Category: personal

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 4: Not my high school boyfriend

~ Will Forrest ~ 3 Comments

Not my high school boyfriend.

He was not in high school. I was, quite specifically in the middle of high school, which back then was a five-year hitch if you had intentions of post-secondary.

My mother despised him, in a large part because he reminded her of my father, whose death less than five years before had left a Problematic-Man-shaped crater in my preadolescent heart.

My older boyfriend offered me the sex and drugs I had been looking for. 1980s prohibition messaging had lead me to expect high school to be a smorgasbord of inappropriate behaviour, reefer and bennies and circle jerks being offered at every turn, and I was poised to take advantage.  Instead I was in choir and two bands.  I had coloured hair and that was sort of insurrectionary.  Holed up in my bestie’s basement (except no one was besties because that word didn’t exist yet) scarfing down British music magazines and their lurid descriptions of Madchester rave-ups, I was longing for something strange to happen, primed for absolutely anything.

And when I met him and he offered, I took it. Not because he fooled me, but because it was everything I wanted.

Did I have an ordinary life ahead of me until then? I can’t say that I did. If not that man then another, or a woman, would have offered me something I wanted that I wasn’t meant to have. And I would have taken it. He just got there first.

“Wait, this isn’t a DIY page?”

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What is a ‘fixer’? 

The term has immoral connotations, referring one who dodges, bends, rewrites the rules, gives unfair advantage to a certain outcome. Lawyers, generally. Mafia, frequently. People with the tools and ambition to bend reality to the shape they desire.

It’s a fun word, though. Flexible and ironic. To fix means to do many things. To repair or remedy, to put in place, to arrange, to neuter an animal. It’s a threat (“I’ll fix you!”) and a humble request (“can you fix this?”) It’s everything I like about language.

To fix is to set in place with a sense of permanence that time betrays.

To fix is to render an animal sterile. Fix a genetic line in place, remove from stock.

In the very best orgasms, time and space stop, and start again. That is the stuff in you that once was a supernova, that once was a star, remembering how it felt to be nothing at all. Why is pleasure not sacred? 

How can we be expected to fix ourselves when they won’t even let us repair our own phones? 

Fix this, fix that.

Fix it to the wall.

Burn the wall.

These are uncharted times. The schism between narrative and lived experience is more apparent than it has ever been. That seems like something we need to fix.

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 3: ‘The Dinosaurs’ by William Stout

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Before Chuck Tingle…

Before the bodice rippers…

There were these two dinosaurs.

No one means for their child to get their first lesson about the birds and the bees from an artful illustration of two Parasaurolophods in rut. It really is a very pretty picture, and the text casts animal behaviour in such a romantic light, as “(t)he pulse of their dark dissonance throbs in the air like a heartbeat.”

But it’s still two dinosaurs fucking.

The Dinosaurs is a spectacular book, a somewhat fanciful but wholly believable dive into the behaviour of this class of extinct animals: the births, lives, and deaths of dinosaurs. Service writes with the meticulously descriptive voice of an Attenborough documentary, and Stout’s art fairly leaps off the page, employing a wealth of media to show dinosaurs as they may have lived.

And on one page, dinosaurs fuck.

Do animals fuck? Or do we reserve that word for only one species i.e. ours?  It’s said that dolphins are the only species besides ours that has sex solely for pleasure, and not as a seasonally triggered biological imperative. Perhaps Mr. Service went overboard in attributing such tenderness to mating dinosaurs, but come on…those lizards are in love.

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 2: The VCR

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My father (R.I.P. 1989) had no filter. I’ve had to think about him from this peculiar distance for most of my life, and thank the gods I knew him as long as I did, because I don’t know if I would understand myself as much as I do without that solid decade.

a VHS cassette sits on a wooden table

Near the end of that decade, he acquired VCR, then rented a number of really challenging films for a nine year old to wander into the room and watch.

2001: A Space Odyssey. Altered States. Rocky Horror Picture Show (calling Dr. Freud, bring clamps) and oh gosh, and I sort of wish this wasn’t so, but among these mind-bending stalwarts I have to list A Clockwork Orange.

I was nine. Maybe ten.

Now, I’m not saying that I’m a bad person because my daddy didn’t monitor my viewing. I’m saying these are some heavy duty psychological loads for an absorbent mind to bear. The circumstances of my life had already conspired against me being normal (Montessori is scarily effective, for the record.)  Now I had the mental imagery to suit, stewing in my preadolescent brain, waiting for me to stumble into my libido.

But I like who I am. I don’t think I’m a bad person because I have peculiar tastes. I’ve never thought that, no matter how often people have tried to tell me it was so.

I still miss him, for the record. 1989.