“Have I got a saga for you on THIS re-read.
Let’s take it back to junior high. I was a Heath Panther (go Panthers? I don’t remember our fight song. I remember middle and high school, but not junior high. I made an academic career out of hating school, and I peaked in junior high. Boy, did I hate junior high).
Somewhere in junior high I went on a reading tear. I read Welcome to the Monkey House, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I read a bunch of novelizations of movies that were about to come out, which led me to swearing up and down that the novelization of the awful James Bond Flick Tomorrow Never Dies was WAY better than the movie. I think that’s the one. The one where a guy who runs a newspaper is using a secret submarine to launch a missile or a virus or something, which somehow makes his news source #1? Something like that.
During this reading tear, I got involved with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Not in the simple paperback, but in a massive compendium volume. This thing was huge. Easily the biggest thing I’d ever read. And I was into it, big time.
I took a lot of ceramics in junior high because that’s what people of my…let’s call it “less-than-academic” inclination did with their time. I was never good at ceramics because ceramics require some combination of skill, patience, and artistry. I don’t possess any of those things. It’s like trying to bake a cake, and maybe you get the proportions wrong, but then you look over and I’m trying to bake the same cake with a melted black plastic garbage bag, a kazoo, and a non-operational Honda motorcycle.
But, we had to do a tile-making project where you create a plaster mold and then press out 4 identical tiles. I made mine based on the little green dude on the cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide.
Cut to my brother.
My brother went to the same school, one grade ahead. He was involved in forensics. Not the kind where you take apart a dead body and pretend it’s to be helpful, but really it’s because you’re a weirdo. I’m talking about the acting kind of forensics. Which, in the parlance of the time, was a very “gay” thing to do. I know this for a fact because I was also involved in forensics in the years that followed, and I was made well aware of how “gay” it was by many of my peers. Okay, by many of my betters. Morally, in hindsight, they were way worse. But in the social hierarchy of junior high, WAY better. What can I say, they had Tommy Hilfiger stuff.
My brother was looking for monologues, and he asked if he could borrow my Hitchhiker’s Guide. Now, I was balls deep in this thing at this point. Maybe 3 books in. Hundreds of pages. And I was hesitant. Because…well…
My brother had a bad reputation in our household for not returning borrowed things and being a little shortsighted. One of his habits, which I’d caught onto at this time, was to wear a jacket to school, and then, in the afternoon, discard it in his locker. This is a very Colorado thing. Itâs 30-degrees in the morning, 80 in the afternoon. This meant there was a pile of jackets in his locker, including one of our mom’s jackets and a San Francisco 49ers jacket that he must have worn in 5th grade and definitely did not fit.
At the end of the year, when it was time to clean out his locker, rather than haul all these jackets home, he trashed them. Yep.
We were not a family that could afford to just go trashing jackets, but it’s what happened.
Before you go thinking my brother was an asshole monster, letâs be clear, he was like 13. Letâs not go judging people by their 13 year-old selves. I know, some kid whoâs like 8 probably gave a TED talk about giving sandwiches to homeless people and shit, but that kid gave a TED talk because he was extraordinary. Not because heâs the baseline for kids, yeah?
Quick tangent: I will never watch a TED talk or other motivational speech delivered by someone under the age of…letâs say 16. Unless they have actual, documented superpowers.
All this to explain why, when my brother asked to borrow a long-ass book I was in the middle of, I hesitated. I thought it through, and I cautioned him STRONGLY that I wanted it back that day.
I did not get it back that day. Nor did I get it back the next day. Or next week.
The summer rolled around. I waited at home for him. Outside. Because at this time, Iâd lost my house key. And, unfortunately, my body decided I needed to desperately pee about a block from my house. Iâd speedwalk the last block, hoping against hope my brother had beat me home, and then Iâd end up peeing in the bushes on the side of my momâs house. This went on for a good year and a half. I wanted to include this detail so I wasnât casting stones in a glass house. Or, if I was, the glass in my house was covered in urine.
Itâs the last day of school, Iâm sitting on the porch, and I ask, âDid you bring my Hithhikerâs Guide back?â He didnât answer, and I said, âYou threw it away, didnât you?â
Eventually someone replaced it. Must have been my mom. But by then itâd been months, and I couldnât keep my Ford Prefects and my Zaphod Beeblebroxs straight. Which is why I quit somewhere in Life, The Universe, and Everything.
Anyway, I just re-read this shit this week, and itâs fucking awesome. Itâs even better than I remember. Creative, interesting, and it presents the universe as being uncaring, somewhat ill-willed, and stupid. So, in other words, pretty accurately.”