Monday, August 15, 2016

My teenage years described in pretentious prose

The chubby boy scurried home that day in a sweaty hurry.  Dark patches had formed under the arms pits of his scratchy white shirt, as the straps of his school bag laden with worn out textbooks and trading cards dug into his shoulders.  As he pried open the door of the Victorian terrace house, the package lay there in wait.  He tore into it with the dirty nails on the end his chubby digits, clumsily shredding through the brown exterior of the parcel, into the bubble wrapped contents.  There they were: three CD cases, each containing the soundtracks of the teenage years that lay ahead of him.  One bore the image of a cockroach, another a flaming skull, the third and final one had a cockroach rubbing its fetid legs together, looking some how as eager to spread its disease as the boy was to delve deep into the music.  This music was aggressive.  Sometimes whiny.  It was his whiny though.  Undeserved self-pitying whiny.  He'd return to his quarters, those which contained that adolescent stench of wet towel, used underwear and discarded tissues to play each of them in turn to complete  ad nauseum.  As the music would begin, so too would the familiar screech and bleep of the old telephone modem.  56 kbps was all he needed to dial into his virtual worlds.  Aside from the ignored maternal or paternal enquiries of "Have you done your homework?", he was free to partake in whichever form of Walter-Mittyism took his fancy.  Wizard, starship commander, lothario.  Why leave these realms when the material plane held no such respect for him.  Social status and the insecurities which accompanied it held no baring on his success here.  The cacophony and the words on his thick screened monitor encapsulated him in a blissful vacuum.  This was his realm and no others need enter.