OH! MBarnum: I'm reading a book called "Running With Scissors" by a Mr. Augusten Burroughs, and ever since I started reading it, I can't help but imagine that this guy looks just like you. I'm not sure why, but he's you. Or you're him. He's a twelve year old and his parents are divorced. His mom has gone crazy and left him to stay with a dirty psychiatrist and his dirty family. He feels totally out of control of his life--except for his clothes and his hair. Here's a snippet...
When I was ten, my favorite outfit was a navy blazer, a white shirt and a red clip-on tie. I felt I looked important. Like a young king who had ascended the throne because his mother had been beheaded.
I flatly refused to go to school if my hair was not perfect, if the light didn't fall across it in a smooth, blond sheet. I wanted my hair to look exactly like the mannequin boys' at Ann August, where my mother shopped. One stray flyaway was enough to send the hairbrush into the mirror and me running for my room in tears...
Throughout my childhood, while all the other kids were starting fights, playing ball and getting dirty, I was in my bedroom polishing the gold-tone mood rings I made my mother buy me at Kmart and listening to Barry Manilow, Tony Orlando and Dawn and, inexplicably, Odetta. I preferred ALBUMS to the more modern EIGHT TRACKS. Albums came with sleeves which reminded me of clean underwear...
I would have been an excellent member of the Brady Bunch. I would have been Shaun, the well-behaved blond boy who caused no trouble and helped Alice in the kitchen, then trimmed the split ends off Marcia's hair. I would have not only washed Tiger, but then conditioned his fur. And I would have cautioned Jan against that tacky bracelet that cause the girls to lose the house-of-cards-building contest.
Don't ask me why...I can just see him as a tiny version of you.
