Meme results part one: My Life Story
Mar. 13th, 2008 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
urbpanLeave it to my brother to take a simple meme and turn it into 2000 word assignment. In addressing his suggestion, "Blog about your transition from kid fascinated with animals to art student to zookeeper," I have also answered ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
drocera's questions about what it was like where I grew up, what I was like in high school and how I met Alexis. belen1974's questions (including the exciting one about my back hair) will have to wait for another post. Trust me, after this novella, you'll need a break.
I spent the first seven years of my life in a woodsy home on a hill in a small town in Connecticut. My family had been moving place to place in blue collar suburbs of Springfield Mass. Before that my parents, natives of New Hampshire, had been living amongst Americans in Stuttgart Germany, teaching English I believe. My brother was born there, and my mom thought they should have a stable home somewhere in southern New England. (I think my folks were somewhat bohemian while in Europe, making wood carvings and enjoying the local beverages when not teaching.)
In the woodsy town, (Stafford Springs, in case you're curious) I remember playing by the stream in the wooded part of our property. I remember turning over logs to find salamanders, and finding turtles roaming around. I remember someone (must've been my dad) overturning a huge log used as chopping block for splitting firewood, and there being a worm snake underneath. I remember my across-the-road neighbor decapitating a snake (he said it was a copperhead, I now believe it was a northern water snake) he found by his pond, with a hoe. I remember the Bicentennial celebration where we went to a public park, and a representative from the Mass Audubon society (Laughing Brook) let me hold a black rat snake.
I can remember some family friend, a year or two older than me, visiting and seeing a rabbit in the yard. He mimed taking aim with a rifle and shooting it; it was his first reaction. I wondered how that could possibly be someone's first thought when seeing an animal in the wild--to me it was magic. I remember sitting in sand in the yard poking holes to help, I thought, the ants construct their home. Another family friend this one 5 or 6 years older than me like my brother, asked me what I was doing. I proclaimed that I was helping my friends, the animals, and that I would never hurt one. He posited a hypothetical: what if a mountain lion was jumping on me, and I had a gun? I'd find a way to not hurt the animal, I meekly replied. Around that time was the first of three times that I was a vegetarian. (It didn't last long, mostly due to the poor fake meat technology available at the time.)
My parents and some friends ran an alternative school, which my brother and I (and a dozen or two other kids of various ages) attended. It was a hippie place; I remembered (in retrospect when I smelled it as a teenager) the smell of patchouli, and being baffled by the older kids talking about "smoking grass." My mom smoked cigarettes, but grass? It seemed to me that it would smell bad and burn funny. When the alternative school closed, I found public school to be a bit of a shock. The regimented times for things, the emphasis on organization, the sitting in rows and listening for so long without talking or playing. It was much more of a shock to my brother, who had to deal with being bullied because of his association with the "freak school" and his long hair.
We moved (for the first time in my life, but once of many times for the rest of my family) to a town on the Connecticut River. A town with some farms, but mostly suburbs, and a posh and somewhat famous prep school. When I think about Suffield now, I'm struck by how stupid it is that the most fertile land in all of New England has been converted into ugly developments and McMansions. Even while we were there, we saw former fields give way to big houses with manicured lawns. Now every time I go back, another swath that was open space is a collection of cookie cutter estates. I hated it even then, and with a sense of humor copied from tv sitcoms, I remarked that compared to Stafford it was "like Detroit."
It was more like Levittown, with more trees, and a bit more diversity: We lived two doors down from a turf magnate (they grew sod that they sold to Fenway Park and other areas) and further down the road were Chris Dodd's parents. There were also real farmers still, and a lot of lower middle class families who drove beat up old trucks and such. Up through middle school a friend who lived on the street and I would walk down to the river, where there were some scrubby woods, and enjoy nature. While learning to ride a bike, the whole family went to another part of the River, where a former tow-path (where mules would tow barges down a canal alongside the impassible rapids of the river) was a bike path through the woods.
But by high school I'd more or less lost interest in nature. I liked it in concept, and idolized groups like Greenpeace, but by my teen years most of my recreation was inside. I loved video arcades, and was an avid player of Dungeons and Dragons and other rpgs. In school I gravitated toward art. In large part this was because my brother had blazed that trail, and I admired him. When I was a freshman in high school, he was two years into a painting major at Swain School of Design. He was also into cartooning, and I was too. My father is a social studies teacher, and one of the classes he taught was on the socio-political importance of cartoons. (It was called "political cartoons" but he taught about the politics of everything from Disney to underground comix.) The house was chockablock full of paperback collections of Peanuts, Tumbleweeds, Broom Hilda, Pogo, Mad Magazine, superhero comics, and some of the dirty stuff, too.
I liked music, too, and found that it became a defining characteristic among high school tribes. In those days, just being more into music than other people meant that you were unusual. I was friends with some metalheads (in the art room) but didn't yet understand the music. I discovered punk by way of the Repo Man soundtrack, and even went to punk shows at "Studio New York," a once a week music show that took place in a local roller rink. Later, when my brother was back home for a time, we would go to "Zone," an art center and all-ages music club in Springfield. In those days, bands that are now mainstream or "classic" were considered cutting edge or weird. The first record I bought was Purple Rain. I had some female friends into this strange band of pretty English boys called Duran Duran. (These friends had new wave hair cuts, and were teased for it.) My friend who got me into music (we listened to the White Album together as middle schoolers) was into New Order, Blancmange, and this weird Irish group called U2. Never did care for them.
I never much pursued music after middle school. As much as I liked it, you had to decide between art and music in high school, and art won. I was a B student in everything else, not caring enough to strive for an A. I had no ambitions for college, and figured I'd go to the local community college. An art teacher intervened, and through her nurturing I managed to apply to Mass Art in Boston. My brother, in between stages in his life, concocted a plan for us to live together in Boston, and I liked that. That way we would live independently (Mass Art had no dorms) but still have one another for support and companionship.
Ironically, it was living in the city that rekindled my interest in nature. The mice in the subway, the mystery of the pigeons (where do they come from? where to they go to die?), the new animals I had never encountered before: four inch long spotted slugs, and ugly moths that breed in boxes of macaroni. I didn't fare much better in art school than I did in high school. The company was much better, but the lack of structure combined with my lack of ambition added up to an academic zero. I stayed in for 5 years, finally dropping out when the student loan company decided I was old enough to start paying back, even if I stayed in school forever.
I worked a series of unskilled jobs, trying to stick to familiar company: young people with funny haircuts and obsessions with music. I worked at a camera store, a movie theater, a cafe, and a record store warehouse. Along the way I met RAchelle, who I would eventually marry. She awakened my spiritual side, and got me paying more attention to nature. I met some of RAchelle's friends, including her best friend from college, Scott, and his wife Alexis. She volunteered at the Science Museum, at the Live Animal Center. There was a fruit bat, a porcupine, funny little things called sugargliders, and lots of big snakes. I knew what I wanted to do for a living. I began volunteering there too.
At that point I had been self-publishing a comic book anthology that had grown out of the Mass Art comic, for a few years. I kept it going for five years total, until it had eaten the last of my money and most of my sanity. And yet I felt compelled to continue self-publishing. I took my fascination with urban animals and began to research and write. I put together an small pamphlet called The Urban Pantheist, which contained articles on pigeons (and starlings and sparrows), house centipedes, and the mice in the subway. I took it to zine shows and sent it to reviewers and sold it at the weird gift shop I was working at by then. I took it with me to San Francisco when RA and I moved there for 5 months, and sold it through Last Gasp Publishing, where I was working as an office/warehouse boy. I also volunteered at the San Francisco zoo, working with a wallaby, an armadillo, and more big snakes.
San Francisco spit us back, and we came back to Boston, burning up money and friendships along the way. We eventually got our own place, and I put out another two issues of The Urban Pantheist. Scott and Alexis broke up, and Alexis moved in with us for a while. Money got short, time wore on, and things got bad between RA and I, and then worse. We had moved back into a big group house with 4 other roommates, and we had separate rooms. At some point I was at a party at Alexis' house (another big group house) and we found ourselves kissing one another out on the porch. Neither one of us remembers initiating it, but neither one of us regrets it. We didn't become a real couple--we were both pretty recently broken up and we were each playing the field a bit. Things were awkward with our circle of friends for a bit, but things were leaning heavily toward awkward anyway. Eventually, after far too long, we decided to become a couple after all, and we even finally got divorced from our former spouses. We married one another in February 2004, in Las Vegas, on bicycles.
Somewhere in there (before RA and I broke up, but not long before), I got a job at Drumlin Farm, taking care of captive wildlife. I called myself a zookeeper, since that's what I was, even though the people there don't like to admit that it's a zoo. I was there for seven years, until I got my current job as a hospital zookeeper.
I left out a lot of stuff, and skipped a lot of important people (sorry, Barb!) in the interest in keeping the length down. It didn't work, but think of how long it would have been otherwise.
Stay tuned for part two: my mom and my back hair.
drocera's questions about what it was like where I grew up, what I was like in high school and how I met Alexis. belen1974's questions (including the exciting one about my back hair) will have to wait for another post. Trust me, after this novella, you'll need a break.I spent the first seven years of my life in a woodsy home on a hill in a small town in Connecticut. My family had been moving place to place in blue collar suburbs of Springfield Mass. Before that my parents, natives of New Hampshire, had been living amongst Americans in Stuttgart Germany, teaching English I believe. My brother was born there, and my mom thought they should have a stable home somewhere in southern New England. (I think my folks were somewhat bohemian while in Europe, making wood carvings and enjoying the local beverages when not teaching.)
In the woodsy town, (Stafford Springs, in case you're curious) I remember playing by the stream in the wooded part of our property. I remember turning over logs to find salamanders, and finding turtles roaming around. I remember someone (must've been my dad) overturning a huge log used as chopping block for splitting firewood, and there being a worm snake underneath. I remember my across-the-road neighbor decapitating a snake (he said it was a copperhead, I now believe it was a northern water snake) he found by his pond, with a hoe. I remember the Bicentennial celebration where we went to a public park, and a representative from the Mass Audubon society (Laughing Brook) let me hold a black rat snake.
I can remember some family friend, a year or two older than me, visiting and seeing a rabbit in the yard. He mimed taking aim with a rifle and shooting it; it was his first reaction. I wondered how that could possibly be someone's first thought when seeing an animal in the wild--to me it was magic. I remember sitting in sand in the yard poking holes to help, I thought, the ants construct their home. Another family friend this one 5 or 6 years older than me like my brother, asked me what I was doing. I proclaimed that I was helping my friends, the animals, and that I would never hurt one. He posited a hypothetical: what if a mountain lion was jumping on me, and I had a gun? I'd find a way to not hurt the animal, I meekly replied. Around that time was the first of three times that I was a vegetarian. (It didn't last long, mostly due to the poor fake meat technology available at the time.)
My parents and some friends ran an alternative school, which my brother and I (and a dozen or two other kids of various ages) attended. It was a hippie place; I remembered (in retrospect when I smelled it as a teenager) the smell of patchouli, and being baffled by the older kids talking about "smoking grass." My mom smoked cigarettes, but grass? It seemed to me that it would smell bad and burn funny. When the alternative school closed, I found public school to be a bit of a shock. The regimented times for things, the emphasis on organization, the sitting in rows and listening for so long without talking or playing. It was much more of a shock to my brother, who had to deal with being bullied because of his association with the "freak school" and his long hair.
We moved (for the first time in my life, but once of many times for the rest of my family) to a town on the Connecticut River. A town with some farms, but mostly suburbs, and a posh and somewhat famous prep school. When I think about Suffield now, I'm struck by how stupid it is that the most fertile land in all of New England has been converted into ugly developments and McMansions. Even while we were there, we saw former fields give way to big houses with manicured lawns. Now every time I go back, another swath that was open space is a collection of cookie cutter estates. I hated it even then, and with a sense of humor copied from tv sitcoms, I remarked that compared to Stafford it was "like Detroit."
It was more like Levittown, with more trees, and a bit more diversity: We lived two doors down from a turf magnate (they grew sod that they sold to Fenway Park and other areas) and further down the road were Chris Dodd's parents. There were also real farmers still, and a lot of lower middle class families who drove beat up old trucks and such. Up through middle school a friend who lived on the street and I would walk down to the river, where there were some scrubby woods, and enjoy nature. While learning to ride a bike, the whole family went to another part of the River, where a former tow-path (where mules would tow barges down a canal alongside the impassible rapids of the river) was a bike path through the woods.
But by high school I'd more or less lost interest in nature. I liked it in concept, and idolized groups like Greenpeace, but by my teen years most of my recreation was inside. I loved video arcades, and was an avid player of Dungeons and Dragons and other rpgs. In school I gravitated toward art. In large part this was because my brother had blazed that trail, and I admired him. When I was a freshman in high school, he was two years into a painting major at Swain School of Design. He was also into cartooning, and I was too. My father is a social studies teacher, and one of the classes he taught was on the socio-political importance of cartoons. (It was called "political cartoons" but he taught about the politics of everything from Disney to underground comix.) The house was chockablock full of paperback collections of Peanuts, Tumbleweeds, Broom Hilda, Pogo, Mad Magazine, superhero comics, and some of the dirty stuff, too.
I liked music, too, and found that it became a defining characteristic among high school tribes. In those days, just being more into music than other people meant that you were unusual. I was friends with some metalheads (in the art room) but didn't yet understand the music. I discovered punk by way of the Repo Man soundtrack, and even went to punk shows at "Studio New York," a once a week music show that took place in a local roller rink. Later, when my brother was back home for a time, we would go to "Zone," an art center and all-ages music club in Springfield. In those days, bands that are now mainstream or "classic" were considered cutting edge or weird. The first record I bought was Purple Rain. I had some female friends into this strange band of pretty English boys called Duran Duran. (These friends had new wave hair cuts, and were teased for it.) My friend who got me into music (we listened to the White Album together as middle schoolers) was into New Order, Blancmange, and this weird Irish group called U2. Never did care for them.
I never much pursued music after middle school. As much as I liked it, you had to decide between art and music in high school, and art won. I was a B student in everything else, not caring enough to strive for an A. I had no ambitions for college, and figured I'd go to the local community college. An art teacher intervened, and through her nurturing I managed to apply to Mass Art in Boston. My brother, in between stages in his life, concocted a plan for us to live together in Boston, and I liked that. That way we would live independently (Mass Art had no dorms) but still have one another for support and companionship.
Ironically, it was living in the city that rekindled my interest in nature. The mice in the subway, the mystery of the pigeons (where do they come from? where to they go to die?), the new animals I had never encountered before: four inch long spotted slugs, and ugly moths that breed in boxes of macaroni. I didn't fare much better in art school than I did in high school. The company was much better, but the lack of structure combined with my lack of ambition added up to an academic zero. I stayed in for 5 years, finally dropping out when the student loan company decided I was old enough to start paying back, even if I stayed in school forever.
I worked a series of unskilled jobs, trying to stick to familiar company: young people with funny haircuts and obsessions with music. I worked at a camera store, a movie theater, a cafe, and a record store warehouse. Along the way I met RAchelle, who I would eventually marry. She awakened my spiritual side, and got me paying more attention to nature. I met some of RAchelle's friends, including her best friend from college, Scott, and his wife Alexis. She volunteered at the Science Museum, at the Live Animal Center. There was a fruit bat, a porcupine, funny little things called sugargliders, and lots of big snakes. I knew what I wanted to do for a living. I began volunteering there too.
At that point I had been self-publishing a comic book anthology that had grown out of the Mass Art comic, for a few years. I kept it going for five years total, until it had eaten the last of my money and most of my sanity. And yet I felt compelled to continue self-publishing. I took my fascination with urban animals and began to research and write. I put together an small pamphlet called The Urban Pantheist, which contained articles on pigeons (and starlings and sparrows), house centipedes, and the mice in the subway. I took it to zine shows and sent it to reviewers and sold it at the weird gift shop I was working at by then. I took it with me to San Francisco when RA and I moved there for 5 months, and sold it through Last Gasp Publishing, where I was working as an office/warehouse boy. I also volunteered at the San Francisco zoo, working with a wallaby, an armadillo, and more big snakes.
San Francisco spit us back, and we came back to Boston, burning up money and friendships along the way. We eventually got our own place, and I put out another two issues of The Urban Pantheist. Scott and Alexis broke up, and Alexis moved in with us for a while. Money got short, time wore on, and things got bad between RA and I, and then worse. We had moved back into a big group house with 4 other roommates, and we had separate rooms. At some point I was at a party at Alexis' house (another big group house) and we found ourselves kissing one another out on the porch. Neither one of us remembers initiating it, but neither one of us regrets it. We didn't become a real couple--we were both pretty recently broken up and we were each playing the field a bit. Things were awkward with our circle of friends for a bit, but things were leaning heavily toward awkward anyway. Eventually, after far too long, we decided to become a couple after all, and we even finally got divorced from our former spouses. We married one another in February 2004, in Las Vegas, on bicycles.
Somewhere in there (before RA and I broke up, but not long before), I got a job at Drumlin Farm, taking care of captive wildlife. I called myself a zookeeper, since that's what I was, even though the people there don't like to admit that it's a zoo. I was there for seven years, until I got my current job as a hospital zookeeper.
I left out a lot of stuff, and skipped a lot of important people (sorry, Barb!) in the interest in keeping the length down. It didn't work, but think of how long it would have been otherwise.
Stay tuned for part two: my mom and my back hair.
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![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-03-13 11:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-14 09:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-14 02:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-14 09:31 am (UTC)It's all lj all the time, now.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-14 02:57 am (UTC)You're mixing up two snake executions. The one you remember was a water snake, Joey and I caught it in his pond with a snake loop I'd made. The copperhead was before you were born. It was sunning itself on the stone steps dad built down to the cellar door. I almost picked it up with my hands, but thought better of it.
Ah... The Zone. Sigh. BTW I saw Black Flag at that roller rink. I got caught in the front of the mosh pit and found myself face to satin encased crotch with Henry Rollins.
Sorry about inspiring you to follow my footsteps. I'm half convinced I'm going to get busted for child abuse for passing that mania on to my daughter.
I don't remember the cafe. Where was it? I must have taken a blow to the head to have not realized you were working at Last Gasp. I think I vaguely knew you were working at a warehouse like Newbury Comics.
You filled in the gaps nicely along with all that reminiscing. Thanks, I enjoyed the trip.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-14 09:38 am (UTC)I've made it my mission to discourage youngsters from art school. Not art--art is great, everyone who has the time should indulge. But they should also develop a skill that helps them contribute to society, and a degree so they can pay their bills.
The cafe was Quebrada cafe and bakery in Arlington; it was in my later years just before Drumlin.
Last Gasp was awesome. Ron offered to lend me money at the end, there, so I could afford an apartment, after we'd already committed to coming back. I kicked myself for that one, but at those rental prices I would have become an indentured servant to the place and been living in a refrigerator box in the Tenderloin.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-14 07:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-14 03:37 pm (UTC)Most notably in MY life, "Studio New York" is where I met Jef.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-14 04:08 pm (UTC)The Rink is in "Get in The Van" but it's just a paragraph, he basically says he played there, it's basically his journal from his first tour. I enjoyed it, but if you just want the Enfield shout out it's not worth it.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-14 04:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-14 09:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-14 10:31 am (UTC)Usually I search people by titles, that's why I ask:)
no subject
Date: 2008-03-14 03:42 pm (UTC)Nah, I'm kidding. I don't really have a strong role as far as these particular narratives go. Now if someone was asking about early girlfriends or long-time friends and you didn't mention me, THEN I'd take offense!
no subject
Date: 2008-03-14 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-17 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-17 06:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-30 04:57 am (UTC)That's really neat you got to volunteer at SF Zoo and work with big snakes. I love snakes! Well as you know...;)
I'm glad you shared this with us all...;)