The year was 1983. Gil Gerard ruled the airwaves as BUCK RODGERS. The Atari 2600 was in its heyday, having yet to disappoint the gaming public with its anemic version of PAC MAN. Barbara Striesand was tugging on America's heartstrings as the cross-dressing, star-crossed lover and Polish-Jewish-boy-girl "Yentil." MAD MAGAZINE was having a grand ol' time parodying Ronald Reagan and Ed Meese, leaving me, in third grade, trying to memorize Al Jaffee's "Snappy Comebacks to Stupid Questions" baffled. Who the hell was Ed Meese? And my family was moving from a small town called Oxford to a small town called Southbury.

My dad had, in a surprising twist of career-fate, been offered a job on a 300-cow dairy farm. (Long story, please don't ask. My dad leads a weird charmed life.) Part of the perk of this position was that it came with not only free lodging for the family, but free lodging in a beautiful, 250 year old Colonial house, with a crazy amount of rooms. Being used to living in apartments and small places, this sprawling manse with its hardwood floors and honest craftsmanship offered my folks a chance to save money, while living in spacious and bucolic accommodations. A deal too good to be true. And, like any such deal, it turned out to be just that. But at least AT FIRST, it was a joy for my folks.

For me, however, it was not so much wine and roses. Moving, when you are going into third grade, is akin to playing emotional Russian Roulette. It's altogether possible that the barrel will spin onto an empty chamber, and the trigger-pull of uprooting your established friendships and replacing your familiar school hallways with new ones will, in the hollow click of disaster averted, give you a second lease on life, and a new, better perspective.

Or, as in my case, the thing can end up blowing your mind, and leaving chunks of your soul on the walls and carpet.

Now, gentle Internet Friend, I don't know about you, but it has been my experience that up to a certain age, the inter-relations of groups of children and the concept of "friendships" have the dynamic of an amorphous, free forming blob. Any kid in 3rd grade, entering into any group of 3rd graders, should be like Type O blood. You can squirt that happy juice it into just about anything, with little fear of rejection by the host. Once you hit 6th grade, or so, the clique divisions begin to form, and budding teen rituals exert themselves into the dread concept of "popularity," and the exclusion it brings about by the division--but usually, up until 4th grade, kids are pretty much interchangeable. At least, they should be. Everybody's a drippy nosed, fly-down, shoelace untied mess with a bad haircut, and embarrassing shoes. But there's equality to it. You'll play with just about anyone with two legs. And if a kid does not have two legs, you'll end up using him at least as a "base" for a game of tag. The important part is, everybody's included, because you aren't familiar yet with the concept of exclusion.

Not so in Southbury, as I learned. Apparently, in that sleepy dale, the kids were well ensconced into the "mature" practice of odd-man-out-ism, at an early age. They were all prodigies at it, in fact. And me being a new kid was enough to peg me as that oddest of little men. No one talked to me. No one. I was convinced it would just take time, and soon enough SOMETHING would happen, somebody would befriend me, and "let me in" to a group. I was sure of it. Just last another week, and it'll happen. Swallow the fear, hold your head up, go on in another day. As the weeks dragged on, my resolve faltered. No one asked me to join in to any Recess game. Soon I grew inured to the daily mental beat down, and stopped expecting a miracle. Lunch was an excursion into hell, each and every day… I'd circle nervously, and try to sit, and get told that the seat my Sears ToughSkin Jeans were touching was "saved" for someone, and told to go away. Being in a new place, and wanting desperately to not rock the boat, and create enemies before I did friends, I sheepishly obeyed these pint-sized meanies. I'd end up sitting at the corner of a table, where I'd speak to no one, and look down at my EMPIRE STRIKES BACK lunchbox, tracing the upraised metal of the embossed AT-AT, until the bell let me get out of that awful room. Recess was even worse. In my old school, I was awash in friends, and as such, usually one of the first picked in teams for kickball. I was an excellent kickball player. Which is not saying too much, since you have to be a 'tard not to play kickball at least passingly well. But still, I was pretty good. The one time I tried to play in Southbury, being an unknown commodity, and generally ignored, I was picked dead last, and never even got an "up" at kicking, to prove my worth. The shame and turmoil of being last chosen saw me avoiding kickball. At recess, I'd wander around, alone, moving from group to group, or hiding behind a tree, playing a handheld electronic game that I had smuggled into my backpack. I loathed recess like the plague.

Everything was different from my old school, and none of it better. In the previous school, we had 3 teachers, each teaching different classes, and you got to walk in the halls to each class like "big kids." You got to mix with other kids in the classes- the kids in your Reading class might not be all the same kids in your Math class. Not so in Southbury, where your "Homeroom Teacher" taught EVERY subject, and you were locked in, Prison-style, with the same children. In my nervousness, one day, I raised my hand and called the teacher "mom," which turned the general apathy toward me from the class to out and out mocking. So, by design of the Pomperaug Elementary school method, I was stuck with these kids, now actively mocking me, ALL DAY LONG. The plan, I guess, if there was a plan at all, was that Lunch and Recess acted as the only pressure-valves to allow some release

But for me, without a single friend, Lunch and Recess were the most dreaded part of the day. It was like the square planet that Superman's enemy Bizzarro comes from, where men bite dogs, good is bad, and bad is good. How terminally fucked is it that the things which caused me the most turmoil were LUNCH and friggin' RECESS, which should be the golden time of elementary school? During this block of cruel time, I'd pray for the clock to hurry up, and get me back to my assigned seat for Social Studies. It is a bad world that sees a child wanting to read about Mesopotamia and cuneiform tablets more than playing kickball.

So how did I cope? Two ways, Internet Friend, two ways. Both of them sad. Coupled together, they multiplied exponentially and became outright pathetic. How to get past each day, and how to give myself something to look forward to?

Well, there was a little girl in my class. Her name was Shelly Curtis, and I fell in "love" with her with all the fierce and fiery intensity, and the odd brand of earnestness that is the special providence of 3rd grade boys. We toss about the words " schoolboy crush" as adults, to describe such things, and dismiss them as trifles. But we forget the very real implications of the word "crush." As in: heavy stone, pushing inexorably on you, immobilizing and pushing the life out of you. That's a crush. That was my crush. The thing is, because of my out and out misery in my day-to-day school existence, the "crush" on little Shelly Curtis grew that much more pressurized. Like the weight of the world, pressing coal into diamonds, so too was my time spent stealing glances at her made that much more valuable and precious, as the contrast that the floating feeling of schoolboy-love provided to the misery was that much more acute. Now, with time and distance, I can see that what I was doing was a defense mechanism, in and of a sort.