(no subject)
Below is a time-wasting unedited piece of freewriting I did. There are many details I should have included, and concepts I wanted to describe, but it wasn't happening. I don't know where the inspiration came from but I kind of like it. You won't enjoy it really:
Hi. My name is John. Let me tell you who I am.
I was born in Portland, OR April 2nd 1987, on what my parents assure me was a beautiful sunny day outside, and I choose to believe that’s foreshadowing of the life I had ahead of me. My childhood isn’t really that interesting. I mean…well…it was really interesting but to me it’s like “been there done that”, ya know?
My parents were divorced pretty early in my life so I had two wildly different places to live. On the one side I had my mom’s place which was nice. I had my social life, my friends, and most everything that your normal kid has. I grew up in a well off suburb of Portland called Lake Oswego where I went to some damn fine public schools and eventually wound up with an education that I would say is more than exceptional for K-12. Things were pretty standard on that side.
The life with my Dad was a different story. I mainly only saw him on the weekends, but I do have memories of the summer where I think we spent…June, or maybe all of July with him? I think I remember that correctly. Maybe it was only a week or two that seemed like an entire month because things are like that when you’re a kid. I remember summer used to last just as long as the school year, and the school year seemed endless when you were in it. One’s view of time is grossly distorted when you’ve only experienced ten years of it. Anyways…about life with my Dad. This is where I had some pretty good stories as a kid. My dad has lived several places in my life, several different houses, but mainly the memories I have most are from the water. I think probably because living on a boat or a houseboat is against the norm, so those memories tend to stick out more. I’d spent more time on a boat than most people do in their life by the time I was 15. I mean even if I spent just 24 hours on a boat(spent more than that every weekend), that’s more than a person who spends three hours in their speedboat everyday for a week. I mean that’s a lot of time to spend on a boat. My life has been like that. I think I experienced more before I was thirty than most people have in their life.
So I have really good stories from my childhood that I won’t bore you about because like I said: to me it’s “been there done that.” Although let’s just say somewhere between selling lemonade on a homemade raft made from driftwood and rusty nails, to playing violin on the streets at the Saturday market and raking in the dough at 14, I learned a lot about different ways of life.
After a while the odd jobs got old and I got my first real Job working at an Arby’s fast food restaurant. It sucked and I never liked it but I worked there for two years: the day I quit was a good day. I continued to go to school and eventually graduated from Lakeridge High school. I never cared for it but it got the job done and I met some good people through the LOSD.
After High school I went to Portland Community College for a year and really enjoyed it. I took classes I wanted to take and learned what I wanted to learn but a dying urge to do something drastically different overcame me and after just one year, I made a decision that would change my life.
The thing is I always had the urge, but was dumb enough to not listen to it earlier in life. At this point I was only 19 driving down I-5 south(later I would know it as “the 5”) to get home from work every night, constantly dreaming of skipping my exit and just keep going. I told that story about wanting to skip my exit every night to a lot of people near the end. I think that was because the more I verbalized it, the more real it would be. It worked of course because in the summer of 06’ I left it all behind and drove to LA.
I spent about a week getting down there, sleeping in my car and various youth hostels. I learned about another aspect of life driving down. I had taken homeless trips before, where I lived out of my car, but this one was different: I was broke so raw top ramen and tuna was what I dined on for that week, and even more distinctly, this trip was only one way.
LA was far from the final stop though. Before I could say I really lived there, I had to deal with some sketchy situations, some broke times, a few more homeless times, and a shit load of luck until I finally got an apartment. I had a room mate named Stephan whom I’d met when he was dating my sister a year or so back. It wasn’t really that awkward cause we got along really well.
I had moved down to LA to start up my business of importing, designing and wholesaling skateboard decks. I had it already started up in Portland but when I moved to LA the game was different and it took me a while before I got it back on it’s feet with a new heat transfer press and a few new ideas. Until I had that running though I worked a few odd jobs. I made the mistake of first working in a café….I should have stayed out of the food service industry. I was lucky though because before I spent two months at that job making shitty wages, I got a call about another job working at a day spay in Santa Monica. I worked that job for almost a year and a half and loved every minute of it. I got to see celebrities come in pretty frequently, and the benefits of free massages and spa use kept me satisfied for quite some time. The only reason I left that job was because after having started to go back to school, I had found the ambition to find something better.
I had my business up and running and Lifestyle Skateboards was paying the bills but I wasn’t ready to live off of it yet. I occasionally applied to an interesting job here and there, but mostly to places out of my league because I figured when I left Burke Williams(the name of the spa), it better be for something good. Oddly enough I found myself writing the odd editorial for a small time newspaper, and getting paid to blog on various websites about so many different topics it would take a decade of time I don’t have to tell you about it.. I never really could figure out how that happened seeing as how my writing style was far from professional, but fairly fluid nonetheless. I really enjoyed freelance writing but often recycled pieces I had written in my blogs years before I ever started writing for money, mainly because writers block is a bitch.
Through the years I had had many girlfriends, some whom I loved, some who simply entertained me, and none of them compared to the girl I started dating while I was working as a freelance writer. I won’t tell you how I met her, but I had known her for a fair amount of time before we started dating. We dated for only a year before getting married. The married life was good but I need not bore you with details so I won’t even tell you how many kids we had, if any. But we were happy together and that was all you need to know.
Eventually the writing got to me. After an undisclosed amount of time, I began to feel hypocritical with every word I wrote. I struggled to find new ideas and new things to write about. It’s not that my writing began to slip in the eyes of my readers, but I began to become disgusted with my repetition in theme. It was hard to come up with a new way to tell a different story week after week, and I began an episode of self-loathing where I recycled the crappier pieces from high school blogs that I had previously left unused, because the shamefully bad taste in my mouth every time I sat down at the keyboard became unbearable. I knew it was time to quit so I went to running my company full time.
Throughout the years of running Lifestyle Skateboards, I had done everything from silk screening to heat pressing; importing blank decks and pressing them myself, and I had more knowledge about the industry than most of the greater minds in skateboarding. This allowed me to successfully live off of my business for a few years, supporting my family until something else came along.
Now to tell you EXACTLY what it was that came along would be to give away the ending to an epic story that I once blogged about when I was around twenty years old. I didn’t use much detail because I knew it was only an outline for my memoirs, which would of course be filled with the details I left out such as those of my childhood and family life. I can however tell you that the last job I held before I died was a direct result of running Lifestyle Skateboards; meaning it was related to the skateboard industry and I worked there for decades without it ever getting old.
I never quit that job but actually died at a young age(for that time) at about 65. Skateboarding had finally taken it’s toll on me and while I did manage to avoid a wheelchair, I was crippled to the state of being reliant on a cane. My death came as a shock to my friends and family, but not a sad one. Everyone around me agreed that if I was going to go, that I went well and another thirty or fourty years of life wouldn’t have mattered to me anyways. Like I said before, I had live more before I was thirty than most people had in their entire lives.
My funeral was different from your average funeral. I had chosen to be cremated simply because I didn’t see the point in taking up space six feet under the ground. My friends had helped to ensure that the setting was just as I wanted it to be. Nobody cried because they knew I would have taken offense had I not been…well…dead. There was an open bar and while it wasn’t a massive funeral, the people who mattered were there and they all had a few good laughs about the stupid/crazy shit I said/did when I was alive. The details such as fireworks display/strippers/keg, etc. were taken care by my friends. They also made sure the video I recorded of myself a decade earlier to ensure that someday my funeral had some comic relief to it was played, and everyone forgot for half a second I was gone. When it was over and they remembered again that I would no longer be interjecting smartass but tasteful comments in their everyday lives, it was ok.
My memoirs never made the New York Times best-seller list, but it changed at least one life upon being read and that was enough to keep my memory alive for another couple of generations, after my friends had all died and my family stopped telling stories about me aloud to my descendents. My memory eventually became isolated in the individual minds of a dozen or so people, never being talked about aloud, but recalled every once in a while when one of those minds was driving their car by themselves and thinking about a particular story I happened to pertain to. My metaphysical time of death occurred nearly two hundred years after my physical one, when the last person whom my life had affected in any direct way died of natural causes at a ripe old age. He had never known me personally but was the last person alive who had been told my story, or parts of it, and with his death disappeared the last significant memory of me.
That’s what happened to me, and it was a good thing.
Hi. My name is John. Let me tell you who I am.
I was born in Portland, OR April 2nd 1987, on what my parents assure me was a beautiful sunny day outside, and I choose to believe that’s foreshadowing of the life I had ahead of me. My childhood isn’t really that interesting. I mean…well…it was really interesting but to me it’s like “been there done that”, ya know?
My parents were divorced pretty early in my life so I had two wildly different places to live. On the one side I had my mom’s place which was nice. I had my social life, my friends, and most everything that your normal kid has. I grew up in a well off suburb of Portland called Lake Oswego where I went to some damn fine public schools and eventually wound up with an education that I would say is more than exceptional for K-12. Things were pretty standard on that side.
The life with my Dad was a different story. I mainly only saw him on the weekends, but I do have memories of the summer where I think we spent…June, or maybe all of July with him? I think I remember that correctly. Maybe it was only a week or two that seemed like an entire month because things are like that when you’re a kid. I remember summer used to last just as long as the school year, and the school year seemed endless when you were in it. One’s view of time is grossly distorted when you’ve only experienced ten years of it. Anyways…about life with my Dad. This is where I had some pretty good stories as a kid. My dad has lived several places in my life, several different houses, but mainly the memories I have most are from the water. I think probably because living on a boat or a houseboat is against the norm, so those memories tend to stick out more. I’d spent more time on a boat than most people do in their life by the time I was 15. I mean even if I spent just 24 hours on a boat(spent more than that every weekend), that’s more than a person who spends three hours in their speedboat everyday for a week. I mean that’s a lot of time to spend on a boat. My life has been like that. I think I experienced more before I was thirty than most people have in their life.
So I have really good stories from my childhood that I won’t bore you about because like I said: to me it’s “been there done that.” Although let’s just say somewhere between selling lemonade on a homemade raft made from driftwood and rusty nails, to playing violin on the streets at the Saturday market and raking in the dough at 14, I learned a lot about different ways of life.
After a while the odd jobs got old and I got my first real Job working at an Arby’s fast food restaurant. It sucked and I never liked it but I worked there for two years: the day I quit was a good day. I continued to go to school and eventually graduated from Lakeridge High school. I never cared for it but it got the job done and I met some good people through the LOSD.
After High school I went to Portland Community College for a year and really enjoyed it. I took classes I wanted to take and learned what I wanted to learn but a dying urge to do something drastically different overcame me and after just one year, I made a decision that would change my life.
The thing is I always had the urge, but was dumb enough to not listen to it earlier in life. At this point I was only 19 driving down I-5 south(later I would know it as “the 5”) to get home from work every night, constantly dreaming of skipping my exit and just keep going. I told that story about wanting to skip my exit every night to a lot of people near the end. I think that was because the more I verbalized it, the more real it would be. It worked of course because in the summer of 06’ I left it all behind and drove to LA.
I spent about a week getting down there, sleeping in my car and various youth hostels. I learned about another aspect of life driving down. I had taken homeless trips before, where I lived out of my car, but this one was different: I was broke so raw top ramen and tuna was what I dined on for that week, and even more distinctly, this trip was only one way.
LA was far from the final stop though. Before I could say I really lived there, I had to deal with some sketchy situations, some broke times, a few more homeless times, and a shit load of luck until I finally got an apartment. I had a room mate named Stephan whom I’d met when he was dating my sister a year or so back. It wasn’t really that awkward cause we got along really well.
I had moved down to LA to start up my business of importing, designing and wholesaling skateboard decks. I had it already started up in Portland but when I moved to LA the game was different and it took me a while before I got it back on it’s feet with a new heat transfer press and a few new ideas. Until I had that running though I worked a few odd jobs. I made the mistake of first working in a café….I should have stayed out of the food service industry. I was lucky though because before I spent two months at that job making shitty wages, I got a call about another job working at a day spay in Santa Monica. I worked that job for almost a year and a half and loved every minute of it. I got to see celebrities come in pretty frequently, and the benefits of free massages and spa use kept me satisfied for quite some time. The only reason I left that job was because after having started to go back to school, I had found the ambition to find something better.
I had my business up and running and Lifestyle Skateboards was paying the bills but I wasn’t ready to live off of it yet. I occasionally applied to an interesting job here and there, but mostly to places out of my league because I figured when I left Burke Williams(the name of the spa), it better be for something good. Oddly enough I found myself writing the odd editorial for a small time newspaper, and getting paid to blog on various websites about so many different topics it would take a decade of time I don’t have to tell you about it.. I never really could figure out how that happened seeing as how my writing style was far from professional, but fairly fluid nonetheless. I really enjoyed freelance writing but often recycled pieces I had written in my blogs years before I ever started writing for money, mainly because writers block is a bitch.
Through the years I had had many girlfriends, some whom I loved, some who simply entertained me, and none of them compared to the girl I started dating while I was working as a freelance writer. I won’t tell you how I met her, but I had known her for a fair amount of time before we started dating. We dated for only a year before getting married. The married life was good but I need not bore you with details so I won’t even tell you how many kids we had, if any. But we were happy together and that was all you need to know.
Eventually the writing got to me. After an undisclosed amount of time, I began to feel hypocritical with every word I wrote. I struggled to find new ideas and new things to write about. It’s not that my writing began to slip in the eyes of my readers, but I began to become disgusted with my repetition in theme. It was hard to come up with a new way to tell a different story week after week, and I began an episode of self-loathing where I recycled the crappier pieces from high school blogs that I had previously left unused, because the shamefully bad taste in my mouth every time I sat down at the keyboard became unbearable. I knew it was time to quit so I went to running my company full time.
Throughout the years of running Lifestyle Skateboards, I had done everything from silk screening to heat pressing; importing blank decks and pressing them myself, and I had more knowledge about the industry than most of the greater minds in skateboarding. This allowed me to successfully live off of my business for a few years, supporting my family until something else came along.
Now to tell you EXACTLY what it was that came along would be to give away the ending to an epic story that I once blogged about when I was around twenty years old. I didn’t use much detail because I knew it was only an outline for my memoirs, which would of course be filled with the details I left out such as those of my childhood and family life. I can however tell you that the last job I held before I died was a direct result of running Lifestyle Skateboards; meaning it was related to the skateboard industry and I worked there for decades without it ever getting old.
I never quit that job but actually died at a young age(for that time) at about 65. Skateboarding had finally taken it’s toll on me and while I did manage to avoid a wheelchair, I was crippled to the state of being reliant on a cane. My death came as a shock to my friends and family, but not a sad one. Everyone around me agreed that if I was going to go, that I went well and another thirty or fourty years of life wouldn’t have mattered to me anyways. Like I said before, I had live more before I was thirty than most people had in their entire lives.
My funeral was different from your average funeral. I had chosen to be cremated simply because I didn’t see the point in taking up space six feet under the ground. My friends had helped to ensure that the setting was just as I wanted it to be. Nobody cried because they knew I would have taken offense had I not been…well…dead. There was an open bar and while it wasn’t a massive funeral, the people who mattered were there and they all had a few good laughs about the stupid/crazy shit I said/did when I was alive. The details such as fireworks display/strippers/keg, etc. were taken care by my friends. They also made sure the video I recorded of myself a decade earlier to ensure that someday my funeral had some comic relief to it was played, and everyone forgot for half a second I was gone. When it was over and they remembered again that I would no longer be interjecting smartass but tasteful comments in their everyday lives, it was ok.
My memoirs never made the New York Times best-seller list, but it changed at least one life upon being read and that was enough to keep my memory alive for another couple of generations, after my friends had all died and my family stopped telling stories about me aloud to my descendents. My memory eventually became isolated in the individual minds of a dozen or so people, never being talked about aloud, but recalled every once in a while when one of those minds was driving their car by themselves and thinking about a particular story I happened to pertain to. My metaphysical time of death occurred nearly two hundred years after my physical one, when the last person whom my life had affected in any direct way died of natural causes at a ripe old age. He had never known me personally but was the last person alive who had been told my story, or parts of it, and with his death disappeared the last significant memory of me.
That’s what happened to me, and it was a good thing.