...the high school years, section I...
1998: The Affair Between President Bill Clinton And Monica Lewinsky Went Public
1998 was my first real year of high school.
Well, let me rephrase -- 1997-98, technically, was my first full year of high school, but in 1997 I was in 9th grade at South Middle School, which wouldn't move the 9th grade class to Morgantown High until the beginning of the next school year. I was, therefore, part of the last 9th grade class to ever grace the halls of South Middle School.
I had taken 1997 off from football; it had by that time mostly lost my interest (I wasn't even paying attention to college football that closely or the NFL at all yet, really), and the internet had taken over most of my other interests at that age. I was really into three things -- anime, Magic: The Gathering, and Marilyn Manson. Cathy and I were in the midst of our relationship, which had been going well, and (as previously mentioned in my other posts) I was doing well in school again. I had a group of friends, I had a summer job which allowed me to have some spending money, and that July, my mother and I went to Pittsburgh and adopted a shih-tzu puppy, which we named Moot.
Well, originally I named him Telemachus, after Odysseus' son in The Odyssey, but my mother wasn't going for that.
Anyway, it seemed that my life was going really well -- I'd settled into a groove, I was very comfortable, and I wanted for relatively little. I still lived a relatively solitary life, especially in the summers -- with my dad's band playing almost every weekend, I was home alone a lot. This was alleviated a bit by the dog, and by the fact that my mother had gotten me my own 20-inch TV for my bedroom the previous Christmas. It was on that TV that, with Moot on the bed next to me, I watched President Clinton -- probably still the greatest president of my generation -- deliver his address to the nation on August 18, 1998, revealing that he had, in fact, engaged in a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. As he was finishing up with his speech, Moot jumped down from the bed and peed on the floor of my bedroom. It was an omen of how the rest of the year would go from that point forward, I think.
Several days later, with the impeachment happening and then being overturned in the background, I began high school proper at Morgantown High School, my 10th grade year. Yes, yet another new school to get used to and to try to fit into, and I originally didn't think it would be that hard. I was wrong.
At the time, Morgantown High was the biggest school in the county. It may still be; I'm not completely sure. They were a contender, if not outright winner, of the state high school football trophy every year. The school was very old, and had a very old history -- Don Knotts (who I'm actually related to, far down the line, but that's a story for another time) and Lawrence Kasdan (if you don't know who he is, look him up) had gone to and graduated from Morgantown High School -- there's a trivia fact for you Hollywood fans. Anyway, in 1998 the school had not been renovated yet, not since the mid-century -- there was no air conditioning, and the only heat was radiator heat from a literal radiator on the walls of each classroom. You could hear the water flowing through them, and they'd pop and sizzle. If you touched one, yes, it would burn the shit out of you. But, on the plus side, if you sat your mug on one, it would keep your coffee warm. I remember that year hitting a cold snap particularly early in the fall, and because of the poor heating, we were allowed to wear our coats in class. I thought at the time that was a revolutionary idea.
My house was within walking distance of the high school -- maybe a mile and a half at most. If I wanted to walk to or from school, I could. I never walked to school that I remember, but I would walk home a lot, especially if I had something to do after school hours ended for the day. Mind you, this was before Columbine, before the years where schools would be on constant lockdown in and out of the building. MHS had open lunches, meaning you could leave campus for lunch if you wanted to. The school was just south of the university's downtown campus, and was on the south end of the downtown area in general -- you could walk to and from any number of restaurants and cafes in the area, or just get off campus for an hour if you wanted to. I didn't have a car, and the 1.5 miles to my house meant that I couldn't go home for lunches even if I'd wanted to, so most of my lunch hours were spent with what group of friends I could gather with on my same lunch period (read: not many) and if they weren't around, staying by myself away from most other people. I was never going to be one of the popular kids, and I was never going to fit in with them. Add to this that lunch was expensive, and it was paid for in cash at a register. Yeah, not happening for me; I waited until I got home every day to eat.
However, I did have a football history, and as most of my friends were separated from me by different class schedules in that massive school, as well as lunch schedules, I figured I'd try my hand at football again. At MHS, football was almost a religion. The school's reputation dictated that. It also dictated that those who had played 9th grade football (at South or otherwise) would basically get an automatic spot on the team as long as they could prove their worth. Everyone else had to try out and go to regular practices, get into shape, all that. So, shortly after the school year started, I made the decision to go back into football and try out for it, see if I could get on the team, see if I could make my high school years a little better.
The first few days of after school training was fine; it was very clear, however, that priority was going to be given to the more experienced, tenured players with games under their belt already. It was they who dominated the weight machines, and they looked at me like an interloper, sneered down at me like I didn't belong there -- and really, I didn't. These were the musclebound jocks, the guys who were born for football, who were there to stay in the habit and because the team demanded it. I was the short, fat kid who played defensive line in jr. high for the practice squad, not even the real squad (which was also looked down upon by the "star" players of the school), looking to join the elite squadron of MHS football players.
Despite this, I trained. I trained hard. My friend Chris was on the team and he helped me out, he stood up for me, he made sure my name was on the right lists and made sure I got equal training time. Chris would go on to play football for the team for his entire high school career, and played for WVU as well. He was and is a good dude, and wanted to see his friends succeed. The Friday of the first week I was training, we were throwing medicine balls back and forth across the football field like basketballs, chest passes -- strength training. This was already after the requisite sprints and weight training, mind you.
I caught a particularly hard-thrown medicine ball, and heard/felt something pop.
I don't remember much of the next few minutes after that, except that I was in immense pain in my lower back and that I was on the ground. I didn't know what it was, but something did not feel right. The pain was blinding. I was on my hands and knees on the turf of the field, trying to catch my breath (even though it hadn't knocked the wind out of me). I was seeing spots. Chris didn't understand the extent of the injury, and told me to walk it off. He asked if I wanted a medic, and I can't remember what I said because I really can't remember much of anything during the incident. I remember getting up a few minutes later, stretching my back (still in immense pain) and telling him I was done.
I then changed back into my street clothes (slowly), picked up my very heavy backpack, and began the 1.5 mile walk home. About halfway there, as I was moving really slowly, it began to rain.
And just like that, my football career was over. I never went to another practice or tryouts. It was simply over.
It was the first time I'd thrown out my back. I was fifteen years old. A few days later, while I was lying in bed, I felt that pop again, and immediately I felt normal again. Over twenty years later, I now believe I probably had a partially slipped disk. At the time, that pain, that fear that I could do something that seriously damaging to my body without even getting hit or hitting someone else, meant that I would never play football again. I made that vow that day.
The next week, on another walk home from school, I stopped in at the local vintage gaming store and picked up a used NES and a handful of games for about $50 total. The only games I would be playing from that point forward would be of the video variety. This marked a huge turning point in my life. To this day, I still have some nagging back problems and knee problems from my time tangentially associated with jr. high and high school football.
Throughout all this time, in the background, my parents were, apparently, house-shopping. I didn't really know about it -- or if I did, it didn't really register, and I didn't really pay attention to it that closely, but I knew they wanted to get a house together, one big enough to where my brother and sister (dad's kids) could come stay in when necessary for visitation weekends and summers and the like. The house my mother and I had in Morgantown simply wouldn't do for that as it wasn't large enough, so they branched out and were exploring many different options and locations.
I was fifteen, so I was along for the ride; I didn't get much say in it, and at the time it was also so ancillary to my actual life that I truly didn't care that much. At the same time I remember being very resistant to change -- I didn't want to leave Morgantown. I was born there, I spent most of the vastly formative years of my life there, and I really liked the house we had. I remember suggesting that my parents look on the western side of the county, where my mother had grown up and where I had lived the first six or so years of my life, but that was rather quickly dismissed.
Sometime in the mid-fall months, my parents found a house that they wanted. It was 20 miles to the east on top of a mountain, at the foothills of a few larger, taller mountains. It was an old plantation farmhouse, the first built in the entire development (in the early 1900s; the housing development around it came later) and it had last been renovated in the mid-70s. It sat half a mile back from the main road and had a few huge oak trees in the front yard, with tall pines on the side and back of the house. Behind the house was a very old wooden shed (my guess from the 40s or 50s, and a hickory nut tree, in which cicadas apparently loved. They put in offer in on it and it was quickly accepted, but the owners (a very elderly couple, retired and looking to get rid of a lot of their property and holdings) said they needed a month or two to get their affairs in order and move out. My parents agreed to this (I remember apprehensively at best), and suddenly we were on a timeframe to moving out of Morgantown.
I don't know exactly how I felt. I can't really put it into words. My entire world was changing. My mother put our house up for sale. Suddenly I was not only dealing with moving to a completely different county and starting at a completely different school again, but now I had to deal with random strangers coming to our home and looking it over, barging in to examine and criticize the place -- sometimes with me there. I would be losing all my friends. I would go through the very tiresome process of packing up all of my belongings, deciding what stayed and what went, trying to figure myself out again along the way.
The move date was set for Thanksgiving week. I knew it was coming. I did not want it to. It had been a wet, cold fall, and the leaves fell early, covering everything in damp brown. It was all so surreal, like it wasn't even happening. My last day at Morgantown High was the Thursday before Thanksgiving week, and I turned in my books, cleared out my locker, and went through the day in a haze. I said goodbye to everyone one last time, to some people I would never see again (alive or dead), and left the MHS campus for the last time. I have never returned since.
The following weekend afterwards was spent moving, with the help of some family and family friends/dad's band/etc. I'd been to the house but one time before, the night before we really started moving everything in, and looking back on that now as an adult I find that really odd. Here I was, about to move into a house I'd never really seen, never really knew, and it was, well, just happening. I took the spare bedroom downstairs, in the new part of the house built during the renovations in the 70s. The house had no air conditioning and hardwood floors (when I was used to carpet everywhere), but my room had a ceiling fan, two windows, and a dedicated phone line for my dial-up internet -- which at that time had very recently updated our plan to unlimited access for $4 more per month.
Moot, my dog, was not happy. In addition to being moved to a new home, he also had to now share this home with my dad's dog, a large shepherd mix named Betty. I had to keep him shut in my room while the furniture was moved into the house, and he showed his displeasure by taking a giant shit on my bed.
These omens keep getting better and better, don't they?
By the end of that weekend we were exhausted, but moved in. Most stuff was still packed up in boxes, but we were in our new home. My mother had taken the week of Thanksgiving off work, so that following Monday, she and I drove up to my new high school -- Preston High School -- to enroll me for classes. School was not, surprisingly, in session. When I asked why, it's because the week of Thanksgiving is deer hunting season in West Virginia, and nobody went to school that week, so the county cancelled all classes every year for the entire Thanksgiving week. If that doesn't give some indication of exactly how backwoods redneck the county I moved to was, here's another example -- there were probably, give or take, ten or so high schools in the county Morgantown was in. There may be more or less now due to redistricting or consolidation; I don't know for sure. Preston High was the only high school in the county, period, and had about 1100 students total. Morgantown High had pretty close to double that, alone.
I met with one of the school guidance counselors, who didn't end up being my "assigned" guidance counselor but remained a close contact throughout my high school career, and he registered me for my classes for the remainder of the year. I would start the following Monday after Thanksgiving, I received a copy of the approximate time for the bus schedule and how it worked, and I was sent on my way for the rest of the holiday week, being told to report to the office as soon as I got in on Monday morning so I could be told where to go. The entire school excursion took maybe an hour.
I remember feeling numb, nervous, and just a little bit excited, I guess. I was that weird nerd kid, with the long afro-like hair (my hair reached serious levels of out of control in those days) who listened to some pretty dark music, wore a lot of black, and desperately wanted to be viewed as a badass but could never quite pull it off properly because he played Magic: The Gathering and loved Star Wars.
The following Monday I put on my fingerless leather gloves, black trench coat, Iron Maiden t-shirt (which I still own and wore last week, in fact), black jeans, and black combat boots, and went to school. I was immediately ostracized. I was introduced to each of my classes awkwardly, and was looked at like I was an alien who had just landed -- the classes were full of redneck guys in shitkicker boots and plaid flannel shirts, offset by the skater kids, jocks, hippie girls and high-achievers, and the cheerleaders and farmers. It was immediately very clear that I was not going to fit in with any of these people. Frequently I was asked where I was from, and when I replied with "Morgantown," people answered with "...then why did you come here?" I always had to answer with some sort of variation of "I didn't choose to; my parents wanted to buy a house in the country, so here I am."
There was one girl, however, who stayed behind in one of my classes that day to introduce herself to me and get to know me better. Her name was Becca, and over the course of the next year or so, I would fall madly in love with her -- the first time I'd ever truly felt that way about another person. It scared me. It scared me very badly.
That is, quietly enough, how 1998 would end. In a new house, attending the third school I'd been to that year, feeling alone and more isolated than ever before. I got a Sony PlayStation for Christmas that year, and my dad got a five-disc DVD player -- our household was rocketing toward the 21st century. And yet, to me, it felt like a time of great upheaval, and I had no idea what would come next. That also greatly scared me.
1999: The World Feared A Y2K Bug Would Destroy All Computer Systems
On December 31, 1999, at 11:55 PM, I put Led Zeppelin IV into my brand-new, just-received-for-Christmas 3-disc changer, scrolled through the tracks to "Stairway to Heaven," and cranked up the volume loudly, singing along with Robert Plant as he belted out the lyrics, which reached the best part of the song just as the clock struck midnight:
And as we wander down the road
Our shadows taller than our souls
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
Where all are one and one is all
To be a rock, and not to roll....
I was prepared for anything. I didn't know if the world would end. I didn't know if every electronic device on the planet was going to stop working. I didn't know if the world was going to be the same the next morning, if we were going to be thrown back into the stone age, if water would keep flowing out of the tap and the lights would still be on. So, I decided to, having just turned seventeen, celebrate the possible end of civilization in true teenager fashion -- blasting what at the time was my favorite song (and the one that spoke to me the most) and giving the rest of the world the finger.
This was, in a nutshell, how most of 1999 was for me as a whole.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
1999 was (and I'll say this again for the probably fifth or sixth time in this series of posts) a strange year. The Y2K thing was very real, and as the year went on, nobody really knew what would happen to the world's computer systems, nor did the news media ever shut up about it. When your dad worked in IT, it took on even more of a focus. Most people believed that nothing would really happen, but it's not like anyone would ever know for sure until January 1, 2000. Doomsday preppers and end-of-the-world cults made the news frequently, religions talked about how the coming millennium was a big milestone event that would see the dawn of a new era, and (personally) for me, it marked a time when things slowly began getting worse in my life -- the beginning of a very long downward spiral.
Because I'd been made fun of for my appearance as well as my crazy-wild shock of afro-hair, early in the year I shaved my head down to the skin, military style, with a pair of clippers the parents had purchased to groom the dog. I also loosened up my wardrobe a bit -- I began purchasing somewhat normal shirts and jeans, and (when I didn't need them, anyway) traded in my combat boots for Chuck Taylors. However, as winters were cold and snowy on top of the mountain, the black trench coat remained -- it was the warmest garment I owned.
Until April 20, 1999, that is. The day of the Columbine shooting.
Suddenly, I had a very large target on my literal back -- I was the weird guy who wore the black trench coat and listened to Marilyn Manson, I must be a member of the Trench Coat Mafia, how could I be trusted? Who could say when I would snap and shoot up the school? Was I one of them? Did I believe the same things they did? I began getting threats, I got bullied -- I was once more finally beginning to fit into the background and just go about my life when the shooting happened, and all of a sudden I went from being the guy who could pass as at least somewhat normal or otherwise faceless to the masses to being the one who was shunned and ostracized again, and feared. Being one of the Freaks when I was in Morgantown, one would think that I'd be used to being an outcast, or be used to people actively avoiding me, and for a time I reveled in that -- instead, now it had the opposite effect. It just made me immensely sad, and it put me into a depression that it took me months to really pull out of. The coat went into the closet, where it remained for at least a year, unworn.
I ended my 10th grade year at Preston High in the beginning of June 1999, to little fanfare. At the very least, I had some things to be a little happy about. I mean, a new Star Wars movie had been released for the first time in sixteen years, and I'd made a few friends -- very few, but a few -- who lived close enough to me where we could hang out a bit, and the beginning of the year was vastly improved by me enrolling in the high school's guitar classes. My music tastes began to branch out a little bit, skewing more towards classic rock than anything else. I discovered The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and AC/DC all independently of one another, but also garnered an appreciation for The Ramones, Rancid, and The Offspring as well as some ska and swing bands. If I could learn how to play it on the classical guitar my dad had let me borrow for my guitar class, it was worth me learning about.
Still, the summer was mostly lonely. I slowly descended into some neuroses, such as becoming obsessed with videotapes and completing my episode collections of several television series, looking to see when they'd air whatever episodes I was looking for and then recording them onto VHS tapes in the proper sequence, cataloging each episode on each tape. I alphabetized my t-shirt collection based on band, slogan, character, or what-have-you. My parents got me a bicycle (an updated, modern one, purchased from Kmart) and I occasionally rode the bike trails to and from my friend's houses in the next town, which was a fifteen-mile round trip. I began obsessively keeping daily journals, filling notebooks with whatever was on my mind -- mostly about how much I wanted my friend Becca to be my girlfriend. By this time, Cathy and I had ended our online-only relationship and were mostly out of contact with one another, though we would talk occasionally via email here and there. I was slowly getting more and more out of shape, primarily because (aside from those occasional bike rides, which were few and far between) I never left the house except to mow the grass or to occasionally go grocery shopping with my mother.
In July 1999, for a change of pace, my parents booked our summer vacation in Dewey Beach, Delaware. I'd been there before, a year or two earlier -- it's where I got my Iron Maiden shirt mentioned above, and where I'd found my first of several KMFDM t-shirts (also as mentioned previously, I still own and wear both of these shirts). Dewey was a very small beach town not far from the larger beach communities of Ocean City, Maryland and Rehoboth Beach -- the latter being apparently the #1 gay beach destination in the world (at the time; that has probably changed in the twenty years since). In 1999 I had no true concept of what a gay person was, as I'd never knowingly met one.
So we packed our things, boarded the dogs at the vet, and drove the ten hours or so to the beach...just in time for John F. Kennedy, Jr. to crash his plane into the ocean 100 miles or so away.
It was a big news story at the time, of course, but it was an everything else stops, turn on the TV and stay transfixed event along the coastline, especially north of us in New England. Pill bottles and luggage and clothing and shit was washing up onshore in places, people talked about it incessantly, and as he was a Kennedy -- the Kennedy that people assumed would be eventually getting into politics and living up to his father's name as well as his own, even if he didn't really want to -- there was a lot of mourning.
For me, I knew who he was, of course, but it didn't factor largely into my life. My focus of the beach trip was to do three things -- one, get out of West Virginia; two, to have some good sandwiches from the Italian sub shop next to our hotel (Nick's, who made the best pizza cheesesteak I've ever had to this day); and three, to find the head shop I'd purchased my Iron Maiden and KMFDM shirts from on my previous beach visit, so that I could go get more.
The head shop was gone, and I lamented its absence -- down the boardwalk further, though, was a video rental place that was selling tapes of Bucky O'Hare and Robotech for $5 each, and I picked up several. I probably still have most of those tapes someplace, or I did until I moved out of our apartment and into this house.
I swam in the ocean, I sat on the beach, I listened to static and talk radio in the overnights on my by now, nearly-busted walkman while I watched my mother sleep, unable to really sleep myself. When we returned home, we got the dogs back from the boarding house and life returned to the normal routine of me feeling mostly isolated and alone.
In August, I entered my 11th grade year with a game plan: survive, and make Becca my girlfriend.
Let me tell you a bit about myself at this age (some of you may be asking, isn't that what you've been doing all along? and you'd be right, but)...I was painfully shy and awkward, and any outward confidence I exuded was simply a mask for incredibly low self esteem and being so sheltered that functioning amongst other, relatively normal people left me drained and exhausted. I hated putting on that mask all the time just to appear like I wasn't as mentally disturbed as I was. I was extremely self-conscious of my looks and mannerisms, of the way I dressed, of everything about myself. On top of that, I was burdened with great intelligence and was very aware of that. Everything was an act, everything was a mask or a cover-up for the real me that, trying as I did, I couldn't escape. I wanted to "fake it until I make it" but I couldn't do that. Every day the mask felt like it was going to crumble and expose me. Nobody knew the real me. I was terrified that the real me would drive people away.
There was only one person who I wanted to let in and see the real me, and that was Becca. I'd put all my hopes and dreams into procuring a relationship with her, into preparing myself to let her in, to the point where I became obsessive and began believing my own bullshit, as they say. We were friends; I, at the time, called her my best friend. Why wouldn't she want to be more? I was a great guy, I could've been great with her and for her. She was my one, I believed at the time.
I asked her out and was summarily rejected. I don't remember the circumstances, I don't remember the conversation, I don't remember her reasoning. I remember that it was October, and I remember that I wanted to die because she wanted to be "just friends." Words cannot express my level of devastation or how it shattered my entire world. It helped cement my belief that I was completely worthless and unworthy of being loved. It shaped my world view that nobody could ever truly be known or fully trusted. And, in a twisted sense, it confirmed my belief at the time that I was destined to be, and to remain, unhappy.
Look, man, I was a teenager. What do you want from me?
Let me tell you a little about Becca. Becca was blonde, pale, mostly plain and nondescript, but absolutely beautiful to me. She was (and is, to this day) a very kind soul. She was also a nerd, and was into a lot of the things I was into, and is probably the biggest Sailor Moon fan I knew then, and probably now. She wore glasses. She was involved in theater. She was prim and proper and almost the exact opposite of myself at that age. She was also (and probably still is) very religious, way into Jesus -- Baptist, I believe. I, meanwhile, had lost any sense of faith I once had several years prior. Again, I was cursed with intelligence and a sense of reason. Aside from a few common interests we would never have meshed well anyway.
Becca was really hard to get over. Four years after this, ironically enough, she and I did eventually go on a dinner and movie date. We went to see Big Fish. It was fine, but the spark just really wasn't there (or if it was, I missed it due to being bad at social cues and the like), and we sort of went our separate ways in life after slowly growing apart during our college years. She got married last year to a guy who, strangely enough, looks a lot like me -- or at least I think so. Maybe that's just me. I assume she is happy and content in her life, but we haven't actually spoken in many years.
Circling back around to the beginning of the 1999 story, however, that's how I found myself giving the middle finger to the world and hoping it all burned to the ground on December 31. I was ready to end the 90s with a bang. If I'd had a gun, it probably would've been a bang to the face.
Friday, August 30, 2019
Sunday, August 18, 2019
Places, part II
1995: OJ Simpson's Trial Ended With His Acquittal Of All Murder Charges
In 1995, I was in my first year of middle school at South Jr. High School (later to be, sort of ironically, changed to "South Middle School" when they moved the 9th graders up to the high school). The day the OJ trial verdict was announced, we watched it live in my 7th grade science class -- and being smart and wise even in my younger years, when two of the asshole rich kids in the class tried to get me to take a $20 bet that OJ would get off, I gladly took it. I was, of course, taking a risk, but I wasn't stupid; I knew he'd be acquitted, and I knew those asshole rich kids were, well, asshole rich kids. When I was proven right and tried to collect, they of course said they wouldn't pay up. If I'd beaten the fuck out of them like a mafia boss, my reputation in school would've been much different for the following two years I remained a student there, and I probably would've been left alone a lot more, and wouldn't have been so bullied by the rest of the rich kids for the remainder of middle school.
1995 was a very formative year overall. I turned 13 in 1995, and I was a fairly troubled kid. I wasn't a fan of authority (something that continues to this day), but 1995 marked my really rebellious streak's beginnings. Truth be told, I was a terrible kid during this time -- I treated my mother horrifically, I got caught trying to shoplift Sega Genesis games from a local department store, and I didn't give a single flying fuck about school or about rules. I was fairly uncontrollable, and truthfully I don't know if my mother knew what to do with me, so after the shoplifting incident, she put me into therapy; it was the first of several times I'd consult with a therapist throughout my life. It's not like I was crazy or anything, but I was a typical rebellious teenager with really bad luck -- meaning every time I tried to get away with something, I never could or was caught. I remember it frustrating me terribly because I kept watching other kids my age actually get away with pretty much anything they wanted. It also didn't help that all of the rich kids at my school would talk about their new video games or show off all of their new comic books and sneakers and clothes, and I had none of those things. My mother and I were better off than we had been six or seven years before, but we were still lower-middle-class and far from rich. I was wearing clothes from Gabriel Brothers, the local discount store that sold one-offs and irregular clothing (at the time) when everyone else was wearing high-end designer shit. I didn't have name-brand shoes, I had whatever Gabes or Kmart sold on clearance (Walmart was just beginning to get a presence in Morgantown at this time, but it wasn't what we see Walmart as today -- it was very different back in the day and wasn't yet the super-mega-congolmerate that we're all now used to). Target didn't have a store in Morgantown until I was in college, so it was either Kmart, Gabes, or nothing for the poors. Maybe Goodwill, if you wanted even lower-rent clothing.
As an aside, I still have some stuff I purchased from Kmart and Gabes in the 90s. Very little, of course, but some. Mainly a few pairs of socks, a shirt or two, and some underwear.
Anyway, I was a troubled child. I was losing my grip on myself, was going through puberty and it wasn't working out well -- my always-straight, dirty blonde/light brown hair turned a darker brown and developed a lot of waviness and natural curl (inherited from my father, no doubt) that I hated. I hated my curly hair and couldn't get rid of it; meanwhile, everyone in my family told me how much they envied it because they thought it looked great. My voice cracked, but only cracked halfway -- I had to consciously force myself to talk in a deeper voice to mask it until my voice finished changing and became how it naturally sounded. This took a good year or so of fully controlled, metered conversations with everything I ever said to anyone for any reason. This was not pleasant. I felt like a monster in my own body. I'm sure a lot of people feel like this as they enter their teenage years, but I was burdened with being smarter than most other people I knew, so beginning to see how the world actually worked and how much it was stacked against people like me threw me into a deep, crippling depression for the first time in my life. I didn't know exactly how to deal with it because I'd never experienced it before and never knew what it really was.
The reason I went to South Middle School was because in the spring of 1995, when I was still attending North Elementary in 6th grade, my mother bought a house for us on the other side of town. It was a good house, and the wife and I drove past it upon my visit back home to West Virginia in 2017 to take pictures -- it looks completely different now, sadly. Anyway, for the rest of the 94-95 school year, I still attended North, because it would've been a major pain in the ass to switch school districts for two months. So we basically just faked it and said I was living at my old address until the end of the school year, and started anew at yet another new school at South in the fall that year.
The Morgantown house was a 3 bedroom, one bath house with a garage, massive laundry room, and underground family room. It was all brick and had been built in the 60s. I don't know how many people had owned it before us, but it was the perfect-sized house for the two of us. I started out in the larger of the two bedrooms, but would later move to the smaller of the two (more on the reasons for this later). The downstairs family room was never used, even though it was completely furnished and carpeted -- we put old spare furniture in there and I'm not sure we ever used the fireplace once. Big wolf spiders loved the downstairs of that house, at least in the family room area and the stairwell -- I don't think I ever saw one in the laundry room -- but my mother and I finally had a place we could really call our own. Not rented or leased, but purchased and owned. We hated mowing the grass and doing the gardening, but I laugh at that now that I own my own home with my wife, and in the summer that takes me like two hours a week to take care of. We purchased two old, heavy touring bikes (probably from the 70s) from the neighbors who were selling them at their yard sale, and my mother and I rode those bikes every once in a while. Even in all of the turmoil in my personal life, puberty, troubled youth and depression, those are the things I remember about 1995. I may have been almost failing out of school, I may have hated myself and felt like a monster, but I still remember some of the good.
So in the summer of 1995, I knew nobody around me. I knew nobody in my neighborhood, I knew no friends, I was too young to have a car (obviously) or a job, and I had no money, goals, or direction in life. I had low-rent, mid-90s non-digital cable television, I had comic books, and I had my own mind. I began writing, mostly in notebooks and on discarded sheets of printer paper. I began writing letters to Marvel and DC, trying to sell them on some half-brained storyline idea or pitch a new character (complete with sketches). I spent weekends (mostly alone) watching USA Up All Night, or getting up early in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays to tape episodes of syndicated Sailor Moon or the original Voltron and Speed Racer series which ran at 5AM on some of the local channels. I was just beginning to get into anime, even though I really didn't even know what it was at the time. That would come later.
1996: Dolly The Sheep Was The First Mammal To Be Successfully Cloned
When Dolly was cloned, the news was announced on a cold, frosty morning on my way to school. I first heard it on my headphones on the morning school bus, on the radio of my Walkman (the radio used far less battery than the actual cassette player did, so I generally listened to it on the bus ride so that people would leave me alone and I wouldn't be left with my thoughts).
While I had started playing intramural stuff in 1995, in 1996 I was playing on what was basically the jr. varsity (they didn't call it that; I can't remember what they called it) football team, defensive line. At my school, the jr. varsity team was basically training and a lot of practice for the actual team -- it was a loose team of what amounted to 3rd and 4th stringers, and as such we didn't play actual games for or on an actual team; if someone got hurt or they needed to fill a position because someone had gone out of town on vacation or got the flu or something, they'd call in one of us. Our job was to be trained up and ready to jump in when the actual "varsity" team needed it. Well, as defensive line, that didn't really happen for me, as I was one of the super-low-demand positions. So while I practiced a lot, and while I was ready to be called up, it didn't happen. I got to keep the jersey, though (I was probably supposed to give it back, but fuck 'em); my number was 15. I was wearing my jersey that year in my school ID picture, which I found and showed the wife a few months back. Some early snowstorms ended the football season a bit prematurely, as well as canceled our holiday choir concert -- something I was infinitely grateful for.
I turned 14 in 1996, and as such I was left to my own devices a lot around the house. My dad, who by this time had been in a relationship with my mother for a little over two years, lived conveniently about 1/4 mile from our new house, close enough to walk to if necessary with no real issue. My dad was (well, is to this day to some extent) a musician, and his band played shows every weekend around town at bars, resorts, and restaurants. My mother, of course, attended these shows without fail, and would generally spend the night "across the street" as I used to call it, at my dad's place at the end of the night. This was fine; it's not like I didn't know where she was and it's not like I wasn't taken care of. The band generally played 8-12, or 9-1, something like that -- meaning they'd take an hour or two to tear down and pack up afterwards, and that meant that my parents wouldn't get home until 2-4 in the morning (depending on venue). While I could've gone to see the band play at pretty much any time or place for these events -- I had the equivalent of a "backstage pass" so so speak, since I was "with the band," I didn't usually do so until I was much older, and only then very infrequently (probably less than ten times over the course of six or seven years).
Despite that, 1996 was the year I started paying attention to music and actually caring about it, and that was spurred on mainly by two things -- the first being the group of friends I fell in with, and the second being the internet. Because our middle school was full of trash people, I became friends with the outcasts, the people who didn't fit into any of the other cliques around the school -- because there were a lot of those. There were the rich kids/the preps, the thugs and troublemakers, the band geeks, the stoners, the poors, the untouchably gorgeous, the teachers' pets, the military brats, the jocks, etc -- I could go on, but most schools had the same sorts of cliques and groups -- mine was no different than the usual. My group of friends came from all walks of life and sort of reminds me now of the kids from Stranger Things, just the 90s version. We called ourselves, self-deprecating as it was, the Freaks.
There were a decent number of us in our core group. There was me, then Carl, who claimed he had a metal plate in his head; Adam, the muscle and sort of the de-facto leader of the group; Anthony, a sort of shaggy and mostly quiet nerd; Ron, the token black guy who was intimidating to outsiders but friendly and soft-spoken with friends; Ahmed, who drew some of the most beautiful comic art I'd ever seen; Paul, the class clown with a troubled home life; Heather, the nerd girl; John, the other end of the muscle -- a big nerd who had been a bully (ironically) to keep other people from bullying him; Stephen, a music and comic nerd whose sister was one of the most attractive girls in the school; and, finally, Chris -- the jock nerd who played on the football team but also loved playing Magic: The Gathering. Most of us were from the wrong side of the proverbial tracks, most of us came from low-income households, and all of us had pretty much been outcast or otherwise didn't fit in with anyone else in the school. We kept to ourselves and played Magic, D&D, and the Palladium tabletop games (primarily Rifts and Robotech) to keep outside of the attention of others.
Almost 25 years later I am still in contact with most of these folks, or rekindled contact with them after a number of years -- Adam, Carl, and Chris are all happily married with children. Carl has six kids, and I did not find out until two months ago that he does not, in fact, have a metal plate in his head. Chris became a high school football star and eventually ended up playing for WVU before settling down with a wife and child. Anthony is in Hawaii and is about to marry an acquaintance of mine, and Ron is still Ron. However, a good number of these people I would fall out of contact with either in high school or shortly afterwards. Paul I didn't see again until college, when he told me he was an electrician. Heather got in some trouble with the law, and sort of fell off our radar; the next time I saw her, I was most of the way through college and she was working at the deli counter of a local grocery store. Ahmed went into computer engineering and dropped off the face of the internet after around 2005 or so, and I've not been in contact with him since. Stephen went into the military at some point, and I lost contact with him around that time -- but his hot sister became a stripper. Finally, on a more sad note, a year or so after I left Morgantown, John committed suicide.
But I'm getting off track.
As mentioned, 1996 was the year I started really paying attention to music, and not just the stuff that was on the radio. Having a dad who was a musician -- in a band full of musicians we were family friends with --opened me up to a lot of stuff I would have otherwise never known about -- Jeff Beck, Frank Zappa, Tower of Power, Rush, Steely Dan, Genesis, Chicago -- etc. My brother (my dad's son) opened me up to more alternative, punk, metal, and industrial music, as well -- Front Line Assembly, Soundgarden, Ministry, NOFX, and the Misfits. My neighbor Stuart was a goth kid, two years older than me, and he introduced me to KMFDM, Bauhaus, Joy Division, and Depeche Mode. I branched out and began forming my own musical tastes as well based on what my friends were listening to -- I finally discovered bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Green Day, and suddenly I had an escape. Suddenly I could disappear into music, I could let my problems and boredom melt away. I soon found myself listening to the local college radio station at all hours, writing down the names of songs and artists I really liked on scratch paper when they mentioned them. This is how I discovered R.E.M., Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Echo and the Bunnymen. When I found someone I really liked, I would look them up and read all about them on...the internet.
Ah yes, the internet.
Words cannot describe here what the internet did for me as a teenager, or as a person in general, really. As a Black Friday deal in 1996, for $999 at Walmart, my mother purchased my very first computer for me. I remember it like yesterday -- it was an AST Advantage 575, the very model pictured below:
It ran Windows 95 first edition, had 8MB RAM, a 600MB hard drive, an 8X CD-ROM drive, a 3.5 floppy, and had a blistering fast 75mhz Pentium 1 processor. Oh, and a 14.4 modem.
Yes folks, that's how old I am -- my first computer had a 14.4 modem. Not a 28.8 or a 56k, but a piddly 14.4.
It also came with a printer that very quickly ran out of ink, and even in the 90s the ink cartridges cost $50.
The computer was purchased for me (primarily) so that I could type up papers and do other schoolwork on it, and very shortly after buying it (less than a month) my mother got me an internet account -- $14.95 a month for 30 hours per month of dial-up access via WVNET, a local company that, as you can see, still exists in some form back home. 30 hours per month! Can you imagine being that limited?
For those of you who are too young to remember, or who didn't have internet access at home until later in life, 1996 was literally the infancy of the internet. HTML would crash webpages. Pictures were a novelty and took forever to load on a dial-up connection -- the vast majority of the internet was mostly text-only with the occasional fancy background or weblink thrown in. There was no Google. There was no Youtube. There was no online gaming. Chatrooms were a completely new thing. There were few forums and no Reddit, only Usenet and newsgroups. MP3s and streaming did not exist. Jeff Bezos had just founded Amazon and nobody knew what it was yet. My web browser was Netscape 1.1. It was a new age that had just started, and finally I was (sort of) a leg up on most other people I knew -- I knew almost nobody who had internet at home, and I knew very few people who even had computers at home. Mind you, this was the mid-90s in rural West Virginia; a computer was some fancy rich people shit that at the time, appeared to be wholly unnecessary for home life.
To me, it was another escape. Online, I could be anybody, I could do anything. I had almost any information I wanted at a keystroke, and who cared if it took five minutes to boot the computer, another three or four to fire up telnet and manually dial into the internet with my modem, watching the text-only prompts on the screen saying "connected" only to be booted offline if someone called the house phone (or if my mother in the other room wanted to make a call).
The computer was set up on an end table in what, at that time, was the spare bedroom that nobody used -- it was set up there because there was already a phone jack in the wall there, when there wasn't one in my bedroom. Slowly, over the course of a few weeks and months, I moved into the smaller bedroom with my computer in it. It became my Batcave, my Fortress of Solitude. Through the CD-ROM drive I could finally play games and listen to music that I liked, and because of the internet I had enough distractions to where I no longer felt completely alone in the world.
1996 ended gracefully enough, and things were starting to look better, despite some of the events going on in the world. One of those nights when I was off school in the summer, up late watching TV and drawing some comic book art, I watched the Atlanta Olympics bombing on live television. I remember waking my mother up to tell her. She was less than enthused. I remember Christmas 1996 being filled with peace and settling down into a groove that would dominate the next two years or so for the most part, and thinking back on it now, I can't tell you what I'd give to have those times back, to be able to relive that year knowing what I know now. Things were so much simpler, so much easier.
1997: Princess Diana Died In A Car Accident While Being Chased By Paparazzi
The night Princess Diana died, in August 1997, my mother and I were watching live coverage on CNN. I remember it being a school night, and that I was up very late -- 1 or 2am -- when they made the official announcement. My mother always had, I felt, a connection of sorts to the royals -- she and my father got married shortly before Diana and Charles had, and Diana had given birth to Prince William while she was pregnant with me. They were almost the same age (Diana was about a year or so younger than my mother) and my mother even looked quite a bit like Diana -- blonde, usually short-haired, with piercing blue eyes. Diana may have been the closest figure my mother had to a true role model, and Diana's death upset her. I, of course, knew who Princess Diana was but knew little else about the family or about the royals in general.
The mid to late '90s were a weird time, friends. I was beginning to slowly come of age, beginning to realize the events of the world around me, and I was finally becoming what one might call "a normal teenager." With the internet to occupy me and help me out, my grades in school drastically improved; by the end of my 8th grade year I was back to my old ways of A's and B's. With music, I could center myself, and when I wasn't in school, I had hobbies -- I was starting to deeply get into anime, I played Magic: The Gathering, and I was, ahem, starting to notice girls. I mean, I'd always noticed girls before, but puberty was over at this point and I had become the quintessential horny teenager. I was 14, almost 15, and I wanted to date. I wanted to feel a connection with someone. I wanted to feel romance and passion and sex.
Precisely none of these things happened. I was still the fat geek who collected comic books, played Magic with the rest of the Freaks at school and watched anime on a 20-inch tube TV with a VCR balanced precariously on top of it. But, thanks to a Sailor Moon fan website chatroom (I know, I know) I did connect with a girl my age in New York named Cathy. We became very close and began an online, long-distance relationship. She is, to this day, probably my oldest friend -- we are still in sporadic contact, we are friends on Facebook, and she remains in New York, married with a son who at this point has to almost be a teenager himself.
Cathy took up a lot of my time. This was not a bad thing; I was able to, through my relationship with her, learn how to interact with the opposite sex. I apparently had a natural charm -- I could woo almost any woman with my words -- and I began to learn how to hone that craft. Cathy and I would be on again, off again for several years, up to and throughout all of our high school years. To this day, we have never met in person and I am sure 22 years later, I am little more than an afterthought or a footnote in her relationship history. But, I'm sure, I could call her at any given moment and we'd pick our friendship back up like nothing had changed.
Diana's death was a big news story for me, but it wasn't the biggest that year -- the biggest and most historically significant event I experienced in 1997 was the passing of the Hale-Bopp comet. It could be seen in 1996, of course, and it was up there and people were talking about it, but in 1997 it exploded across the sky and was very brightly visible for several months -- it was, to this day, one of the most spectacular things I have ever seen. For those of you who weren't alive or are too young to remember, this comet was a big deal. As soon as it started to get dark at night, it became the brightest thing in the sky and your eyes were immediately drawn to it. I remember many nights outside, and probably many mosquito bites obtained, while staring at this comet. It was Hale-Bopp that got me more into science, more into wanting to know what was out there and why. When the Heaven's Gate cult killed themselves over it, the comet became even more intriguing -- and when it began fading from view and eventually disappeared, I felt a wave of abject sadness slowly set in.
1997 gave me my first job and my first real, well, spending money. My neighbor in the house behind me, Jacob, was the local paperboy. His parents also went away on vacation in the summer for two months straight, and he went with them -- meaning they needed to find someone who could deliver newspapers in the area. I was that somebody. I was paid $75 a month -- half upon them leaving and half upon them getting back -- and to me, who came from nothing, that was a hell of a lot of money.
The papers were dropped off at the house between 2 and 3AM every night. Me, being primarily nocturnal in the hot West Virginia summers when I was out of school, went to pick them up upon dropoff, looked at the daily instruction sheet (this would tell me whether I was to hold some people's papers for them or wouldn't be delivering them that day or what-have-you), then I would assemble them, wrap them, place them all into my super-oversized canvas messenger bag, and be out the door between 4:30 and 5. There were about 45 houses I delivered to, give or take, and that number increased to 65 or so on Sundays (which were, admittedly, awful to deal with). The route carried me around about four or five blocks, and was circular. After the first few days I figured out how to do it in the fastest and most efficient way, and could almost time myself to the minute when I'd get home based on when I left. Generally, I would get home right as my mother was getting up for the day, and if she hadn't already done so, I would make the morning coffee.
Walking the neighborhood on those early mornings wasn't just great exercise for me, who was at the time still a fat nerd, but it was peaceful. I got to see some beautiful meteors with long trails extending across the sky, would run into the occasional wildlife (usually deer, possum, or raccoon, though they never came after me or anything) and I wore out my tape of the Rocky Horror Show (stage recording) soundtrack by listening to it over and over on my walks. This is partially why I remember every lyric to every song to this day.
With the money I received from the paper route, at least some of it went towards getting a tie-dyed Millennium Falcon t-shirt and a pair of John Lennon round sunglasses. I wore the shirt for years until it fell apart in the mid-2000s, and the sunglasses I wore at least until I was in college, when they got bent up and the lens popped out of them.
The other milestone of 1997 for me was that I got my first black trench coat. This was before Columbine, mind you -- and I was one of the Freaks who also fit in with the goth kids and metalheads quite well. The coat became a second skin, and I was almost never seen without it (with the exception of the really hot summer months, anyway). Even after I got another one, a gray one, a year later, the black one was a staple of my wardrobe until after I graduated from college (mind you, I was in 8th grade when it was purchased) -- by then, it had developed large rips and wear holes (constant use plus, well, teenage growth spurts) and outdoor exposure had faded the black to a dark brown in many places. I finally parted with it sometime around 2006, and was sad to see it go.
In 1995, I was in my first year of middle school at South Jr. High School (later to be, sort of ironically, changed to "South Middle School" when they moved the 9th graders up to the high school). The day the OJ trial verdict was announced, we watched it live in my 7th grade science class -- and being smart and wise even in my younger years, when two of the asshole rich kids in the class tried to get me to take a $20 bet that OJ would get off, I gladly took it. I was, of course, taking a risk, but I wasn't stupid; I knew he'd be acquitted, and I knew those asshole rich kids were, well, asshole rich kids. When I was proven right and tried to collect, they of course said they wouldn't pay up. If I'd beaten the fuck out of them like a mafia boss, my reputation in school would've been much different for the following two years I remained a student there, and I probably would've been left alone a lot more, and wouldn't have been so bullied by the rest of the rich kids for the remainder of middle school.
1995 was a very formative year overall. I turned 13 in 1995, and I was a fairly troubled kid. I wasn't a fan of authority (something that continues to this day), but 1995 marked my really rebellious streak's beginnings. Truth be told, I was a terrible kid during this time -- I treated my mother horrifically, I got caught trying to shoplift Sega Genesis games from a local department store, and I didn't give a single flying fuck about school or about rules. I was fairly uncontrollable, and truthfully I don't know if my mother knew what to do with me, so after the shoplifting incident, she put me into therapy; it was the first of several times I'd consult with a therapist throughout my life. It's not like I was crazy or anything, but I was a typical rebellious teenager with really bad luck -- meaning every time I tried to get away with something, I never could or was caught. I remember it frustrating me terribly because I kept watching other kids my age actually get away with pretty much anything they wanted. It also didn't help that all of the rich kids at my school would talk about their new video games or show off all of their new comic books and sneakers and clothes, and I had none of those things. My mother and I were better off than we had been six or seven years before, but we were still lower-middle-class and far from rich. I was wearing clothes from Gabriel Brothers, the local discount store that sold one-offs and irregular clothing (at the time) when everyone else was wearing high-end designer shit. I didn't have name-brand shoes, I had whatever Gabes or Kmart sold on clearance (Walmart was just beginning to get a presence in Morgantown at this time, but it wasn't what we see Walmart as today -- it was very different back in the day and wasn't yet the super-mega-congolmerate that we're all now used to). Target didn't have a store in Morgantown until I was in college, so it was either Kmart, Gabes, or nothing for the poors. Maybe Goodwill, if you wanted even lower-rent clothing.
As an aside, I still have some stuff I purchased from Kmart and Gabes in the 90s. Very little, of course, but some. Mainly a few pairs of socks, a shirt or two, and some underwear.
Anyway, I was a troubled child. I was losing my grip on myself, was going through puberty and it wasn't working out well -- my always-straight, dirty blonde/light brown hair turned a darker brown and developed a lot of waviness and natural curl (inherited from my father, no doubt) that I hated. I hated my curly hair and couldn't get rid of it; meanwhile, everyone in my family told me how much they envied it because they thought it looked great. My voice cracked, but only cracked halfway -- I had to consciously force myself to talk in a deeper voice to mask it until my voice finished changing and became how it naturally sounded. This took a good year or so of fully controlled, metered conversations with everything I ever said to anyone for any reason. This was not pleasant. I felt like a monster in my own body. I'm sure a lot of people feel like this as they enter their teenage years, but I was burdened with being smarter than most other people I knew, so beginning to see how the world actually worked and how much it was stacked against people like me threw me into a deep, crippling depression for the first time in my life. I didn't know exactly how to deal with it because I'd never experienced it before and never knew what it really was.
The reason I went to South Middle School was because in the spring of 1995, when I was still attending North Elementary in 6th grade, my mother bought a house for us on the other side of town. It was a good house, and the wife and I drove past it upon my visit back home to West Virginia in 2017 to take pictures -- it looks completely different now, sadly. Anyway, for the rest of the 94-95 school year, I still attended North, because it would've been a major pain in the ass to switch school districts for two months. So we basically just faked it and said I was living at my old address until the end of the school year, and started anew at yet another new school at South in the fall that year.
The Morgantown house was a 3 bedroom, one bath house with a garage, massive laundry room, and underground family room. It was all brick and had been built in the 60s. I don't know how many people had owned it before us, but it was the perfect-sized house for the two of us. I started out in the larger of the two bedrooms, but would later move to the smaller of the two (more on the reasons for this later). The downstairs family room was never used, even though it was completely furnished and carpeted -- we put old spare furniture in there and I'm not sure we ever used the fireplace once. Big wolf spiders loved the downstairs of that house, at least in the family room area and the stairwell -- I don't think I ever saw one in the laundry room -- but my mother and I finally had a place we could really call our own. Not rented or leased, but purchased and owned. We hated mowing the grass and doing the gardening, but I laugh at that now that I own my own home with my wife, and in the summer that takes me like two hours a week to take care of. We purchased two old, heavy touring bikes (probably from the 70s) from the neighbors who were selling them at their yard sale, and my mother and I rode those bikes every once in a while. Even in all of the turmoil in my personal life, puberty, troubled youth and depression, those are the things I remember about 1995. I may have been almost failing out of school, I may have hated myself and felt like a monster, but I still remember some of the good.
So in the summer of 1995, I knew nobody around me. I knew nobody in my neighborhood, I knew no friends, I was too young to have a car (obviously) or a job, and I had no money, goals, or direction in life. I had low-rent, mid-90s non-digital cable television, I had comic books, and I had my own mind. I began writing, mostly in notebooks and on discarded sheets of printer paper. I began writing letters to Marvel and DC, trying to sell them on some half-brained storyline idea or pitch a new character (complete with sketches). I spent weekends (mostly alone) watching USA Up All Night, or getting up early in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays to tape episodes of syndicated Sailor Moon or the original Voltron and Speed Racer series which ran at 5AM on some of the local channels. I was just beginning to get into anime, even though I really didn't even know what it was at the time. That would come later.
1996: Dolly The Sheep Was The First Mammal To Be Successfully Cloned
When Dolly was cloned, the news was announced on a cold, frosty morning on my way to school. I first heard it on my headphones on the morning school bus, on the radio of my Walkman (the radio used far less battery than the actual cassette player did, so I generally listened to it on the bus ride so that people would leave me alone and I wouldn't be left with my thoughts).
While I had started playing intramural stuff in 1995, in 1996 I was playing on what was basically the jr. varsity (they didn't call it that; I can't remember what they called it) football team, defensive line. At my school, the jr. varsity team was basically training and a lot of practice for the actual team -- it was a loose team of what amounted to 3rd and 4th stringers, and as such we didn't play actual games for or on an actual team; if someone got hurt or they needed to fill a position because someone had gone out of town on vacation or got the flu or something, they'd call in one of us. Our job was to be trained up and ready to jump in when the actual "varsity" team needed it. Well, as defensive line, that didn't really happen for me, as I was one of the super-low-demand positions. So while I practiced a lot, and while I was ready to be called up, it didn't happen. I got to keep the jersey, though (I was probably supposed to give it back, but fuck 'em); my number was 15. I was wearing my jersey that year in my school ID picture, which I found and showed the wife a few months back. Some early snowstorms ended the football season a bit prematurely, as well as canceled our holiday choir concert -- something I was infinitely grateful for.
I turned 14 in 1996, and as such I was left to my own devices a lot around the house. My dad, who by this time had been in a relationship with my mother for a little over two years, lived conveniently about 1/4 mile from our new house, close enough to walk to if necessary with no real issue. My dad was (well, is to this day to some extent) a musician, and his band played shows every weekend around town at bars, resorts, and restaurants. My mother, of course, attended these shows without fail, and would generally spend the night "across the street" as I used to call it, at my dad's place at the end of the night. This was fine; it's not like I didn't know where she was and it's not like I wasn't taken care of. The band generally played 8-12, or 9-1, something like that -- meaning they'd take an hour or two to tear down and pack up afterwards, and that meant that my parents wouldn't get home until 2-4 in the morning (depending on venue). While I could've gone to see the band play at pretty much any time or place for these events -- I had the equivalent of a "backstage pass" so so speak, since I was "with the band," I didn't usually do so until I was much older, and only then very infrequently (probably less than ten times over the course of six or seven years).
Despite that, 1996 was the year I started paying attention to music and actually caring about it, and that was spurred on mainly by two things -- the first being the group of friends I fell in with, and the second being the internet. Because our middle school was full of trash people, I became friends with the outcasts, the people who didn't fit into any of the other cliques around the school -- because there were a lot of those. There were the rich kids/the preps, the thugs and troublemakers, the band geeks, the stoners, the poors, the untouchably gorgeous, the teachers' pets, the military brats, the jocks, etc -- I could go on, but most schools had the same sorts of cliques and groups -- mine was no different than the usual. My group of friends came from all walks of life and sort of reminds me now of the kids from Stranger Things, just the 90s version. We called ourselves, self-deprecating as it was, the Freaks.
There were a decent number of us in our core group. There was me, then Carl, who claimed he had a metal plate in his head; Adam, the muscle and sort of the de-facto leader of the group; Anthony, a sort of shaggy and mostly quiet nerd; Ron, the token black guy who was intimidating to outsiders but friendly and soft-spoken with friends; Ahmed, who drew some of the most beautiful comic art I'd ever seen; Paul, the class clown with a troubled home life; Heather, the nerd girl; John, the other end of the muscle -- a big nerd who had been a bully (ironically) to keep other people from bullying him; Stephen, a music and comic nerd whose sister was one of the most attractive girls in the school; and, finally, Chris -- the jock nerd who played on the football team but also loved playing Magic: The Gathering. Most of us were from the wrong side of the proverbial tracks, most of us came from low-income households, and all of us had pretty much been outcast or otherwise didn't fit in with anyone else in the school. We kept to ourselves and played Magic, D&D, and the Palladium tabletop games (primarily Rifts and Robotech) to keep outside of the attention of others.
Almost 25 years later I am still in contact with most of these folks, or rekindled contact with them after a number of years -- Adam, Carl, and Chris are all happily married with children. Carl has six kids, and I did not find out until two months ago that he does not, in fact, have a metal plate in his head. Chris became a high school football star and eventually ended up playing for WVU before settling down with a wife and child. Anthony is in Hawaii and is about to marry an acquaintance of mine, and Ron is still Ron. However, a good number of these people I would fall out of contact with either in high school or shortly afterwards. Paul I didn't see again until college, when he told me he was an electrician. Heather got in some trouble with the law, and sort of fell off our radar; the next time I saw her, I was most of the way through college and she was working at the deli counter of a local grocery store. Ahmed went into computer engineering and dropped off the face of the internet after around 2005 or so, and I've not been in contact with him since. Stephen went into the military at some point, and I lost contact with him around that time -- but his hot sister became a stripper. Finally, on a more sad note, a year or so after I left Morgantown, John committed suicide.
But I'm getting off track.
As mentioned, 1996 was the year I started really paying attention to music, and not just the stuff that was on the radio. Having a dad who was a musician -- in a band full of musicians we were family friends with --opened me up to a lot of stuff I would have otherwise never known about -- Jeff Beck, Frank Zappa, Tower of Power, Rush, Steely Dan, Genesis, Chicago -- etc. My brother (my dad's son) opened me up to more alternative, punk, metal, and industrial music, as well -- Front Line Assembly, Soundgarden, Ministry, NOFX, and the Misfits. My neighbor Stuart was a goth kid, two years older than me, and he introduced me to KMFDM, Bauhaus, Joy Division, and Depeche Mode. I branched out and began forming my own musical tastes as well based on what my friends were listening to -- I finally discovered bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Green Day, and suddenly I had an escape. Suddenly I could disappear into music, I could let my problems and boredom melt away. I soon found myself listening to the local college radio station at all hours, writing down the names of songs and artists I really liked on scratch paper when they mentioned them. This is how I discovered R.E.M., Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Echo and the Bunnymen. When I found someone I really liked, I would look them up and read all about them on...the internet.
Ah yes, the internet.
Words cannot describe here what the internet did for me as a teenager, or as a person in general, really. As a Black Friday deal in 1996, for $999 at Walmart, my mother purchased my very first computer for me. I remember it like yesterday -- it was an AST Advantage 575, the very model pictured below:
It ran Windows 95 first edition, had 8MB RAM, a 600MB hard drive, an 8X CD-ROM drive, a 3.5 floppy, and had a blistering fast 75mhz Pentium 1 processor. Oh, and a 14.4 modem.
Yes folks, that's how old I am -- my first computer had a 14.4 modem. Not a 28.8 or a 56k, but a piddly 14.4.
It also came with a printer that very quickly ran out of ink, and even in the 90s the ink cartridges cost $50.
The computer was purchased for me (primarily) so that I could type up papers and do other schoolwork on it, and very shortly after buying it (less than a month) my mother got me an internet account -- $14.95 a month for 30 hours per month of dial-up access via WVNET, a local company that, as you can see, still exists in some form back home. 30 hours per month! Can you imagine being that limited?
For those of you who are too young to remember, or who didn't have internet access at home until later in life, 1996 was literally the infancy of the internet. HTML would crash webpages. Pictures were a novelty and took forever to load on a dial-up connection -- the vast majority of the internet was mostly text-only with the occasional fancy background or weblink thrown in. There was no Google. There was no Youtube. There was no online gaming. Chatrooms were a completely new thing. There were few forums and no Reddit, only Usenet and newsgroups. MP3s and streaming did not exist. Jeff Bezos had just founded Amazon and nobody knew what it was yet. My web browser was Netscape 1.1. It was a new age that had just started, and finally I was (sort of) a leg up on most other people I knew -- I knew almost nobody who had internet at home, and I knew very few people who even had computers at home. Mind you, this was the mid-90s in rural West Virginia; a computer was some fancy rich people shit that at the time, appeared to be wholly unnecessary for home life.
To me, it was another escape. Online, I could be anybody, I could do anything. I had almost any information I wanted at a keystroke, and who cared if it took five minutes to boot the computer, another three or four to fire up telnet and manually dial into the internet with my modem, watching the text-only prompts on the screen saying "connected" only to be booted offline if someone called the house phone (or if my mother in the other room wanted to make a call).
The computer was set up on an end table in what, at that time, was the spare bedroom that nobody used -- it was set up there because there was already a phone jack in the wall there, when there wasn't one in my bedroom. Slowly, over the course of a few weeks and months, I moved into the smaller bedroom with my computer in it. It became my Batcave, my Fortress of Solitude. Through the CD-ROM drive I could finally play games and listen to music that I liked, and because of the internet I had enough distractions to where I no longer felt completely alone in the world.
1996 ended gracefully enough, and things were starting to look better, despite some of the events going on in the world. One of those nights when I was off school in the summer, up late watching TV and drawing some comic book art, I watched the Atlanta Olympics bombing on live television. I remember waking my mother up to tell her. She was less than enthused. I remember Christmas 1996 being filled with peace and settling down into a groove that would dominate the next two years or so for the most part, and thinking back on it now, I can't tell you what I'd give to have those times back, to be able to relive that year knowing what I know now. Things were so much simpler, so much easier.
1997: Princess Diana Died In A Car Accident While Being Chased By Paparazzi
The night Princess Diana died, in August 1997, my mother and I were watching live coverage on CNN. I remember it being a school night, and that I was up very late -- 1 or 2am -- when they made the official announcement. My mother always had, I felt, a connection of sorts to the royals -- she and my father got married shortly before Diana and Charles had, and Diana had given birth to Prince William while she was pregnant with me. They were almost the same age (Diana was about a year or so younger than my mother) and my mother even looked quite a bit like Diana -- blonde, usually short-haired, with piercing blue eyes. Diana may have been the closest figure my mother had to a true role model, and Diana's death upset her. I, of course, knew who Princess Diana was but knew little else about the family or about the royals in general.
The mid to late '90s were a weird time, friends. I was beginning to slowly come of age, beginning to realize the events of the world around me, and I was finally becoming what one might call "a normal teenager." With the internet to occupy me and help me out, my grades in school drastically improved; by the end of my 8th grade year I was back to my old ways of A's and B's. With music, I could center myself, and when I wasn't in school, I had hobbies -- I was starting to deeply get into anime, I played Magic: The Gathering, and I was, ahem, starting to notice girls. I mean, I'd always noticed girls before, but puberty was over at this point and I had become the quintessential horny teenager. I was 14, almost 15, and I wanted to date. I wanted to feel a connection with someone. I wanted to feel romance and passion and sex.
Precisely none of these things happened. I was still the fat geek who collected comic books, played Magic with the rest of the Freaks at school and watched anime on a 20-inch tube TV with a VCR balanced precariously on top of it. But, thanks to a Sailor Moon fan website chatroom (I know, I know) I did connect with a girl my age in New York named Cathy. We became very close and began an online, long-distance relationship. She is, to this day, probably my oldest friend -- we are still in sporadic contact, we are friends on Facebook, and she remains in New York, married with a son who at this point has to almost be a teenager himself.
Cathy took up a lot of my time. This was not a bad thing; I was able to, through my relationship with her, learn how to interact with the opposite sex. I apparently had a natural charm -- I could woo almost any woman with my words -- and I began to learn how to hone that craft. Cathy and I would be on again, off again for several years, up to and throughout all of our high school years. To this day, we have never met in person and I am sure 22 years later, I am little more than an afterthought or a footnote in her relationship history. But, I'm sure, I could call her at any given moment and we'd pick our friendship back up like nothing had changed.
Diana's death was a big news story for me, but it wasn't the biggest that year -- the biggest and most historically significant event I experienced in 1997 was the passing of the Hale-Bopp comet. It could be seen in 1996, of course, and it was up there and people were talking about it, but in 1997 it exploded across the sky and was very brightly visible for several months -- it was, to this day, one of the most spectacular things I have ever seen. For those of you who weren't alive or are too young to remember, this comet was a big deal. As soon as it started to get dark at night, it became the brightest thing in the sky and your eyes were immediately drawn to it. I remember many nights outside, and probably many mosquito bites obtained, while staring at this comet. It was Hale-Bopp that got me more into science, more into wanting to know what was out there and why. When the Heaven's Gate cult killed themselves over it, the comet became even more intriguing -- and when it began fading from view and eventually disappeared, I felt a wave of abject sadness slowly set in.
1997 gave me my first job and my first real, well, spending money. My neighbor in the house behind me, Jacob, was the local paperboy. His parents also went away on vacation in the summer for two months straight, and he went with them -- meaning they needed to find someone who could deliver newspapers in the area. I was that somebody. I was paid $75 a month -- half upon them leaving and half upon them getting back -- and to me, who came from nothing, that was a hell of a lot of money.
The papers were dropped off at the house between 2 and 3AM every night. Me, being primarily nocturnal in the hot West Virginia summers when I was out of school, went to pick them up upon dropoff, looked at the daily instruction sheet (this would tell me whether I was to hold some people's papers for them or wouldn't be delivering them that day or what-have-you), then I would assemble them, wrap them, place them all into my super-oversized canvas messenger bag, and be out the door between 4:30 and 5. There were about 45 houses I delivered to, give or take, and that number increased to 65 or so on Sundays (which were, admittedly, awful to deal with). The route carried me around about four or five blocks, and was circular. After the first few days I figured out how to do it in the fastest and most efficient way, and could almost time myself to the minute when I'd get home based on when I left. Generally, I would get home right as my mother was getting up for the day, and if she hadn't already done so, I would make the morning coffee.
Walking the neighborhood on those early mornings wasn't just great exercise for me, who was at the time still a fat nerd, but it was peaceful. I got to see some beautiful meteors with long trails extending across the sky, would run into the occasional wildlife (usually deer, possum, or raccoon, though they never came after me or anything) and I wore out my tape of the Rocky Horror Show (stage recording) soundtrack by listening to it over and over on my walks. This is partially why I remember every lyric to every song to this day.
With the money I received from the paper route, at least some of it went towards getting a tie-dyed Millennium Falcon t-shirt and a pair of John Lennon round sunglasses. I wore the shirt for years until it fell apart in the mid-2000s, and the sunglasses I wore at least until I was in college, when they got bent up and the lens popped out of them.
The other milestone of 1997 for me was that I got my first black trench coat. This was before Columbine, mind you -- and I was one of the Freaks who also fit in with the goth kids and metalheads quite well. The coat became a second skin, and I was almost never seen without it (with the exception of the really hot summer months, anyway). Even after I got another one, a gray one, a year later, the black one was a staple of my wardrobe until after I graduated from college (mind you, I was in 8th grade when it was purchased) -- by then, it had developed large rips and wear holes (constant use plus, well, teenage growth spurts) and outdoor exposure had faded the black to a dark brown in many places. I finally parted with it sometime around 2006, and was sad to see it go.
Sunday, August 11, 2019
Places, part I
What was the biggest news story of the year you were born? [link]
Well, I mean, I was only born once, but for the years of my life I've been alive, I can at least tell you folks where I was and what I was doing when all of these other things happened. I was reading through this list a few nights ago, and that's what came to my mind as I was going through them -- where I was both physically and mentally, what was going on in my life, etc. So, as a writing exercise and to get my mind off of everything else going on in this godawful world right now, let's dive in.
1970-1981: I was, um, not alive yet.
1982: The Falklands War Between Argentina and the UK Began and Ended
Well okay then. I was born this year, and remember reading about this/hearing about this as a child, but it mattered little to me as a kid and, even as an adult, is sort of a historical footnote even now.
1983: Soviets Shot Down a South Korea Commercial Airliner, Igniting Controversy
I didn't know anything about this, but in 1983 I was still a baby, living with my parents in West Virginia in a small house about 20 miles west of Morgantown (where my actual father still lives to this day, honestly). Also, sometime in the spring of this year, my mother saw a UFO -- the story of her sighting is for another time, but it is historically significant to the person I would become as I got older (more on this later). I promise my memories of these things will get more interesting as these go on.
1984: Apple Macintosh Went On Sale With the Iconic "1984" Commercial
I sort of refuse to believe this was the biggest news story of 1984. I mean, Ghostbusters came out in 1984, and the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles had a guy with a legit fucking jetpack flying around, and the biggest story is that Apple put out the Mac? Wasn't there a presidential election in 1984, where Reagan got re-elected? 1984 is the first year I remember having real memories that I can recall even now. I went to Virginia Beach for the first time in summer 1984 -- with my parents, my aunt (who had just graduated high school), and my aunt's friend Polly -- it rained most of the time we were there, and I remember watching it rain in the streetlights of the boardwalk there. I grabbed a clam shell off the beach, which my mother still has to this day; it is filled with marbles and is a display piece on the back of the toilet in my parents' house.
1985: Mikhail Gorbachev Became The Last Leader Of The Soviet Union, And Initiated Glasnost And Perestroika
Okay, so I suppose this is a real news story with historical significance. As a child I didn't really have any idea what a Soviet was, nor did I know about the Cold War or anything else. In 1985, Back to the Future came out, and it cemented my love of the DeLorean from that point forward. 1985 also marks the milestone of me being able to remember stuff I watched on television of a child -- I was a big fan of Transformers, Knight Rider (in its 3rd season at this point, and the theme of my birthday cake that year), and was the year I can remember I started paying attention to the pop-culture things that would later shape my life -- movies, music, and so on. I remember HBO in 1985, seeing movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Superman for the first time, even if they were a few years old at that point. I remember summer nights, trips to Idlewild Park, birthday parties for my cousins, and my mother's 1984 silver Pontiac Grand Am. Jesus that car was a piece of shit, but it was better than the rustbucket Malaise-era Dodge Aspen she was driving before that. My father, doing well enough in his job to be able to afford an actual vehicle, bought a brand new Jeep Cherokee, getting rid of his Ford Ranger that constantly had problems.
1986: The Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster Occurred, And The Radiation Affected Thousands
Agreed, probably the biggest news story of the year, and around this time my life began to get more interesting. In January 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger exploded -- I watched this happen live on television with my grandmother, who took care of me in the daytime hours when my parents were at work. I remember watching Donahue with my uncle, who lived with my grandmother at the time, and I remember weekend grocery shopping trips with the two of them to Waynesburg, PA. I remember Muppet Babies, He-Man, and Top Gun, and remember how excited I was to get toys from The Real Ghostbusters, which premiered that year -- my mother got me the Slimer figure, while my grandmother got me Ecto-1 (I had to wait for this for a while, because I remember it was $20, and that was a lot of money back in the '80s). I spent the year collecting the individual Ghostbusters one by one until I had the full set. I remember my father, who worked in the coal mines, went on strike that year -- and began selling Kirby vacuums door-to-door (it was, of course, a time before the internet). I would, occasionally, accompany him on his journeys. It was also around this time when I began to be cognizant of some, ahem, problems between my parents, as well. For my birthday that year, my mother bought me my very first cat -- a smoke Persian I named, interestingly enough, Priscilla.
1987: On Black Monday, Wall Street And Worldwide Stocks Crashed, Changing Trading Techniques For Everyone
Yeah, this happened, of course -- but 1987 was a very formative year for me in many ways. 1987 would be the year that began to shape who I was for the rest of my life. For one, my parents divorced in 1987 -- I chose to live with my mother, and we moved into an apartment in the small town in which she (and I, to a certain extent) grew up. I was mathematically too young for Kindergarten -- I was born in December, and the cutoff was September -- but I was put into a "head start" class that year, and was given an IQ test that said I was a certifiable genius, to the point where my parents were called at work to be given the news. Even at that young of an age, I was reading and understanding (thanks to my grandmother basically teaching me how) and I knew I wanted to become a creator of things -- for some reason I was always drawn to comic books and superheroes and sci-fi concepts. I remember a lot of weird times, things that don't really make sense as an adult -- such as, why did I spend so much time with my grandmother and my uncle, all sorts of overnights and almost every day spent at my grandmother's house to the point where it seemed almost 24/7? My mother was working at a dentist's office in Morgantown at the time, my father still in the mines and living (mostly) alone with the cat -- I understand I was in Head Start for a lot of it, but there aren't a lot of memories from that time that involve being at home. Looking back on it now, it seems like my grandmother and uncle basically raised me for a good chunk of my childhood's younger years, not my parents. Winter 1987 also marks a cornerstone moment in my life -- when I had my first major close encounter with a UFO, also witnessed by my two cousins, their mother (my aunt), and my grandmother. That is, of course, a story for another time, but it is one of my life's only events that cannot be rationally explained away, and something that (I believe) helped shape me into an atheist/scientist years later -- there's not a "god" out there, but something is out there somewhere. Also of note -- 1987 is the year of my first and so far only major surgery, when I had my adenoids removed and had tubes put in my ears in an attempt to stop my chronic ear infections (which to this day, I still have some pretty significant hearing loss from). I can pinpoint it to 1987 because we were still living in the apartment at the time...which was right next to the volunteer fire station. The fire siren going off caused me extreme pain because all sounds are amplified when your eardrums are literally being held open by tubes.
1988: Alleged Terrorists Bombed A Pan Am 747 Above Scotland, Killing 270
Well, here it is -- the first event on this list where I can tell you exactly where I was when it happened: I was being babysat after Kindergarten that day by our former neighbors, Josephine and Frank (both of whom are probably dead now, sadly -- our family didn't keep in contact with them that closely after the 80s) and was downstairs in their basement playing with their kids (Shawn and Angel) and their toys, and I remember it being right before Christmas (a date search confirms this; the Lockerbie bombing was December 21, 1988) because all of their decorations/tree was up. I remember it being talked about on the news and I remember Josephine discussing it with my mother, though I don't remember why she was babysitting me -- she only watched me a few times, and my mother and I were living in Morgantown by that time in a trailer park, where our neighbor Nancy watched me after I would get off school for the day -- perhaps Nancy and/or her family were out of town or something, who knows. I had just turned six, and that weekend my mother would hold a birthday party for me that nobody would attend, not one single person. She made me a chocolate-frosted cake with red gel lettering on it, and nobody came to eat it. This was also the year that we had the long-talked-about "Christmas bush," as our tree was short and fat, and looked like, well, a bush.
I was in Kindergarten in two places in 1988 -- Wadestown Elementary for the start of it, as we were still not living in Morgantown at that time, and I remember being there during the 1988 presidential election where the school had an "election day" thing going on where all of us kids would "vote" (I remember voting for Dukakis) and then, after moving to Morgantown -- apparently sometime between election day and my birthday -- I would attend Woodland "elementary," which was a one-room school for Kindergarten only, on its last year of being open, for the rest of 1988 and the first half of 1989. Also of note -- 1988 is the year I saw my first two movies in the theater, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? with my mother and The Land Before Time with my father, and it is the year my wife was born, the young whippersnapper she is. My mother also began working part time for a car dealership and was able to upgrade from her shitty Grand Am (I really hope that thing hit a crusher shortly thereafter) to a beautiful, ocean blue 1988 Cavalier Z24 -- still my favorite vehicle my mother has ever owned:
Hot damn that was a cool, fast car, and damn me for not appreciating it until much later in life.
1989: The Berlin Wall Fell, Changing Germany's Political And Physical Landscape
On November 9, 1989, I was in Mrs. Arnett's first grade class at Easton Elementary (another school which no longer exists and was torn town a few years back) and watched this event live on television during the school day. They brought large televisions out on carts into the school's common areas and we watched the wall fall. Thirteen years later, when I was in college, an acquaintance had a brick-sized chunk of the wall (with a certificate of authentation and everything) and broke pieces of it off for some of us to keep. I still have my piece of the Berlin Wall, flecked with spraypaint from the graffiti on it, and it is one of my most prized possessions -- it is a literal piece of history. At the time, I knew the wall coming down was a significant event, but I didn't know why or for what reasons. 1989 was a weird year -- we moved into our second trailer in the same park, and we were struggling financially. My mother never made a big deal about it (she really never said a word about it to me, and I wouldn't really have understood anyway), but it was evident. My clothes were ratty and worn out, and we were barely making ends meet -- still, every Friday night she took me to McDonald's for a Happy Meal as a treat, and she did everything she could to give me a relatively normal life. She flew down to Bradenton, Florida that year for a job interview -- the only time to my knowledge that my mother has ever flown anywhere -- and, while I've written about it before, I can't imagine how much my life would be different if she'd gotten/accepted that job. For those of you who remember, 1989 was the first real year of the back-to-back summer blockbuster movies, and one of the greatest years in summer movie history -- Ghostbusters II, Batman, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade all came out within mere weeks of one another. I was a huge Ghostbusters fan, and my mother took me to see Ghostbusters II in the theater during opening week -- I remember how hot it was that week, and I remember I was wearing my $2-discount-store Ghostbusters II t-shirt to the movie. My father remarried, and I was in the wedding as the ring bearer, my rented tuxedo ill-fitting and uncomfortable. I would see Honey, I Shrunk the Kids in the theater with my daycare's Summer Program -- the same daycare I would hunker down in a week after my father's wedding with two other kids and the staff as Hurricane Hugo rolled its way up the coast and plowed into West Virginia pretty hard on its path:
That was fun.
I remember cuddling up with my mother on hand-me-down furniture in our trailer in the winter, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on WPTT-22 out of Pittsburgh. I remember the winter was cold and wet.
1990: The Gulf War Started, And Coalition Forces Moved To Defend Kuwait From Iraq
1990 was weird, man. Most of the 90s were. 1990 was the beginning of a new decade and a new way of thinking for a lot of the country. I remember a lot of day-glo clothing and parachute pants, I remember COPS and America's Most Wanted on Fox -- which, through Fox 53 out of Pittsburgh, was just beginning to reach people in West Virginia. I do not remember the day the Gulf War started, but I do remember talking about it in my 2nd grade class with Mr. Steel. I remember spending time in the tiny library at my school, reading ghost stories and stories about UFOs (I told you, my experiences really began to shape my life, and this was the beginning of it). In the summer of that year, while I was spending the weekend with my grandmother and uncle (another recurring theme of my life, as you may have noticed at this point) my mother eloped and married her second husband -- this was a mistake all around, which she and I would both pay for many times over for the next four years. I did not like this man. I did not like the way he treated me or my mother over those years, and the less said about him, the better. I did have one of the better pictures taken of me in 1990, though:
Yeah, I know. I was cute once. I have no idea what the hell happened.
1991: South Africa Officially Repealed The Racist Apartheid Policy
I am not sure this is the biggest news story of 1991, as in backwoods West Virginia, South Africa was not really at the forefront of most people's social consciousnesses. Rather, for me, 1991 was a big year of big changes -- the Gulf War ending in February meant that my elementary school, at the bottom of the hill that the city airport sat on top of, got to see the massive C-130s flying in bringing the troops home, and seeing some of those returned troops come down to the school to see their children shortly after landing was a big deal. 1991 saw my first summer with the National Youth Sports Program (NYSP), which always gave me something to do and helped me remain active, and my mother and stepfather bought a house in the rich-white-people part of Morgantown known as Cheat Lake -- where I would live for three more years in a room wallpapered with ice-cream cones and hearts (simply because it was much bigger than the other, spare bedroom).
With a move to a new house came a move to a new school, Oak Grove Elementary -- another school on its last year of life while the newer, larger Cheat Lake Elementary was being built. My teacher was a wonderful, very large woman named Mrs. Weber, who even long after I was her student she would stay in contact with me and my family. She also liked to put bright red lipstick on and kiss her students' papers and cheeks, leaving a big kiss print (imagine a teacher in 2019 doing that without getting fired). I really liked her -- she had passion, she cared about her students. She was one of the best teachers I've ever had.
My mother began working at WVU in 1991, where I would myself begin working and attend college ten years later. In March, my stepmother gave birth to my oldest sister, and I was there in the hospital with her and my father that night when she was born. I watched my Pittsburgh Penguins win the Stanley Cup versus the (at the time) Minnesota North Stars. In June, I would accompany my stepfather's parents on a cross-country vacation all the way out to South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, and finally Idaho, where my stepfather's brother's family lived. On that trip I would see many things for the first time -- massive herds of pronghorn, Devil's Tower, Mount Rushmore, and Yellowstone National Park, amongst other things. I would spend two weeks in Twin Falls, Idaho, where I was able to see Shoshone Falls and go over the Perrine Bridge -- I took many photos of all of these things on a little red 110-film camera (yeah, this was a long time ago, folks) which were developed and later lost to history. I wish I still had those photos.
Also of note, during that trip I came the closest I've actually physically been to a tornado, ironically enough, in Nebraska -- while traveling. It was crossing a field next to the road (I'm guessing I-80) and was about 1/4 mile from the car as we were driving. Even after living in the midwest for thirteen years and in Nebraska for five, I have never been as close to a tornado since.
1992: Riots Erupted In Los Angeles, CA, After Footage Showed Police Mercilessly Beating Rodney King
1992 was a really strange time. Grunge was beginning to take hold, as was hip-hop, and glitzy pop acts and hair metal bands were disappearing from the radio to be replaced with that type of music as well as what is now considered modern alternative. I also began to really get into comic books -- drawing as well as reading/collecting them, thanks to (again) weekend shopping trips with my uncle and his spending $10-15 on me every time I went so I could get the latest Marvel and DC books -- this would continue for the next five or six years, really. I remember the L.A. riots and watching them on television, not knowing that they'd be the first of many or that they would signal the beginning of the downfall of our society over the next 25 years or so. I was, again, a white kid in West Virginia, one of the poor kids living in a rich white school district, and there were maybe fifteen black kids in my entire 1500-or-so school. I remember my first school dances where I was not afraid or nervous to dance with girls in my class as well as some older/younger ones, and I remember seeing my Pittsburgh Penguins win the Stanley Cup again, this time against the Chicago Blackhawks. I later saw Batman Returns in the theater that summer, by myself (it may have been the first movie I ever saw in a theater by myself, actually), and watched a father and son down the aisle spending quality time together, the father showering upon the son Batman-themed gifts and shirts and all sorts of things. I remember, while watching that, how I wished my father actually gave a damn about me and did stuff like that for me. I was already retreating inward into myself by this time -- I was fat and was getting bullied for it quite a bit, I never really fit in at the rich-white-kids-school, and with his new daughter taking up a lot of his time and energy, I began to see my father less and less. Around Christmas of that year I was told upon my visit to my father's house that I would need to take with me whatever I wanted to keep, because none of it would be left there the next time I came back -- and she was right; whatever I had left behind had been thrown away by the time I returned to visit the next summer.
1993: The Waco Siege Of Branch Davidian Cultists Ended In Bloodshed
This is easily the biggest news story of 1993 at least on a national level, but during the almost two-month siege on Koresh's compound in Texas, the two biggest events of 1993 for me happened one after the other. The first one was the birth of my second sister, in early March. This time I was not present at the hospital -- my father didn't even call me to let me know until the next day or the day after, and it was postulated by my asshole former stepfather at the time that it was because of how little I mattered to my father because he now had two new kids to care about (something that, really, seemed to end up being true the more time went on). The second biggest event of the year for me happened a week and a half later, roughly -- the Blizzard of 1993. They called it the "Storm of the Century" and it dumped over three feet of snow on my part of West Virginia. Roads were impassable, if you could even tell where they were. Power was out in many places. Home doors were snowed shut and people were trapped in their houses. Almost everything completely shut down -- water mains had broken, so even if there was water, it had to be boiled before use. I was out of school for almost three full weeks. This was a time before the internet -- I didn't even own a computer -- there was very little to do. I had never seen weather like this, had never seen snow this bad. When schools reopened and stuff started getting back to normal in West Virginia, the raid on the Waco compound was but a blip on the radar.
At home, there was a lot going on in 1993. My mother and stepfather decided to take a beach vacation to Myrtle Beach, and I went with; it was the only time I'd ever been to Myrtle Beach and I have not returned since. I remember it was very, very hot and I got a particularly awful sunburn. I also remember someone getting killed on one of the roller coasters at the amusement park down there when we were there, and being knocked down either by a large fish or a small shark in waist-deep water shortly before the beach lifeguards ordered everyone out of the water as sharks had been spotted. I got a t-shirt from one of the surf shops on the beach for $5, and wore it for many years afterwards until it completely fell apart. I also didn't know it at the time, but my mother and stepfather were on the outs with one another, and that summer began what seemed like a year-long sliding scale downward into the end of their marriage. Thankfully. By the end of the year, my mother and I would be (mostly) living alone, as my stepfather had left the house by that time.
The month of August 1993 was the last time I would spend any time with my father, and it was a turning point in my life. The mines were on strike again, a long, drawn-out strike this time, and I always spent several weeks with my father in August. This time around he seemed like a completely different person -- mostly distant and angered by his job (or lack of one, really, during the strike); he'd picked up smoking, something he'd never done before -- Salem menthols, which I remember because later, when I was a smoker, Salems were always my own menthols of choice -- and my presence seemed to be fairly bothersome a lot of the time I was there. Consequently, I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's house (again, recurring theme of my childhood). As the new baby had come, I no longer had a room in my father's house -- that's why my stepmother had told me to take everything with me upon my previous visit, but never said why -- my bedroom had been gutted and made into my oldest sister's room, with her old room now being the baby's room. As such, I literally spent those weeks sleeping on the couch in the living room with what few belongings I had shoved into the corner. When I had a severe allergic reaction to something in the house and broke out in horrifying hives and a skin rash, as well as the soles of my feet cracking and bleeding, my father took me to the doctor to get some foot salve and once more dumped me on my grandmother to deal with.
That summer, my grandmother's 20-year-old cat died, and lightning struck down the massive sugar maple tree about 100 yards from the house. The day the cat died, we had one of the worst thunderstorms I've ever seen in my life, and it marked the last time I would ever see my father for more than five minutes until I was an adult. I would never spend any time with either of my sisters in person again, either -- to this day.
1994: Nelson Mandela Was Elected President Of South Africa After Decades Of Imprisonment
This is NOT the biggest news story of 1994. By 1994, my life was in its first of many downward spirals. I was failing 5th grade (I had just stopped caring about school, and while I still went, it was primarily to trade comic books with my few friends and kill time the rest of the day). I don't know there was a single class I passed that year, but because of West Virginia's glorious school system, I was pushed along to 6th grade anyway for the fall. I was having a lot of emotional problems that I mostly kept to myself, and had a hard time opening up to anyone.
The first biggest news event I can recall is on a cold morning in January -- I had walked home that morning after spending the night at the home of a family friend, since my mother had been out late the night before, to turn on the news and find that the 1994 Northridge earthquake had struck Los Angeles. I did not have to go to school that morning -- a quick date search tells me that it was apparently Martin Luther King, Jr. Day that year -- and I remember laying in bed with my mother on that cold, gray morning, watching the news coverage.
A few short months later, on April 9, I had spent the night at my grandmother's (yes, I know) and went down to the road to get the morning paper. Unfolding it as I walked back up to the house, I was greeted with the news of Kurt Cobain's suicide. I knew of Nirvana at the time, of course, but really only in passing. Truthfully I was a little too young for the target demographic of grunge, and in the early 90s I wasn't paying close attention to music, really -- I hated country music (which is what the majority of West Virginia listened to) and if I had the radio on, it was on WVAQ, Morgantown's pop/top 40 station. Even then I didn't pay much attention to what it played. So, upon his death, I didn't really know who Cobain was, and wouldn't really discover his music for a few more years until I was exiting middle school and entering high school.
In the spring, my stepfather (who had been out of the picture for some time by that point anyway) would officially divorce my mother; when it was done, it was done -- I remember, from my own experience, that it was a very cordial, businesslike transaction. In the settlement he kept the house in Cheat Lake, and my mother and I moved across town to a large apartment building five minutes from her office; he and his friends even helped us move into said building. After that, he was gone from our lives, and I never saw him again (thankfully). With the move came a move to yet another new school for my 6th grade year only -- North Elementary. With that move also came new freedoms; I was eleven that summer, and was used to being on my own a lot of the time -- I was also too young for a job, so 1994 was my final year of the NYSP summer camp; I eventually just stopped going completely as I'd lost interest in it -- even though I was physically closer to it than ever. During this time, my mother met and began her relationship with the man I have referred to as my "dad" ever since, and while they are still together to this day, they have never married. I personally always thought that was because they didn't want to jinx it. He is, and has been ever since they've been together, the most consistent positive male role model in my life.
The mid-90s are weird for me because a lot of things blend together within them. I was, sort of, a latchkey kid left to my own devices for a lot of those years. I'd get up, go to school in the morning, come home while my mother was still at work, eat and watch TV, and go to bed a few hours afterwards. I really didn't have friends or any true social life, and until my birthday in 1994 I didn't even have any video games or anything to really occupy me -- that was the year that my mother bought me a Sega Genesis. Consequently, a lot of my memories of that time are of television and late-run movies when I couldn't sleep -- I watched the entire run of Gilligan's Island at least twice as it always seemed to be on TBS or TNT back in the 90s. I was a big fan of the Fox X-Men and Spider-Man cartoons, but that was also because I was a comic nerd. The original Power Rangers series was big around this time, and I was really into it -- I had a lot of the toys and several t-shirts, a bedding set, and various other odds-and-ends. I remember seeing Halloween and Halloween 2 for the first time on TNT's MonsterVision with Joe Bob Briggs, and remember how even he made fun of the overdubbed dialogue to make the movies TV-friendly. I saw the Star Wars trilogy for the first time when USA Network started running the films back-to-back on rainy weekends. On September 8, 1994, I was sitting down to watch that night's episode of Roseanne on WTAE-4 out of Pittsburgh when the programming was pre-empted by the news of USAir Flight 427 literally crashing in, well, Pittsburgh.
During the summer of 1994, once we were settled into our new apartment and had a newfound sense of freedom away from my former stepfather, my mother decided she wanted to do a road trip. This was sort of out of character for her, even then -- my mother has never really been the adventurous type, nor did she usually want to set out on any kinds of vacations (she was, after all, once more a single mother recently divorced, and we didn't have a ton of money to throw around -- that apartment we had was expensive). She decided she wanted to see Gettysburg and Amish country, bed and breakfasts and the like, through rural Pennsylvania. Okay, I thought, this could be interesting. So she took time off on a long weekend, we loaded some bags into her shiny, new, less-than-a-year-old 1993 Ford Probe and went to Gettysburg. While there, while walking the battlefields, my mother started feeling really weird -- unsettled, filled with dread, overcome with emotions of grief, panic, and fear. She'd later brush it off as heat exhaustion or being tired/dehydrated and didn't want to talk about it anymore -- indeed, the day was over 100 degrees and the car had nearly overheated during our drive at least once. After staying two nights at two different, unremarkable bed-and-breakfasts, we returned home, and the trip was rarely talked about afterwards.
Well, I mean, I was only born once, but for the years of my life I've been alive, I can at least tell you folks where I was and what I was doing when all of these other things happened. I was reading through this list a few nights ago, and that's what came to my mind as I was going through them -- where I was both physically and mentally, what was going on in my life, etc. So, as a writing exercise and to get my mind off of everything else going on in this godawful world right now, let's dive in.
1970-1981: I was, um, not alive yet.
1982: The Falklands War Between Argentina and the UK Began and Ended
Well okay then. I was born this year, and remember reading about this/hearing about this as a child, but it mattered little to me as a kid and, even as an adult, is sort of a historical footnote even now.
1983: Soviets Shot Down a South Korea Commercial Airliner, Igniting Controversy
I didn't know anything about this, but in 1983 I was still a baby, living with my parents in West Virginia in a small house about 20 miles west of Morgantown (where my actual father still lives to this day, honestly). Also, sometime in the spring of this year, my mother saw a UFO -- the story of her sighting is for another time, but it is historically significant to the person I would become as I got older (more on this later). I promise my memories of these things will get more interesting as these go on.
1984: Apple Macintosh Went On Sale With the Iconic "1984" Commercial
I sort of refuse to believe this was the biggest news story of 1984. I mean, Ghostbusters came out in 1984, and the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles had a guy with a legit fucking jetpack flying around, and the biggest story is that Apple put out the Mac? Wasn't there a presidential election in 1984, where Reagan got re-elected? 1984 is the first year I remember having real memories that I can recall even now. I went to Virginia Beach for the first time in summer 1984 -- with my parents, my aunt (who had just graduated high school), and my aunt's friend Polly -- it rained most of the time we were there, and I remember watching it rain in the streetlights of the boardwalk there. I grabbed a clam shell off the beach, which my mother still has to this day; it is filled with marbles and is a display piece on the back of the toilet in my parents' house.
1985: Mikhail Gorbachev Became The Last Leader Of The Soviet Union, And Initiated Glasnost And Perestroika
Okay, so I suppose this is a real news story with historical significance. As a child I didn't really have any idea what a Soviet was, nor did I know about the Cold War or anything else. In 1985, Back to the Future came out, and it cemented my love of the DeLorean from that point forward. 1985 also marks the milestone of me being able to remember stuff I watched on television of a child -- I was a big fan of Transformers, Knight Rider (in its 3rd season at this point, and the theme of my birthday cake that year), and was the year I can remember I started paying attention to the pop-culture things that would later shape my life -- movies, music, and so on. I remember HBO in 1985, seeing movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Superman for the first time, even if they were a few years old at that point. I remember summer nights, trips to Idlewild Park, birthday parties for my cousins, and my mother's 1984 silver Pontiac Grand Am. Jesus that car was a piece of shit, but it was better than the rustbucket Malaise-era Dodge Aspen she was driving before that. My father, doing well enough in his job to be able to afford an actual vehicle, bought a brand new Jeep Cherokee, getting rid of his Ford Ranger that constantly had problems.
1986: The Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster Occurred, And The Radiation Affected Thousands
Agreed, probably the biggest news story of the year, and around this time my life began to get more interesting. In January 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger exploded -- I watched this happen live on television with my grandmother, who took care of me in the daytime hours when my parents were at work. I remember watching Donahue with my uncle, who lived with my grandmother at the time, and I remember weekend grocery shopping trips with the two of them to Waynesburg, PA. I remember Muppet Babies, He-Man, and Top Gun, and remember how excited I was to get toys from The Real Ghostbusters, which premiered that year -- my mother got me the Slimer figure, while my grandmother got me Ecto-1 (I had to wait for this for a while, because I remember it was $20, and that was a lot of money back in the '80s). I spent the year collecting the individual Ghostbusters one by one until I had the full set. I remember my father, who worked in the coal mines, went on strike that year -- and began selling Kirby vacuums door-to-door (it was, of course, a time before the internet). I would, occasionally, accompany him on his journeys. It was also around this time when I began to be cognizant of some, ahem, problems between my parents, as well. For my birthday that year, my mother bought me my very first cat -- a smoke Persian I named, interestingly enough, Priscilla.
1987: On Black Monday, Wall Street And Worldwide Stocks Crashed, Changing Trading Techniques For Everyone
Yeah, this happened, of course -- but 1987 was a very formative year for me in many ways. 1987 would be the year that began to shape who I was for the rest of my life. For one, my parents divorced in 1987 -- I chose to live with my mother, and we moved into an apartment in the small town in which she (and I, to a certain extent) grew up. I was mathematically too young for Kindergarten -- I was born in December, and the cutoff was September -- but I was put into a "head start" class that year, and was given an IQ test that said I was a certifiable genius, to the point where my parents were called at work to be given the news. Even at that young of an age, I was reading and understanding (thanks to my grandmother basically teaching me how) and I knew I wanted to become a creator of things -- for some reason I was always drawn to comic books and superheroes and sci-fi concepts. I remember a lot of weird times, things that don't really make sense as an adult -- such as, why did I spend so much time with my grandmother and my uncle, all sorts of overnights and almost every day spent at my grandmother's house to the point where it seemed almost 24/7? My mother was working at a dentist's office in Morgantown at the time, my father still in the mines and living (mostly) alone with the cat -- I understand I was in Head Start for a lot of it, but there aren't a lot of memories from that time that involve being at home. Looking back on it now, it seems like my grandmother and uncle basically raised me for a good chunk of my childhood's younger years, not my parents. Winter 1987 also marks a cornerstone moment in my life -- when I had my first major close encounter with a UFO, also witnessed by my two cousins, their mother (my aunt), and my grandmother. That is, of course, a story for another time, but it is one of my life's only events that cannot be rationally explained away, and something that (I believe) helped shape me into an atheist/scientist years later -- there's not a "god" out there, but something is out there somewhere. Also of note -- 1987 is the year of my first and so far only major surgery, when I had my adenoids removed and had tubes put in my ears in an attempt to stop my chronic ear infections (which to this day, I still have some pretty significant hearing loss from). I can pinpoint it to 1987 because we were still living in the apartment at the time...which was right next to the volunteer fire station. The fire siren going off caused me extreme pain because all sounds are amplified when your eardrums are literally being held open by tubes.
1988: Alleged Terrorists Bombed A Pan Am 747 Above Scotland, Killing 270
Well, here it is -- the first event on this list where I can tell you exactly where I was when it happened: I was being babysat after Kindergarten that day by our former neighbors, Josephine and Frank (both of whom are probably dead now, sadly -- our family didn't keep in contact with them that closely after the 80s) and was downstairs in their basement playing with their kids (Shawn and Angel) and their toys, and I remember it being right before Christmas (a date search confirms this; the Lockerbie bombing was December 21, 1988) because all of their decorations/tree was up. I remember it being talked about on the news and I remember Josephine discussing it with my mother, though I don't remember why she was babysitting me -- she only watched me a few times, and my mother and I were living in Morgantown by that time in a trailer park, where our neighbor Nancy watched me after I would get off school for the day -- perhaps Nancy and/or her family were out of town or something, who knows. I had just turned six, and that weekend my mother would hold a birthday party for me that nobody would attend, not one single person. She made me a chocolate-frosted cake with red gel lettering on it, and nobody came to eat it. This was also the year that we had the long-talked-about "Christmas bush," as our tree was short and fat, and looked like, well, a bush.
I was in Kindergarten in two places in 1988 -- Wadestown Elementary for the start of it, as we were still not living in Morgantown at that time, and I remember being there during the 1988 presidential election where the school had an "election day" thing going on where all of us kids would "vote" (I remember voting for Dukakis) and then, after moving to Morgantown -- apparently sometime between election day and my birthday -- I would attend Woodland "elementary," which was a one-room school for Kindergarten only, on its last year of being open, for the rest of 1988 and the first half of 1989. Also of note -- 1988 is the year I saw my first two movies in the theater, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? with my mother and The Land Before Time with my father, and it is the year my wife was born, the young whippersnapper she is. My mother also began working part time for a car dealership and was able to upgrade from her shitty Grand Am (I really hope that thing hit a crusher shortly thereafter) to a beautiful, ocean blue 1988 Cavalier Z24 -- still my favorite vehicle my mother has ever owned:
Hot damn that was a cool, fast car, and damn me for not appreciating it until much later in life.
1989: The Berlin Wall Fell, Changing Germany's Political And Physical Landscape
On November 9, 1989, I was in Mrs. Arnett's first grade class at Easton Elementary (another school which no longer exists and was torn town a few years back) and watched this event live on television during the school day. They brought large televisions out on carts into the school's common areas and we watched the wall fall. Thirteen years later, when I was in college, an acquaintance had a brick-sized chunk of the wall (with a certificate of authentation and everything) and broke pieces of it off for some of us to keep. I still have my piece of the Berlin Wall, flecked with spraypaint from the graffiti on it, and it is one of my most prized possessions -- it is a literal piece of history. At the time, I knew the wall coming down was a significant event, but I didn't know why or for what reasons. 1989 was a weird year -- we moved into our second trailer in the same park, and we were struggling financially. My mother never made a big deal about it (she really never said a word about it to me, and I wouldn't really have understood anyway), but it was evident. My clothes were ratty and worn out, and we were barely making ends meet -- still, every Friday night she took me to McDonald's for a Happy Meal as a treat, and she did everything she could to give me a relatively normal life. She flew down to Bradenton, Florida that year for a job interview -- the only time to my knowledge that my mother has ever flown anywhere -- and, while I've written about it before, I can't imagine how much my life would be different if she'd gotten/accepted that job. For those of you who remember, 1989 was the first real year of the back-to-back summer blockbuster movies, and one of the greatest years in summer movie history -- Ghostbusters II, Batman, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade all came out within mere weeks of one another. I was a huge Ghostbusters fan, and my mother took me to see Ghostbusters II in the theater during opening week -- I remember how hot it was that week, and I remember I was wearing my $2-discount-store Ghostbusters II t-shirt to the movie. My father remarried, and I was in the wedding as the ring bearer, my rented tuxedo ill-fitting and uncomfortable. I would see Honey, I Shrunk the Kids in the theater with my daycare's Summer Program -- the same daycare I would hunker down in a week after my father's wedding with two other kids and the staff as Hurricane Hugo rolled its way up the coast and plowed into West Virginia pretty hard on its path:
That was fun.
I remember cuddling up with my mother on hand-me-down furniture in our trailer in the winter, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on WPTT-22 out of Pittsburgh. I remember the winter was cold and wet.
1990: The Gulf War Started, And Coalition Forces Moved To Defend Kuwait From Iraq
1990 was weird, man. Most of the 90s were. 1990 was the beginning of a new decade and a new way of thinking for a lot of the country. I remember a lot of day-glo clothing and parachute pants, I remember COPS and America's Most Wanted on Fox -- which, through Fox 53 out of Pittsburgh, was just beginning to reach people in West Virginia. I do not remember the day the Gulf War started, but I do remember talking about it in my 2nd grade class with Mr. Steel. I remember spending time in the tiny library at my school, reading ghost stories and stories about UFOs (I told you, my experiences really began to shape my life, and this was the beginning of it). In the summer of that year, while I was spending the weekend with my grandmother and uncle (another recurring theme of my life, as you may have noticed at this point) my mother eloped and married her second husband -- this was a mistake all around, which she and I would both pay for many times over for the next four years. I did not like this man. I did not like the way he treated me or my mother over those years, and the less said about him, the better. I did have one of the better pictures taken of me in 1990, though:
Yeah, I know. I was cute once. I have no idea what the hell happened.
1991: South Africa Officially Repealed The Racist Apartheid Policy
I am not sure this is the biggest news story of 1991, as in backwoods West Virginia, South Africa was not really at the forefront of most people's social consciousnesses. Rather, for me, 1991 was a big year of big changes -- the Gulf War ending in February meant that my elementary school, at the bottom of the hill that the city airport sat on top of, got to see the massive C-130s flying in bringing the troops home, and seeing some of those returned troops come down to the school to see their children shortly after landing was a big deal. 1991 saw my first summer with the National Youth Sports Program (NYSP), which always gave me something to do and helped me remain active, and my mother and stepfather bought a house in the rich-white-people part of Morgantown known as Cheat Lake -- where I would live for three more years in a room wallpapered with ice-cream cones and hearts (simply because it was much bigger than the other, spare bedroom).
With a move to a new house came a move to a new school, Oak Grove Elementary -- another school on its last year of life while the newer, larger Cheat Lake Elementary was being built. My teacher was a wonderful, very large woman named Mrs. Weber, who even long after I was her student she would stay in contact with me and my family. She also liked to put bright red lipstick on and kiss her students' papers and cheeks, leaving a big kiss print (imagine a teacher in 2019 doing that without getting fired). I really liked her -- she had passion, she cared about her students. She was one of the best teachers I've ever had.
My mother began working at WVU in 1991, where I would myself begin working and attend college ten years later. In March, my stepmother gave birth to my oldest sister, and I was there in the hospital with her and my father that night when she was born. I watched my Pittsburgh Penguins win the Stanley Cup versus the (at the time) Minnesota North Stars. In June, I would accompany my stepfather's parents on a cross-country vacation all the way out to South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, and finally Idaho, where my stepfather's brother's family lived. On that trip I would see many things for the first time -- massive herds of pronghorn, Devil's Tower, Mount Rushmore, and Yellowstone National Park, amongst other things. I would spend two weeks in Twin Falls, Idaho, where I was able to see Shoshone Falls and go over the Perrine Bridge -- I took many photos of all of these things on a little red 110-film camera (yeah, this was a long time ago, folks) which were developed and later lost to history. I wish I still had those photos.
Also of note, during that trip I came the closest I've actually physically been to a tornado, ironically enough, in Nebraska -- while traveling. It was crossing a field next to the road (I'm guessing I-80) and was about 1/4 mile from the car as we were driving. Even after living in the midwest for thirteen years and in Nebraska for five, I have never been as close to a tornado since.
1992: Riots Erupted In Los Angeles, CA, After Footage Showed Police Mercilessly Beating Rodney King
1992 was a really strange time. Grunge was beginning to take hold, as was hip-hop, and glitzy pop acts and hair metal bands were disappearing from the radio to be replaced with that type of music as well as what is now considered modern alternative. I also began to really get into comic books -- drawing as well as reading/collecting them, thanks to (again) weekend shopping trips with my uncle and his spending $10-15 on me every time I went so I could get the latest Marvel and DC books -- this would continue for the next five or six years, really. I remember the L.A. riots and watching them on television, not knowing that they'd be the first of many or that they would signal the beginning of the downfall of our society over the next 25 years or so. I was, again, a white kid in West Virginia, one of the poor kids living in a rich white school district, and there were maybe fifteen black kids in my entire 1500-or-so school. I remember my first school dances where I was not afraid or nervous to dance with girls in my class as well as some older/younger ones, and I remember seeing my Pittsburgh Penguins win the Stanley Cup again, this time against the Chicago Blackhawks. I later saw Batman Returns in the theater that summer, by myself (it may have been the first movie I ever saw in a theater by myself, actually), and watched a father and son down the aisle spending quality time together, the father showering upon the son Batman-themed gifts and shirts and all sorts of things. I remember, while watching that, how I wished my father actually gave a damn about me and did stuff like that for me. I was already retreating inward into myself by this time -- I was fat and was getting bullied for it quite a bit, I never really fit in at the rich-white-kids-school, and with his new daughter taking up a lot of his time and energy, I began to see my father less and less. Around Christmas of that year I was told upon my visit to my father's house that I would need to take with me whatever I wanted to keep, because none of it would be left there the next time I came back -- and she was right; whatever I had left behind had been thrown away by the time I returned to visit the next summer.
1993: The Waco Siege Of Branch Davidian Cultists Ended In Bloodshed
This is easily the biggest news story of 1993 at least on a national level, but during the almost two-month siege on Koresh's compound in Texas, the two biggest events of 1993 for me happened one after the other. The first one was the birth of my second sister, in early March. This time I was not present at the hospital -- my father didn't even call me to let me know until the next day or the day after, and it was postulated by my asshole former stepfather at the time that it was because of how little I mattered to my father because he now had two new kids to care about (something that, really, seemed to end up being true the more time went on). The second biggest event of the year for me happened a week and a half later, roughly -- the Blizzard of 1993. They called it the "Storm of the Century" and it dumped over three feet of snow on my part of West Virginia. Roads were impassable, if you could even tell where they were. Power was out in many places. Home doors were snowed shut and people were trapped in their houses. Almost everything completely shut down -- water mains had broken, so even if there was water, it had to be boiled before use. I was out of school for almost three full weeks. This was a time before the internet -- I didn't even own a computer -- there was very little to do. I had never seen weather like this, had never seen snow this bad. When schools reopened and stuff started getting back to normal in West Virginia, the raid on the Waco compound was but a blip on the radar.
At home, there was a lot going on in 1993. My mother and stepfather decided to take a beach vacation to Myrtle Beach, and I went with; it was the only time I'd ever been to Myrtle Beach and I have not returned since. I remember it was very, very hot and I got a particularly awful sunburn. I also remember someone getting killed on one of the roller coasters at the amusement park down there when we were there, and being knocked down either by a large fish or a small shark in waist-deep water shortly before the beach lifeguards ordered everyone out of the water as sharks had been spotted. I got a t-shirt from one of the surf shops on the beach for $5, and wore it for many years afterwards until it completely fell apart. I also didn't know it at the time, but my mother and stepfather were on the outs with one another, and that summer began what seemed like a year-long sliding scale downward into the end of their marriage. Thankfully. By the end of the year, my mother and I would be (mostly) living alone, as my stepfather had left the house by that time.
The month of August 1993 was the last time I would spend any time with my father, and it was a turning point in my life. The mines were on strike again, a long, drawn-out strike this time, and I always spent several weeks with my father in August. This time around he seemed like a completely different person -- mostly distant and angered by his job (or lack of one, really, during the strike); he'd picked up smoking, something he'd never done before -- Salem menthols, which I remember because later, when I was a smoker, Salems were always my own menthols of choice -- and my presence seemed to be fairly bothersome a lot of the time I was there. Consequently, I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's house (again, recurring theme of my childhood). As the new baby had come, I no longer had a room in my father's house -- that's why my stepmother had told me to take everything with me upon my previous visit, but never said why -- my bedroom had been gutted and made into my oldest sister's room, with her old room now being the baby's room. As such, I literally spent those weeks sleeping on the couch in the living room with what few belongings I had shoved into the corner. When I had a severe allergic reaction to something in the house and broke out in horrifying hives and a skin rash, as well as the soles of my feet cracking and bleeding, my father took me to the doctor to get some foot salve and once more dumped me on my grandmother to deal with.
That summer, my grandmother's 20-year-old cat died, and lightning struck down the massive sugar maple tree about 100 yards from the house. The day the cat died, we had one of the worst thunderstorms I've ever seen in my life, and it marked the last time I would ever see my father for more than five minutes until I was an adult. I would never spend any time with either of my sisters in person again, either -- to this day.
1994: Nelson Mandela Was Elected President Of South Africa After Decades Of Imprisonment
This is NOT the biggest news story of 1994. By 1994, my life was in its first of many downward spirals. I was failing 5th grade (I had just stopped caring about school, and while I still went, it was primarily to trade comic books with my few friends and kill time the rest of the day). I don't know there was a single class I passed that year, but because of West Virginia's glorious school system, I was pushed along to 6th grade anyway for the fall. I was having a lot of emotional problems that I mostly kept to myself, and had a hard time opening up to anyone.
The first biggest news event I can recall is on a cold morning in January -- I had walked home that morning after spending the night at the home of a family friend, since my mother had been out late the night before, to turn on the news and find that the 1994 Northridge earthquake had struck Los Angeles. I did not have to go to school that morning -- a quick date search tells me that it was apparently Martin Luther King, Jr. Day that year -- and I remember laying in bed with my mother on that cold, gray morning, watching the news coverage.
A few short months later, on April 9, I had spent the night at my grandmother's (yes, I know) and went down to the road to get the morning paper. Unfolding it as I walked back up to the house, I was greeted with the news of Kurt Cobain's suicide. I knew of Nirvana at the time, of course, but really only in passing. Truthfully I was a little too young for the target demographic of grunge, and in the early 90s I wasn't paying close attention to music, really -- I hated country music (which is what the majority of West Virginia listened to) and if I had the radio on, it was on WVAQ, Morgantown's pop/top 40 station. Even then I didn't pay much attention to what it played. So, upon his death, I didn't really know who Cobain was, and wouldn't really discover his music for a few more years until I was exiting middle school and entering high school.
In the spring, my stepfather (who had been out of the picture for some time by that point anyway) would officially divorce my mother; when it was done, it was done -- I remember, from my own experience, that it was a very cordial, businesslike transaction. In the settlement he kept the house in Cheat Lake, and my mother and I moved across town to a large apartment building five minutes from her office; he and his friends even helped us move into said building. After that, he was gone from our lives, and I never saw him again (thankfully). With the move came a move to yet another new school for my 6th grade year only -- North Elementary. With that move also came new freedoms; I was eleven that summer, and was used to being on my own a lot of the time -- I was also too young for a job, so 1994 was my final year of the NYSP summer camp; I eventually just stopped going completely as I'd lost interest in it -- even though I was physically closer to it than ever. During this time, my mother met and began her relationship with the man I have referred to as my "dad" ever since, and while they are still together to this day, they have never married. I personally always thought that was because they didn't want to jinx it. He is, and has been ever since they've been together, the most consistent positive male role model in my life.
The mid-90s are weird for me because a lot of things blend together within them. I was, sort of, a latchkey kid left to my own devices for a lot of those years. I'd get up, go to school in the morning, come home while my mother was still at work, eat and watch TV, and go to bed a few hours afterwards. I really didn't have friends or any true social life, and until my birthday in 1994 I didn't even have any video games or anything to really occupy me -- that was the year that my mother bought me a Sega Genesis. Consequently, a lot of my memories of that time are of television and late-run movies when I couldn't sleep -- I watched the entire run of Gilligan's Island at least twice as it always seemed to be on TBS or TNT back in the 90s. I was a big fan of the Fox X-Men and Spider-Man cartoons, but that was also because I was a comic nerd. The original Power Rangers series was big around this time, and I was really into it -- I had a lot of the toys and several t-shirts, a bedding set, and various other odds-and-ends. I remember seeing Halloween and Halloween 2 for the first time on TNT's MonsterVision with Joe Bob Briggs, and remember how even he made fun of the overdubbed dialogue to make the movies TV-friendly. I saw the Star Wars trilogy for the first time when USA Network started running the films back-to-back on rainy weekends. On September 8, 1994, I was sitting down to watch that night's episode of Roseanne on WTAE-4 out of Pittsburgh when the programming was pre-empted by the news of USAir Flight 427 literally crashing in, well, Pittsburgh.
During the summer of 1994, once we were settled into our new apartment and had a newfound sense of freedom away from my former stepfather, my mother decided she wanted to do a road trip. This was sort of out of character for her, even then -- my mother has never really been the adventurous type, nor did she usually want to set out on any kinds of vacations (she was, after all, once more a single mother recently divorced, and we didn't have a ton of money to throw around -- that apartment we had was expensive). She decided she wanted to see Gettysburg and Amish country, bed and breakfasts and the like, through rural Pennsylvania. Okay, I thought, this could be interesting. So she took time off on a long weekend, we loaded some bags into her shiny, new, less-than-a-year-old 1993 Ford Probe and went to Gettysburg. While there, while walking the battlefields, my mother started feeling really weird -- unsettled, filled with dread, overcome with emotions of grief, panic, and fear. She'd later brush it off as heat exhaustion or being tired/dehydrated and didn't want to talk about it anymore -- indeed, the day was over 100 degrees and the car had nearly overheated during our drive at least once. After staying two nights at two different, unremarkable bed-and-breakfasts, we returned home, and the trip was rarely talked about afterwards.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)