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“I can’t seem to face up to the facts
I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax
I can’t sleep ‘cause my bed’s on fire.”
—Talking Heads, ‘Psycho Killer’.
“Youth is wasted on the young.”
—George Bernard Shaw
Based on a true story. Names have been changed. This was previously published as a newsletter series. For more exclusive L.J. Shen content, please sign-up.
If we start at the beginning, which I believe is the best way to start almost every story, we need to look at the context of the thing called My Life.
This is all going to be very quick and very messy, so please just pretend it’s your first time having sex and lower your expectations. Spoiler alert: you are not going to find pleasure in this chapter. But, like your first time, it’s a rite of passage. So welcome in. It’s good to have you here. Your hair looks great.
I would like to preface this novella by saying, this story is based on a true story, although some liberties were taken, and names were changed to protect the privacy of people.
This story is also PG-13. I mean, I’m pretty sure I included a scene and a half of explicit sex, but nothing worth plugging your Magic Wand into its charger.
Another thing I should note is that I wrote this novella at a time of existential artistic crisis, and it really helped me. I mean, it didn’t help me with what I wanted to do next in my career, and it was also a huge timewaster, but it helped me in a sense that it rekindled my love for the craft.
So thank you, little novella, for being a pal.
Yours,
L.
I was a bored teenager from a middle-class family. A straight A minus student. Quiet, observant, and moderately artistic. Not queen bee by any stretch of the imagination—and I mean, even when you reallyyyy stretched it—but popular enough to believe, or rather hope, that I would have a pleasant high school experience. After all, I was the best thing one can be—average. Not too pretty, but not ugly, either. Not a brainiac, but not a dumbass. Not an athlete, but I could get from point A to point B without stumbling over my own feet.
It was perfectly expected that I would have a nice, boring high school experience.
But that’s not what happened.
One thing I knew even before I set foot in high school was that I wasn’t going to mesh well with the jocks.
The outliers, the freaks, and the punks were way more interesting to me. Not only because most of them had artistic streaks, but because they listened to great bands, read books about philosophy, and had ideas. Bad ideas. Good ideas. But ideas that weren’t just limited to what to wear to prom or how many Skittles you could shove into your nostrils to win a bet.
There was only one tiny problem—my high school didn’t get the memo that it was the early 2000s and didn’t have any freaks.
None. Nada. Zilch. Gornisht.
I lived in a small beach town filled with surfers, jocks, and more surfers. Those were the only three categories to choose from, and I didn’t fit in with any of them.
It was a curse. To be the macabre, eyeliner-enthusiastic kid with the fishnets and black clothes when everyone around you wore Billabong and smelled of surfboard wax. The laid-back summer vibe of my town was a burden I had to carry like a mark of Cain.
When I was a sophomore, my life changed. Finally—finally!—a punk rock kid moved into my neighborhood.
He was a junior. Everyone knew he was in a band. Not just a band, but a band that once warmed up another band that was pretty big at the time. The rest of the band members were from a neighboring city. Punk Rock Kid had just moved to our beach town, and, to put it mildly, he wasn’t really happy about it. See, his parents got divorced and he had to descend from the rich suburbia Olympus to my town, which was more concrete jungle than manicured lawns.
I was immediately fascinated with him.
It didn’t matter to me that he had bad acne. That his lanky, pale posture made him look like a wrinkled bookmark, and that his eyes were too close together. It didn’t matter that he spoke with a voice too low, or that he was immediately picked on by all of the jocks, or that he seemed unnerved by everyone around him. He had a wry sense of humor, wore cool band shirts, and he was a self-proclaimed anarchist.
An anarchist! What a great idea.
Now, let me just say, even my fifteen-year-old ass knew that Anarchism, as a concept, sucked sweaty balls. But there was no denying that an anarchist friend sounded WAY more interesting than the same, cookie-cutting surfer dudebros I grew up with. My entire town smelled of brine, surfboard wax, and sunscreen. They all listened to Blink182 and Green Day and thought that if you didn’t wake up at five a.m. to catch waves, you were a loser.
