From: horsestorideon@hotmail.com
Subject: click click
Date: September 10, 1998 1:19:25 PM PDT
To: mrvisible@worldnet.att.net
yeah… you’d told me the glossy details of your adventurous lifestyle
i don’t think i said i admired you for it, though.
but i can say i think i understand how you say you’ve moved on
not really away from it
but out from underneath it
if you ever were.
i’ve known a few people who’ve tried to convince me that we can’t escape
from our childhoods
and i can’t disagree with them
but i also don’t believe them.
when i tell stories about my childhood
you should know they are all fiction as well
such things are better left to fiction
but they did happen as far as the past does happen
as far as it matters.
[matters]
i was just giving you ideas
i thought that might be…
something.
but we don’t care
we aren’t judging eachother
[right]
we’re telling stories
about the first makeup kit my sister got
about that first potted plant i broke
about my brother getting caught stealing
about birthday parties.
and about getting out of childhood.
in juniour high
i decided to go find some friends
i never bothered before
because no one made the effort to be my friend
i just assumed they didn’t want to
but this time
i decided to go get some
and i watched the kids in school
[new ones, this time… from a different school district … we’d all
been put into this same big building.. and i didn’t know some of them]
people in this school consisted mainly of christians
dead-heads
and sports
fanatics
i learned this over the years.
that learned period was my time of finding that i really didn’t like
sports that much because i didn’t understand the competition.
i wasn’t allowed to read
my father wanted me on the field
so i played every sport out school had til my wonderful 13th year
when i had so thoroughly disappointed my father that he stopped making
me try…
for the eight christmas i recieved a Nintendo…
seeing that i was failing at sports
my father wouldn’t allow me to have books
and i didn’t have any friends who didn’t beat me up
i became friends with the box.
spending endless hours excuseing my self from life
‘, no… no sports. no family renunion. my friends come over and be
player 2. corn fields. Nicktendo. it’s my turn now’
which lasted until i had to go visit my Aunt and Uncle in plymouth
michigan for two weeks
i don’t recall why this happened
i believe it was because i “liked them” so that’s where i was staying.
my parents could never stand being away from us so they never let us do
any of the regular midwestren things of staying with relatives or summer
camp
so this was a first for me
and i spent 2 weeks seeing my parents only once…
which was fine by me… i comforted my brother when he missed them.
my aunt and uncle tought me how to pour a beer without a head right from
their refrigerator door
i learned poker
and solitare.
my aunt locked us in seperate rooms
basement
bedroom
closet
with ligths and books and two hours of forced reading…
i thought the hardy boys were pretty dumb
but different then nintendo and better than where i was.
i started skippin lunch at school to sit in the library reading greek
myths
my father didn’t like me reading
so i did it at school and i didn’t eat [1]
…. we moved into a big house out in the country
[as opposed to the small house in a row of houses in the middle of three
cornfields that we’d lived in previous to this]
same school
same town
just a lot farter away.
it was supposed to represent some kind of achievement my father must
have made.
it had a pond
[that leaked the year of the drought… so we drained it and got rewared
with town ridicule in the local paper for being so wasteful…
he just kept watering the lawn from the spicket]
he was really into appearance
told me it was the most important thing
and my brother and i would spend about 14 hours cutting the grass for
him
with two different tracktors and a gas-powered weed eater
we walked around the 279 trees every weekend and made sure there were no
blades of grass or weeds growing around them.
it was this and that and this and that and building decks and boxes and
barns and such until i left this place…
at age 10, though, the family got it’s first computer…
this was much more interactive than a nintendo and i started making
friends with it.
alas, it was in my fathers office behind his bedroom
and i repeatedly got in trouble for being in there all hours of the
night
connecting by modem to a friend of mine across town
telling eachother how trapped we felt.
nagging and such led me to get it upgraded two years later.. from 8088
to 386
and i started to notice i was getting fat… like the rest of my family
good polish boys, i suppose…
i always ate so slow my brother would steal it from me before i ever had
a chance to finish…
but now i sat in rooms all day on BBSs and pictures and games
now i never really stood up
and i was getting all bloated
[not really… i just remember getting out of the shower one day and
looking down and not being able to see my penis nor my toes over my
belly… i got quite frightened]
so i started the only sport i’d never been forced to play:
wrestling.
age 13
taking the beating
quitting tae kwon do
taking up acting
picking out my friends from the crowd
the ones on the outside of the crowd
in a little group that was vulnerable to attack
by anything but intellect.
they tought me about books
and desperation.
”
Today has been devoted to wondering, and theorizing, and some of it you
have
inspired.
Our conversation the other day on IRC only served to further intrigue
me. Meeting you was like
stepping off the plane in a foreign country; suddenly, there were vast
new vistas to explore,
new languages to learn… So few people contain so much.
And so I’d like to propose an exchange. Tell me about yourself; tell me
about what’s shaped
you, where you want to be, who you want to be, and I’ll do the same. I’m
fascinated by you,
and this seems to be a unique opportunity. ”
this means i’ll have to relearn detail and importance.
i saw a girl named “cera” yesterday.
i love this girl
and when i spoke with her my head exploded
and my entire body was free…
i haven’t felt that way in ages
a year or something
only in brief moments of acid or bikes….
“hello, i’m with you”
‘and you don’t need to say that, because i’m with you too’
but it presented a contrast to me
and i’m wondering what’s killing me
what’s making me old
what’s keeping me in
i don’t want to be a person
trapped in his little body like everyone else
i need to connect
i need to do something to get me out of here
i need the thing to set me free again
i need the friends
so we all can dissipate and run off into
in exploring all the options
i just have to make sure i don’t infected with the tricks of the trade
with the shit of the day
with newspapers and television
just the knowledge
just the sad people sitting in church
just the memory of how smart we used to be
and where are all those books and people to talk to?
this psuedo-greek town is asking me why i’m doing what i’m doing
it always has
and then it asks me WHY NOT…
and then it asks me when
and when
and it never asks me where because it wants me to be here
and i really don’t want to give it that.
but the people here
for the most part
hollow out my insides
which makes me lighter
which makes me want to fly
but it’s so cold…
i’m working on learning to use my hands
if you have any suggestions..
it would be appreciated.
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