Ermmaul and I

In 1969, the military started their groundbreaking achievement in communications. Similar to a telephone line, the interconnected communication base would revolutionize modern living to a grander scale beyond the comprehension of their previous generations. Without computers, humanity would have never landed rockets on the moon, or satellites for missile drones. One could say, for better or for worse, the military gave civilization a wonderful tool to share, educate, connect and inform. However, humanity is sometimes never so kind nor grateful.

\ I had my first computer at age ten. It was a Macintosh. The off-brand type. As most children my age did, it was more so an entertainment device than a wonderful tool for education. Good use of my time, the best of times. Around sixth grade, those were even better times. For the school play I was awarded the lead of Theseus and the Minotaur. I was also General and Emperor Khufu in the Egyptian exhibition for history day. A Riverside thing. Confident and cavalier, I was ready to conquer the world. Actors are natural charms. Not to mention good looking. I would still passively use my computer, but I never felt like I needed it.

Then high school and middle school, the worst years of my life. I was ugly, quiet overnight. By a suckerpunch of bad luck, I was at the worst time growing apart from people rather than making more people like me. I blame myself. Acting silly can also make you a target of assumptions of bad people. Substituting the word silly with stupid, I was someone to avoid. People repellent. Being a growing, developing being, I’ve grown overstimulated with computer games. I needed something more. Extremely bad timing, Ermmaul didn’t find me, I found him. And Seanpaul Garay, Alex Rosado, Ayesha Murtaza, Samuel Swan and the rest who omitted their names. My second identity, shunned by society, only to be joined into another one around the corner.

I would talk to all of these people from all over the U.S. in the comfort of my own room. We would talk and talk and talk and talk about everything in between. We formed a community, a pact that no one else in the real world could match. This living, breathing mock country known to be claimed as Freckistan, was a good chunk of my upbringing going into my young adolescence. I would be a historian in charge of documenting the events and remarkable happenings of the country. Samuel Swan would be president of his fictitious land, although awkward and antisocial, he would still lead with his people. He would run his society well, growing his small nation into a dynasty. With more and more people joining the story, the more stories there were to tell. I had my work cut out for me. As a historian, this cast of characters was interesting and entertaining. I could spend all day telling these little anecdotes which would be fun to read. 

Only this environment was not as glamorous as they sound out to be. Dialects and traditions are not something to take lightly. If one is not careful, one could fall into a dangerous line of thinking led by demons in shepherd clothing. Add in the factor of miscommunication and intellectual ego and you are almost destined for your empire to collapse upon itself. A recipe for failure. The only emotion I could associate with these times is displeasure. Yelling at each other could only be so fun until you start to get ringing in the ears and go deaf from venom injected into your canal. These people would be far from normal. Radicalists one could say. Losers others say correctly. Though it was fun to engage in unaffecting political banter between ineffective parties, side effects from addictive bickering caused headaches, nausea, burning sensations, even temporary blindness. My decaying connections with actual breathing people I could share a meal with were rapidly fading away. Friendship so costly and sparingly given to me gone with the winds of change. I no longer belonged to the outside world. My computer was my life. Inside the C++ code, my strangers online would manifest from the screen and figuratively appear by my side and talk to me. The words on the screen were real enough to cut through glass and mark into skin.

One of these people would stand out. A man called Ermmaul. At first he seemed relatively normal compared to the rest of them. Beneath his mundane simple lifestyle, this man would have been literally Hitler. Not cute hyperbole or flippant humor. Rather a cold, calculated evil that could not accidentally or passively be engaged in. Purest evil in all its form. In his own words, he would not single me out. Maybe it was my fault for taking it too personally, his insulting demeanor. Whatever the case, the guy was a menace and worst of all, a real jerk. 

Someone hurt the guy and he took it all out on me. Who? I will never know. I hope they both burn in hell. They’re meant for each other. After failing all my classes, graduating from regular high school, losing everyone I held near, wasting eight years of my life to this hate-filled ruthless monster was when I finally decided to self-defend. 

The only detail that is important is the fact that I know him by name. I didn’t stop there. I found out where he lived, his family, his school, his work, what he eats, what he doesn’t eat, his interests, his favorite colors, his least favorite colors, his blood type, his family’s blood type. All psychotic facts of a man that no one, not even his closest friends, knew. All in the name of self defense. I was attacking him with fear. Not that I was going to do anything with the information, but the very act of constant stalking was enough to show my true feelings towards a brown white supremist. Again, not a metaphor. He is a Latino who wants a white homogenous society, apart from other backwards abhorrent beliefs.

Ermmaul was a cruel, judgmental freak that cannot see the beam in his own eye. Despite this, not him nor anyone deserved what I did to him. He did not deserve someone aggressively invading his privacy into oblivion and then some. But that is the consequence of hatred I guess. One man’s misery is another’s company. When dealing with fighting a monster, one can turn into one fairly easily. I lost the trust and respect of all those listed above, to this day. I can almost guarantee they still talk about me and the harassment campaign that was shortly only known as Cormpf War I. But I tell this now, it was the best thing I ever did.
A couple of months back I was in urgent care. Ermmaul lived inside my skull almost vividly and ripped apart neurons. A crisis therapist was called on me and I had to spend the night at their facilities. They did not help me. I would use this as evidence that help did not help and would in turn become even more helpless.

I don’t remember much but my Mom and Dad have it recorded in their brains, marked forever like a movie. They tell me I was in the middle of the road laughing, smiling and dancing uncontrollably. I was ten miles away from Madison Avenue, I’ve been doing that for a while, urgent care let me go early. My Dad allegedly circled the block all night. A sheer luck of fools that he found me that day. As soon as I saw them I snapped out of it. Later, after clarity, it was clear I was having a manic episode.

A couple of months later, another incident. I repeated myself into another manic episode. My phrase in question was a self-doubt trying to manifest itself into a positive affirmation. In other words, I said, “IT WILL HAPPEN BECAUSE IT ALREADY DID HAPPEN” in different orders of ways so many times that I was sent to ETS by a 5150 order by the behavioral clinic on Blaine Street. 

At first, when I was strapped to a board and left on a mattress to sleep all day, I wanted to stay. But the more and more I slept, the longer I lost track of myself. I was becoming less and less lucid by the hour. It’s enough to drive anyone mad. Lunchtime was at 12:15 pm every day. You find a decent meal in the most strange of places.

The first meal I had was a pot roast. An odd lunch choice, but beggars couldn’t be beggars who are choosers. I took a long time to eat it all. Probably the longest I ever took to eat any meal. I could still feel every agonizing second of those four days. But by 9 am, 12:15 pm, and 5 pm, I was enjoying them.

To make matters better, Mom and Dad showed up every 2 hours in between meals. They were afraid as much as I. They had as much doubt as I had as well. Their love for me was never in question. Whatever would happen to me, they were there for me. That’s why for every visitor’s hour end, they would wait in the lobby until the next one. Mom and Dad and I were suffering together.

Finally on the fourth day, after a judge cleared me to go home to the custody of my parents, I told my Dad about how good the food was at the hospital. He already knew that, he tasted it alongside me across the hall. In a way, we were both hospitalized. In different ways. So if you ever find yourself hospitalized in Riverside Community Hospital, please try the fish.

Shortly after Cormpf War I, banished from their little group of circle buddies, it was no coincidence that my academic life at Riverside City College began to hit straight A’s across the fridge door. I was even taken out to a nice steakhouse dinner for my hard work.  No more of those missing assignments. So from then on, I was using my computer for the other reasons the internet was intended rather than just an easy fix of gratification.

After being hospitalized and being freed from the clutches of a man owned in my head, I was pretty lost. Nowhere to go, everywhere to stay. It wasn’t until I managed to threaten my Dad with a hypothetical of never working when he picked up the phone and called our landlord.

Wes Andree is a renowned man. An all-rounded American citizen. Wes Andree is more than just a director of a museum, he is a discoverer. An explorer of the new and old. After many years of knowing each other, one fateful Scout Sunday at a church, Wes has become the owner of where my family and I live. For close to twelve years, a date engraved into my soul due to sixth grade being over, I never made eye contact with Wes. I made more eye contact with Nick Andree. Though he was more of my brother’s friend than my friend. We were still good friends. Tall and intimidating, Wes was a man’s manly man. A head of the family table. I never really knew the guy, I still don’t personally. But I can definitely understand him more.

My brother started working at the Jurupa Mountain Discovery Center at around eighteen. His first and only job at the time, he hated it. He would rather shove and kick rocks for Spielberg than shove and kick rocks in Jurupa. My brother was always pretty self-centered. He was supposed to be a famous film director, not a maintenance man for a filthy museum. “Why would anyone want to work there?” Five other people asked themselves. Well, around the pandemic, it was then four, when my brother quit.

Afterwards, my brother went on to have a successful start to his career. Although he doesn’t see it that way. He is not a no name in his industry and has a promising movie in the works. Today. Then there I was. Still battling monsters with a keyboard. Like I was Don Quixote with his windmills. I was my brother’s secondary character. Never meant to be something more. Trapped. But no. As a Clint Eastwood imitator once said, “No man can walk out of his own story.”

On April 17, 2023, my Dad called Wes to give me a job at the Jurupa Mountain Discovery Center. I was graceful but hesitant. Now I can add getting fired to my long list of failures. That was six months, a year and five days from today. The best job in the world has given me purpose. Seeing history before my very eyes, in all its unfiltered glory, no wonder my brother hated this job. It’s too perfect.

But that’s our relationship, if I like something, it is for certain that the other will hate it. We are opposites of the same coin and flipped constantly at the drop of a dime. I like seeing the story of existence. The most unlikely success story of all. A story without an end yet, because it’s still being told.

Quickly after working as a maintenance man myself, I worked up the ranks of feeding the critters like turtles and tortoises. I still play double roles, but that’s because five coworkers is all Wes can afford right now. They mind, I don’t. Soon I will do what they do. Talk to the schools who come expecting something interesting, not a lesson in paleontology. In fact no lesson at all. They get too much of that. Children are like tiny people, if you talk down to them, they’ll pick up on it really quick.

I had some falls, I wouldn’t say my placement in Jurupa has been perfect. Flipping golf carts was not on my resume but then again, no one’s resume has their faults.  I would say that the job is perfect for me, but I don’t always do what’s best for my work. I plan to make it my career. Something that works shouldn’t be broken, so why fix it. After working there for a long enough time, I might even get to be Wes’s trustee foil. Like Sancho Pansa before me. No man can walk out of his own story.

It seems that the chaotic waves of life have simmered down for me for now. I am ready for the next batch of storms to come. After all that I’ve been through, it can’t do anymore to me than what I’ve already encountered. And I encountered some pretty heavy storms. I used to look down whenever I would have the unlucky displeasure of talking with Wes. Now when he looks down on me, I look up back at him, into his stoic eyes.

Dan Millman once wrote a book called The Peaceful Warrior. Adapted to film by the same name. It talks about the most important concept in philosophy today. Here and now.

That means nothing to people who are in the past or future. I was there too. That’s why I tell you now. In both places. Now I am here. Now. 

Charlie Brown knows it too. In A Boy Named Charlie Brown. 

“Did you know something, Charlie Brown. The world didn’t end,” told Linus after Charlie Brown failed a spelling bee. Like I failed my classes. It’s okay to fail. It’s not okay to stop failing. A warden of your mind.

Here I am, refusing to stop failing. I failed so many times, it means nothing. I am in the now.

That is something Dan Millman understood deeply well. Without Dan Millman. I would still be in city college, I would still refuse to try out of fear of failure. Now I welcome it.

Ironically enough, that doesn’t make me a failure. But a winner. A winner at living. A life expert. That’s why it’s called experience.

After everything I’ve been through, it is important to stay in the present moment. My future depends on it.

Charlie and Dan are my friends. So are the people I meet. In the here and now.
I have not wondered what Ermmaul was doing until today. Genuinely, I hope he went through the same ordeal as me. Seeing the internet as a wonder tool for all its functions rather than just a hate box or video game machine. There is a life after hate. I should know. I am now in the University of California, Riverside and I couldn’t be more grateful for it. It’s a decision I made myself. For myself. Godspeed Ermmaul. Or the fires of hell will be calling. Pray the devil will show you an ounce of pity. Knowing you, he would most likely be disgusted by your soul. 

In 2024, the internet continues to be a wonderful tool to be used as a social and interpersonal connective tool for the masses. Becoming dumber or smarter, society has changed due to the open internet connection to the public. In 2025, a year passes and not much changes in a grander scale. 2026 I graduate from university.