The haze rolls yet again; another rainy day, but who am I kidding, I love the melancholy. It's a reminder of better days. A reminder of the times what we danced when nobody else wanted to.
A subtle ode to the "golden days" past, and the roar of the storm that is passing above.
I like to tell myself that this is a promise to a blooming spring, but that's a promise at beat, and if time has taught me anything, its that promises are meant to be broken.
My favourite hero once said, "Hey, don't meet your heroes kid".
I wasn't too sure what he meant at the time since I still saw him as an inconquerable image that towered over all his various peers, foes, and unjust government schemes, but yet something about his conviction made this riddle stick in the recess of my malleable mind. So like any other bright-eyed kid I stowed this nugget deep in my mind waiting for it to show itself when the time was right.
Time would pass, as it always does, and much as time does it ate away at all the lies that kept a young boy's bright. Slowly I started to see the hero's armor chip away. One might call it progression: sidekick to rookie to probie to the new kid on the block, and untimely, "old enough to become the villain".
This brings me to where I am now. Stuck between waiting to see myself as the hero trying t inspire the next generation, but also battered enough to spite their go at life.
Maybe the best I can do is pass the wisdom I got all those years ago and plead my students to not, "meet their heroes," in fact, I would add that, "you won't like what you see when we're outside of contract hours".
"Nothing is better or worse, just different". These are words are forever sketched into the back of my eye, and to make matters worse, they play on loop in the recesses of my mind.
In fact, I can still picture when I first heard them - glossy-eyed and half-asleep in what was possible the single coldest classroom I've ever had the odd pleasure of being in. While delivering what were some rather cross (but albeit correct) remarks about British-American idiosyncrasies, dear old Teach took extended his overly dramatic pause.
Then he scanned the frigid lecture hall looking for a poor Yankee to berate, and of course he chose me (just my rotten luck). Teach locked right trough my soul and made sure that my re-fired brain cells made note of his Majesty's final remarks. It goes with out saying, that he was quite effective as his truism was forever imprinted in my mind.
After playing off this rather odd student-teacher interaction with my friends, I then spent the rest of that semester debating whether these were truly words of wisdom or just an other odd-ball professor's catch phrase being thrown in my direction.
What's funny about all this is that it took all of my poor choices catching up to me to realize just how right Teach was with his truism.