Reviews for The Other Side of Whatever Happened To?

Reviews For: The Other Side of Whatever Happened To?

MrBillyD 2007-08-14 ch 1,	abuseI hope the writer of this piece, is not as cynical as Jake, who is apparently still very young, but sounds like a grouchy old man. If you're not like Jake, congratulations on a very good piece of writing. If you are like him, it's still just as good; but please cheer up. The best is yet to come!
m maldonado 2006-03-26 ch 1,	abuseGuess who. :P Finally crawled out from under my rock to take a good, solid look at stuff that wasn't mine. And I got blown away. This is probably my new favorite piece of yours, honestly. It's probably the best thing I've seen from you, and a huge jump in skill and quality since I last excitedly peered at your work. What a fantastic use of voice and character to tell a story and sell and catch a reader on nothing but a personality in first-person. Super-kudos, sir. ~m
poet tree 2006-03-11 ch 1,	abuseIt seems to me like Jake has gone through some painful things and come back to his hometown only to find all his friends and all the people he knew are still at the mental level of fourteen-year-olds. They believe that their so-called rebellion makes them special when really it makes them all the same. I like this piece--I can feel it. Jake is someone we all know or have known.I am, as always, impressed.
Tim Stillman 2006-03-03 ch 1, anon.	abuseI'm really quite stunned by this story. It has exploded all sorts of things in my brain. Which is what good writers do. Jake is someone we all used to know. That prototype that may be the last link to illusion that we have. And that might mean for us salvation or the death of everything. Dreamshell has managed to write exactly as Jake would speak, and at the same time has managed to give what would seem the eternal stoner deep thoughts he actually would have had on the surface. But I believed Jake completely. A full and distinct person. And I mean quite deep thoughts. I guess I am making a stereotype of Jake as well. The story has taught me to be careful of that. But it is a searing story. And it deals with, for this writer, the heart of himself, which is the past. It's always hard to let go. For my generation it was the scarves and the paisley shirts and the bell bottom jeans. And it hurts that these things are gone. The core past the music and clothes and movies and catch phrases still lives within me though and always will. Because it was such a monstrous time and such a bright selfish time and such an idealized time and much of it was **, but there was hope then, or the illusion of hope, and we were young, and we believed in something, some of us, or wanted to, or hid and pretended to, as people always do. Jake delineates this so well, I can't touch him on this score. He is truly on target especially here. But time as Jake tells us is relentless and if we don't move out of our stone fortresses, we will never find what we are looking for. As I reflect on this story, I remember a recent alumni magazine from my university, and as I looked at it, there suddenly was this photo of this very heavy set man, with this Santa Claus face and his name beside the photo. I looked at it closely, and closely again, and it was a former classmate of mine. Remembering him, he was bone thin and forever young, and I found myself deeply saddened and shocked. Another of those dirty tricks fate plays on us. It meant, as dreamshell's Jake says in a very real way, that closing time is on us, time to wrap it up and move onward to now, or stay locked in here in this dark cold scary place and pretend, and for those of us for whom pretending is all we've ever had, it's a tough choice... To live in the past, as I admit I do, does not allow for present and present if not lived in denies future. And dreamshell is right in this really multi leveled story that is a bravura performance, so there is always illusion. Jake was not what he seemed to be then and by inference Jake is whatever we make of him now. Is he still illusory? There is sadly the need to change. To live every day. The acid head, the stoned dude, the class party animal, the school's all time bad guy who knows all the rules and gleefully breaks them all...and did he really die after all in that car wreck? who..we remember them as we remember the quite ones the sad ones the lonely ones..and we forever want all of them to still be what they were inside as well for the past goes deep and passes the surface but the surface is always the package wrapping and we can't get away from that..those of us unstuck in time are far luckier than those of us stuck in time..though I think the bravery is the same really...both take a tremendous lot of courage... But consciousness plays with us all. And we get through the days as best we can. There is in dreamshell's story this terrible truth-what seemed important back then, our politics, our clothes, our slogans, our hair styles, opur hearts, what we took or mistook for love, can look quite silly or at least out of date today. Keep in mine George W. Bush came from the peace and love generation. So there are no broadsides anyone can use that says my generation knew what was going on, was the best generation,yours was or is not. We are all illusions, I think is what dreamshell is saying. To ourselves and each other. He is so correct in that we are all shifting, ever changing beings. And the worst thing in the world is when a person meets someone from the past they've not seen in a long time, and one discovers not only do you want that other person to be the same, they want thet same of you, when you think it would not matter to them at all. I think of that terrifying picture in The Bradbury Chronicles of my favorite writer now and very old and very ill man, Ray Bradbury, sitting there in a wheel chair, having been given an award, and on one side is George W. Bush and on the other is Ms. Bush. And I think, no, this is not the Ray Bradbury I love. Not here with Hitler and Eva Braun. But people are multi faceted. People do things and they don't know why. Or because they get old and they live in a world of memory boyhood of Green Town, Illinois, and they are frightened of death and remember, oh god, what is used to be like, and please just a little more of it...the way I remember...this time make it work out for me...this time make love come my way...this story deals with depth and intelligence deep emotions, important things inside each of us that we constantly have to sort out... And time takes a person. The Kennedy relative who was charged and found guilty of a crime years after it was committed--there is this picture of him from the time of the crime, when he was like 15, and I saw it endlessly on TV during the trial. He looked like someone I loved and still love with all my heart. And to see him now...to think that the resemblance might be true now as well as then, my friend...Life is so precious and so fragile and so soon gone and the years and time take us and do things to us...Jake chooses not to mourn, and I say excellent good for him... This is one of dreamshell's finest stories. It is about our perceptions of others which is really our perceptions of ourselves and all those major domos of our youth who led cliques because they were the most scared shatters me because it means that people I envied, or was scared of, or always thought myself inferior to, were as scared, as unsure of themselves as I was. When I always felt myself so nothing next to them. To live in the past is to miss the present. To live in the present is to admit the changes. Not just the externals. But the changes of the heart as well. I am constantly amazed at how dreamshell is able to get into this character of Jake and to make him speak endless wisdom and to prove that, as he says, we can't stereotype anyone, even people we don't like. Example: in grade school, there was this girl who I just didn't like for whatever reason, and I knew the other kids I knew didn't like her as well. Too tony, too flip and superior or something she was. So one day in band, I leaned over to her and said we didn't like her, in words I don't remember, and it hurt her and I looked at my friend next to me and the other kids around us and they looked stunned that I had hurt her. When all along I thought they agreed with me. It was not that they were embarrassed I had said what I did, but they truly were did not think what I thought at all. I still remember how embarrassed I was. Totally unlike me to have done such a thing. But I had been so completely sure...the past is a vampire, and Jake gets this across so well, it will suck you dry, and all you will have is the longing memory to return to it. But if the eyes and the brains of us see what is reality right this second in the things around us, we are under illusions here, that we perceive color the way we do, that our consciousness is aware of this moment, that our brains differ the ability to see colors and to hear sounds when we really see our brain's perception of color, not the color itself; what is color anyway?;as well as hearing and seeing from the same places in the brain, and no one knows how it knows the difference, or what tells it to do this, all this from a friend discussing a book on the topic told me and asked me, why don't I see a color and you hear an F Sharp?, instead of seeing a color? or my hearing a sound?;and if this, he added, then would my brain's perception of blue look different from yours?, and this can apply to all our senses, thus making us more alone than ever. And everything around us depends on our consciousness to exist the way we see it at least and thus make it the way it is. The thing in our brain, he says beyond our brain, this thing that tells it what to do and how... But it is Jake's gift and Jake's knowledge and the hurt and the battles he has fought that get him to this point. The past can be bought at a terrible price too. But it is shifting and Jake is right, we remember things the way they were not. It's all stifling or a kind of emotional internment. We are instruments I think he is saying, and if we never try to see the next minute, to confort the process of what we feel and hold true today, then we've tossed our lives away. Sometimes for the sake of love that was, or never was, sometimes because we can't leave the past because it was hard won back there too, or hard lost...and we have to decide, to balance out...someone once gave me the phone number of a person who meant the world to me back then and now...I heart in throat called the number and a child answered the phone. I asked if Joel was there. She said no, dad's still at work. I said so relieved, thanks, I'll try later. And then hung up and trembled for some hours. Jake is lucky. He got out alive. Some of us don't.
BlackOrigin 2006-03-01 ch 1,	abuseI'm not one for writing huge long reviews but this is one nice piece of work here. I love how you can read it and go 'yeah, I know what they're talking about, same thing happened to me'. If I could sum this up in one word, I'd choose 'Reflective'.
La-rose-de-soleil 2006-03-01 ch 1,	abuseVery philosophical. I like the monologue style.

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