The Purple Tux

With just enough education to perform.

Everything In Its Right Place. (Vulgar Language Warning!)

Frowning has nothing to do with your mouth. This is a lesson I’ve learned long ago. You know whenever people challenge you to staring contests, trying to see who smiles or laughs first? Sometimes they try to start off with a frown. Usually, this entails a ridiculous reverse-smile/downturn of the lips. Most of the time, though, it just looks like the person is pouting. Pouting and frowning are two different things. Pouting looks a lot sillier.

You don’t frown with your mouth, you frown with your eyes. Sure, sometimes frowning requires a bit of downturning at the corners of the lips, but even so, it’s all about the eyes. The reason that the phrase “the eyes are a window to the soul” became a cliché is because, like many universal truths, it was simply repeated over and over because people are generally stupid and stupid people need to repeat things to themselves in order to remember them.

You can’t just frown by trying to turn your mouth upside down; that will never work. In order to perform a real frown, you’ve got to feel the emotion inside of you. It’s the same as when you try to smile. If it’s a real smile, people will see it in your eyes, but if you’re doing a crappy job of faking it, again, your eyes will betray you.

The reason I’m talking about the art of frowning is because yesterday and today, I was chilling out with my buddy Champ (no joke, his real name is Champ and it’s not just a nickname). We had a little staring contest going on, and he wasn’t the champ. A couple of other people around noticed this and probably said some funny comments, but I don’t really remember what they said and that isn’t really the point, anyway.

What got me was when Champ said to me, “How do you manage to stare people down like that? Do you just think hateful thoughts?” He was partly joking, I think. A couple of girls tried to play the staring contest with me and I trounced them all. Actually, I don’t really frown when I stare people down, I just kind of scowl at them.

When I don’t want to smile, almost no force on Earth can make me smile. Despite my reputation, I smile much more often than most would expect. It’s just that I can turn this feature off almost whenever I want. The past few years, I’ve found that I’ve chosen to try and smile less and less. (Although I must admit that I doubt anyone notices, because I still smile plenty of times every day.)

Still, Champ’s question haunted me. What got me was that he said it yesterday and today. Do I have lots of hate stored up inside of me? The honest answer to that is, Yes, I do. I have massive amounts of hatred bottled up. Even in my dreams, the hating never stops.

Just this morning, I had a dream. I dreamt that I was chilling at a football game with one of my friends. For some reason, I had just bought a bag of Fuji apples from Safeway. I told my friend to hang on to my bag while I went to go use the bathroom. I took care of my business, but when I came back to our seats, my apples were strewn all over the floor. I asked my friend, “Dude, what the crap happened? Why are all my apples on the ground?” Unapologetically, my friend replied, “Oh, I just dropped the bag, that’s all.” And then he shrugged. This angered me very much. In a blind rage, I charged him and grabbed him by the collar and started shaking him. I started to yell, “Fuck you, man, FUCK YOU!” In fact, I yelled so loudly that I actually woke myself up yelling “Fuck you!!” As an aside, do you think it’s sinning to think sinful thoughts in dreams?

That wasn’t the first dream of the sort that I’ve had. I’ve probably experienced at least a good half dozen (at least) dreams where I dreamt I was killing a person (violently) and woke myself up screaming curse words. I assumed everyone had dreams like that, until I talked to a couple of my friends about my dreams, and they could only shake their heads in astonishment.

I’ve thought about my hatred. I know I shouldn’t hate people, but hating others just comes so naturally to me after all these years. People who don’t understand where I’m coming from have never been mocked back in their elementary school years. They’ve never gotten into schoolyard fights every other week. They’ve never been teased mercilessly by other kids five years older than them.

This one time when I was in fourth grade, I was waiting at a bus stop with my mom after school. Then this particular eight-grader ran up behind me, pulled my hood over my face, called me “Afro” (I was always pretty hairy, even as a kid- and if you laughed right now, well piss off). My mom yelled at him, but he ran off and just laughed or yelled or something- totally disrespecting my mom.

At that moment, I knew humans were an effing terrible species. That was possibly the first time I ever hated someone so much I seriously wanted to kill him. I was only, what, like nine years old. I hated that bastard. His name was Phillip. This one time, he tried to flush my head down a toilet. Bullies don’t get much more generic than that. It’s just damn depressing that young kids can be such pricks.

If desiring to murder someone in my mind is a sin, then that’s a sin I’ve committed countless times. Honestly, I think I can say that there isn’t a week that goes by where I haven’t thought about killing someone at least once. I don’t think I would ever kill a person just because I hated him, though. I just fantasize about it a lot.

I haven’t even gotten into a fight since freshman year of college. (I got into a street fight with a random prick over a basketball game.) I have some rage built up in me. Last weekend, my friend almost got into a fight, and I was so ready to join in. Sometimes, I just want to fight someone. I want to hurt someone as much as I can, and I want someone to hurt me back. I want to feel justified in hitting another human being. I want to feel the satisfaction of socking someone’s smile off his face. (I don’t want to fight someone who can outright kick my ass without breaking a sweat, though.)

I think hateful thoughts all the time. The thing that I’ve realized, though, is that sometimes thinking hateful thoughts actually does make me smile. It’s quite perverse, I suppose, but I’m being honest. I feel a giddy rush of ecstasy imagining my former asshole Track and Field coach from high school getting crushed by a boulder or getting his face smashed in with crowbar with his skull broken in two and the brains oozing out slowly out of his nostrils. Of course, if such a thing actually happened, I probably wouldn’t smile. I wouldn’t exactly mourn the loss, either, though.

So, no, I don’t win staring contests because I focus on hateful thoughts. Staring contests are all about detaching myself from everything else, just a slow disconnect to unburden myself from the reality of human emotions. I scowl because the expression comes naturally to me and because I think smiles are special. Smiles should be reserved for those occasions when something is genuinely funny or exciting or- I don’t know, just smile when something right happens! But the worst is smiling because of nervousness. That’s just the worst.

I would have liked to end this little self-reflective essay with one of my trademark quotes, such as, “Not everyone expresses joy with a smile” or some such phrase, but I’ve already used that one for a previous post. Instead, I shall resort to another cliché:

Look into my eyes.

When is the story going to be about me?

It's hard to work up the concentration to write an entry. I would have written more in the past month if I hadn't been so busy reading other things. That's my problem. Reading and writing are pretty related activities, but when it comes right down to it, they have nothing to do with each other. To put it in comic book terms, Reading is to Writing as Flash is to Zoom (the Reverse Flash); Reading is to Writing as Superman is to Bizarro; Reading is to Writing as Earth is to Earth-2. So similar, and yet fundamentally different. If I didn't love to read so much, I would be able to write a lot more, but if I didn't like reading in the first place, I probably wouldn't want to write at all.

I just wish I could have it both ways.

Right now, someone out there is writing his hardest. He's writing each and every moment of spare time he has, submitting his work wherever he can, getting ready to make a decent living as a pro writer. This guy, whoever and wherever he is, is kicking my ass hard. I wish I could be this guy, writing all day long, playing with the stories and ideas in my head. Even if no one else liked what I had to say, I know that if I kept on writing, I would eventually be able to eke out something that someone, somewhere, might consider printing.

But all I want to do is devour that thick, juicy, sexy stack of books on my shelf. My sexy, sexy, shelf, which only cost about eighteen bucks at Walmart, already stocked with years' worth of novels and graphic literature. If I could have it my way, I would just sit down, get naked, point the fan at my bare derrier, and read some Brian Michael Bendis or Alan Moore or Grant Morrison. Read all day long. Consume those insanely brilliant stories. Voraciously and rapaciously absorb all the pretty words and pretty pictures.

But I was sitting on the toilet reading a great comic the other day, and I thought, "Man, it would be the dopest if I could be a writer and get paid for it." I've come to believe now that my one, solitary dream in life is to be a writer (while being able to survive financially). When I was in middle school, my dream was to fly an X-Wing and blow up the Death Star. That was back during the X-Wing/TIE Fighter glory days on PC. When I was in high school, my dream was to marry the most beautiful princess in the entire galaxy, and raise our children to be Jedi Knights, but I know that was merely a teenage phase. I'm older now, and I've gotten over that. Princess Leia will forever own a special chunk of my battered heart, but I'm okay, I'm just okay.

For the past couple years, I haven’t had a special dream of any sort. Now I know why: I’m not special. Special people have special dreams. I don’t have a special dream because I am not special. This is not self-loathing, and this is not an immature bout of angst. This is only a fact. Not everyone can be special. Not everyone IS special. If everyone WERE special, then being special would be the new normal, and thus, everyone would be normal. I say “normal” and not “average,” because I believe the default status for a human being is to be normal. “Average” is normal people fighting hard to believe they are special. They are only fooling themselves. Again, I am not disparaging anyone (though it would be good if we all felt disparaged daily, simply for the fact that we are dirty, rotten, stinking people), but I am merely stating a fact. From an objective point of view, most of us are normal, and most of the time, we only come to recognize the special via hindsight. Therefore, for the most part, we are all comrades in normalcy, and there is no shame in that. We are all normal people with our own lives and our own stories. Our own stories. We live some stories and we read or hear about others. The only question is, Who is the main character?

Someone out there is writing his butt off while I read my comic books. Maybe that guy will write something awesome one day, something honest and filled with conviction, something that critics and fans alike adore. Maybe that guy is the main character in my story. I said, Maybe HE’S the main character in MY story. Maybe the story is about how I watch this aspiring writer attain glory and honor, and at the end I am only left with a lingering sense of bitterness. Why do we never stop to consider that we, as individuals, may merely exist to be supporting characters in someone else’s story?

Why is my first inclination to assume, “Dru can do this better than anyone else, and that’s why he’s the hero of this piece.”? Why do I have such a mighty opinion of myself? Why do I hate myself so damn much sometimes, and at other times, why do I feel like the Main Man? I always look at my friends and think, Yeah, I can do this better than he can. Or, Man, he’s totally clueless, he should just let me handle it. Or, if everyone were like me, the world would be a truly better place.

Maybe the world WOULD be a better place if everyone were like me. I certainly wouldn’t deny that. But whose world would it be? What good is a world where everyone is part of the supporting cast? What good is a world where there is no main character to drive the plot forward? What good is a stagnant world?

And that’s my biggest flaw, right there.

I am stagnant.

I want things both ways. I want things the easy way. I cut corners and do idiotic things that prove how I don’t deserve to be the main character. Can a jack of all trades be a master of any discipline? Just how instrumental can a supporting character be?

Ender will save us all. But what of Ender’s Shadow? My life is a story about me living in the shadow of everyone else around me. Everyone around me is better than me at something, like school or sports or music. Everyone around me is more popular, more beloved, more attractive, more important to other people. Everyone around me looms over me, every day in every way, and I fester in their shadows.

If you are reading this, THIS IS YOUR STORY. You are kicking my ass right now, and bravo, I say. No hard feelings at all. I only have one question:

When will the story be about me?

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