As like my poem “Last Time” I am going to let this piece speak for itself first — and allow whoever reads it to not have their perception of it affected by my own until after it has been read.
Of Worthlessness & Worth.
I forgive you.
Because you’re worthless.
You took something from me.
Because you’re worthless.
Something I can never get back.
Because you’re worthless.
I’m a better person now.
Because you’re worthless.
I have perspective and understanding now.
Because you’re worthless.
You are worthless.
I hope you become of worth.
This world needs more of that.
I hope you become of worth.
Bitterness is a poison.
I hope you become of worth.
My wish for you is to learn humility.
I hope you become of worth.
People do not need the pain you are capable of weaving.
I hope you become of worth.
I will never stop loving you.
I hope you become of worth.
Be worthful.
This poem has a bit of a double meaning for me. I have written it to represent my journey about a betrayal from one of my very closest friends of whom I cannot any longer give myself to. They hurt me too much, and in a way where as egotistical as it sounds; they do not deserve my presence. Ever again.
This poem also represents me speaking to the woman who molested me in pre-school. I have not been able to express anything about it in writing since I first remembered of the ordeal in high school. It has taken me this long to write something towards her.
As usual, this piece has given me great release and closure from these experiences. I feel I can properly move on now.
On a more positive aside — this is the very first thing I have written in my new book for poetry. It was purchased during a friend’s birthday at the Renaissance Festival this past weekend and is pictured in the featured photo. 100% handcrafted paper and hand treated bound leather.
I felt this piece was the perfect starting point for this new book, and for this chapter of my life where writing is once again a part of me. I feel whole again.
Thank you for reading.
If you have interest in reading anything else I have written please check the Table of Contents, here.
Belts are great. They hold up your pants. Especially for men like me who have nothing to hold up their pants without one. There is a particular belt I own that means the world to me, twice over. It’s the twice over part that gets me.
You see, when I took this belt that I am talking about; from my grandfather’s corpse. I expected to hold on to it for the rest of my life. It’s a symbol to me, at that very moment it became one. The Model-T on that belt buckle is like my “S” insignia, it became hope.
If you have been following my writing for some time I am sure you have read about my cousin, Paul. Paul was the little brother I never had. He looked up to me with these eyes. Eyes I have only been able to enjoy again since my nieces and nephews began to use them. He was also my best friend at the same time — because we were exactly two years apart. So it flipped between the two, but more often than not he would look at me with such admiration. He did it more as I got older, and I still miss it dearly.
It’s this reason why no matter what anyone tells me, I feel a particular guilt about his loss.
I know he had plenty other influences around him, and I saw him but maybe twice a year for most of our lives after our early childhood — but damn do so many of those times define me. I want to think they did him too.
I remember before he was even smoking cigarettes — riding bicycles to town so I could go buy some. He would ask to have one and I would oblige, knowing full well if he wanted to no one was going to stop him anyways. It’s not the sharing that sticks out to me, it’s the bicycle ride.
Just like my friend Alex, so much of the time I spent with Paul was purely with him. Just him. We didn’t need or want anything else, and so many memories I have of him are like titanium encrusted across my brain. So a lot of the things I said and did, I feel like they stuck with him.
Like I wrote, I know there were a multitude of other influences and I was far from the largest. But I still did then and now feel a modicum guilt for the path he went down and ended at. Paul made his own choices, but I think with any loss we feel like there is more we could have done.
This is going to be about what I did do, though. I gave him the belt.
It’s funny, thinking on it — I didn’t even physically hand it to him. I believe I gave it to my Mom and she gave it to my Aunt Mary to give to him. That titanium memory though is from Megan and I’s wedding. May 4th, 2013. Just over four years ago now.
The wedding was over. The reception was over. It was the after party. I can’t remember which relative’s room we were in, but it was facing on the starboard side of the hotel. There were two beds, most likely queen — it was in the Boulderado in Boulder, CO, which is a historic and old place. You know the deal, shiny whites and golds, filigree, encrusted and rimmed mirrors, don’t forget the pretty chandeliers. This room wasn’t filled with all those things, but there were two windows on the far side facing as you walked in.
Paul and I stood amongst the room that was so loud we got called in on a few times. We were center, in front of the beds. Center again, in the gap between the door and the windows. Center. In a world of our own. We just stood there and talked. It’s one of those conversations I only got to have with him once and I was looking forward to checking in on it a few years later to see how things progressed.
It started with him telling me he did not like my now wife until that very day.
Something he saw in her, in me, in us that day. It made him realize something about growing up. How he didn’t exactly know everything. He apologized for it and we had a great heart to heart about him getting to know Megan better.
There was alcohol involved, but I know we both remembered this whole conversation clear as day. Since he had already broached serious subjects I decided that it was the perfect time for me to have yet another talk about his health, and making the right decisions — not putting his body in danger by making bad ones. I was well within my recovery at this time. I was not off probation, but I was on emails only at that point.
I said to him, after probing questions about what his plans were over the next couple years,
“Paul, I’m going to give you Grandpa’s belt. Understand something. If you fuck up again I am going to take it back. I don’t want it back, you don’t want to give it back. It’s Grandpa’s belt.”
He was over the moon about it. I remember him calling me after he got it and being concerned about needing to put a hole in it.
“Paul, Grandpa had a fatter waist than me, I put a hole in it. No worries, wear the thing.”
I really, truly, never wanted that belt back. I am not going to lie, I missed it sometimes. When I would see him and he wasn’t wearing it, I got bummed out — but I know he wore it. From my own recollection, family’s… and how worn that new hole is.
This is why I say the belt means the world twice over to me. I took it off my Grandfather, I hoped to inspire my cousin, and now I keep them alive inside and on me with that belt. I think about them both every day. I have them with me every day.
What I wouldn’t give, though. To be bummed about him not wearing that belt when he could be.
March of 2008, my Grandfather died. This is the first loss I truly felt of someone who I had known throughout my entire life, extremely closely. I had lost others but this was the most impactful for me, expected or otherwise in my life — at that time.
Not the least of which because I was at a “job fair” with some friends and got the phone call while there. I raced home to see my grandfather lying face-up, dead, on the kitchen floor. All the same things he was usually wearing. Glasses, pocket protector, plaid shirt, jeans, velcro shoes, and his belt.
There’s a story that is going to be written about that belt. Suffice it to say I took it off his still warm corpse and I am wearing it as I type this out. There’s a lot more to it than that, though. Unfortunately. That, however, is for another day.
This poem is what I wrote about my Grandfather and shared at his wake. It still makes me emotional.
Grandpa.
Power Wheels,
the History Channel,
denchers,
and a three hour conversation that came from saying you wanted cheese on your burger.
Some of the best memories in my life involve that man.
He will be held in my hand,
heard in my voice,
worn on my waist,
and seen in my pupils.
When I look at that pink building, Gramps.
I’ll hear you, just like I can hear you hollerin’ as I open some pudding.
And I’ll remember,
one of the best men I knew, was proud of me.
Music is something I have a very personal relationship with. So personal I very rarely share my music interests with others. So personal that I have stopped listening to entire genres of music because I could not control my emotions or desired actions while listening.
Music is so personal to me I literally feel it inside of me. My favorite thing to do during my substance abuse days was to sit by myself in nature, on LSD, and listen to music. To let it absolutely consume me. My every atom. That is, to this day, my favorite experience in life. I don’t know if that will ever change.
I’m starting to finally be able to feel music again. I can listen to Metal again which is fantastic. I’m actually going to a Slayer & Lamb of God concert this summer with my cousin, Ryan. Well, Megan’s cousin, but he’s mine now too. I don’t think of him as anyone but my cousin, and family. That’s why I am comfortable with going to this concert with him. This concert in this genre of music that means so much to me.
After I went crazy music was dead to me.
Completely, utterly, unquestionably, dead. I could not feel it inside of me. It gave me no pleasure. People would try to share their music with me and I would pretend to care. I couldn’t listen to anything. Not the Rolling Stones, Faith No More, Metallica, Tech, Rage, Queen, Tribe, Common, Zep, and on and on and on.
It’s one of the worst experiences I have dealt with — and it lasted years. It really wasn’t until the last few months where music made me really want to move around again. I’ll never be much of a dancer, but I’m saying that I wouldn’t even tap my foot to a beat at this time.
There were spurts, surely. But it wasn’t as deep or as consistent as it is right now. I’m open to and discovering new music. Something I haven’t done again until recently. For the longest time I was either listening to sports radio or film scores — as I never lost my love and emotion for film, so their scores were a form of music I was still capable of connecting with. Kind of a funky roundabout, but it really helped me cope with the issue for a long time.
It’s Metal and my love for Paul Perkins that has brought music back to me.
My cousins Kevin & Paul are the biggest metal heads I know. They were just finally getting myself and my brother into it right before I went insane. Alan went on to become just as big of a metal head as the both of them. I, on the other hand, could not listen to it any longer. I was too angry and it put me in even more of an angry place. Even when the songs weren’t inherently angry! Something like Amon Amarth’s Live Without Regrets is just super optimistic and inspiring.
Unfortunately Paul is no longer with us, but I like to think that part of the reason I am able to really connect with music again is because of that loss.
The journey of me being able to connect with music again can be traced back to a trip myself, Alan, & Kevin took to a record store in San Francisco while visiting Alan together — not very long after Paul’s passing.
This was the first exclusively vinyl store I have ever been into. My brother is hugely into collecting vinyl records like I am with physical movies, so he was super excited to show us his digs. There was a great smell in there. Like the kind you get when opening a brand new paperback book. It just wafts of creativity awaiting consumption.
Rows of boxes with hand-written cardboard signs denoting genres, sales, & price ranges. Records just littered in organized chaos, awaiting fingers to eagerly rifle through them. It’s here that I just went off on my own and started looking around. Alan wanted Kevin and I to each pick out something so we could listen to it together. Alan, Paul, Kevin, & I spent many hours solely listening to music together. Music was our language. I just wasn’t feeling it, though. I didn’t know what I was interested in picking up — because I wasn’t interested at all. I just wanted to get out of there.
Then I watched them look through the Metal section, and walk away from it without anything in hand.
I thought to myself “Well, if there’s nothing interesting for them, maybe I can find something.”
That’s all it took. I walked over to the left most box in the section that was facing the wall and started flipping through each record. I’m the kind of person that loves to judge a piece of artwork by the cover chosen for it. If you don’t put effort into your presentation then don’t expect me to put effort into what is behind it. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” has been far more relevant to me in life when it comes to people than when it comes to actual books.
And then I saw it, Tempest, by Lycus. There was something about the album artwork that just spoke to me. It felt like something that if showed to Paul he would not allow me to put down. He would grab my shoulder vigorously and bring his head close to my ear with a “Duuuuuuude! That’s wicked!” So I called Kevin & my brother over and they did something really similar. It was everything I wanted it to be.
Lycus is a specific kind of Metal, Doom Metal. It’s very melodic, deliberate, and patient. There’s a lot of chanting, and it just had a way of worming into my bones when we listened to it. It’s a kind of music that really allowed me to embrace my torture and grow with it rather than fight it.
Since the three of us first listened to that album my connection with music has been like a tarp full of water with a small tear in it. It starts as a small drip, but as it continues to rain, and slowly drops — that rip ever grows.
I realized today after having reconnected myself with music like Bullets & Octane, Coheed & Cambria, and even the original World of Warcraft scores — the tarp is almost entirely gone now.
I can bask in the rains of music again.
It’s a really liberating thing to be honest. I missed it quite a bit. I’m pretty sure human beings as a species in general share this same connection with music that I have. So you can understand when I tell you that having music dead to me is maybe the worst thing out of this journey that I have experienced.
The greatest gift I can give Paul in his passing is what I am doing now. I am using his loss, and my heartbreak from it to make me a more complete person again. It’s what he would want. He would be so excited to hear that I am going to the concert this summer. I only wish I didn’t have to carry him with me and that I could actually have him there next to me.
Thank you for inspiring me, Paul. Thank you for bringing music back to me. I miss you.
Trevor's Notepad 