Juan, the Really, Really Evil Guy

1998.

In 8th grade we had to keep a journal. This didn't involve writing down our feelings or what we did that day, but it was a writing journal to get us to write on an almost daily basis. Now, my writing has always been a bit off-kilter. Vivid, strange, and well-written, despite being rife with stream of consciousness and run-ons and fragments. Yup, that's me.

I went a bit overboard now and again. While that's a common theme in my life, there were two particularly long stories I wrote from an extremely simple prompt. The first involved writing a story on what if I ended up on my favorite show. A paradox is that I'm extremely open about myself (just check my openness score on my psychological profiles) but I hardly ever tell anyone my feelings. So, in 8th grade, I didn't reveal more personal details than I had to. Such a silly thing, neh? I ended up writing a very long story that involved various shows and movies but at no point did I identify my favorite show. It wasn't great, but it was fun.

I don't recall the prompt for this story.

What I ended up writing was 21 pages (in my handwriting, so double that for normal people figures) about this post-apocalyptic wasteland of a world. I hadn't played Fallout by this point, but it's a similar world to that. I wrote it in the first person and the narrator was essentially a middle-aged version of me that had all the answers for questions no one bothered to asked him. A despot rose to power and his name was Juan, and he was really, really evil. That's all I ever elaborated about that. Life sucked but the narrator had a little niche carved out for him. In one of the many chapters, I had ridiculous titles to keep it somewhat amusing, there was a preacher that passed by the narrator's town. He preached and got people to follow him in a crusade to demand justice from Juan. He preaches and the narrator holds town meetings afterward, trying to dissuade people. Before the preacherman left, the narrator spoke to the preacherman for the first time in the story. He calls him by his real name, Parsons, the name of my best friend at the time, also playing a middle-aged version of himself. And they marched off to do the right thing and demand justice. All but 3 others run off, and Juan kills the preacherman as an example and lets the others go to tell others of the preacher's fate.

Finally, things come to a head ... somehow. There's an air combat scene for some reason, and the narrator had been a combat pilot at one point, like I had wanted to be at one point. Juan is defeated and the narrator takes strides in ridding the world of his influence.

The epilogue is short. A farmer begs the narrator for fairer taxes, that his children are starving, and he cannot continue. The narrator mocks the man and then dispatches him in the same way Juan killed the Preacher. A new reign of terror had begun. Bwahaha.

Yeah, that was my happy ending even in 8th grade. I ended up losing that journal and with it, the story. Alas.