This book has been lingering around in the recesses of my mind since I was twenty-four years old. I don’t know why, but when I thought back to my childhood (specifically living in the house I grew up in) I couldn’t help but entertain the idea that…you know, so much awful or scary shit that had been normalized for me might actually NOT be normal. I can remember being in third grade with a handful of classmates having lunch with the school psychologist when one of those classmates (and neighbor of mine) began talking about the blonde boy that was haunting my family. The school psychologist looked like he didn’t know if he should phone D.S.S. or goad my friend to keep talking about it.
There were A LOT of people who knew about the horrors inside of my house (both supernatural and domestic) and I was just this naïve moron walking around thinking…what? You guys don’t have little blonde specters calling out for his mother and waking your parents up in the middle of the night to bring them to the bedroom you are sleeping in? The older I get the less normal I think it was that so many of us growing up were playing “light as a feather, stiff as a board,” or rotating our shoulders in our parents’ mirrors to see the fingertips of our guardian angels. These were things I did, saw, experienced, and ultimately tracked back to…wow, our home lives were kind of weird weren’t they? When you’re so scared to go to school because you’re terrified the teachers are going to ridicule you, or your peers are going to ostracize you then to get off the bus and go back home to a place where all you hear is what a cumbersome economical strain you are on your family? You tend to treat the supernatural with a bit of curiosity and dare I say gusto. When you feel so uncomfortable in your own skin, so unwanted in your own home, and such a leper around kids your own age? You will go to any length to find solace, even if its in folklore or the impossible and improbable likelihood that there is more to your life than being an outcast, a reject, or god forbid a mistake. As a kid, I was only scared of one thing. My father. That was it. I wasn’t afraid of demons, possession, drugs, ghosts, Satan, Marilyn Manson, not getting into college, or the liberal boogeyman. I was afraid of the man who created me. Then I was afraid of myself. The plague that was me. How ironic that we’re all socially distancing now to avoid giving our loved ones something that could potentially kill them, and yet that was how I felt my entire life. Knowing me wasn’t a privilege it was a liability. I used to treat my own existence like a virus that I didn’t want to grow into a pandemic. This story deals very much with people who never ever felt comfortable with who they were, or who they wanted to be. You would just as likely find an avatar to latch onto for dear life than to ever exude any semblance of yourself out of fear that it would ruin others. We are two weeks away from me holding a ZOOM meeting about this book, but I think I can divulge a few nuggets here and there about the genesis of this story. If you’ve read it, you’re reading it, or you’re still on the fence, I hope you’ll attend and we can have fun with the 90s and a lot of the things that made that decade so unusual. The moral of the story? We need to learn from the past, and stop normalizing or romanticizing it.
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