Your Own Ending
When I was a child I read these teen horror fiction novels called Goosebumps written by R.L. Stine back in the mid to late 90’s. My grandfather, Poppy, would take me to the book store every once in a while. Poppy liked to balance out my intake of action figures with literature, and since I wasn’t really apt to read Byron at the age of eight, I bought Goosebumps. As I look back on it now I don’t know how my 70 year old grandfather thought a child's novel about people being stripped of life due to a haunted camera would be healthy for a kid that simultaneously thanked God for boogers and farts in Sunday school. But he just wanted me to be happy. Either way, Stine is famous for books like, The Night Of The Living Dummy and Say Cheese and Die. These novels were creatively fun, slightly scary and also a rich environment for a child's imagination, and my imagination grew like fractals.
Eventually I wrote my own little sadistic stories. I wasn’t concerned with being published since I still couldn't spell “library” to save my life. Was it liberry or Liebary? I didn’t show anyone these tales, and they are probably deep in an underground ashes pile below my old tree fort in Healdsburg California right now. Either way, in one of my stories the main characters were swallowed up by an evil vacuum and the only way to destroy it was to lure the neighbors robotic cat into a confrontation with the usurper. The robo-cat would hack up its fur-vomit and the vacuum would be sent back to the fiery depths of hell... where chores came from. There was also one where the chevalier of the story was sentenced to pick weeds out of his mothers garden for the rest of eternity as punishment for letting the princess kiss the big baddy. I was a fairly melodramatic child. Eventually the hero picked enough weeds, and the watcher of the eternity took pity on him, had a change of heart and allowed him to play video games with his lady love. Either way, I liked creative endings where I won, but only because of the presence of heart, not for my actions.
As I got older and read more Goosebumps, Stine started writing novels that had a “choose your own ending” portion or scenario. In these books your heroes would come to a gritty and macabre scenario, then Stine would offer you what felt like an ethereal option. In bold blood black letters it boomed, “Turn to page 83 to find your heroes in peril” or “Turn to page 120 for your heroes to meet someone they never expected…” Now naturally, being the young little gremlin that I was, I would turn and read the first page of both endings in order to make my assessment on how my heroes would continue. I started this habit because I learned the hard way by unknowingly picking the tragic ending, and my little heart couldn’t take it. THEY ALL DIED AND IT WAS MY FAULT.
I never reread the novel.
I couldn’t even go back and cognitively apply the happier ending either, for in my mind, once they died, they were dead. The sorrow that I felt for their peril suddenly felt incredibly close and personal. It was as if I dragged them to the foggy quagmire myself to have their eyes balls sucked out by the Werewolf janitor to be turned into ice cream for the local treat truck. I don’t know if I realized it, but I was becoming acutely self aware. Choices matter, and everything in life is oddly interconnected. We could always be forty pages away from becoming revolting goop. What was ironic though was that the section where the heroes encounter peril, they made it out safely because in a pinch the marginalized kid developed the ultra secret weapon to defeat darkness, whereas what appeared to be the safer option of the two, “Meeting someone they did not expect," that turned out to be some zombified hero from the past that ended their journey in a real desolate manner. Talk about Psych 101 for the age group terrorized by whats happening to their penis as they stare at the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated in the line at Safeway.
Either way, as I got older I thought about these… duel endings. I thought about them a lot. The potential duality of life afflicted my decisions on whether or not to put The Offspring on the mix cd for my senior year crush or if I should take the long drive home after being diagnosed with cancer. Whenever I felt that there was a decision approaching I begged the heavens to at least let me see the few seconds of the beginning of each choice, or at least still have my grandfather present at the check out counter; I don’t want to pay for these decisions myself. I’m sure the spirit of R.L. Stine is chuckling somewhere in a foreboding oak tree, or he’s proud that the creation of garden gnomes anthropomorphizing Leatherface made a preteen think about hyper-realities. I’d like to think that Stine prepared me for these, these… choices. But in the end, these are choices without an alternative page to turn to. So I would say fuck it; I replaced The Offspring with Alkaline Trio’s “Every Thug Needs a Lady” and took the long drive home that night so if I felt the need to cry, my tears would dry up long before I saw another human being. Its safe to say that I felt fucked each and every time I saw my life potentially diverting. My mind goes haywire, like, what if I accidentally picked the wrong ending? There’s no going back. And if I pick the “good” ending, how do I even know that this is the good ending, for how do we understand the light without the dark. Oh, my god… so this is what drove Schrödinger crazy. Each choice creates a new road of memories within my mind. And each choice that closes one road and then continues me down the other. So, by the age of 28 I now have thousands upon thousands of abandoned roads of memories and thoughts.
Which brings us to today.
Floating deep within the human ether my subconscious dashes like a fox on these abandoned roads. It clutches my happiest memories in it’s retracted toothy muzzle with a sly grin as it scampers from my grasp. I’d like to argue that every once in a while I get close enough to catching him; fingers teased by a single bristle or two from it’s fleeting tail. The foxes bristles prick my skin as a needle would if they drifted like leaves in the wind. Alas though, I get slightly distracted by these metaphorical dead ends on a daily basis, and I am confronted and reminded about the choices that I made and those that I left behind. As I pondered this in the shower two distinct memories emerged from the mire to the tip of my tongue. About eight years ago I stood amongst broken picture frames and in front of a very exasperated, but newly birthed ex-fiancé in Cleveland, Tennessee. Eight years later, and almost 28 days ago I slept on a stiff empty bench in an uninhabited airport in Copenhagen. Each of these memories aren’t what the fox keeps from me, in fact, these memories would be the dirt that it has kicked up as it disappears in a cloud of dust.
These memories were the result of bold choices. The first was to finally say, “No” to an abusive relationship and the second was because I said, “Yes” to an experience of a life time. And sometimes I wonder what life would be life if I had reversed those decisions. Where would I be in life right now? If I had said, “Yes” to the engagement, would I have gone to England for a masters degree? And if I said, “No” to getting my masters would I be here right now writing this awkward diagnostic of my life? And because of these “major” choices that I’ve made, there have been a slew of other roads that were created and also more that were abandoned. And as of right now I am reflecting on the choices that I made that has lead me to what appears to be irreversibly depressed, broke and wishing that I was back in the hospital. I mean, if I was back in the hospital right now, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting fed, what excuse I would tell my friends on a Friday night that I can’t go out because I can’t afford a PBR. Or I wouldn’t be focused on why I haven’t been able maintain an intimate relationship longer than a few months. When I was in the hospital before, it allowed me to have the ultimate “get out of jail free” card for social interactions. People had to come to me. I was stationary. I was a beacon. I was a thought, an idea and an icon rather than an adult with a name and tainted past who cries at night because he has no clue who he is anymore. Perhaps it’s unhealthy to drag the past to the surface, but when everything in this world seems to be interconnected, it’s hard to ignore what I’ve gone through.
Years ago I heard this metaphor that attempted to described the difference between how men and women think. The metaphor goes like this: A man is like an Ego Waffle. The waffle has tiny square divots that catch and compartmentalize the flowing butter and maple syrup. Each thought, or in this case, sugary goodness, finds its proper place in little chambers. If one so chose, they could eat each square individually. Whereas, a woman, she is more akin to a plate of spaghetti. Everything is interconnected, and it’s hard to single out a single noodle or thought without having catching others in the fray. So, to put it simply: Men can focus on the bite size pieces of life, whereas women see the bigger picture. Each have their strengths and weaknesses. I don’t believe this metaphor applies to continuing the binary divide between genders though. In fact, after some focus in the shower, my experience opinion causes me to believe that this is the difference between the uplifted and the depressed when analyzing life choices. I am currently looking through my leatherback journal that I took with me to England, and each page is littered with someone who is lost and trying to figure out who they are by assessing their past choices. My journal, my life, it is a plate of spaghetti, but it’s the plate of spaghetti that I chose.
Earlier in this blog I wrote about a girl name Scully, and how she changed my life when it came to looking at love. As much as I would like to continue the story of her, it is over and I have drained that cow of its milk. So what is there to assess now? Perhaps the beginning of England; the beginning of the new narrative that has lead me here. So, if you are reading this, please give me time because I do have a story to tell. There were faces that I’ll never forget, and names that still cause my hands to shake as they exit the bullet chamber of my mouth. And yet, after everything, I still don’t know where I belong. While I was there I dated a girl much younger than I due to heartbreak, preoccupied my drinking habits by taking money under the table a local pub, I bloodied my eyes with literature, lost friends as fast I gained them, and finally, finished the dying promise I made, get a masters degree in England.
So let’s begin with day one…
Standing in my eight by ten cell of a room I held the phone in my hand as if to take a selfie. My hand trembled. This is new, I thought. Why are my hands shaking? Probably because I haven’t eaten for 8 hours. I just need to hold the phone still long enough to record my self for Scully.
“Hey, so I made it…”, my voice cracked… fuck.
I looked down at my shirt in embarrassment.
It still smelled funky fresh from the 9 hour flight and hour-an-a-half cab drive to campus.
“I’m finally here, In England.”
My lips curled, and my nose twitched. 4000 thousand miles, a five hour time difference and a shitty wi-fi signal was all we had. It was all I had. I looked back at my self in the phone’s video. It was still recording, say something.
“And, uh… I smell like shit…”
My hand shook. I was becoming blurry in the video message. Maybe that’s what I’ll be, a blur.
“…I miss you.”
To be continued.
