One day when I was sixteen, I came home from school and found my father in a tremendously good mood.

“Guess what!” he said. “I traded the Husqvarna!” This was a motorcycle he’d fixed up. It was a special model that was designed for riding up steep grades. Very low-geared.

“What did you trade it for?”

“A cow!”

If he had said, “Magic beans!” I would have been less annoyed. As it was, I found myself uncharacteristically angry. A cow. A cow? A rage more intense and focused than my normal hormonal teenage brooding welled up inside of me. I now know what this feeling is: The feeling you have when your sense of reason is horribly violated. I felt the need to make my position on this development clear.

“I am not going to take care of a fucking cow.”

“What? No. I traded it to Jerry for some beef.” My father was so confused that he didn’t even comment on the fact I’d just dropped the f-bomb. Jerry was a friend of my father’s who owned a ranch down near the Coumbia River. He’d traded the motorcycle for the meat of a whole cow.

But what you have to understand is this: The idea that my father might buy a cow made perfect sense to me because thats the sort of thing my father might do. “I’m tired of paying for fucking milk! It’s bullshit! I’m gonna just get my own damn cow!”

When I was young I’d climb on top of a big hill that was really more of a pile of old sawdust and junk. It overlooked a great forest that was really more of a clump of trees between two roads.

One day I found a piece of white wood stuck in the ground, and it was in the shape of a sword. A pure white blade, and I roamed the forest looking for evil to thwart.

The sticks were actually markers left by a survey crew, outlining a new highway that would eventually destroy the big hill that wasn’t a big hill and the great forest that wasn’t a great forest.

I designed a flag, and my grandmother made it for me, because every young Prince in exile must have a flag, and I fought hard to reestablish my kingdom. I would lose or sometimes break the swords I had found, and luckily the survey crew, no doubt angry as hell, kept replacing them by leaving new ones in the ground.

I believed, really believed, with the intensity only allowed the fresh convert, in The Hobbit. It seemed real to me, more real than the Bible. I went to church, and made an effort to understand but Gandalf always seemed more real than Moses to me. All those pictures of Jesus in a desert made little impact, but living in the Cascades meant that I could imagine the smell of the Misty Mountains on a cold morning. And as a frightened child, living in a place where I had no friends, and was pretty constantly picked on by the other kids my age, it wasn’t hard to imagine what it was like to have Orcs and Goblins chasing after you.

I eventually lost faith as I grew older, and the new highway removed my lost kingdom I’d spent so many hours fighting for. There is something about puberty and the influx of hormones that drags a child’s brain screaming into adulthood. It permanently alters the way one thinks, and childhood’s intensity is lost.

The white sword is only a white stick, the big hill a clump of garbage. It becomes impossible to ever forget the belief, and it remains just outside the edge of consciousness, tickling your memories, because you know that your memories are incomplete. I remember the stick, I remember it’s grain, the roughness of it in my hand, and wrapping the ‘handle’ in tape. I remember imagining that I was ‘forging’ the sword when I wrapped the tape around it, but I can’t ever actually be forging the sword the way I was then.

That intense imaginary world is what kept me from going nuts as a small child. This was what kept me company until I made my first real friend, another kid everyone hated. We could be hated together. It was our personal mythology, the legend of two losers.

As the hormones did their work on my brain, my friendship with Matt became based a lot on music. We didn’t have a lot of spare money (no jobs), so we would copy cassette tapes from the library. For a four year period, I think we had the exact same music collection. If I got something, I would make a copy for him. If he got something, he would make a copy for me.

Then I went to university, and he went to work. I never finished school, but it put me on a different trajectory, and except for a few months this last year, we never lived in the same town, or worked at the same place. And so I had to find something else to replace that friendship. I tried ‘love’ or whatever the hell I thought that was when I was eighteen. I tried Philosophy (yes, with a capitol ‘P’), and even, for a very brief moment, thought of trying to live like Gandhi, on the basis of reading the Louis Fischer biography. It’s a pretty ridiculous story, and maybe I’ll write it down sometime. If you’ve already heard it, well, it wasn’t really as many hot dogs as everyone makes it sound like. I swear.

I’ve tried to be an artist, a working class hero, a performer of some kind, a man of the world (ha!), and I once thought my laziness would make me an excellent Stylite, but I wasn’t born in the sixth century, so that wasn’t an option.

I used to think that being loved would fill whatever that little blank space in my heart, but that didn’t work either.

I’m not wearing a hat anymore. The reason (besides wanting to enjoy my hair before it all falls out) is that I somehow acquired the habit of doffing my cap at people. I am the only documented case of an individual under the age of 70 who does this. And I can’t stop doing it, so no more hats for me, thanks.

And I really think it’s because doffing my cap is the sort of thing that a hobbit would do. It’s the sort of thing that an inhabitant in an arch-conservative’s pastoral fantasy would do.

And I do it because it’s hard for me to have friends. I’ve never figured out how to make friends easily. Even people who I’m pretty sure like me I won’t open up to because I don’t want to bother them. (As I wrote this, I typed ‘pretty sure don’t like me’, which is a pretty accurate summation of the way my cursed brain works.)

I read a book about the Clay vs. Liston fight years ago, and the only thing that I remember is this: When Sonny Liston was an old man, he was jogging with a guy he’d known for ten years, and Liston turned to him and said, “Hey, we’re friends, right?” The guy was flabbergasted. “Yeah, of course we’re friends, Sonny.” And Sonny shyly looked away and said, “Okay, I was just wondering.” Sonny Liston was a bad son of a bitch, and to the day he died, I think he was painfully alone.

I’m not that bad, but I can understand the impulse. I’ve got friends I’m really close to, and other people not so much. I tell people I don’t have a lot of friends because I read a lot, and I have lots of solitary activities that I do that satisfy me. But it’s actually the reverse, though I’m usually not unhappy. Certainly not as unhappy as Sonny Liston. I’ve been satisfied with life, but something is still missing.

What’s been missing, I think, is that confidence and faith in a surveyor’s marker, pale white wood that in my mind flashed silver in the sun, just before the calvary charge began. So I think it’s finally time for me to fill the empty hole of childhood sureties with something. Faith in myself? Confidence? I don’t know what to call it, but whatever it is, I’m glad it’s filling that empty place in my life. It seems like it’s easier going.

I’ve decided to do something vaguely nutty.

I realized a few days ago that I’m verging on becoming a cat lady, only without the cats, and also without being of the appropriate gender. One friend claims I’m a shut-in computer nerd, which isn’t true. Because nerds make good money on their obsessions, while I am merely a geek, one who has odd and interesting knowledge that is not easily monetized.

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