How do you like that? Even among misfits you're a misfit

I do love Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Anyway, there were two stories that were happening in high school. Both were based on dreams. One was straight-up superhero, and the other was post-apocalyptic mutants. There was one other commonality between them; see if you can spot it.

In the first dream, I was hanging out with a bunch of superheroes. I was the only one with no powers. Will it seem less mystifying if mention that the superheroes were all guys from the basketball team that I managed? Initially managing seemed like a fun thing to do, and it was. I did enjoy it, and I was being helpful, so that’s all good. It was also just something that maybe was more for losers, and where you are always aware that there are people who party and date and you are not one of them. I tried to spin it in my mind that I was the spunky reporter, but that didn’t really go very far.

For the other dream, the mutants were basically kicked out of town so were exploring in the post-Apocalyptic wasteland, but I was with them and not a mutant. Again, the only one with no powers. I did not recognize any of the mutants though, so in this case it was not inferiority to specific peers.

That one actually ended up getting pretty complex. As I filled in details I decided that it was about 500 years after whatever happened, and it did involve radiation. At our starting point, there have been two things going on in this cut-off community. One is that initially you had a high percentage of mutants born, but the percentage kept going down, until at the time you have ten mutants left. In addition, a powerful family stepped in and filled the government void and became royalty, and then began losing power, so all you have is a figurehead princess, and the people with the real power want neither mutants nor royalty.

The stated purpose of the “mission” is to map out the surrounding area and establish communication with other groups if possible, and you send the royalty as an ambassador and the mutants because they have special powers to equip them for the trip, but really, it’s just to get rid of them, with the assumption that they will die. No one in the group has any illusions about what is going on, but it takes a while for them to accept the princess.

They had various encounters in different places, and I think I still have the beginnings that I had written out. While I had initially envisioned it as a novel, it felt like too much of a shaggy dog story for that, because there are many parts. I then got the bright idea that it could be a concept album, but I had only worked out one song for it and then did not get much further. And even that was not really songwriting but setting an existing poem (High Flight) to some kind of Iron Maiden-ish guitar that I would never have been able to play.

I am still fond of the whole idea, but I can’t help but think of all the things that would make it impossible now, starting with the fact that nuclear fallout may cause mutations, but not the kind resulting in really attractive people with special abilities. I bet that would make the Chernobyl Diaries a completely different film.

There is one thing that I find really interesting in putting these two together, and I had not realized it before. I was a pretty good kid as a teenager, and I sometimes felt like I had put off all my teenage angst for an extra decade, After Dad left and I came back after college to help out, I felt a lot of responsibility, possibly more than I needed too, and sometimes I just did not want it and felt really rebellious, sometimes getting angry, and sometimes moody and withdrawn. I thought maybe those were my teen years, belated.

Looking back now, I can see a definite thread of alienation during my actual adolescence. Maybe I was developmentally on target after all.