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Over the last couple of weeks, I've been doing a great deal of housecleaning. Not just vacuuming the carpets and washing the dishes (tho I've done those too), but real thorough, minute organization level cleaning. I figure this is my last chance to get the house in order and have it in any kind of order for the next several decades. This has involved finally unpacking boxes that have been moving with me since I first went off to college in '92**, pruning the bookshelves, weeding the closet, etc.

Besides finding a lot of truly hideous '80's paraphenilia, I also found my binder. Now, the binder hasn't exactly been hidden. In fact, it's been sitting on the bookshelf next to my bed for the almost-two-years we've been here, and it occupied a similar position at all the previous locations too. It had just become one of those things that's so ubiquitous that your eye no longer sees it.


In one of the odder moves of my young life, my audience for just about everything creative was the future adult me. Even my diaries, kept sporadically between the ages of 9 and 15, all talked to the adult me, with frequent asides and explanations about things that the young me didn't think the adult me would remember or understand the relevance of (e.g. For Christmas I got a Cabbage Patch Doll. A Cabbage Patch Doll is . . . and this is why I wanted it . . . and this is why it's important that I got one . . .).

The binder in question was started in high school. It's a dull pink color with a 3" spine, and it was designated to contain my creative endeavors. More specifically, the two rules of the binder were: 1) Every piece of art or writing that I was proud of was to go in it, and 2) Once in, a piece could be revised, but could never be removed. The intents of the object were to provide a cross-section of my development as a writer, and to be a permanent record for my future child(ren) about what their mom was like "when I was their age."

Back in my Freshman year of high school, during the height of that "musical style" loving referred to as Glam Metal, my friend, Becky, and I decided we were in a band. She owned a guitar which, to the best of my knowledge, she still can't play. And I, for some bizarre reason, was the drummer. This will be funnier if you understand that my sole musical experience through that point involved a four-year-long attempt to play the flute, which, to everyone's gratitude, I quit at the end of 8th grade. I had (and still have) no rhythm and no comprehension of how music is assembled. Considering we wanted to be a Glam Metal band, neither of these may have been actual handicaps. But it still makes wonder what we were thinking.

We called our band (aptly): NiteMare.

Becky, being a quite talented artist, designed album covers for our first two albums. And we wrote lots of songs. Rather, we wrote lots of song lyrics. I don't recall us ever setting the lyrics to anything resembling music.

Fifteen of those songs are in the binder. The dominate recurring themes seem to be: we're young and angry; we really, really like the movie The Lost Boys; and we haven't yet learned our homonyms. One of the songs is, quite possibly, my first piece of fanfic as well, as it seems to be an homage to the tv show My Secret Identity.

In the interest of coming clean with my flist, I've decided to take three of those songs public. Misspellings and misused homonyms have been cleaned up, and all excess z's have been stripped. Otherwise, these are exactly as my fourteen year old self wrote them. Make of them what you will.



Dead End Zone

There you are, ridin' on the edge of your life
Best friend is a switchblade knife.
Trying to be on top of the world.
Fighting all the odds,
But you just gotta tell me why . . .

(Chorus)
Why did you do it?
Why didn't you care?
This ain't the way to go.
Why didn't you just leave it alone?

Welcome to the dead end zone.
Come, make yourself at home.
You're in the dead end zone.
And there's no going back.

You said life in school is a living Hell.
And life at home, it ain't going well.
But hey, said yourself, things'll be right again.
Where has that attitude been?
Please help me understand.

(Chorus)

There you were, ridin' on the edge of your life.
Best friend was a switchblade knife.
You tried to be on top of the world.
But now you're six feet under.

You're in the dead end zone
Making yourself at home.
This is the dead end zone,
and there's no going back.

Rise Up

Suggestive lyrics
Deja vu
The war outside your window
Might include you

Back with a vengeance
Nowhere to hide
We're gonna take you
On a wild, wild ride.

Immortality
Changing times
Dreamers cease to dream
And words cease to rhyme

(Chorus)
It's our time
Rock ‘n' roll ain't a crime
Ain't no one gonna hold us back
Face the music, feel the beat
Rise up.

Responsibility
Mirror image
Rise up and join us
Cross that bridge

Intrinsic values
Superstition
Modern Hell
Moral decisions

Rebel alone
Imagination
Rise up and join us
No hesitation

(Chorus)

We rock all night
Sleep all day
No price to pay
Turn it up
Or give it up.



World of Lost Dreams

Once upon a time
We were too young to know
Children began to dream
then began to grow.

Changing bodies
Changing minds.
What cannot be true,
Only what logic finds.

Door to a magic land
Closed in our face.
Where anything can happen
Vanished . . . no trace.

(Chorus)
Searching for the World of Lost Dreams
No proof of existence
Just fading memories
Cloaked in blushing shame.
World of Lost Dreams
Nothing is as seems
Stop hiding your face.
You've found your place
In the World of Lost Dreams.

Somewhen we believed.
A time to be naive.
Somewhen we knew for sure.
Now a time to be mature.

People can't fly.
Just a goodnight lullaby.
It's too bizarre.
Go wish up on a star.

(Chorus)

(Spoken)
Keep your feet on the ground
Always look around
Keep your head in the clouds
Dreams are allowed
This is the key
To the World of Lost Dreams


**There were two moves involved then. My mom moved the same week I left, so all my stuff got packed up to go to her house in Indiana, and some boxes continued on with me to Florida. Not counting moves into, out of, and between dorms, the next thirteen years included four interstate moves and two intrastate moves. Not in that order.