High School.

Back around 1984 I was really bad off and I was contemplating suicide. It was mainly because people in grade school told me I was so physically ugly and nothing could hide it. People on the phone even could tell me how ugly it was, it seemed. I’m serious. And what happened to me in that grade school in the 8th grade had a lot to do with the fact I was gay too. The kids there found out that out by then. I didn’t think that was wrong with just being gay back then, but it made me feel I wasn’t perfect. And I was attracted to a boy back in the 8th grade. The kids and teachers found out and they all demanded I get counseling. For passing notes, everyone said.

But then in HS I saw the video to Olivia Newton-John’s Twist Of Fate. I didn’t think there was anything significant about the song or video at the time. But I still thought she was really talking to people like me when the song begins “Do we deserve a second chance? How did we fall into this circumstance?”. It reminded me of this wild idea I got around the 8th grade of time travel to solve my problems. And how my problem of being so ugly just seemed to come out of nowhere on the playground in the 6th grade. When my best friend started taunting me for being ugly, and then it seemed everyone else did too for some reason. And she almost seems to bring up the subject of homosexuality when she sings “We weren’t so straight and narrow, This is much more than we deserve, A higher voice has called the tune”. That really struck a chord with me when I first saw it. Look at the expression on her face and how her eye brows go up as she sings that in the video. And it made me reconsider suicide back then. You know, I don’t know if Twist of Fate had anything to do with homosexuality. The song is actually from the 1983 movie Two of a Kind. But Newton-John did bring up the subject of homosexuality in her 1981 video Physical and it was ground breaking at the time. And she did support things like LGBTQ rights and animal rights too.

As I said, the song and video came out at a time when I had this wild plan of going back in time and changing my DNA to make me more perfect. IOW more attractive and not gay. And my plan, though ridiculous I now know, seemed like a gift from God. Her song talks of “divine intervention”, which made me think of divine intercession which we were talking about in RC grade school at the time (especially at a time when I was very skeptical of things like miracles). So I thought maybe it was just fate’s way of telling me to hold on. Plastic surgery would not cure my ugliness, it seemed to be almost enchanted at times. I clearly couldn’t have any kind of life and I was too ugly to even beg people told me. And my time travel plan was beginning to sound more ridiculous to me and seemed to be going nowhere by 1984. I was ready to give up all hope. But then there was a change in those plans. I don’t remember exactly, but I think I came up with the idea of using empty Faygo pop bottles to create a laser in 1984. I thought at the time maybe a laser could be used to create a time machine because I knew the speed of light was involved somehow in time travel. And I figured light, like that in a laser beam, was already going the speed of light. I was going to create a vacuum in the pop bottles and fill them with some gas. Maybe neon or some other gas I heard of once in an article in Discover magazine. I was already familiar with the song by then like I said, so nothing odd there nor in the timing. But it again seemed to fit my situation so perfectly. And then in the Summer of 1984 I came up with that Faygo pop bottle idea. And then I also thought of the lyrics in that song “Don’t understand what's going on, Woke up this morning, all the hurt was gone This is a new beginning I’m back in the land of the living” which reminded me of my new time-travel plans Summer 1984. Only poetically of course, but I didn't understand what was going on in my life, or how it all seemed to begin during recess in the 6th grade. But I literally woke up one morning in the Summer of 1984, and all the hurt was gone. Because of that change in my time-travel plans, IOW.

I still can’t believe looking back now how ridiculous the whole idea of all of that was, time travel and human cloning. But oddly it may have saved my life. A doctor once told me that songs often have universal meaning to all of us though. And here I am still to this day.