I was going to post something different today, but something interesting happened that inpsired a somewhat different post. Someone asked me the “what were you like as a kid?” question. So I will answer that question and give you all an insight as to how I became who I am today.

So what was I like growing up?

Vastly unpopular and universally hated by girls. Seriously.

Here is how it all went down- Growing up, kids are all confused and clueless. They are all without direction and frightened at the unknown and the world unfolding before them. Some of those kids look around and watch the world and themselves and try to learn from it. Some of those kids become little assholes and target anyone that they think is unpopular or not cool enough, or not good looking enough to meet the application standards that children start inflicting when they learn how to form cliques or enclaves. I was NEVER in with the cool kids. I was the anti-cool. If there were consumer application processes for beverages, I would have failed them and have been remitted to drinking Un-Cool Aid.

This was me in the 8th grade-

I could never really figure out why I was not liked by other kids, and even more so, I could not figure out why, when I didn’t care if they did not like me, they could not be content with that and started targeting me for even more abuse and ridicule.

I was also not aided by the fact that I had big ass eyeglasses due to near blindness without visual correction. I was pretty much a nerd, and even though I make fun of a lot of nerd type things, I assure you all that I do it because I am one! I loved Devo, which saying you liked DEVO in middle school and NOT Boyz 2 Men, or Bel Biv Devoe, was like coming out and admitting to everyone that you were a social reject. I didn’t care, I still liked them. Instead of making out at parties, I stayed home and played Nintendo (or as I have come to know it, the ‘No-Friend-O’)

Unlike kids who were aspiring to be OJ Simpson (HA! See where THAT guy ended up!) my heroes were Devo, Weird Al, Pee Wee Herman, and Egon from the Ghostbusters (the idea of being enabled with the ability to make crazy scientific inventions always appealed to me)

How bad was my experience with chicks? Welllll, I was stood up for my first 3 dates (yet ironically, even though girls didn’t care for me, I never really had a problem asking them out or interacting…strange, no?) and the very first date I ever had ended with my date making out with some random guy she had just met about 3 minutes before! Additionally, there was a group of girls who stopped me in the hallway in middle school on several occasions to tell me how unattractive I was, how little they liked me, and all the reasons no girl would EVER care for me. This happened more than once! It is a freaking wonder that I did not grow up as some sort of warped misogynist!

Luckily though, I didn’t. Here is what happened instead…

I decided that I was going to die a virgin and that no woman would ever like me. I was not pleased with it, but I figured that was the way things would go for me. Instead of dating and worrying about popular clothing choices, I became introspective and thought more about who I was and who I wanted to be, as opposed to other things. This also led to me having a sense of humor. I had always seemed to know what was funny, and I figured since I was not going to get by on my looks, I had better hone the good traits I did have.

In the 8th grade I started reading Dave Barry, who was a huge influence on my writing style. I also met a teacher named Mr. Gilchrist who, on my birthday handed me a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook. Mr. Gilchrist was also a jaded cynic. He was someone who had a similarly shitty life of being crapped on and he taught me that, although you cannot stop bad shit from happening to you, you can at least bitch and rant about it and make a hell of a funny story about everything that pisses you off. Mr. G. taught me the powerful coping skill of misanthropy and sarcasm. If I were a D&D character, I’d have a +9 in both of those categories.

In the end, although childhood was freaking a load of crap, I am thankful for it. If I had grown up popular and socially accepted with blonde hair and designer clothing, I wouldn’t be worth two shits as a human being today because I would have never learned the value of anything. I would have learned very little.

Somewhere around the 9th grade I started growing into my looks and I became fairly fashionable with current themes. Mostly I liked to dress nice because I liked feeling good about how I was outfitted, but something strange started happening…people started gravitating to me. This was all very strange to me. I recall that one time I was walking down the stairs in my highschool and two girls passed me. As soon as they passed one of them made a comment that was basically a cat call, something to the effect of how they’d like to get with that cute guy. I remember looking around in confusion because I was the only other person besides them in the stair well.

I remember liking these sorts of things, but I also remember resenting it as well because no one liked me before I looked like this and dressed nicely. I always wondered if these were the same people who would have ridiculed me just a few short years before.

Although the newfound popularity was nicer than the previous years of abuse, there was something else that had happened to me that was going to shape me for years to come. I saw a Cure video. Let’s go to bed.

I remember seeing it and making the connection that all the people in black and with big huge hair and spikes and leather that I always saw and wanted to know more about, THOSE people listened to THIS kind of music! This happened in the 8th grade that I saw the video, and it sat in the back of my mind through the entire time I was becoming more socially accepted. I always thought about wanting to be like those punk rockers (there was no word for goth really in my mind, no industrial, just punk rock or new wave, and I wanted to be it).

For some reason I never thought I could do it or pull it off. I thought I would try, and the ones that were REAL punks and wavers would SMELL my bad imitation and they would beat me up for imitating them. I also for some reason thought that no one ever wanted to date punk guys. I don’t know WHY I thought this, but I figured that even though they looked cool, chicks didn’t like them.

Well, sometime in the middle of my sophomore year in highschool I had finally made the decision. I was going to go be a new wave kid. I was going to cut my hair get a black trench coat and more fucking spiked colars than a freaking KISS concert.

I thought that this would forever mark me and make it so that I would never date again, but I was fine with that. I had done it once, I could live with it again because I would be looking how I wanted to look.

In the end, it all turned out fine. Apparently this is where I was meant to end up because I don’t seem to be ceasing the lifestyle after doing it for 13 years now (lucky 13!) and I cannot imagine myself any other way.

To this day I hate people who judge based on looks alone. I make jokes here and there about Emo kids, what have you, but seriously I do actually like anyone if they are a decent person and not some ass hat.

In an ironic twist, a few years after I became well known in the goth scene, a group of girls had some sort of weird ass group obsession with me and started something of a campaign to get with me. As it turns out, those 4 girls were IN the group that used to stop me in the hallway and belittle me in middle school. I had the vast, vast, VAST pleasure of telling those girls to kindly eat their own cunts* because I would sooner mount a horse cock than even piss on them. Let’s hear it for karma!