Max and me.

As far as I can remember, I've always felt inadequete when compared to my cousin, Max. And by that, I mean these last few years, since we've been teenagers.

Max. Superstar. The man. Max has got a job. He's working at Taco Bell. Max has got a car. He paid for it himself (maybe that's why it's a piece of shit). Max does good in school. Max is going to college. Max knows what he wants to do with his life. Max plays football. Max has a lot of friends. Max has friends with benefits. Max has girls showing up at his football games that he hardly knows who wear his number. Max doesn't have to worry.

You can probably assume at which point I stopped reciting what my grandmother is always telling and where I put in the stuff I know. And it's a pisser because I don't really dislike the kid. We've never been in a fight. We've always been friendly, although it's obvious the only edge I've got on him is my age, height, and lack of remorse.

The thing is I feel I've been made to hate him, or all he represents. Everything I didn't do. Why didn't I do it? There's too many things, it's too deep. What I know is, my uncle and his mom had what's called a "rocky" marriage that ended in a "bloody" divorce at about the same age I was when my parents divorced. Same kinda situation, except Max saw his dad much more infrequently. Like never. All that parental alienation syndrome stuff Alec Baldwin talks about, my uncle went through it. He hardly ever saw his son. He saw many shrinks. He took a lot of meds.

One day I went out with him somewhere in his truck, and all during the drive I heard this something moving around in the glove compartment. Clack-clack-clack. I didn't ask, and he didn't acknowledge it. After a while we stopped at a convenience store so he could get a drink. I stayed in the truck.

While he was inside, I checked the glove compartment. In it was a .357 magnum, one of the biggest fucking things I've ever seen (it may have been another model, something bigger than what I thought it was). Like, it hardly fit in the compartment, and the compartment was huge. It was so big and looked so heavy I thought I might not be able to lift the compartment closed and my uncle would return and see me messing with it and use it against. All the red that would result of it filled my mind. My uncle's an ex-marine; you never know with those guys. They don't come back the same way they went in (they have the highest suicide-rate among the different branches, incidentally).

My mother later told me he kept it because of the fear that his ex-wife would hire someone to rub him out. I don't know if he still has it, if his current wife, a much nicer person, would approve.

Anyways, Max never really saw his dad. His dads were all whoever his mom was schtupping at the time, sometimes even who she married. Sometimes she would go out of town for a few days and leave him on his own, at around the age of ten. Maybe other kids are used to that, but it shocks me. That's more my thing, though.

Despite what I hear that his mother did to him, though, something worked, because now he's turned out to be a pretty good person, popular-wise. I have a feeling that time she did spend with him consisted of beatings that shaped him into a hard worker, and compliments that shaped him into a confident boy. If my mother ever did any of the later, it wasn't with me there.

So how did he turn out to be such a success, and how did I turn into such a loser? We've got a similar background, similar looks, similar brains. The answer's probably not as hard to sniff out. I know it, and in my poor writing probably already revealed it. I don't know.

I hope soon I get the chance to awe him. To have for once him look at me and mutter, "lucky bastard." Once.

More insanity to come...