#drinking smoking weed football parties tour bus video games

[releaseholiday]

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[rulefour]

Aye, Aye, Captain: Resistance begins a Tohm

when i decided to join the army, i was almost thirty pounds underweight for the age of 19. i had built up a strong enough sense of self to begin to master a train of thought but still had enough wayward energy to run low on esteem. like a catepillar on a thin leaf in a dense, wet spring, or a wandering child in an abandoned industrial warehouse, i was shy, curious, and brave. growing up in miami, it was easy to have friends. we climbed trees, built tree houses, and followed train tracks as far as we could before dark. we picked up skateboarding and riding bikes through the streets of cutler ridge, up to miami beach, down to black point marina, doing laps around the metro zoo, catching the metro rail or a bus when we gathered enough change and were a little too bruised to push or pedal. we would jump fences, climb up roofs, and jump down all the stairs and loading docks we could find, waxing and carving eternal art into every curb, ledge, and rail we passed, playing chicken with traffic. we would run from the cops, get caught, and get free rides home to our parents. we filmed and edited our own skate videos on hi-8 cassette tapes. when we weren’t out, we built our own ramps and rails at home, jumping over trash cans and chairs and immense heaps of boredom.

in middle school i got into fights a lot because i would push people's buttons incessantly once i found them. sometimes with friends over stupid things like when i borrowed a video game and he said i didn't, tossing each other into lockers in the hall in between classes. we weren't great friends afterwards. Sometimes with mortal enemies over meer cultural differences like accents and height - a goofily, toweringly tall hispanic kid who lifted me up against a wall in the middle of class with one hand, and punched me straight in the mouth with the other, as i feebly tried to punch him in the side of the head. we bonded in c.s.i. and became friends. sometimes with my brother over anything, like, "what are you doing? How about some rug burn?" as he dragged me across the floor by my feet. I probably pointed out to him one too many times that he was tall and wore glasses. we're still brothers. my family moved residence often due to consistent low income, the unrelenting rising cost of living, and an unhealthy, struggling relationship between my parents. luckily i stayed at the same middle school. I would ride my skateboard and utilize the public bus system and metro rail to get to school when needed. the freedom led me to explore the city on my own from time to time and experiment with shoplifting candle wax and candy bars. both for grinding.

for some reason we moved further south to a trailer in homestead. it was hard to reach my friends from here. i vaguely remember my dad shaving his entire head, eybrows included. shortly after starting highschool at south dade, we moved to the west coast of florida. i never got to land a kick flip down the six set out front of the school. i’ve moved so much, i don't remember where i was. i've lived in houses, apartments, condos, trailers, and one-room efficiencies. i never seemed to have trouble making new friends but port charlotte highschool was a challenge against that. especially being in a new, small town on the other side of the state. i made a friend that played music and skateboarded, and held on tight. his parents smoked weed with him and listened to a lot of frank zappa. i taught myself how to play guitar southpaw on a righty as a slow realization began to set in that the toll that skateboarding goofy and mongo had taken on my body was not worth the miles upon miles of flat, rough asphalt that charlotte county offered as opposed to the skaters playground of my hometown. i continued to skate anyway. every now and then a few old friends from miami would pool together their piggy banks and greyhound bus up to visit so i could tour them all the fantastically flat skate spots of PC. i forgot my sony hi-8 camcorder on the roof of the car one day they were visiting, and we drove away to a spot to skate. realizing we didn't have the camera when we arrived, we turned around and went back home to find smashed parts of the camera in the street a block from the house, but no camera. i was unphased. my friends were shocked at my indifference. i felt the same as i ever did about anything. what happens, happens.

to help my mom pay rent and bills, i washed dishes at a couple of elderly homes, blaring grunge and punk rock on a stereo as i closed the kitchen, sneaking swigs of tequila from the liqour stash in the walk-in freezers. a large, jovial aquantance i washed dishes with at one place, whose nickname was buttonz for some reason, had a caddilac and a lot of weed. on our breaks we would drive around the block, smoke blunts, then zone out the rest of the night while washing dishes and clearing tables, smiling at the old folks with bloodshot eyes and our headphones on. then i worked at a sam’s club stocking produce. took me until i got fired three months in to learn to rotate the greens properly, or so they thought. turns out customers could reach the back of the freezer and just grab the latest date, who would do such a thing? 

i got kicked out of regular highschool for smoking pot out of a can under the bleachers of the football field with my friend. and rightly so, smoking out of aluminum is dangerous. anyway, the technical school next door had more interesting classes like carpentry and electronics, and better teachers. one of my favorite teachers there was also a musician in a rock band. i made another friend here who played music and skated, i joined his grind core punk band as a lead guitarist and we recorded one song. getting better on the guitar, i started writing and recording my own songs in the noisiest possible ways i could think of. i continued smoking and drinking occasionally with and without friends, skipping certain classes to wander wooded areas near the school. attending random parties that i had only heard about but wasn’t invited to in search of any booze or drugs i could get my hands on for free. one late night party in the middle of the woods where lots of homeless people lived got raided by police. as we heard the radio chatter and saw flashlight beams through the trees, we scattered like critters in the dark. sledging our own path through brush and dirt, me and my friend found our way back to his car, spun out and turned a corner, only to meet flashing lights in our path. somehow my buddy managed to weave and outrun this cop car on these dark back roads in his crappy little dodge neon. sorry that was a different time... or was it? no, we somehow ended up at house party after making it out of the woods. wait that was another night. no, we got pulled over by the police on a main road and were given sobriety tests after trying to hide empty beer cans and lit joints under the car seats. actually, we were on foot after curfew from a recent hurricane, crawling under cop cars out front of the sheriffs office, doing a little night skating, dodging alligators slinking across streets trying to find the canal again. i don’t know. pretty sure all of that happened.

after graduating highschool via ged-opt-out test and akward smile holding a fake diploma, my mom and i moved a little more north out of skating distance from my few friends. i started classes at manattee community college on a pell grant. it felt like highschool all over again. shallow and insincere. weak grades in mathematics during highschool landed me with prime real estate in an introduction to algebra. i had given up efforts of making any more new freinds. almost every day, alone in my room, in a small apartment on a pond in sarasota, a great deal of sound and noise escaped me through things i could hold, bend, and break. the sounds and noises made their way into distorted digital recordings that are good at gathering digital dust. as an ultimate testament to my lonesomeness, i made an online friend through myspace and mutual musical interests and created a few songs by trading recordings back and forth through email. we remain strange.

to help my mom pay rent and bills, i worked at a call center answering incessant phone calls to explain to irate hillbillies why georgian gas bills were so high. the endless queue of complaints ticked by like the clock. one off adds another on. i was fired for progressively returning from breaks later and later. also, breifly at a hotel setting up rooms for business banquets and conferences. that was seasonal and i only worked one season. mid 2008, i was jobless. i tried to focus on school but became slower moving to reach my classes on time. slower moving to reach the bus on time. slower moving to get out of the apartment on time. one morning, i opened my eyelids but it was all i could do. flat on my back, arms to the side, lying in the center of my bed, i couldn’t look left or right, and i couldn’t close my eyes again. staring at the cieling, i couldn’t lift my head. i couldn’t move my toes or my fingers. i couldn’t speak. i tried to think but i couldn't remember who or where i was. it was about an hour before i slowly began to regain movement and memory. if this was the death of the ego, it was a botched suicide, or a monkey's paw wish. the ego comes back, like a zombie. it's exhausting. it takes seemless control of the self and tells you to take the wheel. who's really in charge here?

i trudged into school late only in time to bomb an algebra test. mental and body aches from public transportation and sitting at right-handed desks had caused an unjustifiable malice towards people and numbers. the economy crashed and i couldn’t find a job again even at a fast food restaurant. All the while throughout my bus routes to work, school, and then job searching, being bombarded by evangelist military recruiters on the streets and in emails at home from god-knows-who-i-gave-my-email-address-to that gave it to military dot com. one day, i decided to accept the free ride home from a couple charismatic sailors. like strangers with candy they offered sweetness, danger, glory, acceptance, and freedom. i left the vehicle stripped of all malice and innocent thoughts of perpetual poverty, my mind grew with a different view of what was possible in my life. far away from what most keep close to.

of course, i headed straight to the army recruiters office not long after to shake off the thought of being trapped on a boat in the middle of the ocean and the odd backward glances i kept getting from those navy recruiters from the front seat. i'd rather jump out of a plane.