Well, I don't know. I just got the urge to write something in here, because I was doing rather well and it seems such a shame to just...stop. I'm also procrastinating on sleep, which is a rather masochistic thing to do, but I find sleep isn't quite the comfort it used to be. Who really needs sleep anyway? Hallucinations are fun!
So anyway, I was talking with...who was I talking to? Yeah, I can already tell this is going to go very well. I'm already forgetting the persons with whom I was conversing, and here I'm trying to make a certain philosophical point. Oh, right - it was Missi. Yes - we were walking toward the promise of fried chicken or some other clot-inducing sustenance right after a show at the Academy. I don't remember the show, but I do recall a certain sense of dissatisfaction. Not with the shows, mind you. But...with something else.
I take an aside here because in conversing with Myia this weekend, I've finally identified the feeling completely. It was dissatisfaction with the things I should have been unhappy about while at the Academy, but wasn't admitting to myself. I've always held a rather more exalted opinion of the school than perhaps it entirely deserved. Or maybe I forced myself to think so, intent on finding another way of reaffirming myself in a field where I still feel a little off-balance. I don't know. I like the Academy. I enjoyed my experiences there most of the time, but it certainly wasn't as perfect as I kept making it out to be.
In any case, I didn't recognize any of this in-school or after graduating, but they finally caught up with me that night after the show. My emotions are painfully slow sometimes, and I rarely have the patience to wait for them. Unfortunately, they then gang up on me at the next available inopportune moment. By that point everyone's tickets have mixed up so I don't know what order they're supposed be in, and everything just sort of shoves in all at once and leaves me feeling nothing but slightly confused and rather hungry.
But I digress into strange metaphors. Let me just say - I felt the pain of separating from the school for quite some time. It was inevitable. After all, I practically lived there for two years and then, slice, nothing. To make matters worse, I've never handled sudden transitions well, and sudden changes in my life make me internalize even more as I try to sort through what I feel. Well, the transition finally completed that evening, and I no longer missed the Academy. Life goes on. Yay.
Well, that was a considerably longer digression than I intended. Anyway, as I was initially saying - it occured to me that everything I enjoy in life seems to be one form of escapism or another. I can actually sort of pinpoint where it started - jab in a red pushpin, as it were, roughly around the time that my parents divorced and life effectively went to shit for five or six lovely years. There had been a certain motion toward fantasy before then, and I'd always liked horror movies, but the central obsession of my devious little developing brain up to that point involved certain extinct lizardfolk that roamed the earth (raping, as it were, the planet, and pillaging without regard, as Nicky Silver so eloquently puts it) some 65 million years ago.
There must be some kind of psychological study about this sort of thing - changes in a child's interests as his environment undergoes certain radical shifts, positive or negative.
Anyway, for one reason or another, fantasy, science fiction, and horror became my primary mode of expression very suddenly, whether in writing or in art. At about this time, I started what I called (at that time) my Alien Sketchbook. I think it was probably my first inklings of world building, because I constructed this entire...hmmm...galaxy would be the best term, in my mind. I was in the sixth grade at the time, and I have no recollection of what I was reading. Stephen King was certainly in there, but in a pre-adolescent sort of way I actually chose what I read based upon page number rather than content. Lugging around a book somewhat larger than my head was a very good way to make people think I was intelligent, or so I thought.
Anyway, the Alien Sketchbook (which still sits in a box somewhere in Mom's garage) was a collection of all the aliens that inhabited my little galaxy at war, doing what they could to survive its peaks and its troughs. I had categorized all of them and listed basic specifications like how tall they were, as though I could build them in a factory. Most of them were omnivorous (except the evil ones - they were all carnivores), and even the flying insects could bear loads that ranged anywhere from a fair-sized building to a small moon. Most were also psionically capable in some way, and any one of them could probably have forced stars to go nova by giving them mean stares. I was very taken with psionic powers at the time.
Anyway, I worked stupendously long hours on my Alien Sketchbook - I don't think I've experienced such jumps in my artistic ability before or since. I honestly think my obsession with that battered five-subject notebook worried my parents a little...particularly when I never let them look through it. And you know what, they probably snuck into my room and looked at it anyway. What an outrageous invasion of my privacy! I am very displeased.
I think in some corner of my mind, I was quite convinced that my galaxy, with all of its cataclysmic wars and demi-deific entities, was very real. It was somewhere out there, lost in the ether of space and time, and even if it didn't exist right then it would certainly come to pass at a future date. And when the aliens landed on Earth some gazillion years in the future, they'd pick up my little Alien Sketchbook and marvel that such a young boy in a nondescript Virginia town could have catalogued them so accurately.
I maintained the Alien Sketchbook for several years. As I grew older and my artistic skill improved, I actually secreted the original five-subject notebook away and replaced it with a black three-ring binder. This was a real beast of a binder, three inches thick with D-rings and very carefully chosen narrow-ruled notebook paper. It also had the approximate mass of a Winnebago, could probably be considered a lethal bludgeoning device in thirty-six states, and made me look like a turtle when hidden in my backpack. A rail-thin, anemic turtle with incredibly geeky gold-rimmed glasses. Is it any wonder middle school sucked so much? Hell, I'd have picked on me, given half a chance.
Hmmm...4:30 am again, and here I am still in the middle of a very long blog with no end in sight. Ah well. My craving for writing is satisfied. Sleep would probably be a good idea.
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