I heard this song a few times last week as I was preparing for the Mark David Manders show and came up with the concept on it. A dear friend told me that she misses my more drama-drenched writing, so here's a bit of that.

It takes place earlier this year during the My Little Identity Crisis Melodrama series.

Growing up and growing older
don’t always go hand in hand
And it’s not the weight on your shoulders
that makes you a man
Is this world we know
spinning out of control
Or is it just me?

Matthew was one of the most charismatic people that I knew way back when. He had a soft voice, an unassuming demeanor, and a way of communicating that made you want to like him, however much reason you privately had not to. Matthew was bisexual and it was his crusade to prove that everyone else was, too. He won over at least four converts that I know about, though I'm quite positive there were more.

I didn't know Jonathan all that well, mostly through his brother. He was always a good kid. Kind of shy, but very smart and studious. I'm not sure when he became Matthew's mark, though he was proudly bisexual by the time he was fourteen and widely regarded as Matthew's sidekick. I wasn't sure what happened between them, but at some point they had an argument. I actually read the letter that Jonathan sent to his mentor. He called Matthew something to the effect of an "empty human being without a clue of who you are except by the people you use and the heads you screw with."

Jonathan wasn't bisexual anymore after that. Nor was he the same smart kid that he had been before. Well, I suppose he was still smart, but not as book-smart or studious. I didn't think that much more about him until he'd single-handedly torpedoed two relationships by sweeping the girls off their feet. He left a third in pieces that her friend Jamie had to pick up. Nearly every girl I knew at the time had been taken by him, strung along, and unceremoniously dropped as soon as they became a drag.

I suppose Jonathan was studious all along. He just stopped studying the books and started studying his mentor, the master.

I went to church when I was younger
and they taught me to believe
Now I can’t help but wonder
what’s been happening to me
Has God lost all faith
in the human race
Or is it just me?

Alan is the son of a fundamentalist Christian minister. When he first met Sally, he didn't know if things were going to work out because his father strenuously objected to his dating a Catholic. After about a month of flirting, he finally took the plunge and they ended up dating for about a year and a half.

I never cared much for him. Well, I might have at one point, but then he hurt one of my best friends. Out of the blue, he dumped her refusing to explain why and left her in an emotional wreck. It wasn't until a couple months later that the rumors started surfacing. He'd been cheating on her. We never got the details as to what happened, all we knew was that it was with another guy named Chris.

Alan had fought off rumors of homosexuality before getting together with Sally. But no one could argue that they were a cute couple and seemed right for one another. There was always something a little off about them, though. An emotional distance from an otherwise engaging person. She commented on a couple of occasions that they seemed closer when they were just friends. No one quite understood when they broke up. Not until his involvement with Chris started becoming public knowledge.

At first he denied it, then when a witness and the credible originator of the rumor stepped forward, he said that he was drunk. When Chris said that it had actually happened repeatedly, he called Chris a liar. He got another girlfriend within weeks, but it didn't last very long. Nor did the next one. In fact, in all the time since, he hasn't been able to maintain anything close to a lasting relationship. He couldn't even blame it on the rumors because he was always the one that dumped them because it "didn't feel right."

I wonder if he wonders why. I wonder if he's just convinced himself that he hasn't met the right girl. I wonder if he's allowed himself to even consider the alternative and if the fear of being disowned by his family, laughed at by his friends, and shunned by his conservative classmates at his conservative university has driven the questions out of the conscious arena and driven him into the arms of one girl after the next.

Swing low, swing low Swing low
swing low for me tonight

I wonder if he knew Matthew.

I started drinking much too early
and it led me astray
It doesn’t matter if I was thirteen
or it was ten o’clock today
It’s just the same old song;
Man is there something wrong
Or is it just me?

When my friend Jamie and I were in high school, she had a boyfriend named Terry. There was a party at our friend Eddie's house and Terry didn't want to drive so far out of his way to get his girlfriend, so she wasn't able to go. When she talked to me about it, I volunteered to swing out of my way and get her so that she could go. Terry was livid that another guy was going to be his girlfriend's ride and forbade her, and me, to do it.

We did so anyway and Terry was cold to us both all night long. He conspicuously flirted with another girl. I suspected it was to "teach Jamie a lesson" but Jamie thought that's why he didn't want her to go. It's difficult to say who is right. In order to avoid the shadow of Terry hanging over us, we had a drinking contest. The more she drank, a different side of her started coming out. She didn't just think that Terry was cheating on her, she knew it.

When we found her head bleeding from pounding it on the gravelly pavement, we didn't know exactly what to do. She kept asking for Terry, but he was too busy flirting with the other girl. When we pulled him aside to talk about it, he said that after the fool she's made of herself, there was no way in hell he was talking to her again that night, if ever. Finally, our friend Shawn took her to bandage her up and I went to get some food to put in her. Terry, getting upset and feeling upstaged because everyone was taking care of his girlfriend but him, ended up going with me.

On the way there, Terry was verbally reaming Jamie for making a fool out of herself. "Didn't she know how to control her booze?" he asked.

I wanted to point out that no fourteen year old can control their booze and it wasn't "Budweiser" she was calling out as she bashed her head against the concrete, but while the drinking contest was her idea, I did partake, so I bit my tongue. When we got back, he took the burger from my hands and coldly gave it to her.

Her face lit up. Her man was taking care of her. She apologized profusely for embarassing him. He said that he didn't know if he was going to be able to forgive her. She didn't care, though, her man was taking care of her. They broke up a month later, but got together again a month after that. He finally dumped her for good a few months after that when she got cancer and was unable to go out anymore.

She's recovered from the cancer and Terry is a distant memory. We still talk a lot and I'm one of her closer friends. She's still not quite legal, but that doesn't stop her from throwing down the alcohol. It was a particular problem when she was with Jack, her ex-boyfriend who was truly dangerous. Since she finally left him for good, she goes out a lot, drinks a lot, and regularly wakes up with strangers by her side.

She beat the cancer, but she never stopped pounding her head on the pavement.

Now I’m not drinking to ward off demons,
no, I’ve learned to live with them
And I’ve learned to live with questions,
but there’s one thing I can’t stand
And in the back of my mind I’m afraid I’ll find
It’s just me...

I'd clearly lost my mind. I was sitting there working on my sixth glass of whiskey, watching people dance. Well, not everyone, just one person in particular. Red is dancing with a dufus who is probably five years my senior. I have no right to be angry about it because I brushed her off. I told her that she was too young, that I was too far away, and just about everything except for the fact that I had a girlfriend. I don't know why I omitted that particular detail. It certainly would have taken me a lot less time to get her to move on, which I told her to do the second I realized that she was attracted to me. Well, she's moved on, dancing with Dufus, and watching me watch her. My eyes didn't leave her when I bought my seventh glass and slowly stumbled my way to my chair. Why was I upset? It's not anger. It couldn't be jealousy because I told her I didn't want anything from her. And besides, I was in a relationship. A happy relationship. Right?

Swing low, swing low
Swing low, swing low
Swing low, swing low
For me tonight

Red was always a hard case. When she was a todler, her father left home. He mother was a fierce alcoholic so, by the time she was thirteen or so, she was practically taking care of herself. One summer she was sent to her grandmother's house and her mother never came to pick her up. The mother had moved out of her apartment and no one knew exactly where she was. Red lived with her grandmother for her remaining couple of years of high school and scored a scholarship to Arkansas.

She met a fellow named Blain there and they hit it off. By the time she accepted that he was an unrecoverable alcoholic and philanderer, her grades had fallen and she lost her scholarship. She's now in the armed forces.

You know, I've been putting myself on trial
I guess if I'm conviced
it'll only prove that the deepest wounds
are the ones that are self-inflicted

Presh was a Christian. I don't know what denomination, or whether she attended church at all, but her relationship with God caused her consternation in her relationship with Michael. One night, when we were eating at a Mexican restaurant, we were talking about her relationship and whether or not she should stay in it and she asked me, "Would anyone even date me? I'm not a virgin."

As long as I'd known her, she'd been with Michael. She was utterly devoted to him and I assumed that she was happy with him until she forcefully assured me otherwise. Presh was a big girl and, despite her unhappiness, she wasn't sure if she could handle being single and alone. While she weathered the storm, his verbal and physical abuse was more than I could handle. I devoted all my energy to getting her to leave him.

The more time we spent together, the more we brightened one another's day. We went out to the theater, saw movies indoors, ate. Some days we felt like a couple. Of course we weren't. I'd like to say that it was just because of Michael, but the more she talked and wavered, the more I knew that she simply couldn't handle the thought of being single and that if I'd simply let her know that she wouldn't be, she'd do it.

One night we'd been staying out later than usual and when we got back, Michael was at her house waiting. Presh told me to go. I honestly didn't know how safe it was, but her parents were there so I reasoned that everything would be okay.

He ended up breaking things off that night. Presh and I would go out afterwards, but we'd never cross that threshold. I don't know if I wasn't physically attracted to her or if I was just afraid I would let her down, both, or something else entirely.

Within a month, Michael forgave her and they were back together. I haven't spoken to her in three or four years, but I assume that they're married by now.

And God, what am I supposed to do
Nothing seems to make any sense
You know, I think I have faith in You
I just need a little more evidence
So swing low, swing low
Swing low, swing low
Swing low, swing low
For me tonight

I never fit in very well at the upper-middle class high school that I went to. The biggest problems they seemed to have were broken nails and broke-down Camaros. If I could do it all over again, I'd do a number of things differently and perhaps after the second go-around, I'd have a different perspective on it all. But I didn't know then what I know now, and around my sophomore year, I found Acme and it didn't matter anymore.

I first logged on to Acme peers, but the people there are often the same black-vested kids that I would have logged on to Acme in yesteryear had they been more than five years old. As I get older, I go to the chat rooms less and less as the age difference between me and everyone else becomes more pronounced. I don't have much in common with them anymore. But periodically I go just to see, reminisce, and observe.

As I watch, I naturally assume that the people I see talking will eventually grow beyond the nihilistic dribble they mistake for intellectual conversation. But when I think about my fellow Acme alums, I often wonder. Many of them are in the same place that they were, just in an updated young adult version. Every bit as macabre and dour. The sense of alienation from society that I move past seems to be largely embraced by a good number of them. Maybe they never tried to acclamate themselves to society or maybe they did and failed.

There is an old saying that birds of a feather flock together. Contrawise, there is a saying that opposites attract. I don't know which one applies to me more. Throughout my life, I've been surrounded by emotionally turbulent people. Whether they were Acme people or not, they're the same kind of folk. I often find myself wondering if they are attracted to me (and vice-versa) because we are kindred spirits or because in me they see a pillar of strength. Am I drawn to them because I see something oddly familiar and in need of growing up or because of some hidden desire on my part to regress.

I talk to them, I counsel them, and I listen to them. They tell me about their problems and I prescribe solutions. I tell them to go along and get along, don't seek out conflict, concentrate on the important things and let everything else go. I also tell them that they need to figure out what they want from life. They listen, they nod, they ignore my advice, and then come back for more.

It's a shame, really, because unless they figure out what they want and stop taking what's either easy or immediately enticing, they'll simply spend the rest of their lives aimlessly drifting into the wilderness.

Or is it just me?

[Song lyrics from Mark David Manders's "Just Me"]