DIARY OF A WIMPY KID

The previews always shock—they’re making more of these? Great, but whatever time you’re counting on—time between now and then—is already gone. A railroad through the wilderness, built on spec, and your ticket booked. I can’t remember whether, as a child, my predominant feeling was of tenuousness in the world—pressed by the surging crowd to the void-edge—or rather of being linked to it by the tentacles of an attention I thought might flourish forever. I’d say I was one of those precocious little performers who detected, one day, the limits of others’ patience. Two options at that point: press on, and dominate, or else take a flat-head screwdriver and scratch out one’s face like effacing a coin. “The violent games of selfhood,” Adam Phillips calls them. My enneagram personality type is nine—no wonder I like that film so much—so I seek unity, immersion, I suppose I’d like to know for sure if pleasure is ever really pleasure shared, or whether the pain in someone else can ever be real. Unity, which is why all this highly attenuated hybridity and disjunction stresses me out. I’d like some meaning that comes out as if from my own bank’s ATM, i.e. without a fee.

The kid is not a “wimp” at all but a craven fraud, a desperate social climber, a coward and a sneak. We are meant to understand that he’s intelligent, and more than once he declares that when middle school is long forgotten his kind inherits the earth. But this is no diary, it’s a confession, and we see not a kid but a soul a-tumble through the eternal gauntlet of its becoming. All the grade school friends I betrayed, later, when they threatened to taint my status (one half-notch above rockbottom)—what was I turning myself into, anyway? Someone indomitable? But I was so clearly sentimental, weak, vulgar, anxious, foolish, insatiable, and cold. Unity: the giant or titan you’d grow up to be, if only you hadn’t marked it with the blemish or infected it with the virus or pricked it with the thorn of regret.

Weird, at 13 my almost romantic love—with a shudder through it—for Anne Frank.