Signified G

Reflex

I remember being young, with the world laid out before me. When life was simple, and easy, and everything seemed to be filled with light and love.

Mom and Dad would get along, or so it seemed to me. I had a little brother to play with and grow with. Aunts and Grandparents willing to spend time with us and teach us the lessons of life before we had to learn them for ourselves.

Back then, everything seemed a forgone conclusion.

We would grow up and be successful. Period. We could be what we wanted. Anything. We had the potential. Hell, we still do.We didn’t know how hard it could be. How cut throat this world is. No one explained how greedy other people could be, how the sense of humanity had faded.

We were told we would fall in love and marry a beautiful girl, and we would have children of our own. We didn’t know other people would try to take that love from us, or that those same people we loved might betray us or that maybe sometimes love gets lost in vanity and money and greed as well.

We were told life was beautiful, and fun. A world where tradition and family made everything warm and welcoming. How could we have known family and tradition could splinter, fall away to nothing, and that we could be left alone to endure it all on our own?

If we could all be children, we could live in paradise.

24 May 2012

Moments

I was just thinking about my life. Here are some of the moments that stick out the most in my mind.

- Seeing Avenged Sevenfold play I Won’t See You Tonight, Part 1 Live.

-Beating Barrington in the J.P. Medeiros Memorial hockey game for the first time my senior year of high school.

-Watching the Bruins take down the cup last year.

-Jordan kicking the dent in the side of my car.

-Taking a certain foreign flag from a certain foreign tea room.

-Colt State Park night

-Mikey running into a chain after egging at car in Colt Park about a million years ago. It left a chain shape mark across his stomach.

-The funeral car ride that my family still talks about to this day. RIP Grandpa, love and miss you.

-Winning Mr. Mt. Hope. I humped a stage in front of everyone. I don’t think I’d ever have the courage to do that again. I honestly don’t know where it came from.

-Band camp. Every year. And Disney. Best 5 days of my life.

-Watching Dale Earnhardt Jr. win the Daytona 500 in 2004. I didn’t know cars could go that fast. I need to see another live race.

-The night Dale Earnhardt died. Mr. Krushnowski saying, Hey, Dale Earnhardt died, and me, wishing for anything else, asking if he meant Dale Jr.

-Coning.

-E-Brake incidents. Fucking Chad.

-Car adventures with Dave…nearly sliding into Pine trees, skidding past a car on a patch of sand and laughing at it while feds screamed about how he almost shit his pants, catching air off a bridge in fall river, watching the hockey sticks fly up in the air and landing just before hitting a parked truck.

-Loops. All of them.

-Shawn Gaccione. My hero.

-Holding her as she fell asleep on my shoulder. Heaven can’t compare.I miss you.

-4th of July Volleyball, and Christmas Eve’s at our house.

-Sunday dinner at Grams. We are a loud family. It’s immense fun.

-I spent an afternoon with my grandma Nu two or so years ago. In the storage area there was an old record player. The small ones. From the 20’s. It still worked and she had a ton of old records. We just listened to them, and she seemed so happy. I knew that afternoon, I would remember that day for the rest of my life.

-Mikey’s ex giving my dad the finger while performing felatio.

-“The Nutini Residence”- as in, band practice, poker nights, New Year’s eve, Super Bowls, sneaking friends in, and out through windows. Manhunt, late night third of July’s, and possibly the only place I’ll ever think of as home.

-Skabba, Discrepancy, MWC aka Fallen Glory. Battle of the Bands.

-The old neighborhood. 49ers and Cowboys. Bottom of the cemetary. Cubby holes, tree forts, paintball, baseball, hockey at crest, bike races, movie marathons.

-Mike Souza’s P-Bruins sleepover Birthdays. With Josh, Gerry, Mike, Nate and Tim.

-I once played the trumpet solo in “Georgia on my Mind” in high school which seems very appropriate for today.

-Halo marathons for 20 hours with unlimited pizza, 6 X-boxes and a room full of gross teenagers.

-Potato chip night on Colt State Drive. Why’d you have to fall Chad? Why’d you have to fall?

-I have a picture on my phone of my parents sitting together on the couch over the summer, a scene I had seen a million times before. I thought things were going to work out. Every time I see that picture, I can’t for the life of me figure out how two people so in love get divorced.

-Seekonk Speedway with my Dad and brother when we were small.

-Me and Mikey beating up J.R. in royal rumbles when were were maybe 6 and J.R. was 15. He seemed so old then. Now he’s just bald =p

-Trading toy cars with Nate in 2nd grade.

-Borders and SBC. Probably the best job, in terms of fun, I’ll ever have. (Cinnamon challenge night, Craig in general, so many new friends, so many events, so many homeless people, and of course, John.

-Water Wizz with Uncle Mark and Mikey.

-Standing at Meteor Crater in Arizona, wind whipping over the lip nearly knocking us back off the platform. What a thrill.

-The pool teams. Going to Vegas. Finally feeling like I was good at something. My own pool team, and the good times at Willaby’s.

-Warped Tour 2004, nuff said. Stos, Christyn, Jordan, Feds.

-I remember, when I was about three, my mom giving me and Mikey popcorn as a snack at night, and she’d put it in empty margarine containers, the perfect sized snack.

I have to stop here…

-When I left home the last time, I cried. I cried from the side door of my house, that driveway, so familiar to me, halfway to Boston. I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t shake the feeling nothing would be the same.

10 February 2012 • Memories home life reflection friends cars cubbies tears

The Prayer Line

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything, and I figure what better way to start up again than a Tumblr post!

As a relatively new member of the armed forces, it is easy for me to think certain military tradition are dated, or weird, or hilarious. I may always have a “civilian” view of things. Maybe I’m too old to buy into the entire system in all it’s glory or whatever. But here’s the rundown…

A few of my friends were on break from class today discussing some of the seemingly pointless day to day rules and activities we need to carry out. (These include marching 500ft to the dinner hall, keeping our hair shorter than even the Navy regulations state is allowed, not being able to have a goatee, but allowed to wear a mustache that makes us look like 70’s porn stars, not being able to go to our friends rooms if they live in another building, etc.) In the midst of this conversation I asked if the Commanding Officer had a suggestions box in which I could ask some of these rules be changed up, modernized, made sensible. A friend jokingly told me that the Commanding Officer’s office was in a building restricted to students. This is true.

The military loves saying “use your chain of command.” This basically means, go to your boss, who will go to his boss, who will go to her boss, who will go to his boss, who will go to his boss, who will throw your suggestion away. But why wait in line? Why risk the message being lost? If I have a message for the Commanding Officer, why not walk it right over? Makes more sense.

Let’s assume I am religious (which I sort of am) and that I pray every night (which I sometimes do.) When I pray to God, who as far as I am concerned is on the top of the human chain of command, I pray to God. I say the words, and they float up through the clouds into the universe, through 7-8 black holes and time warps before landing gracefully on God’s lap on yellow parchment paper in perfect handwriting. This is a fact.

I do not have to walk to my church and hand my priest a yellow piece of parchment with perfect handwriting. He does not have to drive an hour to the bishop. The bishop does not have to take a plane to see a cardinal and pass the note off there. That cardinal does not need to fly to Rome to hand the yellow parchment to the Pope. And by the time it gets to the Pope, someone has inevitably dropped their pizza on it, spilled their coffee near it, and stunk it up with old man cologne since it has been stuck in God knows how many pockets. Excuse the pun.

And if this were the prayer system, the prayer line would be backed up at least 2 years, and that’s if everything was digital. People praying for their sick relatives to recover would be devastated to find that God wouldn’t even know about their family member for at least one year, even if they used the express messenger, and that it was more likely said family person would be dead before God even knew they were ill.

This would cause people to begin praying for healthy members of their family to recover from some far off illness which they had yet even contracted, which would put even more traffic in the prayer queue, again holding up those urgent messages. And say that those preemptive prayers got to God before that family member got sick. He would read the little yellow parchment, look down at Mom, who is doing just fine today, sipping on a margarita out by the pool, and explain “I don’t know what the fuck this was about…” and discard the little yellow parchment in his Hell incinerator.

Total madness. Total chaos. Many dead people. Many soon to be ill, but not quite dead people. Ridiculous.

Like the chain of command.

Or the “prayer line”

Because even with all the gays in the military for the last eternity, it took til 2011 to repeal don’t ask don’t tell. So get in line if you’ve got a prayer, it’s going to be a while.

7 February 2012 • Waiting God Ridiculous Military Chain of Command Archaic Prayer Mail Digital Complain Woot

Bipartisan

Working for a closing super-store book chain has its benefits.

Browsing through the near empty shelves at Borders in Providence last week, I came across a book called “Of Thee I Zing” by Laura Ingraham. The book has a woman standing in a boat, a man behind her rowing, set as a parody of Washington crossing the Delaware. It looked humorous.

So I read the back. The book seemed to be about the cultural fall of America, how the youth is more or less going to hell and how the aspects of society that have been the foundation of America since its inception are crumbling to the ground.

Because I generally agreed with this sentiment, I decided to give the book a try.

Within the first few pages Ingraham touches on everything from Facebook to fashion, child rearing to individualism. Generally, her opinion seems to be that the youth lack respect and manners, that family and community aren’t valued, that language is going to hell, and that child proofing your house so that an infant won’t find a way to kill itself on a piece of furniture daily is a ridiculous idea put in place so that companies can profit off your paranoia as a parent.

In short, it was light and hilarious and I could relate to it.

Then I found out Laura Ingraham is a Republican. She makes regular appearances on Fox news. The reason her book is still in Borders is because Rhode Island is a heavily democratic state and her book is more or less contraband here. But instead of tossing it aside simply because I trend socialist, I continued reading. The first few pages were funny and entertaining and I honestly felt I was relating to someone who, despite political differences, shared many of the same cultural views I did, and this really intrigued me.

However, as I read, Ingraham began to take jabs at liberals. She would make huge generalizations about liberals baby-proofing their home, or eating only organic, or being obsessed with Facebook. I got so turned off by her automatic assumption that all “liberals” shared in these cultural activities that I stopped reading. And honestly, I was sad. Because I had really started to like her. And the only reason I couldn’t like her was because she was very forthright in stating she didn’t like me, “the liberal” who in fact did not engage in the majority of the activities she described.

This is how I discovered the political problem in America, and what needs to be done to solve it.

I heard somewhere last week, and I can’t remember where, that years ago, senators from both sides of the aisle would go to work in the capital, debate over their issues and disagreements, and then afterward go out together and socialize and, amazingly, be friends. Like…real friends.

But it seems the American political scene has become so polarized that people involved in politics, and even many observers of politics, make so many irrational assumptions about “the other side” that they forget we are all just people. Laura Ingraham and I have a lot in common. If we were ever to go on a date, and somehow politics did not enter the conversation, we would probably go on a second date, or even have sex! (Not the first night because republicans are all crazy christian fanatics who have no clue how to have any fun…see what I did there?)

We are Democrats and Republics. We are Independents. We are Liberals and Conservatives. We are Socialists and Communists. We are men and women and black and white, we are gay and straight and everything in between. We’re people. Some of us like to baby proof our houses for 3-5 thousand dollars while others leave the bleach in the cabinet. Some of us wear designer clothes and some shop at Wal-Mart, by choice, not necessity. It’s sad to me that the only thing keeping this country from success is blind, irrational hatred for people who are just like us. So Laura, let’s grab a beer sometime, or a soda. We can laugh about the state of culture, and then try to make it all better, together.

15 September 2011 • Politics, Laura Ingraham liberal democrat republican America Of thee I zing Friends Unity Success George Washington Peace Prosperity Penguins Kittens Puppies Borders

Pasture

Beauty queens…

Or so they seem

Until you see them close

Revealing

Nothing natural

Nothing honest

But their desire to deceive

They fall into

This cultures whole

But by no fault of their own

They say

“We’re victims, we had no choice.

Mama told me so.”

So skinny now

Just what I said

Skin and skin and skin and bone

Sickly like…

Abandoned horses

When they’ve grown too old to keep pace.

17 July 2011 • Poem Society Beauty Deception Slavery Horses Sick Anger

Peaceful Nights

Peaceful nights ride to earth on the tails of a storm’s last raindrops.

10 June 2011 • Night Lightning Storms Peace Placid Summer Ice Cream raindrops rain clouds dew Ripples

I hope you two boys can dig. There’ll be some digging to do.”
“Graves?” Eddie asked, not sure if he was joking or not.
“Graves come later.” Roland looked up at the sky, but the clouds had advanced out of the west and stolen the stars. “Just remember, it’s the winners who dig them.

— The Dark Tower Series Book 5, Wolves of the Calla, Stephen King

3 June 2011 • Stephen King Dark Tower Key Rose Roland Deschain Eddie Graves Death Quote Penguins Raptors Oy

Pieces

I’m tying pieces together.

The charms were off the rope,

which came unclasped so long ago.

When it all came apart,

many fell listlessly to the floor,

and shattered crystal glass

over previously untarnished skin.

The scars they made were gruesome,

the pain they caused

surreal.

But pieces broken age and weather,

in every passing storm

‘Til

Years later theyre found by strangers

their old secrets now yield wisdom.

With faith they will adorn

a new rope made of silver.

A herald trumpet in the mind

calls back old pieces to the frame

And once again they’re tethered,

the chain is clasped and whole again.

29 May 2011 • Chain Whole Fulfillment Growth Life Koala Bears Muties Tadpoles Kitties Maple Muffins Butterbeer Wholesome Frogs Fabric Softener Bruins!

Your man Jesus seems to me a bit of a son of a bitch when it comes to women,” Roland said. “Was he ever married?”
The corners of Callahan’s mouth quirked. “No,” he said, “but His girlfriend was a whore.”
“Well,” Roland said, “that’s a start.

— The Dark Tower Series Book 5, Wolves of the Calla, Stephen King

29 May 2011 • Humor Priest Gunslinger Dark Tower Jesus