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November 19, 2006
character
I used to think that people were basically good, that, given the right circumstances, meeting the right people, maybe growing up in the right area, a person would tend to grow up into a decent human being. I figured that all the evil in the world was perpetrated by anomolies of humanity. People who had come up without a chance to become good folks, perhaps having badness instilled in them by their rotten parents or their rotten circumstances. In my expert opinion, then, the world had the potential to be a better place, as long as people behaved like me -- someone who, though not an active doer of good deeds, was at least a conscious practitioner of do-no-harm.
I only thought that because I'd forgotten about Denis. How did I manage that?
One time, I had an idea for a story. It was about a guy who was very similar to me, who became bored of the blandness of his life. He'd grown up a loner and never managed to break out of the mold he'd set for himself. He kept to himself and didn't have many friends. As a character, he was very similar to the guy in my other story -- the only socialization he did was online, and that, with only a few people. Bascially, he didn't get out much.
Over time, though, he developed an "online persona". On the computer, on the chat networks, he was a different person. Bold, funny, personable, talkative. On the IRC, he was his own opposite. He talked to strangers, he talked to girls. He talked on subjects he'd never have discussed in real life.
This story took place in 1998, before everyone and his cat had an online persona.
He grew to hate that term, "real life". For him, his online life was far more satisfying -- socially, intellectually -- than what he had with his phyisical acquaitances. And that's just what they were: acquaintances. Online, he had folks he'd call his friends. Off the network, the people he knew never got close enough to be called friends. There were a couple people who he knew both online and off; they were the rare few that saw both aspects of this guy. Time went on, and his online persona became more and more extroverted while his offline self drew ever more inwards.
One night, in a fit of boredom, this guy came up with an idea. He would "spin off" a new personality in his offline self, and this personality would be inhabited by his bolder, more fun-loving jocular online self. He like the term "spin off", and he liked his plan, too, but he didn't really have any substance to his plan beyond terminology. His plan languished for a while as he tried to figure out a means to implement it.
In the meantime, he noticed changes in the way he was interacting with people: his classmates, the checker at the grocery, his offline acquaintances. He was funnier, and less awkard. Flirty, even, at times. And he realized that, without consciously implementing his plan, his plan had implemented itself. As more and more of his offline personality fell under the sway of his online personality, the guy began to get a little frightened. He hadn't expected his plan to be so effective, and he wasn't quite ready to surrender his reticent ways. Though in many ways he resented his shy, quiet lifestyle, it was still the only life he'd ever known, and he wasn't so eager to give it up. He wanted compromise.
But his online persona, which accounted for more of his behavior each day, wanted no such thing. So, in one way or another (I didn't get around to figuring out the details), the new persona subverted and sabotaged and suppressed the old one, effectively murdering it. The guy was never the same afterward, and lived "happily ever after", in some sense, but in another sense, it wasn't "him", since "he" had given way to the "new" persona.
I had planned to throw in all sorts of interesting meditations on identity, and evil, and the urgency of life that, once grasped, did not permit a mild living. Maybe a new-persona-kills-somebody-while-old-persona-helplessly-watches twist or two, while I was at it.
Instead, I went and found out that some damned Brad Pitt movie had beaten me to the punch.
In the beginning of my time with Margie, I struggled. Life itself is a struggle, of course, but traveling through it there is a certain hope that as one grows older and presumably wiser, the struggle will become less intense, or at the very least, less difficult. Of course, as one grows older and presumably wiser, one realizes that the struggle never ever eases, not for a moment. Life is a struggle from the very first gasping inhalation to the very last silent exhalation, and any time your guard goes down, any time you relax for just one second, you've pulled yourself that much closer to that last, silent exhalation.
As Weird Al so aptly put it: I'll be mellow when I'm dead.
My struggle with my relationship was based in my own bitter regret of my wasted youth. In summary: I spent my youth studying, learning the sort of obscure, pasty-skinned, technical stuff that led to my eventual college degree and high-paying job. In college I kept my nose in the books and talked to nobody. I "got out" of school as quickly as I possibly could and never drank, got high, or got laid. I never had any fun. I ended up a "success," I suppose, if your yardstick is salary and self-sufficiency. I'm not especially wealthy, but I'm smart enough and well educated enough to keep myself off the streets. That's something, or so I thought. As I grew a little older, though, I realized that on the contrary, it wasn't anything at all.
Margie, in contrast, had fun in her early years. She wasn't a bookworm by any accounts, and missed none of the youthful fun that I steered so far away from. That, in itself, did not distress me. I knew lots of people like that, when I was in school and when I was out. Those people quite often ended up "losers," in cruddy jobs with cruddy houses, or, as Dr. Dre so aptly put it: no wheels and no keys, no boats no snowmobiles and no skis. Some of them I knew were not happy, and it was my consolation that all my hard-nosed work (for it had not been hard work) had been for some greater purpose, some foundational work on my life. Or something.
Margie was no loser. She was the happiest person I'd ever met. I never begrudged her that happiness -- indeed, without that joy in her eyes, I'd never have married her. But still, it was that joy that rankled me, early on. Because whereas I'd struggled through college, joyless and alone, building up a life and persona that would eventually bring me the sort of peaceful happiness that everyone on this planet desires, she'd had all of that all along. Somehow she'd figured out early on what it took me nearly two decades to *know*: there is no governor anywhere.
There are no rules, and Suffering Now To Be Happy Later is bullshit. Later doesn't always come, and even if it does, when it's Later, you'll still remember how much Now sucks. How much more effective is it to live Now as happily as you can, while still preparing for a pleasant Later. Maybe some folks don't have what it takes to manage both at once, but once I got the hang of it, it really wasn't too hard.
And that's what I had to struggle with way back then. Not jealousy or resentment, envy or greed. No, I had to deal with the fact that I'd wasted a huge chunk of my life that I'd never get back, and the biggest reminder of that fact was the face I'd wake up to every morning, and the embrace I'd fall asleep to every night.
The disappointment of my squandered youth, though irritating to no end, was quite simple to philosophize away. The song and dance went a little something like this: if I'd done anything differently in my life, if I'd had a little more fun in my tender years, if I'd whipped it out a little more often or smoked a little more weed or woken up in just a couple more puddles of puke, I'd never have ended up where I ended up, which was, of course, supremely happied and married to the woman of my dreams.
I liked that explanation, and it defended me well from my own shameful disappointment, until I came to believe in fate. Damnable fate! Fate was not compatible with the All Was As It Must Have Been theory, because fate itself is one of those same theories. You see, if I was fated to meet Margie -- and there can be no other explanation -- then I may as well have partied hardy during my wasted years. I'd still have met Margie. It was fate. And so, again, I'm faced with the inescapable fact that I surrendered the best years of my life to pointless (and to some extent, unrewarded) bookishness.
Didn't I say that there's no end to the struggle?
One time, I had an idea for a story. It was about a guy who was very similar to me. This guy could work magic. Real magic, not that David Blaine crap. He could turn objects into other objects. Apples into bananas, socks into hand grenades, and so forth. He thinks this is a really cool trick, of course, and tries to show it to his best friend. When he does, though, his friend fails to obseve the transformations. When the guy turns a red sock into a blue sock, the friend swears the sock had been blue all along. Similarly with other changes.
Still, this doesn't stop the guy from using his skill to win the adoration of women and professors. He goes on turning events to his advantage until one day he has some kind of seizure and wakes up in a parallel universe where subtle but significant differences exist: there's a different person in the white house, his best friend has a goatee, and so forth. In fact, he doesn't just wake up in a nasty parallel universe -- he wakes up in a back alley of a nasty parallel universe, getting his ass handed to him by two guys with pool sticks.
Fortunately, our hero is armed with magical abilities, and he uses them to get the drop on his attackers. He figures that maybe he ought to spend some time figuring out what's behind his abilities. He goes about this, somehow, and comes to the conclusion that there exist an infinite number of universes, each representing subtle, minute differences -- one universe where he chose to part his hair to the left this morning, and another universe where he chose to part it to the right. Two universes for each choice, adding up to a really big infinity of universes.
Somehow, intuitively, the guy has figured out a way to jump from universe to universe. So when he appears to himself to be changing a turkey sandwich into a hamburger, in reality, he's "jumping" from a universe where he was holding a turkey sandwich into a universe where he was actually holding a hamburger. The reason his friend couldn't observe a change was because from the friend's point of view, there was no change.
And when the guy jumped from one universe to another, the "him" that lived in the destination universe was "swapped" with the jumping "him". Did the swapped-out "him" notice any change? Maybe, maybe not. Surely, he would have been confused.
So, this figured out, some things happen, and then some more things happen, and it becomes apparent to the guy that his evil-self from the universe he was stuck in had figured out how to jump between really drastically different universes, instead of the easy kind of jump between universes where the guy was manhandling a different kind of fruit. This evil-him had jumped out of the present universe, because in the present universe his girlfriend had dumped him for being... well... evil. So he'd swapped out our hero and gone on to our hero's universe to cause mayhem.
The guy then jumps back into his home turf, finds that the evil-him has already raped and beaten his girlfriend, and then there's some mumbo-jumbo about how he can't undo the bad deeds of his evil-self -- or can he? It's implied that the guy can use the same techniques he's used to jump between universes to jump into God Himself, and of course, God can undo any misdeed.
I thought this was a pretty good story idea. So good, in fact, that I actually got around to writing it down, quite out of character. When I finished it, it was my first short story since high school, and it felt damned good to have written it. It had been an act of creation like no other, and years coming. I was proud of it. I edited it, and polished it, and showed it off to a couple of friends.
Then, a couple months later I went back and reread it. I was embarassed at how amateurish it was. The characters were totally undeveloped, plotting was unclear, and most of the important developments were explicitly revealed to the characters rather than unveiled for the reader by the characters' actions. In short: it sucked.
That's what I get for writing, I guess. That's why I don't do it anymore.
"Write about what you know," they say. I never knew enough to write about what I knew, so I resorted to fiction, instead. But at the same time, I wasn't a strong enough writer for the characters to stray too far from my own personality. So what little characterization I did manage to squeeze into my stories, whether written down or simply narrated in-head, was all very familiar to me. Most of my stories involved a guy very much like me, going along in his life, happily but bored, oblivious, until Fate stepped in and scrambled things up. I suppose that's the recipe for most stories, yeah?
In general, though, my stories feature a character who manages to wrest control of his life from the uncaring grip of Fate, and betters himself through his own hard work. It's fantasy. It's wish-fulfillment. It's just me, building up a fanasy world in which someone-like-me gets rewarded for the sacrafices of the past. It doesn't work like that, though. Fate is a tease. She'll let you think you're holding the reigns just long enough to show you who's really leading your chariot. But a writer has more power than Fate. A writer can give his characters more than Fate would ever allow, he can expose them to the sort of content happiness that exists only in fairy tales. A writer can bless his character with every good thing ever imagined and let that character die happy -- and there's not a thing Fate can do (short of killing the writer) to intercede, even though she'd love to, I'm sure, since writers tend to ruin her reputation with all their happy endings.
Anyways, I performed magic once, and because I did it in a scientific fashion, I
managed to convince myself to no small extent that it worked, and that my grasp
on Fate's whim was akin to a rancher's grasp of a bull's nose ring. I figured I
was in control. And though I no longer believe in that level of control over my
own life, I still have no explanation better than magic for how I met Margie.
When I was fifteen, I had a crush on a girl named Ida. Nowadays, and probably even back then, people stopped having "crushes" around the age of 12 and just got on with things, the whole "telling her" routine followed by the "kissing her" and, if that went well, the "getting some." Not me, though, not for a lot of years. I don't think Ida ever even knew how I felt. I was shy, and I was quiet, then, so I didn't mention it. But I hung out with her as often as I could, and she was cool with that.
Not her brother, though. He didn't like me. Denis was seventeen, and he had a moustache. He was so proud of his little wispy young-man moustache. I hated it as much as I hated him. He and his scraggly moustache played for the football team, and every girl in school fawned all over Denis and his stupid little moustache. The teachers let him slide through classes without accountability, and the administration took every opportunity to fail to discipline him when needed. I know this, because, of course, he picked on me. At school, on the schoolbus, around town. Whenever Ida wasn't around, he'd punch me in the guts and tell me what a jerk I was. Only he wasn't as nice about it as that. He must have really enjoyed making me miserable, he certainly devoted enough time to the endeavour.
My consolation, back then, the consolation of all smarty-types when they're young and getting beat up by jocks, was that I'd end up rich and married to his sister and he'd end up married to a cow, spending his spare time serving me fries instead of beating me up.
As it turns out, that's not how it turned out.
Denis and Ida had younger sister, Sally. Silly Sally, we'd call her. She was five and a half, and always underfoot. Whereas Ida's presence would restrain Denis' punishment, Sally, evidently, did not command the same adherence to the golden rule. Denis would go about beating me up and insulting me right in front of her. So besides the normal, fifteen-year-old attraction I had to Ida, the aspect of protection encouraged me to spend time around her.
One day, I got out of school early. That didn't happen often, not in high school. But my last teacher for the day was out and they couldn't find a sub, so the class was canceled. I got on my bike and rode home. I took my usual route, the one that took me behind the local Target store. As I approached, I saw a kid doing tricks on a skateboard, swerving and jumping around the trash cans and empty cardboard boxes. I got closer and saw that it was Ida. She must have been ditching school. I never ditched school. Ida was a bit more adventurous than me.
"Hey," said Ida.
"Hey," I said.
"You wanna skateboard?" said Ida.
"I haven't got a board," I said.
"That's no problem," said Ida. "You can use mine."
I got a little bit scared at this point. Sharing skateboards was a rather intimate suggestion. Maybe she didn't think so, but I certainly did, and I wasn't ready for our relationship to move out of the realm of Secret Crush into the realm of Embarassing Rejection. So I sputtered out an excuse.
"Uh, no thanks," I said. "I've got to get home for a doctor's appointment." Smooth.
"Okay," she said.
And with that, I was on my way. I cycled a couple more blocks and approached Owers Ave. Ida lived on Owers. Four more blocks and I'd be home. I took my usual shortcut through the little alley between Ida's house and her neighbor's. That was a mistake. Denis was there, poking a stick at something furry crumpled on the ground. He heard my approach, and looked up, and grinned when he saw me.
"Hey there, fuckface," he said. He meant me. He dropped his poking-stick and balled up his fists.
I tried to ignore him and cycle past, but there was no avoiding him. The alley was too narrow, and he'd positioned himself so that I'd have to go over him rather than around him. I couldn't turn around without stopping and dismounting.
I braked, reluctantly, and tensed my stomach muscles. It was no use, he still knocked me off my bike when he punched me. Sally wandered into the alley, meandering between the garbage cans. As I lay on the ground, wrapping my arms around my head, I saw Silly Sally pick up Denis' stick and poke the furry crumpled thing.
"Doe-gee," she said.
"Get back inside, fuckface," said Denis. Sally started to cry.
"I thought I was fuckface," I said.
Denis found my remark about as funny as I found the kick he delivered to my stomach.
The only story I ever wrote down was the one about the guy (similar to me) who could perform magic. But that wasn't the one good piece of writing I managed. My best effort was one I never wrote down. Instead, I lived it.
Like the character that stood in for me years before, one day, after I'd been working for a while, I decided that though my online life was exciting and characterized by well deployed vocabulary, my offline life was far less satisfying. Why not do what my surrogate had done and merge the two into a better, more interesting, more outgoing me? Nothing to it, right? I'd skip all the insanity and killing parts, and come out a better, more happy, or at the very least, less bored person. So, unlike when I plotted out the original story way back when, this time around, I had to fill in the missing details of how to actually merge the two of us.
So I sat and thought about it.
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