Do you guys ever look back at your old stories you’ve written? How’s that typically go, for you?

At this time twenty years ago — spring/summer 2006 — I was sixteen years old, and spending my every spare moment on this old desktop PC in the corner of my room, writing this massively-long and pointless novel while listening to AFI’s freshly-dropped “Decemberunderground” on my headphones. It was, without a doubt, one of the happiest and funnest times of my whole life.

Recently was the twentieth anniversary of “Decemberunderground”‘s release (6/6/6, remember? Lol) and it occurred to me that it’s been exactly twenty years since that happy novel-writing time. So, for shits and giggles and old times’ sake and all, I decided to look back at that old novel, for the first time in a really long time. Looking at my old writing is always a bit risky, for me, because 99.9% of the time it’s so cringe it makes me physically ill and then I want to go fling myself off a roof. But, I guess I was feeling resilient, because I opened the doc anyway.

I just skimmed it though — I’m not about to read the whole thing. Because that sucker is, I kid you not, 210,682 words long. Good grief!

Oh, to have that much free time again, time to write 200k+ words! — but, if I’m being honest, it wasn’t just a surplus of time, that allowed me to write such a long novel. It was a lack of inhibition, and a pure, childlike joy that I don’t know how to get back.

Let me tell you about this thing. It is the story of a certain guy, with whom you’re probably familiar if you know me at all, when he was seventeen years old, going to crash with his friends for a period of four weeks during the summer. Basically, it just follows all their silly little random antics over this four-week period. There is a plot, but it’s very loose and understated — the book could easily have been a short story or novella, but it was crammed with so much filler, SO much filler, just loads and loads of filler that served no purpose at all other than to tickle me and make me (and my bff at the time) laugh. I literally just followed the characters every waking moment of their lives for four weeks and wrote down all their pointless conversations and everything.

That’s all it was. I wanted to just hangout with them, that summer, so that’s what I did.

Publishable? Hell no — not by any stretch of the imagination! Of value to anyone except me (and maybe my high school bff, who btw I added in both myself and her as characters, too, in true sixteen-year-old author fashion)? Hard no! Is it at least any “good” as a piece of writing, though? Absolutely not! It’s cringe AF! — and yet, there’s something about it that’s imo kind of better, kind of lovelier, than any fiction I’ve written since roughly college, when I started to become more “serious” and self-aware about writing.

Is it just me? I miss how much fun writing used to be. Oh don’t get me wrong, it’s still fun. That’s why I do it. It’s still the only thing that makes me forget to watch the clock. But it’s a different kind of fun now, a very self-aware fun. Always, it’s directed toward some invisible audience, some target reader; always, practicality is a priority: would anyone else like this? Is it publishable? What am I doing, what is the point of this? So what, so what, so what?

It didn’t used to be like that. At some point I lost the ability to write just for myself, the way I did twenty years ago. I guess that was when I stopped being a child. I lost the ability to play.

And the thing is, I don’t even really want to write like that anymore. It’s so selfish. It’s such a waste of time. It’s just titillation — it’s pointless.

But I kind of miss the days before I worried about such things.

It’s not like I wasn’t worried, at sixteen. It’s not like I was some happy-go-lucky carefree kid. I was properly angsty, actually, in the thick of all the ED stuff and afflicted with terrible social anxiety that made high school a nightmare — this though, this little (er, not so little) book, this was my escapism. Pure escapism! These days, there’s no escape quite like what this was for me at the time. I guess I’ve outgrown it.

I’m glad I don’t write like this anymore, but also, I kind of miss it. Still, when I hear “Decemberunderground,” or any of the other songs that were on my playlist then, I go right back to this stupid book, in my head, and the nostalgia is so sweet. I’m grateful to have built this world to go back to whenever I feel like it — but it’s a place frozen in time now. It’s like a snow globe. I can pick it up and gaze at it, but I’ll never live in it again.

Like many of us who write, I have a whole collection of these snow globes, a whole mental curio cabinet of them, which I love to pick up and play with from time to time, and I can’t help cherishing each of them in its own ways, even the hideously cringey ones; this one, though, this stupid thing from spring/summer ’06, will always be one of my favorites.

Without further ado, in case you’re curious, here’s an excerpt from that ridiculous novel — raw, unedited, completely un-retouched, just fresh out of my sixteen-year-old brain (and, of course, completely irrelevant to whatever there was of a “plot”):

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“You’re gonna die, Roger,” Pete said. It was Sunday morning. Roger had just awoken to the sound of Pete using the shower. Now, he was seated on the sofa, yawning. Pete emerged from the bathroom with his hair wet, wearing what had once been a pair of black pinstriped pants but had been cut off at the knees with scissors, the hem then re-fastened with duct tape.

“What?” Roger asked. He turned around slowly.

“You’re gonna get a whooping. Leslie’s mom is going to kick your ass.”

“Why?” Roger asked. He wasn’t all the way awake yet. It was especially difficult to imagine Mrs. Willoughby kicking his ass. Or anyone’s, for that matter.

“Look here,” Pete said. He had stopped in his tracks in front of the sliding glass door.

Roger pulled his lazy self up off the sofa and went to go check out the carpet. Because for some reason, Pete was pointing at the carpet. Roger had no idea what the problem could be. And then, he saw it. There was a trail of big reddish-brown boot prints, leading from the sliding glass door over to the armchair where Roger had collapsed last night. And that was where the culprits were lying- the two old, mud-caked work boots.

“Damn,” Roger said.

“Yeah. True dat.” Pete laughed, and stepped over the mud trail to get to his mass of posessions lying in the corner of the basement. “Way to go. Carpet, one. Roger, zero.”

“I can clean it up,” Roger said. Even though he knew nothing about cleaning things. That always aggravated Susan. He would spill a glass of orange juice on the kitchen floor, and she’d tell him to wipe it up, and after five minutes of wiping the juice had somehow expanded and was covering an even larger section of tile than before.

“Yeah. Of course you can,” Pete said. He was digging through his pile, presumably looking for a shirt, as he still didn’t have one on. He soon located one, a red t-shirt with some skateboarding logo unknown to Roger. The red clashed violently with the fuschia of Pete’s hair. It didn’t bother either of them, though.

Roger thought about the footprints, and what he would need to clean them up. Whenever he tracked mud on the floor in his house, Susan would pull out the Swiffer WetJet. But this was a carpet. He couldn’t Swiffer a carpet… or could he?

“Hey,” Pete said, “did we catch any of those mice?”

“I dunno,” Roger said. “Haven’t checked.”

“I’m gonna go do that.” Pete hopped over the pile of clothes, towards the nearest plastic box. The first one he reported as empty, except for the wad of Twinkie. While Roger investigated the mud prints, Pete walked over to the second mouse trap, and made an announcement: “Dude! We got him!” Pete laughed out loud in victory.

“Awesome,” Roger said. What he was thinking, though, was that he should probably just get some new shoes. As much as he hated that idea. Roger liked those shoes. He had gotten them in eighth or ninth grade, and they had been ridiculously large then. Now they were only kind of large, but they were perfectly adapted to his feet. He liked them. But he knew that there was probably mud caked into their soles, dried mud from God knows how long ago, that turned into instant carpet stainer when moistened. Not good, not at all, especially since Leslie’s basement had carpet.

“He’s still alive!” Pete exclaimed. “He’s moving around! Ha, ha, little bitch! What now, huh?”

“Let’s take him outside,” Roger said.

Pete scoffed. “Why?”

“I dunno. So he can, uh, run into the woods or whatever.”

“You’re such a hippie.”

They heard someone coming downstairs. And then they saw the slate blue Chucks descending the steps. It was Leslie.

“What are you guys doing?” Leslie asked. “I can hear you all over the house.”

“Yo, L-sizzle, we caught one!” Pete cried out, refusing to lower his voice.

Leslie blinked. His eyes narrowed a little.

“Where?” Leslie asked.

Pete pointed towards the corner from which he had retrieved the mouse trap. “Right there. Come see it.”

“Oh my God,” Leslie said, sounding exasperated, but coming over to look anyway. Roger joined them. He was curious to see if it was the same mouse that had so rudely awoken him yesterday.

It might have been the same mouse. It was difficult to tell. It was just a small, grey-brown mouse, cowering in the corner of the tight plastic box with its nose nestled beneath its belly. It was kind of pathetic. Roger was glad that they hadn’t bought the poison pellets.

“How did that get in my house?” Leslie wanted to know.

“I dunno. You tell me,” Pete said. “Let’s name it.”

Roger laughed. One minute Pete wanted to step on the mouse’s head, the next, he wanted to name it.

“Let’s not. Let’s just take it outside,” Leslie said. Leslie was still wearing his green-and-navy plaid pajama pants, with a black polo shirt. He glared at the mouse, like it had personally offended him by being in his basement.

“Yeah, that’s what Roger said,” Pete said dismissively. “What should we name it?”

“Frank,” Roger said. The mouse looked like a Frank to him. It was round and helpless.

“That’s a gay name,” Pete said.

“Don’t name it,” Leslie told them both.

“What do you want to name it, Leslie?” Pete asked. He held up the plastic mouse trap, and shoved it in front of Leslie’s nose. Leslie jumped backwards.

“I don’t,” he repeated. “Let’s just get rid of it.”

“Sam,” Roger said. He supposed Sam would suffice if the mouse couldn’t be named Frank.

“That’s double gay. Let’s name it… umm…”

“Mouse,” Leslie said.

“Burt,” Roger said.

“I say we name it Leslie,” said Pete. Suddenly he burst out laughing. “No, no, get this. Let’s name it Leslie Two. No! Leslie Two: The Return of Leslie,” he exclaimed, and sang three dramatically descending notes in a minor key.

“You suck,” Leslie said. But he was trying not to laugh. That was the closest Roger had seen him come to laughing in a long time.

“Why not? It looks just like you,” Pete said. “Doesn’t it, Roger?”

“Oh, yeah. Practically twins,” Roger agreed.

“That name’s too long anyway,” Leslie part one pointed out.

Pete decided that the mouse was to be referred to as ‘L-Two’ for short.

Since Leslie was sure that his family did not want a pet mouse, they held a releasing ceremony in the backyard. Pete called Bonnie’s cell phone and left a message about the mouse, so that Bonnie could be an honorary guest. It was a bleak, grey morning, still wet from the rain. Roger was barefoot. He didn’t want to get any more mud on his filthy old shoes. He could feel the bottoms of his jeans getting soaked from the grass as he followed Leslie and Pete out to the edge of the woods.

“…We’re in the backyard. We’re about to let him go,” Pete said into the phone. He was narrating the entire scene to Bonnie. “Roger’s gonna open the box. Right, Roger?”

“Right,” Roger said. “Hi Bonnie.”

Leslie crossed his arms and watched solemnly. Roger carefully pulled off the removable end of the trap, trying not to jostle L-2. The plastic box made a sharp popping noise when it opened.

“Did you hear that?” Pete asked Bonnie’s answering machine. “That’s the box opening. Here he goes.”

Roger knelt down so he was closer to the ground. The wetness on the grass was now soaking through to his knees. He tipped the plastic box over just a little bit, so that L-2 could slide out into the grass. There was a soft plop, and after a second, the little mouse had disappeared into the greenery.

“There he went. He’s gone,” Pete said. “Bye, L-2. Have a nice life. See ya, Bonnie.”

Pete hung up the cell phone, and they went back inside.

Leslie noticed the mud prints. Roger was surprised that Leslie wasn’t angry. Not only that, but Leslie even helped him clean it up, using some blue liquid in a squirt bottle, and a coarse scrubbing brush from the bathroom cabinet.

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