TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
I've debated with the idea of publishing a sort of life story about my upbringing and influences in my life. I fear it comes across as overly self-indulgent, but I guess this whole site really is when you get down to it. I have received positive feedback when I've written about my personal history before, so I would like to talk a little more about what experiences have shaped me the most.
Rather than adhering to a strict chronology, I tried to more or less take a theme for each "chapter" and talk about its broad influence throughout my life. Is this the most "objective" fashion of narrating the story of my life? Probably not. The story we tell ourselves and others about our lives is always somewhat flavored and tinted by our own concerns and moods. But all great history writing, either from the first or second person perspective, must be so. I would like to say, then, that this may not be the most "objective" life story I could have written, but it is certainly the most honest.
I also will make the concession here and here alone that this is the story of a quite fortunate person, probably among the most fortunate 10% of all humanity, at the very lesat. The "sorrows" and "struggles" I narrate here are ones that most of the world would kill to be their everyday. It will seem whiny and entitled to most. But it would be dishonest not to narrate it as I felt and experienced it. I can't tell the story of people who have suffered more than me, but I never forget that they exist. May the whole world come to know the love that I have experienced and the wisdom I have come into contact with. All names of people that I know are changed.
I was born on July 18th in 1994. It was a Monday. These are some things that were going on in the world during the month in which I was born:
＊Signs of global heating were already apparent as uncommonly high temperatures were recorded in Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
＊The Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 ended its life by being broken into chunks, each of which violently collided with the planet Jupiter. It was the first collision of extraterrestrial objects in the Solar System to be directly observed.
＊The Tutsi genocide in Rwanda entered its closing stages as the interim government was driven out into Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) by the Rwandan Patriotic Front.
＊The deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history occurred when a suicide bomber believed to be associated with Hezbollah drove a truck full of ammonium nitrate into a Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires and killed 86 people.
＊Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Il-sung, died and followed the common commie path of having his embalmed body put on public display.
＊Future dictator and Russian puppet Alexander Lukashenko was inaugurated as the first, and to this day only, "president" of Belarus.
＊Jordan and Israel signed the Washington Declaration, a peace treaty putting an end to 46 years of officially being at war.
＊A small online bookseller called Amazon.com was founded by a then-unknown supervillain named Jeff Bezos in his garage in Bellevue, Washington. His humble site would mutate into one of the most evil and destructive monopolies in history.
＊Most Americans were more concerned with a news cycle dominated by O.J. Simpson and Tonya Harding than any of the above.
＊Some notable albums released included Chocolate Synthesizer by Boredoms, Volume 16: 4 Da Summer of '94 by DJ Paul, Riding Our Black Oceans by Cenotaph, and Another Thought by Arthur Russell.
＊Notable films released included High School II by Frederick Wiseman and Chungking Express by Wong Kar-wai.
These are the circumstances into which I entered the world. I was born in a decently large town south of the Mason-Dixon line. My Zodiac sign is a Cancer and I was born in the Year of the Dog, for whatever that's worth. I am an only child, but my extended family is quite large. My father is the middle child of three children and my mother the second-youngest of six. Altogether I had nine older cousins already when I was born, and two more followed after me for a total of eleven. I'm an Amerimutt through and through and think it's cringe when Americans pretend to be connected to such vague European origins, but for what it's worth my family is of primarily Welsh and French stock. My hair is brown now but used to be closer to a dirty blonde when I was younger.
One thing I'm very thankful for, which I always feel the need to emphasize my gratitude for, is that my parents had the spine to leave me uncircumcised as a baby, recognizing that this "common" American practice is actually very unusual in the rest of the secular world, and is actually seen as a serious form of child abuse by many, not too different from the female genital mutilation that only "those savages" in Africa do. This is my view today and it has been for a long time. I've heard different reasons for why circumcision became so widespread in the US. I thought it might have something to do with the influence of all our weird, backwoods, fundamentalist Christian movements, just like snake-handling and any other number of kooky literalist beliefs. This may have very much had something to do with it. I have even heard that this was occasionally paired with the sadistic, puritanical instinct to limit sexual pleasure and thereby prevent "perversity," because US Christian fundamentalists are some of the most evil people in the world.
However, based on what I can tell it actually seems like the main reason was bogus medical research suggesting that it was more hygienic or helped prevent venereal diseases. So it may bet the case that it is more of a remnant of America's sketchy eugenicist period of forced medical experiments and that these religious beliefs were more of a compounding factor. In any case, it took a lot of guts for my parents not to give into peer pressure and not perform the cruel act that would have left me mutilated for life. My two male cousins also were uncut, which helped me not feel "weird" or "different." My dad always told me that if anyone made fun of me for it, I should just tell them that it feels bigger to a girl if it's uncut. That was some grade-A parenting!
I have some scattered memories in my hometown from my first few years. It sounds silly, but my real earliest memory is after I'd just taken a dump in the driveway of my family's first home because I didn't have a diaper and watching my parents discover my turd. But my earliest and clearest memories are from a few years where my family lived in Kansas. Most of them are related to one thing and that is the snow. We lived in a town that got real, decent winters with appreciable snowfall. At least it did back then. My hometown, by contrast, was in a very warm and sunny part of the US that even back then never had particularly strong winters. You're lucky to see snow a day or two of the year there, if at all. As a child I loved the snow and the cold. As an adult, I still do. Unfortunately, I still live in a part of the US that is far too warm for my liking. Someday I dream of escaping far up north...
One of my earliest memories is very dear to me. I remember waking up early one winter morning after a bunch of fresh snow had fallen. My mom helped me get a bowl from the kitchen, walk out into the yard, and find a clean, undisturbed patch of snow. I scooped up the snow into the bowl and brought it back into the kitchen. Then we sprinkled the snow with a coat of sugar and made a kind of "snow ice cream." My mom would later inform me that this was in fact a tradition in her family that she had learned. When she was a young girl, my hometown was still warm more than often but had more common snowfall than it did when I was a child. And my grandmother taught her to make the same concoction when it did happen to snow there. This tradition was then passed on to me. I plan to do the same if I have a child and there is still snow around us.
Eventually, we left Kansas and returned to my home state. Most of my friends were there, and culturally it was a far more invigorating and active place. But I missed seeing snow in the winter sincerely. The winter has always been my favorite season. It's hard to describe why exactly. I suppose the first thing I think of is the quiet and stillness. There is something deeply tranquil about how the very earth itself seems to be slumbering over the winter. It's very conducive to contemplative and meditative attitudes. I've always been an indoors person, and it lso never feels better to be indoors than when you're looking out over a frigid landscape.
Of course, this is what I think as an adult. As a child, I was much more interested in sledding, tubing, and building snowmen. One of my fondest memories is of sledding down a certain hill in the town park and intentionally crashing into these bushes over and over again. I must have looked stupid as hell. But I just thought it was the funniest shit in the world to constantly careen into those bushes and have an epic wipeout. I'm probably lucky that I never poked my eye out with one of the branches, haha. I remember being inside those bushes and looking at the latticework of the branches, just marvelling at the patterns of nature.
Even outside of Kansas, I never stopped loving the cold and the snow and dreaming about returning to it someday. Eventually I would encounter the phrase "global warming" and hear mutterings about scientific consensus that the world's termperatures were increasing due to the burning of fossil fuels. The idea of this horrified me as a child. Most of the alarm back then was pretty hyperfocused on rising sea levels. This is for good reason, of course, but for me this all blew past what to my child's mind was the most important thing: What would become of the frigid, snowy winters that I longed for? How fast was the clock ticking on how much longer I could get out of my hometown and experience them? I felt a severe, paralyzing sense of anxiety and dread about the future even as a child when confronted with this knowledge. I didn't pray or believe in prayer back then, but I often felt myself begging "Please, please, let the grown-ups figure this one out."
There was a lot of misinformation and propaganda deceitfully drawn out back then as much as there is now. But I was shrewd. Even if there was a miniscule chance, I thought that this had to be the most important thing to be concerned about. And I desperately wanted it not to be true. I would have been ecstatic to learn that there was no global warming. But I learned to parse through misinformation, deceptive arguments, and deflection tactics. I felt disgusted and afraid every time I saw a car or a gas station. I hated having to take a car and I hated living in a city whose urban planning and infrastructure was totally car-focused. I was lucky enough to live in a neighborhood that was above average in terms of walkability, even if nothing like the average European city or probably even somewhere like New York City or Boston.
Of course my parents were concerned about the effect this had on me. But they were also informed and aware. They did not lie to me about it. But they did encourage me to not spend my time being paralyzed with fear about it. When I look back, I wish that my family and me had done more. We tried to carpool. We tried to buy local produce. We made every effort to reduce, reuse, and recycle. But I feel like it was never enough. At the same time, I do think my parents were wise. If I do have children, I will also not want them to spend every day agonized and afraid over the fate of the planet. I would want them to take the opposite message: To cherish the beauty of nature even more than ever. And I am happy to say that I believe my parents have instilled this in me. When I grew up I had no patience for anyone who complained about the cold or the snow. Yes, I have driven in the snow and shoveled a driveway. I know it's not all fun and games! But I always saw people who complain about the cold as spoiled and deluded. They will not know how much they miss it until it's gone...
Some part of me used to feel an acute sense of anger and jealousy over people in times past. "How fortunate they were to live in an era where they could take the beauty and splendor of nature, at the very least, for a given!" But I have come to realize that this pattern of thought is not just conducive to nothing but fostering hatred and resent, but is a flat-out delusion. My parents were born when DDT was decimating bird populations. They spent their young adult years afraid of incidents like the meltdowns at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Their parents were born at a time when American bison were on the verge of extinction. And so on. Was there ever a time where man lived in a garden of Eden and avoided the corruption and despoilation of nature? I can see none. The emergence of modern homo sapiens was one side of the same coin of the mass extinction of megafauna. We began as a species by disrupting the order of things.
Don't get me wrong. I don't put that message out to encourage apathy and inaction about the ecological war crimes of many of the most powerful governments and corporations on earth today. What I want to say is that I have realized that in some sense, my longing for the snow and the cold is an expression of the very human tendency to always think that the grass is greener on the other side. In traveling to cold, frigid climates, I constantly met people who loved and fantasized about living in some tropical beach climate! And of course they would. We instinctively cherish and cling to what is rare and uncommon. I have been fortunate enough to live, for brief periods at least, in places with snowy winters. While I loved the weather and landscape, I must admit that this alone did not make me fully happy. A lot of the time I was simply beset with the feeling that "As cold as this is, it used to be much colder! And it will only get warmer! What's the point of it all?" I felt that I could be living in the coldest place on earth and still only feel regret that I was not born sooner.
It seems then that I would always be longing for some greater time that I was just born too late for. It was only after a thorough intellectual understanding and felt experience of Shintou and Daoist teachings, especially as funnelled through who I see as the westerner born with the most eastern soul, Martin Heidegger, and the Four Noble Truths as funnelled through Śākyamuni Buddha that I came to realize what a more accurate assessment of my relationship to the natural world should be. These same teachings would similarly help me navigate my way through a great deal of my other neuroses and complexes.
After returning from Kansas and being torn away from the snow, I entered first grade in my hometown. My memories there are scattered but mostly pleasant.
One day I was working on an art project where we were gluing various things together. I don't know if it was a picture, a sculpture, or whatever else, but I had a big tub of beads. I took one of those beads, which was golden-colored, and started rolling it around my face for fun. I pretended that the bead was some kind of alien probe landing on a planet with mysterious terrain (my cheeks and face). Eventually the bead came across a "cave" which was my nostril. I started putting the bead up my nostril and got it in far enough that I couldn't get it out again. I calmly went up to a teacher and apparently said "I have a golden bead in my nose!" Then I was taken to the nurse and they pushed it out. I think they had to call my parents about it. This story makes me sound like a fucking retard when I write it out, lmao. But I was like five, what do you expect?
I took part in a school play about the story of Thanksgiving and the pilgrims, as many kids did at the time. I wanted to be the narrator and instead of acting out any particular "role." I remember greatly enjoying the feeling of being "above" and "removed from" everything and perhaps I can trace this back to a tendency I've always had towards wanting to step back and look at my existence and others from a "higher" and more reflective place. It's one reason that even writing an autobiography like this is therapeutic and helpful for me.
I had a number of friends at who I hung out with at school but never really saw outside of there. One of the ones I remember most was a ginger girl named Megan. Me and her both loved insects and would spend much of our break time out in the garden and playground digging through the dirt and looking for earthworms, ladybugs, pill bugs (we called them roly-polies... and apparently they're actually crustaceans and not insects), or whatever else we could find. I'm not sure how much of it is just rose-tinted glasses but I remember there being many more insects in the city when I was a child than there are now. Another thing you can thank city pollution and global heating for. Anyway, Megan was a weird girl and a little manic. A friend of mine from this school who I later met again when we were teenagers confirmed that she thought Megan was "crazy."
I only went to have a playdate with Megan once, and it felt a little awkward and weird to me as a kid. Her house was two stories and I remember it being very spacious and vast, but that's probably just me being a kid. When I arrived, she was busy cleaning her room or something and her mom invited me to sit on the couch and wait. I passed the time looking through a coffee table book with artsy black and white photographs of seashells. When Megan was finally ready, we went upstairs to her room. She had rented the VHS of Rugrats in Paris: The Movie and invited me to watch it. However, she said it had an evil lady in it who abducted the main kids, skinned them, and wore their skin. That sounded creepy to me and I passed. Did she just make it up to scare me or did she have some lost-episode creepypasta version of it with hyperrealistic bloodshot eyes? We may never know.
Another kid who I had vivid memories of was named Colton. Now, Colton was a year or so younger than me at least, maybe even more. In any case, he behaved like it. I don't think Colton was quite ready for school. Nowadays, maybe he would have been put in a special ed program. To put it bluntly, Colton was a little shit. But he made me laugh and I liked playing with him. That said, he didn't treat me with the same kindness. He would get angry quickly and sometimes would bite my arm when he was frustrated. He also liked to taunt me sometimes. I remember him talking about monster trucks and saying "I'm going to ride in one and crush your mom's car!" Of course I wasn't stupid and it's not like I really believed he would, but I realized that he was saying something rude to me and that bothered me. My parents urged me to stop hanging out with him because I was becoming too upset by his mean behavior. But I've always been attracted to and interested in weirdos and outsiders, sometimes to my own detriment. Sometimes it meant I would do something nice, like trying to be good friends with and including the girl with a developmental disability in our class when playing (my parents tell me I did this, but I don't remember). On the other hand, sometimes it meant I would have much more patience than I should have for people like Colton.
But eventually, Colton's reckoning came. I remember one day he was out on the playground and started showing me his penis. He then said "I'm gonna pee out here in front of everyone! Let's do it together!" I tried to get him to stop and refused to join because I knew this was a bad, bad idea. So I just removed myself and stood apart, watching it unfold. The next events felt like they happened in slow motion: he pulled out his wiener and took a big piss near a bunch of kids, waving it around and laughing. Some teachers started running over in a panic and dragged him off. He would be expelled for this (apparently it was a kind of last straw as they had known he wasn't really ready to be in school yet). I just sat there thinking "I was friends with this kid? What the hell was wrong with me?" I didn't really miss him after he was gone.
The school was more oriented around "activities" than distinct "classes." But we did have a few special "classes" where we moved to a new area, namely PE, music, and art. I LOVED drawing as a kid and spent a ton of my free time doodling all kinds of stuff. So you might think that art class was my favorite, but it was actually the exact opposite. In art class, we had to have some kind of direction to our process, and that made me frustrated. I hated being constrained and just wanted to draw freely whatever I wanted. The best part of art class was the last five minutes or so where we could draw whatever we wanted. I remember that art class was on Monday and after art class we lined up to move to the next area. I looked back at the art room and thought to myself "This is the best part of my entire week, because I just finished art class, so now this moment is the furthest I am from having to go back!" Pretty harsh, lol.
One of the last memories I have of first grade is September 11, 2001. I was at school when it happened and there was a big panic. They sent us all home early because no one knew if there were more attacks coming in other major cities or not. I had no clue what was going on, of course. I just remember eating my packed lunch at home watching cartoon reruns while my mom was bothered in the other room. It was probably for the best that they waited to explain what was going on after the fact. One of the things I most remember being struck by was a certain dedication in a newspaper, I think from the one year anniversary on 2002/09/11, that had the names of all 2,996 victims in alphabetical order. The idea of that many people dying was hard for a small child like me to get my head around.
You might notice that I keep saying "first grade" instead of "elementary school." There's a reason for that. When I entered the second grade, I started having some serious problems. According to my parents, I had a lot of ASD-like symptoms. I was never officially diagnosed with autism or Aspergers and to be honest I'm not sure where I am on the spectrum, if anywhere. But at that age I had serious problems in large groups and switching from one activity to another. From my perspective, I remember suddenly feeling completely in over my head and unable to keep up. I remember looking at a math worksheet and realizing that I had no idea how to do anything on it. I gave up in despair and started drawing random faces after scratching out all the problems, feeling guilty but also hopeless to change my situation since I had fallen so far behind. I felt something similar for a reading exercise. We had these little workbooks divided into sections with a themed paragraph and then a few questions. I remember I had flipped ahead and saw one about a rover on the moon or Mars or something like that. I was really curious about it and looked forward to reading it, but on the day I finally got there I felt horrible because even this one I was interested in I was unable to understand and had to give up. It was crushing.
After a discussion with the school counselors, my parents considered two options: medication or homeschooling. First we tried medication, but I had some really bad side effects and this made my parents decide to stop. I was first on Ritalin, and while it helped my attention span, it also completely killed my appetite and made me start getting way too thin. Next I went on Zoloft, and that made me unnaturally, unusually giddy and manic. I remember camping outside in the backyard in a tent when I was on Zoloft because I was too excited and wanted to try something different from sleeping in my bed. My parents were rightfully disturbed by these side effects and decided that I was too young to be on medication. This meant that they had to consider the other option, which they ultimately went with. Between 2nd grade of elementary school and 7th grade of middle school, I was homeschooled.
Being homeschooled has advantages and disadvantages. But on the whole, I think my parents made a decision which helped me in ways I can only now appreciate. First and foremost, I should make it clear that my parents are very non-religious. I will talk a bit more about the role of religion in my life later on, but I should at least make it clear that I was not the stereotypical image of a homeschooler who was part of crazy right-wing fundamentalist Christian families who refuse to teach them evolution or stuff like that. Those certainly exist. But the other side of homeschooling families is often families of far-left granola hippie types. My family was much closer to this end and these were most of the other homeschooling families who we networked with and engaged with (homeschooled families usually join broader groups so their kids can still partake in social events).
What are the advantages of homeschooling? It depends a lot on the country you are in. Of course, for kids with conditions like autism it is often the only way to effectively have them learn. But even for neurotypical children, homeschooling has a lot of advantages. I think that kids who are homeschooled also become less easily manipulated by peer pressure and become more skeptical, shrewd thinkers as a result, often with conviction and confidence for things like group discussions and meetings in the future. And as incidents of bullying are rarer, homeschooled kids usually become kinder and gentler people. Also, for a historical perspective, it's worth remembering that for the vast majority of human history "homeschooling" has been the norm. The public school is a very recent invention. Not that the fact that it's been the norm for so long inherently means it's good, but this is evidence at least that it's not something totally out there and untested.
However, there are some disadvantages to homeschooling that I do want to mention in the interest of fairness. First and foremost, it is very difficult to teach a child everything at the same level as a school if you are just one person. You can meme about American public education if you want, but almost everyone has at least one subject that they could almost certainly not teach as well as even an average American public school teacher. I, for example, was very bad at math and remain so because my mother had so much trouble teaching it. You can hire tutors and hopefully rely on other external resources for that kind of thing, but there might always be pitfalls like this. From a social perspective, homeschooling can be lonely and isolating. My case was exacerbated as I was an only child. While ideally homeschoolers should be involved in groups with other homeschoolers that allow them to have some social interaction and meet more kids, it's pretty much always a much smaller pool. You don't have the larger selection of a "normal" school and thus are less likely to find someone you really click well with. And when there aren't new kids constantly entering, graduating, moving in, etc. it can leave you with only the same friends for years. Not that that's inherently bad, but I think it probably contributed to me having a harder time making new friends. Of course that's something we all struggle with as we get older, but homeschooling can add to this.
Homeschooling in some sense isolates you from the broader cultural world. This is sort of a double-edged sword, since mainstream culture is a cancer on society in pretty much every country. However, it can lead to some kind of traumatic transitions, as all homeschooled kids eventually have to enter a university and/or get a job. Those are probably served better by "normal" schools. Although most of that could be fixed by making our universities and jobs better, in the meantime it can leave homeschooled kids with an unfairly harder transition. Lastly, the biggest problem I had with homeschooling and why I was glad to eventually stop it is that I really found it hard to go from "parent mode" to "teacher mode" and back again with my mother. I found it much more psychologically comforting and manageable to have a "teacher" who was only at school and removed from my private life. Being able to compartmentalize "school stuff" and "private stuff" made things much less stressful and much more clear to me. Children need a lot of structure like this. With all that said, I am very thankful that I got to experience both worlds. In my earlier, more formative years, I was homeschooled. In my later, more mature years, I went to a "normal" school (it was a private school which was pretty unique in its own way, but it was indeed a school). I can nitpick problems it created but overall I would not change a thing about the education I received.
Being homeschooled was often quite lonely. But I was not alone. I had a pretty sizeable friend group, mostly made up of the children of my mother's friends. My mother is pretty extroverted and has a number of connections with artistic types in our city. Many of her friends also homeschooled their children around the same time, so we had lots of opportunities to hang out together. The most important figures from this cast of characters are the following:
Maxwell: One of my earliest friends, even from back when I was in first grade. Also the sole member of this group who was never homeschooled. Maybe the most "normal" of this group. Tall and lanky. Sensitive and emotional by nature, but clearly sociable and able to roll with the punches. An incorrigibly free spirit who loved playing music and having fun. His parents were divorced. His mother was an artsy type in the same circles as my mother, and her boyfriend was an artsy guy from Turkey. His father was an Italian-American with that kind of outspoken, brash, east coast style but was a great dad all the same.
Daniel: The most acerbic and sharp-tongued of the group, but also very intelligent, funny, and passionate. Had long, wavy black hair that went about halfway down his back. (My hair was also this long at this age, by the way.) Out of all the members of this group, he seemed to be the one who was most curious about the outer world and had the most forthright opinions about it, and for that reason the two of us really clicked in a special way. We were intellectual types, I guess. His family was Jewish on his father's side. They were a quite liberal and secular family (one of those with a Christmas tree next to the minorah), but they did have their rituals that were important. The extent that I experienced this was always putting on the guest yarmulke and doing my best to chant along with the prayer when I ate dinner at their house (although I never learned more than "Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu...") and going to Daniel's bar mitzvah. His mom was in the same artistic circles as my mom (and made the best mashed potatoes!). His dad was a computer science guy and so Daniel taught me a lot about computers. The only member of this friend group who was not an only child.
Levi: Daniel's younger brother. A bit too young to really be as close of a friend to me as Daniel, but he usually tagged along, even if he often ended up wandering off on his own. He was the kind of kid who could just play in a field for an hour imagining he was a wizard or something. Also had long, wavy hair like his brother, but his was a light brown.
Ida: The sole girl of the group, but not really a "tomboy" even though most of her closest friends were boys. She was always in jeans and t-shirts instead of frilly dresses or anything girly like that, but she was unmistakably feminine all the same. She was a ballerina and went to intensive ballet classes since she was very young. She was like a sister to me, so I never really was able to look at her "as a woman," but I can say that anyone could tell that she was a beautiful girl. She was of nordic ancestry with light blonde hair (always in a bun) and piercing blue eyes. She had a very cute, gentle smile and a nice round face. Her body was what you expect of a ballerina: petite, svelte, and limber. Her mother had similar features and was another artsy type in my mother's circle (seeing a trend here?). Her parents were divorced and I never met her dad, who I believe was a military guy.
Riley: Oldest member of the group who was a few years older than the rest of us and thus was often the kind of "parent" or "guardian" of the group when required. A huge nerd who showed us most of the cool shit when it came to computers, the internet, and so on. Just a really solid dude who could get on with just about anyone and find a way to be personable with them on their level. Appearance-wise he was a really big guy with ruddy hair, a scraggly pube-beard (eventually), square glasses, and usually some kind of baseball cap. He lived near some woods and train tracks in kind of a rougher part of town. You'll never guess it but his mother was an artsy type who was an old college friend of my mom! Although I think she was on disability for something or other and had some problems that kept her from being as involved in that world as the other parents. She was divorced and I never met or knew anything about Riley's father.
These friends were, then, a natural part of the social circle my parents had that already existed. In a sense, they were not friends I had to go out and make for myself but ones I was brought up with, much like an extended family. We all lived fairly close to each other, but this was still an American city with fucked up infrastructure and poor public transit, so the only one who was really in walking distance from me was Daniel and Riley's house. My parents would have to drive otherwise. I went to their house all the time though. In fact, that would be the place we met and hung out more than anywhere else. Riley might as well have been a third child in Daniel and Levi's house because of how much time he spent over there.
With Maxwell being the only one of us who wasn't homeschooled, we had a lot of free reign. It was a pretty amazing upbringing, all things considered. The homeschooled boys especially had a lot of freedom and autonomy because of our parents' beliefs about child-rearing. I say "homeschooled boys" because the two whose parents were comparatively a little more strict or concerned were Maxwell's and Ida's. Now, Ida's male friends were like family to her mother, especially me. So it wasn't an issue of her not trusting us or anything, even if of course a mother of a single daughter has to be protective sometimes. Ida's mother was just pretty intense in any case. Though it was in a good way. She had high expectations for her daughter and for me as her friend, although she never held those high expectations without a copious amount of praise and support along with them.
One of the other important figures at this time was an art class that many of us homeschooled kids went to. It was at a local community center in the neighborhood, within walking distance from me and Daniel's families. The class was taught by one of the family friends I'd been most fortunate to know: a lovely, lively older lady named Miriam who was born and raised in Israel. She had a very storied life. Her husband was an equally interesting character: a very genteel old chap who was born and raised in South Africa and had been involved in the anti-Apartheid movement in his youth. The two had lived in Paris in the 1960s, which was of course quite a place to be. She told me many amazing stories. Apparently she once ran into Alain Delon (literally!) in bumper cars at a carnival and was quite star-struck. The two were also friends with a couple from Japan who had similarly emigrated to Paris, the female of whom apparently left a traditional life as a geisha. Miriam and her husband also had lived in Trinidad and Tobago and a few other places in South America for an extended time. They had assembled many art pieces and artifacts and it seemed like every object in their house had an amazing history behind it. Although their house still felt quite unassuming and tidy, never gaudy or cluttered.
Miriam was an artist in what I would call an expressionist style, similar to Picasso but usually focused on highly abstracted nude female figures with a lot of bright colors. She taught a number of classes and one of them was for homeschooled children in particular on Thursday mornings. It was one of my greatest opportunities for socializing, and Miriam was an amazing teacher, storyteller, and bearer of wisdom. And she was an incredible cook on top of it! Her homemade couscous was delicious, but my favorite of her specialties was her deviled eggs with a small slice of anchovy on top. It's hard to put into words how many peoples' lives she changed and made brighter. She often felt more like a grandma to me than my own grandmother. She died in 2021 and I miss her quite a lot. There was a huge playground outside of the community center as well, and it was a big social space for us kids. I was always a little withdrawn though and didn't necessarily partake in games of tag or hide and seek and the like. I was usually alone on the swingset or playing with twigs in the corner or something, even if Daniel and the others were more likely to join in.
One thing about my time as a child set me greatly apart from other kids my same age. I was uniquely sensitive to and aware of the fact that I had "childish" interests. Without coming across as self-important, I do think I can say that I was mature for my age. I could have conversations with adults on a level that a lot of other kids my age could not, and was often seen as a smart and precocious child. But I would at the same time be deathly afraid of doing things like watching cartoons in front of adults. I suppose having some awareness of what was "adult" and "mature" early on also made me aware of the cartoons I watched as the opposite of that: "childish" and "immature". Being an only child and being homeschooled of course kept me in this sort of mindset as I was very often the most "childish" one in the room.
I did love many "childish" things, of course. But I had to do so in secrecy. Indeed, I spent a lot of my free time watching Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network and it was probably the closest connection I had to whatever was the "mainstream" of other kids my age. I could watch them in front of my parents, because I wasn't afraid that they would judge me negatively for it. But if an adult that wasn't one of my parents came into the room, I had to turn the TV off immediately. I just felt like they would think I was a baby and stupid if they saw it. And I understood that these cartoons were very much "not for them" so I didn't want to bother them by forcing them to be in the same room as my childish shows. I know this is very unusual so I'm not sure why it was so strong for me. Even at my friends' houses, I had to run out of the room if we were watching a cartoon and his parents came in. They thought I was very weird because of it.
Around my parents, I could watch cartoons. And they often enjoyed watching them with me, so I'm not sure why I thought other adults would be any different. But during the theme songs or any other musical number, I had to turn it off. I was very very strongly embarrassed by listening to music, dancing, etc. around adults or even other kids my own age. I never allowed myself to listen to any music around other people besides very obviously "adult" things like classical symphonies etc. until I was in high school. I suppose I saw it as an extension of the "childish" phenomenon and didn't want to appear immature, so I had to take on a very somber and serious comportment around everyone who was an adult so they would keep respecting me for my maturity.
Ironically, this entire mindset was a prototypically childish one to have. My idea of what made something "adult" was basically a child's caricature: It had to be boring and serious and dour. The less fun it was, the more "mature" it was! And this ideology was as half-baked and riddled with contradictions and exceptions as you could expect from a child. Why, for example, was I never embarrassed dressing up and trick or treating on Halloween? Quite to the contrary. It was my favorite holiday. Why was I not embarrassed at reading comic strips? I suppose I thought if I was "reading" them, then that was more "mature" than just watching a cartoon, but it's not like I was reading Charles Dickens. Why was not I not embarrassed at playing computer games, which we had a few of? I suppose I thought it was because computers were more like an "adult" thing and less like a "toy", but for that matter I was actually not embarrassed playing with toys like stuffed animals at all! I can't answer any of these questions now, because I can no longer understand that mindset. In any case, it is unfortunate that I thought this way as a kid. In a lot of ways, I missed out on a lot of childhood because of it. It's one reason I put so much emphasis on enjoying "childish" hobbies like anime and video games today. Maybe an element of it is "nostalgia," but I can't say that calling it a kind of Peter Pan syndrome is strictly accurate. Am I avoiding growing up? No, I would say I'm going in reverse since I forced myself to grow up prematurely. Call that a cope if you want but that's how I see it.
I should sketch out a few of the pieces of media from this time, "childish" or not, that I remember the most strongly. When I lived in Kansas, we were very close to our neighbors. We stayed in touch even after leaving Kansas, but I think the last time we talked was over social media when I was still using it around the age of 15 or 16. They had a very distinctive last name that makes them hard to forget. The father of that family was a firefighter and he had two children: a girl a few years older than me named Ruby and a son named Jordan who was an infant at the time we were living next to them. It might seem cliche to say that Ruby was like an older sister to me, but she was exactly that. We were always playing together. I remember some room they had with a ton of great toys. In my memories it was the size of a massive warehouse. In reality it was probably the size of a garage.
My fondest memories with Ruby are her sharing her big collection of newspaper comic anthologies. She had all the greats: Peanuts, Ziggy, and the two most important for me: Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side. Actually, I'm not sure if The Far Side was something I learned about from her or from my parents and family, but those were the two comics I loved most as a kid. I learned to read by reading those. Of course I had picture books like those by Richard Scarry and Shel Silverstein, but these comics were a step above in moving towards independent literacy. I remember many cozy days with Ruby's comic anthologies spread all over the floor, maybe in front of the fireplace on cold days. Calvin and Hobbes is of course a masterpiece of a strip and is still something I read to stay sane and access some very warm feelings whenever I feel particularly down. Although I did and still do feel quite melancholy reading the winter strips and realizing that I was separated from places with real, snowy winters. I constantly tried to make my own comic strips too, of course. A lot of the time I would just copy the exact dialogue/etc. but with my own characters (and sometimes ones which were pretty obvious rip-offs), haha. I think a lot of kids do stuff like that. It's a cheap way of pretending you're as creative as the original material!
As embarrassed as I was about watching cartoons, I did watch them all the time. What did I watch? Typical stuff. Me and Maxwell watched a ton of Tom and Jerry. I loved Wallace and Gromit and a lot of the old Warner Bros. cartoons too. I was never that into Disney except for Winnie the Pooh. I otherwise watched all the standards on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon: Rugrats, Rocko's Modern Life, The Amanda Show, Hey Arnold!, Johnny Bravo, Dexter's Laboratory, The PowerPuff Girls, Ed, Edd, and Eddy, etc. I was never a fan of superhero capeshit shows at the time or many action-oriented shows. I never watched a lot of anime back then either, because I didn't have patience for shows like Dragon Ball Z or other shows that weren't just comedies. I liked Sailor Moon (because of cute girls), but never caught it much.
I felt less embarrassed watching cartoons like this with my cousins, even if I still had to temper my enthusiasm to appear mature. I remember one evening in particular where I was sprawled on my family's chaise lounge with my two older male cousins Kevin and Tanner. It was the first time I watched what would become my favorite childrens' cartoon: Courage the Cowardly Dog. It was the King Ramsey episode and the one where Eustace's foot grows into a huge fungal monstrosity. A lot of kids say that this show scared or traumatized them as a kid, but it never had that effect on me. I recognized the weird, creepy feeling but that was precisely what was so enticing about it. Though it had its moments, Courage was never the funniest show, even as a kid. If I wanted to laugh, I knew that I was much better off with SpongeBob SquarePants or Ed, Edd, and Eddy for example. But I loved how imaginative and creative every episode was and the often eerie, surreal, and mysterious mood the whole show was steeped in.
I can watch it today and of course it looks a bit less impressive, but I still attach a great degree of nostalgia to it for that reason. I even remember watching the final episode of the series, "Perfect", and somehow knew it was the final one. I think they might have announced it as such. Or maybe it just felt so final that I somehow intuited that it was. Ordinarily a kid would be sad that his favorite show was ending, but for me I felt weirdly at peace with it. I felt like it was a perfect ending and gave it a great amount of finality and closure. And that is one other reason that Courage remains so good I think. It didn't overstay its welcome like other cartoons from the time. Courage the Cowardly Dog never scared me. The show that I found uncomfortable as a kid was Invader Zim. But when I was a bit older I started to remember that show with more fondness as I went through my goth/chuuni phase that that show was made to appeal to. But this was after it had already finished airing so I was rarely able to catch it, unfortunately.
I was mature for my age so my parents also let me watch The Simpsons with them sometimes. Of course I could only understand the simplest slapstick humor from it, but I was a fan. But I had to stop watching when we saw some episode with Sideshow Bob and I got really scared by it. This left me with a kind of trauma about anything Simpsons-related. Any time I saw anything Simpsons-related, I had to leave the room or otherwise try to excuse myself. I started to dread watching TV when Burger King or McDonald's had Simpsons toys because I risked seeing a commercial for them. I had a friend with some Simpsons memorabilia in his house and made all the excuses I could to not visit his house. And of course if I ever saw the show on TV, it freaked me out. I never brought this up to anyone, because I had some fear of acknowledging it at the same time. I felt like if I expressed it in language, it would make it too "real". It felt like a negative force I didn't want to draw out and encourage. Of course, this was hard because I did realize that The Simpsons was really really funny! I wanted to watch it and acknowledge the humor of it while also being afraid of it.
It was strange, because in a way I began perpetuating my fear of this show simply for its own sake. I was beyond the point of finding Sideshow Bob particularly frightening. There was stuff on Courage the Cowardly Dog that was way scarier, after all. It all came to a head one day when I was at my friend Maxwell's house and he was about to start watching The Simpsons. I started to excuse myself to wait it out in another room, but suddenly had a revelation: "You know what? I'm tired of running. This is a cartoon and it can't hurt me. If Maxwell can watch it and not be hurt, then so can I. I'm going to watch it and see if it actually is as terrifying as I've been telling myself it is." Of course, it wasn't. It was hilarious! This was a very instructive experience for me. It made me realize that the terror is all in me and how I choose to respond to something. A 2-D drawing can't do anything to me. I think this explains the way I've come to view fiction as such a freeing and liberating medium where anything is allowed. It's why I never made the mistake of being afraid of something like lolicon. And I owe it to this early education. A lot of people never have it.
I was uncommon as a kid for never having any video game consoles. My mom had a pretty negative opinion of them at the time. I think she got caught up in the hysteria and was a bit paranoid about them being too violent. She actually has apologized for this later and said that she regrets being too strict and overbearing about it. She later said that it probably would have been better for me if I was allowed to have access to the defining medium of my generation, video games, as a kid. However, when I actually remember my time as a kid, I can't remember there ever being a time when I wanted some particular game and she wouldn't buy it for me. I think, of course, one of the main reasons was that I saw video games as "childish" and embarrassing. Of course I couldn't imagine asking for one. That said, my mom was a strong believer in "free-range parenting" and child autonomy. She always made her opinion on things clear: "If I prohibit some game or website in this house, I know that you'll just look at it at a friend's house instead." So her boundary was that while she refused to buy some things, she generally didn't try to police what other parents let me do at their houses.
My mom did also allow some computer games, which was a somewhat arbitrary distinction. I played a lot of online games about certain cartoons on PBS or Nick Jr. I had a few of the point-and-click I Spy games, which of course I loved as I was a big fan of the books. Me and Maxwell were also both big fans of the Humongous Entertainment games. The first Pajama Sam was my favorite, and I never got sick of doing that mine cart maze over and over. I played the second one as well but never beat it. I played the first three Freddi Fish games and I have definite memories of beating the second and third. Maxwell had the fourth but I never did. I remember my father coming home one evening from work and telling me that he thought of how to beat one of the puzzles while at work and wanted to give it a try. It was really sweet of him to be so invested in it for my sake. There was some similar game where you played as a family of monsters getting ready for a family reunion and the end prize for beating it was some thing you could play around with where they were all bouncing around in zero-gravity and you could change the speed and intensity. Another game I'd like to know the identity of if it rings any bells... A little later, me and Maxwell also had the RollerCoaster Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon games, though I never played them on a level that had any more strategy than just putting down a bunch of cool shit and getting cucked by the actual gameplay part because I didn't know cheats or anything lol. While I didn't have any console games, I was able to experience a lot of them in a second-hand fashion, usually from my friends or cousins. My mom would have probably expected me to pick up a controller and play some with them. And yet I never did. It just never occurred to me. I only related to video games as something to watch others play. Controllers were so intimidating that they looked like alien technology to me at that point.
One of the people who also played games, interestingly, was my grandmother. She had a lot of computer games like Myst and some puzzle game that I loved but can't remember where you had Tetris-like pieces on a conveyor belt and had to fit them into shaped objects, like a lamppost or a turtle. If anyone knows what that game is, let me know... Anyway, she also had an SNES for her grandkids to play and played some games on it herself too. The one I remember seeing her play was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. She had a few save files, all named after her male grandkids, which was wholesome. I was absolutely mesmerized watching her play and explore that world. There were other games I remember that are standards. My friends were mostly Nintendobabies and had Nintendo 64s and Gamecubes. The one I remember thinking looked the most fun was Super Mario Sunshine. But one of the most formative memories I had was spending the night at Maxwell's house playing games. That night we played some console port of Lemmings, which I thought was really fun and entertaining in its own right, but it was the next game we tried that really left an impression on me. Maxwell's stepfather had a game of his own that he allowed us to borrow. What was that game? Megami Ibunroku: Persona! Of course, it was the horribly butchered American version called Revelations: Persona, but it was still quite powerful to us. Neither of us had ever played a game similar to it and we really had no clue what to make of it. We kept playing, somehow fascinated and curious despite the fact that we were impatient babbies and had no clue what was going on in the game. I remembered the opening line from that game for years, which is Zhuangzi's quote about the butterfly. It was the first place I ever heard that quote and my memory of it far outlived the game for years.
When I talk about my extreme compulsion to be seen as "mature," you should understand that it wasn't all a facade. I legitimately did have many very "mature" interests and hobbies. And they were ones that I was quite genuinely passionate about. Besides leaving my penis intact, the single thing I am most thankful to my mother for is how much she inculcated and nurtured my sense of curiosity. One thing that also helped this was living one block away from the local library, which was a gorgeous, old-fashioned piece of architecture. It had this massive, weighty quality to the stone walls on its outside, somewhat like one of those buildings on an old English university campus like Oxford or Cambridge. As a kid, I constantly borrowed books and sometimes VHS tapes or DVDs from this library.
My first interest was biology. I would rent books about animals, plants, and ecosystems. My parents probably expected me to become a scientist at this point, though I never had a career trajectory in mind at this point. My favorite animals back then were ones that lived in the polar regions, because I was still fascinated by cold climates. I read a lot about penguins, seals, walruses, etc. I think my interest began when I saw real life penguins for the first time, which was at the Central Park Zoo in New York City if I remember correctly. I remember creating an elaborate, ridiculous plan for what it would take to keep a penguin as a pet and trying to convince my parents that it would be viable (including some frozen enclosure with a saltwater tank). They humored me well enough.
I also began to take an interest in the study of a more familiar animal: homo sapiens. As I was interested in animals that were "exotic" and "unusual," I was interested in knowing more about countries around the world. I remember a section of the library which had childrens' school books of a sort, each one about a specific country. I rented several of these, but the one I remember most clearly was on Sudan (before the country split). I was curious about countries that were so totally different from my own. It put a lot in perspective early on and made me question a lot of assumptions. I remember reading about the problem of desertification in Sudan and being concerned as a child. I didn't have an immediate connection to this country, so the problem was quite abstract to me, but I still hoped for a bright ecological future for them. A sad portent...
One thing that spurred on this interest came from a pretty weird place and it's kind of humorous in retrospect. My friend Maxwell had me watch a very silly movie called Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls which basically features Jim Carrey acting like a complete goofball for 90 minutes. We watched this movie and adored it. Maxwell dressed up as Ace Ventura for Halloween one year, in fact. Honestly, some parts of the movie still make me laugh really hard (the infamous rhino scene). The movie is set in Africa and features scenes of Carrey doing undercover work in some remote tribes. Nowadays it could never be made because the SJW freaks would scream about how politically incorrect it is. But the effect it had on me was actually the complete opposite. I became deeply interested in tribes like those depicted in the film. I started reading National Geographic and researching various tribes in the library to see if there were any that were similar to what I saw in the film. This interest soon outpaced that film and I became very interested in traditional tribal customs and cultures all over Africa, but in Kenya and Ethiopia especially. It was my dream to go visit and become part of the Maasai tribe.
I'm not sure what drew me to these tribes in particular. I suppose part of it was a natural curiosity at just how different a way of life could be from everything I was used to. I was especially struck by and interested in the way that nudity was so casual and accepted among them. Perhaps part of it was the natural curiosity of any American kid who sneaks a National Geographic to see some tribal booba. But I feel like it went deeper than that. I found something very refreshing and interesting about just how different a way of life seemed possible in these tribes. I fantasized about joining them. I even tried to make some of my own chalk paint to decorate my body a few times out of curiosity and imitation. But in the back of my mind I realized that I was a slave to my surroundings in many ways. If I lived like this, I would miss going to museums, I would miss going to the movie theater, I would miss watching TV, and so on. It was a difficult balance and I felt torn about it. Maybe I would have been more interested to learn about tribes in the US and Canada who grapple with the same struggle of the appeal of the modern world versus the deep sense of meaning and belonging of living in a communal, tribal structure. But I seemed to require some degree of nudity as a prerequisite to be interested. Of course, I eventually abandoned this because I realized that I liked the cold too much to want to live somewhere where you could be naked all the time.
I had a lot of wonderful experiences traveling around the country as well, thanks in large part to the freedom that homeschooling offered our family. The ones I cherish most were experiences in Colorado and Alaska, given my love of the cold. Getting to see lively coral reefs and volcanoes in Hawaii was another high point. We also saw the Redwood Forest in northern California, after visiting the Pacific Northwest to see some family friends. I am very thankful to my parents for these opportunities, although to be honest I cannot say that my experiences of these trips were ones I can chart out for my evolution of thought and worldview. The only thing I can say about them is that I greatly enjoyed them and am very thankful for the opportunity.
Perhaps the self-conscious reflections on my own immaturity and upbringing that I was capable of at that age show that I had a lot of self-awareness. I think that an above-average self-awareness in some areas was balanced by a very low self-awareness in others. But what was I aware of? What was my sense of WHO I was back then?
"Identity" is a problem that everyone grapples with and never really solves, because it is a problem that cannot be solved. Whenever we construct an identity for ourselves or others, it is somehow unsatisfying or incomplete. But I didn't realize this yet. I was tossed about between the two poles of the identity problem: what we choose and what is forced on us. I was homeschooled and lived in a sort of artsy family that took pains to reject a lot of what our American culture took as "normal." This made me feel a sense of alienation and confusion about who I was and where I lived from a young age.
I first remember experiencing this when seeing stereotypes of groups I fell into in various forms of media. When I saw an exaggerated stereotype of someone from my state, country, etc., I felt confused and very frustrated. I felt annoyed at the idea that someone would assume something about me without even taking the time to verify if I felt that way or not. For a simple example, I was raised in a home which was deeply opposed to the Iraq War, and it made me upset to be tarred as warlike as an American when my family was the exact opposite. In fact, the homeschooled environment I was in was such an incubator that when I did meet someone who was more right-wing or patriotic in my own state I found it sort of a culture shock. So I grew to hate stereotypes and all forms of losing individuality.
I took it as a holy duty of mine to not stereotype if I didn't want to be stereotyped. I remember when I was mocked for my accent when I was in New York City at one point. Someone said that I should just poke fun back at their equally silly accents. But I thought, "How could I do that? How could I demand something from someone that I didn't do myself?" So I took it upon myself to treat all people as individuals. For that reason I found the whole idea of nationalism inherently stupid and ridiculous. I felt no attachment to myself as an "American" or for my state. I thought flags and national anthems were ridiculous and stupid. What did any of that have to do with me?
Now, later in my life I would come to have a healthier understanding of stereotypes. Most people do not "stereotype" in a way that is nearly as bigoted or hateful as my image was. I started to realize that you can poke fun at someone for the stereotypes associated with them and that this does not in fact need to be in conflict with treating someone as an individual. Of course, it's easier to be alright with stereotypes when the stereotypes about you are good, and I almost only experienced negative stereotypes aobut myself at that point. But even when people have stereotypes towards others, they often wield them in a playful way which is not as judgmental as we might assume and quite a lot more open. Stereotypes can in a sense never really be about an individual, because they are statistical impressions.
But at the time, I did not understand that. I hated being defined by others and told who or what I was. The idea of having no will of my own scared me. One of my favorite TV series at the time was the classic first edition of The Twilight Zone, and an episode called "Nick of Time" had a particularly strong effect on me. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend checking it out so you can understand the particulars, but it sketched out an idea I resonated with and felt like was finally captured in a piece of media: That it is terrifying to have your life laid out before you. It paralyzes you. As potentially stressful as it might be to have the responsibility to create your own future, it is always more comforting to have it in your own hands. I still love the episode. For the time then, I became committed to an individualist philosophy: individuals are what mattered to me and we should not resort to stereotypes as a way of limiting the potential of others to live the kinds of lives they wish.
Of course, a lot of this just felt like a way of running away. I felt like if people had a negative stereotype about my country, state, etc., it would be a constant impediment in my life and keep me from making friends with people from "opposing" parts of the world (which according to the stereotypes was everywhere). But when you take the individualist pill to such a hardcore degree, it's pretty isolating. I wasn't united with anyone or able to become a part of any crowds. I never joined a sports team or routed for one. I never joined boy scouts or anything like it. I never wanted to join a team or see myself as part of a group so I wouldn't have to compete with and villify others. But I was left alone. When I isolated myself from all the communities around me as some form of virtue, I felt like something important was missing. We all need something larger than ourselves to lose our identities in and give ourselves up to once in a while.
My parents tried to help. We were not religious and didn't go to anywhere like a church, which is the traditional way most people have fulfilled this need. I'm very thankful we never had any Christian influence in our lives, but I never quite had something that gave me meaning in a community at this age. But not for lack of trying. I had a number of extracurriculars, but didn't stick with any for very long. I took a yoga class for kids that my mom's friend taught, but it didn't last long. I took piano lessons, but they didn't last long. I signed up for a fencing class, but it didn't last long. The one that lasted longest was evening tennis lessons which my parents forced me to take with a few other kids from middle school through high school, but even then I never ever talked to other students at my tennis class. I liked tennis fine, but I was never a sportsman and so never had the desire to compete or really push myself. It largely existed as a form of physical education in my homeschooling.
In this search for an identity and purpose, a lot of kids have their "chuunibyou" phase. I was a few years younger than chuuni age chronologically, but I pretty much became a prototypical example. I even had something of a "Wiccan phase". The first thing I remember related to this was a series of graphic novels about a character called Emily the Strange. I ate those up. They were the most goth thing you could imagine... perfect encapsulation of 2000s proto-Hot Topic edgy goth girl shit. It worked on me like a charm. I went through a whole phase of trying to be like her. I tried to become telepathic and read minds and stuff like that and had my parents take me to new age bookstores to get books about that stuff. My mom in fact went through something similar back in the 1970s and still had some old books about white magic and witchcraft and I eagerly read them.
Eventually this all got a little scary to me. I remember having a bad dream where I had some magical die where if you rolled a "4" it would cause a gate to hell to open and for the earth to be flooded with zombies (the remake of Dawn of the Dead was coming out soon and I was very scared of the trailers). Of course, someone rolled a 4 with it and the rest played out as expected. I was scared of dealing with dark, demonic energies after that and abandoned trying to learn witchcraft. When I was becoming too afraid of things like ghosts, demons, and superstitions, my father had a talk with me and told me in no uncertain terms that he didn't believe in any of that stuff. His words were very comforting to me: There was no scientific proof in things like ghosts or demons or afterlives, and so what reason was there for us believe in them? Under his influence I was pushed towards being a very materialist atheist and abandoning all these spiritual yearnings because I found a scientific mindset to be the most comforting one at the time. I gave up on ever finding meaning in religion or the supernatural outside of as a potentially entertaining subject of fiction. However, I felt that the world was suddenly very drab and boring. It would be a long time before I could view the world in an enchanted way once more.
I was able to set some boundaries that were ultimately for the best in adopting a rationlistic, scientific worldview. But if anything this made me take fantasy and imagination more seriously than ever before, because it seemed like all of a sudden the world was a much more ordinary, dull place than it had been before. It was thus very important to find ways to stimulate the imagination and partake in other worlds to escape into for me. I was still deeply interested in "unexplained" phenomena of all sorts, though I just started viewging them with a more critical, skeptical eye. Part of me was always sensitive to wanting to make the world more strange and enchanting though. When reading about UFOs or cryptids or whatever, I was rarely skeptical in the sense of "this guy's full of shit," but more in the sense of "what could he have seen?"
I was fascinated by things like UFOs and cryptids and always wished I would have some kind of paranormal experience, though I never can say that I have had one that couldn't be explained in some way or another. I felt more of a sci-fi nerd tinge to the interest than a spiritual one at this point, though. To this day I love reading about paranormal experiences on places like /x/ even if I believe 99% of them are bullshit. I certainly did back then as well. I found some sites on the net about these things that interested me, but the peak of my interest was during the time I was still largely reading books about it. I remember renting a really cool one from the local library with like 12 different descriptions of apparent alien abductions/encounters/etc. with watercolor illustrations. It had some famous ones like the Flatwoods monster, but the one I remember most was a really detailed encounter of a guy being abducted by these things which were like white boxy robotic humanoids with pointy noses and no other features on the face... or something like that.
I read a bunch of spooky stories as well. In a way, the teaching from my dad helped me overcome a lot of fears of things like scary movies as well. If it was just make-believe, how could it hurt me? But I was still sensitive enough to things like jumpscares that I preferred reading stories. The ones I remember best were the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series of course, which I rented countless times and memorized many of the stories from so I could tell them to friends! Some kids say that the pictures gave them nightmares but I always thought that they were cool as fuck! The only one that really gave me the creeps was the infamous "pale lady." But even then I made myself enjoy that very sensation of getting the creeps because I knew that these were too fuckkin sikk not to read!!! I remember being disappointed that some of the stories in the back of each anthology were "funny" because I felt like it was a waste of such creepy as fuck pictures, but I had more than enough in the main section of the books.
I also remember one similar anthology of scary stories that I found in a different library in the town during a short period where our local library was being renovated. This anthology I don't know the name of (but would love to find out if anyone knows it!). The story I remember best from it was a clever one: It was about a guy who discovers a time travel portal thing in his basement and a pushy girl who is obsessed with wanting to use it. Eventually she sneaks in and uses it, but she doesn't realize that the machine transports you to the EXACT same spot in the past. So she wants to travel to a particular day in the past, but suddenly gets transported to the middle of outer space, because the earth was moved from that EXACT same spot! She realized what happened and immediately dies because she can't breathe. That story blew my mind as a kid. I remember two other stories from the anthology. One was about a kid who was afraid of the sea but had a grandfather who was a sailor and went out into the deep with him. They caught some unknown fish that was grotesque and the kid asked what its name was. The grandfather replied "it doesn't have a name." Finally there was some giant sea monster and the grandfather died chasing after it in the sea or something? Also there was one story about kids playing tag in the playground and one of them disappeared or something. I thought that one was lame.
Eventually, I took a step beyond the childrens' literature and read some classic stories by authors like Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe as well, though I found the language hard to understand. Sometimes I would have my mom help explain what was going on in them to me. I remember we were able to work "The Pit and the Pendulum" into our curriculum. It was pretty educational. I learned a lot about how to read "difficult" texts because I was so interested in the content. I would often read a paragraph and have a general sense of it and then start to piece it together. I liked the Poe story "Hop-Frog" most because it was pretty short and therefore pretty easy for me to understand. I guess I was still in a bit of a goth phase because of all these dark stories, haha. I remember reading it to Ida and explaining what happened in it as best as I could. We sort of went through this goth phase together because our moms were spending a lot of time together because our homeschooling schedules were well in sync.
So my taste was becoming somewhat macabre. But I would say that more than the dark, gothic aspect of any of these hobbies, what interested me was more the surreal, inexplicable aspect. Around the same time that I was interested in these stories, my favorite pieces of visual art that I experienced sometimes in museums but mostly in books were the paintings of surrealists like Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and, my favorite of the classic western surrealist painters then as now, Yves Tanguy. I spent hours trying to draw these paintings and similar stuff like that. As the world seemed to be much less of a mysterious, inexplicable place, I had to find something else that would give me what I needed. What did I need? A concept best exemplified in the Japanese word 幽玄 ("yuugen").
Like most of the important terms in Japanese aesthetics, "yuugen" is a term that resists exact translation. The best translation I have been able to find for it is "mysterious profundity". It calls attention to things that are mysterious and impossible to fully comprehend but hint at something larger than ourselves. I became convinced, as I am today, that all great art must do this and chased after anything that gave me this feeling. Of course, as a child, I would simply sum this up in the word "weird". From a young age I had no interest in fully understanding or "comprehending" something. There's a thousand things out in the world that have already been fully comprehended. Where is the adventure in that? Of course, I would only later realize that in the world of science and academia there still remains plenty that is unknown and, indeed, mysterious and profound. But at the time at least I took a hard turn away from "reality."
I never stopped being interested in comics and illustrations either, but I became interested in the real patrician stuff besides just whatever was in the newspaper at the moment. A lot of it was helped by my aunt Rachel, the oldest of my mother's five siblings and a very well-read and intelligent woman who I've always been closer to than any other family member besides my parents. I found out a lot of great older illustrators just by looking through her library. Two particular ones I remember well are Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams. There was something more strange, out-there, and less suitable for the mainstream about their works and I felt something distinctive in the sense of time about reading older comics like those. I never actually watched any of the TV or movie versions of The Addams Family, but I loved the comic version. But the most important older illustrator would be one I found not at aunt Rachel's house, but on my mother's own bookshelf...
I remember the night very clearly. It was a night like any other, and I was looking through a bunch of books I had never opened or even noticed before in a humble bookcase in the corner of the living room. On the bottom shelf, I found Amphigorey, an anthology of short illustrated books by Edward Gorey. I was captivated and bewitched. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. I sat there on the floor, so enthralled that I didn't even have a moment to carry the book off to the couch. For those who don't know, Edward Gorey was an illustrator and writer who worked in the second half or so of the 20th century, most prolifically during the 1960s and 1970s. Many people mistakenly think he was British because of a certain Victorian/Edwardian gothic tone that a lot of his works have, but he was 100% American and in fact only left the country once as he was very withdrawn. He provided illustrations for many other authors, but is most famous for his own works. They essentially take the form of children's picture books, being short stories that often rhyme with large illustrations, but the content is generally macabre, surreal, and gothic in tone, though often with a sort of Lewis Carroll-inspired sense of nonsense and whimsy. But you can't really understand what they're like until you read them yourself. I highly encourage anyone to.
The first story in this anthology I read was actually the last one in it, called "The Remembered Visit." Why did I start at the end? Well, from a young age I was always fascinated with the "last" or "second to last" in big collections like this. I suppose I became aware of the fact that people often have a tendency to overlook these at first glance because we become fatigued by the end. So I started here to avoid passing over the ending story and not giving it its full due. A weird quirk but that's how it was. The story was one of Gorey's more "normal" stories. It had nothing surreal, nonsensical, or fantastic in it. It was a largely straightforward story about a young girl named Drusilla who is brought along on international cruises with her family and finds herself bored, listless, and lost in this world of adults and "sophisticated" things like museums and fine art. I always thought that "relating" to any character in a work of art is a deeply overrated and really pretty unsophisticated way of appreciating art. But on a personal level, the degree of connection I felt to this character is hard to explain. I too was a young kid trapped in an adult world for various reasons but unable to really find my place in either world. Drusilla eventually meets a mysterious old man who gives her some beautiful pieces of rare paper and promises to someday in the future show her even finer specimens from his personal collection. I won't spell out the ending, but it is as sad and poignant as it is simple and stark.
It was a simple, tragic little story but something about it moved me so deeply. I felt that in opening up this book of Gorey stories I had found something ancient and precious, a sort of repository of forgotten memories and dreams. I was absolutely hooked. I can't explain how much of an influence Edward Gorey had on my sense of art, of beauty, of drawing, and so on. Maybe more than anything it was the "tragic sense of life" that I first felt so clearly in these works. For the first time I had a great awareness of the beauty of sadness, melancholy, tragedy, and so on. Many of these stories were tragic and dark, but they never depressed me. They were stunningly moving, beautiful, and mysterious. These were more mature and deep than anything I had experienced until then, and everything before them felt immaterial and simple in comparison.
I was still too embarrassed about listening to music in front of others to add "strange" music to my love of "strange" literature and visual art. But I have one experience I remember strongly: I was mostly dependent on family or friends playing music that I liked and secretly enjoying it while pretending to be indifferent. My mom is a bohemian type and has many friends who are similar, so one of my particular formative experiences was in the car with my mom listening to what was certainly some of the wildest music I had ever heard: Diamanda Galás. Of course, I didn't know that's who it was, but now when I remember what it sounded like I'm pretty sure it has to have been. I remember this deeply because I closed my eyes and imagined a whole little scene around the piece: It was a desolate wasteland of sorts with an oppressive, black sky. The landscape was rubble and broken buildings with wires and poles jutting out everywhere. There was a lone man walking through it, but the whole time these strange voices were calling out and he could hear them. The voices (Galás's voice and all the echoes/doubling effects) were a sort of magical ritual chant from these blue female imp creatures who lived underground. If I had to say what they looked like, they were somewhat like Midna from Twilight Princess (not exactly though, this was before that game came out so I'm just using it as an approximation). But they were more simplistic and angular with big thick outlines like characters from The PowerPuff Girls or Dexter's Laboratory. There was a whole colony of these female imps underground in a cavern, huddled together where their leader was calling into a sort of microphone and transmitting her voice to the man above the surface. The rest were swelling and raising their arms, summoning some god or creature or something. It was a powerful vision and was one of the first experiences I had with listening to "unusual" music and seeing where my imagination took me while doing so. This is something I still do to this day.
One way that me and my friends exercised our imagination together was by playing Dungeons and Dragons together. Riley and Daniel had the dungeon masters' handbooks. We didn't always play in the most rigorous or authentic way, but we had a lot of fun doing it. Though I was a creative type, I never had the competence or charisma to be the dungeon master myself. Riley, the oldest and most personable, was a natural choice and he pretty much always DM'd, with Daniel on a few other occasions. At the height of our sessions, it was Riley DM-ing and me, Maxwell, Daniel, Ida, and Maxwell's friend Eliot playing. Sometimes I remember Levi joining or Daniel's friend Owen being there, but that was rare. I remember always playing a gnome. I rolled a very high charisma score and we thought it was funny. I must have been a "very sexy" gnome! I remember some of our most degen sessions being at Maxwell's dad's house where we sat around a big office table he had on the first floor. We ordered a ton of pizza and chugged sodas. I remember we nominated someone to be the "soda bitch" whenever they went upstairs to get us fresh ones, lmao. I didn't stay interested in Dungeons and Dragons for long though. It feels like kind of a childish game and I dunno, it just feels kind of embarrassing to play as an adult.
One language/culture that would come to play a pivotal role in my life was that of Japan. In this way, I was not unique. It's where everyone wants to be and the language everyone wants to learn these days. It was quite popular back then as well of course, even if there was still a mystique of Japan as being a strange, difficult, inaccessible place. Back in the days of Engrish.com, it was very easy to sustain this exoticism. It wasn't like nowadays where you can see a thousand obnoxious cunts doing street interviews with Japanese people about any and every topic. I would like to think in my writings I have made it clear what exactly it is about Japanese culture, insofar as it can be spoken of in broad strokes, that I like. I do think that it is one of the most admirable and enviable cultures on earth, but few people really get specific enough about WHAT is so good about it, and often just use it as a place to project their own fantasies. That itself is the essence of being a weeb, and it seems like everyone is a weeb these days.
So what is it about Japanese culture that appealed to me then and that appeals to me to this day? The first experience I had with "Japanese culture" was probably going to a sushi restaurant with my parents every once in a while. This was before sushi was as widespread and accepted as it is today. It was when you still had to call everything by its Japanese name and thus learn the special knowledge! My father, however, loves seafood of all kinds though, and sushi was one of his favorite foods. I still remember the first time he took me to my first sushi restaurant. I wish I could remember the name of the place, but I genuinely cannot. It no longer exists today, in any case. The place was dimly lit, with a refined and elegant atmosphere. I really felt like I was being taken somewhere special and different. There were "Japanese" decorations like byoubu, ukiyo-e, and all that stuff. It would probably seem tacky to me today, but back then it really felt like I was in an exotic, strange place. Then came the food: I was encouraged to try some "simple" things at first to get used to the "strange" cuisine. For many years I stuck to the staples for kids: tamago, ikura, tobiko. Sometimes I would try a tako or ika in there when I was brave. In any case, I grew to love sushi as I realized that the deliciousness of it was quite different and more "challenging" than the other things I enjoyed with my child's palate.
I have always been attracted to girls of East Asian descent, as far back as I can remember. I really don't know why or how this fetish developed. But surely this helped my interest in Japan deepen as well. For now though, I would like to focus on the other things that drew me to the country. I suppose one of the things that I found most refreshing was the way that adults were somehow allowed to enjoy many of the same things as children there without being ridiculed. One of the most foundational experiences I had was seeing an exhbition of Japanese pop artists. This included famous painters Murakami Takashi and Nara Yoshitomo before the former became really famous abroad. I was in awe of this exhibition and wanted it to last forever. I think part of it was repression from not being able to publicly acknowledge my love of cartoons and mascots. Here I could see incredibly expressive, cute, cartoony 2-D characters but it was in a museum so it was "sophisticated" or whatever. I loved this exhibit and started becoming interested in Japanese toys and plushes and stuff like that. Of course, I still felt constrained because things like Sanrio characters were only "for girls". But my parents got me a book of illustrations from the artists in this exhibit and I became obsessed with it.
In the year 2005, I would actually get the chance to visit Japan for the first time. When it came to foreign countries, I had been to Mexico and Italy with my family before, but this felt like another level in terms of distinct cultural difference. My mother and father took me at 11 years old. It was September and the weather was perfectly clear and cool, not at all like Septembers in Japan today. I'm very grateful for being able to experience Japan at a time when it wasn't as completely flooded with tourists as it is today, although it seems like no matter what time period you're in, "the real Japan" is already a thing of the past according to someone. We were stereotypical tourists, I suppose. We went to Kyouto and Nara. We had a tour guide to take us around and do the translating, as it was a time where you couldn't necessarily get around even the big cities without some Japanese.
I had complex feelings being there. I felt like I was in a very beautiful place, surrounded by lovely people. However, I lacked the language and cultural context to interact with anyone there. I felt like I was on the exterior of a very beautiful diorama, always resigned to being an observer. I felt my difference quite clearly and felt as though I must be careful. I felt like just speaking and existing there was like walking through a garden of lilies, and I had to be careful not to stomp on the delicate, fragile flowers. The slightest glance or gesture could disrupt the atmosphere of refinement and grace around me. It was intimidating as much as it was rewarding. But it was also quite lonely.
The main thing we went to see there was the 2005 World Expo, which was held near Nagoya. The location is now the home of Ghibli Park. It was a beautiful showcase of eco-industry and a great portent of what could have been if it were not for identity politics corrupting everything related to ecology... I remember an exhibit showing a recreation of a mammoth and another one about salt mining in Croatia. These memories are spotty and hard to grasp in full. I remember it being exhausting but overall an invigorating experience. I felt very adult and mature, even when I had some stuffed toys of the two mascots. After all, they were from this refined, sophisticated culture, so how could they be childish? We had a lunch at a very elegant restaurant. I felt as if the whole country was too beautiful and graceful for someone as boorish as me.
We stayed at an old-fashioned ryoukan in Nara. It was quite an experience, like nothing I had ever experienced before. We were quite overwhelemed by the hospitality, which came through even from staff who could barely speak our language. I was given a kimono as a present that I still own. In Nara I of course fed the deer at Toudaiji. The deer were quite hungry! One of them bit my dad on the rear as soon as he got the bread out to give them. Another deer raised itself up and almost tackled me. I didn't get hurt but I was quite shocked. Of course, I now am very thankful that I was dragged along to all these shrines and temples. The guide said "This must be quite boring for you!" over and over as I was just a kid, but I always said that no, I was quite glad to see them. The guide said that my behavior was much better than her own son, who ran through the areas impatiently. I'm not sure if she just said that as a bit of flattery, but it was a nice compliment.
Our guide was wonderful. She was a middle-aged woman. I remember when we first arrived, we were in Oosaka. For only one night, we had a younger, prettier lady escort us from the airport to our hotel. I was under the mistaken assumption that she would be our guide for the whole trip. When she was riding with us in some kind of shuttle bus from the airport to the hotel, I had a strange snese of joy and comfort. I imagined that she was my older sister, or something like that. I imagined having an older sister of Japanese descent in my life and it made me feel a strange sense of joy. It wasn't quite a feeling with lust behind it, but I did think she was quite beautiful and wanted to hug and touch her. I restrained myself, of course. I was disappointed that I wouldn't see her again.
I had some wonderful souvenirs from Japan. The one thing I remember seeing when I was there was manga. I saw a Doraemon manga and knew that I had seen this character somewhere before. I felt a strong sense of curiosity. I wanted desperately to have this manga so I could somehow cross over and partake in this culture of cute, lovely things that I could only observe from the outside. I remember being in front of the manga and trying to rehearse my request for my parents to buy it for me in my head. At the end of the day though, I felt embarrassed by the request and felt that it would be too "childish." I still regret it. Of course, I wouldn't have been able to read the manga. But maybe that would have pushed me to learn Japanese sooner, who knows? All I remember is standing there wishing I was in a culture where I could be more surrounded by this kind of stuff without having to ask for it. I felt a lot of jealousy about Japan at that point. So this was one of the first aspects of Japanese culture that I felt drawn towards: a love and cherishing of childish, cute things, even for adults.
After returning to the US, I remained interested in Japan, but I wasn't very aggressive about chasing it out yet. I spent a brief period trying to learn the language, but didn't get very far. Later I would be much more proactive and it would have an even more important role in my life. But at the time my interest in it wasn't all-consuming yet.
Our family got our first PC and email addresses sometime in the late 90s, from what I remember. We were using Windows at the time. I suppose it would have been NT or 2000. My earliest memories of the computer are watching screensavers and being entertained for way longer than I should have been by the classics: "After Dark" (the flying toasters), the Microsoft 3D Maze, and, the king of them all, the 3D Pipes. I certainly wasn't browsing the internet very much outside of accessing a few online games. I remember one about the cartoon Oswald, which was some kind of cooking game or something, and some trivia game show about Arthur. I remember there were multiple levels of challenge, from kindergarten to college student, and I would challenge my parents on the really hard ones, haha. We moved to a new house around the time I started homeschooling, and that was also when I remember using the computer and internet more. Mostly I would use it to look up interests in animals. I would spend a ton of time on Google Image Search just looking up pictures of animals. It was so much nicer and more streamlined back then.
Me and Maxwell used the internet in a pretty similar way. But from the beginning, Daniel was much more savvy about computers than me. I suppose it went with the territory of having a dad in tech. My cousin Tanner was the same as his dad was a computer science guy. Their family used Apple computers at the time unlike us and I remember the iMac G3 in their house. I think it was the standard dark blue color. I don't know if they ever had that hockey puck abomination of a mouse though. Tanner and his family lived in a city that was a few hours away from us though, so I didn't see him as much as Daniel. Probably the biggest influence was Riley. He was older than us by a few years so of course he had more experience and could keep an eye on us when we went on the net to some degree. Not that my parents trusted him to do anything. I remember one day he set the family computer in our house to a desktop wallpaper of Knuckles the Echidna and my mom was upset because she was too computer illiterate to know how to change it back, lmao.
My dad is the greatest dad I could have asked for and I can't thank him for enough when I think about all the ways he selflessly and tirelessly put effort into raising me well, both economically and emotionally. But he had faults of his own. One of them is that he never naturally was able to be "authoritative" very well. He is accommodating and amiable by nature, and this often led to issues. A lot of the time I would talk him into doing things he really didn't want to, and as he was the adult, perhaps it should have been his responsibility to stand up and say "no" more readily. A lot of the time he would go along with what me or my mother wanted but secretly have some resentment over it. In any case, this is an extremely minor flaw in otherwise an incredible father figure. But I need to explain it to sketch out that the dynamic in the household was that my mother would usually be the one with the final say on what I was allowed to do. The same went for my use of the internet.
So that applies in terms of restrictions as to what I could access. My parents, but really my mother, let me watch a lot of R-rated movies and things like that with the proviso that we watched them together so they could explain things to me that needed context or have the option to ultimately shut the movie off if it was too extreme. Eventually this would apply for the internet as well. My mom was pretty wise. She early on saw that the internet was something much larger than her, and was something where my literacy and knowledge of would soon outpace hers. She knew that whatever she did to censor and block me from accessing games, movies, internet, etc., I would find some way to get at it. So instead she made it very clear what the risks on the internet were: I should never tell anyone my real name, my address, or any personal information. Things on the internet can last forever, so don't post anything you aren't prepared to stand by. People on the internet will lie about who they are, so don't take everything on there to be true. She also wanted me to keep her up to date about what I was doing online, so we could be on the same page in case I saw something confusing or inappropriate. Above all, her motto to me which she repeated whenever I used the internet was "don't get tricked." I think it was an excellent way to approach the issue. Of course, now the internet is very different from how it was back then and much less "separated" from our daily lives. I think a lot about how I would approach the issue as a parent and I think that the spirit would be the same, but some of the details might vary.
I didn't have my own private computer yet. I was just using the desktop PC in the family office room. When I remember the events covered in this chapter and the next 3 or 4, it often feels like I'm describing some five years, but in fact this was all in the space of about 4-5 years. The earliest site I remember going on with friends was Neopets, which we all of course played. Riley was especially "good" at the games, to whatever degree you can be skilled at such shit gameplay. I also remember a brief period where me and Maxwell got interested in kaijuu from old movies after we watched a Godzilla film and spent a lot of time looking up obscure kaijuu on some ancient website.
The most defining thing that came to interest me on the internet was discovering Flash. I had played some Flash games and related ones in Java or other web languages that friends showed to me, but the real breakout for me came when I discovered that there weren't just Flash games, but Flash animations as well. The earliest I remember was the infamous "WE LIKE THE MOOOOOON" Quiznos commercial. Only true oldfags remember this one. I saw it on the TV with my dad and had complex emotions. It creeped me out but also made me laugh. We both remembered how weird it was and my dad soon showed me a newspaper article about it! Apparently the commercial made quite a stir with the rest of the American public and this little human interest bit of the newspaper talked about what people thought of it: some liked it, some hated it, all seemed perplexed. It also revealed the creator of the strange creatures: Joel Veitch, whose animations could be seen at rathergood.com (except it looked COMPLETELY different back then, of course... namely it actually looked good with all content reasonably compact and well-organized instead of being a gay and soulless array of white squares). Well, we all know what the next step was. I went to the site and started watching all the animations. Of course I adored them. I ended up sharing it with my friends but they didn't become as obsessed as I did. But eventually we would bond more because my friends Riley and Daniel as well as my cousin Tanner soon introduced me to some other classic Flash animations that were even better.
The first one I remember Daniel and Riley introducing to me was Legendary Frog, which I watched a few times and liked at the time but didn't get too attached to for long. But the other ones would be defining for a long time to come: Weebl's Stuff, David Firth, and, especially, Homestar Runner. I loved the "Weebl and Bob" and "Salad Fingers" series (although the one with the nettles really fucked me up for a while), but Homestar Runner soon consumed my soul and I forgot about everything else on the internet. It massively influenced my sense of humor and I still often find myself referencing it unconsciously. I can actually pinpoint more or less when I got super autistically fixated on Homestar Runner. After being shown a few shorts and getting introduced to it by Daniel and Riley, I first looked at the Strong Bad Email list when the 100th episode, "Flashback," was the newest one. So that would have been March of 2004. I was 10 years old.
Well, what can I say about Homestar Runner if you've never seen it? In my opinion, most of their golden-era toons are still hilarious to this day, though I can't presume to speak in any unbiased way. I don't know if I could explain it in much more detail than that it was some of the funniest stuff I'd seen yet, and the kind of humor emlpoyed felt like it challenged me and elevated my sense of what was funny. The games section of their site also made me more interested in gaming for the first time in my life, and I for once found myself playing games on my own initiative instead of just at friends' houses. Not that most of the games on that site were really that great. If I had been playing games on my own, my standards would have been higher and I would have realized that most of them were dogshit borderline joke games with gameplay that was below even most other Flash games.
The parody of the old King's Quest games on Homestar Runner called "Peasant's Quest" was particularly memorable for me. I spent so many hours just wandering around it, being entranced. Now, I wish I could be cool and say that I beat the entire thing on my own. I did not. It was some girl at Miriam's art classes who told me to look up a walkthrough and finish it that way after she apparently got further in it than me. Well, I had no gaming experience. I might as well have been a toddler playing it. I did look up a walkthrough and beat the game countless times on my own after that. I might have been able to speedrun it lmao. There was also a Rockman parody alled "Stinkoman 20X6" on that site which made me super angry lol. I tried to play it again a few times but once you've played a real Famicom game the controls in "Stinkoman" were truly unbearably bad... They released each level at a time for that game and the final one they made was a kind of Life Force parody. I remembering having a dream of some fantastical other stage set in a jungle being released.
Besides Homestar Runner, there were so many other sites I browsed back then that it's hard to get an accurate chronology. And when I do, it feels way too short. There's no way I experienced all those sites in only a few years... and yet, it seems I must have. That's what being a kid is like I suppose. Time seems to move slower and things are more rich. A few months can become a massive, defining epoch of your life. And using the internet back in those days absolutely was for me. Besides Flash cartoons, I mostly found interesting sites from a certain book that I stumbled across in the "humor" section of our local big chain bookstore and had my parents buy me. That book was called 505 Unbelievably Stupid Web Pages. I have to admit that even as a kid, I absolutely hated the author's comments on each site. Whoever wrote this was the most painfully unfunny and annoying faggot I'd ever read anything by. He badmouthed Homestar Runner in one section, which immediately earned my ire! But I learned to put up with his heresy in order to find the other interesting new websites. Each website was ranked from 1-10 on the scales of "Abnormality", "Stupidity", and "Entertainment". Obviously, the high "Abnormality" websites were the ones I was most after, but there were a lot of interesting websites in this book, many of which you could tell weren't really that "stupid" or "weird" but were just there to fill up space. But they were cool, so who cares?
Internet history and archaeology is fickle and transient and always has been. I picked up this book around 2003 or 2004 and a great number of these sites, many of which were just random Geocities and Tripod vanity pages and other web-1.0 experiments, were already dead and gone. The descriptions were only more tantalizing than ever because of it! Some of them truly must have been extraordinary, I thought. In truth they were probably pretty silly, half-assed pieces of nothing. But still undoubtedly a better use of internet bandwidth than all the slop videos on YouTube. I have several of the most influential sites I found from this book (that are still online) linked in the links section of my site, but it can only ever be a fragment.
I haven't been able to find the original print of the book but only reprints which have clearly changed a lot of the sites and descriptions. Eventually I would start searching for weird websites on my own, an activity called "netstalking" by those who still partake in it (usually based Russians). Many of the websites linked in the book had links to other strange sites and I would branch out and out. This was a time when the world wide web truly did feel like a "web" in terms of how you located and found stuff. The truth is that when I remember or revisit most of these sites, they look like what they were: bored computer science students who were probably teenagers with too much time on their hands trying to do random stuff to be funny or waste time. But at the time, they felt like they all must have been made by insane, weird, crazy people! The romantic appeal of something like that was too great to resist.
I can give descriptions of some of the most memorable sites. One famous one is "Eric Conveys an Emotion," a classic site where this dude uploaded pictures of himself conveying some random emotion in increasingly humorous ways. One site is called "Vector Park" and had some incredibly cool, mellow sorts of games that you could mess around with almost like art objects. One was a site with a bunch of documented tests of the "survival" capabilities of marshmallow Peeps. One is the largest collection of pictures of urinals on the internet, apparently. One is a site called "asdf" which is a bunch of kouan-like ruminations on something called "asdf" which is unclear. One is called "The Chameleon Conspiracy" and seems like a guy making up a story about his pet chameleon being involved in some conspiracy with the president (via very bad photoshops). One is called "The Cephalopod Chronicles" and was a document of a guy who brought a stuffed octopus to various trips, mostly mountaineering in New England. One was called "two men and a wooden duck called geoffrey" and was a bunch of nonsense written by who must have clearly been a severely autistic child (well, the author was apparently Australian, maybe that explains why it's so deranged). One is called "World of Mank" and seems to be some description of "Mank," a combination of pudding and fizzy orange drinks that turned into some monstrous blob-like being. Just a bunch of nonsense, but the kind of surreal and strange stuff that I was in search of.
There were just as many sites that are gone and that I've been unable to find archives of, leaving me with nothing but memories. One was dedicated to "rehabilitating" discarded traffic cones in strange places. I liked this idea and I got into taking pictures of traffic cones as a kid, just to see what strange situations they might be in. One was a humor site called "Clownzone" which was basically just a bunch of jokes and funny things. I remember that site had a big button at the top left of every page which said "QUICK! BOSS IS APPROACHING!" and if you clicked it, it would redirect you to a search engine with the phrase "ways to increase productivity at work" or something like that searched, haha. One of the sites was about some sock monkey who rode on a toy motorcycle. It said his favorite food was birthday cake (an uncharacteristically good question from the book author: what does he do when it's not his birthday?) One was called "Rubber Faces" or something like that and had a bunch of photos of celebrities that you could morph and stretch. One was a collection of sugar packets from around the world. One site called "Sevenpeas" was just an animated flash loop of seven peas in a pod that were slowly vibrating and moving around the page away from the pod while some mellow music played. If you clicked on them, farm animal noises would play.
Some descriptions were maddeningly tempting but were sites that were already gone by the time I read the book. One was called "Nump the Striped Cheese Dog" and was apparently a bunch of very nonsensical and stupid stories about animals called "Cheese Dogs." One of them was called "Polar Bear Pac Man" and was what it sounded like: Pac Man but with an Arctic theme, where you played a polar bear being chased by penguins or something (WHICH DON'T LIVE IN THE SAME POLAR REGIONS, FUCKING MORON). It was #18 in the book, and I've always had kind of a numerological obsession and was interested because that was the day I was born on. Anyway, it was already dead and I never got to play it. I remember it mostly because that game must have been truly ancient. I know this because the link to it wasn't even a URL with alphabetical symbols but just the string of numbers. It was in reading this book that I first realized that the "real" nature of URLs was just a bunch of numbers.
Some sites were truly hard to describe. One of them was called something like "World of Hats" and just featured sort of creepy monochromatic pictures of guys and random hats to put on them. Kind of like the game Hatris but more eerie and not really a game... One of them was called "Yucfu Inc." and just had a bunch of pictures and captions that didn't really make sense. One of them was a weird old-fashioned photo of a guy making an unpleasant face and doing a kind of "I crush your head" gesture with his fingers. One was a few raccoons that seemed taxidermied in a diorama. The logo of the site was a very crappily-drawn spatula with wings. The whole thing was white text on garish, bright red background. One site was a Geocities page about something called "Popo," which seemed like some sort of ad site for a device of sorts that kind of looked like an old brick cell phone, but seemed to be intentionally described in vague, confusing terms. It apparently produced beautiful music, but also could help you at work, and so on. When you kept going further on that site, you'd find weird easter egg pages and it would just get more and more nonsensical. It seemed like it was designed by an insane person (actually probably an amateur CS student getting drunk on Geocities page gimmicks... and probably drunk on real alcohol too, lol). One easter egg page I found was just a bunch of transparent background .gifs of a guy's face (the website designer I presume) bouncing around on the bottom of the screen in front of a stock image of flowers with a voice repeating "RECTUM... RECTUM... RECTUM..." over and over again in the background, lmao. The site said "hate mail is always welcome." One was called "The Profiterole Project" or Profiterole Profile or some other P-word. It was a sprawling Angelfire page which was kind of like Yucfu, hard to really understand. All the backgrounds were this kind of cool dark purple tiled swirly pattern. The two major themes were profiteroles and spiders. Don't ask me.
Now I want to talk about the two sites which probably made the greatest impact on me: two sprawling HTML maze, art project things. One was called "Superbad" (not related to the movie of the same name) and one was called "The Bad Scary Place." It's hard to know exactly how to describe these sites, but both are similar in style. Well, let me give examples from both and just describe my experience visiting them today:
A description of a journey through "Superbad:"
First Page: I see what looks like an old photo from the 1950s of a few people at a fancy lunch. It's tinted red against a white background. The four people in the picture, one man and three women, have white circles over their faces. The text under the picture says "pancakey man" and is flipped upside down. I can click on any of their faces or a sort of meter icon on the right to go to different pages. I click on the man's face and am taken to the second page.
Second Page: I see an abstract graphic, sort of like pop art stuff from the 60s with the comic book influence. To the left of this there are a bunch of small circles in different colors. When I hover over them, a kind of Cartesian plane follows me. I click on one in the middle and am taken to the third page.
Third Page: An animated gif of a sort of a white line moves and then stops over a red background. A label to the right reads "left: Jay uses this device sometimes." Under that label are three yellow-tinted pictures of what looks like a vacation photo of a couple wearing sunglasses and a transparent .gif of a honeybee. I click on the top photo of the couple and am taken to the fourth page.
Fourth Page: A page with a dark-red background has white text next to an image of an Asian businessman edited to have a morphed, elongated forehead. The text reads "This picture of me was taken when I was in heaven. It was fun. I was bathed in a golden light the whole time. They gave me this suit to wear, but I had to give it back the same day." Under this there are three hyperlinks. I click on one that says "the accident."
Fifth Page: A tiled background has a blurred, abstract pattern of browns and whites. Above this, there is a black silhouette of a person who looks like he is being electrocuted, or possibly ascending to heaven. He is surrounded by a bunch of orange dots. A yellow vertical line is under him. At the bottom of the line are five honeybees. I can click on any one of those bees for more links, and could go on, but I will stop here.
A description of a journey through "The Bad Scary Place:"
First Page: There's a photo of a corridor leading down into the darkness and a caption that says "There's this guy down there. He's yelling about the 'bus snacks.' I don't understand either." The page has white text on a black background. The right edge of the screen has two snatches of text: "he jumped into the railroad, it made him" (cut off) and "this is where the dream gets really weird." At the bottom of the page, the word "WHITE" appears in green letters. Another hyperlink hidden at the bottom says "eat this dog, I will (said the rabbit)." Under the main picture at the top of the page there are three hyperlinks to click, seeming like answers in a choose-your-own-adventure book to the prompt about the guy and the bus snacks. I click on one that says "That's just Morris. He's our mailman. He's a little strange." I click on the first response, and come to the second page.
Second Page: I see a photo of a balding man with glasses in front of a window with the blinds shut. Next to this picture is a distorted stock image of a mailman with no face. The words "Dual personality" are spread across the bottom of the two images. The caption under it says "Oh hey Morris, how's it going?" and then some sentence in Spanish. This one also has three options under it to "respond" with. I click on one that says "Set your watch" and am taken to the third page.
Third Page: I'm taken to a new page with white text that says "rabbitINtheHATrabbitINtheHATrabbitINtheHAT..." over and over again (I mean like 200+ times, breaking the boundary of the page to oblivion) and has a blurry stock image of a pocketwatch above that text string. I can now click on the image, the very last "HAT" in the string of "rabbitINtheHAT," or a hidden image of what looks like a family from an old 70s ad holding a sign up together photoshopped over a psychedelic background at the bottom of the page. I click the family ad and am taken to the fourth page.
Fourth Page: I see a black and white photo of what looks like a medical experiment from the 50s where a solution is being poured into a funnel going into someone's nose. The face of the patient has been edited over with some hyper-contrasted filter to make it unrecognizable. The solution has "BSP" written over it (short for "Bad Scary Place" of course) and the image has a green caption which says "MIND CONTROL SMELLS LIKE MINT." The background of the page is a tiled image of what looks like an old computer that seems to be describing escalations to thermonuclear war, maybe a screenshot from some sci-fi movie. I click on the only thing there to click on, the picture of the experiment, and am taken to the fifth page.Fifth Page: I see an image of a hilarious old ad from the 50s that says "They're happy because they eat lard!" which has been edited to say "ALL HAIL LARD!" instead. Above it in red text are the words "YOU WILL OBEY!" Below it, there is more red text that seems to be describing a militarized police state coming into a family's house and forcing them to cook with lard, insterspersed with more edits of the ad saying "PRAY TO LARD!", "LARD KNOWS ALL!", and so on. Several keywords in the account as well as each picture contain further hyperlinks, and I could go on with them, but I will stop here.
So in a sense, these are huge HTML mazes with an assemblage/collage feeling. Just tons and tons of links that you keep clicking on and get lost in like a big labyrinth. These probably sound like very strange websites. Similar descriptions in the book made me interested in these sites from the beginning. And while I did love "Superbad" and still do, in a sense "The Bad Scary Place" was really the most important one. The aesthetic of "Superbad" was often strange and surreal, but it was more postmodern and airy. "The Bad Scary Place" had a much darker, unhinged tone. The book's description of "The Bad Scary Place" especially hyped it up for me. He described the site as something like "downright psycho" and made it sound completely creepy and disturbed. I loved the idea of seeing something super fucked up! In truth, the site was not as "scary" as the name might imply. The name "The Bad Scary Place" is one I like, because it sounds like a child describing a nightmare or something. And that's what looking through the site often felt like: recollections of a nightmare or something. Many of the motifs make it clear that this is what it is going for: motifs of Alice in Wonderland, dreams, and hallucinogens appear over and over. For me, they were of course not cliched at all because it was all fresh since I was so young. However, I really do think that even today the site holds up as an amazing piece of digital art.
This site stimulated the hell out of my imagination. I in fact remember a dream I had which was particularly striking about the website. I dreamt that I was visiting "The Bad Scary Place," but that it was something like a physical space. I invented new pages for it that were similar to the ones that were on the page, but were imaginary. One had a bunch of tiled images of some kind of embryo... more detailed than an ultrasound. They were apparently mutated fetuses. That was the only image from this dream which was a traditional web "page." The rest of it was a huge house, where each room in it seemed to represent a "page." It was an old house made of wood, looking like a stereotypical "haunted house." I was walking through it and had found the "creator" of the site holed up in an empty room on the bottom floor, nude and shivering in a fetal position, in a terrible state of mind. Still, as I loved the site he had created so much, I wanted to stay by his side even in terrible times and I supported him and was patient. He eventually came out of the room and started adding more to the site (this never happened when I was actually looking at the site of course... it had already been abandoned by the time I discovered it). At that point, the "house" and site started flourishing and a bunch of people flocked to it. It seems like the worst kind of symbol of commercialization and en-shit-ification of a site, but in the dream the "house" also opened a gift shop! Somehow, I understood this in the dream as not corrupting the integrity of BSP. The "mascot" of the site was two figures next to each other, one arm around the other's shoulder. One of them was a sasquatch and the other was a kind of fishman. Two life-size models of them stood next to me as the gift shop was flooded. Anyway, this dream represents the apex of the time in which I was obsessed with this site and surreal, inexplicable, somewhat creepy things like it.
I discovered some other interesting sites. There was a follow-up to 505 Unbelievably Stupid Web Pages which was about online STORES, and I got that book as well, though it didn't have all the same magic as the original. To operate a store, I guess you have to be a little less unhinged, lmao. But I found some interesting sites in it. Most of them were just cool instead of stupid or unhinged or whatever. The two I remember most clearly were site called "The Creatures in My Head" and "explodingdog." "The Creatures in My Head" was the art site of an illustrator named Andrew Bell. He makes these macabre sketches of weird monsters. They look like the kind of thing that an Invader Zim backpack-wearing Hot Topic kid would eat up and, well, I wasn't too far away from that phenotype! It was different back then though, because he would literally put a sketch up every single day. It was always monochrome and didn't have a background, so they weren't the most detailed things in the world, but they were incredible to me. Just weird little monsters, each one unique. I of course went back and saw all the ones from my birthday, July 18th. Damned if I can remember any in detail though.
"explodingdog" was also a number of illustrations, though not quite daily. Basically the artist would have people email him phrases and he would illustrate what came to mind when he heard them. The art was simple, in fact you could say amateurish. They were photoshop drawings but basically looked like slightly nicer MS Paint drawings, as they were all stick figures with solid colors and lines. And yet, I was surprised and amazed at how expressive they were. I remember getting a physical copy of one of the books of drawings he made for a birthday or Christmas. I don't know exactly if I can say why I love these drawings so much other than that there's something very mysterious and emotional about them. I just felt moved by them in a way I didn't with a lot of other art at the time. I do know that I submitted a caption or two to him over the years, but to be honest I can't remember if he ever illustrated it. I feel like he might have, but that if he did I was already forgetting what caption I asked for since I was a kid and didn't have the greatest executive functioning. He was consistent enough that it wasn't like some of these other internet things where you're pissing into the wind as to whether you'll ever get an answer (no, Strong Bad never answered my emails ;_;). Sadly explodingdog.com is now some Crypto abomination... I hope the pictures are all archived somewhere for posterity as that would be a much better use of internet bandwidth.
There were a lot of similarly cool early internet art projects like this. It was so cool back in the day when you could tell that no one was trying to "market" themselves because the internet was such a wildcard that you could never base a career off of what you did on it but only luck into one. So many people did so much just out of good will and love of creating. I can't remember all the sites that are worth mentioning. I know one website I found had a HUGE list of interactive art piece sites using Flash or Java, but sadly don't know the name of even a single one today. I do remember discovering a wonderful little Flash widget game thing called "tinygrow," which I still encourage people to check out to this day (it's on AlbinoBlackSheep). I think I knew some other things like it by the same creator or a similar one (Japanese guy I think), but I don't remember the specifics.
I discovered some real crazies online, though thankfully never got "tricked" by anyone as my mom warned me about. Mostly because I wasn't actually communicating with anyone online at this age. I had one very bad experience with people being mean on a forum of one of these sites and my parents made me stop posting there and browsing when it was making me upset. But thankfully I didn't do anything stupid like give my name or any important info really. I just made silly, stupid posts being LOL SO RANDUM like any 12-13 year old would do, and the forum members responded as could also be expected. I remember telling some poster not to double-post and he literally posted all of the following words as 11 separate posts right after each other: "I'll" "post" "as" "many" "times" "as" "I" "want" "to" "shit" "head." Now I just think about how long it must have taken him to do that and how spiteful he must have been and laugh at what a loser he was, lol. But I did find some sites from some really deranged people. The two most famous are still legendary in the field of internet schizos: Alex Chiu and Gene Ray.
Well, how do you explain Alex Chiu's Immortality Rings or Time Cube to someone who's never heard of them? Alex Chiu is actually still posting regularly to YouTube as of 2025/04/10 when I'm writing this. He never stops making prophecies about the future and consistently gets like everything completely wrong lol. Anyway, Alex Chiu created these rings made out of magnetic metals apparently that you wear and are supposed to make you immortal. It's based on crazy new age mumbo-jumbo and his site is really a trip. Most of the site exists to sell the rings, but there are a ton of old pages where he talks about immortality, a plan for a world government, sacred mathematics, I Ching, the book of Revelation... all with some amazing MS Paint-tier illustrations. Really Alex Chiu is a legend and I'm glad he's still out there. He doesn't seem as much a part of hallowed internet history as the next guy, which is for shame...
Of course, as crazy as Alex Chiu is, no one has ever topped the site "Time Cube" for being the pure apex of schizoposting bliss. Again, you have to really look at the site (archived versions now) to understand it in full, but "Time Cube" is, well, an enormous page of ranting words that were written by the "wisest human" Gene Ray (PBUH). If you watch interviews with him or listen to him speak, he was clearly quite mentally abnormal, probably severely schizophrenic. He was already elderly when he made the site in 1997 and he finally passed away and left this cubic earth in 2015. His site was basically an enormous bunch of ranting paragraphs in huge, garish letters that he just keep adding on to the top of with no real index or divisions. It repeated the same basic points over and over again, mixed in with bizarre, aggressive, angry language castigating the entire institutions of science and higher education for keeping people from being able to understand his brilliant theory.
What was that theory? Well, in his own words: "4 Earth Quadrants simultaneously rotate inside 4 Time Cube Quarters to create 4 - 24 hour days within one Earth rotation." If you peel through the insanity of the site, what it at least SEEMS to be arguing is that the earth is divided into four "corners," and that thus in one rotation of the earth there are four separate days: sun-up, mid-day, sun-down, and mid-night, occurring simultaneously. Note that he was NOT a flat-earther, which makes it sometimes hard to follow how these corners are to be mapped onto a spherical earth. Greenwich Time, then, he claimed, was a lie and a conspiracy to deny the four simultaneous rotations and four separate 24-hour days occurring in a cubic earth. And this had profound implications, as it showed the nature of the universe as being a kind of sacred opposition rather than unity. In his words: "All Creation occurs between Opposites. On Earth between opposite hemispheres, and for humans, opposites sexes. The 2 opposite sexes equate to 2 separate Cubes, as if dice of femininity and masculinity - equating Human Life to a Crap-Shoot chance of exciting lifetime possibilities. Academic and religious taught singularity creation deserves a coming horrific hell." This is on the milder side of the endless heaps of ire he pours onto the academic and religious establishment.
Other points which get touched on over and over again are how language, words, and god (these are all connected... somehow) are constructed by academia to keep us enslaved and doomed to never realize the cubic truth. God is an inherently cubeless (therefore evil) concept because it teaches singularity rather than the opposites and polarities inherent in the Time Cube. Sometimes he mixes in fears over environmental degradation into it (nuclear waste seemed to be his biggest fear). Oh and he also seems to think miscegenation is bad because it interferes with the four races of the earth (white, black, yellow, red) sustaining the vitality of existence through their opposing polarities. The fags over at """Rational"""Wiki really got a kick out of that detail! I remember some part where he said that America was a red-skinned nation, then it became a white-skinned nation, now it is becoming a black-skinned nation, and eventually it would be a yellow-skinned nation. I hope I live long enough to be surrounded by the QT yellowz if I am doomed to stay in this country!
As a kid, this site was confusing and strange to me, which is what I was after, but it was also kind of intimidating. His words were pointed and angry and I felt a little afraid at first just instinctively, the way a fire-and-brimstone preacher might make you feel. I was too young to differentiate a lot of his schizobabble from real scientific jargon that would have been over my head. So just to make sure there wasn't really something worth worrying about going on here, I remember asking my dad about it and he had a chuckle about it and explained that the site was clearly just the work of a nutcase. I remember we started with the first paragraph on the site at the time which read as follows:
"Apply analytical math to Earth sphere and discover 2 opposite hemispheres rotating in opposite directions - equal to a ZERO value existence. Earth is not an entity, for adding the opposite values cancel each other to no existence. All the universe exist as opposite values. Academic and religious taught stupid SINGULARITY is greatest of all evil, as even humans are created via opposites."
My dad just asked me to look at that claim: "Earth is not an entity." What meaning could that possibly have? "Entity" just means something that exists. What could earth BE if not an entity? A good question. Suddenly this site was a little less unnerving to me because I realized that it was just the inconsequential rants of a complete nutcase. But that made it all the more entertaining. I decided to share the Time Cube "gospel" with my friends, of course always making it clear that it was complete nonsense. I remember printing some of it out and bringing it to Daniel's house and read some to him and we laughed about it to no end.
If there was one web page in 505 Unbelievably Stupid Web Pages which would really set my life on a certain course, it wouldn't be any of the above. Not "The Bad Scary Place," not Alex Chiu's Immortality Rings, and not even "Strong Bad Email" from Homestar Runner. No, that honor goes to a short little Flash animation called "JaDa." The first thing I should note is that "JaDa" is what is called an "animutation." You have to watch some of the classic examples of this medium to really understand what they were all about, but they were pretty big back in the early 2000s. Basically they're Flash music videos, done in a style that was considered crude by the more "normal" Flash creators. Of course, I would dispute this broad strokes characterization as some of the later examples of animutations definitely had a lot of hard work behind them. Anyway, animutations typically eschewed traditional line animation in favor of using cut-out photos and graphics as sort of "puppets," like the old animations by Terry Gilliam and Stan Vanderbeek. They would typically be a bunch of random pop culture detritus and just other random images and graphics set to a silly or weird song, typically of foreign origin. Though not all animutations did it, the prototypical one would create fake or "misheard" lyrics to the song. Later, these "misheard lyrics" videos would be big on YouTube and other sites, but animutations really were where the concept began at least in internet media as far as I can tell.
Back to "JaDa" specifically. What exactly was depicted in this short? The music was a sort of jaunty Swedish song, which I think was a commercial jingle. It didn't have misheard lyrics, however. The main "singer" was an image of Margaret Thatcher's head on a kitten's body, flying around through space. There were also repeated images of a giant rabbit jumping around London as it burned and obese naked ladies with the heads of deer. I didn't realize that they were even naked because the quality was so bad... when I showed it to my parents, they pointed it out to me and suddenly I felt a little embarrassed. They told me that I could keep watching it since it was just images of naked people, nothing "pornographic" with real sex going on, but that I shouldn't show it to my friends without their parents' permission. Frustrating when I was obsessed with this short!
I found "JaDa" on some personal site that the book linked to. It was just a .swf with no links to anywhere. But eventually I would find out what the category of an "animutation" was and that "JaDa" was one. I don't know exactly how this happened. I do know that one of the sites I mentioned, "Yucfu Inc.," had a link to the site of the guy who basically invented or at least popularized the medium of animutation, Neil Cicierega aka trapezzoid. But I believe I didn't make that connection at first and make the full leap to browsing that site, even though I found "Yucfu Inc." before "JaDa." I remember that I first found out about this category of animutations on the absolute king of the classic Flash sites, AlbinoBlackSheep.
A little bit of background: Daniel and Riley were way into Flash sites at this point. Of course, they had shown me Legendary Frog and Homestar Runner. But they also had Newgrounds accounts. Maxwell only went on Flashplayer.com, which was like the pussy version of Newgrounds which was the real EVIL site for BAD kids!!! (hahaha) Daniel would often go on the Flash portal and just vote on whatever was newest, usually voting to blam it since it was 90% garbage and always has been. They showed me Happy Tree Friends, which of course my mom hated and I had to keep private from her. I had also found AngryAlien, which was the home of those 30-Second Bunnies parodies. My dad actually read about that one in a newspaper or something and recommended it to me as something I might like. He was so great about thinking of stuff like that. The other figure who was instrumental in this was my cousin Tanner, who was probably between Daniel and Riley in terms of age. He loved AlbinoBlackSheep and showed me a few amazing shorts. He and my other cousin Kevin also browsed Ebaumsworld (for shame!) but I think Tanner was much more of a conoisseur and showed me the really good stuff which was on ABS.
The first one I remember seeing was a Flash called "The 5th Avocado," which I didn't know the name of for YEARS. I just remember it being kind of strange and mysterious. Seems like a silly word to use for such an amateurish piece of nonsense, but it really struck me as similar to those sites I was in love with. That was the first one I was "inducted" to, and it felt like he was revealing something special and secret, bringing me into the cult! Sounds lame, but that really is how it felt. Of course he showed me a lot of others that anyone who was there remembers. I don't know which of these were Tanner and which were Daniel and Riley, but I soon saw "All Your Base Are Belong to Us", "It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time!!!", Madness Combat, "Mashed Taters", Star Wars Kid, "The Demented Cartoon Movie", "Bill Cosby Gangsta Rap", Numa Numa Yeah, Strawberry Clock, and so on (who can remember the chronology of all these?).
So eventually I started going on AlbinoBlackSheep on my own time. This was helped when I got my first personal computer, which was a Windows XP laptop. I think it was an older one of one of my parents that was handed down to me. This allowed me to browse the internet with a lot more freedom, which my parents trusted me with. I believe it would have been around the time of the Japan trip, in mid-to-late-2005. I discovered the "animutation" category and watched just about everything. The great thing about ABS is that it was pretty heavily curated, so you generally were always watching the cream of the cream of the crop. I found the vast majority of them incredibly entertaining. My favorites were the Neil Cicierega shorts, like the archetypal one of them all, "Hyakugojyuuichi!!" But I liked just about everything in that category. It's hard to explain exactly what was so great about these. Certainly the randomness and weirdness was something I found completely hilarious. But I think a lot of it was just the fun of listening to the music and seeing a music video of sorts with it. Remember, I was still not allowing myself to listen to any "fun" music in front of people, and so I never had a way to discover or listen to music that would interest me on my own time. Suddenly, I had a way to listen to music that I ended up liking.
Around this time, I started going to a different art class from the one that Miriam taught in our neighborhood as I was growing up. Though Daniel, Levi, and Riley and me all remained very close family friends of Miriam and her husband, we were getting a little old for the class that she taught. I replaced it with a few different classes that I took in the evenings near our town's art museum at a kind of educational center related to art. The classes I was taking were about digital art in particular, like Photoshop and video editing programs. Unfortunately they didn't have Flash, which would have been the ideal of what I was looking for. But I do remember the teacher being a pretty weird but inspiring guy for me named Mr. Blanchard. I underestimate his influence on me, but I really do think it was substantial, as he was one of the only real-life older male role models I had outside of my father.
Mr. Blanchard was a middle-aged guy who wore thick-rimmed black glasses and had scraggly, unkempt hair and a messy beard. In short, he looked like a genuine computer enthusiast. He was pretty knowledgeable. The only downside was that he was a Macfag. Though this was back in the early 2000s before Apple fully stopped being a computer company and turned into nothing but a fashion brand. In retrospect, I wonder how much of an autistic weirdo he actually was and I just didn't realize because I was a kid (and also a very autistic weird one lol). I remember him teaching me to use some video programs. I sent him random pictures I wanted to use. One of them was Domo-kun from NHK. I don't remember creating anything too substantial. I know at one point I tried to create a stop-motion animation in the class and had fun, although I never did it very well. He had some very strange pieces of digital art on the wall that students created, presumably more mature ones as he taught students up to college-age. They kind of creeped me out, but I kind of liked them for that reason. One of them looked kind of like that meme sculpture Zhdun (the sitting elephant seal), but it was all yellow and had human hands. Its face kind of looked like it was made something like Tweety Bird, but morphed and distorted to all hell. It was uncomfortably realistic in its rendering.
I forget how it came up, but at one point Mr. Blanchard showed me a video he took when he went to Area 51. Maybe he figured out that I was interested in unexplained phenomena and whatnot. It was a shakycam recording of the border keeping him from going into the restricted area. He told me that there was loud rock music playing to deter people. He zoomed in to the hills in the background and paused it. He pointed out some blur in the distance and moved to the next frame where he showed me how it looked like it was moving and kind of looked like a giant walking creature moving its arms and legs. If I squinted my eyes, I could kind of see it. Nowadays, I think it was probably just a mountain. Of course as a kid I was super happy to entertain these ideas, but it's amazing how you couldn't make him sound any more like a stereotypical conspiracy schizo lol. I also remember when he was looking up this video on his computer, he looked through a few other projects. He had one called "Olmec Big Head." He was speaking to himself while looking through these and said something like "ah, you don't need to see 'Olmec Big Head...'" Now, I'm sure that he was just saying that to fill up air while he was looking for the right video and that he wasn't going to show me a vacation video that wasn't what I was looking for. But at the time, I thought he wasn't going to show it to me because it was "dirty" or "not for kids" or something lol. I knew what the Olmec heads were so I imagined it was a video one of his college-age students created and pictured two naked ladies humping one of the Olmec heads and moaning in pleasure.
Anyway, the reason I'm telling you all this in the Flash chapter is because in Mr. Blanchard's class I had a few rare opportunities to meet kids my age with similar hobbies outside of my small homeschooling circle. I was a pretty shy kid so I didn't talk to them a ton. But the subject of AlbinoBlackSheep came up and I added a few words. One girl at the table said that she had also seen the "animutation" section on ABS and told me I should watch one called "French Erotic Film." I told her it sounded like it would be inappropriate for my age, but she said "Ah, don't worry, it's just a joke that it says it's inappropriate. It's just a video of a bunch of Scotsmen dancing and turning other people into Scotsmen." I watched it and thought it was awesome. That girl was probably kind of weird. I remember her saying "VAGINAS!!! I love VAGINASSSS!!!" in a weird, obnoxious accent to other kids in the class. A common pattern in the girls I seem to surround myself with: they're fucking nuts.
On Neil Cicierega's site, there was a link to an "Animutation List," which had just about every short in the genre categorized in a big list. Of course I watched them all. However, I would eventually discover that some of these animutations had "mature" content. I was a very careful user of the internet. I know that my parents entrusted me with the responsibility of browsing the internet unattended, and I REALLY did not want that right taken away. Much as I loved these Flash animations, it was still embarrassing to watch them in front of my parents. So when I saw something too "adult," I would close the animation very shortly. I remember one called "Pokey and the Ombaoojiebaseo" which had some bare boobs (gasp!) and made me a bit spooked, even though I liked the Flash I was seeing. Another called "DEW HAAST" would have the same effect. Of course, these later became some of my favories.
One day I decided to be brave and just a little disobedient of my parents, which was something I ordinarily would find unbelievable, and I watched an animutation called "what" which I had been curious about but hesitant in watching since it was rated Mature on Newgrounds. I found something absolutely amazing, though it had an image of Goatse in it. I wasn't even really grossed out by Goatse, just more confused and interested. "Huh... so that's what it looks like in there... Why would someone do that to themselves?" I still remember the first time I watched this short. I was home alone and our decrepit, ancient old cat Gertie was looking at the computer screen next to me. When the goatse image came up, the cat was staring at the screen intently. Probably just a coincidence, but I imagined the cat to be as shocked as I was lol. Anyway, I noticed something important: I watched this Flash which contained some nudity, even some pretty crazy nudity (i.e. not the kind of thing you would see in an old painting in a museum), and I was... normal. I didn't get traumatized or turned into a deviant. I just throught the Flash was hilarious and awesome and wanted to watch it again and again. I realized that I might not be able to explain what happened to my parents, because they wouldn't understand, but that in fact nothing bad really happened at all. I was no longer afraid to watch "Mature" flashes on Newgrounds, at least.
I showed these animutations to Daniel, Maxwell, Riley, Ida (not the ones with Goatse or nudity of course, I didn't want to get in trouble with my parents)... just about all my close friends. None of them really liked them to the same degree as me. Riley and Ida were more accommodating and would watch and basically be happy that I liked them so much, even if they weren't able to share my enthusiasm to the same degree. Daniel was a pretty outspoken guy and would sometimes just say that he thought they sucked lol. Maxwell was mostly confused by them. In any case, it wasn't a hobby I really could share to the same degree with them. This would lead to me joining my first major forum and internet community online, because I would have done anything to talk about and enjoy these animations with like minds.
Most of these animutations were housed on Newgrounds or AlbinoBlackSheep. But my interest was pretty exclusively focused on animutations more than Flash in general at the time. I never thought of joining those sites, then. I had a bad experience with a forum and people on them being rude and aggressive, so I was hesitant to join any other internet communities. But eventually I found that a site called Animutation Portal had been created for animutations in particular. Yes, it was a lot more of a hugbox than somewhere like Newgrounds or ABS. They didn't have a blam feature. So for an 11-year-old kid, it would perhaps be an appropriate place for a community. When I discovered this site, a Flash called "Llamas in Drag" was the newest one at the time, and according to the Fanimutation Wiki, which miraculously somehow still exists, it was released on December 18 of 2005. So it would have been near the end of 2005 or beginning of 2006 that I first visited this site. I remember lurking for what feels like years before ever registering, but I guess it couldn't have been more than a few months. When I look at it, I probably only posted on this site for about a year and a half. And yet it feels like a huge portion of my life that I was engaged with it.
Moving from a heavily-curated site like ABS to Animutation Portal meant that I would be seeing a lot more animutations of, let's say, questionable quality. Of course, I had seen the classic ones so many times at this point that I didn't really care. I was eager to watch any and every animutation I could find, regardless of quality. But I did soon start to get more of a discerning eye and become able to put into words what exactly it was which made the "classics" so much better. Namely, it felt like someone was really unhinged and insane when they made them. Of course at this point I was not so naive. I knew that the people making these were just nerds like me. But it was about the atmosphere and impression they were able to create. It sounds stupid, but I learned a lot about art and aesthetics just by watching and thinking deeply about these silly Flash animations.
I eventually joined the Animutation Portal forums and acted like a complete spazztard. But you have to understand: this was a site for kids who were too autistic for Newgrounds, lol. I do want to shoutout some of the people on there who I have fond memories of. There was a user named spoonorca who was very spergy but also very kind. I actually never think I figured out if he was a boy or a girl but I'll say he because it was the day when you could do that and be right 99 times out of 100 on the internet. One of those 1% exceptional cases was another member who was all over the site back then. She went by the username Hibiscus Kazeneko and was an elusive girl on the internet. She was kind of crazy. She was super obsessed with hot anime guys, though was never a BL/yaoi girl (I think she didn't like gay guys very much?) I remember she once claimed that she wanted Seto Kaiba to impregnate every single egg in her body. Anyway, she was a stereotypical wapanese white girl from the mid 2000s, though high on the spergy side (yes, even obsessed with Sonic), but was nice to me. Also she was my first glimpse of a fellow crusader against western censorship of anime. Back then it was more extreme censorship, but it was also a time when Japan could truly just ignore whatever those weird Americans wanted from their works... Accessibility and integrity never seem to come together, as much as we want them to.
Eventually, my parents would be supportive enough to get me a really special gift: a copy of Macromedia Flash so that I could make my own Flash animations. This was not a cheap gift at the time! I taught myself a lot of the program, but mostly I got through the basics because I had lurked on the site for so long that I had seen a lot of amateur animutation creators fail and get some tips and tutorials, which I noted. For example, I knew to set audio to "stream" rather than "event" from the very beginning, which was a classic rookie mistake (for those who have never used Flash: "stream" makes the audio stop along with the animation when you pause it and remain synced up like that, but "event" just plays the entire audio the moment it starts without being tied to whatever is going on visually). I remember a very nice comment where someone said that the animutation I ended up putting out was, while clearly not the best animutation in the world, was the most impressive first use of Flash he had seen someone upload there. I made a total of four animutations in full. No, I don't have any of them saved, and even if I did I don't think I could bring myself to watch them because they would embarrass me too much.
I learned a lot in creating these Flash animations, on both a technical and emotional level. I learned a lot about computers and programs on them, especially stuff like compressing file sizes and the difference in audio formats and quality loss (this was back in the day where you had tight limits on how big your uploaded Flash could be!) I really was a beginner with technology, so I had a lot to catch up on. I didn't even know about Print Screen until I started with Flash. When I found out I could take a picture of my screen like that it blew my fukkin mind! When it came to making these Flashes, I also learned about how to take constructive criticism and, perhaps more importantly, to not feed trolls. Now, I uploaded to Animutation Portal and not Newgrounds, so it's not like I had any genuinely mean comments by internet standards. I also realized how absurd a lot of my own spergy outbursts could look on the internet by seeing the sperg-outs of others, and learned to have a bit more restraint in being a fucktard. But I was a sheltered, sensitive kid, so I had to start somewhere.
I think it was also important for me to get over my sense of hero-worship. Once in a while an actual adult would come to our spergy forum of 12 year old Flash enthusiasts. If we were lucky, one of them might be a real "defining" creator of animutations. A lot of these creators put their works on Animutation Portal as a show of respect but never really stuck around for the community. One named Indogutsu Tenbuki was such an unbeliveably nice and diplomatic guy. I can't say enough about how just genuinely solid and helpful of a dude he was, a lot like my IRL friend Riley. Big weeb and RPG Maker nerd, so a guy who could definitely pass an old nerd G-check. Another named Kelenar created a lot of my favorite animutations, to this day. He only posted a few times, but he said some nice words about one of my animutations and I was overjoyed because of how much I respected him. One more was called Un-J, who I'll talk more about later. But it was also important for me to realize that these guys were ultimately just individuals like me, not gods among men. This was especially important to realize as one of my very favorite animutation creators, Toxic AKA Bob Barker, had joined that forum as a troll under the username "someone" and spent all his time writing reviews of Flashes that basically just read "complete shit," "irredeemably awful," etc. with no real content to them. Sometimes he would be really rude and just bitch about how terrible animutation was and how animutation was dead, etc. He didn't post THAT often all things considered, but it was pretty goddamn pathetic, all things considered. What does it mean when the guy I worshipped was acting like such a petty child? I had even emailed Toxic and had some kind words with him. But it made me have some better boundaries and realize that sometimes you don't want to meet your heroes.
Some people on the forum were also just weird. A lot of them clearly were severely autistic. One guy with the username Surn posted some message about how aliens had started abducted people and turned them gay so that they could depopulate the earth and that now they were doing the same thing by turning people into furries, lmao. I don't think he was kidding either. In any case, my time on Animutation Portal wouldn't last forever. It was mostly valuable to me as a bridge to TEH INTERNETZ as a place with a life and vitality of its own, so I could figure out what everyone "on the internet" was concerned with at any given time. It basically allowed me to experience "memes" for the real first time, in a real context where I was an "internet person" among others. I'll talk a bit more about Animutation Portal in the next few chapters insofar as it played a role in the development of other hobbies, interests, and... hormones. But I eventually left it. It wasn't for any particular reason and not so much the result of any terrible event. I just gradually started going to other sites more until I didn't go to AP at all anymore.
Now, my primary in the animutation community spanned me being 11 to 13. In other words, I was in the grip of puberty. I now would like to talk a bit about awakening to these feelings and my history of sexuality, which is probably responsible for giving me a bunch of my weird complexes and hang-ups today.
Of course, no one's sexuality comes online all of a sudden as soon as we enter some grade in middle school. My interest in girls was an evolving process that began when I was very young. I never really had that "ew, cooties" phase with girls. I remember having crushes from a very early age, and I was always pretty honest about my feelings. At least towards myself. I found it painfully embarrassing to reveal those feelings in front of others, especially family members. But I never had the phase of pretending that girls were icky or teasing them as a way to hide the fact that I had a crush on them, like a lot of boys go through.
The earliest girl I remember having a crush on was in 2nd grade when I was in 1st and still at a "normal" school. There was a girl in that class named Chloe who I always loved. She had big round glasses. As young as I can remember, I've always loved meganekko. I'm not sure exactly why. I guess maybe I prized intelligence over anything and since glasses are the most stereotypical way to look smart, I grew to love girls with them. I barely got the chance to meet Chloe in class though. I think we had a few conversations, and I do remember dropping a Valentine's card in her cubby. The outcome, however, I can't remember.
I remember her appearance in very broad strokes. She was somewhat lanky and tall. She had dirty blonde hair tied in a ponytail. Racially, she was white. This wouldn't last long. Since I was as young as I can remember, the vast majority of the girls I liked were of Asian descent. I'm really not sure what it was, but the archetype of the kind of girl I would grow to love coagulated very early on. It sounds kind of silly, but the first character I remember having a crush on was Phoebe from Hey Arnold! and I came to like girls like her: black straight hair, big nerdy glasses, dorky. My mother told me that at an early age I had a crush on a girl in our neighborhood named Helen who was from a Korean-American family. I also remember me and my father going to the beach once and meeting a mother and her child who I started playing with and hit it off with right away. I only remember that her family said that they were from "Asia," but I'll be damned if I can remember what she looked like or what her name was. Anyway, after that day we split and I never met that girl again. It was one of those unexpectedly impactful events.
Encounters with cute girls were extremely valuable for me as a homeschooler. I wasn't surrounded by tons of girls to potentially fall in love with. Of course I did have some girls around me at that time. As a homeschooler, I had a lot of group classes and events with other homeschooling families in our neighborhood and city at large (of course none of them being religious). But the selection was limited. And you would be hard-pressed to find any Asian families who were hippie enough to homeschool their kids unless you lived in California, maybe. Certainly not in my state. I never met a single Asian person in any of my homeschooling events. Not even one. So getting to meet girls who were "to my taste" was special for me. One of the crushes who would be most memorable for me was named Megan Wu. I first met her at a summer camp that was held at the same community center that Miriam's art classes were during a few different summers.
First I'll talk a bit about that camp itself. I went there with Daniel and Levi, as they had groups for kids from age 5 to 13, or so. A lot of the kids who went to that camp would later end up doing a summer job at it once they became teenagers, me included. But for now, I was going there as a camper. I didn't have a lot of friends there. I was a very withdrawn kid when it came to anyone besides my close friends. I was never in the same groups as Daniel, and even if I was I would feel more self-conscious in front of a group with him. I was never treated too poorly or teased at this camp. I think most kids just thought I was kind of strange and aloof. I always was better at making small-talk and opening up with teachers and other adults around me than the kids my own age. I remember Megan Wu clearly though. She had clear, circular glasses, long black hair in a ponytail that went down to her waist, and a very cute smile. I remember wanting to be her friend so strongly, but feeling at a loss. Being homeschooled, I never had to go out of my way to make friends before. They were just kind of thrust on me. Making friends is never easy as an adult, but I think I was extra nerfed by being homeschooled.
I couldn't think of anything else to do but make a note that said "Do you want to be friends?" and three options for YES, MAYBE, and NO and having a friend of hers pass it to her. I still remember clear as day watching her read it, put down an answer, then look towards me, smile, and wave her hand with the paper in it to give back to me. With a response like that, I can't imagine she would have been cruel enough to say "NO," lol. But to be honest I don't remember if she said YES or MAYBE. What I do know is that I lost any ability to stay friends with Megan as she was not a homeschooler and had to go back to school after the camp ended. I did actually go to one other extracurricular that Megan was in. It was an acting camp. We ended up putting on a play version of Peter Pan. I believe I played one of the Lost Boys (a silent role). Again, I couldn't do much to get close to Megan. I tried to mention it once to my dad and was so embarrassed that I dropped the whole topic. I remember trying to write her a poem like in a cartoon where I literally took every letter of her name and made some mushy garbage for it ("'M' is for the MAGIC we could make together" or some vomit-inducing line like that). I remember telling my cousin Krystin about it and she basically re-wrote the whole poem for me because she started telling me all these tips about "THIS is what girls like!" I never got along with Krystin too well. She was very assertive and pushy, which is a nice way of saying she was a bitch lmao.
By the time I was entering puberty, I was a lot more reserved and shy during homeschooling events. Namely it was because there had been some major changes in the dynamics of my homeschooling life. Most notably, Daniel ended up going to a normal public school by the time he entered middle school. He came to our house on his way home from school everyday for a while to blow off steam and bitch about school as he was having these culture shocks and troubles adapting. My mother was very nice to let him do so. It made my homeschooling day much more enriching as well. I'm not sure what was happening with Riley, but I think his family was having some trouble so he wasn't around as much. Ida was homeschooled but never really involved in the same circles as us. Her life was ballet, and all her extracurricular time was spent at ballet and other kinds of dancing schools (I think she learned some kind of Highland dancing for a while, complete with a kilt). I don't know if she ever had many friends at these places. If she did, I never met them.
The two closest friends in the homeschooling groups I had were two boys named Benjamin and Joshua. Their mom was even more of a hippie, granola mom than mine, but not really in a good way... She was the opposite: a very controlling, micromanaging, schoolmarm type. She brought her kids up to be vegetarians and basically shielded them from a lot of explicit movies and TV shows and whatnot. It sounds kind of fucked up, but I basically taught them to be vulgar like normal boys their age lol. It was gradual. At first I went to their house and was warned to be on my best behavior because they weren't allowed to swear and whatnot. Little by little, I introduced a little more vuglarity to them to the point that even their mom knew a bit about it and didn't really mind. I should say that their upbringing style was definitely on the negative end of the self-important yoga mom school of homeschooling. They were basically what is sometimes called "unschooled," and in retrospect I think they were great proof that you can't just let kids "discover" their way to everything in an academic setting. Benjamin and Joshua were very kind, caring, sensitive boys. But they really were behind others their age in terms of basic skills like reading and arithmetic. Anyway, I would later drift away from these two and so don't mention them with other friends. But at the time they were the only ones who were still in a lot of the same homeschooling events as me.
But even they weren't around on a weekly basis anymore by 2005-2006. At this point, I had very few of my core friend group involved in homeschooling activities. I instead had a number of other families that my mother came to know through homeschooling and considered myself to be on good terms with, but who were ultimately more distant from me and who I felt much more restrained around. The most consequential of them was the Pollards. Their mother and father were still together, but I don't think I ever met the father even once. He must have been making some decent money, as they had a very nice house, although of course all houses feel bigger when you're a kid. I think he was in some science field and maybe involved in research as I remember their house being filled with large books and the family office room being completely suffocated in books and papers. The mother in this house was intelligent and funny. I talked to her more than I did the kids my age, as usual. They had pet parakeets. Anyway, there were three children in the family:
Caleb: The eldest child, who was probably about 3-4 years older than me. He was a very opinionated guy with a lot of charisma, good at leading discussions and whatnot but a bit exhausting to be around. He had floppy, kinky hair and his younger sister called him a sheep to poke fun at him about it. He had a lot of acne. Loved anime and Japan.
Samantha: The one who called Caleb a sheep. Probably 8 or 9 when I would have been 12 or 13 at this time. She was scrawny and had a thin face with long, dark brown hair. I remember her mostly being an annoying brat.
Rebecca: The middle child of this family and the one I had the best relationship with. About the same age as me. She had a very round face with high cheekbones. Her hair was sandy-colored and was in two long, neatly brushed strands down her side. She looked like a hippie girl from the 70s. She was quiet and nerdy.
Nathan: Not biologically a member of the Pollard family, but was almost always hanging around as well, especially at homeschooling events. Nathan was very "jock-coded," with a military-style crew cut and a pretty muscular figure (he must have played football or something). But he was a nice guy as well, though he could be a bit blunt.
Anyway, though the mom of the Pollard family seemed unassuming, she had a very proactive role in orchestrating a lot of homeschooling events. Sometimes these would be hosted at her home, other times in cafes or community centers. We did things like practice debating, reading articles in the news and talking about them, and so on. I always gave the bare minimum effort and didn't engage with people there very much. A lot of the other kids there similarly tried not to make much of an effort. I thought Rebecca was sort of cute, but for the most part never had any interest in most of these girls. It just didn't register to me. As there were no Asian females to direct my interest to in real life, I was finally pushed towards the one place where I could find them: the 2nd dimension.
A bit of background: I was a nerd in nerdy environments. I experienced almost no direct bullying or mockery for the things I liked because I was in a homeschooling environment, and just about everyone there is some kind of nerd or another by default. That's because we all become nerds when we are freed of the oppressive influences of hegemonic society. As a nerd among other nerds, Japanese anime always had some ambient presence in my life. A lot of my friends were fans to the degree that they just watched Adult Swim and picked up on all the standard shows like Cowboy Bebop and FLCL for example. Out of all these, Daniel had the most courage to dig deeper. He liked all the standard stuff you would see on Adult Swim, but also a few out-there choices. One of these would be incredibly consequential on my life: it was called Azumanga Daiou.
Daniel liked Azumanga Daiou quite a lot. He had the game for the GameBoy Advance and a lot of stickers from that. He had the pin of the black cat that it seems like every fat wap girl had around that time. But most notably, he had a poster (pictured above). It was sitting in his room. I really don't know how to explain what happened to me when I saw this poster. All I can say is that I felt pure love. I felt like I wanted to protect and cherish and hug every single girl on the poster. I felt like my heart was crying out in pain, but with tears of joy. It was like fruits that sting the tongue with their sweetness. I felt like every girl on the poster was my daughter and they had all just been born and I was holding them in my arms for the first time. I felt the most pure and ebulliant ray of sunshine strike into my chest. I was impaled on the lance of a love too great for this world. Is this what anime was like? If so, I could see why people were so obsessed with it. I didn't understand the appeal at all when it was about gay shit like Naruto, but once I discovered that elusive, intangible concept known as "moe," I was on board.
Now came the unfortunate part: I was viciously excluded from being able to partake in this hobby. And I really have myself to blame more than anyone about it. As strong as the feelings I felt towards the girls in Azumanga Daiou were, they were not strong enough to overcome my embarrassment and sense of shame of wanting to watch a cartoon. I was as self-conscious as ever and could never admit that I liked something that would be seen as "childish." Some people tried to play the game of arguing that anime was special because it was from this sophisticated, far-off land called Japan. But I never fell into that trap. I knew that anime was something nerdy, different, and maybe even a little "shameful." I knew that it didn't define Japan and that not every Japanese person was interested in it. But I think I held too strongly to this belief. I beat myself up for it. Japanese people, those sophisticated, godly, ethereal beings, could never possibly do anything but watch Nou plays and paint calligraphy and arrange flowers all day! Clearly they just made these cartoons for little kids and other defects of their society! Any thought that gave credence to the feelings I felt would be indulging me and turning me into a disgraceful, childish person. That was the way I felt and it was not pleasant. I was turned against myself, as if my every instinct was wrong. I learned to not trust my own feelings and that usually if I thought something was boring, that meant that it was good and mature. If I instinctively liked it, that meant it was childish and worthy of being mocked over. That had been my guiding light. I know this sounds insane. I really don't know how these feelings formed, especially when I didn't really get teased or bullied that much at all, being homeschooled.
I of course allowed myself to enjoy some of these "shameful" interests as long as they were in private. But this was, in many cases, impossible with the anime I was interested in. I felt this way about the cartoons I liked on channels like Cartoon Network, but I could at least turn the TV on in private and watch those shows when no one else was around. And I could watch all kinds of Flash animations online by the same standards. But this was before everything was available to stream on 10000 different sites, and I didn't know anything about piracy. So what did I do? I stared at that fucking poster at Daniel's house over and over again. I could never ask him anything about the show. I could never give a hint of my interest, lest I look too immature and risk being mocked. Why he would do this when HE was the one who owned the poster is hard for me to make sense of now, but that's how strong this fear was. I felt like I had to become a PhD in the most esoteric parts of Japanese culture and basically earn the Order of the Rising Sun before I ever earned the right to watch even one episode of an anime.
Daniel and us had another friend who we knew from Miriam's art class. Her name was Abigail and she was about our age. She was a very sweet, somewhat shy, very soft-spoken girl. She was tall and had long blonde hair that curled at the ends. She had very pinchable, cute cheeks and a heartwarming smile. She also had a younger brother a few years younger than Daniel's brother Levi. Her brother was... uh... very "creative." I think he wore a costume of Link from The Legend of Zelda every day for up to a month at one point. Based on what I heard from my mom later in life, I believe their parents were potheads, at least behind the scenes. Don't get me wrong; they were responsible and upstanding adults. We never heard about them doing any substances. But in retrospect it makes sense. Their mom was definitely the most "chill" of any of these homeschooling moms. I mostly remember watching Daniel, Abigail, and other friends play Super Smash Bros. Melee and other Gamecube games at her house. Abigail was also a big fan of Azumanga and had similar posters of it and other cute anime girls. I saw some anime with her and Daniel at her house, but as always I had to act aloof and uninterested, as much as it pained me.
The other place I had to have some degree of physical closeness to Azumanga Daiou and, eventually, other anime series that I had learned about from animutations and become interested in, was the bookstore. There used to be a big retailer called Borders in our town and it had a huge DVD section. Me and my family often went there for fun when we wanted to do some shopping. The anime stuff was all tantalizingly locked in glass cases. I guess they were pretty pricey DVDs at the time. Now, here's what I could have done and what any NORMAL kid would have done: I could have shown one of my parents which DVD I wanted, asked them to buy it for me, and they would have. Or if it was too expensive, they might have waited until my birthday or Christmas. It might have been a little different from what they normally bought me, but it would have been perhaps one awkward moment and then I would be watching it that evening. It certainly wouldn't have been too "adult" for my taste, as I was watching shows like Family Guy and South Park at that point and my parents knew about it. But I couldn't bring myself to cross that hurdle. Maybe the presence of such cute girls on it showed that I was going through puberty and starting to like girls, 2-D or otherwise, and that was just too embarrassing to admit. So instead I would get excited to go to Borders each time, but only so that I could stare at the DVD behind glass, knowing that people with less shame than me could be free enough to buy and enjoy what I desperately wanted to watch. Azumanga was not the only DVD there I wish I could have purchased, as there were other anime DVDs of series I came to know about due to Flash animations and wanted to watch nearly as bad. But it was the single one I was most obsessed with.
It is times like this that I especially lament the design of so many American cities that make everything car-dependent and thus make it harder for kids to have autonomy in walking around, doing stuff on their own. The store was not in walking distance from me, so it wasn't like I could have saved up my own allowance and gone and bought the DVD on my own behalf. Of course, I might have been young enough that I couldn't have anything "behind the glass" sold to me without an adult (even if it wasn't "dirty"). And really, the embarrassment I would have felt in asking the staff to open it would have been just as paralyzing. I tried to ask an attendant just to open up the glass so I could look a few times, but could never bring myself to do so. As such, I was so jealous of my friends who were so much less "mature" and "refined" than me and could actually just act their age. I know in retrospect that the only one keeping me in this cage was myself, but it was as oppressive as any external constraint.
So I did what was available to me and looked up everything I could about Azumanga Daiou and other anime series online. I discovered a lot of great, web-1.0 era fansites this way. I saw a lot of great screencaps, script excerpts, etc. Of course, none of it was actually being able to watch the episodes. With Azumanga I was slightly fortunate because at that time the first 5 or so episodes had been uploaded to YouTube. I watched them so much that they are burned into my brain. I was just desperate to continue and have MORE, but sadly they wouldn't show themselves. I never even got to see Chiyo's dad, for fuck's sake! If I knew a thing or two about piracy I might have been able to help myself, but I didn't at the time, unfortunately. So I had to imagine them in my head, recreating what I knew on the basis of hints and tidbits. It's one reason I continue to love and support "fansites" to this day. You never know how special it might be just to be a repository of information about the piece of media that you love.