We all have a phase as young boys to have our parents get us into sports. I played a bunch of them, but never truly got the hang of any of them. I did play Little League baseball for quite some time. And did not know I should wear a cup. Or a jock strap. I didn't know what they were. For a while, at least.
The first time I saw a cup I was very young at my cousin's house. I was playing around on the floor by the shoes when I discovered it. Totally oblivious to what this solid plastic construction with Swiss-cheese like holes in it could be, I came to my own conclusion. I placed it on my face, the narrow part over my nose and the wider lower part over my chin and I ran into the next room.
"Aunt Cathy! Look at my mask!" I exclaimed, very pleased with myself.
It took me a few moments to realize that they kept saying "Cup" and didn't mean the thing I drink from, and that perhaps this new item was called the same name. She then explained what Uncle Pete used it for.
I was upset by my decision. This would become an early pattern in my behavior.
Also, once, in Little League, playing catcher, I took a baseball to my huevos. Everybodys' Dads laughed at me. My mother bought me a jock strap the next day. A lesson was learned, but the damage remained the same.
5.06.2007
5.01.2007
JOLENE
One morning, I woke up with an enormous hangover and the word “JOLENE” written across my chest in Sharpie.
I also had “STAIR” written down my right hip, and my left forearm was a mess of words and tracing veins in several different colors.
Here’s how this happened:
Freshmen year of college, living in the dorms, my roommate and I are having a party. The theme of this party is that one of the Music Major kids on our floor got absolutely shitfaced in the early afternoon, got kicked out of a public event and was now passed out. His roommate, CG, was a good friend of ours, who despised his alcoholic roommate. Alcoholic Music Major also happened to be totally loaded and had an impressive collection of liquors. CG, my roommate and I came together and decided we had to help him with his Problem and the easiest way to do this was to drink his booze and tell him that he had drank it all in the morning. So CG nabbed a bottle of 100-proof Smirnoff vodka and we had a party.
Several shots and a few beers in, I started writing on myself. Just simple words on my left forearm to remember the next day. This is a thing of mine. Anyways, even more shots in, CG and I started tracing out our veins in marker, then got abstract and turned them into tree branches. We made several jokes about ink poisoning and blood brothers. More drinking led to our inevitable desire to get high. CG thought his passed out alcoholic roommate might have bud, so he ran off to see if he could pinch some. Unfortunately, only the smallest nugglet was produced from the heist. We toweled the door, turned on the fan, cracked a window and ripped a bowl...to no real effect. CG’s eyes then lit up, and he raced back to his room.
He returned with a pile of pale grey-greenish leaves, clearly also procured from his unconscious roommate. We had no idea what it was, and his only response amidst his cackling laughter was “Salvia Divornium.” I instantly knew this was going to be one of those nights.
We had a few more drinks, some guests came in and out, but it was not long before temptation overtook us. This was a new type of plant we had never burned before, so we made to make an occasion out of it. We had to go to the Pond.
The three of us left our guests and their intoxicated merriment and set out across campus, through parking lots, and down into the woods to the magical pond where many a drug user has used drugs safely and securely. We sat on a rock and lit our bowl up. (Note: later research into salvia divornium would tell me that the preferred method of inhaling was through a water pipe, or bong, but we were unaware of this at the time.) The vodka and beer were already playing havoc with our brains so we did not notice anything out of the ordinary at all. The pond was still serene, cool and safe, our occasion was had. We went back to the room to drink more.
Over the next few hours, many different people came in and went out of my room. I’m not entirely sure who all of them were. Someone played the guitar. My roommate took a girl back to her room. Someone brought their friends over. One way or another, a lot more drinking was done and I was feeling very, very messed up. It was like being high, but more like a super-high. A new high. And drunk. I was very, very drunk. My loose lips let slip to another denzien of my floor that we had a bunch of salvia. He immediately wanted to try it, as did another. And this time, we had my ghetto-bong from earlier in the semester. Windows up, fan cranked, flame on.
I’m not precisely sure how much salvia we smoked. But it was a lot. The leaves burned very quickly, and one of the guys told me that you’re supposed to smoke the extract since it was more potent, so we just smoked as many of the leaves as we could. My roommate came back, drunk people left, we turned the music down, the night began to settle in. This was OK. I was feeling very OK with everything.
When the last person left and I started to get ready for bed, I started to notice the first signs of tripping. I didn’t even expect to actually trip from just the leaves. I didn’t even know what tripping felt like. But I got into bed, there was a weird incandescent light filling the room from an outside streetlight, the White Stripes were playing. Everything was kinda groovy. I lied down on my back.
Then things got less groovy. The song got really loud and dirty. It was the song “Jolene.” I thought about this, and as I thought about this, the ceiling spoke to me. Those separate panels you always see in classrooms split right down the seam, becoming the two sides of it’s mouth. One panel with a fire sprinkler became the eye. The sprinkler/pupil swivelled and looked right at me, and I meant right at me. The lips moved apart and I heard a deep booming voice inside my head. “You should write Jolene on your chest,” my ceiling said. I agreed with my ceiling.
I had a Sharpie on hand so I scribbled it right then and there, backwards J and all. As I gazed upon my body, I also must have found a good reason to write “Stair” down my side. Couldn’t tell you why. After this, I promptly passed out.
I awoke the next morning with the residual hangover and the discovery of my self-graffiti. I immediately went to the shower to take care of this. As my roommate came in the floor bathroom we all shared, he spoke to me through the curtain which made me really uncomfortable but we were both fucked up so it didn’t matter.
“Dude,” he said. “I had a dream I talked to Bob Sagat.”
“Really?” I replied.
But I guess he moved away from the curtain at that point. It took a while to wash off all the ink.
Forever, I’ll remember the name Jolene, but never know why the ceiling thought it was so important.
I also had “STAIR” written down my right hip, and my left forearm was a mess of words and tracing veins in several different colors.
Here’s how this happened:
Freshmen year of college, living in the dorms, my roommate and I are having a party. The theme of this party is that one of the Music Major kids on our floor got absolutely shitfaced in the early afternoon, got kicked out of a public event and was now passed out. His roommate, CG, was a good friend of ours, who despised his alcoholic roommate. Alcoholic Music Major also happened to be totally loaded and had an impressive collection of liquors. CG, my roommate and I came together and decided we had to help him with his Problem and the easiest way to do this was to drink his booze and tell him that he had drank it all in the morning. So CG nabbed a bottle of 100-proof Smirnoff vodka and we had a party.
Several shots and a few beers in, I started writing on myself. Just simple words on my left forearm to remember the next day. This is a thing of mine. Anyways, even more shots in, CG and I started tracing out our veins in marker, then got abstract and turned them into tree branches. We made several jokes about ink poisoning and blood brothers. More drinking led to our inevitable desire to get high. CG thought his passed out alcoholic roommate might have bud, so he ran off to see if he could pinch some. Unfortunately, only the smallest nugglet was produced from the heist. We toweled the door, turned on the fan, cracked a window and ripped a bowl...to no real effect. CG’s eyes then lit up, and he raced back to his room.
He returned with a pile of pale grey-greenish leaves, clearly also procured from his unconscious roommate. We had no idea what it was, and his only response amidst his cackling laughter was “Salvia Divornium.” I instantly knew this was going to be one of those nights.
We had a few more drinks, some guests came in and out, but it was not long before temptation overtook us. This was a new type of plant we had never burned before, so we made to make an occasion out of it. We had to go to the Pond.
The three of us left our guests and their intoxicated merriment and set out across campus, through parking lots, and down into the woods to the magical pond where many a drug user has used drugs safely and securely. We sat on a rock and lit our bowl up. (Note: later research into salvia divornium would tell me that the preferred method of inhaling was through a water pipe, or bong, but we were unaware of this at the time.) The vodka and beer were already playing havoc with our brains so we did not notice anything out of the ordinary at all. The pond was still serene, cool and safe, our occasion was had. We went back to the room to drink more.
Over the next few hours, many different people came in and went out of my room. I’m not entirely sure who all of them were. Someone played the guitar. My roommate took a girl back to her room. Someone brought their friends over. One way or another, a lot more drinking was done and I was feeling very, very messed up. It was like being high, but more like a super-high. A new high. And drunk. I was very, very drunk. My loose lips let slip to another denzien of my floor that we had a bunch of salvia. He immediately wanted to try it, as did another. And this time, we had my ghetto-bong from earlier in the semester. Windows up, fan cranked, flame on.
I’m not precisely sure how much salvia we smoked. But it was a lot. The leaves burned very quickly, and one of the guys told me that you’re supposed to smoke the extract since it was more potent, so we just smoked as many of the leaves as we could. My roommate came back, drunk people left, we turned the music down, the night began to settle in. This was OK. I was feeling very OK with everything.
When the last person left and I started to get ready for bed, I started to notice the first signs of tripping. I didn’t even expect to actually trip from just the leaves. I didn’t even know what tripping felt like. But I got into bed, there was a weird incandescent light filling the room from an outside streetlight, the White Stripes were playing. Everything was kinda groovy. I lied down on my back.
Then things got less groovy. The song got really loud and dirty. It was the song “Jolene.” I thought about this, and as I thought about this, the ceiling spoke to me. Those separate panels you always see in classrooms split right down the seam, becoming the two sides of it’s mouth. One panel with a fire sprinkler became the eye. The sprinkler/pupil swivelled and looked right at me, and I meant right at me. The lips moved apart and I heard a deep booming voice inside my head. “You should write Jolene on your chest,” my ceiling said. I agreed with my ceiling.
I had a Sharpie on hand so I scribbled it right then and there, backwards J and all. As I gazed upon my body, I also must have found a good reason to write “Stair” down my side. Couldn’t tell you why. After this, I promptly passed out.
I awoke the next morning with the residual hangover and the discovery of my self-graffiti. I immediately went to the shower to take care of this. As my roommate came in the floor bathroom we all shared, he spoke to me through the curtain which made me really uncomfortable but we were both fucked up so it didn’t matter.
“Dude,” he said. “I had a dream I talked to Bob Sagat.”
“Really?” I replied.
But I guess he moved away from the curtain at that point. It took a while to wash off all the ink.
Forever, I’ll remember the name Jolene, but never know why the ceiling thought it was so important.
Blogs.
These "weblogs" have been getting pretty popular within the year(s), and frankly, I approve. I think it's putting Internet space to some good use, by letting everybody contribute, create and share. I'm no judge on the quality of a "blog", but through observation I've deduced that at least most blogs are created for one, or more, of the following purposes:
This later type of blog are mostly used through websites such as Livejournal.com, Myspace.com, Xanga.com and The Open Diary. There're a bunch more, but I definitely don't feel like linking to all of them.
I'm not going to lie. I own a blog. You're reading it, yeah, yeah, I know. But in the past, I kept a couple of blogs of ... "ill repute."
As far as type goes, they fit the first category. They were all very lame. I say "all" because I switched sites a lot, alternating between different journals with different changes in my life. I am now, hopefully with a cathartic effect, cataloging all my past blogs (in chronological order):
That was fun. I hope nobody actually reads those though. Embarassment to perhaps it's highest degree.
Whatever...I'm over it.
- A journal/diary-esque recounting of the author's day, complete with their bias and feelings on different subjects important to them, like their love life, current drama, and online surveys and memes of no real consequence, along with their current mood and music.
- An outlet for an author's artwork, creative writing, novels, poetry, fanfiction, etc.
- A political forum and/or soap box platform, where the author gives his views on current "hot" topics in politics and world news.
This later type of blog are mostly used through websites such as Livejournal.com, Myspace.com, Xanga.com and The Open Diary. There're a bunch more, but I definitely don't feel like linking to all of them.
I'm not going to lie. I own a blog. You're reading it, yeah, yeah, I know. But in the past, I kept a couple of blogs of ... "ill repute."
As far as type goes, they fit the first category. They were all very lame. I say "all" because I switched sites a lot, alternating between different journals with different changes in my life. I am now, hopefully with a cathartic effect, cataloging all my past blogs (in chronological order):
- Free Open Diary
- T'was my first blogging experience. My sophomore year in high school. It was a lame and sad time of my life. I created it because my girlfriend at the time had one, the reason need not go further than that. Thank God Almighty, that due to not writing in it after a couple or so months, it was deleted and expired, and no one may ever read it's contents (I wrote poetry. Enough said).
- Blurty #1
- I wasn't quite so much an emo-nerd-loser-boy in this one, but I was still very angsty. My writing had only improved incrementally, and I still posted song lyrics. I made a few stabs at writing fictional material, but they went unnoticed. It was basically my rants and raves about the horrid days of highschool. Highschool was not cool. I look back for nostalgic laughs and chuckles, but I don't recommend it to anyone.
- Blurty #2
- A short-lived side project based on the fact I attempted to fast myself from sleep for a couple of days. The attempt failed, but I did not tell my friends about this new blog on the side of my main Blurty account. It taught me the value of writing for myself, and only myself with no audience, which ironically is the reason people wrote in "journals" or "diaries" back in the days of old anyways. Fancy that.
- LiveJournal #1
- I switched from the simple, young, naive Blurty to the wide, wicked and lame world of Loserjournal, because all of my friends did. It was also prompted by a crush on a cute girl that I ended up being magnificent friends with, but I don't blame her for the addiction that followed. I posted a lot, primarily about the transition from my senior year in high school to the first semester of my freshmen year in college. My writing style began changing, because I had a surge of reading and writing in that time of my life. You can actually read along and mark the entries I've made where I start becoming a new and different person than I was in high school. Quite interesting stuff...if you were to ever do a documentary on me. I don't think you should do that though. That would kind of creep me out.
- Blogger #1
- I decided it'd be a fun idea to try out Blogger. I had found it accidentally over the Internet, searching for other blogging sites. So I started the "Autotravisography" trying to tell my life story from start to finish, like a memoir in the making, or just an autobiography. Anyways, I never really got into it and eventually deleted it.
- Livejournal #2
- After breaking up with my girlfriend in the dusk of my first semester at college, I decided I wanted a new livejournal aimed more towards my friends at USM. I also didn't want my ex reading about all the details of my life. She found it anyways, but whatever. New developments: I started to use pictures much more, and I started using it as a bulletin board for events I was attending or putting on, such as concerts or parties taking place in my dorm room. I had a fun time with it, it became less emotional and angsty and more casual and fun. It's really still in existence for my own petty amusement. Or maybe I just can't let go...
- Blogger #2
- After witnessing the amazing success of my roommate Jake's blog, I decided to give it another try. I tried it based on the "writing for myself" principle, mainly due to the fact I knew very few people would read it. And very few people did, and I sort of felt like a jerkwad copycat so I made it more fitting to it's subtitle "A Wasteland of Thought" and started dumping all my writing projects, finished or not, into it. Then stopped doing that too.
- Blogger #3
- That's right, I just linked you to the site you're already on. How fuckin' cool is that. This is the Travipedia, which is along the same line as my first Blogger venture. I have all these stories I tell all the god damned time and I will forget I told you them and start telling them again to be met by "Dude...I've heard this story eight times," but then someone there would be like "Well, I haven't heard how Travis totalled his Stepdad's truck. Or how he lost his virginity. Or how he accidentally ate laundry detergent." So I started this site, to archive them all and maybe see if my ridiculous life is humorous enough to garner some Internet attention.
That was fun. I hope nobody actually reads those though. Embarassment to perhaps it's highest degree.
Whatever...I'm over it.
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