Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Disturbing Self-Revelations

On my recent weekend trip to Orange, aside from receiving a constant chiding from my father and brother (hickory sticks and everything) to post on my blog more often, I also came across something else which inspired me to post.

One of Jez and my tasks while we were up there was to go through a plethora of kitschy crap that has piled up in boxes and cupboards and bags all through what used to be my bedroom, and decide what of it was worth keeping (such as the giant papier mâché cat sculpture with huge teeth my aunt gave me for my fifteenth birthday) and what was utter and complete crap (my birth certificate, photo albums, sporting and academic awards, etc.) Anyway, while we were going through a box of papers on which I had written or drawn (badly. I seriously can't stress how bad I was, and am, at drawing) at some time or another, I came across a piece of writing, clearly in my own hand, that really rather disturbed me. Given the explanatory sidenote that my own grandparents are called Eula and Lloyd, here it is, in its entirety:

THIS IS WEIRD BECAUSE LLOYD IS NORMALLY REALLY TWINKLETOES FAIRY MAN

Winter
Terry spends all his time in his room
Grandpa Lloyd gets worried
He decides to take Terry & Grandma Eula up Mt Fosho (a long task without cars)
They catch a train and begin climbing up (with huge rucksacks)
Terry is always complaining about the cold
Grandma Eula cracks and rants and raves non-stop
As they go up, Grandma Eula is getting more & more annoying
She is driving them crazy
Grandpa Lloyd threatens to throw Grandma Eula off the edge
Grandma Eula continues to rant
Grandpa Lloyd cracks and loosens Grandma Eula's grip on a rock
Grandma Eula grabs his hand and they both fall down
They take the food with them (By the way, they are dead)
Terry runs down and finds them dead.
He has to survive on the food.
When it runs out, he has to eat his grandparents.
When other people come up, he gets rescued
Police find the remains of Eula & Lloyd
They arrest Terry for murder.
Terry gets sentenced to life.
He likes getting locked up in solitary confinement.
AND THEY ALL LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER

Now what really disturbed me about this, apart from the fact that it's just plain weird, is that despite the fact that I clearly wrote it, I have absolutely no discernible memory of doing so. I don't know when I wrote this, I certainly have no idea why I wrote it, and I am absolutely stupefied as to what particular substances I was smoking at the time.

This disturbance was compounded further when Jez came across a couple of other pages featuring the exact same characters, one of which was a map of the house in which the three lived, and the other was a table listing their particular character traits and habits. So this wasn't just some isolated baby-panadol-induced hallucination, this was some sort of weird serial with unnecessary character depth. While it helped to explain a couple of the more ambiguous passages in the above opus, it ruined my ability to laugh it off as a freak occurrence in my otherwise sane and mentally-undiseased childhood. Just for illustrative purposes, here is the table in the best reproduction I can manage, without being bothered to screw around with fancy HTML commands:

Reads:
GRANDMA EULA
Horror
Crime
GRANDPA LLOYD (From other side of family)
Flower Fairy Books
Barbie Magazine
TERRY
Comedy
Mystery

Plays:
GRANDMA EULA
Shooting Games
Electric Guitar
GRANDPA LLOYD
Hungry Hungry Hippos
Triangle
TERRY
The computer
Saxophone

Likes:
GRANDMA EULA
Listening to AC/DC
Taking Heroin
Lifting Weights
GRANDPA LLOYD
Listening to Janice Ian
Cooking vegetarian meals
TERRY
The TV
KFC
Macca's

Dislikes:
GRANDMA EULA
Grandpa Lloyd
Terry
GRANDPA LLOYD
Grandma Eula
Heavy metal music (That includes opera in his opinion)
TERRY
Grandparents
Spending time in the house outside of his room

So realistically, this latter portion should have clarified it a lot. I mean, there's a fair bit of material in there that helps with the dating and it's clearly just me being silly and over-the-top, but at the same time, it's still creepy (I mean, the heroin reference really isn't cool), and the fact that there is more than one of these suggests I should really remember it. Especially considering my memory of the weird, Freudian mess I call my childhood is usually pretty acute (For example, the story Jez told at my 21st about me and my 'body exploration' in kindergarten class was nothing he was present for, I gave him that story word-for-word specifically so he could use it at my 21st). So basically my discovery of these strange works was sort of like watching a video of oneself age three playing a game of bathtub 'find the cucumber' with Uncle George that one had successfully repressed.

But then again, it's been fairly well established that I'm a strange individual, so why should this make a difference?

4 Comments:

Blogger Catie said...

yay new post!

but also, that is pretty disturbing. i'm going to just back away slowly from the computer now...

July 9, 2006 at 5:17 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

We still check regularly in hope and, one day, there it is - A new post from Sean's Beard. Grandma's little secret is out now - along with Grandpa's and Terry's bigger ones. Who was uncle George and why was he washing the vegetables in the bath :-) (no, don't answer that)

July 11, 2006 at 9:43 PM  
Blogger Jez said...

To be perfectly honest, that story was no more disturbing that many of the other hundreds of stories we wrote in our youth (for example, Freddy the Pumpkin).

The fact that you have repressed it of course may mean something...

Ooh, here's an idea to get your posting juices flowing: why don't you share with us many of the other weird and wonderful stories from our filing cabinet of doom? Of DOOM, I say!

July 18, 2006 at 10:14 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

i still like you sam, after the trampoline/peeing story and the kindergarten-putting-out-your-cucumber-in-full-view-of-teacher story and the putting-passionfruit-and-also-peeing-on-the-slippery-slide-before-sliding-down story and yeah.

i still like you sam, you make me look all the more sane and normal by comparison.

October 16, 2006 at 7:35 PM  

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