On Diary Entries

adapted from Journal 17, p 184-186. Friday 28/July/2017

Not to be a manic pixie dream girl but I don’t have diary entires like other people. Other people have stories like “OMG I’m in middle school and there’s this boy I like” and I just don’t have experiences like that. Not because I didn’t have crushes but because I didn’t go to school. Maybe I should invent some kind of fake history for myself, a canon of half-truths that will cement me as one of these normal people who felt comfortable in ‘homerooms’ (rooms which are never at home) and ‘recess’ (the activity, not the cartoon).  I could write, today, about all the times I gazed misty-eyed and doe-eared at the most beautiful girl in the world while not thinking she would notice me, and how my life was punctuated by sharp bells, like the lives of the Magic Tree House kids.  I could write about the times I spent with my real childhood friends but frame them as school activities, just replace Raven’s living room with a middle-school boardroom and tell my story about how he was explaining a dreidel to me (although I don’t think he was jewish) and how I was always lost in his pale eyes and dappled freckles. About how later on we stopped hanging out because he joined a hockey team and disappeared, but how I would always turn my head when we passed his street, for years after, hoping to catch the barest glimpse of my first and only best friend. 

I could tell the story of the giant bouncy sack that my friend Seth kept in his basement, although now that I say it that sounds raunchier than it was. It was a synthetically produced and soft bag, suspended from a beam on a bouncy rope. It was tough to get into but once you did you were completely enclosed in a dark, weightless environment. Like being in space. Or another night at Seth’s house where I remember he was taking a shower and his mom and I met, passing in the hall outside the door. She expressed concern to me about how long of a shower her son always took. Always eager to please mothers (whom I considered my true peers) I waved my hand and said “I’m sure he’s just spaced out, staring at the wall and lost track of time. That’s what I always do.” And while that was true, I can’t imagine what she thought her son was doing in there. Presumably she had met him and could tell that of the two of us I was the only one to whom it had even occurred to that “Kissing” existed, let alone could be something exciting or pleasurable. 

When I would sleep over at Seth’s I slept on a camping apparatus on his bedroom floor. I have always had a hard time sleeping. I would look up at his shelves and his box of boy scout accolades and wonder how he could possibly have so many, and what they symbols meant, or at his stacks of Garfield comics (with whom he was obsessed) and wonder why these were his touchstones, along with sponge-bob. Sponge-bob! I should have paid more attention at the time because now, as an adult, people are constantly referencing sponge-bob to each other, telling stories of his exploits with his undersea comrades and how those myths shaped and call-forward to the present day experiences of these annoying people speaking in code at this party, where there is never enough to eat and far too much to drink. The perils of sponge-bob of the square-pants are like some kind of massive modern epic, the Odyssey or the Bible, echoes of which are a coded part of everyday existence that simply fall deaf on my ears. I tried to watch an episode at one point but the heroes resolved to steal their friends underwear as a part of a game they didn’t understand and it really grossed me out, so I stopped and never picked it up again. 

I would lie in this room and not sleep and  look at my friend’s bed, a compact little thing, well organized, with three drawers underneath that I longed to open. My bed was a raised loft object with a desk underneath, which seems cool but all I wanted was to be a normal kid who had strange little adventures, like I would read about in books. Kids in books don’t live in bunk beds unless they have to share their room, (which I did not) they live on the floor. They have spaces to hide things in, and reasons to keep secrets. In books kids never have filing systems, or have to figure out what to do with all their free time all day. Kids in books never have enough time! They have an annoying older sibling or cousin, and their prying parents are always getting in their business, but they can only truly appreciate what they have after being caged by elves or eating their way out of King Arthurs roast boar before it is carved for thanksgiving dinner. 

I could be one of those kids in those books, if only I invented a more conventional past for myself. One where I replace the hours of playing ClueFinders and Rock Raiders on the PC with instead taking courses in algebra and cooking, probably, and in this new life I would have had teachers all with different, memorable, and improbable names, and who were not my mom. I could do a correspondence course on “only 90’s Kids” garbage and spout Sponge-robert and Mr. Shrek references and allusions with ease, I could concoct a whole new and more relatable past that greases the wheels of social interaction and doesn’t require half as much explanation. But I won’t,  because I’m not a good enough writer, or student. 

This train of thought all came about because some of my friends got into this stage show where they would stand on a stage in the back of a bar and read their childhood diaries to a crowd, getting laughs and sympathetic cringes, an empathetic experience of shared history between generations, experiences of school and friends and love, to which everyone in the room could relate. And I sat there, once more in a jealous awe, this time not of a lifetime of pseudo-military scout-achievement but of the total lack of cultural capital of which I had to give. I wanted that public approval so badly, to have my life laughed along to or to have someone, just the once, say “Oh yeah, that happened to me too.” 

Part 2. Journal 19. p32-35. Wednesday 15/November/2017

Los Angeles.

Nothing like waking up in the middle of the night and looking in the mirror and and thinking about how much you don’t look like yourself! 

There is nothing more interesting to the perverted and prying mind than someone else’s diary. You can bask in the intrigue and drama of a life totally unrelated to your own while also drawing parallels to the situations of your own life and feeling supreoiur that you handled that version of that experience in your own life so much better, or that you can at least spell “superior” correctly, first go. I would give anything to read the diary of my younger self and find out exactly, in unmediated blue and white, what exactly was going on in the head of that sick horny fuck at any given moment instead of what I’m doing now which is trying to get comfortable in a shed where I’m spending the night and trying to convince myself that the man in the mirror, despite his total lack of resemblance to myself, is not capable of breaking through the glass and accosting me. It has not happened before and I believe it never will, for that man is a coward. 

Unfortunately for posterity I lived in constant fear that my childhood thoughts were dangerous or otherwise too salacious for publication, and if I wrote them down or even thought too loudly they would be transcribed by enemy forces and published, causing me to suffer the worst of all the punishments – public humiliation. Of course, now that I am an adult and a ‘Writer’ I wish that I had at least one BIONICLE slashfic (or Animorphs or ClueFinders) to read in front of an audience and laugh about.

I did keep, for a time, a detailed log where I would at night (during my brief childhood flirtation with Christianity) write before bed. I was all about schedule and routine and as such would follow a close schedule of going up to bed, praying to a pre-conceived script of my own design (generally a request of providence and safety for my father, who travelled, and a wish for some toy I didn’t really want. It always felt false, and like it was missing heart) and then in a specially-designated composition notebook make a list of my day. I cannot find this notebook at present but, from memory, a typical entry would have looked like this: 

woke up

ate breakfast

played LEGOs

ate lunch

watched a movie

prayed

wrote in log

And then either that night or the next morning I would add

went to sleep.

Hundreds of entries, all the same. Well, it felt like hundreds I don’t have the original text in front of me to verify. After writing I would speak aloud the names of all of my toys, 15-20 stuffed animals of various species and gender so that they didn’t think I had forgotten them, and go to sleep. Eventually the monotony of this routine that I had enforced upon myself wore away at me to the point that I drew an illustration of myself being tied to a rocket ship, crying, as it dragged me to a spot I had carefully labeled “Adulthood”. I remember that clearly. It had a real “on the nose” political cartoon vibe. I remember sitting up in bed and sobbing while I explained the situation to my mom, whose head came up to about level with the mattress, suspended in the air as it was. 

I wonder where those notebooks got to, I had three at this time, organized by project, all lined composition notebooks. The first was an unfinished short story combining elements of the magic treehouse series, back to the future, and the LEGO Island ‘Pepper’ character (who was my favorite), the second was the Log, and the third a book of inventions. That was my big career aspiration, to be an inventor. 

My idea was that I, a math-illiterate, ‘artistic’, homeschooled child would revolutionize the world with my inventions, all of which built upon inventions that I already knew about or were totally fictional. The ones I can recall off the top of my head were characteristic but implausible, such as a machine that moulded and produced LEGO bricks (itself composed of LEGO bricks) and a shrink ray so that I could be really small and see the world from a perspective one inch above the ground. For both I diagrammed out all the parts and labelled them like it was a DK book but I provided no clear detail on the actual mechanics of how I would make work such an improbable machine as a shrink ray, but to my young mind that was a question far less important than whether it should have fins or not. If I made the design cool enough, I thought, realization would naturally follow. 

My idea of the profession of ‘inventor’ came entirely from the film “back to the future” and the character of “Doc Brown”  played by comedian and character actor Christopher Lloyd. He is the center of attention at all times (despite not being the main character) and holds us rapt with his zany antics. He progresses the story at a mean clip by presenting the young man (played by Michael J. Fox) whom the story is ostensibly about with the means of traveling through time. This causes a number of problems, as you might imagine. 

I never identified with the boy, the protagonist. He was cool, he lived in the city, he had a beautiful girlfriend, he played the guitar, he rode a skateboard everywhere. I lived a solitary life on a dirt road. Marty McFly (the boy) might as well have been a character in a french drama or an alien for the level of parallel our two lives had with each other. I identified with the Mad Scientist, the inventor, the lonely, intense, sexless old man who in his artist’s garret invents the reason for the film and changes everyones life permanently. So when it occurred to me one day that I would someday need a job, inventor really stuck out to me. I realize that it sounds outlandish, but at the time it seemed no more unreasonable than my friend’s career aspiration of “Marine Biologist” which she chose because she liked the Seward Sea-Life Center and the film Finding Nemo. 

On the surface Lloyd’s character is supposed to be a mad genius, a kind of a god who with lightning strikes the scene and changes it, but on further re-watches, and especially combining information from the opening scene which pans across his shelves and the part in the middle which takes place before he has invented time travel, he is revealed not as man gripped by divine vision but as something of a dilettante wastrel. He has no job, his family has a big house and a lot of money which as time goes by slowly disappears, and he squanders his fortune trying things, making things, pursuing this idea that any half-way decent scientist would recognize as folly. He pursues this vision he set out for himself to the detriment of all else, including sentiment and reason, makes useless shit that people don’t really want, but never has to succumb to the free market because he always has his family money to fall back on, hoping that something works out, that he can make something that people love, that is his, that will succeed with no compromise. And in that respect, I am that. Wasting your family’s money and making art without compromise, alone. If that is a job, it is a job I have achieved.