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Edited on Tue Feb-08-05 09:44 PM by stpalm
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I was born on a hot day August 9th, **** in St. Paul, Minnesota. August 9th was the day the second atomic bomb was dropped on Japan(also the day Nixon resigned), and my family continually refers to that day as the one where another bomb was dropped . As a baby, many likened my appearance to that of a monkey and looking back I can see the resemblance. I had a bizarrely shaped cranium and strange, simian looking eyes (in contrast to today when many ask if I am Chinese because of my eyes). My earliest memories mostly involve reading, in fact. I was able to read at a very young age. I had an odd fixation with “DANGER” and “WARNING” signs, and in the car I would point out to my mother that there was a “DANGER” sign on the side of the road. I would also point out the “WARNING” signs. “CAUTION!” was another favorite.
My parents, having had ***** at thirty, had me ten years later, so today they remain... aged for parents of people my age. In the poll we had to complete a few weeks ago in this class, I laughingly informed them that according to the requirements of the test, they could either qualify as “parents or “grandparents”. My mother didn't seem to amused, because she seems fixated on her mortality- she sometimes brings up the fact that she can't believe that she is 56. She works as a law librarian, because she can't use her other degree (Art History) for anything besides the occasional “Jeopardy!” category. My father, who began as an immature miscreant growing up in Duluth (shooting frozen peas from a straw in class, stealing massive mouthfuls of communion wafers from the church storage as an altar boy), somehow managed to make it out of there and attended the U of M before becoming *****************.
My brother ******* is approximately ten years older than me, so there was a great disparity in the types of activities we participated in. His girlfriend ***** came over from North Carolina a few times. I would walk in to the room to say something to him, and then make loud, fake steps away from the closed door so that I could listen to what they were talking about. This didn't work at all, and Andrew remained sort of distanced from me at the beginning of my life. I recall annoying him, wanting to watch him play his violent games (featuring gory monster killings and a button that let you flush money down urinals) on our old computer. I annoyed him so much one time that he kicked my favorite stuffed animal, cleverly named “Gorilla”, (because it was a Gorilla!) out the front door, down our VERY long and steep driveway.
On the subject of Gorillas, I was enthralled with them when I was young. I absorbed many non-fiction books about Gorillas and amassed a collection of the aforementioned stuffed animals- about 15 strong, I would estimate. I wrote several long stories published through the school publishing center about a group of spaceship traveling Gorillas. They were awesome stories for a kid that age, to be frank. (I loved writing at this early age, and that may explain the excessive length of this autobiography). My fixation with Gorillas may have been linked to my shocking similarities to the Gorillas cousin, the monkey. I even saved twenty dollars and donated it to the Gorilla foundation (the “Koko” people) and figuratively adopted a Gorilla in Africa named “Amy” through donating to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. Assuming I was an adult with humanitarian leanings, my name was circulated to several mass mailing lists, including Visa, who sent me, a ten-year-old, a credit card in the mail, citing my “timely loan payments and wonderful credit rating”- up to 100,000 dollars I was authorized to spend. Awesome!
As a child I was very small and sickly- I missed lots of school. However, I was an INCREDIBLY cute child- recent viewing of videotapes confirm this. Missing school was too bad, because my school was awesome. Marine Elementary, a small public school of 100 kids in the small, 600-citizen riverside town of Marine on St. Croix (with a small main street with an antiquated looking General Store that actually sells penny candy), provided an idyllic childhood for me. Each grade had only 25 kids in it, so I attended school each year with the same 25 kids and got to know them very well. I also grew up in the perfect house, on Square Lake- a perfectly sized lake with what was proved to be the cleanest water of any lake in Minnesota. The tradition at Marine Elementary is the 6th Grade play. Each year, the parents and faculty pool their efforts into what turns out to be actually a really good play. That year, the play was Little Orphan Annie- the musical. It was a good show, and I was the policeman. At the end of the play, I was supposed to whisper something into the FDR's ear for part of the play. Each time, however, I whispered some sort of scatological remark into the ear of the president secretly. In the filming of the play you can distinctly see him giggling. My mother found out somehow and was not amused.
Perhaps because of that, my bedroom was struck by lightning. One Saturday night I was sleeping soundly with a bunch of small handheld games at the foot of my bed, for some reason they were all stored in some sort of gum ball machine. An incredibly loud BOOM sounded by my room and I shot up out of my slumber. The room started to fill with an odious odor- sort of like a combination of exploded battery acid and a pile of burning hair. I later found it out to be ozone, an incredibly poisonous material from way up in the ozone layer.
The great thing about growing up in Marine was the safe community. Except for the fact that the General Store was robbed once at gunpoint by a friend of my best friend's brother at gunpoint once and that an arm from a victim of a Russian serial killer was found in the dump, the town was very safe. Most of the parents were friends, and the town was a very nice place. The two things I described above were basically the ONLY bad things to EVER happen in the town. It was an ideal place to grow up- if you ever listen to the unfunny “Prairie Home Companion”, the description of “Lake Woebegone” is basically that of Marine. Because of the safety of the town, My friends *****, *****, and I all got the foldable scooters- “Razors” about a year before they became a fad and rode them to school regularly. We even got on the cover of the town newspaper in a lengthy article featuring several fabricated quotes of mine courtesy of the author. Our parents expressly forbade us to ride down the dangerous, twisty, and pothole filled Nason Hill Road outside of town. This way was much faster, and the way our parents made us go involved taking a detour through a housing development and forced us to walk half of the way. A very awkward moment for me, a person who didn't get in trouble much, was a day when I needed to bring a project to school and had to get a ride to school. Going down Nason Hill Road, my Mom and I approached ***** and ***** slowly going down the hill. I stared out the window and we slowly passed by them as my Mom glared at them.
Another highlight of the Marine scene was the Red Wagon. Me and my friend ***** started our own secret warrior society and fought with his two brothers and their friend from down the road. We would battle with hockey sticks and pinecones, sieging the treefort with our red wagon, carrying all our war goods. Those days were the scenes of many smacked knuckles, but reading through our battle diaries and looking at our fake battle flag (a handkerchief adorned with fake battle holes attached to a hockey stick), I realize that I actually lived the life featured in many sappy, dreck filled movies about the ragtag band of kids growing up in the perfect town.
Of course, it wasn't all perfect. Well, actually, it was. I had the privileged of going on many vacations- Washington D.C. Was the first vacation I went on. On the plane I shouted out the names of all the monuments as we flew over the mall as an overexcited 8 year old. I briefly got lost in an art museum in Washington which was the subject of a dramatic book I wrote in 2nd grade. We went to Hawaii and I was scared to death of seeing crabs come out of the sand at a beach on Maui. Alaska was another thrill- a seven day cruise through the inner passage marred only by an annoying “friend” who I met on the boat who always hung around me in an attempt to use my flippers in the swimming pool. When I was 12 we went to Germany. The flight drove me stir crazy- I am almost 100 percent sure. The plane smelled like spicy peanuts, a baby kept crying, and I couldn't watch the movie because a man with a giant turban sat directly in front of me. These details are only the amusing and slightly negative anectodes of the trips that I feel would go well in this autobiography. The trips were all sensational- don't get the wrong image. Two years ago we went to England, and that was an awesome trip- I got to see all the historical sites, which satisfied my hunger for medieval/ WWII history.
We moved to River Falls four years ago so that my father would not have to suffer through the long drive to Minneapolis and his new job at **********. At the school, I am basically enrolled in whatever band I can find- Marching Band, Jazz Band, Concert Band, etc, as it is the only extra-curricular thing I am decent at that does not involve sports. I played soccer for awhile, and was okay, but I quit because I hated the overly competitive atmosphere of the game. Part of my love for Band encompasses my love for Ska music, a genre devolved out of Reggae- involving the same guitar sound sped up with horn parts- some of the bands today combine that with Punk to make a totally awesome type of music that I have over 350 songs of on my iPod. It's a really happy kind of music that makes you energized.
This recent summer was one of my best. I got to go for an eight-day rafting trip down the Grand Canyon, and it was one of the best experiences of my life. The Canyon is just amazing, and it's natural beauty and the ferioucusness of the 200+ rapids we shot I think about every day. I would love to go back. Adding on to that, immediately afterwards, I came home and the day after I left for a two-week camping trip in the Boundary Waters through camp Widjiwagan with my old friend David. It was awesome to spend bascially a month away from civilization and experience nature. That sounds really corny and idiotic, but it is true. Unfortunately I had to come back to a horrible Presidential campaign in which George W. Bush won despite the fact that I volunteered for a bit with the Pierce country Democrats. That is part of the reason I want to go back camping for a long time- I love politics, government, and current events a ton, but I need a break every once in awhile.
This autobiography is a bit hard to write when you are young, so I have been finding it hard to fill in the latest details with anything amusing. The first part no doubt was amusing in parts, but the last few paragraphs are basically rambling about what I do now. But that is how it goes when you are only 16!
THE END.
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The end is really rambling and pointless, but I am young! In fact, the whole essay is nonsequential and disjointed. Oh well.
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