In my not-so-humble opinion as the original author, the first part of this verse is pretty much entirely high-school uberdramatic drivel. That said, the end has a sort of elegant, if not misplaced, power. Given my vast life experience (it’s a joke, laugh.), time does not heal any wounds. If you were genuinely wronged, that hurt will not just up and disappear. What time does do is allow you to gain perspective, meet new people, better understand the past, collect and bestow new joys and hurts, and continue playing the game. Of course, I wrote this piece while frustrated at no longer being with my first love. Do I still wish I wound up with her today? Absolutely not. Now that I actually have a clue who I am and who I want to be, I know that I need to be with someone strong, spiritual, confident in who she is, someone genuinely compelled to make the world a better place, and above all, someone who wants me to be happy. The last two are hard to find these days. I got lucky. Ask my wife.
Faith seems to be an appropriate topic for tax day. This years rings particularly hard for me as some side consulting that I forgot to account for has cost me dearly to the tune of $1086 that I definitely do not have sitting in the bank. That said, I have faith that life will move on, the federal government will take my paltry monthly payment and charge me my late fees, the sun will set, the sun will rise, tomorrow will be a new day.
The piece called Faith is one of my first character studies of just sitting down in a location and trying to honestly observe what people were doing and feeling. I’m pretty sure I was sitting in a hallway outside of a classroom when I wrote this one, but I’m honestly not sure anymore. Reading through it, it reflects solidly on how I feel that most people, myself included, manage their way through life: fearful, wandering in the dark, terrified of death and dying. I have a solid internal dichotomy when it comes to these topics. On one hand, I’m a scared child. I don’t like getting hurt and I’ll avoid the doctor for years because I don’t want to face something that may or may not be wrong with my body. On the other hand, I openly welcome death. It’s not that I don’t have anything to live for; quite the contrary, I have a lovely and loving wife, a beautiful home, a collection of cars and motorcycles to keep me busy, and a job that pays me plenty enough that my family never wants for our necessities. That said, I like new things. What could possibly be more new and different than death? If you could pass through a magic portal to worlds unknown that it’s entirely possible that your current feeble mind can’t even physically imagine wouldn’t you do it? So why haven’t I killed myself? The default answer here is “because I don’t want to deal with the consequences in case I’m wrong”. That’s really not at all it for me. Honestly, I have too much to live for. I enjoy my life. I want to spend as much time as I can exploring my wife and my world. I want to play with engines until their carcinogenic lifeblood does me in. I want to see more sunsets. Death is the only salvation from the terrible things in life. That said, take some time out to enjoy the good thing. Everything will pass in its own due time.
For those of you who don’t actually know me…
You should know that the great majority of the content on this log is over a decade old. Mostly, it’s my thoughts from high-school. I’ve always been unnecessarily dramatic in pseudo-hidden ways — ways that are hidden unless you actually bother to look. In high-school and early college, I carried what has come to be called the Big Grey Notebook. It’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s big. It’s grey. It’s a notebook (well, in as much as a 3-ring binder is a notebook). It’s also falling apart. No surprise, being that it lived in my backpack for seven years. I never wondered why backpacks have that second big pocket that won’t really fit more than a single notebook. That’s where you’re supposed to keep your Big Grey Notebook. At any rate, the Notebook holds all of the chicken scratch that was my adolescent soul.
As an experiment in self rediscovery, I’m going through my Grey Notebook and transcribing my thoughts into the digital ether. Mostly, I’m working towards sorting out what I was feeling then as it compares to what I feel now. Basically, how did I get here from there? Further, I’ll be explaining to the best of my ability (again, mostly for my own benefit) what exactly each piece meant to me at the time and what it means to me now, looking back over ten years later.
Betrayed by my signature dates, the Dedication was written nearly a year after the Notebook came to be. Everyone who read it (and there were a lot of them) complained that it just started in the middle. Never one to be dramatically incorrect, I put together this set of thoughts. I’ve always believed in God, but I also believe in the myriad human forces that interact with us on a much more tangible level. In all honesty, I believe that the latter have substantially more impact on how people act/think/feel than does the Former.
This was the first piece I ever wrote about alcohol. As my liner notes mention, I’ve never had a personal run-in with alcoholism, so I have no idea why it’s such an important topic to me. Perhaps it’s along the same lines of whatever makes me absolutely straight-edge. I have never been drunk, high, or otherwise experienced altered conscious reality through the use of chemical substances. I have absolutely no desire to do so. The pure thought of it is absolutely repulsive to me. Seeing people I care about partaking in substance abuse (kinda hard to avoid in college) just made things worse for me. I don’t think I’m better than anyone else. I don’t think I’m “stronger” and “don’t need that”. Plain and simply, I find the idea of polluting the body and diluting the soul/consciousness absolutely abhorrent at the lowest basal level.
I’ve written this one over a dozen times. It never works out like I want it to, probably because the concepts are absolutely cliche and have been beaten to death like so many chimerical dead horses. In my head, it is something much more profound than just Light and Dark. There’s something amorphous about Truth moreso than the Love that one would expect to correlate with Light. In the vision in my head, Darkness is not hate or sadness or even the unknown, but rather, it is Deception, Lust, all that is not what it promises to be. Maybe someday I’ll manage to get the ideas down in such a way that anyone else could possibly understand them.
While possibly overly simplistic, this is one of my favorites. It succinctly states, in no uncertain terms, that the physical body — and all of the materialistic world along with it — is absolutely unnecessary. The easiest idea to draw from this is that God is in control and nothing on earth matters. That’s probably what was on the tip of my brain when I wrote this. However, reflecting back, I think it has a much more True meaning at least as it relates to my life. However good or bad it may be, I have a profound ability to turn the page on anything in my life and move on. I’m pretty sure I learned that the hard way through various experiences currently locked away in the Notebook which will be revealed on these pages in their due time. It’s not that I’m petty or resentful. It’s not that I wish anyone ill will. I simply have an uncanny ability to pick up and move on. This is what keeps me going when everyone around me sucks, when I don’t know how I’m going to pay the bills, when I can’t stand my job, or when I feel like God isn’t listening: I know, absolutely without a doubt that I can walk away from everything, both figuratively and literally, and that I will still be me and I like who I am. Fifty pound spare tire, lack of faith, lack of faithfulness, superiority complex, bad knees, possible skin cancer (which I should really get checked out), brown hair, steel blue eyes and all, I know that when I actually put myself out there that good things happen. Be it God, karma, or just sheer dumb luck, I simply cannot fail at life. Neither can you.
I’m tired, so that’s it for tonight. More commentary on the rest that I’ve already posted tomorrow night. After that, I’ll put up some new old stuff and we’ll see what that stirs up. Thank you for you attention, dear reader. I hope you take away something of value.
-grey
At night, I lie alone and I wonder
What are we all here for? I don’t understand
At night, I pray to God that I’ll see you
You know that I really need you, here holding my hand
I need you. I need you here with me
I need you. If you could only see
What you do to me
You might understand
That in this land
I can’t live without you