Judo

Devouring all the Hardy Boys series by 4th grade, discovering science fiction (andre norton).

In my youth, I was a pacifist. But my parents made me learn judo - I remember one time I fought off four attackers in fifth grade, using it, while my assailants complained that I wasn’t fighting fair. In eighth grade, and my pacivism in full flower, my left arm broken from falling off a tree, a dude rather bigger than me pushed me around the schoolyard. For the life of me now, I don’t know what it was about. I finally took a swing at him with my cast just by the exit to the parking lot, and then we were rousted by school security.

Had I connected, I could have hurt him real bad - but I missed his nose by an inch! and we got hauled off to the office with him claiming I was the assailant. I got a couple days suspention, so did the other guy (who tried to befriend me afterwards, and I declined).

A kid named Henry came up and said he’d protect me. and I never had any further trouble.

Anyway, NOT the fighting, not the constant abuse from the jocks and the in crowd, not the nerdism. but the dichotomy between what was happening, and what was being said, stayed with me ever since, and I’ve always made a strong distinction between what people said, and what they did.

In 1982 or so along the way I grew interested in why we fight wars, and how we fight them. I played a few wargames (I remember playing the japanese side consistently in a game that hoped to duplicate the battle of midway, in particular - and winning every time because it made no penalties for excessive fuel use and I dumped the “enormous battle line across the pacific” idea on day one. I started attending classes

Well, because… I got access to the stockton state library and instead of going to class, I hung there and devoured every one of the 21 official volumes of the Navy history of world war two in the pacific, and for an alternating view, “” yamoto guy - , Churchill’s biography, Donoues 10 years and 20 days

I’d read my dad’s copy of “Inside the third reich” long before this as well as

And I came to the basic conclusion that the early warnings brought by radar won the early phase of the war in the pacific.

In that library I read “the strategy of technology”, and “war is a racket”. Both had a huge influence on me - the latter book started my interest in understanding what happened in Nicaragua, and the former, showed me a way out of direct conflict.

How do I feel about it now?

War is still a racket, and most wars (nowadays) have an economic basis, and had the US followed his recommended policy of isolationism, the germans or the russians would have got the bomb first. The concept of a ballistic missile

In 10th grade, in Mr Dotti’s history class, I tried to combat my demons directly. I don’t remember what the assigned topic was, but what I wrote was titled: “Against Futilitarianism”. I’ve struggled against this feeling my entire life, that what feynman

I don’t remember what I’d put in the paper, and perhaps if I did, I’ve have not given into futility so many times in my life.

To cheer myself up, to find ways of getting up in the morning. The relentless beating of panic’d hearts.

””

And pink floyd’s

“Mother do you think they’ll drop the bomb?”

As antidotes, I read buckminster fuller, Jerry Pournelle’s

• Computer store

• Chronicles of Narnia

In 7th grade, my english teacher chose to read aloud - one

I got tired of her slow delivery and snuck the entire series out from the library. I didn’t realize not until much later that C.S lewis was an apologetic christian.

• Sleep

• Evelyn wood speed reading

• Piano

• Algebra was easy.

Once I learned that you could do anything you wanted, so long as you did it to both sides of the equation. It was merely a matter of learning the rules for “anything you wanted”. Algebra II was an exercise in tedium as they taught by rote ways I’d already figured out. I could do a few linear equations in my head, and I was never writing down how I got my answers, either and I got downgraded for that. My handwriting was always rushed, crabbed, poor, and it was with great relief I adopted a computer for writing everything else after 10th grade that I could write at home, rather than in the classroom.

Geometry, on the other hand, befuddled me. I was saved by an HP41C calculator, that unbenownst to my professors had a text mode where I could plug in the formulas before the test, and also program in simple solution. So I got by there - and later, in calculus - by programming that to help.

Once

In some ways a savant, and in many others, an idiot.

The inflation rate was higher than the savings rate.

Less educated than I, went on saving

One fall, I came down with mononucleusis. After I got better, I kept the doctors note - and every chance I got to cut gym class and go surfing, I took. I finally got caught that spring: the gym teacher had taken everyone out for a run on the boardwalk for a change. That crowd passed, just as I was coming in, and I was sentenced back to playing basketball or worse, running. fn(1 2017 - OCHS now has a surf team)

Everybody I knew

• Calculus

The only thing I remember about calculus is the day we passed around Larry Niven’s “Man of steel, woman of kleenex”.

some skill with a soldiering iron.

• Paperboy

I was a terrible paper boy. Getting up early, throwing a paper exactly onto someone’s porch, racing to get it done before school, I hated it all.

Sunday papers were the worst. I had to make two runs, my fingers would be covered with newsprint, and everybody else got to sleep in.

I enjoyed the throwing part, not the missing part. I hated going around billing too, ‘cause I’d remember every paper for the client that I’d missed with or merely forgot to deliver every time. But nearly nobody ever complained, and I got out and got to know a few people in the neighborhood.

• mildreds strathmere restaurant

It was the most seriously intellectual dishwashing crew in history - Al May - who went on to investigate e coli - Paul - who later went to bell labs - mike - a talented artist… all a year my senior…

… And me. I was stuck with the pots and pans most of the time. I remember graduating to line cook, and learning how to make everything on a complex order pop out on time.

Between dishes… I read, and I read. To this day I think the world is divided into two sorts of people - those that learn to read fast enough to experience textual adventures as more rewarding than real life, and those that don’t. Reading fast is a curse, though, because real life happens at its own pace and patience really is a virtue.

One time we’d been slaving away, and got a little caught up, and all dashed outside to jump in the ocean. Just as we got back the chief cook showed up, as we all stood there, dripping. “Hotter than hell in here”, I said. He grimaced and went back to the kitchen.

• The year after mine

Most of my friends were in the next year. They were more interesting, more educated, more mature, and I wanted to be like them. But the native class distictions

• Christmas cat

One year we went caroling and a little lost kitten I wanted to adopt, but my parents wouldn’t let me.

• 2nd try at college

I convinced them that I could indeed go to college and that the investment buying the trailer was far, far cheaper than me actually staying in a dorm room.

I roomed with Tom again, and Tim willis. On roughly the same day, both tom and I ended up bying nearly identical motorcycles.

Tom studied. I didn’t. All I ever learned about physics I got from him, which wasn’t much. One thing

In college Tom brought home (in his backpack! on his motorcycle!) a very smart burmese hybrid cat. Olorin could open the front door by hanging on the doornob, and often insisted he’d come in that way even if I opened it for him. I taught him to sit on my shoulder and let me walk around the trailer park. It was very cute when he started jumping up there - as a kitten. As he got older, and bigger, he started missing my shoulder - and crawling up my back, whether or not I had a shirt on.

I brought him home that year, and we had his balls snipped. Although I was encouraged to keep him indoors for a few days, I relented to his crying to get out, and he ran away, and I never saw him again.

• Oysters

• Swim team

After an hour or two of that repetition, I stopped imagining what it would be like if the hole in the girl’s swimsuit opened a little wider.

I beat the school champion’s (a junior) record once or twice (as a freshman) in the breast stroke, but he came on strong at then end of the season, and I didn’t care. The competitions made me nervous, the abuse in the locker room .

I liked the relay races. And the divers. I couldn’t fill my ears with music. I couldn’t still the relentless boredom of a mind unwilling to stop working. In surfing, well, if my mind kept working, it was trying to analyze the wave patterns, trying to predict when the next set would come, trying to understand what it meant when two waves got together… for some reason I found that, fascinating, and sometimes, calming.

I tried to come back for one competition the next year (they were short people) dived in for the 200, and faded after 50 yards. I never went back.

I didn’t care about “winning”. It seemed like the odds of ever rising to the top of this field

Horatio Alger

• Hurricane David

• What went wrong in my junior and senior years?

Nowadays I put it down to the lack of strenuous exercise (to calm my mind). I was almost entirely self taught, and I didn’t pay much attention to verbal input because it came by too slowly.

My parents noticed. They debated about putting me in private school, but I didn’t want to leave my few friends, and they relented.

Something might have worked, might have clicked, might have impressed upon me that the skills I had in deficit would hold me back, but they did.

I kept honing what I was good at, and neglecting what I wasn’t good at. One thing that did work was that I’d had a stutter in the early grades, and some speech therapy straightened that out.

I’d be in the back, dozing, as I’d read the book in the first week. Someone would call on me, I’d give the answer, and I’d go back to sleep again.

• The hill school

Computer camp

• Water slide

I tired of talking to people, and started putting on a mime routine. It worked.

One day, someone had the bright idea of saving time by combining both the ph stuff and the clorine (acid) into one, wet bucket.

The clouds filled the pumphouse, and I got asked by Roy Gillian

One thing I inherited from my father was that I worked hard - 60-70 hours a week that summer. One thing I didn’t inherit though, was frugality - I spent it as fast as I made it - on stuff that makes me cringe today - ring-dings, in particular, went up from 25 cents to 40 one year.

• Blue Laws

but for me, well, it seemed like all my friends were going to become dealers, of some sort or another.

• The SATs

I was mad - because I had failed a couple questions involving imaginary numbers, and I hadn’t the faintest clue what “i” was at the time. So my scores were depressed.

And impressed by the unisex bathrooms.

Having not had the study skills, the grip on memorization of key terms, the terrible handwriting, or the deafness - I’d have bombed out of either MIT or Brown just as fast, or faster.

So

• Blade Runner Reference

“I have done terrible things”

“Ships on fire on the shores of orion”

• smashed, smashed enough to shut my mind off, smashed enough to somehow “live in the moment” like everyone else did, but it never happened.

expect me to show up, and I’d always say yes, but never arrive.

• ACA folded

I had to get out of there.

traced it back to a routine in some shared library or another, patched it, and called in to report the bug.

By the way, do you want a job?

January 1, 0001
2219 words