Summer afternoons, a Friday. It is my brother Brian’s birthday. He’s a good man. He was a pain in the ass growing up but now we are friends. It took a while to get to this point and here we are. Years ago, let’s say 50 years ago, it was different.
Life was good and easy and I had few responsibilities. And if I did have responsibilities I sometimes neglected doing them. Something as easy as putting away the butter from the morning, I just couldn’t get it done. Not out of malice, but more out of forgetfulness and distraction.
I remember a walloping from my mother for that exact offense. I didn’t know about money or how much a container of Breakstone’s Lightly Salted Butter was and how it maye have become rancid due to me. I have no idea if scenes like this played out in the homes of my friends but for me I was living in a different world.
I almost burned the house down due to idiocy. Teaching myself how to smoke cigarettes. I thought I would be smart and smoke in the dark, in the basement, sitting on top of dried out newspapers and putting out the cigarette on those very same papers which caused them to smolder.
That was one of the last straws, what will they do about John? Sometimes I was shipped out to friends of my parents. Sometimes they had kids my age, sometimes they didn’t. Marge Mudrack was a friend of my parents, a widow who sometimes hung out at the VFW.
She offered to take me in and so I was shipped off. She had a pool and it was summer but I really did not spend much time in the pool, though I would see my mother drive by since the HBJ book warehouse was quite near.
Mom wasn’t stopping by, she was going home to make dinner for her other children and my father. No time for me. There was nothing to do for me and if I was able, I would get some cash, some coins and buy comic books, but that rarely happened.
I was a handful and someone to worry about. My brother Brian was sometimes saddled with me, my mother telling him to keep an eye on me which he did with great resentment.
One summer Brian was working at HBJ and his friend Pete Frega was coaching a Summer League baseball team. Brian called me up from the warehouse payphone and asked if I wanted to play summer league baseball.
I of course said no to which Brian replied ‘Too bad, you’re gonna’. I could protest until I was blue in the face but the die was cast. I did not want to play baseball and never expressed any interest in doing so. That didn’t matter.
My mother might’ve watched one game and saw me strike out as I was swinging for the fences. Oh I hated it and tried to injure myself to get out of it. I had a baseball cap and a summer league t-shirt to go with my bruised nascent ego. I don’t think I lasted the baseball season which was just another thing in my life that was unfinished and incomplete.
The pattern was starting to form.
The Google Gemini rewrite as a William S Burroughs essay
## The Algebra of Need: Leave the Butter on the Counter
Summer afternoons, a Friday, dripping down the wall like molten plastic. The calendar says it is my brother Brian’s birthday. A good man, as men go in this sector. Growing up, he was a terminal pain in the lower biological functions—a specialized biological irritant—but the temporal shift has altered the coordinates. We are friends now. It took a long, gray stretch of Nova time to arrive at this juncture, but here we are.
Step back fifty years into the pre-recorded tape. The scenery changes.
Life then was an easy, low-velocity operation. Responsibilities? Negligible. And when they did manifest, they were subject to immediate, systematic neglect. Not out of malice, you understand. No conscious sabotage. Just the heavy, drifting fog of the distraction-addict. A simple directive: *Put the butter back in the icebox.* A task of minimal complexity, yet entirely beyond the executive functions of the current occupant.
The matriarchal control unit did not approve. I recall a severe physical walloping for that precise infraction. In those days, the economic reality of a container of Breakstone’s Lightly Salted Butter was an abstraction to me. I had no concept of the market value, or the biological process of rancidity taking hold in the heat. Were the neighbors’ children subjected to these same domestic tribunals? Unclear. I was operating in an entirely different reality-matrix.
### The Basement Experiments
The idiocy escalated. I nearly incinerated the entire residential structure trying to master the basic mechanics of cigarette ingestion. Thought I was a slick operator, see? Smoking in the subterranean dark, perched on stacks of dried-out newsprint. Extinguishing the glowing tips directly into the dry pulp. The papers didn’t ignite; they smoldered. A slow, acrid countdown.
That was the tipping point. The control board convened: *What is to be done with John?*
“`
[TACTICAL RE-ASSIGNMENT: SUBJECT JOHN]
Status: Handful. Constant surveillance required.
Action: Ship out to peripheral agents.
“`
Sometimes I was farmed out to associates of the parental unit. Some had offspring my age; others were barren outposts. Enter Marge Mudrack: a widow who clocked heavy hours at the local VFW post. She agreed to take custody of the problem child, so I was processed and shipped.
She had a swimming pool—the ultimate suburban status symbol—but I rarely submerged. Instead, I’d sit by the perimeter and watch my mother’s vehicle cruise past on the access road. The Harcourt Brace Jovanovich book warehouse was in the immediate grid. Mom wasn’t stopping for a visitation. She was on a hard schedule, heading back to the base to prepare rations for the compliant children and the patriarch. No slot in the timetable for me.
Time slowed to a gelatinous crawl. Nothing to do. If the local currency could be scrounged or pilfered, I’d make a run for comic books, but those supply lines were usually dry. I was a high-maintenance liability. My brother Brian was frequently drafted into the guard detail. *“Keep an eye on him,”* the order came down. He complied with a heavy, palpable resentment.
—
### The Baseball Mandate
Then came the summer Brian took a position at the HBJ warehouse. His associate, a character named Pete Frega, was managing a Summer League baseball syndicate. Brian initiated communication from the warehouse payphone—a cold, metallic transmission.
“You want to play summer league baseball?”
“No,” I said. The natural response to any external programming.
“Too bad,” the wire crackled back. “You’re gonna.”
Protest was useless. The blue-faced resistance of the powerless. The die was cast by the higher-ups. I had never expressed a microdot of interest in the national pastime, but the machine didn’t care about preference. It demanded participation.
My mother witnessed exactly one game. She saw me strike out, swinging with frantic, wild desperation for the fences. Pure ego-death in the dirt. I loathed every second of it. I actively attempted self-mutilation just to get a medical discharge from the roster. All I had to show for it was a cheap baseball cap, a sweating summer league t-shirt, and a bruised, embryonic ego.
I didn’t survive the season. Just another unfinished file in the cabinet. Another incomplete circuit.
The pattern was hardening. The mold was set.