When Insecurity wasn’t an alien nation
If I could time travel, I’d go back to visit myself at age fifteen. “Let’s go fishing,” I’d tell younger me. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and catch some decent trout. Even it they aren’t biting, I need to give you a few words of advice.” Once we were settled in the magic canoe that transported me back to Sennebec Hill Farm in the early summer of 1963, I’d make myself comfortable and proceed to tell younger me what was in store for him. I doubt he’d believe a word of my tale, but who knows. I’d tell him of instances that stick in my mind like burrs under a saddle, wearing and tearing, eating away at self-confidence and inner comfort for far too long. Stuff like being afraid...all the time, about imagined expectations of others, about wanting to talk to certain girls, but letting that insane movie director in my head, the one I later named Cecil D. Disaster, write a script where they totally humiliated me in front of everyone in hearing range (I used this as the start of my first nove...
