My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

in a totally unrelated photo, here I am on a Segway

I was in the kitchen standing in front of an open cupboard wondering why I couldn’t gang rape a sentence. Besides the statistical/grammatical problem of being a one man gang and the fact a sentence doesn’t have an orifice, I was further disappointed in myself for two reasons: 1, why did I frame the question like that? Gang rape? Obviously I have been visiting fetish sites habitually and it is affecting me. 2, why was I in the kitchen looking in the cupboard that contains cans of refried beans and chick peas that I have never seriously considered eating since the day I brought them home, (around the time of Janet Jackson’s semi-nude appearance at the Superbowl), when I should be in the other room writing?

Standing in the kitchen in front of the open refrigerator or an open cupboard is a sure sign I’m trying to write, but with that kind of effort I’ll leave a legacy of shopping lists. Sometimes I am so devoid of ideas I open my roommates cupboards and stare at their food. Remember, I don’t cook. I hardly eat. I just go out to the kitchen and wish I had a wife who loved to cook. Sometimes I think I’ll find her in the cupboard, the wife I wish I had, just waiting to hand me a little plate with the delicate rose pattern around the edges and she has a bacon and egg sandwich cooked and cut in two triangles.

“Oh, thanks sweetie!” I say as I take the plate, shut the cupboard door and return to the computer. I guess that’s why I don’t have a wife.

It’s a terrible vicious circle. I don’t have a wife so I hardly eat and hardly write but spend an incredible amount of time tracking down websites that have the longest free porn clips. I’ve come across a few that give you up to 8 minutes of video for nothing! You get what you pay for so I imagine my computer is infected with interesting Russian malware. I could be helping decode pin numbers and rerouting wire transfers as we speak. Someone has to pay those actors. Actresses. Those leather harnesses aren’t cheap either. So I let them install Trojan horses and I use about four minutes of their eight minute clips.

Anyway, there I was in the kitchen. And really, that’s how the thought came to me, fully formed. “Why can’t I gang rape a sentence?” I meant by that, “Why can’t I write an amazing sentence?” Equating amazing sentences with gang rape really concerned me.

“I need to get right,” I told myself. I think about church. Then I remember I don’t like church. Why am I the way I am? I sit down and think about my whole life up to now. For a few years in grade school I was in a “gifted” reading program. Ken Paul, Marsha O’Keefe, Matt Murphy and I got to leave the classroom and go to a storage room where the ditto machine and the purple transfers were kept (the height of copying technology at the time, since obsolete).

God, if I could only remember that reading teacher we had. I mean his name. I can remember his presence: a condescending French attitude. He had spent time studying French, he was the French teacher for the 8th grade, but he’d probably learned it in Alberta. Which I don’t think is a very French part of Canada, so you get the idea that his condescension was a bit out of line.

Ahh! Mr. Moreau! I haven’t thought of him in years! I think he sensed my hatred of him. Or the little table we sat at. God it was cramped in there.

He was turning me into a nerd. I think that was the root of my anger towards him. I loved to read, I was reading Tolkien back then, The Chronicles of Narnia, all kinds of fantasy things. Truly escaping into literature. I loved it. But I didn’t want to be taken out of the general population.

You know why? The other gifted kids were smarter than me. I could go toe to toe with them in reading, but I was an imbecile otherwise. I felt myself being rejected by the nerds. I was in over my head and they saw me as a drowning maniac. They wouldn’t come near me or I’d take them down.

Imagine yourself in fourth grade…it’s hard. I’ve never been good at that kind of stuff. I have no idea what I wore, how tall I was, even how old I was. I had only a sense that I didn’t belong in the regular classroom, and I didn’t belong in the storage room/reading annex.

At some point that year I was sent back to regular English class. This was fine, because then I could make the kids laugh. Most likely I was sent back to the throng because I couldn’t sit still. Matt, Marsha and Ken were nerds. Smart kids. To smart kids, nerd isn’t an insult. It means they’re gonna have good jobs and rule the world. They were probably eating healthy, and growing at a normal pace. I was fueled by Toucan Sam’s greatest and Fenway Franks. My mind was constantly disoriented. I was growing an inch a semester. My feet are all hammer-toed to this day because I grew too fast for my sneakers.

So. I got thrown back. “We thought you were something, but we were wrong,” the teachers said.
“You’re too weird for us,” the nerds said. What’s a fourth grader do then? The best I can put it together, it was about that time I started shooting animals with the bb gun. And setting fires. Turning into a junior psychopath. Which ties back into the distance I feel from people today, the use of pornography, the hours spent alone in the house staring at cans of food I’m too depressed to cook and eat alone.

Thank god for blogs.