Okay, I'm back...
Haven't been posting much of late, for various reasons. Among other things I've been rather depressed of late. I'm really not sure the two ideas I have for my video projects are very good ones, as they force me to focus on two aspect of my life that bring me down, but I'll be damned if I could come up with anything else. One project, as I mentioned before, is me going back to Murphysboro, the town where I grew up at, and stayed till we moved away when I was in first grade. I did some feeling at the house I spent most of my childhood in and at my old elementary school (which has long since shut down, and the city isn't sure what exactly they'll do with the buidling.)
Not really sure what the hell possessed me to do this.. contemplating my childhood has always been the source of depression for me, and yet, part of things if I could just "unlock" certain aspects of it, it'd help in going a long to explain the hows and whys of what I do today. It's a weird thing, I miss a lot of aspects of my childhood, and yet there are a lot of things I wished had been different.
Going through my old school (and house) was kind of weird... the house has definitely seen better days. Ivory is now growing up the sides of the walls, and parts of it are in a bit of disrepair. When I went over, I knocked on the door but no one was home, but a young neighbor was, so I went over to talk to him for a bit.
I introduced myself, and told him why I was there. Turns out he was attending the same college I was, a medical student. I asked if he knew the house he was now living in used to be a beauty salon, and he said, yes, although he couldn't tell me exactly they had changed it over. We talked for a bit, and since the fellow(s) currently renting my boyhood home weren't there, he gave me "permission" to film the exterior of the house. I gave him a slip of paper with my youtube identity, said if was interested he could look me up and see some of the vids I posted.
God, the memories... I could probably go on for days and pages and pages of all the things I thought about while roaming around the outside of my old place, filming and commenting on things. Part of me wished the fellow renting the house was home, so I could maybe go inside and see how things had changed maybe even view my old room, but another part of me felt that'd be foolish, in fact, that the whole damn trip down memory was foolish. What the hell was I expecting to find, I wonder?
Still, I went on from there to my old elementary school. Still strikes me how SMALL the whole damn place seemed. I wandered around by the backdrop fence where we played kickball, walked over by the merry go round (once a bright red and blue with yellow handle bars, the color had now faded.) For fun, I pulled the bars a bit and then, after the merry-go-round got into a decent spinning motion, I sat down for the ride.
Damn, I'm definitely NOT a kid anymore. The spinning motion made me freaking dizzy! I set the camera down, getting an interesting bit of film with the playground spinning on by. Just for fun, I checked the entrances, they were all chained tightly. A thought entered my head to make some calls and see if anyone in the city had the key and would let me inside to do some filming, but I figured that wouldn't happen.
Stiil, part of me thinks it'd be an interesting thought, but another... well.. sure you can guess.
Finally went to the back, exmaining the monkey bars (now red with rust) and the swings in the back. I remember when I was in school, I had two main friends, Doug and Todd. One of our hobbies during recess was to get on the swings, go up as high as possible and then leap out! Not just leap out, mind you, we had several different styles of jumps, each with their own unique names and things you did to perform them. One of the Doug inventions was what he called the Orange Juice, where you leap out and land on your knees (I presume it's named after the way a lump of concentrated orange juice would just fall straight to the bottom of a container.)
I had the Monkey (or I think I called it the Monkey, not sure) where, as you jumped, you held onto one side of the chain for a split second, allowing you spin in mid air and land facing the opposite way of how you jumped.
I know, it all probably seems pretty silly to anyone reading, but this was back before we had the internet to keep us entertained.
I'm still amazed though at the malability (or perhaps, sheer stupidity) we had as kids. I'm pretty sure if I were to try jumping out of a swing at full arc today, I would probably end up breaking something!
After that I went by the first house that I grew up in Murphysboro. (You see, I lived in two houses, we moved after mom got a divorce from my first stepdad, but stayed in the same town.) For some reason, I didn't want to get out and talk to whoever owned this house, so instead I parked my car on the street and went up to the park that was behind where we used to live. It was a small park, only a few swings, a basketball court, a slide and a merrygoround (hell, didn't even have a drinking fountain.)
It's here that I guess good came out of the whole trip. I was sitting there when a man walked by from a nearby house (thought it was my old house, turns it out it was the neighbors.) He began to speak to me a bit, and I thought his voice sounded familiar. Finally, it's clicked, he sounded like G, our neighbor from back then who was good friends with my sister. But, no, that can't be right.. didn't he pass away some time ago?
Er.. apparently not. So, after an embarrassing back and forth, I finally realized, this WAS the guy I knew back when I was kid.
When began talking a bit, and I told him how the rest of the family was going. He said Tammy (my sister) called him on occasion, but he hadn't heard from her in awhile. I promised to deliever a message to him. We reminiscenced for a bit about the past and whatnot... and this brought up a rather painful memory for me.
A long time ago I was in the park playing around, when, imitating something I saw in a movie once, I fell to the ground as though I'd just been hit on the head by something. My arm fell against a broken piece of glass and I got a deep cut, deep enough to require about five or six stitches. Well, I don't remember doing this at the time, but I'm told that when I was asked what had happened, I said G did it.
I guess looking back, I could tell you why I did that. Keep in mind, I was a young kid (either in kindergartion or just before, which would have made me, at the most, six years old). My stepfather was the type that believed heavily in using the belt, and I got it used a lot on me. So, I suppose when I was being interviewed by everyone on what happened, I panicked, thinking I was going to be in trouble, and told that lie. I'm not sure, but I don't think anyone believed me, which is a good thing. God only knows what type of damage could have been done if they had. I supposed they knew G was a good man, also he was slightly developmentally disabled, but he didn't have a mean bone in his body.
I tried to find out, indirectly, if G remembered what had been said (dunno if anyone told him about my accusation or not), and I wanted to apologize, but I didn't. I was too ashamed to say it directly. Instead we talked of other things.
After a bit, I had to leave, but I told him I'd pass along a message to my sister, and I'd try to stop by and visit him again someday.