8, 18, 28

One day you’re 18 and the entire world is a mysterious, wondrous, massive place bursting with possibilities and magic. You wake up a decade later looking down the barrel of 28 and out of nowhere you know the number of every freeway and the direction it runs. You don’t remember when you learned this information and can’t decide if it’s even important to know. You’re on the way to see a girl from 10 years ago and suddenly you remember what it’s like to not understand how a city works, and a plane passes overhead and you remember how it felt to not know that flights ran on a pre-determined schedule. A song comes up on shuffle and you remember when it was music and not a combination of notes and harmony and rhythm and God Particle and LA-2A and blah blah blah.

***10 years is***
A lot of time to learn a lot of useless information, and a lot of time to forget a lot of important stuff.

I knew, for as long as I can remember, that I wanted to be an artist. I refused to be a “grown up.” When I was 18, I dreamed of going to LA with my friends and pursuing music. We had our little band, we thought we could conquer the world. But then Spud just had to go off to Utah and get Mormon married and shatter my idea of the band. So I hard-pivoted to going to college in Arizona and leaving my music dreams behind. I was 18, it was time to grow up, and I had a full-ride scholarship and a commencement speech worth of reasons to grow up.

***I also had her***
But we’ll get to that.

Let’s go back another 10 years. I was 8 years old and I was in that sweet spot where you’re functional as a little human being but you haven’t been burdened by self awareness. So you know what you like to do and you lack the wisdom to tell yourself not to do it. Art, then, was drawing, and I liked to draw pictures to make my friends laugh. I liked the validation I got from drawing for my teachers and parents. I was a “draw-er” before I knew I was an “artist.” The tragedy comes a few years later when kids start thinking sports are cool and I’ve invested all of my skill points into drawing anime eyes and now I’m in the gifted class and all the kids I used to be friends with think I’m a nerd and ahh damn I have an inferiority complex for the rest of my life. I felt isolated by the very thing that made me “me,” and I could already sense the childhood wonder begin to dry up around all of us. Playing pretend gave way to chasing girls and sleepovers turned into parties. Drawing comics for class went from cool to weird and nerdy. I felt like the only one who knew we were growing up, and I wasn’t ready to leave behind the magic.

Around the time I was 11, I started getting into music. I was obsessed with lyrics first and foremost and was fascinated and empowered by the idea that if you put something into a song you had the liberty to say anything you want. There was real life, which even within the highly structured environment of elementary school was chaotic and inscrutable. And then there was art, which was neatly packaged and able to be played back if you missed a part. Around this time I also began my journal but that’s a whole other story (and also where I came up with the name Max Bennett Kelly).

I began to see art as the path to true freedom, a way to liberate your inner world in a way that was acceptable to the public. I clung to this idea because I felt so unaccepted by my peers who once found my creativity and intelligence endearing and exciting. I couldn’t understand why art wasn’t cool ’til it was “cool,” why the most famous people in the world were artists and yet it was “lame” to write song lyrics in class. How did you close that divide? Like I said, I wanted to be an artist for as long as I can remember, but that dream was (and probably still is) intrinsically linked to my desire to be accepted, to be liked, to be “cool.” I struggled a lot with being seen as “nerdy” and written off for it. Kids can be cruel, which is a horrible reality at a time when everything feels like the most important thing ever.

If there was any solace, it was that I grew up in the particular ensuing decade. I lucked out – nice was in the zeitgeist and once I hit high school it felt like bullies were dead, jocks weren’t the kings of the school and you could be received positively for being yourself. I grew up expecting to be Anthony Michael Hall in Breakfast Club and was delightfully surprise to be more like Jonah Hill in 21 Jump Street. I started being rewarded, again, by leaning into my creativity. I started posting music with my friends online and developed a bit of a following. I would make video projects for school and perform at talent shows and assemblies and my teacher and peers loved it. It felt like the two halves of my brain were both being scratched, I was able to do my art, and it was what made me “cool.” The little kid in me who remembered what it was like to be accepted for being himself was vindicated after years of torment and isolation. However, the draw to “cool” was too strong. I was popular now and I started drinking and chasing girls and doing all the things I used to see as sellout activities done by the cool kid bourgeoisie. Art was for the nerdy proletariat. I wanted so badly to be “cool” inherently, without taking the roundabout way I always had. Why was it so easy for some people to be in the “in” crowd? Why did I have to make fucking videos and songs and pictures just to get them to like me? What was the place of art in my life? Was it a way to draw people in or a way to alienate myself from others? When it came time for college, I began to wish for a simpler future, where I could be accepted without having to be… me.

***And now we’re caught up to the next decade***
Who says you can’t write a recursive non-chronological blog post?

The dominoes come toppling down when, like I said, Spud cut us off and went to Utah. I think I was relieved, secretly, that the band died and I was able to grow up guilt-free. It was my fault I wasn’t pursuing my dreams, it was the band’s fault for dying!! I had outgrown my childish nonsense and was ready to go off to Arizona to do Important Adult Things™ like joining a frat and taking Greek mythology midterms. However, there was one little snag… her. Yes, her, the her that I drove down to see on Sunday. The “her” that I wronged more than anyone I have ever wronged. My great blunder, my great shame. Let’s call her Codename: Monstro. She was a time capsule that I didn’t know how to bury. She was the last person to see me before my tragic 10-year journey of self-destruction and self-discovery.

When I went off to college, determined to destroy every idea of myself I had ever held dear, Codename: Monstro remained back home as a symbol of everything I was leaving behind. I didn’t want to go off to college. I know that now. I was so scared. All I had ever known was in Kent, WA. I had never moved. I had the same friends my entire life. I was the biggest fish in the smallest pond imaginable. The clock was ticking forward against all my wishes and it broke my heart and I hated myself for not following through on my dreams. But hey, if you can’t beat em, join em. If I was going to college, I was going to Go To College™. I would encapsulate every single American university stereotype. I failed at my dream of being an artist, but I would succeed at being a college student.

But I failed at that, too.

I didn’t get into a frat. I applied to a bunch of clubs and was rejected by every one. Oh wait, didn’t I want to be an artist as long as I could remember?? Why am I here again??? I was tormented by the idea that I sold my soul to come here and was punished for it. I longed to go back in time, just a few months, to undo everything. I would have never let Spud go to Utah. I would have gotten the band together and went to LA. I understood now what I was giving up by growing up. I was so ashamed for having betrayed myself. My creativity, my art, my sense of self, that’s what made me “cool.” Without those things, I was one college kid out of 50,000 with no defining characteristics. I was a shadow with nothing to talk about, no identity outside of being popular in high school.

***10 years is***
A lot of time to get your liver eaten.

And now, a brief tangent. In RELI 305, we learned that Prometheus brought fire to man and was punished by being chained to a rock and having his liver eaten every day by an eagle. We think of Prometheus as a martyr who sacrificed his freedom and bodily health to bring fire to man, and we interpret this fire as a metaphor for innovation and evolution and change. In HNRS 206 we learned about Plato’s allegory of the cave, and how for many individuals their idea of the world is nothing more than shadows on a cave wall, cast by an unknowable fire behind them. The people in power, aware of the fire, create shadow puppets of their own design to cast on the cave wall. The former group of people are no more aware of the shadow puppets than they are of the fire itself. For this group, the shadow puppet of a wolf is the wolf itself. They are unaware that what they see is merely a symbol of the actual world, created by those with actual access to the real thing. The irony is, neither group of people is aware of the sun outside the cave. The ultimate source of fire. The true light. Plato asserts that enlightenment begins when one begins to questions the shadows, sees the fire, and begins to search for the exit of the cave to find the sun.

I suppose that if you view the quest for fire as man’s ultimate struggle for purpose, it makes sense why Prometheus was punished for just… giving it away. Man spends his whole life trying to bask in the sun that the gods dangle over us, mocking and beckoning. It’s a microcosm of a microcosm. The humans with access to fire dangle it over the heads of the humans without, acting like the gods they so desperately wish they were. Prometheus took pity and he got his liver eaten for it. But the damage was done, and now we have fire, and now man is punished for seeking out the sun. Only our livers don’t grow back.

Like many men before me, the shadows weren’t enough. With a younger man’s hubris, I sought the sun in the most literal way by going to Arizona. I left the cave and was blinded. Without the shadows to guide me, the vast, real world was unfathomable to me. I missed the comfort of not knowing how freeways worked, how flight paths operated, how music was made. But I made my choice, I was outside of the cave and I could never go back in, no matter how hard I tried. I spent the next decade finding a way to make it all make sense again (someone should make that into a song lyric). I asked every question I could possibly think of, desperately looking for an answer that would be as comprehensible as the shadows used to be. But there was no going back. Freeways would never just be freeways, planes would never just be planes, music would never just be music. Friends would never just be friends again. Home would never be home. Love would never just be love. When Jevandre was still alive, he loved this tenet of Bruce Lee’s philosophy: for a beginner martial artist, a punch is just a punch. For the intermediate, a punch is an impossibly complex series of muscle contractions and releases and an instantaneous calculation of force and velocity. But for the master, a punch becomes a punch yet again. I wanted, so badly, to believe that this was true. That with enough study and analysis and questioning everything would become simple again, the way it used to be.

College happened, college ended. I eventually figured it out, but have always regretted betraying myself at 18, and have spent the last 10 years getting my liver eaten in atonement, promising to never, ever let that part of myself down ever again. Art was once a way to connect me with others, then it became a way to isolate myself, and it once again is a way to connect. I regret having to let it go just to learn how to get it back, but it couldn’t have happened any other way. I set out from home and went on this wild odyssey just figure out that I knew who I was all along. The punch has become a punch once more.

***And now we’re caught up to the current decade***
And the recursion is reversed.

You’re 28 and on the way to see Codename: Monstro. The immensity of 10 years of time hits you. You haven’t seen her since you broke up. You owe her an apology. You’re sorry that in your quest for fire you couldn’t bring anything with you. You’re sorry for leaving her behind. You’re sorry for pretending like she meant nothing to you, when really she was everything. You’re sorry you didn’t know how to say goodbye properly. You’re sorry you had to throw rocks so she wouldn’t come back. You’re sorry you were a jackass.

It’s rare, in today’s world, to have no idea what someone has been up to for 10 years. I’m so used to keeping up with people on social media that I forget we are biologically designed to let time pass. That our minds are designed to forget. I’m so used to keeping up, to knowing, that I’ve forgotten what it is to remember. But when I saw Codename: Monstro for the first time in 10 years, I remembered. I opened the time capsule I had buried so long ago that I had forgotten that I had ever buried it. I had so deeply forgotten how she was, how we were together, that I was astonished I was able to remember at all. But seeing her reminded me of the time before I left the cave. Before I left home. When things were simple.

***10 years is***

A lot of time to catch up on, so don’t bother.

Instead we just talked about what we were doing now. We did a brief Sparknotes on everything, sure, but mostly we just.. talked. It was bizarre to speak with someone who had no idea about Max Bennett Kelly, who was absent for my entire college journey, who didn’t know about Codename: Apples, who didn’t know Spud came back and we restarted the band, who didn’t know that we all went to LA together, who didn’t know that the band broke up, who didn’t know that Jevandre died, who didn’t know about Codename: Emily, who didn’t know I had found some success, who didn’t know I bleached my hair, who didn’t know about Codename: Didi, who didn’t know I saw the world, who didn’t know I lived in my dream loft, who didn’t know that I was leaving LA, who didn’t know I was moving to New York. Codename: Monstro knew me at 18, skipped 10 years, and is seeing me again at 28 with no details to cloud her judgment. I stand before her, as I am, here and now.

***And once again, I ask***
Who am I?

Life is so, so, so funny. I’m cracking up as I write this. I was devastated when I went to college and no one knew anything of my past, because I had nothing to speak of in the present. I spent the next 10 years building up my life so that I would never be caught like that again. And then after the most defining era of life, I’m faced with someone from my past who had no idea of what I had built; faced, again, with the undeniable and inescapable and unfathomably horrific idea of being… me. No accolades. No identity to lean on. Just the words I spoke and the air I breathed and the space I occupied.

We had a wonderful time.

These last 10 years didn’t matter. The next 10 years won’t, either. Time happens whether you like it or not, and trying to define and consolidate each moment is futile because eventually you’ll get caught with your guard down and have to present yourself raw, authentically, naked and flawed and vulnerable and beautiful, as you are, right now. And in those moments, you won’t know why the freeways work the way they do, you just know one of them drove you away from someone who meant everything to you. A plane passing overhead could very well be the exact same one that took you off to college. You don’t recognize the song playing on the speakers but it reminds you of one you listened to together in the same car you drove 10 years ago.

After matcha I mentioned that yeah, I’m still driving the Prelude. She couldn’t believe it and wanted to see it. So we stood outside of the car, just like we did back then. I’m so glad I forgot how that felt, because it was really nice to remember.

’Til next time -mbk