Young things mostly belong to themselves.

Pretty much all of my free time is spent trying to determine what has gotten itself lodged in my belly button. Whatever it is can claim responsibility for a disquieting odor. The smart money, at least for the moment, is on malignant lint but then again, the smart money was on Afleet Alex to take the Kentucky Derby, and I think we all know how that ended. Badly for George Steinbrenner, that's how.

Anyway, my first thought - and maybe yours as well - was that maybe my belly button has picked up an infection, excellent hygiene on my part notwithstanding. If that’s the case, identifying the offending infection is less important than eliminating it before it spreads to other, more visible parts of my midriff. Right? Right. So I poured half of a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide into me, into my umbilical crater, as a I lay shirtless on the bathroom floor in Joel’s ersatz apartment, a double-thimble-shot at a time, over the course of fifteen minutes, and called it a night. If you are thinking that prolonged content to the bathroom floor in Joel’s apartment is an unlikely candidate for Bacterial Infection Treatment of the Year, the only response I have for you is: Giacomo. You crazy horse, you’re too small to play football for Notre Dame. You're 5 foot nothin', 100 and nothin', and you have nearly a speck of athletic ability. Also, you’re a horse.

To go back to before my hilarious Rudy reference for a second, I would like to make a factual aside, if that’s okay. Normally when I use “turns of phrase” in my blog entries, they are just that “turns of phrase”, not a literal description of events. In this case, after my peroxide treatment, I actually stood up, looked at myself in the mirror, thought back on the last fifteen minutes, and said, out loud: “yeah, I think that’s a night.” If you have ever wept for anything in your hollow little life, dear reader, weep for the distressing extent to which this moment reflected the general status of my life at the time (two days ago).

I can tell, incidentally, even now, that I will have to fight the compulsion to title this blog post “navel gazing.” It will put up a fight, the compulsion. By now you know if I will have won against it, or if I have failed.

Anyway, the peroxide treatment was apparently a failure, because my belly button still smells like warmed over vinegar poured over a mound of granulated ass, like gravy over mashed potatos.

Here are a list of suspects I have compiled, a rogues gallery of substances that may have, unbeknownst to me, worked themselves into my navel:

Malignant lint.
Peanut butter.
Petroleum jelly with bits and pieces of rancid ham in it.
Ennui.

Anyway, I’m going to UHS now, with a student ID I borrowed from a new, concerned friend I made at Newbury Comics a few minutes ago. He was all "man, I really hope the new Sleater-Kinney album is as good as the pitchforkmedia.com review indicated" and I was all "don't stand so close to me; my stomach is vomiting pus."

On Sideburns

I've been giving this some thought and I've decided I am not going to attempt sideburns, as I don't think I will ever be able to manufacture the attitude with which to keep them company. This is not to say that I am without attitude. Here is a poem I wrote a few years ago:

Honey Bees Anticipating Honey Theft

Oh, so you’ve met my double, an unsavage nightmare of a man, before?
And he promised you privately the varied clockworks of this,
our gin-soaked, despicable gender

you have become something I can be proud of, an eventually useful invention
you’re awake to even my undreamt of lies, you can name them before I do
There’s something virtue-affirming in being found out: a bastard
Before any of my shoeless, gap-toothed children make it plaintively into the world

It’s a shame he had to leave you
The only evidence of his exceptional sensitivity
This wound in you that blossoms angrily out at the ruins of me
With every bloodthirsty twitch of my suspect hips

When I wrote this, I was positive that it comprised a statement of attitude. I mean, it talks about hips, and bastard children, and refers sneeringly to sensitivity all the while being, really, quite sensitive. But ultimately I was forced to admit that this poem is, in fact, too sensitive for it's own good. It is, in fact, more of a whine than a statement of badassness.

So I tried hitching my spiritual wagon to this asshole star:

Erotic Fictions

No longer sponge enough for the warmed up winter still
My less than heroic attentions more than make up
For my few and fewer still faults
I’ve given up the cold candle of decency; it’s thawing in little rivers
Down my clenched up aqueduct back

If I believed them, and I accepted that there were gods of small things
I would be grateful, but ask to be made smaller still
To fit in even tighter panted pockets
To slip uneventfully out from under even the best designed cellar door

So you’re witnessing, of sorts, a flame-drenched renewal
A small newly-formed god of rhythmic, pleasurable pettiness
I’m not a concept man any more; I’m into eyes and thighs
I’ll call your number late from some summer night you have no claim on
And tell you your mother’s fortune
And how mine has little to no part in the same

Unfortunately, this poem blows far too hard to serve as a proclamation of any sort, let alone one of the importance my debut as hardcore attitude-haver requires. Nice use of alliteration, though, dick.

So I moved on to this one:

stitch these on your pillow, sister:
it's ridiculously, gravely important
that you have a good time living in parentheses
take from every insulated moment as many insulated thrills
fit, fold heaps of sunlight and energy into your absorbent sheets
travel light, but don't forget to look around the train's station as it goes

and when God finds your bitter friend out there in the country
and speaks to him convincingly of the star vaulted sky
I’ll still be there, taking notes, unbelieving still
Because not even for the ancient of days
Can I surrender astronomy to the stars that authored it
Science, stupider than faith but less ethnic, will stick-figure me,
Will place me flickering into its liquid sky, and all you’ll be is cut in half
Only geometric in crude slices, sin’s sister, all flesh and no heart

Oh please, please, please be happy:

something isn't just better than nothing
it's immeasurably better - you can't even conceive!
oh he's knock-kneed, silver-eyed; he eats chalk
but you can't, you can't, you can't deny
that he lives and breathes, he walks upright
he's a semi-colon - sponge enough
for the wet slice of night to follow

Which I now realize is plagiarized dually from a) this awesome craigs-list debate I read and a really, really famous e.e. cummings poem. I will tell you about the awesome craigslist debate now:

I was surfing the "for free" list, as is my wont as a cheapskate/keen chronicler of the disastrous fates of Boston-area relationships (free: his and her towel set. Free: wedding ring. Free: MY HEART, MY HEART, MY FUCKING HEART!) when I came across an entry that had prompted a lot of debate. I forget the exact content of the posting, but it was a slap at the New York Yankees, who had just been swept in a series against the Red Sox. A string of craigs-list posters had congratulated the Sox fan on his wit by the time Greg_G., presumably a Yankees fan, chimed in:

something something something not pertaining to Jeremy's life

have fun living in patheticness.

Which I misread as saying: "have fun living in parentheses." I thought that was a pretty awesome thing to say, very poetic and badass. But he had said the other thing, which was lame.

In any event - soul patch? Yes. A soul patch.

[‘]Round here we stay up very, very, very, very late.

Additionally, while it is by now obvious that we talk just like lions, we sacrifice very much like lambs. We are the March of people, if you will, 'round here.

At one point last night a girl threatened to detesticle me with the heel of her shoe. I informed her that I had as a precautionary measure moved my junk – a term that here includes all external genitalia – to a mirror, where it was completely safe. This was not the highlight of my night. I fear I have yet to achieve the low point of today, the day after, although my hair appears to be sweating blood and I am listening to early-period Counting Crows. Everything they are saying re: ‘Round Here I find descriptive of my here and the immediate environs. In case you were wondering, I inserted the apostrophe that takes the place of “a” at the beginning of that song title. Apparently Adam Duritz couldn’t be bothered. That’s fair; he had a lot on his mind when putting together August and Everything After. I don’t think he’s a dick for leaving off the apostrophe.

When I was eight or possibly nine/seven, I went to Schlitterbahn, which is this huge waterpark about 45 minutes south of Austin on I-35. It was a four-day weekend from school, and we went on Friday. It is impossible to have a bad time at a waterpark when you’re seven, and similarly impossible to have a good time immediately afterwards, especially when you burn your feet on the pavement in the parking lot, which I did, and you realize in the car that the gallon or so of river water you swallowed earlier in the day is full of angry, angry paramecii.

Anyway, to get into Schlitterbahn - which is German for the process of slightly overweight people becoming noticeably more so with the aid of unfortunately chosen swimwear, a phenomenon discovered in Bavaria in the early 1920s – you exchange money for a bright yellow armband, the kind that delineates over 21 people from squeaky-voiced infants at, for example, the Lowell House Spring Formal. I thought it might well make me awesome to wear such an armband to school to show people that I had been to Schlitterbahn. This was a good guess, on my part. Less laudable is the logic that led me to believe I shouldn’t bathe until school on Tuesday – four days away. This makes no sense to me, now, as of course the entire idea of the armband was to last in water – not just shower-intense water but Great Gushing Bastard – then the most popular attraction at Schlitterbahn – intense water. But at the time it was important that I not shower. And that’s why I got an “Acceptable,” my first non-“exemplary” mark, in conduct in second grade, because I came to school smelling like ass and my teacher wanted to put a stop to that shit but-quick.

The 2005 Lowell House Spring Formal – henceforth referred to as Champagne Torture ’99, for no apparent reason except this horrible goddamn pain on – on, I kid you not - my face and in my skull – was last night. I went, despite no longer attending Harvard, or, indeed, any college/employment-substitute worth mentioning.

THERE IS NO GOD. THAT SAID, THE ABSENCE OF GOD, THE GODVACUUM IF YOU WILL, IS AN WRATHFUL, OLD-TESTAMENT GODVACUUM. HE DOES NOT THROW NOT THUNDERBOLTS AT THE CHILDREN HE DOES NOT LAY CLAIM TO OR IN ANY FORM REDEEM.

That’s probably all that needs to be said about Champagne Torture ’99.

Tony Danza is sad because Judith Light Hired A New Man-Maid.

He also seems to be Italian, the new guy, but his girth and pony-tail - he appears to be played by Mario, that chef from the Food Network who specializes in rural italian recipes - make it a pretty good bet he's not a former baseball player. I'm pretty sure that part was from the show itself, although I doubt the new maid's name was given as "Balzin." Balzin seems like it's probably the name of a sculptor, but instead, according to google, is a hilariously common misspelling name of the fan site for the lead singer of T-Rex.

I had an interesting dream last night that was almost completely faithful to the second to last episode of the long-running ABC sitcom "Who's The Boss." This show was in syndication - it still is, I guess, but not in the sense that you can see it every day at 5pm - when I was just young enough to appreciate adult television, and as a result I have seen every episode, save for a few from the last season when Tony and Angela finally got together. Those episodes ran concurrently - i.e. the show had yet to reach it's natural conclusion - with the five month period I spent immersed in the world of Sam Danza, Mona the sex crazed grandma, Judith Light, and, of course, creepy fucking Danny Pintauro, who is now, I believe, on Broadway, which surprises me because I remember being impressed even as a seven year old by how awful his line readings were, and how much I hoped he wasn't hiding under my bed, grinning strangely to himself under one of his series of atrocious hairstyles.

In my dream, the one I just woke up from, Danny Pintauro was nowhere to be seen, which is good, because I do not have easy access to anti-psychotics. Instead, Angela's son was played by someone who might have been Joey Lawrence - hard to say, thirty minutes after waking up - but who in any case was much older than Danny Pintauro - I have trouble even typing that little baby-eater's name, truth be told, - or his character ever was on the show. Also, he was a real dick about Tony and Angela's relationship, prompting Angela, in my dream, to cut him off at one point.

Tony: (something impassioned; I'm not sure how much of my dream was accurate to the original show, although I suspect at least the general plotline is correct, as how else would I be firmly convinced that it was the second to last episode? Intuition? I don't have intuition; intuition is the defining attribute of a lucky man's mind, and I am demonstrably unlucky in most, if not all things. Alternatively, intuition indicates some sort of connection with G-d, with a higher power; I am agnostic, lowest of the philosophical castes. Anyway, much of the preceding 18 minutes - sitcoms lasting 22 minutes, give or take - had been devoted to Tony settling the last significant emotional/psychological obstacle between his happy union with Angela, his former employer. He had just overcome it, winning Angela, who had spent much of the episode wracked with cold feet complicated by anger towards Tony for some imagined slight Not-Danny-Pintauro had manufactured, over.)
Not-Danny-Pintauro: I have a theory about men like you -
Angela: (coldly, so coldly) Oh do you? Do you have a theory?
[AUDIENCE CHEERING, ON A MASSIVE, DEVASTATING SCALE. NOT-DANNY-PINTAURO FLEES THE STAGE, OSTENSIBLY DUE TO HIS MOTHERS COMMENT, BUT THE LINK BETWEEN THE STUDIO AUDIENCE'S ANGER AT HIM AND HIS EXIT IS CLEAR AND THE META IMPLICATIONS FRANKLY SCINTILLATING.]

And then I woke up. I love you, air mattress. You make life electric. Also, your immediate proximity to the floor means there is no way Danny fucking Pintauro is hiding under you. http://www.danny-pintauro.com/Official/DannyPintauro/gallery/pix/90/90_djp_006.jpg

Heart Shaped Boy III

Ground tag probably wouldn’t have lasted more than a couple more days, anyway, even if the usually lax fist of the small school’s administration hadn’t come down hard – it was a pretty stupid game, for one thing, as everyone agreed afterwards, and in any case was pretty much unplayable with all but three of the participants rendered safe by vandalism and the unlucky kids who were still in the game spending all their time trying to rip the plastic seats off the two swings which made up the attached swing set, including the kid who was it, because, he figured, he wouldn’t be it forever, unless of course he was the last kid to get out of harm’s way.

This was really a terrifying prospect, particularly because it was the secret ambition, everyone suspected, of the game of tag. At least that’s what Theodore thought; under the speculative umbrella provided by his temporary safety, he universalized his thoughts to give them more weight. Ordinarily, he would know better, but there was no harm now. Under normal circumstances, tag was a very fair game, as even the slow kids would eventually catch someone, someone who tripped or who was cornered, and even if they were it for a while, there was no penalty involved. This put tag in contrast with other games popular with boys Theodore’s age, for example truth or dare, which was the next big thing, because it didn’t go out of it’s way to destroy anyone. But, Theodore realized with just a little bit of regret, his discovery could change that, could let tag become ostracism for real instead of just pretend, if one kid was left stranded and it while everyone else was safe in the deep end of the gravel pit. The game would last forever, stalemated.

Of course, the only reason Theodore alone arrived at this conclusion is because he was feeling sorry for himself, because he saw himself as at the small end of the social stick, like his hypothetical tag victim. In reality, Theodore’s situation was far worse than hapless Mark, who would almost certainly have been the one left as it, seeing as he was learning-disabled and had the arm strength of a five-year-old girl, but he couldn’t think objectively enough about his situation, not at the unlucky age of 13, to realize it, for which we should all be grateful.

There is a short story by Flannery O’Connor in which a child, neglected by his parents and strongly aware of this neglect, is taken to a tent revival by one of his many nannies. At the tent revival, the boy learns of the importance of being baptized, and, in his particular misery, takes what he learns as an outlet for a more literal form of death into life. Like many of Flannery O’Connor’s characters, the boy surrenders to misery and drowns himself in a botched baptism that is close enough to suicide to be extremely unsettling, which, of course, is the idea; that’s how you know it’s a good story, because you hate its workings, you hate most of its characters, except for the one who she winds up killing off in a burst of poetic foolishness in the closing paragraphs.

Theodore was like that. Not like the little boy who threw himself into a river – no, his parents were loving and his nannies, the occasional baby-sitter, were more attentive than the one who let her charge kill himself her first night on the job, and who almost certainly didn’t get paid as a result. He was like Flannery O’Connor; smarter and darker than he had any way of knowing how to handle, and smarter and darker than anyone around him knew how to handle, and therefore was constantly making judgments and stories about what he thought about, which is to say other people. Ordinary children ask to have the salt passed to them. Theodore questioned the whole practice of having to ask for salt – why wasn’t there a separate salt shaker always within his reach? His parents, after all, always had the shaker within their reach, by virtue of having longer arms. Was having to ask for the salt supposed to build character? You get the idea; while you, should you happen to be the rare type of person who can relate to a child like Theodore (you aren’t, there was only one) may have found Theodore to be pleasant upon talking to him, you would leave the conversation bewildered as to how a boy could have such a high vocabulary and vivid imagination yet such sad eyes. The reason, of course, was because the vivid imagination was a front for an even vivider imagination, one that was capable of lies as well as fantasies. Or at least that’s how he styled himself, as a sinister mystery wrapped in an evil, evil enigma, chambers of self retreating well-like to who knows were.

I fear I’m giving you the wrong impression – you should not think of Theodore as one of those kids you read about who set cats on fire and wind up in jail for setting people on fire. When I say that Theodore was dark, I mean that he was intelligent and sad, two attributes that influenced his demeanor in a downward direction. He had the air of a British orphan, which is to say he had the air of someone who had had so much bad happen to him that he had surrendered himself to the very thing that kept doing bad things to him. He was, then, resolute, almost protective, of his unhappy quietness, knowing that whatever change you offered him would be a snake looming to strike.

That said, he was a sensitive boy with an attractive face, all eyelids and lip shadow, framed by heavy, smooth-to-touch hair, parted naturally in the middle and waving down from there. He read as much as possible, not because once he had started reading at school he was instantly and permanently labeled, in the manner of Native American children who are, I gather, named according to the most memorable thing about them by the time they turn eight, boy who reads at school, but because he genuinely enjoyed the written word. He was kind, which, as anyone who has ever dated a Frenchman knows, is different from being sensitive. He’s the kind of person who, would you have met him at nineteen, you might have liked for his shyness, but had you met him at thirteen, and thank god you didn’t because if you had you would have stopped reading by now, convinced this book couldn’t go anywhere with such a miserable, uninteresting person at its center, you would have treated him badly, or not at all.

Maybe, like Wes and Steve, you would have tricked him into getting murdered inside the old elementary school, just because you were in tenth grade and he was in eighth and you could pretty much do what you wanted with him. Probably not, because Wes and Steve are awful, awful people, even now – Wes is a realtor who cheats his clients even if it doesn’t effect his commission, just to cheat them, and Steve throws half-empty beer cans out the window at birds who wake him up on mornings when he’s off work, which is always, because he can’t hold down a job – but I can’t, not knowing you very well, rule it out.

Heart Shaped Boy II

Theodore Thursday won every race he ran, and couldn’t remember a time when this rule was disproven. Ordinarily, he sensed, a boy with his athletic skills would be set. In this case, and in others, “ordinarily” meant for Theodore Thursday “in a world in which he had a different name and face.” In this world, being the fastest boy would go a long way.

Look at Rory, who was beyond stupid and miles past ugly, but had continued to be well-liked all the way through middle school on the merits of his strength at kickball, even though kickball was either a baby, a girl, or a fag sport depending on who you were talking to. Everyone had decided kickball was done for - at least, all the boys had decided so - midway through fifth grade. Instead they turned their attention to a new and complicated variant of tag in which you could not - even a little bit - touch the gravel around the play set, nor could you leave the gravelly area entirely. Even though Rory turned out to be no great shakes at Ground Tag, as the new game was called, the memory of him being good at even a disgraced activity earned him points. Theodore, who continued no matter what sport was popular to be good at being fast, continued, in fact, to be the best at being fast, continued to be ignored.

In fact, a suspicious observer – two adjectives that describe Theodore nicely – might point out, as if in passing, that Ground Tag seemed expressly designed to take away Theodore’s advantage over the other boys without singling out that advantage. In generally, Theodore’s speed was politely ignored by his classmates, much in the way you should ignore an aunt’s facial tic, or an uncle’s drinking problem. As it turned out, Theodore was lousy at Ground Tag; speed alone didn’t help him climb over the jungle gym or slither through the blue plastic tunnel, especially since Theodore Thursday was hopelessly, painful to watch, uncoordinated when not running flat out. Theodore would have been among the worst boys a ground tag had he not been so naturally inconspicuous – for the most part he was able to stay out of the way and not get chased at all.

It was from the inspiration that comes from not being chased or bothered at all except by flies that Theodore got the idea that made him, briefly, the very best at Ground Tag, the same idea that ended Ground Tag forever. From the remote arm of the elaborate Funtime Apparatus, traditionally ignored by Grade 4 and up, but reclaimed by Grade 5 without apparent embarassment during the Ground Tag fad, Theodore found himself staring a few feet over at the five foot tall plastic hut he hadn’t played in in years and years, and hadn’t enjoyed playing in then. The hut was a sort of miniature log cabin made not out of wood but plastic, used only by extremely young kids during their recess earlier in the day, and in pretty bad shape after six years of service to the school’s kindergartners. Theodore saw that one of the yellow plastic shutters on one of the playhouse windows was partially off, had popped out of the little groove it normally fitted into – it’s makers understood that if they couldn’t make their playhouse indestructible, like the Funtime Apparatus, they could at least make whatever damage it suffered easily reparable, they could win by giving in.

It was no great effort, then, to reach across from the ladder he was crouching on to rip the wounded shutter all the way down, so that it fell at his feet on the gravel. He stepped on it, there was just enough room for him to stand comfortably. Then he ripped the other shutter down, tossed it in front of him, stepped onto it, reached behind for the first shutter to toss it ahead, and quietly made his way in that manner to the far corner of the gravel pit, where he was just as ignored as before, but this time in the shade, and this time for good, without the apprehension of possibly getting tagged.

The first person to note Theodore’s discovery was a small, shovel-faced boy named David who was best known for being unpleasantly dirty all the time, despite not being poor, and who was recognized by all for a certain strange resourcefulness – he stole and hid erasers. Nobody knew why, least of all David, but he’d been doing it for a while and had gotten pretty good at it. David had, at the start of recess, hurried up to the very top of the highest of the roofed areas on the Funtime Apparatus, had scrambled up to where he could see the entire game and could not be tagged without a great deal of effort, as the rules held that it didn’t count as a tag unless you touched the person’s body, not their shoe, and to touch David’s body you’d have to:

a) touch the unpleasantly dirty kid and
b) climb up with him onto the roof, as he could scramble around to avoid anyone reaching up from the railing below.

Since there were between twelve and fifteen other boys to chase, allowing a give and take of a few boys each day for illness or detention, it wasn’t worth the effort to go after David, who climbed up on the roof at the start of every game and stayed there until recess was over.

As you might imagine, David had grown bored with sitting on top of a roof for forty minutes every day for two weeks running, because even though it seemed to him like never getting tagged counted as winning, nobody else accepted that interpretation when he suggested it, which he did, every day, at lunch. When he saw what Theodore had done, David leapt at the chance to incontrovertibly win the game, or at least take credit for a truly clever move, as Theodore, he knew, wouldn’t. He scrambled down, made his way quickly over to where he could reach the playhouse, and lightened the hut of its door, scooting it with hip jerks and not-quite-jumps until he was well out of range of any potential tagger. Then all he had to do was draw attention to himself, which was easily enough accomplished, even without the aid of a teacher not paying enough attention to her chalkboard inventory. He screamed victory, and for a few moments nobody had the words with which to contest the claim.

The next morning, Mrs. Hull, who taught first grade, led her children, all of whom struck Theodore as having strangely huge heads in proportion to their bodies, out to recess. Her class’s recess was the first of the morning - normally kindergarten would have gone first, but kindergarten had a student substitute teacher that day and student substitutes weren’t allowed to take students outside the school building for safety reasons. Instead the kindergartners had to make do with indoor playtime the entire week their real teacher was in Puerto Vallarta, and by the week several had been sent to the nurse with injuries related to having wooden blocks with letters - “A, a” “B, b” and so forth – written on all six sides, so as to provoke simultaneous interest in reading and architecture, thrown at their foreheads. Mrs. Hull had been teaching first grade for thirty years, and was therefore both hard to surprise and easy to anger, traits which she was prompted to display in full upon finding the playhouse completely dismantled and scattered in bits and easily reformable pieces around the outside ring of the gravel pit. Amongst the wreckage were school notebooks that had served as rafts for the kids who weren’t quick enough to profit from the playhouse’s fate. The notebooks were hard to recognize at first, having been left out after 5th grade recess, the last of the day, had ended, and swollen and disfigured by overnight rain showers. Ground tag was cancelled forever.

Brown Eyed Girl

When I was in seventh grade, I went for to summer camp at Northwestern Missouri State University in Kirksville, Missouri. The college is better funded than the name might suggest, or at least better maintained – I remember being as much impressed by the well-kept lawns and fountains as I was by the freedom of being sent a thousand miles and four states away for six weeks. I wound up going to the camp – a program called Joseph Baldwin academy geared to high-achieving youngsters for two summers. The first summer I took a class in creative writing from a real-life college professor. The second year I focused on international politics and a girl named Susan whose hand I held on the way to dinner every night for three weeks. She was taking Algebra. College level Algebra. It was a very big deal, the hand-holding, and like most things that are a big deal to me, it ended badly. I once wrote a short-story which featured a woman who, distressed over the impending execution of her son, cried so much that her tear ducts were empty and she started crying blood. It turns out that no matter how sad you are, that doesn’t happen.

My history with summer camp was already long and storied by the time I attended Joseph Baldwin. Here are all the summer camps I went to in my life.

Camp Doublecreek – I went here from ages really young to still pretty damn young. This place was fun. My sister was a counselor when I attended, as was her friend Yvette, and one time Yvette walked over to me, picked me up, turned me upside down, and put me in a trash can. I still don’t know why.

Laity Lodge Youth Camp – There were spiders here, mostly Daddy Long Legs, which are terrifying. This camp was Christian, a fact which seems obvious now but didn’t dawn on me until the closing night bonfire, where all of the sudden you couldn’t sit down without finding yourself in the loving lap of our Lord and Savior. I remember looking around in alarm; what the hell, you know? One of my co-campers, Luis, claimed to be a lieutenant in the San Antonio Crips, a claim I now doubt in direct proportion to the extent I believed it then, as we were both 12 at the time. Another notable thing about LLYC was the fact that it was run by the unfortunately named Howard E. Butts family, who owned and ran the H.E.B. grocery store chain. Every term we had a steak dinner, in which the steak the store butcher’s dog wouldn’t eat, having been frozen and thawed a couple of times, was fed to little kids.

Camp Longhorn – I wished I was dead here. One of the activities was a one mile swim in a murky river, with no place to stop and rest, not even I riverbank to cling to, along the way. Holy shit. One of my cabin counselors was called “Nad,” which was at the time really, really awesome.

Joseph Baldwin Academy – Detailed account to follow.

Baylor Debate Camp – Eeeeeee! Debate camp! Eeeeeeeeeeeee! I got into Harvard, though, so who’s the silly debate fag now, Luis? You are.

Anyways – Joseph Baldwin was probably the most fun out of all my camp experiences, as I managed to make friends both years I attended. The friend groups were dramatically different; my creative writing year I made friends with a large girl named Angela and her waxy-haired roommate, whose name I forget but who wore the same Nirvana shirt, the one with a big close-up of Kurt Cobain’s unhappy maw, like every day. The next year I befriended a bunch of dorky geeks in my International Politics Seminar. We used to steal copies of USA Today from the newspaper kiosk between our dorm building and the dining hall, and read all about the airplane crash that dominated the news at the time. We had a number of theories regarding what nation had set up the surface-to-air missile attack that had downed the plane, and were all stunned when something to do with wiring was pinned down as the actual culprit.

Anyway, Susan - holy shit. I remember literally nothing about the relationship, which, given the extent to which all the horrible things that have ever happened seem to remember me, given how permanent they are and how ephemeral I seem in comparison, flickering against their pain-drenched backdrops like the cast-off silhouette of an ill-fated shadow puppet, indicates that I was happy while I was with her.

I have been asked to point out at this point that Daddy Long Legs are not, actually, spiders. They have six legs. Another thing I should mention in this digressionary paragraph is that one of the two years I attended Laity Lodge Youth Camp was the year after Kurt Cobain killed himself. One of the campers – who, like all the campers except Luis – Luis actually went by Bladez, actually, but Luis was his Christian name – was a middle class white kid, was convinced that not only was Kurt Cobain not really dead, but neither was Tupac Shakur, and that both were living under the name Mock A Velli somewhere small, but not so small that they would be completely stifled by rural values. Such was this intense kid’s conviction, and the charisma that stemmed from it, that everyone in my cabin, including me, believed him. We also all firmly identified with either the East or West Coast in the rap wars that were ripping the country apart that summer, and there were consequences for picking either the wrong coast or obviously picking a coast at random. I managed to do both.

Our song, Susan and me, our song was Brown Eyed Girl, which is by Van Morrison, who I’ve been told is awesome. I have no idea how Brown Eyed Girl became our song. I have no idea how we would have come to be in a position where we were listening to music together, let alone Best of Van Morrison. That said, it was definitely our song, and it is a song I will correspondingly always associate with romance. Here’s the thing, though: her eyes were green. Not hazel, mind you, I’m not one of those guys – you know those guys – but green, like evil cat green. Mine were brown, but I was a dude, so the applicability of the song, whose status as our song neither of us seemed inclined to question, was never clear to me.

At this point I may seem to be contradicting myself; you could argue that details I’m providing and the repeated claims I’ve made not to remember anything about the relationship are, at best, at loggerheads. First off, who actually uses the phrase “at loggerheads?” Secondly, it’s one of those things – I remember lots of little bits and pieces, but little to none of the narrative behind them. It’s weird. The only overarching thing I remember from the two weeks that constituted my first real relationship was the feeling that finally, finally, I had become something resembling, on not-too-close inspection, at least, a man. In any case, we’ve reached the end of things I remember while not remembering, so settle down.

Susan and I broke up, tragically, when camp ended and I went back to Texas, and she went back to wherever she was from, possibly Florida. In keeping with our natural disinclination for long, drawn-out goodbyes, I don’t remember saying any, or seeing each other after dinner the night before camp ended, which was indistinguishable from the other nights we ate together. We had certainly never discussed the possibility of a long-term relationship, although it’s possible something in my body language signaled a readiness for long term commitment, and emotional check my soul couldn’t begin to cash. But that seems unlikely to me now, as for the most part my body just communicated “I’m uncomfortable in this situation” or “please remove me from this situation as I find it uncomfortable.” It made and makes sense to me that we, just like Nerd Camp, were through. Apparently it had just hit a rocky patch.

About two weeks after I got home, I got a phone call from Susan. We exchanged phrases, many about the Northeast Missouri State campus and how it used to have a lot of fountains. She had just started school. School was fun for her, as I said it was for me, but I was the only one who was totally lying, I think. Finally, Susan got down to business: she couldn’t take the strain of a long term relationship, it was just too hard, and she was calling it quits. This struck me, at the time, as fair. It was also confusing, for a number of reasons, not least of which was the wording she used to conclude our first and last phone conversation: I bought my ticket with my tears and that’s all I’m going to spend.

Those of you familiar with 60’s psychedelic pop can disregard this next sentence. That sentence is a lyric from a song called “Red Rubber Ball” by the band Cyrkle. They produced no other hits.

In the days that followed, I went from bemused to confused to angry to sad as it became clear to me that I had been dumped, had been kicked out of a relationship that I had forgotten I was in, which only made it worse.. Then, all of the sudden, I believe it was in Geometry class, as I was telling the girl sitting next to me about the crazy chick who’d broken up with me using song lyrics, I went from semi-adult, relationship having male to gender-robbed mopebag, arguably permanently, because I realized what I should have known all along, what in retrospect was all-too-obvious. It was then that I realized that I was, in fact, the brown eyed girl.