VHS freeze frame of a little description my junior kindergarten class wrote about me at age four. Was I simply uninterested in the small, inconsequential tragedies of other four-year-olds and and their short attention spans, was I simply too self-absorbed in my own world, catering to snails and baby birds ‘saved’ from the rainstorms in plastic blue containers provided by mom, full of wet grass and leaves while the green and white GO trains passed by below, one by one by one — or was I shy, like the teacher added hastily, at the end, this incomplete sentence like a badly scraped together consolation prize with a missing verb.
Sometimes I can take one look at a person and know there couldn’t be possibly anything significant I could say to them or wanted to hear from them. The deep selectiveness I employ, like a weapon, about who I take an interest in has both served and undercut my objectives. And after I’ve shown my Aces only to receive betrayal in return, there is rarely forgiveness.
Growing up, I was rarely concerned with popularity or being liked by everyone. I didn’t know who was popular, and I was even surprised to see other kids talk about our particular class of popular kids, as if their statuses were a concrete fact. They were never particularly clever, and so their respect or adulation meant nothing to me, especially if I didn’t know them or care to know them, or admired them for some talent from afar. I was okay with being disliked, hated even, which I sometimes enjoyed rather cruelly, because when you know someone hates you, you know you’re occupying their headscape. So you’ve already won. The more effort with which I see other people making their banal offerings all over social media – those rote, threaded opinions that have already been repeated thousands of times – the less I think humanity is going to make it. What insincerity.
As a kid, I only cared about being liked by the people I liked. And sometimes, if they didn’t like me back, the more I took it as a challenge. Like this new boy who showed up in the middle of the year in grade eight because he got suspended from his old school. I gave head to him by the river during a hot and sticky June, tall grass crushed beneath my knees, because I wanted him to ask me to the semi-formal. Instead, I saw him later through dim flashing lights in the gym that had been turned into the dance floor with his hands all over the ass of a blonde named after ripened French cheese with a gigantic mouth. That’s when I decided I didn’t like him anymore, and then I didn’t care if he liked me.