10 am Friday morning, April 1st 1977. Caught the tailwind of something and woke up five years later. Being young is not unlike being intoxicated, occasionally flashbacks of what you did when you were there come rushing in, but you can't be sure if its really there or if you really did that. Usually I hope I'm just fabricating it, I did some pretty stupid shit when I was young. Grade school at Callaway Elementary, a bookworm for 15 years straight and then some, continuing onward and forthwidth. Northern Minnesotan farming community, thriving off 4-H clubs, combines, elipsis. I lived on the reservation, where the family ran a fishing resort. In the 3rd grade I was best friends with Michael Gerving, watched Kujo at his place, played some dumb games. His family was Native American, so I always felt out of place at their place, but it was good times. Being book smart never did me any good when dealing with people, I have clear memories of facing his parents' stern faces, set in concrete and unchanging, and thinking there must be some sort of ritual or some appropriate way to respond in case they looked at you. Whatever secret there is to acknowledging others' inner lives without encroaching on them - or in bridging chasms over centuries of ancestral violence that, later in life, you realize hasn't really abated - remains hidden. Mike transferred to a White Earth elementary in the second grade, probably. I never saw him anymore after that in any case, and that's what the teachers told me. He showed up one day and they made him go, and I didn't get to say goodbye. I was left paling around with Jessie Soyring, who I'd been friends with ever since we'd gotten into some fight over some toppled blocks in kindergarten, after that. I think he knocked an edifice I was building on top of me. He apologized later. It was pretty routine. Video games, tree forts, etc. etc. After the 6th grade we decided we hated eachother, like usual, and that was the last I ever really saw of him, minus the few parties he invited me to during our senior year in highschool. That was odd, but I suppose everybody gets sentimental. I spend the bulk of my time now writing poetry about people I can't really remember. Remember that time my brother's buried me in a garbage can? They yelled suggestions on how to survive while they shoveled dirt over me. 'Breath slowly, you'll live longer that way.' Good advice. I never made it to any of Jessie Soyring's parties. Middleschool was bogus, and nobody wants to rehash the same old stories about adolescent dejection. Highschool was an experience. Most things are. What I did in highschool is debatable. Most of what I remember consists of three things, slacking off, not doing anything, and laughing at Dave Kidder. Slacking off was performed mostly with Nate Hanson. I met him in or around the 9th grade when we sat together on the bus and made a game of insulting eachother, in lieu of the other kids insulting us. Offenses made were forgotten when Nate gave me a bag of cookies on the last day of school that year. They were good cookies. I did nothing with Chad Bauer. Actually we did quite a lot, we just achieved nothing in the process. Volleyball, dungeons and dragons, video games a la casa de Wambach, beer and speed with my brother Justin, and taking gravel roads with the fermont clocked and Nate screaming bloody murder in his seat. This place is nuts. This place isn't nearly as nuts as the Integrated Science Program. That is nuts. I could go into a long speech about how nuts it really is, but it wouldn't do it, I could spend five pages trying to give you a picture of how incredibly balls-out it is, and you still wouldn't get it. Its bleeding insane. My class's motto, which just killed the three of us who thought it up one night at 3 am, we were dying we thought it was just that funny, is "Iducation Solves Problems." That's just how nuts it is, that's what it drives us to. The Writing Program, as one might expect, is just the usual unmitigated sham of institutionalized culture and indoctrination. It was also a hell of a lot of fun. So anyway, I had a t-shirt in the 3rd grade that neatly summed up the basic gist of my entire life. I'm presently occupied vacillating on what to do with the rest of it. This is a new thing, actually, and I'm rather enjoying it.