Emilio, One Half of the Iconic Duo "Emilio & Marigold"

 

Callie the Wildfire, Ozzie's Ex-Lover from "Rainbow Ranch"

 

Salty Cindy

Teaching history? You’re on the wrong side of it

You took your students’ lives, turned them into shit

Yelling and screaming until they hear you from Scotland

If you went further east, they’d launch nuclear rockets

Oral quizzes? You’ve got no fucking business

Put our anxiety on display for millions to witness

Calling us lazy when we worked our asses off

But we believed it like our brains were acid washed

Rushing us through like a military exercise

So that we’d be good drones in a capitalist enterprise

Don’t you know it takes more than a degree

To teach any class, let alone senior history?

Empathy and kindness should be prerequisites

Not a grumpy outlook and marine sentiments

If I wanted to fight a bunch of strangers overseas

I’d have actually said the words, “Sign me up, please!”

But I didn’t, because I’m not a cog in the machine

I have my own ambitions, my own goals to achieve

None of them include listening to your loud voice

The future is mine, I’m the one who makes the choice

Where do you belong? In the unemployment line

Although I wouldn’t even trust you to cook my fries

Wouldn’t trust you to take care of my kitties

Nor my puppies neither, you’d be just as shitty

I don’t even think your own family likes you

Face it, Salty Cindy, you have nothing left to do

You can go get fucked with a rifle’s bayonet

It’s a surefire bet, are there any takers yet?

Like a sex offender, you don’t belong near a school

You belong in a morgue where the bodies are cool

I know this all sounds just a little too extreme

But this is what I do when you fuck with my dreams

Mourning the Loss of Beauty

 My name is Garrison and I don’t think of myself as an attractive person. I held off on saying that for as long as I could. It’s not that I don’t think men’s beauty standards are an important idea to dissect and analyze, no, no, no. I was more afraid of potential responses I could get for saying such a thing in public. Some might be kind and say that I don’t look THAT bad. Some might accuse me of being shallow. Some might be realistic and say that every type of beauty fades away eventually. Some might be well-intentioned and say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder…which doesn’t sound promising if the beholders refuse to acknowledge me in any way.

But there’s one response I’ve always feared throughout my entire life. I don’t know the official name for this trope, but I call it the Disaster Porn Excuse. It’s where you talk about your problems with someone and that same ignoramus reminds you that others have it worse. Of course other people have it worse! What is this, the Sadness Olympics? Do I only get a bronze medal for believing myself to be physically ugly? The Disaster Porn Excuse goes something like this: “You know, Chud…there’s a Corona Virus pandemic going on…there’s police brutality all over the country…wildfires and other natural disasters are happening at an alarming rate…and you’re bitching and whining about your lack of good looks? Hyuk, hyuk, hyuk! Get a life!”

Not believing in my own physical beauty (or lack thereof) isn’t anywhere near as devastating as a Corona Virus pandemic. I get it. But that’s not what my brain said to me the other day. Just because someone has it worse, doesn’t invalidate your own problems. Does there have to be an earthquake and a volcanic eruption happening at the same time in Port Orchard for me to have a say in my own personal difficulties? It’s not right to compare and contrast problems. And yes, even having said all of this, not being physically attractive still sounds like small potatoes. It does sound shallow and whiny…until it’s not.

My senior year of high school was pretty much the only time in my life where I was confident in my sex appeal. I had a hairstyle that was parted down the middle and curled at the tips. I wore sunglasses even indoors. I wore a leather jacket that I had no business owning given my family’s income. I had a beard that made me look older than my teenaged years. I had and still have hazel eyes that could be stared into for hours. Judging from all the smiles, giggles, and flirting I got from other girls at my school, I think a few of them caught feelings for me. They didn’t come out and say they were in love with me, but I got hugs from a few of them, they petted my shoulders, one girl drummed on my back with her hands…and you know what? As shallow as it seems now, getting this kind of attention is addictive. It’s validating. It makes me feel like anything other than an outcast. After a freshman year where I was almost bullied into suicide, not feeling like an outcast was pretty fucking amazing.

That is until the voices in my head started getting louder and louder. The voices threatened to kick my legs and break them. They threatened to kick me in the ass and make me shit myself. They threatened to make me their bitch, this being the worst of my schizophrenic insults due to my strong sense of individuality at the time. The voices got so bad that for the second time in my life, I threatened to kill myself. Thank god I was able to get the medication I needed and start the long hard road to recovery. That should have been the end of my misery…until it wasn’t. The thing about schizophrenia medication is that it numbs your emotions and makes you gain weight. Remember the smoking hot sex god that I was all throughout my senior year of high school? He was replaced by a three-hundred pound zombie who couldn’t cut it in a college sociology class or even technical writing. Technical fucking writing! But if I didn’t take the medication, I’d either be dead or in a nuthouse, so being a three hundred pound invalid was the lesser of two evils. It’s a classic case of death or chi-chi.

Losing my beauty was going to happen eventually as it does with every person on the planet. I just would have liked to keep it for longer than my teenaged years. College is supposed to be a time when the real magic happens, when partying, sex, and love are the cornerstones of good education. I had my fair share of crushes, but I never acted on them. Not once. I didn’t believe I had the right to. Why? Because my good looks were stolen from me. I didn’t get my face bashed in with a baseball bat and needed reconstructive surgery. My looks were stolen from me by an invisible force that happened at random. It was complete and utter bad luck that the public ignored me and went out of their way to sidestep me. I had very few friends in college and I owe all of that…to bad fucking luck. Remember how addictive being sexually fawned over was? I was still addicted, but had some serious fucking withdrawal.

It wasn’t until after I graduated from college that I started my own personal education with You Tube videos and internet research. You know that feeling when people treat you differently because you may or may not look good to them? There’s a name for that: the beauty bias. It’s something we all have whether we want to admit it or not. When an employer has to choose between a pool of candidates, he’ll go for the sexiest one. When people decide what friends they’re going to connect with, they’ll choose the sexy ones. Even in celebrity culture, the sexier musicians, actors, and influencers are the ones who get the most opportunities. 

Would Nightwish have become a successful heavy metal band if Tarja Turunen had a bulge in her neck the size of a basketball? Would Evanescence be a worldwide phenomenon if Amy Lee’s face was disfigured by a wood chipper? Would In This Moment have been a smash hit if Maria Brink sharted herself onstage at every show? I hate saying this, but the answer to all of these questions is no. That’s not my answer. That’s the public’s answer. It’s sick, it’s wrong, it’s unfair, but it’s reality. While nobody would come out and tell me I was too ugly to fit in, I knew deep inside that’s what they were thinking.

So what do we do to curb this bias? Honestly, I don’t have the one true answer to that. Sure, we could share Body Positivity memes all day long. We could call out shallowness in magazines and TV shows. We could be more inclusive even if we’re not feeling it at first. But these are all surface-level solutions that can only work if everybody gets involved, which they won’t. That’s why I never watch You Tube videos from fitness influencers: they’re the biggest offenders when it comes to making fat and ugly people feel like shit. Many of those exercises are impossible for an obese person to do on a consistent basis. Food addiction is very real. But hey, it’s all our fault, right? We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves according to these fitness influencers. We don’t lift enough weights. We don’t run far enough. We don’t eat enough rabbit food. But most importantly, we don’t inject enough steroids into our bloodstreams. You know what? Maybe I’d rather be fat and lazy than look like Hulk Hogan and The Ultimate Warrior. Come to think of it, if you do these super-intense exercises, you too can look like The Ultimate Warrior…in 2015…a year after he passed away from heart failure.

Since other people won’t fight our battles against poor self-esteem for us, we have to find ways to do it ourselves. We can surround ourselves with people who believe in Body Positivity. We can self-talk ourselves into feeling at least marginally good. During the days where we do feel good, we could hold onto that feeling for as long as we humanly can. Or if you’re schizophrenic like me, you can use your imagination to your advantage. When I came up with the idea for this essay, my mind was in the shitter. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I wanted to curse myself until I believed in my own bodily mediocrity. But I did something the other day to make myself sing a different tune. Will the feeling last forever? Probably not, but I take my little victories where I can get them.

I imagined a scenario where one of my online crushes confronted me in a hairdresser’s salon after I’ve spent the entire time doubting my own beauty. She said to me, “Your attractiveness doesn’t come from your soft hair…or your lovely eyes. That’s not where you draw your strength from. You draw your strength from your quietness. You’re an enigma in public. You have an air of mystery about you. You keep women at a distance because you’re considerate of them. And the more mysterious you are, the more they want to learn about you. And the more they can unlock from you…the more likely you are to trust them. Attraction has nothing to do with physical appearances. It’s about feeling comfortable and calm around whoever you’re with. If a woman can get you to be yourself around her without any filters…that’s when you know you’ve succeeded.”

Is any of this true? Maybe, maybe not, I couldn’t tell you firsthand. But does it make me feel good for the time being? You’re damn right it does. Being crushed on in high school made me feel good at the time. Now I have to find other ways to feel good. And when I find them, I want to hold onto my happiness for as long as I can. Finding temporary happiness may not always be attractive to the world around me. Then again, it doesn’t have to be. At the end of the day, the only one who gets to decide my worth is me. The sooner this is hammered into my brain, the better off I’ll be. Maybe happiness isn’t six-pack abs and a leather jacket. Maybe happiness is a bottle of Diet Coke and two pepperoni pizza Hot Pockets. I can do this…I have to do this…

If I can get one more jab in to solidify my TKO victory over poor self-esteem, Bill Maher has no business calling fat people ugly when he himself looks like a creature that crawled out of a mausoleum because a necromancer told him it was a good idea. He would know what a necromancer is if he didn’t thumb his nose at genre fiction. But even with his willful ignorance towards my generation, he knows deep down that he should be the one mourning his loss of beauty, not me. Oops! I guess the beauty bias is alive and well! Uh-oh!

Silent Warrior, Chapter 4

Scott’s two classes before lunch (art and English) went by in a blurry haze. Every word coming out of the teachers’ mouths sounded like gibberish. Every assignment they handed out was met with indifference. The extroverted students who spoke up in class on a regular basis might as well have been speaking Chinese. The only thing missing from Scott’s zombie demeanor was the desire to feast on brains; that dwindled away once Tom Simpson was no longer within sight. It wouldn’t be fair to feast on the brains of neutral students from other classes.

The undead hunger would have to be concentrated on Scott’s lunch, which consisted of dry chicken nuggets, limp French fries, and a carton of milk that smelled like fruit salad. Even if the food wasn’t bland and boring, he still had mental images of worms and maggots juxtaposed on his meal. It would have been nice if his mind could conjure up the gummy worms he ate as a kid instead of corpse-eating critters.

Scott pushed his meal to the opposite side of his faraway table, where he was isolated from the rest of the school folk with his head tucked in his arms. He wondered if this would be a good place to release his biblical flood of tears. Though isolated, he was still visible from miles away. Surely a deafening sob would overpower the cacophony of student babble easily. They always did. It was funny how nobody was around to witness his achievements, but his peers and superiors would always be there for his downfall.

He tried to suppress a singular tear, but the splash on the table was as obvious to him as a cannonball in a swimming pool. He quickly wiped it up with the waist of his T-shirt while whispering, “No, no, no, no, no!” He couldn’t let his secret heartbreak get out. He couldn’t crumble into human ruins in the middle of lunchtime. Just one tear…it was only one tear.

Before another surge of salty fluids could rush out of his eyeballs, Scott felt a gentle tissue wipe away the remains of his sorrow. Through puffy red eyes, he saw the silky hand belonged to a freshman girl with dual brunette pigtails, a cutesy-wutesy face, and overall shorts with Birkenstock sandals. She smiled dimly and said, “You look like you could use some company.”

Scott shrugged his shoulders, snorted mucous up his nostrils, and said, “Sure, why not?” The little lady took a seat next to him and tucked her chin against her chest. Scott wondered if this girl was just as shy and awkward as he was. “It must have taken a lot of courage to come over here.” He couldn’t stop the words from pouring out of his mouth like rollercoaster vomit. He mentally kicked himself and quietly said, “D’oh!”

“Actually, it did,” said the girl, and Scott’s anxiety was replaced with warm tingling through is nerves. He felt as though he dodged the world’s biggest bullet with that one, in a high school where everybody shot from the hip, no less. “I don’t normally talk to cute guys, but uh…uh-oh…” Scott’s face turned bright pink upon hearing he was cute. “What I’m trying to say is…uh…”

“It’s alright, you don’t have to worry about me,” said Scott while patting the girl on the back. “I’m actually pretty terrified myself. If you’ve ever had Mr. Simpson for a teacher before, you know exactly what I’m talking about.” He took a swig of mediocre milk to sooth his scratchy throat.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’m his daughter,” said the girl, to which Scott spit his milk all over the table and coughed. “You really should be more careful with spilling things on the table.” The girl took a few napkins out of her pocket and wiped the table down before they could get in trouble with teachers passing by.

“Look, I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to hang out together,” said Scott nervously with his hands in a defensive position. “I’m already in the doghouse with your father. He gave me half an hour of detention after school today, which I’m obviously not going to show up for but…where are you going?”

After throwing the napkins in the trash, the girl stood up and tried to walk out of sight. She spun around after being called out by Scott and said, “Just so you know, I only came up to you because I thought you needed a friend. My dad has that affect on people. That’s why my mom divorced him when I was nine. But if you don’t want to hang out, that’s fine too…”

The girl’s walking speed increased and her fists clenched tightly. Scott shot up out of his seat, threw his disgusting feast in the garbage, stacked his tray, and followed after her into the hallway. The girl furiously spun the combination wheel on her locker before Scott placed a hand on her shoulder and said, “Wait! Look, I’m sorry. I really am.” The tension in her shoulder eased to cotton softness. “I’ve just been having a shitty year, that’s all. I didn’t mean to take it out on you. Can we talk for a while?”

The freshman interlaced her fingers into Scott’s and said, “Of course we can talk. We can talk about anything we want. How about if we introduce ourselves before we feel like blowing each other off again. I’m Adrienne. Adrienne Simpson. And you are?”

“Scott George. Nice to meet you, Adrienne. Can I ask you a question? How do you know all about me and Mr. Simpson?”

“Because that’s all you ever talked about in English class, silly.”

Scott’s face grew tomato red upon realizing what the hell he’d been doing all this time. All of that zombie groaning. All of that muttering. Not paying attention to his own fucking actions. Had other students been aware of his grumbling the whole time and not just Adrienne? Why didn’t the teachers say anything? Maybe they did say something but Scott was too numb to realize it. The Novocain feeling in his brain wore off and the white hot pain of embarrassment and humiliation washed over him, leaving him so weak at the knees that Adrienne had to support him by the hips.

“I wouldn’t worry about it too much if I were you,” giggled Adrienne while standing Scott upright. “That class is full of all sorts of weirdoes. You were probably just blending in, no offense by the way. I know this because I’m a weirdo too. And I’m proud of it!”

Scott’s short-term memory came splashing back to him once more. Of course that class was full of nerds and geeks, because it was about graphic novels. Jocks and cool kids didn’t read classics like Watchmen and Fun Home. Well, they probably did, but only to snicker at Fun Home with homophobic slurs passing their lips every so often.

“You know what, Adrienne?” said Scott with a small grin. “You’re right. I’m proud of being a weirdo too. Goddamn, it feels good to say that. If I had said that anywhere else, I would have gotten my ass kicked for it.”

Adrienne patted Scott’s warm cheek and said, “See? This world isn’t such a bad place. You just have to find the right people, that’s all. Or in your case, let the right people find you. Tell you what, Scott, how about instead of riding that god awful bus, the two of us walk home together. Like I said, we can talk about anything you want.”

“Uh….well….um…”

“Come on, it’ll be fun! Just you and me! Nobody else! We can even hold hands if you want!” said Adrienne while smiling cutely at the fidgeting Scott.

The senior took a huge breath to settle his nerves and finally had the courage to say, “You know what? Fuck it. I don’t have anybody else around here watching my back. You and me against the world. Why not? What could go wrong?”

“What could go right is that you don’t have to cry your eyes out in front of everybody and you’ll actually have a reason to smile again. Come on, smile for me!” Scott’s attempt at doing so made him look like a psychotic serial killer, to which Adrienne giggled, patted him on the shoulder, and said, “Not a bad start. See you soon!”

With the buzzer sounding off once again, Adrienne waved happily at Scott and walked away to her next class. Though she had an adorable figure from behind, it was actually Adrienne’s bare feet in sandals that Scott couldn’t take his eyes off of. He felt himself going into zombie mode again, but this time with a slightly less frightening smile on his face. He shook his head awake before he could embarrass himself further by getting a public hard-on. Lord knows there wasn’t any recovering from that.

Next stop for Scott George was math class, which he was surprisingly alert for. He blew through the algebraic equations like an accountant on crack, seemingly forgetting all about Mr. Simpson’s detention notice from earlier in the day, if only for a little while. Adrienne was the only ally Scott had in this war against a hellish educational system. He couldn’t rely on his own mother, the other teachers, or the other students for a soft shoulder to lean on. He still had no idea what Adrienne saw in him that others didn’t, but with the speed at which he finished his math assignments, he was desperate enough not to question it.