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If you DO want to know, welcome to my blog |
For those who actually want to follow my thoughts, ideas, moans, and gripes, this is the place for you! For those of you who are returning...I questions your judgment, you poor souls. 
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| Nope! No thanks! I hear people say it often: "Man, I wish I was young again!" "Young" was not a good time in my life; I'd rather not repeat it, thank you very much. My youth was spent among bullies, lower-middle-class semi-poverty, self-imposed exile, and Jerry Springer! (Interesting side note, I lived in Cincinnati during the time Springer was ousted form city council, supposedly for paying a lady of ill repute with a check—what a moron! Yet he went on to be an absolute genius, serving America up the thing it seems to have wanted most then and to want even more now: GarbageTV. All hail the Circus Master!) Everybody has their bully stories. Some people have stories of being the bully, others own the perspective of the victim. I'm the latter. I have ADHD, which makes it hard to focus on things and really catch on. In the 80's, though, that was what my mother called psychobabble. All I had to do was "settle down and stop rutching." (Routching? Rootching? Did Mom make that up, or is that really a word? I refuse to Google it. The All-Powerful Algorithm might bully me about looking for made-up words. See? There's that ADHD; a story without parenthetical asides and tangents is a story not worth telling!) Where was I? Oh yes: if I stopped wiggling and paid attention, I'd be just fine. Oh, and Mom's magic formula for dealing with bullies was straight out of the new testament. Turn the other cheek. Ignore them and they'll stop, and turn the other cheek. Although it's another tangent, I must share my great-grandfather's take on that. JeeJee (GG) said: "If a man strikes you on your left cheek, turn to him your right, as the Bible says. I guess if he strikes that one, too, you can pummel the tar out of him, though!" I wish I'd gotten to meet that old codger. Well, Mike, Mike, and Justin didn't feel the need to go away after I ignored them. In fact, they found a passive little mouse of a boy to be a fun target. Recess, classroom, walking home from school—they'd spawn like baddies in a video game, my own personal monsters. Bugger! And I had a big brother whose obligation it was to bully badger me to the point of distraction. The hardest part during all of this was simply not understanding them. I don't mean that in an autistic way, although I was slow to learn social cues. (That's a whole other "when I was young" story.) I just didn't understand why people wanted to be so mean—wanted to be so mean. So yeah: youth=bullies. Youth also contained an intimate understanding of privation. Ever have to ask your neighbor if you can fill buckets and jugs of water from their hose spout so you can flush your toilets and have drinking water because dad couldn't or wouldn't pay the water bill? Ever shiver under blankets because he did the same with the electric? Thankfully, I don't recall both at the same time, but I strongly remember both. That's a level of embarrassment one never seems to shake off. But we were never hungry; Mom always found grocery money. In fact, we even ate out a lot. Mom was not a good cook, so Dad took us out to Burger King or Riley's several nights a week. I reckon a lot of that money could have gone for water and electric. Not a family of financial geniuses, to be sure. Well, without said water or electric, it was difficult to bathe or have clean clothes. Old clean clothes, hand-me-down's and often torn-up shoes. I'll leave you to imagine how furiously that fueled the bullying. So what does one do in such a situation? Once I was old enough, I put on a leather jacket and torn jeans (which wasn't hard; that was the only kind of jeans I owned), and started smoking. I became a sheep in wolf's clothing, one of the outsiders, the hoods, the tough guys. People left me alone for the most part, then. But there's a flip side to that coping mechanism— everyone left me alone. For years it was hard to make new friends (aside from my two new besties: Jack Daniels and Jim Beam). Well, harder than usual. Then I was suddenly all growed up, few friends, no skills aside from self-taught computer geekery, a bad reputation, and not a single set of presentable clothing. The rest of the story's not very interesting: I joined the service, did my stint, got out, got married, etc. But those younger years left their mark. In a clearing stands a boxer, a fighter by his trade And he carries a reminder Of every glove that cut him Too true, and too young to win those scars. So I swim against the stream of the popular urge to be a kid again. I wouldn't mind having the body I had back then, the one made mostly of cartilage that would bend and bounce when I fell, and would quickly uncrinkle itself if I slept wrong on the pillow at night. I wouldn't mind that part of youth again; but if it comes with the rest, I'll stay the same old man, with the same scars and the same sore swollen joints, still unable to understand why people still want to be so mean. |
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