"The Boy Himself" by Frederic Goupil
He was happier then, in a way, taking the anti-depressants the psychiatrist had prescribed, though he took them begrudgingly, irritated at having to mask his true genius, his true discontent with and, yes, sometimes even hatred of, the world. But the world was so big, and world was such an all-encompassing word, and after a while of taking those small yellow pills, he began to wonder, some days, if he had ever really known the world, or if he, or anyone, ever really could. Of course not! It came as an epiphany, slamming the ideas from his hyper mind to fall, cooling, to the pavement.
He sipped coffee on a bench, watching foot traffic go by. He was watching girls, sometimes, but more than that, he was watching all kinds of people go through their days, through their own idiosyncratic routines. He didn’t understand how they coped with it all: day after day, doing the same or similar things. For him, such a routine would be classified under drudgery, and if he couldn’t get up and get out at any point in time that his ADHD mind prescribed to him as the time to get up and change the subject, well, life just wasn’t simply being lived to its fullest. He drank the coffee down.
After a while, less than a year was all it took, his notebooks grew unwieldy. He had designated a specific room in the plastic trailer assemblage that was his family’s home for his philosophical musings, filing them away with no particular system. He hadn’t really developed a philosophy, after all; that was too much of a category, too much a word coined by the man to keep children from free associating and engaging with the world that surrounded them, the world that imbued them with vitality, and food, and food for thought. In his more inspired passions, he denounced the philosophers at the dinner table, in an attempt to shock his father, but the fits of verbal rage rolled off his dad’s back and under the table, where the dog pawed and licked at them, as if they were tasty treats, which Henry supposed that they could be. Perhaps he would market them. The thought was deliciously absurd, and he thought that it might work.
So during the month of April in 1992, Henry made and distributed hand-drawn stickers, the first ones free, to his acquaintances. He imagined himself as a pusher of aesthetics, of ideals long lost in the ridiculous, rushing tide of material progress, and he was sure that someone among all his acquaintances would bite, would be intrigued, and would have five dollars or more to spend on custom-made stickers. Because he could do it, he told himself, he could even make a living this way. This could be it! He could be the art director and staff of his very own graphic design playhouse—not business, mind you, it was too horrid of a word. This was how such things were started, he told himself: small, with a loyal base of acquaintances. He would not let himself label them as customers or even consumers, but they would always stay acquaintances; he didn’t dare entertain any of them as friends, because to do that would ultimately be distracting and humbling in a way that would crush his aspirations towards greatness. After all, Henry told himself on a deeply subconscious level that he couldn’t even be aware of, it was so hard-wired into him as a product of western corporate 20th century culture, greatness was what made life worth living. It was the secret goal, the ultimate apex of existence, to become that lone, solitary genius of an individual, sailing a flag that no o