The most difficult part of my life is the fact that I don’t really know where I belong. Not   that I don’t fit in with anybody or realize my own clique, because I don’t have a problem with finding a place amongst my peers. In fact, I have a pretty withstanding circle of friends which has been cemented without many new introductions or subtractions for almost a good decade. Not that I don’t branch out, because everyone likes to be with new people at some point or another and also because change is inevitable. Friends have always been more important to me than family. Blood was never a reason for me to rely on someone, probably because I’m convinced that there is more to life than scientific methods and set circumstances, perpetuating us humans to follow the laws of mankind and having to abide to predated standards. I may seem conservative, but I would like to consider myself a liberal. Or a conservative liberal rather. I’m divulging into this topic not because of some random fury against science (that comes later), but because I’ve always been one who glorifies free will as opposed to destiny and inevitability. I think the world is a lot more interesting if there isn’t a bunch of people telling us why we cry or why we remember certain memories and others we forget. I’m stubborn enough to believe that there isn’t a methodical explanation to almost everything about the natural world. This thinking stems from a childhood of questions and lots of white knuckling, along with late blooming and finding things out on my own. Which is why I feel lost. All the time. Just lost.

From what I hear it’s hard for my friends to pinpoint the exact mood I’m in on different days. I often hear things like “are you okay?” or “why are you in a bad mood?”, on days when I feel absolutely great. I guess it’s because there is a social norm for people to look and act the exact same every day of their life. There seems to be a certain vibe or mojo that floats around people, especially people who interact and spend time together for hours upon hours every day. If something seems to be throwing off that vibe, human instinct is rather keen on getting those types of inclinations. Which is something that I’m very good at, but also never really understood. As a toddler I was told that I had a fine quality of being able to read people. Read as in observe and take into account their body motions or actions which allowed me to insist their mood or feeling that day. It has to deal with a lot of nonverbal communication and in my opinion, I think narcissists are better at it than most people. I can say to this day that I’m good at reading people, and I’ll say there is a lot of emotion involved. Which I guess would prevent me from being able to read someone who’s favorite movies are Speed, The Matrix and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But aside from the occasional stoic, it’s a personal strength of mine.

Let’s take a step back to where that last paragraph was originally intended to go. I’m told I’m hard to gauge, which I find funny, but it’s the way I like it. I think people are too dependent on one certain personality, say obnoxious, nerdy, jock, intellectual, lucid, dumb-blonde, etc. I like to be all of those things because really, why would it be any fun having the same personality day in and day out? I guess that scares some people. Caring too much about what people think of them, somebody won’t do something they want to do. A perfect example of that would be when I wore a bandana to school last year. I don’t think I had ever worn a bandana in my life, but I felt like that day I just needed to wear one. You’d be amazed at how many people couldn’t fathom the idea. No one understood why I was wearing a bandana.

        “You look stupid.”
        “Oh my god, why are you wearing a bandana?”
        “What’s up Rambo?”

I’m wearing a bandana becAUSE I WANTED TO WEAR A F***ING BANDANA. There are plenty of other examples, and probably another person could provide one better than mine on a much grander scale, but my point is it’s so hard for people to accept things that aren’t normal to them that they lash out in a way. So getting back to the whole novel Pinpointing Gabriel Jackson’s Personality that my friends can’t seem to finish because they’re vacationing on writer’s block, I’ll just say that this whole rant about vibes and mojos is a long way to say that I don’t really understand my personality either. It’s not just you!

The whole figuring out what you want to be thing or the booking a ticket to Heartbreak Hotel isn’t really what I’m concerned about. Teenagers deal with that s*** anyway. What I can’t seem to understand are the after effects. It’s like eating a cheeseburger and getting it stuck between your teeth and washing it down with a refreshment but instead of washing it down it just stays there and the more cheeseburger you eat the more food gets stuck and by the time you’re done with the cheeseburger there’s an embarrassing amount of food stuck in your gums. Whew!. Don’t worry, that sentence was supposed to be long. But anyway, yeah. It’s hard for me to deal with stuff. The whole white knuckling term probably fits me like the term Kanye West fits conceited. I deal with a lot of psychological problems that I think my mom knows about but doesn’t seem to think it’s a big enough deal to address. It’s probably because she cares about me so much that she doesn’t want to face the fact that I could very well be psychotic.

What I mean by white knuckling is that the many experiences or instances that requires coping skills weren’t taught to me and that forced me to deal with things on my own, prescribing myself with my own retaliation methods. For example, struggling with anger management is very difficult to deal with when you don’t know that you have anger issues. I often questioned to myself why I was angry or why do I feel the way I do. Why did I feel the need to punch that door or break that glass? A lot of that physical reaction was because I was a boy, because it felt good to release that anger and because it was just an impulsive decision (I’m very impulsive). But that method served me only a short term solution. And then came the advice. People are great at doing that. Telling you to stop doing what you’re doing.

        “Stop being angry!”
        “Control yourself!”

It’s very difficult to fix whatever problems you may have if you aren’t giving a method on how to do that. No one was showing me the way. White knuckling is in many ways a literal term. Not handling the coping system, clenching your teeth and clenching your fist turned my caucasian knuckles pearly white. Anger management wasn’t the only thing I had to deal with and I felt like I was the only one facing these problems and I had no idea how to handle it or where these problems stemmed from.
 

A lot of it stems from my dad, a guy that likes to make excuses for himself and find the easiest way to coast through life. A guy who was a miraculous figure in my life while managing to be an absent father. It’s funny looking back at my relationship with my father. It really is quite interesting. Most of that comes from how bland and dull the relationship actually was. The only thing we had in common was our interest’s in sports, he was a sport’s journalist, and even that pathage became a traffic stop when I started becoming heavily involved with soccer.

I stayed with my dad maybe once a week, sometimes two, in his four room apartment. It was always dirty. Clothes were scrambled all across the apartment. The kitchen, which was as wide as a three-cushioned couch and only tall enough to where I didn’t need to duck my head lower than three feet, was always covered in piles and piles of paper and seemed to have an endless array of dirty dishes in the muddy watered sink. The brown carpeting across the surface of the apartment was rigged and was partly stitched. There was loose change all along the floor, along with a s***-ton of coins scattered across it. Sports related magazines and memorabilia uttered all across the living space, taking up space on tables and countertops, which if you were wondering, were dusty and every time you laid your hand on it it was like you just stamped your hand on a box stamper. The bathroom was compact. We hardly ever had toothpaste or face wash and we lacked the much needed necessity of toilet paper. The bedroom was the worst. Piles and piles of clothes covered the bed. There were so much clothes covering the bed at a single time that if a bunch of hoodlums went into Avalon Exchange and took every piece of clothing off of it’s hanger and then threw them all on the ground there still wouldn’t as much clothes sprawled around as there was in my Dad’s bedroom. It was a very bland white room with brown covered mirrors and doors. The ceiling fan was even s***… I mean brown. The carpeting was mugged gray that used to be tan. There were no headboards, just a stained green-use-to-be-white mattress. The table lamp was always my favorite thing in the apartment because it had a lot of interactive story board games I would fall asleep to and also because the lamp was kind of retro and the sound it made when it turned it off or on was pleasuring. My Dad’s advice on finding space when it came time to sleeping on either the couch or bed was simply this: push it all on to the floor.
       

My Dad lived in the city, which meant I was never able to hangout with my friends when I was with him and during the times when he didn’t want to connect with me through sports or homework I would let my imaginative mind run free like a beagle let off of it’s leash. I would pretend I was Harry Potter and use a stick as a wand, or grab a golf club with it’s head missing and use it as a bat while I pretended I was an All-Star third baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals. I remember I use to be so bored over there that I would sometimes just lie there on bathroom floor and just stare into the ceiling. It was during this period that I became a sports superfreak. The radio alarm clock that sat on the shaving bag that sat on the sewerage pipe of the toilet introduced me to a new facet of sports: radio broadcasting. I would listen to Randy and Demarco Farr and I would listen to 590 Da Fan, learning everything there is to know about sports. I would wake up everyday to the sound of radio frequency, tune in to the hottest topics around the sports world, and then go to school.
       

Sports ran my dad’s life. The reason I wasn’t with him all that much, besides the fact that his place was a shithole, was because he was constantly off covering a highschool game. It never really bothered me. I guess that’s where my perception that all sport’s journalists were terrible athletes comes from because he certainly was. The pinnacle of what I deem to be my Dad’s greatest sports moment with me was when I had gone scouring through his cabinets, stumbling upon a signed Mark McGwire baseball. Seeing that it already been drawn on, I grabbed a marker and scribbled across the whole thing. Thinking that I had just won the key to my Daddy’s heart, I ran into his room and showcased my work. I think you know what happened. I just think that’s ironic because that baseball is probably worth as much with my scribbles now that it would be if I hadn’t.
       

I never really got the notion that the relationship between me and my dad was something to be desired as a child. It took me until I was about thirteen years old or so to realize that it wasn’t a very healthy relationship, and it wasn’t until I was sixteen that I finally quit trying to pretend that it was normal. I never really liked the whole idea of parading around with a sign above my head telling the world my business, so for a while I acted like the only thing wrong was that I hadn’t seen him in a while, but there was certainly more to it than that. The only people who really knew about the situation was my mother, my father, and me. Some friends would get a crumbing of details but no where near a synopsis. I didn’t like discussing it because a lot of my friends didn’t even know their father so I didn’t want to use it as a lever for someone to feel bad for me, let alone the fact that I never really brought it up and besides, the majority of my close friends have known me long enough to get the picture.
       

From birth until eighth grade I spent at least one day of the week with my dad. That all changed during the holiday season in the penultimate month of the year. He and his girlfriend of,  let’s say four years, broke up. From November until April, they didn’t see each other, which served as a by-product to what many people call a nervous breakdown. During that time span I hadn’t seen him either, until one day he showed up on my front porch looking a lot like Harrison Ford from the Fugitive, only before he escaped the train and shaved his beard. Before then, I knew my dad was going through a tough time, but I hadn’t the slightest of what was really going on. The only thing I remember from the conversation were the words “medicine”, “depression”, and “sorry”. And then I did the math.
       

It turns out that my dad has a nervous breakdown. My family has always suffered from depression, anxiety, and alcoholism. The strange thing was that the only thing the doctor’s diagnosed him with was Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which surprised me and my mother because we had never been disposed to that sort of behavior. There had to be more than that.
       

What I didn’t know were the phone calls my dad had made to my mom and my old basketball coach. I don’t know much of the details, but I envisioned it like this. . .
       

It was a prototypical rainy night in late April and although it was close to 9 PM, the resemblance of the sky was visible and the tops of the trees along with the edges of the buildings in the distance seemed to outline it, which made the lavender sky look like a turbulently ragged and torn piece of paper. Although the roads were dark, every fifty feet stood a street lamp, so it was hard to escape the existence of the night. Every time my dad’s car would drive by one of those light standards, the shadow would expand and lengthen to it’s widest capabilities until it would be retracted and the shadow would shrink back into obscurity with no obstacles anonymizing the light. Driving into limbo, my dad makes two phone calls; the first to my then basketball coach and the second to my mom. Somewhere between hello and goodbye my dad tells my mom that he is on his way to drive off of a bridge.
       

I don’t know much more than that, only that for a while he wanted to kill himself. I didn’t react in any type of way, because when you find out something like that for the first time you don’t really know how you’re supposed act. It’s not my place to cry, it’s not my place to be scared. It affected me but I didn’t know how. It’s not like he did it or anything. Was I suppose to grieve for someone who was still alive? It seemed silly for me to muster up anything more than a hug. The following month he became unemployed, and the month after that I got a text message saying “just got married tonight…”. What the f***. Things seemed to be getting only weirder.
       

Fast forward a little over a year, I had seen my dad probably five times. It was November of my sophomore year when I figured the relationship and run it’s course. Between the anger, the complaining, the one-dimensionality, I couldn’t put up with it anymore. It took a toll having to deal with a person who was always angry at you but somehow made it seem like he cared for you, blaming it on confusion. Everything I was interested in or wanted to do never mattered. Everything I found interesting was always swept underneath the rug. Even when I tried to play into his interests or help him move the furniture into his new house, he found a way to be angry about everything or cast a dark shadow of negativity on everything he was around.
       

I’m sixteen and a half now and I haven’t even talked to my dad in over eight months. I know a lot of friends with absentee fathers. I look around and the commonality between me and my friends is that none of us have a good relationship with their dads. It’s almost crazy to think about. My best friend’s dad is either always drunk or always high at home, my other friend’s dad just got out of prison, and I can name over fifteen friends who have never met their dads. It’s the modern age of single parenting.

Another thing I realized was that everyone we know has problems. Everybody. Large or small. Everyone suffers from something. On my dad’s side lies alcoholism, depression, anxiety, and on my mom’s side is everything times two. It helped me pinpoint what was going on with me. That’s when I came to the realization that the problems are within us and not everyone is without their flaws.
       

This is not an essay on the relationship with my and my dad. It is not in an anyway, shape, or form intended to plead for a pity party or take away from the original intent of the essay, which was pretty much a battle cry for teenage angst (this is beginning to sound like a public service announcement). I went into as much detail as I could about the relationship to give people the detailed explanation of how complicated we all our and how difficult it is to find our way. What I’m saying is that my story isn’t much different than anyone else’s. We are a selfish and ignorant species with many callings for damnation and one of them is that we tend to think that the world revolves around us (don’t worry, only children, I do it too). In fact it’s truly remarkable how many people can relate to my relationship with my father, yet no one ever realizes that everybody we know goes through the sames things as we do, or feels the highs and lows of human empathy. The storied debate of nature vs nurture is candidly evident regarding situations like these. Our childhood is the greatest factor to the rest of our lives. It is the most magical time period we will ever experience before we wake up and become as cynical as the rest of the world wants us to be. It’s a time that’s hard to remember. I personally have an extremely vague remembrance of my childhood and I like to say I didn’t truly wake up until I was around twelve. I didn’t really remember what was going on around me, I just remember living. Saying anything I wanted, not trying to impress girls (in fact I tried to avoid them), and not knowing any definitions to the words I was using. It was a pretty awesome time. In many ways as a child you don’t have a conscience, just a motor to a boat without a steering wheel. Kinda like Speed. Why do I keep bringing up Keanu Reeves…? Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have a conscience either. It is also the most important times of our lives, and we aren’t even aware of it.
       

As we are growing up as kids, our minds are susceptible to any kind of convincing or persuasion, usually stimulated by encouragement, and it’s during this learning period where our minds take in as much information as we can. The adults we spend time with, their actions influence ours which naturally anticipates our actions when we are older. This by nature allows us to narrow down our interests which evolves into passion and personality. This is key to our development as a human. All the traits that can’t be passed down genetically are formulated during this time period. So what is it? Nature or nurture? Well in many ways nurture is nature because our nurturers are products of the natural society that they take part in. Just like my dad. Just like everyone else’s dad. It’s the same script over and over again. The more you surround yourself with an ecosystem that has troubled biodiversity, the less effective and productive you will be. At some point I just want to curl that script up into a paper ball and cease to exist like Christopher McCandless. How lost can you be until it’s impossible to find your way back?

It seems as if I lack the motivation
I want to be sucked into oblivion
I wanna let go without giving up but
It seems I serve a less than adequate contribution to
my community, my friends, my enemies
My word doesn’t pay any rent

I want dreams to be reality
but if so
does that mean i need to die?
the light that shines is only as bright
as the things is it shining on

My world is a flipped horizon
of a child releasing his grasp on a hot red balloon
cliff side to immorality mountain high
n cliff side of the genocide

The world is not palatable
a place unique to love
amour inattendu

I am of sought out shapes
just standing with all the other rats, the proles

Give me a reason

        Maybe it’s important to remember that not all things that wander are lost. Not everyone’s problems are without a cure. The world is big, but life I can be as small as reaching out and touching it with your fingertips. That’s what I need to learn how to do, it’s what we all need to learn how to do. It’s easy to want to live your life vicariously, ignoring every facet you face. Wasted time cannot be taken back. I’m always reminded of a quote when I’m sitting there, on my apple products and staring blankly into my thousand dollar television. “Anytime I feel lost, I pull out a map and stare. I stare until I have reminded myself that life is a giant adventure, so much to do, to see.” - Angelina Jolie.