Mediocre Jo by Ed Sandlewood

Shooting at the walls of Heartache...

2010-01-20T23:19:00.002-05:00

My soul is vibrating inside, yearning to get out!!! I want to scream, to shout, to yell, to do something that gets me unstuck. I am here, stuck, nailed stapled to the spot. I have to be free, to be back where I was before I got where I am.

yeah....

Spoiled Beauty

2010-01-18T23:52:00.002-05:00

To the beautiful goes the spoils...so he thought. He flipped through the third magazine of the day, looking at bodies that weren't his and clothes that would never fit. It made him feel sad, it made him feel hurt and most of all, it made him hate himself. Why do it then? Why pick up the magazines that never EVER reflected his own look, his own sense of style? Because those magazines never existed and as much as he never wanted to admit it, he wanted to be them. Look like them, live like them, love like them. Jealousy is such a wasted emotion and he was emotionally wasted. He didn't love himself like he should so nobody could ever love him in return.

Here's to hope....

Expectations

2009-12-15T22:17:00.003-05:00

Expectations is what always got him in trouble. Expectations is always what got his heart broken and expectations is why he was always let down. Expectations. A glance turned into true love. A comment turned into wedding bells. A song? A song turned into a whole dramatic scene that would lead to true love and a wedding. His expectations were more fitted for a teenage girl, not an adult of 34. Ugh. 34. His expectations of 34 were much different than where he actually was. Living back at home, in his parent's house, working a job he hated in a City that left much to be desired. Once again, his Expectations had let him down.
Oh, Expectations, you tease him so. He now sits in his car, listening to an Ipod playlist entitled Love: The Musical thinking about a boy, dreaming about a relationship, a fight, a break-up, a huge reconciliation and a wedding. How lovely yet so sad.
When he was in 9th grade he met a girl by the name of Brenda. She was a very ordinary girl, yet she somehow reminded him of his mother and she had the most amazing blue eyes that he had ever seen. He sat in his room on a Sunday, daydreaming about their time together, listening to How Deep is Your Love. That was a Bee Gee, So Sad That You're Gay But You're Only 14 And Don't Realize That It Isn't Real Expectation. Still heartbreaking, but it was never meant to be.
Fast Forward to his newest Expectation. This Expectation is going to hurt just as much as that Bee Gee moment, and all because of a passing statement passed on through someone else.
(to be continued....)

Who Ever Promised You Would Be Loved?

2009-06-26T22:56:00.002-04:00

Who ever promised you would be loved? He mused. You're not young, well past the age of Grace. 33 and three quarters to be exact. You've never been pretty because you've never been thin when thin is the new Grace. You know thin is the new Grace because it's everywhere you open your eyes. Those are the ones to be loved, but never you. Who ever promised that, lied. Get your money back. The right label won't fit you. The right scene won't be saw by you. The hole is one that you will never fit. You have been led astray. The look looked right by you. But then again, who ever promised you would be loved? Somebody is playing with your emotions.
The pecs aren't there. The abs, not nearly ripped. Man boobs never were attractive and we won't start on that outfit. Pity has died. And so have your chances at love.
What do you see when you open your eyes? What do you spy? You've never been lusted after, after one look no one takes a second, special is not so special...with you. The clock ticks just to remind you that you are unwanted. Who ever promised you would be loved?
Hope still lingers and that's a shame. That spark of Hope burns in your heart and keeps the want alive. Is it Hope? Didn't you know Hope was a liar! Didn't anyone tell you? She leads men astray with her false prophecies.But if you insist, you can still believe but it will get you nothing.
Hope stays in your heart, and colors what you see with your open eyes. She will tell you you're beautiful. She will tell you you're wanted. She will fill your head and heart with dreams and fantasy.
I hope that Hope is there when you jump. Flying is a difficult thing, especially with a promise so dear.

Racing the Sun

2008-09-29T22:52:00.006-04:00

He looked down at his watch. Shit! It was 6:50 in the AM and he was still two blocks away. He had looked down at his own clothing to make sure that no telltale signs were visible. No lipstick marks, no perfume lingered and he had even wrapped the condom into a ball and shoved it back into the wrapper. He dropped the squishy package down a storm drain to be carried away with the other secrets that men keep.
He looked up at the sky and the thick Eggplant was turning into Plum with light blue edges. The sun was coming up and he broke into a sprint. He rounded the corner, ran up the driveway and quickly yet quietly pulled out the keys to the side door. He looked at the horizon as the sun slowly peaked over the edge and he opened the door. At first glance, no lights in the kitchen were on which meant that he had made it just in time. At second glance, he saw the knuckles coming for his eye two seconds too late.
As his head snapped back and his vision was filled with stars, the only thing he heard was his mother's voice in his mind repeating the same phrase over and over....don't let the sun beat you home. It looked like he lost the race.

Comraderie

2008-09-29T22:26:00.003-04:00

Shitastic. Crapful. Heinous. He kept a mental list of the most descriptive adjectives that he could come up with to describe his most horrible day. Now he was stuck in traffic and had not moved for an entire fifteen minutes. What had he done to deserve such an atrocious day? What deity did he piss off, what Fate did he challenge (and subsequently cross) that he would deserve to have such a rotten day? He was glad that no major waterways were near him because at the rate he was going, he would have been carried out to sea in a tsunami.
It had started out as a normal day. The same bullshit, the same patterns. Until he made it to lunch and after that, it was downhill. Reports were lost, copier machines were broken, ink was spilled (on a very expensive and extremely new, cream-colored, Ralph Lauren Polo vest that he just purchased YESTERDAY spending the equivalent of a week's salary on the beautiful cashmere that has now looked like he skinned a dalmatian and sewn into an article of clothing), and bosses were pissed off, on and around. What had he done to deserve such treatment? And then the traffic. Not just traffic but Traffic. He lived in a Midwestern state, in the middle of Nothing Important and here he was, stuck in a fucking Traffic jam. How perfect!
He had moments, waiting in the car, where he began to breathe and calm down but every time he looked down at his new, cream-colored, Ralph Lauren Polo vest and fixated on the very large black spots, he would begin to fume and wallow all over again. It was a vicious fashion cycle and he was doomed to repeat it. Was there anyway out? Was he so alone in the universe that his detestable day would not end?
He looked into his rear view mirror at the car that was riding his ass very closely. Too closely. If one thing pissed him off more than ink stains and traffic jams, it was bastard drivers that rode his ass like he was a cowboy at a gay rodeo. That's when he saw it. He witnessed a moment that was sure meant to be private, one that was sure to send waves of revulsion over any other witness to the event. People can forget that car windows are not opaque, and that all the actions that are visible in the car are generally visible to the world around. He watched as the Assrider behind him placed his index finger inside his nostril all the way to the knuckle and slowly, yet efficiently, rotated and pulled out. On the end of the penetrating finger had to be the biggest, greenest ball of booger ever known to Man. As if in slow motion, he watched the Nose-Picker Assrider move the offending finger toward his lips. He watched and knew that no way would this Nose-Picker Assrider do what he thought he was going to do. The man's lips parted ever so slightly and in an instant, the gelatinous ball of green disappeared into the inner most regions of his mouth. Nose-Picker Assrider's jaws ever-so slightly moved up and down as if instead of a booger, it was Maine Lobster. The Traffic slowly inched forward and he withdrew his gaze from his rear view and stared straight ahead. With the scene he just witnessed he understood one thing.
He had a fellow partaker.

Goodbye is a four-letter word

2008-09-15T20:20:00.005-04:00

The bathroom mirror was always his harshest critic. The lights shown down from above, darkening the circles under his eyes until his face looked like a Halloween mask that no one was wearing. His eyes were red and puffy from a night of crying. Crying over saying goodbye to the life that he lives and hello to the life that he lived years ago. The call came two nights ago and after an hour of screaming, crying and finally quiet acceptance he placed the phone back on the cradle and picked up his laptop. If he had to book a flight home, he could not stand to speak to Missy or Tonya or Michelle in their fake, plastic, irritating personas over phone. He loved the Internet for two simple things: sterility and anonymity. When Seamus came home from work that night, he found a mound of emotion laying face down on the bed.

"Baby, what's wrong?" Seamus asking sitting on the bed and running his hand down the length of his back. He always liked when Seamus touched him. It reminded him that he was alive and worthy, something that he forgot at times.

"It's my sister. She needs me." Was all he said.

That night, after a session of intense and passionate lovemaking, Seamus stared into his face and kissed him deeply. He looked into Seamus' eyes and knew why he fell in love with him five years ago. Those pale green eyes reflected the beauty that he could not find within himself. When Seamus looked at him, he felt lovely. He tried to explain this to Seamus one day when he felt particularly vulnerable. Seamus scoffed at the idea.

"You don't need me to feel beautiful, Baby, you are without any help from me or anyone else."

No matter how many times Seamus said it, it always gave him those wonderful butterflies to hear it. He did not know if it was the beauty of Seamus or Seamus' thick Irish brogue that did it, but it always made him feel happy. What he never suspected was that it was just the plain and simple truth. Now he stood in front of the mirror and was saying goodbye to everything that he had held dear, everything he had built and all the creature comforts that he had acquired. Now he was faced with going back, back to that place that always made him feel odd, unwanted and unloved. Everything that home should not make you feel.

He jumped into the shower, and let the hot water take him away for a few moments until he got to the business of washing. By the time he was finished, so much steam had filled the room that it was like he was living inside of a cloud. A hot, steamy cloud that smelled of Ivory soap. He stepped onto the bathmat and was surprised by all of the steam. He could not have been in the shower that long, could he? It was impossible to see anything in the bathroom. Suddenly, someone brushed up against him. He almost called out Seamus' name but something was wrong. The dimensions of the other person were not of Seamus' tall, lean body. It was someone short and sturdy. And that's when he panicked.

Left Behind: The End

2008-09-08T01:55:00.003-04:00

You don't have to be a Christian to understand the concept. I left so many years ago to look for myself and I found ME, doing the same shit in a different locale. So I wander back and I find that many are moving on and forward without me. It's more than a random letter from a high school friend, who you never thought much of but turned out to be a BEAUTIFUL bride. It's more than pictures of your best friend having fun with a man she could possibly love. It's more than watching night after night as someone else lives your dream because you may very well be too lazy to run after your own. You find yourself feeling tossed out, left behind to watch from the top balcony all the time looking down on stage.

I felt this way before, this feeling and I are old friends. The worst case I ever had was when I was dumped. Granted, looking back those feelings of love were just drug-fueled fascination but I thought I wanted it so bad. I thought the boy was THE BOY, I thought the city was THE CITY and I thought the life was THE LIFE. None of it was true, none of it was real except for the feeling of being LEFT BEHIND. Watching from the starting gate as other fabulous people ran the race of life and I could not get enough energy to get out of the gate. To pooped to pop, to leaden to run. And here I am again, watching from the balcony, watching from the finish line watching from afar...

It is a truly awful feeling that I don't much care for. I try to combat it was spurts of activity and LIVING LIFE but then it comes to a stop and I feel stuck, again or old, again or fat, again, or unloved, again or unwanted, again and the cycle begins, again.

And here I am, Left Behind. The end is the new Beginning.

Importance of Being Impatient

2008-09-04T12:08:00.002-04:00

I slowly begin to droop into my coffee. It is not that I am tired, it is that I am EXHAUSTED (sigh). I pick up the cup and bring it to my mouth, and the liquid bitterness slides across the back of my tongue, dives down that esophageal path and splashes into my stomach with a languid sigh. I sit back and relish in the fact that I am listless, bored by being bored and melting into the softness of the couch. I have a job to do, one that I am over educated for yet do not have the experience to do correctly.

A commercial sprang before my eyes today where a group of (white) people looked into the camera and pondered their existence. I was intrigued and continued to watch through bites of sugary cereal, anticipating the answer. At second twenty five, the answered was revealed. The meaning of life and all of it's questions can be found at askamormon dot com. That's right, all of life's questions can be answered from a place deep in the heart of Utah. Yippee.

I did anxiously await that answer, I wanted to know WHY. Those crazy latter days saints or otherwise. I'll have to keep waiting. And so I sit, drooping into my coffee wanting to know the answers now but my impatience is the lesson that I still have to learn.

Texas

2008-09-03T13:37:00.003-04:00

The stay in Texas had been way too much for her to handle. What started out as a brief stint turned into a life sentence. When she arrived, full of youth and beauty, twenty years ago she never knew that her once idyllic life would turn into a piece of torn and tattered cloth. Her beauty was replaced with a certain "handsomeness" from her years spent out in the unforgiven Southern sun, beating upon her skin like someone would beat a rug to rid it of dust. Her youth, well that was different story. Her vigor, her gait even the length of her hair had aged. Not just aged, but weathered. Life had been rough on her in the barren landscape but the one thing that she would hold close to her heart and broken dreams is she survived. There was not much left for her to do now. She looked down at her hands, the knife still clutched there with the bruises already beginning to form on her wrists and knuckles. The light caught the knife, producing a shine in between the blood stains that had caked upon the blade. She was now finished with everything that once held her there. Nothing left to do but move on.

She methodically washed her hands, then the knife. She grabbed the kitchen towel from the rack and patted dry the knife then her hands. After she replaced the knife in slot in the wooden block next to the stove, she left the kitchen with not even a glance over her shoulder to say goodbye. She walked down the hall, picking up her bags along the route and moved toward the door. She had been well prepared for this moment but she was not going to let the excitement ruin her chance to take her mental snapshots so when people asked her what happened, she could tell them precisely. Finally the door was within her sights and she glided, no danced, toward it. Effortlessly she stepped over Dale's large carcass grabbed the doorknob, turned and stepped out into the dry, sunshine. Once she closed the door, she reached into her pockets for her keys and moved toward her car. The trek from door to door was just a few steps but she stopped and pondered each one. Each step brought back a memory. Each one she remembered a time she had cried inside that house, each time she lost a little bit more of herself. When she finally reached the car door and grasped the handle, she had mentally created a scrapbook of all of her sad times. Once she sat behind the wheel, that same scrapbook was destroyed by the fires of her mind and she would never think about those times again. What she at one time thought would be guilt after the deed was replaced by bliss. She did not know if the bliss was brought on by psychosis or by shock, it did not matter. What mattered was it that it was finally and fatally over.

She placed the key in the ignition and the sound of the motor was like honey to a diabetic. Forbidden but the taste was intoxicating. She put the car into drive and began to move away from the house without a second, third or fourth thought. When she reached the beginning of the road that would finally take her away, she rolled down her window and made her peace with the past twenty years. The words carried on the wind long after she was gone.

"Fuck Texas".

Herpetic

2008-05-22T19:44:00.002-04:00

I haven't turned my back on writing. Really, I haven't. I have found that as of late, my brain space has been occupied by tests, and papers, and IEP's, and ADHD, and Bitchy Counselors and...and everything else except writing. And what has all this stress led to? Herpes...more specifically Shingles. It seems that all of the worry and stress that I have subjected my body to has led to the suppression of my immune system which has led to the encore performance of Chicken Pox. Believe me, being somebody that adores theatre, revivals are a great thing. Lupone in Gypsy, Peters in Annie Get Your Gun but Herpes in The Re-Rash is not something that I would buy tickets to, let alone let play out on my back. So I am sitting here, off from work for a week and trying to pack with the Cincinnati Bengals running drills on my back in 9 inch stilettos. It isn't very fun. The good news this week...My thesis has passed and I am graduating.

Funny Story....because of the aforementioned outbreak, I had to have my prescriptions filled. I dropped my scrips off at the local pharmacia and waited for two hours while the lovely, if not slow, pharm techs filled the prescription. I smiled, I laughed and I even flirted a bit with the pharm techs as they did their job. I was mighty full of myself as I skipped home, being cute and witty. I open the door and pull out the medicine....ALL OF WHICH IS FOR GENITAL HERPES, which is stamped in big, bold letters. It seems that the same medicine used to clear up the herpes virus of shingles is also the medicine used to clear up the herpes virus, version genital. All the time I was flirting and being witty with the pharm techs, they were thinking "the whore is a walking petri dish trying to spread the love throughout the pharmacy". That's what I get for thinking I'm cute. Maybe next time I contract a (semi)STD, I could have had sex to go along with it. That way, at least the rumors and the stares would be worth it!

Putting the ROCK in Mediocrity

2008-05-14T21:32:00.000-04:00

By no means do I think that I am mediocre. My mother has always told me that I am a beautiful person. People have told me I have a wonderful personality. I even had a famous poet tell me once that I was beautiful. I am by no means a 10 but also a little higher than a 3 so I'll be happy to diddle in the middle for a while until the dial slips either north or south of where I am now. If I believed other people of my same persuasion, I would believe myself an ogre, a giant or stone. But I've never been one to believe the false opinions of others when they did not neatly fit into my own perception of myself. To others I may be mediocre but to me (and my mother), I am the greatest things since bread makers.

Who is this ramblin' fool, you might ask? I am a big kid from a small city in the midwestern, southern part of the country (once again in the middle). I come from a multi-racial background with a mom, a dad, a sister and three dogs (one, God bless her soul, deceased the year prior). I moved to the big city to grow up, to fall in love and to strike out on my own. Two years later, have I accomplished any of the aforementioned line items? Well, I have grown up. Check. Have I fallen in love? Depends on how you view love and if the person has to love you back for it to count. Half-check. And believe me, I've struck out (on my own and with help) more times than I would like to admit so check, check, double check. I am apart of the worlds oldest profession (the noble one) working amongst people that can't figure out if I'm serious or not. Hell, half the time I can't figure out if I'm serious or not. I decided to start a new blog, detailing my adventures in the Great Land of Odd, living in the glamorous life of celibacy in a city where more people rush past me than actually stop and talk to me.

My adventures are at times humorous, at other times sad. That's just the way life goes, I suppose. I just needed to start something new, something fresh that I can combine anonymity and mediocrity in the same place.

Welcome.