Posted by jason j labota on 5/22/2007, 1:42 am
68.111.209.61
My name is Jason Labota. Mine was pretty much the last generation to call Centralia its home town. My family moved from Centralia in the 80's, I was about 7 or 8. I'm 29 now and living on the west coast, in an environment that could not contrast more to that of my origins. Here it is pretty much always 72 degrees with a breeze. Everyone is beautiful and trendy. Easy going, with a sense of gratitude and content well-being, an undercurrent of appreciation for the paradise we live in here. The sunsets over the Pacific bleed into the sky with colors that could wring halleluias from any angel... and as I watch another sun disappear and feel the hush in my soul as night becomes, I think of where I am from. I feel kind of rudderless. I never would have been able to predict that I would wind up here. Everything is somewhat surreal, I can't help but wonder how differently my life would have unfolded had my little town not been decimated by the fire beneath it and razed by a beaurocracy that dealt with a community's pleas for help by wiping it out.
I have to imagine that there was a logical chain of progression laid out for me, a girl who lived a few blocks away that I would grow up with and eventually marry, a job with a company that my parents or their friends may have worked for before me, friends that I knew since before kindergarten and who's weddings, and funerals, I would have attended...
As it is, I live in a virtual paradise on Earth. I have a job that I love and make more money at than I ever could have expected to earn back home. I have bon-fire parties on the beach at night instead of mine fires sending up evil steam next to the cemetary where my grandfather rests... But I don't have home.
I don't have that sense of being where everyone remembers that time that thing happened...
A person's world is not Earth. A person has knowledge of the planet we live on, a person is aware of the world in its greater and real sense, but each person's own world, their LIFE, is made up not of current events or of all of the media bringing them news from everywhere all at once, a person's world is made up of the people and the places he knows and loves, the places one has memories of and the people who share those memories. Noone here could understand what I meant if I talked about walking the Tipple Road.
Cherish your home. The play defines the player. Without it the player can stand upon the stage and has the freedom to do and say anything at all, but the feeling is gone. I can do as I please but it's all just kind of for kicks. Without those around you who see the things that you see, from the same starting point of view, you can never really... explain. And it's very lonely.
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