This is my blog that I'm writing for national novel writing month. Basically, I have to bust my ass to have a semi-coherent novel done by November 30th. Feel free to leave comments, anything helps really.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

ONE

“Who am I?”

That question surely hasn’t been answered yet.

“Where did it all go wrong?”

That’s the question I ask everywhere I go and no one can seem to tell me the answer. The only answer I get is silence. Absolute, no fucking doubt about it, genuine silence. I look at my life at where it stood three years ago, and everything was perfect. Perfect in the sense that it made me nearly complete. Or so I thought. That was one of my many misplaced ideas I had lost. In retrospect, maybe things were never right in my life. Maybe my utopian paradise was created by society and not by me. From day one I’ve known, I suppose, and yet I fought for it to be right. I’ve just chosen to blatantly ignore all of the signals and live in a crystal idealization of myself.

“What have I become?”

I used to be a man with dreams. I was a man that had goals and lofty aspirations. Now I’m hopeless. I’m a shell of the sensitive man that I once was. I’m a man that sits on the roof of his parents’ house, just as I did twelve years ago. You see, in high school when I was depressed, I would grab my dad’s Eagles tape and pop it into my walkman. I would grab the silver ladder from the garage, lean it up against the side of the house, and make my way to the roof of our one story house. I would find the song Desperado and listen to it over and over again. Don’t ask me why, but that song made me break down and my melancholy would pour out. Life has come full circle and I often find myself in the same exact place. Except now it’s Ben Folds songs that litter my IPod.

I mentioned day one earlier. By that harrowing day, I am referring to the collective whole of my teenage years. One’s life doesn’t REALLY start until then anyways. Up until that point, everything done in life is carefree and fun. As a child, who really cares about anything but running around the playground, watching television, and playing house with the neighbor girl? It’s all fun and games, and then life suddenly changes. One magical morning you wake up with a stiff penis and a sticky substance in your shorts. That’s when life starts. And ends, I guess, with Viagra and all that jazz. The beginning is like winter turning into spring. Then stress enters your life and nothing is ever the same again.

“Is it over?”

That’s the stress talking. Of course it’s over. I’m done trying to impress members of the opposite sex. My life has revolved around girls for far too long and I perhaps based too much stock in what they thought. Well fuck them! They’ve had their chances and now they’ve screwed with my mind once too often. It doesn’t matter anyhow. Bitches. All of them. Nothing matters now. I moved back home to my parents’ house to get away from all of that. To find myself. It’s sure helping, right?

“Am I crying?”

Be a man asshole. You’re 28 years old and living with your parents. You’re not a teenager anymore. I worry a lot, if you can’t tell. I always have. Sometimes I’m so inside my mind it that the entire thing drives me nuts. I have taken a lot of responsibility for myself; much more than a lot of my friends ever did, and yet I’m the one staring at the mountains off in the distance in the afternoons. I sit there, letting the deep, throaty vocals of Tom Waits soothe me over. I try to fight back those tears, but one will always eventually drop down my hair covered cheeks.

My name is Timmy. I’m an alcoholic. Or at least I like to call myself one. If that’s the case, I’m also a drug addict, sex addict, and an esteemed member of gambler’s anonymous. And by gambling, I mean that I buy five dollar scratch tickets at the local gas station on a daily basis. Sometimes, I even buy a whole sheet of them. My liver is probably failing, but I’m sure it has close to a good ten, or fifteen, years left in the healthy cycle. That’s if the smoking and eventual lung cancer don’t catch me first. I have brown hair, blue eyes, and the uncanny ability to drive people away that get close to me. I am six feet tall, and outwardly it appears that I have been chiseled from that of a Greek God. Okay, that’s not true, but I like to think so. Surely everyone has heard this sob story before, so I’ll spare you the minor details.

“Have I lived life to the fullest?”

Who knows?

“Do I deserve any of this?”

That answer is probably not; at least not in my eyes. People have often asked me if I’m afraid of death. I say yes, that I don’t want to die yet. I also tell them that I can’t really dwell on the inevitable. Everyone does at some point. I figure that if some higher power decides that it’s my time to go, then I will politely oblige, just as I’ve done with everything else in my life. I had my opportunities and my chances. I even attempted to gather ye rosebuds while ye may, as the saying goes. I have repented and sought forgiveness for those that I’ve sinned against. The fact is, I don’t even know where my mind is at most of the time. The scary part is that by not knowing the answers, I’m sent deeper and deeper into oblivion. I am a seeker of knowledge and wish to know everything I possibly can before I pass from this place. This place Earth, as it’s called. Well, by most observers anyway.

As I look back now, I can honestly say that so much that I’ve done n my life was done to impress my parents. I yearned for girls, yes, but I was a need for my parents’ constant support and reassurance that drove me nuts. Nothing was ever for me and that turned me into the person that I became after my teenage years. I couldn’t visualize anything for myself. It was always seen through my parents’ eyes. In high school, I didn’t get good grades to necessarily learn. I studied hard in subjects that interested me, but only hard enough to receive a low ‘A’ or high ‘B’ in that course. I might have been the valedictorian with a bit more effort. I wanted to learn, yes, but not the basic rubbish the schools were doling out in the public system. I wanted to read Dante, Aristotle, Plato, and Milton. All of those were subjects that are lost on the majority of today’s MTV fed society. A random teenager can name you the latest Lil Wayne or Taylor Swift song, but they can’t name you one of Shakespeare’s plays. Unless, that is, it’s one that Julia Stiles was in the movie version of. I took four years of Science in high school. For some reason, every single year I had to have the Scientific Method re-taught to me because the book demanded it so. The irony is that I can’t even tell you what it is now, just proving to everyone how much I really cared about Science.

Somehow, though, I managed to get through it. I got through the ups and downs of a middling athletic career in which I lettered in four sports. I got through the awkward stage of wearing glasses and bearing with the pain of girls choosing the guy right next to me at the various school dances. I got through the pain of being alone as I heard my so called friends talking about all the fun things they did without me the previous weekend. Not once did that phone ring at my house. I survived everything. Except for maybe this thing I’m going through here. That part is still to be determined. I’ve done everything for my parents. Everything. I even kept from taking my own life. Just for their sakes.

1 comment:

Heidi Neilson said...

OOohhh... teaser sense tingling :) Nice start, nowri brother.

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About Me

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Boise, Idaho, United States
I am a playwright, screenwriter, novelist. My novels "Of Snow Forts and Santa," "The Dragon Princess", "The Blue Gem" and "The Dragon Slayer" are all available in paperback and as e-books. To learn more, visit jason-haskins.com or follow me on Twitter, Instagram, or Threads