The lovely ladies over at Coilhouse ask the question: what made you weird?
What made me weird? Being a prodigy nerd child. Douglas Adams. Stephen Hawking. Reflex magazine. Mondo 2000. The movie Pump Up The Volume. Nine Inch Nails. Clive Barker. (Specifically, seeing Hellraiser when I was about eleven or twelve.) Stephen King. Psychedelics. Growing up around musicians, F/X artists and performance artists. Moving all the time. Living in Turkey. Mister X comics. Unpleasant Ways To Die. Liquid Television, and also 120 Minutes. (Thanks, MTV, for being cool back in the day.) The B-52s. The Real Ghostbusters cartoon series. 80s teen horror movies. Sandman. D’Aulaire’s Book Of Greek Myths. C.S. Lewis. Piers Anthony. William Gibson, definitely. Zork. Ridley Scott movies. Asterix The Gaul.
How ’bout you?
It is possible that I am not weird.
Some of my wierdness seems to be inherent (parents had my hearing checked when I was ~4 years old because I would get completely absorbed in whatever I was doing and not notice anyone talking to me or calling my name, so they thought I had a hearing problem). But that’s a minor component.
Parents divorcing when I was 6, and moving to Israel. Steve Austin. Star Trek. Battlestar Galactica. Tutoring to get me fluently reading English using textbooks based on Greek Myths. Being ‘That American Kid’, and the only blue-eyed blonde in class. Never losing my American accent. Watching English language TV (half of it American, half British) and comparing the (occasionally wrong) Hebrew subtitles to my own running translations in my head. Haunting an English-language used book store. Tom Swift Junior. Spider-Man comics. The Lord Of The Rings & The Hobbit (yes, in that order). A neighbor with a Sinclair Spectrum (and the Hobbit text adventure game). Visiting the states for summer vacation when I was 13, and meeting my cousin who introduced me to D&D and Isaac Asimov (The Caves of Steel, specifically). Kid Video. Heinlein. Clarke. Cherryh. Niven. Pournelle. learning BASIC on a Dragon 32. Getting a Commodore 64. PEEK and POKE. Trading games on cassette tapes. Byte Magazine. Getting a PC. BBSs. FidoNet. Going into the Israeli Army (even though I could have avoided it by returning to the states). Gaza. Returning to the states after finishing military service and moving in with my dad. My first SF convention. Dad kicking me out after 3 months. Working in a toy-prototyping shop. The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. The Internet (in 1994). The Web.
wEIRD? tAKE THAT BACK, SIR! i AM THE VERY MODEL OF A FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WEENIE!I was not rendered weird by chemistry, archaeology and wave mechanics, no sir. Nor by that foul gaul Asterix! Nor by watching too much Twilight Zone and reading too much Heilein as a toddler and furthermore rock and roll had nothing to do with anything (ok, starting about ’66 rock, blues, Dylan, Miles and Bach had a little to with it, whatever it is)nor gazing at pictures of Louise Brooks, even, because, kind sir, I am not weird. Not at all. Not watching Satyayit Ray movies at 11 and wondering what that weird music was, and certainly The Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo did not drive me to drugs (that was a blonde and a light blue ’72 Mustang Mach 1)(I think I mean that literally. She drove, I didn’t. Metaphorically she just drove me crazy. Not weird.) Maybe Neruda, Nabokov,Borges and Dylan Thomas may have had something to do with the current state of things. OK?