Chapter Thirteen: I will always be the one who smiles while he stabs

Ask anyone who knew me in high school. At some point, they all thought I was going to lose it.

I try not to dwell on my high school years, even though I probably bring them up a fair bit. There's a reason so much popular media is concerned with 14-to-18-year-old characters. Everyone goes through the same suffering, at a fairly crucial point in your development when you're really starting to get a sense of what the world is about. Whatever pain you have in high school stays with you. Usually it is only displaced when something hurts you more.

I have absolutely no delusions about those years. I am neither nostalgic for them, nor do I think they were some kind of black hole of existential suffering. They were what they were, and while a lot of the time they weren't good - and a lot of those times, I took it badly - sometimes they were pretty okay. Of course I do not wish to have them back.

If you need me to explain why everyone thought I was going to lose it, I'll set the scene. Although most of my best attributes (funny, smart?) were present at the time, I was also real quiet and shy. I was a classic introvert, a fairly mysterious customer, and nobody likes an unknown. Even the people I'd have considered my friends from grades 9 and 10 probably weren't all that sure about me.

And then there was the coat. If you know me, you know the coat. It's retired now, but all through high school I wore this gigantic overcoat that looked kinda like something Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold probably wore. Not a trenchcoat, but like, just a huge winter coat. Basically, I looked like someone who was gonna kill somebody. And I knew it. And, well, I didn't do much to correct people.

Because although it wasn't the most sociable image to cultivate, it probably kept a lot of people off my back. I'm not saying I never got messed with, but I think the fact that I looked a lot less harmless than I probably was gave people the idea that maybe someday I really would snap. I liked that vague feeling of power, knowing I really didn't have it in me to live out whatever revenge fantasies I may actually have had.

Cary and I reminisce about this occasionally. For the first three years of high school I was not myself, because I didn't know what being me would even entail. I struggled to find an identity. Nowadays, people know pretty well who I am from the first glance, at least Vasa did. And I am, of course, the charming, irresistible young man I have become. I think I may have this blog to thank for that. By chronicling every goddamn detail of it, and no longer bottling it up (which was a huge problem in those days,) and rather than keeping it for myself, letting the world stroll by and see it, I feel like I've done myself some good. My life is an open book, so to speak.

People feel they know me, and for the most part they do. Like I said, even the people who would've been considered my friends in the early years of high school probably didn't have much of a sense of who I really was. It was only in grade 11-12 I started to make friends with the people I would still care about here in my early 20's.

It's funny, I started this entry up because I had a title I liked, and wasn't sure what I'd end up writing about since nothing really happened today. It was gorgeous, I biked a lot, when down to the lake and bought comics. The title got me thinking about those "killer years" and here we are. The blog as therapy, a recurring theme of SWP.

I'm still on Twitter, although don't worry if you think it might interfere with my SWP duties. This is still very important to me, perhaps now more than ever. A few nights ago I did a bunch of random Lyttle Lytton sentences, because I'd seen Jeph Jacques and all his fictional characters doing them - and his were funny, but wrong. It's actually incredibly hard to tone down the "deliberate funny/outrageous" and do an intentionally bad opening sentence. I've probably done some really awful ones when trying to come up with something good - I often find that when I try my hardest to be good, is when I'm at my worst. Anyway, I was doing a ton of them, one after the other, and people started randomly adding me the more I did (some even replied back or re-tweeted, how novel!) So it's a more attention-getting medium, it seems. A bunch of people seem to find SWP through the link I have on that page, which is neat. I'm getting more hits lately, from places as far flung as Vancouver and Decatur, Georgia. Along, of course, with the usuals.

I left this entry pretty randomly like 50 minutes ago. I'm not sure where else I was thinking of going with it, but considering I didn't think I had anything to say tonight... good for me.

Keep on rockin'
-Scott