xtcian

12/12/02 While talking to my

12/12/02

While talking to my shrink today, I realized how destructive the years 1979-81 were to my already-addled psyche, and not just because they were the worst fashion years since the 1890s. That was the time our family calls "2nd Iowa," when we came back to Iowa after a fully glorious couple of years in Northern London. I had spent "1st Iowa" getting the crap kicked out of me at Grant Wood Elementary School, so the thought of coming back to that shithole filled me with dread, and I was not disappointed.

I started 9th grade at Franklin Junior High School still a year ahead, having skipped kindergarten - and the first week, one of the violinists in the orchestra challenged me to a "fight by the bike rack" and a girl I'd known since kindergarten pulled my hair back so hard in the hallway that I dropped my books and screamed that I was a "fucking faggot." Hello again, America!

I retreated into myself with such hermetic perfection that I was able to go through two years without saying one word at school; most folks probably thought I was retarded. I became adept at avoiding being called on in class, which is a learned art form. Especially in classes like French, when you're graded on pronunciation. I learned how to be so tightly coiled up and unapproachable that the teachers started looking right through me, knowing that asking me to speak may end up being more trouble than they wanted.

the "2nd Iowa" house

At home, things sucked too. I was growing hair in weird places, got my first taste of acne, and was experiencing the dawning of a new existentiality; all 12-year-olds stare into the gaping maw of unhappiness for the first time, but I fell straight in and was consumed. I didn't talk for an entire month at one point, and saw no joy in practicing either violin or piano, both instruments being nothing but sources of criticism from teachers and my parents. The only escape I had was ham radio (which I've explained in better detail), which meant the only people I talked to were 45-year-old spazzes in New Mexico.

One summer afternoon during one of those years - probably 1979 or something - I was riding bikes in the neighborhood, peripherally around Sean and his gang of scruffy ne'er-do-wells. This girl named Tina Buresh (who lived down the street) happened upon us all, and ended up riding down the hill with me towards our house. Sean et. al. immediately launched into the refrain that I had a new girlfriend, etc. and I bolted inside. I curled up in the bathroom, threw up, then stayed in the house for a couple of weeks.

I was so alarmingly horrified that this would even be a possibility. I'd had a nascent experience with the enchanting Heidi Downing a few years earlier, but London was a long way away, and now I was sailing into the outer troposphere of puberty. It seemed very dangerous and nauseating, upsetting the carefully-constructed control-issued persona I'd built for myself. The only good by-product of friendlessness was the freedom from catering to any other human. I was sickened by the responsibility of being liked.

Later on in life, after my first kiss at 18 and virginity loss at 21 (oh the stories), I pulled the worst trick imaginable: I tried to make up for a lifetime of being a romance-less dork by seducing as many women as I could, but I kept my horror at the responsibility of being loved. This set in motion the years 1989 to 2000, for which I'd like to lay me down on a desert basin and apologize. There were probably no two greater personality flaws working in perfectly disastrous incongruence with one another, and thank god I lived long enough to see it end.