End lesson:

And we liked to party
and we kept it live
and we had a three volume tome of contemporary slang
to keep a handle on all this jive

-rod

It doesn't matter what we do

I could feel

your warmth.

You held me tight and dug your nails into my back. I remember when I dipped my face into your hair, that smell that drove me crazy filled my breath with ecstasy. You and me enveloped into one, pushing ourselves together again. That warmth filled the room, growing more and more as we forced each other closer. Your fingers trailed along teasing my skin that begged for more, Your small hand tightened around my arm as you dug your fingers into my skin after every breath. Oh but how momentous was it when I stood apart and we gazed into each others eyes for a second admiring the beauty of our skins.

I stared into your eyes and remembered that gaze. There had been many times when I had stared into your eyes and knew what they said. I am sure that I had given you the same look so many times, "I want you." I yelled with a look, blinked and screamed "I NEED YOU."

[end]

Nude

Words come and go
They are like my breath, constant and always recharging
They are like my weapons, loaded and ready

I have so much to say, so much to exclaim. So much to settle with the world but never enough time to structure my words! The papers are on the floor, the notebooks in the car, and my pen - where is my pen? Mess! Too many words and not enough time to organize them.

Then blam.

You hit me so hard I can't keep myself from being breathless. You make me speechless. The things you can do to me and the ways you can make me feel are ultimately distressing at the end of the day because I can't be with you. Ohhhhh and why not....

Why not....why couldn't I? Didn't I take care of you?
I've seen your biggest smile, I'm in the middle of your picture. You're hung tight around me.
I'm in the middle of the picture.

Pleasure, peace, love, comfort, religious

Call it what you want but it was my something else. I think back and try not too, its the worst when I see you away from me, being OK. I want you to be ok and I want you to feel horrible. I want you to miss me damnit.

-rod

There's nothing wrong with me...

Loving you. I know that this emptiness would disappear if I could fill the giant void you left when you walked away but although its been grueling I've been putting up with it. Letting it tear me up. The truth is that we both know this'll probably work better. We can say good-bye as friends and continue our life as that and not as lovers separated.

The truth is I don't want to say good-bye.

I've been feeling tried, for a long time now. By everyone and everything, and its way exciting that its been this long of a run. Don't think what I know you're trying to make it. Thoughts I know plague your mind with ideas of me - looking for clues to the possibilities. Truth is not even I could explain it but I know what I'm doing.

Tackling the waves of problems we faced it was nice to be back up against the wall but knowing I at least had you to confide in. You were there for all of it and we were there for everything. This is more memorable I think than anything in my life. Somethings though don't last forever, and some feelings don't stay strong. This is when perseverance and tolerance or something should have stepped in, but at our young ages and our hearts full of ambition I think its best if we tackle everything head on, alone.

Used to be one of the rotten ones...

The idea was not something that I really understood, I would argue how the artists never really drew upon anything meaningful with their words and they never played any instruments that required real skills. I remember making point of the fact that they would incorporate other peoples music and create very basic breaks(chops of songs usually in 4/16 breaks). Hip Hop has grown to be something completely different now. It's instrumentals have increased in not only complexity but diversity, pulling inspiration from long lost indian records, to completely recreating a genre with old, dusty records from a time long gone(blunted in the bomb shelter -- Madlib). I think all the beatheads from L.A. are doing a great job at progressing the genre but more importantly to me, they opened my eyes to what they were doing.

It's not about the end product for us I'd say. It's the journey towards it, the end part is just a culmination of the ideas you had while listening to all those dusty old records. Anyone can lay down a drum loop and throw a cute sounding horn or a fancy piano piece. It's a little bit more difficult though to find an original sound, a style, to pull it all together with. I think a lot of that comes from what you grew up influencing you up to that point, I never chose a genre to love or stick too although I do have my preferences(and hip hop is not really one of those). I think the spirit of hip hop can be carried through all sorts of mediums, and hip hop embodies a more updated jazz feel. The ability to be free from any classical rules, while still applying the basics though: Harmony, melody, and structure(albeit any of these can be argued). My musical journey has taken me from punk, rock, classical, jazz, all kinds of world music and even for awhile indie pop but I do believe it's that knowledge that all these genres has bestowed on me that let's me create something original.

Records...are something I just love. My equipment can't really keep up with me anymore, but if I could I would still buy records everyday of the week. I pick up whatever looks interesting, and yes, I do judge a record by its cover (hah!). I remember at first being interested in records because of the collectible aspect when it comes to indie bands releasing limited press Vinyls but soon I purchased my first set of tables, a mixer....and I can only say that since that moment I have not been able to get rid of my itch. I enjoy the music as a hobby, not as a background noise to drown out the emptiness of a room, and this is the ultimate way to enjoy your music, by making it yours.

It echoed louder

than usual that night.

The moon poured through cracks in the blinds, even still the room was as dead as a mausoleum. From one side came the quiet pips of someone snoozing quietly, from the other wisps of music in the air. I was comfortable though, laying on my bed running through my memories, watching the highlight reels.

The headphones sang their songs and brought memory after memory. The darkness was my blanket, engulfing me in that comfort of anonymity, in that area where nothing was real and everything was only a faint memory of a time where almost nothing seemed real. The echoes of laughter rang through my ears, the sounds of children on some island in the middle of a vast sea enjoying life without hesitation. The lawn was washed out, too green to be real; and the sun washed everything white, a contrast to the darkness which I lay in, a floating sun burnt 70's polaroid hinting of a time when nothing mattered.

The neighborhood was small, uninteresting and run down. Boxes of the same looking little apartment were huddled together within the gates but at the west end of the complex, on the far corner sat a little piece of heaven within this purgatory. There, the door would open wide to a vast wide open green field, I remember you could comfortably fit 22 of the best football players you could find in little Garden Grove. At one end of the field giant trees lumbered over the whole complex, their gigantic arms stretching out past anything my little limbs could ever reach; and soft green grass till the opposite end.

One room held all the wisdom, experience, lies, and problems. Another held hope for the future, evolution and adaptation. And yet another helped pay the bills. The grand hall contained our souls, entrapped in the tube and glued to the chairs. Our galley, well food.

It feels good, to be so lost within oneself sometimes.

It's when the memories burn brighter than the sun that I can't help but want to go back to that place. When the audio of happiness stream from one side of my head to the other, echoing as it comes back, and back, and back, and back...

A surprise event

The new year came and went but I was too busy to notice.

Straddled down in the ICU fighting...fighting...fighting for what?

Life? What is it?

It's strange. While I lay in my bed with morphine pumping through my body I got scared for the first time in my life. I got scared about life.

I didn't get scared that I was going to lose my life that night, no never, i'm too much of a fighter to go out like that. I wasn't scared that I was going to never wake up but I was scared that had I not woken up, what would have been of my life?

What would people remember? That every time I inhaled some smoke that I could blow a ridiculous O? That I was phenomenal at Halo? I didn't know, I still don't. That night I could have disappeared off the face of the planet, and maybe that could have been my end.

It's funny, the kid who was all the questions and ponders, abstractly might I add, about life could have lost his life in some stupid event that was not even important. For the first time in my life I was scared that I would have ended up being nobody.

Nothing.

There already is enough Nothing and enough Nobodies in this universe, especially on this tiny dot in the middle of the infinite nothingness we know as Space.

But it was a good experience sitting on my death bed, IV's streaming out of my arms, monitor pads watching my heart; I learned that I can't just be NOBODY, and that my life right NOW is just that - nothing. I have nothing to look forward too, and nobody to help share it. I've never been the kind of person to want that routine life I've never been one to join the idiot box generation either, then why would I waste my time? Why would I waste the precious seconds I've been granted to experience and understand the most I can doing nothing and being no one?

Is it because I can't find my calling? Or because I can't find a place to be someone?

The truth is I don't know. I've accepted the fact that somethings I will never know, and that sometimes you don't need to know. Life can't wait for anyone and life sure as hell isn't going to land in front of me.

The following night I was left alone to recover and I thought about myself and those close to me. There's only one way I can be happy I realized, and I have to take action now because if I don't I might one day die as a nobody, who did nothing. And that scares me more than death itself.