Making history, making me in 2017

I have always lived my life, in quite conscious ways, as more than one person. I can remember, at the various summer day camps I went to, always creating a “club”, which these days overprotective parents would call a gang. We were called “The Drunk Skunks”, me not quite understanding what Drunk meant. I believe that I heard the expressions from my brothers while at my Aunt Linda’s house. They probably overheard it in reference to Uncle Tim whose sad, sad, alcoholic death we all saw coming thirty years before it happened.
Let me go back further . . .
In preschool, I remember observing, to my mother, that life was unfair. Girls, who hated a boy, would rush over and give him attention if he fell down and started crying. Mum told me that girls were like that. I tried it for myself and it worked. I was impressed. I remember battling with Eric Burgess for supremacy of the preschool class. I don’t remember who won, but I seem to remember thinking that I did, though now I have a vague feeling that I didn’t.
In Kindergarten, I can remember having a meeting of formerly popular kids to try to coordinate plans on what to do: The new kids were all becoming more popular than we were. How could we coordinate and act as one against the threat? Robby was there, though I can’t remember who he was, and I remember being frustrated because only he would be dumb enough to think that anybody liked him.
I remember the great dramas of my childhood, obsessing over Megan in my epic love triangle with Rob (not Robby) and the suspected triangle between Danny (my then best friend) and Andrea (our mutual friend). I even tried to forbid those two from seeing each other. It, quite obviously, didn’t work.
Regardless, I was always very aware of social things. This wasn’t to say that I had a useful understanding, I certainly lacked a practical understanding, but I had an awareness. When I went to Southfield Christian, all of that become more evident. I hated it there, I couldn’t understand things in a meaningful way. Everybody was awful, and everybody seemed to behave in the most idiotic ways. Of course, I did, too, and I realized it to some extent. But what really set things off was the summers.
At camp, I was King Drunk Skunk, hero of the masses of Super Summer Day Camp, or Science Camp, or some such thing. Theater camp, between third and fourth grade, I believe. The summer between second and third grade, when I was to transfer to SCS, I met a boy who joined my club and he and I became fast friends. Shortly after getting to SCS, I was dumped. Social liability. It was heartbreaking. Yet, the next summer, there I was: A king among men. It never failed. Every summer, I was King, wherever I went, and every Autumn, I was a nothing and a nobody. The same things that I did ceased to work with those people, while others doing what I did got the results that only came to me over the summer. Why? I didn’t understand it. It made me angry and bitter.
By the time I was older, the family problems had kicked into high gear. Christopher had gone from being a perfect son in 5th grade, at Bingham Farms, to being a disaster in 6th grade at Southfield Christian. He’s given two versions of why: Either he went to Space Camp, realized he didn’t want to be an astronaut, and gave up, or, he got lonely and decided to get friends by being one of the dumb kids. Either way, he was causing problems. Meanwhile Collin was causing huge problems. I’d get women up during the night with screaming from mom finding something, or Collin in a fight. The police came to our house more times than I can count. Finally, Collin ran away, the police wouldn’t do anything, dad tried to drag Collin home, the lady who was harboring him called the police, and dad got in trouble. During this era, my parents marriage fell apart. It was also during this time that I had chronic stomach aches and that my insomnia started. I reached out, as best I could, to the people in my life who were nearest to being friends. Unfortunately, that was a disaster.
When you’re thirteen, and lonely, and your ideas of how friendship works is based on how you think it should work based on very idealistic portrayals of human relationships (mostly Boy Meets World), you expect a lot out of people. Especially when you consider that the people you’re expecting a lot out of are also, more or less, thirteen. When they’re also girls, who aren’t really supposed to hang out with you, and whose parents get annoyed when you call, it causes more issues. I withdrew from my mother at this time in my life, largely because I didn’t want to bother her. Yes, I was miserable all the time, but she had it a lot worse. A decent number of hours during my childhood were spent combing mom’s hair and playing Christmas music on the CD player while she stared out the window, crying. Even when you’re thirteen, and dumb for thirteen, you don’t want to complain to a lady like that. So, I turned to friends who couldn’t really help me, even if they had wanted to, and even if they had been allowed to. And when that didn’t work, I lashed out. Causing drama and being a general problem. I was a nightmare, and, looking back, it was probably for the best that they didn’t put restraining orders on me from how often I called. Regardless, I found myself very, very, alone.
It was also at about thirteen that I lost my best friend, Jennifer, to age, puberty, and growing apart. I don’t know exactly what happened, or what went wrong. I seem to remember something along the lines of a love confession from her to me, one that I did not reciprocate. Also, being lonely, I was always asking her to set me up with a girl, something which tired her out after a while. We parted on very bad terms, and the last time I saw her, maybe ten years ago, things were still awkward, though I doubt that either of us could explain why.
However, before the left my life, one day in December, I believe, we were looking for friends on AIM, and I happened across a young girl named Purpplecow. Her interests included Sailor Moon, Star Wars, and Jesus. I knew that this was a girl worth talking to. It turns out, I was more right about that than possibly anything else in my life.
It was also around this time that my friend Courtney from SCS reintroduced me to her friend Ann, whom I had known. Courtney and I, you see, had declared ourselves to be engaged in Sunday School, privately, of course. We drew a picture of us on the back of a little card with semi precious stones on it that I’d gotten as a present from my either soon-to-be or recent aunt. Then, however, Ann made us break up. I hadn’t liked her, on principle, when Ann and I had been in the same class at SCS in 3rd grade, but she and I eventually became friends. I’ll always remember the two of us, maybe a few others, all catching the cotton wood seeds as they floated. All of us wishing that she wouldn’t have to move to Georgia. But, she did. And then to New Jersey, but Courtney kept in touch with her. For whatever reason. And she reconnected us, as the three of us were otaku, by the very low standards of the day. And Ann introduced me to many of her New Jersey friends, the most amazing of which, was named Kat.
Of course, I was head over ears in love with Ann, whom we called Ami. It was an age to be romantic. Mourning this obsession, I wrote in my diary, questioning how I could, “Fall out of love,” and a respondent named PainedPixy told me that there’s no such thing as falling out of love. She said that love lasts, or it’s not love. This is the definition I have used ever since.
My life, here, was very different. The internet had opened up a new world of interaction for me. Suddenly, I could pour out my soul to three different people, all of whom cared, and responded, and reciprocated. They didn’t judge me. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like the fat kid nobody liked. I was suddenly able to cast myself in a more heroic mold. I was a disembodied mind, and I had always had faith in my mind. Suddenly, I could be anyone. I didn’t have to be the miserable figure whom I had been for so long, and, if I was miserable, I could pose as Byron had posed, though not knowing just what a Byron was. It felt natural, and I assumed many things that, though they seem like affectations when I look back, had overwhelming sincerity at the time. Though, of course, I may be mistaken. There’s also something to be said for the fact that sincerity comes naturally to the young. Still, it’s this era that I want to talk about.
Fifteen. I had been writing my great Magnum Opus, the Sailor Moon Fan Fiction, something which never got a title any grander than that. I worked out characters and backstory. I wrote, and I wrote. I wrote more of that than I think I ever wrote in anything else, ever. Not counting the diary. I made a character for myself to be, and I imagined that I was him. And he loved Makoto, and so did I, in a way. And she loved him and maybe could have moved me. And when I would dream that I was him, and I would wake up, there was a feeling of beautiful sadness that would last for days. My adoration for her predated my close relationship with Ami, if I remember, but not by much. We’d only just gotten cable that year, if I am right. And as I loved, for lack of a better term, the character, I began to fall for Ami. And, of course, it was natural that I would fall for Kat and for Courtney and for so many others, but those three remained members of a crucial triad plus one.
At that time, life was very confined within my mind, because it had to be. Discussions were on AIM. Or on Open Diary. I had what I would now deem to be a rich inner life partly because . . . well, because I had to. That’s where we all were. Our relationships, with each other especially, were more internal than external. Conversations were to be reread and puzzled over, after copying and pasting. Drama was to be had. Thinking was to be done. Respective fan fictions were to be puzzled over for clues, and one on one “role playing sessions” further blurred the line between outright fantasy, semi fantasy, and our semi realities.
I’d made efforts to change myself before. Plenty of times. All my life, I’d loved pretending that I was other people. I remember sleeping in my shorts with a shirt behind me bed thinking that it made me like Cody from The Rescuers Down Under. I would dress up in costumes as a kid and say that I was somebody different. I remember, once, overwhelmed with feeling listening to the song at the end of The Land Before Time, after having watched it with my brothers, feeling overwhelmed with a feeling of divine purpose. I can remember thinking that I was to be a prophet, like Moses (specifically), and as my brothers started bickering, I put on my holiest voice and tried to get them to stop. It did not end well for me, and I felt cheated. However, the first serious change was the summer between ninth and tenth grade. I was finally leaving SCS. I was getting over Ami, slowly, and developing feelings for Courtney and an obsession with Kat. I was thinking, and I was feeling, and I was watching Toonami and wanting to be like those heroes. In quests, before, to understand socializing and social life, I had studied Sun Tzu and Machiavelli and others, and I had kind of put it to use (in a very, “Let me show off having done my homework, and, by the way, I’m better than you,” sort of way), but it had been limited. The summer between ninth and tenth grade, I wanted to do something big, something impressive. I needed to change things and for there to be some sign, some line of demarcation.
I decided to put in a rose garden.
Of all the places in the yard to put it, I picked the worst one. In thinking on in, my mother probably only let me put anything in there because I’d be clearing out the mess where rose of Sharon leaves had formed a layer of semi soil on top of the asphalt which extended just a bit beyond the chain link fence demarcating the front yard/driveway from the back yard. Well, I put in the rose garden. That summer, for some reason, I had to use my brother’s iMac for some reason. I used AIM less, as a result, and I wrote e-mails. E-mails whose absence I will always miss, and be a bit grateful for. Nothing that I could ever have written would be as beautiful and wonderful as I remember them having been. It was during this time, as Tuxedo Mask, my own original character, Xanatos, Treize Khushrenada, and The Phantom of the Opera all percolated in my mind, along with my obsessive listening to The Beatles and John Denver, I started to become a different person. I wanted to be a deeper person, a more meaningful person. I read poetry. I was even more insufferably pretentious. And, in a lot of ways, I enjoyed it.
Things did not go well at Groves. Freed from the disaster that was SCS, I found that nobody, beyond my internet darlings, much cared for me as a deep thinker of significant thoughts. Being a chubby kid in dragon t-shirts, presumably, did not help. My friendship with Joel Silverman helped quite a bit, though. However, it was a moment at the cast party, or just about there, for Brigadoon that changed me. Andrew Yeh told me, “You’re a downer, Oz. That’s why nobody wants to be around you.” And, so, I decided that I would become a new person. Or, at least, that I would create a new personality.
It was at this point that the great era of my Aaron/Oz dichotomy began. Aaron was the self that was “natural”, in as much as he was the product of influences and gradual changes. Oz was a studied attempt to be a social animal. And . . . it worked. Using Joel as my model, social theories as my guide, and trial and error in a large school, plus my still domineering personality, I pushed my way to the top of the social ladder. It was, of course, at this time that I met Lee.
For the first time, in any meaningful way, there was a girl, a flesh and blood girl, who really liked me. And wanted to be with me. And was attractive, fun, and made me feel good about myself. Thus began a titanic battle within me.
Courtney and Kat and Aaron and Anime and all of these things were fighting about Oz and Tris and Joel and LEE and real life and all of these things that were right there. Suddenly, everything became a giant struggle between two aspects of myself which I had artificially divided off from each other. This drama would last until the sheer hypocrisy of my life with Amanda, and how far that went against my ideals, forced another massive alteration, and, then, the apparently zen like healing unity of Rachael brought the universe together. And then the nightmares of ‘07-‘09 wrecked the rest.

So, why the backstory?

Because I find myself, for the first time in a very, very, long time, wondering something. What if I just built a new me? Not simply what if I fix this or that. Not simply, maybe I should alter a few things here or there. What if I decided to become a new person and . . . just did it? Is it wrong to do that? Is it bad to do that? Is it possible to do that? And, if so, what then? Can I be Treize, like I once tried to be? Would I want to be? Could I be The Phantom, or could I be something beautiful? Will I always be a silly entertainer. Do I mind that? Can I be everything? I really don’t know. I don’t know what to do or how to think about this or how to go about much. But, as I start to consider things, really . . . maybe it’s time I tried to become somebody else. That may be the better option. Or the easier. Or maybe it’ll be worse. I don’t know and I can’t say.
In a lot of ways, I feel like the mental effort that I spend keeping all of my past straight, and weaving together all of the lose ends, may be better spent becoming somebody new. Maybe, picking up where I left off in ‘01. Before Andrew Yeh told me I was a downer. But, still, quite different. Maybe that’s why the changes that happened in Japan didn’t stick? They . . . happened. There was no decision, no resolution. If there’d been time, who can say? But there wasn’t. And I lost a lot of the good that was in me, then.
Maybe it’s Jordan Peterson, but I’m feeling more and more like I’ve spent the last decade feeling sorry for myself, doubting myself, not appreciating myself, and making excuses for everything. If I’m worthless, the it’s fine that I eat fried food and play civilization. If life is meaningless, or even has the possibility of meaninglessness, then it’s very easy to . . . well, anything. It’s all easy. Nihilism is freedom. Meaning is the terrifying realization that everything, EVERYTHING, you do is significant. With every step, you feel the world alter its course beneath the tread of your foot. How long has it been since I’ve felt confident doing that? How long has it been since I’ve been confident.
At this point in my life, can I still be The Man Who Makes History?
Do I even want to be?
Maybe it’s at least worth something that I’m having these thoughts.