[Author’s Note: this Blog Post was eventually heavily changed and repurposed to function as a chapter in the TMR Novel. This is the Original & Unedited form. To read the Revised & Refined version, find its corresponding chapter here.]
At the airport, like I always am.
Not really. I’m writing this at my parents’ kitchen table in Kent. Ever since I decided to turn the blog into a book, I’ve been trying to think of a good way to conclude it. I can feel my thoughts on this topic (whatever that means anymore) running out, and I’m ready to move onto Something Else. But a story isn’t a Story™ unless you come back home, different than before. So I thought as a fun Compare & Contrast moment, maybe I could quote one of my blog posts from a year ago, the way I quote my journal entries.
12/28/24 at 7:26PM (371 days ago)
***Wouldn’t that be cute?***
A satisfying way to button it all up.
No, too tidy, too neat. And it’s not even solid kismet. This year, I’m not going back to the airport until the 30th, not the 28th. So to make this conclusion work, I’ll have to bend some logic— okay, well, I always give it ±3 days for the synchronicity to Count™. And I’m also not flying back to LA, I’m flying to Baltimore to ring in the New Year with my friends. No, this ending doesn’t work. The situations are too different. I think a year ago, I would have forced a pattern here regardless. Turned it into a Story™. I can still see the Story™, but it doesn’t ring true anymore.
So what does that say? Have I broken out of the Infinite Loop? Am I officially Not Going Insane?
It seems too convenient. That was all it took? One teensy public self-takedown and now I’m cured? No. The Book’s Not Over Yet.
I’ve mentioned throughout the blog that the name “Max Bennett Kelly” came from the original iteration of my journal that I started when I was 11. I thought, Oh Maybe That’s How I Can End This Book. Maybe let’s resolve the Marcello/Max Bennett Kelly/Max Noir thing. I’ve been reading this years’ blog posts back, poring over the type-setting and jerking off over my Beautifully Interwoven Themes. That sounds like a good ending. That sounds like what it’s been about all along.
Back in LA, I prepared myself to fly back to Kent for Christmas, where I’d get to my childhood home and dig into the ancient hard drive that held the Old Journal. I knew what I’d find there. I was looking for one specific line I could quote for the book: “It was then that my real self and my idealized self converged.”
I imagined what I’d write.
In the days before the flight, I stayed inside and worked on turning the blog into a book. I didn’t do too much living in case something important happened that would force me to turn some life into the blog. I was banking on this ending.
When I got back to Kent, Dad warned me that he found the hard drive but it was broken. Well, I was determined to fix it. I carefully broke off the drive from its solders. Then, I ordered a SATA-to-USB cable and waited for it to arrive. While I waited, I holed up in my childhood bedroom. I didn’t see any friends, procrastinated the last of my Christmas shopping. I continued to format the book, add clarity here, emphasis there, context everywhere. When I finished the book, I thought, I could do all that life stuff.
The cable finally arrived, and I booted up the hard drive. I sifted through terabytes of disorganized digital chaos. Mom’s work documents, Sis’s homework, Dad’s projects. I found the folder I was looking for: “Chell’s Stuff.” I quickly scanned over mountains of files from my childhood, searching for the inner folder called “Story Of My Life.” It was hidden in a clever maze my younger self had designed to keep out wandering eyes. If you clicked on the wrong folder, you’d be sent back to the beginning of “Chell’s Stuff.” Without knowing the proper way through, you’d be caught in a loop.
***But if you knew the title, you could just search for it***
I don’t think my younger self expected that I’d be the one breaking in.
The Old Journal was last modified 8/11/2011, when I was 14 years old. It was organized into 10 sections: a Prologue, Parts 1-8, and an Epilogue. Each section was divided into Chapters. The Prologue (Chapters 1-9) was a retrospective, covering my birth up until it caught up with the present-tense narrative, which was Parts 1-8. Parts 1-8 were written, then, in real-time, starting from the eighth grade. Events in my adolescent life were diarized into Chapters, and key milestones would motivate the beginning of a new Part. Part 8 covered through the end of high school, Chapter 64. The Epilogue contained a single, unnumbered Chapter.
The writing in the Old Journal was littered with the seeds of the voice I’d later use to write what you are reading now. Capitalized Phrases to denote my theories and concepts. My crushes’ real names substituted with Codenames. The most important moments of my young life, retrofit and retold and reorganized into a Story™.
The bulk of the Prologue was spent lamenting on being an outcast in the social hierarchy of early grade school. I portrayed myself as a “nerd” who longed to be one of “cool kids” who would hang out at the monkey bars at recess. In-narrative, they were called the Monkey Bar Kids, or MBKs for short. I wanted to be an MBK so bad that I backronymed an alter-ego out of those letters. Max Bennett Kelly was the “idealized” version of myself. Everything impossible that I longed to be. Charming, popular, confident, decisive. He was an imaginary friend that only I could see. Early in the story, when a Monkey Bar Kid would bully me, Max would whisper in my ear the perfect comeback to get the lunchroom laughing. As I grew up, and the Old Journal progressed, I relied more and more on Max Bennett Kelly, and less on myself, culminating in Part Four, Chapter 31, titled “A Fairytale Ending.”
In this Chapter, I recounted asking Codename: Jenny Jones to be my girlfriend, the summer before high school started. This Was Love, I narrated. No More Playground Stakes. I let Max Bennett Kelly take over my body and possess me, fully. Chapter 31 contained the quote I was looking for:
“It was then that my real self and my idealized self converged.”
I became one with Max Bennett Kelly and got the girl of my dreams.
Except, that only happened in the Old Journal. In real life, Codename: Jenny Jones rejected me.
Chapter 31 was written in July 2011. The Old Journal was last modified a month after that.
I kept reading ahead. Chapters 32-64 didn’t exist beyond Chapter titles with brief outlines. They were predictions of story beats that would happen through the rest of my life. Projections based on the trajectory of the story of my life thus far.
Part Five would start with a chapter called “A Memoir, If You Will” that, once written, would supposedly be about how I decided to turn my life into a memoir.
Part Six would be about losing touch with Jevandre and Michael.
Part Seven would be about fully embracing my dream of being an artist.
Part Eight would be about that dream falling apart and my subsequent cynical outlook on life. It would conclude with Chapter 64, “Understanding What Love Is And Why It Doesn’t Exist.”
The single, unnumbered Chapter in the Epilogue would be called “A Boy Called Marcello” and would be about “wishing I could have the lost time back; a sense of closure, parting ways and wherever the latter may lead; heart vs. home.”
I read the secrets of the universe, just as I had written them in the stars a decade and a half ago. Here it was— the beginning of the Infinite Loop. I had the time and date now. I could finally go back, to the moment right before Max Bennett Kelly took over. So I reached in and killed him, mangled him, ate him, before he could do any of that to me. My younger self went home and deleted the Old Journal. The Prophecy was never foretold because it was never written. My younger self grew up as his real self and was happy. I smiled for him, because that’s exactly what I would have done if it was me.
The End.
***Yeah***
That’s exactly how I’d want to end it.
Except, that only happened in the blog.
This is just the way I turned it into a story, for you to read. The reality is messier, harder to understand, less neat, less elegant. But the reality is the truth.
I real life, once I broke into the hard drive, I found the Chapter outlines. But I couldn’t find any of the stuff about Max Bennett Kelly. How? I remembered writing it. I needed to find him so I could bring him to justice. I pulled out another old computer from the closet. Maybe Max Bennett Kelly was in this one. He has to be. But the computer wouldn’t turn on either. I was bloodthirsty. I started cracking the computer open. I’d bring the shattered pieces to a repair store after Christmas and they’d be able to give me the files. Then I could go in and find the beginning so I could find the end. I just wanted the book to be over, so I could move on with my life. The Infinite Loop.
I stopped myself.
I couldn’t put the screwdriver in the computer. I just couldn’t do it. I was too tired for another autopsy.
I was on the floor of the office when Mom came in to remind me to get ready for Christmas Eve Mass with the family. I didn’t want to go, because the ending of my book was ruined, and I needed to finish this book, because it’s the most important thing in the entire world.
What must it be like to be around me?
Mom reminded me to get ready for church. I had been free to get lost in my own rabbit hole for hours because I knew, subconsciously, she’d do the work to be responsible and remind me to get ready. I’m going to be 29 soon.
What must it be like to love me?
I thought of every woman who ever did, and wondered when each one realized I had turned them into a character in my story. The story I was speeding through to get to an ending I had pre-written for myself, long ago. I don’t think I knew I was doing this. But how could I have missed it? Thousands of journal entries over hundreds of pages.
Am I a narcissist?
It’s the big, scary word this book has been circling around for 200 pages, but I somehow never wrote it down.
Mom reminded me to get off the floor, so I got ready for church.
Father Carlos’ homily was strangely pertinent, but everything is strangely pertinent when you’ve spent a lifetime shoehorning symmetry. He talked about randomness, and how easy it is to feel purposeless at times when life seems like nothing more than a roll of the dice. I could feel myself narrativizing — Maybe This Would Be A Great Ending — but then I realized I was missing what he was trying to say, so I tried to listen. I couldn’t pretend any longer that Father Carlos was speaking only to me. Everyone who congregated here today came with some variation of the Big Question, and they were all living lives in search of the Big Answer. Maybe some of them found it with Father Carlos. God provides a single Grand & Ultimate Answer to any Big Question that could ever be Asked. That story sounded tempting, now. I started writing my own story to find my own Big Answer, and what I found were Tiny Answers that answered the Tiny Questions I had. And then I found some more Questions, and had to find some more Answers. Maybe that’s all there is. Maybe That’s The Real Big Answer All Along.
***The Infinite Loop will return in True Modern Romance 2***
Oh God, please don’t let me write a sequel.
Ah, the old ouroboros. Who am I to stop the snake? I am no Adam or Eve, and even they couldn’t do it. We’ve taken the apple and now all we can do is eat it.
· . ★ ✵ * . ☆• ★ ° •
We got home from church, Mom and Dad and I, and we watched a movie. My parents still live in the same house Sis and I grew up in. I realized I had never asked them why they chose this house to raise a family in, so I asked them now. They told me it was because the upstairs had three bedrooms, so that we could all sleep near each other, and also because it had a basement, so as Sis and I grew up we could hang out downstairs and they could have their own space upstairs. They could have bought a newer house, Mom and Dad said, but they chose this 70’s split-level because it had a big backyard and was in a neighborhood with other kids for Sis and I to meet. They told me this with a sense of casual pragmatism, as if the enormity of their decision hadn’t reverberated for the next three decades.
Did they know that the neighborhood kids would end up starting a band with me? Did they know one of those kids would end up marrying Sis? Did they know that the art supplies in the basement would birth a dream I’d still be chasing, 25 years later?
I told Mom and Dad that AWAL dropped me, but I had a plan, and I’d never stop chasing this dream of mine that was actually an extension of the dream they had for me.
Dad said that if I ever woke up and didn’t want to do music anymore, that he and Mom would have my support in that, too.
But I can’t stop— didn’t he see that? The dream is all there is.
“I used to dream of making movies,” Dad said, “I used to dream of winning the Super Bowl. But now I have this dream where I’m running…” That was all he could get out, because then he started crying, and Mom started crying, and then I started crying. I’ll never know what the rest of the dream was, because all he could get out was, “…and at the end, none of that matters, because I’m just so proud that I raised a good man.”
Am I, Dad?
Mom and Dad fell in love when they were in high school, and forty years later they still hold hands in the grocery store. Mom and Dad are the true romantics in this modern world. Mom and Dad are the exception. I wondered aloud if this path I am on will prevent me from ever having what they have. “Maybe it’s okay if I don’t find it on my own,” I said, “because I am lucky enough to have ever felt it at all.”
Dad pulled me in for a hug, and he said, “I just realized I never gave you a big hug after you and Ella broke up.” This is ridiculous, because he had, a hundred times over, given me a hug about this. But I don’t think I ever hugged him back, properly. Not in a way that said, Yeah Dad I’m Sad. But I’ll Be Okay.
In my father’s dream, he was running, something happened, and when he stopped running he raised who he thought was a good man. In my life that’s really a dream, I’ve been running, too, and I wonder if I’ll ever stop.
the end
-mbk
Dear Jevandre, 
Oh, the ol’ blog. How I’ve missed you. What’s up? How’s it going? 
