My friends and I took an hour out of a Friday afternoon to pack in a little car, drive to the grocery store and purchase Cadbury eggs. We presented our spare change for the scrumptious goodies to the cashier, filed back out of the store and climbed back into the car.

“Should we eat them now?” I asked.

Everyone agreed that now would in fact be the best time to eat them because we all had places to be later.

A slow song spewed out of the radio when we started the car. Kuxton produced his Ipod from his coat pocket and browsed through a long menu of music. I anxiously waited for him to find a better tune to accompany this activity, a song that didn’t make me feel like sobbing buckets of tears and getting my candy wrapper soggy.

A Milli, by Lil Wayne, burst through the speakers and out the open car windows, nearly knocking an old woman stuffing groceries into her trunk off her feet.

So we sat there and munched on an Easter delight, while Lil Wayne dropped beats.

“I feel like we should be doing drugs right now,” Coning said. She was always able to dryly point out the sheer reality of a situation, such as how strange it was that four college students would sit in a parking lot eating holy candy while nodding heads to the rhythm of lyrics such as “I’m a venerial disease.”  

I guess that just goes to show how much we love chocolate.

Today, I saw a parked car that had eight large, colorful, plastic dinosaurs on the dashboard, and it made me laugh.

My phone hit the top of the heater that connected to the wall in my tinyy room. Upon later examination of the bright blue mouthpiece, I noticed tiny, equally spaced ridges where the teeth of the heating machine had struck.

I can’t purchase another phone for another year, I thought.

The screen went white, but it still made calls. I considered deleting one contact off the long list, the one that caused me to lose control of the motion of my arm and the grip of my hand.

The name glared at me.

I thought the better of it. Frustration had tapered. She wouldn’t call anyway. I would type in her number in a few weeks, and she would complain in my ear about things and ask me questions of which we both know the answer.

Completely normal.

Not for me. Forsome reason, I stuttered when confronted with the 18 year crutch. I’d rather shove it under a box, under a blanket at the back of a deep closet, shut the door, padlock it, and fly to the other side of the world.

I’d rather focus on the charcoal that dirties my fingertips on Thursday mornings. And the grinding bodies in the grimy basement on Friday nights.

Life is just better that way.

I looked into the bottom of my third glass. Nearly empty. Again.

Anxiously, I swished around the droplets that clung to the edges of the cup. Another shot of liquid would consume them, and their existence would mean nothing.

I considered pouring another, but my fingers let the slippery glass crush in my palm and fall to the concrete, slicing my finger as it went.

Laced with blood, a million shards spread across my feet, stabbing the tips of my toes. Spurts of pain sprung from below, working their way upward like a garden fountain hidden behind the bushes in my backyard.

And I threw my head back and bellowed into the overhead lamp that set a soft glow over the room.

FUCK.

Take away the shards of glass and swirling liquid and empty bottles lining the wooden table in the corner. Take away the soft light that mellows the hard concrete. Take away the glass. Take away the room.

I stand there suspended. Nearly empty. Again.

I think I’m understanding better now

That things in life don’t come prepackaged like lunch meat.

Smoked ham, sliced thick in meaty between two pieces of stale wonder bread.

My younger days were filled with routine. Restraining.

Get up at five, brush my teeth, go to school, come home, eat dinner in silence with family members. Day in and day out.

My mother doesn’t have friends. She stays at home and cleans every corner of the house and organizes her recipe box and feeds the parakeet it’s bird seed.

My dad goes to the office and complains about going to the office and watches Meet the Press. He complains about society and he complains about my mom having friends. When he’s not complaining, he builds birdhouses and remodels the house so that it could look better than our neighbors’. He plants trees and cuts them down.

I’ve since discovered that other families have different ways of peddling away their lives. For some, it’s watching endless DVD box sets and playing boardgames with the family.

I’m not sure what life I want. I thought I settled for something that seemed great, but now I’m prying open other dimensions through false hopes and empty promises. Dimensions where genuinity is more important than the number of songs on your playlist.

People and things aren’t always what they seem. But as long as I’m happy, I’ll just keep exploring and dealing with that.

I want to take pictures.  Everyday. Of the little things. The little moments.

When I pulled the lever on the Dew Machine, I expected the green. It poured into my paper cup, like the Hulk’s piss, droplets spraying up the side. Then green turned into brown. Coke. My caffeineated bliss was ruined.

If I could photograph that moment, where the green turned into brown, where color divided the pop from two different worlds in one fluid motion, I would be happy.

And most of the time my mind is scattered all over the place in tiny pieces. It falls into sidewalk cracks and between the mattress and the wall and in my shoe next to the two dollar bill I kept there for lunch. If I could take a picture of the pieces, scoop them up in a dust pan, and keep them in a shoebox in my closet, I would be happy.

I could box the pieces and market them for the smart kids who go to the smart class and work on complicated math problems and logic puzzles. I was one of those kids once. I solved a few logic puzzles. One time we went to the zoo and photographed monkeys and developed the pictures. I still have it somewhere.

That photograph made me happy.

Now everything’s gone digital and the papery, glossy photographs have transpired to the computer screen. It hurts my eyes if I look at it for too long. But an infinite amount of pictures can fit in the space that’s the Internet.

If I went to a 24 hour film place, and told them I wanted to develop an infinite amount of pictures, they would look at me funny and turn me away. With my head down, and my camera under my arm, strap hung loosely around my neck, I would return to the outside world, where everything was a photograph.

Defeated by what’s larger than me, I would toss my camera into the ocean.

They’re tasting better today.

M&M’s are my favorite candy, but for some reason, I haven’t been able to eat them lately.

I think I can attribute that to the fact that I had some kind of stomach flu earlier this week, and the night before the barfing, I had consumed several large handfuls of M&M’s. I’ll let you imagine the rest.

So now, even when I’m craving something sweet, those colorful little chocolatey pieces just won’t do it for me. I avoid them because they carry reminders of a time I just don’t want to remember. No matter how good they taste now, remnants of how they tasted then are fresh in my mind.

This adamant quality I have of avoiding things that carry bad memories might be common (is it?) Would David want to have a beer with Goliath? (had he not killed him of course, and had there been beer in those times. Who knows what got them drunk back then.) No. Probably not. Which is why I steer clear from the people and places that give me not-so-great feelings inside the pit of my stomach.

Maybe this isn’t healthy (I’m talking about the avoiding people thing, not the candy, because that probably would be healthy.) However, I seem to get more joy out of my life by simply moving forward. If I don’t talk to my family for a week, I won’t have to stress out about what they’re going to say. If I don’t hang out with so-and-so, I won’t have to tell that person that I don’t have fun with them anymore, and that they annoy the hell out of me (sorry for being so blunt.)

But, lately, I’ve realized that it might be worth it to confront the people who mean the most to me. I’ve confronted my mom countless times about how I felt when she treated me a certain way, but that never seemed to work for long.

Maybe, however, it would this time with this other person. Maybe it’s worth my time to try again–try confrontation with someone who doesn’t possess incredible OCD qualities. Because simply standing idly by and watching myself struggle and perhaps throw away something that’s just getting started can’t be good. It’s time to work on the things that I can and want to fix.

Because M&M’s are way too good to move on to another candy

1. Some dude got pulled over on the highway for having too many shopping carts piled in the back of his pickup truck.

2. I was washing my hands in the bathroom at Red Lobster, and I look over at  the lady next to me to see that she had her hands in her mouth, wiggling her teeth around. I couldn’t help but stare, appalled. Surely she wasn’t going to take out her dentures. Then she looks at me and says “Sorry about all this, but I have to take out my retainer before I eat.”

Whew, I thought. But still kind of gross.

3. A lady passed me in her car and her hair was piled so high, I could’ve sworn it touched the ceiling of her Buick.

4. On Delmar, a pretty busy street traffic-wise during the day, I saw a guy standing outside his pickup truck, which was pulled over to the side of the road filled with tons of brown bags. Now, generally I see a lot of homeless people on Delmar, but this guy had a sign that said Fresh Pecans, $2. I wonder what was really in those bags…

5. At a New Years Eve party, APPARENTLY I was face-to-face with a guy who claimed to be a 24-year-old California producer. At first, I thought that could be legit, since the party was filled with college theater kids. Except, when some kids got word that the party might have to disperse, this guy is back in the kitchen contemplating the best way to escape. And I won’t even talk about the guy who couldn’t tell stories.

6. I watched kids and adults play Pokemon at the mall. Nuff said there.

7. There’s a bear under the Arch (not literally under it, just in the open area next to the underground museum. And it’s a stuffed bear. Taxidermy, if you will.) This bear is unrecognizable–it’s definitely not a grizzly and probably not a Missouri breed. My only guess is that the bear was Louis and Clark’s guide and somehow that skipped the history books.

8. Oh, and speaking of homeless people on Delmar, I passed one today who asked if I could donate. I politely refused, so he continued ahead of me towards a group of younger people. Suddenly, he turns back around and mutters, “I’m too old for this.”

I have to stop at eight because my computer is making weird noises.

“It was horrible. Just horrible. Horrible horrible horrible. Everytime he came home he would say how horrible it was. I’m glad your dad switched jobs. It was terrible. He would say that everytime he came home.”

I listened to my mom speak in circles. When she did this, her voice would get higher and faster, and she seemed to be gasping for air like she was drowning.

Horrible.

It was like the intro to a dj’s mix pulled straight from the unmistakeable pattern of a synthesizer. I imagined dancing to this, surrounded by blacklights and wasted 20-something-year-0lds, my heart thumping in time with the words that spewed in and out of the singer’s mouth in rapid succession.

Hor-hor-hor-i-i-i-hor-i-i-ble-hor-i-ble. 

She stopped and stared at me accusingly, probably recognizing that I had drifted off. Drifted to the dance floor where the cold concrete floor vibrated. I noticed, and smiled, letting her continue, the way that she usually did.

I sat on the couch. I had to, to avoid sinking to the floor in either boredom or surrender, maybe both. She stood in the middle of the room, on her soapbox. She told me about dad and how he quit his job to find a better one, a workplace that, from her description, sounded creepily perfect, like the factory in Brave New World.

That book, like all books of its sort, made me never wish for perfection. Beauty, it seems, lies in the cracks in the pavement.

So dad, leaving his horrible job to find this better one that tested its employees for the perfect personality, came home day after day with a smile on his face because everybody he worked with liked each other and worked together elatedly.

“He really likes it. It’s wonderful. Just great. It’s so great.”

And then, I heard it again, the higher pitch, the quicker pace, the gasping.

I looked around the room at the furniture and the pillows and the piano and the knicknacks and noticed how clean everything was. As usual. Nothing was disturbed or out of place. The crystal shimmered as if it had just been dusted. The couch I sat on looked as if it yearned for more company.

I wondered if my mom had ever read Brave New World. I doubted it, because I’ve never seen her pick up any literature other than the newspaper or the occasional magazine. She once recommended me a book called The Horse Whisperer, but where that encouraged me to pick up more books of its type, it seemed to stifle her interest.

If she had read it, I wonder if this conversation would be taking place, me on the couch, her standing in the middle of the room with her arms in motion, drawing pictures in the air to better explain how horrible it all was. The perfect room around us that cried out for someone to disturb the peace. Or at least live in it.

As her words replayed over and over, I wondered how I never noticed this before. My current state of calm probably had something to do with what made my ears perk up.

Hor-hor-hor-i-i-ble.

 Her words dumped me back on the dance floor, thrown in a conga line. A fearless flow of energy leaped at all sides of me, and for a moment I took another break from that overwhelming anxiety that emitted from my mom’s lips.

She rattled off explanations, diagraming the path her husband had taken since the spring, and I danced far away, where my only worry was tripping on my own two feet and stumbling back into this New World that my mom had created for herself.

Then the garage door rattled open and the kitchen door knob jingled and the smell of baked chicken wafted into the room and both of us were shaken out of our stupor.

At least, for now.