you don't need anyone to show you those mistakes

my friend vinny visited me this weekend and we had a brief yet great conversation about our living situations and how, deep down, we really hate them. i don't think my situation is as bad as his is, but it was just really nice to know that someone that i am pretty good friends with is going through the same feelings that i am.

here is the deal...
i am have been good friends with all of my roommates for about 2 and a half years. at first i didn't really care that they smoked weed and as long as i wasn't doing it myself and just saying 'it's just not for me' i was fine. then last year they started picking up more and smoking more and i was still fine. this was all before i lived with them. I used to have a friend, a best friend, i won't say his name. We were best friends from the time we were about three all the way through middle school. he was into drugs then, in middle school, and i also smoked pot then but i stopped in 8th grade (which seems really little now that i think about it, but i guess we thought we were old then and we thought we knew everything). When we were in 8th grade, his dad beat him and he had to go live with his mom in orlando which really sucked because then i could only see him about twice a year. when i did see him he would tell me about all the drugs he could get and stuff like that and in the back of my mind i wanted to yell at him and shake him and kick him because i didn't want him to do stuff like that (in 9th grade, i think, maybe 8th grade he was talking about heroine.) but i knew that nothing i would say would make him not do it. i wish i that i had said it now. pretty much all through high school he was in rehab. i don't know what for. he would get out and go back in. i wasn't really in touch with him through all of this but that was probably a good thing, for me at least. last year he contacted me through facebook and he was in rehab still and i didn't know what for, i don't really care. we would talk on facebook messenger maybe once a month. and then all of a sudden this summer, i got a message on facebook for his funeral in orlando. he died of an overdose and i had talked to him a few days before. the last thing he told me was that he was rolling a blunt. i wish now that i would have put our friendship on the line and just said, 'what the fuck are you doing?! you just got out of rehab! you are killing yourself!' i was very depressed that he died and i was in a state of unbelief, but i was glad that i had been emotionally disconnected from him for so long. it would have been so much more painful if we were still best friends.
i think this is why i started to emotionally detach myself from my friends/roommates. it is a hurtful process but i know that if something happens i won't get as hurt. also it isn't just incase something happens, it is really because i am sick of being surrounded by sin. all i want is to be surrounded by people that love god like i do.
when i try to voice my opinion, they kind of team up on me and make me feel like my views are super extreme. i feel like it is a loosing fight. if i try to fight i can only go down with them.

a good day for minor injuries

today was a great day for minor injuries. it was the 40th birthday of flagler college and they had inflatable-moonwalk-everythings on the west lawn. They like to do that atleast two times a year. The first moonwalk structure that i encountered was the obstacle course. it is a full moonwalk obstactle course! and it is about 50 feet long atleast. it is designed for two people to race in and nick and i were racing. have you go under and over these inflated bars and through them and stuff, it is hard to describe. anyway and i am listing to david bowie right now so my train of thought is a little skewed. anyway this was where i got injured first. at the end of the race you have to climb up an inflated moonwalk wall with a rope, and on the other side of the wall is an inflated moonwalk slide you have to slide down. it was neck and neck when nick and i reached this part and i dove/front flipped on the slide and i guess at the beginning of my jump i was still holding the rope. it ended up wrapping around my ankle and gave me a pretty wicked rug burn around my achilles as it lowered me down slowly. other than the obstacle course there was an inflated moonwalk slide that was taller than my house. and a gyro (J-eye-ro), which is not a sandwich but is one of those things they strap you in at space camp. and a photo booth and bbq. everything was free. so good.
my other injury came about when nick and hiller and i decided to inspect this old school house across the street from my house. i can see it if i look out my bathroom or kitchen windows. it is really old. i don't think it has had a class in there since like the 1800s. i could be way off though. we had to jump a fence to get to the house and right when we did hiller started freaking out and yelling about a bee or something that stung him. it all happened very fast. he ran into me and bolted off and i thought, 'what the hell is he- OOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWW!!!' and i started running too. the wasp had stung me in the right arm. it was pretty awesome. it started getting really red and it puffed up a little and in the middle was a dark purple/black dot where the thumb tac stinger hit me. that was the first time i got stung by a wasp since i was eight. we went back in my house for about 30 seconds and then we decided it was worth the risk to try it again, but this time we wouldn't jump that fence. the school was really awesome. i will probably go in there again sometime.

The Takers

So my friend devon is the lead singer of an amazing band, The Takers. They are definitely one of my favorite bands in Gainesville. If you ever have a chance to go to one of their shows, do it. A couple weeks ago devon asked me if i could make tshirts for the band and sell them at the fest. I said that I would and i am. But, the band liked the design I made so much that they are using it as the cover of there first solo album, Curse of the Drunk. I am super pumped. It would be cool to get paid for it, but I don't even care. I am just super stoked to do it for them. Here is the tshirt design that I made.

They want me to make the colors a little different for the album cover but that is what the tshirt is gonna look like. hopefully i sell enough to make some money.

My new ORGAN + Journal page of the week

today i bought a wurlitzer fumaker sprite organ. i guess it is from like the 60s or something. it is pretty awesome. here is a picture of it. it makes pretty sweet sounds and has six instrument switches. and it makes beats. there are six beat switches and also there is a touch tone pad which is my favorite part of the whole thing. this is me playing it but the picture is not actually mine. but mine looks just like that.

in other news, today is sunday, well right now it is officially moday, but it is sunday night and that means that it is time for journal page of the week. Here you go...

Sparklers

so i didn't know this until tonight but if you take sparklers and bundle them up together the result is explosive. my friend nick and i bundled up 40 and lit it. it was amazing. there are some vids on youtube of people doing like 9000. i can't wait to try. also if you put duct tape around them it makes a very loud bomb.

a journal a day

so i have been doing art in my journal a lot lately and i think it is a good idea that i started putting some of it up on my blog as you can see. i think from now on i will put my favorite page up on sundays from the previous week. Here is one that i did a couple days ago.

journaling