Places, part IV

A warning to my readers:

This one gets dark, and/or may be triggering to some friends and family.

Reader discretion is advised.
Don't say I didn't warn you.

...the high school (with some college) years, section II...

2000: George W. Bush Defeated Al Gore In A Controversial Presidential Election

I finished my junior year of high school in June 2000 to little fanfare; I had spent most of the first half of the year recovering from Becca as well as burying myself in schoolwork. I didn't miss a single day of school throughout my entire high school career at Preston, and ended up getting awarded a perfect attendance certificate for it when I graduated.

I was the genius to my extended family, after all, and they expected great things from me. My mother wanted me to go to culinary school or become a doctor or a lawyer; meanwhile, I really didn't have much to offer. My work ethic then wasn't what it is now (read: it's much better now for most things), and I learned very quickly -- especially as an adult -- that always being the smartest person in the room in West Virginia isn't that difficult a feat to accomplish.

I did not want to go to college, yet it was fully expected of me and was a given that it would happen whether I wanted it to or not. My mother, who was particularly controlling and domineering in those days, basically forced me into it. As an adult I can see her reasoning now compared to then -- she wanted better for me than she'd had. She, who got married at 20, had me at 22, hadn't gone to college until her 30s (and even then part time), and who had given up whatever dreams she'd had to raise me and take care of me. I see that now, when I couldn't then.

There was also the factor that I had that vast amount of intelligence that most people around me did not possess, and I felt intense pressure (both from myself as well as other people in my life) to put it to use, to refine it, to go to college and "make something of myself." I lived in rural West Virginia -- there wasn't much to do there job-wise unless I wanted to slave away at the university or work at Wal-Mart, or drive 100 miles (round trip) per day to work in a coal mine or a Toyota factory. While my intelligence was my biggest asset, it was also my biggest hindrance on my psyche. I saw myself as above menial work, above a menial life. All I knew that I wanted to do once I finished school was that I needed to escape the black hole of my state.

But that wasn't helping me then. In summer 2000 I was still a kid without direction, and a kid without opportunity and means to find it.

So, once more, I turned to music, writing, and introspection.

I had received a stratocaster and a screaming-loud practice amp for Christmas the previous year, and when my parents weren't home I hooked it all up and let it wail, usually through an effects pedal. I'm sure I was nowhere near as good as I thought I was, and though this guitar is literally sitting next to me in my office almost twenty years later, I can't remember the last time I played it -- I'd be so out of practice now that I wouldn't know where to begin. As I couldn't read music (and still can't), I subscribed to Guitar World magazine (which yes, still exists) and had new songs delivered to my door every month in the form of tablature, which I could read and play. I tried to learn all I could. I imagined myself, as many teenagers did, as being in a band, or starting one -- the impetus behind that being that if I were a rock star, I could also get the fuck out of West Virginia that way.

In my formative teenage years, my musical tastes had gone off in many strange directions all at once. By 2000, I was beginning to refine them into what they are today. Coincidentally, most popular music at the time was absolutely going right down the shitter, so I learned to appreciate stuff that I never would have appreciated before, or would've written off as stupid or otherwise meaningless. Yes, I discovered Weezer and Beck, but I also discovered Fleetwood Mac and garnered a new appreciation for some of the oldies and classics like Johnny Rivers and Dusty Springfield. I was equal parts Motown and Epitaph -- Bad Religion, The Offspring, and Rancid called to my rebellious side, while The Temptations and The Chi-Lites soothed it. There was a song for every feeling, for every mood, and as I had just upgraded to a 56k modem (lightning had blown out my old 14.4), I now had access to find more music quickly. I began amassing large playlists in the infancy of the mp3 years, and burned out my 3-disc CD player in a year or so from everything I was running through it.

Still though, I was mostly unhappy in my life. I had no idea what I'd be doing after high school. The thought of an uncertain future scared me, and the pressure to perform well in school (even though I was getting straight As) was crushing. I had nothing to do during the summer, so in addition to music, I filled notebooks with journaling, recording the day's thoughts and feelings, and hoping that some anime would play on one of the basic cable channels I had access to. Most of the time, it did not.

I don't know if I can accurately describe what life was like in a time before the internet and smartphones dominated every aspect of it -- to people who didn't live through it, I mean. It was, for lack of a better word, boring. Especially in West Virginia. When the school year was on, I could bury myself in books and papers and work/study until I tired myself out on any given night. When school was out, it was three months of...nothing. With oppressive summer heat and no AC on top of that nothing. I could have been researching career paths or trying to figure out what college I was going to be forced to attend, but...I just didn't have the drive or the care to do so.

When I was a child, I had some hopes and dreams. As mentioned before here, I always wanted to be a creator. I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to draw comic books, I wanted to write novels and movie scripts and television series. I'd also been inspired at a young age by Ghostbusters, when Dr. Venkman tells Peck that he had "PhDs in parapsychology and psychology." It was the and that I'd found so fascinating there. I looked up schools who had parapsychology programs -- one of them, ironically enough, was New York University. I ordered the catalog and literature from them only to find that tuition there -- for fall 2001 -- was just shy of $30k per semester.

I was smart, but I wasn't $60k-a-year-in scholarships smart. At the time, I didn't really know what student loans were, and as an adult nearing 40 now, I am very glad I didn't.

Because I was already on the college track, I'd taken the ACT in the spring. I got a 23. A full ride, room-and-board-and-everything scholarship to WVU started at 26, so after studying, prepping, quizzing myself and generally not sleeping for a week or so beforehand, I took the test a second time. I got a 24 the second time. I'd also already been enrolled in dual-credit courses starting that fall, both Composition English 1 and 2 (which ironically, I'd be teaching ten years later), and History 151 and 152. The credits earned from them would transfer to most colleges in the area.

Looking back on this time now, I can see that I was very depressed, and had been since I was rejected by Becca. That was just the beginning of a long downward slope that got worse by the end of the summer. As mentioned, I became more isolated and withdrawn, and by the time the school year started again in August -- this time for my senior year -- I was just tired and numb all the time.

It would, as they say, get worse.

Adding to my dark thoughts and feelings were the fact that an acquaintance I'd known in Morgantown, a fellow nerd on the far outskirts of my group of friends, had been killed in a car accident that fall. His name was Matt, and though I didn't know him that well, his death weighed heavily on my thoughts.

That fall, the weather went haywire really fast. We got a freak snowstorm the first week of October, which snapped tree limbs and bent other large trees in half, followed a few weeks later by the worst windstorm I've ever lived through -- which ripped siding off our house like it was paper and knocked out power for at least a full day. My parents were worried about money and insurance, and I was worried about, well, everything. It was the beginning of my anxiety issues, the beginning of a deeper downward spiral.

I was feeling pressure from all sides to pick a college and figure out what I wanted to do with my life, at seventeen, and really the only thoughts I had were two things: die or get the fuck out of West Virginia. It had been almost a given that I would go to WVU even before I'd applied there, but I didn't want it. I didn't want anything; really, I just wanted to be left alone. I could stay in this room 24x7, I thought, only coming out to eat and to use the bathroom, and that would be far better for me than trying to force myself through more schooling. I didn't have a plan; one was being thrust upon me. I hated my life. I hated everything about it -- the expectations put on me, the feelings of dread the next year produced, feelings of being unloved, unwanted, and uncared for (whether it was true or not), feelings of inadequacy and of jealousy of others who seemed to have it so much easier, and were so much better off, than I was. I didn't have a car or a license or rich parents, I didn't have almost anything I'd wanted in life. Instead, my parents had uprooted me from the town I lived in and loved, from a house I lived in and loved with close access to entertainment and opportunities and my friends, and had dropped me into a farmhouse on top of a mountain half a mile from the nearest paved road, into a school in which I would never truly fit into, and now I was being forced into college? Being forced to go to school for four more years to do what, exactly? I didn't know. I didn't want to know. I slowly came to realize that I had no control whatsoever about anything actually happening in my life, I hadn't had any control over it for a long time, and (perhaps the worst part of all) I didn't see that changing anytime soon.

Stepping back for a moment, any of you who know me well know that I am the very definition of the term control freak. I have to be the boss, be the leader, be the center of attention (unless I have chosen not to be for some reason), and I will be listened to, respected, and obeyed -- even if I have to do it by force -- or you will face the consequences, as well as my deep, volatile anger. It is legitimately the only reason I became a manager at my current job (the bump in pay I received was mostly negligible) -- so I could tell other people what to do instead of being bent to others' wills and wishes. I don't respond well to authority figures' edicts, proclamations, or ultimatums because I need to be that authority figure. It is one of the most deeply defining aspects of my personality: my way, my rules, my control. If someone is above me in leadership hierarchy they'd better have a damn good reason why they're there, or they'd better have my respect -- because without it, they're not even going to get so much as my acknowledgment.

When I don't have that control, and I don't have the ability to obtain it, my natural response is that I need to get it or obtain control over something that will give me leverage. At that point in 2000, the only thing I could leverage was my own life.

So here's the story, folks. It is a story I have told very few people, generally only very close friends and some family -- the story of how I tried to kill myself. It is not easy for me to write about, as (with everything else in this series of posts), writing about it makes me re-live it to a certain extent. While I've briefly mentioned it to many in passing, and while I don't feel like there should be a stigma to talking about it openly, there is. You tell people you tried to kill yourself and they look at you like you're insane, or look upon you with pity -- not empathy and understanding. So, it's something that I (for many obvious reasons) don't like to talk about that much. I am not the person now that I was when I was seventeen, at least not in most respects, and I feel that I've evolved and, well, grown up. But that person is still a part of me, deep down, and it helped shape who I am today. So, let's tell the story.

It was mid-October. I don't remember the date in particular because, truthfully, I just didn't care. It was before the huge windstorm mentioned above, I know that, because that was early November. I was in a very dark place. I didn't have a gun, I got queasy and sick at the sight of my own blood (to this day, I still do) and hanging myself when I was fat was simply laughable. I didn't want pain, I didn't want to suffocate or drown or any of that, and we didn't have a garage to where I could do the old carbon-monoxide-exhaust-pipe trick. So, basically, an intentional overdose on pills was truly my only option.

I took an entire bottle of aspirin, handfuls of pills at a time, quickly, and went to sleep.

This. Did not work.

I awoke a few hours later and violently vomited great clusters, chunks of pills -- with blood and mucus mixed in -- multiple times. I drank water to wash the chemical burning out of my mouth and throat; it felt like someone was squirting fire out of me from the stomach up. Every time I drank more water, the vomiting came again. This continued for several hours in the middle of the night. I have had food poisoning and the stomach flu multiple times, bad enough to where I wanted to die, but this was something completely different. This was a burning, dizzying pain that blurred my vision and made me so weak I couldn't move.

After continually drinking a few glasses of water every hour or so and after multiple hours of throwing up, it got to the point where there was finally nothing left inside me. When I was able to keep the water down, and started feeling more normal, I knew it was done. I vaguely remember cleaning up the bathroom and returning to bed to pass out -- it was a weekend, so I didn't have school -- and I just slept.

I awoke feeling no better, and felt a great deal of shame for multiple reasons -- the first being that apparently I couldn't even kill myself right. Worse yet, I was in no better situation than I was in before trying.

I'm not sure my parents ever really knew. I tried telling my mother about it once, but I'm not sure it really stuck, or if she actually understood what had transpired or what I was trying to say. I'd also like to say that it changed me as a person at the time and gave me a new, more optimistic outlook on life and the future, but it really didn't. If anything, it made me more hopeless and sad, made me feel more trapped. Nobody knew about it and I didn't tell what few friends I had -- outwardly to the entire world I was still the same witty, sardonic Brandon I'd always been. It was yet another mask. By this time I'd put on so many masks for so many different people and situations that I didn't know who I really was anymore underneath all of them. Realizing this, of course, made me even more sad.

I was incredibly lucky. I could've sent myself into multiple organ failure, I could've blown out my kidneys or thinned out my blood so much that there would have been no recovery, and it would have been an incredibly painful, gruesome death to endure as one organ shut down after the next. I don't want to even think about the possibilities any further than that, honestly.

Stepping back for a moment, if anything, my suicide attempt put me more on the path (at that juncture of my life, anyway) of becoming sociopathic in my behaviors. I've done research in the years since, I've taken the tests and have studied the traits, of which I feel that I, even now, match up with quite a few of. Some I very strongly matched with then, but don't now, and others I very strongly match up with now but didn't then. Others I have never matched with, and still more I match with only a little or rarely. Do I think I'm a sociopath now? No, not really. Do I think I was well on the road to becoming one when I was in high school, if my path would've stayed the same as it was then? Yes, absolutely.

Others will say that you don't "develop" sociopathic tendencies, that they're something hardwired into you and your brain chemistry -- I don't agree with that. It's the classic nature vs. nurture argument, and while yes, I do think some people are born sociopaths, I don't think ALL sociopaths are, and probably not even the majority.

And yes, I plan to write a post discussing how closely I match up with those traits in the near future.

Anyway.

I was a month too young to vote in the 2000 election, and truthfully I wasn't paying that close attention to it at the time, as I was not generally a political person when I was in high school. With nothing else to focus on or occupy me, I very slowly resigned myself to my fate of college and graduating high school in a few short months. I spent the winter reading and writing, burying myself in my schoolwork as an attempt to keep my mind occupied with something constructive. The election came and went. Thanksgiving came and went. I turned 18 in December 2000, and I don't even remember my 18th birthday or what I did for it. I remember that my mother bought me an Eagles Hotel California t-shirt, which I had until it fell apart a few years ago.

Christmas and New Year's came and went with little fanfare, and I was happy to have the year 2000 behind me when it was all said and done. And it took me years before I could look at an aspirin bottle again without feeling incredibly queasy. It took even more years before I would let myself take aspirin again for any minor aches and pains. Surprisingly, it still works.



2001: The September 11 Terror Attacks Killed Thousands

Okay, so here's the big one. Let's just get it out of the way now, and I can tell the rest of the story of 2001 afterwards.

When the actual 9/11 attacks happened, I was sitting in my 8AM Math 121 class at WVU, and nobody knew anything about it. It was a Tuesday morning, and I had back to back classes all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I didn't even hear about the attacks for several hours, when my Geology professor announced what had happened and that he was cancelling classes for the day so everyone could go home and "be safe with your families." Almost all classes at the university were cancelled for the rest of the day, so I took the PRT -- WVU's above-ground light rail system -- back to the medical center where I worked, and worked all afternoon in the lab with the radio on, listening to the latest (remember listening to the radio for news?)

That night, we stopped at the grocery store on the way home and I purchased a special-edition afternoon run of the local newspaper, The Dominion Post, and immediately took it home and sealed it up inside two manila envelopes; it has remained sealed to this day, and it is somewhere in this house. Upon arriving home, I put a blank tape in my VCR, set it to 6-hour mode on one of the news channels, and hit record. When it had finished, I put a second tape into the VCR and did the same. I still own those tapes, as well. One of these days I'll hopefully digitize them.

So now that's out of the way, let's tell the story of the rest of 2001.

I returned to school after the new year with a strange mindset. I was over the hump, so they say, and barreling towards the end of my high school education at a fast clip. I still didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and didn't know if I'd ever get out of West Virginia, but I sort of settled into a mindset of "some people have it way worse than I do" and decided to at least attempt to make the best of it, because who knew what the future would hold?

I wouldn't say that it was optimism, per se, but rather more of a "I need to see what happens next" mentality. So basically, I leveled off a bit. My rebellious teen years were long over by this time, so I was mainly just trying to be normal in the eyes of my teachers and peers. I was dressing fairly normally, I had a normal haircut, I always kept clean-shaven (though admittedly it was hard to grow any real facial hair until I was mostly through college anyhow). I took Driver's Ed and got my permit. I made some friends -- Brittany, Kristen, Chad, John, Hannah, Becky, Robbie, Whitney, and Shanna -- most of whom I'd stay in contact with for many years afterwards. Brittany would be my best friend for several years, throughout college and afterwards, and Shanna and I were so close that we were practically dating. If things had gone differently, we probably would have been.

I was still far from "normal," but I was slowly getting there. I applied to WVU in the spring and was almost immediately accepted and awarded a number of scholarships, including the "employee dependent" scholarship, because both of my parents were employed by the university. This scholarship covered most, if not all, of my in-state tuition, and state and federal grants not only ensured that I'd have the cost of my books covered every year, but would provide me with a refund check in cold, hard cash -- basically, spending money that I would need as an adult. As my education was free and I wasn't going to be a financial burden on the parents for it, I figured I'd see where it went. If I didn't like it, I didn't have to keep doing it. It was also decided fairly early in this process that I would just remain living at home with my parents instead of on campus -- my parents both working at the university meant that I would have transportation to and from school every day regardless, and this would actually motivate me to go to my classes. It also gave me the benefit of being able to get away from everyone and everything and decompress for a while when I needed to. Sometimes I'd get an early ride home from campus with my neighbor, who was also a student there, so I wouldn't even have to wait until the end of the day.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

While I didn't necessarily dislike my high school, I was ready to be done with it. I'd been going there every day without fail for three years, and was ready to get out and move on with my life. I was on the school newspaper staff, and wrote a few articles for the paper -- but I stayed far from the yearbook committee. I didn't want to have senior pictures done, so I didn't get them done. Instead, we just ordered a set of the normal school pictures, which I didn't look terrible in, and I ordered one of the lower-end "graduation packages" from whatever company was doing it (Herff Jones, I believe). Even in the lower-end packages I got a mug and a t-shirt, both of which I still own and use today. I didn't buy a yearbook. I didn't go to prom, either as a junior or as a senior, and I had no clue when homecoming was or what it was about. I cared not for such foolishness.

As graduation neared and I finished up most of my work for the year, I sent out probably close to 100 graduation announcements -- or, as I liked to call them, "send me money cards." My school was small, so it's not like I could personally invite everyone to our graduation -- there was a limit of three tickets for each student to give to only the most important friends and family, apparently. I remember this angered a lot of the students' families, who wanted to bring everyone possible to the high school graduation and....who knows, tailgate or something? I hadn't a clue. I wanted my grandmother to come, but even in 2001 she was frail and it was a very long trip for her, and an even longer day (she didn't die for another seventeen years, but still). Instead, my aunt Barbara would end up coming along with my parents.

During the last week-ish of school, I reconnected with Becca a bit and made my own peace with the situation -- she and I had grown apart quite a bit over the course of the year prior, but we were still close-ish, and part of what kept me going was the friendship I had with her as well as the thought in the back of my mind that maybe, eventually, things would change. She wasn't necessarily opposed to us being in a relationship, but her feelings hadn't really changed either, and we'd already grown apart enough to where going to different colleges in the fall would just make it that much harder to stay in touch. So, instead, I wrote her a letter and told her not to open it until well after graduation.

In that letter was everything I needed to tell her, all of my thoughts and hopes, everything that I'd personally experienced since we'd met, and how she had broken my heart but it wasn't her fault -- I was a different person then, naive and immature, and how much her friendship had helped me ever since that first awkward day we'd met. I may or may not have told her about the suicide attempt; I can't remember. I just remember telling her that I wished her the best in life, and that she'd helped save mine. I remember it being one of the most honest letters I'd ever written, and once she had it in her hands, my pursuit of a relationship other than friendship with her was officially over. Time marched on, and so did we.

Graduation was scheduled to be outside on the football field. We'd done rehearsals of it earlier in the week that May, when it was dark and gray. It was scheduled to be held on June 1, a Friday night. I lived 20 miles from the school, and there was literally nothing to do at home that night (I had all of my graduation robes/stuff with me, as well as my guitar to play as I killed time), so I planned to just stay at the school and hang out with friends from 3:30 to 6 or so, when families and parents would start filtering in for the ceremony, parking, getting their places in the bleachers, etc.

Around 3 that afternoon, the sky became dark as night, enough to where the parking lot dusk lights kicked on, and a severe thunderstorm rolled into the area, dropping a few inches of rain as well as some hail and horrendous lightning. As the football field quickly became a mud pit, the announcement was quickly made that graduation would be moved to the following night, Saturday June 2, and that it would be held in the gym as a backup plan, and I went home as normal. The strict ticketing rule was immediately put into effect, as the gym only had so many seats.

And so, the ceremony commenced the next night. Truthfully, I was bored by most of it and was attempting to not fall asleep throughout it. Our Valedictorian was one of the rich kids, and ended up going to Brown, I believe. Where he is now, who knows, as I didn't really know him at all. Despite my perfect attendance and straight As, I was still ranked 50-something out of 360 or so, even with a 4.25 cumulative GPA (there were many others with 4.5s or higher due to weighted classes).

After the ceremony, hats were thrown, pictures were taken, and we went home. I didn't really feel any different. Gladiator premiered on HBO that night, I watched it, and then I went to bed.

Becca eventually read the letter, and wrote me a long email telling me that it made her cry, but it was a "good cry."

And so ended my high school career. Many of the people I went to high school with I would never see again -- many others would die long before their time, including a few close friends. Suddenly, my last free summer was in front of me, a summer where I would spend relatively little free time alone and would, instead, be plagued by a series of unfortunate events.

I've mentioned here in the past that I have two historically unlucky months out of the year -- August and October. In 2001, the bad stuff began happening in August, but I am (again) getting ahead of myself.

In summer 2001, as I would be entering WVU in August, I took a job in the department of Microbiology as a laboratory technician; this was offered to me through a family friend who worked in the department, and would be paid with money from his research grant. It was minimum wage, $5.15 an hour, and was 20-30ish hours per week. This meant I'd be making about $400-600 a month before taxes, which was not a lot, but it was amazing money for me at the time when I had literally nothing else to do, and the job was simple -- clean glassware, mix some formulas, answer the phone, order some parts here and there, and keep the research lab in general running condition. There were four graduate students who worked there doing research, in addition to two professors. Two of the graduate students were post-docs, and the other two were but a few years older than I was, doing doctoral work. I spent many long hours in the media room, autoclaving glassware, getting distilled water at the proper percentage out of the onsite distiller machine, and doing the general lab labor. It was not a hard job, and was definitely not a hard job for someone of my skills and knowledge base. I started it six weeks before classes started, after which point my working schedule would change slightly.

Over the summer, I slowly received replies to my graduation announcements. Most of them had a little money inside them, ranging anywhere from $10 to $150 or so. I finally had a little money to my name, and could purchase some things that I wanted (something that previously had been a very rare opportunity). I only felt a little guilt about spending said money on frivolous things -- such as when I spent the $10 that a family friend sent me on a Judas Priest album, and said family friend died the next week. I'm sure she would've appreciated that, heavy sarcasm intended.

By the beginning of August, I was in a decent groove -- I was ready to start college. This was, of course, a drastic shift in my demeanor from the previous fall. I was beginning to lose a little weight, I looked and felt pretty good for the most part, and things were looking up. I didn't have a clue what I wanted to major in, but I'd already gotten my courseload and schedule (that was done on orientation day, back in April or May) and it was full speed ahead to the future. I'd even gone shopping and had gotten some new clothes and shoes, like I was a kid in grade school again.

On the way home from work one sweltering 100-degree evening, my mother and I were caught in bumper to bumper traffic and were rear-ended, hard, by a lifted Silverado from the late 70s/early 80s. The truck was lifted so high that its front bumper was sitting on the hatchback of my mother's 1993 Ford Probe. The hatch would need to be replaced, as well as the entire back end of the car, pretty much. I can't remember if the frame was bent or not, but the repair costs were over $1000. Thankfully, neither of us were hurt, nor did we have any real lasting physical injuries from the accident. As it was my mother's only vehicle at the time, she got it repaired (but it was in the shop for a week or two, as I recall).

A week or so later, right before I started at WVU, my aunt Eilene -- who had been in the hospital for a few days because she had been sick and was about to be released, had a blood clot break off somewhere inside her body during a walk down the hospital hallway, and collapsed and died.

I haven't written much here about my father's side of the family, as for a good chunk of my life, they were fairly ancillary to it -- as my father had basically broken off all contact with me eight years before, I didn't really associate with my extended family on his side that much. It wasn't really by choice, honestly; I lived about 50 miles or so from any of them and I really just wasn't around and/or in their lives. They always wondered why my father didn't want anything to do with me, and Eilene and my uncle Ronnie (my father's brother) were particularly vocal about it as my father had moved in with them as a teenager after his own father offed himself in the 70s. I spent many days and some holidays at Ronnie and Eilene's house as a child, and had a closeness with them that I didn't have with anyone else on my father's side of the family. Adding to that, I'd just seen both of them while out shopping a few weeks previously, and they'd sent me a graduation card with $50 in it.

I remember getting the call at home that day (it was a day I had off), and then remember letting my mother know -- and then numb and in shock, I sat outside on the front porch of the farmhouse and chainsmoked half a pack of cigarettes, staring off into space. I'd been a smoker since before I graduated high school, but it was that summer that I really became a real smoker, a cigarette aficionado, if you will. I had my favorite brands, my favorite flavors (remember when you could buy flavored cigarettes?) and figured that I could allow myself one vice. If nothing else, I could tell myself that at least it would kill me slowly, unlike downing a bottle of pills at 1 in the morning and hoping for the best.

Eilene's funeral was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. I told my mother that we needed to go, that I wasn't going to just not show up, and she agreed. It was the only funeral I've been to in the 21st century. Eilene looked gray. Generally, I mean, they look dead of course, but she was gray, no real color to her face, nothing. She didn't look like herself. Her body just looked like an empty shell. I found the entire experience deeply unsettling. My Uncle Ronnie was deeply somber and kept his head down for most of the funeral, withdrawn, broken. As people filtered up the aisle of the funeral home to pay their respects, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up to see my father standing above me.

"Hi, dad," I said. He looked down at me and nodded slightly, lips in a tight line across his face, and kept walking. He didn't say a word.

It was the only time in my adult life I would see my father in person, to this day. And he looked just as broken as everyone else did.

We followed to the cemetery and watched her be buried, in the scorching hot August sun, near the top of the cemetery's hill. And then we returned home.

I started at WVU the following Monday. Three weeks after that, September 11 happened.

Everything changed after September 11. I know people say that a lot, and generally mean it in grandiose, exaggerated terms, but for the rest of that year, it all felt very real and everything was changing around us in real time. For the first time, no planes flew overhead for days at a time. When they did start flying again, people would visibly cringe if they looked like they were flying low. The National Guard would fly training sorties in their Apache helicopters up and down the Monongahela River. We were a nation of fearful people who didn't know if 9/11 was going to be the start of World War III or something worse, and I was just an eighteen-year-old kid just starting college, watching a good chunk of his friends who had gone directly into the military three months prior all getting phone calls one by one -- they were being called up for active duty. There was talk of reinstating the draft. President Bush told everyone to not let the terrorists win, to go out, spend money, and keep the economy going. My mother did that, actually -- after the Probe was fixed, she went out and purchased a new Honda CR-V. The Probe was paid off and was being reserved for me -- when I could actually afford to pay insurance and put gas in it, of course. That was not going to happen anytime soon, so it sat in the driveway most of the time.

Meanwhile, I had a 17-hour semester for the first semester of my college career, and it was brutal. I had preliminarily chosen Psychology as my major -- the study of the mind -- so that I could not only understand myself better, but to possibly use it as a stepping stone to a career in the field or a related one (sociology, anthropology, etc). My Psych 101 class was taught by a grad student, but it was very difficult for me. After studying hours upon hours for a test in that class, burning myself out on it, and then getting a 30% on it, I summarily dropped the class. I was not going to be a psych major.

My first semester at WVU was incredibly humbling -- I was no longer the smartest person in the room. I wasn't even in the top 50% of smartest in most of my classes, or so it seemed. I slogged through my core classes as best I could, got several Bs and B-minuses, and felt like I was drowning. I had no real friends there, really -- there were a few people I knew from high school, but my closest friends had gone to different colleges -- Becca to Fairmont State, Shanna to Pitt, Brittany to Potomac State. I caught up with Kristen more, who had gone to WVU with me, as well as a friend from Morgantown High, Stephanie. But, really, I didn't make any friends in any of my classes -- I was swamped with coursework, and when I wasn't, I was at my actual job.

However, there was one friend I made who remained my friend for the next seventeen years. Her name was Meredith, and she was in my Intro to Creative Writing class with me.

Mere was a non-traditional student by that point; she was several years older than me, and had gone to Appalachian State for a few years, I believe, before transferring to WVU. She wanted to be a doctor and was very strong in the sciences, and was taking the creative writing class to kill time. Meredith was brilliant; she may be one of the smartest people I've ever met to this day. She could write like it was second nature to her, she could sing like a bird, and she was exceedingly kind. During that first semester at WVU, she was like a guardian angel to me. She showed me the basics of what being a college student was really about, taught me about life, about music, showed me how to roll a cigarette with loose tobacco and papers (American Spirit, naturally) and was more of a mentor and guiding light to me than anyone else I'd met at WVU to that point.

I didn't fall in love with her or anything, but there was an attraction there. It was an attraction of mutual admiration and respect. It was love, but it was not a romantic love. It was a love of deep understanding. She was older and far more mature than the simple green freshman I was -- she'd been married and divorced, had lived in many places, had seen and done many things that up until that point I'd only seen in movies and read about in books. She was a sexual assault survivor. She'd had several major surgeries and her health had always been a concern. And, because she was a med student, I didn't see her much outside of class -- we'd primarily keep in contact via email or via AOL Instant Messneger (AIM; oh, how I miss the glory days of AIM). She and I bared our souls to one another in long late night AIM sessions, telling each other our life stories. She was one of the few people I trusted with the suicide attempt story, because I knew she wouldn't judge me for it.

Mere and I stayed in contact throughout the entirety of my college career and long afterwards, moving from email and AIM to Facebook. As much as she helped me over the years I also helped her when her fiance at the time killed his mother and then himself. I was there for her when the doctors thought she had cervical cancer and performed a hysterectomy, only to find out later that she did not have cervical cancer, but cancer somewhere else (I don't exactly remember where). Because she couldn't have kids, she bonded very strongly with her niece and helped to raise her. When she posted last year that she was sick again but was doing well and had gone into remission, that she was fighting everything off, I cheered for her and sent her my best wishes.

When a few weeks later, she died, I was very, very upset and broken by it.

I never got details on how or why, or what had happened; I only saw the post from her mother on Facebook as well as a barebones obituary on the funeral home's website. I don't know whether she was buried or cremated, and I didn't want to ask for any details.

2001 ended, finally -- and after everything that had happened during it, I was not sad to see it go. But, I had a new focus, I had a job, and I was working to better myself. After such a tumultuous year it was the best that could be expected.

Places, part III

...the high school years, section I...


1998: The Affair Between President Bill Clinton And Monica Lewinsky Went Public

1998 was my first real year of high school.

Well, let me rephrase -- 1997-98, technically, was my first full year of high school, but in 1997 I was in 9th grade at South Middle School, which wouldn't move the 9th grade class to Morgantown High until the beginning of the next school year. I was, therefore, part of the last 9th grade class to ever grace the halls of South Middle School.

I had taken 1997 off from football; it had by that time mostly lost my interest (I wasn't even paying attention to college football that closely or the NFL at all yet, really), and the internet had taken over most of my other interests at that age. I was really into three things -- anime, Magic: The Gathering, and Marilyn Manson. Cathy and I were in the midst of our relationship, which had been going well, and (as previously mentioned in my other posts) I was doing well in school again. I had a group of friends, I had a summer job which allowed me to have some spending money, and that July, my mother and I went to Pittsburgh and adopted a shih-tzu puppy, which we named Moot.

Well, originally I named him Telemachus, after Odysseus' son in The Odyssey, but my mother wasn't going for that.

Anyway, it seemed that my life was going really well -- I'd settled into a groove, I was very comfortable, and I wanted for relatively little. I still lived a relatively solitary life, especially in the summers -- with my dad's band playing almost every weekend, I was home alone a lot. This was alleviated a bit by the dog, and by the fact that my mother had gotten me my own 20-inch TV for my bedroom the previous Christmas. It was on that TV that, with Moot on the bed next to me, I watched President Clinton -- probably still the greatest president of my generation -- deliver his address to the nation on August 18, 1998, revealing that he had, in fact, engaged in a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. As he was finishing up with his speech, Moot jumped down from the bed and peed on the floor of my bedroom. It was an omen of how the rest of the year would go from that point forward, I think.

Several days later, with the impeachment happening and then being overturned in the background, I began high school proper at Morgantown High School, my 10th grade year. Yes, yet another new school to get used to and to try to fit into, and I originally didn't think it would be that hard. I was wrong.

At the time, Morgantown High was the biggest school in the county. It may still be; I'm not completely sure. They were a contender, if not outright winner, of the state high school football trophy every year. The school was very old, and had a very old history -- Don Knotts (who I'm actually related to, far down the line, but that's a story for another time) and Lawrence Kasdan (if you don't know who he is, look him up) had gone to and graduated from Morgantown High School -- there's a trivia fact for you Hollywood fans. Anyway, in 1998 the school had not been renovated yet, not since the mid-century -- there was no air conditioning, and the only heat was radiator heat from a literal radiator on the walls of each classroom. You could hear the water flowing through them, and they'd pop and sizzle. If you touched one, yes, it would burn the shit out of you. But, on the plus side, if you sat your mug on one, it would keep your coffee warm. I remember that year hitting a cold snap particularly early in the fall, and because of the poor heating, we were allowed to wear our coats in class. I thought at the time that was a revolutionary idea.

My house was within walking distance of the high school -- maybe a mile and a half at most. If I wanted to walk to or from school, I could. I never walked to school that I remember, but I would walk home a lot, especially if I had something to do after school hours ended for the day. Mind you, this was before Columbine, before the years where schools would be on constant lockdown in and out of the building. MHS had open lunches, meaning you could leave campus for lunch if you wanted to. The school was just south of the university's downtown campus, and was on the south end of the downtown area in general -- you could walk to and from any number of restaurants and cafes in the area, or just get off campus for an hour if you wanted to. I didn't have a car, and the 1.5 miles to my house meant that I couldn't go home for lunches even if I'd wanted to, so most of my lunch hours were spent with what group of friends I could gather with on my same lunch period (read: not many) and if they weren't around, staying by myself away from most other people. I was never going to be one of the popular kids, and I was never going to fit in with them. Add to this that lunch was expensive, and it was paid for in cash at a register. Yeah, not happening for me; I waited until I got home every day to eat.

However, I did have a football history, and as most of my friends were separated from me by different class schedules in that massive school, as well as lunch schedules, I figured I'd try my hand at football again. At MHS, football was almost a religion. The school's reputation dictated that. It also dictated that those who had played 9th grade football (at South or otherwise) would basically get an automatic spot on the team as long as they could prove their worth. Everyone else had to try out and go to regular practices, get into shape, all that. So, shortly after the school year started, I made the decision to go back into football and try out for it, see if I could get on the team, see if I could make my high school years a little better.

The first few days of after school training was fine; it was very clear, however, that priority was going to be given to the more experienced, tenured players with games under their belt already. It was they who dominated the weight machines, and they looked at me like an interloper, sneered down at me like I didn't belong there -- and really, I didn't. These were the musclebound jocks, the guys who were born for football, who were there to stay in the habit and because the team demanded it. I was the short, fat kid who played defensive line in jr. high for the practice squad, not even the real squad (which was also looked down upon by the "star" players of the school), looking to join the elite squadron of MHS football players.

Despite this, I trained. I trained hard. My friend Chris was on the team and he helped me out, he stood up for me, he made sure my name was on the right lists and made sure I got equal training time.  Chris would go on to play football for the team for his entire high school career, and played for WVU as well. He was and is a good dude, and wanted to see his friends succeed. The Friday of the first week I was training, we were throwing medicine balls back and forth across the football field like basketballs, chest passes -- strength training. This was already after the requisite sprints and weight training, mind you.

I caught a particularly hard-thrown medicine ball, and heard/felt something pop.

I don't remember much of the next few minutes after that, except that I was in immense pain in my lower back and that I was on the ground. I didn't know what it was, but something did not feel right. The pain was blinding. I was on my hands and knees on the turf of the field, trying to catch my breath (even though it hadn't knocked the wind out of me). I was seeing spots. Chris didn't understand the extent of the injury, and told me to walk it off. He asked if I wanted a medic, and I can't remember what I said because I really can't remember much of anything during the incident. I remember getting up a few minutes later, stretching my back (still in immense pain) and telling him I was done.

I then changed back into my street clothes (slowly), picked up my very heavy backpack, and began the 1.5 mile walk home. About halfway there, as I was moving really slowly, it began to rain.

And just like that, my football career was over. I never went to another practice or tryouts. It was simply over.

It was the first time I'd thrown out my back. I was fifteen years old. A few days later, while I was lying in bed, I felt that pop again, and immediately I felt normal again. Over twenty years later, I now believe I probably had a partially slipped disk. At the time, that pain, that fear that I could do something that seriously damaging to my body without even getting hit or hitting someone else, meant that I would never play football again. I made that vow that day.

The next week, on another walk home from school, I stopped in at the local vintage gaming store and picked up a used NES and a handful of games for about $50 total. The only games I would be playing from that point forward would be of the video variety. This marked a huge turning point in my life. To this day, I still have some nagging back problems and knee problems from my time tangentially associated with jr. high and high school football.

Throughout all this time, in the background, my parents were, apparently, house-shopping. I didn't really know about it -- or if I did, it didn't really register, and I didn't really pay attention to it that closely, but I knew they wanted to get a house together, one big enough to where my brother and sister (dad's kids) could come stay in when necessary for visitation weekends and summers and the like. The house my mother and I had in Morgantown simply wouldn't do for that as it wasn't large enough, so they branched out and were exploring many different options and locations.

I was fifteen, so I was along for the ride; I didn't get much say in it, and at the time it was also so ancillary to my actual life that I truly didn't care that much. At the same time I remember being very resistant to change -- I didn't want to leave Morgantown. I was born there, I spent most of the vastly formative years of my life there, and I really liked the house we had. I remember suggesting that my parents look on the western side of the county, where my mother had grown up and where I had lived the first six or so years of my life, but that was rather quickly dismissed.

Sometime in the mid-fall months, my parents found a house that they wanted. It was 20 miles to the east on top of a mountain, at the foothills of a few larger, taller mountains. It was an old plantation farmhouse, the first built in the entire development (in the early 1900s; the housing development around it came later) and it had last been renovated in the mid-70s. It sat half a mile back from the main road and had a few huge oak trees in the front yard, with tall pines on the side and back of the house. Behind the house was a very old wooden shed (my guess from the 40s or 50s, and a hickory nut tree, in which cicadas apparently loved. They put in offer in on it and it was quickly accepted, but the owners (a very elderly couple, retired and looking to get rid of a lot of their property and holdings) said they needed a month or two to get their affairs in order and move out. My parents agreed to this (I remember apprehensively at best), and suddenly we were on a timeframe to moving out of Morgantown.

I don't know exactly how I felt. I can't really put it into words. My entire world was changing. My mother put our house up for sale. Suddenly I was not only dealing with moving to a completely different county and starting at a completely different school again, but now I had to deal with random strangers coming to our home and looking it over, barging in to examine and criticize the place -- sometimes with me there. I would be losing all my friends. I would go through the very tiresome process of packing up all of my belongings, deciding what stayed and what went, trying to figure myself out again along the way.

The move date was set for Thanksgiving week. I knew it was coming. I did not want it to. It had been a wet, cold fall, and the leaves fell early, covering everything in damp brown. It was all so surreal, like it wasn't even happening. My last day at Morgantown High was the Thursday before Thanksgiving week, and I turned in my books, cleared out my locker, and went through the day in a haze. I said goodbye to everyone one last time, to some people I would never see again (alive or dead), and left the MHS campus for the last time. I have never returned since.

The following weekend afterwards was spent moving, with the help of some family and family friends/dad's band/etc. I'd been to the house but one time before, the night before we really started moving everything in, and looking back on that now as an adult I find that really odd. Here I was, about to move into a house I'd never really seen, never really knew, and it was, well, just happening. I took the spare bedroom downstairs, in the new part of the house built during the renovations in the 70s. The house had no air conditioning and hardwood floors (when I was used to carpet everywhere), but my room had a ceiling fan, two windows, and a dedicated phone line for my dial-up internet -- which at that time had very recently updated our plan to unlimited access for $4 more per month.

Moot, my dog, was not happy. In addition to being moved to a new home, he also had to now share this home with my dad's dog, a large shepherd mix named Betty. I had to keep him shut in my room while the furniture was moved into the house, and he showed his displeasure by taking a giant shit on my bed.

These omens keep getting better and better, don't they?

By the end of that weekend we were exhausted, but moved in. Most stuff was still packed up in boxes, but we were in our new home. My mother had taken the week of Thanksgiving off work, so that following Monday, she and I drove up to my new high school -- Preston High School -- to enroll me for classes. School was not, surprisingly, in session. When I asked why, it's because the week of Thanksgiving is deer hunting season in West Virginia, and nobody went to school that week, so the county cancelled all classes every year for the entire Thanksgiving week. If that doesn't give some indication of exactly how backwoods redneck the county I moved to was, here's another example -- there were probably, give or take, ten or so high schools in the county Morgantown was in. There may be more or less now due to redistricting or consolidation; I don't know for sure. Preston High was the only high school in the county, period, and had about 1100 students total. Morgantown High had pretty close to double that, alone.

I met with one of the school guidance counselors, who didn't end up being my "assigned" guidance counselor but remained a close contact throughout my high school career, and he registered me for my classes for the remainder of the year. I would start the following Monday after Thanksgiving, I received a copy of the approximate time for the bus schedule and how it worked, and I was sent on my way for the rest of the holiday week, being told to report to the office as soon as I got in on Monday morning so I could be told where to go. The entire school excursion took maybe an hour.

I remember feeling numb, nervous, and just a little bit excited, I guess. I was that weird nerd kid, with the long afro-like hair (my hair reached serious levels of out of control in those days) who listened to some pretty dark music, wore a lot of black, and desperately wanted to be viewed as a badass but could never quite pull it off properly because he played Magic: The Gathering and loved Star Wars.

The following Monday I put on my fingerless leather gloves, black trench coat, Iron Maiden t-shirt (which I still own and wore last week, in fact), black jeans, and black combat boots, and went to school. I was immediately ostracized. I was introduced to each of my classes awkwardly, and was looked at like I was an alien who had just landed -- the classes were full of redneck guys in shitkicker boots and plaid flannel shirts, offset by the skater kids, jocks, hippie girls and high-achievers, and the cheerleaders and farmers. It was immediately very clear that I was not going to fit in with any of these people. Frequently I was asked where I was from, and when I replied with "Morgantown," people answered with "...then why did you come here?" I always had to answer with some sort of variation of "I didn't choose to; my parents wanted to buy a house in the country, so here I am."

There was one girl, however, who stayed behind in one of my classes that day to introduce herself to me and get to know me better. Her name was Becca, and over the course of the next year or so, I would fall madly in love with her -- the first time I'd ever truly felt that way about another person. It scared me. It scared me very badly.

That is, quietly enough, how 1998 would end. In a new house, attending the third school I'd been to that year, feeling alone and more isolated than ever before. I got a Sony PlayStation for Christmas that year, and my dad got a five-disc DVD player -- our household was rocketing toward the 21st century. And yet, to me, it felt like a time of great upheaval, and I had no idea what would come next. That also greatly scared me.



1999: The World Feared A Y2K Bug Would Destroy All Computer Systems

On December 31, 1999, at 11:55 PM, I put Led Zeppelin IV into my brand-new, just-received-for-Christmas 3-disc changer, scrolled through the tracks to "Stairway to Heaven," and cranked up the volume loudly, singing along with Robert Plant as he belted out the lyrics, which reached the best part of the song just as the clock struck midnight:

And as we wander down the road
Our shadows taller than our souls
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
Where all are one and one is all
To be a rock, and not to roll....

I was prepared for anything. I didn't know if the world would end. I didn't know if every electronic device on the planet was going to stop working. I didn't know if the world was going to be the same the next morning, if we were going to be thrown back into the stone age, if water would keep flowing out of the tap and the lights would still be on. So, I decided to, having just turned seventeen, celebrate the possible end of civilization in true teenager fashion -- blasting what at the time was my favorite song (and the one that spoke to me the most) and giving the rest of the world the finger.

This was, in a nutshell, how most of 1999 was for me as a whole.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

1999 was (and I'll say this again for the probably fifth or sixth time in this series of posts) a strange year. The Y2K thing was very real, and as the year went on, nobody really knew what would happen to the world's computer systems, nor did the news media ever shut up about it. When your dad worked in IT, it took on even more of a focus. Most people believed that nothing would really happen, but it's not like anyone would ever know for sure until January 1, 2000. Doomsday preppers and end-of-the-world cults made the news frequently, religions talked about how the coming millennium was a big milestone event that would see the dawn of a new era, and (personally) for me, it marked a time when things slowly began getting worse in my life -- the beginning of a very long downward spiral.

Because I'd been made fun of for my appearance as well as my crazy-wild shock of afro-hair, early in the year I shaved my head down to the skin, military style, with a pair of clippers the parents had purchased to groom the dog. I also loosened up my wardrobe a bit -- I began purchasing somewhat normal shirts and jeans, and (when I didn't need them, anyway) traded in my combat boots for Chuck Taylors. However, as winters were cold and snowy on top of the mountain, the black trench coat remained -- it was the warmest garment I owned.

Until April 20, 1999, that is. The day of the Columbine shooting.

Suddenly, I had a very large target on my literal back -- I was the weird guy who wore the black trench coat and listened to Marilyn Manson, I must be a member of the Trench Coat Mafia, how could I be trusted? Who could say when I would snap and shoot up the school? Was I one of them? Did I believe the same things they did? I began getting threats, I got bullied -- I was once more finally beginning to fit into the background and just go about my life when the shooting happened, and all of a sudden I went from being the guy who could pass as at least somewhat normal or otherwise faceless to the masses to being the one who was shunned and ostracized again, and feared. Being one of the Freaks when I was in Morgantown, one would think that I'd be used to being an outcast, or be used to people actively avoiding me, and for a time I reveled in that -- instead, now it had the opposite effect. It just made me immensely sad, and it put me into a depression that it took me months to really pull out of. The coat went into the closet, where it remained for at least a year, unworn.

I ended my 10th grade year at Preston High in the beginning of June 1999, to little fanfare. At the very least, I had some things to be a little happy about. I mean, a new Star Wars movie had been released for the first time in sixteen years, and I'd made a few friends -- very few, but a few -- who lived close enough to me where we could hang out a bit, and the beginning of the year was vastly improved by me enrolling in the high school's guitar classes. My music tastes began to branch out a little bit, skewing more towards classic rock than anything else. I discovered The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and AC/DC all independently of one another, but also garnered an appreciation for The Ramones, Rancid, and The Offspring as well as some ska and swing bands. If I could learn how to play it on the classical guitar my dad had let me borrow for my guitar class, it was worth me learning about.

Still, the summer was mostly lonely. I slowly descended into some neuroses, such as becoming obsessed with videotapes and completing my episode collections of several television series, looking to see when they'd air whatever episodes I was looking for and then recording them onto VHS tapes in the proper sequence, cataloging each episode on each tape. I alphabetized my t-shirt collection based on band, slogan, character, or what-have-you. My parents got me a bicycle (an updated, modern one, purchased from Kmart) and I occasionally rode the bike trails to and from my friend's houses in the next town, which was a fifteen-mile round trip. I began obsessively keeping daily journals, filling notebooks with whatever was on my mind -- mostly about how much I wanted my friend Becca to be my girlfriend. By this time, Cathy and I had ended our online-only relationship and were mostly out of contact with one another, though we would talk occasionally via email here and there. I was slowly getting more and more out of shape, primarily because (aside from those occasional bike rides, which were few and far between) I never left the house except to mow the grass or to occasionally go grocery shopping with my mother.

In July 1999, for a change of pace, my parents booked our summer vacation in Dewey Beach, Delaware. I'd been there before, a year or two earlier -- it's where I got my Iron Maiden shirt mentioned above, and where I'd found my first of several KMFDM t-shirts (also as mentioned previously, I still own and wear both of these shirts). Dewey was a very small beach town not far from the larger beach communities of Ocean City, Maryland and Rehoboth Beach -- the latter being apparently the #1 gay beach destination in the world (at the time; that has probably changed in the twenty years since). In 1999 I had no true concept of what a gay person was, as I'd never knowingly met one.

So we packed our things, boarded the dogs at the vet, and drove the ten hours or so to the beach...just in time for John F. Kennedy, Jr. to crash his plane into the ocean 100 miles or so away.

It was a big news story at the time, of course, but it was an everything else stops, turn on the TV and stay transfixed event along the coastline, especially north of us in New England. Pill bottles and luggage and clothing and shit was washing up onshore in places, people talked about it incessantly, and as he was a Kennedy -- the Kennedy that people assumed would be eventually getting into politics and living up to his father's name as well as his own, even if he didn't really want to -- there was a lot of mourning.

For me, I knew who he was, of course, but it didn't factor largely into my life. My focus of the beach trip was to do three things -- one, get out of West Virginia; two, to have some good sandwiches from the Italian sub shop next to our hotel (Nick's, who made the best pizza cheesesteak I've ever had to this day); and three, to find the head shop I'd purchased my Iron Maiden and KMFDM shirts from on my previous beach visit, so that I could go get more.

The head shop was gone, and I lamented its absence -- down the boardwalk further, though, was a video rental place that was selling tapes of Bucky O'Hare and Robotech for $5 each, and I picked up several. I probably still have most of those tapes someplace, or I did until I moved out of our apartment and into this house.

I swam in the ocean, I sat on the beach, I listened to static and talk radio in the overnights on my by now, nearly-busted walkman while I watched my mother sleep, unable to really sleep myself. When we returned home, we got the dogs back from the boarding house and life returned to the normal routine of me feeling mostly isolated and alone.

In August, I entered my 11th grade year with a game plan: survive, and make Becca my girlfriend.

Let me tell you a bit about myself at this age (some of you may be asking, isn't that what you've been doing all along? and you'd be right, but)...I was painfully shy and awkward, and any outward confidence I exuded was simply a mask for incredibly low self esteem and being so sheltered that functioning amongst other, relatively normal people left me drained and exhausted. I hated putting on that mask all the time just to appear like I wasn't as mentally disturbed as I was. I was extremely self-conscious of my looks and mannerisms, of the way I dressed, of everything about myself. On top of that, I was burdened with great intelligence and was very aware of that. Everything was an act, everything was a mask or a cover-up for the real me that, trying as I did, I couldn't escape. I wanted to "fake it until I make it" but I couldn't do that. Every day the mask felt like it was going to crumble and expose me. Nobody knew the real me. I was terrified that the real me would drive people away.

There was only one person who I wanted to let in and see the real me, and that was Becca. I'd put all my hopes and dreams into procuring a relationship with her, into preparing myself to let her in, to the point where I became obsessive and began believing my own bullshit, as they say. We were friends; I, at the time, called her my best friend. Why wouldn't she want to be more? I was a great guy, I could've been great with her and for her. She was my one, I believed at the time.

I asked her out and was summarily rejected. I don't remember the circumstances, I don't remember the conversation, I don't remember her reasoning. I remember that it was October, and I remember that I wanted to die because she wanted to be "just friends." Words cannot express my level of devastation or how it shattered my entire world. It helped cement my belief that I was completely worthless and unworthy of being loved. It shaped my world view that nobody could ever truly be known or fully trusted. And, in a twisted sense, it confirmed my belief at the time that I was destined to be, and to remain, unhappy.

Look, man, I was a teenager. What do you want from me?

Let me tell you a little about Becca. Becca was blonde, pale, mostly plain and nondescript, but absolutely beautiful to me. She was (and is, to this day) a very kind soul. She was also a nerd, and was into a lot of the things I was into, and is probably the biggest Sailor Moon fan I knew then, and probably now. She wore glasses. She was involved in theater. She was prim and proper and almost the exact opposite of myself at that age. She was also (and probably still is) very religious, way into Jesus -- Baptist, I believe. I, meanwhile, had lost any sense of faith I once had several years prior. Again, I was cursed with intelligence and a sense of reason. Aside from a few common interests we would never have meshed well anyway.

Becca was really hard to get over. Four years after this, ironically enough, she and I did eventually go on a dinner and movie date. We went to see Big Fish. It was fine, but the spark just really wasn't there (or if it was, I missed it due to being bad at social cues and the like), and we sort of went our separate ways in life after slowly growing apart during our college years. She got married last year to a guy who, strangely enough, looks a lot like me -- or at least I think so. Maybe that's just me. I assume she is happy and content in her life, but we haven't actually spoken in many years.

Circling back around to the beginning of the 1999 story, however, that's how I found myself giving the middle finger to the world and hoping it all burned to the ground on December 31. I was ready to end the 90s with a bang. If I'd had a gun, it probably would've been a bang to the face.

Places, part II

1995: OJ Simpson's Trial Ended With His Acquittal Of All Murder Charges
In 1995, I was in my first year of middle school at South Jr. High School (later to be, sort of ironically, changed to "South Middle School" when they moved the 9th graders up to the high school). The day the OJ trial verdict was announced, we watched it live in my 7th grade science class -- and being smart and wise even in my younger years, when two of the asshole rich kids in the class tried to get me to take a $20 bet that OJ would get off, I gladly took it. I was, of course, taking a risk, but I wasn't stupid; I knew he'd be acquitted, and I knew those asshole rich kids were, well, asshole rich kids. When I was proven right and tried to collect, they of course said they wouldn't pay up. If I'd beaten the fuck out of them like a mafia boss, my reputation in school would've been much different for the following two years I remained a student there, and I probably would've been left alone a lot more, and wouldn't have been so bullied by the rest of the rich kids for the remainder of middle school.

1995 was a very formative year overall. I turned 13 in 1995, and I was a fairly troubled kid. I wasn't a fan of authority (something that continues to this day), but 1995 marked my really rebellious streak's beginnings. Truth be told, I was a terrible kid during this time -- I treated my mother horrifically, I got caught trying to shoplift Sega Genesis games from a local department store, and I didn't give a single flying fuck about school or about rules. I was fairly uncontrollable, and truthfully I don't know if my mother knew what to do with me, so after the shoplifting incident, she put me into therapy; it was the first of several times I'd consult with a therapist throughout my life. It's not like I was crazy or anything, but I was a typical rebellious teenager with really bad luck -- meaning every time I tried to get away with something, I never could or was caught. I remember it frustrating me terribly because I kept watching other kids my age actually get away with pretty much anything they wanted. It also didn't help that all of the rich kids at my school would talk about their new video games or show off all of their new comic books and sneakers and clothes, and I had none of those things. My mother and I were better off than we had been six or seven years before, but we were still lower-middle-class and far from rich. I was wearing clothes from Gabriel Brothers, the local discount store that sold one-offs and irregular clothing (at the time) when everyone else was wearing high-end designer shit. I didn't have name-brand shoes, I had whatever Gabes or Kmart sold on clearance (Walmart was just beginning to get a presence in Morgantown at this time, but it wasn't what we see Walmart as today -- it was very different back in the day and wasn't yet the super-mega-congolmerate that we're all now used to). Target didn't have a store in Morgantown until I was in college, so it was either Kmart, Gabes, or nothing for the poors. Maybe Goodwill, if you wanted even lower-rent clothing.

As an aside, I still have some stuff I purchased from Kmart and Gabes in the 90s. Very little, of course, but some. Mainly a few pairs of socks, a shirt or two, and some underwear.

Anyway, I was a troubled child. I was losing my grip on myself, was going through puberty and it wasn't working out well -- my always-straight, dirty blonde/light brown hair turned a darker brown and developed a lot of waviness and natural curl (inherited from my father, no doubt) that I hated. I hated my curly hair and couldn't get rid of it; meanwhile, everyone in my family told me how much they envied it because they thought it looked great. My voice cracked, but only cracked halfway -- I had to consciously force myself to talk in a deeper voice to mask it until my voice finished changing and became how it naturally sounded. This took a good year or so of fully controlled, metered conversations with everything I ever said to anyone for any reason. This was not pleasant. I felt like a monster in my own body. I'm sure a lot of people feel like this as they enter their teenage years, but I was burdened with being smarter than most other people I knew, so beginning to see how the world actually worked and how much it was stacked against people like me threw me into a deep, crippling depression for the first time in my life. I didn't know exactly how to deal with it because I'd never experienced it before and never knew what it really was.

The reason I went to South Middle School was because in the spring of 1995, when I was still attending North Elementary in 6th grade, my mother bought a house for us on the other side of town. It was a good house, and the wife and I drove past it upon my visit back home to West Virginia in 2017 to take pictures -- it looks completely different now, sadly. Anyway, for the rest of the 94-95 school year, I still attended North, because it would've been a major pain in the ass to switch school districts for two months. So we basically just faked it and said I was living at my old address until the end of the school year, and started anew at yet another new school at South in the fall that year.

The Morgantown house was a 3 bedroom, one bath house with a garage, massive laundry room, and underground family room. It was all brick and had been built in the 60s. I don't know how many people had owned it before us, but it was the perfect-sized house for the two of us. I started out in the larger of the two bedrooms, but would later move to the smaller of the two (more on the reasons for this later). The downstairs family room was never used, even though it was completely furnished and carpeted -- we put old spare furniture in there and I'm not sure we ever used the fireplace once. Big wolf spiders loved the downstairs of that house, at least in the family room area and the stairwell -- I don't think I ever saw one in the laundry room -- but my mother and I finally had a place we could really call our own. Not rented or leased, but purchased and owned. We hated mowing the grass and doing the gardening, but I laugh at that now that I own my own home with my wife, and in the summer that takes me like two hours a week to take care of. We purchased two old, heavy touring bikes (probably from the 70s) from the neighbors who were selling them at their yard sale, and my mother and I rode those bikes every once in a while. Even in all of the turmoil in my personal life, puberty, troubled youth and depression, those are the things I remember about 1995. I may have been almost failing out of school, I may have hated myself and felt like a monster, but I still remember some of the good.

So in the summer of 1995, I knew nobody around me. I knew nobody in my neighborhood, I knew no friends, I was too young to have a car (obviously) or a job, and I had no money, goals, or direction in life. I had low-rent, mid-90s non-digital cable television, I had comic books, and I had my own mind. I began writing, mostly in notebooks and on discarded sheets of printer paper. I began writing letters to Marvel and DC, trying to sell them on some half-brained storyline idea or pitch a new character (complete with sketches). I spent weekends (mostly alone) watching USA Up All Night, or getting up early in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays to tape episodes of syndicated Sailor Moon or the original Voltron and Speed Racer series which ran at 5AM on some of the local channels. I was just beginning to get into anime, even though I really didn't even know what it was at the time. That would come later.



1996: Dolly The Sheep Was The First Mammal To Be Successfully Cloned
When Dolly was cloned, the news was announced on a cold, frosty morning on my way to school. I first heard it on my headphones on the morning school bus, on the radio of my Walkman (the radio used far less battery than the actual cassette player did, so I generally listened to it on the bus ride so that people would leave me alone and I wouldn't be left with my thoughts).

While I had started playing intramural stuff in 1995, in 1996 I was playing on what was basically the jr. varsity (they didn't call it that; I can't remember what they called it) football team, defensive line. At my school, the jr. varsity team was basically training and a lot of practice for the actual team -- it was a loose team of what amounted to 3rd and 4th stringers, and as such we didn't play actual games for or on an actual team; if someone got hurt or they needed to fill a position because someone had gone out of town on vacation or got the flu or something, they'd call in one of us. Our job was to be trained up and ready to jump in when the actual "varsity" team needed it. Well, as defensive line, that didn't really happen for me, as I was one of the super-low-demand positions. So while I practiced a lot, and while I was ready to be called up, it didn't happen. I got to keep the jersey, though (I was probably supposed to give it back, but fuck 'em); my number was 15. I was wearing my jersey that year in my school ID picture, which I found and showed the wife a few months back. Some early snowstorms ended the football season a bit prematurely, as well as canceled our holiday choir concert -- something I was infinitely grateful for.

I turned 14 in 1996, and as such I was left to my own devices a lot around the house. My dad, who by this time had been in a relationship with my mother for a little over two years, lived conveniently about 1/4 mile from our new house, close enough to walk to if necessary with no real issue. My dad was (well, is to this day to some extent) a musician, and his band played shows every weekend around town at bars, resorts, and restaurants. My mother, of course, attended these shows without fail, and would generally spend the night "across the street" as I used to call it, at my dad's place at the end of the night. This was fine; it's not like I didn't know where she was and it's not like I wasn't taken care of. The band generally played 8-12, or 9-1, something like that -- meaning they'd take an hour or two to tear down and pack up afterwards, and that meant that my parents wouldn't get home until 2-4 in the morning (depending on venue). While I could've gone to see the band play at pretty much any time or place for these events -- I had the equivalent of a "backstage pass" so so speak, since I was "with the band," I didn't usually do so until I was much older, and only then very infrequently (probably less than ten times over the course of six or seven years).

Despite that, 1996 was the year I started paying attention to music and actually caring about it, and that was spurred on mainly by two things -- the first being the group of friends I fell in with, and the second being the internet. Because our middle school was full of trash people, I became friends with the outcasts, the people who didn't fit into any of the other cliques around the school -- because there were a lot of those. There were the rich kids/the preps, the thugs and troublemakers, the band geeks, the stoners, the poors, the untouchably gorgeous, the teachers' pets, the military brats, the jocks, etc -- I could go on, but most schools had the same sorts of cliques and groups -- mine was no different than the usual. My group of friends came from all walks of life and sort of reminds me now of the kids from Stranger Things, just the 90s version. We called ourselves, self-deprecating as it was, the Freaks.

There were a decent number of us in our core group. There was me, then Carl, who claimed he had a metal plate in his head; Adam, the muscle and sort of the de-facto leader of the group; Anthony, a sort of shaggy and mostly quiet nerd; Ron, the token black guy who was intimidating to outsiders but friendly and soft-spoken with friends; Ahmed, who drew some of the most beautiful comic art I'd ever seen; Paul, the class clown with a troubled home life; Heather, the nerd girl; John, the other end of the muscle -- a big nerd who had been a bully (ironically) to keep other people from bullying him; Stephen, a music and comic nerd whose sister was one of the most attractive girls in the school; and, finally, Chris -- the jock nerd who played on the football team but also loved playing Magic: The Gathering. Most of us were from the wrong side of the proverbial tracks, most of us came from low-income households, and all of us had pretty much been outcast or otherwise didn't fit in with anyone else in the school. We kept to ourselves and played Magic, D&D, and the Palladium tabletop games (primarily Rifts and Robotech) to keep outside of the attention of others.

Almost 25 years later I am still in contact with most of these folks, or rekindled contact with them after a number of years -- Adam, Carl, and Chris are all happily married with children. Carl has six kids, and I did not find out until two months ago that he does not, in fact, have a metal plate in his head. Chris became a high school football star and eventually ended up playing for WVU before settling down with a wife and child. Anthony is in Hawaii and is about to marry an acquaintance of mine, and Ron is still Ron. However, a good number of these people I would fall out of contact with either in high school or shortly afterwards. Paul I didn't see again until college, when he told me he was an electrician. Heather got in some trouble with the law, and sort of fell off our radar; the next time I saw her, I was most of the way through college and she was working at the deli counter of a local grocery store. Ahmed went into computer engineering and dropped off the face of the internet after around 2005 or so, and I've not been in contact with him since. Stephen went into the military at some point, and I lost contact with him around that time -- but his hot sister became a stripper. Finally, on a more sad note, a year or so after I left Morgantown, John committed suicide.

But I'm getting off track.

As mentioned, 1996 was the year I started really paying attention to music, and not just the stuff that was on the radio. Having a dad who was a musician -- in a band full of musicians we were family friends with --opened me up to a lot of stuff I would have otherwise never known about -- Jeff Beck, Frank Zappa, Tower of Power, Rush, Steely Dan, Genesis, Chicago -- etc. My brother (my dad's son) opened me up to more alternative, punk, metal, and industrial music, as well -- Front Line Assembly, Soundgarden, Ministry, NOFX, and the Misfits. My neighbor Stuart was a goth kid, two years older than me, and he introduced me to KMFDM, Bauhaus, Joy Division, and Depeche Mode. I branched out and began forming my own musical tastes as well based on what my friends were listening to -- I finally discovered bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Green Day, and suddenly I had an escape. Suddenly I could disappear into music, I could let my problems and boredom melt away. I soon found myself listening to the local college radio station at all hours, writing down the names of songs and artists I really liked on scratch paper when they mentioned them. This is how I discovered R.E.M., Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Echo and the Bunnymen. When I found someone I really liked, I would look them up and read all about them on...the internet.

Ah yes, the internet.

Words cannot describe here what the internet did for me as a teenager, or as a person in general, really. As a Black Friday deal in 1996, for $999 at Walmart, my mother purchased my very first computer for me. I remember it like yesterday -- it was an AST Advantage 575, the very model pictured below:

It ran Windows 95 first edition, had 8MB RAM, a 600MB hard drive, an 8X CD-ROM drive, a 3.5 floppy, and had a blistering fast 75mhz Pentium 1 processor. Oh, and a 14.4 modem.

Yes folks, that's how old I am -- my first computer had a 14.4 modem. Not a 28.8 or a 56k, but a piddly 14.4.

It also came with a printer that very quickly ran out of ink, and even in the 90s the ink cartridges cost $50.

The computer was purchased for me (primarily) so that I could type up papers and do other schoolwork on it, and very shortly after buying it (less than a month) my mother got me an internet account -- $14.95 a month for 30 hours per month of dial-up access via WVNET, a local company that, as you can see, still exists in some form back home. 30 hours per month! Can you imagine being that limited?

For those of you who are too young to remember, or who didn't have internet access at home until later in life, 1996 was literally the infancy of the internet. HTML would crash webpages. Pictures were a novelty and took forever to load on a dial-up connection -- the vast majority of the internet was mostly text-only with the occasional fancy background or weblink thrown in. There was no Google. There was no Youtube. There was no online gaming. Chatrooms were a completely new thing. There were few forums and no Reddit, only Usenet and newsgroups. MP3s and streaming did not exist. Jeff Bezos had just founded Amazon and nobody knew what it was yet. My web browser was Netscape 1.1. It was a new age that had just started, and finally I was (sort of) a leg up on most other people I knew -- I knew almost nobody who had internet at home, and I knew very few people who even had computers at home. Mind you, this was the mid-90s in rural West Virginia; a computer was some fancy rich people shit that at the time, appeared to be wholly unnecessary for home life.

To me, it was another escape. Online, I could be anybody, I could do anything. I had almost any information I wanted at a keystroke, and who cared if it took five minutes to boot the computer, another three or four to fire up telnet and manually dial into the internet with my modem, watching the text-only prompts on the screen saying "connected" only to be booted offline if someone called the house phone (or if my mother in the other room wanted to make a call).

The computer was set up on an end table in what, at that time, was the spare bedroom that nobody used -- it was set up there because there was already a phone jack in the wall there, when there wasn't one in my bedroom. Slowly, over the course of a few weeks and months, I moved into the smaller bedroom with my computer in it. It became my Batcave, my Fortress of Solitude. Through the CD-ROM drive I could finally play games and listen to music that I liked, and because of the internet I had enough distractions to where I no longer felt completely alone in the world.

1996 ended gracefully enough, and things were starting to look better, despite some of the events going on in the world. One of those nights when I was off school in the summer, up late watching TV and drawing some comic book art, I watched the Atlanta Olympics bombing on live television. I remember waking my mother up to tell her. She was less than enthused. I remember Christmas 1996 being filled with peace and settling down into a groove that would dominate the next two years or so for the most part, and thinking back on it now, I can't tell you what I'd give to have those times back, to be able to relive that year knowing what I know now. Things were so much simpler, so much easier.



1997: Princess Diana Died In A Car Accident While Being Chased By Paparazzi
The night Princess Diana died, in August 1997, my mother and I were watching live coverage on CNN. I remember it being a school night, and that I was up very late -- 1 or 2am -- when they made the official announcement. My mother always had, I felt, a connection of sorts to the royals -- she and my father got married shortly before Diana and Charles had, and Diana had given birth to Prince William while she was pregnant with me. They were almost the same age (Diana was about a year or so younger than my mother) and my mother even looked quite a bit like Diana -- blonde, usually short-haired, with piercing blue eyes. Diana may have been the closest figure my mother had to a true role model, and Diana's death upset her. I, of course, knew who Princess Diana was but knew little else about the family or about the royals in general.

The mid to late '90s were a weird time, friends. I was beginning to slowly come of age, beginning to realize the events of the world around me, and I was finally becoming what one might call "a normal teenager." With the internet to occupy me and help me out, my grades in school drastically improved; by the end of my 8th grade year I was back to my old ways of A's and B's. With music, I could center myself, and when I wasn't in school, I had hobbies -- I was starting to deeply get into anime, I played Magic: The Gathering, and I was, ahem, starting to notice girls. I mean, I'd always noticed girls before, but puberty was over at this point and I had become the quintessential horny teenager. I was 14, almost 15, and I wanted to date. I wanted to feel a connection with someone. I wanted to feel romance and passion and sex.

Precisely none of these things happened.  I was still the fat geek who collected comic books, played Magic with the rest of the Freaks at school and watched anime on a 20-inch tube TV with a VCR balanced precariously on top of it. But, thanks to a Sailor Moon fan website chatroom (I know, I know) I did connect with a girl my age in New York named Cathy. We became very close and began an online, long-distance relationship. She is, to this day, probably my oldest friend -- we are still in sporadic contact, we are friends on Facebook, and she remains in New York, married with a son who at this point has to almost be a teenager himself.

Cathy took up a lot of my time. This was not a bad thing; I was able to, through my relationship with her, learn how to interact with the opposite sex. I apparently had a natural charm -- I could woo almost any woman with my words -- and I began to learn how to hone that craft. Cathy and I would be on again, off again for several years, up to and throughout all of our high school years. To this day, we have never met in person and I am sure 22 years later, I am little more than an afterthought or a footnote in her relationship history. But, I'm sure, I could call her at any given moment and we'd pick our friendship back up like nothing had changed.

Diana's death was a big news story for me, but it wasn't the biggest that year -- the biggest and most historically significant event I experienced in 1997 was the passing of the Hale-Bopp comet. It could be seen in 1996, of course, and it was up there and people were talking about it, but in 1997 it exploded across the sky and was very brightly visible for several months -- it was, to this day, one of the most spectacular things I have ever seen. For those of you who weren't alive or are too young to remember, this comet was a big deal. As soon as it started to get dark at night, it became the brightest thing in the sky and your eyes were immediately drawn to it. I remember many nights outside, and probably many mosquito bites obtained, while staring at this comet. It was Hale-Bopp that got me more into science, more into wanting to know what was out there and why. When the Heaven's Gate cult killed themselves over it, the comet became even more intriguing -- and when it began fading from view and eventually disappeared, I felt a wave of abject sadness slowly set in.

1997 gave me my first job and my first real, well, spending money. My neighbor in the house behind me, Jacob, was the local paperboy. His parents also went away on vacation in the summer for two months straight, and he went with them -- meaning they needed to find someone who could deliver newspapers in the area. I was that somebody. I was paid $75 a month -- half upon them leaving and half upon them getting back -- and to me, who came from nothing, that was a hell of a lot of money.

The papers were dropped off at the house between 2 and 3AM every night. Me, being primarily nocturnal in the hot West Virginia summers when I was out of school, went to pick them up upon dropoff, looked at the daily instruction sheet (this would tell me whether I was to hold some people's papers for them or wouldn't be delivering them that day or what-have-you), then I would assemble them, wrap them, place them all into my super-oversized canvas messenger bag, and be out the door between 4:30 and 5. There were about 45 houses I delivered to, give or take, and that number increased to 65 or so on Sundays (which were, admittedly, awful to deal with). The route carried me around about four or five blocks, and was circular. After the first few days I figured out how to do it in the fastest and most efficient way, and could almost time myself to the minute when I'd get home based on when I left. Generally, I would get home right as my mother was getting up for the day, and if she hadn't already done so, I would make the morning coffee.

Walking the neighborhood on those early mornings wasn't just great exercise for me, who was at the time still a fat nerd, but it was peaceful. I got to see some beautiful meteors with long trails extending across the sky, would run into the occasional wildlife (usually deer, possum, or raccoon, though they never came after me or anything) and I wore out my tape of the Rocky Horror Show (stage recording) soundtrack by listening to it over and over on my walks. This is partially why I remember every lyric to every song to this day.

With the money I received from the paper route, at least some of it went towards getting a tie-dyed Millennium Falcon t-shirt and a pair of John Lennon round sunglasses. I wore the shirt for years until it fell apart in the mid-2000s, and the sunglasses I wore at least until I was in college, when they got bent up and the lens popped out of them.

The other milestone of 1997 for me was that I got my first black trench coat. This was before Columbine, mind you -- and I was one of the Freaks who also fit in with the goth kids and metalheads quite well. The coat became a second skin, and I was almost never seen without it (with the exception of the really hot summer months, anyway). Even after I got another one, a gray one, a year later, the black one was a staple of my wardrobe until after I graduated from college (mind you, I was in 8th grade when it was purchased) -- by then, it had developed large rips and wear holes (constant use plus, well, teenage growth spurts) and outdoor exposure had faded the black to a dark brown in many places. I finally parted with it sometime around 2006, and was sad to see it go.