pazithigallifreya

Sometimes I still get vaguely upset over the fact that Paul Reubens died despite it being two and a half years ago, and that feels like a deeply weird thing to say from my point of view.

Weird, because I'm not the sort of person to get wrapped up in any kind of celebrity's personal life. Even if I am deeply fond of someone's work, of fictional characters written or portrayed by someone, I'm just not really the parasocial-relationship type. I don't delude myself into thinking I have any actual connection to someone even if I do have a connection, deeply, to the work itself. I've always held them apart, somehow.

Usually such a passing just results in a kind of weary acknowledgement of the grief inherent in the relentless passage of time, that we are all finite in our existence, and nothing dear to anyone stays forever.

I'm getting older. My parents are both retired and elderly and I know their time is limited, and the figures that littered my childhood are frittering away rapidly, departing this world. They will, too, probably far sooner than I want them to, despite all the complicatedness of my relationship with them

Paul Reubens.
Pee-Wee Herman.

I was a weird kid, born in the mid-80s, and already deeply alienated and baffled by my peers in preschool by the age of 4. I baffled them as well, no doubt, which is why they didn't care for me. Some reacted to their discomfort around me with aggression, with bullying. More than few of them. adults weren't all that understanding either, in many cases.

I wasn't a happy kid. I suffered from what I recognize now as anxiety and depression beginning in kindergarten. I had intermittent insomnia by age 7 or 8. My parents interpreted it as a bad attitude and thought I could be scolded and punished into cheerfulness, or at least the appearance of it. Being weird, loud, annoying - especially where anyone outside the family home could be a witness to it - oh no. That wasn't on.

I watched a lot of Mister Rogers Neighborhood as a kid growing up on PBS and basic network television, whatever could be gotten by fiddling with the antenna on the tv, there was no cable in my childhood home. It was comforting and homey and soothing. I loved Mister Rogers as much as any kid of the 80's and 90's in similar circumstances, but that wasn't my particular obsession in kindergarten.

Pee-Wee's Playhouse, though. The kind of thing that Fred Rogers himself cared nothing for - it was loud and garish and largely ad-libbed, had innuendo and queer undertones that were lost on the child audience in all but the most subconscious level, but I lived for that Saturday morning half hour where I could, for a short time, feel like an actual human being and not some weird little frightened animal trapped in a world and with people that barely made sense.

Maybe it wasn't the meticulous work that the Neighborhood was, but the Neighborhood was for every child out there, from the odd to the ordinary.

The Playhouse was for the misfits. It existed for kids like me, a small secret window into a world where you could just exist and breathe as yourself, and not be scolded, smacked, or sent to your room for being something too shameful to stand.

The whole manufactured controversy with the stupid adult theater hit when I was 6 years old. I sort of but didn't quite understand what happened, not really, I just knew my personal refuge was ripped away suddenly, disappearing from its Saturday morning timeslot. I recall having some sort of stress dream shortly afterward where I was standing in some simulacrum of the Playhouse itself, distorted in appearance, all the puppets and much of the furniture absent, stark shadows thrown across the floor and all the color faded out, and Pee-Wee himself standing there, looking both sad and angry as hell. About as sad and angry as I was, in fact, a mirror of myself in hindsight, more than anything resembling the actual character himself.

I said something to him, a question I think, and he replied, and while I don't recall anything of the conversation, I woke up just as upset as I had gone to bed.

I had a toy playhouse with a few of the figures, not all of them, my mother either hadn't gone back to work yet or only recently had at that time, and my father was working for the postal service, there wasn't much money around. I remember taking the whole thing and just dropping it in the trash can in my room, or balancing it in the basket I guess, as it was too large to fit. My mother retrieved it and put it up somewhere, as I found it in a storage box many years later when looking for something else entirely.

I never met the man before he died, maybe that's for the best. People never quite fill up all the corners of the public image. I can't even make myself watch the documentary he'd made before he passed. Maybe someday I will.

Anyway, I'm still kind of upset about it. 

It's strange to me sometimes that the strongest memories from childhood aren't Events or people, but certain vivid sensory impressions and environmental details.

Bright orange-red clay soils that smell of iron and stain clothing, flecks of gold mica if you dig deep enough to get close to the weathering bedrock beneath

Loblolly pine trees with thick rough scales of bark that peel off in layers, the reddish-brown pine straw that piles up year-round

stepping on pinecones while running in the yard barefoot

the smell of the dogwood tree in the front yard when it bloomed

the smell of your sweaty child-hands after holding onto the metal chains of the swing set

lifting rocks and poking the roly-poly bugs to make them roll into balls

stepping outside after dark in the summertime to an almost deafeningly loud chorus of tree frogs and crickets

I live somewhere else now, the soils are alkaline & calcarious, the bedrock limestone, and pine trees are few and far between, bugs are disappearing, and who knows where the tree frogs are these days.

It's weird the things you end up missing.

where do people hang out here? I miss old fandom communities from LJ...