You better call somebody

or

The way to a man's heart is through his thoracic cavity

JAKE- I have just finished the final draft to one of the larger writing assignments in my Writing A Personal History class. Over the next couple of weeks I will be posting portions of it in the order they were written. You, my friendly readers, will be taken on a strange and perhaps unpleasant journey through much of my young adulthood. Remember, this was all written from memory and while needing to be true, it also needs to be a good piece of literature. It is like in the movie Jurassic Park, where portions of the Dino DNA are missing, they just filled it in with modern amphibious DNA to make the end product whole. If it were Shakespeare, i guess this story would be a tragedy, more or less, but do not get too sad for me, things worked out really well eventually.

Being Young and Rather Unaware

By Jacob Reynolds (Online Eng 320)

"Everything We Do" by Peter Meinke

Everything we do is for our first loves
whom we have lost irrevocably
who have married insurance salesmen
and moved to Topeka
and never think of us at all.

We fly planes & design buildings
and write poems
that all say Sally I love you
I'll never love anyone else
Why didn't you know I was going to be a poet?

The walks to school, the kisses in the snow
gather as we dream backwards, sweetness with age:
our legs are young again, our voices
strong and happy, we're not afraid.
We don't know enough to be afraid.

And now
we hold (hidden, hopeless) the hope
that some day
she may fly in our plane
enter our building read our poem

And that night, deep in her dream,
Sally, far in darkness, in Topeka,
with the salesman lying beside her,
will cry out
our unfamiliar name.

My Place or Yours?

It was hard to sleep. It was always hard to sleep on the night before something big happened. I lay in my bed, the top bunk of course, although there wasn’t anyone in the bottom bunk to feel lessened by my being higher up than them. On my floor lay neatly the outfit for tomorrow. It was something new, every part of it. Mom always made sure we had new clothes for the school year. The tags have been freshly removed and the blue long-sleeve t-shirt lay above the jeans, just as they would be worn the next day. I stared up at the ceiling; the glow-in-the-dark stars shined their dull green.

I remembered something a girl had said just a few months ago. She and her high school buddy sat with four or five of my fellow middle-schoolers in a circle on the floor of some hallway at school. Soon we would be in high school and she was dishing the dirt on how to get by as we made the big leap. She seemed knowledgeable enough as her long blonde hair flipped side to side while she gabbed a mile a minute. A smiled spilled across her face; she must have thought she was doing us the biggest favor. “Without me these poor kids would be utterly lost,” she must have been thinking. Then she said something that actually stuck in my head. She said that it didn’t matter what you wore in high school, nobody cared. As I lay in bed listening to various family members shuffling in the hallway outside my bedroom door, I wondered if that was actually true. I would soon learn it was not.

The high school was this brown monstrosity planted seemingly right in the middle of town. All brick with a small incove before you reached the front doors. Upon entering, your options are to turn right for the cafeteria or left for the classrooms. It was a big school and there was much more to it than that, but for an incoming freshman, that was all I needed to know at this point. Also right next to the front doors, on either side, was an oxymoron of what the whole purpose of high school was supposed to be as far as I knew it. Behold, The Chairs. The Chairs consisted of a row of benches where all the cool kids from a given grade would gather. To the left of the front doors was the bench the Freaks would sit at; the Freaks having taken over the freshmen chairs some time ago. To the right of the doors was a much longer bench where would sit the sophomores, juniors, and seniors in ascending order, seniors closest to the cafeteria. Only cool kids allowed of course. At times I would wonder why the high school, a self proclaimed champion of diversity, would allow for these clique-making machines to exist at all.