I’ve always wanted to keep a journal, but I convinced myself that something big would have to happen for me to want to start one. Well the big things come and go, and I never start writing about them. So I’m sitting here watching One Tree Hill and I realize that if I don’t just start then there’s no way I ever will.
It seems like that’s how everything is with me lately though. Like I can’t do anything because I’m waiting. Waiting for something that’s bigger or better than what’s happening now. Like right now isn’t enough for me. and I know things are kind of horrible but I need to stop waiting for things. I think I know now I need to just make things happen. I should be making better choices. I should be doing something with what I have.
There’s this song called Boston by Augustana, and this song by Meiko called Hawaii, there’s also a song Far Away by Ingrid Michaelson; the one thing they have in common is that the people all just want to get away. They want to be somewhere different and they think that maybe that new place with change how they act or the people that they’ve let themselves become. And for about two years I’ve listened to those words and felt like that’s all I needed. A new place, a different town, with new people who have new ideas. But now I’m here, a different town, with new people who have new ideas, but I’m the same person, so it doesn’t count. I’m the same person, with the same ideas; just in a different town.
So I guess since I’ve taken so long, and so much has happened that I should give you some sort of background on who I am and how I got more than 600 miles away to this new town in the first place.
Well, two years ago I was halfway through my junior year in high school. I have met some awesome new people in that old town. Danny Collins, the gayest boy you’ll ever meet who loved only loved three things; his on again off again life partner Cody Knacke (more on him in the future), and us, his friends; Vi McClendon, the little girl with the huge mouth, who told great jokes and is an amazingly funny drunk; Melissa Kay Sanchez, the even tinier than Vi, girl who was my sober partner in crime during those nights filler with booze and bad choices; and lastly there was Lauren Crockett my sister, well not really but it felt that way, we liked all the same music, felt the same ways about obscure ridiculous things that no one else even knew about, and the person I could just do nothing with. And with these people came a later curfew, crazy adventures and lots of other new strange people, with very few boundaries and even fewer inhibitions. I started to meet people at school and became “popular” I guess you could say, although I completely attribute it to the fact that Roger House is a very awkward name and thus it worms it’s way into your mind and just won’t leave, so people knew my name but still not much about me. i don't know it’s always been like that though, I’m Roger House hard to remember but impossible to forget. I was put in more advanced placement classes, because I had “great potential” and “an obvious thirst for knowledge”; at least that’s what you’d be told if you asked Mr. Pinkerton the school counselor for everyone who had a last name that started with any letter between G and Q. And it changed me a little I have to admit. Not who I am but how I see things. I started to speak my mind. I had always been passive aggressive, with almost everyone I ever met. It’s like I couldn’t say what I thought, and things just built up until they boiled over, at the wrong people too, and I made a conscious decision not to do it anymore. I would say what it thought no matter the consequence. As you can imagine that didn’t last long, I went from never saying anything to saying everything that popped into my head, the filter was gone, but now these big chunks of nastiness could slide right out and I had no control over them. So I re built some of those walls, I started to tell people how I felt, but only when it truly bothered me; and thankfully I stopped getting angry with the wrong people. I’d like to say that I stopped voicing my hurtful opinions because I’m actually a decent person, deep down, but honestly I’m 98% sure that the only reason I stopped, was because I felt like I had lost control, and I am nothing if not a control freak.
So on to present day.
I'm a veritable college drop out, part-time sales associate, living from paycheck to paycheck, driving a red 98 Honda civic with a gaping hole in the dash where the stereo should be, and I loose bumper with a dent in it from where I spun out on the freeway and hit the retaining wall and four new tires that had to be purchased because the others decided to give out; waiting for something big to happen, so I don’t feel so ridiculously out of place. And just now I finished a season (on dvd) of one tree hill, and I’ve decided to be more honest, but in a way that I can control, and in a way that won’t hurt anyone.
I am going to write it all down, everything.
All the things I think and feel and see and hear.
From now on things will be different,
because i am different.
