It's like it's 1996 all over again!

(Updated note: As per the request of a friend, his last name has been stricken below so it can be untagged from Google. I guess the feds are after him.)

Yesterday was a flashback into the 1990s, as well as a look of things to come. After receiving two sweet-ass first level seats to the A's-Red Sox matchup from my fiancee's parents--thanks Joe and D-I-double-N-A--I called my buddy Matt ******** (pronounced "sypher"; don't ask me why) and within a five-second conversation we had already made the easiest decision in the history of the world to meet up. Had I ever known what it was like to make a booty call, I would say this was probably easier. It was as if I were asking him if he'd like to breathe. (Quick quiz: who needs to work on their analogies?)

I've known Matt since 7th grade when I began attending School of the Madeleine in 1995. After a great seven-year stint at Kensington Hilltop Elementary School--which during one of my later years there was decreed the best elementary school in California--my parents were worried about the public school system in our future, which had just changed its name from RUSD (Richmond Unified School District) to WCCUSD (West Contra Costa Unified blah blah blah). Even ignoring the horrible stigma associated with putting the word "Richmond" anywhere near a system of education, it was slim pickings when it came to middle schools. The regional one, Portrero Middle School, lies midway up the beautiful and steep El Cerrito thoroughfare Moeser, but it too seemed to reek of urban decay. Now, El Cerrito is not known as any kind of bastion for crime, but there were stories coming out of Potrero about rape and muggings, not to mention the horribly bland aesthetics of the hallway, which to me always felt like a mental institution.

My parents were also looking into the future, and saw El Cerrito High. A school that was designed by the man who also created San Quentin, and it looked as such. True, nobody was getting shot at these schools for lunch money, nor were they gang hangouts, but something always seemed off about them. When a family has money, you try not to send them to the regular ho-hum public schools.

(And don't even get me started on our attempt to force myself into the Berkeley public school system; those fuckers are as exclusive as a country club.)

After a brief flirtation with moving to Marin County--where I fear I would have sat around in rooms comparing types of caviar with my Tibouron "friends"--my parents decided that it was time for Catholic School. Oh joy...

You have to understand, I was raised pretty heavily atheist. My mother--while raised Catholic--came from the uber-feminist and free 1960s in Northern California and had long become a source of anti-religious venom, while my father--raised Jewish in the Maryland-D.C. area--had settled into an interesting form of agnosticism. Now, I tell everybody that I am either "spiritual" or agnostic, not because I feel any kind of sympathy for organized religion, but I've come to the understanding that I both don't want to and can't prove any form of God exists or doesn't exist. (I learned this lesson the hard way during a week-long cruise to Alaska, where I butted heads with two 14-year-old twins from Nebraska.)

School of the Madeleine is located in North Berkeley, on Berryman off of Sutter/Henry/Shattuck/whatever street it becomes. It is a K-8 school housed in a grey three-story block, which while homely seemed to fit the principles of Catholicism well. Amidst a great concrete field of hopscotch lines and an old baseball backstop, there is a two-level plaster-and-wood church on one end and a small nunnery on the other.







By the time I enrolled into Madeleine with two others (Megan Tipping and Camille Thorton-Allston) we were thrust into a very undesirable situation as the rest of the 7th grade class--save a few students--had all known each other since Kindergarten (there was only one class per grade, by the way). Not to mention that, as is my lot in life, I am a chubby fellow, and we all know children between the ages of 10-14 are the cruelest of the cruel and can turn any characterstic, fortunate or unfortunate, into a subject of tease and torture. Take, for example, the fact that I am intelligent and liked to use words such as "excellent" and "spectacular" as a 12-year-old, and then imagine a prick like Patrick Nagel turning it into a mimickry of Charlie Knickerbocker. (Not that he knew who Charlie Knickerbocker was, but that's what the Contintental accent he used to mock me sounded like.)

My personality didn't exactly match my surroundings, either. Then again, my personality has never matched my surroundings, as you all very well know. A good story in regards to this: the Madeleine youth group decided to get together and attend Angus at the Oaks Theatre--a marvelous little teen film about a fat kid who teaches his high school community about acceptance no matter what you weigh or how you look. The movie meant a lot to me, and even at age 12 I was able to discuss broad artistic themes. Unfortunately, middle schoolers can't. The next day during recess, my peers were using the film as a jumping-off point to make fun of fat kids. The character Angus Bethune became Angus Balloon, and so on and so forth. I tried to move everyone's attention to the fact that this cruelty was the exact opposite of what the film was trying to teach, and that they shouldn't be so quick to judge. As I discussed their shortcomings in reaction to this after-school-special-lesson story, I quickly became an egghead in their eyes, as well as a target. Guess who had the nickname "Angus" for the next couple months?

If it seems I am veering off the subject, believe me I am not. I believe everything needs context in order to be told correctly. As well, I am not a very good speaker and usually leave out chunks of details in order to barrel toward my point. At least in a blog setting, I can go at my own leisure. In other words, I write so that I may not speak. You'll get used to it.

Matt, along with Andre Lipinski and Kevin Gross, were my best friends in middle school, as we all shared some forms of nerddom in what we liked. Sure, we busted each other's balls, but at least we weren't putting Alka Selzer in bread so the seagulls that circled Madeleine would swoop in, pick it up, eat it, then shit blood and fall from the sky. We all got along very well, and while we all had a general hatred for Farris Nimri-Denning (the only kid fatter than me in our class), we still accepted him, somewhat, as an acquaintance, more for the use of his video game systems than anything else.

(Here's where I set up material that is important later on, so you should probably stop skimming this entry and start paying attention. Foreshadow this, motherfucker.)

One bully that stuck out was Nate Snyder. While I always had the knowledge that most boys around middle school have a bit of pudge in their belly area and could retort cries of "you're chubby" with "so are you," Nate was the one person who could proudly lift his shirt and point at his lack of said chubbiness, and then continue to berate me. Not a great deal sticks out in my mind in regards to what pranks, played out on me of course, were his and what pranks belonged to such others as Patrick, Andrew Potocki, Nico Monday and Nick Winnicki, but I know that he was a bad egg.

I must give props, however, to the utter amount of teamwork it took to punish me for doing what apparently (although improbably) no other Madeleine student does--take a shit in the school bathrooms. During class one day, I excused myself, and something about my demeanor must have said "I'm gonna take a shit," because minutes later in the stall, the swinging blue saloon doors of the bathroom flew open and I was bombarded from all sides with toilet paper amidst squeals of glee. This is ignoring the fact that what they were doing seemed a whole lot more unnecessary and, well, gayer than what I was doing. It's just amazing that somehow they all got together and all managed to leave class, presumably in a tight-knit circle, walked down two flights of stairs, get their hands on some T.P. without alerting any authority figure, get a few dozen good shots into the stall without even looking over the wall, and get back up to the classroom all within the span of, tops, two minutes. The incident wasn't as horrifying as, say, the opening scene of DePalma's Carrie, but the details hold up very well 11 years after the fact.

Nate, most infamously in my life, is the creator of the deadly tease beast known only as the "Chubbysnake," which is a lot less disgusting than you think it is. If and when his boasts that he was thin and I was fat didn't get to me, this was his great backup plan. It involves the bully standing at attention about a foot or less away from the victim, with one or two arms flailing about, considering how much surprise you would like to throw into the equation. Like a cobra waiting to strike, the hand would make a pointed shape of a snakes head, and while moving about, the bully would chant, very slowly, "Chubbysnake. Chuuuuubbbbbysnake. Chuuuuuuuuubbbbbbysnaaaaaaaaake." The victim, of course, will start to become defensive as if a strike is about to come, but this is a mistake exploited by the bully. As the victim tries to cover up parts of his/her body in vain, the bully will find the one weak spot, and strike with speed and precision somewhere on the belly, with the cry of "PBBTTTHHHHH!" as the pain strikes the victim. I realize the description is a little convoluted, which makes me think I need to find my sister and have someone film me doing it to her, as I have in the past for different purposes. (Wow, now it sounds gross again.)

Flash forward to yesterday, July 26, 2006, as I picked Matt up from his house on Tacoma and make the 16-mile drive to the Coliseum (I refuse to call it McAfee or Network Associates or whatever the hell the prefix is now). We had been good AIM friends for a while, especially since we had both matriculated in Los Angeles in order to study film, me at Loyola Marymount, him at Chapman and USC. I hadn't seen him, though, since February when I was visited the Bay Area, during which we saw Good Night, and Good Luck and basically intellectually butted heads about forms of themes and aesthetics, him the critical film studies major, me the film production guy who stood for all forms of film criticism most of the general public seems to hate. (Addendum: Matt would like me to let you all know that he did production AND critical studies.)
It was a good way to restart my new residence back in the Bay Area, as going to an A's game is never a bad thing even when they're losing. It's a beautiful stadium despite being placed smack-dab in South Oakland, and the seats were top-notch (Section 120, Row 29, Seats 19 and 20). The heat wave didn't even make a difference, as the seats are placed perfectly in the shade, but not at all far from the action. The A's won 5-1 against the Red Sox, so it was a great day to stop on by the park. Most of the discussions between Matt and myself regarded our two topics, politics and film/TV, but that's the kind of stuff I thrive on.

Driving back from the game, Matt received a call on his Razor phone (a device which I mock is solely for teenage valley girls, and he should stop being such a pussy). It turns out Nate, a good friend of his still, was lurking around the Berkele/Albany/El Cerrito area and was bored, and that we should meet up later that night at a pub. I thought, Hey, why not, as I had heard that Nate had chilled out quite a bit, and while I do harbor some resentment in the back of my head for how he treated me in the mid-90s, but I am also always reluctantly thankful to all the bullies in my life for turning me into the person I am now. They say whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but I've always called "bullshit" on that term, because, say, cutting off someone's leg isn't killing them, but it sure as hell isn't making them any better at running either. I do, however, appreciate the fact that I never became one of them, and being bullied only makes you want to strive to do better in your field and in life, and I am happy with who I am and where I am.

At around 9:30, I met up with Matt and Nate again, and wouldn't you know it, skinny little Nate Snyder has become chubby. And I don't just mean a little round about the face--I mean he has a double chin, something I don't even have unless I'm trying to do a Jabba impersonation, and he walked in this amusing waddle that is usually reserved for meatheads who can't put their arms all the way down their sides. I found out earlier from Matt that this was a result of medication, but hey, I'll take what I can get. It took every bit of effort in me to not automatically go into "Chubbysnake" mode, this time as the inflictor and not the inflictee.

As the night went on, I realized what was always so off-putting about Nate--sure, he was a spaz in middle school, but so was I. The medication, it seems, happens to be for something really serious, and I discovered he had still not finished college and seemed thoroughly amazed that I had graduated high school (another Catholic institution) with a GPA of 4.3, which to him must have sounded like I had made advances in finding the cure for cancer. I really fucking hate gloating, though, so through the night I seemed to feel worse for Nate, as he was no longer a bully and finally had to come to terms with the fact that he had some disorders that needed help. He constantly spoke out of turn, and was always mentioning that he couldn't follow the conversations Matt and I were having (which is also partly my own fault as I talk way too fast and have confused many a person with my segues).

This didn't, of course, stop me from a few good laughs.

Matt: Did you finish reading that book?
Nate: Which book?
Matt: The one you bought from Borders.
Nate: No, I couldn't focus on it.
Marcus: What was the book about?
Matt: ADD.

So there I am, feeling like the bigger man without having to resort to any namecalling or grudge matches, and all because evolution played out naturally. I could feel good about myself without doing what he put me through in middle school, and it felt invigorating. Is this why I'm back in the East Bay after half a decade in Los Angeles? Is this part of what I'm trying to understand about my life and myself? Am I a better person than I give myself credit for?

Probably not, as that would just be a completely self-centered and egotistical way to make you read this incredibly long blog entry and come out of it with the moral of "Hooray me! Hooray Marcus!"

No. However, it does make you consider how much life changes in 10, 11, 12 years. I am content with who I am, and I feel mostly successful in what I have done with my life so far. Everything is just moving along well now, and a new era is commencing. At the end of the strongest heat wave I can recall in this area, the fog is a welcome reminder of life's ever-changing timeline. Things will work out, or things won't. The important thing is to keep it all in context.

--MG

P.S. Two of my letter keys stopped working a paragraph ago. I'm surpised how far I went without the letter "b," which I just now had to copy and paste just to let you know of my frustration.