SEXUALITY AND ASSHOLISHNESS

Sexualization and assholia: bosom buddies?

The following is an excerpt from Andy Nowicki's Confessions of a Would-Be Wanker.

At the age of 12, I still clung to my own innocence with a desperate tenacity. Still, I knew on some level that it was a lost cause. During the summer of 1983, as a rising seventh grader, I recall one incident at the neighborhood pool which somehow put things in a queasy sort of perspective.

SEXUALIZATION AND HUMILIATION: THE SUZANNE AFFAIR

The following is an excerpt from "Welcome Back Chaos," Andy Nowicki's upcoming memoir/manifesto.

by Andy Nowicki

My mind also flashes to a different memory, of events which took place during the school year which followed the summer of WarGames.

There was a girl in my seventh-grade class named Suzanne, a skinny, beady-eyed girl who always faintly repelled me. I had no idea why I felt this way at the time, but looking back now, I think it was because she was, in general, a pretty scary child. In today's parlance, one might call her “psycho,” or perhaps more benignly, aver that she “has issues.” I do not mean to be unkind in my assessment of Suzanne, who perhaps was the product of a broken home, or the victim of child abuse. Some trauma had surely warped her psyche, to the point where now, on the brink of young womanhood, she had become prone to bizarre fixations and obsessions which would take root suddenly, as if from out of nowhere.

SEXUALIZATION AND ASSHOLISHNESS

Sexualization and assholia: bosom buddies?

                         

by Andy Nowicki

(The following is an excerpt from "Welcome Back Chaos," Andy Nowicki's upcoming memoir/manifesto.)

At the age of 12, I still clung to my own innocence with a desperate tenacity. Still, I knew on some level that it was a lost cause. During the summer of 1983, as a rising seventh grader, I recall one incident at the neighborhood pool which somehow put things in a queasy sort of perspective.

Earlier in the day, my friend and I had taken in the summer popcorn flick WarGames—featuring young, mop-topped Matthew Broderick and stern, middle-aged, mustachioed Dabney Coleman—in which a cocky teenage genius manages to hack into a national security computer system, and in so doing nearly sets off World War III. The movie, with its fantastic premise, appealed to our still-childlike sense of wonder, while also tapping into a certain budding anxiety, wherein adolescence is synonymous with chaos and catastrophe.