fifteen, and just about getting too old for this kind of thing.  Pretty soon, this would be "kid stuff" to me, and I would find better, more grown-up ways to pass the time.  But for now, this was still my favorite thing to do in the snow. 

It was mid-January before we had our first real snowfall that year, and our first snow-day, as well.  My Dad made a thermos of hot chocolate, and drove my brother and I and all of our equipment out to the golf course.  I had gotten a real snowboard for Christmas that year, and couldn't wait to try it out.  It was just a cheap, plastic knock-off from Toys 'R' Us, but it sure beat trying to ride down the hill standing up on our sleds, the way my friends and I had been doing the past couple of Winters.

Over and over I flew down that gigantic hill at what felt like a hundred miles an hour.  Then came the slow climb back up the steep, slippery slope to the top, just to strap in and spend another few seconds sliding back down again.  It was like my own personal amusement park ride, with no waiting line.  Half-way through the day, some friends and I built a snow-ramp in the middle of the hill, so we could start flying off into the air during our rides.  As the light began to dim at the end of the afternoon, my father and my brother were exhausted and ready to go home, but I felt like I could've stayed there all day and all night; I couldn't ever remember having more fun.

After we got home, and had put our wet clothes in the dryer, and were enjoying some more hot chocolate in our comfy, warm pajamas, my father said he had to talk with my brother and I about something.  He sat us down and started to talk about my dog, Dillon.  Technically, he was the family dog, but everyone knew he was really my dog, just as his mother, Dree, had been my father's.  Dree had been a breeding dog; a pure-bred Black Labrador Retriever.  Over the years, we'd bred four litters of pups from her, and Dillon was from her first.  I'd been three years-old back then, and Dillon and I had bonded instantly.  My parents had decided not to sell him off with the other pups, and instead let me keep him.  So Dillon and I had grown up together.  Whenever the family came home, he'd greet me before acknowledging anyone else.  If anyone else in the family and I called his name at the same time, he would come to me.  I was the one who spent days and days of Summer roaming the woods behind our development with him, chasing squirrels and rabbits and hiding from the older boys from the other neighborhoods.  Dillon was my best friend.  For many years of my childhood, he was my only friend.  And I was his favorite Human.

But he was twelve years-old by this point.  The fur under his chin had gone grey years ago.  He was moving very slowly now, when he bothered to move at all.  He slept most of the day.  And a few days earlier, he'd stopped eating.  It was time, my father said, to "put him out of his misery."

I'd known this day was coming; I wasn't ignorant.  Still, I hadn't been prepared for it to be right now, this day.  I'd just been so happy, having so much fun on that massive hill!  And now, suddenly, it's time to kill my dog?!  But what was the alternative?  Make him spend another day suffering, just so that I could continue to avoid dealing with the inevitable?  Why not today?  Would tomorrow really be any better?

My little brother, many years younger than me, didn't understand it the same way.  All he knew was that he didn't want our dog to die.  He cried and cried, and my parents took him upstairs to try and console him, leaving me alone in our basement family room with Dillon.

He sat at my feet, the way he had so many times before over the years, and he looked into my eyes, and arched his eyebrows, as if to ask what was wrong.  I petted him, and rubbed his ears the way he loved so much; and I told him how much I loved him, and how very much I was going to miss him.  And I cried, as I tried to love him enough to make up for what I knew was coming.

And then, before I knew it, and before I was ready, I heard my father call down to us from the top of the stairs that it was time to go.  He began to call out, "Dillon!  Come!  Come here, boy!  Dillon, come!"  But Dillon didn't move.  Whenever my father would call his name, Dillon would turn his head to look towards the sound of my father's voice, and then turn back to me, with this quizzical expression on his face, as if asking me what to do.  Eventually, I heard my father say, "Son, he's not going to listen to me.  You'll have to be the one to tell him."

I started crying again.  It was bad enough to be losing my best friend like this.  I really didn't know if I could be the one to tell him to go.  It was too much to ask of a kid.  But my Dad was right - it had to be done, it was the kind and loving thing to do, and I was the only one who could do it.

As best I could manage through the tears, I squeaked out a pathetic-sounding, "Go on, boy.  Go on.  Go upstairs."  But either he didn't understand me, or he didn't want to go.  So I got up and started up the stairs myself, saying, "Come on, boy."  Dillon rose slowly, on shaky legs, and padded weakly over to the stairs at my command.  He hadn't climbed the stairs in many months, and it took him a long time that day.  I wonder if he knew, as I did, that it would be the last time?

Finally we made it all the way to the top to join the rest of my family in the living room.  My little brother, my mother, and I were all crying at this point; everyone but my father.  He was trying to be strong for us.  He opened the front door, and said, again, "Come on, boy!  Here, Dillon!  Come!," trying to get the dog to follow him out the door and into the waiting car.  But, again, Dillon wouldn't move.  He just sat and looked from me, to my father, and back again.  "What should I do?," he was asking me.

I didn't wait to be told this time.  I held my head up, and stuffed down the tears, and walked out the front door, saying, "Come on, boy."  He slowly followed me out the door; I could almost hear his poor, old bones creaking in the cold.  The Sun had gone down by this point, and it was dark as I led him down our front walk to my father's car.  When he was younger, Dillon used to leap into this car in a rush of infectious enthusiasm, excited almost to the point of mania by the prospect of going on a trip someplace else.  His favorite was the beach.  He'd swim in the ocean until he was completely exhausted.  But those days were gone now, and in the end, my father had to pick him up and place him in the car himself.

Standing there on the sidewalk, in my pajamas, on a cold, January night, I could see my dog through the back window of the car.  He watched me as I waved goodbye to my best friend, feeling like a fool, and a murderer.  He watched me as they drove away, and I stood shivering and crying in the cold.  He never took his eyes off of me.  I wonder if he knew it was the end, too.

After they rounded the corner out of my sight at the end of our street, I suddenly felt more alone than I'd ever felt before.  And I was so scared.  And I was so angry!  Angry at my parents, angry at time and age and sickness; but more than anything, angry at myself.  And suddenly I was running.  Running through the snow and into the woods.  Running deep into the trees where there were no tracks and no paths and no sky to be seen.  Running until my feet were burning in agony from the freezing snow.  When I couldn't go any further, I collapsed on my back, sinking deep into a snowbank.

I laid there, all at once burning and freezing in pain, shivering and weeping for my best friend, for the life I had loved and helped to end, and watching the steam from the melting snow float up off of my body into the bare branches of the trees above me, silhouetted against the stars.

Requiem For A Snowflake...

Dear mother, Dear father
What is this hell
you have put me through?
Believer, deceiver
Day in, day out
Lived my life through you
Pushed onto me
what's wrong or right
Hidden from this thing
that they call life

Dear mother, Dear father
Every thought
I'd think you'd disapprove
Curator, dictator
Always censoring
my every move
Children are seen
but are not heard
Tear out everything inspired

Innocence
torn from me
without your shelter
Barred reality
I'm living blindly

Dear mother, Dear father
Time has frozen still
What's left of me?
Hear nothing, say nothing
Cannot face the fact
I think for me
No guarantee
it's life as-is
But damn you
for not giving me my chance

Dear mother, Dear father
Clipped my wings
before I learned to fly
Unspoiled, unspoken
I've outgrown
that fucking lullaby
Same thing
I've always heard from you
do as I say
not as I do

I'm in hell without you
Cannot cope without you two
Shocked at the world that I see
Innocent victim
Please rescue me

Dear mother, Dear father
Hidden in your world
you've made for me
I'm seething
I'm bleeding
Ripping wounds in me
that never heal
Undying spite
I feel for you
Living out this hell
you always knew...

NO!

                    -"Dyer's Eve"
                      Metallica

Keep Ridin' 'Til The Cycle Is Broke...

Heard this today, and it touched me; deep.  Again.  Had to share.  Hope it touches you, too.
(Suggestion:  read it aloud.)


                                 Million dollar baby girl in the lower middle class
                                 With a maglight right beneath her pillow
                                 And though she's never been a boxer by choice
                                 She's known to act oak [OK], you'll never catch her a willow
                                 Nuh-uh
                                 She's the calm type
                                 You see the small scars
                                 Creepin' down her arms
                                 peeking from them long sleeves, right?
                                 She keeps him weak in the knees
                                 but she stay out of sight
                                 And when that school bell rings
                                 it's goodnight
                                 Or might as well be
                                 He never sees her around
                                 But he looks
                                 For weeks now he's been "Maybe tomorrow"
                                 But he's shook
                                 He sees those bruises and he needs to please her
                                 Plus he don't wanna go home either

                                 Gives her a look as they pass
                                 Copies down a poem from a schoolbook
                                 Gives it to her after hesitation whoops his ass
                                 She took it fast
                                 Lost, like, all sensation in her hands
                                 then braces herself gracefully
                                 sturdy where she stands
                                 humble mumbling
                                 past the words, fumbling
                                 Nothing discouraging
                                 just nerves
                                 just drumming up the courage
                                 Something 'bout skylines
                                 or bike rides
                                 or riverbeds
                                 Somethin'
                                 Somethin' that he read
                                 it caught her right beneath the armor
                                 cauterized thought of any blunt force trauma
                                 Ain't no way that he could harm her
                                 Nuh-uh
                                 No way

                                 When that curse leaves a shell like a snake with fresh scales
                                 Some people seem to call that home
                                 But some souls roam
                                 Keep riding 'til the cycle is broke
                                 We don't gotta go through nothin' alone

                                 She's in the weather
                                 the whole storm
                                 Huggin' on her prince
                                 his hands to skin warm
                                 Quick out the door
                                 no note
                                 no forlorn
                                 'Cause all they heard was "Papa
                                 don't hit me no more"
                                 But they couldn't seem to keep the swelling down
                                 How they regretted ever lettin' out this 3rd child born
                                 But things are getting better now
                                 Yeah, cozy sweater now
                                 with her thumbs through the holes
                                 in her sleeves worn down
                                 And a boy similar
                                 Noise minimal
                                 toy criminal
                                 Joy's simple when someone's found it in you
                                 Somehow it boosts the individual
                                 That bluish hue is mutual
                                 They make love gently
                                 so aware of each others' bruises
                                 And sorta scared they could lose this
                                 trust
                                 Bury the blues
                                 somewhere it won't bear roots
                                 But is this boy where the truth is?
                                 She's spooked, see
                                 Fruit never seems to fall far
                                 from the useless branch that it's attached to
                                 And quacks say if he's beat up he's bound to smack you
                                 She's down to step back now
                                 If he ever gets loud
                                 She couldn't be proud
                                 of whatever she might do
                                 But this is the first time
                                 she ever felt touched
                                 that didn't bring her to hush
                                 like something was being done to her
                                 That unscrews her
                                 She loosens with the booze
                                 Her hinge can stay bent
                                 addressing her dude's wounds
                                 Regressing to bedrooms
                                 where fools ignored "don't"
                                 He's not one of them tools
                                 that screws, nuts and bolts
                                 And she know that
                                 And she know that but she holds back
                                 And she hope that
                                 he see the way she flinch
                                 'cuz it's kneejerk to brace for the attack
                                 Even if he's only rubbing her back
                                 I mean
                                 And even if it's like the deck has been stacked
                                 It's not an act
                                 He's really loving her back

                                 Hold your heart up

                                 "Never raise your hand"
                                 She says that with her grown-up voice
                                 "I'm your's now" just like a child
                                 "Please don't be scared now"
                                 It clicks
                                 a piece finally fits
                                 "I love you"
                                 They say that with their lips

                                 "Never raise your hand"
                                 He says that with a grown-up voice
                                 "I'm your's now" just like a child
                                 "Please don't be scared now"
                                 It clicks
                                 a piece finally fits
                                 "I love you"

                                 When that curse leaves a shell like a snake with fresh scales
                                 Some people seem to call that home
                                 But some souls roam
                                 Keep riding 'til the cycle is broke
                                 We don't gotta go through nothin' alone

                                                                  -"Been Afraid"
                                                                    P.O.S.