don't eat the dandelions:
2004-01-19 - 9:11 p.m.
a poem is / thoughts expressed / between expressions
Yesterday, spent 7 hours of reenacting the scene where Bambi wakes up and realizes he can walk on the pond. Only, slightly more downhillish. Abrasion gained on my upper right pelvic crest, hoo-rah. Went with Mitch, Mike (both of which had really never skied before) and Eric (who has been skiing since he was 3). By the end of the trip, Mitch was going down the hill rather stylishly, Mike was working on a string of not-falling-downs, and I was going about 70kph, but still crashin� like a mofo. Fun was had.
Enclosed are the memories I have kept, in my little tin box of childhood.
I made my dad stop the car, an emergency. I Slid off the seat and onto the road, to pick up a discarded cardboard box. He asked if i wanted to keep it. I reminded him that he had once told me that everyone should have their own day of the year to clean up the planet, for the planet to become clean, and then informed him that today was our day.
A girl named Mollie, who was fond of eating mucous extracted from her nasal passages, stole some stickers out of my desk. Somehow, I figured out who it was, and informed the teacher, but I didn�t really care about the stickers, they were just small plastic pictures (actually, I think I had a hard time telling the difference between stickers and stamps, except that when I was in school, you had to lick the back of stamps to make them stick, and thus, they tasted different).
A kid whose name started with D didn�t graduate kintergraten. Remember talking about why he stayed back and if it was a good solution to the situation, with my first grade teacher, who had misplaced part of her pinky finger, and was pregnant with a girl, later named Zoe.
In first grade, I discover a picture in the trash in crayon, a picture of two stick figures and �after a week of pondering, I feel that I�ve figured it out, and feel rather proud informing my male classmates that, logically, girls cannot also have dicks. the teacher does not find my reasoning funny, although she does not argue. She simply stated, rather loudly, that the science of human anatomy was not an appropriate subject in the classroom (or something to that effect, while I was re-explaining my reasoning to the principle). I return home to discover the �proper� names of these mechanisms. My spare time was spent writing a story with another kid in my class, Paker, about a mechanical wolf-man and a dragon who could change his size (and for short periods of time, his shape) who fought a plethora of evil-doers while listening to music from their boom-box. The story went it�s separate ways when we came to some argument about the plot change on the 102nd page, and so the story was never really finnished.
Wrote a short picture-book (one sentence combined with one picture on the opposite page) on monarch butterflies, in which all of my sentences started �The monarch butterfly�� . The first-grade teacher tells me it is bad practice to start sentences with the exact same words as another sentence. I take it home and rewrite it, and never write two similarly-starting sentences again, until my junior year of high school, in which I write a paper in honour to this particular style.
After years of building furniture-forts in our livingroom (with Sarah, while Sister watched TV and droned out) to hide from arguing parents, my parents got divorced. Mum eventually gets a new boyfriend, who thinks he believes strongly in discipline, but actually believes in abuse. I later find out that he and his brother (whom Mum later marries) had the shit beaten out of them on a regular basis, by their step-father, until they were old enough to move out of the house and resort to a life of burglary and selling weed.
In the several years that followed the divorce, I spent the weekends with my father, and every weekend was a different adventure. One trip to Canada, another to a park where I puked and Daud coined the term �Jasonslime�. He made up a story about clear Pepsi that I�ll never forget, and somehow managed to trap really large snapping turtles in the back of his pickup so he could put them in the river behind Mum�s house when he was dropping us off. The snapping turtles ate the ducklings. During one of these adventures, my cousin Christopher showed me how to play D+D, and we traded Spellfire cards. Even though I usually had no one to play these games with, I spent much of the rest of my life making multiplayer board games (especially after I got the HeroQuest board game). On another adventure, Sarah and Sister were in a park, and I had to stay in the truck because I had done something wrong. Angry with my father, I looked around for things to destroy, and found his camera. I �wasted� all the remaining film with pictures of trees. When he developed the film, he was furious, and forced me to cut them up and throw them away. I cried as I looked at each one, admired it as art, and sent it on its way.
Second grade. Invented and perfected the art of sliding down the hill on a cardboard box, because I didn�t have a sled. Stopped being friends with Parker, telling him that I only hung out with him in first grade because I felt bad that he didn�t have any other friends, and was just trying to convince the other kids that he was a good friend, so that he didn�t have to go through school without friends. His family moved across the street from my house, whereupon our wolf-hybrid broke it�s chain on a mission to tear his dog�s testicles completely off, and a year later his family moved out of town.
While the rest of my class was busy chasing cooties, I played on the teeter-totters by myself. About this time, another Jason, a substitute teacher, worked at our school, and I was very fustrated whenever someone called to him too loudly, because I thought they were talking to me. I did not end up hating my name, but instead hated that someone else has it, and also realized that I really did want to join the other kids, but for some reason couldn�t bring myself to be happy
Wrote a rather extensive picture book with characters that had the same names as the people in my family (which included Jeff at the time). Through a series of natural disasters and an encounter with rabid sharks, the characters die off, one by one.
This one time, in music class, I was bored or didn�t like what the teacher was saying, so I bunched up my shoulders and slanted my eyes, like a cat before *pounce*. She stopped he lesson mid-sentence to ask what I was doing, and I looked around to see that everyone else in the room was also curious. �umm, looking at you funni?� Thus far, I have neither attempted cannibalism. Nor music.
Forgot how to do long division, between second and third grade. I was still able to do short-hand division, and I had memorized all the simple ones, so I barely even noticed the difference. Found this forgetfulness humiliating (though none of my teachers figured it out) and while teaching myself how to do long division, vowed never again to ask a question in math class, to which I didn�t already know the answer.
After watching the movie �Teenage Mutant Turtles 2� and noting that mutagen was contained in large dandelions, I convinced six of my classmates to hunt for the largest dandelions on the playground, which I collected, extracted the juices, and mixed with green food colouring, water and four to make a �super potion� which we ate. Both my mother and I are called to the principle�s office. Also, played kickball a couple of times, was not very good, and gave up.
Fourth grade was composed of a series of fights on the playground, reading fantasy books and making up code words. Leon, another fourth grader, held me in a headlock and called Parker over to help beat me up. I bit Leon�s arm, broke the skin, and was sent to the principle�s office. A sixth grader got me alone and knocked the wind out of me, to which I retaliated by ambushing him with the rest of the boys in my grade. The six grader went to the hospital and never returned to school, while I was sent to the principal�s office and threatened to be expelled. Used my life savings (40$) to buy a used NES. This was also the year the GT program was created at my school, to accommodate myself and a fifth grader named Emily Martis, who latter also attended MSSM (high scholl#2).
While drunk again, Jeff went on a rampage and destroyed our house. Smashed the windows, spraypainted the walls, etc. Sister, Sarah, and I went over to the neighbour�s house and the sheriff was called in. Jeff was arrested and treated for by a psychiatrist at BMHI (Bangor Mental Health Institute, to which Mum later visited on several occasions). After about four other boyfriends in the next few years, Mum settles on Jeff�s reborn-christain brother, Greg, and marries him.
At the age of ten (fifth grade), I developed myopia, but instead of telling the teacher that I needed glasses, or sitting in the front of the classroom, I pretended to know what was written on the board, and made up my own analogies and exercises. On the first day of sixth grade, I was the first person in my class to get glasses.
In the summer before seventh grade, I moved to Daud�s house permanently, and attended the Warsaw and then MCI (Maine Central Institute) schools. I was that kid in high school who sold souls. Sold them to another Jason in town, who bound them to clay beads and wore them on a necklace. I told the principle that it wasn�t real, that I was just pretending, but at the time I hadn�t thoroughly convinced myself of that. The first kid that I ever bought the soul of, died of an accidental gunshot wound before he graduated high school. In high school #2, I was the only person unanimously polled for any of the senior superlatives. �most likely to start a cult�.
