insane in the membrane
The summer between my eleventh and twelfth years, right around the time the divide between childhood (I'd been rather good at pre-adolescence, I think, and for that reason and plenty others I'd enjoyed it) and my pre-teens (where every day was suddenly supercharged with a brute hostility and often violent sexual longing) was about the width of one of the hairs I was getting in my armpits or on my chest, I retreated into a fantasy world.
It was a terribly lonesome time - too lonesome, too fast: the families of friends I'd grown up with hit the streets leading out of the neighborhood at escape velocity, the ones that stayed stopped speaking the same easy kid speak we had a year before, and the 'rents - who were never really quite there to begin with - when they weren't physically attacking or screaming at one another (or both), had begun ominous chatter about the sorts of summer jobs boys my age had.
I was moving at warp speed from the Goonies to Lucas. So I fled the world around the end of the fifth grade, and more or less stayed away through the eighth.
Much of my rapidly dwindling imagination was spent convincing myself that I was really one of a race of Timelords* , mislaid in some suburban Dullsville with a couple of boring neurotics as parents: the rest of the world was blind to the fact that - when I wasn't running from the neighborhood bullies, who for some strange reason had never been in my orbit before puberty - I was engaged in a running battle with forces of cosmic evil, forces that had just so happened to have chosen a tourist trap on the west coast of Florida as the gateway to invasion on planet Earth.
Nevertheless, it became obvious to me at some point that this was really less a kind of safety zone or personal salvation than just utterly sad and pathetic: regardless of how fucked up it was, life was poised to pass me by, and I had better work to weave my secret life into something a little less childish than a safety blanket. Long story short, I learned to deal, a little bit anyway, though I still (very proudly!) carry a hefty amount of geekiness from those days around with me(that said, I still duck and cover come big dark emotional storm clouds. C'est la vie).
So, WTF? Okay, I write all this to make the point that that way - as a sixth grader with a bad haircut and braces pretending he was an 850-year-old alien - is no way to function, no way to relate to the real world and the kind of things people do, even within the limits and constraints of that time-of-life.
Now, I had a handle on this by about age 13 - truthfully, I only half-believed it only a quarter of the time myself. And granted, I was and am a late starter. And if I had not learned to deal, that person, the person I was, who ran around his neighborhood dodging psychic force beams from the sky, would not have been ready and equipped to handle the responsibilities that - for better or worse - get thrust on you at age 16. And 17. And 18. And so on.
Would you have listened to that person?
Right. So why do we listen to these people? Why do you think it is their invisible psychic force beams get precedence over a lonely sixth grader’s?
*For the geeks in-the-know out there, my fantasy world had a distinctly 6th Doctor-ish feel; and quite coincidentally, my days of kid-dom and the glory days of Doctor Who had begun to end right around the time the States were getting Colin Baker's Doctor, so his all-too-brief tenure as the Doctor has come to represent a somewhat bittersweet period in my life - when even the Doctor was under fire from the squares and bean counters and the blighted world of grown ups.
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