[So, holiday time means I get to clean out my room, amongst other things, and so random stuff keeps cropping up... I thought I'd take a trip down memory lane w/ some of my prize writing pieces from aaaaages back, actually the only two I could find, of which this is the first.
A little bit of background might help: we'd just watched Freedom Writers, and so that's where most of the mood is, and I know the others in the class all had stories which reflected the same kind of thing, if not exploring the same topic. It's from grade 8, so obviously the writing style needs maturity, but I've kept it as true to the original as possible. My topic of choice was, simply, "Life in the Big City", and I think I did reasonably well considering all of these are kept to a max word count.]
There is a place which is dreamt about. Those hard workers in yonder fields, the ones who spend their days manhandling the smelliest breeds man domesticated, hammering away at their beloved iron harvesters as their fathers' fathers' fathers did, toiling day after day: those chaps tell their home-educated sons and daughters not only about God, and kindness, and how to grow asparagus, but also about this dreamt-of life. Their misconceptions, however, are as boundless as their hopes.
Welcome to the Big City. Your life is already over.
It looks brilliant from a distance, but, then again, you can't judge a hardcore porno mag by its cover. Those skyscrapers look so flashy, but in reality they loom over the putrid streets like giant, inanimate prison wardens. Those stuck-up, self-centered, suit-toting snobs of Virgin Mobile look at life like any old soulless passer-by would look at the silver they work in. Their matrix of pixelated lights tells nothing of the lives below.
Down here, life is lived like nowhere else on the planet. Looking across the cold tarmac stained with blood and shattered glass, one can see the dirty people, those no-hopers who can do nothing that will ever amount to anything in their short, miserable lives. Why indeed do they live? There is no reason for it.
You can see the factory girls in their twilight gear, selling their bodies for all that it takes to stay alive. Under the soft, flickering neon lights, those n*****s hang out in their Lee Fontino shirts, wild personalities not given away in anything they do. It is them responsible for the obscenities sprayed on the walls inside which the Nips make daily trade, those ruins with their ripped-off Coca-Cola ads where there are boxes upstairs hiding the crack. Then, there are the Latinos, with missing teeth and shaven heads, no longer holding any traces of the culture they came from.
It's not only the people. Also hidden from the panoramic sweeps showcasing urban conquest are the spaces behind the brick walls; behind the concrete shadowing the streets. It's fifty-fifty that along any stretch of wall there will be a hidden club, chop shop, or some weed parlour. These people live their lives in such confined spaces.
There are secret, uni-racial nightclubs where the same throat-throbbing music pumps around the metropol, accompanied by strobes and half-naked bodies. One can take their freshly-gotten, sparkling car, drive it round the back, and it will be untraceable before you can say, "Toyota". You can get to the underground dealer, where the "brothas in da hood" will outfit your frame with the best of dinner-plate-sized specs, "genuine" fake shirts of varying hues, "don't mess with me" sneakers, and cold steel which holds twelve in the mag, straight off the USMC production line.
The epitome of capitalism will leave you stranded in the rubbish dump of evolution's rejects, and no-one will give a damn.
Friday, 29 June 2012
Thursday, 21 June 2012
memory
I am sitting in the percussion room. I can't remember why or how, but Andrew is there with me. He has this big marimba piece he really needs to practice, but I don't want to give up valuable drum time. We both want to be nice guys and leave but we actually both need to stay. So we just decide to be awesome and zone out, and so we're both playing at the same time, each of us completely engrossed in our respective instrument. They're on different timbres and frequencies, so it's no problem for skilled musicians. As we prepare to leave for class, we both smile at the absurdity of the situation which has since become routine amongst the percussion students.
I enter the house and she gives me a deep loving hug. I walk over to the door of the room, and see Andrew first. He is sitting on the floor opposite, and he immediately spots me and smiles. I smile back, I think I winked too. Everyone else looks over then and I recognize a few of them, saying an awkward greeting. No one expected me there, and so they all look at me with bewilderment until, as one, they click. I chuckle to myself and move off to spend some time alone with her, but not before I glance at his face and realize he has also found my humour in the situation.
You were an amazing friend. I'll miss you.
Wednesday, 20 June 2012
holidays
So now, after a long and hard 9-day battle, although actually it was pretty much since the beginning of term, Eisteddfod is now over, and I have a holiday. Which means that I get to tell myself what to do, instead of having other people to tell me what to do.
This is me, right, so I'm not going to camp and expect things to come my way. On my to-do list is lots of reading, getting whizz at guitar, getting ready for the next big Highlander Gathering (avec les certains femmes, hehe), probably a bit of piano (oh, you know, just a tad, maybe a Rachimaninov prelude or two to keep me in practice) but seriously I will get boss at sight-reading, and other exciting stuff. Maybe I'll clean my room ;)
So 'nyways, Ed'fd bru.
Jas, it was quite a mission this year: the more responsibility I accumulate, the harder it seems to get... I had a horrendous individual run this year, the adjudicators really didn't like me, and so I'm still feeling bummed even though Mallett came second overall. We're going for the clean sweep next year, so we'll have to work so hard. But next year is going to be a whole different ball-game as a whole. We'll just have to wait and see how the year goes.
But yeah, vaab. Rocklands expedition coming up, thanks Andy, so I won't be completely stuck at home these holidays.
This is me, right, so I'm not going to camp and expect things to come my way. On my to-do list is lots of reading, getting whizz at guitar, getting ready for the next big Highlander Gathering (avec les certains femmes, hehe), probably a bit of piano (oh, you know, just a tad, maybe a Rachimaninov prelude or two to keep me in practice) but seriously I will get boss at sight-reading, and other exciting stuff. Maybe I'll clean my room ;)
So 'nyways, Ed'fd bru.
Jas, it was quite a mission this year: the more responsibility I accumulate, the harder it seems to get... I had a horrendous individual run this year, the adjudicators really didn't like me, and so I'm still feeling bummed even though Mallett came second overall. We're going for the clean sweep next year, so we'll have to work so hard. But next year is going to be a whole different ball-game as a whole. We'll just have to wait and see how the year goes.
But yeah, vaab. Rocklands expedition coming up, thanks Andy, so I won't be completely stuck at home these holidays.
Wednesday, 13 June 2012
everything is interesting
He is perfectly average. His affluent background has not aided excellence, and his parents have long given up the expensive playthings and incentives. He has no aspirations, no inspiration, content in allowing life to float past him. He is not dull, but no-one knows him well enough to say otherwise; he has not yet succumbed to drugs or sex or alcohol, or rock and roll music for that matter.
She is a vibrant spark of life, ready to explode into full flame at any second. Spontaneous and creative, the world is a puzzle which she must dissect. Everything fascinates her, from the sciences to the arts to how people work, and she does not hide it. She seeks information, she desires experience.
She ends up at his house, quite by chance due to transport and timetabling complications. As his mother serves them lunch, he watches, carefully but silently, as she optimizes a hypothetical solution to the aforementioned complications on a napkin with a stub of pencil.
The second time she is there voluntarily. They sit in his room, bare as an asylum, a solitary window the only source of light. His conversations are dry and lack enthusiasm, so she talks, mostly.
The one time, she brings him a gift. It is a small orange sticker, perfectly round. On it are the words,"
EVERYTHING IS INTERESTING
" and she clambers onto his shoulders and pastes it on the ceiling directly above his bed, a small circle of colour in the whitewashed room. Already, it seems, she knows him.
She fascinates him like no-one else, and he begins to wonder why. She is certainly attractive, but not to the point where they all have dark fantasies about her. He's seen her naked only once, only kissed her about twenty times. But that's not it; he knows the connection is not just physical, not just romance. It's almost more profound or something (he thinks that's the right word).
When she is in his room, the sparks in her eyes transform the bare walls into multitudes of technicolour shapes. She shows him her world through their time together, and she longs for him to open up to her too. Slowly, painfully, their conversations become less one-sided. He begins joining in on her tangents of oil paintings, mine mechanics, train timetables, Baroque music, and Marxist-Leninism. She casts her radiant glow wherever she can in his life, and he is eternally grateful for it, though he does not realize it yet. Every day he wakes up, reads the words, her words, and that feeling rises up again. He can't yet describe it, but he knows that it's the feeling she has coursing through her veins non-stop, every moment in her life.
********
She will lay herself on the railroad tracks in eight years' time. He will become a world-renown artist, and wherever he goes he will give away, freely, the orange stickers he carries in his pocket.
She is a vibrant spark of life, ready to explode into full flame at any second. Spontaneous and creative, the world is a puzzle which she must dissect. Everything fascinates her, from the sciences to the arts to how people work, and she does not hide it. She seeks information, she desires experience.
She ends up at his house, quite by chance due to transport and timetabling complications. As his mother serves them lunch, he watches, carefully but silently, as she optimizes a hypothetical solution to the aforementioned complications on a napkin with a stub of pencil.
The second time she is there voluntarily. They sit in his room, bare as an asylum, a solitary window the only source of light. His conversations are dry and lack enthusiasm, so she talks, mostly.
The one time, she brings him a gift. It is a small orange sticker, perfectly round. On it are the words,"
" and she clambers onto his shoulders and pastes it on the ceiling directly above his bed, a small circle of colour in the whitewashed room. Already, it seems, she knows him.
She fascinates him like no-one else, and he begins to wonder why. She is certainly attractive, but not to the point where they all have dark fantasies about her. He's seen her naked only once, only kissed her about twenty times. But that's not it; he knows the connection is not just physical, not just romance. It's almost more profound or something (he thinks that's the right word).
When she is in his room, the sparks in her eyes transform the bare walls into multitudes of technicolour shapes. She shows him her world through their time together, and she longs for him to open up to her too. Slowly, painfully, their conversations become less one-sided. He begins joining in on her tangents of oil paintings, mine mechanics, train timetables, Baroque music, and Marxist-Leninism. She casts her radiant glow wherever she can in his life, and he is eternally grateful for it, though he does not realize it yet. Every day he wakes up, reads the words, her words, and that feeling rises up again. He can't yet describe it, but he knows that it's the feeling she has coursing through her veins non-stop, every moment in her life.
********
She will lay herself on the railroad tracks in eight years' time. He will become a world-renown artist, and wherever he goes he will give away, freely, the orange stickers he carries in his pocket.
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