Entry 002
Adriance doesn’t really talk much about the lawsuits, and there were a couple of them. At least three, I’ve gathered, but between the gag orders and his own insecurity about them it could probably be a lot more. He remembers the look of the courtrooms, dyed red-orange with big panels of varnished wood everywhere with a really musty smell. He told me people looked at him like he was diseased, and they didn’t get all that close in case they might catch his badness from the air. I feel like that was a projection but that’s not something you can tell a kid who’s been in court more times than you’ve left the state.
I heard a couple of different horror stories from him, one for breaking that kid’s whole face, one event at a food court with the broken glass, one mishap between a school desk and some drywall, and one impressively fast break-in to get snacks for his class in junior high when his mom made him bring celery and carrots instead of a few cadburys and doritos. He also got sent to the principal’s office a few times for telling girls the exact and accurate sizing, style and colour of their bras and panties, followed up by “could you let me have a look just to make sure?” but he laughed about that when he told me.
This led to a load of suspensions, expulsions and “new beginnings” defined as his parents giving him long lectures in the evening on the boons and benefits of being a good boy—which is to say a totally normal and unremarkable boy. This further meant abstract things like having an unshakeable (mostly, thankfully, liberal) respect for American principles (love of democracy, liberty, sportsmanship[i] This one was always comical because there was no way in hell Adriance would ever be allowed to play sports. Everyone involved with him already knew this because “a year with zero lawsuits” and “Adriance being encouraged to exist in a physical space” were not close and happy bedfellows, so I don’t know why they bothered telling him about sportsmanship and competition. It seems to me they only told him that because they wanted to make him feel bad about there being no chance he could ever participate. And before you say anything, yeah, this did give him a complex. If you ask me, they should’ve been telling him about the great American pastime of having some brewskis, heading down to the shooting range, and driving a car (ideally not in this order), which were all things that he might have actually had fun doing. , and respect for your fellow man, etc.), and asking oneself what a normal human reaction to a given situation was before you decided you wanted to cause some serious bodily harm to someone else, along with more concrete things like wearing a nice polo shirt to school, keeping your hair short and your grades up, and many late night rewatches of Christopher Reeve’s Superman from 1978. The latter event Adriance said was most bearable because afterwards he would crawl into bed and jack off to Margot Kidder like he was getting paid money to do it. Fortunately for Adriance’s future personhood, he was only ever the bigger person with regards to height and not much else, so when he arrived at my high school at the age of fifteen, he was a bitter asshole who, even though he was not allowed to wring you by the neck by virtue of his conformist upbringing, would look at you like he wanted to do it, and you’d know he wanted to do it.
What all this BS really amounted to was that Adriance was a useless, sexless nerd too afraid to come out of his shell in a really cool and radical way that might have actually gotten people to like him, so it just manifested itself as the above personality archetype. And not only was he a nerd, he wasn’t even good at it. Seriously, he’d always ask me for help with finding the Yoshi coins in SMW, and never traded me a Growlithe for my Vulpix even though that’s literally how the game was supposed to work, and he did that when he was in his twenties! Anyways, the only place Adriance was really permitted to fight the Man (or the Man and his Wife, as it were) was in his pretty decent ability to play guitar and sometimes bass. Now don’t get me twisted up here. He’s not a virtuoso or aficionado. If I can be really honest, he didn’t have any good or new ideas—which I thought, given his comparatively interesting childhood, would have implored him to create some kind of, I don’t know, chronic disease genre, but this never panned out. But for the kind of guy Adriance was, who was maybe just a little too dumb to do anything really interesting, the kind of music that was anti-establishment because it was anti-whatever-your-parents-were (which you would eventually become in another ten or fifteen years) was just right for him. This meant lots of Weezer, Pavement and Neutral Milk Hotel.
I’m making it sound like I don’t respect him, which is only true maybe 10% of the time. You think whatever you want about how it looks like I think about Adriance, but I want to say that when I saw him lurching out of the school counselor’s waiting room—because he was in the timeslot just before mine during lunch break—following an epic fight that involved him taunting Mrs. S. into writing to his parents that he was a delinquent lost cause for his Intermittent Explosive Disorder which of course implored Mrs. S. to have a talk with the music club director and the boss of the only extracurricular Adriance was ever good at, thereby cutting him off from what little adult validation he could ever get, I was afraid of him slamming the door and blocked my ears in anticipation. The room stayed quiet.