I’m feeling haunted today.

All this goddamned noise in my head from all the crazy shit I have swirling around in there. Ghosts, banshees, pltergeists, and revenants, all running around and screaming like the kids in a 60’s cartoon.

Were kids really that horrible back then? If so, then…. what the fuck, man.

I remember being taken to (dropped off at?) a few kiddie matinees when I was a wee tot. They were bedlam. Kids running around screaming, throwing their popcorn and soda all over the place, nobody but me paying attention to the movie. The noise level was such that it made it hard to hear the movie. It was total chaos.

I would sit in the front row all by myself, hunched down like a zoo animal hearing a big truck going by. I was in the front row so that I wouldn’t be surrounded on all sides by the madness, and I would just stare fixedly ahead at the screen until the madness was over and Emery, the owner-operator of the theater, would open the door into blessed summer sunshine, and I would be let loose from Pandemonium.

Come to think of it, even to this very day, I feel a sense of great relief when the movie theater door is opened. Granted, that doesn’t necessarily happen at your local EverythingPlex any more, but when it does, I feel like I just got out of jail, and that’s true no matter how much I loved the movie.

Fast forward to my days in elementary school, and I have more or less the same reaction to the chaos around me on the playground. So much noise, so much chaos. I would find someplace at least somewhat quiet, and stay there a lot of the time.

I was terribly shy as well, so even when I wasn’t being bullied, I was too timid to do a lot of things. Even getting up on the monkey bars so I could go hand-over-hand across the part that was like a horizontal ladder, which I totally could do and quite enjoyed doing, required a monumental fight against inner demons that I could neither understand nor explain to anyone else.

In fact, it honestly would not have occurred to be to seek help. I didn’t even grasp that I had a problem of the sort that people could help with. Life had, even at that young age, taught me that asking for help from anyone was always a losing proposition. I wouldn’t get the help I wanted, and I would come away feeling rejected, dejected, and depressed from having opened myself up to someone only to have them dump a dirty ashtray into me and close the lid.

I knew I was different from the other kids. That was made painfully obvious to me every school day. I didn’t know why they did what they did, and I had no friends that would have helped me learn, so I spent recess and lunchtime surrounded by kids but utterly alone amidst the chaos and cacophony.

It was the kiddie matinees all over again.

Later in life, I wondered why Emery put on those matinees. They were total nightmares for him. He was clearly frustrated by and scared of the kids, and I can’t blame him, because so was I. The cleanup must have been like cleaning up after an incontinent elephant, and as I recall, the ticket to get in was pretty cheap too.

My guess is, it was some kind of tradition held over from the days of the poodle skirt and malt shop, and if he had tried to stop doing it before it was time, he would have had an army of pitchfork-wielding parents at his doorstep (which, come to think of it, was only two doors and a street away from my doorstep) filled with the righteous fury know only to parents who suddenly have to take care of their children for two more hours a week.

This is what makes teacher’s strikes such tricky business.

Nevertheless, the matinees stopped very shortly after I experienced them. Couldn’t have been more than three years. And I trust you can see why.

Good riddance, if you ask me. Oy.

Then again, it was at one of those matinees that I got to see Star Wars in the theater like three times, so they weren’t all bad. But those times, I was with my siblings, and hence, insulated.

So I dunno. Maybe I was destined not to fit in. It would have taken a serious consciousness upgrade for me to have been able to see what was go on around me clearly and then move to make things how I wanted to be. I would have needed to be able to grasp that I was different, understand that difference, decide to learn to fake enough normalcy to get along and have friends, and essentially locked a big part of myself away.

Not sure that would have been the choice I would have made. But even if I had chosen the other path, the lone wolf elitist path, I would have at least been able to make some sort of peace with myself.

Instead, I was just a heavy, soggy bag of emotion and problems, impossible to respect and prone to biting the hand that feeds me without even realizing it, and so nobody wanted to (or could) deal with me.

But what can I say? For all my overweaning intelligence, I was just a kid. Locked away all alone in my own little world, I couldn’t do anything but struggle through every day. Always looking for something but somehow never reaching a conclusion. All my energy went into dragging myself through the quagmire of boredom and terror every day.

At that early an age, if there is nobody watching you and seeing that you are in trouble and intervening… it isn’t going to happen. And every child, no matter how unique and/or difficult, deserves to have someone like that in their lives.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.