The world can be a tricky place with thin spots in the ice while crumbling quite literally beneath our feet. One person flaunts the fact gaining attention for their intrepidness. This is a figurative ice and I will explain. We all go through our moments of self-discovery. Coming of age in our right without the knowledge of it beforehand. It is one thing to hear the story of the Birds and the Bees and quite another to feel what we feel.
During my Junior High days there was a classmate who had sex outside of the old school next to the football stadium. As stories go, this sounded like a date rape fantasy of a pretty and innocent girl but none-the-less it was prurient in nature, a myth of the preteen years. The same story-teller told of the time he had touched a classmate in the bathroom of her parent’s house. One gets the idea here in Sixteen Candles and Molly Ringwald’s panties. The sheer awe of the unknown and to the Devil with the details and how they affect others.
So using the skater analogy again let’s consider this ice. A person decides to lie about something. Perhaps that diving off a water tower into a shallow retention pond is safe. The problem is not whether anyone has tested this out in reality but simply repeated old tales. They may even say they have jumped, while they have not. Person B thinks they need some Street Cred and invariably suffer because of it.
The girl above did in fact move away but I never heard anything else about again. As to the reason or reasons why and the alleged facts by a somewhat silly boy telling other silly boys lies. And before anyone plays the Ace just be sure that there are still aces remaining.
We seem to operate at our best with someone to keep us in line. And that when no one is looking, when take something that is not ours, The human condition, I guess.
This all reminded me of the events during my school days and how these cracks in the ice, happen to the innocent and who cries for the victims in life? Like I saw at a Soup Kitchen, where a relatively young man, dressed badly, smelled worse and had a big wound on his neck that was soaked with blood. He started acting out an the Deputy summarily threw him out. A young woman at another table commented that he was not like that before going to Prison.
And in a movie I saw from one of the Baltic States where two young girls used their looks for advantage. These were nothing more than jumping lines and getting boys to hold their books on the way home from school. The more beautiful girl was able to fend off the lecherous older guy until one day she was kidnapped, passed around and eventually decided to marry this POS. Too young to be married, her advantage slipped away.
Her more conservative girlfriend stopped her from using her gun on her husband who murdered her ex boyfriend for no other reason than jealousy. The conservative girl went to the wedding while loathing the miscreant who forced a young girl into a bad situation. The more modest girl started to dance a very ethnic dance with adult movements and wowed the revellers and I guess were enamored. Anyway, part of life for women around the world is this kind of subjective justice and it sucks. The pressure of being weaker doubles down when their very utility is neutralized by seedy creeps and bullies.
Back in 1974, I was a kid, only 18 years and probably was witness in some way to a date rape. It sure felt like it because as I was leaving out the dorm that night, guys were pulling a train on a teen girl and some guy asked me if I wanted to have ‘some.’ I said, “no.” And besides, the choice of words haunts me too as well as the whimpering that went along with her disorientation.
I was so naive but a part of my soul has been tortured to this very day. If I knew then what I know now, I might have gone postal because I cannot imagine a crime worse than that. You see, she was drunk and whimpering. Damnit. That really pisses me off. No girl asks for ‘it.’ Not for that.
But date rape characterizations are nothing new and for the longest time just generally accepted. In the movie ‘Animal House’ the guy was contemplating having sex with a passed out underage girl. Did she ask for it? NO! Does it happen? Hell ya! Is it any wonder so many women want to spread the pain around.
Going a few years into my adult life, I had a girl friend and she was given a roofie. The net effect according to her, was she never felt the same about anything! Date-raped by her boss at the mall. She and I went through hell afterwards and my anger @ jerkoffs intensifies. My girlfriend was only pieces of ceramic, like Humpty-Dumpty, those pieces can’t always be fixed.
I suffer too, knowing that seedy men with seditious desires lay in wait, like Jack The Ripper or the Boston Strangler. In these instances the pain is far worse than death. It is a slow blood-letting of one’s spirit and sense of control. We had great times and every once in awhile we would talk.
From her bosses abuse of her, of us really, she went on a self-destructive binge with an older guy who was a criminal. Arrested for a crack ball and spending time in prison, he seemed to like finding young victims. Her sister said he liked to read magazines like ‘Barely Legal’ and ’18’. Yeah one of those! One day her sister gave me a journal she had written and she had talked to her sister about the parasite she was with and how she missed me and my steady decisions and what would I do in a particular situation. She said I am the guy that returns the shopping cart. For awhile I was miffed by that but then got the gist of what she was trying to express. She also got a disease from this miscreant, Herpes!
(She fell in love in the first place)))
For some reason these words tick me off. An otherwise innocent girl and not perfect by any means, paid the price for both of you and you both should be ashamed. And I harbor guilt for not being able to protect her from the smarmy underbelly of the beast that lurks with a touch of wind and a wiff of illicit drugs.
If her mom had not been a prostitute and subjected her to so much, she might have been able to cry on her shoulders. She could have told her Mom what he said and did and your Mom would turn away. Flushed with anger and disappointment, words she heard once upon a time. Now reverberating like a song that plays over and over on a music box. The ballerina fell suddenly and her porcelain dreams laid like a million shards of what ifs.
So let’s examine some of the dubious comments made by men and boys and mostly they are one and the same. Your high school heroes and high society icons flickered as capriciously as the stories of high school football players and date rapes. The bottom-line being the reputation of the boys and a girl who was allegedly asking for it. She was collateral damage in the game of cat and mouse.
He gave you wine or drugs and told you it was okay. He promised you everything to dance in the sheets and tomorrow he denies that he even knew you or the things you said, you couldn’t have meant, if you did say them….
Their friends and influences probably had mixed emotions about the destruction, from the boss to the drug abusing narcissist whose real romance is a synthetic cesspool of misery. Both now share in a common malady with excuses and no care for the damage they were doing.
What once was a fairy tale happiness transmogrified into a hellish world of missed chances. Where lightning does strike over and over again(in the same place) and the pain still flows, if even now to more or less a trickle. In the video above Boy Meets Girl they dance and sing with a love that we all want and yet finally, even they play a requiem to a love gone strange. To me, as I worked in the media in Tampa, the song was a fresh time. A promise. Together with Paula Abdul’s ‘Straight up’, it seemed life had spectacular promise, even after a lost preemie and the mother who ran off for a decade and a half with our daughter.
But life has second chances even if those chances require some modifications to retrofit them to make them work. I do remember what my daughter said about her 16th birthday and how much she loved me. That that was her best birthday ever. This after being lost to me from her early post natal days to about fifteen years later. Still, I would NOT change things too much because what if we never rediscovered that and that is why the blog about ‘Ten Years a Single Mother’ and her kids love for her touches my heart. Kids get the connections and their love is pure if they are loved.
The theme of this entire post is what are we going to do. Rather than just complain about the pain, how can we fix a thing? You, I and many others have lived on both sides of the track and nothing…… nothing gets fixed by complaining. We need to put people first because a warm place and a hot dinner matters.
To the abuse of women, children and the vulnerable, you and I can change the world. I have a few things going now. One is to get Emotional Support Animals and Service Pets for people who need them. Let’s teach men and society in general how to treat a lady and your kids. We need to focus on identifying potential abuse and treat the family not a case number but take care of it as a village. With compassion. No tolerance policies does not heal a family. Making rules is what politicians do. Why do we punish people like Aileen Wuornos the way we do? Why not find out where at-risk people are and help? That gives us all a better chance of surviving the obstacles in life.
From murderers to offenders of all kinds, punishment is the easy part, preventing tragedies can happen and should happen. That takes more than a Breathalyzer and seeing if you can walk a straight line. How much better will this world be with solutions and not grandstanding politicians and other nabobs using the moment for personal gain.
Education is the key to everything. Not just laws but helping people be better people. Not projecting how good we are, but how good we can all be, if we just try. Ghettos are going nowhere and neither are the homeless, the drug users and other kinds of abusers. Let’s get this done and stop maligning others. The old speck and the log thing.
The day was one of those humid but unremarkable days with the exception of a forecast that included inclement weather.
I was standing outside a warehouse with three friends and we were discussing the forecast with the sunny blue skies and a light wind. I gave my take on the situation being a Meteorologist. In effect saying, You cannot tell by the clear skies what’s going to happen during the afternoon and early evening”.
Sure to form by late morning the first little towers of cotton seemed to gather as the heat poured energy from below. Like a pot of boiling water the change became more noticeable as the air liquefied into mad rivulets of upward vertical motion.
Marci told me that she needed to get out of the bamy skies as the humidity hung like a soggy blanket, making the hot more miserable.
We found our way into an empty warehouse, where we found a fairly sturdy set of walls and a heavy steel door. Apparently, we weren’t the only ones with that idea. The fact it was ventilated made it a prime place to hide.
The room was not really that spacious so one got the feeling of being like an animal caught in a snare. Claustrophobia seemed to seize us both at the same time and we left the relative safety for the open air and a less confined place.
The wind began to swirl with a passion as the heat climbed up towards the fast growing clouds. In the distance were lines of Cumulonimbus Clouds. Like a gathering army of angry and mischievous Gremlins. By late afternoon, the ominous looking clouds fattened with sharp spikes of light shooting out in all directions with the accompanying claps of thunder and their reverberations. The party was getting into full swing.
From an office you could see lines of storms systems. These Mesoscale systems snarled and marched onward with high winds and low pressure that popped your ears and engendered a primal fear. Soon sirens blared as the culmination of physics manifested in an eerie calm. Bluish black clouds ragged with pent up rage acquiesced to nothing.
Buildings shook as they do when heavy ordnance releases it’s fury. With the rise in air currents came the chattering of old roof tops that graced structures with uncertainty, threatened to be peeled back or just collapsing with fatigue. We saw a woman on a phone as the curtain of night started to drape itself about and the luminous light and sound show intensified bringing an increased sense of dread.
We wandered about and around the phone lady and soon she feel self aware and struck out to find another place. Marci and I, decided to hole up in this semi-private space, waiting for the current round of chaos to abate. The last round of storms left us shaking. To the left of us was a window which was heavily armored and I assured my consort that we were safe. Suddenly like a bomb exploding, a wash of red covered the window, a human stain with no doubt, all was not well.
As we found another spot that seemed safe, a room that looked like a classroom and filled with people, I had some bad feelings here, even more than any that I had spent time in and my suspicions were born out. With another lull in this never-ending parade of severe weather and the threatening sounds of crashing glass and gales of wind unseating rooftops we found an office across the street.
This one office struck my fancy as I saw a bay window front to a store and office warehouse. Me and my friend sat in two of the chairs practically inert and watch debris flash by in an instant. Only slightly more safe was this place and keeping that in mind, I went into the warehouse with Marci in toe. There were a lot of beautiful furnishings all handmade with the middle of the room sporting a table with chesire-acting cat sitting quietly in a chair next to that table. She knowingly acknowledged me in this strange sanctuary conspicuously absent of people.
Walking back outside the carnage was obvious. The scenery changes were not limited to buildings as dumpsters of debris, seemingly human powdered the landscape and the aftermath of solitary suffering.
Floyd, Times Are Changin 