Memories from Childhood

When I was three years old, I stomped up to my room on my sister's birthday because I didn't get a present. This is my first memory, actually. I remember that, as I went up, stomp by stomp, I was trying to look angry at my mom and my dad and my sister through the posts under the railing on the stairs. And I remember it not changing their minds one bit. It was still my sister's birthday, not mine.

We all used to get lemon Italian ice together, but I don't remember where. Sometimes it was watermelon. We biked there and back, wherever it was. It was cloudy.

For vacation, my parents would take us to Martha's Vineyard. We stayed in a pretty nice gray condo that was about a half mile away from a pretty nice beach. The sand there was smooth and warm in the summer. I remember trying to pull my dad underwater in the pool near the condo. He was hairy and fun and I loved him. Trying to drown him was my way of showing that.

At Martha's Vineyard, there's a small candy shop. It's old, so they spell shop "shoppe." I used to get little gummy hamburgers and hot dogs there. I still remember how they tasted. They tasted exactly as you would expect a gummy hamburger or hotdog to taste. I'd also get a few sheets of those dot candies that you had to peel off the paper. I never could get all the paper off some of them, so I ended up eating a lot of paper. I guess that might explain some things.

When I was in fifth grade I accidentally flashed one of my friends. I thought I had covered my "private parts" with a cardboard guitar (and I don't remember why I had a cardboard guitar), but, as my friend told me shortly afterward, I wasn't holding the guitar low enough. I think I was embarrassed, but part of me really wanted him to see me naked.

One night when I was a kid, I dreamt that I was standing in front of the door in my room. I looked up, and the top of the doorframe stretched up and up and up, endlessly. I was terrified, and I woke up.

When I was in second grade, I moved. Up to that point I lived across the street from my best friend. After I moved, we never talked again. He went on to play football. I didn't play football.  We never really said anything to each other; we just stopped having play dates. I didn't really understand why friends just stop being friends, and I still don't.

In fifth grade, I was called to the principal's office for creating an exclusive club and ranking members as higher or lower than each other. We had our own currency, which I made out of Sculpey clay, baked in the oven at home, and then distributed to everyone in the club. I called the club "the Birdy club" for the sole reason that I liked birds. That fateful day, I walked into the principal's office and wept at the terrible words that came out of Mr Benowitz's mouth: "Not at this school." When I got back to class, I was despondent. My friends asked me what happened, and I told them. "The Birdy club is over."

In seventh grade, I was suspended from school for one day for vandalizing a classmate's computer account. I didn't like this boy, so I guessed his password (which was his first name) and then copied and pasted 700 folders onto his desktop, each of which were named, "you suck," and contained another 700 folders with the same name. When I realized this was a bad thing to do, and that there were consequences for doing bad things, I cried like a baby. I learned my lesson and vowed never to get caught vandalizing computer accounts again.

When I was in ninth grade, I was out running with the cross country team in the trails behind the school. All of a sudden one of my teammates starts yelling and screaming, and everyone starts booking it out of the woods onto the soccer field. I have no idea what's going on until I start hearing buzzing, and feeling pain on my legs. Fucking bees. I got stung four times. My brother got stung about ten times. The worst was about 20. Fucking bees.

I went to high school prom with a date four years in a row. The first year was with my sister's friend. It was one of those arranged marriage type deals, and we didn't talk much. I just wanted to go to prom. Second year I took my best friend. We both wore pink. We later dated, broke up, and never spoke again. Third year, I took a girl in my class I didn't even know but who didn't have a date. We split shortly after arriving. Fourth year I took my then-girlfriend Sophie. We wore olive green because she thought it matched my eyes, and we took lots of cute photos in her parents' house, which always smelled like her dog, who is now peacefully dead, like our relationship.

In my second year of college I lost my virginity in room 806 in Larson Hall on a mattress under a dark red blanket. The mattress lay on the floor under a lofted bed frame that belonged to one of her roommates, both of whom were studying abroad for the month. This was one week after we watched Wings of Desire, the most boring movie I have ever seen, hands-down, period. I recommend it.

Today I played air-guitar to my favorite songs on the Green Line and did dead hangs from the metal bars that run across the ceilings of the train cars. There were so many times when I wanted to take out my ear buds and introduce myself to the pretty ladies on the train, but I decided that I much preferred my own company to theirs. So I spent the remainder of my caffeine high looking out at the world through the windows on the train, watching it whiz by at unnatural speeds, smearing my fingerprints all over the glass.

---

If you liked this post, check out some of my other recent posts:

• I can't watch TV
• Everything happened right
• My ass glowing in spandex, plus death
• This weekend
• I don't believe in love

Thanks for being you.

Everything Happened Right

I look back on my 23 little years of existence on this planet, and I am utterly awestruck. Putting all the uncertainties and daily stresses aside, and all the hurt that comes and goes, and the unanswerable questions that I could wrestle with for the rest of my life...there's this core of light that remains. That core is the tiny tiny lightbulb of my awareness that for 23 years has told an evolving, changing story.

And it has been an amazing story.

I grew up in the Christian Church and loved Jesus from age 13 to age 20. During that time I lived the life of a teenage boy, complete with its hormonal ups and downs, social trial by fire, and all of its anxieties and depressions. I ran Cross Country, was a leader for my class, made friends, lost friends, and then, after what seemed like a lifetime, graduated, went to college, and entered the next unknown.

In college I stopped loving Jesus. Jesus became an obstacle between me and my true self, so I pushed him out of the way, made my way to the edge of the cliff of despair (High Horse Cliff), and jumped, hoping I would land somewhere on the soft, grassy knoll between Daoism, Humanism, and Nihilism---a space I, for lack of a better name, like to call Davidism.

(Read more about Davidism here.)

(Or here.)

(Or.... here.)

While I was falling from High Horse Cliff I saw all sorts of spirits. Some were terrible and told me that life was meaningless and that there was no point in going on. Some chastised me and told me I was bad and evil for pushing Jesus away, and they taunted me from a high cliff face to which I could never ascend. Some were kind, though, and said nothing. They held me in warm, soft hands and pulled me close, cooling the chill of the wind with the fire of their breath. When I did eventually land, I kissed each of these kind spirits goodbye, and I knelt down and pressed my hands into the dirt, warmed by the sun.

This is home, I said.

I've fallen in love with the air here. The earth is firm and forgiving and goes down and down onto an endless bedrock, and water gushes from the openings in its mantle. Cool streams flow into placid lakes, and I wander their edges and hold hands with the sun while it dances across the sky. From time to time the sounds of music touch my ears, and I'm reminded of the spirits who loved me while I floated down from "Heaven." Always I will remember how they breathed their love on me, and one day I will become a spirit, too, and breathe my love on someone as she falls from grace.