itty bitty memoir-y

I'm thinking of entering this in a contest and am interested in feedback.

I got my first "real" job, as opposed to what would today be called the gig economy, when I was fifteen.  My mother was a high school guidance counselor and one of the English teacher’s husband half-owned a comic book store and needed help.  She asked my mother to hang a sign in the guidance office and moms grabbed it for me.  It's always who, not what you know.  The year was 1990.  Don't be fooled by the numerics, it was still fully the Reagan 80's.  Cultural decades used to overlap numeric by a few years.  I imagine the whole mindset of cultural decades has run its course, but I'm not connected with youth culture any more.  There's nothing like spending your adolescence drowning in cartoons to encourage adult thinking.

I was already there anyway.  I was raised atheist outside of society and grew up without a sibling, cousin, friend, or culture.  Just two narcissistic parents who are still mostly out to lunch.  I say my culture was "people who write books", and they come in all flavors.  As books are a slow-moving medium, in 1990 almost all of what was available was still (mostly dead) white men, but it's not the fault of the white guys.  Most are worthy writers just trying to keep body and soul apart.  Me being totally feral and clueless, I didn't even know there were boy books and girl books growing up.  My first introduction to puberty in more than a biological fashion was a book called "Whatever Happened to Fat Glenda", which I imagine wouldn't fly at all today.  I started on Stephen King in 2nd grade--"Firestarter" caught my eye, and the first time I read it I identified with Charlie, not Daddy.  I carried a Zippo etched with “Pyro” for a decade before I lost it.  I was onto "The Executioner's Song" by 4th grade and read the one that set the Columbine kids off, “Rage”, over the summer between fourth and fifth.  It’s probably good I didn’t have access to firearms.  I was aware enough to break an arm patting myself on the back for getting the humor in "The World According to Garp" in fifth.  I liked fifth grade.  Mrs. O'Hara let me read my own book under the desk.  I was excellent at quietly finding cracks through which to slip.

By fifteen I was halfway through the classics.  I'd acquired pretty much the whole Western canon out of used book sales sponsored by the local library.  One paper grocery bag of used books was one dollar.  In paperback prints of classics, which are rarely over 250p, that's pennies per book.  I never bothered to finish the canon.  My cutoff is WWII.  I only read anything written before then to enjoy the language.  Anything useful, any interesting idea or clever joke, has been recycled many times by people like me, other students of the language.  I say, skip "Candide".  This is not the most perfect of all worlds.  There, I just saved you 129p of prose.  As far as I'm concerned, all English literature up to this millennium can be distilled into the works of Sir pTerry.  I spent my 30s rereading the Discworld pretty exclusively, and even recently found another uncaught joke.  Discovering new jokes in Pratchett books is a lifelong task.

I don't know if you can tell yet, but I'm autistic enough to be slightly up on my toes.  It's a pain in the balls.  I recently accidentally snuck up on a pit and got bit.  Picture Sheldon as a snooty book lover stuck hawking overpriced comic books for spending money as a teenager.  I mean, it beat flipping burgers.  I could at least wear my own clothes, but I ended up with a hard-on against comics, collecting, and fandom in general.  I'm a real nerd, baby, from back when we had to pay some f*****g dues.  All this "nerd culture" s**t really chaps my a*s.  The old internet, where the real nerds congregated after having been driven from mainstream society, was by far the coolest one-off subculture scene in world history.  All the world's outcasts got together to chichat, trade drug recipes, and binge on grotesque porn.  Then somebody told the world's in-groups you could watch people f*****g on the thing and in, like, six months, so many people had signed up for AOL that enough Sun Workstations had been purchased to finance the first expansion of the original internet.  The world's normies, the f*****g pinks came on and displaced the nerds into nerd culture and never looked back.  All because they thought there was anonymous porn on the thing.

You realize the porn companies own every right-wing "moral christian" politician in the world by now, right?  The people who run the computers quietly took over the world while making it ever easier for a total idiot to use their products.  I blame the mouse.  It totally killed crApple.  The IIe was a beautiful machine, and if one didn’t develop a hardware fault by 1990 it ran until the plastic crumbled.  Then that f*****g idiot at apple added a hard drive to make the thing a lot more resilient and a GUI so the nitwits in my elementary school could use it.  Please, I’m still trying to figure it out�"of what good is a one-button mouse?  I mean, I know there are people you could give one button and one flashing diode and they’d write the word processor before writing the next work of Billy the Bard.  I don’t think the Macintosh was optimized for them.

I'm prone to tangents so long they need a derivative, but it's just a terminal case of isolation brain.  Didn't some a*****e say the joy is in the journey anyway?  I'd swear I read that somewhere.  Anyway, there was no actual comic book store where I worked.  We had a storefront, but it wasn’t open to the public.  Jay put up a sign to let the local cops know he was protected.  Joe ran the office and handled most of the mail order, Jay was the mobile partner who did the shows and buying.  The kids mostly worked shows so, starting from ninth grade, I would go to work Friday night after school and get home on Sunday night, probably 2.25 weekends a month, plus a few days of $5/hr sorting and bagging work after school.  

I went to the NYC monthly show at the Penta for most of high school.  There was never any adult oversight outside of the convention itself--Jay reveled in rulebreaking.  He put millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine up his nose over the few years I knew the man, and liked to have the kids out of sight and mind.  The rules were, "Work starts at seven.  Don't die." and he would set us loose in whatever strange and hostile city was buying merch this week.  I can only imagine how bizarre a childhood this sounds to today's youth--even at home, I was a latchkey kid.  I woke up to an empty house, got myself off to school from age 7 on, and came home to an empty house after.  I saw my parents for 45 minutes at dinner, otherwise only when they wanted to share something.  Mostly, I read books and raised myself.  I was safe, strangely enough, wandering around Greenwich Village at fifteen years old, looking twelve and bewildered.  I looked /too/ vulnerable, and predators took pity/sensed a setup  Still do. Remember--this was the bad old days of NYC.  Before Guiliani had all the squeegee people rounded up and shot, and I fortunately never even pulled the flick knife I bought.  It literally was the only thing I had on me worth stealing.   I never did many drugs because nobody would ever sell them to me.  I recently spent time homeless in Africa and the locals all looked out for me.  

I know Chicago throws one hell of a 4th of July party.  Gomer and I got off on the wrong subway stop and had to hoof it a good mile or more through the barrio.  I'm reasonably inconspicuous, but Gomer is six foot five with flaming red hair.  The little kids were shooting bottle rockets at us.  We ended up by Lake Michigan, and Gomer had me hold his shoes and shirt while he swam out to a party on a boat docked in a marina.  I'm sitting on shore feeling abandoned, and sober, and when I saw him crack his second beer I swam out to join, burdened by two shirts and sets of shoes.  I barely made it, but we were both competitive swimmers.  Only the watchers were freaking out; we’d seen each other swim a mile or more before.  It turns out he was only staying on the boat because the water was vile, and there was a taxi boat for getting back to shore.  Gomer was just waiting to be picked up.  I got a beer out of it, but ended up scrubbing diesel residue out of every crevice.  Took a f****n’ hour, and no f****n’ towels.

I got paid to go to ComiCon twice.  My best memory there was getting ditched in Tijuana at around 3AM.  That gives my teenage a*s 4 hours to cross an international border, make my way back to a city on the opposite coast of the one I know, and pretend I got some sleep last night.  The border guards fucked with me�"I had a few beers in me, and kept answering “New Jersey” when they asked my home.  Eventually one clued me in that I had to say “America”.  That and white skin, and no accent, was the entirety of the border check in those days.  I paid a hack cab, but we stopped off to buy cocaine and I got ditched again.  I'm sorry, I've got the social skills of a neanderthal.  I understand why.  This one was because I only knew one cokehead and he still had infinite money.  He was a good lesson, though--all my bosses were on coke when I was a kid, and none of them beat it.  It won every time.  A fool may learn from his own mistakes, but a wise man watches other people f**k up.  Coke's fun, but I never played in that tax bracket.  Did a lifetime fill of free stuff anyway.  Coke dealers need someone who can keep up to talk to, and they appreciate that I don't geeze.  Much.  I ended up on an old coin-op pay phone trying to get a cab.  I didn't know the name of any cab companies, but there was an operator-assisted connection for which I could, and did, dial zero.  She fucked with me a while..."what color are cabs?"  Me: Yellow!  "So would you like me to call you a YellowTM cab?"  Me: Yes!  Please!  The cab eventually showed up.  It's eerie to be all alone in a brightly lit but totally empty urban downtown in the wee hours.  

The old comic book world was stone criminal.  I think that crops up anywhere you have people creating value out of nothing.  Like any blockchain currency, any collectibles market draws the bottom feeders.  Real dynamite was $5 a quarter stick.  Our forger once stuck a little AK sub in my face and put the red dot on my forehead over a joke.  A verbal joke; I said my scripted line in a deadpan voice as instructed and got barrel-checked for it.  There was a slot in the front of the banana clip, it was fully loaded.  We all laughed and I went outside.  I found out later than Jay chewed him a new a*****e over that.  Apparently, pointing loaded, full-auto firearms at the kiddies is a smidge over Jay's line.  Not much was.  I immediately finished a 40 of OE from the gas station across the street and was working on my second when Jay came out to check on me.  He made me dump my beer that night, but we were allowed breakfast 40’s instead of a quart of milk or oj if we wanted.  It’s how I learned not to drink at work�"it’s hard enough to stay awake after two hours sleep, coming down off a beer buzz is awful.  I never smoked weed at work, either.  The boss also loved to egg people and places, and was thrilled when paintball guns came out.  The kids got an automatic thousand dollar bonus for taking the rap if we ever got caught.  Only Mike ever had to.

Jay was also a compulsive gambler.  He used to bet us a hundred dollars against one embarrassing moment over our report card.  If we got nothing below a B, we got a bill.  One C, though, and he got to humiliate us.  I had to sing the ABC song at the salad bar in a Shoney's in Maryland.  Gomer had to trail us in a mall somewhere while Jay approached teenage girls with a sob story about the boy who had never been kissed.  Got him kissed :)  Jay gave me my first joint, too.  Started a lifelong love affair.  I'm disassociated anyway, weed makes humor possible through the agony.  Without it, I do tend to be cranky.  

Isolation sucks, but I don't know how to break it.  I'm totally feral; I'm completely unsocialized.  OTOH, I do all my own thinking.  I'm capable of freestyling casual insight to knock the socks off most listeners.  OTOH, heavy addicts talk about "the abyss", where you lose all your delusions and stare clear-eyed at hard reality.  Well, we learn how to have those illusions through social pressure.  It's trained into a developing brain and if you don't get it at the right age, it's never real.  Think of people who didn't learn reflex violence before they were old enough to leave memories that stuck.  There are warriors at that bone-deep level, and anyone who came to violence later in life will always be, on some level, a punk-a*s who is faking it.  I'm like that with /every-f*****g-thing/, to the point where I gave up even attempting to be fake before I hit puberty.  I'm just me, nothing special, not especially evil.  Chaotic neutral on the two axis moral scale.  Lower left, on the two axis political scale, but I'm stuck in the abyss.  I literally can't see the world any other way.  My brain doesn't do false hope or rosy glasses, and the abyss is f*****g sticky.  Nobody wants to be around me for long.  They just end up projecting what they don't like about themselves onto me and then hating on me for it.  "Scapegoating" is the olde Jewish term for it.  And, please don't read this wrong--I'm not saying that whatever they see in me, whatever the hateable thing is, isn't there.  I know it is.  I am legion.  40 years alone in my head since I was old enough to leave memories that stuck--I've explored every last nook and cranny inside this skull.  I just don't hate myself for it.  I own it and move on.  If it causes harm, I don't act on it.  It's not that f*****g hard, and I'm an angry white man alone in a room.  If I was a creep in any way shape or form they would have drawn it out of me by now.  I'm one of the most heavily surveilled men on the planet, and I understand why, and it's so.  F*****g.  Pointless.

I am good at making people laugh, though.   I give good ramble.  I ran out of book learnin' to chase by the time I was out of my teens, although they have factories churning out new book learning these days.  I was always too traumatized to tunnel too deeply into any one area; I had to float and bumblefuck my way through life until enough general knowledge accrued that my disorganized brain could pull (apparently often accurate) conclusions entirely out of my a*s.  I call it "Ernest disease"--I'm overwhelmed by absurdity everywhere I look.  Why just today, I read that the Icelandic Prime Minister took the day off in solidarity with a one-day national women's strike for gender equality.  My brain immediately wrote the following day's headline: Putin Annexes Iceland while Head of State Sulks.  Not that I'm against women's equality.  Hell, I'd put them on top for the next 5k years, just to balance things.  Us c***s certainly made a Koch-up of the world.  I'm writing this wondering if I need to explain the joke further.  Is it just me, or did humor itself die out in this dying world, let alone wit?

Where all the light hearts at?  The world needs you.  Not the pablum, not the manufactured products like /every-goddamn-comic-book-movie-ever/, but the frivolous folk.  Not The Monkees, but The Beatles.  I’ll admit there’s a lot of horrible in T&J, but I still see less overall than in Disney.  Disney’s just as bad, morally, and tells a far falser tale about reality.  That kayfabe s**t really is the root of all evil.  I want to break my isolation by putting a pair of tighty whities on my head and sit at a card table with a sign, "join my cult", but I have no doubt some thugs wearing blue wool and sporting pistols on their hips would be visiting shortly to move me along.  I had my humor-only coping mechanism forced on me, and am begging anyone I meet to teach me the other way, to help bring me more back to the center of the bell curve in this kind of stuff, but there really is a benefit to digging as deep into humor as you need to go when the going starts getting rough.  Not much actually helps as a coping mechanism for truly horrible s**t.  Basically, suppression, humor, and emotional support from other people are our three choices.  Suppression needs to be temporary; the longer you suppress something the more bullshit with which you will have to deal when it comes out.  Emotional support from other people rocks the house in, but pTerry explained all the philosophy you need to know regarding other people: you can't trust anyone and there's nothing you can do about it so let's have a drink.  There is nothing new under the sun; people have been digging up the big answers since the dawn of time.  History is littered with our corpses.  Look for anyone who rode the booze-to-bullet arc.  We tend to write s**t down.

Author's Note

Hello! I've never interacted with any other writers outside a county creative writing class.

This has hyperlinks all through it, but they won't show here. I cross generations the way I cross class and I included explanatory links to a lot of references, plus a lot of humor, like the word "New Jersey" links to the BHG song, "The Ten Greatest Things About New Jersey", a bonus track which is ten seconds of silence. The links are important.

I'm a much better critic than I am a writer, but brutal. Tell me why mine sucks and I'll do same for you.