It feels like every member of my family believes in some kind of wild, crazy shit: my sister believes crystals have healing powers, my brother believes psychedelics can unlock some latent third eye in the mind, I believe that maybe possibly reincarnation might be real, my grandma believes extraterrestrials are walking among us, and my mom believes in trickle-down economics.

All these things seem ridiculous to me. But wouldn't it be a little arrogant to just dismiss them outright? Like, who am I to pretend to know which things are true or false, right or wrong, plausible or implausible, and so on? After all, I'm only human. I don't know everything. I'm not some bastion of knowledge. I just kind of go with my first impression, based on the information available to me and, admittedly, my preexisting biases. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I've solved problems of epistemology that philosophers have been debating for centuries. I’m not that full of myself. So I'm willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, my eccentric family members have tapped into some esoteric knowledge that I have just not tapped into myself. Who knows? The universe is vast. Anything is possible.

Yet, for some reason, I can’t help but think that some of my family members’ wild claims are just flat-out wrong, that perhaps their own limited knowledge and preexisting biases are leading them astray, leading them to believe some crazy, unverifiable shit.

Take, for example, my sister, who believes that certain types of crystals can treat certain types of illnesses, corresponding to the astrologically adjacent color of the crystal. My sister has been dealing with hypothyroidism and various muscle pains for her entire life. And she refuses to go to a doctor, thinks they're all money-grubbing shysters, so she's been treating her ailments with what she calls crystal therapy for years now: wearing necklaces adorned with crystals, meditatively squeezing crystals, sometimes sprinkling crystal dust on her food, that sort of thing. Yet she's not getting any better. Actually, the opposite, she's getting worse. One would think that if the crystals aren't alleviating her suffering then she'd stop believing in the so-called “healing powers” of these crystals, but no, she continues to believe, persisting with this ridiculous crystal therapy. I imagine her thought process is something like, “Well, I'd be much worse off if I didn't use the crystals at all,” or something like that, which, to me, is some self-serving circular logic, some post hoc justification, like she's unwilling to face the fact that she's been wrong about the crystals her whole adult life and is now simply doubling down on the bullshit, like some sort of psychic self-defense mechanism that keeps her from feeling like an idiot or something.

And my mom, as another example, with her trickle-down economics, this idea that cutting taxes for the wealthy will somehow result in financial prosperity for the little guy, which seems to fly in the face of everything we know about basic human behavior, which is mostly driven by greed, an inclination to accumulate and hoard wealth for self-serving purposes. I mean, Reagan and Bush tried this, they tried cutting taxes for the wealthy, and various post hoc analyses showed that this produced no significant increase in overall economic growth or job creation, instead just widening the gap between haves and have-nots, because the wealthy simply pocketed the extra cash, buying themselves more yachts and mansions or whatever. Trump also tried this with the 2017 U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which dropped corporate tax rates by about 10%, and we’re not really seeing any of that trickle down. Instead, we’re seeing CEOs spend those savings on dividends and stock buybacks, while our national debt increases exponentially and job growth remains pretty much stagnant. This stuff is all publicly available information, yet you’lll never hear about it on Fox News, which is where my mom gets most of her information, so she continues to persist in her fantastical beliefs.

But I didn't really want to talk about crystals or economics here. What I actually want to talk about here is big-headed gray aliens, which might just be the only claim here that’s even remotely plausible, surprisingly.

My grandma has always been a staunch believer in extraterrestrial life, not only that life exists on other planets, which seems reasonable to me, but that aliens have traveled to Earth and, in some cases, have infiltrated world governments, which does not seem so reasonable to me. In 1947, when that unidentified flying object crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico, dominating the news cycle for months, Grandma Susu was an impressionable teenager, and this event left an impact crater on her brain about the size of the one left in the desert by that mysterious UFO. The government’s response certainly didn’t help dissuade her from believing it was aliens, if anything it reinforced it, because at first the government acknowledged it was a UFO crash, but the very next day they retracted this claim, instead saying it was a weather balloon. And the reports of strange aluminum-like material found at the crash certainly didn’t help dissuade her either. This material, when crushed, would instantly return to its pre-crushed state, supposedly, which, to Grandma Susu, meant that of course it had to be of extraterrestrial origin because anything not immediately understandable must be aliens. Forget “God of the Gaps,” we’re in “Aliens of the Gaps” territory now. And of course, the government has no reason to lie about this incident unless it was truly aliens. Surely there was no top-secret aircraft that the government might have been hiding in order to protect their secret from enemies of the state, and surely this would not have resulted in some sort of mass disinformation campaign in which the government might first claim that the crashed top-secret aircraft was actually an alien spacecraft but then turn around to claim that it was actually a weather balloon, just to confuse people into not knowing what to believe or whatever, thereby tricking people into camps of alien-believers and non-alien-believers, and in this way, whether someone believes it’s a weather balloon or an alien ship, it doesn't really matter either way, because both camps are now serving government interests, because if people believe the bullshit then they won’t be poking into potentially sketchy government secrets, but of course neither the UFO community nor the National Association of Weather Balloon Enthusiasts care about this dynamic, both just choosing to believe whatever narrative reinforces their preexisting biases.

I’ve found that the truth is often hidden in places people least want you to look. So it seems more likely to me that whatever crash-landed in Roswell was some sort of experimental aircraft that the government was trying to keep hidden, evidenced by the massive disinformation campaign around the whole thing, which only served to distract people from what was really going on. But of course Susu doesn’t see it that way. She wholeheartedly believes that whatever crash-landed in that desert was actually of extraterrestrial origin, and she hasn’t stopped talking about this since 1947.

When I was a kid, I would spend the summers with Susu, and back then her media diet consisted almost entirely of ufology, and this rubbed off on me in a big way. I absorbed alien mythology like some sort of intense background radiation, which both frightened and intrigued me. When she was playing solitaire in her room, she’d have the SyFy channel on, watching some documentary about aliens. I remember one time she was particularly excited about a new Roswell documentary, one which showed so-called “new unearthed footage” of the autopsy done on the quote-unquote “alien bodies” supposedly recovered from the Roswell crash site. This footage was reportedly taken in 1947, right after the crash, yet, as independent researchers pointed out, none of the film equipment used in the footage could have existed in 1947, and there were a number of other little oddities, all of which eventually forced the filmmaker, Ray Santilli, to admit that the whole thing was actually a staged recreation of some footage he saw that he swears on his mama’s life was actually real, genuine autopsy footage that, as of the creation of the recreation, was so deteriorated that it can no longer be watched, hence the recreation, which he only admitted after being called out, go figure. And of course, the aliens in the footage resembled the classic Gray alien variants found in all sorts of science fiction media, which gets another go figure from me. And of course, the SyFy documentary did not cover any of this recreation stuff at the time, instead presenting the autopsy footage as bona fide proof that aliens crash-landed in Roswell, which just served to validate and solidify Susu’s preexisting belief that aliens did indeed crash-land in that desert on July 7th, 1947, which also served to scare the shit out of me as a 10-year-old child with an overactive imagination who was easily spooked by the unknown.

I remember being so scared of aliens that, whenever I was outside and it was dark, I would always feel that primal pressure, that atavistic self-defense mechanism, on the back of my neck, my brain always telling me that something was behind me, stalking me, as if some sort of big-headed Gray was going to snatch me up and take me to the mothership for forced mating and probing or whatever. I was so scared of aliens that, sometimes, at night, when I had to come home from a friend’s house, instead of simply walking home, which would have taken like two minutes in most cases, I would instead call Susu and have her pick me up in her car, and those car trips only served to scare me further because Susu would always be listening to some paranormal radio program on the AM band, and they’d always be talking about fucking alien abductions and shit, which would just further freak me the hell out. But I never told Susu any of this because, despite aliens scaring me, there was something exciting about the whole thing, something gripping. The tinge of fear coupled with the unknown, like something more was out there in the vastness of space, was enthralling to me, and honestly, I couldn’t get enough of it. I would watch the UFO documentaries and listen to the AM broadcasts just as closely as Susu would, absorbing it all, totally entranced, even though it scared the living hell out of me and made it so I couldn’t sleep in my own bed at night, seeing aliens behind the darks of my eyelids.

And Susu wouldn’t just listen to paranormal radio on car trips, she would also listen to it while sewing in her garage, at full blast, with the door open, meaning aliens and ghosts surfed the invisible waves within the airspace of her small home at all hours of the day. I could not escape the alien invasion, nor did I want to, because learning about aliens was like uncovering some deeply esoteric knowledge that only a privileged few could know. I remember one radio show in particular, called Coast to Coast AM, hosted by Art Bell and sometimes George Knapp, was Susu’s favorite. She would never miss a broadcast. Based out of Nevada, land of the aliens, these guys lived and breathed extraterrestrials. And they had an “Open Lines” portion of the show in which people would call in and tell their own alien stories, most of which involved abductions, lost time, UFO sightings, crop circles, all the standard alien shit. And, I remember, when George Knapp was hosting, he would introduce each broadcast with this poetic paranormal ramble, and this ramble stuck with me, intensified my youthful romanticization of the search for the unknown.

“Good evening, everyone. You're in the right place at the right time. This is Coast to Coast AM. Tonight, we're coming at you, blasting out of the Mojave Desert like a scirocco, blazing across the land into your town, into your home, slamming into your radio like a supercharged nanoparticle of dark energy. You've arrived at a nexus point, a crossroads of shadow and light, a phantasmagorical marketplace of ideas and blasphemies, where together we prowl through the wilderness of smoke and mirrors in the collective psyche. We are Coast to Coast AM, a grand melting pot of cultures and subcultures, from the benign to the bizarre, all on the same path, searching for breadcrumbs of cosmic understanding, hoping we'll be able to follow the trail back to where we started.”

Of course, back then, I didn't understand what half of those words meant, but it sounded cool as hell, so I was hardcore into it. Susu and I would dim the lights, gather around the radio, her operating the sewing machine, me operating the Game Boy Color, and we would listen to those crazy callers tell crazy stories about shadow people in the sewers of Las Vegas, technicolor lights in the Phoenix night sky, time travelers traveling back in time to collect old IBM parts to save their future timeline from some robot takeover, secret government mind-control projects using LSD and remote viewing, people claiming they’re the reincarnation of some old war hero or something, and, of course, alien abductions which often involved probes inserted into places they should never be inserted into. And, after those late-night broadcasts, I would fall asleep curled up in Susu’s bed, equal parts frightened and fascinated.

Recently, feeling like I had become too close-minded and rigid in my worldview, I thought it would do me well to revisit some of those old Coast to Coast AM broadcasts, relive some of that frightening adolescent fascination, get in touch with my inner child, a version of me that was less cynical, less arrogant, more open to otherworldly wonder. I was in serious need of phantasmagorical ideas and blasphemies being blasted right into my brain like supercharged nanoparticles of dark energy. And so I went searching for the Coast to Coast AM archives, and, lo and behold, I found it online, a huge repository of the old broadcasts, and I’ve been listening to them for the past few months, entrenching myself in paranormal mythos and hardcore extraterrestrial lore, dissolving myself into the grand melting pot of bizarre cultures and subcultures, inhaling the smoke that swirls before the mirrors of the mind, all in search for breadcrumbs of cosmic understanding.

But I haven’t found any breadcrumbs yet. I’ve only found rumor-fueled speculation, already debunked pseudoscience, supposedly top-secret information relayed by quote-unquote “Ex-Area-51 employees” who won’t use their real names or produce their credentials due to “personal safety reasons,” fervently told accounts of UFO sightings that are most likely just misidentified swamp gas or ball lightning or literally the planet Venus, stories that amount to nothing more than fiction because there were literally no witnesses other than this one guy who’s basically saying “just trust me bro,” and a number of other tales that, while entertaining as hell, are totally unverifiable and quite possibly made up by unhinged people starving for attention, their fifteen minutes of fame, made possible by Coast to Coast AM.

I imagine the average Coast to Coast AM caller’s everyday life is so mundane that they involuntarily come up with fantastical stories, see things that aren’t there, slot their sensory experiences into some paranormal narrative that they already buy into, all to alleviate their own boredom.

But here I am, being cynical again. Maybe I'm just too old, or maybe I've been indoctrinated by the mainstream science narratives, or maybe I'm just too close-minded to believe in all this shit. I listen to all these far-fetched stories told with approximately zero backing evidence, and I find myself becoming slightly annoyed, like these Coast to Coast AM callers are searching for cosmic breadcrumbs in all the wrong places. They see something they don’t understand and immediately attribute it to the paranormal, like shadow people or aliens or fucking Bigfoot or whatever, and this line of thinking offends me on some level, like the natural world is already full of mysteries without having to make shit up. For example, many UFO sightings are explainable by ball lightning, a mysterious and barely understood phenomenon, yet these so-called “ufologists” are not interested in studying ball lightning, which is super cool and interesting. Instead, they come up with fantastical stories about discs in the sky and big-headed Gray aliens, thereby ignoring the wonders of the natural world.

Ufology is basically like a religion, a belief system with no tangible evidence behind it, yet ufologists like to pretend they’re legitimate scientists practicing the scientific method, though they don’t actually follow the scientific process. They see ball lightning, don’t understand it, and instead of developing a testable hypothesis, they immediately conclude it’s aliens and therefore don’t have to investigate any further. They work backward from a conclusion formed by science fiction media and preexisting biases. I think my point here is that the universe is already full of mysteries waiting to be solved, but by focusing on imaginary Gray aliens and fucking Bigfoot, they are doing themselves a disservice almost, depriving themselves of a deeper understanding of the world around them.

But I am sympathetic because I do actually believe that aliens exist. I really do. Like I said in the sixth paragraph up there, “big-headed gray aliens … might just be the only claim here that’s even remotely plausible.” That's because aliens make sense to me, and this is not a hot take by any means, it’s actually quite basic. Depending on the scientific spacetime model you subscribe to, the universe is either infinite or really really fucking big and expanding. Personally, I don’t think the universe is infinite, otherwise every inch of the night sky would be covered in starlight due to the infinite number of stars, meaning there would be no night at all, but I do believe that the universe is really really fucking big and expanding, and I think physicists have done some math or whatever to sort of verify that. Either way, infinite or not, both scenarios imply that there are lots of galaxies swirling around lots of supermassive black holes within which lots of planets are swirling around lots of stars, “lots” being a gross understatement here, to the point that it would be absurd if aliens did not exist on one of those planets out there. And, based on measuring cosmic background radiation, the universe is something like 13.8 billion years old, and the Earth itself is only 4.5 billion years old, meaning a lot of time has passed for life on other planets to pop up. In fact, I would argue that, based on our current understanding of the universe, aliens are pretty much a given, like 100%, they are out there, they have to be. There is another Earth-like planet out there in another galaxy that has life on it. I am wholly convinced of this. Now, whether or not aliens can get to our planet is another matter entirely, one that I'm skeptical of due to our current understanding of the seemingly hard-coded rules of light-speed travel, but nevertheless, I believe they are out there somewhere. Otherwise, young-Earth creationists are right, and our entire scientific model of the universe is just flat-out wrong, and that's not something I'm willing to accept right now based on the available evidence, because, frankly, I trust modern science over ancient desert scribbles. And aliens don’t even need to exist on Earth-like planets. They don’t even need to be carbon-based like us. There’s nothing stopping life from being silicon-based or nitrogen-based or phosphorus-based or whatever-based. It would be arrogant and naive to think that all life in the universe has to be like us. Life could even exist outside of the human-visible electromagnetic spectrum, like within weird space waves and shit, and we’d never even know it. The thing about science is that we’re literally always learning new things, so it would be insane to think that, right here, right now, we have cracked the code of the universe, as if there’s nothing left to discover.

So, again, I am sympathetic toward believers in the paranormal, because they have the right idea. The universe is vast, and there are many unknowns. They’re searching for cosmic breadcrumbs just like everyone else, they’re just doing it the wrong way. They’re kind of starting with a whole loaf of bread instead of breadcrumbs, beginning with a conclusion and working backward, as if they already have everything figured out and just need to prove it to other people for some reason, which is not how proper science or even logical deduction should work.

And this line of thinking also does a disservice to yourself, as it’s a close-minded worldview, because if you immediately jump to “it’s aliens”, then you’re not really open to any other possible explanation, and those other explanations could be really fucking cool, yet you’d never know it, because you’re not really following the cosmic breadcrumbs, you’re following a story that you’ve already convinced yourself is true.

But maybe that’s just me being cynical again.

“The Citadel Military College of South Carolina (simply known as The Citadel) is a public senior military college in Charleston, South Carolina, United States. Established in 1842, it is the third oldest of the six senior military colleges in the United States.”
—Wikipedia

A few months ago, I was really into Columbo, and one night, while watching the show on Pluto TV, I was hit over the head by some seriously dreadful deja vu.

A cannon had backfired at a military academy ceremony, killing its headmaster, foul play was suspected, so up drives Columbo in his busted-up 1959 Peugeot convertible, shaking and backfiring and billowing smoke like crazy. He parks, gets out, bumbles through an open portcullis into the courtyard of a massive three-story barracks, floor a checkerboard pattern of red and white, walls smooth and white and taller than the eye can see. It’s all very orderly and intimidating and familiar somehow. And I’m sitting on my couch, overcome by this dreadful sense of profound deja vu, as if I had stood there before, right in the middle of that checkerboard courtyard, but I couldn’t place the when, where, or even the why. So up Columbo walks in his wrinkly old trench coat with that signature drunken-penguin gait of his, and there are dozens of young military cadets performing drills in the courtyard, and their drill instructor, a Colonel Lyle C. Rumford, played by Patrick McGoohan, who plays a villain in like every other episode of Columbo for some reason, instructs his cadets to continue their drills before turning to talk to the aloof hobo detective, at which point Columbo asks a few seemingly innocuous questions before going wait wait just one more thing, then asking a few more questions, and then wait wait just one more thing, and yet more questions before the Colonel reveals, in an overly calm and conspicuous way, that the now-deceased headmaster was planning to allow girls to join the academy, which of course makes Columbo instantly suspect the Colonel as the murderer, and so now Columbo is determined to figure out how the Colonel did it, how the Colonel murdered the headmaster while making it look like an accident done by one of the young cadets. And throughout this scene, shots of the barracks from every angle are shown, the three stories of white-cement archways, the rounded castle-like stairwells at each corner of the rectangular courtyard, the countless dark blue doors lining each identical floor, and of course the cadets with buzz cuts and fatigues all looking both stoic and miserable at the same time somehow. And all this is just making my deja vu more dreadful and profound. So I’m sitting there thinking to myself, I have been here before, I know I have, but where, where is this place, and it’s bothering me a little bit, so I whip out my phone and search up the episode, and that’s when it all comes flooding back.

This is the place my dad sent me for summer camp when I was like twelve. This is the Military College of South Carolina. The Citadel. How could I have forgotten?

“The Citadel was initially established as two schools to educate young men from around the state, while simultaneously protecting the South Carolina State Arsenals in both Columbia and Charleston.”
—Wikipedia

Back then, I played a lot of video games and shopped at Hot Topic and listened to 80s music on repeat. My youth was typified by a yin-yang dichotomy of apathy toward anything that didn’t interest me and hyperfocus toward things that did interest me, those things being Zelda, The Cure, Dragon Ball Z, and Gundam Wing, but never school. I was the type of kid who would literally use dog-ate-my-paper type excuses when teachers asked why I didn’t complete my homework. So my grades were terrible and I was put in special-ed classes. I always had the feeling that people thought I was dumb and detached, but looking back, I now realize this is only half true, although for people looking at me from the outside, this was not obvious, understandably so.

My parents divorced when I was like ten, so I would live with my mom one month and my dad the next, as outlined in their court-ordered custody agreement. My dad was a hardass, while my mom basically let me do whatever I wanted. This parental yin-yang colored my entire childhood. My mom’s favorite phrase was “yes, honey.” She indulged my every whim, either because she loved me and wanted to make me happy regardless of the consequences, or because she didn’t want to deal with my tantrums, or maybe a mixture of both. My dad was the opposite. He was all about hard work and personal responsibility, and he didn’t take no shit, and he was the only person who would tell me no. He was also very stubborn, so he could wait out my tantrums no matter how long it took. My dad had an old-school conservative upbringing typified by rulers and staring at walls, and he incorporated a watered-down version of this into his parenting technique. He was never abusive, but I grew to be afraid of my father, and this fear brought about a certain level of obedience. But after my parents got divorced, it was like I lived in two different galaxies, one with a warm bright star and another with a cold dark star. When I was living with my mom, I did whatever I wanted. I would come home from school, tell her I didn’t have any homework, drink soda and play video games all day, spend all night on my Dell PC just chatting away with strangers in the Yahoo! chatrooms while Adult Swim played repeats of Home Movies and Cowboy Bebop in my periphery. There, I lived a life of no responsibility and maximum comfort, courtesy of my new wealthy stepdad. I remember my bedroom only vaguely. It was on the second floor of a mansion, and you had to walk across something like an indoor bridge to get to it, so my mom never bothered to check on me at night as long as I kept quiet. My room was a decent size but felt small because of the king-size bed pushed against the middle wall. My computer desk was on the right side of the bed, with a bookshelf and stereo to the left, and there was a low-standing dresser with my television and Nintendo 64 to the right. A big dresser containing all my band shirts and tripp pants was situated on the left side of the bed, with only a small walking space between the bed and the dresser. I had stuck band stickers all over the dresser itself, which was something my stepdad hated because the dresser was an expensive antique, much like everything else in the lavish house, none of which I appreciated, because back then I never once thought about how privileged I was, because frankly I was a spoiled fucking brat, and my dad knew this better than anyone, because when I came to live with him, I had always gained like ten pounds since the last time he had seen me, and I was tired all the time, and so of course he blamed all my apathy and weight gain and bad grades and inability to focus on my mom.

Living with my dad was like orbiting a whole other star. From the moment I walked through the front door of his square brick house, party time was over. It was all about chores and schoolwork and playing on local church sports teams of which he was the coach. To this day, my old room is decorated with photos of the teams I played on, everyone looking bright and happy except me, wearing a huge scowl in every picture. At my dad’s, there was little time for doing the things I actually wanted to do. The Nintendo 64 was in the basement, and the basement was locked until I completed all my chores and schoolwork or whatever. When I came home from school, the first thing he would have me do was sit at the kitchen table and do my homework until it was perfect, often coming in and checking over my shoulder. But I would sit there in silent protest, in that uncomfortable metal chair, just using my pencil to poke little holes in the apples in the decorative bowl at the center of the table, pretending like I was stuck on a math problem or something. I was stubborn in a very dumb way, because I knew that if I completed my homework, then Dad would let me play video games, but I still didn’t complete my homework for some reason, so I never got to play video games. In this way, my dad’s parenting method didn’t really work to improve my grades, but it did work in preventing me from throwing tantrums like I would with my mom, because I was truly afraid of my dad, not because he was abusive or anything like that, but because he was firm and would take my stuff away and do all the other normal stuff normal parents would do when trying to raise their kids to be fine, upstanding citizens.

At some point, however, my dad got sick of it all, and realizing that my apathy was not fading and that I was not improving, he decided to send me to a summer camp for troubled youth, although he didn’t frame it that way at the time, positioning it as just a normal summer camp that normal kids went to, so it wasn’t until I walked through that open portcullis and onto that red and white checkerboard flooring that I realized that this was not a normal summer camp at all, this was actually a fucking military camp. I remember standing there, frozen, staring up at the castle-like compound, watching kids wearing buzz cuts and fatigues march in the courtyard, realizing that I was a long, long way from home, in a place that might as well have been hell, and that’s the first time I ever felt true dread.

“A lawsuit contends that The Citadel knew one of its counselors was abusing summer campers in the mid-1990s but didn’t fire him and did nothing to stop it, yet another in a string of sexual-abuse accusations that have been made against two men who worked at the military college’s summer camp.”
—The Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2013

The next thing I remember is my dad was gone, and I was being shouted at by some older man in full uniform. He directed me to get into marching formation with the other kids, but I was frozen in terror. I remember I was wearing my Cure t-shirt and tripp pants, and I was sweating profusely in the harsh summer sun. So when I didn’t immediately comply, the man shouted something like, “C’MON PIGGY, WE DON’T HAVE ALL DAY,” which kicked my ass into gear, and I immediately fell in line. We marched out of the portcullis, through the sports field, and into another huge white castle-like building. I had no idea what was going on. Some of the other kids were in civilian clothing, some were in fatigues. The ones in civilian clothing were separated from the fatigues-wearing ones and ordered to march down a thin hallway, where we stood silently outside a blue door. Kids entered this door one by one. At first, I didn’t know what was happening, but after the first kid entered with shaggy hair and exited with a buzz cut, my eyes grew wide, and I knew. They were cutting my hair. Back then, I was serious about my hair. I liked it long and messy, like Robert Smith from The Cure. So as the line and average length of hair for the regiment grew shorter, the pit in my stomach grew larger. Until eventually, I entered the barber’s room and was pushed into the chair. The clippers went BRRRRRR and just like that my hair was gone. I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. This was one of many hammers used by The Citadel to pound individuality and ego out of children.

Later that day, they assigned us our quarters. Mine was on the second floor. There’s a scene in that Columbo episode where the titular detective enters one of these rooms to question the cadet accused of accidentally backfiring the cannon. My room looked just like the one shown in the episode, indicating that The Citadel has not changed in a long long time. The walls of the room were white brick. There was a single barred window. It felt like one of those insane asylum rooms. There was a sink in the corner, a single dresser with two cabinets pushed against the right wall, and a bunk bed against the left wall. The mattresses were thin, and the blankets ratty and torn. I was paired with another kid. I forget his name, but he was strange and kind of horrific. I remember he was tall and lanky and acne-ridden and would make a lot of weird sex jokes. I slept on the bottom bunk in a perpetual state of psychic terror. On the first night, in the middle of the night, instead of going out to the bathroom, my bunkmate took a shit in his underwear, wrapped it up in a ball, and then put it in my cabinet dresser for me to find the next morning, like some sort of weird animalistic dominance thing. I was too afraid to report him, thinking he would hurt me or something, so I just cleaned it up and didn’t say a word about it. I remember, night after night, after they would ring the bell and scream “LIGHTS OUT” at 8 p.m., I would just lie in my bunk, frozen, staring up at the wire mesh above me, fantasizing about ways to escape. Occasionally, a camp counselor would creak open the door and peek their head in, checking on us. One time, at night, I remember a counselor entered my quarters, stopped in the middle of the room, and stared at the bunks for what felt like an hour. I was wide awake but holding my breath and keeping my eyes shut real tight, frozen with fear, thinking the guy was going to get me out of bed and beat the shit out of me or something. Nothing happened, but I learned how to play dead that night.

“The suit was filed in federal court in Charleston earlier this week by a now-25-year-old alleged victim who claimed to have been abused on 21 different occasions by Michael Arpaio. The Citadel ultimately closed its summer camp in 2005 after reaching a $3.8 million settlement with five campers who said the former Marine captain had abused them between 1995 and 2001.”
—The Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2013

Every day was the same. I would wake up at five in the morning to the sound of a loud whistle, put on my fatigues, hustle down the stairwell, and line up with the rest of the kids. Then we’d march to the mess hall, where they’d serve us the worst-tasting breakfast you have ever tasted, so bad that I hardly ever ate anything, only drinking some milk most mornings. Then we’d march out to the field, do push-ups and jumping jacks and sit-ups and burpees and laps for a few hours. Then we’d play soccer for some reason. Then we’d march back to the mess hall and eat the worst-tasting lunch ever. Then there’d be a thirty-minute block of free time, where we could socialize or whatever, but being so out of shape and practically starving myself, I was pretty much half-dead by this point, so I would just go back to my quarters and sprawl out on the bottom bunk and pretend I was in another place, pretend I was in the world of Hyrule, and this was a brief respite, my little form of escape.

They wouldn’t let us bring anything personal into the camp with us, but we were allowed paper and pencil for writing letters to family, and I remember one time, during the break period, I wrote a short letter to my grandma, Susu, because her address was the only one I could remember, and the letter went something like this: WHAT DID I FUCKING DO TO DESERVE THIS? I AM GOING TO DIE IN HERE. I WANT TO GO HOME. PLEASE. I’M SORRY FOR WHATEVER I DID. TELL MOM TO GET ME OUT EARLY. PLEASE. I CANNOT DO A WHOLE MONTH IN HERE. SAVE ME. PLEASE. This text is almost verbatim because Susu kept the note and still has it to this day, along with the newspaper clipping she found years later outlining why The Citadel summer camp was closed down permanently.

“Arpaio pleaded guilty to multiple charges in 2003 following a military court-martial and served 15 months at the Charleston Naval Brig. According to the lawsuit, Arpaio was indicted in 2009 on federal charges including conspiracy to commit murder and disposing of a cadaver and is in federal prison.”
—The Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2013

When it was all over, I had lost about thirty pounds and was mute for an entire week. I remember, when I got home, the first thing I did was fold all my clothes and arrange them neatly in my dresser, then I put all my Gundam models and Nintendo 64 games and Dragon Ball Z VHSs in the closet, hiding all the things I loved, then I straightened out my sports team photos on the dresser, organizing everything real nice, because I thought that if I hadn’t done all this, I’d be sent back there, back to hell. And then I sprawled out on my king-size bed, imagined myself in Hyrule, and passed out.

But it must have been midday or something, because I remember my dad woke me up. He was looking around my room with this astonished look on his face, and he said something like, “Wow, you really cleaned up, I guess your time at The Citadel taught you a thing or two, huh?”

And I remember rolling over in bed, looking up at him with this blank expression on my face, and nodding, then I went back to sleep, dreaming of Hyrule.

Then, the following year, around my thirteenth birthday, when the judge gave me the option to pick which parent I wanted to live with, I picked Mom, and then, just like that, I was back in Hyrule, for real this time.