The Mask Becomes the Face

It's a lot of fun to be a bad guy.

One of my most favorite villains that I've ever had the joy to discover is Syler from the television series Heroes. Even though I've only ever actually finished season one and only saw bits and pieces of the rest...

Damn. I wanna be able to act that scary someday.

Unfortunately, that made watching the same actor (Zachary Quinto) in the 2009 movie adaptation of Star Trek rather comical. I kept expecting Spock to subtly murder the entire crew offscreen, eventually assuming control of the ship as the sole survivor. He could have pulled it off, too, AND beaten Khan single-handedly in the sequel.

To me, Zach was an inspiration to someday play a villain as scary as Syler in a movie.

My mother told me to never accept an offer to play a villain in film or theater.

"Don't be silly, mom. A job is a job. It's hard enough to eat as an actor. At least, until I break through."

She responded with something along the lines of, "Every part you play makes a small art of who you become."

That's a scary thought. I've played a lot of bad guys.

I think that every human being alive wears a metaphorical mask every waking moment of their lives. From about the moment as a toddler that it begins to dawn that how they act affects how they are perceived, and thus treated, masks are collected and fashioned. This is who I am around strangers. This is who I am around mom. This is who I am around dad. This is who I am around my siblings, around my family as a whole, this is who I am at school, at work. Wanna see the mask where I let my hair down? Oops... that's my liar mask.

How much do these masks become us?

One of the best performances I've ever been in was called The Rainmaker. I played a bitter, stern brother named Noah who acted as the sole caretaker and provider of his family in wake of his mother's death, his father's age, and his younger brother's incompetence. He was unmarried, deathly serious, and constantly unhappy, but dammit, he saw to it that his family was taken care of no matter what.

That performance one of my darkest time periods in high school. Although there was outside conflict beyond what I was drawing into myself to prepare for this role, I believe that the mask I was in the process of making for this role had the most negative impact on me out of any role that I've ever accepted. I was depressed. I got into useless fights. For reasons I still can't explain, I intentionally avoided my friends and family. I was at perhaps the second lowest that I have ever been in my life.

But I rocked the hell out of that performance.

... Was it worth it?

By diving that deeply into that role, I put darkness into my soul that I'm still trying to expunge.

There's a colloquial saying, "You are who you hang out with." Another way of putting it is "You are who your friends are," but I consider that one less accurate as some people, either out of some manifestation of masochism or extreme desperation, choose to spend time with people that are not their friends, regardless of what they say or hear, or let themselves think.

Everyone is acting around their friends, assuming a role for the play of life, putting on masks, showing a new face for new people. Are you pretending to be the person you want to become?

If a bad person pretends to be a good person for a long enough time - active, persistent effort - eventually that bad person will be able to look back at his or her life, and see someone that is completely indistinguishable from a good person.

So what happens when a good person spends a long enough time fitting in with bad people?

From the Master - Acquainted with the Night

Acquainted with the Night

BY ROBERT FROST

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;

And further still at an unearthly height,

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. 

I have been one acquainted with the night.

Today's Poems: More Depressing Stuff, I Deeply Apologize

Grindstones

If we could love
We would die swiftly
From swords in our mouths,

Sharpened by the grindstones
Encasing what we were
Before we loved,

Rending open hearts beating
Softly in exposed chest cavities
Bleeding love all over the floor

Another victim of caring
Too much while blindly seeing
Wrong in what isn't, right in what shouldn't

Be.

......................................................................

Emptiness

Emptiness burns
Like a cigarette butt on fresh newspaper
Spreading
Consuming
Eating all the stories
Until nothing is left
But ash and burnt fingers

......................................................................

Fire

Love is

Hot

Like fire

A campfire

For friends

Is warm and cozy

But

The passion of a bonfire

Is a safety hazard

Stay safe, kids

Don't burn up

......................................................................

Mother's Love

A mother's love

Enfolds

Embraces

Comforts

Like a warm quilt on a cold night

Oh no!

The quilt is heavy

Can't get out

Don't suffocate

Under mother's love

......................................................................

Six Word Stories

Six word stories

Tell six things

Darkness is easy

Why not happiness?

Quote the Master

If my path looks meandering
I'm finding where I want to go
As I go there

The beaten path is hard underfoot
Beautiful trees and foliage cleared
While I'm here

So it comes to mind words from
Another mouth and another time
Better said

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;	5
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,	10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.	15
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

                                  ~Robert Frost

Poetry Three: First Kiss, Fault, Dreaming

First Kiss

"Disillusionment"

She told with lips

But not words

"Takes a bite out of the heart

and strips you of the innocence needed to survive."

I taste blood on my tongue as she breaks her teeth

What she doesn't know

She kisses a corpse

My heart is coated in resin.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Fault

It’s not my fault

They told me so; it wasn't me.

As I sit in this little white room

And imagine her bright red blood

All over my face, hands, the floor

I agree

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dreaming

This sentence is false.

Either this is truth,

making it a lie,

Or the sentence is false,

making it true

. . . also a lie.

Perhaps the sentence is false as

-more often than not-

it is a lie.

But the more the lie the more the truth

suggesting truth be more than lie

which creates all the more lie

and truth.

Perhaps the circle is neither,

an illusion.

You’re dreaming.

Time

Clocks are time, or perhaps time is a clock, both an infinite loop traveling ever in circular motions, moving around and around and around in dizzying, looping curves, higher, higher, higher, until the spring winds out and the system falls silent, the clock to tick no more, or perhaps time to loop no more?

Although a clock can be so much more. It has a face and hands, does it not? Fairly disproportionate for a handyman, but a clock can, in time of need, put its own spin on things and lend a helping han'd. Perhaps he'll wind backwards, or forwards, or both, minutes rapidly racing ahead, barely keeping abreast of backward-trodding, lumbering, slumbering, slow-moving hours. If both were to move in a different direction time would effectively stop, making a clock a very handy man that can.

And unless sir clock was of the grandfather variety, proudly displayed on a wall where all can listen to him bluster, but don't touch! He's fragile. When grandfather (our clock) lays down to rest, who knows if he'll rise again; perhaps his time has run out.

Time. Clocks are time…

Brain Dump - The Guhrumphey Sea

‘Swas sillig when the gumphey sea

                did bluster brook and bolt

                                SEVENTY FIVE YEARS sucking seashells off

                                bandy beaches, and Bugger and I did brusquely folt.

“A man and agry ye!”

                we didst mock out to the sea.

“Sirrah! Cease forthwith this ghurrrumphing and kacklaking!

                Make peace ye between land and sea!”

Not One Out Done this agry sea

                by a benthum boy as I                           - though such small sad figures I and Bugger be –

                He SCALLS itself in great motion commotion,

                                Whithing up up UP waves floofing, frasing

                                                                                                                Down

                                                                                                                                Down

                                                                                                                                                DOWN

KEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMMMMAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Ahll over sandy beach seashells and two herroneious Humans beans, me, myself, me Bugger and I.

Now should you visit the

Gumphey sea in all its bluster and brook

You may find two ice’d figures frazen in spot

Cold and Cold and Cold and Coldly chilling with hot

                Sir Ocean away back from the Spot,

Protecting beaches and sneetches and seashell sally seeshes all from being gobbled ohp.

                Consider yeself lucky, boy you be

                That ye did not live through the story of

The Guhrumphey Sea!

Imagine a Brand New Color: Describe it Without Mentioning the Usual Color Descriptors

It's extremely unpleasant. I feel like my eyes are chewing on charcoal, a rough, grinding sensation, leaving an ashen taste in my mouth, which is now dry and desperate for something moderately wet. However, my eyes, not being a mouth, immediately shriveled into raisins that I thereafter used for fire starter. So to describe this color as unpleasant would be an understatement, as I am blind now from ocularly chewing on charcoal, and my burning peepers are currently keeping me warm.

Brain Dump - Defiance

We are at war.

I stand with two firm feet planted shoulder-width apart, facing forward in a soldier's stance. Veins bulge around the ball in each ankle, my calves are hard and cylindrical, like the end of a baseball bat. Knees bent, thigh muscles coiled, buttocks clenched, my stomach is one solid slab of granite. Back muscles strain release from skin imprisonment, shoulder blades mimic small sheathed shields. My balled hands crushed air into solid mass, my tensed forearms hover just above the bend made between angled leg and unyielding hip. Elbows are tightened to the exact degree, biceps are screaming, shoulders thrust back, and neck corded like thick stalks of wheat tied into a single unbreaking bundle. Every muscle possible to move in the face tenaciously resists his neighbors; the jaw muscles jut the thing down and forward, while the ones moving the forehead take it back and up, cheek muscles clutching the bone raise in stark relief, the lines in my forehead subtly scribble my life story, and eyelids tightly blanket the orbs within. Nostrils flare, harvesting the rich smells surrounding: soil, pine, water, ozone.

Deep, deep, deep within my most spacious cavity, an enormous wave forms, it roils, seething in anger at captivity. Building, the beast bursts confinement, rolling forth like a great tsunami, sweeping aside the hard apple in my throat and threatening to burst the tunnel directing it. The beast explodes on entry with the world, charging every direction simultaneously like wildfire, desperate to consume, consume, consume.

This little beast lasts but a moment in one far greater.

Around me, the world churns and boils. An angry, smoky face in the sky cries billions upon billions of soldiers born of tears of anger. They beat and beat and beat against my skin with a deadened thumping, rapidly laying down their lives for a dark master above.

Keerash… BOOM! The Master's blinding, brilliant arm strikes a nearby tree, creating a new explosion, a storm of splinters and flaming sap caught within the greater, swept along in the great current surrounding the Eye of the Master.

Like sandpaper, smaller minions riding the wave scrape and make raw my face and arms, occasionally carrying sticks like tiny clubs to smash, leaves like undersized shields to crinkle and smash, fragments of stone like primal axes cut and make bleed. They slide across my skin, a continual wave of the same, the same, something different, the same, simple-minded soldiers with innovation by accident and desperation rather than design.

The world is in chaos around me as the old Master bellows and rages above, but I stand firm. Even as I stand in the Eye of Himself, made still by cold and fury that silences all infraction and nuisance with an icy fire, raising my arms made wet by the perspiration of my efforts and the life-blood of his loyal servants, challenging with all my being as I cast my fury back into the sky and demand control of the storm, screaming with a need that shakes my very frame. The Eye of the Master moves on, seeking an unwilling victim, but unafraid to said his closing remarks as a reverse of the first, brilliant arms crashing down, teardrop-shaped soldiers, and rushing minions, all disappearing into time and distance as he leaves behind a world deeply cleansed by his righteous presence.

Only now unable to stand, my knees buckle into wet soil, my head bows and throws droplets, back curves, and hands fall into lap, a figure of fervent supplication following a deeply religious experience.

I, man, am small and weak. You, Master, great and cleansing and terrible and unimaginably vast.

And I stood firm.