Below is the very first ever column I posted to my blog, just MySpace bulletins at the time. This piece was later moved from MySpace to my first website under the name The Brendon Joshua Blog, long before I called my writings Coffee on Tuesday which happened about 3 years or so after this piece. This is my first in a series where I will be revisiting my Coffee on Tuesday columns and sharing my thoughts now that I have matured and can now see things through an adult lens. This serves 2 purposes: preserving all my old columns on my new website and allowing me to answer for my teen aged and early 20s transgressions and maybe get some closure. What should we call this series? Coffee by the Ocean? Into the Tuesday?
The original writing is italicized and my commentary at the end is in the columns normal format. Enjoy. Or don't. Who am I to tell you how to feel?
Here It Is!!!
So here it is, my long awaited debut into the world of blog. Over the next few months I will let you into my life, and hope you do the same. I will share all the details of the daily grind and tell you the stories I only tell those who are close to me. I hope you enjoy reading my blogs as much as I enjoy writing them!
Paramore, I believe them to be one of the better rock bands of our day. The song that turned me on this future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band is one called "That's What You Get". In this song the chorus consists of "that's what you get when you let your heart win". Almost everytime I hear this melody I cant help but think, "What do I get when I let my heart win"?
Her name is Kathryne, she's the mistake I made in August of 2007, and again in January of 2008, and once more in May of 2008. I believe her to be my "First Love". I absolutely loved everything about her. Her dirty blonde hear, her cute little smile, and she did this thing with her hands where she would put them together in a half-fist to make a heart shape. That was and still is one of my favorite things about her, not to mention the fact that she was an excellent kisser. I recently decided to not make that mistake anymore and pretty much cut off all ties with her. This was only after she decided to stop making the mistake called Brendon and stay in a more secure relationship with the "Re-bound she, accidently, fell in love with", is what I call him, amongst other things! I don't play baseball, but let me tell you that life has certainly thrown me some fast balls. Life threw me "Katie Bear" three times and each time she fell out of my glove. It's a shame really, at just 16 and 17 we had both decided on a Tiffany & Co. ring for her, the color would be Teal or Yellow, and the ceremony and reception would be on a cliff overlooking Cannery Row and the beautiful bay of Monterey California. At times in our, sometimes three, sometimes four, hour conversations, we would pause to tell each other how crazy it was that we were planning our wedding, and then jump back into that fantasy world that only two 16 and 17 year old would call love.
Saying goodbye was harder this time then it was the first two times for some reason. Maybe because I truly thought in my heart that Mr. Re-bound would fall on the page right after our first two relationships in the Brendon-Kathryne History book. Maybe because I was heart broken over Bianca, we'll save her for another blog, or maybe just because I had higher expectations than Kat was willing to meet. All I know is that I came with my feelings and left with, as we say in bar-slang, the "Shit-end" of the deal, nothing at all but my tears and a $1 bill in my wallet. So here I sit on this warm summer night in June, the month in which I was born, on my bed with my MacBook and a pocket full of memories that I realize what "I get when I let my heart win", that is absolutely nothing.
-Brendon Joshua
This was my first column posted on June 29, 2008. Other than obviously being written by a teenager, it so clearly copies the Sex and the City writing format which served as my key inspiration then. I was religiously watching Sex and the City at 16 years old and I wonder how much of those storylines fed my unrealistic relationship expectations. Boy, is this column a mess. It’s all there; spelling errors, mispunctuation, missing words, hyphens where they don't belong and lack-of-hyphens where they do. Cringe factor 7/10.
I remember writing this thinking that really was the end of our story. I figured since she was graduating a year after this was written, it was safe to tell this story because I would probably never see her again after she graduated. I always knew she was destined to do great things in her life. You don’t get a girl like Kathryne Cole, a very attractive, hard working ball-buster to stay put. I knew she would leave Beaumont and never look back.
I was half right. She did leave Beaumont for almost a year after she graduated and moved to, of all places, Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany! The part I was wrong about was that she did look back and she looked right at me.
I laughed out loud when I read the line, “I recently decided to not make that mistake anymore…” Because, I did ‘make that mistake again, and for the last time in April 2011. I married ‘that mistake’ in March 2014 and had kids with ‘that mistake’ in March 2019 and again in August 2021. Best mistake I ever made 4 times.
We didn’t get married on a cliff overlooking Cannery Row in Monterey, and not just because there is no cliff overlooking Cannery Row, but because we were married at the last minute and could not afford anything other than the $90 California marriage license. My best friend’s dad married us in a park down the street from her parents house and we had no wedding colors; she wore a dress from a Huntington Beach boutique I bought for her one Valentine’s Day, I wore a suit my parents bought me when I went through my, “I’m going to be the President of the United States and presidents wear suits.” Phase in high school.
We still have three or four hour conversations. I still love her hair even though she hates it. She no longer makes the heart with her hands, Taylor Swift kind of killed that gesture for everyone our age in 2010, and I, pretty famously, still write on a MacBook.
And Paramore is still a great band.
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