The Virgin Prince's War Journal

To all of you, be you bipedal or bipolar,

Ah, they just don’t build them like they used to. I’ve spent the last few hours assembling artificial light-up reindeer, so that we might make the Virginlair that much more festive and enjoyable for when my young niece visits this Christmas. She’s a precocious thing, and smart enough that she’ll know a string of lights when she sees one, but perhaps the deer-shapes will be pleasing enough to her eyes, she being at the perfect age for the peak of imagination. As for myself, it seems rather silly that I’m assembling reindeer out of Christmas lights and metal wire, for the sake of having simulated deer in my front yard. It wasn’t that long ago that we had real deer in the neighborhood, even after there were million-dollar mansions built on the hill across the street from us. When those went up, all we lost was the lone wolf that used to trot peacefully down the sidewalk across the street from my house.

But even after I lost my late-night drinking buddy, they kept building. Every place for blocks all around us that hadn’t yet been completely claimed by man, every place where there were still trees and brush, every place where you could still see deer, skunk, foxes, and garter snakes, every place we’d played and hiked and hid and ran in our youth, every place we’d smoked a joint in high school, or snuck a drink of our parents’ booze (or urinated that same booze) or some weird person kept dumping their trash (which frequently included car parts, old copies of Penthouse and other nasty pornography, and the discarded packaging for a penis enlarger pump), all of it, it was all bulldozed. Fences went up, cutting us off from the paths between the trees looming large over our heads that we’d once walked freely through, and every shelter filled with trees that once had seemed so massive and magical, became just a small city-block’s worth of cold, sterile dirt, on which sat nothing but a few yellow earth-moving machines.

I admit I tried to sabotage the machines once or twice.

There was a condo here, a townhouse there, some apartments to the left, and to the right, the large houses to suit the yuppies moving into my neighborhood. But not a single speck of dirt left to play in, it’s either been built over by now, or has a fence around it to keep us off, meaning they will be building soon. The deer, which we once saw so frequently, have retreated onto the grounds of the college, which still has some unpaved hill left behind it, stretching all the way back to the prison. The skunks wander through the streets of the neighborhood behind me. Funny, that the creature otherwise known as the wood pussy has taken to wandering city streets, though its current close proximity towards streetlamps and stop-signs would explain its other name of polecat.

The short end is, I’m putting deer made of metal wire and plastic lights in my yard to replace all the deer that used to actually be in the neighborhood. My neighbors are too, especially back there in skunk-territory. I’d rather have a bush trimmed to look like a condominium.


So I built these monstrosities, these messes of wires ready to catch fire and motors waiting to burn out. Though the instructions brought new definition to the term “lacking”, and the pieces fit poorly, and other pieces weren’t included entirely, and the materials themselves were flimsy and tended to fall apart at the slightest touch, I probably could have finished the deer in under an hour. But I found things to fix.

The first reindeer was weighted wrong, and tended to fall face-forward and to the left, and came straight out of the box with an already busted light bulb, but it was of heartier construction, and the motor worked well and the beast’s neck swung properly to the left and right, as might a proper old-school rapper (particularly, Run DMC, in moments of shaking their heads in disdain at Penn & Teller, come to mind), so I quickly finished, knowing I would simply fasten the thing to the ground with stakes. The second deer fooled me. I initially thought this would be the better of the two as it was weighted better and the parts fit properly, and it being considerably easier to assemble. But as I attached the pole to the headpiece which caused the motor to bring the neck and head up and down, I found that I was not given the clip the instructions told me use to fasten the wire. Shoddy work! So I bent a paperclip and used that in its place. This would have been fine, except then as I tested the motor, the piece into which the pole slid broke off entirely, having snapped off due to poor design and cheap soldering. This sort of thing happened to me once before with a pair of Laser Tag guns.

As I had fixed (and had made better) the Laser Tag guns in my garage in the latter days of my youth, so did I attempt to fix the deer. I attached the rod to several other pieces of the neck, attempting to bypass the rod-holder entirely, and being successful in achieving movement, though the range of movement for the neck was quite disappointing. Thus, I detached the rod and reattached it to other parts of the neck, trying each time for better movement. Still, the motion was lacking, so I figured out where the rod-holder had been and reattached it even better than it had been originally with the help of two paper clips and a pair of needle-nose pliers. It was now ready once again to be assembled as the builders had intended.

However, by this point both the rod and the rod-arm had detached themselves, thanks to the movement of the motor and, again, shoddy craftsmanship. Again, I reattached these both better then before with a paperclip and a little motivation. The beast was assembled as the manufacturers had intended. The neck movement still sucked. During all this time, the cheap plastic material of the body had continued to crumble and fall off with each time I touched it, causing me to want to finish repairs as quickly as possible.

I dug through the garage until I found a bolt, which I attached to the end of the rod, thus reducing the slack and causing the head to lift higher. Of course, the actual mechanics of the rod, rod-arm, and motor were so poor that they tended to catch on them selves, again, reducing the movement of the neck. On and on I continued, bending the rod arm one way, then the other, then trying to keep the rod straight with a washer (which I couldn’t find, so I then customized one out of something I found in the garage). The results stayed the same with everything I tried, undid, and tried a different way. I assembled and reassembled the thing in every possible combination and configuration until I finally realized that some things are simply crappy.

I’ve even gone over and checked on the damn thing a few times while writing this, just looking for some possible way to fix it.

Poor design is poor design, and I have it assembled now as intended. This deer is the Ford of Christmas decorations, having a motor too weak to move the counter-balance, a counter-balance that drags along and catches on the body’s interior, being too large, placed too low, and too far back, and a rod and rod-arm that are built too close to the counter-balance and are insecure and unstable (sounds like my ex), making worse the problem of the counter-balance, and worst of all, shoddy parts that come apart on their own. Forgiving that this deer doesn’t even have antlers, I’m left to accept that the best this thing can do is a slight, arrhythmic nodding, similar to a boxer past his prime. Perhaps if I had the time, money, and materials, I could get the thing running perfect, but I doubt it. I think this is a case of junk simply being capable of being junk.

That said, old Darryl “DMC” and Mohammed Ali are ready for being tied down in my front yard. Furthermore, my carpet needs a good vacuuming, as it is now covered in golden-plastic bits and metal shavings. Ah, but my niece will be excited!

I wish all things could be as simple as plastic reindeer. Certainly women are not, and my most recent ex-girlfriend is certainly no exception, though I doubt half the time even she can make sense of herself. Whatever the case, unlike the screws on my shoddy decoration, she simply won’t let go.

I had hoped that she would give me some space for myself, I, having developed quite a taste for it during the two months she decided to ignore all the efforts I’d made to keep a friendship alive between us, and stubbornly decided to stick to insults rather than apologies, and silence rather than compassion. I haven’t forgiven her, and don’t rightly think I have an obligation to. This is my right. I have put up with nonstop pettiness and cruelty on her part during the length of time I have known her and I think have a right to act perhaps a bit small myself for a change. If she hadn’t wanted me to come to this realization, she probably shouldn’t have stopped calling even before I last called her, and further compounded the problem by stubbornly and selfishly giving me two months of silence in which I had plenty of time to contemplate many things, our entire relationship and personal history included.

But unlike her, I’ve made no claims of a huge metamorphosis, in which I’ve completely turned my back on my bad ways, and now am so forgiving and far from petty. Furthermore, I’ve shown more compassion to her than any, short of a holy man, ever would, having comforted her when she freaked out because her boob-job didn’t quite take initially, stayed up talking to her when she broke down in the middle of the night, due to a lack of alcohol in her system, and, with tears in my reddened eyes, called her best friend so that she might make sure my former amour was safe and not going to do something dangerous in the aftermath of my own conversations with her in which she’d confessed to taking pills again, then proceeded to say the worst, cruelest things to me I have ever heard. I did all this because I cared. I was there whenever she needed comfort or to be cheered up, and I put great effort in that direction.

So I say, without any shame or feeling at all that I am being less than truthful, that I have known forgiveness and compassion. While she is trying to find it, I’ve already had it. And having made no claims about a great personal change, I feel I have a right to be petty. There it is. If she’s really so changed, then she should prove it. I, myself, have made no such claims. As was always the case in our relationship, I, for one, have no problem admitting when I’m wrong. I am being petty.

I simply don’t care. This is part of the healing process, and if she doesn’t give a damn about my need to feel better, and my well-being, then she’s simply proving herself to further be the incredibly selfish person I currently view her as. I had told her, in my last letter, in as civil a manner as possible, that this was how I felt. She acted as if she could deal with this maturely in her response.

So I find it funny that this person who claims to be experiencing a great chrysalis, a change in which she is becoming an entirely positive person and shedding the negativity which she once contained in spades, chooses to continue to write snide remarks consistently on her website (this being prior to any mention of her on mine, but actually starting immediately after my email response, effectively contradicting all she had written, hence my doubts of her sincerity) and continuing to do so in increasing intensity, and obsessively reading my own site and posting more of her own criticisms, negativity, and immaturity in my comments.

I certainly didn’t ask her to read my webpage, and certainly did not expect her to, she always complaining of how lacking my writing is. But I find it funny that while she gripes and complains and makes petty comments within the safety of her own webpage (and has been doing so for sometime) she fails to see my own right to express my own honest feelings within my own webpage. It’s the type of hypocrisy I’ve come to expect from her, and I’m further not surprised she’s already chosen to ignore my request of personal space, filling my comments box.

But I have a great emotional strength and feel moral righteousness on this matter for two reasons. One, I feel completely right in my heart. Two, unlike her, I can be honest with myself, with her, and everyone else. I AM being petty.

And if she does give a damn about my friendship, then she’d better learn to let me have that for right now, because I’m not yet ready to forgive, though I know I’m willing to eventually.

It’s still better than she deserves.

So let’s see if there’s any truth to these claims of personal growth.

Be seeing you,
The Virgin Prince