Trials and Experiments

"I want to choose
from the entire forest
a tree
to whom
I will confide
a secret."


I haven't had much of an appetite lately. I'll cook dinner just to watch it get cold. And even if I start to eat, I don't finish it. I always leave a corner of the crust, or the last half of the sandwich and I never understood the correlation this action has to my every waking moment.

I'm am an artist by nature. And when I say that, I mean I wasn't pounded through the public school system nurtured into scribbling on tests and taking overdose amounts of art classes to pass. I played sports and took honors classes, read mass quantities of Shakespeare in one sitting, and started writing competitively when I was 15. I wasn't your typical artistic stereotype either; I wouldn't wear trench coats, keep to myself, drink tea and carry around a portfolio full of unaccredited, structural depraved drawings. I was a socialite. I had cops at my house more than legitimate friends. I walked around the halls known as the kid who did this or the kid who did that, or for my fog horn bleached hair. All that mattered to me during those years was being known; was showing everyone that I am worthy of acknowledgment regardless of if I stopped growing and couldn't play basketball anymore. I was still " that kid who looks like eminem" and as much as I resented that phrase, I loved it. I felt that was all that mattered some days. Even in the blind stupor of popularity, I still found my ways to be artistic. I'd put a twist on all my actions; I'd surprise you with some random act of stupidity like smoking a bowl in the lunch room or by robbing one of my friends. I call that art because it never made sense. It was never rational. It was always open to interpretation and that's mainly what I got off on. Confusingly keeping you on your toes, wondering if that nice shy guy you grew up with was either going to sit down and talk to you or punch you in the throat. This was my teenage art. It was malicious and uncalled for and fortunate enough for me, I finally got the acknowledgment I deserved.

I always planned on finishing high school on time and with my friends and going to Hawaii University and never doing drugs and growing up to be a video game developing super hero. However, behind the wheel of my own destruction, I found the perfect routes to not finishing anything how I planned. I would always find a way to leave the crust; I would finish my tests thinking it was aced, come back to school the next day to find out I failed for not including whole answers. And instead of taking a step back and looking at what I did to get there, I would just simply get angry. I remember one day I walked into my Honors History class and literally threw all my teachers stuff off his desk and threatened to beat his ass if he didn't give me a better grade. Instead of saying , "damn I could have done this better'- I just deflected all the responsibility towards who ever else was involved. But the universe doesn't let people get away with that type of nonsense. Not finishing things properly was going to come back at me 10 fold. And it did. The artist had reached his block. It was concealed in the form of ecstasy and carried with it a life long lesson. Here's the lesson: Ignorance doesn't make you invincible. There are still laws. There are still bigger, tougher, better fighters out there. There is still worse things that can happen.

My dream of becoming that super hero never came true, and its my fault. I fell into holes that were too big for me to crawl out of and even to this day, I still carry my shovel just in case. I am living a life full of mistakes and the sad thing is that I have yet to break that pattern. I am 23 and still leaving bits of my crazy, beautiful art unfinished. Sometimes for the better, but for now... I'd like to just start eating normally again.