Deals with the Devil, I'm the AntiChrist, & Other Stories
Posted: Sat Jul 26, 2008 5:01 am
Technically speaking, I should probably be putting this in War Stories, but seeing as it functions as an "I'm Back" (what can I say, the Marty McFly act Tabloid Hound and the others have stumbled into put an end to a month of lurking fueled by the kind of thinking that leads to visits by an angel named Clarence) I think I can get away with Agency Voice, at least for now. 
And before anyone asks, I'm... physically unharmed, back in Springfield, the so-called cultural center of the Ozarks, where all the god-fearing people have gunracks on their gunracks and a church just isn't a church unless it has a Starbucks in it. But I digress...
I believe, the last several times I posted, I claimed to be planning an assault on some kind of secret government facility. Before that was some half-completed story about me ambushing three fully armed agents of this shadow agency at my internet girlfriend's house. Most of this was a lie (though even I was unaware of quite how much at the time), a fabrication meant to make everyone assume I'd been killed or captured. There really were three agents, and one of them really was my old "friend" Chuck, but the fact of the matter is I went quietly and faked my own disappearance in exchange for something. A binding promise from their boss that none of his goons would ever go near my girl again. In retrospect, I really should have paid more attention to Ron's policy towards deals with the devil.
Of course, I also should have listened to Mom when she told me something about 13 years ago, back when the divorce was going through. At the time I wrote it off as misplaced anger over the whole ordeal. I certainly couldn't take it literally, because the implications about me were simply unacceptable. By the time I'd learned to dismiss most of my mother's actions as sheer religious lunacy, I thought that she actually believed it, but that her belief had no meaning. Now I recognize it as a somewhat valid metaphor for the soulless nature of a true sociopath. You'd think a PhD in Psychology would know better than to tell her 8 year old son that his father is the devil (then again, she told me years later that I was an accident born of her emotionally blackmailing my father into sex, and telling me this was supposed to make HIM look bad, so maybe she's just an idiot). I vividly remember her clarification (at length), that she didn't mean "oh, the devil posed as your father, Rosemary's Baby style", but rather that the man I knew as my father, Andrew Maynard, was literally Satan himself walking the Earth. Which, to the still relatively devout Christian boy I was at the time (as opposed to the vile heathenous... man-boy?... I've become), meant I was the AntiChrist and that I had to die and... yeah... way to go Mom. Which, minus the confusing roundabout on the Memory Lane turnoff, brings us back to the point. Never make a deal with the devil. Throw in traumatic memory ichiban and it becomes "never make a deal with Daddy."
Contemplating whether to continue with precisely what's happened to me lately or with older less esoteric examples of my father's evil seems to have caused a surge of bile in my throat, so I'll just throw out a small sample and then open the floor to well-wishing and questions that should be answered once I feel composed enough to continue anyway.
But about that sample: my father is the kind of man who, when I got to High School and suddenly started making, horror of horrors, B's, showed me all the cool stuff he'd already bought me for Christmas and was going to have to return since my grades indicated all I would be needing were no. 2 pencils and notebook paper. On the day of unconditional love and giving, when various faiths are celebrating the birth of their saviour or the fact that the Earth hasn't been destroyed in unending darkness or whatever they might be celebrathing, this man showed me a PS2 and then made me drive with him when he returned it to the store. Granted, this only seems horrifying to me because I'm a greedy bastard, but I really can't really cope with telling anything worse just yet, ok?
Insert dramatic pause joke here.
And before anyone asks, I'm... physically unharmed, back in Springfield, the so-called cultural center of the Ozarks, where all the god-fearing people have gunracks on their gunracks and a church just isn't a church unless it has a Starbucks in it. But I digress... I believe, the last several times I posted, I claimed to be planning an assault on some kind of secret government facility. Before that was some half-completed story about me ambushing three fully armed agents of this shadow agency at my internet girlfriend's house. Most of this was a lie (though even I was unaware of quite how much at the time), a fabrication meant to make everyone assume I'd been killed or captured. There really were three agents, and one of them really was my old "friend" Chuck, but the fact of the matter is I went quietly and faked my own disappearance in exchange for something. A binding promise from their boss that none of his goons would ever go near my girl again. In retrospect, I really should have paid more attention to Ron's policy towards deals with the devil.
Of course, I also should have listened to Mom when she told me something about 13 years ago, back when the divorce was going through. At the time I wrote it off as misplaced anger over the whole ordeal. I certainly couldn't take it literally, because the implications about me were simply unacceptable. By the time I'd learned to dismiss most of my mother's actions as sheer religious lunacy, I thought that she actually believed it, but that her belief had no meaning. Now I recognize it as a somewhat valid metaphor for the soulless nature of a true sociopath. You'd think a PhD in Psychology would know better than to tell her 8 year old son that his father is the devil (then again, she told me years later that I was an accident born of her emotionally blackmailing my father into sex, and telling me this was supposed to make HIM look bad, so maybe she's just an idiot). I vividly remember her clarification (at length), that she didn't mean "oh, the devil posed as your father, Rosemary's Baby style", but rather that the man I knew as my father, Andrew Maynard, was literally Satan himself walking the Earth. Which, to the still relatively devout Christian boy I was at the time (as opposed to the vile heathenous... man-boy?... I've become), meant I was the AntiChrist and that I had to die and... yeah... way to go Mom. Which, minus the confusing roundabout on the Memory Lane turnoff, brings us back to the point. Never make a deal with the devil. Throw in traumatic memory ichiban and it becomes "never make a deal with Daddy."
Contemplating whether to continue with precisely what's happened to me lately or with older less esoteric examples of my father's evil seems to have caused a surge of bile in my throat, so I'll just throw out a small sample and then open the floor to well-wishing and questions that should be answered once I feel composed enough to continue anyway.
But about that sample: my father is the kind of man who, when I got to High School and suddenly started making, horror of horrors, B's, showed me all the cool stuff he'd already bought me for Christmas and was going to have to return since my grades indicated all I would be needing were no. 2 pencils and notebook paper. On the day of unconditional love and giving, when various faiths are celebrating the birth of their saviour or the fact that the Earth hasn't been destroyed in unending darkness or whatever they might be celebrathing, this man showed me a PS2 and then made me drive with him when he returned it to the store. Granted, this only seems horrifying to me because I'm a greedy bastard, but I really can't really cope with telling anything worse just yet, ok?
Insert dramatic pause joke here.