Infamy, Not Stepping Through the Wardrobe, and Familiarity Breeds Contempt

While it’s surprisingly warm for December, the weather here is just generally crappy, and is well-suited to the whole “living in infamy” theme that was set for today’s date so many years ago.
The day started out with a phone call from Scott informing me that I still have a job, which was good news, as the company I work for announced hundreds of layoffs today. I was glad that I was not among those who lost their jobs, but my sympathies go out to all of my colleagues who were not so fortunate.
We’ve known they were coming for a while, but there was still a lot of speculation as to who would be cut.
Now we know.
The timing of the layoffs is particularly shitty, and officially announcing them today also adds to the general sense of infamy.
After calling my mother to let her know that I was still among the ranks of the gainfully employed I showered and headed out to do some grocery shopping.
I got home and was in the middle of cutting up some round steak for today’s culinary adventure (Crock Pot Round Steak) when my mother called back. I had woken her when I’d called earlier, as she and my dad are now in Tucson for the winter and are two hours behind, so she decided to call me back once she was actually awake.
While I was talking to my mother I got a beep, which brought the number of phone calls in one day to near-record levels for me.
It was Kathleen calling to see if I’d gotten the call about the layoffs and inviting me to go for a ride with her out to some consignment store, as she didn’t feel like making the trip alone and Brian is ill today.
She had brought some things out to be sold at the consignment store a while back and was heading there to pick up the items that hadn’t been sold and to get paid for those that had, and to drop off some other things to sell.
This took a while, so I wandered throughout the store looking at the various kinds of crap that they were selling for far too much money.
The only thing that really caught my eye was a complete set of C.S. Lewis’ “Narnia” books, but they were in pretty rough shape, so I ultimately decided to pass.
There was a very cute young girl working there, though once again, in the same depressing fashion as my Outback experience, my eyes kept being drawn to the fairly attractive older woman.
After Kathleen and I finished there we stopped for a slice of pizza, then headed back.
At the very least it was an interesting change of pace from sitting around doing nothing, or, as I was also considering, cleaning my apartment.
I watched two fairly interesting things on TV last night.
The first was something called “My Coolest Years” on VH1, which featured various actors, musicians, and comedians reminiscing about their high school years. That alone was not especially interesting, but they had an episode of it that focused specifically on people who had been metal heads in high school. Having been one myself, it was sort of entertaining to watch.
There were definitely some things that I could relate to, but overall it wasn’t especially representative of my own experiences.
For one thing, I didn’t really drink that much during that particular period of my life, and I was never a pothead.
But the major element of my life that prevents virtually all of my high school memories from resembling anything like the vision presented on TV and in movies, or in the recollections of other people is the fact that I’m from a very small rural community.
And when I say very small, I don’t mean just a couple thousand people. The town I grew up in had a population of around 110 people.
A few years ago I was discussing the “American Pie” movies with a friend who, expecting me to agree with his assessment, asked "Aren't they exactly like how it was in high school?"
I said, “No, not even a little bit.”
My high school was extremely small. I believe there were 32 students in my graduating class, and that was rather on the large side for my school.
Also, my high school was generally looked down upon throughout the area, so that combined with the small size helped to keep the school from developing the sort of sharp divisions that you find in a typical movie high school. There were definite cliques, but in general we had the sense that we were all in the same boat: we all went to Jeffers, so we were all basically losers.
The small size also necessitated inter-clique interactions. Jocks associated with nerds and burnouts as much as they did with anyone else, particularly since, with a student body of about 200, it was easily possible to know everyone, and the athletic teams couldn't really afford to be exclusive, so pretty much anyone could join. It was the same with the cheerleading squads.
I myself crossed several social boundaries: I was a “brain,” but I was also a metal head, and I smoked, so I spent my lunch hours hanging around with the burnouts.
Still, while I wasn’t the kind of social pariah or target for ridicule and abuse that I might have been at a larger school, I tended not to socialize much and had only one real friend throughout my high school years.
The fact that I wasn’t really inclined to socialize was exacerbated by the fact that I was pretty much an outsider. After all, I lived 20 miles away. Kids from my neck of the woods (some of us literally lived in the woods) went to our own local school from Kindergarten through 8th grade, so by the time we started high school we were at a distinct disadvantage, as most of the other students had known each other for years and we were all “the new kids.”
We did have the benefit of the assistance of those kids from our area who had gone there before us, but it was still a difficult transition to make, particularly, as in my case, when it involved going from a class that consisted of me and one other person to a class of me and 31 other people.
Of course, my K-8 experiences hadn’t been pleasant either, so I didn’t really have any friends from my own town, and eventually I grew to hate most of the new people I was forced to spend so many hours of the day with, so I became even more withdrawn.
So given that I didn’t really like anyone and that I lived 20 miles away from virtually everyone I went to school with and didn’t have a car of my own, I had largely gotten the partying thing out of my system before high school, thanks to frequent weekend visits to my older sister’s apartment while she was in college, my high school years bore little to no resemblance to John Hughes films or the “American Pie” movies.
As for my life out in the sticks, there really wasn’t much to do. The nearest mall was 30 miles away, so I spent most of my time in my room listening to music, drawing pictures of demons and heavy metal album covers, reading (I spent the majority of my time reading. I’d read on the bus ride to school, during study hall, between classes, at lunch time [when I wasn’t smoking] and on the bus ride home), and occasionally writing.
And as for dating, my girlfriend went to a different high school and lived 45 miles away. I spent a lot of weekends at her parents’ house, and she spent a lot of weekends at mine.
It was expensive for us to call each other (in-state long distance is pricey), so I could only call her once a week for 10 minutes. She played basketball and was a cheerleader, though, so I could usually talk my dad into going to the games when her school played mine.
Living in the middle of nowhere and having no job or car also kept me from being able to make it to any decent metal concerts. I never really hit a metal concert until college (and after).
So basically the only things I could relate to in the VH1 show were the hair, some of the clothes, and the one comment one of the guys made about how metal heads typically spent their time hanging out “around corners and behind stuff.”
That part was pretty funny, and was very true.
The other thing that I watched that was interesting was “The Whole Wide World,” which is a movie I’ve been trying to see for a number of years without actually actively seeking it out.
It stars Renee Zellweger and Vincent D’Onofrio and tells the story of the relationship between a schoolteacher named Novelyne Price and writer Robert E. Howard, creator of “Conan.”
There were very strong performances by both Zellweger and D’Onofrio, though I was disappointed by the fact that, since it was based on Novelyne’s memoirs, it didn’t focus as much on Howard as I might have liked. In particular, we didn’t get to see much about his suicide, though of course Novalyne wasn’t privy to that, so it only makes sense.
Still, I enjoyed the movie a great deal.
For those of you who don’t know, Robert E. Howard was a profoundly troubled man with a morbid attachment to his mother.
It was quite literally a “morbid” attachment; when he discovered that his mother was not going to recover from the illness that had afflicted her, Howard shot himself. He was only 30.
I’ve read all of Howard’s Conan stories, as well as the various adaptations in the comics and the stories written by later authors based on his notes and unfinished stories, as well as the later, completely original works by writers such as Robert Jordan. Indeed, at one point I even started writing a Conan novel of my own.
I’ve also read several of Howard’s non-Conan stories, such as “Swordswoman,” a character very similar to his “Red Sonja” character.
I suppose that I’ve always been somewhat fascinated by Howard’s life (and death). Honestly, the whole reason that I chose to submit a short story to “Weird Tales” (still haven’t heard anything on that, by the way, so I think it’s safe to assume that my submission was rejected) was because the pulp that served as the namesake for this current incarnation was where most of Howard’s work was published.
I read somewhere once that when he wrote, Howard felt this presence standing behind him, some pre-Christian, primal force that actually dictated the stories to him, and he didn’t dare stop writing or look behind him for fear that this barbarous spirit would chop his head off.
Finally, when he completed the story and would slump exhausted in front of the typewriter the presence would leave.
Crazy? Of course, but I certainly could benefit from having a similar psychosis pop up behind me…
What was most compelling to me about the movie was just how much I could relate to D’Onofrio’s portrayal of Howard.
No, I’m nowhere near as crazy or as attached to my mother, but there was this definite awkwardness and an inability to fully relate to his fellow human beings that felt awfully familiar.
And while there is no one, and has been no one, in my life comparable to Novalyne Price, it was very easy to relate to the way that Howard’s eccentricities and issues caused him to drive away the chance he had at actually finding the happiness that he was looking for.
That I could relate in some fashion to what was being presented in the cathodes last night was something of a recurring theme.
I kept seeing things that looked familiar, my inability to relate to much of the high school stuff notwithstanding, and in most cases I really didn’t like what I saw.
On two episodes of “Blind Date” I saw three guys whose bitterness and loneliness manifested themselves in personality defects (never being serious and being too judgmental, to name a few), and while I’m not in exactly the same boat, since I’m not event going on dates, my own tendency to be withdrawn and the fact that I not only don’t seek out human contact I actively avoid it prevents me from even getting the chance to screw things up on a date.
But the fact that I recognize these things doesn’t mean that I’m going to do anything to change them (or that I would even know how, or where to begin), so really it just served to make me feel uncomfortable, as if I weren’t able to make myself feel uncomfortable without TV’s help…