Adapt Or Die

Read that on some guy's T at the gym years ago. It's the logo of my life. In fact, I don't think you can live very long if you don't adapt. For me, life was a struggle at the get-go. I learned as a kid to adapt to stay alive. We lived in a black hood as one of two white families on the block. My playmate was the other white kid, a girl. Then off to an all white hood at ten. And from my ability to adapt to stay alive, being beat up pretty regularly in the old hood, when the white bully of the new hood challenged me--I kicked the shit out of him. So easy, cause white folk fight differently and I had learned a lot to live to ten in my old hood.

The white hood wasn't any better. Richer, but not better. I had the same old shit to face, being different, queer in this case, in the breeding grounds of the Great White Flight. All around me were testosterone driven white men with wives and kids. No one in the white hood were light in the loafers. No effeminate hair stylist, drag queens, nancies. All that went on in Hollywood, not the San Fernando Valley. At least if it did, and they wanted to stay alive, they melded in with the rest.

Recently, someone contacted me about a high school reunion, it would be the last high school reunion since people are thinning out. Just when I worked through the anger of all those years of torment in high school, I find out some of them are still alive. Why? I thought I outlived them but apparently not, some are still alive and enough of them to want to gather and reminisce in one spot.

When  I read of some kid in high school going postal and slamming a bunch of kids at the school with high power weapons, I know what is going through their mind. The constant torture of being bullied, humiliated daily in front of everyone and having to go back day after day for more with no way out. It twists you in strange ways.

I didn't go. I think it already happened. I'm not sure, trying to block it from my mind. I e-mailed back to the person that I probably wouldn't attend, high school being a traumatic experience, I left out that I had pegged them for dead by now anyway. My way of surviving it all was to commit to outlasting them. It's a win-win that way.

Wally ain't doing so good. Adapt or Die, the logo in its perverse logic is getting me through this. Wally is failing, little by little even though I try to keep going, to keep a stiff upper lip, and even with Prince Albert's help it's hard. In some ways harder, but I'll survive somehow, someway. That's what you do--or die.