Mikachu's New Autobiography

[Mikachu Yukitatsu]

This could well fit into Misc., but as this is going to be a lengthy one, why not FanFic. As I'm going to be 40 years old in 2025, I'd like to update my autobiography for you. So this is going to be my story, story of my drawing hobby, story of my studies, story of my obsession to beauty, story of Pokemon, story of TPM, story of videogames, story of anime.

1985-1990
EARLY DAYS

I was born in June 1985. There was a thunderstorm on the same day, as if to reflect the relationship between my real name and the electric rat Pikachu. Eventhough my mother gave me the name Mikael based on the new leader of U.S.S.R., Mikhail Gorbachev, she just couldn't dare to name me Mihail (the Finnish reading for the current General Secretary) because she was afraid that we would be even more persecuted then. Also, she sort of self-translated my name Mikael as Hebrew 'nobody loves like the God does'. She told me afterwards she had asked the priest who was christening me to write the name in Hebrew, but the priest had refused. Nevertheless, 'Nobody loves like the God does' was to persecute myself during my entire life, showing up as a passionate, yet often platonic and/or distant, love towards beautiful girls and women, and as a god complex in the videogame series called Civilization and creating and controlling my own worlds in my drawings and comics.

What about my father? I doubt my father and mother ever lived together, although it was common for mother and father to live together in Finland back then. I think they even met each other in a mental hospital. I saw my dad like twice or thrice. The first occasion was when my mother called him to see the new-born infant to the hospital. My father had merely lifted me up and asked 'Now what should we just do with this' and suggested us to take a taxi, jokingly. The only memory of my father was when I went to see him with my mother in 1989 or so. The thing was, I didn't actually even remember my father from the event, I just remembered the traffic lights. That's because my father lived in Oulu, and it was the first time I saw traffic lights. I even recall myself saying that I didn't want any delays.

Back to my earliest infancy, my mother didn't seem to be able to take care of me properly to start with, although she insisted that she loved me so much, so I was put into a child caring institute for one and half of year. My mother came to see me, however, once a week and every single time she would sing to me. But on Christmas Eve 1986, I was let home to live with my mother, grandmother and one of my 5 aunts in the countryside of a small rural village called Merijärvi.

My early days in Merijärvi left a very peaceful memory. We roamed trough the forests and swamps of the countryside with my mother, and my mother also rode a bike around Merijärvi. I was on the backseat, and I remember the 4-year-old me wondering about existential questions 'I am me. I am nobody else. I really am me.'. That's right, always when my mother tells me about my early childhood, she stresses how clever I was. Eventhough I didn't learn to talk until the age of 2, my sentences were perfect. According to my mother, I could read at the age of 3. I myself remember being able to read at the age of 4 or 5. I read Donald Duck comics, Peanuts and the Bible. Yes, the Bible. I even had some sort of a God connection of my own. I remember opening the Bible frequently and saying 'I study thy holy scriptures.'. Also I must mention I could, according to my mother, calculate huge numbers.

In 1989, I moved with my mother to the center of Merijärvi. I have a memory of my godfather letting me drive his car for a second and I was very afraid. We still visited grandmother in the countryside often, and what was still lacking, was an everyday interaction with other children. The only interaction might have been with the children of my other aunt, who came to visit us from Kokkola, a bigger city but not as big as Oulu. Later on, my mother declared that 'aunt' was not of my family at all, as she believed our grandmother had slept with our neighbour about whom my mother also talked always with a negative ring. However, the inreraction part was a subject to change soon.

[Mikachu Yukitatsu]

1990-1993
NEW VOCABULARY

So, 1990 came and me and my mother moved to a little bigger town called Kalajoki. It was located in the west coast of Finland. Back then, the town center wasn't very beautiful. I asked my mother on the first day whether she wanted to live here or dedicate her life to my happiness. I don't exactly remember what she replied, but I figured out she had to move because she wanted to study and become a wood artesan. Her education was to last for 3 years.

Our new recidence was a two-floored row house right in front of later-abolished Jokisuu school and the Kalajoki hospital. I was put in a daycare located in the same yard. There I started to learn to play with other children and watch children's tv programs. Even in my early games, there was some strange 'plot' to follow and I don't know if the other children in the daycare understood everything. For instance, I recall myself swinging and singing about biblical events I had read, namely about Prophet Daniel and his three friends.

At the age of 6, I was sent in a bigger kindergarten. There I read some Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles comics and watched anime for the first time! It was Ginga Nagareboshi Gin, Silver Fang, which for some odd reason reached Finland very early to become many Finns' favourite. Well I don't actually count it as my first anime becuase the contact was so short. I kinda liked it, eventhough, due to the biblical image of dogs as they were gods to some pagan nations and everything, I had to ask my mother if it was OK for me to like it.

I entered school in 1992 at the age of seven. The first 6 grades of the elementary school are called ala-aste or alakoulu and the second level is yläaste or yläkoulu. I was bullied since the very first day at school. As for the first things I was to learn, I learned the Finnish slang for 'having sex', 'nussia' and the word for the thing between woman's legs, 'vittu'. The latter is actually surprisingly common in Finnish, because it's the stem of the verb 'vituttaa', to be 'pissed off', although I never learned to be pissed off in the Finnish way. I had never heard such words before! I noticed I liked school itself though, and I was a good student. I also found more comic books to take example from, like Tintin and Asterix.

Yes, the comics. I actually had a brief friendship with a boy who had to learn our class early. I still don't know exaclty what happened, but before that, he saw my early Donald Duck copies and something told me he shouldn't have seen them. I regarded them as my secrets back there. I doubt I foresaw any reason related to copyright laws, but nevertheless, I was angry. We brought the dispute to school the following day, and even our teacher tried to make sense of it. The teacher said that only a little baby keeps on shouting everybody 'I have secrets! You are not allowed to tell everybody my secrets!'.

However, I was to miss the ending ceremony of the first grade because something happened with my mother and the teacher in the artesan school. There was probably some drama and we had to escape to my mother's friend who lived in the southern Finland. I couldn't sing 'suvivirsi', the traditional religious summer hymn in Kalajoki church because I was already in the south that day.

[Mikachu Yukitatsu]

1993-1997
KARI KUKKO, BELSA THE BABYLONIAN AND THE OTHERS

Summer 1993, I learned how to ride the bike and I also began to draw comics more seriously. Before this, I did draw some comics based mainly on some teddy bears we owned (although in my drawings they didn't look like teddy bears) but now was the time for a main character called Kari Kukko (Kari the Rooster) and his wife Kaisu. I also experimented some other adventures, but was only able to finish several Kari's stories.

Or perhaps I should be more accurate. I was able to finish other stories. Actually, from 8 to 10 years old, I was full of stories. I started 'playing programs', monologues, short movies where I played every role. I only stopped doing those thing after I accidentially run into a door glass and nearly killed myself. In this case, fortunately the hospital was near.

Another quick way to finish stories was to play them with LEGO figures. I carefully structured and arranged the houses, castles and ships and some LEGO figures even had their own names and traits. I wasn't completely alone there with the LEGOs though, I had one close friend from the same school and sometimes my cousins. But we three never had a chance to play as a threesome, and even when there were two of us playing, there usually were two different plots and almost no interraction.

At the same time, I began to notice something was wrong with my mother. Policemen sometimes came to my house looking for her. She had to spend time in the same mental hospital, Visala, I visited later. Meanwhile, I stayed either at my grandmother's place or in substitute families. Latter occasions exposed me 24/7 to typical pop culture, for instance Looney Tunes and The Simpsons. Those were the substitute families in Kalajoki.

Autumn and winter 1994 came, bringing on a long-lasting character, Belsa Babylonialainen (Belsa the Babylonian), who was to live in the seventh and sixth century BCE. The Bible was a vast source of inspiration, as well as other events in the ancient world. The first adventure of Belsa took place during Nebuchadnezzar II's sack of Jerusalem. The second was about Nebuchadnezzar II's image of gold, and although it ended up unfinished, I was able to continue Belsa's adventures for a total of 20 complete 'albums' or 'books', if you will, even after being separated from my mother for good. I also read Mika Waltari's book 'Sinuhe the Egyptian' very quickly when I was 11 years old.

Other late-Kalajoki era comics were Lammen Väki (Folk of the Pond), Ukko, and Heppu Humanoidi (Heppu the Humanoid). Lammen Väki and Ukko were about talking animals and their interraction with hunters and peasants, respectively, while Heppu Humanoidi was sci-fi, of course.

Meanwhile, school went quite well, but looking back to it now, I knew many things already. I was picky about what I wanted to learn, and also, it was easy to blame the new teacher who started to teach at that school in 1995. The new teacher was into gymnastics and sports more than the one we had for the first 2 years and six months. I had an impression he ignored teaching world history, concentrating more on local history, too. But then the most practical thing I managed to learn at the age of 10 or 11. To tell the time using a normal clock, not a digital one like before.