________ ________ ________
2017-07-12 / \/ \/ / \
/ __/ /_ _/
I moved out of home when I was 17, right / _/ / /
after high school. I never ended up \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
graduating because by the end of it I was / \/ \/ / \
skipping most of my classes to skulk around / _/ /_ _/
the local internet cafe and get online but /- / _/ /
that's maybe a story for another day. \________/\________/\___/____/
Because I hadn't graduated though,
university was out of the question and I moved one town over to attend a
technical college and study "information technology".
I moved into a share house, as you do when you're young and have no money,
with four other people. One, a friend from high school moved in with us at the
same time to go to the same college and another was a friend from our AD&D
group who had moved in the year before. The other two were people were new to
me but they're not important at the moment.
I didn't stick with college very long for the same reason I didn't with
high school; I just wanted to use computers and get online and back then
actually using a computer was only a small part of "information technology",
in fact the larger part of the course was math and accounting. It was junk.
I bring this all up because when I first started this Gopher space I was
looking for things to make it look nice, everyone seems to have a fun FIGlet
title but I wanted something different so was poking around ASCII art to see
if I could find something suitable.
In my searches I found ASCII art of Lum from Urusei Yatsura[1] and that
reminded me of the friend from high school that I'd moved in with. He'd found
that same piece, printed it out on tractor-feed paper and stuck it up in his
bedroom, along with a few others. One I think was a character from Record of
Lodoss War but I might be misremembering.
I went off the rails a little bit after I moved out, drank quite a bit and
got rowdy and was also trying to find my place in this new environment but I
never really was very good at that so I ended up acting pretty shitty to this
guy who I imagined was "below me" in whatever hierarchy I thought I was part
of. He didn't drink with us, he went to school to actually try to study and
not just to use the computers get on IRC or the AnimEigo (was it AnimEigo?)
message board and he went home on weekends to be with his family instead
playing Magic: The Gathering or finding a party line to call (the college
library was closed on weekends so no internet for us!) to talk shit with
whoever was around.
One weekend we were really tying it on, I forget the exact occasion but it
may have been a friend's birthday party or one of their "end of the world"
parties, and a friend at the time went a little too hard and was throwing up
all over then blacked out. Someone else, drunk, thought the right thing to do
would be to put him on the guy's bed to sleep it off, since he'd gone home for
the weekend. So they go into his room and get the guy on the bed and see all
the his nerdy shit on the walls and start messing with it because they're
higher on the totem pole now for probably no reason other than the guy wasn't
around to defend himself and protect his shit.
And I go along with it because I want to protect MY place in the hierarchy.
We defaced his shit with scribbles and drawings of dicks and who knows what
else, including some of the guy's own artwork I think, irreplaceable. We
messed with his stuff and rolled blunts with his AD&D characters' character
sheets.
It was all truly shameful and, while that was probably the worst of it, it
wasn't an isolated incident. I was bullied quite a bit in school and like most
kids who are would bully in my own right, but that doesn't excuse it and I
still hate myself for not being a better person.
Some time later my mental health got extra bad and cut off contact with a
bunch of people, including him, entirely. Or maybe he already had with me.
More recently I found him again on Facebook, he seems like he's doing
really well and that makes me happy. I sent him a message even though it'll
likely be one-way, to apologise for being a piece of shit a million years ago.
[1]
gopher://baud.baby/0/files/lum.txt
EOF