You’re sixteen years old, getting kicked out of school for violence. It doesn’t take; you just add arson and weaponry to your routine and keep your head down. You’re a small, squirrelly teenager, with a big mouth and a bad attitude. Beatings and shakedowns don’t take diminish that in any way. You get sent to reform school.
You’re nine years old, and it’s the first time you can remember your father hitting you. It’s over nothing, and you’re surprised, but you’re not surprised, as well. Nothing in life ever makes sense, and everything is vaguely painful, and people have ridiculous expectations.
You’re fourteen years old, and they put you on the little league team, citing you don’t socialize well. You play one game, and grow tired of the forced camaraderie, the dullness of the sport itself, the vicious anti-intellectualism of the other players. Since you know it works, you attack the coach with a baseball bat, and are immediately removed from the team. You come home and your father beats you so badly you can’t leave the house for two days.
You’re twelve years old, and they put you in boy scouts, citing your don’t socialize well. After four or five meetings, you cease speaking to the other scouts, and often head back indoors to play the other kid’s sega genesis, or go back inside to read. When the scout master gives you flack for not participating, you attack him with a small hatchet, and are immediately ejected from the scouts.
You’re twenty three years old, just getting out of your first serious relationship, and you’re going somewhat crazy. You never cared that much about someone before, and the distance between the two of you makes you nuts. You move to San Jose, and form a strange alliance with three other men going through their own misery. Your drinking escalates.
You’re twenty one years old, stuck in the middle of nowhere. You have a fairly well trafficked blog, but it does nothing for you, so you begin experimenting with how far the structure of meta-ness can go. Your drinking escalates.
You’re eleven years old. You read at a grad school level, but you have no friends. Your mother is still getting her degree. Your father is in another country, doing something. You spend most of your time alone, watching edgy cop shows. You get that there’s something more to life, but you don’t know what it is. You start exploring on your own without supervision.
You’re nineteen years old. You’re starting to get tall for some reason, which you like, but after all the awkwardness and humiliation of high school, it seems like too little too late. You’ve just discovered cocaine, but you have no money. You don’t have any new friends in college, but everyone is an idiot, so you don’t care at all.
You’re twenty nine years old. You’re back in small town nowheresville, making a tremendous amount of money. Your first week back is a triumph of sex, alcohol, and hedonism. The next few months are brutally slow torture realizing how many people are frightened of the legacy of your temper, how badly you mistreated everyone you came across. It’s impossible to get laid in nowheresville, because everyone good looking has either been married for six years or doesn’t care anymore, so you start drinking very heavily.
You’re seventeen years old. You haven’t spoken to either of your parents for six months, you’ve been hiding out, couchsurfing around the city, surviving by stealing from places and selling their goods to whatever pawn shop is a good distance away. You get pinched on a breaking and entering, but they basically let you go. You show up at your mother’s apartment, but she’s not there, so you sit in the lobby for two hours, being discussed by all the rich old ladies walking past you the whole time. When you go out for a cigarette, you get into a fight with a skateboarder, and that is when your mother arrives.
You’re twenty two years old, debating how you can kill yourself. School is useless. Life itself is an anhedonic, dull journey, surrounded by morons and pathologically unfulfilling experiences. You don’t like your girlfriend. You don’t like your friends. You don’t, honestly, like anything or anyone. You get drunk to the point of vomiting blood frequently, you don’t understand the idea of a “career”, and you have no underlying ambition to drive you. There is no meaning, nor community in life, just the implications and illusions of such. It is one of the lowest points of your life.
You’re twenty seven years old, and you’ve been employed for seven months, and having incredible sleeping issues, barely getting two or three hours a night. You end up bashing a man’s skull with a champagne bottle at a liquor store during a fight, and going home and weeping for hours, unable to understand what’s going on with you. You decide to pretend it didn’t happen.
You’re twenty four years old, and you’ve just nearly killed a man outside a bar in Santa Monica. You realize it’s time to leave Los Angeles; it’s not a city so much as a cesspool that collects the worst elements of people’s individual narcissism and forms it into a mass gestalt of awfulness. Also, you don’t want to be prosecuted for attempted murder.
You’re ten years old, and the teachers have begun to wonder why you don’t speak to other students, or play, or socialize, and instead just read to yourself in class, during lunch, all the time. You don’t have the vocabulary to explain yourself, so you just keep silent. You got to a lot of parent-teacher meetings, but your mother is busy and your father is disinterested, and you could care less, so nothing comes of it.
You’re twenty five years old, and life is great. You have a giant apartment right near a series of bookstores and bars, your roommates are all hilarious, your job overpays you astronomically, and you’re getting laid all the time, albeit along your quest to find a stable, working relationship with another person. This party lasts approximately eight months.
You’re twenty years old, and you don’t know what you’re doing. Classes don’t make any sense. Professors don’t make any sense. The girl you’re trying to date doesn’t make any sense. You feel unmoored from life as a whole. People keep making you do things with them they insist are fun, but you experience it from the outside, dissecting everything. You don’t see the point of the frivolity or exploration. The only things you like are the independent movie theater downtown and your cat.
You’re six years old, and your mother gets you a cat. His name is Maxwell, and he’s quite fat. You have one toy, and orange truck, that you’ve somewhat lost interest in playing with. You frequently wonder what the other children are so afraid of all the time. You spend a lot of time talking to Maxwell, who in turn prefers to sleep on the top shelf of your bookshelf, which is out of your reach.
