Puzzle, Fortress, 1992

I’ve recently been managing an addiction to the Showtime TV series Dexter. It’s been out of control at times, I’ll admit, and has mirrored the Harry Potter and Lost problems that I somehow overcame (mostly, I think, by completely satiating those desires with all the available material). As I’ve paused to reflect on this new escape into narrative, I remembered my abandoned blog and the feeble attempt I made therein to fill in some of the blanks of my own narrative. Not in a plot-smart (or even plot-conscious) way. Not necessarily to instruct, perhaps to entertain. Not to turn back the veil on anything big. But to put some of the puzzle pieces of a life out there because their color and shape, though not easy to place, are interesting in and of themselves; because every puzzle piece is itself its own strange little puzzle. And I have a box full of them, so why not?
This one is of those dark, background pieces, where several of the pieces look the same and the front of the box isn’t any help. At the top of a steep hill, a longish piece of front yardage about forty feet wide and twice as long, sits a red and brown brick ranch house. Behind, obscured from street-view, is a fenced in backyard with one of those DIY kit treeless tree-houses, only a few years old but already in disrepair. In it I’m sitting, fuming and sad, as my fortress of solitude is pummeled with soccer balls, footballs, and various other weaponized yard debris, picked up and beamed at me in rapid succession to maintain the assault’s fever pitch. My assailants are Drew Carlisle and Joanna Wilkey, and though I’m foggy on their exact motivation (this corner of the piece is three shades of black), their malignance is by no means unjustified. I recall vaguely the gist of the antagonisms: I hated their proficiency at sports, which I lacked; I aimed this at them with words of hatred; they aimed back with their aforementioned immaculate hand-eye coordination before I knew what the meaning of the word irony was. Which is ironic, how many ironic situations someone might find themselves in before knowing what the word means. I think whenever you find out what it means, irony loses half the chances it had before. Suggesting, of course, that the people at Irony, Inc. bought the dictionary companies and made all the cover art completely unappealing.
That was all there was to that moment, really. I don’t remember how it was resolved. Likely, Joanna’s mom poked her head out the back door and told us it was time to go to school and we all dropped the war in the grass and stuffed the hatred in our pockets for safekeeping. I also remember that Drew, who because he was very smart could lie better than any of us, once told us about a rally for Bill Clinton that he and his dad went to where some lady flashed her tits at everyone. I dunno, I guess it might be true. 1992 was crazy.