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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.
impatient? Paper, eBook
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