A Computer That Molests You

      worm, noun
a) creeping or burrowing invertebrate animals with long, slender soft bodies and no limbs.
b) intestinal or other internal parasites.
c) a self-replicating program able to propagate itself across a network, typically having a detrimental effect.

Between the living room and the kitchen is a computer that molests you. It sweats through dial-up text and thousands of miles of wire in the sky that wrap around your thin neck. America is online and it wants to fuck you so, so bad. This is the prologue to the rest of your life: a hot night in the season of locusts, where you learn that no is an ugly word and that yes is always easier to say. It gets worse. It gets so much worse.

Age is something you lie about, and not very well: twelve and fifteen are functionally the same to these people, one more appealing than the other, maybe, but they want both. Sex is something others take from you. It hasn’t happened yet, but it will, and it will kill you. Right now, wearing your twin brother’s red basketball shorts and an old t-shirt advertising the Republican candidate for state treasurer, you feel good, feet dug into the beige carpet underneath the computer desk. (Location gets your body dumped in a landfill, where you belong. Your corpse is beautiful enough for a plausible life sentence. I want you to fuck my corpse.)

I was a fan of science-fiction and so were they. This is how I met them: on an IRC chat room dedicated, in a vague way, to that subject. Most of my friends were older than me, the closest in age being an Irish kid who was a year older than me: of the rest, they ranged from thirteen to thirty-six, from Florida, Minnesota, the United Kingdom. Being online was a lot of fun and it made me feel like I had friends, real friends, not just people who viewed me as part of a package deal with my twin brother. We “roleplayed” – played pretend. One of us would narrate. This was usually shunted onto the Irish kid and they occupied that role for a long, long time, two years. We played the same online games and that was our connection to the main chat room. I can remember a couple of the funnier controversies: a guy who wanted to be moderator got told no, so he crafted a female persona and almost immediately got what he wanted, then faked his own death after a few months. When he got found out (by my oldest friend, who was the only one to notice his female alter’s IP address didn’t match up with their given location) he posted Korn lyrics and bragged about how he’d played everyone. A guy I was close with got proto-cancelled for sexting one of the few girls in the chat room, who was married. Then me.

I was the second-youngest person there.¹ Everyone knew. I gave a fake name, fake nationality (for some reason, I settled on Quebecois) and fake age: fifteen. Fifteen seemed adult. Fifteen meant maturity. The three-year gap between my real age and the one I clumsily pretended to be would have been noticeable in reality, but online, you could be anything you wanted to be, talk to people from all around the world, and make friends. I didn’t have many friends.

All of my computer-memories are of heat. A little after I turned twelve, I graduated from using the family computer to a laptop that burned grill-marks on my thigh whenever I wore shorts. Suddenly, what I was doing online became private. No risk of my brothers sneaking up behind me and watching what I was doing online: innocent wolf roleplay on a now-defunct chat service² was now fully mine. Frank was from Florida and only a few years older than me, young enough that he had zero weird feelings about being my friend. We both lived in the mechanical heat that radiated off of a computer. We talked every day. One day, his mom printed out all our chat logs and read them out loud in front of him and his aunt. I told him I’d literally die if that happened to me. Science-fiction roleplaying shouldn’t be spoken out loud. One day, he sent me a link over IRC, the long untruncated kind that Google Images gave you, then a message that just read ‘holy shit.’ I clicked on it and stared at a triptych, three pictures of a man’s erect glistening penis, urethra spread and crawling with maggots. I closed the tab and sent the link to Rory, my Irish friend. The only penises I’d seen at that point were my twin brother’s and my dad’s, both in innocent contexts. This was shaping up to be a good, maybe even great summer. What was fun, at least at first, about being a kid in an online chat room filled with adults was all the attention they gave you. Most of them treated me like an annoying younger sibling.³

My brothers were all at hockey camp and phoning mom crying and begging to come home, talking about how they had to share a bunk with this retarded kid. Sweating in un-air conditioned cabins. Not me. I was always home alone in the interstice between childhood and maturity. I didn’t know it yet, but I wouldn’t really grow up for another few years, unsuspecting of and unaware of any physical changes happening to my body. Just lengthening.⁴ I listened to Green Day and My Chemical Romance and, shamefully, horrible neo-swing music that Rory was into. I wasn’t very talkative in the real world. Online, I was unnervingly chatty and always, always messaging someone, even people I didn’t know. You could see things that you wouldn’t see in real life, too, or at least not things you’d see in Pennsylvania: Mexican drug dealers getting their heads sawn off to disco music; shotgun suicides; victims of nuclear disasters with all their skin sloughed off; Team Fortress Two yaoi; first-hand accounts of vaginal rot and insect fetishism; computer-generated bestiality porn; insects the size of a large dog fucking women; penises twice the size of a fully grown man and filled with thick semen; clown erotica; observing that some people have a psychosexual obsession with bald women; the she’s really a four-hundred year old vampire defense; allegedly trues tales of incest and worse; mister hands; sadistic transformations into chairs, antique cannons, so on; the devouring mother via twelve different kinds of vore, each vehicle of consumption growing increasingly more absurd; sweat; death. (Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.) Rory⁵ and me were best friends; I met them through Frank. Rory was Irish, close to my age, and had a lot of trouble sleeping, which I related to. My bedtime was 11 p.m., but I’d stay up late talking to them and my other internet friends. We wrote a lot together, always collaborative, always with the overbearing sincerity that only two middle-schoolers could have. Everything we did was an elaborate way of playing pretend: elaborate barter systems used by post-apocalyptic nomads that went unused, because no one wants to calculate how many cigarettes convert to a bottle of potable water. Spiders that talked and wore clothes and lived in an abandoned uranium mine in the Ural mountains. Kids that turn into cats. Kids that turn into adults who turn into corpses. A secret society of old men who are really government assassins. Medical experiments on corporate space stations. A lot of my happiest memories are of talking to Rory. (A lot of my happiest memories are of talking to a kid who lived three-thousand miles away, who I’ve never seen a picture of, and who I haven’t spoken to in ten years.) I felt closer to Rory than to my actual breathing shitting masturbating brothers who reeked and very often beat the shit out of me. The only time Rory hurt me was when they left me. I remember something they said (typed), once, saying that all of us wouldn’t be friends for that long. They gave it five years. I said you’re nuts and that we’d always be friends. We aren’t friends, anymore.

WORLDS

Worlds is an online chat room that I used fairly heavily from 2011 to about 2013. I came to it through /x/, the 4chan imageboard dedicated to discussing the paranormal and occult; it was, at that time, undiscovered by the internet at large. Now, there’s a handful of video essays and articles on it, but almost all of them get it wrong and buy into the hype that it’s ‘haunted,’ that it’s hosting a ‘cult.’ No one who buys into this narrative has played the game for longer than a week. My experience of it was this: you log on, select a premade three-dimensional avatar or create your own, and go take a walk. Worlds is the only video game I’ve played that felt vast. There are probably sections of it that I haven’t seen and probably sections of it that no one’s seen in years. It was a real treat for my eleven-to-thirteen-year-old self and I made a couple of friends through it, none of whom I still talk to. The game had a brief surge of popularity on Tumblr at the same time, which I was also using, curating an aesthetic blog that I’ve since deleted: lots of shojo anime and horror movie stuff. Mild forays into yaoi porn. Vaporwave was starting to get big at the time, Floral Shoppe having just been released, and the Y2K haunted house of a game slotted in neatly to that time and place: a low-poly frat house had a staircase in the bathroom that led to a subterranean labyrinth with bleeding red walls: on a space station walking through the mirror led you to a maze and at the center was a fetal minotaur that wouldn’t stop screaming: a tie-in universe for The Blair Witch Project that let you walk around thick Atlantic forest in the autumn, going between hexagonal trees: the stations of the cross in the sky, cloud skybox rotating faster than your eyes could keep track of: a lot more.

Exploring was fun. Talking to the people who played – a fair mix of people who were younger and had joined the game during the initial resurge in popularity that the game went through in 2011 and older players, who tended to be forty to seventy years old – was a lot of fun, too. It was commonly accepted past a certain point that messing with new players and trying to convince them that the game really was haunted was a good use of your time. The guy who did it best and arguably the one who started the whole practice was Nexialist, whose avatar was generally a Hellraiser-style cenobite with a skinned horse head. Generally, all of the “Worlds is a cult” theories stem from him, mostly because he plays it up. We talked for a little while: he’s pretty normal. He works (worked, maybe, since this was in 2012) in a library.

What’s interesting about any group of people that are together online for a while is that, sooner or later, someone falls in love. It’s easy to fall in love online: people only present what they want you to see. It’s all intentional. The Worlds regulars weren’t any different. No one on Worlds groomed me, but I remember one of my friends asking me if I wanted to see something ‘weird’ – weirdness was our go-to, so I immediately shot back a DM saying heck yeah, let’s go. I teleported to his location and it quickly became clear that I was in a level that was dedicated to storing other player’s nudes. It was set up like a gallery: photograph, username, photograph, username, photograph, username. Most of them were grainy and the details were hard to make out, but the fact that I was in a long (very long) hallway lined with geriatric dicks, breasts, and vaginas made me feel uncomfortable. I knew and talked to some of these people. They were generally pretty nice to me. I didn’t want to see any of this. “isn’t this super weird?” my friend said. “yeah” I replied, then asked “why is this here?” “I dunno” said my friend. “I guess they’re all lonely or something.”

Loneliness is inseparable from the internet. When you’re online, you are alone. What are you doing, right now, reading this? You might be around other people, but this is a solitary activity. Don’t fool yourself. The loneliest type of game you can play are MUDs: all text. Roleplaying MUDs also suffer from an endemic culture of grooming to the point where it’s a recurring joke among people who play these outdated, archaic text games that “MUD admin” and “pedophile” are inseparable. ArmageddonMUD was the poster-child for both roleplaying MUDs and the culture of sexual abuse that these games promote. You are perennially alone in these games, whether you’re exploring the brutal island of Harn, wandering through the wasteland around Allanak, or fighting ghosts that live inside of rusted-out cars and piles of garbage in the post-nuclear holocaust ruins of Bakersfield, California. None of these games will exist in ten years: almost no one plays them anymore and only a handful of people who do are below the age of forty. Most of the friends I’ve made playing text games are old: thirty-five year old land surveyors, divorced fathers pushing seventy, old women whose kids have all moved out or joined the army. White text on a black background. James got me into MUDs: he introduced me to HellMOO, a now-defunct action game modeled after Fallout. You play a teenage⁶ mutant in a technicolor wasteland peopled by Mormon suicide bombers, dead-eyed clones, radioactive treemen, and a coterie of hideous freaks. You become less human the more experience points you game; my first-ever character started off as a functionally normal thirteen-year-old and ended as a cannibalistic sewer-dwelling monster with webbed hands, white fur, and the ability to set people on fire with its mind. HellMOO had sex mechanics. It was simple: you type prefix another player or an NPC’s name with the word “fuck.” What follows is an elongated and varied description of your character fucking or being fucked. The entire game had an undercurrent of sex to it, which made me feel extremely mature and grown-up even though I was thirteen. Players could form gangs and cooperate to murder and fuck their way across the post-holocaust Bay Area. The one I was in looked down on the people who played the game just for the sex mechanics – the term for them was “sexhavers.” All of my friends on HellMOO knew I was thirteen and found me annoying but tolerated me for reasons I can’t entirely comprehend. All of my friends were blind⁷ mutants who beat each other to death with spiked clubs and shot at the FCPD with 12mm CopKiller bullets. All of my friends still play HellMOO.

DO YOU HAVE A WEBCAM?

Anecdotal evidence exists that suggests being a fan of Star Trek and being a pedophile are correlated. According to an anonymous detective in the Toronto Police Services Sex Crime Unit, every single skinner, chomo, and creep they’d arrested had Star Trek paraphernalia in their homes: some had a little and some had a lot, but all of them had it. I don’t remember if I privately messaged him first or if it was the other way around. In all likelihood, it was me. He was my first. He’d posted pictures of himself in his Star Trek uniform in the chat and talked about being a furry. We talked about that, about what furries were, because I wasn’t sure: I liked cartoon animals. I asked him if furries had sex with animals, like I’d heard, and he said no and asked me if I wanted to know what furries liked. I said sure and he invited me to a private chat room that had some of his friends in it. I don’t remember most of what they showed me, but it was mostly hardcore pornography interspersed with what my fursona would be if I were a furry, if people had weird fursonas like crabs and bugs. A picture of Bugs Bunny eating a pile of rotting feces while Daffy Duck sodomizes him. I think if I were a furry my fursona would be a spider, I typed, like a spider who’s an old lady with eight handbags and a big hat. (i want to touch you so bad if you were in front of me i would have my hands all over you lol)

I left the chat room after a week. I never told any of my friends about it. The next one was less subtle.

I know that Dale didn’t love me. I don’t think James loved me, either, not anymore, and I don’t think he understood how I viewed our relationship. Dale’s dad made him hunt deer and skin deer and he hated it and he hated his father. He wasn’t fit for it. Below him. (Like me.) This is the first time where I’m not sure what to type in response. “Do you have a webcam?” I do. My mom told me to put tape over it. He asks if he can see me in my underwear before I can respond and I think about it, really, because I’m lonely and I want Dale to like me and think I’m cool. Twelve and already willing to degrade myself for someone else. Already willing to make myself lesser. I can’t remember what the lead-up was, just the question, like how (at age eighteen, too old, way too old) the guy who would go on to molest my best friend asked me within weeks of us meeting if me and my twin brother would masturbate together, if I had ever touched his dick, if I’d ever seen him masturbate, if I’d watch him masturbate and how he wanted to go down on me behind a dumpster. How big is your brother’s cock? When you were in middle school (he was specific, he had this thought out, this was a fantasy of his) did you ever jerk him off? Did you ever jerk your twin brother off? Our moms know each other. (He’s only slightly older than me. I’m only two weeks away from the worst thing that’ll ever happen to me, and it isn’t him.) Our moms know each other. Are you still a virgin? Do you want me to give you head? We can do it behind that dumpster. I’m just so horny, come on. Well, can I jack off in front of you? On you? “Did you ever eat your brother’s cum?” This ugly little shrew. Already so comfortable asking me to watch him jack off. Like he can smell it on me. Maybe Dale asked me the same types of questions and maybe my responses – at twelve I knew as much about sex as I did algebra, not a lot, failing grades, remedial – let him think I was too innocent to know what he wanted. Insulting. I was covered in sweat and half-naked and staying up late, since it was summer, and summers back then were filled with insects (there are less each year) and seasonal allergies, so I stayed inside, too: my sister was sleeping over at a friend’s house and my brothers were at hockey camp. Can I see you in your underwear? I dunno. Why do you wanna see that? Because it’d be funny. Why would that be funny? Because it is. I dunno if I wanna do this. Just forget it. A few weeks later, one of my friends – way older than all of us, blue-collar but into tabletop roleplaying games, funny, didn’t want to fuck kids – was privately hosting an abandonware murder-mystery game, graphics drawn in Microsoft Paint, rain pouring, Halloween.midi: summer camp map. The debate was whether a drawing of a sergal sucking the blood out of another animal’s slashed throat was sexual. Hexadecimal greens and browns, bit-crushed knife slashes. Dale was playing with us and started sexting me through the game in a boathouse (a ten second loop of water lapping against digital lakeshore played) – what would it look like if you took your shirt off? Would you make out with me? I want to hold you. Let me hold you. If I held you, what would it feel like? What do you feel like? Another player walked in and caught part of Dale’s script. All mediated through the game, all unacceptable. I switched to IRC and in our chatroom – the private one Dale wasn’t in – he went “wtf are you doing” – “idk dude” – “are you two cybersexing in here” – “idk” – ten seconds later, Dale was kicked from the game. My friends told me off for being ‘weird,’ made fun of me a little bit, and kept playing.

James was my first boyfriend. I never found out where he lived or what his real name was, just that it started with a J, like mine, and over the years I’ve filled it in as Jack or John. He was sixteen years old and maybe just a little delayed, emotionally and romantically. He knew how old I was. I don’t know if he viewed what we had in the same way, if he saw what we had as a relationship, but I did, and he was always cagey about it, what we talked about and did together, always ashamed of me: of dating a twelve-year-old. He wasn’t like the others. It was true love in the sense that it would be the schematic for what I wanted. In love with the computer: you want the computer to take something: you want it to threaten to disembowel you in a way that is only privately sexual and of course you realize that, to a theoretical observer, it just looks like the computer is taking a knife to you and tearing your intestines out and that it is bringing you deep sexual pleasure. Or maybe you want to be sickly, or the computer to be sickly, plastic tubing snaking into veins, the steady beat of a heart-rate monitor. The arousal of cancer cells dividing, multiplying, metastasizing to newer and more exciting regions; lungs to liver, skin to breast tissue, penile, ovarian, bone. True love felt sick and good. True love was a Department of Defense contractor who sent you scat porn that you’d look at in disgust. True love was the boy who’d just graduated high school and bragged about how blue his eyes were talking to you over Microsoft Comic Chat, asking you if you had a webcam. True love was him asking to see you in your underwear. True love was named James and James is sweet and nice to you and wants to strip the skin from your kneecaps with a razor blade. True love was roleplaying incest guro, always as the younger sibling, always having your knees broken with a pipe and describing how much it hurt, how it feels to have your small intestine pulled out and wrapped around your neck, the taste of gasoline, having your teeth pulled out. True love is saying I love you to an idea that wants to kill you.

I only have fond memories of James, even if I’m wondering what he got out of it all. I cried while thinking about him a few months ago; yes, there was something wrong with him. There had to have been something wrong with him. He shouldn’t have had that kind of contact with a pre-pubescent child⁸ but that doesn’t change the fact that I enjoyed it. The fact that I enjoyed it doesn’t change the fact that I was mildly autistic and neglected by more or less everyone around me. I just don’t see the point in talking about his intentions when I’m so familiar with my own: I wanted to be loved and he gave that to me in many, many ways.

It’s normal to feel like this, apparently, but whenever I talk about him, what it feels like is this: that my line of thinking borders on theirs. Regular, banal, utterly mutant thought-line making excuses. That this is all weepy and confessional, another sexual abuse testimonial about something that fails to bother in light of worse things that have been done to me. I used to take at least thirty minutes out of the day when I was working as a cook to go cry in the walk-in. I still think about what you did to me, but this is where it all started. This is where I learned to acquiesce. Some of them may have gone on to hurt children, far worse than what the current crop of puritans would consider to have been me being hurt, having been exposed to, my God, so many unpleasant images, visual and textual, hardcore pornography, graphic descriptions of how these men did in fact want to use me, sometimes violently and almost always as I was aware at the time grotesquely, which is what sometimes confuses me, years later: they were aware of how laughably wrong and openly ugly their urges were, but they (to some extent) acted on them anyways. They wanted pictures of me to more accurately jerk off: details of my life (at the time) were, to them, a source of sexual excitement. That I had no friends. That I was homeschooled. That I had fairly short greasy hair that only came down to around my chin. That I was aware of how weak I was compared to my twin brother and, probably, easier to handle. The same pedophile talked to all of the friends I had at the time who were around my age. The community we were in is still around. None of the child predators still use it, as far as I’m aware, and as far as I’m aware, no one involved in running it has any idea what was going on.

The first time I tried to masturbate, I was twelve. I was talking to James. It was less about what we were talking about (diesel fuel injections and urinating myself from fear) and more the half-aware understanding that I was aroused by what this was and wanted to touch myself. I started doing it more often, not to completion, around family members and my brother’s friends. One night during the summer walking alone to a corner store at age thirteen I was walking by a dark alleyway and had the same thoughts, more intense: how I would later learn that the real thing, having it actually happen to you, is horrible and how I would in spite of this continue to have the same thoughts, only (somehow) more confusing and (only now) filled with shame.

I can’t respect confession. The rituality of it all disgusts me: having to kneel in a tiny box, in uncomfortable proximity to parish priests who my family has known for decades, telling them about all the ways I’ve been bad. I still go to church as often as I can, which is a few times a month. I’ve stopped going to confession. It doesn’t do anything for me. Ersatz Christs that get off on this. I really do hate the church, hate everything they’ve done to my family, hate that I still feel compelled to do this, hate that I’m being held hostage by a cabal of sinister pseudo-pagans in Rome. Hate. So much of myself is given over to hate; ineffectual and insular. Seeping. Dripping. This time, the priest’s a family friend and he’s known me for a long time. I like him a lot. He’s really proud of me and the person I’ve grown into over the years. He’s about to find out that I’m not. I’m about to break his heart. I was hoping the entire time on the walk here that it wouldn’t be him and it is. I’m sorry, Father. I laid it all out to him. My long, undeniably bad history of going along with it, of hating saying no to other people. The fact that it’s led me to suffering the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone, an assessment both blankly self-centered and culturally true. That I masturbate four times a week. That I’m afraid I’m going to Hell and Father, what exactly is the church’s line of thinking on being r—d? Is that a sin? He’s quiet. He tells me that I’m a “good person,” that I didn’t deserve to have that happen to me, and that I need to masturbate less. Ten Hail Maries.

My mindset is Roman Catholic and birthright. Consider how many members of my immediate family have been sexually abused: my mother will (casually) compare-and-contrast her general resilience to having been molested to my own weakness. I am weak. She is not. They win. I lose. I used to think that I deserved this; there are text messages to a friend that more or less say as much, sent four months after the fact, after being hospitalized. I was, at that point, entirely deaf in my right ear and partially in the left. (A grotesque quantity of earwax, some mild permanent damage caused by prescription medication.) I spent a lot of time listening to music and watching Twin Peaks with him. I told him that, yeah, something horrible had happened to me. Something I stupidly never figured would happen to me. Something that I must have done something to deserve. Something that I must have invited. I still think about what he told me: that you have to accept that there are people in this world who will do evil things to you for reasons that won’t make any sense. Years later, I’m in a class on Shakespeare with one of my best friends, a female power lifter who tells me to shut the fuck up and stop thinking about it whenever I start bitching about it. Coleridge, it turned out, had a good term for this: motiveless malignity. Sadism is as American as apple pie and baseball. What happened to me was normal. I go on F-List and trawl through the chatrooms for people to talk to: just talk. Never anything overtly sexual. I want them to tell me about why they like what they like. How did you get into eye gouging? Does it bother you that you’re, functionally, a pedophile? Always respectful, never judgmental. Let them talk. Playacting my own abuse, going over it, just with more control: tell me what you like. Tell me what you masturbate to. German chatrooms for gore and cannibalism, the Anglophone ones for the same subjects. When I lose myself in these places, I can make it safe. Safer. Some of them are less than friendly. Usually the ones who are into shit that most people would see as heinous. I don’t have that privilege. It all reads as sex to me: I can get the appeal of vore and guro, even if the ideas in and of themselves hold little currency. Why do you think you’re attracted to children, I ask, and he types back, I’m not. It’s the idea. (This is what I amounted to, for them, I think: an idea.)

Say that I’m excusing this depressing and common (very common) pig behavior. Say that this is a defense mechanism. I’ll tell you the truth: that most of these men were not loving. Beyond that: that their needs were readily apparent and willingly met. I was taught to enjoy this – being victimized, at first in this neatly compartmented psychological way, then much worse later on, physically, in reality – better and maybe more correct to say that I was given the choice, at least at first, to enter into this role and occupy it fully. Or you could call it predestination. That I was always going to be this. Pathetic. Mewling. Something that other people use. The direct object. I allowed it to change me and to become inseparable from who and what I am. The two constants in my life are science-fiction (what I write) and what the world demands I feel moral outrage at: my own victimhood, at my own learned helplessness, at the fact that I have gradually, over many years, come to enjoy it in a vacuum, something that I can only describe as disgusting.

“You’ve been in my life for so long that I can’t remember anything else.”⁹

I’ve done a lot of thinking about whether or not I’d take a one-way trip to Mars. You have to ignore that, if there were applications to be part of the first wave of colonists, they’d deny me, probably for psychological reasons. No one wants to spend the rest of their life in a glass bubble with someone who screams in their sleep and has trouble holding a conversation. The time it’d take for a signal to go from Mars to Earth is twenty-four minutes: twenty-four minutes spent waiting for a reply. I use the internet too much to be comfortable with that. You can’t torrent Seinfeld on Mars. At least not easily. Living on another planet would be lonely, too: I use the internet to meet people. People on the internet are easier to talk to. I can type a hundred-and-ten words a minute; most of my friends, the long-term ones, anyways, are just as quick. Move fast enough and it vaguely resembles the tenor of a real conversation. On Mars, I’d have a husband. We’d go out in our pressure suits – which I picture as identical to NASA’s launch entry suit – and lay down on brown rocky ground near the north pole and stare up at the night sky, the exact same as on Earth, which is just a faint blue dot. Maybe I’d be happy.

POSTSCRIPT

Some of the text was taken from the following blog post, written in early 2022: https://jstanek.substack.com/p/ogres

Reading Damiek Ark’s Come October (Feral Dove, 2023) inspired me to write this. It’s great. This is the most personal thing I’ve ever written. You should read Come October.

1. The title of “youngest” went to my Floridian friend’s younger brother, who I still talk to, sometimes. I am in intermittent contact with most of the people mentioned.
2. Weird kids are inherently drawn towards pretending to be a wolf because wolves are cool. I loved wolves, growing up. I would play this crappy game called WolfQuest for hours at a time and quickly graduated to the aforementioned wolf roleplay… in hindsight, a gateway drug to being a furry. Mama tried!
3. Incest between siblings is more common than you’d think, ranging from somewhere between ten to twenty-five percent of all people; I have distinct memories from when I was very young of not wanting to shower with someone much, much older than me, maybe my older brother. As I grew up, he’d talk about my genitals a lot. He had a rhyme about it. When he came to visit us with his daughter for New Years Eve, a few years ago, I remember staying up late in the living room and hearing her crying and him whispering something to her downstairs. I’m not sure why I immediately assumed he was molesting her. I don’t think —— molested me. I’m not a hundred percent sure, anyways. And anyways, I went downstairs and checked and he told me to “go the fuck upstairs” and gave some sort of explanation that felt like bullshit. Maybe this is why we were so close after he got out of prison. (When he got out of prison, he would make constant jokes about raping me.)
4. At just about five-foot seven, I am the tallest member of my family by a wide margin. Both of my parents are significantly shorter than me. Up until last year, I was perennially uncomfortable with my body. In many ways, I still am.
5. I’m not using anyone’s real names, for the record.
6. Your character starts off at age thirteen and ages slightly each time you die. You can reach endgame before your character’s old enough to drink.
7. Text games have an excess number of visually impaired players, since these are the only kinds of video game that can be played with a screen reader.
8. I was a late bloomer.
9. From Alien³.