May 12th, 2005
Solitude
I don’t have a lot of warm memories from the three years I spent in Cleveland, going to Hawken. My relationship with most of the older guys on the football team was abrasive, to say the least; I had no idea how to interact with girls; and my strongest relationships tended to be with teachers. While this might have been good come report card time, it wasn’t very beneficial to my social life on the weekends.
Consequently, I spent copious amounts of time alone in my room.
There was only so much homework one person could do, so subsequently, I found myself learning new an innovative ways to entertain myself.
It is amazing what someone is capable of doing when there is nothing to do.
On a typical weekday, I would get back to my house at around 5 in the evening. I would normally change into a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt and start watching reruns on television.
At around 6, I would throw in a couple of Stouffers frenchbread pizzas and continue watching reruns. Since my father didn’t normally get home until 8 or 9 PM, we didn’t really have anything that resembled family dinners.
My Father, being the eternal pragmatist, had a remarkably simplistic solution to the problem of feeding me. At the beginning of each month, we would take a trip to the Stouffers factory and buy a bulk container of 50 boxes of Stouffers pizzas. The dilemna of how to feed me was magically solved in a one-hour long trip.
By 7, I would have eaten two Stouffers pizzas and watched about two hours of reruns on television. I would normally go up to my room at this point in time, and grind out my homework in an hour or two.
By 9, I would be done with all my responsibilities, and that is when I began to use my creativity to fill the time.
One of the things I would do is to read the Plain Dealer sports page. Not in the conventional sense that one normally imagines, but rather, I would skip the articles and instead concentrate on the box scores.
There was something that fascinated me about how I could visualize what happened in a game by staring at a chart with numbers. Not only would I study the box scores of the teams I was a fan of, but I would study the statistics of players who had formerly played for teams I was a fan of. It was all quite autistic.
After about thirty minutes of studying the box score, I would look through my old Dungeons and Dragons books, reading about the various spells; types of monsters; and types of characters.
Now that I am twenty-six, I can admit that I used to be addicted to Dungeons and Dragons when I was younger. Mind you, I stopped playing by the time I got to high-school, but there was always something that still fascinated me about the methodology involved with creating a universe.
I loved the fact that there were clearly defined rules for deciding how a character was brought into the world, how they interacted with the environment around them, and how they grew through time.
In the absence of interaction with real people, preoccupation with inanimate objects; and with concepts, flourishes. What is scary, is not that one can become hyperfocused on something inanimate, it is that time has the stench of death affixed to it in these situations. Memories are painted in the black and white of text in a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook.
Minutes melted into one another, and suddenly, it was 10 PM - time to go to bed.
