A Special Birthday Post! It’s my Birthday! Hello!

I turn 22 today but I don’t have anything special to say about myself, so instead I’m going to talk about my first best friend, a friend I thought was long dead. Was he? I mean, you can read the post to find out. Or the title. Whatever works.

Childhood

Do you have a stuffed animal that you treasured as a child? One that you still own to this day? Is there one you haven’t seen in years? These are all rhetorical questions, obviously. I don’t care what your answer is. When I was a child I had a stuffed bear named Grubby. I don’t know why I named it Grubby. It’s not a good name. I was not good at naming things, I was a stupid child, and I named our cat Potsy. He hated me because I would antagonize him and throw him around and every morning I would run downstairs without clothes on and try to avoid him jumping at me and clawing at me. Poor Potsy. Grubby was a transgender bear. I could never decide whether Grubby was a he or a she. At one point as a child I brought a stuffed horse to my mother and said “She’s transitioning!” So I was a progressive kid. And a smart kid. I had no idea that my four year old self had such a solid grasp on the complexities of gender.
Grubby did most things with me. They were the Hobbes to my Calvin. Even then, my sense of self was derivative and based very much on pop culture. I spent much of my time having conversations with them, in a way you’d think would make me sound insane, though I was in fact a child. They were the guest of honor at the breakfast I had with all my stuffed animals when I was four. I was going to have a tea party but I didn’t know how to make tea so I made six triangles of toast. Then dad told me I had to eat all the toast, I hadn’t thought about it ahead of time, and so I spent an hour or so in front of the TV eating toast. These days I barely have breakfast on my way out the door (Which is not medically advised, and causes my attention meds to seemingly eat at my stomach interior) but occasionally eat 2/3rds that amount of toast because it is delicious. Ah, delicious toast.

The Death of Grubby the First

Unfortunately, all things must come to an end, and my time with Grubby eventually did. It ended because, especially as a child, I was absent-minded and oblivious and always losing shit. I remember not long before I misplaced Grubby, I lost my favorite book of Garfield strips, which was a massive loss. And a rare copy of a Tarzan novel, but that was a sore spot. Anyway, as near as I can tell, original Grubby perished when I accidentally threw them away. That broke me, and it haunts me to this day. I would go back in time and find them, if I could. My father, ever the fixer, went online and bought two more. At this point they were separated, my parents, so I had one for each house, and Grubby lived on, albeit in a different form.

Life Continues

When I moved out of my mom’s apartment, I never thought about the fact that the second Grubby stayed with her. I still had the second one, at my dad’s house, but eventually I lost them too. I don’t know if I threw them away and forgot or if they are still there and I somehow never found them when I cleaned out my closet entirely. I couldn’t tell you. For a long time there my closet was a danger zone, seconds from collapsing. In my mind, life got worse once I no longer had Grubby. I struggled with anxiety and depression, I had a lot of trouble at home and in school, fought to find friends, and eventually dealt with weight gain and listlessness, struggled to graduate, and had a truly hard year in my Junior year of College. You could claim this is all because life is difficult and I did my best, but I think there’s a very clear source for these frustrations. I didn’t have Grubby. When I had Grubby, life was fine and easy. After that…? Chaos.

The Return of the Bear

I learned recently, after reconnecting with my mother, that she’d kept good care of my fuzzy friend, and an iteration of my childhood still existed, trapped within that adorable bear. Upon reuniting with my long-lost friend, I felt… incredibly weird. I often find myself confronted with my childhood, when I watch superhero movies and get exceedingly excited, or look at my body and face in a mirror, but I’ve never felt such judgement as when I stared into Grubby’s beady eyes. They had several questions for me.
“Where have you been for the last eleven years?”
“What’s a Kangaroo Jack and why do you have a poster of it taped to your desk?”
“Did you know your forehead is the size of my face?”
“Why’s your face all hairy?”
And just like that, we were having a conversation again. I was viscerally aware of the fact that I, a 21 year old man, was talking out loud to a stuffed animal. Over the next few days it got weirder. Grubby came to work with me to check out the library. When I hung out with my friend Joe, Grubby was there, staring Joe down to determine if they liked her. I stopped clinging to my old friend after a few days so as not to be the bearded man with a stuffed animal, (I definitely shouldn’t be posting proof of this on the internet) and stopped telling Joe jokes that Grubby was possessed and coercing me to murder her. When I asked my dad over the phone if he’d like to talk to Grubby, I could feel his eyes roll.
Jokes and overwhelming weirdness aside, I’m overjoyed to have them back. There is nothing more comforting than being able to scratch that bear’s head and relive that time in my life when I was smaller and weirder, before my innocence was trapped within more grownup Russian Doll casings of cynicism and sarcasm. Before I became the newest iteration of John. But again, now that they’re back, life will be perfect once more. I’m about to have the easiest year a 22 year old has ever had.

A Beautiful Reunion!

Thank you for reading my blog! This will be my fourth year, and I appreciate everyone who reads this weirdness, especially if you stick with me after this one! Next time: Other stuff!