Chemically Coated Personalities

By Justin Rawdon Lipscomb

Chemically Coated Personalities is a memoir-inspired poetry collection in three parts.

This collection is told in stream-of-consciousness poems chronologically over the course of the author's life thus far. They tell stories that draw inspiration from memories, songs, books, and the full moon, using language that takes on a musical quality.

Addressing topics like race, sex, addiction, relationships, and politics, this collection translates the author's experiences into universally felt emotions, giving others a voice where they might have yet to find their own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387876426

Book preview

Chemically Coated Personalities

Poems

Justin Rawdon Lipscomb

For all the ideas lost to indecision

Dedicated to Laurie and Larry

Preface

Just under two decades in the making, what you will find in this book is compiled from ideas captured in notebooks, nestled in drawing pads along with my doodles, the back of restaurant table mats, and any scrap of paper I could find when the mood struck. There are two notebooks, both started sometime around when I was twenty years old, that are the foundation of this work.

The blue notebook is a seventy sheet, one subject notebook covered in stickers that is now tattered and yellowing with age. It has survived a lot—relationships, break-ups, moves, being misplaced, and condensation from a cup of water when it was loaned out. I cannot recall how long it took me to fill it, but at some point, it was full and even before it was, I used to carry it around everywhere. In thinking about it now, it was probably acting as a security blanket, a place where I could store away all my emotions and have them at the ready when I had a private moment to experience them.

I remember one instance where I took the notebook to work in a Boy Scout knapsack that I got from my grandfather (which I had drawn on to make it my own). I still have that bag. It has been the safe haven for the blue notebook and all of my other writing at different points in my life.

I was working one of my many seasons of third shift at a warehouse in my early twenties while reading my blue notebook. Everyone sitting at the folding table with me at lunch was in a daze; we were temps and not used to the intense physical labor of loading trucks and standing for hours on concrete floors. We were under the fluorescent lights that in a warehouse somehow seemed specifically designed to illuminate the missteps in life that caused one to end up working a third shift seasonal job in a distribution center.

One of my co-workers asked me for a sheet of paper while I was leafing through my notebook. I had to prove I didn’t have any by showing him the full pages. He asked why I carry around a full notebook. I don’t remember my answer, but I couldn’t have stomached the idea of tearing a page out, even if there had been a blank one.

The second notebook is a black, one subject seventy sheet, sans the stickers; it has seen better days, too. I remember the black notebook was specifically for an English 101 class that I took at a local community college. I remember the teacher asking the class if anyone knew the word pedagogy. No one did. After giving us the answer, she explained to us that we were all already playing catch-up in the eyes of the world, being at a community college; there would be times when people would try to trip us up with words that weren’t in our everyday vocabulary—that we needed to work hard so we would be prepared to demonstrate that we weren’t to be dismissed.

It was my second attempt of many at going to college. The first half of the book spans from April to August of the 2000-2001 school year. I dated the entries because the notebook was my journal for the class. We needed to write daily entries, which we shared with the class. I would need to check my records to see if I actually finished the course. It looks like I have enough dated entries to cover a quarter’s worth of class time. But I spent a lot of money and time playing at going to school in my early twenties, so it is hard to tell. I eventually got a couple of Bachelor’s degrees, after four or five attempts, with enough class time to have a Ph.D., but that is a story for another time.

I filled up the second half of the black notebook over the next couple of years. I carried the black notebook around just as much as the blue notebook, using them both as a way to decompress, and when I read a particular piece from either, I would fantasize about becoming a famous author whose work professors teach in school.

I have kept the pieces in somewhat chronological order, starting with the earliest and ending with the most recent. Keeping the original writing intact proved to be a bit difficult since I was significantly more liberal with my use of grammar and language in my younger years. In transcribing all of my writing from paper to digital format, I found in some cases I couldn’t even read my handwriting, but we are all just making it up as we go, so no harm in a change here and there.

A more straightforward example of one of my bad habits makes me think I must have been an annoying read for my English teachers because I could swear it wasn’t until I was twenty-three or twenty-four that someone told me