Everybody’s the star of his own show, and the show mostly sucks.

I read something today that put a capper on something else I’ve been thinking about for the past couple of days.

Rodgers had a shaman’s view of reality. Don the green cape and springtime comes. This accounts for his almost hilarious demeanor on YouTube, with his winks and pauses and artful poses. He actually thought you walked up to lady and winked and jiggled like a human pinball machine and that got things rolling. That’s what he did. He rolled up to you and did this imitation of a human being. Despite his considerable intelligence, which is evident from his writing, he could never actually see other human beings as free beings and treated them like candy machines with buttons. They were always planets circling his world. He could never empathize with them.

The harder he mashed down on his silly buttons the more he turned people off. He was probably crazy from his mid-teens onward, a kind of walking idiot savant; a sort of wind up parody who must have seemed ludicrous to everyone else, even though his heart and soul were in those misguided malapropisms.

Did you read that sad, stupid “manifesto?” I confess I skimmed after the first few pages, and never got past age thirteen or so which means I missed what he probably considered the good part. It made me uncomfortable because I didn’t actually miss being that kid by much.

It can happen. You grow up never really understanding other people at all, like you missed one vital day in a school course that’s 90% of the grade and never ever catch up, so you end up trying to fake it and it can’t be faked and there you are. Making it up as you go along and never getting it right. Always pushing the pull door. Never understanding what it is about these people that allows them to connect with one another, trying one approach after another and every one is another disastrous failure. There’s the whole rest of the world, and then there’s you. You’re outside it, and they know it.

What Elliot Rodgers’ problem was, I have no clue and don’t care. Kid had everything handed to him. If you can’t work it out with those advantages, screw you. Me, I like to think I had an excuse. I went to twelve different public schools, I was always the new kid. The whole concept of “long-standing relationship” was foreign to me. But still: I read as much of this pampered brat’s “manifesto” as I could stand and even though we had nothing in common it rang bells.

Girls? Hell, girls avoided me like I had oozing, leprous sores. Looking back now, I don’t blame them one tiny bit. I used to do silly things, stupid, embarrassing things to try and mimic something that might conceivably be cool. Now, forty-plus years later, I can look back on my teenage self with a little shudder and fully understand why that kid was shunned at best. It’s a wonder I wasn’t beaten up more often.

I never completely got over it, which is why I’m here. Don’t let anybody lie to you: Nobody ever became a hermit in the desert because of his great people skills. But at least I can see it now, y’know?

But at the time, it just made me angry. What did these kids have that I didn’t have? I was smarter than most of them. I read incessantly (this was before video games – ask your parents about “pinball machines”) my reading comprehension was off the charts and I used my words. (Big problem, in hindsight…)

Oh, I used to get angry. And I used to fantasize – mostly about being some sort of hero, but sometimes about hurting people. I never did, because I’m not crazy. But I won’t say the thought never crossed my mind.

I believe now what I didn’t understand then: When you’re an isolated kid you become the star of your own show. Maybe everybody does this, I suspect it’s true but really don’t know. But isolated kids – definitely. You’re living in a badly-written 24/7 movie and you’re the star. Everybody – Everybody else has bit parts and they’re not following the script. What’s going on outside your skull isn’t like that script, and that’s why your perceptions of what should be happening can never synch up with what actually ends up happening.

It’s one thing when you know you’re really just some trailer-park schmo. I fantasized about being something special, but I knew I wasn’t.

Imagine, though, if you’re a Hollywood kid with a Hollywood dad, all the toys, all the clothes and the hair, everything about you is shiny and designer-label fashionable and no matter what you do you’re still this toxic misfit…

Wow. That’d be enough to drive you crazy.

About Joel

You shouldn't ask these questions of a paranoid recluse, you know.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

5 Responses to Everybody’s the star of his own show, and the show mostly sucks.

  1. Dick says:

    Yep, think you got it.

  2. UnReconstructed says:

    and…..add to all that the *blur*. The blur between fantasy and reality that we contend with now. Like in the before time, if I told you to your face, (or via phone) that I thought you were an asshole, there would be very real consequences. You pretty much knew everybody (on some level) that you communicated with. That was real.

    Fantasy was books or TV or movies.

    Clear, pretty clean dividing lines between real and not real.

    Now there is a blurred reality. Like facebook, like here. MMORGS, where your character lives in a fantasy world, but can interact with other real people in that world. You are pretty sure that those people exist, but you have never met them, and you might never meet them. Although there might be negative consequences to telling somebody in the blur that you thought they were an asshole, the consequences are much much less tangible. You know of their existence, but it doesn’t affect you directly. This is what I call a blurred reality. Cause and effect much fuzzier. Sorta real, and sorta not real.

    Teenagers ALREADY have a hard time with reality. Add in the blur with FB, twitter, youtube, and yes, video games, etc,etc, and you have a situation where occasionally shit like this will happen, especially with a spoiled brat coping with rejection.

  3. Expat says:

    .Hollyweird family has kid more fucked up than most, and that takes some doing. Dad takes time off from photographing women’s backsides, @ $1,200 a crack – so to speak, to make film about kids slaughtering kids. Takes some of that money and gives it to waste of sperm kid (WSK) who buys 3 expensive handguns and proceeds to stab and shoot a bunch of kids. Victims dad blames – wait for it, you know it’s coming. The NRA.
    WSK’s dad vows to make another snuff film honoring the memory of his WSK which is ok as he’ll only kill kids by slowly beating them to death and it’ll make money.
    OK, I made the last of that up, or maybe got it from the media. Same difference.

  4. anonymous says:

    This post has a lot of insights I had never thought of, thank you for writing it. I was never ‘that kid’,but had a few friends who were, people who didn’t fit in the high school cliques and suffered for it.

  5. jefferson101 says:

    A lot of us didn’t miss being that kid by much. At 15, I still didn’t really relate to other people in general as independent people, They were there to be manipulated.

    Happily, somewhere between 15 and 16 years old, I got my attitude and attention corrected. Empathy is hard for some of us, but we can do it once we figure out how, and that makes all the difference.

    I’m probably not a lot of people’s idea of “The Life of the Party”, or even real sociable on a lot of days, but I’ve managed to maintain a functional life, a marriage (42 years and counting) and raise some decent kids. I’ve never yet had to bail the kids out of jail or put them in rehab, and they are self supporting. That’s about the best anyone can do, most days.

    I do feel sorry for a few of my earlier Dates, but I got over it, and I hope they did too. I didn’t do anything to them that was illegal, so I don’t feel too bad. I was hard to get along with, but I still am that. I don’t need to go kill random people to prove anything, at any rate.

    The poor special snowflake got his feelings hurt, so he went out and killed people instead of learning how to deal with them. That’s a problem that I, Society, or the Government can’t solve. His parents screwed him up, blame them.

To the stake with the heretic!