The [se]X-files

The X-files was an important aspect of my middle school and early high school life. Phrases like, "hantavirus", "inoperable tumor" and "well manicured man" were  all mine for the plagiarism! While some girls were eye-banging JTT and Aaron Cartrer, I was praying  David Duchovny would surface as a sex addict. Thanks, God. I always wanted to believe!

The news just keeps getting better.

For the uninitiated the X-files was a show about a brilliant investigator, Fox Mulder with the FBI who used the clout he gained in the violent crimes division to begin investigating cases that were closed or deemed unsolvable.  His motivations were personal as he had witnessed his younger sister be removed from their home by some sinister suited men. Her abduction was treated as a death among family members and no resolution was granted him. Agent Scully was initially partnered with Mulder to report back to their immediate supervisor, bringing her medical background to bear on his whimsical ways and find logical explanations for the cases otherwise deemed unexplainable.
There were the rando monster-of-the-week and then there were plot episodes. The plot arc amounted to either; his sister was traded to a program for testing, or as precious cargo collateral, OR, was some kind of clone which then a bounty hunter would try to kill and a Russian agent (who was sometimes also a clone) would pretend to have information about just before a spaceship or a storage container full of humanoid, vaccinated, corps surfaced somewhere the agents happened to be.  Let's see then uhhhhh, Mulder gets his ass kicked a bunch--totally takes it like a boss and then uh, Scully sees some shit that should really change her mind about the paranormal--but doesn't--even though she's apparently a devote catholic. Plus this other guy who smoked cigarettes might be Mulder's biological father but was clearly just Canadian and Scully's brother was in the Navy and that was important somehow and she also gets cancer. I don't know. I never rewatch those episodes.
The monster of the week ones would probably scare you today. Dude, one guy removes livers with his hands and hibernates for years in a nest of newspaper and bile. Another dude was just a huge tapeworm...There were cockroaches, once. Tons of them.

Most people learned that FEMA was a raw deal in 2005. But back in 1998 Alvin Kurtzweil let me know there was some other shit going on.

Watch the video, friends--watch the video and learn. These were the sort of notions that compelled me to get a Pink Floyd, Mother Should I Trust The Government poster to hang in the room, above the shelf where I stored my tobacco pipes and tobacco pipe paraphernalia.

Plus my obsession grew into the greatest art I was capable of making:

I created this while serving a three day in school suspension for being awesome.

If you can't rationalize your drug use, it's time to give it up.

I want to make love to his haircut.

I believe I copied this image from a TV guide, to the best of my abilities.

I figure it was probably completely normal to dedicate whole pages of your journal to drawings of a man twice your age. I mean, it's not like I could put blink 182 lyrics on every leaf.

Holy crap, I was deep. And apparently couldn't spell the word "wrong" until after freshman year.

Don't worry, I made room for Ben Fold five lyrics too. But the X-files gave me a reason to never do my homework on Sunday night. (Read as, at all.)

Wow, it's like you can almost read my handwriting. 

Before I completely understood sex, I had this fantasy where I would somehow win a contest and get to spend time with David Duchovny. There would be a limo and he would ride along with me and the romantic part was that I would share my headphones so we could listen to the same song.

Exactly like this, but way less hot.

In fact, an early rendition of said fantasy involved me listening to the music and singing/rapping it back to him....I think I was really into the Men in Black sound track at the time. Obviously, I was well adjusted and would clearly lose my virginity before college. Or not.

When you ask yourself why would anybody be an X-file fan, you next need to ask yourself what the acronym for 'Extraterrestrial Biological Entity' is. And why you wouldn't have known what it meant if I simply wrote it, eg--EBE.
You must next ask yourself how many nebulae you can name. If you can't even name the hoursehead nebula, then you would have never been able to impress my father-in-law that one time when a book he was reading randomly opened to an image of it.

Correct, that is the horsehead nebula. You may now marry my son.

I really miss the Thanksgiving  X-files  User's Choice Marathon. It made my family so much more tolerable. Observe, le rage:

Hats off to my little brother, he learned to wash his hands on his own.



And hats off to me, as I  also learned that it's possible to have the kind of romance that doesn't cause someone to breach their work contract. But, it took years of unlearning the X-files to get there. See you when you get there?