i got an assignment in ap calc today to write my life story. this being from the perspective of eighty-three year old me in 2070. so i thought i would write it here. this is how i do, after all.

i was born at two o'clock pm february twelfth nineteen eighty-seven on a bed in a room in rex hospital in downtown raleigh, north carolina. this should be an important detail not for particular stylistic reasons but because it is my entire life's story after all. well... then i suppose i should start with my conception but i dont actually recall that. i remember baby pictures of myself - doing things - but the original memory... damn. not photographic, just emotional. just a sense of being and knowing and feeling and if i think hard enough about it i can convince myself its just me creating a memory for myself now but i think... i think. back in 1990 we built a house south of garner, north carolina. i loved to walk around upstairs and go near the edge and throw nails off our upstairs. this always upset my poor mother (god rest her soul) but i enjoyed it. no... back before that we lived with my grandmother for six months. i was sick and nauseous and had to take a pill so i took it with a pepsi and... a pickle? or a banana? ah - i forget. the important part is... i remember. i remember things from pre-school in fuquay-varina united methodist church and counting to a hundred to prove i could and a little red backpack that i used for four - no six - no four - years. and i remember things from every single grade through elementary and middle school. in my head ive set aside memories filed away so that when i think of that specific time i can recall those same ones over and over again. but i wont go into all that. memories are important, they shape who you are. but they dont shape who you become, or became in my case.
i remember always being just outside the loop when it came to new slang or styles or whatever. i guess i never was quite... i dont know the word. i got straight a's through elementary school. i almost cried when i got my first b in middle school. that was the start of something. it made me... vincible (logical opposite of invincible). this meant to me that it was ok to fail. or, not to fail but to be imperfect because i was still better off. everyone plays the flute, sometimes (thats fool, as i know now). no, middle school was great and i remember my english teacher eighth grade writing a novel about his secret past and i wanted to do that. i learned to play music in middle school, the clarinet and then sax. i worked on the yearbook staff... did a lot of things. played soccer the last two years and did damn well if i recall correctly. and i do.

the real turning point in my life was high school. raleigh charter high school. i never knew how special that place was until i left. i remember applying there and writing some bullshit candy-coated essay that was true but that i didnt really mean. i was impressed by their presentation for open house (and the proximity to krispy kreme doughnuts) but i also liked southeast raleigh's but for different reasons. southeast had a football team. it was the real school of the two. charter was cool but didnt offer much in the way of the total experience i didnt want to miss. so i made southeast my first choice... and didnt get in. i lived outside of district. so i set myself up to go to charter. now, southeast did call back a week or two before i started school back in 2000 but i got angry because they had ditched me so i bitched at them - politely - and let them go. so i attended raleigh charter high school.

this place was different than any other school i had seen. small... with intelligent teachers and students to match. the kids were strange and i believe that shaped me because i started believing myself to be the same way. ive appreciated that ever since. i still miss freshman year. all the kids i remember now... i dont know where they were. i can sit and think of a specific memory - elections, english class, movies etc. - and wonder... where were you then? why werent you with me? but it was alright. i made great friends, fell in love with them, and learned how to deal. i got read to in english class and learned how to appreciate literature. but no, i still appreciate literature but those people are the ones i miss most. kids that could keep me up till four am any night - and did. i miss those people. jesus, whatever happened to them?

sophmore year i learned to write. this has been a big part of my life... ever since. mrs newmark (?), my government teacher, had this weblog... this blog. it was an idea that i took up with no understanding and made it my own. i sortof believe i was the first of the entire blogging community (a formidable one at charter) to actually start writing. and writing everyday things turned into essays and thought provokation and things ordinary high school kids werent doing. i learned that when you express yourself, be that through writing or music or any number of things... you will learn more about yourself and how you think and act and react and deal with any number of things. it is heartening in a way. soph year was the year of love and music. i got a guitar for my birthday and started teaching myself the ropes. it was slow at first but i really felt it and kept going. so by senior year i knew a lot more than even my contemporaries that took lessons. i even started writing music. this was a big step because music is fluid, like poetry... and it takes instrumental and lyrical mastery. not easy. but that wasnt all, no, not all. there was a peace protest that year where a lot of our kids marched out to the town mall to question authority and speak out against the war in iraq. and we all know what that was about.

as an aside, it was around this time that i pretty much conquered boy scouts and became an eagle scout. this is something i am still proud of today... i still get asked about it. i cant say how much that has influenced my life for the better. but its a helluva lot. DAMMIT BOY.

this was all fine and wonderful and lovely but i could write for days and months and years in fact about those high school years. in fact, i managed a hundred thousand words in that blog through the beginning of senior year. that came into play later. but more on that as it happened. chronologically of course. obviously the next part of my life was college. this was no surprise to me but it was wonderful to be accepted early to wake forest university. it was my father's school and his father's school and my uncle's school on my mother'sside of the family and... ah - what a wonderful place. we had always been huge sports fans and even as the atlantic coast conference expanded we were rabid, rabid, demon deacon fans. unbiasedly i visited schools and finally chose wake as the place for me. it just felt right, you know? so i went to school there. freshman move in day was a bitch because my mother got all... well you know. teary-eyed and such. and she wouldnt leave... but i cant blame her. i always loved her most of all. so when i found some alone time in my little dorm i sat down with my guitar and played every single one of the forty dave matthews band songs i knew. this isnt an exagerration. those were incredible melodies... he was an incredible man. i remember being turned on to music and him back freshman year. but that is enough about freshman year. i already cannot bear it.

well at wake, as is tradition, a lot of alcohol went around. yeah, i got drunk a lot but i knew my limitations and studied hard as well. made friends with chris paul and willie the jet jet jet idolette. good men, the both of them. i majored in biology at wake and minored in intramural sports. i was on a soccer team... i forget the name. but it was exceptional and somehow made it past the IM office without being censored. good times. and that semester junior year i studied abroad in vienna was... oh jesus. there are some things that dont need mentioning. all my jewish friends an account for that. i loved wakes program in vienna so i went to london senior year. astounding also... and more booze. but hell, i passed biology with some... colors. i dont think they actually flew - i spent more time at lawrence joel memorial coloseum at basketball games than i probably should have - but i passed. and made it well enough to get into bowman gray medical school. see, back in high school i never knew what i wanted to do or be when i 'grew up'. i knew though back in my head that i was grown up already and it was just a case of what to do to get by. so i figured upon the fine profession of anesthesiology by chance on a trip to the beach with my father - no mother - and thought about it and found that i didnt mind the sound of it. i could always write and do other things that would complete my life while i wasnt working. the bowman gray years werent the most memorable of my life, aside from a couple precious visits to nyc with old friends whom i missed dearly. more about that later of course.

after graduating from bowman gray and getting hired by a plastic surgery clinic in raleigh, the doctors names i always have trouble remembering, i was diagnosed with diabetes. this was no big surprise either but saddening to say the least. i imagined my old uncle - who i always admired for all the wrong reasons - always needling himself and checking his sugar back in the day. well tough. it was something new to deal with. and ive always kept it around in the background. amazing for a diabetic to live to eighty-three? damn fucking straight. ive never been ordinary though. i am the most unusual kid. humble too.

this, however didnt play much into the best time of my life. that time when i had gotten into the groove of work and was doing fine to the tune of a couple hundred thousand a year. but money isnt important, materials arent important. its what you do with your life that really matters. i tried not to waste time. i spend $12000 on a 1967 austin mini (there werent many left, trust me) and a couple thousand more to fix it up with a rollcage etc. for racing. this was all around 2016 or so. ever since i was a kid i had always wanted to go vintage racing. so i took a weekend's class to become a driver and took that little mini out on the track. it was wonderful, that sensation of lawlessness, that freedom that comes with pushing that tiny machine to its limits around every corner. and of course it was a crowd favorite. intimidating though to race out there with those big cubic inch mustangs, camaros, and vettes. i always used to feel different because i never was a fan of the corvette. i guess that came from my father. he was a british car man. owned a 1969 jaguar e-type convertible that i still have today. such a sensuous car. it was... and still is the most beautiful automobile ever. and let me tell you, it would run too. sonorous with that big 4.2 inline six under the long hood. sex on wheels.

but no, this isnt about cars or sex... yet. it was about this kid i met at my ten year high school reunion. sweet kid of then twenty seven. the same one i had always known about. the one that wasnt supposed to work. shes beautiful you know. still is. we dated through the years and through the vintage wrecks (though few) and the rock climbing (another vehicle... hah... 1979 jeep cj-7 with the amc 304 - AH the rocks we climbed etc.). we got married. that was the most wonderful day of my life. wonderful because i didnt believe it to be real. ever since back in the day i had known this would happen but never really believed it. i had to stop and smell the roses that day, not let life pass me by. it was hard. hard to deal with, all that. standing in the chapel and watching her walk down the isle with her father. how do you deal with that? it was tough, difficult, but mmmm. i can still feel that. still feel her lips and my inner collapse. she can make me die, still does.

i continued to write the entire time though, remembering kerouac and hunter thompson from back when in high school and when i finally became accredited by some small sources i decided to publish the blog. you remember, that one from high school. i had checked it over and over in school and figured it to be about 150 pages worth of material senior year... then up to 400 by the end of college. i found a publisher and after a while it published as a sort of... ahem. i dont even know. a real-life beat journal of sorts. i had slowly become more conscious of myself so the stuff from college was real drunk and aware and kerouacean than anything before it. and i loved that. loved it to my core. i never wanted to be the next jack or shakespeare or joyce but i still wrote all the time. i wrote poetry, music, essays and sometimes just words for fun. it is a release you see, to get all that out, to type or scribble until you cant anymore and when you look back you may not completely appreciate what youve accomplished but at least you feel better than before. what was inside is now outside, continue the turnover of ideas and you will get more and more fantastical and wondrous and stupifying shit that really will make her dress wrinkle. yes, you understand. dont you?

this was about the time that i got to live my dream life. i bought a twenty-foot carolina skiff and bolted on a johnson 240. holy christ that bugger would run. lake or salt it was the thing... even for family. i had a family. without being hostile or selfish though, this isnt about them. they were never who i had imagined anyway. i built a house for me and my lover out in the country of the last underdeveloped county in north carolina - chatham. it was a beautiful place on a huge plot of land with trees and fields and streams (sounds a bit like a magazine eh?)... i saved a cow. i felt it was the right thing to do. always had an infatuation with the animals. beautiful eyes... that cow. belle. i bought her off a farmer who was going to send her to the meat factory. this may sound a bit fantastical but i swear to you, that is what happened. now that i had saved a cow i wanted to give her the world. or at least all she could appreciate... being a cow. now what is the one plausible thing that cows never get to experience that most of us here in the good old NC can almost take for granted? yes... no. yes... the beach. i loaded belle and the strange kids into my trailor and truck (respectively) and headed off to the beach. i would take belle and the wife on walks while the sun set. people may have looked at us oddly but that was fine. belle loved it. loved it i say. well how many of you ever took a cow to the beach? thats right.

and - ah - there were sad times too. i choose not to mention them much though because in my old diabetic age only the happy things need mentioning. so as my parents and family died off, either in accidents or through disease ( i was the last one to contract diabetes however) i relied more and more on my wife. shes always been there though, and will always be. she was there through the comical war. you rememeber... when switzerland got pissed in the 40's and attacked germany. jesus, what were they thinking? the swiss army was outfitted to the teeth... with forty useless functions. that one was a bit fun but people did die. that is never fun. you can watch violence on television all you feel like. shit, or realize it like you can do these days (never understood all this new fantasy-reality technology shit). nah i remember how that felt. i went rafting once back in high school. we lost a man from the boat at the beginning of a quarter mile rapids. we couldnt get him back in and i can still hear the guide yelling for us to get the man we must get the man and how our man up front couldnt pull him all the way in and had to let him go before we hit another rock and went over another rapids and how terrible that must have been to let him go and have him get sucked under the raft and not come up. and not come up. and not come up for seconds which were innately hour-ish in a time so stressful as that. and i thought he was dead. and that would have been the first time i had seen a man die. terrible feeling... though i had watched two of my dogs die in the two years before that. i got over it though. tears dont flow forever.

this all kindof blends into my life today. maybe a mid to late life crisis deal but i just cant find much to say about my life to now. i was in a coma from '54 to '56. my wife stayed faithful. god i dont know what i would do without her. i wouldnt be here. that coma was from a car accident by the way. you cant be too careful in cars. thats a life lesson for you. ah - how did i ever manage to end up in that lake anyway? i suppose since then ive never really been able to put up with frustrating things. now for the life of me i cannot remember the past ten years. i need to take more pills dammit. god why did i start this? i havent even scratched the surface. this isnt what i am about... it was never about what i was about. ever since high school ive been more focused on the emotion and the deepness and the black and whiteness and utter grayness in people and everything they do and feel and think and behind whats there and why and who and life! and why is this nothing like that! ah! i want to be on the road again. my love and i have a death compact. dont tell.