The Whole Shebang (Part One)

For the longest time, I thought my life was an annoying lump of clay that had no flavor to it. I felt as though my body had been submerged in some sort of awkward chocolate pudding that contained a potent numbing agent which blinded me from the horrors of the real world. To make things clear, during my first year living to my fifteenth, life was pretty much going way too slow, but things were sweller than swell, full of sheltered tones. My parents had no issues with each other or within themselves, my older sister was doing... Whatever my older sister wanted to do over in the land of the filthy-stinking-rich-spoiled-to-the-core-dumb ass Vermont. My dog was a happy little sport without a care in the world, I had this whole art thing going on for me, I had never stepped a pale foot in a court room before, everyone seemed to be somewhat chill with each other, I didn't spend that much time with many of my relatives, the works. My home life was like a song from the Care Bears or some stupid shit like that. Everywhere else, I was pushed through the gates of hell every day because I was vastly different from the other kids in my class. The brunt of my hardships during these "squishy years"- if you want to call them that- were created by being bullied by various popular ass-hats who didn't know their head from their elbow. To be completely frank with you, this harshness pouring out from the dirty mouths of my ignorant peers was not from the usual character flaws that book heroes were outcasted about. I didn't wear a cape every day to school even though I was twelve, and I never ate ketchup and peanut butter sandwiches. I was never in a wheelchair or covered in the thick smell of rotten eggs or vomit or farts. I was the fat kid, the loser, the "smart one", the emo, the metal head, the kid who liked the Power Rangers during her 7th grade year and wanted to be one herself, the ugly girl, the one who had a major crush on Dr. Richtofen- later I found out I have a thing for Colonel Klink, too- etc. In general, I wasn't the most beloved kid in the class due to that, and boy did I fucking pay for it. I rarely got a break. You'd think that a tiny hick school like Salem would be jam packed with just these jolly, pleasant motherfuckers who only wanted to watch International Harvester tractors compete at a pull during the fair, people who don't give eight damns about what the hell you look and act like, but it isn't. Let me give you a bit of a nice reality check, a smack on the freshly powdered butt cheek, if you will: MANY CHILDREN ARE MEAN NO MATTER WHERE THEY ARE. Don't let some random YAHOO review from 2010 fool you, okay? You could be a kid in an area "known" for being a great place that has polite residents and still come out of your mama's saggy womb automatically being a real sorry cuck of a person. That's just how society works out a lot of times. There are tons of people who turn out to be these big huge screwheads with these pus filled egos even though their family or area or whatever has the reputation of being a bunch of freaking diamonds.
Things aren't always what they seem to be, that's what I'm trying to get at. You never know what the heck is going on behind closed doors, down underneath the umpteen layers of precious skin that belongs the corroded world. One might make a dumb hypothesis or have a hunch about what's actually happening to make a bully be a bully, but they can't actually see what is going on within the core of a situation with just that. Just thinking about it or talking about it is not the same as digging farther into things, farther than three centimeters below the earth's quite valuable crust. This is the one problem with many people which drives me up the freaking walls, to be honest with you. The problem gives me a permanent wedgie in my knickers and launches a fat, prickly stick up my soft starfish. Thinking that you have a clue about psychology or self-help when you clearly don't makes me go crazy and I want to give that high-and-mighty son of a bitch a proud shiner that'll cause their offspring to be born with a bruise on their young eye. Too many butt-wads in this era are that way; they seem to thrive off of thinking that they know everything about anything while lacking 90 percent of the information needed to understand at least a quarter of the deal. All of them just feed off of each other's ideas of what the situation is for a few days, possibly weeks, milking and stretching the subject so that everybody can get the energy they desire to stay alive. Then those jackasses come up to the person that is being talked about one fine day when they've stored up enough power to perform a big scummy ritual, not carrying a clue in their pocket, and give the poor chap this cheesy talk (that's the whole ritual thing) about how everyone wants to help him when, in truth, no one really wants to help. Everyone just wants to get on the guy's nerves so that he'll give an answer to why he's so much of a jerk and then someone can go home happy, screaming 'I told you so' loudly out the bus window, because their petty little hypothesis about Jimmy Jr's wretched attitude was right on the ball. It's all so sad and pathetic and unecessary, that type of mindset. It makes you want to curl up in your bed with the Radiohead song Creep playing on repeat in your Beats earbuds. Well, that's what it makes me want to do. What about you, stranger? How the fuck do you feel about all of this? The same? The exact opposite? Whatever. You probably just want to get through this piece and then go watch some Netflix...... Hey, listen here, bub. We're not done here yet, so don't click off before it gets to be interesting, alright? Just give this puppy a chance. Be a lamb, darling. I promise I won't try to make this sound too edgy or too sugar coated or too cringey. Anyway, that is how to describe my class to the best of my 17 year old ability. I can't think of any other way to put it. In that fuck-cluster of a group, you were either the bully, the person who thought they had a clue, or the outcast. If you have been paying attention, you'd know that I was good old number three, but in the long run that's alright to a certain degree. I was the person who stood in the background and observed all of the crap I wasn't within. I was one of the only ones that had a clue and I could formulate my own opinions. I was able to escape a disgusting group mentality that only would have bogged me down if I got trapped in it. I wasn't interested in being politically correct or perfect or anything of that sort. I was just interested in being solely me, even though it caused others to not like me very much.......
The only issue that was present was the fact that every day was the same damn thing, the same damn krieg. It felt like I was reading the same sentence in a book I didn't particularly fancy over and over and over again. I was stuck in the same level of the video game that was my never ending life, and I was unhappy as hell. I was depressed because of that and the bullying. I hated myself. I wanted to die. After a while, in the eighth grade, I wanted to go into COD Zombies and never return. I wanted to hang around dead guys, since I felt just as dead. And then things started to get a tad bit... Odd at home. It all basically started to go downhill during the summer when I was going into the ninth grade. During this time, my mother had started going through menopause after her birthday in June, and she had become a very irritable and impatient person, two things that were not her original personality. At any time she would willingly give you shit for "taking too long" while making your breakfast or drying the dishes or cleaning or whatever, and other times she'd get angry with you for no reason at all. Talking with her became sort of difficult during that time, I tell you what. She stopped caring about subjects that a mother should care about, and wasn't interested in many things that didn't revolve around her or any of her interests. Being extremely rude or blunt or sarcastic became the new norm for her, and it was at an annoying extent. It was sassy city at every corner of a room that woman walked in. To make matters worse, a not so new and reoccurring thought that my dad was recording her while he was at work was becoming then more frequent as a tinfoil hat started to do an evasive coup de tat on the mind. Her memory, of all things, also went down into the shitter that summer, too. Imagine what it would be like to talk to yourself while on your worst period ever, but you're also suffering from bad memory loss, and that was my mother in a can all throughout that summer. I thought she had become a whole different person, but shrugged it off because I was so young and so unaware of the inner workings of the psychological mishaps which were occurring within my mother's quickly stagnating brain. I figured it was just because of the middle aged changing period, and that she'd be back to normal in a jiffy. My idea was way off, sadly. All throughout the ninth grade, though, my mother sort of just sat in a stage of some sort of nasty limbo for a while mentally. What I mean is that, in front of me, her mental issues were not coming out in one shot. They just sort of sat there and festered for a while, sometimes leaking out some wacked-out orange gooey stuff here and there. Then.... You guessed it, the tenth grade came.
The tenth grade was when my home life collapsed inward on me, becoming worse than what was being served up at school. I was taken out of that numbing pudding by my friend, Lucifer himself, then, and I was thrown into a vat of battery acid after I turned sixteen. I've been scarred by it ever since then. If someone had told me in February, which was is a month before my birthday, the time my dog had finally went to go hang out with my boy John Banner in the comfy club up in the blue sky, that my mother was seriously going nut-so, I think things would have went a tad bit different. I wouldn't have taken things so hard, maybe. Maybe I wouldn't be as scarred if my father came out and told me, "Kiddo, you're mom isn't doing so hot", and if he forced her to go to a doctor, I wouldn't be telling this story, and we all wouldn't be so messed up. Everything that happened would have been avoided. But we can't sit and stew about that. Okay, let me rephrase that. I can't sit here and stew about that. You can't change what happened, but you can talk about it. And, my god, you can't make this crap up. It's that insane. It's that off-the-charts. It's that goddamn awful. You can't be a Hap Shaughnessy while talking about this. Your nose can't grow to be ten inches long because of it. What I'm about to tell you is so raw and so completely bonkers that even the best of the best in the writing biz couldn't brain storm this monstrosity up. No kidding. No exaggerations. No blue-balling. No attention grabbing. I'm not that kind of writer. You know what I'm talking about. The type of creator who writes all of this brilliant stuff, all of this brilliant but super fake but also gripping realistic sounding stuff, within chapters upon chapters, only to leave the last episode of the work on a unexpected and disheartening cliffhanger. Yeah, that's not really my thing. I'm more of a tell it how it is type of girl. A tear off the band aid before the glue gets all soft and gummy kind of person. An all tough no crying type of writer- alright, I think now you have a good idea that I'm not writing this just to fuck around. It's time to get into the story I promised you. I'd be quite a floppy person if I didn't get down to the point at any time in this, to tell you the truth. I'd be just as bad as those writers who just leave a bloke with the cliffhanger and hold up their thick middle finger to the crowd. I'd be that blue-balling, waste- of- your- time creator who lacks even the smallest ounce of common decency.
As I mentioned before, my dog died one night in February, causing the Jenga block that held up a fragile tower that was what could be called "mental stability" of some kind to be taken out of the stack. My mother had taken care of him and his short and overweight litter mate, Chloe, ever since they were puppies, and she was attached to him. So attached that his death was devastating to her. I'm not saying that this extreme love for the animal was a bad thing, though. Greaser was a good dog, a great dog to be exact, even with the fact that he was a loudmouth of a Beagle (his bark belonged to a German Sheppard, I swear). A little low on the IQ side of the stick, but a loyal and friendly boy with a huge heart who had been my best buddy since I was in about the third grade. Needy as fuck, though, that dog of mine. He had a preference about many things, like how you had to cover his whole body- along with his head- with a blanket before going to sleep, or you had to wait a long time while he went to take a dump because my dog thought he had to inspect the area for fifteen minutes and then spin around in a circle about seventy times before the party got started, before the A-Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He even preferred to sit in a weird position, too, and that caused the hair on his butt to curl up into two adorable, identical swirls on both sides near the thighs. Those swirls housed about a million fleas and Greaser was always itchy down there because of that, and he was sadly also itchy in his ears. The flaps were so thick that the inner parts of the ear were constantly overheating, causing this disgusting smelling infection within them to get cultivated, and we had to put bag- balm in them every day to help calm it down. Of course, it tended to dig in them because of the overwhelming sensations caused by the infection, and that inevitably made it worse. You would hear him start to scratch at it during the night, and then begin whine because after a while his nails would really get in there and rub upon the most sensitive spot, then you'd hear someone yell, "leave your ears alone!" as if he was some sort of hypochondriac picking at a sore wound. When it wasn't doing that, my dog was eating his blanket and destroying his dog bed, because that was fun for some reason, and then in the morning my mother would sometimes come down to my room to ask me to sew it all up if I was home on vacation. I didn't mind doing that sort of thing; it was, in an entirety, my dog and no one else's, so it was my own responsibility to make reparations to whatever he had destroyed. I had a sewing kit, two hands, time, the responsibility. There was no excuse for me not to step up and do what I, as a pet parent, had to do. It was equal to having an objective in a mission- if you didn't do it, nothing would progress. I guess you can say the same thing about the whole waking up to find a dead animal in your living room one cold morning in 2019, honestly. If he had never died, things probably would have been slowed down, and not much progress would have been made for a little bit. Perhaps. I'm not entirely sure if that's how it would have went, but I think there's a bit of a chance that I might be standing right in the middle of that far away department.
February soon came to a close, and then my birthday came sneaking up on me like the Spanish Inquisition. I was taken out to the mall that day by my mother, who forcibly had me get my ears pierced and eat pretzels that I supposedly had always wanted to try- even though I never actually said that I did, nor did I ever even want to have a soft pretzel from the vendor. I remember sitting there at the table across from her, sipping on sugary iced tea and wondering why the hell it was so important for me to get holes cut into my earlobes and eat fried dough I didn't want. It all just didn't make any sense to me and I was more nervous than excited about life that Friday morning. Sure, having a day off on my birthday was convenient enough for a trip to Glens Falls, but why was it so important to her during that time? She was acting as though this was a once in a lifetime chance for me to finally meet Til Lindemann or something to that effect, as if I was going to meet the queen of England, as if I was about to go back to the 1940's to talk about the war effort with Hitler, Ging, Goebbels, Rommel, Jodl, Krebbs, Model, Manstein, and Bormann over tea in the Berghof. She acted like I was about to talk with Donald Trump about foreign affairs. She acted like I was about to fly a Stuka dive-bomber for the mighty Luftwaffe and make Germany so proud of me and my family. She acted like I had just received an Iron Cross for brave doings out there on the freezing Russian Front, saving my bearded comrades left and right as bullets whizzed past my head and Soviets shot off their version of the Nebelwerfer. She acted like this was our first time stepping into an establishment bigger than the trapping store we used to go to when I was younger. She treated me like I was the Red Barron; a respectable and well accomplished individual whom could only be shown the most intelligent, honorable, intentions. It was an uncomfortable moment in my life, especially when we went to a shoe store then a DVD store, later on while my ears were very sore from the piercing, and then went to the FYE store to "check out" what was there. Being a good sport, I looked around at the anime orientated merchandise, like the crazy Japanese cereals, soft drinks, Ramon, etc. There were other things in there, too, that were about comics and cartoons. I found this great Captain Planet shirt and a flat brimmed Rugrats hat that I fancied very much- I bought them with my allowance money shortly thereafter. I went home that day sporting my new hat, and I wore it for most of the afternoon, my ears still sore from having holes punched in them. The left one bothered me more than the right, causing me to worry that it was going to get infected (I get infections easily), but I was told that I would be fine. Within a few days, I hated the earrings because they caused my ears to be unbearably painful, and I threatened to take them out. My mother insisted that I kept them in even though I was in pain and told me that they would start to feel better. All I had to do, she said, was keep putting the solution on my earlobes and not touch them.
I thought things were going quite well after that for a bit until one doomed Thursday at almost six in the morning. My mother came into my pitch black room, did not bother to turn on the light, and stood there before me in a ghoulish way to tell some disturbing, fabricated, news. It was strange to see only her skinny, scrawny outline while telling me in a straightforward manner, "Dad's gone crazy. We're leaving today. Do not say anything about it and try to relax. We can talk more about this later when he leaves." Her voice was eerily calm and collected as if she thought knew what she was doing but actually did not at all. She was like that one Karon on the internet that reminds everyone of the famously creepy REDRUM twins.
"Oh, ok...." I said. I became a shipwreck on the inside but tried not to show it outwardly, looking out the window with a blank, hollowed stare as the sap house light turned on to illuminate our gravel covered driveway. The rocks were sterne which shined brightly within a thick black mass of empty confusion, trying to guide me in the correct direction, warning me about things I was about to encounter. I did not hear these warnings, sadly. My father came out to feed our baby chickens, his brown carhart jumpsuit appearing paler than usual in the mediocre light, its life force being drained by malicious ideas being brewed, his shadow seeming to harbor many evils within it. I then became more afraid of him than I ever was before. My mother then left my room, and I tried to at least get a little bit more shut-eye, but that was basically impossible. Her crazy words rattled around in my tiny brain like bouncy balls as I reviewed my first taste of the situation's newest untrue complexities. Dad? Crazy? We're leaving? Today? Right this goddamn day? Am I dreaming? What in the living and breathing hell is going on right now? Someone help me!
After a while, I came out into the livingroom, freaked the fuck out and tired and confused and depressed and frightened. It was weird for me to be in the same room as my father, since I was just told about five minutes before that he was now totally bonkers, and it was awkward to be around my mother, because she was acting as though she had taken the position of being a powerful, supernatural individual. Moses, maybe that's what she felt like. Or Aldo Raine. Possibly both. I tried to watch the news, but everything felt fake to me; every word that the dumb, blonde ancor woman spewed out had the value of an old piece of lettuce with sharpie marker written on it. I didn't care about anything anybody said. I didn't want to hear about the ISIS crisis or nonsense blabbering or some stupid guy crashing his pickup truck into the side of a supermarket that morning. I probably wouldn't have even cared if the newscasters started having a heavy conversation about MW3 (Modern Warfare Three- for all of you people who don't play games). All I thought about was what was said to me earlier while I sat hunched over on the couch.
There was a moment when my mother looked over at me and smiled this slight grin- it was filled with smug satisfaction and some other emotion I still don't know to this day. It was strange, a little too strange. My father left for work at almost six thirty, and about fifteen seconds later, the "explanation" of what was going on came out into the open.