Good Jobs, Steve.

As I sit and contently listen to my Ipod, (sorry for the lame pun above) I’m struck by just how much these things have affected my life. No grand epiphany or shocking revelation, but from a kid who’s first real foray into actually listening to music was a 2 gig nano way back freshman year, I owe a large amount of my musical tastes to these blasted things. At first those 2 gigs seemed like all the space I’d ever need, after a year or so, I just realized that it wouldn’t cut it anymore. So along came my 8 gig, which is when I realized all the different types of music there were. Gone were the days of “this song is popular, ergo it is good”. Now I could just listen to random peoples’ Itunes and decide for my self what I liked. And now here I sit, listening to track 98 out of 3597, knowing that each of the songs on here have been culled from a list. Each, a song I like, mayhaps not to listen to daily, but each song good in its own way. I started with whatever you would call that junk that came out in middle school, and have progressed in a million random directions. From Animals as Leaders to Boston, from Eyadea & Abilities to Marc Rizzo. And I owe it all to a device smaller than my hand.

Untitled

Fool. Emotions swirl; sadness, longing. Acceptance. Contradictions to live with, old friends making their rounds yet again. Thoughts teeter on the brink of… Madness? Folly? Swings back. Ration, logic, calculations. All return. A balancing act. Lies and truth, acceptance and denial. Ah, how naive of me to believe I could rid myself of them that easily. I am… content? No. Whole.

As I ramble

I hate being an empathetic person. I can always put myself in someone else’s shoes, make excuses for them, explain everything wrong away. And I can’t stand it. I want to be able to say, “I don’ t give a damn about your reasons, these were your actions.” Not, “You’re human, I’m human. Mistakes happen and you learn and move on.” Black and white would be so much simpler, You’re a good person, You’re bad.

Grey just gets confusing. Morality changes based on the situation. Good and evil become nothing more than points of view; different wordings of the same event. Villains do good, and heroes fall. But where do we draw the line? Where in the this quagmire of shades do we say “This, this is evil or This all that is good”? Is it different for each of us? Could my “evil” be your “good”? If so, who is right? Do we turn to religion for answers; try to categorize every thing we do based on archaic rules? Trust our own judgement and try to cope with the myriad of fluctuating variables of our own views?

I don’t know the all the answers, hell, I barely know any at all. But as for me, I’ll follow my own rules. I’ll  live in my grey world; taking the good, taking the bad, taking the neutral. I’ll put my myself in some else’s shoes. Because as difficult as it can be, as much turmoil and confusion as it can bring, I’d hate being static and unchanging even more. So I’ll plod on, accepting that in most, NOT all, situations, good or evil just won’t cut it. It will have to be good and evil.

A Non-fiction Fictional

Love_Is_Not_All.html

So, I wake up, realize I have twenty minutes to get to class. Have an “Oh Shit” moment, sprint to the showers, lather, rinse, repeat. Sprint back to dorm. Alarm goes off “Just a little late”, smack it around some… Oh hell, hope that didn’t wake up  my roommate, I’m sure my white ass in his face is the first thing he wants to wake up to… A’ight, he’s still snoring, I’m good. Oh crap, class starts in 10 and there was something I was supposed to read… Ah, it was just a short little poem, I’ll just power read it while the teacher rambles. Ok, made it, just in time. Open up browser, “Love is not all” yada yada yada, oh ok, it’s just a sappy little love poem… although that making friends with death for lack of love alone is a little offsetting. “Logan, what do you think?” “Um.. uh…. It starts off by describing what love isn’t, switches to a “but even though it doesn’t really meet any of your physical needs, people still die, whether literally or metaphorically, without it. ” “Ok, but you need to go deeper” (That’s what she said! Oh Shit! Don’t laugh! Don’t even think about laughing… ok immature moment avoided, back to paying attention). “Anyone else have anything to add?” Person in back, somewhat shyly “I think it has sexual overtones, ” A floating spar that rises and sink and rise and sink again, and later ‘moaning for release” “Trade the memory of this night…”  “Good! A lot of people have noticed that, some compare the images of lust with the idea of love.” Reread poem. Oh ok, I get that. “I think it may be dealing with the future, perhaps the author and the person they are involved with have been fighting or something?” “Read a bit more into it, what if the author was just being thoughtful, what if this  was written in reply to ‘Do you love me?” Reread poem again, ‘nagged by want past resolution’s power’, ‘Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,’ ‘I might be driven to sell your love for peace'”.  Oh, damn. She is talking about the end, leaving him. In the difficult hour, when things are darkest between them, when she is hurting, when she has in a moment of passion decided she doesn’t need him, she might “sell” his love for peace. Sell, that’s a harsh word, purely financial, no emotion just… business. “Trade the memory of this night”, try and forget him. And then at the end, She doesn’t claim she won’t leave him, things could get to bad to salvage, but she doesn’t think they will. This isn’t a sappy love poem at all. In my mind it talks of the hardships of love, and how even though love doesn’t  fulfill your physical needs; it’s not food, nor watter, nor rest, nor shelter, it’s absence can destroy you. It’s a person being honest about the question of “Will we work? Will we go the distance?” And the author doesn’t know.

Enervate

Rest eludes me, brain firing random thoughts and images; they make no sense, even unto itself. I wait, as thought and emotion slow and begin to seep out. Fatigue sets in. I quiet.

Strangers

As I go through my day, I sometimes wonder what is happening behind the masks people present to the world. Sometimes I catch fleeting glimpses of pain, of joy, of sorrow, of peace. But oftentimes, their faces are blank to me; perhaps I’ll get a fake smile or brief nod of acknowledgement, but as to the nature of the person beneath, I often simply do not know. And as I paint that selfsame smile on my own face, I can’t help but think, do they wonder about me as well?

Let’s get down to business (to defeat the Huns)

Sorry for the lame Mulan shout out, I’ll try to keep my nerdisity under control. But… back to the matter at hand. I’ll appease my ego and start this with a brief autobiography. I was born March 5, 1992 in Boone Hospital in the wee hours of the morning. I was born to Charles and Tammy Dunn, the first and only child of their marriage. While I wish I could report that life went happily ever after and that love lasts forever, I have few memories of my parents together. They divorced while I was very young. While I will not deny that my parents splitting had an effect on me, it didn’t ruin my life, and I’m not an emotional wreck that can never have a meaningful relationship. In truth, I have a working relationship with both my parents, and though several times I have feared them to be strained almost to the point of breaking, we have always been able to sort things out. I started out my life as a southern Baptist, and was even enrolled in a Christian school until the second grade. After that, I went to public school were my soul was corrup.. actually no, I met what will hopefully be several friends for life going through the public education system, and a good deal of who I am today reflects their influences. And so ushered in my high school career, we’ll just omit my freshman and sophomore years, I was a shy,stuck up, pretentious ass. During my junior year, I fell in love, fought with my parents, and went from just being an ass, to a (sometimes) decent human being who just acted like an ass. I started to become my own person; no longer was my opinion measured as lesser than those of others. And the arrogance of that stance sometimes burnt me, but it also let me make mistakes and to learn from them. Senior year was a blur, I moped around, dejected and heartbroken for a bit, got over it, made nice and moved on. After graduation, I began working at Food Lion and acting in community theatre. There I met the next woman I let into my heart, but since I’m still sorting out exactly how I feel, we’ll just stick with acknowledging we dated and stating we have since ceased to. The next woman to steal my heart? Hopefully, she is out there hiding somewhere, waiting to be discovered. And now I’m in college, having met some pretty cool guys and gals to waste my time hanging with. And that brings us to the now, me sitting here,  in my dorm, wasting time on this blog :)

And fyi dear readers, after this, I’ve decided to pick a single topic and ramble on about it for a while, so hopefully they will be slightly less jumbled than this one.

Well… you see,

Being the trend-setter that I am, I have decided to start publishing a blog. They will be incremental, seldom have any readily apparent rhyme or reason, and will probably end up making me look the fool, for I seem to play that role most easily. Oh, and yes, for me, being “deep and meaningful” often goes hand in hand with a small dose of melancholy. So, I’ll apologize for any sad-ons I give people. But now that’s out of the way…..