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One day when I was in fourth grade and I had no friends, much like the year before, and the year before that, my class read a 3 page lesson about negro slaves from "From Sea To Shining Sea," that year's social studies textbook, "Popcorn!" style. (in which, as you may know, one paragraph is read aloud by a student who then calls out "Popcorn!" followed by the name of a classmate, who will repeat the same process and so on; traced back to Alfreid Weissman, PhD of Stanford University, Department of Neurophysics, this oral-vocal technique relies on stimulation of the medulla midsectional lobe by the cranio-syllabic signals created by the repeat-stressing of the soft "o" sound, hence "Popcorn!") The lesson detailed the abuses brought upon the negro slaves, complete with the apologetically sympathetic undertones that modern-day's retrospective akwardness and political correctness often pressure historians into. Some choose to interpret this as whitewashing of events, as a deliberate gradual elimination of any record of faults on the part of the percieved perpetrator. Others choose to take it at face value and praise its etiquette; to these men and women, misleading understatements and carefully-selected factual gaps are simply some of the tools necessary to build a tailor-made history that shakes our hand and smiles; it follows instructions seamlessly; it may drink tea or it may drink wine. Others prefer the one that drinks blood -- and only blood -- and if a madame doth protest, it'll be her damn neck. All during recess that day, while other children played ball games and jumped rope happily with each other like every day, I sat on the bench directly across the yard from the so-called "Booger Fountains" -- whose faucets, incidentally, were rumored to be plugged with various mischevious students' boogers -- the bench where I sat every day during recess and lunch, facing the wall of the Science Discovery Center building a few feet in me. Over the years several classmates had postulated various reasons for my sitting there recess and lunch after recess and lunch, such as "He likes to HUMP it when nobodys looking!" But the real reason for this was to hide the daily stream of tears that would underscore the constant thoughts of self-loathing that coursed my mind. What was wrong with me that I should be so ostrasized, that I should be the butt of so many poop jokes and toilet pranks while the other children played handball and hopscotch like citizens of a perfect nation whose shadow I was cursed by some congenital mishap to forever enviously wither in?

The recess following our class' slavery readings, I sat facing the wall, across from the Booger Fountains as always, but today for the first time I sat so out of habit and not to hide my tears of jealousy and longing for acceptance. The negro slaves, who underwent constant humiliation and abuse of many forms, treated worse than dogs, had lead lives which were now depicted as much more brilliant than those of my classmates, although I could not put my finger on what made their tale so awe-inspiring. After all, what did they do but pick cotton and occasionally engage in inconsensual acts of sexuality when called upon to by their masters? The slaves we studied about lived not as humans, but as animals in the world's eyes, and one cannot deny that the negro slaves were generally physically ugly, from their oversized, clownish lips to simply the color of their skin, a dark, diseased shade of brown.

Yet, pathetic history, nigger-lips and all, in our text they are remembered as beautiful!

I thought about all of this quite often for the next few months, awake at night, the gears of my mind turning and churning, and yearning. Yearning for what? To be beautiful like the negro slaves! You see, I was just like them -- sub-human, ostracized by those whose ostracizations really matter in the fourth grade, clearly plain-looking at best. If they could be beautiful, then maybe, just maybe, I could one day be beautiful too -- but only if I could realize just what their secret was; to do so would be to map a crooked, endless labyrinth, a battle to crack a near-impossible enigma.

And crack it I did, as one day it hit me! -- straight out of the air of consciousness, a simple particle of thought blown into my brain by the powerful lungs of either fate or randomness. I believe that Newton must have felt the same sensation, of both brilliance and relief, that the precious answer whose pursuit has been arduous and full of dead-ends, has suddenly become almost divinely apparent, and whose simplicity is both an awesome force and a humbling vexation. And god bless the mighty breath whose work it was, for that day I was transformed. I was no longer stupid, or chubby, or Mr. Piss (a term of affection my classmates often chanted rudely to me while they would spitefully join their hands in a circle around me and rotate around me, spitting the nasty, bitter words at me over and over: "MISTER PISS! MISTER PISS! TOOK A LEAK AND HAS SEBACIOUS CYSTS!," a torturing ritual whose basis was, admittedly, largely factual, but whose haunting and perseverent existence extended beyond my comfort).

Yes, I could be beautiful. I could be MORE than beautiful!..in fact, the truth was, I would have to be more than beautiful. The slaves who were like me in so many ways (although my skin was not the shade of a coloured person, of course), were beautiful -- but not in their appearances (since most negro slaves came from Africa, they bear striking resemblance to monkeys and gorillas; in fact, the few surviving geneology flows including slave heritage show that some slaves were directly related to apes, gorillas, and, least common, giraffes. In a few cases an animal was an actual parent of the negro slave. This demystifies the strange animalistic physical qualities most negros exhibit, such as their large lips, a feature directly descended from the common ape snout); the slaves were certainly not extravagant in their accomplishments, as while cotton-picking is arduous labor, it is not especially talent- or skill-requiring; and least of all were they popular: an 1801 newspaper sports a front page article that suggests "the growing negro presence in America, we can all attest to, is a disturbing tarnish on the cloth of our glorious country," and later proposes eliminating slavery through "the replacement of negro slaves by Border Collies, whose paws, utilizing a simple procedure whose only tool is a sledgehammer, can be rendered partially opposable, and therefore completely efficient in the cotton harvesting processes that negro slaves are most commonly assigned." The article later speculates that once replaced by Collies, the negro slaves, considered not only useless but a waste of life and a stain to national image, "may actually prove useful still in the booming cotton industry after the canines are fully implemented in the fields, as reports of a 100% efficient conversion of negro slaves to dogmeal, which may well serve as a slightly more economical alternative to standard dogmeal production, which involves horses and pigs and is 121% more expensive a process than the negro-dogmeal production, which would provide far larger bulk quantities of negros than is possible with the barn animals in the conventional production.

These slaves' beauty lied solely in their tragedy. To recount their unspeakable suffering and pain makes our eyes water with sympathy and heartfelt remembrance. For example, Harriet Tubman's heavy frame and flabby face is somehow made angelic when one takes into consideration the extreme hardship she endured all her life: Harriet, a victim of geneological obesity, was unfit to work the fields, and recieved many whippings and other anguishing punishments, until one day she summoned up the courage to speak to her plantation master, the prime owner of the plantation; plantation masters generally despised the negro slaves even more than the average person did, and were feared by the negro slaves, who only showed him their utmost respect and best labor in the fields when he was residing. Harriet summoned up the courage to address her plantation's master personally to explain the unfairness of her abusive fieldhands, only to be quickly hushed, violently raped by the plantation master himself, and subsequently impregnated. Years passed and Harriet, victim to almost all of slavery's horrors, risked her life to organize and lead the largest slave jailbreak in the history of negro slavery, until four days into the revolt she suddenly and randomly fell ill to the condition known as narcolepsy. Harriet was easily recaptured and was the subject of the most notorious "Example Show" -- an almost theatric display of punishment of a negro slave who violated some rule, in front of all the plantation's slaves with the intention of rule enforcement through fear of breaking them -- which included her violent multi-participant rape (in front of the entire population of the plantation), the severment of her limbs, her endurement of 3 weeks of being secured by chains and left alone to starve, and finally culminating in her impalement (a gruesome torturing device in which a pointed iron rod of 6 feet is set in the ground to point vertically and the unlucky subject's rectum is placed on the tip, after which it will take 5 long days for gravity to slowly compell the subject to lower to the ground, still stuck on the rod and very alive as it traverses and perforates the entire digestive tract, eventually exiting through the mouth. A quick death during impalement is a luxury, as many are fully alive and aware for the whole process. If the subject happens to be alive afterwards, he is left to die impaled.) Tragically beautiful, anyone? Undoubtedly. In fact, Harriet Tubman quickly became a sort of dead role model for me to model after.

And so my realization, in all its grandeur, was that to be beautiful I had simply to be tragic.

COMING SOON: HE SLITS HIS WRISTS AND BLAMES CATSCRATCHES AT SCHOOL THE NEXT DAY WHEN INQUIRIES ARE MADE -- BUT DESPERATELY HOPES THAT SOMEBODY KNOWS THAT HE IS LYING SO THEY WILL BE SORRY FOR HIM, AND BE HIS FRIEND. WILL HE WILL TURN TO DRUGS AS A MEANS TO ESCAPE HIS PAIN AND FURTHER EXHIBIT HOW AGONIZINGLY BEAUTIFUL HIS LIFE TRULY IS?

REMEMBER. HIS PARENTS DIVORCED WHEN HE WAS 11, THE AGE PSYCHOLOGISTS SAY IS MOST TURBULENT FOR CHILDREN INVOLVED IN A DIVORCE. HE IS MOST DEFINITELY ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY PITIFULLY ARTFULLY MELANCHOLOLY

TRAGICALLY BEAUTIFUL.

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