Pandemonium reigned

This blog is my midlife crisis. Getting divorced at the age of 40 was not. However, leaving a bad marriage did enable me to enjoy a crisis of identity that led to the recent success of Backstage and prompted me to write this blog.

But why write this blog now, at this age and stage of my life? I used to be able to write to entertain, but then I went to grad school and learned to write in a formal, academic style. I wondered if I had permanently dulled those neural pathways that were involved in writing goofy short stories when I was younger, especially the one that ended up giving the kids in my high school something more to make fun of, apart from my intense social awkwardness, lankiness, glasses, and braces?

I wrote a story once that included the sentence “Pandemonium reigned.” It was actually a line that I had stolen from a guy named Gordon, which he penned during a typing class on Salt Spring Island. It was the year that through some quirk of scheduling, the grade 10 boys at Gulf Islands Secondary School all had to take either typing or cooking as one of their electives. I wanted to take woodworking, but settled for typing as the lesser of the two feminine evils offered to us. It was during one of our early typing classes that Gordon started to write these entertaining short stories that involved ordinary people suddenly finding themselves in outrageous situations or performing irresponsible acts of mayhem. Pandemonium, as it were. And indeed one of his stories included the hilarious (to me at least) sentence “Pandemonium reigned.” when describing one of these situations. If I recall correctly, this particular masterpiece involved a young man – driving angrily at high speed in a stolen car – randomly blowing up people and things, in a somewhat prescient take on Michael Douglas’s character in the film Falling Down.

Imagine if the boys in Lord of the Flies had found themselves marooned in a typing classroom rather than a desert island. Bored with the curriculum’s required study of business letter formats and the proper construction of typed footnotes, we started to follow Gordon’s lead. I began to look forward to typing class as it had deteriorated into a kind of drum circle consisting of timed speed contests and story writing bravado. While I soon eclipsed Gordon’s skills as a typist, nobody could touch his mastery of amusing and bizarre fiction.

When my family relocated to suburban Victoria that spring, there were two new found things that came with me: a penchant for typing, and a surreal story-writing sensibility. When asked to choose my courses for the latter half of the year at my new high school (Stelly's Secondary), I had no choice but to add typing (since I was only halfway through what I had started on Salt Spring) and creative writing (since I was always pretty good at writing). In hindsight, I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me that I would be the only boy enrolled in typing, and the only student enrolled in creative writing who was actually thrilled to get credit for making up stories. While I could manage to hide during my afternoon typing class, my love for creative writing was soon outed by Mrs. Taylor’s habit of posting the stories she found most entertaining at the back of the classroom. One of these stories was my own take on one of Gordon's extravaganzas, replete with that killer sentence.

Whether karma, cosmic justice, or coincidence, this simple act of plagiarism would lead to my suffering the ridicule and scorn of my peers.

A boy named Dale was one of my fellow creative writing students, and he apparently did not share my love for Gordon's writing style. Unfortunately, Dale wasn’t content to simply tell the others about the weird and nerdy stories written by the new guy; he felt it was necessary to show them firsthand. After he stole my story from the back wall of the classroom, he proceeded to spread it like a virus through literally every person in our grade. I think he might have even made photocopies. Unsure what to make of me and my writing, it was somehow decided that the best way to deal with this new kid was to make fun of his work. I thus became known as Pandemonium Reigned.

For the remainder of that school year, when I wasn’t being alienated and ignored, I would find myself yelled at across the rows of lockers: “Hey, Panda-moniummmmmm!” I’m not sure how many of my abusers actually knew what the word meant, or how many of them imagined that it was raining pandemonium. I did know, however, that this nickname was not helping me make friends.

So it was with some poetic irony that Dale and I would grow to become close friends, and eventually carpooled for a time during our university years. But it wasn’t until 12 years after his act of thievery that he admitted his responsibility in the crime. While standing at the urinals during our ten year reunion, Dale broke the cardinal rule of male etiquette and spoke to me, explaining that the whole “pandemonium thing” was an act of “intellectual jealousy”. What I couldn’t explain in return, for at that point I could hardly admit to an act of intellectual theft, was that it didn’t hurt so much as confuse. How could something as unimportant as a short-story be so misunderstood and misconstrued at my new school yet so loved and lauded in a typing class of boys a short ferry ride away?

I guess the medium really is the message.