I want to condition myself to go to bed at a reasonable hour. At my friend's place now. I feel safe here. I feel so safe that I want to go to bed early. Well, 3:41am is early for me. I do not want to stay up and watch the Scorpions on Metal Mania. The worst is when ABC News Now comes on. That's when I know I am experiencing insomnia. I just want to go to bed early and feel safe, but I live alone, so it is hard. There's a lot of anxiety, going to sleep by myself. Sometimes when I was a kid I would go to sleep when someone was in the room and when I would wake up that person would be gone and the lights would be off and I would be in a panic. Very bad feeling.

"Samantha" novel excerpt, Chapter 1

"Dungeons & Dragons" and "Star Trek" were on the right. Guns N' Roses and outright rebellion were on the left. Samantha Epstein was in the center of everything.

She was on my bus in 6th Grade. In 5th Grade she was an ugly nobody, but how she blossomed over a summer. Now she was the prettiest and most popular girl in time for a new school - Wall Intermediate.

Being half-Jewish, half-Italian she had dark, Mediterranean features. Her tan, sort of olive skin off set her long, black, curly, shoulder length hair. For a 12 year old she had exceptionally large breasts, accentuated by her very tight sweaters. How I wanted to pull her tits from her blouse and suck on them. What exactly did her nipples look like? What color were they? Closer to brown or pink? Were her nipples small, round and neat or bigger with sort of jagged edges? Her tight jeans conformed to her small but thick ass. How I wanted to lick her asshole, kiss the cheeks, bury my face deep into the crack of her ass and never come up for air. Oh, and if she had a cute little birth mark on her hiney, how I would kiss it for hours - just the birthmark and nothing else, for the sheer worship and perversion of worshipping just a beauty mark. Speaking of slight but glorious imperfections, she had just the slightest hint of a potbelly, this imperfection being the one flaw that completed a picture of perfection. I will agree with Edgar Allan Poe's paradox that no perfection exists without a slight flaw. Her potbelly hinted that she still had a bit of a little girl left in her even though she was now blossoming into quite the picture of a woman. How could I not fall in love?

How could she not love me? I have always been a good-looking boy, but with phases of awkwardness. Inconsistent through most of my life, I alternated between a sort of homosexual, English schoolboy fragile handsomeness and a greasy-skinned, froggy, Eggbertish, child-molester-working-at-Kmart kind of doofiness (though my soul remained as pure and strong as the most sublime examples of physical beauty.) This was one of the "doofy" times. I had wire-frame glasses and braces. Though never an acne sufferer, this was the closest I had ever come to being a "pizza-face." I was, at times, goofy enough to be a nerd stereotype. Still, I felt myself more attractive than the other boys. Big, tall and of a more classic cut, I towered over scrawny, freckly, red-headed, big-nosed, sunken-faced, pale, rotten-mouthed little skater punks and soccer star runts, the sort of popular boys a girl like Samantha would be more likely to like. I may not have been at my best, but I was certainly at least better than them.

I knew the score, but perhaps my intent was to create my own real-life 80s film, in which the geek finally makes good and gets the unattainable girl. Unfortunately, movies are not life. Despite my narcissism, the one consistent throughout my life was a lack of self-confidence, which is the most difficult obstacle in the art of seducing any woman. Even in 80s films the protagonist usually had to learn confidence from some kind of mentor before getting the girl. But Samantha was different. Somehow she would see through my quirks to my essential quality. Back then I operated under the erroneous assumption that women were superior and that the most attractive ones would sense my worth in some intangible way.

The first thing I noticed about her (other than her looks) was that she was a loudmouth. Her voice was sharp and carping, like a slap in the face.

"Go fuck yourself, asshole!" she screamed at some other boy who had said something to her. What a foul mouth. The curse from her lips sexually excited me. Like a German Shepherd I pricked my ears to capture more of her profanity, all of which I planned to store in my brain for future stimulation.

Samantha had a candy business on the bus. She sold sourballs, warheads and jawbreakers. Even though I did not like any of that junk I bought a sourball from her as a way to belong and to have some kind of interaction with her. I had to prepare myself for an entire week just to buy the candy.

"Thanks," I said, because I was raised to be polite.

She didn't reply. Politeness on her part would be an act of weakness.

How I loved her and wanted to torture her, to tie her to a wheel, to slice her large breasts with thorns, to shove objects up her pussy and force her to come against her will. Love is not expressed only through mushy kindnesses.

I went home and rubbed the sourball across my balls. The wrapper had touched her fingers and now my balls. Then my cock, then the tip of my cock, then my asshole. I wanted any part of her to touch every part of me. Maybe I should sleep and cuddle with it!

I had the optimism to genuinely think I could end up with Samantha. Maybe delusion. Stephen King may not be a critic's favorite, but he was correct when he said that the cliques of any Junior High are more strictly regimented than any Hindu caste system.

I wanted to become one with Samantha, physically and spiritually. Carl Jung would have classified me as an almost total introvert. I take everything in and I hardly ever gravitate outward. But I did not want to subsume Samantha. I wanted our separate individualities and egos to merge into one cosmic being. Seeing Samantha at school was one thing, but imagine merging with her soul. What could be more intimate - and with such an unapproachable girl. She was Rock N' Roll music. All those sounds of blossoming sexuality. Guns N' Roses. Axl Rose. His tumultuous relationships with beautiful women. Would I have something similar with Samantha? Would she deprive me of sex, steal my money and "cheat" (as everyone is free, there is actually no such thing as cheating) on me with my friends? I hoped so! At least all of that was life (something I had already been too deprived of) and I would have been happy to have anything with her. Anything at all. I'd take any bare minimum. This is what happens when you're raised in an emotional and spiritual ghetto. You're happy for any scrap of love. How would I go about getting her? Did I need a plan, a strategy? I would just have to inch closer to her and pray. This was the beginning of the madness. Would God or the universe help me?

Was I God?

I wanted to know if Samantha was human like me. Did she think, did she feel? Did she even exist? What if the entire world existed just for me? What if I was God and had created all of this to escape my own loneliness? I think of the Alan Watts quote: "God is playing hide and seek with the universe." I asked myself to wake up as God just a bit so I could have Samantha even if she wasn't real.

She was real. She had to be. So did she think like me, feel like me? I heard her on the bus:

"That's such a weird feeling when you close your eyes and you see these spots of color. The just float in front of your eyes, like little lines."

My heart swelled with love. How I wished to watch her in her room, perhaps teleport my consciousness there. Not even for any lascivious purpose, but just to see what she does when no one else is around.

Better yet I wanted to go inside her mind. Did she think of me? How often did she think of me? Where was she tender and kind? Where did she hurt? Where was she exactly like me? Where was she most different? Perhaps we would find this out when we became one.

The little things too. What did her room look like? How was it decorated? Was it girly? Did she sleep with a stuffed animal at night? If so, which Disney (or other) character was it?

What did it feel like to be the most popular person in school? I couldn't imagine. What did she think of it? What if deep down she loved me but she could not do anything because of her social position?

By chance, Samantha and I shared many of the same classes, including gym. I was not athletic at all and I hated most athletics with a fierce passion. I considered it cruel that they forced us to play nonsensical games that meant nothing. Would baseball/football/kickball/etc... give meaning to an inherently meaningless universe? Especially when played at a middle school level? No! What difference did it make who won or lost a half-hour game played in gym class? Only Samantha provided meaning. She was the reason why anyone did anything at all. The world existed only for the worship and utter fascination I felt for her. Fascination. That's the word.

We did not really interact until the day I lost my clarinet the period before gym class.

I did not really care for the clarinet or its music, but like Boy Scouts, karate and other suburban rites of passage I did it because it seemed like something I was supposed to do. Woody Allen would disagree and say that I was disparaging a fine instrument.

My Aunt Donna had given me the clarinet. It had belonged to her son, Rob.

Aunt Donna represented a cleaner, brighter, happier world far from school (and even home.) I associated her with happy memories of playing in her pool and hanging out with her other son, Ryan. Ryan was a few years older than me and I idolized him. He hooked me up with Sierra computer games like “Police Quest”, “Space Quest”, “King’s Quest”, and the infamous “Leisure Suit Larry” (a role-playing game in which one virtually picks up women.) For this reason alone Ryan was the coolest.

All of these emotions and associations were tied to one clarinet. Not only that, but I have always attached warm human personalities to inanimate objects. So when I lost it I sobbed uncontrollably.

I sobbed all the way through gym class.

We were playing soccer and Samantha was on my team. I was too distraught to stop the other team from scoring on us at will (I have always hated sports with a strong passion anyway) and Samantha exploded.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she screamed. “Why don’t you wake the fuck up?”

My reply was a choked sob.

“You fucking crybaby!” she said. “You fucking pussy! Crying over a lost clarinet. You’re such a fucking baby.”

“Fuck you, bitch!” I screamed through a sob. Don't worry about the contradiction here between my holy love for her and the foul language I spewed at her. I was only desperately defending myself in the only way I knew how.

“Fuck you, you fucking asshole! You little fucking baby! You fucking pussy! Everyone hates you! So go fuck yourself!”

In Wall Township this was a normal and acceptable way for two 12 year olds to talk to one another.

“Fuck you, you fucking bitch!”

“Oh, good comeback! Is ‘fuck you bitch’ all you can say, you fucking loser?”

“Fuck you, bitch!”

Now I was madly in love with her.

Of all of the paranormal shows on television, the only one I usually enjoy is "Celebrity Ghost Stories." It is interesting to see figures I know from pop culture telling stories that may or may not have legitimately happened.

Right now I am watching "Psychic Kids" on Bio. I am willing to make the argument with anyone that there are NO educational shows on television.

On Psychic Kids they take "psychic" teenagers and bring them to haunted houses, etc... Most of the teens are painfully ordinary kids except for the fact that they seem both lower- middle class and sort of "outcast" in a grungy, "goth" kind of way. But all of them seem like typical dumb kids.

"Like, oh my God! Like, I can, like, sense, like energy and, like, auras, like around me, like and stuff."

Everyone must be due for 15 minutes of fame nowadays. Fat, ugly (but otherwise painfully average) "goth kid" teenagers right on the margin of the suburbs/trailer park investigating the mysteries of life and death. What a bizarre world we live in.

"Like I feel like a ghost's, like, energy, like in this house. It's, like, totally freaking me out, dude."

No one can say for sure what another person can do, but I'll bet she's about as psychic as my ass.