Holding the Dream

Perhaps all I’m doing is informing the world of my own strangeness, giving them reasons to look at me with thoughts circling words like weirdo, freak, and psychopath. I’ll grant you the first, I’ve known my whole life that I’m a little weird, you can’t spend your life inside tales that you don’t even live, and by that I mean stories, and not come out just a little off-kilter. I can’t answer or talk to the second and third words. Those are harsh words, words of judgment and scorn. Words I have used, will use, and have had used against me in certain moments, even if I pray for the latter ones to never come, but with the subject I wish to discuss, it just may pop up. Everyone has those items that take on more meaning to themselves than the item inherently has, and for me those items were weapons. Not guns, not the cold and callous killing machines that could strike a foe down from hundreds of feet, across a dead, wasteland battlefield. No, the weapons I’m talking about are the ones that force you to stand toe to toe with your opponent, close enough to see the fear in your own eyes reflected through their own similar gaze. These weapons are swords, the bo staff, knives, daggers, sais. These are murderous, brutal instruments of death, and yet they’ve taken on this idea of hope for me and of a strength beyond the desire to kill. Heroes wield these weapons, and villains do as well. But it’s the connection to the heroic struggle that gives these objects a meaning that exists beyond the base facts of bloody combat.

When I was a child, a boy of four, my mom had a garden. It was small; a structure of dirt piled high inside of a rectangle made of two logs stacked on top of each other on all sides. Calling the thing a garden is a kindness. Smatterings of green occasionally broke through the hard, red, clay surface that was occasionally broken up by my mother using her blue-handled, white-bladed trowel. But to my mind, and my imagination, it was a sword, a blade wielded by a hero. And when I was in possession of the weapon, I too became a hero. I would stand on the wooden logs of the garden, dressed in jeans and a tee shirt, and hold the weapon high over my head, humming the theme song from The Legend of Zelda, because the trowel looked like the magical blade in that game. And when the humming reached it’s most heroic moment, I would leap from the garden and into the mythical realm of Hyrule where monstrous pig men wondered the land carrying spears to strike down anyone foolish enough to get in their way. Other monsters roamed the land, giant spiders, knights dressed in red, and these weird blob things that shot rocks the size of grapefruits at you. In this realm, I was never able to face the final tyrant that ruled the land with an iron fist, because the nefarious mother would always show up and steal the trowel from me, pulling me back into reality and threatening to send me to my room if I lost it, as if a hero would ever misplace his weapon.

But, I grew older and larger, and the once perfectly sized weapon became small. It was no longer a mighty sword, but a simple dagger, and that was no weapon for a hero. I was the hard fighting hero, the one who wore only a breastplate if anything and was dressed ruggedly in browns and blues and thick heavy boots. A dagger was for the wimpy boys who had to fly to best their enemies. I always hated flying. It was a skill that was too powerful and too fickle. I didn’t want to have to depend on fairy dust anyway. Simple finesse was good enough for my heroes. And there was no better weapon for that then the long sword (Actually, there are a lot of better weapons for finesse, but I was just a kid.). Long and slender sticks were now my method of madness, and the woods were my battlegrounds. Standing in the woods, I’d wait— stick held in front of me, my eyes searching for any enemy that I could find. You could hear them, the heavy thunk-crunch thunk-crunch as their plate mail greaves connected heavy with the ground. They were moving slowly, and I knew there was no point in running. I was surrounded. But my nerves were a steel stronger than my blade, and I smiled a crooked sort of grin as my imagined foes stepped through the grove of the trees. Five, ten, fifteen, eight, maybe thirty; the number of foes never mattered, never even entered into my mind. But the drawing of their blades, the metallic slip of steel against their gold and blue, jewel encrusted sheaths filled my ears. Their swords glittered with the arrogance of nobility. But my sword, simple and plain, gleamed in the sun with a power their blades and their eyes could not comprehend. They moved, heavy feet crushing leaves, and the dance began. As I said, the number of foes never mattered. It was the struggle, the clashing of blades, and the shifting of the feet to dodge a blow that so mimicked and yet hid from the realities of life. These were problems of a real weight that children could not possibly understand, and I myself understood little of it, and yet my imagination instinctively knew the need for something to rise against. And I would dodge; a downward swipe with a quick side step, spinning the way children do to add a touch of flair to what should be simple, bringing the hilt down hard on the back of my opponents helm, or a horizontal slash by dodging around a tree, allowing the enemy blade to sink in and become stuck. These were childish games, without the notion of death for either side. The penalty for lose was the shame of defeat, and the slow walk back, feet heavy, weapon sheathed, and head hung low, knowing bitterly the dry mouthed taste of absolute defeat.

Soon, stories came to the weapons themselves, origins for the blades themselves. A boy walks, alone in a meadow, aimlessly, wondering where life was going and yearning for an adventure and a struggle to grant his life meaning. Boredom was his ache and the longing for something interesting to happen was why he wandered. Fate decided to answer him, by having the ceiling of a subterranean cavern open up and send him tumbling into the dark depths. No matter how many times, I played out the dream, the boy always hit his head on the smooth rocks, and always sat up holding the back of his head and groaning, cracking one eye to look at his surroundings. A beam of light, from where he fell was all that illuminated the cavern, however, it wasn’t stalactites and stalagmites that met the boy, but a gothic burial chamber. Statues of knights and monsters, like the gargoyle, griffin, Hydra and monsters beyond ledged, adorned the walls, and bones lay, brittle and broken on a floor stained red, coloring the steps like a waterfall flowing from ever smaller pools. The bones were like a pointless barrier, blocking a path beyond the stretch of the light, and the only sign into that beyond was a faint sparkle. The boy was mesmerized by the sparkle, and hand outstretched and foot-crushing bones, he walked forward into the darkness. The sparkle belonged to a blade made entirely of diamond and set in the cold black of a Damascus steel hilt. It was a mythical blade, a blade beyond creation, and my mind was transfixed by it. It was simple; the hardest material in the world must be the sharpest material in the world. If it could cut diamond, than it must be able to cut through anything else. It was childish, but for a time this was the weapon with which I kept reality at bay.

My high school years were passed in a dreadful school and a new home, the woods of my past were no longer mine to explore, but it didn’t take me long to learn the fun of my new home and the way it could feed into my dreams.  The house was large, over looking a pond on one side, a meadow to another, and a large hill packed with large rocks and spindly trees that rose high before jutting out even thinner branches with sparse leaves that blocked just enough sun for the hill to be cool. But the coolest thing about the house was the wall. It was a long thin wall that ran next to the driveway. One side of the wall, where the gravel and driveway sat, was only a three feet drop and five at it’s longest, but the other side was ten feet up and perhaps twelve at it’s longest. The sense of controlled danger the wall gave off made sure that it always found me on top of it, perhaps sitting, or perhaps wandering up and down it in a television sitcom inspired pace, hands folded behind my back, as I waited for a friend to arrive. But the wall also feed into my dreams, it was the embankment of war, where brave soldiers stood poised and ready as a brave leader shouted out not to fire until you could see the whites of their eyes. Heroes were made on that wall, but as I had said before, guns were never my calling. But the wall was too grand for a sword made simply of a stick and an imagination. Luckily, we had a picket fence.

My father had bought it for the soul purpose of blocking off the air-conditioner and some other bulky metallic contraption, which perhaps might have been a second one, but I never knew. It was a simple fence, large slabs of wood (the type that could just barely fit in the grip of a child’s hand) criss-crossed to form a sort of simple grid, and sharp points on the tip were used to drive the fence into the ground.   It was perfect, and the fence just so happened to be a little too long on one end, so, of course, saw in one hand, hammer in the other, I made my way back to the fence. I’m pretty sure I cut my thumb as I worked diligently sawing through the two pieces that held the excess to the fence, but the slight blood that trickled felt more like a christening than a pain, a baptism by blood, and a birth by hammer blow. I sawed through those slats quickly, and hammered off the cross guard that some fool had attached to the blade. It was done and with that, I gripped the handle, foot placed on the fence like the anvil, and I tugged with all my might, and the sword pulled free. I brandished the blade proudly. It was a little over half my own height, and the hilt was a little too big, but I didn’t know enough about sanding and shaping to even bother with changing that. It was perfect. Tan like a sun baked bronze that had been hidden in a desert oasis, slowly mingling and merging with the sandstorms. It was a sword worthy of the wall, and worthy of dreams of Robin Hood and jumping from chandeliers and battles on thin parapets and logs over the river. I made more than one— after getting in trouble for the first, I discovered a large section of the excess next to the road, waiting to be picked up by the garbage men. This I drug back to the house and set up near the wall. I made blades for my friends who would join my battles on the wall, facing off against me in a test of nerve and skill, hampered by their lack of courage in the face of danger.

I had mentioned my school. It was a simple place full of the same person repeated over and over again as if God had, for a day, lost the majority of his molds, and it was the frat boys and sorority girls in training that he churned out. They all dressed the same, talked the same, walked the same, and held views the same. It was a racist place and a xenophobic place, and so I knew without even being told, the need to keep my mouth shut on my games. However, like all good secrets, it doesn’t even have to be told before the whole of the school knows and that one person who annoys you the most is following behind you in the halls, moaning swooooooord as if a bottle brush had been shoved down his throat, and making crude connections to masturbation and ejaculation covered blades that were really more confusing than insulting, which often brought the same look to my face, the one that screamed, “What the fuck are you talking about?” But still the battle cry of swoooooord came. Even if it only came from the mouth of one moron, the lesson was learned, (even if it wasn’t truly felt) not to share the enjoyment of something strange with anyone, especially not kids your own age.

So, like all kids who find themselves with interests that boarder on the outside of the norm, I kept it to myself only sharing it, or rather showing it, to friends that I felt I could trust completely. I wasn’t exactly following my own advice, but when does anybody? My friends knew that I played at weapons, since I lacked anything that could be considered a real one. That was about to change though. I found a site on-line— Wooden Sword Online. The name of the site should give you all the information that is truly necessary about the site. It was a small site in colors of white and beige, and felt to me like the colors of purity made real, or as real as any web page could make it. There wasn’t much to the site. There were a few videos and some books that taught would be Samurai and Vikings how to fight in the ways of old. These didn’t interest me. My imagination more than made up for the need of any real training (an idea long since faded in me from my joining of karate). There were shields here too, bid round ones like the Vikings and angular ones like those carried by knights of old. Of course, those were made of steel, or iron at the least, while these were simply wood. But it was the weapons on the site that interested me. I purchased three weapons that day. I picked up a bokken (which is a wooden Katana), a wooden dagger, and a six foot tall quarterstaff to fill out my dreams of Robin Hood fighting on a log over the river, hopefully with less painful results than Daffy Duck experienced. These weapons were slow in coming, but eventually they reached my hands. The bokken was easy to hold and a cinch to twist and spin. I was capable with the bokken and was able to play and dream without reality knocking occasionally at the door. The quarterstaff and the dagger were not so easy to use. More often than not, the hilt of the dagger would knock into my wrist causing me to loose the small amount of control I had over the weapon, which did little other than confirm my notion that the dagger was not a suitable weapon for any real warrior. My problems with the quarterstaff were not the fault of the weapon, but a fault of my own. Every movement I made with the slender stick felt as if I were trying to pull a cat through a hole that was too small. It felt wrong. But still at night I would dance. I was the lone ronin (a Samurai who has forsaken his master), wandering down the roads of Japan, seeming to savor the beauty of land, not heeding where I was going. Suddenly, I would be surrounded.  My eye, the one that still functioned, would flash dangerously, and I would make a murmur, a statement to myself and a warning to the others. My voice was soft and low, and held with it a menacing quality not heeded by the men who surrounded me. They demanded my money.

“I refuse,” were the words I uttered as my hand shifted to grip the base of my sword.

The men all reacted at once, dropping into stance and placing their hands to the hilts of their Katanas. Again, they demanded my money, adding this time the price if I refused— my life. I reached up and touched the brim of my hat. And again, as if daring them to, I stated my refusal, as I slowly pulled my hat away. The men flinched for a moment. I was known, of course. You could tell who I was at all times by my face, the jagged scar that ran from my forehead to my cheek like a dead snake torn to bits by dogs and the pale, dead eye that sat in the center of it The men would pause, just for a moment, until the leader urged them forward, reminding them that I was just one man. But the pause was all I needed. I surged forward, blocking a downward swipe with my blade and slamming my palm into the chest of the leader, knocking the wind from his lungs.  I spun around him quickly, bringing the flat of my blade across the back of the head of one of the men. Still, it was the same. I was old enough know to know that death was a part of combat, but my minded wanted none of it. Death was always possible for me, but my heroes and my dreams that played out in my mind, loved life, and would risk it all to see that even their enemies lived to see the next day, if it was at all possible. The battle carried on like this, fists and feet were used as much as my blade to down the enemies, and the flat of the blade was used more than the edge. And although, the blade did taste flesh once or twice, they were only grazing blows given to the men whose reckless zeal might one day get the killed. The enemies defeated, I sheathed my blade, not even flicking the blood off the blade, because I didn’t know any better. I bowed to the men, and wished them good hunting, but asked that they remember to know their opponent.

This hero was solitary, like most Ronin were, but he would make friends and he would do glorious acts of bravery all in the name of the people. He was a champion born and raised from a mind that always had need of a hero. He would do a good deed, deny the need for reward, and leave before most could see his face and his horrible scar. His reputation of old, of the terror he was forced to be under his master, was what he needed most in a weapon. He was strong and powerful, but his cunning and his use of intimidation was what kept him alive for as long as it had. That was what I liked in a hero, an intelligent, but powerful, protector.

I had begun to write during this time. It was a practice story, one already told. I took a game, one I loved and turned it into my own story, taking the characters as my own and filling out the gaps in the plot doing my best to make the story as emotionally stirring and fun as possible. It had magic in it, and characters with super human abilities, but more than that, it had weapons that amazed me.  The main character’s weapon was called the Arc Edge, and was a blade crafted to fall somewhere between an ax and a sword. Not a block knife, it did not extend out in an ever-thickening blade until jutting in like an angled machete. No, It went out like a sword, straight, to a bulbous end. It was more axe than blade and was used to hack and chop at the enemy, and was almost the size of the young man who wielded it. But it wasn’t this weapon that caught me eye. It was the twin silver swords, used by one of the characters in the game. It was the Silver Breeze that fascinated me. You see them used only once or twice, unless you repeat again and again the section that has them, but it was their quickness and finesse that impressed me. They were agile blades, and I liked that.

The writing took me years, and day in and day out I was consumed with the writing of this story, until at last I was finished, and the final word had been typed onto the page. I felt a void. My work of years had come to a close, but I also felt excited and had a reason to celebrate. And even though the work could never be published, I felt I needed something to commemorate the event, but no simple plate or coin would do. Those were best left to racecars and tragedies. No, I knew what I needed. I needed my own Silver Breeze. So, I searched.  On-line was the realm I chose to begin my search in, and like my wooden weapon site, I soon found a place that would cater to my metal sword needs. It was aptly titled web site, Swords-Online, where they sold blades in various styles. I could order a Celtic blade, or Roman, or Egyptian, or even Oriental blades. But these styles were not the Silver Breeze, and I honed in quickly on the medieval blades, and I was instantly taken aback to the woodland battles of my childhood. Glittering little pretty blades adorned the pages. Replicas of Excalibur were everywhere, with their intricately carved hilts of gold and glittering sparkles of jewels. They surrounded me, and as I surfed that page my disgust became more and more palpable. This was it? This was what we chose to remember the blades of the past as? Little trinkets whose only purpose was to sit around and look pretty like a trophy wife at a businessmen’s ball? Where was the real? There was no soul to these blades and even through the web I could feel it. Then I found it, a German made, mercenary long sword. It had a wood finished hilt and simple steel cross guard, and a round pommel. The blade shined with real rather than shimmered with spectacle. It was simple, there was nothing fancy about the blade, and in that fact it spoke volumes to me. This was the blade of a hero. It was a blade of action rather than thought, and I ordered it immediately.

It was an expensive blade, but not terribly so. Some of the blades crafted by true experts and made to be as perfect as they were in the past can reach a couple thousand dollars. Those are beautiful blades, and simple blades, blades so real their presence could cut the soul. Mine was only a couple hundred, but that was what made it special. It was mine.  It took several weeks, but the sword finally came in, packaged in a box that was almost as long as I was tall. I remember carrying it back to my apartment, the huge box resting gently on my shoulders, smiling the whole way. And when I got home, I set to work removing the blade from its cardboard prison. I’d held Japanese Katanas before. They are a light weapons and for some reason I had felt that this would be close to the same. I was wrong. The weapon was far heavier than I expected and I was instantly more impressed with the knights of old than I had been in my childhood. Slowly I drew the blade, and there, staring at the sharpened, simple blade, it hit me, and my hands began to tremble. This was a weapon, a weapon that Robin Hood might have used when he was defending the people of Nottingham, and now it rested in my hands. I was both terrified and excited. And in that instant, I realized that I had been ignoring something. I had been ignoring the fact that the sword was a weapon of death. In my dreams, none of my enemies were ever killed. They were only stopped and at the worst wounded, but death never entered the picture. Feeling the swords weight, and the sharpness of the edge, death pressed itself down around me. This was a tool designed for death, but my mind and my beliefs did not falter. My mind saw, still sees, weapons as an emblem of unity by their ability to protect. Protection is not an easy thing, and often the choice to protect carries with it the same duality of life and death that is carried by a sword. I smiled a little to myself, a nervous sort of smile, and realized that what I had ignored was far too important to be ignored— but heroes didn’t always think things through, and as I sheathed the blade, I allowed myself, though I was no hero, that same reprieve.