Text on Image # 4:

“1999

MICKEY ME REBEL SOCIETY

Prologue

When you become a teenager, the world is new. It seems small, cramped, and most unfair.  Your stomach begins to turn every time you watch the news and hear the latest in politics.  Every figure of authority makes you burn inside, because the other day on the news you saw one of them beating a fellow youth to the ground during a protest.  Everything the government decides upon seems to matter, as if everyone were pointing at you.  You - the failure in society, the bad one, the cause of their mistakes.

Finally, you notice something.  To you, its like seeing the light at the end of a tunnel.  You notice that you’re not alone.  Others hate it too.  Others also hate being the scapegoats of society.  Also, to your relief, they all seem to be in the same age group.  Thirteen to nineteen and you share similar views.  Together, you want to overthrow the adult kingdom.  But there is that side of you that knows you’ll be an adult soon too, and that what you do in these years will reflect in how you live your adulthood.  So you want to do good things that might, someday, exchange for a good life.  Still, there is the other side of yourself that lives in the moment.  The part of you that craves complete chaos.

In the end, you give in to your destructive side, you give in to your cravings.  While you decide upon this, the world goes into a silence, a peace.  Everything seems so regular and routine, while deep inside, you know it is like the silence before the war.  Then, it all erupts.  And they point at you again.  They point at all of you.  And the more they point at you, the more you want to turn against them. “Well,” you begin to wonder, “what would happen if we did?”

I first met Mickey when I was 12    ”

Hello! I have decided to start utilizing the blog feature on this website again. It is Thursday, June 6, 2024. I am sitting on my front porch in Boston, enjoying the end of the sunset on a cloudy tumultuous day (it’s 8:31 PM & 66 degress fareinheit with a “dense fog advisory” on my phone’s weather app).

I have been nursing an injury the past 2.5 weeks and have had lots of time on my hands so I decided to start time travelling a little bit and revisit past selves.

I am currently 37 years old and have always been too afraid to examine who I was as a child.  I’ve always had a poor memory (I think it runs in the family) but luckily that taught me to be a solid archivist! I have been privileged and lucky enough to be able to hoard many documents from (most of) my past, and these little pieces/messages from past selves have been assisting me lately in making sense of my present.  I highly encourage this exercise of checking in with past selves, especially if you struggle with memory capacity, brain processing speed, and/or ADHD.

Today I am revisiting a piece of writing from 1999.  Nestled in a furry Scooby-Doo notebook lives a “book” I attempted to write when I was 12 years old.  I decided to start transcribing it today after reflecting upon an idea I had earlier about my wish to see the normalization of children’s art museums in the world.  

Hear me out - the most common gripe I have seen in my personal writing from my childhood and adolescence is the sense of control.  I was *pissed* when I was a kid. I hated school and hated even more the fact that on Saturdays, after going to american school monday through friday, I had to then endure a full day of polish school classes (I went to a Saturday school in Brooklyn, NY in the 90’s for polish kids).  Then, on Sundays, my catholic family went to church.  All my days were accounted for, without my consent.  Throw on top of that the burdens of various societal expectations within schooling or church environments - I’m sure most if not all neurodivergent kids struggled with this.  Throw on top of that the confusion surrounding being a third culture kid in america -  you are *exhausted*. 

I’m still analyzing this book, but what I have found is that it might be about a lawless society of teenagers trying to overthrow the “adult kingdom”.  They are led by a cult-like figure named Mickey Me, who is an anti-fascist teen who unfortunately becomes the very tyrant he was originally fighting against.  Perverted by the social phenomenon of his movement (being looked up to as a “leader” in what was originally supposed to exist as a non-hierarchical society of teens), he eventually loses sight of the group’s reality, purpose, and hope.  The group he leads spirals into self-destruction after following too closely the orders of a fallible human being (himself).

Reading the first bit, I couldn’t help but reflect on our current reality.  The references to youth protesting, being beat by “authority figures” just makes me think of the recent student encampments for a free Palestine being brutalized by police.  I definitely didn’t know that was going to happen in 2024 back in 1999, but I grew up with short, vague, anecdotal stories from my dad about dissidents of the government when he was growing up in Poland in the 70s & 80s and the way they were brutalized and silenced by the state and I guess it left an imprint on my imagination.  Don’t get me wrong - I’m all for full communism.  But I was raised to fear it because of what happened in Poland.  Knowing what I know now (and maybe more facts will reveal themselves over further time), I know that what my parents were experiencing was an occupation, not full communism.  To top it off, their liberation movement was coopted by U.S. interests and meddling, and replaced with a promise of liberation via capital accumulation; via exploitation (capitalism).  Nobody really won after that.  But my US history books in school growing up conveniently failed to mention it…

The text I have transcribed so far (visible in the last photo at the top of this post) reads below. I promise to keep updating as I transcribe this document and others like it!