Restless Soul, Enjoy Your Youth

A friend of mine told me about the most recent album of Pearl Jam.

It was the summer 0f 1995, or so, and the album had just came out six months ago. 

He had bought Vitalogy at El Chopo, the most underground market of music at Ciudad de México -you could find out punks and the most unaccessible music, there-, and one day he lent it to me. 

I really loved the music and the fact that it was a pretty recent album. 

All I had heard then was old. Nirvana was my favourite band of all times, but since Kurt Cobain's death it had elapsed one year and the last studio album of the band would be Unplugged In New York. 

It was sad to realize that Nirvana would never play again. 

I had heard Ten and I kinda thought Pearl Jam was the opposite to Nirvana, that they did not have the same anti-commercial attitude of Nirvana, even though they'd just had sued Ticketmaster.

Pearl Jam wanted to be fair with their fans and they hated that Ticketmaster elevated the cost of the tickets for their shows and the fact that the company was the only one able to sell the tickets. 

I had read alot of interviews in which Kurt Cobain expressed his animadversion to Eddie Vedder. He said Vedder was a fake guy and he hated that Vedder pretended to be a nice guy with a high social consciousness, but I think it was more related to the fact that Kurt Cobain saw a bad reflection of himself in Eddie Vedder. 

  

I was really touched by the album, when I met a girl named Nancy. 

She was younger than me and she looked really beautiful and happy.

She was blonde and overweight. 

Except for her overweight, she looked like a girl I felt in love with when I was in elementary school. 

Veronica was from Aguascalientes and she was a tiny girl and the blondiest girl I ever met.  

Veronica left elementary school so soon -her family went back to Aguascalientes- and I couldn't get close to her.

Nancy had a sister and they used to wear the same clothes. 

It was pretty funny 'cause one day Nancy wore the clothes that her sister wore the day before, and so on.

I spoke to her once and asked her if we could meet. She did not understand why, but was nice and agreed. I realized she had green eyes, just like Veronica, and I felt so happy.

Obviously I wanted to make her my girlfriend. 

via GIPHY

We spoke several times, but soon it became pretty evident that I was not attractive to her. 

I don't even remember in what she was interested on, nor what we talked about.

I just remember that I gave her away a cassette with my favourite songs and that she started to hang out with and older guy who was some sort of dealer in the school.

We has so old, that he was a bearded guy. I always suspected he was "un porro" -a term we use in México to refer to the guys that the autorithies of the schools buy to get rid of troubles with the real students-, but I have to accept that he was also a pretty good looking guy and that alot of girls were crazy about him.

Sometimes he played football or basketball, but he sucked.

He was very clumsy. 

One day, I was having a good time with Nancy and he suddenly appeared and stared at me with a very hostile look.  

Later that day, I was in the high school gym watching a basketball game. 

It supposed to be an important game, between the school team and its worst enemy, or something like that, and this guy was sort of controlling the crowd -as I mentioned, he was kind of an employee of the school authorities- and someone in the crowd pushed me and I fell  on the floor of the court, just a millimeters away from him.

He was sitting but got up immediately and looked at me with his characteristic hostile look.

Dunno why I felt so strong and angst -maybe 'cause he was dating Nancy- and I stared at him with a very hostile look, to. 

He approached me, walking like the rough guys of Michael Jackson's Bad music video, and I just told him:

Are you sure, you want to have troubles?  

Dunno where that sentence came from.

Obviously I was not looking for a fight. 

My words surprised him and he pretended that one of his friends calmed him and he went back to his place in the high school gym.

via GIPHY

While doing it, he persisted in staring at me with his hostile look.

I felt stupid and contagious, and, since we were a teenage crowd in a high school gym, I thought it had just been pretty similar to the Smells Like Teen Spirit video of Nirvana.   

It was so cool and dumb, but funny. 

Every time I hear Vitalogy -and particularly, Not For You-, I almost smell the parfum of Nancy's blonde hair and wonder why would she think about me right now. 

Would she still believe that I am not enough for her?

This Is Not For You!!!

Winded Is The Sailor... Drifting By The Storm...

I woke up this morning from a vertiginous sleep in which I was a teenager.  

I woke up really sad, missing who I was then.

I could be so indifferent to common issues. I didn't need to socialize, nor tell people who I was in the world to feel comfortable.

I thought guys from my age were silly and older guys thought I was silly, but that was OK.

I really did not care about people, nor I really had an interest on what people thought about me.

I studied Psychology 'cause it was a college career between science and literature (or I thought it was so) and I wanted to be condescendent with my mom and dad. 

Then, besides my dad, I was the second in the entire family -I have two aunts and three uncles, and half of them had sons and daughters older than me- to get to college.

I really wanted to be a writer. I wanted to study Letters and to have a degree in Letters. 

Somehow, since I owned a scholarship in elementary school -mom and dad asked me to reject it in high school 'cause they thought someone else would needed it more than me- due to my academic ratings, my family thought it would be a waste of time if I studied Letters. 

They thought I would die by starvation.

I think I would be happier.  

Since I learned to write, I write. 

I learned it when I was four years old. 

Then, as any other kid, I played with toys, but I enjoyed more to write stories.

I remember myself on a sunny saturday morning waking up and writing immediately about a dream I'd just had. It was a sad dream about Mickey Mouse asking Minnie to divorce him.

Mom and dad were slept and the apartment was so quiet. Maybe I was on the first grade of elementary school. I was an advanced student and I was five years old.

I remember feeling in a cathartic way, thinking that I had never felt so focused and excited.

Writing seemed the deepest human activity of all I knew. 

When I played with toys, I loved to play alone. I made up stories with my toys -the kind of stories I saw on cartoons mixed up with the stories of the soap operas or movies my mom used to watch- and I hated when an intruder destroyed those stories. 

(Mom had a friend and her friend had a boy older than me, and the boy went to our apartment to play with me very frequently. He had a Grayskull Castle and he wanted to stole my toys all the time. He was so abussive. When her mother saw him with my toys, he used to say to her that I'd just gave him away my toys, that it was OK with me. His mom forced him to return the toys, but I was so silly -or maybe I just didn't care enough for toys- that I wasn't angst at all for that issue. I really felt uncomfortable playing with him.)  

After all, I was a happy kid. 

When I was a teenager, I devoted my life to literature and music.  
I really never committed to school, to the point that most of my contemporaries saw me as a retarded with a low IQ. 

Once I tried to get involved in a debate team and one student told me that it was so complicated 'cause "I needed to show some kind of  intelligence". 
I wonder in what kind of man does that guy became.
Certainly, to be a teenager, he was so prejudiced. 

Everything seemed boring and exhausting in high school. 

Then, besides writing songs and poems, I played guitar and I read alot of poetry and novels and I listened alot of garage punk and I fantasized alot about girls I liked. I wrote them poems I never gave to them, and I dreamed of them with me in a movie theater, or places like that. Of course I wanted to have a girlfriend, but it was so difficult to me to get closer to girls in a spontaneous way. Do not why, but I always liked older girls from other classrooms. 

I was so quiet that I seemed so retracted and, perhaps, scary.

But maybe when I was about to finish college, I started to care about what persons thought about me. It was so common to find out arrogant classmates presuming what they knew, what they do and so on. 

I started to look for social recognition, but at the same time -which is pretty childish- I grew up thinking that I was so selfish and egocentric. It was a dilemma, a dichotomy between what I hated it and what I needed it.

(That's why I obtained a PhD?) 

Mom didn't like that I was not affectionate with her, and maybe that's why she always told me that I was so selfish and egocentric. As a consequence, I learned to be as quiet as possible, to the point no one really knows who I am or what I do. Sometimes I even suspect that my wife doesn't even know at all why I feel suddenly so sad or angst.  

On the other hand, alot of guys seem to not understand that a conversation implies at least two persons. To listen up everyone around me and to not have the opportunity to be listened up is exhausting.

At this point I'm so frustrated. I think I'm useless.
I have no power to get out of bed. I would like to sleep forever. 
I finish this year being a coward. 

Sometimes I'd just love to yell who I am or what I do, but I must be patient.

Tremor Christ