second person narrative mode - christmas edition

Imagine you are a girl. (If you are actually a girl, this exercise will be much easier for you.) Now imagine you are not just any girl; you are an overweight, clumsy, awkward girl with a heart of gold. Imagine you have broken almost every rule enforced upon you by your parents in some misguided attempt to protect the honor of your friends and to uphold your own personal beliefs in being a friend to the friendless and living a strictly Carpe Diem life. you make poor choices, like staying out late because if you don't your friend might drive drunk or get involved with the wrong people; so you come home late and you get grounded. Imagine you find yourself entangled in these stupid scenarios over and over because you were raised to believe that your specific deity which you have chosen to worship rewards those who selflessly take care of those who can't or won't take care of themselves. Then imagine after several years, say 23 or so, of being constantly taken for granted, ignored or abused you start to question your motives. are you doing these things because you want to or because you're supposed to? Are you doing these things selflessly after all or are you assuming there is a reward? Are you supposed to expect the reward? Then maybe you have a crisis of faith here and there because ... you want that reward! you feel so guilty for wanting it and this causes so much anxiety and depression in you.

Now imagine you are seeking answers. Imagine the only way you know how to do this is a constant internal dialogue. You see everyone around you making life make sense with college degrees, husbands and wives, hobbies or sports, and with unquestionable religion. You see most everyone around you contented, calm and accepting. The only way you have found, however, to make anything make sense is to keep quiet and be alone and to escape into some music. Your headphones are your church. Your mix tapes are your religion. When the music stops, the confusion creeps in. You drown yourself in it, it is the only time your imagination runs free, there are no expectations and you dream wildly. it keeps you calm, it keeps you awake, it keeps you safe. you have no husband, you only have Bono. You have no degree, you have Peter Gabriel. You are not working a job you care about, but on the way to and from this job you get blast Jesus Christ Superstar at full volume and sing along. This somehow makes it all okay.

Sometimes when you are alone with your music, you are someone else. You are on stage. You are flawless and loved. You are thin and beautiful. Pretending you are someone you aren't becomes something you do so much it almost becomes who you are. you become an amalgamation of the pretend you and the real you. Then suddenly someone comes along, the right girl at the right time who encourages you to try and be both. why not? Dream out loud, be wild, be free, kick and sing! You may be in a stranger's bedroom at a house party and meet this girl and never think twice about it and then sometime down the road that moment becomes legend in the story of who you are together. Then one day you're sitting out on a patio of a coffee shop and this same girl decides to sit with you and you find yourself telling this practical stranger things about yourself you never said out loud before. Through a series of twists and turns, broken hearts, dead ends and towers falling, this girl becomes so much a part of yourself that you forget where she ends and you begin. You start to depend on her, to love her like family, to trust her input and opinions more than you trust your own. Her approval feels better than your parents'. You need too much sometimes and she kicks your ass in gear. you get stuck in a loop and she pulls you out. she watches you fly into the same closed window over and over again and she never judges you, she just waits until you learn your lesson. You love this girl. she is your best friend.

As you get older, it gets harder and harder to stand back up when you fall off the hypothetical horse. You feel so sure about something and it falls to pieces and you, therefore, fall to pieces. Your best friend will listen and nod and offer kind words and keep you moving. Sometimes the weight of the poor decisions and the heartbreak and the pain keep you in bed for days. Your body aches, your brain can't sit still, you walk aimlessly around the house for hours, heaving with sobs. Your best friend knows this about you, she is never cruel, she is never demanding, she is never condescending; she listens.

Somehow through the grace of your chosen deity, you suddenly find yourself becoming the person you always wanted to be. your body is cooperating and looking better, your self esteem is in tip-top shape, your mental imperfections are under control and your bills are being paid on time. and for this you suddenly start seeing those rewards you hoped would come. so then one day, you meet a man. This man takes you back to the girl you used to be before your best friend. this man reminds you of all the times when you were a kid and you just knew your chosen Deity would repay you for your kindnesses with just this type of person. The strength, beauty and goodness radiates from this man with such high intensity you want to just linger in it all day like a cat with a premium ray of sunshine. This one man represents everything you admire and respect in humanity, he represents everything you ever admired about yourself and your best friend in a beautifully bearded package. you can even see your mother and father in him, you can see such gentle kindness, such wild passion, big dreams that he will determinedly make come true, and most importantly you can see every reason in the world why you should be a better person because of him. You find yourself taking those final steps your best friend laid out for you and now through the strength and conviction of your love for this man, you are strong enough to take them. You feel justified and finally like a complete person, not just a collage of ideas. you feel whole. you finally feel better than the rest of the people who thought they had it figured out because you know the real secret; you solved the riddle of true love.

you start a project. you are on step-whatever of your never ending-step-plan to become the best you that you can possibly be by actually doing something you set out to do; you start writing. it may not be the best written thing out there, but it is yours. and with every new thing that is written, you feel more and more confident. you feel that empty vessel that was meant to hold your pride all along start to fill. you are writing for three people. yourself, your best friend and your true love; the only three people in the world you trust with your life and most importantly, your heart. you make a decision to dedicate songs to the people you love the most as a Christmas present as a part of this writing project. From day one you start to realize the two hardest entries will be for these two people. It takes you months to make a decision and as soon as you make it, you realize it was the wrong one. Imagine this: you have to stand at the graves of your grandparents. You have to look into the faces of the people who share your blood. You have to spend Christmas Eve alone and lost. You have to hear the right song at the right moment, you have to read just the right poem at the right time and you have to have just the right dream during the right nap to know the answer...

There is no one song for your best friend. There is no one song for the love of your life. They are your songs; they are every song. These two, these two random people your chosen Deity has chosen to set before you that he or she gave you to love more than life itself, they are your soundtrack. They ARE the music.



no two silly people have ever been so loved xxx

Radiohead - Karma Police

Long ago, before I became this pinnacle of sanity you have now grown to know and love, I “dropped my basket.” I had succumbed completely to my then undiagnosed Panic disorder completely and turned my life and adrenal glands over to a drug called Effexor. This drug, while you are on it, seems to be a kind of miracle drug. Nothing switches, no wild uncontrollable thoughts about death, no racing heart and sweaty palms in otherwise safe situations; synthetic calm after years of self-torture and exhaustion. However, there was a downside or two to this “miracle drug”. My serotonin levels eventually became so evenly leveled that my brain tricked me into believing that I had no consequences what-so-ever; I was like a blank sheet of paper. I wasn’t high, I wasn’t low, and I wasn’t anything but a poor decision maker with no shoes on. I got laid off, I didn’t care. I lost my fiancé, I didn’t care. I had to move home with my parents… whatever. I didn’t wear shoes for a year or two… who cares?

Somewhere in the midst of this haze, as I found myself every day at the same damn coffee shop, doing puzzles and chain smoking, I met a girl who would become my anchor and partner in crime; Anne, who has affectionately become known as “N’abney” through a manipulated pronunciation of her first and last names. I had known her barely a heartbeat when she walked across the street and bought me a crossword puzzle dictionary from the used book store. It was love at first nerd. What followed was a then several month progression of Anne and me clinging to each other throughout our follies and downfalls. I was losing grip on life in general, Anne was lost and trying to finish school. All we knew to do was to smoke drugs and go wild and have earth shattering conversations while we bawled our eyes out in our cars.

Eventually, everything came to a head. My family was slowly cutting me off in every way. I had no money and my dad took away my cell phone first, and then my car. Anne saved the day by letting me borrow her early 80s beige town & country, affectionately known as the “Nazgul”, for the screeching death sounds it made due to its lack of power steering. My friends, one by one, took me aside and said “get your shit together or we can’t be friends anymore.” (This is a testament to how evil SSRI’s, especially Effexor, are when not properly administered or monitored.) My friends gave me an intervention over a medication my doctors intentionally put me on. Then the last straw… my health insurance granted me as a severance from my last job ran out. My parents refused to pay for the then $120/mo prescription, as there was no generic, and I literally went completely cold turkey off Effexor. You can do a quick Google search and see how dangerous and wrong and terrible this experience was for me.

Digression/point of post: one of the things I do the best and I know I do a lot is give people nicknames. Whether that nickname is something you did once that was silly or just a ridiculous mispronunciation of your name; everyone at one point or another gets a nickname from me. Some people have more than one. It’s an endearing thing I do; it means I care enough about you or something. I have only been the recipient of a nickname that stuck once, and that was from N’abney… One night in the midst of all this haze, Anne, while driving around with another of my long time best friends, Bart, called and sang the entirety of this song, all the while substituting my name in place of “Karma”. I had, at one point, had a few friends that would sing Culture Club’s “KARLA Chameleon” to me in the halls at school, but it never really caught on. Some people outside of the N’abney inner sanctum still call me “karla police” now. Piggybacking off the nickname, I once had a brilliant idea to start a cable access show where I would dress as a cop, walk around NCSU’s brickyard and stop kids listening to headphones and ask what they were listening to. If what they said did not please me, I would “arrest” them and make them listen to some Joy Division or the Buzzcocks or something. This idea, as all great ideas that rise from the haze of marijuana smoke, never came to fruition, not unlike the great “cheese as currency” debate of ’03.

I have never heard Karma Police without thinking of N’abs. I somehow have more “in jokes” with N’abney than just about anyone else in my whole life. That girl has saved my life so many times I can’t even count anymore….

N’abney & Karla Police = burning the 80s… 4ever! xoxox