I can only think of one man who even tried to uncover this problem’s cause. It was an Alaskan psychologist who called it a disease, but he could not figure out why so many were so numb in the spirit. Even after several years of research, the only thing he came up with was that the world and its population had come into a plain state of endless boredom.
After the fourth year, he put his notes and books down.
And said, “oh well.”
Staring at his wall, shrugging.
The people of Rippington are not quite as bored as the rest of the world for one reason or another. I suspect it’s because of the walm, but I’m not sure. Nor do I care.
Leaf is on the border between emotionful and emotionless. He cares a lot about some things and a little about others. Maybe it’s because some things are boring and some things haven’t bored him yet.
Let me correct myself:
I am Leaf.
I apologize for speaking in the third person when explaining myself, but that’s just how I seem to be. I catch myself doing this quite often. It’s because I can see in the third person. Anywhere in the world I want to go, my eyes will go. They will pop out of their sockets and wander the countryside. Just as a god or a movie camera would go. Even myself is just another character to me, hovering over my body from God’s Eyes, watching someone else moving and talking to my commands, my own living corpse.
I call my body a corpse sometimes. It is because I don’t like it at all. It bores me. I’d much rather live inside a strong man’s body. Then maybe I’d have more self-esteem and I wouldn’t need to look at myself in the third person. My body is all dangle-lanky and weak. It whines when I ask it to move, and the bones creak and complain as they labor.
My last name is no longer in use. I am just plain Leaf. It was Cable in the beginning, if I remember correctly, but Cable is retired now. I am just a Leaf. And I don’t feel that I need to have a last name.
I feel pathetic sometimes, and I think that it is funny.
My parents were Mr. and Mrs. Cable. I don’t care to remember their first names. I’m sure they don’t care to remember mine either. Actually, they better remember my name. They gave this weak-wretched title to me.
They said to me, “Leaf is also a name for a person and not just the vegetation that grows on trees and plants.”
However, they meant Leif. Leif is the person and Leaf is just a leaf.
Great, eh? I’m a leaf, not a human being like my parents once told me.
People always took my parents for hippies for naming me Leaf.
I would respond: “No, take them for idiots.”
I would not capitalize my name if I hadn’t been named Leaf. My personality calls for a spelling in all lowercase letters, like mike or bobby or stephen or joey. Spelling your name like this shows that you feel inferior to the rest of the world, as I certainly do.
But if I were to spell my name leaf, then someone might suspect that I really am the vegetation that grows on trees and plants instead of a person. Maybe even God would believe that. And during autumn, when all the leaves crumple and fall from their branches to die, I too would curl into a crispy ball and drop from the surface of the planet, to suffocate in the breathless areas of the universe.
I’m not very good at talking either. I am utterly confused, sometimes. This is because I took too many drugs when I was in high school. Actually, I wasn’t in high school during this period. I was dropped out. When I say something like “back when I was in high school,” I usually mean: “back when I was supposed to be in high school.”
Anyway, I did a lot of Felix back then, and snoopies and cucumber seeds and slur corn — this was back when I had the money for such high society drugs — I also did a lot of opie, but that was usually free from friends. Nobody really sells Opie thinking there’s a market for the stuff. It’s basically dirt, the chemical version of Groo.
After my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Cable, figured out — it did take them a while to figure anything out — that I replaced doing homework with doing expensive, mind-altering drugs, they decided it would be best for their selves to not have a child anymore.
So I left my parents, off on my own, working at corner shops and thinking they’d miss me. But they didn’t, and to hell with them.
One day, I called up Mrs. Cable (mother) to ask if she missed me. After I asked, there was a long pause. I’m sure she was just staring at her wall, shrugging. So I never called again.
After I was on my own, I resorted to drugs that were easier to come by. Actually, I can’t relate them to real drugs. They were just chemicals, household products that you can buy in any/every store. Air-fresh was the first product I tried. It was invigorating, like taking a bubble bath with your brain. Cough-away was good too, but your vision strobe-battered and made you sick. Later, I experimented/gambled with anything that had toxic ingredients inside. Some things made me gorefully sick. Some things could have killed me.
I hate to think back on those days.
About fifteen months after I left home, I found myself
permanently deranged by these drugs. And I haven’t been cured.
Because of my drugging experiments, I can no longer communicate like the rest of the world can. My mind is locked away from reality somewhere; the thinking is perfect/straight, but my voice doesn’t come out right when I speak my thoughts. I have a stutter, and it takes time for my thoughts to process into words people can understand. Maybe that is my problem, I think in thoughts instead of in words.
I have a bad attention span too.
Speaking eventually became so difficult to me that I gave it up, almost entirely, and I have loads and loads of free time to think now, which I actually enjoy. Who needs a voice anyway? I stay silent during the whiles, usually talking in my head, speaking only to my best good friend and those who are blessed with patience. I do partake in conversations with people, in a way, but my opinions are only expressed to myself, within my brain, and nobody gets to hear them.
I do have friends, plenty of friends. This is an odd thing, now that I think about it, since I’m so antisocial and mind-screwed and all. They think I’m funny for being the way I am, the silent character of the group. Every group has one. I guess. Somebody has to be in the back of the crowd, following. They say I appear and disappear without any of them noticing. Sometimes they say I’m a ghost. Sometimes they say I have magic powers.
Since I don’t speak so much, I write words on my shirts to express myself to the world. I wrote ghost on one of them. Slave on another. The most descriptive shirt says crippled.
Other shirts tell people: I am a sandwich, I am a dildo, and I am the drunk driver that killed your kid — an attempt at being mean.
But my voice is only one thing that the drugs screwed up. The worst part is what happened to my vision. It is all cracked up, kind of like acid-drug. Everything I see is always shifting and melting, like the world is made of water, streaming down and around and up again.