Channel changes. The television set of my recollection hisses as it welcomes a new face, decade, millennium.
The curious, excited soul of a child drifts from the summer of ‘99, The Slim Shady LP still on repeat, through the anxiety of high school dances, the electric mayhem of Y2K, seeing The Blair Witch Project (1999) at a local drive-in and forever adoring the ambiance of the wooded location where I first experienced this groundbreaking classic, and found footage horror as a whole exciting then testing the genre fanatic in me as the doors for such future masterpieces as Paranormal Activity (2007), Rec (2007), Cloverfield (2008), and The Fourth Kind (2009) are unapologetically kicked open with a smirk-inducing burst of adrenaline.
Channel changes to September, 2003. Meeting my future wife on our third day of part-time work at a local grocery store. In so doing, a lifetime of bliss hurriedly tears down the cobweb-laden attic of the secluded heart.
From herein, a wave of warehouse jobs, an ocean that has consumed the next twenty-plus years and counting of my life crashes down upon the once sturdy home I built of my time, creativity, responsibility, doubt. Still, my first published book of poetry, The Human Condition (2008), will come by the end of the decade to help salvage my sense of self.
Channel changes to a related station: A vision of my notebooks of hand-scribbled rhymes, edges worn from use, being summoned by an increasing obsession with rap (particularly the poetics and social consciousness of the lyrics)—an interest that makes me write more poetry, themes and rhyme schemes mirroring the music I love, and even make my own fleeting attempts at rap—an action whose public displays challenged the still painfully shy kid in me—more visible to the spectators to whom I was once a willing shadow.
Scene shifts. Story stays the same.
Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP (2001) and The Eminem Show (2003)— two instant, endlessly replayable classics that still find their way into my thoughts and into my playlist— continue to inspire the poet in me.
Andrew Buckner is a multi award-winning poet, filmmaker, and screenwriter. His short dark comedy/horror script Dead Air! won Best Original Screenwriter at the fourth edition of The Hitchcock Awards.
