I know you’re reading this, because you’ve been following my writing religiously, waiting for my genius to break through and become apparent to the rest of the world. You’re waiting for me to find my footing, find my voice, find a writing project to throw myself into and make the entire Internet pay attention.

That’s fine. Please, though, stop writing to me.

There’s nothing inappropriate about your letters. They’re chatty and professional, and everyone thinks it’s just so moving and inspiring that the English teacher who nominated me for this fellowship is continuing to follow my work and support me. Fine, yes, you’re a good person—but our time together is over.

I’m sure teachers like you just wait for students like me. Students who don’t just write because they have to, but because they want to. Students who have something to say. Students who aren’t afraid to break the rules. Students who have “a voice.” We make your job worthwhile, and what’s more, we’re your path to immortality. Bob Dylan’s English teacher has never written a book, but his desk has been exhibited in museums across the country. This man recognized genius, we’re told. This man gave young Bobby Zimmerman encouragement, and might just have been instrumental in ensuring that albums like Blonde on Blonde were brought into the world. Thanks, Mr. Rolfzen.

Am I your Bob Dylan? That’s a pretty fucking long shot, but I’m your something. Your only student to go on to any kind of success or recognition as a writer. And I’m only 17—a high school dropout (unless you count Internet school, which I don’t). I have a lot of decades left to win a Pulitzer, or a Nobel, or at least a Minnesota Book Award or something. Someday, it just might happen that I’ll be standing behind a podium and give you a shout-out. You might even be in the room, an invited guest.

Not that you’re only looking for recognition. You’re looking for affirmation that you’re making a difference, that all those papers you’ve graded and detentions you’ve monitored is actually adding up to something—and in terms you can appreciate, not just in terms of students who say thanks and give you a Starbucks gift card at the end of the year. You’re looking for a piece of writing you can point to and say, “Every once in a while…”

You’re doing that already. I see you sharing my shit on Facebook—and in public updates, so all your former students can see, if they for some reason decide to look up your profile when they’re drunkenly reminiscing. You go ahead and do what you do, but you can save your paper and stamps, because I’m not going to read your letters any more—and I never responded in the first place.

Why? Because I hated high school. Because I don’t want to be a stereotype. Because I would have done fine without you. Because a teacher-student relationship is all about the context. I appreciated your encouragement, and obviously I came on this writers’ program, so I think that something good (or at least less-shitty than the alternative) came about as a result of your sticking your neck out for me. Thanks. I’ve said thanks before and there, I’m saying it again. But I’m not looking for a Mr. Chips, or Mr. Holland, or Mr. Robin-Williams-on-a-Desk. I’m looking for someone you’re not, something you don’t have. I don’t have it either, but now it’s time for me to find it on my own.

See you on Facebook, man.

Unreality House is on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook

Photo by Ben Russell (Creative Commons)

I remember the running and laughing and jumping over puddles and the sex, and the sex, and the sex, and the sex. Actually, I don’t really remember the sex so much as I remember the locations where it happened in my apartment, and that it was good.

I like taking wet clothes off, and I liked taking your wet clothes off. I remember hiding behind blinds the next day, but not for as long as I would have liked, because you had to go to a thing with your girlfriend’s family.

After you left, I went back and looked at my still-wet clothes on the floor and wondered whether I was using you, or using him, or getting used, or whether it all mattered. My upstairs neighbors were listening to their damn Pearl Jam album again, and I had a desperate sense of futility.

I hate relationships. They make me feel trapped. But I hate even more not being in them. There’s that place inside me that nothing can fill except someone who’s promised to be there, and to stay there, no matter what. What always ends up mattering, but as long as someone’s promised, I can believe and be content.

I hate writing about shit like this, but the alternative is just sitting here alone in the rain and eating myself alive. Here’s a piece of me for you to glance at, lick, taste, chew, spit out, ignore, whatever. It’s out of my system now.

Photo by Toshihiro Oimatsu (Creative Commons)

Her name was Sally. We’d hang out most night on top of the reservoir. Yeah, I know, on top of the reservoir. Like we were in a fucking Springsteen song, except it was real and there was no fucking—at least, between us. There were just long stares, stares during which I counted the hairs on her head, and watched her buttons cling stubbornly to their buttonholes, and did geometry with her legs.

She had curly blond hair and long limbs that tapered at the ends, like she’d just eaten a slice of Wonderland cake and it hadn’t quite reached her little hands and feet yet. Her eyes were small, too, and set slightly too closely together. I used to mentally Photoshop her—this was before Photoshop, but it’s what I was doing in my head—pulling her eyes away from her nose and making her hands and feet grow, so she’d be perfect.

But she didn’t need to be perfect—she had me, and she knew it. She was a year older than me, and a couple inches taller; I was like her toyboy. When we made a circle to talk and pass the pipe, I’d try to sit next to her. She didn’t smell good—she smelled kind of musty. I don’t know why. It wasn’t like she was dirty or anything, she was just one of those people who smells a little musty all the time. To me, that was hot. I didn’t want the hairspray-smelling girls in my grade, especially not the one who kept asking her friends to ask me if I liked her. I found that mortifying, and I wished that she hadn’t made such a big deal of it so that we could just hook up and get what we both wanted without it making the goddamn school paper.

There was no chance of Sally hooking up with me, but she knew how to lead me on. She’d give me long boner-inducing hugs, and play with my hair, and call my house if they got together and for whatever reason I wasn’t there. I was like her safety: someone acceptable for her to lean on—sometimes actually physically lean on—while she put actual moves, more subtly, on riskier bets.

In August, one of those bets paid off for her. I remember exactly where I was standing when she told me: I was on the phone looking out our dining room window, watching our fat neighbor wash his car in the bright sunshine. She asked if I’d gone to the reservoir the previous night. I said yes, and asked where she’d been. She’d been with Sean, she said. Oh, I said. Yeah, she said. Then I hung up and started screaming—crying and screaming and punching the couch like a goddamn idiot.

Now she’s engaged. I like to look at her Pinterest and tell myself what a sellout she turned into. What a fucking sellout.

Photo by Tarah Dawdy (Creative Commons)

Did not need to come back

Transformers. The original Transformers had a bizarro quality to them. Like, an evil robot dog that turns into a microcassette that goes in a microcassette recorder robot. (Take this dictation, motherfuckers!) Or a robot that turns into a space shuttle that turns into a steam locomotive. And when they transformed into humanoid form, they looked super awkward. Now they’re just big loud robot-looking robots. What fun is that?

Strawberry Shortcake. Every doll smells like a different food. There are enough kids at school who smell like different weird foods; I don’t need them sitting on my shelf.

My Little Pony. These are, and always have been, strictly for candy ravers. Unless I’m going to get high when I lick that picture of a rainbow on the pony’s ass, I’ve got no use for this shit.

Care Bears. They shoot people with love that comes out of their stomachs. Come on. This whole brand is nothing more than a gift to the people who like to have sex in animal suits.

Cabbage Patch Kids. Xavier Roberts had a million kids, tattooed his name on their asses, and gave them all up for adoption. Kill the product line and give that guy a reality TV show.

Should come back

She-Ra. What a badass. Why do we have a crappy Avengers movie instead of a movie where She-Ra and Xena join forces, and Xena’s into She-Ra but She-Ra has a weird thing going on with her brother He-Man, and He-Man’s perving on Gabrielle but Gabrielle’s obviously wet for She-Ra? It would be like Closer, but with talking green tigers.

Go For It! This game ruled. To win, you had to buy as much consumer crap as you possibly could—the first player to buy useless shit in all major retail categories won. It was even better than Mall Madness.

Muppet Babies. So the Muppets are back, whatever. Fuck the Muppets. The Muppet Babies were cuter than sloth GIFs.

Teddy Ruxbin. You put a tape in him, and his mouth moved while he talked. Teddy Ruxbin was actually too expensive for my family to own, which is why I want it to come back: I want to buy one and see if he’ll work with Adam Carolla tapes.

Lawn darts. They still have these, but now they’re just weighted—not pointed, like they used to be. I have a few people I’d like to play a very aggressive game of old-school lawn darts with.

1. It was easy. Bullying is like crime: usually, it’s not something you make a big plan to do. You just do it because you can get away with it. The kid is there, he’s vulnerable, you know you can get an easy laugh by throwing his stupid hat in a puddle…done. This is why 99% of not being bullied is just staying out of the fucking way.

2. I was bored. School is goddamn boring. Boring, boring, boring. If I’d actually had something interesting to do, I wouldn’t have been compelled to kill time by tormenting other kids.

3. Other people were assholes to me. I’m not going to play the victim card and say I was so sorely abused or whatever, but the fact of the matter is that school is full of giant fucking assholes—from teachers to custodians to other kids. When people say insulting shit to you because they can…well, I’m not saying that makes it morally okay to be a jerk to someone else, but do the math.

4. I wanted to make the kids I bullied wake up and smell reality. Really, bro, can’t you see why it’s not a great idea to wear your red Coca-Cola Bear sweatshirt to school? I thought that maybe if I pulled it over his head and shoved him into the wall, he’d stop wearing it, and I’d be doing him a favor because people might actually start to fucking respect him.

5. People expected me to. After a while, I became known as “the bully.” When vulnerable kids appeared, everyone in class obviously expected me to give that kid shit, and if I didn’t, they’d be disappointed in me. No one likes to let their fans down.

I’m not saying bullying is good, and I’m not asking for your forgiveness or compassion or any shit like that. I’m just saying, basically, that school is a machine designed to make bullies. Don’t be so shocked when it works.

Photo by Brian Auer (Creative Commons)

1992. I was ten, and I thought it would be a great idea to take my bike out in the spring and do a spinout on the sidewalk ice. I hit the ice, spun, and landed on my side so hard that it felt like I was made of concrete and I’d actually broken. I couldn’t breathe, and I thought I was dying. What would have been my last moments were spent thinking about what a dumbass I was.

1997. Among my friends, the injury I sustained on the homemade ramp in Marlon’s backyard was the least severe. Bob scarred his calf, Mike got a compound fracture, and Louis ripped his scrotum. It was awesome.

2003. Got in a fight outside a bar on the night I turned 21. I was full of whiskey and beer and vaporous hubris, until I puked it all out onto the curb and watched it drip slowly down the sewer.

2004. Drunk again, fell down the stairs. Once you fall down the stairs—like, really fall down the stairs—you start treating stairs with respect. Take it from me, stairs will fuck you up.

2008. Took boxing lessons, trying to be Mailer. Ended up more like Plimpton.

2012. How many creative writers does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, as long as he’s not living in a decrepit old house with bats in the attic, mice in the cupboards, and janky-legged chairs at the goddamn motherfucking assfrassing sonuvabich kitchen table. FUCK.

Photo by Geoffrey Kehrig (Creative Commons)

“I cheated on you too.”

“I just need to be single right now.”

“I’m gay.”

“I want more sex than you do.”

“You never fucking talk.”

“You don’t understand what’s important to me, and you never will.”

“You smell weird.”

“You cry when you can’t get it up.”

“I’m afraid that if I wait any longer to break up with you, you’ll kill my cat when I do.”

“When I said ‘not tonight,’ you threw a tantrum and broke your bong, then didn’t understand what I thought was so funny.”

“No reason. I just want to.”

Photo by Kaptain Kobold (Creative Commons)

• He was awkwardly hinting that he wanted to try butt sex.

• He thought we were at the point in the relationship where he can be lazy about foreplay.

• He was planning to introduce a sex toy, and he didn’t think it would be sexy to drop it on the bed along with the necessary tube of K-Y.

• He had it left over from his last relationship and wasn’t sure what to do with it.

• He wanted to use a slip-n-slide indoors.

• He was planning to give me a back rub, and he was out of lotion.

• He was planning to give himself a mohawk as a joke. (Or not as a joke.)

• He was planning to get me a pair of skin-tight leather pants.

• He read a book that told him to get some lube.

• He found my diary saying that I wished he would use lube.

One night in November, back when the four of us actually hung out together, we were lying around the living room talking about dreams. Will said he believed dreams were random, Lucy said she never remembered any of her dreams, I said that I think dreams are very significant, and Tanner didn’t say anything except to tell a story about a dream he had last year.

He’d been sleeping with one of his regular cougars, and, in his words, “I started to actually like her. Like, we could occasionally have an actual conversation. Once she came over and we actually forgot to have sex. Almost. We almost forgot.”

That night, he said, after she left, he dreamed that he was at a crowded party, and he saw her across the room. He wanted to get close to her, to catch a smile, to share a joke, maybe to slide his hand across her ass. But the party was too packed, and he escaped out onto the patio.

Outside, he lit a cigarette and noticed that there were a couple of young kids playing on the patio. Looking more closely, he recognized that they were his lover’s kids—and their dad, his fuck buddy’s husband, was watching them while he talked with a younger woman. Tanner wanted to believe that there was something going on between the husband and this woman, but he didn’t see it in their body language. Then the woman turned to go back inside, and the husband said, “Hey, check on Elizabeth for me, will you? Make sure she’s actually getting some air in there?” He smiled kindly while he said it.

The dream ended there—Tanner woke up suddenly, he said, as though from a nightmare. I asked Tanner what he thought the dream meant, and why he woke up from it so suddenly. “I have no fucking idea,” he said. “Will’s right, it was just random. It’s just the one dream I actually remember.”

You had me there, Tanner—for just one brief moment, I thought maybe you weren’t a total asshole.

Photo by Drake Lelane (Creative Commons)

Pro: Buttloads of money.

Con: No time to spend it.

Pro: It’s extremely challenging.

Con: It’s fucking hard.

Pro: Expense account.

Con: Accounting doesn’t accept receipts tossed in a brown paper bag.

Pro: You always have the newest tech toys.

Con: You actually have to use them.

Pro: Opportunities to invest in creative start-ups.

Con: Most of them are run by “creative” fuck-ups.

Pro: You have a nicer place than any of the other English majors.

Con: None of them come to see it, because they all think you’re a sellout.

Pro: Meeting lots of hot women.

Con Pro: No time for relationships, only furtive sex.

Photo by Ed Yourdon (Creative Commons)