.:the formative years:.

i was born in alliance, oh, but after about two years, my parents and i moved to a little shithole town called rolla…rolla, mo…thriving population of about 13,000…maybe 15,000 now. who knows…it has been almost 12 years since i’ve been back there. the only thing that rolla has going for it is the university of missouri rolla (UMR). it is apparently quite the engineering college, and rolla is, for all intents and purposes, a super nerdy college town.

i think that i enjoyed rolla for the most part. i don’t have any particularly bad memories of it. i have a lot of memories of playing baseball in the summers and eating endless amounts of cherry snowcones. i remember not getting enough juice in them and being left with a bunch of ice. i remember the day that my dad bought me an atari 2600, and how we sat there and played ’space invaders’ and ‘combat’ for hours, and how i knew that i would be hopelessly addicted to video games. i remember telling him and my mom that ‘pac-man’ would be the last game i’d ever ask for. then there are two memories that follow that one. the first is of when my mom was in the hospital getting ready to birth my brother, and i triumphantly paraded into the hospital lobby with a copy of ‘defender’ held up in my hands in a conspicious way for all to see. the second one is of me telling my mom and dad that my throat hurt on a school day, but getting up about five minutes later to play ’starmaster’. i remember our first computer…an ‘adam’ computer, complete with coleco vision game system…and playing ‘buck rogers’ on a super-slow but ever-so-high-tech-at-the-time tape drive. i remember how much i hated when my mom made porcupine balls for dinner (they’re kind of like meatballs except they have rice in them and they’re cooked in beef broth). i remember playing GI Joe and Laser Tag and Star Wars and Army and He-Man and karate with my friend tyrone and i remember riding my bike up the street to my friend jeff’s house to play his sweet new 8-bit nintendo. i remember riding up to the forum plaza to go steal ‘garbage pail kids’ from TG&Y (tear, grab & yank as my dad used to call it), to buy cherry taffy from the hallmark store, to eat ice cream at ruby’s and to buy the latest choose your own adventure book from the tiny book store there (can’t remember what it was called). i remember playing slip and slide inside of my friend roger’s house. i remember going over to my friend dan’s house, and having his dad turn me onto the world of dragons and knights and wizards through the apple IIe game ‘wizardry’…and ‘ultima’…and ‘the ancient art of war’. i remember playing ’superman’ with my brother adam and accidentally hurling him into the wall. i remember being a mean older brother because i had glasses and straight bowl cut hair and people were mean to me. i remember the smell of this kid nicholas; both his parents smoked, and so he always smelled like stale old house that had been smoked in for years without painting or changing the carpets or spraying a fucking drop of lysol. i remember taking taekwondo for a while, and how i used it to kick the principal’s son’s ass one day in a game of ‘pickle’ because he wouldn’t stop making me slide into a rock when it was my turn to run. i remember how awesome it felt to be this nerdy little kid and feel how easy it was to punch the little bastard right in the gut and then kick him in the face. i remember how i came to school the next day, and he had a black eye, and yet he had the audacity to go around telling everyone that he kicked my ass. and everyone believed him. i remember having a crush on this girl named robin and sending her a flower for valentines day. she found out who sent it to her, and at the end of the day i saw her throwing the flower away. i remember crying in the dark in my bedroom for hours. i remember that heartbreak tasted like salty tears, dirt, a pillow sham dried with a ‘bounce’ dryer sheet, my mom’s perfume and godfather’s pizza. i remember getting yelled at for taking a sleeping mattress down to the creek and floating around right after it had flooded down there. mom was not happy. i remember almost drowning in my friend B.J.’s pool and having her dad harry save me. i remember B.J.’s brother shooting robins with his BB gun and setting the woods on fire. i remember the 4th of july there and how huge of an event it was and how my patient dad took me and some of my friends to buy fireworks every year. ‘you might as well be burning a bunch of money in a pile,’ he’d say, but he’d always say it with a smile, which made me think that he really liked shooting off fireworks too. i remember watching star wars over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. i remember taking chairs and turning them into my x-wing star fighters. i remember sneaking up to the junior highschool and purchasing cans of soda with change that i scrounged up from everywhere i could find it. i remember trying to dip for the first time with a group of neighborhood kids and almost passing out from how bad it stung my mouth and how high it made me. i remember thinking, ‘maybe if i would have tried skoal bandits this wouldn’t have happened’…but i never tried skoal bandits after the initial fiasco. i remember playing ninja, which consisted of getting dressed up in my taekwondo outfit and building ninja weapons with my constructs. i remember making armor and out of paper grocery bags. you’d cut out a hole for your head from the top and holes for your arms out the sides. i’d get my markers out and put my different ’standards’ on it. i remember watching the sex scene between tom cruise and kelly mcgillis in top gun and thinking that kelly mcgillis was the prettiest shadow i had ever seen. i remember taping music from MTV onto my tape recorder by using a microphone and holding it up to the TV speaker. i would sit for hours waiting for weird al’s ‘eat it’ to come on. i remember my brief stint with piano lessons which was inspired by my fascination with an old-school yamaha ’synthesizer’ and its ability to teach me to play ‘when the saints go marching in’. i remember this kid tony telling me in the bathroom one day that the band ‘ac/dc’s’ name meant ‘after christ, devil comes’. i remember collecting baseball cards and chewing the nasty, crunchy wafer-thin gum from the packs like it was the best shit in the world. speaking of gum…big league chew. hell yes. lots of big league chew to make myself look like i was chewing for real like the real baseball players would. i remember playing a baseball game at the park down the street with this *older* kid eric and this *older* kid jamie and matt and ben and maybe a few others. i remember how eric was saying something to one of my friends and how i, this skinny, scrappy, goofy looking kid stood up to him thinking that i could do the same thing that i did with the principal’s son. instead, he took my leg and flipped my on my back. i remember yelling at him between crying and snot and drool and breathless gulps of air and me pedaling my bike as quick as i could back home. i remember walking in the door and seeing how pissed my dad was and how he took me back down there to get my stuff (i left my glove and my bat there) and to tell eric to pick on someone his own size. i remember my walter payton high-top kangaroos. i remember fishing in the creek for bluegill with a stick, some fishing line and little pieces of bread. i remember taking a wiffle ball bat and whacking fireflies in the summertime. i whacked so many that my bat would glow like a lightsaber. i remember going into the woods over and over again and my mom telling me over and over again that i shouldn’t be going out there because i’d get lost. i remember riding on my bananna seat bike through those same woods singing ‘can’t slow down’ by lionel ritchie because it was the only thing that was keeping me from thinking about my rising panic at being lost. i found my way back…and mom was mad because i was really late for dinner. i remember going out to this kid jonathan’s house and going out into the woods…and getting lost…after a giant flood. we broke into a house that seemed abandoned. we found a couple of people that were out on a boat who offered to give us a ride back to where we needed to be. his mom was mad beacuse we got lost…and were late for dinner. i remember getting up the next morning and going out to the camp ground (his parents were groundkeepers there) with him and raising absolute hell. we threw knives into walls. we set things on fire. we put stickers all over the copy machine. we yelped and laughed and became little horned imps…until his dad came along…and then i had to go home. jonathan got locked in his room for a month. he was only let out to go to school and to eat. i blamed it all on him and i managed to stay out of trouble.

i could go on and on and on. i think, overall, i had a pretty normal kid experience there. i made a lot of good friends, got made fun of by a lot of stupid morons, and had the foundation for what would come….