Jan 13
Rainbow Watson ruined my life
The story of over a decade of self-sabotage, bad movies, and maybe one divorce.
Rainbow Watson has lived rent-free in my head for over a decade.
Originally this was an article about the books I never wrote. It was weirdly sentimental, self-defeatist and I guess sort of genuine, but then, appropriately, I didn’t finish it. The whole thing didn’t feel right. Felt more pitiful than anything else.
But it did get me thinking about the parts of stories one never writes that refuse to go away. It got me thinking about Rainbow Watson.
When I was a kid, I realized writing was something I could do outside of the classroom, for fun. My first story was half-written in a day, abandoned shortly afterward. It was basically A Series of Unfortunate Events but with different names attached to it. You see, I knew stories followed a structure, and I had just seen a movie that had a structure, so by spending a couple hours and around 20 pages on that, I could obviously write a whole novel. For a 9-year-old it was pretty solid logic.
Of course, the book would never be finished, because I didn’t have a middle section figured out. How was I supposed to get to the ending without making it boring? If I just re-wrote the movie, people would think it was a rip-off of what I was clearly ripping off. I knew I shouldn’t steal people’s ideas at the time, but I didn’t really know what to do to make my own. In the end I decided to shelve the project. The actual story wasn’t anything to write home about, anyway. But I remember, to this day, about this character I introduced right away called Rainbow Watson.
He was a fat, short British man whose entire existence revolved around showing up for the main characters and telling them bad news. Every time something bad happened, Rainbow Watson would either knock on the front door, send a telegram or somehow acquire the means to contact the children I was writing about. He would say something obvious about how their situation wasn’t improving, but then would always end sentences with something like “but I’m sure it’s going to be okay”, and then leave without doing anything.
I had some idea that in the end, Rainbow Watson would swoop the kids from danger, and just adopt them before their misadventures finished them off. It never got there, and I ended up just moving on, but I loved writing Rainbow Watson. At least, I thought I did.
I think a lot of the supporting characters I have written since have been Rainbow Watson reborn. I don’t even remember the name of the character I based him on, but I remember the feeling behind it — something about a character who couldn’t actually help you, but was always available to support you really got to me. Back then, I didn’t put that much thought into it, but I really do believe it’s this weird prototypical encapsulation of what I eventually would be interested in. People who don’t know what to do figuring out how to be useful.
And really, that’s most of what this second version of the article was going to be. I was going to go on a tangent about Rainbow Watson’s many versions throughout different things I wrote, most of which I either abandoned or transformed into something else. I was going to characterize him as this weird, consistent presence in my life. Whenever I started to run out of ideas or just wonder what else could be done with a story, I would reach in and pull something that looked like… well, Rainbow Watson.
But, then, of course, that also went nowhere. The words stopped flowing, the whole thing started to sound stupid, and I was left with another half-finished idea to bounce inside my head.
But, Rainbow Watson, though. Full name, every time. Like a mosquito bite you keep assuming went away, but then keeps itching at the most inopportune times. I still wanted to write something about him. And I had no idea why. I hadn’t thought about him in so long. Why would I want to write about him?
People fetishize and anthropomorphize their writer’s block a lot. I mean, that’s what I did in my first article here. By making writer’s block our subject, we get to cheat ourselves out of it. But have you ever had the experience of having a laser-focused, single-minded writer’s block? As in, a block where you can’t write about something specific, but it just so happens to be the one thing you want to write about?
Because the third version of this was going to be about that. About the specific blocks one has when trying to get an idea out of their head. I had this whole thing setup where I was going to basically imply Rainbow Watson was actually in my head, sabotaging ideas in order to include himself in some way, shape or form, only whenever the idea got to his part I just stopped, because I couldn’t make him work. A monster in the form of an idea in the form of Rainbow Watson.
It was going to be this long stream of consciousness where Rainbow Watson would appear in my every-day activities, replace characters in movies, appear in other books, and overall just make my life a living hell. In the end, the story about Rainbow Watson becoming so ubiquitous in my routine would be the story itself.
The story of a meme of a character from a decades-old cancelled story that tries its hardest to be included somewhere else, anywhere else, only to ultimately make his own name such a common appearance that people just hate him. Rainbow Watson would make his own story, and be the whole reason why no one would ever hear about him ever again. No one likes a forced meme.
It wasn’t going to be particularly funny, and that’s probably the reason why that also stopped. Which, well, puts me in a bad position: I do want to write something, but my ideas keep coming undone. None of them hold enough water on their own to fill a whole page. And, frankly, none of the ideas were very good either. None of them quite had some intangible quality I was struggling to define.
I decided this wasn’t helping with the bad day I was already having, and went to watch a movie.
Around an hour into this movie that I really wasn’t enjoying, I kept asking myself if the problem was me. I wasn’t finding pleasure in writing, or in watching things, or in reading, or playing. Maybe it was just a bad day to try to be creative. As the movie characters sprouted more exposition, I also grew increasingly frustrated with the fact that I didn’t care about the movie at all.
The movie was trying its hardest to justify its own premise through characters explaining exactly what was going on, and exactly what would happen in the next scene. I don’t think it had a single moment where people just talked about something that wasn’t related to explaining the metaphysics of what was going on around them. It had me so distracted that, almost out of spite, I came to a conclusion as to what was wrong with my idea.
As the movie kept going on and on about things I didn’t care about, I realized: hey, all these things I’m trying to write about don’t actually matter to anyone else but me. They’re all just information with nothing to attach to. It’s like I’m stuck in hours and hours of exposition about things that should be cool and should matter, but since I have no attachment, no reason to care about them, they have nowhere to fit in mine or anyone’s head. I’m talking about a story instead of telling a story.
Writing is an exercise in basically lying in order to convince others that the things in your head make sense. We do this because stories are a key part of our life experience — language is, in many ways, the tool we use to tell stories first, and then relay objective information second. You need people to actually understand what you’re talking about before convincing them of something. You need someone to trust you and think you’re just like them, a human being, before caring about anything they have to say.
I have tried for the life of me to convince you Rainbow Watson means something to me, and it’s likely all I really ended up doing was convince you that I have no commitment skills, and abandon things too easily. I fed you information for hundreds of words about something I desperately wanted you to care about, only to come out empty-handed.
And now I realize that if I really wanted you to care about any of this, I should have probably started with establishing Rainbow Watson was the only character my dad ever liked.
My dad always tried getting me into his own hobbies, but I just could never do it. I never liked soccer, never liked basketball, and never managed to run for more than a few minutes without breaking out in hives. When he would watch cartoons with me, we would laugh together and then go completely silent, as we realized we had nothing in common with each other.
“Did you like the part where–” would generate grumbles from either of us. Trying to ask if the other one liked a movie or an episode of a show would just result in awkward pauses after non-committal answers. My mom always said we were the same person; impossible to talk to.
My dad never liked my stories. When I still showed them to him, he would read it all in dead silence and then whisper to me “‘s good”, and go back to what he was doing. At some point I actually showed him the same story twice. He didn’t notice it.
Except that one time.
I wasn’t even asking if he could read my stories anymore. He told me he needed to use the house computer and I obliged, forgetting to close the Word window I had open. As I got ready to play with some toys or whatever, I heard my dad belly-laughing from the other room.
I came back and he had the Word window open. He saw that I had arrived and told me, for the first time in my life — “Hey, this guy’s hilarious. Good job.”
He was reading Rainbow Watson’s second time showing up. I remember barely knowing what to say. I almost never got complimented, and definitely not by my father. I remember staring at him like I thought he was going to vanish, and I was going to wake up in a cold sweat if I did anything wrong. I didn’t think I would ever be in that position. Being complimented by my father.
And then I remember relief, and smiling, and saying thank you.
Two months after that, my parents finally divorced. It just wasn’t meant to be, and I ended up not seeing my father a lot after that. We hung out after I grew up, we went to each other’s houses, but ultimately we were more friends than anything.
Five months ago, as I managed to arrange things in order to visit him, we were reminiscing about the world before the virus when he surprised me with a question: “Hey, did you ever write more about that guy?”
“What?” I asked back, almost sure I misheard him.
“You know, the Rainbow guy! From that thing! I remember loving that shit.”
I must have looked really surprised, because he started laughing again. There I was, thousands of pages later, full of opinions and concerns about where my life had to go and where I had already gone wrong — fully aware that I was not where I wanted to be, and maybe never would…
And my dear old dad still remembered that one dumb character that made him laugh all those years ago.
There aren’t a lot of characters that mean a lot to me. From other people’s writing, sure, but out of the couple dozen names I’ve put down on a page, I can only really tell of three or four that I really, actually care about. They’re all a part of me in some ways, but a lot of them are also just me by rote. There’s ultimately not that much to care about.
But Rainbow Watson, fat British man extraordinaire, is one of the few that I have actual formative memories associated with. One of the few that keeps coming up and trying to slide himself into new projects; one of the ones that make me reconsider if a cast is already too full, or not full enough, and whether I could maybe add someone kinda like that.
So, now, I hope it’s easier to understand why I seem so adamant about telling this guy’s story.
… well, okay, except, all of it was a lie.
Come on! My dad doesn’t give a shit about my writing — you’ve read my writing! Why would I ever show it to him? You would have had to ignore the entire thing about writing being lying to get hooked into that story!
But god damn it if I didn’t just write a story about Rainbow Watson. This dumb character that’s been stuck in my head ever since I accidentally reverse-engineered fanfiction at age 9. All because of his stupid name! That’s why he’s in my head! Because the word RAINBOW sounded cool when I was a kid, and it still does!
Fuck you, Rainbow Watson! I never have to think about you ever again! I finally did it! I finally wrote a full story about you and someone read it! I’m finally free of having the urge to insert you in everything!
And now he’s with you.
Whether you loved or hated this stupid article, whether you came here accidentally or started reading whatever else I have published — whether you’re here because somehow you typed in the exact set of characters that redirects here, no matter. You have him now.
Rainbow Watson lives in your head now. You know what he is to me. You know what I’ve tried to do in order to get him out of my head. You read me wax philosophical, critique and lie my way into getting rid of his hold on my free time.
And now you have that memory. That annoying, cyclical, condescending memory of that one article you read about a dumb character that had a funny name.
Rainbow Watson just found a new home. See ya later buddy.
