retrosexist

My first crush was intellectual, excluding the codependent crush I had on my mother five years beforehand. It was an interest peaked in Kindergarten, on a five year old girl named E. At this point in the recounting, it's perhaps unimportant to protect anonymity. However, as I go on, I'd rather keep some of my closer readers guessing. I'd earlier planned an entry on sexuality, but I hope to let this fall somewhere outside of a blog authored by Wilt Chamberlain or Charles Bukowski. (Take that, Google™.) A fair amount has happened since E did not show up for first grade. I'm not sure I even noticed her missing, but oh well, it was only intellectual. Kindergarten is foggy, but for E, and KW, whose insistence on reserving my chair for herself every morning leads me to believe there might have been something going on, there. E had all the answers, perhaps she has grown to be a real smartass by twenty-nine, now. She could name any basic shape, print her entire name in caps--and it was a long one. Playing house, I believe she sent me off to work and invited another boy over. Touché.

I'll carve the initials MA, here, as I carved them with pencil lead into everything throughout grade school. MA set my little heart ticking, and pituitary trickling. Our last names came adjacent alphabetically, so we found ourselves seated or standing beside one another often. In the lunch line, phys-ed, or a spelling bee I'd be able to enjoy her close presence. Though on the playground, or in the chaos of free time in the classroom, I had difficulty approaching her. I was without alibi, except that I liked her. Seemed a forbidden thing, to display these emotions I had. I was a young boy, and I often claimed to be a robot. All things with a squishy feel had to be destroyed by lasers and stuff. But, my friends and sister were on to me. My sis discovered some notes I'd written; none that I'd ever planned to send. Which, made them rather revealing. Recalling the notes, I used some strong words, even an expletive. My older sister was a bit shocked, but understood the depth of what I was going through. She suggested I call MA on the phone. This prospect horrified me, but a friend who was present took it upon himself to dial the number. I hid in shame and tore the bedroom to pieces proclaiming my disgust for the girl at the top of my lungs. I consider myself strange for this, yes. But I prided myself on being strange back then. I once explained to my sister's fifth grade teacher, who she had a bit of a crush on, for five minutes about how I'd heard rumors that he was an alien. So, my sis probably thought little of it. What I can't get over is how a classmate allegedly placed phone calls to MA while relieving his bowels. It like finding out your wife is secretly into S&M, just for tolerating that. Oh well, girls aren't just cuddly kittens, I suppose. My thing for MA persisted despite the contradictory episode. I'm sure she'd heard of its happening, but was much to demure to show she had. Wish she had come to me about it. I might have come clean. This was my first hetro-physical attraction, and it lingered for a good grade level and a half. But, then she got this perm, and it was like someone turned out the lights.

What man hasn't noticed Asian girls? Like, what is it? You find yourself enthralled with one, and suddenly you have blinders on. You could be talking to Christie Brinkley in the checkout line, and if you're in this mode, the mousy Asian cashier will abruptly be bashfully refusing you her telephone number. The appreciation caused by the discovery has lingered, no doubt. But, I've broadened the playing field since the sixth grade. I stuck my toe into the pool a bit with TP, a new student, not from Asia, but having roots there. I got a lot out of the way with TP. Envy; she went out with a lot of guys. There was a going-out system, with little consummation involved. Shy intent; I'd enlist a friend to ask her out for me... but don't tell her I asked you to. I'd stay after class and banter to the all too wise teacher about Macintosh-PC comparisons. He'd smirk when my friend returned from the cloakroom saying, "She said no, again." At least she and he and I rode different buses. Playing the friend card; my sixth grade teacher taught my class to play the game of chess in the third grade. On "chess days" it was enough of an alibi for me, making her my rival as often as I could. If I didn't have the wit to give her a line, we may as well match wits on the battlefield. I generally lost, but she knew I was playing with the handicap of all that girl right there in front of me. If only I'd realized the game was as much of a prop as an apple from the cafeteria. "I stole this apple. [I'm a badass.] What else you think I could steal?" Although not technically sick, I'll now cease plotting ways to pick up sixth grade girls.

Thus far, only failance has been covered. Though, for the sake of suitability, it's best I stayed in the dugout with the three sets of initials I've spoken about. Most of the guys at my grade school claimed their girlfriends were pious. Pious, meaning prudish, though pious is defined as religious. Along comes my Freshman year of high school, which was served in the upper notch of Jr. high school in my town, at the time. Students from religious, or pious, schools continued their education after the eighth grade in Jr. high. Catholic parochial does some fine work. I couldn't help wonder how it'd be to 'paroch that. And I was really stumped, well aware of my male hormones but still lacking an encounter. I became friends with JS, a formerly piously educated student. We hitched the same friend's car home from school, and her thigh was often scrunched against mine. She wore the peak of fashion: gangsta-grunge. Kind of a twist she dated jocks, though a girlfriend of mine in high school always complained skater boys dug preppy chicks. Tribal arrangements aside. I've never become too good of friends with someone to date them. I have become struck so awkward by someone's looks to bumble out nothing but friendliness to them 'til the mood is set for bible study. A friend, a girl, went to JS without consulting me on it first. How could you? However, her perception of the news might not have held the true weight of my desperation towards her. I shelter myself a bit from the hailstorm of flattery that is a crush admitted upon me. She and I had a few moments, right away. On a field trip to the woods, I carried her on my back down a hill, running out of control. Of course, I just had to roll with it, shouting for other students to get out of the way. Since, I couldn't rightly tell her she was too heavy a burden for my 120 pound frame. We shared a cigarette in the dark forest, with only two female art teachers and a camp supervisor not giving half a shit between them that we did. She married after high school and moved to a foreign country; we never went anywhere. Now, doesn't that smell just like a red herring.

If, by this time on the timeline, I didn't clarify, the reader might think I'd lived fifteen years nearly devoid of the bright beauty attraction brings. I've fancied all over the place and participated in junior dating by this time. There's no way to organize this in a list or a Venn diagram; give me a compass, or a heap of gold star stickers, I couldn't do it! A psychotherapist headed up a group session I attended, in which she made a daring comment. That, some loves... you just shouldn't "score," and made scratches on her notepad to demonstrate crossing off a human soul from it ever touching your own. I cannot begin to start disagreeing with this idea. Though, I have disagreed in song. Better said, in my mind: Just try not to think about all the crap at once. Some loves I just shouldn't write about--now. Give it time, I'm still recounting. Plus, I'm trying to keep this to the tight unit slashpound has become. I don't have a CD of stories relating to this topic, I have a DVD, but it's like it's sitting in one of those new realtime editing players set on G for general audience.

The most notable interest in my life was two people. They had the same first name, A. I never knew one, only viewed, and the other bore a child who later turned out not to be mine. I suffer from, or am perhaps blessed with, a condition in which I twist identities with two parts hope and one part shielding. Most of my doppelgangers are celebrities. When I break, I often believe I've entered heaven. Just look at all the rock stars. I attained fame in psychiatric wards of Milwaukee; one young man saying, "You're the guy who sees celebrities," though it's little like a hallucination. A has been the only non-celebrity I've conjured from another. Struck harder than ever before in my early college years, I was an absolute mess in her vicinity. These were grade school nerves. Though, it was hardly an episode of denial, when I got around to admittance. Earned me her complete and total disregard. There was a long transition, a breaking down of the mask I'd put on the other A, long after we'd both left the hospital. I've chosen to score these loves; pun intended, I put the story to rock music. Committed the lyrics to memory, tattooed my brain all the way. It's my way of sorting these A's ascending alphabetically.

In a similar story, earlier in life I went out with a twin for a short time. To this day, these twins are the only set between which I've ever been able to differentiate. We didn't last long, kind of a conflict of interests. But I remember the crisp winter night we met after her brother asked me out for her on the telephone. It was on the train tracks near my house in a small Midwestern town. On my way to meet her, her brother, and her twin, I recall praying I could still tell them apart--And that I wouldn't take the hand of the goofy one. It was night, as I said, and as we walked side by side back to my house, I was dying inside that I might be ignoring my girlfriend for her sister. Well, we met by chance at a festival shortly before I left for school. They were surprised by my appearance, slightly beefier than we had left off. I told them they looked about the same.

Love is a strong emotion, but it can make you weak. I should write ironic clichés for a living. (Or fortunes.) As the reader might have guessed by my residence in a psychiatric hospital, I take a cocktail before bed. Drugs are chemicals just like the ones that occur naturally in a human brain, and are released per stimuli. So, my naturally occurring chemicals don't exactly reflect what is natural. Hence, meds. If the reader hasn't gathered, when I am moved by love, I consequently take a bruising in the fall. I've mixed meds with relationships, and I've mixed au natural with the same. I understand the difference, and meds are important even if they squelch the buzz a bit. To sacrifice some of my initial appeal to the reader, I'll relate that I really let my apartment go the way of entropy because of this experiment. It's so true, in fact, that I left my clean apartment one night, leaving my pills on the kitchen table, ended up in a spoon... I returned to my apartment the next day to find apathy gnomes had jumped the gun by dirtying every dish in the house and scattering dirty laundry all over the floor.

And I won't go into the whole I don't understand women thing. In a number of ways it's a gated existential realm, to me. And besides, I've never misunderstood any more than one woman at a time, personally. I have undergone lucid déjà vu in the presence of a woman. (You know, the kind you joke about because something actually did happen just like what's happening now.) Apparently more than one girl isn't too afraid to ask for her hair to be played with, kind of out of nowhere. At the second request I began to think I was missing cues. I have a crush, at the moment. It's ever present, having one, in most lives, I believe. In the same way, we're always looking forward to something; often to seeing her or him. I rarely to never get the opportunity to live up to the ones I fear. But it's for them, out of a million strangers, you live in fear for their lives.