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Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Black Eyes

The song I wrote this to﻿

Eyes wide open from the Devil's smoke. The smoke that lifts you up so high, and then violently drops you down with nothing but lose teeth and confused thoughts, all connected back to pale skin and fragile bones.  Your dark black eyes match the circles that so massively surround them, as if your eyes had fallen deep inside a giant crater.  Two black holes in your face fill with water, as the tears fall down your boney cheeks and into your wide open mouth, as it screams so desperately for your father to save you.  You cry out for help with closed eyes and hands that have seemed to form into tree branches that have branched in all different formations and directions.  Your father is just as gone as you are. His eyes are blacker than his hair, and you can tell he has come down harder than you have.  He no longer stands tall and confident, now he leans drooped over and beat.  The realization has hit you, and hit you hard, that the person who has been protecting you throughout your whole life has now become a helpless man that cannot do anything for you, only to cry as well.  Seeing your father stand in the middle of the road staring back at you while his arms wrap around his body, is a feeling that will never leave you.  Two minutes of crying and shaking, not one of you had the courage to take a step forward and embrace each other.  You keep waiting for him to hug you, but he never did.  To this day, you don’t know why you didn’t either.

I sometimes lie awake in bed finding myself reliving this stained memory, trying to guide myself toward him.  Imagining that everything would have disappeared the minute we hugged, that life after that could have gone back to normal.  But no, I realize that never happened as I get up out of bed in the middle of the night to find myself looking back at a man that left that crying kid in street so long ago. Our bodies shook rapidly from the "come down".  I was only 16, and I had been up for four nights straight with no food, no water, and no sleep.  Every time the thick cloud of smoke entered my lungs, a part of my innocence disappeared. My mind went places I didn’t even know existed.  I couldn’t tell if it was the drugs giving me this rotting feeling inside, or the lack of life necessities that I had abandoned.  Black is all I saw in his eyes, no white at all, just black.

On top is heaven.  Your eyes roll back behind your head and soon you become lighter from all the bad that has left your body.  You float with emotions and feelings. You can feel your heart and mind pound with dreams and ideas, but your legs don’t move.  Your legs are numb, so is the rest of your body.  Paralyzed is what you have become.  You are understanding life better, for the first time in a long while you feel good.  You are actually slipping further away from reality. You are becoming sick, at the same time you feel you are being healed.  You truly feel alive, but you are slowly dying.  This is no movie.  This is reality, something that seeing up close can change your outlook on life forever, in a good way, or bad. I guess it’s a matter of how you take the experience in the end.   Blinking is something that happens in a blue moon, and going to the bathroom is something that well..... never happens.  Itching feels great, until you find out that you have been itching the same spot all night, and now the blood from behind your neck has built up under your finger nails.  Your hair has seemed to fall like a dog in the middle of summer.  You are literally dying.  All at the same time you feel the most alive. 
Four nights later, the story wraps back to the beginning, and you have lost complete track of the time and day.  It's only when you hit bottom and the smoke no longer swirls inside you that you have realized that the last four days has been a complete lie.

I sat on the side of the road for hours with my head between my legs, praying this feeling of being sick would leave me so I could feel normal again.  Sick is the only word I could find for this feeling, even though it has no way of explaining how sick I really felt.  A sad story that I had no intention to write.  An experience that haunts me to this very day. 

Back to school I went on Monday.  Walking through the hall reminded me that life has been continuing on without me, even though I could have sworn it stopped.  I never did experience this dream world again, I swore to it.  The temptation was too high, the drug was too good.  I walked away and never looked back, leaving the four day room of smoke forever.  Thank God for Weightlifting. Thank God for my Wife. Thank God for you.

The new MDUSA video
My back is finally feeling better.  Getting ready for the MDUSA try outs this Saturday! 

Weightlifting 2016


  1. When i say i feel you, make no mistake, i understand every word you wrote as if it were my own

  2. The passion behind these words is something I can't even explain, Jon. This is amazing. You're amazing. Weightlifting is amazing........LIFE is amazing.