Accidental Historian

You Can Go Home Again, Part 2

Imagine that you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade or so.  I don’t know why you’ve been living under that rock.  Perhaps you’ve spent too long in Arizona and it’s just so nice and cool.  Whatever.

Now imagine that you’ve crawled out from under your rock and decided to rejoin society.  The first thing you do is look at your Nokia candy bar phone with its monochromatic display and ability to let you play Snake and think, “I probably need a new phone.  Especially since the battery in this thing died about nine years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days ago.”

You notice that there’s an AT&T store nearby.  So you walk in and ask, “Hey, do you guys know where there’s a Cingular store around here?  I need a new phone.”

The guy behind the counter asks, “Cingular?  Have you been living under a rock?”  You tell him that yes, yes you have.  So he says that AT&T bought Cingular about nine years ago and that he can totally get you a new phone.

You ask, “So what has changed about cell phones in the last ten years?”

He starts to explain.  About thirty seconds later your head explodes like that dude from Scanners.

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I have this weird tendency to believe that things don’t change at all if I’m not paying attention.  I think that’s probably a pretty normal human tendency, but I find it odd since I notice it in myself and I tend to pay attention to things like that.  So a week or so ago I walked into Al’s Hobby Shop in downtown Elmhurst, Illinois and asked the guy at the counter what’s been going on in the world of R/C cars since 2000.  I didn’t understand something in the neighborhood of 50% of what I was told.  I also got into the habit of starting my sentences with, “In my day…”

I’m an old geezer in training, is what I am.  I’ve been looking forward to my twilight years since I was 25.

If you think about it it’s probably reasonable to think that a lot of things have changed in the world of R/C cars since I hung up my Futaba Magnum Sport back in 2000.  The world of consumer electronics has changed drastically, after all.  It’s also changed in ways that directly impact the R/C world.  We’ve been making better batteries.  We’ve been making electronics smaller, smarter, and lighter.  We’ve been creating new ways of making our devices communicate with each other.

I have a cell phone that can connect to the internet, hook in to my wi-fi network, access files from my laptop, and allow me to talk to my grandmother over my Mazda’s sound system right now.  Absolutely none of that functionality required me to do anything, either.  It was just part of the package.

The good news is that I’m pretty quick on the uptake, so I started to figure out the changes pretty fast.  The bad news is that 13 years is a long time to not pay attention to a thing.  It didn’t take me very long at all to realize that all of my equipment was completely and totally out of date.  That actually kind of made me sad, since my equipment was in really good shape.  The old 410-M5 and 610-RV were still working perfectly.  My old race batteries were still discharging at about the 5 minute, 30 second mark.[1]

I took the RS4-MT and the RS4 out to my cul-du-sac and ran a few batteries through them on Easter Sunday.  Everything worked great except for the bit where the receiver in the RS4 was glitching out and I drove it into a rock while attempting a close cut on a drift maneuver.  The slide broke both rear body posts.[2]  Everything else was fine, but it’s kind of hard to drive a car when the body is hanging off to the side.  This handicap was exacerbated by the fact that one of my front posts was held together by strapping tape.

My battery training instincts were so strong that I pulled the battery out of my RS4 as soon as I realized I wasn’t going to be running it for a while, put the battery into my RS4-MT, and ran out the rest of its charge.  Old habits die hard, I suppose.

It turned out that none of that mattered.  My 410-M5 and 610-RV were no longer relevant.  My Reedy 17 turn and Onyx 14 turn double motors were slow.  My Ni-Cads were race-ready but no longer race worthy.  Even my Futaba Sport radios were more than a little behind the times.  My two newest cars had been discontinued for at least a decade, too.[3]

In truth some of my equipment was out of date when I retired from racing.  The two ESCs were already several years out of date.  Several of my batteries were already pretty old, too, and had been relegated to “practice pack” status.  It didn’t really matter, though, as the state of the art in the world of R/C cars didn’t really advance all that much between 1992 and 2000.  So when I pulled my stuff out of the basement on Easter Sunday I expected to find out that it was old.  The thing that surprised me was when I found out that it had been completely eclipsed by subsequent developments.

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Imagine that you were a total gearhead in the ‘70s and ‘80s.  You were a Chevy person and totally invested in the war with Ford.  But then, for whatever reason, you put your love of cars away for a couple decades and started taking the subway everywhere.  Then one day in early 2013 you decided to renew your license and get your old Impala up and running again, fully expecting to wow all the kids at the local track.

So you do exactly that.  Except what you find is that the kids are now kicking your ass with their Subaru WRX STis and Honda Civic Sis and only the old timers seem to care about Mustangs, Corvettes, and making fun of Mopar.

That’s pretty much where I found myself the Wednesday after Easter.  Ni-Cad batteries were actually two generations behind.  NiMH batteries had come and gone and the new power was coming from LiPos.  Brushless motors had replaced the old brushed cans.  The difference boiled down to more power delivered more quickly with significantly longer run times.  It also meant that there were new players in the market.  Novak and Tekin were still making speed controls, but there was a new kid by the name of Castle Creations.  There were several new manufacturers of batteries I’d never heard of, too.

The biggest change, though, was both the easiest to understand and the hardest to digest.  Traxxas is now the biggest player in the car market.  I knew a couple guys who ran Traxxas cars back in the day.  They weren’t good cars by any stretch of the imagination.  Traxxas was what you got if you couldn’t afford or didn’t know to buy Associated or Losi kits.  Now, though, Traxxas is everywhere.

There’s a very good reason why Traxxas is now the top dog: innovation.  It’s not necessarily that they’ve been innovating on a technological level, although there’s some of that.  I’m told that they single-handedly invented an entire off-road class.  They also brought waterproof electric cars to the market.  Mostly, though, they did what no one was doing in the ‘90s: they figured out that the best way to grow is to cater to the casual R/C driver who just wants to buy a fast car and have it work out of the box.  They also figured out that allowing that casual dabbler to trade in some of the equipment for better equipment later is a pretty good way to keep them coming back for more.

That set of innovations actually made me pretty sad.  Almost everything I saw was a ready to run car in a box.  Aside from my Kyosho Raider I built my cars.  If I got one that was already built it was because I got it used from someone else.  That was a major part of the experience.  I still know almost every inch of my RS4 and RS4-MT because I put everything on those cars together.  I took pride in being able to say that.  They weren’t just R/C cars.  They were my R/C cars.  That’s part of the reason why they followed me to Texas and back and I was able to pull them out after 13 years and run them down my street as if I’d never put them away.

It’s now possible to buy cars that go 70 or even 100 MPH right out of the box.  I suppose that’s fantastic from a marketing perspective.  I suppose it’s snobbish and elitist to complain about how the kids these days just don’t understand.

I also know that while I was at the hobby shop I saw several people walk in and ask to have someone else fix stuff that was so basic I would have been embarrassed to ask about in public.  There’s nothing wrong with asking for help, don’t get me wrong.  There is something wrong with not even bothering to try to figure out why something isn’t working.  It seemed to me that the hobby was headed in that direction, at least judging by what I was seeing.

I can’t fathom letting other people do my work like that.  Since I pulled my old stuff out less than two weeks ago I switched out the plugs on six batteries and four ESCs.[4]  I installed new motors and electronics on two trucks.  I rebuilt the shocks and put new wheels and tires on my RS4-MT.  It’s pretty badass.




I honestly can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want the pleasure and satisfaction of looking at their car and saying, “I made that.  I fixed that.  It’s mine.”  It seemed I was the only one.  I was starting to despair, too.

Then the good news arrived.

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[1]We ran Ni-Cad batteries back in the day and had to “train” them.  Races lasted five minutes, so the ideal run time was just a bit over five minutes.  We would run the batteries for just over five minutes and then hook them up to discharge lights, which we made ourselves by soldering six to ten automotive bulbs together in series.

It was easy to tell who had the system down.  We’d put the batteries in our cars, then put the transponders in and put the body on.  Then we’d wave the car across the finish line to check in for the race and walk over to the start line and wait until the last possible moment to turn the car on and run over to the drivers’ stand.

My final set of race batteries was a triple set of Trinity 1700 Ni-Cads running Panasonic cells.    They were expensive batteries when I got them at the tail-end of the ‘90s.  I took damn good care of them, including making sure I stored them properly even when I stopped racing for over a decade.  It’s a testament to the quality of the batteries and my understanding of how to take care of them that they still worked exactly as they were supposed to in March of 2013.

[2]I found a new set of RS4 Pro 2 body posts on Amazon and ordered them.  When they came the comparative quality of the Pro 2 posts compared to the RS4 Sport posts was blatantly obvious.  So part of the problem was HPI’s fault.  I’m pretty sure that the Pro 2 posts wouldn’t have broken if I’d done the same exact thing with them installed.

[3]Interestingly enough, though, everyone who’s seen my RS4-MT and knew what it was had the exact same reaction: “Oh, I used to have one of those.  It was a great car.”

Yes.  Yes it was.  Yes it is.

[4]I also discovered that there’s a really good reason why I was never particularly good at soldering: I had a soldering iron that was way too good.

I wanted a good, quality soldering iron with a pistol grip and a trigger.  So I got the best one I could get, a beast of a Weller iron that did 200 watts.  I always used great gobs of solder because the solder seemed to evaporate off the tip of my iron and never seemed to stick properly.  The tip was also a really wide chisel design.  I finally got frustrated by this last weekend and headed to the hardware store to see if I could find a soldering iron with a narrower tip.

I noticed that soldering irons actually had numbers attached to them.  The soldering irons that were listed as “standard grade” were 25 watt units capable of up to 750 degree heat.  The “medium grade units had a few more watts and went up to 900 degrees.  I don’t know how hot my soldering iron got, but, again, 200 watts.  Rosin core solder, by the by, has a melting temperature of about 460 degrees, depending.

Part of the problem is that I was using the 200w gun wrong.  You’re not supposed to hold the trigger down and deliver constant heat.  It has so much power because you’re supposed to pull the trigger, heat it up all quick-like, then hit your spot and release the trigger.  I was applying constant heat, which is stupid as fuck.

Part of the problem, though, is that my tip was way wider than the area I was working with more often than not.  That made precision deployment rather difficult.  Long story short, I got a cheap, small soldering iron that’s way better for my style and application and it’s amazing how much better I got at soldering.

You Can Go Home Again, Part 1

Easter brought about a resurrection…of sorts.  Can you really bring something back to life if it was never alive to begin with?  Or is everything alive if it’s part of your living memory?

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They’ve been important enough that they moved with me four times.  They were dead weight in all of those moves, things I thought I might do something with but never really in any serious, intentional way.  Still, it was a part of my past that I had put away but never really forgotten.  Sentimentality demanded I put in the effort.  So they went to Brookfield.  They went to Texas.  They went into a storage locker for a year in Carol Stream.  Finally they went to my basement.

On Easter Sunday they emerged once again.

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It all started in either the summer of ’92 or ’93.  I want to say it was the summer before seventh grade, which would make it the earlier, but it might have been the summer after.  My junior high offered summer clubs.  It wasn’t summer school so much as summer camp in a school.  I signed up for the radio controlled car club.

One of the requirements was to bring your own radio controlled car.  My dad and I went down to the local Radio Shack and purchased a buggy.  I thought it was the fastest car in the world and it was going to kick everyone’s butt.  I had no idea what I was getting in to.

My little Radio Shack car broke on pretty much the first day.  It was no big loss, really, since my little Radio Shack car was absolutely nothing compared to the cars the rest of the kids were running.  It wasn’t something that could be repaired, either.  My dad and I didn’t go back to the Radio Shack.  We were directed to a local hardware store that had a hobby section.[1]

That was where I bought my first real R/C car: a Kyosho Raider.




The Raider was what was known as an ARR kit, which stood for “almost ready to run.”  It was a starter car that came with a closed, can-style stock motor and a mechanical speed control.  I needed to supply my own radio.  I also needed to paint the body.

For those who don’t know, R/C car bodies are made of clear lexan.  That’s so you can paint the inside.  I did not know that, so I painted the outside.  With a paint brush.  The results were somewhat less than stellar.

The mechanical speed control melted shortly into the summer’s events.  Back to the hobby shop I went with my dad.  I bought my first electronic speed control (ESC): a Novak 410-M5.  It was bright orange with a big, black heat sink.  It also didn’t have a reverse option.  I thought that was weird.  The next time I bought an ESC I got a Novak 610-RV, precisely because it had reverse.

My Kyosho Raider was big, heavy, and slow.  It was also not really part of the zeitgeist, as most of the other kids had Losi or Associated cars.  Losi v. Associated was the Chevy v. Ford of R/C.

They came together at various points over that summer for spirited games of “kill the Raider.”  Weirdly, although I firmly remember being a bullied kid and I remember the chants of, “Kill the Raider!” quite well I don’t remember that as being anything other than good fun.  It was also a useful impetus to become a good driver.  Sometimes slow and steady does win the race.  Other times it simply means you can turn the tables on the other guys.

I also know that I didn’t hold those games of kill the Raider against the other guys.  I raced with them for the better part of the next decade, after all.  I can still remember their names, their faces, and in some cases their cars.

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I didn’t race the Raider for long.  It just wasn’t a good car and there were no modifications that could change that.  I’d added the 410-M5.  I also added a Trinity Slot Machine 27 turn stock motor.[2]  I shifted fairly quickly to 1/10th scale onroad pan cars.  The big dog in that particular class was the Associated RC10L.  I had a (used) TRC Pro10.[3]

Really, though, in 1/10th scale pan car there was no real advantage in one car over another.  This is a Pro10:




This is a RC10L:




The cars were as basic as could be.  It might look like the big metal bar on the front of the Pro 10 would add a lot of weight, but it was some sort of super light magnesium or something and the benefits of a much sturdier and easier to adjust steering system far outweighed the minor weight difference.

I put that car through a lot of races.  The first body I had with the car was basically a lexan wedge.  We raced on carpet that was stored on 12 foot wide rolls and duct taped together at the seams.  One race the tape came up at the seam.  The leading edge of the body caught the underside of the gap and the car disappeared under the carpet.

The car had its quirks.  The motor mount, for one, gave me fits.  The rear pod (as the motor mount box in the back was called) was just two metal supports with graphite over the top.  The motor had to be able to move, as changing gear sizes required being able to move the motor to compensate.  The motor mounts themselves were just a pair of grooves cut in the uprights that were wide enough to fit a motor mount screw.  It was trivially easy to jostle the motor out of place.  It happened in a race once when I had a pretty wide lead.  The race was a main, which meant it was the big one at the end for all the bragging rights.  I kept the car in the race even though it was emitting a ghastly whine and running incrementally slower with every lap.

I won the race by a hair or three, then retrieved my car.  The pinion (the smaller metal gear attached to the motor shaft) had cut a perfect groove right down the middle of the spur gear (the larger plastic gear attached directly to the rear axle.  There were no teeth left to speak of on the gear, either, which would explain why it was moving pretty slowly at the end.

In high school I needed to do a demonstration speech for speech class.  I decided to do my speech on how to assemble an R/C car.  I took the Pro-10, since it was a relatively simple car.  The speech went pretty well, except for the bit where I cut a few corners and didn’t fully assemble the car because it actually takes for-frickin’-ever to mount a couple dozen screws while talking about it.  I wasn’t using the car at the time so I never got around to fully reassembling it.  The pieces are still somewhere in my parents’ basement.

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Sometime around the beginning of high school one of my friends decided to upgrade from his first generation RC10T to an RC10T2.  His RC10T had the aluminum tub chassis and a lot of the cool upgrades, including Associated’s famous Stealth transmission.  I jumped at the chance to buy it.  I’d wanted a truck and I was tired of racing on road.

That was the golden age of stadium trucks, at least for us.  There were a bunch of us keeping the Associated/Losi rivalry alive but also racing each other for bragging rights.  Several of the guys had a competition going to see who could buy the coolest stuff and go the fastest.

I got the better end of that deal.  I didn’t spend a lot of money on upgrades, so I just made sure I knew how to drive.  I can still fondly remember weaving around my buddies while they went full-speed into walls because they didn’t understand the concept of braking into a turn.

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I wasn’t out of on road that long, though.  There was a big change in tech in the mid- to late ‘90s.  The old pan cars disappeared and were replaced with four wheel drive touring cars.  I don’t remember Associated or Losi jumping on that market.  I do know that I was a fairly early adopter, adding a HPI RS4 Sport to my collection sometime shortly after it was released in 1997.  The other big name in the touring car market, at least as far as I knew, was Schumacher, who had put out the SST 2000.

Then came happy, amazing news.  HPI was releasing the RS4-MT, a stadium truck version of the RS4.

I bought one almost immediately.  Or, at least, I bought one as soon as I could afford to.  It was the coolest thing in the world as far as I was concerned.

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I raced my last race in the spring of 2000.  My cars were both HPI, which was solely an after-market parts, tire, and motor manufacturer when I bought my Kyosho Raider.  The ESC in my RS4-MT was the Novak 410-M5 I’d put in that Kyosho Raider nearly a decade before.  The ESC in my RS4 was the 610-RV I’d bought a year or two later.

In the thirteen years since that race I pulled them out exactly one time.

Then, on Easter Sunday of 2013, a resurrection.


(L-R: RC10T, RS4, RS4-MT)


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[1]That hardware store’s hobby section had R/C car stuff, model trains, and RPG stuff for reasons that are completely beyond my comprehension.  I also used to get Ral Partha BattleTech minifigs there.  My BattleTech thing and my R/C car thing are oddly intertwined like that.  The week before I pulled my R/C cars out I pulled my BattleTech stuff out, set up a scenario, and played a game (against myself, because I’m weird like that).

In order to do that I had to come up with a way to create a temporary workspace.  I also decided to finally get around to finishing a Shadow Cat and Cauldron-Born minifig that I got a few years ago.




This, somehow, got me thinking about R/C cars.  Weirdly, the last time I put serious thought to one I also put serious thought to the other.  There was a power outage in the summer of 2007 that lasted for the better part of a week.  In order to pass the time I pulled out my BattleTech minifigs and my old Testors paint and painted (or, in a few cases, re-painted, including an Axeman that I’d completely and totally butchered but which is now one of my favorites) a bunch.

I was still seeing Amy at the time and I showed her what I was working on.  She, um, she didn’t get why I thought it was cool.  At around that time I also pulled my R/C stuff out to see if it worked.  I took my RS4-MT over to her place one night to show her what I was talking about.  She was nonplussed, to say the least.

There’s probably a lesson to be learned here, but fuck if I know what it is.

[2]”Turns” are a strange and wondrous thing that I never fully understood.  These were electric motors, so they consisted of a round can with magnets on the edge and a pole that went down the middle.  Wire was wrapped around the pole and the amount of wire determined the turns.  The higher the number of turns the slower the motor because, um, science, bitches.  I guess.  There was then a cut off somewhere in the neighborhood of 22-24 turns that switched from “stock” to “modified.”  Modified motors were generally faster.  They also had an additional signifier of “double,” “triple,” and, I suppose, “single.”  What that means is…um…I don’t know.  I mostly raced stock because stock motors were a lot cheaper than modified.  I was also usually running in some sort of formalized class where we all used similar equipment and kept track of points throughout the year.

I developed loyalties in motors, much like I developed loyalties in speed controls.  My ESCs were both Novak.  My motors were either Trinity or Reedy unless I was required to run something else.  The two best motors I had at the end were a Reedy Speedworks 17 turn modified and a Trinity Onyx 14 turn double from their SpeedGems series, which was the absolute shit.

[3]You might be noticing a pattern here…

Sketches: Ellie

This would have been the second chapter of the 2010 kinda-sorta re-write of the project that never got off the ground.  Note the rather intentional parallel structure to the first chapter.  This, like yesterday's entry, is an unedited copy of something I wrote three-ish years ago.

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The last thing Eleanor Jane McIntire's father had said to her was, "When you get tired of this rebellion, you come on back home.  We'll be waiting."  He'd then tossed the last box in to the back of her rented truck and slammed the door shut.

Eleanor, or Ellie, as everyone called her, was a twenty-five-year old college graduate with dreams of a successful career in the big city and a past she was desperate to escape.  She'd lived in a world dominated by men and wanted to know what it meant to be a woman for herself.

Her father wanted to be the image of the stern Southern gentleman.  That's what the McIntires had been for as long as he knew, after all.  He hadn't bothered to trace his lineage back any farther than a Colonel who served under Joe Johnston in the final days of the War of Northern Aggression.  It was just as well, as the hard drinking Irish Catholic immgrants who had scraped together the money necessary to buy passage to the New World in the early 1800s wouldn't exactly have met his high standards.  Either way, he expected his boys to grow up to be successful gentlemen as well and live up to the family name.  He'd expected his daughter to grow up to be a beautiful debutant, even if they weren't part of the class that had such things, and settle down early to the life of the content homemaker.  It was expected, it was right, at least in his world.

Her mother, meanwhile, had other plans.  After giving birth to four boys and hoping for a girl the entire time, she'd named her only daughter after Eleanor Roosevelt.  It was a little act of defiance.  She couldn't have gotten away with naming the girl after Susan B. Anthony, but no one seemed to think twice about a First Lady.  Even if she was a powerful, determined woman, she had gotten where she was by being a wife.  Ellie's middle name, meanwhile, came from Jane Addams, the social work pioneer who had changed the landscape of Chicago forever.  It was a good name, a strong name, one Ellie wore with pride.

Her father called her "Princess," a name Ellie pretended to enjoy but secretly simply endured.  She had no urge to be a princess or carry the burden the name held.  She didn't want to be daddy's little girl or simply Mrs. So-and-so.  But as bad as Princess was, it beat by a country mile the name she wore through most of high school, the name that cause her to burn with shame every time she heard it.  Easy Ellie, the boys at school called her.
Even after her older brothers beat Tim Johnson so hard he ended up in the hospital the name stuck.  It was a whisper, but it was still there.  On one level, though, it had been a blessing.  Her father had let her leave Atlanta to go away to college in Florida in the hopes that by the time she returned everyone would have forgotten about the whole thing.

She'd made the mistake of growing up tall, headstrong, and beautiful in a world where the girls were supposed to stay virtuous and the youthful indiscretions of the boys were dismissed with a knowing smile, a wink, and the words, "Boys will be boys."  It was all her fault in the all-important court of public opinion.  It was Ellie who had messed up.  That was simply how it worked.

Strange, though, how she'd yearned to hear her father call her Princess after a while.  But when Easy Ellie arrived, it seemed that Princess was gone forever.  Still, her father had expected her to play the role as best she could from then on out.  He'd ask her if she'd met anybody every time she called home from college.  When she invariably said she hadn't he would sigh heavily and hand the phone to her mother.

Ellie stayed in college as long as she could, but eventually had to graduate and head back home.  She'd taken a job teaching fourth graders at a nearby Christian school, but soon started to feel that her world was far too small.  She began dreaming of a life lived according to her own rules and plans.  One day she began daydreaming about the life of her middle namesake.  Before she realized it, she was making plans to move to Chicago and make use of her double minor in social work and psychology and her major in education.

Ever since she'd left home for the second and, hopefully, last time, her father had not even made a pretense of caring what happened to her or expecting her to meet a man.  Her mother always answered the phone and they played a game where both pretended her father had a legitimate reason he couldn't talk and that he sent his love.  For the first three months after arriving in Chicago Ellie had cried herself to sleep.

She hadn't actually ended up in Chicago itself.  She'd ended up forty miles away from the city in one of the many old river towns that dotted the area.  It looked pretty much like every river town in the midwest.  A long main street dotted with bars, restaurants, and cute little shops occupying hundred-year old brick and stone buildings dropped sharply towards the river, crossed it on an ornamented span, then climbed another hill on the other side.  The farther up the hill out of the river valley or down along the river away from the town center, the more modern the construction became.  The cute shops and riverfront parks gave way and were replaced with tract housing, strip malls, Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's, Meijer, and Menards.

Still, Ellie loved her new home.  Easy Ellie was a distant memory, Princess a non-factor.  Even if she wasn't exactly the second coming of Jane Addams, she was happy.  She had a full-time job working at a day care center and pouring her love in to the children of strangers.  Three nights a week she worked at a little coffee shop called the Koffee Klatch.  The regulars loved that she was always willing to offer a sympathetic ear and laugh at their lame jokes.  And if some of the men seemed just a little too charmed by her southern accent and big, bright, green eyes, well, that was bound to happen sometimes.

And so Eleanor Jane McIntire went through her days outside Chicago, trying desperately to keep herself from realizing that none of her dreams were anywhere close to coming true.

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Whether or not this ends up going anywhere it's important.  It marks a sea change in my perception of narrative structure and, possibly more importantly, a new understanding of the nature of the Self and the Other in both the story and reality.  It's also the first time I fully realized the importance of empathy in the creation of a character.

Ellie started out as Jack's love interest and the woman to be won over as part of the overall course of the plot.  Over the course of the various scenes I sketched out between coming up with the story in 2006 and the attempted re-write in 2010 she became a fully fleshed-out character with her own hopes, dreams, and voice.  I realized that just leaving her as the woman who showed up and gave Jack's journey diminished her.  More than that, it robbed her of her life and experience and all the things that brought her into Jack's life.

She was actually a far more interesting character than Jack.  I think that's why I ended up keying in on names and the idea of namesakes.  The idea of a girl growing up knowing she was expected to be a southern belle by her father but also knowing that she was named for Eleanor Roosevelt and Jane Addams by a secretly rebelling mother fascinated me.  She'd always had this sort of inherent agency, longing, and darkness that combined in a way that was far, far more interesting than Jack's rather static tale.

The problem was that I wrote myself into a corner by going with the parallel opening chapters.  Jack had to be the main character, as the thing that drove the plot was something that happened to him.  I thought about making a not-exactly-parallel structure, where we were introduced to both characters as co-equals, then each chapter was from an alternating perspective.  That proved to be far, far too difficult to pull off while also preserving the actual narrative arc the story necessitated.

This, for the record, is why the 2010 re-write didn't get too far.  I knew how to get through the first half-dozen chapters.  After that I was more than a little lost.

Sketches: Jack

So I've had one of those stretches where I've lacked the time and energy to do much writing.  As such, I think I shall begin my sketches idea.

I've had an idea sitting out there in various states of incompletion since early 2006.  The idea still fascinates me and I love the characters involved.  I've never actually been able to write the whole idea, though.  I think there are two reasons for that.

First, this project, such as it is, really brought the origin of the sketches idea.  I kept seeing scenes of interaction between the characters.  I never really knew what happened between the scenes, though.  Every time I tried to write their stories I got hung up on the events between the events.

Second, this project, such as it is, straddles the end of my Christianity like nothing else.  It arrived during the period of great confusion that marked the beginning of the end.  It's stuck with me ever since, with the characters remaining the same while their worlds have changed drastically.

In the spring of 2010 I tried to re-write the book.  Well, I tried to write the book in a different way than I'd conceived of it the first time around.  I didn't get very far.  I'd still like to get somewhere with this one of these days, though.

Today and tomorrow I'll put up the first two chapters from that 2010 re-write.  I might put some other stuff up later.  This is unedited, for the record.  I just pulled it directly out of the file in question.

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The last thing Jackson Paul Reed's father said to him was, "Don't ever let a woman get her claws in to you, kiddo.  It just ain't worth it."  He'd then thrown a pair of suitcases in to the trunk of his old brown Cutlass and disappeared in a cloud of thick, black exhaust smoke.

Jackson, or Jack, as his biological father had called him, was five years old.  He stood in the middle of the street.  Watching.  Expecting the beat up Oldsmobile to return. 
It never did.

His father had left plenty of women in the past, but never a kid.  He didn't know that a child didn't quite understand the dynamic of relationships between a woman and a man who was terrified of commitment.  He didn't know that the kid could grow up blaming himself, could grow up insecure.  Chances are, though, he wouldn't have cared.  Such is the nature of selfishness.

To her credit, Jack's mother never once attempted to use her son as a stand-in for his deadbeat father.  She'd set out as soon as possible in an attempt to find a real man, not the sort of self-focused rebel who stoked the imagination of an 18-year old girl from a small town, then left when things got tough, but the sort of man who was stable.  She decided to do it right the second time around.

Tom Patterson was exactly the right sort of man.  When he met Cindy Reed he was a thirty-two-year old widower looking for a new start.  She was thirty.  Jack was twelve.
He'd arrived at the door to pick Cindy up on their first date with a bouquet of flowers for her and a Transformer action figure for Jack.  Bumblebee.

Jack already had a Bumblebee, but he didn't care.  All that mattered to him was that Tom had thought of him.  He hadn't heard from his own father in seven years: no calls, no birthday presents, no Christmas cards.  Nothing.

His mother had always called him Jackson.  She'd named him after Jackson Pollock, hoped that such a name would give him creativity and genius.  Tom called him Jack, and so did everyone else, except for about three months during his eighth grade year when all the boys at school called him Action Jackson after he told a whopper about getting his hand under Jennifer Dooley's shirt after a basketball game.  She had actually let him kiss her.  On the cheek.  When word got out about his supposed adventures she'd met him at his locker, slapped him as hard as she could and called him a pervert.  Even as a marginally aware thirteen-year old, Jack had been able to recognize the pain in her eyes.  He'd vowed right then and there to never hurt another girl again.  If anyone was going to get hurt in his future relationships, he decided, it was him.

The one thing nobody ever called Jack was "son."  His biological father had always called him "kiddo" before he'd stopped calling him anything at all.  His mother called him by name or referred to him as, "My boy."  Sometimes, too, she called him "kiddo."  Tom had wanted to call him son, but hadn't, even after the official adoption papers went through.

Tom had been hurt and never really understood why Jack refused to take his last name.  It was no big deal, really, just the defiance of a teenager struggling for an identity, but Tom had never seen it that way.  He had always wanted a son, and even if this wasn't how he'd envisioned getting one, he was determined to make the best of it.  The fact that Jack wouldn't completely play along bugged him on some level.  It wasn't supposed to work that way.
 
From the first time Cindy and Jack came in to his life, Tom had regarded his treatment of the boy as one of the most clear-cut aspects of his Christian duty.  God had adopted Tom, after all, a metaphysical orphan who had only made it through the years following his first wife's tragic death in a car accident with God's help.  He was bound and determined to make sure that Cindy and Jack knew the same God he did.  His new wife adjusted to the concept well enough.  She'd grown up in church, but really hadn't had time to go in years.  She didn't so much leave as much as come up with other things to do with her time.

Jack didn't adjust to the church idea anywhere close to as well as his mother.  Nobody really knew why, and Jack didn't say anything because he didn't want to cause any problems.  But whenever someone referred to God as the Heavenly Father he winced just a little bit inside.  His father had left in a cloud of smoke, after all.  What was to stop this other, new father and his big, cosmic father from doing the exact same thing?

Eventually, though, things settled down in the Reed-Patterson household.  Teenaged Jack never rebelled like the rest of his peers did.  On one level he knew he had it pretty good.  On another level he feared that it could disappear at any time.  That little five-year old standing in the street trying to figure out what he'd done to chase his dad away had grown up to be a teenager who tried to figure out how to never chase anyone away.

He grew up handsome and awkward.  Certain girls saw this and decided to take advantage of him.  A succession of clingly bitches used him through high school and college, always taking and rarely giving back.  He rarely broke up with a girlfriend even though he always knew within a few days or weeks that he should.  Still, with each one he thought that he could help them or, at the very least, he didn't want to hurt them like he'd hurt Jennifer Dooley, like he'd been hurt.  So a succession of girls had used him up, sucked him dry, then left him abandoned, hurt, confused, and calling them, weeping, in the middle of the night long after they'd gone on to their next mark.

After a while, Jack began to believe the last words of his father.  He vowed at some point to never again let a woman get her claws in to him.  It just wasn't worth it.

And so Jackson Paul Reed grew up a living embodiment of one of the great, unspoken truths.  Although people rarely get what they actually deserve, most are spectacularly good at getting what they think they deserve.

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Looking back I can honestly say that I wouldn't change much about this chapter.  I also absolutely wouldn't include it in anything as is, especially not as the introductory chapter to a book.  It's just a bit on the nose.  I guess I might have been fascinated with the notion of being on the nose at the time.  I don't know.

It's also interesting to me how hard I was trying to flog the idea of god, family, and fathers.  The idea of god as a father and, more importantly, as a deadbeat dad, was strong in my mind.

So...yeah.  That's a thing.

A Distant, Dreadful Star, Part 11

[Author's Note: This is part eleven of the story born of this post at Slacktivist.]

They stood on the porch, scrubbed faces impossibly clean, teeth impossibly white and framed by painted-on smiles.  Painted-on smiles that did not quite reach their eyes.  This pair was not here to make friends.  They were con artists in search of marks.  They were the guy with a whiskey sour looking for a quick fuck at last call.  They were sharks on the hunt.

Well, maybe.  Things had been pretty weird since the disappearances.  It had been increasingly difficult to trust strangers.  The number of con artists who had hung out shingles and started missing people finding businesses was depressingly large.  Business was booming for people willing to look past human misery and focus on human fallibility, though.  Business always seemed to boom for heartless bastards.

They weren’t the only traffickers in misery out there.  They weren’t even the worst.

“May we come in?” the one on the left asked.  “We’d like to talk to you for just a moment.”

“No, I’d rather you don’t, actually.”

“But we have news of great importance,” the one on the right said.  “We’re sure you’d like to hear it.”

“No, thanks, I’m good.”

The one on the right reached for the handle of the screen door.  “I think you’d like to hear this,” he said.

Katie reached over and clicked on the lock.  “Go away,” she said.  “I’m not interested and if you attempt to enter my house without my permission I will call the police.”

“Very well,” said the one on the left, “But just know that if you don’t invite the Lord into your house then the Lord will not invite you into His.”  He held up the Bible in his hands.  “But the Lord still is willing to let you repent.  For a limited period of time.”

The two then spun on their heels and stepped off the porch in unison.

Katie closed the door, threw the deadbolt, and slumped back against it.  She sighed and rubbed her forehead, trying to get rid of the headache that had been plaguing her for nearly a week.  Unfortunately for her, though, she knew the reason for her headache was Joe.  The new evangelists who were circling her neighborhood like vultures weren’t helping.

She pushed off against the door and headed back to the kitchen.  Joe was sitting at the table with his laptop open.  Stacks of printed paper were scattered all over the small wooden table and haphazardly dumped on the chairs.  A pair of giant, vertical timelines were taped to the shelf on which she kept teapot and tea cup collection.  A grotesque diagram of fantastical animals and disturbingly – almost lovingly – rendered pictures of disasters and death covered most of the wall.  She did not consider it an improvement over the set of her grandmother’s china plates that they’d spent the previous summer mounting there.

Joe paused his YouTube video of some preacher or other as she walked in.  “Who was at the door?” he asked without looking up.

“No one,” Katie replied.  “Well, no one we knew.  Someone looking for family who had the wrong address.”

“Oh,” Joe replied.  “Okay.”  He grabbed a piece of paper off one of his stacks.  “Hey, look at this, I think it’s proof that that Anwar Al-Saafi guy from Iraq is the Antichrist.  Someone should do something about him.”

Katie walked over and started rubbing her husband’s shoulders.  “Honey, you know I think this stuff is a load of total bullshit, right?” she asked.

“I know that’s what you think,” he replied, “But I need you to believe me.  This shit is real.  It’s right there in the Bible.”

“I told you, Joe.  It’s not in the Bible.  It was invented by some Scottish girl with mental health problems in the 1800s.  It only went mainstream because someone figured out they could use it to sell books back in the ‘80s.”

Joe slammed the paper down.  “No, this is real,” he said.  He stood up, turned around, and grabbed Katie by the shoulders.  “If it’s not real how do you explain the fact that all of this is happening?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “Maybe it’s aliens or something.  All I know is that there was never a real Bible prophecy for any of this stuff.”

“It has to be true,” Joe said, gripping her shoulders tighter.  “It has to be.  There’s no other explanation for any of this that makes a damn bit of sense.”  He stared at her, eyes wide, nostrils flaring.  “If it is true we can use it to survive to the end of this.  We can see Eddie again.”

Katie’s shoulder muscles began to tremble under Joe’s tightening fingers.  She felt his thumbnails begin to dig into her flesh.  But she stayed fixed on his eyes.  His wild, angry, frightened eyes.

“Stop it, Joe,” she finally said.  “Please.”

“You have to believe me.”  His grip tightened.

“Please, Joe.”  She whimpered slightly.  “You’re hurting me.”

His grip relaxed.  Joe closed his eyes and his hands slipped from her shoulders.  “Oh, god, I’m sorry, Katie.  It’s just…”

“I know,” she said, “It hasn’t been easy.”

He tentatively lifted his hands back to her shoulders and rubbed them for a moment.  Then he sighed heavily and slid his arms around her.  “I just know there has to be an answer out there and I want to find it so bad,” he said.

“I know.  But you also haven’t slept for nearly a week.”

“I can’t.  I have to keep looking.  There’s not much time.”

“There’s enough time to sleep, Joe.  And things will make more sense if you’ve slept.”

“Okay.”

She reached up and pushed his arms away, then grabbed his hands with hers and backed out of the kitchen, leading him towards the bedroom.  “C’mon,” she smiled and cocked her head, “Let’s get you to bed.”

Being Me 6: Acceptance

I mentioned earlier in this set of posts that one of the things I due to occupy my time is bar trivia.  It’s one of those activities about which I’m rather ambivalent, since I’ve actually ended up meeting some really cool people, but I also have a definite carrying capacity for the whole bar trivia thing itself.  I like trivia.  My mind is a veritable font of trivia.  I’m also not really all that competitive.  My main goal is to go, hang out, have some fun, drink a couple of beers, and occupy myself for an evening.

This can be a problem.  There are some really hyper-competitive assholes who do bar trivia.  It’s weird, too, since I cannot fathom why anyone would get that worked up about the whole thing.  Sure, it’s fun to win.  Sure, it sucks to lose.  In the end, though, everyone’s playing for bragging rights and a token gift card to come back to the bar.  It’s not that big of a deal, really.

Back when I first started I was on a team with a few really cool people and this one guy who was a total dick.  All he cared about was winning.  All he talked about was winning.  If he wasn’t winning he was pissed.  He also seemed to think he knew everything about everything.  The unfortunate thing about the team was that we did win on a fairly regular basis, which just created an even greater expectation of further winning.  At first it was fun, but then the weight of expectations plus my general lack of desire to deal with the bullshit started to weigh heavily.

Eventually I’d reached the end of my ability to deal with the guy and I realized I had two choices: I could stop doing bar trivia or I could find a way to make it fun.  I left the team.  At the same time I talked to a couple other people on the team who were also tired of the guy and it basically ripped the team apart, which was a really good thing.  I never really offered an official explanation as to why I’d left, though.  So when a new team coalesced around a bunch of people I actually did like hanging out with it probably seemed pretty organic.

Still, from that point on my former teammate made it a point to single me out for trash talk and general verbal abuse.  I mostly ignored it because I couldn’t stand him but it also didn’t matter because I didn’t have to deal with him outside of a couple hours on a few Tuesdays a month.  There’s something to be said for selective deafness, really.  Not every battle has to be fought, especially when the high road is the path of least resistance.  And, really, trash talking about getting some dumb question at bar trivia is the lowest form of self-esteem builder.

A few weeks ago he sent me an email.  The email was an attempt to recruit me.  It fit the standard template of manipulation.  He attempted to flatter my intellect in order to make it a point to say that I would be the key piece to creating a dominant winning team and I should totally join.  I read it in the spirit which it was intended: someone who took something I find disposable fun but way too seriously and who wanted me to help feed his ego.  This was also someone who had done everything in his power (probably at least partially unintentionally) to alienate and annoy me for months.

I ignored it.  I also made it a point to tell some other friends with whom I play bar trivia about it and we all had a good laugh.  It was pretty pathetic, after all.

A couple weeks later he and another guy on his team, who’s hyper-competitive in an antsy, no off switch sort of way, but who generally means well cornered me in the bathroom and asked why I hadn’t decided to take them up on their offer.  I honestly and clearly told them that I did the bar trivia thing for fun, not to win, and I just liked goofing off.  I hoped that would mean they would leave well enough alone and went back to my team.  It should surprise no one that this did not, in fact, end the exchange.

A few questions into the second half he decided to trash talk me, specifically referencing things I’d just said a few minutes before.[1] I’d finally had just about enough, so I walked over  and said, “You know why I’m not on your team?  Because you annoy me.”  Then I walked away.

A couple minutes after that he showed up at my table, leaned in, and said, “I wanted you on my team because I respect your intelligence.  But you can be a real asshole sometimes.”  Then he walked away.  I, meanwhile, went selectively deaf in my left ear.

When he walked away I felt myself start to shake.  I realized that I’d just been bullied and, more importantly, that he’d actually been bullying me ever since I’d switched bar trivia teams.  Considering that this was right after I started this particular series that was kind of a big deal.

The thing that stopped the shaking, though, was the simple fact that everyone who witnessed the event and the other people I told about it afterwards thought that his actions were completely and totally uncalled for.  Everyone who knew the guy was aware of the fact that he was a dick.  They knew he was annoying.  More importantly, either they didn’t think I was an asshole or they thought that anything I did that could be construed as assholeish was a measured response to a long-term annoyance from a guy who really deserved to be hit with something much harder than the word “annoying.”

Thus we reach the end of the road.

-----------------------

The thing that’s missing from all of the stories I’ve been telling myself over the years is the bit at the end.  It was always me against the world in my own head.  It was always someone trying to push me around.  It was always me desperately trying to find a way to figure out how to get that one person to turn around and, for lack of a better term, justify my existence and give me a reason to go on into tomorrow.

That’s never been the case, not even once.  I have always, as we used to say in the church, been surrounded by a cloud of witnesses.  I’ve had friends and family who stuck around and tried to help me through the worst of it.

Sometimes, too, it’s just been a random witness who saw something and said, “Wow, that dude’s an asshole.  What’s up with him?”


-----------------------

This part is hard to discuss.  It risks devolving into victim blaming, survivor’s guilt, or the zealous new convert turning to those behind and saying, “Why aren’t you as smart and determined as I was?”  This is not my goal.  My goal is never to heap burning coals atop the head of another.

That said, this is my story.  I offer it up as a cautionary tale or, maybe, to someone else who is in an analogous situation or who knows someone who is and needs to hear this from a different voice.  It’s always much simpler when it’s over or when it’s happening to someone else, after all.

----------------------

I realize now that I had my priorities all messed up and backwards.  I constantly searched for affirmation from people who had no shits to give.  At the same time I held the people who did care about me in a sort of contempt.  My explanation for this is both simple and complex.

The primary problem is that I didn’t much like myself and I was afraid of what would happen if I fixed that and still ended up having trouble or not being accepted.  I chose, whether intentionally or unintentionally, targets for acceptance that were close enough to make sense but far enough removed to make the chase a certainty and the catch a remote possibility.

I realized a while after Amy and I finally stopped talking to each other that she was, in fact, the prototypical example of this phenomenon.  Everything went really well at first even though she expressed a certain level of reservation.  At about the four-month mark she started to pull away and set up barriers but never actually formally broke anything off.  Any speculation as to why that was is outside of the scope of this particular story, for the record.

I maintained the chase for something on the level of a year to a year and a half, however.  At first I thought I had a chance.  After a while, though, I started to seriously ask when I should quit.  I knew that she really didn’t like me much anymore.  I was starting to resent her.  It was an awful situation for everyone involved but I wasn’t willing to give up and she lacked either the ability, the willingness, or the force of will to cut me off.

Then after it ended I still tried to figure out how to go about getting it to be not over anymore.  It wasn’t because I thought that was a good idea.  It wasn’t because I thought it would work.  It was because at some point over the previous couple years I had gotten it into my head that if I could just figure out how to get Amy to love me I would be validated as a person.

-------------------

The equal and opposite alternative was to convince myself I didn’t need anyone, anywhere, anyway, no-how.  This one always had a certain level of appeal for me simply because I really do like being left to my own devices.  It was easier, in some ways, to place myself in splendid isolation and hang out with my own self-loathing than to do anything to fix it.

The cycle fed on itself.  I convinced myself that the world was full of people who didn’t like me.  So I stayed alone and didn’t risk proving myself right (or, for that matter, wrong).  That also gave me license to push other people away and, in doing so, create a self-fulfilling prophecy about the world at large.

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The solution to that, of course, is to stop.  It’s slightly harder than that, though.  The trick is to make sure I realign my priorities.  I’ve got to say, “Eh, haters gonna hate,” to the haters.  I’ve got to say, “Too bad, you’re missing out,” to the people who don’t care.  Then I’ve got to find a way to appreciate the people who do care.

I’ve managed to get that exactly backwards.  I’ve tried to make the haters not hate.  I’ve tried to make the indifferent care.  I’ve tried to push the people who do care away.  It’s easier to maintain my small, walled-off world that way.

Something’s gotta give, though.  It’s time to make sure that the correct thing falls away.

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[1]The funniest thing about this – to me – is something I didn’t know at the time, but he was trash talking me in spite of the fact that my team was significantly ahead of his at the time.  I’d scored somewhere in the neighborhood of 70-75% of my team’s points, too, which meant that I’d been single-handedly outscoring his team brain trust.

Being Me 5: Coping

I started this series on an odd sort of personal note.  I mean, the idea of a personal note is not, in and of itself, odd.  The one I chose, though, is kind of strange.  My goal was to figure out how to take that extremely personal moment and make it universal.  The subsequent posts under the Being Me label were, therefore, an attempt to figure out how to do exactly that.  I cannot finish the thought started by that story on a universal note, however.

The simple fact of the matter is, though, that I believe that the personal is universal and the universal is personal.  That’s why we tell stories to each other, after all.  So for the posts remaining in this I’m simply not going to try to be universal.  If it ends up meaning something to you, great.  If not, I hope you at least enjoy where I’m going, for whatever function of enjoyment exists in this form of storytelling.

-------------------

I learned at some point that the trick to making it through was to not actually want anything.  This might seem like a sort of Zen thing, I suppose.  The Buddha said that the source of discontent is desire, after all.  In my case, though, it wasn’t anything Zen at all.

Wanting things was an invitation to failure.  If I were to say, “I want [this],” and genuinely try to get whatever that thing was there was a pretty good chance I’d fail.  If I failed there was a pretty good follow-on chance that someone would make fun of me.  I wanted nothing less than to be made fun of.  I got that a lot, after all.  The easiest solution, then, was to not want or, alternately, to only want that which I could already get.

This, interestingly, is the sort of attitude that’s pretty standard for Evangelical Christianity.  I think it’s pretty standard within most religions, really.  It’s an attempt to channel desire in socially acceptable directions, since human desire is the most obvious danger to strictly built human institutions.  I don’t think that I necessarily took my aversion to wanting things from Christianity, however.

I’m pretty sure that, as with most things, I simply used Christianity as a justification.

-

It’s somewhat cliché to talk about defense mechanisms.  I will do so, however, since the term already exists and as much as I’d like to reinvent the wheel just to seem clever it doesn’t seem like a particularly good use of my time or yours, dear reader.  So let’s talk about defense mechanisms.  I had a bunch of them running at any given point, after all.

Like most red-blooded, heterosexual males I developed an interest in the fair sex somewhere in the neighborhood of puberty.  My first specific memories of discovering girls are from the sixth grade.  My first assumptions that the girls I liked wanted nothing to do with me are also from the sixth grade.  Interestingly, my first real memories of being ashamed of my feelings about girls come from the seventh grade, which was also when I started getting all up in the church as a coping mechanism.

I don’t say “ashamed” in the sense that liking girls was, in and of itself, shameful.  If you were a boy you were supposed to like girls, after all.  However, you were supposed to like girls in a chaste way that wouldn’t end until your wedding night.  As such, what I learned to be ashamed of was my budding sexuality and how it made me think about girls.

I figured out how to channel that into a sort of principled lack of action.  Christianity gave me the tools to do exactly that and all I had to do was extrapolate from what I’d learned about sex.  The trick in dealing with any sort of sexual sin-related issues was to deny you had them, after all.  If that didn’t work or sound feasible, then, the other two solutions were to admit to a lesser degree than you actually dealt with or to simply dodge the question.

Eventually the only person I really had to answer to was myself.  I managed to basically convince everyone around me that I was in control of everything (and, in reality, I was about as close as a teenager could be to in control of such things, although part of that was that I allowed my own low self-regard hold a good portion of that particular line).  The excuses were pretty easy, too, and all rolled up into some variation on, “I’m waiting for god’s time/god’s plan/insert cliché here.”  So when I found myself confronted with some other thing I was afraid to do the logical (to my mind) response was to cast all that onto god, too.  It was a ready-made omni excuse.

---------------------

The other important trick was to carefully manage how I interacted with everyone else.  The main method involved silence.  Where silence wasn’t an option I offered as little information as possible and filled it with as many caveats as possible.  The final trick was to make sure that most of my friends didn’t know each other all that well.

I also became extremely conservative in my own personal actions.  I only engaged in activities where I knew I would be able to succeed.  If I had to do something where I knew there was a chance of failure I played up the failure aspect and made sure everyone knew I didn’t really care about the outcome and I was trying to fail or I tried to do it in a place where no one would see me.

Mostly I isolated myself.  I then tried to convince myself that I really wanted to live that way.  In truth, I kind of did.  I’m pretty sure that I chose that route precisely because I enjoy being left to my own devices.  There is a bridge too far for such things, however, and I regularly spent my time on the other side of the next bridge over.  I intentionally stunted my own social and emotional growth in an attempt to make sure I’d never, ever find myself in a vulnerable spot.  Being socially and emotionally stunted, however, was a good way of making sure that I was genuinely ill-equipped for those moments I most feared.  It also meant that when a minor example of such a moment presented itself I blew it completely and totally out of proportion in my own mind and just made things so, so much worse.

Weirdly, though, most of the time the people around me didn’t even know what had happened.

This might seem like a lot of work.  This was a lot of work.  So it’s important to ask what, precisely, the end goal was.

In broad terms, my goal was to not get hurt.  I knew that if I said something or did something there was always a risk of being made fun of.  Being made fun of, meanwhile, was intolerably painful.  Similarly, a relationship that added value but suddenly ended would invite all kinds of pain.  I solved the problem of potential future embarrassment or emotional pain by making sure that I never had to experience any embarrassment or emotional pain.  Then I retroactively looked for ways to justify my behaviors.

---------------------

For a long time I had the Fat Kid excuse.  Having the Fat Kid excuse, especially in junior high and high school, was a perfect reason.  It was my baseline, “Well, nobody would want me, anyway, so why should I try?” justification.  In 2004 I took that excuse away by losing 110 pounds.  Nobody treated me like the Fat Kid anymore.  Nobody who hadn’t known me before believed me when I told them I’d been the Fat Kid (and this was before Facebook + smartphone = instant proof).

No longer being the Fat Kid didn’t actually change anything, though.  That’s why when I tried to talk about Christianity and leaving Christianity behind I had a hard time honestly saying, “Christianity did this to me,” or, “Christianity did that,” or even, “Ever since I left things have been so much better because I’m no longer [this way].”

That’s also why the story with which I lead off this series kicked me so hard in the gut.  All of the sudden I realized, “I’m doing this thing.  I do not know why I’m doing this thing.  I’d better figure out what’s happening.”

For a long time I’ve felt that I’m doing something wrong and that something has to give.  I didn’t feel like someone else was telling me I was doing something wrong.  I felt like there was something inherently flawed in the way I perceived myself and interacted with the world and I was getting in my own way on that life-long quest for happiness and contentment.

--------------------

It’s funny.  Even though I said that I don’t really see an obvious universal angle to my personal story I immediately understood what Ta-Nehisi Coates was talking about when discussing why he doesn’t carry a gun:

This is not mere cant. It is not enough to have a gun, anymore than it's enough to have a baby. It's a responsibility. I would have to orient myself to that fact. I'd have to be trained and I would have to, with some regularity, keep up my shooting skills. I would have to think about the weight I carried on my hip and think about how people might respond to me should they happen to notice. I would have to think about the cops and how I would interact with them, should we come into contact. I'd have to think about my own anger issues and remember that I can never be an position where I have a rage black-out. (Via Fred)

I’ve been friends with gun people.  I’ve put many rounds through guns in my life.  I’m comfortable with guns, comfortable with the idea of guns.  I would never, ever choose to carry a gun.  I would never, ever choose to own a gun.

It’s a realization that I had several years ago when talking to a gun-owning friend of mine about guns and the mentality that goes into being the sort of person who carries a concealed weapon.  His attitude was that a gun is a tool and something that you should have just in case something happens that requires a gun.  My immediate reaction was to point out that I have never, in my life, been in a situation where I felt I needed a gun.  My parents had never in their lives been in a situation where they needed a gun (I also later asked my dad about it and he confirmed that, no, he’d never felt the need to have a gun).

Even though I didn’t have Ta-Nehisi Coates’ words I implicitly understood his idea.  Responsibly carrying a gun requires you to become the sort of person who carries a gun and thinks about carrying a gun and is aware of the fact that you’re carrying a gun.  I am a responsible person.  I am not, however, a gun person.  The difference there boils down to that question of whether you’d like to live your entire life armed or not.

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The problem is that I have been living my entire life armed.  At some point I crawled up into my own little world and tried to make sure nobody else managed to get in there with me or, even worse, pull me back out.

For me, then, the question is, “How do I stop being that person?”

Being Me 5: Manipulation

I didn’t have a girlfriend until after high school.  Hell, I didn’t go on a single date until after high school.  I, um, I had self-esteem issues.  And I was scared of girls.  It happens, y’know?

The thing about the particular person that I started dating right after high school is that I didn’t like her that much.  It was one of those, “Well, I guess this is the best I can do,” sort of things.  Before you go feeling bad for her, I feel I should point out that she was someone who repeatedly and egregiously used men.

We were together for nine-ish rocky months.  It ended when I tried to break up with her but she acted like she didn’t want to break up and then went out and messed around with two other guys, one of whom was a friend who she told that we had broken up.

For at least seven of the next nine years I heard from her every spring.  The last time came after the aforementioned friend’s wedding, when he invited her and I asked him what the hell was wrong with his brain.  Eight months later I got an email from her asking why I hated her.  I responded, which was probably dumb.  I was honest, though.  I told her that I didn’t hate her because that required me to care and I really, really didn’t.

She then attempted to inform me that no one knew me or could possibly know me better than her.  Which, y’know, was weird, since we hadn’t had more than two or three civil conversations in nearly a decade at that point.[1]  She didn’t know me at all anymore.  But she still tried to tell me that no one knew me better than her.

That’s a play that might have worked on me at one point.

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I’m forced to admit that there’s a stretch in my life where it was really easy to manipulate me.  There weren’t really any girls putting their claws into me at the time, though.  I was being manipulated by the church.

Okay, the thing with the girl referenced above did overlap with that.  But, um, I figured it out.[2]

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The thing about Evangelical Christianity is that it’s inherently manipulative.  There’s no way around it.  They tell you that you have to be a certain way and believe a certain way and if you’re not that way you’re going to be punished.  But they have no proof of said punishment.  For any other group this would result in laughter and mockery.  The fact that Christianity in general and Evangelical Christianity in specific has such power is indicative of the power of its manipulation.

I suppose it’s necessary for me to explain a bit.  Sigh.  Okay, let’s get to it.

I was desperate for validation before I hit high school.  I don’t know when it started, so I’ll just go with “before high school” as a catch-all for, y’know, anytime before 14 or so.  I got a lot of my validation from church.  Or, depending on how you define things, I got less negative validation from church.  That might require a bit of explanation, too.

Church, at least as far as I experienced it, was good at a construction of, “We’ll accept you if…”  They were more than happy to want me around.  They were more than happy to want me to get involved and do things.  They only wanted me around and involved if I behaved in a certain way and that way was a narrow, not really particularly Biblical collection of behaviors and activities, however.

That’s where things get sticky.  Evangelical Christianity would have you believe that they’re the sole defenders of a true, Biblical, unconditional love.  The love they peddle, however, is as conditional as any love I’ve ever experienced.  More than a lot, even.

Before I get too deep into things, though, I think I should point out that I don’t really have a problem with conditional love.  I think that all love is, on some level, conditional.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.  One of the things about living in the real world is the realization that nothing whatsoever can be truly unconditional, love included.

The problem here is that the love of the Evangelical Christian god is actually more conditional than most sorts of human, earthly love.  It’s not even a contest, really.  God, according to the Evangelical mindset, is more than willing to revoke his love for infractions as simple as being who you are.  That was an unconscionable viewpoint for me.

There are several people in my life who I used to love and who I would do anything I could to help even though I haven’t talked to them in years and even though the reason I haven’t talked to them is because they hurt me.  There are other people in my life who I can’t stand but upon whom I wish no ill will.  There are even some people who I can’t stand, who have said or done awful things to me, and upon whom I still wish no ill will and who I tend to feel sorry for if I sit down to think about their motivations.  As such, the thing I realized with growing horror towards the tail end of my time in Christianity was that I was more loving and more forgiving than the Christian god as taught by Evangelical Christianity.

There’s a reason I took to referring to god as “the Cosmic Jackass.”  Part of that is because he was a bigger jackass than me and I freely admit that I’m perfectly capable of being a jackass.  If, in the end, my general jackassery stopped short of damning people to hell who didn’t know any better, or people who were just doing their best with a bad hand, or people who did know better but ended up making bad decisions, then where did that leave god?[3]

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None of that really helped with my big problem, though.  I desperately wanted to be accepted.

Christianity, for all its faults, offered one thing that the various other outlets I had did not: a fairly straightforward path to acceptance and respect.  It was fairly easy to start down that path, too.  All you had to do was be the sort of person who showed up and helped out.  There’s always a shortage of people who want to show up and help out in a church.  The other trick is to spend your time studying the Bible and knowing how to say seemingly profound things in Bible study.

I eventually combined those things in such a way that I ended up in leadership positions in church groups.  It kind of happened by default most of the time, too.  I even spent a brief time at a friend’s church the summer after everything kind of fell apart doing my level-headed best to not be that guy.  I still ended up getting pulled in the direction of being that guy.[4]

There was a lot of burnout in the ministries I was involved in.  The same group of people tended to be involved in everything and the same group of people tended to be very tired of having to do everything.  This is a familiar dynamic for any group where something eventually has to get organized and done.

My need for affirmation and the heady rush of being the guy who was there and handled shit created a vicious feedback cycle.  I have to stop here and get back to inherent problem with this whole stretch of self-revelation, however.  I don’t think anyone really intentionally manipulated me.  I think the problem with any group that has a sufficient need of getting stuff done is that if someone shows up and says, “I want to help!” the people that need help say, “Great, get to it!”

Where the manipulation comes in is the inherently manipulative nature of Evangelical Christianity itself.  Every other group in which I’ve involved myself I’ve had the option of saying, “Yeah, I can’t get involved with that.  Sorry.”  In Evangelical Christianity, however, you’re taught that you’re supposed to spend your every waking hour advancing the kingdom of god.  To do otherwise is to risk god’s displeasure.

That’s why I ended up pushing myself well past the breaking point.[5]

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[1]Meanwhile, remember that one of my primary beliefs is in the tug of war between empathy and resentment.  I chose empathy.  I also still have the email string from 2009 floating about and I went back and read it to do my necessary research for this post.  Empathy makes it really hard to do that without feeling bad for shutting her down like I did.

That’s one of my points: empathy is a hard choice to make.  Resentment is the path of least resistance.  It’s easy to hate.  It’s a lot less easy to choose to try to understand another’s pain but then still say, “I don’t need that person in my life.”

[2]Seriously, though, it’s hard to read the email string from the past and not feel like I was being a total dick and wanting to email and apologize for something that happened almost four years ago.  In an exchange between me and someone I don’t care about.  Have I mentioned that choosing empathy as a default is difficult?

[3]I’ve been poorly treated by a lot of people in my life.  I can still remember the names of people who bullied me in grade school.  I can still remember specific instances.  I can also honestly say that if I were responsible for deciding whether any of those people were to be forgiven or tortured for even a minute I’d choose forgiveness every single time.

I mean, I suppose there are extenuating circumstances, like if someone who bullied me grew up to be a child abuser or something.  But if I were god and I had the ability to make stuff like that not happen then you know who I’d blame for child abuse?  Me.  Period.

[4]That was where I met Amy.  At the time I pretty much knew that I was damaged goods and couldn’t really handle trying to win her over.  Interestingly, my solution to the problem was to go back into my church-leader-guy mode.  I literally knew no other way of operating on a level of even minimal confidence.

Now that I put it in those terms it’s blatantly obvious why I spent so much time sitting around and feeling bad about not having Christianity anymore even though I couldn’t be a Christian anymore.  I’ve said that Christianity is like an abusive relationship many times.  It really is.  The reason I stayed in was because when confronted with a situation where I had to dig in and be my best self I had no reserves outside of my identity within Christianity.

That’s not an accident, by the way.  Evangelicals are more than happy to tell anyone who’s willing to listen that the only way to succeed is through Jesus.

[5]I’m not really sure how best to present this part of the story.  But here goes:

The critical stretch for me in regards to leaving Christianity was my second full year at Western Illinois University.  I was on the leadership team for the InterVarsity chapter out there.  I was pushing really hard on the personal aspects of my Christianity.  I was also trying to succeed academically (which, for the record, I did: 4.0 GPO the fall semester, somewhere in the 3.75 range in the spring).  I was also entertaining and confronting serious doubts about stuff for the first time.  Furthermore, I was hanging out with charismatics, which brought a lot more of the prophecy and speaking in tongues stuff out.

For someone full of self-doubt, prone to trying way too hard, and already a little too willing to sit around and try to figure out what god’s will for my life was this was a dangerous combination of factors.  I spiraled off and basically had an extended nervous breakdown.  My primary saving grace in all of it was school.  I refused to let the fact that I was an emotional wreck hurt my GPA, so I pushed on through sheer force of will and intellectual arrogance.  My secondary saving grace was the people I knew who weren’t the people in the ministry I was working with.  Close at hand was a collection of friends of all religious persuasions who were more than happy to just kind of hang out without asking anything of me (which was good, since I was probably a major bag of dicks).  Farther afield was my church at home, which was useful for comparison purposes when the group I was working with seemed completely dysfunctional (which, for the record, it was).

Being Me 3: Empathy

I was hanging out with friends on a Tuesday, doing my usual Tuesday bar trivia thing.

A woman walked up looking for the whole trivia thing, so she stopped to ask the people at our table where the bar trivia stuff was going on.  She looked pretty much like the sort woman you’d imagine catfighting on that dumb show about Hugh Heffner’s many ex-wives.  Her voice had that upward lilt that made every sentence sound like a question and that made her sound like, well, a typical ditzy blonde who gets through life on looks.

My friends were not particularly nice to her.

Later on I went and talked to her.  She seemed like a completely decent human being.

My friends thought that my intention had been to hit on her.  I didn’t tell them my real motivation, since my real motivation was hard to explain.  I felt bad that she’d been made fun of and wanted to make sure someone was nice to her.

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I said in the last post that I think that you choose early whether you respond positively or negatively to misery.  In reality it’s far more complicated than that.  I think there’s a matrix of choices and reactions and the thing you choose at a young age is how you’re going to look at those moments and what steps you’re going to take.

You might, for instance, be kind to family and puppies and kick bums in the street.

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Humans organize the world into groups.  This is often spoken of as a negative, but I think it’s an inevitability.  There are simply too many people in the world to be able to account for everyone.  So we separate what we know from what we think we know from what we don’t know at all and assign labels and stereotypes to everything.

In broad strokes we identify our family, then our friends, then our tribe, then our not-tribe that’s harmless, and then our enemies.  We then sort that by those who are helpful, those who are neutral, and those who are harmful.[1]  Our reactions are then pretty much programmed in and we can run it all off of a macro.

What I think we choose young is how we react to seeing misery in the situation of those who are outside of our tribe and can either not do anything for us or might actively harm us.  It’s easy to help your friend who is in trouble.  It’s similarly easy to ignore that kid you don’t know who’s in trouble.  It’s also quite easy to see that person you actively don’t like who’s in trouble and to do what you can to add to his or her difficulties.

Empathy is what allows us to say, “I would hate to be in their shoes, so I’ll try to help them.”

Empathy is also a good way to find yourself alone.  If you depart from your tribe to help your enemy you might find yourself without a tribe and with the only potential assistance coming from someone who was more than happy to trip you and steal your lunch money yesterday.  Choosing empathy, then, has a very real potential social cost.

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It doesn’t surprise me that the word “empathy” has gotten treated like a four-letter word by the Glenn Becks and Bill O’Reillys of the world over the last couple of years.  The very act of empathy is one of sacrifice and intentionally powerlessness.  It cannot be used by the rich and powerful to increase their wealth and power.  It can only be used to break down power.

I realized at the end of this last election cycle that it doesn’t really matter what happens and the outcome of the election barely mattered.  Right now in America the rich and powerful have won.  Sure, there were a few victories here and there, most notably on the front of gay rights.  But the big questions aren’t even being fought over anymore.

What was the big question that kept getting asked during the election?  “Are you doing better than you were four years ago?”  It wasn’t, “Are we doing better?”  All I’m supposed to care about is whether I am doing better or worse.

The first complaints I ran across from the anti-Obama folks after Election Night were complaints about the stock market dropping a smidge and the possibility that taxes might go up.  Someone on Facebook basically said, “Hey, go thank your liberal friends for when your taxes go up next year and ask them how they feel about it.”  I kind of wished he would have asked me, since the way I feel about it is, “I’m not too happy, but I’m pretty sure it’s necessary.”

I would love it if my country cut its military drastically and started spending more money on infrastructure, on making sure the poor are taken care of, and on making sure that our indigent and mental care facilities are top-notch.  I would love it if someone admitted that, yes, sometimes taxes have to go up on some to make things better for all.  I’m perfectly willing to admit that if I’m one of the some I’ll take that hit because I’m also one of the all.

That’s what empathy gets you.  That’s the choice that I made when I was young.  I tried to see the people around me as humans, rather than labels.  I didn’t always do it well, but I always tried.

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Again we get to Evangelical Christianity in this discussion of empathy.

Evangelical Christianity is good at empathy for those in the tribe and terrible at empathy for everyone else.  Oh, also, it’s often terrible at empathy for those in the tribe.  So…yeah.

Growing up Evangelical you’re taught to divide everyone into tribes.  It’s basically “us” and “them” and “we” are the forces of good and light and “they” are trying to burn down the world.  As such, they must be countered at every turn and stopped at all costs.  Every action they take must be place into the matrix of how it is used to mock Jesus and destroy Jesus’s people.

That’s how you end up with the absolutely mind-boggling confluence of Christianity, power, and hatred.  Evangelical Christians give money to the NRA and support building a pointlessly large military while cutting money for the old and the poor because they’ve been encouraged to think of guns and the military as “us” and the poor and old as “them.”  It helps immensely that it’s the evil liberals who want to take money from the rich and the fine patriots at Lockheed Martin to give it to those free-living, money grubbing homeless people.

Those who are outside the bubble are constantly baffled by the lack of internal consistency in the broad Evangelical position.  There is a consistency to it, but it’s not a logical consistency.  It’s simply that if [designated enemy non-tribal group] is against [thing], then I’m for it and if [designated enemy non-tribal group] is for [thing], then I’m against it.  It helps, in this situation, to not remember what you were for last week, because you might be against it next week.

Within the tribe, though, there are also those who do not deserve empathy.  Well, more precisely, there are those who aren’t doing enough to deserve empathy.  Empathy in Christianity is a conditional thing, after all.  Someone who isn’t seen as sufficiently holy will be the recipient of tough love or, from time to time, an intervention.[2]

The lack of empathy is fairly simple to understand, really.  Everyone in Evangelical Christianity is encouraged to think if god as their bestest buddy and the relationship they have with god to be the most special possible relationship in the world.  Everything that happens, then, is talked about as god’s attempt to teach that exact individual a lesson.  People, then, stop being people and instead become object lessons or little reminders from god.

I’m not saying that non-Christians or non-Evangelicals can’t fall in to the pattern of thinking they’re the center of the universe, of course.  I’m just saying that it’s encouraged in such a way as to invite absolutely no reflection in Evangelical circles.  It’s barely even something that happens on the level of conscious thought, really.  I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out where all of the crappy, negative lessons came from and the best I can deduce is that we all taught each other.  I am just as implicated in my behaviors and actions as anyone else.

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One of the end results of empathy is the realization that you lack control.  You make yourself powerless in the face of all of the terrible majesty of humanity at its best or worst.  You might help your enemy today and find yourself at the bottom of his boot tomorrow.  You might also find that your friends now say that you get what you deserved by clutching that particular viper to your chest.  That’s just the nature of things.  Empathy is always a risk.

That is why no one ever chooses empathy at all times.  I see empathy as a response that is in constant conflict with the opposite potential response.  But that is something for another day.

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[1]And, y’know, those who might take their pants off if we say the right thing.  I feel like that might be a separate category, but I don’t know where it fits.

[2]I’ve talked about it here before, but the absolute worst thing that ever happened to me during my time working in ministry was after I took steps to resolve a situation that would have been completely appropriate in, say, a corporate environment (this was when I was at Western after working full time and being in and out of junior college for more than half a decade) or even at the church where I’d done most of my ministry before that.  I was instead treated to several of the other leaders of the ministry I was part of springing a surprise, “Yell at two of the leaders and tell them we’re correcting them in love,” fest on me.

It obviously worked, since I still remember the event, I still say that what I did was absolutely appropriate, and I haven’t talked to any of those fuckers in years.  The problem, now that I’m far enough removed from it to really understand what happened, was that the other leaders did not have a fucking clue what they were doing.  They were running around playing at ministry and even though I wasn’t getting paid I was the closest to a professional they had.  So when I saw a problem that needed to be fixed I went to the person that was most capable of fixing it and that, somehow, resulted in me being treated like an enemy.

Being Me 2: Identifying the Downpresser Man

When I was in grade school I figured out that one of the other kids had things way worse than I did.  He had genuine mental deficiencies and zero social savvy to speak of.  For a brief period in either fourth or fifth grade I decided that somebody needed to be his friend and that somebody might as well be me.

It didn’t last long, as being his friend was genuinely thankless[1] and I was all of, what, ten years old?

At some later point I remember trying to figure out why all the kids picked on me.  My teacher reminded me of the time that I’d tried to be a friend to the other kid and informed me that I had gotten respect for doing that.  That was news to me.  The lesson I learned was that I got picked on because I wasn’t good enough at being selfless and giving.

I think there was a secondary lesson, too: people like you more if you do the things they don’t want to deal with.  Well, they might not like you more, but they’ll “respect” you more.  Joy.

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This, inevitably, is where the church fits into the narrative.  This is also why I’ve always had a hard time trying to figure out how the church fits into the narrative.  There are really two notions of the church in my mind: the place I went for shelter and the place that made everything so, so much worse.

On the one hand, I started hanging out at church a lot and doing all of the youth group stuff because no one picked on me there.  Well, at least, not as many people picked on me.[2]  It was nice.

I also figured out that there’s a sort of automatic route to being respected in the church.  All you have to do is show up, know things about the Bible, and know how to articulate the things you know.  I was very good at doing all three of those things.

The drawback in church is far more insidious than a kid calling you names, though.  I had defenses for you basic, run of the mill high school jackass.  I had no defenses for the Cosmic Jackass.

The standard message of Evangelical Christianity is “you’re not good enough.”  I had a hard time with that, since I was already pretty damned sure that I was a worthless bag of suck without the infallible word of god informing me that, yes, yes I was.[3]

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There are three basic human responses to witnessing misery: you can try to take steps to help, you can ignore it, or you can actively do things to make it worse.  Choosing to do nothing and choosing to cause active harm really aren’t that different, as benign neglect is still a form of neglect.  The thing about being the person who chooses to try to stop things is that you will often fail.  Misery is too big, too strong, to hard to understand.

Misery also doesn’t scale.  The personal misery is worse than the systemic misery.  It’s possible to look at homelessness and say, “We can fix this by doing A, B, and C.”  It’s not possible to look at a little kid who gets picked on and doesn’t know what to do and say, “We can fix this.”  It’s a tiring, thankless, never-ending task.

I know this because I’m 31 years old and I still don’t know how to cope with things that happened half a lifetime ago.  I also know that I’ve showed my ass on any number of occasions when people were just trying to help or didn’t even know they’d hit a raw nerve because they didn’t know me then and I’m not a big fan about talking about it.

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I think you choose your camp young.  You’re either someone who tries to understand and fix misery or someone who doesn’t.  This isn’t to say that you’re always in one camp or another.  It’s also pretty obvious to me that everyone is going to not notice misery or try not to think about it from time to time.

I chose my camp in grade school, I suppose.  I saw a kid who needed a friend and I tried to be his friend.  I didn’t get anything out of it and failed at the whole enterprise.

Then when I failed I was told by a teacher that maybe if I hadn’t failed all the other kids wouldn’t have picked on me so much.  I honestly think that she was well-meaning.  I think she was trying to find helpful suggestions to fix the situation.

There is only one solution to that problem, though: the bullies need to be stopped from being bullies.

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This is where Christianity becomes monstrous.  I found a measure of solace in church.  Even that wasn’t complete, though, because I kept getting the message reinforced that I totally suck.  All of the reasons that I sucked, though, were things that could theoretically be fixed.

It gradually dawned on me that the church was treating other people far, far worse than it treated me and that the entire institution permitted and even encouraged such mistreatment.  That wasn’t the reason I left.  It’s certainly a huge part of the reason I wouldn’t ever go back.[4]

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There are truly horrible people in the world.  On some level I have to give the kids who picked on me a pass, since what the fuck does anybody know when they’re young?

If any of those people grew up to become the sort of person who argues against anti-bullying measures, though, they’d better hope they’re never in a position where they need me to help them with anything.  There are adults who interfere in the affairs of the bullies and the bullied who don’t have the best interests of the victims at heart, after all.  Sure, they say they do.  It’s always about the children and all.

They just need to learn how to toughen up.  It builds character.

Bullshit.  I had more character than those assholes in the fourth grade.

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I’m 31 years old.  I have a mortgage, a car payment, and a dog.  I also divide the vast majority of the world into categories of “people who have hurt me” and “people who just haven’t gotten around to hurting me yet.”  I’ve also been crying off and on for 24 hours because someone violated my trust in a way that’s really probably not a big deal to most people.[5]

If I could trade all that in for a little less character building between, say, ages 5 and 18, I would.  I would do it in a heartbeat.

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[1]His parents did not help.  My parents were behind his once during a junior high parent-teacher conference that went at least half an hour over the limit because they were haranguing the teachers on all the things they were doing wrong.  At one point in high school one of my friends tore a couple pages in a magazine because the guy just would not leave us alone and it seemed like a good idea.  I was a more-or-less innocent bystander to the whole thing but his mother called my mother and yelled at her.  After my friend had confessed to the act and she said that such a thing was impossible because he was a good kid and I was a little shit.

By the way, for those keeping track at home, my list of misdeeds in high school consisted of smoking about three cigarettes and deciding I didn’t want anything to do with that particular activity.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, kids: that’s what you get for trying to be friends with that weird kid who has no friends because he’s completely and totally socially inept and his parents are certifiable.  Although I did get to hear my mother rip his mother a new one over the phone, which was awesome.  She was scared of my mom after that.

[2]My sister was friends with a guy when they were in junior high youth group together.  By the time we hit high school or college age she hadn’t talked to him in years and had nothing nice to say about him.  I once asked her why and she told me it was because he’d been a real ass behind my back.

The reason that came up was because he later ended up being a friend of sorts and I was friends with his siblings.  He was a genuine asshole but always got the “true man of god” treatment because he was really good at playing the game.  I always felt like I was doing something wrong by not liking him.  There’s a lesson to be learned there.

[3]This is the sort of assertion that always gets a knee-jerk, “Hey, no it isn’t!”  This is a thought that requires way more than a paragraph, but the simple fact of the matter is that the entire platform upon which that house is built is the base assumption that everyone is unfailingly awful and the only way to combat that is Jesus.  So then when things go badly the only possible answer is that the person experiencing bad things must have failed somehow.

That is an awful, wicked thing to teach a kid who has a hard time summoning the courage to get up and go to school in the morning.

[4]The fact that I quit religion is a bigger factor, though.  So this is somewhat speculative.

[5]And listening to the Counting Crows’ “Raining in Baltimore” and “A Murder of One” over and over and over again.  I think that August and Everything After has to be one of the 10 best albums of the ‘90s.