The daughters of bright americans. chapter 1

Lined up in the four season sun room, all five of the Harrington girls sat; motionless, waiting to be interviewed. Their slight tanned legs hung over the edges of worn wicker chairs, gently wearing at the skin on the back of their thighs. They were all positioned in a similar fashion: hands to their sides, clutching to the low arms of the chairs; and their knees, pushed together, on an angle.
The Harrington girls, known for their beauty, and all being born within a few hours of one another, looked completly different to just a few weeks ago. Looking from left to right, from Rene, to Alysha, they looked worn down. their identical blue eyes sat above identical dark circles, as though the sun was mounted on a rain cloud. Their full lips no longer sat closed, but hung low, revealing a set of teeth inside. Their heads were titled, not out of coyness, but out of boredom.
The interview was a movie about the lifstyles of rich kids; filmed by one rich kid himself; Danny Houses, the heir to a toothpaste creator. All of the other 'subjects' in the proposed doctumentry were heirs to rich and brilliant parents (some were grandchildren only, living off the wealth of their late parents, under grand pa's and grand ma's supervision). The Harrington's parents were the most famous and brilliant of them all, and the girls lived under that mantle with pride and excess. Their life was the model for wealthy teens, having freedom in equality to money. They lived extravegant lives, went to private schools, had fields full of horses, and houses that had their own zip codes. It was life at its most exuberant. These kids sat at the height of their lives on a precipce that overlooked the meanderings of everyone else in the world. It seems a near cliche to think that rich people are uneffected by the things most people deal with; they can rise above it, with such an abundance of riches. But we also say; that money can't by everything. It can by love and hapiness. It has no ability to define a persons morality. It's like an illusion. The critics would argue, that if you took their money and their security away; they would not be who they are. they would not have that confidence, that sense of importance, that charisma. It's all fake and misleading.
The parents looking on would say that all the cash flow going in and out of their lives, is not good for them. "They are able to grow anything except for a soul".
But something dramtic, and life changing has occured to the Harrington girls. The decandence of their lucid lives has been forever alltered. And in silence, they wait, to share their whole story, and why the way that they have been living is a distant memory, like war veterns, long since returned from battle, with only limps and nightmares to connect them to a world now so foreign and unimaginable.

Danny Houses is ready. The camera's are ready. A flood light in the corner turns on, followed by squinting blue eyes. A lone microphone (attached to a recorder) sits on a glass table inbetween the girls and Danny. The 'record' button is pressed...and...ACTION!

people have health benefits, not machines

I try everytime to see you. anything under twelve and we're golden. i don't think you care much about the reasons why i do what i do, but i do. and you're part of the reason.
there are the times where you're full, similar minded people line up for your service; touch of a human, the need to support living flesh. on those times i refer to machines. what can i say, i am but one man.

A love story; with limited funds. Part 2

The fact was this; that when he got the money, he kept the philosophy, which i thought, like all belief systems, should only last for a season. But he kept ours, which made him cheap.

the middle aged haircut

Long hair is for the young. i was getting my hair cut. a mullet was forming in the back,a style to some, the sign of neglect to me. an overgrown garden that your neighbors grumble about when you're gone. when my hair gets this long, i'm tucking my neck into the collars of my work shirts.

short hair is for the middle aged. there she was again, Linda, in her 40's looking for practicality over style and grace, in her haircut. there's something about middle aged women when it comes to their haircuts. gone are the long curls or flowing streams of blonde. i guess its one less thing to worry about, one less thing to take care of it. they've got kids now, pta meetings and dinners to cook. bulbs needed to be planted, food needs to be bought, they can't waste their time of attracting their husbands anymore. if you want it, come and get it.

short hair is practical. long hair is for the young; those without house payments and grocery lists

A love story; with limited funds. Part 1.

it was in the last year at college that we met. i was glad, finally! To have met a man who had the same ideals and ideas on romance, as i did. as a student of grueling courses and copious amounts of school activities, I found it hard to keep a job that consisted of more than 12 hours worth of work a week. i was poor. the rest of the time was spent sleeping, dreaming about why I wasn't awake finishing my course work, wishing I was sleeping. It seemed like an never ending cycle of living; but when i met Chris. i was attracted, yeah, sure. but i resisted the notion, because i didn't need a distraction at the time. but he swaggered over to me, and he charmed me in a way that softened the callouses i had grown in my brain from years of hard study. he was interesting, but he understood the demands on me because they were on him too.
but like every romance that develops in the confines of an educational institute, the grades slipped, and the heat got hot.
I was with him all the time, sneaking in work when he slept, but we were together. he played a guitar and made up stupid songs about being pulled over by the police (with a french accent). All we needed was a quiet place, cheep beer, low lights, and the ability and talent, to keep one another entertained for sometimes, days on end.
We were lovers in poverty. lack, was our way of being creative, and enjoying simplicity. birthdays and vacation times were ushered in with creative, shoe string gestures, that i found endearing. and even when Chris felt bad because he couldn't afford to buy me a pair of new shoes, or ear rings, i would reassure him that this was what i had been looking for all my life.
I had grown up in a wealthy family, and expensive gifts was our love language. these loves gifts were also tools, to manipulate, bring guilt, and buy approval. i had seen my parents most violent arguments being resolved with weekends away and fine dinning, yet they still divorced. my sisters pursued the image of my father in other men who had golf memberships, and only found heartbreak...and gucci shoes.
Chris and i lived in a world where we could feel guiltless when valentines came around. we went through a chirstmas and didn't even open a gift. it was liberating, and amish (plain).

We got out of college and got jobs, that were nowhere near the professions we had studied for. i thought i would get a degree and watch myself skip ahead in the corporate climb, and get the job i wanted. i knew i had to pay my due's but damn it, education was a sell out!
Chris on the other got a real good job, with real money, and that's when it all went terribly wrong.

The Incapability of going to bed alone

there are some activities in life that need to be shared. so for those who eat or drive alone, there always seems to be a big question mark sitting opposite them, or in the passengers seat. There's nothing to ask when people are with others. A meal shared, or a ride shared by two consensual people. It's never a subject up for debate. It's obvious. Humans are creatures of company. so when the activities that require mutuality are performed alone, they simply look out of place.

I couldn't sleep, and debbie was gone. it was only the first night and i couldn't lay on that bed. how was i going to cope, night after night? me, facing that giant landscape of a queen sized bed? i feared i would turn into an insomniac. though back when i was single, i practically was, and i thought i was cool by being it. staying up every night until your eyes burned, and couldn't focus on any one thing. it felt as though my will was fighting my very own self. it made me feel that i was in control of my life, my slow aging body. sometimes i wouldn't even make it to my bed. and most nights i would sleep in my clothes.

i knew things would change when she left. going to bed used to be one of the better parts of my day. the comfort of our hugs became a drill, a moment of closeness i treasured. it didn't seem to matter if one was wide a wake when the other wanted to hit the sack, we clocked out at the same time. it was in bed that we made our plans together. it was where we first named our unborn children. it was where we heard each other's dreams while they were only images in our sleep. it was where we budgeted the money, debated religion and culture, and also what we thought of the movies we had just seen, and books we were currently reading. all this and the sex, we shared on that bed. that box spring represented a world we lived in and invented all at the same time.

a new country in the U.N

a new dominican

a governors house, made by foreigners hands.

so when debbie left, those twenty odd steps to the bed seemed impossible. maybe it would get better, but for now that one thing we shared would be faced alone. i began to remember my father, when my mother, on the very rare occasion went away for the weekend, leaving my father with the similar jaunt of facing an empty mattress. he was a man, a husband of 26 years, now a defenseless animal unable to perform the simplest of maneuvers on his own. he never cooked, and he never went to bed at his regular 10pm. he stayed up all night with me, watching movie after movie. every now and then he would turn his head to the staircase aware that he should have been sleep hours ago; but he never moved. i couldn't believe how paralyzed he was without my mother. my parents were never passionate people. they weren't huggers or public kisser. they were practical. their love was like an ebb at the bottom of the ocean that you'd never knew existed, but it lived, gently and unnoticed. and because of hat way of expression, i never saw my parents as husband and wife; not until we spent those late nights together on the couch. then i saw a man embedded to a relationship day and night. A love so rooted, so committed that it controlled him, even to the contradictions of his own body, much like the times of my youth. but when i looked at my father, it wasn't the arrogance of the young that i saw, but the sweet possession of true love.

why was it so disabling to be in love? was he whipped? or was it just the result of giving yourself to someone completely. i've known in my own relationships that there is a lot of give, far less than the take. i was surprised watching my father, at the possessive effect of being that fundamentally committed to another person. i couldn't recognize in my father then, or me now, if either I or my father had become weak? maybe i was just seeing one side to the story. maybe my mother, while away sat up and played sudoku all night in the attempt to sleep herself.

the one thing i did know was whatever happened to my dad at those times, was now happening to me now; we both had the incapability of going to bed alone.

Intro's

Hi, I'm B.J James, poet, novelist, and screenwriter.

This will be a blog of my writing for your enjoyment.

An assortment of poems and micro fiction.