Earth

EARTH THE EARLY YEARS As I mentioned earlier, most people, when writing a "personal section", make it about as interesting as pricision-cut toenail clippings. Nothing of personal interest rarely lies within. BUT NOT ME!

No, I'm gonna give you exactly what you're looking for! I'm not going to include those typical personal yet obnoxious facts like what age I was when I lost my virginity (19), what illegal drugs I've done (none), or whether I have had any embarrasing homosexual experiences in my teenage years (been there, done that)- I'm afraid you won't find any filth like that here. Instead, I'm going to give you a breif rundown of my life, as chaotically as possible, so that you might understand me better. Or at least get a damned good laugh.

    My mother went into labor late on the 30th of January, 1975. According to my father, the "Hospital Horoscope for Babies" for January 30th said that I was going to grow up to be a real professional; very organized, studious, meticulous and hard working. Well, it wasn't until the next morning that Iwas born, at which point that Baby Horoscope essentially said, "Forget all that other stuff, The Kid is Fucked".
    From there, we moved to Detroit, Texas, and then Lansing, New Jersey. It was there that I had the first memory that I can recall- I fell down the stairs one night. That's about all I remember about Lansing. RANDOM MEMORIES of THE EARLY YEARS: I remember putting together a LEGO bus meant for kids ages 8+ when I was only 4. My parents thought that it meant that I would be a great engineer (like my dad). As it turned out, it only meant that I Really Liked LEGOs.
I remember I loved to swing on the school jungle gym in Baton Rouge, even though I kept hitting my head on the metal bars. One time I started bleeding all over, even though I felt fine. The school nurse told the recess-teachers that I wasn't to swing on the bars anymore.
I remember this kid named Landon Idell who kept grabbing other kids asses, screaming "Itchy Butts!". [CONFESSION] I was the one who taught him that game- little did I know that I had created a monster...
I remember my best friend Matt and I would always run around the playground, pretending that we could run as fast as the guy from "The Greatest American Hero" (a short-lived Superhero TV Show in America)
I remember getting stung by a jellyfish when we were on vacationin Texas. I hate jellyfish.
I remember that my Kindergarten teacher's name was pronounced "Mrs. A-BEAR" but it was written Hebert. Those nutty Cajuns.
I remember we had to learn French in First Grade (because of the Cajun/French influence in Louisiana). The only things that I remember are "Janolapan" (bunny rabbit) and that on Easter there's no Easter Bunny in France, but rather the church bells fly around and give children the candy.
I remember kissing Christine and Paige under the table in first grade- AT THE SAME TIME.
I remember going to AA Meetings with my dad when I was a kid. It was like having a second family.
I remember getting up every morning at 5:00 for about a year and a half and watching Star Wars on video disc before I went to school. I think that bits of Star Wars infused themselves into my genetic structure at that point.
I remember that my childhood soccer team, The Hurricanes, won the state tournament. I played on defense. When it rained our team became more interested in kicking mud on each other than a kicking a silly ball.
I remember naming the cat that I found "Justa". It was the first word out of my mouth when my parents asked me to name him. Later, for no apparent reason on some nights I would cry nonstop and ask my parents "What would happen if he died?"
I remember Father Dan from the Catholic Church that we went to in Louisiana. He brought the faith closer to the people without using all the rigid dogma,and the other older priests hated him for it.
I remember my first computer- an ATARI 400, loaded with 16 whopping K and equipped with a tape drive. My dad wrote a killer "Tron" Light-Cycle game in BASIC.
I remember saving up Kenner proofs-of-puchase so that I could order the Yoda, Emporer and Anakin Skywalker action figures.
I remember watching Kung-Fu movies every weekend with my dad. My favorite was "The Five Deadly Venoms".
I remember when my grandfather died. I remember not really thinking anything.
I remember seeing Empire Strikes Back opening weekend with my folks. For some reason, we had to wait on the roof of the building before the movie started due to overcrowding.
I remember the time I threw a green metal Matchbox car at Robbie Davidowski, one of my childhood friends with a freakish temper, and it hit him right in his forehead. I ran away.
I remember my first pair of Spider-Man Underoos. I hid in the closet to surprise my dad when he came home. I don't think your average adult male knows how to react to a situation like that...
I remember the school making me go to some sort of "special classes" when I was in Louisiana. We got to do fun things on our own like cook food, make board games, and write and perform puppet shows.
I remember moving to Sparta, New Jersey. My cat hated moving. Third Grade. We had a big tree in our backyard, but I was only allowed to climb up to the first large branch.
I remember elementary school in New Jersey- we had to move to the different teachers' classrooms, instead of vice-versa like in Louisiana.
I remember I teased a popular girl named "Muffy" during recess and she bitch-slapped me with her purse, knocking my to the ground in front of all my friends.`
I remember I teased the new kid, Fabio Santos, for being fat during recess a years later. He caught me, sat on me, and poured snad in my hair. It took 3 days to get it out. He became a pretty good friend, actually.
I remember my best friend for a couple years was Dan Littman, a rather well-to-do kid who shared my love of LEGOs and Transformers. I didn't talk to him after 6th grade. Last I heard about him he apparently turned into a completely average yuppie fuck.
The Middle Years In 6th grade I saved up Report Card Money and bought a Nintendo. That, coupled with my dislike for regular sports and love of food turned me into a rather fat kid. Really fat. Like I was one of the 5 fattest, nerdiest kids in my grade. I stayed that way until 9th grade (see Philmont, below). I equated athletics to Hell. It wasn't until 8th grade that I could do a proper pull-up.
In 7th grade I made the aquaintance of Drew Dunlap. He had just moved from California and he would later become my best friend. We would talk about movies and make up new role-playing games in the back of math class even though we were totally bombing.
One of those days we went to visit my Aunt Judy and Uncle Larry, who have a sheep/chicken farm. That's the first time I learned that sheep have 2 dicks.
I loved shop class in 8th grade. The thought of building whatever I wanted to, like my grandfather and father before me, was really pleasing to me. Unfortunately I sucked so utterly bad at it that I stuck to the lathe and made really pathetic lamps.
There was an RC Model Airplane club at school. I liked regular models, but not RC ones. So I went anyway and built other models by myself- cars, planes, see-though anotomical people... I actually got laughed at by model-builder nerds,which was something in itself!
One of my favorite classes was sewing. I made a duffel bag that I still have today- I chose the most sickly gaudy colors- bright orange, dark blue and lavendar. I still use the thing.
My other favorite class was cooking. The group of 4 guys that I was with for the semester used each and every cooking opportunity to make a dessert of some kind- no matter what we were supposed to make.   We even found a dessert recipe for the "meat" unit. We would eat half the ingredients before anything was finished, and if we burned something we always whined to the teacher (because she would lower our grade), "No, REALLY, we LOOOOOVE our cake a little burned... it tastes better that way!"
On the first year of summer camp with the Boy Scouts the bigger kids took my cot out of the tent while I was still sleeping in it at moved me into the latrine. I didn't feel so bad, though; I woke up to find myself surrounded by about 5 other Newbies like myself.
I had done a lot of camping before, but one of the more significant journeys of my life was when I went with about 11 other kids, only half of who I knew, to the Boy Scout camp Philmont in New Mexico for about three weeks. We spent two full weeks hiking (10 to 15+ miles a day), camping, doing activities in the wilderness like learning about the Native Americans, panning for gold, hiding untrained horses, etc. It was a real sweat and male bonding kind of thing. I left there really feeling changed about my life. As it turned out, the spiritual journey had a physical component to it- I had earlier sold my time-sucking Nintendo and watched my eating more carefully, and all that hiking at Philmont did the final job of burning about every ounce of loose fat that I had- my friends could barely recognize me when I returned. And that was my Jennie Craig Moment-of-the-Day.

High school was great. I hated almost every class I was in, got a D in one of the easiest classes I had ever taken, but I spent almost every day after school at Drew's house.
Once, I tried out for Fiddler on the Roof with Drew at a local theatre called Pax Amicus. That's the first time I learned that I can't sing for shit.
Freshman year this big football-player kind of guy one day chased me down after gym class, and made me give him this big, warm hug in front of his friends. He meant it to be humiliating, but it actually was rather nice.
Sophomore year was even better. Drew and I would often cut school when we had big test or papers and work on them that day. I often skipped once a week on my own, hanging out for the day in Catacombs of the high school band room (although I didn't play an instrument).
I had this blue trench coat that I thought was cool, but this one dick in my Mechanical Drawing class kept calling me "secret agent nerd". So I arranged it so that he would "accidently" sit on his own drafting compass...
Through navigating the school's curriculam, I was probably one of the only few students in about 800 that didn't take Biology in high school. I really hated those nasty planaria- they made me freak out, the way they could just "grow another head" if they wanted to.
Sophomore year I met Steve Chalfant, who in a few short months became my other best friend. You'll find his name floating around these pages somewhere. He was this total brain who ran a Dungeons and Dragons campaign with me and Drew and this other guy named CJ. Later, with Steve, Drew, and some other friends (Jesse, Ann), we spun a story that was so incredible I was able to recount it for years as an epic. Unfortunately, I have long since forgotten most of the details, save that my character's name was Hoag and he was the AD&D Equivalent of The Punisher. Yeah, I was a total D&D freak: One day my favorite 20-sided die got lost in Steve's basement, and I lamented it for days. Later, as a gag-gift for Steve I wrote a song about it.
It was sophomore year that I really started getting into music- Ray Lynch, Enigma, L.L.Cool J, The KLF, that sort of thing. Drew always had me listening to Showtunes- his family was big into the theatre. But for the most part, showtunes made me nauseous...

Before Junior year I moved to a suburb of Chicago.

Chicago... where the forest preserves exist only as downtime before the construction of shopping centers.
Since my arrival in Chicago, well, all I can say is that it was ok. I made some cool friends, got invloved a little more in school, actually studied here and there. But for the most part I was bored senseless by routine. Academically, I got my first 'A' since elementary school, which was funky. But I got thrown into all sorts of honors courses where the students were socially worms but loved the taste of spilled blood. Competitive as hell.
It was from Chicago that I returned, for the third time, to Philmont. The last time I spent a whole month there on a program called "Trail Crew"- you spend two weeks building trails and doing shitwork in the middle of nowhere, and then you get a free two week trek. That was an incredible experience. The most interesting thing about it, save for the time we almost brutally killed the two kids that snored loud, was when most of us decided that, since this was probably the only time in our lives when we could do so, we should go without bathing for a month. I ended up wearing the same pair of clothes (brown pants, green rayon shirt, no underwear) for 3 of those weeks. Made sense to me at the time...
As for Boy Scouts in Illinois, it wasn't nearly as interesting as in Jersey. Most of the camping was pretty low-speed, with the kids and the adults just kind of laying around all day. I blame the miniscule and ill-placed Forest Preserves of Illinois for that- no wonderous sights to be seen; get lost in deep woods and all you have to do is walk a mile in any direction to find a mall or highway. Thanks to scouting in Illinois, though, I did meet one of my best friends- Mike Slivka. We have a really strange relationship- sometimes he feels like a little brother (he's about 5 years younger than me), sometimes he feels like a peer. In any way, he made life in Illinois that much more interesting.
Speaking of scouts, I finally got around to my Service Project and became an Eagle Scout.
It was in Illinois that I had my first girlfriend in years. Her name was Kris Scholten. The only thing I have to say about her now is... well... um... I remember that her mom was really nice. She had a big car, too.
It was in Illinois that I had my First Love. I mean, true stop-the-heart love. Her name was Toral Jha, and when she was a Freshman I was a Senior. I got shredded, big time, though. I have no regrets, though- it was really that cool to love someone that much the first time.
Soon after, half because of friends, half because of reactions to things that went on in my Gourmet Foods class, I became a vegetarian. I was really strict back then-now I eat fish and certain seafoods. Totally lost the taste for meat since then. Except every now and then I found myself having cravings for chicken strips at Denny's...
It was at the end of high school that I took up Tae Kwan Do. I had been meaning to for years, but never worked up the courage to actually go until that point.
My friends Tony and Marcos, the guys that I regularly hung out with, and I would regularly go shopping (yeah, GUYS CAN SHOP, TOO!) and the infamous Buck Flicks (second-run theatres). I loved the buck flicks- if the movie sucked, you can just sit there, crack jokes and throw food.
I finally decided Senior year to kill my dreams of becoming a chef, and becoming a Special Effects technician, and to give Saint Norbert College a shot. Then I graduated.