Cultie Biographies

im not a slut. i get paid to put out.

Fuck your faces off. Biographies now, get writing. And make it good. I want to know who your parents were and where they came from, who your siblings were and how you got along with them. First day of school, fears and comforts, most vivid memories.

i'll do it but it wont be worth any literary anything because i give up on trying to be a more than mediocre writer

This will make me very depressed actually. I can't.

Mine too. So I'm skipping over years 5-10. Sorry Charlies.

Did it make you even more depressed? Or did it help?

oh it was nothing really, it's just one of the assignments you get, i suppose it helped i don't really remember.

My life is really predictably boring. This is why I enjoy writing fiction.

Thank you, then. I've got three pages and I'm not even born yet.

I'll get to work on this, I like talking about myself :)

I haven't had much more time to work on this, but I'm using real names and places and probably shouldn't ever post this on the internet. And it is getting quite lengthy.

I like this idea, enough that I'm typing this when I should be napping. I think I'll start mine after the nappage, to get the mind juices flowing the NaNoWriMo marathon that is to be tonight.

What are we talking here, a crafted piece or a quick run through relevant points in our lives. I ask as some of us are really ancient unlike Zoth who thinks he's one Anne Rices creations. Should have gone for Christ although I think there may be copy write issues outstanding one that one. I'm still waiting till the son of god becomes a vampire but as usual she's draggin in out, I digress.

I think this is a great idea as I would be interested in knowing how a lot of people came to this point of their lives. Although there are some people I don't trust to tell a word of the truth, you know who you are.

I think a lot of good ideas how ever never get beyond the writing about doing them round these parts so I won't hold my breath. That aint an insult, its just this place sometime seems like an ideas factory with no one to benefit from the products of the creative people that work there.

what?

you people know enough about me already so . . .

teehee

Is it okay if i make one of those like, wikipages, so we can all post maybe like, chapters as we write along and comment or something? Or maybe just post along here as we write? I have until i was about five done and I'd like to at least post what I've written so far somewhere in case I pass out or give up trying to write the rest of this.

I was born within the walls of an Irish castle on October 21, 1681. The master of the house was a mister Edmond DeSwitch who had a keen interest in the art of alchemy. Though a complete failure in every aspect of his work, his incessant fumbling with God's video game led to severe consequences for all who surrounded them. Mutations of mind and body were not altogether uncommon in this household, which ultimately resulted in my departure at the tender age of one.
Having left my thousands of brothers and sisters behind, I traveled the world in search of wisdom and new forms of mayonnaise. As I have always lived in the shadow of emphatic irony I found my next home within of the walls at the base of the Australian Illuminati. For many years, I inadvertently soaked up millions of memes of above average information which further mutated my consciousness creating an intellectual wanderlust which eventually drove me to Great Britain where I found an odd sect of apple obsessed chaos worshipers. Within their temple walls my third eye opened, revealing the goddess in all her majesty
I found myself face to face with the goddess Eris who, finding me cute and less annoying than her other saints, sainted me on the spot and introduced me to her good friend Timothy Leary. Timothy in turn introduced me to an electric cheeseburger who eventually talked me into taking over the mind of Ronald Regan and forcing him to run for president. In the body of the Gipper, I became hooked on crack and completely screwed the U.S.A. condemning it to hundreds of years of masochistic frivolity. I looked upon my creation and saw that it was good. However, since my importing of crack had completely buggered the lower class, I began to feel guilty. So I did the only sensible thing. I abandoned the president's body and dedicated my life to making sure that broccoli will never again seize the reigns of the world.
For those of you who are not personally familiar with my dear friend Eris I must say that her reputation as a trickster is not overstated. She enlightened me but, being the goddess of chaos, it was only to be expected that she would play a trick. One night she left me without a trace. That morning when I awoke I found that I was missing two appendages and that I had gone all squishy and pale in addition to a considerable increase in size.
I searched for many years for a way to heal my wounds. Luckily, one day I bumped into the electric cheeseburger at a dive bar on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama. I regaled him with my story and he was very sympathetic. Apparently, he hadn’t always been an electric cheeseburger. As it happened, he had also been searching for a way to return his form to it’s previous glory and only recently found a solution. Sadly, the price of that transformation was much too great for his moralistic outlook. It seemed that only large scale human sacrifice would release the power necessary to get me into that level of cosmic swap meet. Having already been the president my hands were already stained with the blood of countless innocents. Nevertheless, murder for personal gain is always wrong. You should only kill for fun or revenge. Otherwise you’re a jerk and no better than a soccer mom who drives a hummer.
I was still pondering the best course of action when I happened upon a family named Bush, who regularly indulged in mass murder but only for the sake of monetary gain. All that potential energy was just going to waste so I did some things I can’t talk about for obvious reasons and eventually gained the power to transcend life and death. I am now able to manipulate my physical form at will and travel through all fifty six dimensions. Having achieved this, I ate a taco.
I wrote my first book "Muffy: or a Transmigration of Selves" in 1999 and subsequently misplaced it. This novel was followed by several screenplays which have also been lost. Recently I discovered "Muffy" hiding in a shoe box in my closet labeled Salvador Dali's Rhenquist. I took that as a sign from Eris to finally unleash it upon the world. And so I did. Unfortunately this has resulted in a certain amount of unwanted notoriety which is inconducive to the lifestyle I prefer. Luckily, shape shifting affords a certain privacy which even paparazzi can’t destroy.

It was the summer of 1980 and my mother, Joy, had just graduated college. She was an animal science/agriculture major in a New Jersey university. She'd been working in the field, literally- a field- for the past three years and was in good shape. She was tan like Ill never be but her hair was like mine would be- bright red.

She was also engaged to a young man named Vinny. Vinny was a good man with a huge thick black head of hair and permanently greasy fingers. Joy met Vinny in a restaurant/bar by her school and in less than a year she was planning on marrying him. Joy, and her Doberman Pinscher Shepherd, moved in to Vinny's one bedroom apartment just over the bridge from the city. They were close to both their parents and to Joys new job- a Zookeeper at the county's zoo.

During the day the two would go to work- Vinny to the garage and Joy to the zoo, and every night save for Mondays, they would meet eachother at home for dinner. You see, Monday nights, my mother would ride her Harley from work to a local bar for Monday Night Football with some of her coworkers.

On this particular night, my mother was enjoying her beer when an older man came to speak with her. His name was Frank and he wanted to buy her a drink. He was persistant but my mother informed him gently that he was just too old for her. The old man had a thought, "You'll like my son!"
"Im engaged" my mother replied.
"Just give me a minute"

So the man hobbled away, he has but one leg, mind you, to a pay phone outside of the bar. He frantically calls his son, Frank Jr.
"Frank! Im in trouble. Youve got to come. I pissed off some guys and they wanna fight."
"Ill be right there"

Frank Jr in motorcycle boots and a leather jacket pulls his own Harley into the lot and rushes to his father's side.
"Dad, whats happening?"
"Come 'ere, I got someone for you to meet."

And thats the story of how my parents met.

Ich heiße Ludwig Franc-Tireur, ich komme aus Frankreich, und ich bin mit Frank einverstanden.

This is the longest and most difficult thing I've ever written. I don't even care if none of you read it now. I feel like I really needed to write that. So, thanks.

This is my story. I've left parts out that I didn't want to tell. Other parts I didn't want to tell, I told anyway. Some things I've left out for length's sake. Some of it's a little hard to believe, but it's all there. It's all true. It was all hard to write. I'm afriad of finishing it, but I've got to, because it's me.

I.

My parents met in a bar when my father played super hero and rescued my mother when she was cornered by a drunk trying to take her home. My mom was in a band that had played that night called the Great Shakes (they were a cover band, did shit like Human Fly and Friday I'm In Love) and apparently the man has been bothering her all night, until my father jacked him up against the wall and said "leave the lady alone." They went home together. He told her than night that she was going to have his children. This was all very funny because at the time my mother was dating his best friend.

My father, Billy, was a comic book fanatic, and drove a black firebird with a Punisher skull painted on the hood and another hanging from the rear view mirror. In 70% of my family picutres, he's wearing a teeshirt with someone's emblem on it. He had black hair, a tiny, straight nose, insanely defined cheek bones, and perfect blue eyes, to the point where I remember strangers stopping him on the street to tell him this. They weren't even blue, really, sometimes they were light enough that they were almost steel or blue shade of white. He had at least seven huge tattoos when he passed away that he accumulated over the years after I was born and had four more planned. One huge on on his shoulder, a monarch butterfly. When he was younger, after his father killed himself, he stood on the roof of a building, working, and it was raining, and he contemplated jumping. In the middle of the rain, a monarch landed on his shoulder. It stayed. My father was calm then, and convinced it was his father's spirit, as the Navajos say that the monarchs carry thoughts and prayers of our deceased loved ones to us. He had it tattooed the next day. In my head he's always this perfect combination of nerd and badass that compliment each other to the point where it's seemingly impossible.

My mother, Deborah, was/is fucking beautiful. Big brown eyes and wide lips, people always compaired her to a female Mick Jagger but without the wrinkles and dickheadedness and perfect Donny Osmond teeth. Brunette when I was born but blonde ever since I can remember. I've never met anyone skinnier, when I was little I always compaired her body to Iman's.

I don't know much about before I was born, but the few stories I've been told from before are these: eventually they end up drunk in the snow, walking down the street singing the theme song to HR Puffenstuff. My father eventually writes a song called "No Chicken Till Tuesday" for her, which is about a man who's wife sends him to the store, only to find out they won't have any chicken delivered until Tuesday. He kills and eats his wife instead.

II.

I was concieved when my mother stood on her head. My father would rub my mother's pregnant tummy and chant "I wish I had a monkey, I wish I had a monkey." and this led to my parents almost naming me "Aloicious P. Monkey" (Aloicious sounding like 'All the Wishes') but they didn't, and instead named me Danielle Marie Tobias although the pretty much always called me this or Michu unil last year when my father passed away. Michu Mezzaros was the world's smallest man, and ran with the Barnum and Bailey's circus. My father's uncle was the ringleader for the circus for many years when I was growing up, so more often than not we were there, and my bald little wrinkly baby smile was notorious for looking so similar to the 40 year old Michu Mezzaros. Not to mention we were the same size. I had no hair until I was 3 years old, and my mother used to tape bows to my head so people would stop calling me a little boy. This is cuter than sad. I only wore dresses with matching socks and hats until I left the first grade, unless my parents were dressing me up weird, which they were, a lot. I have pictures of me dressed like everything from a biker to a turtle to a lion to a thug. My mom was always taking pictures of me hidden in gigantic piles of stuffed animals. We always had gigantic, colorful fishtanks all over the house, and appropriately, my first word was "fishes." It's actually debated among my family if it were "cookiefish" or "fishes" but today I feel like going with the later. Apparently I've always had and was born with superhuman reflexes, because one night my mother walked in the living room and I had one of the goldfish squeezed in my hands bleeding, and exclaimed "Look mommy, I'm hugging him because I love him so much!" and from that moment on they had to keep me away from the fish tanks because I was overly adept at catching them with my bare hands in one shot. The squeezed fish lived longer than any of the other fish, though. We also had finches at one point, in a long hanging cage in the living room corner near the fireplace (which I don't remember ever having a fire.) We had about a dozen, and I remember waking up and my father showing me how they had laid eggs in the nest. Which lead to a lifetime of finches breeding and interbreeding until we had about 40 finches, maybe 50. Eventually though, we couldn't pay the rent because my father decided to support his growing habits rather than support us and were evicted, and the landlord turned the heat off a month in advance and all of the birds died. The day before we moved out I remember my mother letting me go insane on the walls with crayon and paint in revenge.

I'm skipping around my timeline here, though. When I was two years old, my brother Taylor was born. My mother had me by C section and was told she wouldn't be able to have another child, as her whole reproductive system was fucked up and she was far too small to have children. They always called Taylor a pleasant suprise, however he almost wasn't, and was born blue, with his umbillical cord wrapped around his neck. He spent a few weeks in an incubator and turned from blue to yellow. The night my mother brought him home was the first night I had my first asthma attack. my lungs ceased up, I turned blue, and almost passed out. When my mother and father brought me into the hospital they assumed something had happened to her concerning my brother's birth, another c section, and were suprised to find me blue and purple. I don't remember any of this, it's all through retelling, but I do remember the first time I used my nebulizer, which is sort of an oxygen machine that pumps medication into your lungs as well as air. I was two and a half, and at my Nan's (my father's mother) staring at her blue and white checkered table cloth with the little Quaker figures when I started to get dizzy, and promptly threw up all over the porcelin lady and her duck. I hid underneath the table and almost asphyxiated because I refused to use my nebulizer again for weeks. The only other option my parents had without medication was to pump me full of coffee every time I had an asthma attack, which contains small traces of whatever the fuck is in my medication. I remember being maybe 3, awake until 5 in the morning watching Sailor Moon, being amazed at the hours where everyone was asleep and the sun wasn't up but still made everything dark blue.

We moved a lot between all of these little anecdotes and it's hard to decribe which houses were which and were the changes happened, but every scene so far has taken place somewhere else. By the time I was four my father was never home. He had more important things to do and drink but I never realized it somehow. He frequently worked his ass off but when he did my family never saw a paycheck. He seperated from my mother multiple times and though it doesn't seem too bright it was luck for us that my mother got us on welfare, without food stamps we wouldn't have eatten. After a while, my father discovered that you could buy beer with food stamps, however, or trade them to people less well off for less money, but real money, for drugs. He had other girlfriends, and threatened to leave us for them. I remember him telling me that whoever he was with when he saw the first monarch butterfly, he would stay with. I spent all summer every summer chasing monarchs with a bucket and a fish net.

After this we turned to food pantries. I never realized any of this was going on, I was blessed with being little and ignorant enough not to recognize that we were poor. I delighted in the little shit we had, my mother made me a doll house out of shoe boxes, tape, and wall paper. She fashioned little tables out of smaller boxes, and a bed from a tissue box, with the tissues for blankets. I reveled in this dollhouse, not knowing how long it must have taken her to make, to me it was better if not more fun than the hundred dollar houses my neighbors had, because I could punch a new window in whenever I pleased. Christmases were full of joy for me and my brother, and we never realized that all of our gifts were donations, most from the boxes in the hallways at my own elementary school, where kids could buy and drop a toy for a needy family. Boxes where children could donate a can of food for needy Thanksgivings. Needy was only a vague idea in the back of my head until I was old enough to have escaped it. I never had friends in elementary school, mostly because by the time I was in the fifth grade I had already been to 4 schools. Somewhere between all of this I knew a girl named Coley with a glass eye and a pervert father. I met up with her years later and knowing something was vaguely wrong with her and to this day I wonder why with no reason to believe it I know in the depth of my stomache that she was sleeping with her father. But that's neither here nor there.

The rest of my child hood is all fragmented and without real chronological order. I was a childhood model for a long time, and once landed a Snuggles commercial on TV dressed as a ballerina. I once planted a seed in my mother's garden and she laughed knowing it would never grow but made sure she told me she watered it every day. Three years later a marigold popped up. A child that lived next door to us once pushed an armoire on top of my 3 year old brother and tried to crush him to death. I had a dog named Bandit who I loved dearly, who we eventually had to put in the pound because we were losing the house we lived in again when I was about 7. When I turned 13 my father took me to the pound to pick out a rescuse dog for my birthday. Bandit was still there, emaciated and old. I took him home again in lieu of any other dog, and he died 3 days later. Eventually my father landed in prison for...something. I was never clear on what. We took long road trips to Canada, Waterbury, Maine, where ever he was incarcerated at the time to see him throughout the following years, and I can never remember why he was arrested...He would send me and my brother pictures he drew in jail of us as X-men, pictures of Batman and Marvel females for me. The envelopes he sent were always covered in colored pencil, crayon and ballpoint pictures. My father was one of the most amazing artists I had ever met in my entire life. I remember him sitting me down once when I asked him to teach me how to draw, and showing me a picture of Garfield. I did my best to draw a big orange cat, and he took my paper from me, flipped it over, and handed it back. He sat behind me with my hand in his and showed me each perfect circle, each half circle, each angle on the original drawing, and telling me 'Don't draw a cat, draw the lines you see exactlly how you see them.' and until this day I can't draw worth a god damned from the top of my head, but I can sit down with a ball point pen, not pencil or charcoal or paint, and draw a photgraph or illustration exactlly as it looks.

III.

I don't remember much else but prisons and pictures until I'm 13 and living at home with my mother, brother, and grandparents. I'm skipping a lot here. I tried to run away a lot. One time they caught me barefoot in the snow passed out on my English teacher's lawn in the snow. I had crawled out my window and ran across town.Along with asthma, I have a spastic lung condition that makes my lung essentially unable to inhale cold air. My lungs shut down and I passed out, he carried me inside and called the cops. Eventually my parents had the police on speed dial. I thought I was smarter than everyone, needed to fight my way out and away from them all. I started getting into verbal fights with my teachers at school. I became a self destructive narcissist and dellusional at that. I believed for a while that I possessed the psychic control of God, and that there were no effective consequences for anything that I did. I had no friends, although the quiet sad kids started to follow me and do as I did over the next year or two. Maybe it was that I was out spoken or the allure of seeming not to give a fuck that attracted them, but what they didn't realize was that at this point I denied the existence that there was any shit to give and spent most of my days denying the existance of myself or anythign around me. One of these girls became my 'best friend' although I didn't harbor the capability to really care much about anyone or anything. She was simply the one who followed my actions the most, dressed like me, did as I did, harbored some sad faux impression of the violence in my head. She simply thought that at this point I was a rebel, that I thought it was some sort of cool to piss off everything around me for fun. She thought my lack of caring for her was a facade, a game I was playing for some sort of image. One day she decided to insult me to my face, maybe playfully, I don't know. All I remember is that I jacked her up against the lockers until she was blue, dropped her, and walked out of school for the day. I'm skipping a bunch here. I never touched drugs, didn't drink. I had been smoking since I was 11, but that was the extent of it. I had no interest and still really don't in the unreal. I stopped eating, never slept, and started burning myself and carving gashes into my legs. I wasn't depressed, I didn't want attention. To me it was simply another exploration of my existence, what was real, what would leave a mark. Trying, (this is really the best way I can explain it, I still don't really know) to discover some sort of consequence. At home I did what I wanted, left when I wanted to, and knew there was no consequence. They would try to kick me out, until they realized it was what I wanted. At school I maintained an A average, while I only attended a sixth of my classes. Eventually my family noticed that I was seeking some sort of boundary, and I ended up in Four Winds mental institution for about a year in 3 month intervals. 3 months inpatient, two weeks out, repeat.

Here I discovered more of a lack of consequence than ever. The interns weren't allowed to touch me unless to sedate me, which was how I preffered to spend the day rather than in group therapy with the people I considered pathetic, tallowy attention addicts. I could sense their mental weakness radiating from them like alcohol sweat the day after a party, the way bulimics always seem to gleam sickness and deficiency. I wanted nothing to do with them, and found that the easiest way to get what I wanted was to act out. I would wake up, throw a stool or a bench into the hallway with as much force as I could. When they began to expect this sort of random outburst from me, they assumed I was manic depressive, and loaded me full of mood stablizers and mild sedatives to control my energy and anger, but what they didn't ever assume was that there was no energy or anger, only my Occam's Razor solution. I continued, increasing my act of fake distress, increased my outburts. They eventually stopped sedating me, and restrained me to what we called the "velcro burrito" a black plastic sheet with velcro on one side, much simpler to apply than a straight jacket, and twice as effective, and the rubber room. In the rubber room without the velcro jacket, it was easy enough to punch through the walls or beat against the glass wall until my fists bruised and they would be forced to sedate me again. In the burrito I would gnaw at my lips until they bled, or smack my skull against the bullet proof plexiglass until they were sure I would knock myself out any way. I was never interested in injuring myself, though, again it was just that I had found a way to keep myself chemically sedated as a means of escape. I learned how to enjoy sleep. The one time I attempted to commit suicide I was on such a cock tail of medication that I took a pencil, dug the eraser out and split the metal at the end. I dug a hole from the vein on my wrist to my elbow in an attempt to prove that I wasn't alive in the first place and therefore couldn't be killed. I still believed that I was the only God in my universe that didn't exist anywhere outside of my head and could cheat the rules that pertained to everyone else's life. I believed I was an entity, a super being, an alien. This lasted a couple of months, until they figured that I, and another roomate of mine, a former addict, were conspiring together different ways to rouse the patients and staff to get our thorazine shots and seroquel. I wanted to be knocked out, she enjoyed the high she got while fighting to stay awake. They eventually refused to sedate us with anything but antihistimes like Benadryl, and we gave up. I eventually began going to solo sessions, and my diagnoses pingponged between a list of thirty disorders including paranoid schizophrenia, delusional disorders, bipolar disorder, etc. Eventually, after 4 or four discharges and readmittances, they simply told me that they couldn't help. I was out, and life was the same. Only upon my release, I had now accuired a healthy drug habit. I had been trading "sharps" (objects that could be used to injure patients or staff, including things like mouthwash, safety pins, pens, spiral notebooks, lighters, razors, pencils, mirrors, cds, etc) for patients Xanax, Valium, Seroquel, BuSpar, Adivan, anything I could get to attempt to turn the world off and marinate in my self absorbed brain.

When I arrived home, I shaved my head. Until then, I had hair down to my waist. When I returned to school, I was only interested in the skin heads that congregated in the hallways. I didn't share their hate but found their commitment to an imaginary concept interesting. They were interested in me because I looked like I was one of them. I joined one of their bands, but was subsiquently kicked out when they discovered that I didn't have any interest in white pride. I spent nights with the Irish pride groups that still accepted me and knew me from the same circles. They were all older, but I was comforted by their stereotypical rockabilly lifestyles, all denim and coifs and Doc Martens. They wrote songs about me, I drank their whiskey. I was never imposed upon or hit on, they all treated me like a younger sister, although I'm sure one of them was in love with me. I never so much as shook hands with them outside of swing dancing at shows, but the whole world assumed the opposite. At high school they graffittied the walls with imaginary tales of my Slut-itude. It never bothered me, because I still had no interest in the things that were unreal. Eventually, one of the more popular quirky indie kids and his friends attacked me in the hallway for being a "neo-nazi." This didn't bother me, because it was untrue, but when one of them flung a steel trash can at me, I hurled it back, and my reflexes and aim were again a little too supernaturally accute, and I unintentionally hit him in the side of the head and neck. I was asked kindly to leave John Jay High School.

IV.

I eventually left my home for my father's house in Connecticut. To me there was no other option to escape a world and home that refused to change and was forcing me to stagnate. My family saw it as the only was to get me through my freshman year of high school intact. I never attended my classes in Bethel. Everyone was obsessive in their interest in the new girl with the short hair smoking not in the bathrooms but in the corners of the hallways during class while the hall monitors checked the bathrooms. I found skaters and stoners the most compliant, and continued to cut class with those who had no will of their own and would agree to show me around town. I found my first real friends in two girls, Jazmyn and Laurie. Laurie was motherlike, and I appreciated her open hearted good will and honesty, but Jazmyn intersted me because she had an aura that was not like anyone elses. She created silly little worlds of her own and seemed magical to me in her ability to get lost in the beauty in things that didn't interest others, be they blades of grass or the clicks her piercings jangled when she wore long jewelry. She scribbled one liners in sharpie where ever she found blank canvas. Wore glitter on her earlobes and collected stray kittens and empty beer bottles. The introduced me to their friend Arlen, who I had met when I lived in New York when his band played with my Irish group of friends at a record store. We thought we fell in love instantly. We couldn't be seperated, his obsession with me so intense he would stay awake for days while I slept and draw me. His drawings started horrendously, in black marker that couldn't pass a sixth grade art class. He drew them so continuously, however, that he eventually was able to draw lifelike portraits that stunned our friends. He kept notebooks of his every thought, all day, during class, breaks, when he was home, and would hand them to me to read and approve daily. We traded blood the way little kids might in old movies, pricked our fingers and held hands for hours. He was obsessed with every nuance of me, while I slept, when not drawing, he would trace every inch of me with his fingers and make notes about each square of me in his notebook. He confessed his love for me every time he spoke. Looking back now, I'm sure what I was really in love with was this obsession. He was quiet and never expressed anything but this, unless he was behind the drums, the only instance where I ever found him attractive and self assured.

And so the four of us would lay in fields and drink and smoke rather than go to class, when it rained we would comandere a friend with a jeep and off road it into the woods, and do the same. Me and Jazmyn became incredibly close, we would sit in her room at night huddled together underneath her window and smoke, melt wax on her windowsill, burn incense, and draw on the glass for hours. We would take pictures of each other and kept albums. Wrote poems in tiny notebooks and compaired them. Traded clothes until we were unsure who originally owned what. Eventually I noticed when we were with our usual group of people she got snarky. They were all older than me, and for the first time I found myself self concious. I questioned my actions, and found it hard to maintain any sort of stability in my behavior without double checking mentaly if what I was doing was juvenile, whereas beforehand I was convinced that my perception of self influenced the world around me. I began to feel the influence of the world pushing against me at all angles and quickly attempted to retreat back into myself to avoid being crushed by it. I began to write furiously, filled journals and notebooks daily. Held parties at my house to which I never appeared. I would sit in my dark room by the window and write of everyone around me with a bottle of wine between my legs. Drug dealers became friends and would spend days on my couch, providing drugs for free in exchange for haircuts and food. A boy named Mark started to come around, and was sort of a brother figure to Jazmyn. We had a platonic love for each other that was shrouded in a veil of faux hatred. He would look at me and tell me I was an idiot and we would both smile, then he would take my notebook and write me pages of funny observations about the people surrounding us, my things, and me. Today I cherish these few pages the most, and I don't know why. He once left me the gift of a dead racoon on the stone wall outside my window, not because he was creepy but because the absurdity of it amused him into such laughing fits that his maliciousness dissolved into pure joy. Once after a three day speed binge, I crashed for 24 hours and woke up to find him sitting in the driveway, cross legged on his car, outside my window. He knocked on the window, and asked me what day it was. I told him I don't know, and he looked up in the brand new sunlight and smiled and said "Me either." It was, to me, one of the most glorious, simple moments I've had. One day, I emerged from my room with a new drawing I had done of a photograph of Arlen that Jazmyn had taken and a glass of red wine into the living room to find Arlen and Jazmyn curled around each other holding hands and staring each other in the eyes in a way that far exceeded the platonic love that surrounded our group and entered into post-coital. I became furious and threw the rest of the bottle at the wall behind Arlen and it shattered all over the floor and couch. He confessed their secret relationship to me underneath my furious screaming and I ordered him to leave. Jazmyn followed. Laurie simply stayed, sobbing, and picked up the shards of glass from the floor and even though she sliced her fingers continued to use her nails to find the tiny shards. She confessed her guilt, having known the whole year, and her sobs freed her alone from my rage, although I ordered her to leave as well.

I continued my relationship with Arlen, however, as well as the rest of them, although a nervous biting animal now lived in the space where my unbridled love for them once did. Mark seemed to be the only one innocent and capable of understanding this silent creature, and I found comfort in his sarcasm and abruptness. Me and Arlen's relationship became insane and torrential in it's inappropriateness. He would down handfuls of Adderall and spend weeks writing apologies and suicidal confessions, novels worth of self doubt and hatred. He handed me these to read as well, daily. When I slept now I would awake to find him backed into a corner, arms curled around his knees, crying, staring at me. I would pretend to be asleep and he would attempt to touch me and then jump back like a scared animal, as if I were radioactive. I never found anything so unattractive as his obsession now, coupled with such weakness and psychotic mental instability. I grew disgusted but in my own self absorbed ignorance, I stayed around. One hot dark night, my father arrived in the parking lot of a local venue our now feeble group spent our night at, and attack Arlen in a fit of rage, screaming that he had observed my rage and hurt for too long and that Arlen was nothing but a scumbag unworthy of being in my presence, let alone of sleeping with me, although there were a lot more FUCK, DICKHEAD, and BITCH'es somewhere in there. He wailed on Arlen in front of a crowd that had gathered, and it was my luck that this particular show happened to be all of the bands I had hung out with in high school, the skin heads, the Irish punks, the rockabilly nerds. Everyone I had known, from my first high school, from Bethel, the skaters, stoners, the addicts and partiers that camped at my house so often, the boys turned men that still wrote songs about me, even the girl I had assaulted first in school all watched, as I collapsed on the pavement and lost conciousness in my drunken fury and confusion.

Shortly after this, I arrived in the morning at school to find someone I considered one of my many friends, a quiet boy whom with I shared literary and conceptual banter with over breakfast in the hallways sitting in the hallway by the door. He had been living in the loft in a barn above Arlen's driveway, and told me calmly that in the middle of the night two men had come and tore Arlen from his bedroom. They found him high and speeding, and he observed through the windows as he fought two grown men and they put him in a van. apparently he tore his house apart in the battle to stay, punched out windows in attempts to escape to me, but was taken that night to a survival training camp in Idaho. Apparently his mother had found him night after night awake in the corners of his dark room writing, and has stolen his notebooks while we were out. Two dozen notebooks filled with his unhealthy obsession with me, and his lack of ability to focus on anything else. Later, when my rage settled and I talked to her, she told me that there was a notebook full of nothing but my name. Another full of nothing but our sad, postpreteen lame attempts at sexual exploits. After the incident with my father she felt the only way for him to mature into his own person was to move him as far away from me as possible. I agreed, but didn't want to admit that I had the ability to become so poisonous to weak people. I wanted nothing to do with Arlen anymore, although I begged and she promised she would deliver me these notebooks. I had no interest in him or our relationship, but some solid part of me was sure of nothing but how essential and vital these notebooks were to my being. I never got them.

V.

I retreated from everything and everyone. I began to do nothing but write. I slept on the couch in my empty house, and on the rare nights my father was home we sat in silence and watched movies. I never entered my room, lived out of a pile of notebooks and pens and novels I kept under the coffee table. I never left my house but for school, which I started to actually attend. I died my hair from blonde and purple to dark brown. I let it grow. I traded torn jeans for long skirts. I attempted my best in classes, but the old personality I attempted to shed followed me, and my reputation forced teachers into skepticism of all of my work. I did nothing but blanket myself in intellectualism, ate nothing but novels, oranges and cigarettes. Stole Camus, Huxley, Sartre, Daniel Quinn and Kesey from the libraries. I spent lunch hours in the hallways reading. I wrote furiously. My teachers began to talk down to me, and I would often snap ba