I’ve lost my moleskin that Enzo gave me, which means that I
am relying on random scraps of paper and napkins to write down my ideas and
this isn’t an ideal situation.
This means that I have a bunch of half-baked ideas that haven’t been
through the very cursory filter I put them through.
Three shorter stories: one melancholy, one random, and one inappropriate.
Doing Time
Most of you don’t know this, but I did time at Leavenworth. I did each year of high school in a new school and I completed my junior year there. This was a great opportunity in many ways but most of all; the best way to get rid of a bad reputation is to move. It’s a really cool thing to drop into any conversation that you’ve done time at Leavenworth and while it isn’t the best thing I took from the experience I get a great deal of mileage out of it. No one asks questions and no one will fool around with you after learning you’ve done time in the LV.
I’ve kept up with two people from that experience pretty well, Nedenia and Candace – but I knew Candace better at University than during High School, despite being in Youth Group and school together. I didn’t have many friends that year because on top of my social anxiety disorder I was a one-year student that move through that school while their fathers or mothers filter through Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth and wasn’t going to exert the incredible effort it would take me to find a connection with the other humans. I did, however, make friends accidentally with a few people but because the internets were around there to link us through a series of tubes I lost contact with everyone when the next school year became busy.
While wondering what happened to this or that person who had been, “a friend in my head,” as Wendy Williams would say it, a friend offered the idea of updating my Facebook schools to include where I had gone so I could find them. I can count on my hand all the times I left the house without being ‘on official business.’ It was a hard year, new school, new town, new country and new everything. The closest I came to friendship was teammates, people who picked me for a partner in gym, and being in your group for projects in class. I wonder sometimes if those people knew exactly how nice they were being when they were just trying to fill out their squad or finish a project well. It’s funny that these people, who constantly included me at school probably were picking the other slow, fat kid in gym or the other smart kid in class, didn’t realize the depth of their compassion. Sometimes I feel like I really did do time in Leavenworth and I remember that there were people who were a cool breeze in Hell and endeavor to be that person for someone else.
The best and the brightest of these encounters was the time I had a group project for American History class that I had to work on after school at the public library. This was a harrowing experience for me because I had to exchange contact information with my peers, accept an offer of transportation from them to the public library, and then find my way home afterwards. One of my neighbors brought me home from the library and that wasn’t so bad because I wasn’t expected to socially interact with an adult, except this adult was only three of four years older than I was and married to someone my father’s age. The hard part was riding in a peer’s car to the library when – in all my social anxiety I would have been happier in the trunk. Towards the end of the project, when I had solved the riddle we were working on the peer that drove me to the library said, in his glee that we were close to final success, “If I were gay, I’d kiss you.” The neighbor who was driving me home had heard this and on the way home coached me to pretend to be gay and date this young man, “just don’t put out,” so that I could, “meet some people my own age and make friends.” Even at sixteen, I knew this would be an inappropriate method to integrate myself into society. I would have loved to be that person’s friend but I didn’t have the skill set and I would have had the niggling fear that people thought I was pretending to be his friend so he’d molest me in the public library. To this day, if they remember that they probably think that my weirdness toward them was in reaction to their statement and not, in fact, to my neighbor unconsciously twisting my brain around. Until I moved that same neighbor would ask if I were dating that guy yet and if were even ‘just friends.’ I think she thought I was being facetious when I’d say, “I have no friends.”
The next Monday in class this same person announced that he had gotten new shoes and threw his feet into the air so everyone could see; they were very nice shoes. The teacher responded that he didn’t need to make the same demonstration when he got new underwear, I think it was the first time I spoke in class without being called on – it was an open question in one class if I was autistic, in another if I could speak English at all - and I announced that I had gotten new underwear that weekend.
I think not having friends was only partially due to my social anxiety.
However, this guy prepared me for senior year where it became difficult to shut me up. He may or may not have quoted in class, "be yourself, everyone else is taken," but his example reminded me to come back out of my shell and terrorize everyone with every random thought in my head, and my new shoes - which were never as nice as his.
Forward, All Through the Night
Another thing I don’t advertise is that I am a huge fan of Cyndi Lauper; she is like a prototype for the Chaos Bean. Pop stars today rely on their looks and ability to be someone’s private dancer, a dancer for money – than to have talent and something to say. A great deal is debated about what makes someone an artist and in my opinion an artist is someone with talent and something to say. The person who paints the pretty cottages can paint a pretty cottage but I wouldn’t call him an artist because he isn’t saying anything, there isn’t a message conveyed. They don’t make them like Tina Turner anymore, and we certainly don’t have any Cyndi Lauper replicas running around. When I heard five of her songs on the radio in twenty minutes I feared that she had died as well.
Bring Home the Bacon
One of my favorite, essential things to do is to name your baby for you. I find it awkward to refer the fetus you’re germinating in neutral terms. Anna introduced me to her baby by referring to distended womb as, “Ali,” and this started my habit of naming your baby for you.
During the Revolution I was interned to Mademoiselle who is now great with child and worked closely with Kristi who recently bore her child into the world. Mademoiselle is a vegetarian, and I’ve mentioned her habit of eating leaves off tries like a Giraffe but I haven’t mentioned is that she is a huge fan of Absolutely Fabulous and I’ve named her baby Serge Monsoon Turtle after Edina Monsoon’s beloved son; Kristi’s baby is Saffron.
Her husband, also an herbivore and a partisan in the Revolution, misses bacon. My traditional and condescending baby gift is a piggy bank and I’ve gone the step further from naming their child for them to naming their child’s piggy bank. I promised Mademoiselle’s husband during the Revolution that after the Revolution I would do my best to find bacon for herbivores. While I was toting Serge’s bank around Target looking for something else I realized that I had found the only bacon that Mademoiselle would find acceptable and thus fulfilling my promise.
Poor Mademoiselle, all through the Revolution she had to endure my shenanigans
and tomfoolery and spent the better part of her past week wondering what I was
fervently text-messaging her about when I babbled about the vegetarian bacon
and how I needed to hide it in her garden. Moreover, in some cultures it’s considered rude to put money
in the pig (stuff the bacon) and in other cultures it is considered rude to
leave the pig with an empty belly.
In a quandary because Mademoiselle and her consort come from different
cultures I left a bag full of pennies to add to the pig if it were
appropriate. The copper in pennies
comes from Arizona - John McCain’s adopted home state. I wanted that to be Mr. McCain’s sole
contribution to the little dauphin’s life. Honestly, won’t someone check HIS birth certificate? The non-Christian who was born beyond
our borders isn’t the candidate who won, silly gooses.
I hate to ruin the surprise, Kristi but I have to find you the appropriate piglet as well for Saffron.
And this, dear reader, is what happens when I miss-place my moleskin.
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