December 29, 2023:

My imaginary friend is Robbie the Robot, from Forbidden Planet.

This is a deliberate, self-conscious decision. I've been told, whether by kids or adults I no longer recall, that it's common for kids to have imaginary friends, and that they're fun. I should have one, then. I make the decision walking home from sitters', on the sidewalk alongside the runoff channel steps from our driveway.

Why Robbie, specifically?

Robots are cool; Robbie is protective; mommy loves science fiction.

He's my friend for some while. I talk to him frequently — quite often while walking home from sitters'. He never replies, but I like that he listens. Largely, for the most part, to one-way conversations about games, reading, my kitty, and, soon, rock and roll music.

December 28, 2023:

There's something wrong. Something about food.

I don't like food. There's a very restricted, very narrow list that I'll tolerate. Hamburgers, hotdogs, corn on the cob. Chips, sodas, ice cream. No-one points this out at the time, and it's late in life that I notice that these are picnic foods — my father's foods. My absent daddy's foods.

I don't like eating. The physical act is stressful. My mother watches the fork anxiously from plate to mouth. Her anxiety is transmitted, so that I hate the activity and cut it short as soon as possible. Eat enough to not starve to death, then stop.

They — the adults — all of them — look at me sadly, and with disapproval. I'm too thin. The sitter says, sadly, "You're nothing but skin and bone," and I look at myself thinking, What else is there supposed to be?

My mother tells me, "If you don't gain weight, the authorities will take you away from me. They'll say I'm a bad mother." This makes me even more reluctant to participate at meals. I internalize the idea that there's something wrong with me. I'm doing something wrong, or I am something wrong.

December 27, 2023:

No no no. That's not the right moment.

It should instead be 7th grade, with the decision not to continue in the gifted program.

I had leverage; I could have negotiated. No shop classes: wood, metal, electrical, drafting. No gym class. Pure waste.

Instead: the necessary languages for later. French, German, Latin, Greek. Spanish, to participate fully in local culture.

Everything else — literature, history, philosophy — I could handle on my own.

I'll join your shit program on those terms. Only those. Doing my best to ignore you and your effete beret and your ridiculous mini cigars.

I had no idea then what leverage is, or what leverage I had. Nor any notion of negotiation. But we're not talking the boy of twelve, we're talking a return to that moment with every current experience, memory and skill.

More. A job. At the music store in the Quad, the Vox dealer. Get a parental signature, use the wage and the discount to buy instruments. Start a band. Have more sex. Avoid the drugs.

There's the road forward.