Category: Year-In-Six-Sentences

I ended up in Eureka, somehow. I was broke and directionless. I was depressed. I dealt with this directionlessness by enlisting in the U.S. Army, as a truck mechanic. I completed my training in South Carolina, and narrowly missed getting sent to Kuwait for the first Gulf War. Instead, I ended up in South Korea on December 28th.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1990 – it was written in the future.]

In August, I graduated cum laude (and Phi Beta Kappa) from the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities), despite the  ‘lost semester’ from the Spring of 85 at Macalaster marring my transcript. My final major was Llinguistics, with a minor in Computer Science. I’d managed enough coursework to have ‘undeclared’ minors in Spanish and Botany. I returned to Mexico, and spent two months in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Then, later, after two weeks in Cuba, I ended up becoming very sick in Merida. So I returned to Humboldt County, where my father was at this time.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1989 – it was written in the future.]

Having forfeited my scholarship at Macalester by dropping out in 85, by January I fromally enrolled at the University of Minnesota. My declared major was computer science, but I soon changed it to linguistics. I dabbled a lot in languages: Portuguese, Medieval Welsh, Japanese, Russian, Ancient Sumerian, Georgian (Kartuli). I worked hard at a book bindery (book-making factory). I studied very hard, too. I rented a room in a house in St. Paul, and Bob and Mark are my housemates, among others.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1988 – it was written in the future.]

After a year working in Mexico City, I travelled (somewhat aimlessly) with a friend by horseback in the mountains of Michoacan (southwestern Mexico). I met lots of interesting people, including many indians, hippies, a draft dodger or two, and a dangerous, drunk, angry man with  a gun. The gun shot bullets.  I got a bullet hole in my shoe, but somehow survived this incident mostly unscathed. Eventually, I return to Minnesota. I rent a room in a crappy house in Southeast Minneapolis and take extension classes at the University of Minnesota, with the intention of returning to school.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1987 – it was written in the future.]

In January, right after the Superbowl, I flew on a one-way ticket from Chicago to Mexico City (and why do I remember the Superbowl as the salient fact? – because it was the Chicago Bears in the Superbowl, and the city was crazy with it). I took an intensive course in Spanish at the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico and ended up with typhoid. During my convalescence, I ended up with a job at Casa de los Amigos, a Quaker meetinghouse and rather leftist hostel in Mexico City. I worked as a volunteer English teacher, too, teaching English to Central American refugees. I made lots of friends. I got to travel to El Salvador for a few weeks in the fall, and get to see a civil war up close and personal.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1986 – it was written in the future.]

I decided to study art history in Paris for the January term. That was fun. By May, however, alcohol and drug issues caused me to drop out of college. I lived in my car, first passing through Duluth and Ottawa, and then up and down the East Coast (mostly Boston, New York City, with a week in New Orleans). By the Fall, I was living a few blocks from Barack Obama (not that I, like, know him or anything – I just figured this out in retrospect) on Chicago’s South Side, and working in a hardware store. My unabiding love for instant ramen was formed during this period.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1985 – it was written in the future.]

I changed my declared major from math to religious studies. It wasn’t that I was feeling some sense of religiosity, but rather because I was looking for answers. Also, a certain math professor left my self-confidence in ruins. I worked for the Mondale Campaign that summer. I remember commuting to work on the #16 bus along University Avenue in St. Paul. I wrote more poetry this year, probably, than all the other years of my life combined.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1984 – it was written in the future.]

I walked a lot in high school – mostly in the fog. I graduated from Arcata High School in Arcata California. My summer internship at a civil engineering office turned me off of the idea of pursuing engineering, careerwise. I started college at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota. The main reason for my choice of Macalester was that it was very far away from home. I met my best friend Bob on day one, and he is still my best friend almost thirty years later.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1983 – it was written in the future.]

I took a road trip, alone, over Easter break to visit my uncle, who at that time was in Port Angeles, Washington. I was surprised my mother let me do this.  I didn’t take enough money for gas, so I panhandled in Coos Bay and got enough quarters to put enough gas in the car to get home. That summer, I went to Harvard University, where I studied astrophysics and creative writing and went to a Dead Kennedys concert. I felt I had been transformed from a nerd to some kind of  beat poet, by reading William S. Burroughs and Ginsberg and Kerouac. I doubt I pulled off this transformation very effectively, but I started wearing Army surplus jackets and smoking (secretly).
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1982 – it was written in the future.]

I just kept going to high school. I was a very depressed teenager. I refused to talk to my father, but I would go visit him because he had cable TV, which my mom refused to get. I spent the summer with my uncle who was in Skagit County, Washington. I developed anorexia (self-diagnosed, but seriously – no food for 2 or 3 weeks straight?). I began writing poetry.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1981 – it was written in the future.]

I just kept going to high school. I walked a lot in the fog. I played dungeons and dragons a lot with my friends, Wade and Richard. I spent the summer with my uncle, who was in Boise County, Idaho, at this time. I contemplated becoming a Mormon, just to annoy the hell out of my parents, and because the church was conveniently located across the street, and I envied the sense of community the Mormons at school projected. I also remember telling my mom that if I could vote, I would vote for Reagan, though I suspect this didn’t annoy her as much as I hoped.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1980 – it was written in the future.]

That Spring I travelled to Europe with my father, stepmother, sister and stepsister. I liked Europe – I tried to speak French and pretended I was alone and not with those American tourists. I graduated from the 8th grade with the feeling I was destined to always be alone. My mother separated from her second husband and we moved back into the house in town on A Street at 11th Street in Arcata. I hated high school before it even started. I felt fear every day.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1979 – it was written in the future.]

This was the year at the ‘ranch’ – my stepfather’s farm on the Arcata bottoms up against the Lamphere Dunes near the beach. I disliked my stepfather and my mother was clearly distressed by this marriage of hers, but I chose not to give a damn. I had a little hut that was a sort of detached bedroom. I listened to Cat Stevens and drew pictures and watched the rain. I took very long walks along the one lane roads of the bottomlands. I decided that I liked math, and over the course of the year – the end of 7th grade and beginning of 8th grade – I went from being rather remedial at math to being very good at it.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1978 – it was written in the future.]

This year was the ‘exile from Eden.’ I ended 6th grade at Centering School, and began a VERY traumatic transition to 7th grade at public middle school. I have always believed this was the single most traumatic experience of my entire childhood – more than my parents’ divorce. My mother chose this year to remarry, too. I was very angry and resentful about this. 7th grade sucked.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1977 – it was written in the future.]

5th through 6th grade at Centering School were the best years of my childhood. I was popular at school, I learned a lot, and I was relatively happy, in my low-key way. I we meditated after lunch. We voted on what to study. We made a lot of art projects and did drama. We went to camp at Wolf Creek and slept in canvas-covered geodesic domes.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1976 – it was written in the future.]

That Spring my parents divorced. 4th grade sucked. My mother enrolled me at Centering School, a private, alternative, ‘hippie’ school for 5th grade. I really liked Centering School. I walked the length of 11th street, from my house on the edge of the hill as A Street down to the school, which that first year was in the Methodist Church (that it rented) near Q Street. I staged mock ‘superhero battles’ with my friend Steven during recess.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1975 – it was written in the future.]

Moore Avenue school closed, and I ended up at Alice Birney Elementary in Eureka for the remainder of my 3rd grade year. I walked home sometimes, alone, and it seemed very, very far – epic. Then that summer the commune house in Eureka seemed to fall apart, and so we took a long trip to see my grandparents at their summer home in Colorado. My parents forgot my 9th birthday – I think they were stressed. I started 4th grade at Edgemere Elementary School in Oklahoma City, because we were staying with my grandparents there. By Christmas, however, we were back in Arcata and I was at Sunnybrae Elementary.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1974 – it was written in the future.]

I liked Moore Avenue school. My best friend was Steven. And I was friends with his sister Jeannine too. Along with my sister, we formed a sort of idyllic, hermetic community of children. This is the time when the Eureka H Street house experiment began: my parents bought a giant old Victorian house in Eureka that we shared with another family – it was like a commune when you added in various attachments and relatives on both sides. Each year at Thanksgiving we drove to La Honda (near Palo Alto) for a giant hippie hanksgiving event.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1973 – it was written in the future.]

I remember the drive from Arcata to Eureka with dad in the Model A (1928 Ford – dad’s main car), because school was at Moore Avenue in Eureka but we lived in Arcata. Sometimes at night, driving home late in the Model A, the loud roar of the old car’s engine would lull me to sleep. I developed the idea that there was an alien landing site somewhere near Indianola. I think it was because of the colored airport lights at Murray Field, north of Eureka along Highway 101. I also remember thinking that the aliens were watching me. I KNEW that if I could behave in a sufficiently idiosyncratic manner, they would ‘rescue’ me from my exile on Earth.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1972 – it was written in the future.]

Rumor has it I was alive through all of 1971. I don’t recall much.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1971 – it was written in the future.]

Rumor has it I was alive through all of 1970. I don’t recall much.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1970 – it was written in the future.]

Rumor has it I was alive through all of 1969. I don’t recall much.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1969 – it was written in the future.]

Rumor has it I was alive through all of 1968. I don’t recall much.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1968 – it was written in the future.]

Rumor has it I was alive through all of 1967. I don’t recall much.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1967 – it was written in the future.]

Rumor has it I was alive through all of 1966. I don’t recall much.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1966 – it was written in the future.]

I was born. I was disoriented. I cried. I ate. I wiggled and gazed. I don’t recall much.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1965 – it was written in the future.]