the students are not any more lazy or rambunctious than they have been
all year long, but my tolerance is all used up.

"yolo, tip."-student
"what did you just say to me?"-ghost
"you need to relax, dude. yolo."-student
"the next time you want to offer up the term yolo to to me to explain
away your tendency for piss poor decisions, you might find the one
life you have ending much sooner than God originally intended."-ghost

i'd like very much to meet the guy who coined this yolo nonsense. i'd
junk punch him in his man business.

on a lighter note, here's the last offering of qoutes from the kiddies.

"swine flu. that's the asians fault."-d.d.
"asians? why?"-m.b.
"i don't know. it seems all the viruses start over there."-d.d.
"even the black plague?"-m.b.
"actually, i think your people are getting the bad rap on that one."-z.n.
"why?"-m.b.
"why else call it the black plague?"-z.n.
"man, that happened before there were even black people around."-m.b.

"it looks like a moose had its way."-madi g
"which way is a moose's way?-boren
"canada."-ghost

"yeah, like m.c. hammer."-boren
"yeah, great idea."-the asian
"i pity the fool."-boren
"wow."-the asian
"pop culture fail. that's what that is."-ghost
"that's mr. t, jessica."-the asian
"what did he sing?"-boren
"he didn't. he was an actor."-ghost
"this is an all new low. even for this class."-the asian

"she looks like she's having a seizure. and enjoying it."-e.k.

"you sound like an old black person. i always hear old black people
talking about chicken."-e.k.

a student moving toward her painting:
"i'm going to paint you, bitch."-boren

"...and then boom, here comes the rape."-b.h.

"i mean really, who wants to be with a guy who rubs corn starch on his
nuts?"-j.h.

"i can count to potato. i can totally count to pumpkin."-g.s.

ghost

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i don't know.

i keep working, creating, and time passes strangely. the weeks pass
quicker than the hours, the years pass faster than the days. i make
less progress than i'd like, than i imagine i could. i keep trying
though. i can't give up. there is nothing else in this world for me
should i throw in the towel. i simply cannot abide the "if only."

ghost

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scratches on the mirror lose the certainty of pattern, the underlying randomness peeks through. the voice which speaks is silent, and profound meaning fades into the horizon as the distance from divine purpose yawns. the electricity of one being one dims. the eternal moment ticks, and is over.

i find sky is not the color of my thought. the earth was not raised to my front door. the dream subsides and the ghosts i befriended are revealed as shadows of unknown instincts. it is like dawn when the sky is grey. it is the doomsday clock that never rang.

ghost

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this is what i've covered the window in the door to my room with. this is what the students see when they pass my room. if you look closely, within the iris of one of the eyes you can see a cut away with a black backing. it opens so i can look out to see who is knocking on the door. 

you know?

ghost

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See the full gallery on Posterous

ghost

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dreams die slowly, quietly worn away by the thousand things of everyday living. they are forgotten through the course of normal life, until one morning you wake and find you face the day with a little less hope for what the day will bring. a dream has died. like wild animals in gilded cages of our imaginations, dreams must be cared for. either you set them free to live, follow the dream, or one day they will escape, having gnawed through some weak spot in the place of our visions. 

i have dreams. i would like some of them to become real, to become true parts of my life, but life often gets in the way. i often must put some on hold to follow others. i wonder, though, which of them i'd rather lose, the greatest or the least of them. sometimes it's a tough choice because the greater the dream, often the greater the sacrifice to achieve them. the greater the reward, the more heartache and sleepless nights to make them realized, but also, the less i am willing to let them go. which ones to lose then, if i had a choice? it's easy. if it involves my kids, i'll keep working towards it. everything else is expendable. 

ghost

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traded texts with a friend tonight. she is trying to conquer the noise and chaos of her days. she is desperately seeking order, and i am just another agent of chaos cluttering her evening. i let the conversation go. i am in another world, altogether. sometimes, it is the quiet that disturbs me most. i stare at a blank sheet of paper for a while. i want to write, but that blank sheet is daunting, and it occurs to me just how inflexible emptiness can be. nothing to draw upon, nothing to work with, nothing to nurture and make my own.

i wonder if sanity breaks if there is too much of it. mine feels like it slips and i sigh.

my mind works furiously to fill in the blank that surrounds me in its vacuum hold. my mind needs something there or it will fake it. i stare at the blank sheet for an hour, then scribble meaningless diagrams and snippets of conversation that never occurred, and then i try for another hour to make sense of what i've done.

i think that quiet is a small thing, about as large as a moment. moments too, should be few and far between. string them together and you find madness. i wrote a week or two ago that i was no longer a man of thunder throwing lightning to the ground, but a man of rain caught up in the downpour of my days. i think that it is not quiet that grows, but that we that shrink.

quiet is a mysterious thing. there is reason, i'm sure, and i suspect it is not buried too deeply. i try not to dig, but i find that to hide from quiet is to bring it with you, and every untended moment it fills. i have spent so much time these last years with quiet that it has saturated me so that i know not that i wear it like a cloak wherever i go. people comment now. they wonder why i am quiet. they think i do not like them, that i am unhappy because i have nothing to say. i suppose so much time alone, i've developed habits. when there is no one to speak them to, you tend to keep your thoughts to yourself.

i write about quiet tonight in a futile attempt to overcome it, to attempt to scrawl a solution to the problem of quiet. it doesn't help and i lose. again. tomorrow i will rise and face it. again.

ghost

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every so often, i'll be sent something, an email, a pic on my phone,
what have you, from someone who, for whatever reason, thought of me
when they first saw that something. i'll admit, it's nice to be
thought of. it's nice to be reminded from time to time that people do
know me pretty well, and that as often as i feel it, i'm not really
all alone. yesterday, a friend of mine sent me this.

the artist

a dream and a fire which i cannot control, driving me without those
comfortable smooth paths of solidity and sleep which nature has
decreed for man. a fire which i inherited willy nilly, and which i
must needs feed with talk and youth and the very vessel which bears
the fire: the serpent which consumes its own kind, knowing that i can
never give to the world that which is crying in me to be freed.

for where is that flesh, what hand holds that blood to shape this
dream within me in marble or sound, on canvas or paper, and live? i,
too, am but a shapeless lump of moist earth risen from pain, to laugh
and strive and weep, knowing no peace until the moisture has gone out
of it, and it is once more of the original and eternal dust.

but to create! which among ye who have not this fire, can know this
joy, let it be ever so fleet? -william faulkner

that's beautiful. and true.

ghost

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and what am i wondering about on this less than notable day in my long
chain of days? i've been considering whether or not you'd want to live
in a dream after i woke from a particularly difficult one this
morning. in dreams we are not governed by the civilization that has
structured the way we act in the waking world. we act and say things
uninhibited by conscience. we easily forgive killing someone in
dreams. the stuff of dreams, too, it seems insubstantial fluff
compared to the granite we walk on when we're upright with eyes open.

i think to be eternally in fantasy would not be heaven, but a sort of hell.

i wouldn't have thought that when i was young, when i had the dream
where i flew and could stay in the sky. someone told me that meant i
was seeking escape. perhaps i was, though i can't remember what i
might have been trying to escape. i asked this of some of my friends
and they said they often dream of flying. i find it odd, and telling,
if the escape theory be true, that i haven't dreamed of flying in a
very long time.

no, give me the real world. give me the occasional slap n the face if
need be. i think i'd prefer that to a thousand years of nothing but
feathers.

ghost

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Dimples doesn't buy my standard reply anymore though, and Tank is
starting to ask secondary questions, like why amy decided she didn't
want to be married to me anymore. i told Dimples a while back that
when she was older, old enough to understand, we could talk about it.
she said okay, but i know she still wonders about it. i do not look
forward to that talk, despite the fact that her mom has done her best
to turn my daughter against me from the word go. well, to be fair,
probably not so much in the last three years, but before that, yeah.
Tank isn't buying it either, it seems. he keeps asking questions, and
i don't know how to answer them without lying to him.

at some point, ill have to have frank talks with all of my kids about
why things are the way they are. my question is, what do i say? the
truth? in Dimples' case it will be easier. i can recognize my own
fault in it. i gave up on the relationship when it was at its worst.
whatever i blame her for, i'm partly to blame too. with Tank and
Pixie, though, how do i explain it without them possibly feeling some
anger toward their mom? is it something i should never answer? a story
i should just take to my grave?

thankfully, i still have time to figure it out.

ghost

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mine is very good. some people say freakishly so. but i do forget
things from time to time. some of it will come back to me every now
and then, but i wonder how much i've learned, how much i've done, that
i've buried deep down inside in my mind.

considering this, i started to wonder what would happen if all of my
memories, the ones i've repressed or suppressed or that have just been
hidden under layers of years, suddenly overcame me in a flood. what if
one day the dam burst and a torrent of images, emotions, and smells
carried me down a raging river? where do forgotten memories go? i
imagine them all tucked up and stored in corners, and that some day
what is in those corners will fill up the whole room. there's gotta be
a threshold, i think, the proverbial straw that will make my mind
buckle and yield, when one more thing i forget will make it all come
back to me. the doors of my perception will break open from the strain
of all that is in the room they conceal. all of it, all at once, will
show.

all in all, my past isn't something i'm too afraid to face. but, i've
been around, i've seen some stuff. i've done some things i'm not proud
of. i cringe when i think of the wake of destruction i'm sure i've
left behind me. i'm not alone in that. we've all got something we'd
rather not remember. we all run away from something don't we? everyone
hides from at least one experience of violent emotion and its throes,
or a cold and deliberate act of malice. i'm no better or worse than
anyone else. and maybe i'll even be forgiven in the end. but i don't
look forward to the day when all my ghosts appear before me and demand
reckoning. if you see someone on the street somewhere, face frozen
with shock, that would be me. be kind. tell me i'm still a human
being.

ghost

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i was listening to a preacher once. he was talking about how we often
have the mind set that life should be fair. i don't remember much of
that sermon other than this one sentence. "what's unfair about life is
that it is fair."

i no more know what he was trying to say with statement now than i did
when he said it twelve years ago.

life is not fair, is it? comparatively speaking, say compared to a kid
born in some third world country who was abandoned by his parents and
had to struggle just to eat every day, i've had it pretty easy. i
mean, i'm sure that kid would look at my life and think, that's a cake
walk. compared to him, i'd say i've escaped my share of suffering.
but, that gets me to thinking, what is the meaning of life? the
hypercomputer earth from the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy deduced
the answer of the meaning of life, the universe, of everything, was
42.

what do you mean when you ask that question? what is life about for you?

i'd like to say life is the simplest thing there is. you wake, you
breathe, you eat. wash rinse repeat. but it's not, is it? not for us
humans, anyway. there's so many emotions, so many relationships, so
many needs beyond just food, water, and shelter. we need validation.
we need to be touched. we need to know someone gives a d*mn. we need
to know we are necessary.

i don't suppose there's any reason for this post. just me, thinking.
and painfully aware that a great many of my needs are in no way being
met.

ghost

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ghost

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some people fear success as much as they fear failure. sometimes more.
i think i've been one of those people, though i'd say it was a neck in
neck race between which i feared most. the trick to either i think is
to face them with courage.

what happens to someone if a dream comes true? i think we are less
prepared for that than if something we long for escapes our grasp. i
think perhaps we are familiar with wishes going unfulfilled, and maybe
it is a shock if something we imagined in some far flung fantasy comes
to life. kinda makes me think of that old saying, "be careful what you
wish for. you might just get it."

how would you act if one of your dreams came true? i like to think i'd
act like it was just another day. all casual like. i suppose another
way would be to walk around stunned by everything that happens. but,
then everyone would know something was up.

just to clear this up, i'm talking real success here, not having
spaghetti come out all al dente. i mean like curing cancer, or hitting
the mega lottery powerball for many millions of dollars. if that were
to happen to me, i'd show you courage they'd write stories about that
would be remembered for generations to come. like f*cking homer.

from the odyssey. not the simpsons.

ghost

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in the time since amy left me, there have been a few false starts,
beginnings with possibility, but they always seem to wither and fade.
and, to use a cliche break up line, i'm beginning to see it's me, not
them. for a long time, i was still in love with who i thought amy was.
with the eventual realization that our life together had been a lie,
there came a great anger that burned me for a while longer. i've found
some measure of peace with all of that, though i can still sense
evidence that i am not yet healed.

quite simply, i'm concerned i'll try and fail. again. and really, i
can't afford that. not from an emotional or financial stand point.
i've also noticed a desire not to have anyone around for long periods
of time. maybe i've grown too accustomed to my solitude. i don't like
being around people for long. i feel myself start itching for them to
leave, or looking for any reason to take off. perhaps it's just that i
spend all of my free time with my kids, and am unwilling to give up
any time with them. perhaps i use that as an excuse instead of
admitting my fear. you can't grow a relationship without devoting time
to it, and i seem unwilling to do that anymore. i'd be willing to
wager no one worked as hard in a relationship as i did, to make it all
work, to keep things running smoothly. that evidence i mentioned
earlier shows up when i'm considering wading off into another
relationship. i'm just not ready to risk it, to put it all on the
line, to put in that kinda work.

it seems i'm no longer a man of thunder, throwing lightning to the
ground. today i am content to be a man of rain, caught up in the
downpour of my days.

ghost

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the more i think about it, though, the more i think expressing
ourselves is just a dozen compromises of meaning to chunk it into the
words that are available in our vocabulary. we don't think about it.
we're used to it. we manage. and maybe that's a good thing. maybe my
raw streams of meaning i'd project to people wouldn't make much sense.
maybe i need the process of constructing sentences, finding words, to
validate my meaning, to craft a statement and temper the raw meaning.

yes, it's probably a good thing my thoughts must become words and pass
my tongue before they reach others. it gives me time, at least, to
maybe tap the breaks on the rant that's about to spill into their
minds like liquid hellfire, or the lustful thoughts that touch me when
i see a particularly well fitting pair of jeans, or the genuine
disinterest when someone is droning on and on about things i care
nothing about.

ghost

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where i'm from, there are consequences for actions, boys and girls.
yours will be explaining to daddy why there's a dent in his volvo.
mine will be icing my ankle.

mine was worth it.

and no, i wasn't at wal-mart.

ghost

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but saturday, i saw the best game of my life when my five year old
boys battled it out with another five year old team.

i've often said that despite the fact that neither my brother nor i
became famous pro soccer players even after all the time and money my
family spent for our years of playing, the sport we've both played for
over thirty years helped form us both into the men we are. it taught
us honor and fair play. it taught us camaraderie and discipline and
work ethic. the game taught me to go further than i thought possible,
to dig deeper, to find reserves of strength and power i might not have
otherwise been aware of. it gave me confidence that i can't describe.
some of the things i've had to endure as an adult, i learned to deal
with playing a game. to not give up, to keep trying no matter what
odds are before me, to keep my head even when it would be easier to
give up.

saturday i saw two evenly matched teams of five year old boys going
after their goals with determination equalled only by the other teams'
desire not to let them score. they were playing to win. they were
playing for sheer joy and love of the game.

and it was a defensive slug fest.

Tiny Tank and another boy on our team had played a baseball game
against one another earlier in the day, and by the end of the game,
after a back and forth battle, a gritty game length brawl for the
ball, both were starting to flag. it was awesome to see them both with
hands on knees between plays, then getting right back into the mix and
continuing to fight hard. i lost track of Tank's blocked shots,
defended rushes, and take aways, but i won't ever forget the little
fist pump he gave when he scored and then immediately looked to me for
my reaction. which was me jumping up and down and yelling like i had
won the lottery. because i did. five years ago.

ghost

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