Prelude
It is that deciding moment, in your relatively young life, when you realize that the influences of your parents / home life growing up, and the decisions you make as how you want to run your own life, collide in the most unexpected ways.
As with most of my friends (at least I know this now, but at the time had no knowledge of it), I had a very poor way of figuring out the opposite sex. This was due, in part, to my upbringing. I was always taught to respect, with utmost dignity, the feelings of others. That one facet, to me, translated; what I desired sexually, girls had no interest in.
At least that was my attempt to rationalize the fact that I never got over the junior high experience. We moved as soon as I was out of my eighth grade school year. So all of those horrid experiences stayed with me. The laughter, the belittling, the cruelty. I wanted to make it better, but those kids never grew up in my mind. Maybe it was just a cruel fascination with making myself feel miserable, but I wanted to have something better come out of that. After all, that was when I had really discovered girls and that I liked the way they looked.
In fact, that was the real problem. I liked the way those girls looked. Somewhere deep down in my mind I knew, just knew, that if I could get one of them to like me back, then life would turn around for me. I could finally let go of all the hurt and pain that I had received from those kids (now in my mind) teasing me about never kissing a girl, never getting the one I liked to dance with me. I could laugh at them. Somehow it didn't make any difference that I never saw those school kids again. They were stuck in my head and I needed desperately to slam the door (in my mind) on them.
Here is the real dilemma of course. The first year in my new high school, I didn't even know where the junior high was. By the time I found out, I had also been told by all those around me, how immature those children were. We were all the 'older and so much more mature' high schoolers, after all.
By the time I was in my third year of high school I knew plenty of kids, that is kids in high school. A few of them even had sisters that were in junior high. I tried to visit as often as I could, but the guys would tell their sisters to go away. I couldn't win.
Then I graduated; and, as someone had put into law, I became an adult. My fantasy of actually having any sort of budding friendship with a girl had just been taken away. At 18, I could go to jail for such a thing and be condemned by society for the rest of my life.
Drowning my sorrows in college was about the best I could do. I moved out of the house, one good plus on my part. That first semester, a computer class was one of my saving graces. I met several friends who opened the avenues of the World Wide Web for me. Sure I knew about the porn, doesn't everyone? These guys knew all about the newsgroups and how to get into ones that didn't show up on a lot of servers. While these guys were into some things that, when I found out, made me back off from them; it did allow me my first bit of pleasure. I found pictures of girls that looked like they were in junior high. Now if they were or weren't really didn't matter a whole lot. I loved those sweet innocent looking faces.
I ended up filling half my laptop's hard drive with pictures.
Then it happened. The second year of college. One of those guys from that computer class was busted. Some of the images on his hard drive got him into a lot of trouble. I went to my apartment, sick to my stomach that day. I couldn't, just couldn't delete all those pictures. What on earth was I going to do?
Three days later I found out the problem. Some girl had borrowed the guy's laptop and 'found' the pictures by accident. The laptop was almost ruined when she vomited, after a snuff victim and accompanying sound, came onto the screen. That guy had degenerated a lot further than when I knew him. I couldn't blame anyone wanting to find out more about that guy. It was just sick. On the other hand I knew that what I had would get me into trouble. The fact was, I never wanted to hurt anyone. Any picture that looked like it was forced in any way I never wanted to look at. All right, it's true. A lot of the girls were partially or totally nude. But that was it. Nothing sexual was going on in those pictures.
It did give me a reason to believe I could save my skin. I also got a very good encryption program. One that another guy that I had met in the computer labs turned me on to. It wasn't a commercial product. It had no public keys. This was one the government didn't want people using any longer, as they would have to spend a lot of time breaking the code if they wanted in. That suited me fine.
Now you suspect that that lulled me into a false sense of security, but no. I guess I was a bit paranoid. I built a special hiding spot in my car, to stow my laptop. I didn't like to take any chances. To further distance myself from anyone I knew from that computer class; I gathered my college units together, took an associate degree and left the school. I had all summer, I told myself, to figure out what I was going to do.