justnick's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - I was just a kid when the Toupe murders happened. I didn't really understand it. An old priest and his wife were beaten to death by some local teenagers. One of them was in my sister's math class. "He was just the lookout, since he was youngest." people said, like that was supposed to make it easier to process. Bite sized chunks of tragedy.� In high school, like so many others before me, I got lost wandering the hills and valleys of narcissistic self-loathing. I'm mostly over it. That was when my sister got sick. �Hugging my sister goodbye in that hospital was, bar none, the single worst moment of my life. I more or less shut down emotionally at that point. I did it to preserve my parents' marriage, on a conscious level, but deep down I honestly thought my only alternative to madness was Vulcan-style mental conditioning. I would sit in class and pray for apocalyptic scenarios. Meteors, cataclysmic earthquakes, vengeful eldrich deities, anything. That was the thing, it isn't accurate to say I was suicidal, I was just fed up. I wanted the world to fuckin' blow up. That'd show em. I went to a college named Dawson after high school. I went into cinema for one very specific reason: Wes went into cinema at Dawson. Wes was two years older than me, made fun of me constantly (in an older-brotherly sort of way), and was the best guitar player I had ever seen. I worshipped the ground he walked on. �September 18th, 2001, his father put a bullet in the back of his head. I stopped going to classes almost immediately. They kicked me out two years later, after twenty-four months of lies, Opiates, and loitering around campus. A few years of mind-numbing drudgery later, and I go back to school. Concordia this time. My second year, JT Leblanc dies on the operating table. Every day in elementary school, JT and I walked or biked home together. I hadn't seen him in a while, but we hung out every once and a while. He died from a blood-clot related complication during shoulder surgery. My dad was going in for the very same surgery less than a week later. He's fine, but it was stressful. It was my twentieth birthday when we found out Sidorenko was getting a new heart. He had been on the transplant list for a while, and had big clear tubes connected to a luggage-sized battery battery sticking out of his chest the whole time to pump his blood. I remeber one particularly alarming incident when it started beeping that it had low batteries, only for us to realize his backup wasn't charged either. One of his �friends rushed him to get a new one, but tensions were high for a while there. A couple of months ago the new heart stopped. He was 25. I heard through a facebook message. Last year there was a shooting at Dawson. �Some kid snapped and opened fire in a school of ten thousand kids. I wasn't there, but a few of my friends were. The poor girl who died was standing in the smoking pit. I spent a substantial amount of time in that smoking pit. �The first thing everyone says is that they don't understand. "How could someone snap like that? How could someone do that?" But we know. Everyone knows. Pain, anger, loneliness, and instability. But we pretend we don't understand so we don't have to acknowledge that these atrocities grew from feeling we all have every day, gone horribly awry. Because the whole fucking thing can collapse all around us at any moment, and that's hard to fucking deal with. Wednesday at twenty to six, I spoke to my friend Jason. We weren't close, I only met him a few months ago, but he was a good guy. we bonded over a love of getting stoned and watching animal planet. By midnight, he was lying in his own blood on the hood of a white car, two bullets in his neck. They don't know why it happened. He was 22. I left a message on his machine Thursday, before I knew what had happened. A message that, presumably, some police officer is checking for evidence as we speak.� Sometimes it feels like life is too fragile, and the threat of collapse too imminent to carry on in regular society, but I think of a promise I made to Wes, and how strong my sister is, not to mention my parents, and I keep moving. Still, though. That's too many dead friends for a twenty-six year old. 12:14 p.m. - 2011-01-15 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||