Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Brain Dead

62


From high to low, when and how would my life bottom out?
I got through the first month of my Senior year of High School pretty intact and if I had been able to pass any test in 'Advanced Math' I may have rebounded and made it through the school year. During that time the 'Civics' teacher had warned us of the up coming military aptitude tests they'd be having us do. He pointed out that while they would say and legally couldn't use the test to come after us for recruitment, that they always did anyhow. How could we find this out for ourselves? When taking the test put down the wrong middle initial, then see how many recruitment fliers and visits you get using that wrong middle initial...! And so we were rounded-up for the military tests in the semi-balcony portion of the auditorium at the end of that week and took them.
Also in the early Fall I went to various Radio Shacks trying to buy the lower case kit by itself so I could install it directly. The majority of the stores said that I could only get it as long as they installed it for an additional fee, but not otherwise. I finally found one at a mall about fifty miles away that would sell it to me plain without questions asked. When it arrived nearly a month later, I pulled out my father's old soldiering set and called my friend Jeff in Colorado and he talked me through the process of installing it as he had installed a third party kit of his own. With the chip in place and jumper wires attached where I thought they should have been, it came time to cut a lead on the circuit board itself that would sever the old uppercase-only video chip from power. Had I gotten anything wrong, I'd not only have no lowercase displayed, but no text displayed on the screen at all. Knife out, I made a gouge in the lead, closed the computer case and tried it out. It worked! Buoyed by this, I went ahead and mail ordered the 'Expansion Interface' and first floppy drive that would bring the computer up to thirty two kilobytes of memory and allow me to get off the frustratingly slow cassette deck. When it arrived, the extra RAM worked fine, the but floppy drive didn't work, it lit up and spun, but no data was read or written with it. I returned it and received a replacement disk drive only to find it had the same problem and the mail order company said that they had found nothing wrong with the drive I returned. My early boost from the lowercase kit had become frustration from having plunked down all that money and only gotten some additional memory for it. Working out the problem with the floppy drive would have to wait until the next time I was in Colorado and my friend Jeff could take a look at it.
I had scored very well on the military exams and sure enough I started getting fliers and invites in the mail to join various armed service branches, all featuring the wrong middle initial of 'Q'. I looked over the application forms I'd gotten and found it interesting that when you reached the 'sex' check boxes, the answers were 'male' and 'a female'. Apparently for men, sex was an adjective, but for women, sex made you a thing in the eyes of the armed services. Intended to be a passive aggressive response to having to take women into the military, rather than referring to women as 'women', the military took up referring to women as 'females', but by fifteen years later women had started referring to themselves that way, as well. When Star Trek: Deep Space Nine came out, they tried to point-out that 'females' was a pejorative, but once another fifteen years had passed, not only had women been routinely calling themselves 'females', men had even started calling to themselves 'males' completely defeating the original intent of the pejorative. After my not responding to their mailed invites in the Fall of Nineteen Eighty-One, I got a recruitment visit at my house. I don't remember if it was one or two guys that showed up, but they were very keen on signing me up. I assured them it wouldn't work out and I wasn't interested. They asked why I thought it wouldn't work out but I just assured them it wouldn't.
With November the first quarter of school had come to an end and I was entering a dark spiral, both emotionally and cognitively. Of the two math classes I dropped, I used one of the empty slots to take additional English classes, one of them with the teacher that I had for my second go around of 'Basic Composition' the year earlier. The other free slot was first period of the morning and I kept that free. I was admiring the wheels of a student who had been coming to school on his moped. He asked if I wanted to buy it. I realized with it and my first period free, I could effectively sleep-in each day and come to school late without impacting my classes. I took him up on it, working out a payment plan that would have it paid off by the end of the calendar year. The rest of the Fall I'd putt along to and from school with the moped and then again once Spring came.
Yet with the payments on the moped, junk food purchases, house bills and exhausting my savings with the unsuccessful computer upgrade, I realized I couldn't make ends meet with my part-time grocery store paycheck. I asked Van if I could borrow some money from him and he agreed. I was paying him back twenty dollars out of each weeks' paycheck and one week when he asked for his twenty, I thought I'd have some fun and say, ''I already paid you.'' Meant to be some teasing to have a little fun, after the first volleys of 'no you hadn't/yes I had' he abruptly said I was right, and I had. This stunned me and I tried to convince him I really hadn't but he was adamant and wouldn't take the money for that week. I would later discover that he had been carrying some guilt concerning me and I guess letting me have the twenty dollars helped relieve some of it.
By the middle of the second quarter the sudden hot spells I'd been having once a day since the end of my Junior year of High School had now started to occur a couple times each day. But as they always went away after a few minutes, I just ignored them as best I could and continued with my day as if nothing was happening.
I had started to completely shut down in class. Any class. I had entered this mental fog and would just stare at the floor as each class went on around me. The English teacher, who had been so impressed with me the previous year, actually blew up at me in class demanding in front of the rest of the students what was wrong with me? This barely got me to look up from the floor to her but I had nothing to say and she went back to teaching the class for the rest of the period. Once done and the rest of the students had left I was lethargically the last one to leave and she came up to me and apologized for having done that, but I told her that she was right, there was something wrong with me and I didn't know what. She didn't know what to say to that as I left.
In 'Civics' class my staring at the floor became the mainstay of my class participation and the only time I perked up was when I heard a student talk about how not all youth culture was against the Reagan era, take for instance the recent Devo song 'It's A Beautiful World'. ''For you,'' I mumbled. Perhaps stunned that I showed any life at all, the teacher asked me to repeat what I had said. I pointed out that the Devo song ended with ''It's a beautiful world for you. It's not for me.''
Toward the end of the class, we were to read Machiavelli's The Prince and Marx's Communist Manifesto. While we could show we had read the books by turning in a written summary, I opted for the verbal one-on-one question & answer to avoid the additional writing by hand. Despite having read them, when the teacher asked me about them my mind was an empty void. When asking about The Prince I could only come up with the vaguest of answers to his questions, prompting him to ask if I had actually read the book. I assured him I had.
He moved on to the Communist Manifesto and started with the question, ''Name a form of socialism mentioned in the Communist Manifesto.''
There had been another form of socialism mentioned in the manifesto? I panicked as I desperately tried to remember what it could have been. But again there was nothing there. After a bit of me staring at the floor while I failed to think, he prompted me again with the question and I apologized with tears in my eyes, ''Other than Communism, I can't think of another one it mentioned, I'm sorry.'' He stopped asking me any more questions at that point and said I could go. I again apologized thinking I had just blown the oral exam. I hadn't realized at the time that Communism was the form of socialism he had been asking for. But he apparently realized from my answer that I was just trying too hard to answer his questions and gave me passing marks for having read both.
By the middle of Winter I had taken up finding empty classrooms just to sit in and stare at the floor, it gave me more privacy than staring at the floor in the study hall area, I guess. But in this open concept school, it wasn't like I couldn't be seen and one time Van found me and asked what I was doing. I just shook my head and lamented how I used to be able to think, I could come up with pages of computer code at a whim and now I couldn't think of a thing. ''I just can't think anymore!'' I repeated with a burst and started to cry. Van put his hand on my back as I slumped over and buried my face in my arms.





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