Archive for the ‘The World Beyond Reason’ Category
A Vagrant Story
Moving to a city has meant a lot of things to me. I have never been in a place so big…so available. In so many ways I am finding myself a citizen of the most ordinary proportions. No longer am I the biggest fish in the humblest of ponds, but an everyman, simply trying to get through the day.
I graduated with a little over forty students–most of which entered into kindergarten with me. People came and went in handfuls, but at the core of my youngest life, I experienced the same people for so long. I dated every girl, loved and hated every guy. We were closer in some ways than family. In our unified experience, that of growing up and growing old, we bonded on a lot of levels. From the quainter times of playground soccer to the battlefields of Friday Night Lights, we lived through one another. Our girlfriends were lifelong partners; our friends as close as siblings. It may be the most beautiful thing I will ever know. Seeing girls grow from children into women, seeing boys evolve into the beasts of men…and knowing them as completely as you can throughout it all.
A nest, a cove, of beautiful friendship. Eternal and everlasting. Unchanging and undefinable.
I moved from that life to reaches of East Texas, garnering an education from the most modest of universities. Driven to this place by things as petty as money I instantly hated it. I felt my mind was being wasted. I felt that I had been forsaken by my parents. But its simplicity grew on me. It reminded me of home. Old money and older grudges–a history rich and self-concerned, for in these peoples’ minds nothing existed outside the piney fortress which protected them. Protected them from this, where I live now. The hustle and coldness of city life.
And I bonded. I bonded with so many people from all walks of life. And in time they too became family–brothers and sisters in a life that was so basic, so distilled, so pure.
I find myself now alone. Alone in a city of a million. The Friday Night Lights glow without me…the dissidents protest without my leadership. Alone…and without a greater purpose.
I think back to those days as a child. Taking the field with brothers…holding hands and staring deep into each other’s eyes. I am constantly reminded of a moment I shared with one of them. We walked hand-in-hand as men, as leaders, to the field. We were seniors. We bore the weight of a season’s expectations together. And he looked into my eyes, with his unbelievably blue pools of stoic intensity, and he told me that this was it. There was no one else to fall back on. It was our time, and no one else’s.
And we won.
I think back to those days as a young man, on the floor of the Student Senate, sitting amongst a caucus of like-minded allies. Flirting with the Senate secretary with only my eyes and a wry smile. I longed to stand at the podium beside her and lead this respected body. In the back of my mind, I knew it would always happen. I would will it into existence. Her smile back invited my future company. And in a matter of weeks, I stood beside her. Gavel in hand. King. More appropriately…Speaker.
The biggest fish in the smallest of ponds. Again.
These moments, however isolated, represent something bigger. They represent purpose. They represent direction and meaning…however trite and uninspiring they may be. Now I lack that sense. Where am I going? What is my purpose here, in the city of a million strangers? Who can I lead? Where is my flock…for I must attend to them…
A leader lost. A story not yet written. The writer’s block of my life.
I have and always will believe that every human being has a story, and their choices are their pen. For so long I wrote with such deep and dedicated conviction. I penned a fantasy of love, victories, conquests, and unforgiving will. Now I sit wondering…where does this story go from here..?
Wandering the circles of my mind I find little peace. I find that my current surroundings are perhaps unfitting for me. I always longed to get lost in the world, to be absorbed by its grandeur and become the everyman I am today. But not here, not now…I want to do more. I want to give more. I want to create more. I want to be more.
A stupid salesman in a city of a million strangers. A bachelor’s degree in history hanging on my wall–the consummate reminder of everything I’ve done and everything I am no longer achieving.
History…maybe that’s all I am.
Maybe the greatest of those isolated moments will pale in comparison to the future…but through the rows of cubicles and headsets I see little light. Not here. Not now.
What is the reason that I am here…in a city of a million strangers…?
Want Ad
Girl who can put up with my shit.
(And whose shit I can put up with.)
Apply now.
The Only Way To Die Is All the Way
Like all things worth talking about, this entry is about a girl. A dead girl. And the way she made me feel.
Eons ago in the times before man enjoyed the common amenities of modern life–sanitation, clean water, and electricity–there was no Facebook. This unimaginably distant past, where poking wasn’t digital and the saying, “Well…we’re Facebook friends!,” was a humbler time. It was a time where being in a relationship meant more than a mouse click, when social interaction was based on more than wall posts and picture comments. It was a time when the fabric of this life was richer…
Do not get me wrong…I enjoy the comforts of the everyday routine–the aimless perusing of girls’ profiles and pointless log-ins–as much as anyone; however, there is a great sin that we as a generation are comitting.
We aren’t letting people die.
This is serious. It goes beyond the damage social-networking websites have reaped upon our sense of “friendship” and “belonging.” It goes deeper than the pathetic and now trite fighting that nearly every couple in this new age has experienced due to digitally induced jealousy. It is a grave matter that we must address.
You see, right after Facebook entered my life, and the Stephen F. Austin college community, I was poked. This particular poke was by no means special…it was the feverish binary affection that I had already grown to hate. You think I am cute? Call me. You think I am interesting? I don’t think you are. But, in now standard Facebook etiquette, I poked back.
And a new relationship was born. We would befriend one another within hours. Having never spoken a word, never shared a conversation, we became “friends.” Surely we would meet someday, in class or at a party, and experience the awkwardness of familiarity without the courage to confirm our own ridiculous connection out loud. We would meet eyes and shuffle on…towards drinks, towards real friends, towards anywhere but each other’s eyes… Surely this would happen…
Two days after our digital relationship began I cracked the seam of the school newspaper and read of a tragic death. The name struck me as familiar. Her particulars eerily reminiscent. It bothered me all day. I had the most haunting feeling that I knew who this girl was…
So when the anxiety was too great and the suspense too much for my mind to handle, I bailed on class. I shuffled, as if avoiding not just her eyes but all eyes, to the nearest computer. I had a dark and dangerous secret and I needed to know the truth. I logged onto Facebook–it must have been the third time that day–and I went to my newfound “friend’s” page. And I confirmed everything I had suspected.
She died. The girl who, for whatever reason found me, and started a connection that was bound to go nowhere had died. Tragically. At first, her wall was the worst part…six entries from friends, of the real variety, confessing their undying love and misery. And below the sixth entry, there was one post from a girl from the previous six saying how much fun she had with her the previous night and to call when she got in from her trip home. A digital dichotomy of life and death. A sickening sight. Or is it site..?
Out of morbid curiosity I returned to her page for the next few days. More and more entries were posted on her wall. So many that the posts from her living life had been pushed deep within the tomb of her electronic history. Now the great dichotomy of life and death was her own profile, which spoke of her favorite music and activities, juxtaposed against a literal wall of sadness and regret. It drove me mad.
And then the most disturbing thing of all happened.
A friend, one can only hope not a real one, changed her profile. She left everything intact, but below all of it she wrote a message to everyone. She announced that she had gained access to her dead friend’s account and would keep it open, as a digital memorial to the fallen. She encouraged people to write “to” the deceased on her wall and to carry on her memory by joining the R.I.P. group she had just started.
She had her dead friend join the group mourning her own demise.
This lunacy is not relative to this event. I had another friend, a real one, die and a similar scene of madness took place. I check his page, which I have removed from my friend list out of sheer respect for the dead, often and on birthdays and holidays friends and family still write “to” him. Wishes of happy thanksgiving…and paragraphs of anguish for all the world to see.
My question is simple: What is wrong with you all? These people are dead. Allow them to die. If you catch me on the wrong side of a knife or mangled beyond recognition in the most horrific of accidents, please allow me to die. I do not want a Facebook group with 30 members who feel obligated to join out of some new age electronic fidelity. I do not want my page, which contains my material and temporal interests and whims, sitting static and illustrating the most shallow and pointless information about who I was and what I stood for remaining after I pass.
And you should demand the same. The internet and electronics have destroyed our sense of communication and friendship. They have blurred the line between the obscene and the tasteful. This is not a symptom of our twenty-first century lives, it is the entire disease. Not even death is safe anymore.
One day I sat at lunch with a friend of mine and we were discussing the details of our once and future death. I told her that I wanted my tombstone to read succinctly: full name, dates, and the quote which you will find tucked neatly on the right hand side of this website. With the biggest of smiles she told me that she wanted her tombstone to read simply: “BRB.” A hilarious, and unfortunately clairvoyant, joke on what our generation was becoming. I have stolen her joke many times, opting for “AFK” over “BRB” because I find it so much more ridiculous.
We are products of our era. We are victims of our times. But remembrance is eternal and everlasting…our fallen friends and family members live on, in us, in our minds and hearts, and in everything we do. You do not need something as hollow as HTML code to respect the dead and pay them their due, or to show that you care.
Remember, all you have to do is remember. Please…let them die.
The Ghost of Alison Kinsey
Last night I was enjoying a round of drinks at the dirtiest dive bar in downtown Austin with good friends. We sat in our usual spot…next to the corner where I accidentally broke a glass and the pool table where I accidentally broke a cue (seriously, both accidents…). One of my friends began telling a story about his day at work. He is a fantastic storyteller, and I love listening to him tell me about his life, his ideas, and anything else he could possibly conjure.
He packed his cigarettes slowly and looked into my eyes–honestly afraid, or was he simply baffled? I do not know. As he slapped the fresh pack of menthol cigarettes on the fat of his hand he regaled us with a tale I now wish to share. Ripping the thin plastic wrapper from his cigarettes he began…
The day before he had received a call at work. How ordinary…as that is all we do…take calls. Yet, this call would begin the most interesting of discussions. After the call was routed through thousands of miles of electrical cable and circuity it came steaming into his cubicle, hot and ready. As sometimes happens, a profile automatically pulled up on his computer screen. The name read Alison Kinsey.
He lit his cigarette, feet from the smoking prohibited sign that graced our general space. He went on…after he picked up and said his standard Dell greeting he waited for a response, only to receive dead air. A ghostcall. The bane of a telephone salesmen’s existence. These happen from time to time–a personless call, a phantom on the telephonic network. They count against all of your key metrics…close rate, margin per call, average handle time, and on and on…they are truly the most annoying part of this job.
While he waited in silence, counting the seconds until he could compliantly hang up, he noticed that this profile had well over 600 notes within it. Most customer profiles do not have any notes, so this was by all means special. He began to read them. Taking another slow drag from his minty cigarette, he told me that the notes were riddled with complaints about this number–a ghostcall phenomenon, or worse yet…
A voice comes across the line.
“Hello..?!”
“Thank you choosing Dell, what may I build for you today?”
A woman is there and after some basic questioning it is revealed that her name is not Alison Kinsey. He follows through to conclusion and it becomes obvious that the call is fraud. The call ends and he logs out for a brief moment to read deeper into these notes left by other reps. Soon it becomes apparent that this number, Alison Kinsey, is a legend within Dell. Other reps wrote of how they had received three calls from her within a matter of hours; other complained of the attempted fraud. All cried out for Dell to do something, anything about this number.
One note read, “My first day in Gold Queue (our top queue) and I finally got Alison…today is a good day.” Lighting another cigarette, my friend told me that it appeared a rite of passage…a to-do at Dell…to speak to Alison Kinsey, or the pretender on the other end. Blowing minty smoke in my direction, he continued…
It is the next day, the very day he is telling me his tale, and he is sitting at his cube. A call comes flying in, hot and ready. It pulls up a profile–Alison Kinsey. He curses. Not twice? He picks up, and as usual, it is silent. He takes the opportunity to add to the collective sentience, to the history of this damned profile, and he writes, “Twice in two days. I guess I’m in.” He then glances up to investigate the number associated with the profile…the number that brings Alison Kinsey into your life.
1-800-283-3355.
The phone call is coming from within Dell.
The ghost of Christmas past. Alison Kinsey. He crushes the lit cherry of his second minty cigarette into the table–the place is in need of some color, even if it is a chalky burnt black. Leaning back in his chair, eyes huge, he nods. Yes, we heard him correctly. The number was our own. Alison Kinsey was our own.
So, I began to wonder. Was Alison Kinsey the first person these fraud artists attempted to rip off? Was her name the unfortunate one to grace the customer profile associated with our own number? Or was Alison Kinsey the figment of some creative reps imagination, who one day decided to give this amazingly haunting profile a more human name?
Who is Alison Kinsey? And why does she call the same number she’s calling from?
I’m sure it is quite simple…a scam artist’s attempt to cover their own tracks by somehow having our number appear when they call, which in turn always brings up the profile of Alison Kinsey, but the dreamer in me likes to think bigger…greater…more fantastic…
The ghost of Dell. The ghost of Alison Kinsey.
Maybe one day…I’ll meet her, and write my own note. I think it will read, “Finally.”
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
The last poem I ever wrote, and will ever write.
the lady on the shore, by: elliott james griffin
does this moon have you in store,
you,
my lady on the shore…
laying down to dream, outside time and space
like before, i am greeted by the same sad face.
sitting by my ocean,
you look so pale
do you require my strength?
you seem so frail…
your skin always so kind;
resting gently on the beaches of my mind.
your eyes always so empty;
carrying burdens that weigh so heavy
a beauty that is deeper than my eye sees
will you always be in my dreams,
will you always reside in me?
why is your heart so broken…
is it my fault,
for saving words i have never spoken?
i am sorry:
if only the morning did not steal you
and each night our love begin anew
my lady, if only…
why must the days
be so
lonely..?
trapped in my sleep, we cannot get out
and each time fear grasps my throat,
silencing words id die to shout!
i love you…!
words i have not spoke
and everytime i attempt to speak them
i am silenced by a choke
are you
the unattainable,
the unimaginable,
the girl i wish to hold..?
or are you
the allusion of whats to unfold:
something so beautiful, something so perfect-
all alone.
in day i sift through the dreams
and realize im still not awake
this world is not real;
this world is a fake
you are real
you are reality
you are really
in me
enough! it will end!
to hell my soul i will send!
on this night i am coming for you
even at cost of heaven’s blue!
i will not leave you by your own
for such sin i could never atone
i will take my life to sleep
never caring where my soul shall creep
meet me by the sunset, our brightest door
Now I will always have time for you,
you,
my lady on the shore…
Relinquish Your Pain Unto Me
Download Link Kajiura Yuki - Sakura
I want you to try something for me. At the top of this entry there is a song, a special and wondrous song. Listen to this song and close your eyes, letting go of everything within your mind. Block out the bills, the pain, the loss, and the worries of the world beyond. Turn it up so loud that the music is the only thing you can sense. Let it inundate your entire being–become one with the sounds.
Within these ivories and strings there lies a message so spectacular that I cannot begin to describe it in words. I want you to think of the good in this world, of babies being born, and smiles, and the unconquerable human spirit. Of hope and promise and the power you possess….breathe deeply and feel your Soul reverberate within your body.
If you would just close your eyes with me and believe in something bigger for the next two minutes and six seconds. Relinquish your pain, let it go…and for the briefest of moments…you will be set free…
Remember, remember…
Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof.