Perfect Vision

Chapter 1 of my life's story.

There comes a time in every young adult's life when you have to ask yourself, "How did I get here?" The world is moving fast but you feel suspended in time. I'm at that point now. Being unproductive sounds easy, in fact, it sounds like the opposite of doing anything hard. This is false. Being unproductive, it turns out, is one of the harder things I've ever done. No, it isn't hard to actually be unproductive, but it is hard to keep being so. Eventually you start to lose your mind. Eventually you begin to conjure up crazy ideas and sleep 14 hour days where your wild dreams contort those ideas into seemingly good and plausible ones. Once you wake up one day suddenly realizing that your life revolves around nothing, do nothing about it, and write about it instead.

To successfully become unsuccessful, like anything else, all starts with work.

To ask myself how I got here I start by assessing when I actually became productive. When I was eleven years old my mom told me to get a job. Now that my younger brother was old enough to retrieve the T.V. button for her and get her cans of diet caffeine free soda, I was of no use to her. I got a job. I now carried the sole responsibility of delivering newspapers to the small pastoral town I lived in. I made thirty bucks a week to make sure everyone got their news, despite blizzards, monsoons, droughts, forest fires, alien attacks, or any other natural occurrence that may impede on my job. After two years, I decided it was time to step down. Turns out you can't be a freshman in high school and a newspaper carrier.

I tried to be lazy for a few months but my mother refused to let that happen. I got a job at the little market uptown called Hudson's Market. The owner, Bill Hudson, was a stingy yet friendly man I've known since I lived here (mostly because my mom sent me there on multiple caffeine free diet coke runs). He hired me instantly to work in the ice cream parlor and I was breaking the bank with my $5.15 an hour. This job however, was only seasonal. I live in Ohio, in a land where ice cream comes and goes and never lasts forever. I must have had star quality though, because when and other kids around me were getting fired, I was asked to stay. I worked about 2 hours a night stocking shelves and illegally pricing beer. Once a week (or maybe twice if I pushed it) I dusted the wine shelves, which I had timed out perfectly to take up exactly two hours.

Soon summer rolled around again and the wonderful world of ice cream returned to us. I was growing restless with the business, but my friend Stacy got hired and we quickly joined forces to become a productive team. We developed the art of "assembly line pop machine". Stacy would hike a Coke to me, in which case I would catch it with a sweet spin move and toss it into the machine with a fade-away. This was of course, in no way good for the customers. Luckily my mother didn't drink bottles; otherwise she would have wound up with diet caffeine free coke all over her face, no thanks to us.

Needless to say, it wasn't to much longer until Stacy and I both got fired.

"We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation."-Anthony Burgess


Unfortunately my mother could not nag me quickly enough this time. In the nanoseconds between jobs, I managed to get arrested. I was fifteen years old, getting ready to enter my sophomore year of high school, and I was completely broke. I was clothed and in good health, I wasn't starving, and I wasn't out on the street. What I didn't have though, was sufficient lip-gloss treatments. How could anyone in their right mind expect me to reinvent myself as a high school student without lips superior in both color and shine? Eventually the pressure from society wore me thin and I got arrested from Wal-Mart for stealing 22 dollars worth of lip-gloss. I spent the rest of the afternoon in a backroom analyzing their network of security cameras while a police officer lectured me and told me I watched to much T.V.

This would serve to be a valuable lesson in my young adult life, from here on out I only got better. I was addicted to systems, and learning how to cheat them.

"I don't suffer from insanity but enjoy every minute of it". -Edgar Allan Poe

As any normal American teenager is, I was frequently riddled with chemical imbalance. There are many disorders to choose from including but not limited to; bipolar disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety, paranoia disorder, borderline personality, obsessive compulsive disorder, and sleeping disorders. If you are really good, you can master one of the more severe, like multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia, schizotypal, or anything else with the prefix "schizo" is usually pretty hardcore.

This all begins with counseling. When you were 14 years old your parents more than likely decided you had no feelings. If not, you did not grow up properly and are more than likely doomed. Once I turned 14, and my parents finally came to the conclusion that I had no feelings, I attended my first counseling sessions at Family Services. My counselors name was Keith. Keith was tall with short curly hair and glasses with wide eyes underneath. He wore nothing but beige and had a dimly lit office. The first time I met him I immediately asked him if he liked landscaping, I'm not sure why.

Counseling usually consists of two segments, part of the session with the child and the parent, and the other part with just the child. Oftentimes I sat in the dimly lit office staring at the candy dish on the table in front of me. I was never really listening but every now and then I would glance up to catch my mother's concerned look with her hands in the air in a defeated gesture (she always talks with her hands). I didn't even have to look at Keith to know that he was looking at my mother attentively and nodding with his notebook in his hands. I wondered what he really wrote in that notebook. I bet he got sick of listening to the 'problems' of suburban white kids and their parents. I bet he never wrote down anything relevant.

I wouldn't.

I imagined that he was probably writing a list of grocery items to pick up after work. Something along the lines of…

Bread

Fruit Loops

Sliced Ham

Caffeine Free Diet Coke

Milk Duds

Eventually these sessions were conducted with my mother present less frequently. When she wasn't around I began to open up a lot more. I went out of my way to be very calm and collected and always speak respectfully of my parents. Every teenager thinks they have everything figured out, and I realize that. The difference is that I really did have almost everything figured out. Not about life, but about my situation at home. I was quiet and observant, I usually spent my days silently watching people and analyzing them in my head.

Because it is in my nature to have to know everything about everything, I read some of my aunt's books on counseling. I wanted to be able to view the counseling process from Keith's perspective. The most important thing I learned was that counselors are taught to highly value silence. I thought about our sessions and realized how often Keith utilized this concept. I realized that Keith rarely said a word. He was making money off prompting me to go off on tangents so he could not counsel me in anyway. Essentially this is the art of counseling, there is no counseling involved. I spent my time talking to myself while Keith wrote down his grocery list. When I was done, we sat there in awkward silence, him staring at me blankly, and me delving into my inner thoughts to solve my own problems.

I began to get bored with my relationship with Keith, and it all came crashing down the day I had a nervous breakdown in his office.

I had just finished spending the past 8 hours being frisked and holed up with juvenile delinquents. I had spent my third day in SSSP at the juvenile detention center (for reasons I will get into later). The corrections officer in charge of us was a greasy older man who acted excessively creepy towards me and often winked at me when no one was looking. You could tell the other kids were frequent visitors because despite the fact that the officer was an asshole, they seemed to have a mutual understanding between them. I spent the next eight hours reading "The Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe" and Dante's "Inferno" while juvenile delinquents tossed wads of paper at me and tried to get my attention. I ignored them and kept reading. At one point the corrections officer came over and picked up my book. "The Short Stories of Poe" he said aloud, in a voice resembling that of Robin Leach. He looked at me quizzically and the other kids chuckled. I didn't like his tone, he was mocking me, he was mocking Poe. They all disgusted me.

When my time was up I was seething. I was so intensely angry, I was angry at the people who put me there, I was angry at my mother, I was angry with the justice system, and I was essentially angry at America. I didn't belong with people like that. My mother drove me directly from juvy hall to family services. I sat silent and seething in Keith's office while he stared at me blankly. Eventually I broke down. I cried hysterically, I began to laugh, I got up and walked from one chair to another repeatedly, I cried again, I laughed again, I knocked over the candy dish. I scared the hell out of poor Keith that day. He sat there puzzled and shocked, his face completely flushed pink, he had no idea what to say.

In the end Keith decided that I was bipolar and wanted to send me for a psychiatric assessment test to determine what kind of medication I should be on. That would be my last day at family services....