Relaspe

Chapter 1: Before and After Shock

My name is Jonathan Emit Pickett- a 19 almost 20 year old living in Northfield, Vermont in a cheap hotel room, might I add, with no parental morals to hold me down. When I was 16, I dropped out of high school to start a band with my best friends- Nathan, Tony and Preston- thinking it was the best thing to do. We were gonna call ourselves "The NoBrainers" because we were so cool and it was a  no brainer that we would be popular- at least that's what we thought. Turns out the name was already taken and after our first couple of gigs, we got sued for plagiarizing and stealing a copyrighted name...

Oops. It kinda wasn't fair, though, because the band we supposedly "stole" from actually  wasn't doing as well as us. They weren't popular, they weren't well-known and the only thing they actually had going for them was an un-updated Facebook account from like ... 10 years ago.

But, apparently, that was all the leverage they needed in order to sue us.

And believe me, they sued us for almost everything related to the band.

So my parents tried to get me back into school. I stayed for another year but, honestly, my grades were going nowhere. I didn't know what I wanted to be as an adult but I knew I wanted to have a little fun before charging head first into adulthood like everyone else. That's why I dropped out again. I thought I was ready to explore the world before I was forced into a little cubicle at my Dad's accounting job. 'Life's too short for us to be wasting it in school', I figured. My parents, on the other hand, didn't agree too well with this.

Thomas and Beth Pickett- the biggest stick- in-the-muds I've ever had the pleasure with acquainting myself with.

They never allowed fun- always studying. When I was younger, it was a lot worse. While my friends played tag and rode their bikes outside in their yards, I was forced to stay inside and read books. We had a TV- but it was always stuck on the news. Pretty much, what I'm trying to say, I didn't grow up with a lot of influence to my decision. It was pretty much "Study or Get Left Behind". And with the level of my intelligence, I surprisingly got left behind even though I studied.

It was a lose-lose situation for me and being the only child of overprotective parents wasn't helping me in school at all. When I came home with C's and D's on my report card, my parents wouldn't beat my butt. Nope. They just handed me the Webster English Dictionary, a few pieces of paper and a pen and told me to write down every word, pronunciation key and definition in the dictionary. In my entire lifetime, I've only had to do this about 6 times. Ask me any word from A to F and I'll probably be able to tell you it's definition without a second thought. Anything after F, though, is usually the point when I started to fall asleep. Always the same letter and the same word:

Fahrenheit

Just thinking about it gives me a mild chill. I can barely spell it most days and it's definition is pretty pointless. So after the word, my eyes start to close and I'm snoring and drooling all over the pages.

Surprisingly, my parents don't care... but they make me continue the next day. They aren't evil- just annoying.

Which is probably the reason why I developed a crazy anime obsession at age 14- manga have words but they have pictures,too. My little obsession started really simple. You see, even though I wasn't allowed to watch TV at my house, doesn't mean I couldn't watch it at my friends' houses. Especially Tony's. Tony's mom is a professional chef and a caterer for her own private business. So when I came over, she would make snacks.

And her snacks were always to die for. But in their family they had this saying, "Why would you eat without a show"- which I guess was their excuse for Tony's fatness. Yes, fatness. I'm not one of those kinds of people who sugar coats when someone's stomach is choking their belt and their thighs stick together like pancakes on a skillet- big boned, chunky, overweight, obese. They all mean one thing: fat.