Kill Your Television

Law & Order: SVU marathon on USA all day today. There goes my plans of getting anything done. I'm really ridiculously hooked on this show. Makes me wanna be a detective when I grow up.

Josephine Collective

Kickass band. Kickass video. Also, they share a name with my grandmother.

1:30 AM

Do you ever worry, when you've had a glass of water and you're crunching the ice cubes, that you've accidentally bitten off part of the glass and when you bite down it will cut into the soft parts of your mouth and bleed everywhere?

I worry about that, sometimes.

I mean, not in an emo way, but in a wouldn't-that-totally-suck way.

Original fiction can be found over here:

http://next-best-lie.livejournal.com/

another year older, not much wiser

It's my birthday.

Youth in Memoriam

His name is Jesse. He's my age, but was a year behind me in school. We were friends, more or less, since the fifth grade. We even dated for a while, that special sort of Junior High dating that involves awkward silences and surreptitious hand-holding. He wrote me letters all that spring, even though we lived no more than a mile away from each other. For years I carried the dragon he drew for me in my wallet, the paper soft and creased, the green crayon flaking off in waxy scales. Even after that, he trusted me enough to come to me first when he though he had maybe gotten a girl pregnant, when he needed someone to lean on for a while.

He didn't come to me when his life started to fall apart. He didn't have to - we all saw it happening.

Jesse had the sort of smile that made you fall in love with him. It was huge and happy and open, and flashed across his face like summer lightning. He was a wild thing, made of energy and emotion and bold, bright ideas. I can't pinpoint the date when that boy started to disappear, but it must have been around his sophomore year of high school. I can, to some extent, tell you what caused it: bad home life, hard time at school, shitty relationships, drugs.

I have more regrets about Jesse than anything else in my life. More guilt. I knew he was falling, we all knew it. We stood by and watched the smiles disappear, the spark fade from his eyes. We watched.

It was like Jesse was an anonymous homeless man on a street corner. You see him there, spare him a pitying thought, maybe a handful of change, but in the end you walk right on by. You don't care, not really, not enough to actually do something. You probably don't even think about him again.

Jesse deserved so much more than that. He was our friend, not a random stranger, and we failed him utterly. Someone should have done something. I should have done something. I could have helped him, I think, could have saved him if I had tried.

It's too late now.

(The boy didn't know what his life would become. Think of this as a memorial, of sorts, for a time when he was closer to whole.)

Photo Post #1 - 森の池