Cataloguing The Cyclical Metronome That Is My Life
My friend cielo from high school recently found a letter i wrote to her the summer between high school and college. It mostly delt with fantastical musings about "getting on" this girl or that, none on whom i actually ever "got on." the diction had such californian syntax, i almost couldn't finish it. it felt foreign and fake. not the subject matter, but my vocabulary and style.
i wonder, years later, if i ever make it out of the greatest city of our time, whether my personal style will make me cringe again, and feel so east coast.
i try to picture that dustin, in many ways a wandering, depressed soul, still a year away from losing his virginity, and can really only see myself now. oh sure, i might still have had hair down to my shoulders, with the barest signs of the spare tire to come around my middle, could still play a full soccer game without dry heaving out that sickly unctuous spittle into the water fountain, but so young in the game called life.
not that i felt young at all at the time. I had graduated. i was on my way to college, for crying out loud, that ellusive goal i had worked so hard to reach for four long years. four years of losing my naivete, becoming cynical, taking responsibility for my own well being... ending my ability to be happy with who i am in the futile quest to be liked by one and all...
who is the real dustin? the child that could go out into his garden at six years old and have full scale ninja wars replete with a large cast of characters, most importantly centered around my best (imaginary) friend alex (who looked and acted surprisingly similar to a boy named alex in my kindergarden class who i really didn't know)? the boy who first talked about orgasms as "the shockwave," an event that took a few years to coincide with the ejaculation of anything but the need to do it for a bit? the kid who skipped five days of school in two weeks, mostly spending the day in a dilapitated arcade playing cracked copies of street fighter II, surrounded by a group of squalid mexican youths wondering what the hell a gringo looking youngling was doing on this side of the avenue? the young high school freshman who truly did not want anything to do with drugs? the senior that did?
being a living breathing creature means a life of constant flux. the now is always ticking by, second by second. we can try to chase it down, but it always becomes the past before we can even get a sense of what we had. i am all those dustins. or is it more, those dustins are all in me? for every second im alive, a new, more experienced dustin is born, tentitively peeking out his tussled head from the birthing canal.
why then, is it so hard to live in the style of my older selves. can i not find that time in myself when i could simply just be... it might not necessarily have been happy, but, not sad? maybe that's why the loss of innocence and ignorence appears in the very first chapter. once you take a bite, you can never go back. once you feel uncool, whatever nonsense that means, how impossibly difficult is it to not doubt your worth?
i wish i could write another letter. one to that very version of myself, bored so bad in a friendless summer, forced to live in an imaginary world where women fell atop of him left and right. i would tell him to hold on... hope would come. soon a lovely and gentle brooklynite would whisk away the dreadful v-card. an insationable hunger for knoledge would grow, albeit a bit later than i would like. the magnificent epiphany that the opinion that matters most as to one's self worth had to come from the self itself. if that was in place, the outside social scene would follow suit tout-suite...
but how tempted would i be to try and change things? would i tell myself to kick more educational ass sooner? would i give myself pointers to situations that popped to twenty twenty in the irksome hindsight? or would that cheapen the lessons that made those later selves what they are?
does it all happen for a reason?
i wonder, years later, if i ever make it out of the greatest city of our time, whether my personal style will make me cringe again, and feel so east coast.
i try to picture that dustin, in many ways a wandering, depressed soul, still a year away from losing his virginity, and can really only see myself now. oh sure, i might still have had hair down to my shoulders, with the barest signs of the spare tire to come around my middle, could still play a full soccer game without dry heaving out that sickly unctuous spittle into the water fountain, but so young in the game called life.
not that i felt young at all at the time. I had graduated. i was on my way to college, for crying out loud, that ellusive goal i had worked so hard to reach for four long years. four years of losing my naivete, becoming cynical, taking responsibility for my own well being... ending my ability to be happy with who i am in the futile quest to be liked by one and all...
who is the real dustin? the child that could go out into his garden at six years old and have full scale ninja wars replete with a large cast of characters, most importantly centered around my best (imaginary) friend alex (who looked and acted surprisingly similar to a boy named alex in my kindergarden class who i really didn't know)? the boy who first talked about orgasms as "the shockwave," an event that took a few years to coincide with the ejaculation of anything but the need to do it for a bit? the kid who skipped five days of school in two weeks, mostly spending the day in a dilapitated arcade playing cracked copies of street fighter II, surrounded by a group of squalid mexican youths wondering what the hell a gringo looking youngling was doing on this side of the avenue? the young high school freshman who truly did not want anything to do with drugs? the senior that did?
being a living breathing creature means a life of constant flux. the now is always ticking by, second by second. we can try to chase it down, but it always becomes the past before we can even get a sense of what we had. i am all those dustins. or is it more, those dustins are all in me? for every second im alive, a new, more experienced dustin is born, tentitively peeking out his tussled head from the birthing canal.
why then, is it so hard to live in the style of my older selves. can i not find that time in myself when i could simply just be... it might not necessarily have been happy, but, not sad? maybe that's why the loss of innocence and ignorence appears in the very first chapter. once you take a bite, you can never go back. once you feel uncool, whatever nonsense that means, how impossibly difficult is it to not doubt your worth?
i wish i could write another letter. one to that very version of myself, bored so bad in a friendless summer, forced to live in an imaginary world where women fell atop of him left and right. i would tell him to hold on... hope would come. soon a lovely and gentle brooklynite would whisk away the dreadful v-card. an insationable hunger for knoledge would grow, albeit a bit later than i would like. the magnificent epiphany that the opinion that matters most as to one's self worth had to come from the self itself. if that was in place, the outside social scene would follow suit tout-suite...
but how tempted would i be to try and change things? would i tell myself to kick more educational ass sooner? would i give myself pointers to situations that popped to twenty twenty in the irksome hindsight? or would that cheapen the lessons that made those later selves what they are?
does it all happen for a reason?
posted by El Follador at 10:08 PM
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