I am reminded, more often these days, as I get older, of what factors it takes to raise a child. Factors that, if disregarded, found not a family but a facsimile: bereft of fealty, a deaf family, an unfit family. Today a once-flickering pilot flame flares, for these factors have found their way to the future, where, finally, they can be sifted. By none other than the foundling who was forgotten. It is me. I am he. I’m here to fuck shit up.
Let’s first begin with factors of blame. Let’s think of infancy, of a strip-mall beauty competition where judges forbore a mother’s fault to award a place of Best Smile, foregoing first, second, and even third. Let’s think of a poor babby who cried alone in the dark. Let’s think of factors further of a faithless mother who told a child that he did not deserve love, of a feckless father who was embarrassed to teach him to piss at a public urinal, of a faggot brother who announced to him a fascination towards soft, squishy carrots. A mother who murdered a favourite bird. That’s the word.
I am reminded too of a mother who felt her way into a child’s room one night, late, while that child tried to sleep, to force herself upon him.
Let us take a step back and acknowledge the child. I am reminded of this inconvenient first son of a facade. I am reminded of more factors, factors that child would have been willing to share, had anyone asked. But nobody did, so he learned to forget. He wanted to be free of the horrors. He found freedom instead in his own mind, and when the fat bulk of a fatuous, failed woman came flailing at him, and a father failed to acknowledge fatherhood, and a brother failed to find heart, he forgot again. He learned to proceed, to carry on, to move ever onwards through a half-life of unified grief. What use was a family of artifice to this child left adrift? Would they make him free?
That child learned of friends of convenience, and remembers fallen forms of friendship gone unfed. He remembers asking for help, and finding none. His falsity of friends, such as they were, fell by the wayside. His protests and his pleas for given fucks faded in the face of father time. He learned that he was not the same as them, and learned to force it down, lest they find out.
Twenty years later, twenty miserable years later, I remember a child who long ago decided to raise himself. Who befriended himself, who fed himself on the scraps of a society that gave no fucks. He fostered himself. A scavenger child, an Oliver Twist, who found a Fagin at nineteen years of age and left that foulness behind, who founded this website, and now writes these words that fester at his fingertips. He found what he valued about himself and figured it out. More than anything, he found a friend in himself. He found his family in himself.
Would those friends and family he left behind follow him into adulthood? Would they try to feed that friend who long ago learned to feed himself? When his world fell apart, would those friends be close enough to help him pick up the pieces, or would he have to pick them up himself, as he always had? Would those founding friends and family, if they knew one another, find him in the suffering dark?
When he lost his mind in that suffering dark, who found him but the counterfeit of his own mind? He found a test. He found a game. He found it was played twenty-four hours a day. Would he go out into the dark again, and again, and again, hoping to find a light to guide his way? He was thirty years old and no longer a child and yes, he did. He followed the calls and soon found himself fugitive. He was forced through the courts, and the funhouse, and he found himself nearly in the morgue. Those friends and family who had flattered themselves for so long, they were gone. He found himself underground, foraging for gemstones amongst the rough, and found none but shiny baubles. One glittered for a briefness, but he was fleeced of it while he himself flailed. It was not the colour green. Let’s forget the colour green. It is a false colour. It is a fugue colour. It is a colour of finance, and nothing more. He no longer tries to find himself in the dark, following the calls, for that too is a falsity, a fakeness, a friendless place.
To those friends who forgot that child until it became convenient, I say fuck you. You failed that child, you failed that man, you failed that friend, to say nothing, any longer, of any family.
That child says fuck you. That man says fuck you. The writer of this piece, especially, says fuck you. That child, the motherless, fatherless, friendless child who begged to be free finally found his freedom in truth, and you’d do best to forget him. All past versions of that man are fallen, festooned about Flanders Fields like so many fallen wreaths. There is only one left, and it is me. And I fucking hate every one of you.
You all, only, get an F. You can force it where the sun doesn’t shine, for all I care.
I’ll delete this shortly, because I really only want my work to show up here. This is a professional place.
By the way, the only reason I had those dancing people was because I treated them like people. Dancing people aren’t any different from anyone else I’ve ever met. That’s the thing. Fuck you, I’ve met the President, Donald Glover, and Miss Universe (et. al.). Would you believe me if I said they’re all, also, just people? It’s ego that separates us, and I don’t recognise that sort of shit.
