Fred Aiken Writing

Tag: personal narrative

May 29, 2024

long hair, slightly care

i let my hair grow out,
but not because i wanted to,
it’s just because i cut my own hair,
partly to save money,
but mostly because it feels like a challenge,
and it gives me an opportunity to get
to know the landscape that is my head,
the grooves, the bumps,
reacquainting with old skateboarding injuries,
the surgery that had me bedridden for three months,
the time my 3rd grade crush laughed
at how big my head was when she handed out
baseball hats that were given to her for free because her uncle
was the accountant of some minor league team,
so of course i got self-conscious that my head was way too big
for my body,
which led me to start wearing clothes, in particular shirts,
that were too big for me, 
in order to give the impression
that my head isn’t all that big for my body,
that my head is reasonably proportional to the rest of me,
though when my cousin found out about what my 3rd grade crush had said about my head,
she went and punched her in the noise
before exclaiming, ‘your nose is now too flat for your face!’
all of which is to say,
i don’t like when people touch my head,
so i just go ahead and cut my own damn hair
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May 18, 2024

Some Work Song Thrown in the Back of the Truck

Daily writing prompt
How do you balance work and home life?
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I’ve gone through several iterations of work-home balances. Unfortunately, growing up in the States, it was ingrained within me that in order to achieve some semblance of happiness and worth within society that I needed to accumulate things, e.g. cars, house, phone, random stuff in storage that only comes out once every year or so, and the only way to accumulate these coveted things was by working. Or so the theory goes.

So, throughout my twenties when I got out of college I worked incredibly hard. I worked multiple jobs, sometimes 3 or 4 at a time. I used to work from 5am till well past 10pm. I had little to no social life, which wasn’t all that bad because even if I hadn’t been working, I doubt I would have been all that social since I’m incredibly introverted and do not like conversing with people generally. But I was constantly stressed. I felt like I wasn’t doing anything right.

But the goal was to always reach a point where I would work incredibly long, but hopefully efficient, amount of time, and then I would get to retire, or at least reach a point of financial independence where money was something of an afterthought. And if all went well, then I would be able to retire much sooner than my mid-to-late sixties. Ideally, maybe even in my forties, but I wasn’t completely unrealistic and was at least shooting for my late fifties so I could enjoy the last 20-30 years of remaining of my life to do whatever I pleased.

Though, like I said, I was always stressed. I was miserable. I pulled away from my wife, from my parents, from my siblings, and anyone and everyone that cared for me. I told myself that I was working so hard and so much in order to improve my station in life. I was at the brink of completely losing everyone around me before I realized that my constant state of working all of the time and never taking time to actually live was destroying whatever sort of future I imagine I could lead at the end of the working rainbow.

So, I pulled back. I took one job with regular hours doing something that I don’t need to stress about (a common mantra in the coffee industry from barista to roaster to importer is ‘it’s just coffee‘), and I’ve rediscovered hobbies and interests I once had, like reading, writing, and playing chess, along with a handful of interests I didn’t know I had, like sewing and learning a new language.

I think the biggest challenge and realization that I needed to make about developing a healthy work-life balance was understanding that jobs and careers and anything to do with making money, unless it’s a passion, is not the end-all be-all of life. It’s just a way of sustaining oneself, and as long as what I do at work provides enough for me to live off of and save a little bit for when I do reach a point where I no longer need to work, then I’m good. I don’t need to overexert myself to the point of exhaustion because the only thing that will lead to is failing relationships and a deteriorating mental state.

Some of the biggest regrets I’ve made in life were confusing working with living, and listening to individual and societal voices that rewarded that mentality of constantly pushing myself to physical and mental exhaustion rather than taking time off and reorienting my priorities around the people and activities that I enjoy doing.

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April 28, 2024

El Tigre

I don’t know why people call him El Tigre. I think it might have something to do with when he was a kid and every Halloween his mother would paint Randall in orange and black body paint and pin an orange and black tail to his black gym shorts and he would go around the neighborhood roaring at adults that handed him candy. His mother was obsessed with Winnie the Pooh when she was growing up, and she most identified with Tigger and his boundless, imaginary energy that she suspected, in retrospect, and after years of psychology training and study, was due to her undiagnosed adolescent ADHD. A neighbor of Randall’s, a Guatemalan husband and wife that had fled the country during the mass genocides of the 1980’s thought Randall was adorable and began calling him El Tigre whenever they saw him walking and playing around the cul-de-sac, and the nickname sort of stuck.

So, I guess that is to say, I do kinda know why they call him El Tigre. At least, I knew how he got the name. Why and how the nickname stuck into Randall’s adulthood, well, I guess that’s more of a mystery.

When Randall turned 16, he began to workout furiously. He obsessed over becoming muscular and tough and strong. He needed to be the strongest kid in his class. He did not have the usual reasons, such as being bullied when he was younger and wanting to exact some amount of revenge on his torturers, nor did Randall play any sports that required him to be in such physical shape. But rather, Randall got it in his head one day that in order to go from being a child to a young adult to a one day full-fledged adult, he would need to have muscles in order to do so.

His mother blamed television for such an influence, but due to the serotonin release he received when working out and how happy and well-rounded he became as a result of his muscular obsession and improvement, she did not stop him. Rather, her tacitness became passive approval of her son’s change in mood and behavior.

Despite not searching to join or become a part of a school team sport, the wrestling coach at Randall’s school sought him out after witnessing his pupil’s sudden change in stature and form. Coach Bilsby approached Randall one day after gym class and told Randall that he would be perfect for wrestling.

In Randall’s mind, he instinctively went to WWE-style wrestling, and thus he agreed to come to the team’s next practice. He would declare to his teammates that his wrestling name was El Tigre.

But alas, traditional wrestling was not what Randall expected. He watched as the other boys in spandex and sweat tussled on the ground. To Randall, the other boys looked to be having a seizure while hugging one another in outfits that left little to the imagination. The gym smelled like adolescent sweat and dirty sneakers. The entire ambiance of wrestling lost its allure for Randall pretty quickly, and he declined Coach Bilsby’s offer to join the wrestling team.

Randall sought grander aspirations. So, as any teenager that watched grownups in colorful spandex getups and made-up names and personas, Randall took his childhood nickname, El Tigre, and made his own wrestling persona from it. That’s how we got El Tigre. It’s how I came to know him, coming up at the same time in the amateur wrestling circuit. It’s how I ended up in the hospital after El Tigre taped a pair of ham spirals to his hands and beat me mercilessly until I was unconscious during our matchup. As I lay bleeding from multiple orifices, fellow amateur wrestlers and promoters had to pull El Tigre off of me as the crowd cheered and screeched their approval. El Tigre! El Tigre! I heard. And that’s the last I remembered.