Love for History

He was a bully and we were just kids. It can't be easy teaching 12-13 year olds, which is why you shouldn't spend more than a couple years on any one grade level, but like it or not this guy was stuck with us and we him. He taught in a rote style and was hell bent on making us memorize dates, he had a point to prove I guess and it wasn't about the importance of events in American history or the importance in understanding the relevance f the past in order to understand the happenings of the present. No it was more about understanding that he was in charge and we needed to do what he wanted.
I'm glad then looking back that I jerked off while sitting in his class.

Do you remember what it was like to be that age? An incredible fever of hormones and vitality, a indefusable vigor and energy that was bursting out of every cell in your body as you underwent the great revolution, doubling in size, weight and potential. I was sitting in class when it came over me, that blind hormonal wash over the same one that had beset me that first summer day when i was twelve, when I could no longer handle my burning flesh and tore my clothes off, jumped in the shower and grabbed my dick the way I had seen in the dirty movies I saw in my cousins basement, pumping quickly and achieving a painful and shame-filled dry release. This was my fever as I sat there listening to the droll recitation of dates and the authoritative delivery on how meager our accomplishments were and how poorly we measured up to our instructor's expectations. I can't remember what set it off, but it could have been any of the young nubile bodies in the room, the smells they gave off, the sweat, the musk, the perfumes. In those days the girls all wore Vanilla Fields, a tragic and tacky fragrance but one that to this day drives me absolutely crazy due to its association with this sexual madness. I was wearing colored jeans, they could have been purple, orange or green in the cross-colour era but nevertheless they were no thinner than any other denim. Despite this I could feel my own hand through this garment, a feat I find incredible when compared to the misery I suffer at the hands of Latex safety some fifteen years later. I feigned the tapping of a rhythm on the underside of my desk so ask to mask the true intentions of my hand vigorously brushing the crotch of my pants and so did my ecstasy rise unbeknown to the rest of the class. While the rest of the room slept with eyes open in the stifling atmosphere of the room, my nerve ending were screaming in a thousands crashing octaves of pleasure as I filled the front of my tighties with more than the recommended two teaspoons of seaboys. The true thrill and true victory of this act wasn't in the climax itself but how it was delivered, as in reaching the threshold I endeavored to appear rapt in lecture and made direct eye contact wit the stodgy brute of an instructor and my eyes shone, squinted and closed and baby beans blew clear through seven dimensions of earthly apparel and stuck me to the insides of my pants for the rest of the day. To this day I swear I cause him a stutter, a flinch cuz he knew, he couldn't keep me flaccid, he couldn't keep me crushed, I was raging hard and I just blew my load in his class. Jefferson would have approved.

The Sleep Empire

They were dark lands that I ruled over, my twisted hooded figure shrouded in smoke and illuminated only by the glow of burning pipe coals, my power was to be immense promised to me by Elder Gods, I would be a spiteful ruler, no father to the world but a battered vengeful son. My pain would be your pain and together we would share the shadows in my heart.

This was the presiding myth in my life, The Dark Empire with me in it's seat. It burgeoned early, born of a cocktail containing perceived alien otherness and dis-empowered spite. I was constantly being stepped on, kicked around and I didn't know what to do about it. Some kids build fortresses within themselves, safe houses in which to shelter themselves from the assaults of the world. I always felt these people lacked both ambition and vision. I started with a world, a mirror world which I reduced to ashes with fire and wrath, then I expanded into the cosmos blacking out the stars under my dark banner, the banner of the IHGS (Imperfect Humanoid Genetic Specimen) I built up stories about myself, about my history, my purpose, compensating for the complete lack of personal identity or direction. I gave myself power where I had none, I assigned myself a destiny when I was crushed by the immensity of choice, and above all I gave my universe grand design assigning meaning to the chaos and emptiness that was my small life imploding under the weight of adolescence, abuse and neglect.

This was a life lived behind eyelids, this was the retreat. Every slight or misstep taken in real life would embolden the Dark IHGS Emperor in his conquest of another world, the crushing of another rival. The more material gain, and worldly success slipped from my fingers, the greater the personal power of the Young God Emperor became, ruthlessly commanding his vast Empire of wastes and cinders. I was a god of death in the otherverse, a cloaked doom figure with the megaton fist. I was a seething cast iron giant whose blood ran molten, I was the most frightened little boy in the world.

Carnivorous Confections

It's an empty box building now. A large ill conceived custom prefab job, the kind of thing that could only happen in the glory days of the McMansion, the late 1990's. Before that it was a squat brick structure,`long with almost no windows, the inside illuminated by the intermittent flickering of fluorescence leaving the corners dim and dusty. They tore down the old hobbit market to build the high ceilinged new one, an idea that never made any sense to me but at that age what does? It's a funny sort of pragmatism, the wisdom of the child, they are still able to see things plainly. I understood that Patterson's, the little brick neighborhood market and deli counter, closed down because it couldn't compete with the new Super Stop n' Shop Mega Market that opened up half a mile away. Now some brain factory threw up the monumental idea that a bigger more costly neighborhood market could meet the needs of the surrounding streets better than the commercial chain market could. It changed hands a few times. First it was the Andreonni's who built it then bailed to get into the restaurant business, then Mike Craven owner of the aptly named " Craven Pizza" across the street picked it up, unfortunately he was also one of the largest smugglers of marijuana in the lower 48 states and took an indefinite sabbatical to the Federal Work Farm. It changed hands a few more times after that until the final owners, in the face of a plunging real estate market and general economic slump, realized that they couldn't sell enough food to pay for the operating expenses of the massively mis-designed building. So it's empty, like the houses, like the storefronts like everything else.

I used to go to Patterson's with my mother, I remember how crisp the air was in there. It smelled of the salt and spice from the deli counter. I remember my mother getting her American cheese sliced by a man who defied age, an old butcher archetype, white hair, rosacia, white apron smeared lightly with his work. If I was good she would buy me a box of Ringling Brothers animal crackers. I would hold the sweet hard cookies in my mouth tracing their grooves and detail with my tongue, I would bite down and let the legs or head dissolve in my mouth. I lingered over the box ,examining the animals in their cages and comparing the drawings to their short bread equivalents. Riding away and staring out the window of mother's wood paneled station wagon the green lawns and gardens of the cold war suburbs passed by without incident. That was the old America there, in the little brick building, it just couldn't keep up with itself. Now we got nothing...and that's a start.