July 30th, 2025

this page is a consolidation of four different short autobiographical pieces that i originally collated on February 6th, 2024, in the hope that bringing them all into the same place would have some kind of panoramic effect. i believe they all may have been written throughout 2023. i intended to format these as a webpage for a long time, but didn't get around to it until now. there is probably minor editing between the collation then & the formatting now

i've included two additions: a preface involving my father (written 2/6/25), & a final fifth one that i wrote today (7/30/25)

~

When my dad was a child, his mom took him on a cross-country road trip, to relocate to the West Coast I think. She abandoned him in a diner - said she'd be right back & sped off. He was extrajudicially adopted by a waitress in that diner, whose name was Rose. He remembers her fondly. She very much became "his mother." It seems he's probably had an interesting life, although there's a lot of gaps in my understanding. I'd bet a hundred dollars that he has a draft of some kind of memoir in his Google Drive account.

I believe he spent most of his life living in California - San Francisco, I believe. I have no idea what dragged him to Missouri where he ended up meeting my mom & growing roots there. Maybe some of his birth family is there - he tends to refer to them in "hick-y" ways, an "it sucks but I gotta love them" tone. They're all Trumpers now, I'm pretty sure. But he did also tell me at some point that they're concentrated more around both Texas & Michigan, so I don't know.

At some point before I was born, there was a big meeting where everyone appeared on TV, some obscure late night show, I think. It would not surprise me if there were no archive of it. I have no marked recollection of ever meeting any members of his family whether adoptive or biological. Perhaps I have, but no memories stick out to me.

I was born on August 15th, 1998. I am left-handed, I have green eyes, & they made my initials ABC on purpose. A girlfriend once told me that my initials had immense explanatory power about my overall demeanor & didn't elaborate. I mostly lived with my mom, seeing my dad on weekends, but as a child I liked my dad more - & I recall saying so to my mom, with a child's googly-eyed sadism. It might have been because he "shared the Asperger's." Over time, this grew into a marked alienation from him, as I found his way of living & relating to the world markedly inane & alienated, in ways perhaps indeed "touched by the Asperger's." As a child, I was already older than my mother, while my dad was still my age.

In my lifetime, he actually had a daughter he wasn't there for whatsoever. Only her mother raised her. I vaguely gathered over the years that this was a situation hanging quietly in the background. Just a couple years back, he actually finally went & met with her in... Kansas City, I think it was. Or maybe Tulsa.? Somewhere. It was a very major thing for him.

I have little to no understanding of where either half (?) of my family "came from," & generally regard myself as having kind of sprung up from the dirt in Missouri without explanation. My mom might be British or Irish. My dad might be Scottish. I don't know. I was the only child of my mother & father. I have many half-siblings, none of whom have really remained in my life. Mostly out of mutual apathy.

~

I have a memory of being very young & going with my dad to a house in the woods where three old women lived. It was Fall or Winter. All the trees were bare. The bareness of those specific trees now flickers in my mind whenever bare trees I encounter today feel "real." I am not sure how many times we visited these elderly women. I remember being there at or near Christmas - I remember the tree & that I was sitting on the carpet holding a copy of The Jungle Book. Of the range of time in which we visited these three women one or more times, I am not sure how far before or after Christmas it extended.

I know that these women were related to me. Whether this was by blood I am not sure. I can't remember their names or exact relations. I can only remember Aunt Opal. I don't know if she was my aunt or if she was my dad's aunt who I took to calling by the same title that he would. I guess probably the latter.

My dad told me that, although Aunt Opal was old, she was, in her mind, equivalent to a young child of about age four. The things she said & did seemed to verify this. I was young enough that I did not regard it as a disease. That was not a perspective that even occurred to me. Rather, she felt like a certain ebb in the way that people's qualities were assembled randomly. She was like an interesting new type of person that life wanted to show me, an experimental enmeshing of old age & youth, & that was her essence. Her condition was just "an attribute."

It's easy to imagine that these three women are all dead now. I have never been informed of any of their deaths. While I believe they were related to me, & they feature in these intimate early memories, I only know one of their names & I cannot recall being informed of any of their deaths. But I have never asked.

A few times I ran down a path in the trees to a neighboring house where there was a woman & a bunch of other children & I would play with them. I don't know who this woman was, if she was a relative, or a friend of the old women, or if I just gallivanted onto her property & made friends.

Over the years, my dad took me along on random visits to many different friends & possibly relatives of his. So many random people, each representing their own isolated occurrence: The sole time that he happened to visit a given person at the same time that I happened to be under his charge. These people's houses are sprinkled all through my memory as enigmatic places, so many houses, without indication of where on earth they were, because why keep records? Why tell me?

One night, maybe in 2007, my childhood house, where I lived with my mother, filled with people. It was like a party. I think these all may have been relatives. I don't know. No one told me what was going on. In any case, I think they all would have been affiliated with my mom in some way. I never learned any of their names & I don't think I saw any of them ever again.

A teenage (?) boy got on our Windows XP computer & played the Flash animation How to Kill a Mockingbird, which enthralled me with its absurdity. An older girl kept saying the word "manwich" to me in a threatening voice. I would feign terror & run away. This bit had taken shape because of a tin of Manwich in a closet with shelves by the kitchen, which we used as a cupboard. She wanted to turn me into a manwich!

When I was about nine, one of my older sister's friends came over. I wanted him to think I was cool, so I played the song Favorite Disease by Thousand Foot Krutch on the computer because it seemed like high schooler music.

I remember my sister calling me a retard a lot. Once, when we lived in the house that we inherited from my grandma, perhaps from 2004 to 2006, she had compelled me to walk in circles around the living room coffee table, crying, because she insisted that a wasp was hovering behind me & that it would sting me if I turned to look. I was afraid of wasps. I still am.

I have a maternal uncle who I have encountered only a couple times in my life, perhaps only two or three. I do not know his name. Maybe Tom. All I remember is his big white beard. The last time I saw him was probably at my mother's memorial service in 2015. It was in the big sermon room of a church on the edge of town.

I sat alone in a chair at the back of the big sermon room. A prominent local pastor who I recognized & had dim familiarity with approached & tried to casually talk with me a bit. But my replies were so awkward that they seemed to override the... The... Well, I guess there is an approach of understanding & patience & fellowship that you expect from a pastor approaching to speak with a teenager whose mother has died. But I feel as though my stilted replies simply torpedoed those qualities & made awkward an interaction which one would think should be exempt from awkwardness, exempt from the lens of interpretation that permits awkwardness. But it was just awkward & stupid. I couldn't play my part. I was not sad.

Around 2012 or 2013, my uncle's wife went missing for a substantial length of time. I do not know her name. When she reappeared, she explained that she had stopped to help a man whose vehicle was broken down on the side of the road. The man was only pretending that the vehicle was broken down, & while she was turned away he pointed a gun at her. He took her captive & she was his captive for the span of the time that she was missing. Then she escaped. She wore her hair different because she didn't want to be recognized around town as the missing woman & repeatedly reminded of the experience. I remember her staying one night in our apartment, asleep on the recliner. Someone casually awoke her &, briefly, she displayed a clear post-traumatic response - wide-eyed, "What?! What?! What?!"

Later that poor woman got up in the middle of the night & went to use the restroom, found the toilet clogged, had to deal with that.

Once, I was sitting in the living room, in the computer chair. My mother & father were sitting behind me on the sofa. They were talking about what had happened to my uncle's wife. My mother said she was sure that, in addition to the kidnapping & everything, "other.. activities had occurred." She said some phrase to that effect & glanced from him to me, to say to him, "I'm referring to rape but I won't say that right now." I knew what she meant, though. I knew what rape was. I also knew what fisting was, & bestiality, pedophilia, incest, coprophilia, knife play, & sounding, &...

The greatest separation reigned between the blank shadow that I presented to my family, & the debatably more substantive being I allowed myself to be on the computer. I did everything I could to maintain an iron curtain between the two. I don't have time to ruminate here on the early psychological effects of this splitting, nor the mild trauma (?) of its eventual rupture.

Once, for Thanksgiving, we - my mother & stepdad - convened at some large building out in the middle of nowhere, I guess a church, with lots of people who I believe were almost exclusively in-laws related to me through my stepdad, who was a cowboy. I use that word not as a description of his profession but as a pejorative term. He liked Alex Jones. You get the picture. Alex Jones to me was not what Alex Jones is now to to Tumblr, to the internet, & to the broader world, this man the world had to reckon with. He was, to me, some random obscurity. The insane man that my stepdad was taken with.

My first recollection of my stepdad is getting out of bed, walking into the living room, & seeing him sitting on the couch without explanation. He waved to me & said, "Hey." I thought he was a burglar. Maybe he wanted to kill us. I didn't care & I went back to bed.

My mother & stepdad parroted certain conspiracy theories - FEMA, the chip, & such - & from a young age I felt pitilessly disgusted by what I regarded in them as an infantile desire to feel like they lived in some kind of movie. It felt pathetic to be a child watching grown adults lack what was, I felt, the mild stoicism necessary to acknowledge life as a thing that is overall quite dull in many ways.

I remember a time when my dad became very enamored with country music & western aesthetics for a little while, in a way which felt incongruous. It felt almost like a kind of childish internal response to my mother's involvement with my stepdad. A cartoonish self-refurbishing. Store this detail about my dad away in your mind for when I give him some description later on. It will paint the picture a little better.

When I picture the foyer of that building that we went to for Thanksgiving, I think of a window which was open all the time on our Windows XP computer. "Preparing to uninstall...," it said. I do not know what was perpetually in preparation to be uninstalled. The window was impossible to close & it would open after the computer was restarted. I do not know why the foyer is linked to this window. I think my mother may have talked about it there.

That window has a feeling, a texture, in my mind. An intimate sense of frozenness, stillness, the color of sand, like the sand that would be in that hourglass cursor, the hard stillness of sand hardened into dry sandstone.

In that church, some vague number of children & I wandered together into the dim, empty sermon room, with all the rows of chairs, & a stage with one chair on it. It seems we organized into an activity of going up to sit on that chair one by one & introduce ourselves. I went up & cracked myself up by saying that I was a stop sign that had fallen down to Earth from outer space. No one else laughed. I loved nonsense though. I loved animutations by Neil Cicierega. In the same way I loved How to Kill a Mockingbird.

Later, I think in sixth grade, standing in a hallway with a small group of children, I had exactly one occurrence of cracking myself up with this zany humor that no one else connected with. A girl's brief but disgusted response pierced me fully & violently with a cruel understanding that would cause me to completely shut down this side of myself for at least the next fourteen years, without hesitation.

Once, we went to the house of my step-grandma, Sue. If memory serves me right, Sue was standing in the living room in a wedding dress, under some kind of trestle-arch decoration which had been placed in there. She might have even held a bouquet in her hands. She was in a state of deep sorrow & intense denial. Her heart had been stolen by some perhaps tall & skinny man, a truck driver, perhaps named Carl, perhaps he might have said he intended to marry her that day, some informal wedding conducted in the living room, perhaps that was the reason for the bouquet, dress, trestle. But Carl had vanished, cut off contact. She insisted stubbornly that he was going to come back as my mom & stepdad insistently tried to bring her back to reality.

In my memory, she is a distinct type of rural middle-aged white woman who would be consumed by computer games such as Bejeweled or Zuma Deluxe. At the risk of sounding very patronizing, when I look back at this memory I feel her as such a poor, confused thing. Her moment of emotional agony & desperation registered as one that would take little work to adapt into a Tim & Eric skit. I'd like to think that I don't say this mockingly, only with an eye to absurdity.

~

In middle school, I had an intense & lasting crush on a girl named Amanda. This was because on the first day of sixth grade she had approached me & briefly complimented my Homestuck t-shirt, which blew my mind. My mind swam in feverish spirals of her recognizing Homestuck. I interacted with her very rarely. Once she glanced at me from across the lunchroom & I felt my whole head vibrate.

My dream was to have a girlfriend who knew what Homestuck was.

One day, at the lunch table, an eighth grader named Grant talked with his friends about The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny. I aggressively shoehorned into the conversation my memorization of the "Gandalf the Grey & Gandalf the White" part. As I did this Grant stared straight down at the table, an ambiguous posture I have always retrospectively parsed as petrifaction by secondhand embarrassment, & there was little response afterward.

Once, during gym, a boy - I believe his name was Jotham - took my notebook & ran around refusing to give it back to me. I do not remember what my demeanor was like as I followed him back & forth to get it back, but I imagine it was stilted, rigid, because I clearly remember being caught in a kind of anxious thought spiral around the idea that I might be blushing in response to what was happening.

This was at a time when I would have regarded this as "gay" & when I likely had a degree of firm & unquestioned internalized homophobia from my mom & stepdad. This did not ever manifest as an actual dislike of gayness or gay people, rather just an invincible conviction that I myself could not possibly be "gay." I was not afraid of being "gay," as though it would make me lesser - it's just that it simply wasn't possible.




I was friends with Amanda on Facebook. At age fourteen, on July 13th, 2013, I decided I would try to befriend her. I sought to do this by opening a computer program that you could type a message into & then have it automatically send the message once every x seconds, in whatever chat window you selected. At 7:29 PM, I began repeatedly sending her a message, once per second, that read "ก็็็ʕ•͡ᴥ•ʔ ก้้้ BEAR RAVE ก็็็ʕ•͡ᴥ•ʔ ก้้้"

I feel that I did this to avoid the perceived vulnerability of just saying "hi" & initiating a normal conversation about whatever middle schoolers talk about. I sublimated my desire to reach out into a piece of expression that felt irreproachably irreverent, & as I did it I could tell myself that I was just following an innate drive to be chaotic & weird, rather than trying to befriend someone - drown out rational consideration of what I was doing with the voluntary white noise of "being random," "being zany."

As the bear raves sent, one after the other, I leaped & flailed around my living room in a state I will venture to describe as autistically hyperactive nervous excitement, tacky as I may feel in appropriating "autistic" as an adverb.

After eleven bear raves, she replied, "Um okay lol". After about ten more, she replied with a sticker of Pusheen sleeping. I continued sending bear raves until 8:33 pm.

We did not interact again until August 24th, when I sent a message reading "WHO IS JOHN GALT". There were, at the time, banner ads around the internet for a movie adaptation of Atlas Shrugged which just read "WHO IS JOHN GALT", presumably in an attempt to be eye-catchingly enigmatic. For a little while, I thought it was funny to repeat that phrase. I understood nothing about the book or the film.

She replied, "John Galt is a character in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged (1957)." I replied, "but who IS john galt" after which we had an inane conversation where she typed like Terezi Pyrope.




In 2015, when I regard myself as having been more or less insane, a time I pray to God will never be bested as the subjective nadir of my entire life, Amanda sent me a message which read:

"So I know that you’ll never respond to this message but I read most of the post you make on tumblr (when I'm online) and I just wanted to tell you that I wish I could be a better friend and help you out when things aren't going well. I sincerely hope that things get better for you, and I'm sorry I was not there when you needed someone but I do want to be there because I do consider you as a friend even though you probably don't consider me as a friend."

I never replied to this. I am not sure how I reacted to it internally, but for much of my life I had instinctively, as stated prior, had a very very militant attitude about the separation between my "real" & "online" expression, & if this was my first moment of realization that she read my blog then there is a chance I was very disturbed & caught off guard by that. I hate to think of what she might have been responding to. I was a chaotic whirling of thoughtless nihilism, cynicism, & dread. [This wasn't the traumatic rupturing of my online & offline lives that I alluded to earlier. That happened a few years prior. Maybe I'll add that to this page later.]

Today, while trying to ascertain the date that I messaged Amanda with "bear rave," I rediscovered the above message as well as a 2015 drawing by her of me in a "bear suit."






I also rediscovered a still of me on the local news in 2011.



This was from a local news segment where a man named Brad would seek out the more "off-beat" things happening in the area. The segment was called "Brad's Beat." I was being featured as a thirteen-year-old stand-up comedian.

I was interviewed in this capacity at the same dining table in the same two-story house where, six years later, I would (with a confused mixture of emotions) acquiesce to eating the dinner at a Christmas party in lieu of penitently fasting for several days out of guilt related to interpersonal tension with one of my exes. This was the same ex who, about a year after that Christmas party, would, in a state of severe emotional instability, send me a rant calling me a loathsome homeschooled animal because I got a haircut without them. Another six years later, I would notice that these events took place at the same table & unify the memories in this piece of writing as if to vaguely say something about time & places & change.

In addition to the interview, Brad & I filmed a short teaser that would play before the ad break preceding the segment. It had Brad describing what was up next, followed by me saying some standard sentence that he had asked me to say. Then, after my sentence, I followed it up with my own non sequitur phrase, "exploding bears in space." I hadn't told him I would say that, & the teaser showed him looking at me, chuckling, & saying "what?!"

That I was a thirteen-year-old stand-up comedian was my dad's doing. For a long time, before I was even born, he had done gigs as a stand-up comedian, children's entertainer, or magician. As an extension of this he had, since at least first grade, been occasionally parading me onto stages to recite material that he had written in a mindset of, "These are the kid version of jokes. It will be funny if a kid says this." I did it for the school talent show. I did it at a Christian nightclub.

My set included such jokes as:

My mom works at a portrait studio. that means she makes people look beautiful... For a hundred bucks!
I'm not sure what my dad does... This week. But he came home yesterday smelling like a Big Mac.
He told me he slept like a baby last night. I guess that means he woke up crying because he wet himself.
Last night my sister talked with someone on the phone for three hours! I asked her who it was & she said, "Wrong number."
My teacher started telling this story that started off "rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub..." I didn't even stick around to hear the rest of that one.
Anyway, my dad says I'm not supposed to talk to strangers, so I gotta go.

I was neither for nor against this. I simply did it. It was a routine in both a comedic & programmatic sense. The audience's laughter brought me no joy. Nor did I feel cajoled or used. If I had been raised to have a more robust sense of agency, I might have found it a kind of demeaning way for a parent to relate to a child. But I wasn't raised in such a way. After my performance in the talent show in 1st or 2nd grade, a small group of girls swarmed me enthusiastically on the playground & I just stared at them blankly while they touched & shoved me.

It didn't take too long for me to start seeing my stand-up act as an expression of a characteristic sort of naivete that I have always known my dad to display about "being an entertainer," among other roles, including being a Christian. I feel that this naivete endures nearly twenty years later. He is one inclined to make something a technical reality so that he can declare it to himself as a full-fledged, essential reality, & be "pleased" with that. He seems to approach life as a series of parcelized costumes to try on, with each representing a new "era" for him to have gone through & store away in a section of his mind resembling a trophy case, a portfolio, or a series of portraits.

By having me deliver these jokes, he could enjoy the technical reality that I was also a stand-up comedian like him. He was able to ignore the way that the artificiality of this drained it of its essence.

Similarly, by creating a thing that technically counts as a song or film, he can enjoy the technical satiation of a drive in him to be a musician or filmmaker - not because he has something he wants to express in these mediums, but because the roles of "filmmaker" & "musician" have taken roost in his mind as things which hold an air of exoticism, & he wants to bring himself into alignment with them. He will become drunk on this feeling, sitting on the couch, cackling to himself at his own creative energies as he pens lyrics to an extremely by-the-numbers country or rock song. He will obsessively accrue filmmaking tools he never makes use of & take joy in brainstorming film plots that come off as odd caricatures of conventional storytelling. He is a man who lives by trying on various masks, careful always to maintain a layer of dissociation between himself & the real breadth of possibilities, so that the target of his fixation remains a sort of cartoon version of itself, safe to approach, unchallenging.

This is glaring to anyone who meets him & also has a decent measure of honesty with themselves. Most of these people have been my friends from outside my hometown, who are not subject to its particular delirium, which is like that of an entire city of people who are, in spirit, "homeschooled." I have never spoken frankly to him about this because his fever, while comprising so much of his being, is also so paper-thin that there is a sense that one could not press on him at all without doing far more severe & extensive damage to his character defenses than he really deserves. I feel that holding my tongue about something so flagrant for basically my entire life has done me some kind of damage, made me find my own voice worthless.

Framed in my living room is an old article from the local newspaper about my dad's magic act & his fascination with Harry Houdini. Framed right above it is a blue poster in Comic Sans which advertises a show at the above-mentioned Christian nightclub, on April Fool's Day 2006. The main act is my dad with his stand-up, followed by myself & two musicians.

Over the course of the following year, one of these musicians would start to become popular on MySpace & would sign to Warner Bros. Records in 2009. His band has a Wikipedia page. They have released ten albums, the most recent one being in 2020. Their second album has 176 ratings on rateyourmusic.com, the most of any of them. About eighteen years later, I would leave for Virginia to stay with some friends for about four months, the longest I had ever been out of state or even out of town. In a thrift store in Virginia, I would find a CD by the band in question.




It was true that my mom worked at a portrait studio. My mom was somewhat locally recognizable for manning the studio at a Wal-Mart. Sometimes when there was no one to watch me after school I had to spend hours corralled in this portrait studio. This is undoubtedly how I developed an affinity for fake pieces of fruit that are used as props, such as those that could be found in the prop chest there. I do not encounter fake fruit very often, but it tends to stimulate something in me. There was the blanket, the curtains, the fruit, the foam... I feel that the portrait studio donated a lot of textures to a part of my psyche.

As for my mother's sense of humor: The only joke I can immediately recall ever hearing her tell went as follows, "What do you call a black guy in space? An astronaut!! What are you, racist??!"




When I was somewhere in the range of nine years old, I called my dad on the phone to demonstrate to him that I had memorized all ten minutes of Weird Al Yankovic's Trapped in the Drive-Thru. I definitely also called him once to sing the entirety of Virus Alert. When I was about twelve, I called him to express my excitement at having learned what "precordial catch syndrome" is - that I had always just been experiencing that, rather than having frightening heart problems I hadn't told anyone about.

~

About a month before my seventeenth birthday, I was on the website Omegle.com, using a feature called "spy mode." The way this mode functions is that a user types in a prompt, & then two strangers are connected as usual, but with this prompt to discuss if they so choose. The person who types the prompt can see the conversation happening, but cannot interact in any way.

I was typing all kinds of nonsense into this prompt field, & at some point two people connected, John & Sequoia. They had a long conversation & quickly went from strangers to friends.

I do not recall if I paid full attention to this conversation as it happened, or only cursory attention, or whether I only reviewed it after it had concluded. In any case, I was sort of captivated by the whole thing, because both of these people talked to each other in a very... Approachably plain-spoken way unlike anyone Ii had ever talked to. "Normal," I thought of it as, a finnicky word which one can connote either positively or negatively on any particular usage. The positive side, groundedness, the negative side, banality.

In this case, I thought it was wonderful. I guess if I had to vaguely describe it, I would say... They just talked, but, "just talked" in a way that escaped being banal. It felt real because there was no excess of self-consciousness or self-awareness to it, nothing convoluted. It felt very cozy. It made me think of the house I grew up in. It made me think of a scene from a book that I had always visualized taking place in the kitchen of the house I grew up in.

I saved a copy of the conversation to my computer. I had always done this after pretty much any notable Omegle conversation that I was involved in, although I wasn't actually involved in this one. Consequently I feel like this was the first of a few subsequent actions I took that I don't think were exactly conscionable.

The second action: Towards the end of the conversation, Sequoia had shared her e-mail address with John so they could keep in touch. I sent Sequoia an e-mail, just to express that I hoped it wasn't strange to say, but I thought they both had a very interesting & entertaining conversational style. I reasoned to myself that this would not be exceedingly strange, given how she'd willingly disclosed the address in "spy mode."

Sequoia replied with bewildered alarm. I immediately felt deeply embarrassed. It felt very obvious in retrospect that it was a strange e-mail to send. I sent a second one apologizing & then dropped off the face of the earth as far as that was concerned. I moved on with whatever stuff I did around the time I turned seventeen. The experience faded away. But I would remember it on infrequent occasions. The impression never wavered: Those people were so normal... I've never talked to anyone so normal...

Just over four years later, in 2019, about four months after my twenty-first birthday, I was chatting with a close friend who I'd met early that year. It was December. I was having a particular moment of recall about the conversation. I told my friend about it, & about the impression it had left on me. & then, to illustrate what I meant, I did the third & final thing which felt less than conscionable: I dug up the conversation & sent it to him in full.

How did he respond to it?

The conversation revolted him. He felt that each of them talked like characters in a mid-aughts British young adult novel - weird, prefabricated, colorless personalities that he couldn't stand. He found it nightmarish that each one seemed to be consciously choosing to play such a role, & insisted that people do not talk like that, that no human who existed in an environment independent of young adult fiction would ever, ever talk like them on their own. He likened them to fifteen year olds who'd read Harry Potter & now made attempts to be witty & quippy with sentences devoid of semantic content.

This new lens of interpretation clicked into place effortlessly & I immediately saw how grossly accurate it was. Just like that, the spell was broken & the conversation was now a sort of unpleasant thing to skim over. What had I been thinking?

~

Around Christmas of 2017, about four months after my nineteenth birthday, I went to a Christmas dinner in a big, pretty two-story house that I hadn't been to in a long time. The house was owned by a married couple, two friends of my dad's. He had lived there with them for a while back around 2011. Now he'd invited me along to this dinner, which he was attending in his capacity as an employee of the couple, who had since become franchise owners of a pizza restaurant. I arrived at this party trying to starve myself for three days. I will tell you why.

This was during a time when I felt like I had terribly wronged someone. At least, I sort of think that's how it was. It's possible that I had done them wrong, & sensibly felt bad. But it's also possible that they had made me feel far worse about something than I deserved to. Things were mutually pretty negative between us &, certainly, neither of us were blameless. The relationship was an absolute mess, completely inadvisable, no one involved should have been.

If nothing else, I had done something especially bad back in October, so I had good reason to feel bad, generally. But it's possible that my guilt on Christmas may not have been deserved in an immediate way. It could have been! I simply don't remember the exact circumstances. What matters is that I felt very bad.

I cared strongly about the way I was feeling. The guilt was eating me alive. I felt like a worm. This was a period in my life where I didn't have much self-esteem beforehand, & maybe I felt like I could be very negative & cynical, but one way I at least didn't feel was ethically compromised. But now I did. I felt shattered.

During this part of my life, I had hardly any capacity (willingness?) to really think about myself, & I was even less adept at interacting with others - more or less completely crippled in that respect. So I had this crushing store of guilt & felt totally clueless as to how to process it & make sense of it, or how to make things right between me & the person. The situation between us was fairly complicated & intense in its own right, far surpassing my fetal social capacities, & maybe enough of a product of their own private pain paired with my clueless barely-human quality that there really was no feasible way of definitively settling things between us. I had no idea what to do. But it felt impossible to imagine that the guilt could just linger there inside me, taking no form.

So the only outlet I saw for the guilt, the only place I could put it, the only way I could do right by it & assuage it, was some kind of self-imposed punishment. & what I went with - what i did multiple times (or at least attempted multiple times) - was set a countdown on my phone for one to three days & restrict myself from consuming any food or drink for that time. I went with this because I was simply too afraid of subjecting myself to anything more visceral & directly painful.

So I had one of these countdowns going at that Christmas dinner. The countdown was three days long, I believe. I had a plate of food. I broke my oath, even though I didn't want to. The reason I did this was that the idea of not having any of the food while I was there made me feel a sad in a very potent & sentimental, & this sadness overpowered the guilt. It was as if I was personifying the event itself, or maybe the food. Feeling sorry for it. & the thought that I would have to neglect it because of such a dismal, loveless ritual motivated by such dismal, loveless circumstances was too much. So, begrudgingly, I ate the food.

What most stands out to me is the peculiar emotion as I ate. In one part, although I did not forgive myself, I felt like someone who had been mercifully forgiven for something but in a bittersweet manner where I couldn't quite believe it was really the case & was uncertain, hesitant, half expecting to be hit or scolded. In another part, it was like all the people at the dinner, who I felt represented a quite different sphere of reality from the person I had wronged, were all sort of taking me in their arms & insulating me from the other sphere where all the wrongs & grievances existed, so that I existed only there at the party, innocent of wrongdoing because the other place wasn't real anymore. I felt maybe like someone who had been walking through a war zone, resigned to their certain death, but some kind & loving people appeared & scooped me up in a truck & now I was just speeding along towards safety. Although no one at the dinner was remotely interacting with me in this way, if at all, & I didn't feel that close with any of them - fairly alienated by them, in fact. None of them knew about my social circumstances or my oath not to eat. Regardless, this was how I felt while I ate the food.

~

Even if any of my family had been adequate, I fear I never could have emotionally fallen into any of them for comfort - that way you emotionally fall completely forward into someone, letting gravity take you, hiding in them - as by a young age my dimly recognized notions of intimacy, romance, & family had colluded to produce a mistaken sense that full surrender of oneself to a member of one's own family would be akin to incest. My exposure to extreme sexual content through the internet likely didn't help matters. This was a large part of why any hope of developing an early-life framework for emotional relation to other people was out the window for me pretty much immediately.

This was, however, ultimately just an extra, superfluous nail in the coffin, as by that time I already dimly recognized, if unconsciously, that the landscape of traditional media & radio country music had already - in a kind of pernicious, eldritch manner - reduced the people in my small town to shrieking automatons. If this sounds pretentious or misanthropic that's because it is pretentious & misanthropic to type in the present day but I feel that to sit here & pretend to fault myself back then for developing the impression in complete earnest would amount to an act of retroactive self-child-abuse, with marked psychological severity, given my circumstances at the time. So everyone I had access to felt severely confused & utterly inconsequential to me, & if anyone did stick out I was naturally too stunted to attempt to interact with them in any coherent way.

I went on the internet, which I recognized on some animal level as my only avenue of anything resembling an "authentic existence." There I recall, among other things, browsing Encyclopedia Dramatica in vague, confused recognition of it as a "funny" or otherwise "eclectic" website. There, however, I prominently recall seeing a close-up photo of a person's head splattered on a road, a photo of a person suspended from a ceiling in bondage gear being anally fisted, a gif of a person shitting in another person's hand, &, on one of my few visits to /b/, a photo of a removed eyeball with a razor blade embedded in it about halfway deep in.

I alternated these exposures with playing Roblox, Sonic & Mario flash games, mouse avoider flash games, single-player browser RPGs, & a chatroom where I roleplayed with strangers as an orphaned vampire child.

On a few sparse occasions my mother would discover things I had been looking at in the browser history. She would scroll through the odd things but not take any action or really commentate on anything. During these moments my mind would completely petrify & I would feel powerless. When she didn't do anything I could just pretend it hadn't happened. Maybe her mind was petrified too by this unfamiliar hurdle in the experience of parenting. Or she just didn't care. Privately I began to recognize the sense that I had been quietly made into some alien thing different from the rest of my family & that it was some kind of responsibility for me to conceal this fact.

The only thing my mom ever got mad at me for doing on the computer was swearing in Roblox. I got banned & it sent her an e-mail with what I had said. She shamed me to my sister while I sat on the kitchen counter, genuinelt repentant.