Fat Ninja

Don’t read that thinking I’ve started smoking again, because I haven’t. It was actually kind of a memory exercise that I ran myself through. I was listening to Dead Can Dance’s album Toward the Within this morning. It’s an album that I listened to quite a bit in my senior year of high-school, so I used it to kind of take me back to that time of my life.

I remember that in my brooding adolesence I used to sit in my room with very few lights on, listening to this sort of music, cigarette dangling precariously from my lower lip, contemplating subjects ranging from unrequited love to the impending horror of graduation that threatened to destroy the life that I had come to know and love.

It’s funny when I think about it now. I mean, just to think of the stark contrasts between me now and me then is mind boggling. I honestly believe that if these two versions of me were to ever meet, they’d most likely look on one another with pity and a quiet contempt.

I think in highschool I behaved as though there were some unseen audience, watching as my life unfolded according to a script I had never seen, much less read. I suppose I can thank television and film for that. After all, the interesting characters that I’ve encountered on screen have, for the most part, been altogether oblivious of their audience.

In short, I tended toward theatrics and melodramatics in highschool. Every tiny change I encountered, or every little thing that did not go my way was a cataclysmic event that threatened to rend my soul from my body and leave me empty. That’s not to say that these feelings weren’t sincere at the time, as they most certainly were.

It’s a good thing that we grow up and mature (most of us). It gives us perspective. As a father, though, I need to keep close to that perspective so that I do not lose sight of it. I want, of all things in my relationship with Byron, to be able to have some sort of grasp on what he will experience as he grows.

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