I can’t believe it, but it’s true. On September 14^th, 2007, I turned twenty-five years old. That’s a quarter of a century gone by since I was born in 1982. This is so messed up.

I’m sure a lot of you are wondering what the big deal is. After all, it’s not like I’m at an age where I should really be in awe of how old I am and start pondering about squandered youth. For most people, and this is a bit ironic, that starts at thirty. But I’ve always been too clever for my own good when it comes to these sorts of matters.

No doubt my fellow quarter centennial peers aren’t even thinking about their age and still insist on either acting like stupid teenagers or grown-ups, when they’re really neither. I adamantly refuse to accept that I’m twenty-five, if for no other reason than I realize I’m currently working for the state, and have solid plans to get married and buy a home. The worst part is, when this starts to go down, I’ll be about two years from thirty, and then I’m going to cry.

My outlook on life might seem bleak, that that’s only because I appreciate my current lot in life more than others my age. I’ve always been like this. When I was a kid, all of the other kids would talk about what they wanted to be when they grew up, and I just wanted to play outside. I never gave the idea any serious thought until I was twenty-two, when I decided I wanted to work as an audiovisual technician at Owens Community College, and that was based on the fact I was a student worker for AV at the time, and figure I could get along just fine. Before then, I never really gave it much thought, because I knew I didn’t need to worry about it.

In high school, I never really considered the realities of going to college, getting a job, or growing up. While all of the other kids were learning to drive, preparing for careers, and getting pregnant, I sat in front of my Playstation, blissfully chastising my peers for wanting to grow up too fast. I still think wasting those innocent high school years on pretending to be a grown up was a stupid thing to do, especially since I’ve been out of high school, because the lack of any real responsibility is something that doesn’t last forever and will evaporate once you’re thrust out into the Real World. Unless you’re Paris Hilton.

Even in college, and up until the past few years, I was still unaware of this thing called growing up, because I was clinging to my childhood and not letting go. I’m still not letting go, but a good chunk of my childhood is coming with me, and it’s going to be a passenger for most of this flight.

This may elect chuckles, pity, or concern out of many of you young grownups who think my simultaneous dependence on my childhood and realization that I’m going to die has indication of some serious psychological problem. You might also have issue with the fact that I’m still living with my mother when I have a wife and house looming in my near future, I no immediate plans of expanding my education beyond the two Associates Degrees I have (Digital Media Technology and Creative Writing, the last being because I had to keep taking classes to keep my student worker position before I was hired part-time), and waste time broadcasting my opinions on a website that no one really looks at, and have judged me a blight on society.

Well, I can confidently tell you that you are wrong, because with those two Associates Degrees, I can, in the most desperate situation where I can apply the culmination of knowledge represented by them, rub them together and make fire.

(I have to credit C for making that joke, which I use so much that, should he get a nickel for every time I said it, would probably end up with around thirty-five cents)

But seriously, I have a plan laid out, which is my critical response to years of not thinking about the future at all. This stark look at the future hasn’t been going on for too long, and when I started planning for it, I went overboard and tried to make up for lost time. With my eyes now to the future that won’t come fast enough now, but will be here before I’m ready, I can’t help but think back to where it all began.

I grew up in the small city of Oregon, a place that has left such an impression on me that I plan on continuing to live there for as long as I can. I lived as an only child with my parents in a house located next to my grandmother’s, so it was pretty much guarantee that I would be a spoiled child, which I was.

I went to Starr Elementary school, which was pretty typical, with pointless school work, clueless bullies, and authoritarians who I am convinced received their training at the Hitler Disciplinary Academy. Despite the frivolous bad points, there were far more good points of the Starr school experience, and many of the overall experiences shaped me to who I am today.

I met C in elementary school. We actually started as enemies in second grade, but reconciled in third and became fast friends. I also met other friends that occasionally poke their way into my life, the most significant being a dandelion-head named Tommy who served as one of my best friends up until high school. Speaking of friends, perhaps the one I spent the most time with went by the name of Nintendo Entertainment System, which shaped inordinate amounts of my childhood memories and served as my major source of entertainment, when I wasn’t outside pretending to be in a video game (natch) or fighting along side the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

My parents got divorced when I was in third grade in 1992, which if you knew the situation, turned out to be a good thing for me down the road. My mother became concerned that this drastically affected me, as reflected by my dropping grades, so she sent me to a psychologist.

Yes, I visited a shrink, and I must say that the experience proved to me that psychologists serve no real purpose other than to sit in their office and tell you, in more words, that you are insane. Don’t get me wrong, the guy was nice, and the campy little games we played that were designed to delve into my psyche were actually fun. What troubles me is he never really figured out the real reason my grades were slipping: school was getting harder.

Then it was on to Fassett Middle School. I distinctly remember being terrified of going, because I had spent half my life at Starr, and I was smart enough to notice the pattern that school seemed to be getting harder as I went on. I expressed in a journal entry that I thought I would “crash and burn.” To my shock, I did pretty well in middle school, and the adjustment was more painless than I thought. I didn’t care for the lack of recess, though.

I imagine most people tend to forget middle school because it’s a transition from elementary to high school, and never give it much thought, but I experienced some very important events in my three years at Fassett Middle School, most of it positive. Of course, there were a few rough spots.

Late in my seventh grade year, my grandmother, who I saw almost everyday for over thirteen years died on Mothers Day of 1996. I tried to put on a brave face, but it was no use, and I experience for the first, and maybe only time, to be honest, what it was like to lose somebody important (and I realize I should count myself lucky). My mother referred to her as the rock of her church, and though I still believe this to be a bit of an exaggeration, and I can claim without hyperbole that she was the rock of them family.

Upon her death, years of hidden tensions and hostility snapped their tethers, and the family was never the same again. This was in part because of the ensuing estate battle between my mother, her sister, and her brother, and because of the lifetime conflict between my mother and her sister, which was hidden from everybody until my grandmother died. During the Christmas Eve before she died, at the time when everyone gathered at her house (and the source of some of my warmest memories), my grandmother cried that she was glad we could all get together one last time for Christmas. I’m sure everybody thought to themselves “don’t say that,” but she knew, because she was already in bad health then, and was staying in a nursing home at the time. But I don’t think she ever thought the family would never gather for a Christmas Eve again.

Speaking of deaths in the family, eighth grade proved traumatic when my mother decided to euthanize our rat terrier, Sparky, after one of his many attacks. After my parents divorced, my dad took our cocker spaniel with him, so my uncle offered us a rat terrier, which he raised on his farm. This runt of the litter turned out to be one of the most evil beings on the face of the Earth, attacking without provocation and providing a taste of what Hell must feel like. A nasty attack on my mother was the last straw, and he was put to sleep weeks later.

This upset me, because like an unruly child who had no real good qualities, I wanted redemption for Sparky, but it never came to pass, and his reign of terror ended. I never saw the body, though, so he could still be out there…

The silver lining of the dog experience came in the winter of 1995, when my mother’s friend let me pick out a puppy from her dog’s litter. The idea was the replace Sparky, but I caught onto the trick and refused unless I got TWO puppies. In retrospect, this seems cold, and I probably wouldn’t have agreed having Sparky put down, because I’m too compassionate when it comes to animals. Sparky ended up surviving over a year until the final breaking point.

The little mutt I picked out came to be known as Sandy, who served as my retainer and protector from Sparky (in truth, she took some of the attacks for me). After Sparky was gone, Sandy’s personality blossomed, and she became my best friend (in the non-human category) for years, as I’ve gone through a lot with her. Up until this writing, Sandy is twelve and getting old, but is doing well for a dog her age, by which I means she’s a spoiled little dog.

C and I also experienced one of our two major fallouts, because a friend of his named Erin didn’t want to hang around me because of Tommy. The entire incident started when Erin, who is screwed up to begin with, threw a glass bottle at me while we were waiting for the bus to take us to our weekly bowling club. The bottle shattered harmlessly on the concrete, an event which was witnessed by Tommy’s English teacher, who dragged Erin back into the school. After this, Erin’s mother, who is also insane, forbade her from hanging around Tommy or me because, really, we made her hyper.

It was at that point that C felt he had to choose between the two of us, and he picked Erin because Tommy didn't come with that package. Plus, his mother, who (I bet you didn’t see this coming) is also mildly insane, hates me, so we stopped hanging around each other for a while. We eventually patched things up until the middle of high school, when social pressures (read: an insane girlfriend) separated us. Is it just me, or do I not get along with insane people?

Middle school was probably also the ground from which my seeds for the discontent of authority were sown, all because of the school’s band director, Mister Deal, affectionately known by my friends as BFBD. BFBD maintained no discipline or empathy for students, which lead the mentally insufficient to believe they should run amok. His ignorance resulted in a tambourine being thrown and hitting me on the head, and an argument with another student that ended with him bashing me in the head with a metal notebook binder end, resulting in some bleeding. The fun part of this one was I got in the same amount of trouble as the kid who hit me. To think, in this day and age, the entire school system, right down to the janitor, would be sued over that. What a jip.

Speaking of disrespect for authority, my last two years in middle school were spent in weekly catechism classes. These were classes at my mother’s church which we had to take in order to become members. In the fine tradition of Christian values, I spent the last year of catechism being attacked by other students. The abuse was so bad, I thought if I killed their leader, they would scatter and leave me alone; I even wrote myself a letter of intent to cool my head.

Just like BFBD, the pastor in charge of the class occasionally yelled at the boys responsible, but didn’t do anything, because, hey, if they didn’t pass the class, they didn’t become members, and their parents would take their business to another church. As it turns out, I never saw most of the kids in church again after they were confirmed. So you could say a class I had to endure in the Lutheran church started me on the path of dismissing religion altogether. Somehow, I don’t think that was their plan.

Before middle school, I never thought adults could be so stupid, but that was just a preview.

That’s not to say a lot of good didn’t come from middle school. I accidentally signed up for advanced English and math classes, because I thought the regular ones were for the dumb kids (and this assumption shows how qualified I was for these classes). While math was a nightmare, my English teacher, Misses Heintschel, showed me that writing can be fun, and I quickly realized I enjoyed writing very much, and started pursuing it. If I may use the cliché which general comes up during these sorts of retrospective ponderings, what goes around comes around. Seriously, if she didn’t point me in the direction of writing, the world would be a much happier place.

Years of untapped creativity gushed out the next year, when I had the committable Misses Morrin as an English teacher, and she pretty much let us go where we wanted (or at least more so than any other teacher at that point) with our writing. Most of my efforts back then were best sealed in a vault and dropped into the deepest parts of the Atlantic, but one effort came out of it that translated into a story in which I take a bit of pride, and that is Meatloaf Dead, a novella which spawned from a journal entry I was tasked to do for class. Actually, the journal we were required to keep is one of my most prized possessions, since it contains my thoughts and ideas from an innocent part of my childhood, something that can never be replicated. That, and I thoroughly enjoyed annoying the class with by reading out loud my disgusting stories, weird dreams, and, in the early part of the year, my fragmented and obsessed ramblings for the Nintendo 64.

There were also a few incidents that still affect my life. I discovered girls in middle school, a discovery that takes up an inordinate amount of my time to this day. I actually never hated girls, and had a crush on one in particular in fifth grade, but by middle school, I was beginning to realize that I wanted girls to like me, a mentality that has pretty much doomed my life to a series of bumbling mishaps.

This is how bad it was: for some reason, in sixth grade, I decided to go to one of the school dances. I’m not sure why, probably because my friends were going, so I found myself standing around, alone and dateless in a sea of clueless middle schoolers. Then, for reasons I can only attribute to desperation, a cute girl asked me to dance with her.

This was not supposed to be hard, involving nothing more than the girl putting her hands on the guy’s shoulders, and the guy putting his hands on her hips, and the two swaying and twirling like a defective carnival ride. Then there was me, Rico Sauvé, who, copying the girl’s motions, put my hands on HER shoulders, making our dance look like we were struggling to strangle the other person to death. I bet she still thinks about me longingly to this day.

I also got my first Playboy magazine in middle school. Actually, that was the summer before, but this one magazine triggered off a series of desperate early-teen cravings to see naked women, mostly on late night Showtime and Movie Channel programming with my like-minded associate, Tommy. While the Internet made this pastime all but obsolete, that wouldn’t come for a few years, and I still accept print media whenever it’s offered to me. Old habits die hard.

And to allay any retrospective fears for the safety of my female classmates, I didn’t even consider actual sexual encounters because they were pretty much impossible for me, up until I met my fiancée, who dragged me into that perverse world all herself. So don’t give me that crap about being a perverted kid, because I was the one of had his innocence taken from me.

As if I didn’t want it.

Perhaps one of the more significant changes in my life came when I met a guy named Ervin (really) working at a local (now defunct) video game store. At first, I harassed him exclusively for old video games via weekly phone calls that I’m sure he appreciated coming from a fourteen-year-old. In the winter of 1997, Ervin handed me some copies of Street Fighter 2: The Movie, Oh! My Goddess, and Tenchi Muyo!, and forced me to watch the latter with him. This was my first true exposure to Japanese animation, and it stuck.

I maintained contact with Ervin for a few years, after which he faded into obscurity and left behind his life of anime. The seeds that were planted thrived, however, and I have long since carried that torch and converted a few friends to the cause. Through those rough social years of high school, anime gave me an identity to hold onto and a kinship with other like-minded outcasts, and I’m not sure how well high school would have went without it. This is not to mention the countless hours of quality entertainment it provided me, a trend that continues to this day, as reflected in this article.

Yes, I’m a nerd. Sue me.

Just when I was getting used to middle school, it was time to be thrust into the final leg of my grade school career. I went into Clay High School not knowing what to expect, outside of the fact I was once again at the bottom of the pecking order in a place where that sort of thing had an actual affect. Still, I wasn’t all that nervous about it, and remained pretty confident for a while.

As you might expect, a lot happened in high school, and it would be impossible to summarize all of the important events in any satisfactory way. I met several friends that I’m still in contact with today, perhaps most noteworthy being Bob, who shared my newfound love for anime with a fanatical passion, and went on to join the Army, but not before a brief stint in the National Socialist Movement. Bob was a character.

We had a falling out in 2002 over a misunderstanding involving an anime convention, a broken down car, and taxi fare. I had no idea anything was amiss until someone told me months later, and by that point, it was too late. He called me up years later and we’ve since remained in touch.

I met Kevin and Joe my Junior year. Bob guided these two into the world of anime, where I acted as sort of a supplier for my animation junkies. Both of them are not what you would describe as normal, but I enjoy hanging around them to this day.

It was also a time for friendships to fade away. Tommy and I began falling out in high school, because he’s the type who is easily influenced by others, and other people were willing to be friends with him, so long as I didn’t come along with the deal. Considering the events of middle school, it's sort of ironic.

Speaking of annoying people, high school was the ultimate culmination of the evolution of horror that was Brian Rycowski. Every school has a couple of weird kids crawling around, and Brian was the king of them all. He started out as the wimpy kid late in elementary school, then evolved into the strange kid in middle school, and finally crawled out of the primordial oddness sludge and became one of the creepiest people in the world.

A few measly paragraphs can’t accurately describe this kid, but I’ll give it a shot. At his most annoying, Bryan would call me up asking for video game codes and not go away or silently pass highly radioactive gas that legend has cleared out an entire classroom and got him a detention. At his most psychotic, he was very disturbing, but not really dangerous.

On the disturbing side, Brian had a dog who he trained to hump pillows on command. I am not joking here. When day, Bob’s delightfully idiotic little brother Evan (who will receive his own article one day, mark my words) came with his mother to pick Bob up from Brian’s house. The dog, apparently mistaking Evan for a pillow, proceeded to knock Evan over and do the deed while Evan cried and screamed. Did I mention this was a girl dog?

This was about the only good Brian story that didn’t involve Brian being tormented, despite the fact he wanted to be part of our group (which should tell you something about his state of mind, what with him aspiring to join a group of misfits like us, even though he was constantly being rejected). He used to hang out with Bob because he thought he was cool, and Bob wanted to get out of the house (which should tell you something about his parents), so he tolerated him. One of the whimsical activities they got into for a while was making tennis ball bombs, which showed incredible stupidity on Bob’s part for letting Brian have access to explosives. His only salvation is the hope he intended Brian to blow himself up.

One day, Brian was annoying me on instant messenger, and I told him to go away as usual. Then he got clever and told me something was going to go “boom” near my house. I later threatened him over IM, and he pitifully explained he was sending me a sound file of an explosion, and that’s what he meant the entire time. I should have definitely reported him to the police.

Instead, I continued to put up with Brian. I coped by tormenting him as a way of hinting that I didn’t like him and he should go away. One time, he showed up to my house while Bob and I were in the park breaking things in a sophisticated manner. Brian had gone looking for us by the time we came back, and he left a pair of roller blades behind, so I did the right thing and hid them on the roof. My mother heard me up there and told me to put them back where I found them, so I climbed back up, got the roller blades down, and tossed them in a thorny bush before Bob and I escaped to the basement to hide from Brian. When he finally came back, my mother covered for us, but was furious when Brian couldn’t find his roller blades, not so much because I was mean to him, but rather because she had to deal with him again.

Another time Brian arrived at my house uninvited while Bob and I were in the backyard playing with sticks (who needs fancy electronics?). After being annoying as usual, Brian turned his back on me, and I had a revelation. I threw a stick that I had fashioned to be blunt throwing dagger at him. It ended up striking him parallel on his back with an entertaining yet harmless thwap. As I smiled at my accomplishment, Brian spun around, got in my face, and started screaming at me, to which I could only grin, because I was curious what the scrawny moron could do to me.

It turned out he could squeal, as a separate incident proved which nearly lead to my first suspension and police record. It started out in the band room, where we would congregate before school and during breaks. C and I discovered some metal poles wrapped in tape which the flag corps used for practice. Naturally, C and I started twirling the things around in an attempt to look cool, which shockingly didn’t seem to be working.

Meanwhile, Brian happened to shuffle in. Per his usual, he began annoying us and likely let off one of his famous SBDs. As he turned to leave, satisfied that we were thoroughly bothered, I jabbed my pole into his weighted down backpack, which was fortified enough to withstand anti-tank fire. C and I tossed the poles back and walked off laughing at my retaliation.

Not long after my next class started, I was summoned to Mister Shober’s office. Mister Shober’s official title was Dean of the Students, but he was known as the Administrator of Sadistic Tortures by the student body. If anyone checked his job description, it would probably read “Give anyone who walks into my office, at minimum, an in-school suspension.” This was the man whose office I entered, which contained an angry Mister Shober and a pitiful Brian holding a broken floppy disk in both hands.

It turns out my mischievous blow destroyed a computer disk Brian had in his backpack, and he reported me to Mister Shober, who was quick to inform me that if I attacked Brian unprovoked, I would be suspended out of school and have assault charges filed against me. Somehow during my explanation, I gave the impression Brian touched me first, which could have been true, but probably not. Regardless, it was hard to explain how much I wanted Brian to go away and make my vicious attack on his backpack seem justifiable.

Because the possibility of Brian starting a physical confrontation was suddenly in the air, Shober informed us if this were the case, we would both get in-school suspensions. Brian started to panic, and said he didn’t want anyone to get suspended. This could be interpreted as one of the few good things he ever did, but I’m still not sure what he hoped to accomplish by reporting the incident in the first place. Regardless, Shober told us someone was going to get suspended.

The situation was tense, and I needed some room to think about how to get out of it, so I asked Shober if Brian and I could go into a nearby storage room and talk this problem out. In retrospect, I’m not sure why he allowed this, because I could have easily coerced Brian into backing off or just beaten him to death. Instead of these two logical solutions, we actually did talk things out, and I agreed to pay him fifty cents for the disk if we could agree to stop bothering each other.

We returned to Shober’s office with this proposal, and I could tell he was pretty much stuck, because we actually came up with a real solution, and it wouldn’t look good to punish us for it. Ticked off, he agreed this was acceptable, and I was a free man, one of the few to survive the wrath of Mister Shober relatively unscathed. For some reason, I questioned for the longest time whether or not this was worth the fifty-cents. It was.

Many of you have probably cast me as some evil villain whose sole pleasure in life was torturing a meek little boy while at the same time bathing in my hypocrisy as I complain about being bullied myself. This is because you never met Brian, and only by meeting him would you truly appreciate how uncomfortable you can be around someone as pathetic looking as him. Brian always had the choice to leave me alone, but he never did, and I don’t see anyone getting into a huff when a monkey gets eaten by a lion after the monkey spent the afternoon hurling its droppings at the lion. Plus, my bad feelings about him were proven after his rape conviction.

There’s always a chance this story is untrue or some information is wrong, but it fits within the context of Brian. He once confessed to being bisexual to Bob, who just about died from horror at the thought of Brian was interested in him, and was about to kill Brian if he did. He didn’t, but rattled off a list of guys he did, which prompted Bob to tell him not to come near him again, or face fatal consequences. The bisexuality itself was not at all the problem. What was the problem was Brian had a thing for children.

I can’t remember when it was, but suddenly Brian disappeared from school. I didn’t really question this, because I was worried I would jinx it. Later, I heard a few different sinister rumors, but could never separate the facts and remember which was true or not. I finally asked around about it, and got a disturbing story for my trouble.

According to this information, Brian took a little boy out to some woods by his house and raped him at knife point. Another boy reported this, and Brian was sent the jail. He was still a minor, though, and was quickly released. His family disassociated themselves with him and moved away in shame. Brian went on the live in California, and hasn’t been sighted since, except perhaps on a male escort website featuring someone with his name who sort of looked like him (really), but without any additional evidence, this will remain a mystery.

Maybe the folks around me were unusual and not the type most people had to deal with, but like most people, my love life started in high school, and it was more or less remarkable than anyone could have imagine. I started courting (not dating, really, it never got to that) a girl named Jamie after she broke up with her boyfriend. We were friends before this, and the guy was an ass anyway, so I don’t feel bad about going for the rebound.

The summer of 1999 was perhaps one of the most awkward times in my life. Jamie indicated she wanted to start dating, but wanted me to take more initiative, and I was too bashful and naïve to even touch her. I eventually kissed her (okay, she kissed me) on my seventieth birthday, and we discussed dating, but she evidentially had another guy she was looking at, and the day after the Homecoming dance, told me she wasn’t interested in me in that way and she was dating the other guy. This story is well documented in my fiction Band Girl.

Of course, it hurt like hell, but at that point, I resolved not to let it happen again, and the bit of confidence I gained led me to court and eventually date my future wife, Christy. We started going on dates after I was deferred from a girl who had no interest in dating me to Christy during my Junior year, and we eventually agreed to be just friends. The next school year, at the urgings of Bob, who suspected something was up, I pursued the idea of dating Christy again, and the result was a our first kiss on March 30^th, 2001, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Besides the deep, romantic factors, because of Christy, I had gone from pathetic wimp to groping a girl in the auditorium between classes in less than three months. Things haven’t really changed that much since.

The other big part of high school was the marching band. My school had a rather prominent marching band, thanks to the efforts of director Charles Neal, whose tireless yet fair discipline whipped a bunch of disorganized, clueless teenagers into a band of disorganized, clueless teenagers with egos. Not to undermine his accomplishments and methods, which were undeniably effective. Mister Neal managed to convince dozens of teenagers that they were something special, and this motivation gave the band its strength and pride.

But as with most things, high school students in general don’t know how to handle pride. This induced ego trip made ridiculing other bands second nature, though this is to be expected. When there wasn’t another band to mock, the students turned their ire inward and attacked each other, by which I mean me.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone when I say I was a loner. I established an exclusive group of friends who never really hung around each other that much and hardly reached beyond them for socializing. Most of the time, I sat by myself, content to be alone and observe the idiocy around me, and shaking my head in response. I wasn’t an Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold in the making by any stretch, but I understood the value of being alone.

This mentality conflicted with the band philosophy of conform or die, so I was frequently chastised for any form of self-expression by my peers. That’s not to say the band was a Nazi Death Parade where strictness is concerned, but the other band members made it clear that self-expression was only acceptable if it was their brand of self expression. You know what? Maybe it was like the Nazi Death Parade.

While it is easy to assume that I’m just playing the poor helpless martyr here, I can assure you the band itself was charged with ego based on what happened after Mister Neal retired. The band was taken over by a new director by the name of Bryan Gyuras during my Junior year, and tensions ran high almost immediately. Mister Gyuras was accused by the students of changing band traditions (of which they were only a part of for two years) and being a poor leader, and this resulted in time-wasting discussions and half-hearted walkouts. More of the story can be found here.

Since I wasn’t particularly good where music is concerned anyway, and I couldn’t stand the new levels of idiocy the band had stooped to, I quit and joined the newly-founded Visual Communications class. This turned out to be the best move I could have made, because it sparked my interest in digital production, which motivated me through an education and career path that lead me to work full-time at a state college, where I serve my country by pumping out self-absorbed articles like this during work hours.

The only train wreck that could even come close to the band was the spectacular mayhem that was Tech Prep. When I was about to go into high school, there was some kind of presentation held one night at the high school for a class called Tech Prep. I can’t remember the details, but I think they promised that it was about computer programming, and they told C, who went to a different presentation, that it involved drawing on computers. The reality was it was a glorified woodshop class with obsolete computers which were never really used for anything important. Nothing like part of your first high school experience being based on perjury.

You would think being lied to was bad enough, but the students themselves made it worse. I’m not at all joking when I say C and I were the only people with normal intelligence in the room. The rest of the idiots transcended all previous levels of idiocy and turned out to be a primitive race of humanlike beings that became known as the Tech Prepians.

This is all absolutely true, and is perhaps one of the greatest stories I have about high school. The Tech Prepians were out of control, to put it in far too simple terms, and a typical day would consist of classroom and woodshop objects being hurled around, perverse moaning, and an apathetical teacher shouting for the first five minutes of the chaos before giving up and sneaking a sip of the flask hidden in her desk when nobody was looking.

Okay, there was no flask, but things would have been better if there were. Misses Boyer, who was part of the National Guard, maintained absolutely no discipline over the Tech Prepians. She was also pregnant, giving her an excuse to slip away for a few days and leave the tribe to some poor schmuck who would invariably have a nervous breakdown after one day of experiencing the locals (I’m not joking). Only one substitute ever stood up to them, and he did so by cursing at the lot.

This class almost led to my first fistfight. For weeks, I had been going down to the principal’s office and demanding he do something about the idiots. Given the size of the class, there was little he could do outside of asking me what I wanted him to do about it, as if I were the clueless principal and not him. Sadly, these were still the days when lawsuits never crossed the students’ minds. On a side note, the principal was the husband of Misses Heintschel, though his leadership could not be described as similarly inspiring.

One typical day, the Tech Prepians were wreaking havoc, the substitute teacher was powerless, and I had had it. I stood next to C as he was working on the computer, complaining about the idiots and huffing “That’s it, I’m going to Mister Heintschel!” I’m not sure what good it would have done, but you can bet if what happened next carried on as far as it could have, I would be seeing him whether I wanted to or not.

A nearby idiot made the mistake of opening his mouth and repeating what I said in a mocking tone. After months of abuse that including a dusty work glove being thrown in my eye, this was the thing that made me snap. I spun around, stomped over to the offending moron, and tried to shove my finger into his brain.

At least I think this was my intention. When something makes me snap, I can have a violent temper, but I tend to cool off very quickly and come to my senses. I remember taking three steps towards the idiot, each one cooling me down just a little. By the time I got to him, I had enough sense not to hit him, instead resorting to shouting at him to shut up while I pressed my index finger firmly into his skull. I remember him stupidly grinning all the while, either because he was amused that I was being aggressive, too slow to react otherwise, or so scared all he could do was grin and wet himself.

Either way, the substitute, noticing that one of the non-Tech Prepians was being hostile, shouted for me to leave the moron alone, to which I protested “He’s being an idiot!” This was logic that couldn’t be argued with. The idiot got off pretty well, because if he was right behind me, I would have spun around and slugged him.

In spite of the dread that was the Tech Prepians, I managed to glean a lot from the class. Not the class materials, which I can honestly say were two notches from worthless, but the idiots themselves, which C and I transformed into characters for various projects. I wrote a history of Tech Prepians (which is, at this time, missing, but will resurface on this site the moment a copy is located) and I fully intend to talk more about them in a future article. By that point, I had a tendency to take the stupidity around me and turn it into something entertaining, which is the very essence of any good satirist.

Sophomore year was the year C introduced me to the works of Dave Barry, which helped me form the writing style that I use to this day. Also contributing greatly to my writing was my English teacher, Mister Cooney, who encouraged my writing and was a great teacher who balanced humor, kindness, and intelligence. The only annoying thing about him was he was pretty strict about formatting, and this was at a time when I would occasionally put illustrations and fancy fonts on my papers (this wasn’t discouraged by my Freshman English teacher), but this turned out to be a good thing, since that was the kind of thing that would be required in English classes from then on. Plus, I didn’t have to put in illustrations anymore

I was fortunate enough to have Mister Cooney for a history teacher the next year for a distance learning class that never fully developed, and when I found out he was teaching at Owens when I was in college, I was tempted to sign up for his class just to have him as a teacher again, but he stopped teaching shortly after. Hmm…

Speaking of writing, my time at high school was probably one of my greatest as a fiction writer. We’re talking quantity and not quality here, because most of it wasn’t any good, However, back then, I had a lot more enthusiasm for creating new worlds and characters, even though most of it was heavily influenced by anime and video games (again, I was, and still am, a nerd).

Some of my more ambitious projects included a compilation of stories written for my Freshman English class (this only counts as a side project because I put a lot of effort into it) called Beyond the Limits, a short drama/sci-fi/romance called Night of Memories (the interesting thing about this one was I wrote it for Jamie during and after the courting, and opted to finish both with her in it and an improved version with another character), and a fantasy novel called Of the Moon. While each of these projects started from worst and progressively evolved into bad, they were fun when I was working on them, and I don’t think I’d mind dusting them off again for a revamp if there was any interest.

Another project I worked on was my first website, LWC’s Realm of Insanity. Really. This website fell in line with just about every other personal website of its time, by which I mean it is now embarrassing and was mostly useless. Still, I feel a nostalgic tear well up whenever I happen by it. One day, I plan on archiving the entire thing into one place so the world will be able to see it and learn from my mistakes, lest history repeat itself and the world of dotcoms plunge into darkness once again. And no, I’m not going to tell you what LWC stands for, so figure it out. The original site can still be found in pieces here, though I have to warn you it won’t be completely functional. Just think of it as a trip into some ancient ruin and marvel at the follies of the past.

Another series of projects that I worked on were conversions for the first-person shooter DOOM. I literally worked on these conversions every year in high school, and produced three total conversions. The first was called Mihoshi DOOM 2, and was based on the namesake from Tenchi Muyo! The series that I’m most proud of, however, was called Chris Zasada’s World WAD. It was a total conversion based on my life, featuring cartoon images of friends and foes, which I would gun down. To this day, I’m still mapping out an entire universe for the series, and you can bet if I ever win the lottery, I’m starting my own video game studio just to give this series the mainstream exposure it deserves.

In any case, working on DOOM WADs was one of the highlights of my high school life, and there are many parts of my work that I’m still proud of today. The hours spent designing the game on my old Packard Bell, with Bob helping me out on the more complicated illustrations. To say I look back on the DOOM WAD days with fondness is an understatement, as it marked a time when I happily produced a work of art in my spare time, whereas nowadays, I just look at internet porn.

I know at this point I have to pay lip service to those of you who froze up in horror at the part about me gunning down friends and foes, especially with the recent rash of school shootings bringing back that 1999 paranoia and scapegoating. In retrospect, DOOM WADs featuring Tech Prepians getting shot in the somewhat-accurately mapped gym was probably not the classiest thing to do at the time, because I was from the generation who went to school during Columbine.

Let me first assure you that no one really showed concern about the DOOM WADs, in part because most people probably didn’t know I was working on them, but also because I was a good kid who had no intentions of acting any of the violence out. The second World WAD was actually the focus of my big Senior project, which let me tackle the issues surrounding DOOM and show that even though the subject matter was questionable, it was also an expression of satire from a high school kid. The project committee was really cool about it, with only one member objecting to the use of the word “dildo” in a short story based on the game (this was a mention of an actual Tech Prepian artifact called the Dildomobile. I’m not kidding, but you’ll have to wait for the article to find out more).

That didn’t stop the school from going into the typical post-Columbine madness. In retrospect, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but the school instituted some strange policies, the worst of which was the brief ban on shirts with logos or bands on them. To this day, I haven’t the tiniest ion of a clue what this was supposed to accomplish, unless it was some kind of plot to piss off the right student so they would go on to shoot up the place, thus proving there was a need for inane security protocol.

This paranoia birthed what was perhaps one of the best days in Clay High’s history: Bomb Day. After Columbine, some extremely gifted savant decided to call in a bomb threat from a school phone. It took authorities a while to find out who did it, so in the meantime, administration decided to play it safe and make the proposed D-Day an optional school day. I thought this was the stupidest thing in the world, and figured no one would pay it any mind, but it turned out most of the school didn’t even show up. Not that most of them were afraid, mind you. They just wanted a day off.

Needless to say, I went in, and the lack of other students made it the best day ever. I was mortified when they came back the next day. There was a strong temptation in the air to call in a bomb threat myself just so I could experience another Bomb Day, but discretion is the greater part of valor, and Bomb Day would forever remain a happy memory shared with my friends to this day. Check out my article on Bomb Day here.

Somehow, I survived the war-torn havocs of Clay and made it to Senior year. I could best describe my final year in high school as oblivious. I didn’t let my work slack like many of the other Seniors, though I didn’t plan for the future either, mostly because it never hit me that I wouldn’t be going to high school after the year ended. The graduation itself didn’t even faze me, save for an emotional encounter with C initiated by him, which was odd, because we weren’t on that great of terms at the time, but this would be the last time we needed to kiss and make up, and have been great friends ever since. And I doubt this has anything to do with the fact we see each other for less than a week per year now.

The next day, it started dawning on me that college was just around the corner, because I had to register at Owens Community College, where I am currently employed. That summer proved to be full of changes, and was my biggest effort towards adulthood, for which I’m still on the journey.

Mister Cooney, the wise sage that he was, once quipped to the class when I was a Sophomore “Sophmore year is when you kiss your childhood goodbye.” Through my valiant efforts, I held this curse back until I was out of high school. I can safely say, however, that college was truly the time when I started growing up.

I started learning to drive in May of that year. Throughout high school, I never needed to drive, since I had the bus which I was already paying for to take me to school and my mother to take me the few places I needed or wanted to go. It was an irresponsibility I hated to see go, but I knew I had to learn to drive eventually.

As with most kids, driving was nerve-wracking at first, mostly due to the efforts of my melodramatic mother sitting in the passenger’s seat, but I got the hang of it, and got my license the following fall. Despite having to deal with a psychotic parent, an apathetical driving school, and the evil BMV, I managed to go from a nervous novice who hated driving to a fully-licensed motor vehicle operator who hates driving, an attitude I still retain. Seriously, about the only thing I like about driving is I can stop wherever I please without begging my mother or whatever unfortunate friend happens to be behind the wheel. Otherwise, I prefer it when other people take the wheel.

I also got my first job the following fall. I tried applying at local production companies to do video production over the summer, but none would dare take a chance on a high school graduate. Around my birthday, I was at Major Magic’s All-Star Pizza Revue (think a local Chuck E. Cheese’s with an old army guy heading the show instead of a cartoon mouse) with some friends when I thought “Hey, it might be fun to work here!” And so I did.

This conclusion was drawn because I was a stupid teenager who had no idea how the world worked. The job turned out to be lousy, and I should have been able to see this after my first day, which was on a Friday night, meaning there was no time for training. By the time things settled down, the other employees assumed I knew how to do everything. Couple this with a thirty-two mile round trip for five-twenty-five an hour, and I quickly realized this job was below me.

So it worked out for the best that I was fired after about six days of working there over the course of two weeks because I wasn’t catching on fast enough. Good riddance, I thought, and I didn’t actively seek employment again until almost a year later.

While it was certainly nice to only have to worry about school, my mother was becoming increasingly irritated with me over the lack of employment. Outside of one fueled incident where I couldn’t take her nagging and drove off, applying at any place I could think of (with no offers, mind), I never bothered looking for a job until a year later. Part of this was on account of me starting a business as a freelance videographer.

Using my knowledge and experience gained from my V-Com class, I was confident I could offer people inexpensive video production. The problem was, I didn’t have any equipment. My mother grudgingly purchased a digital high-8 camcorder for the video end, but I still needed a computer to edit the final product. This was at a time when I didn’t know that much about computers, but the following year would teach me a lot.

It was Bob, obviously still pissed off about the convention business (though I didn’t know this), who introduced me to two computer geeks named Daryl and Matt. These two went on to (slowly) built me a PC, which lasted maybe less than two painful years before it died and was sold off for parts. I later learned that the two had severely overcharged me, and had a reputation for being conniving rats. I can vouch for this, as Daryl still owes me over one hundred dollars for a video card, or, officially, one thousand dollars for the card and the piece-of-junk he put together. If nothing else, the experience taught me that the world is filled with some genuine, unrepentant assholes.

The computer did work okay for what it was intended, but the business was a disaster. I had two clients total. One was a wedding job I did with a friend that didn’t pay squat, and the other was for a local restaurant whose owner clearly did not know what he wanted, and the entire affair ended with us both being dissatisfied with the way things turned out. I avoided going to the restaurant for over four years so I wouldn’t have to face my old client, though I recently went there twice, and discovered I really wasn’t missing that much.

Fortunately, an announcement in one of my digital media classes turned out to be the road to my salvation. The college’s AV department was looking for student workers to work on digital media. I knew this something I needed to look into, so I applied right away and got the job.

This was the beginning of my career, though things took a lot longer than they should have, mostly on my part for refusing to look for work someplace else. I was working out pretty well, and a year later, there was a full-time and part-time position opening up. I was passed over for the full-time (I didn’t apply for the part-time because I didn’t meet the requirements), which was a blow, but I stuck with it. In 2005, the part-time person left, and I applied and got his position. In 2007, the full-time person left, and finally, after four years of waiting, I got into the position, thus setting my fate for the next forty years until my retirement or death.

In the meantime, I graduated from Owens twice, the first time with a degree in digital media technology, and the second in creative writing. That last one was just so I could keep my student worker job (because in college, you can stick around for as long as you like, as long as you keep paying), but it was kind of neat because the degree was new, and I was the first student to graduate with that degree. I enjoyed the core classes, and it helped me refine some of my writing. So you can only imagine what kind of a mess you would be reading if I didn’t go to college.

I started Pocky Box on Christmas of 2004, a result of an overflow of opinions that had to be expressed. Even though the updates slowly became less frequent, I still consider Pocky Box to be one of my greatest accomplishments as a writer. Before, I would just write fiction, and this would generally take a long time, during which I may lose interest. As my schedule becomes more hectic with obligations to work, family (well, girlfriend), and friends, updates became harder and harder to get out on a regular basis, such as the dozy of a delay that separated the update this piece is appearing in.

Perhaps the most important event in my life occurred on March 30^th, 2007, when I asked my girlfriend of six years to marry me, dooming her to become Christine Zasada. I actually asked her a month before hand, but March 30^th will forever be known as the day I popped the question. And don’t think for a second I wasn’t nervous as hell. An article of the entire experience can be found here.

Now I come to the point where I have to acknowledge people. This is difficult, because although this sort of thing is usually where the writer says good things about people, I also prefer to be honest, and that’s not always pretty, but here we go.

First, I’ll get my mother out of the way and thank her for the twenty-five plus years of financial support and keeping a roof over my head. My mother is the sort that lies on the fine line between liberal and conservative, perhaps more to the right, but she’s given me enough space to do my own thing. Despite the fact the edge of my wit strikes at her on a near-daily basis, I still love her. Thanks, Mom.

On the emotional side of things is Christy, who never leaves me wondering whether she loves me or not. She is the sweetest girl I could hope for and you bozos really missed out when you decided not to ask her out on a date. She’s one of the few people I can be honest with, and provides the kind of love and comfort I look forward to enjoying for the rest of my life. Just hopefully I can reciprocate.

I have to thank my father, not so much because he did anything good, but because I could see where his life went wrong and learned by example not to steer my own life that way. I don’t think a child should have to learn by doing the opposite of what their parents do, but if you don’t let yourself get wrapped up in self-pity, you can learn the lesson with a lot more conviction. I’m certain this has piqued the interest of a few people, wanting to know more about my father, but once again, I’m going to be cruel and leave that for another time. Believe me, there’s a lot to cover, and a single paragraph could not do him justice.

Next I’ll thank my loyal dog, Sandy. Sandy has been my best friend for twelve years, and I’ve experienced many things with her as my loyal companion. Over the last year and a half, I’ve experienced the death of two uncles that I didn’t really know what well, and found myself a little disturbed that I didn’t feel particularly sad about it. However, as Sandy shows signs of her age, I find myself lying awake at night, wondering when the day will come when I find that she has passed away, and the thought manages to spur a tear or two from my eye, and I imagine I’ll be out of commission for about a week when it’s her time. I don’t find this morbid or inappropriate, as I have been with Sandy nearly everyday for twelve years, and she’s provided nothing but love without underlining motivations. She’s my little buddy, and that’s not something I will lie about.

I can’t go without mentioning C, my best (human/non-fiancée) friend. We’ve been friends off and on for about fifteen years, and only when we were free of social restraints of school and (in his case) parents did we realize we had, as he once said, a brotherly connection. This probably is the best way to describe it, as we used to run in different social circles in high school, and have chosen different lifestyles, yet this only seems to balance the two of us out, and I can think of no other person than C to trade stories of our manly accomplishments with tongue firmly in cheek and to sit out on the porch when we’re old, yelling at kids who get on my lawn.

I’ll run through the other people I used to hang out with, just because they’ve contributed little bits to the story that is my life. Bob added a bit of manliness and (it has to be said) foolhardiness to our group’s anime nerdom, but it was with this focus that I’ve been able to know what to do with the torch I’m carrying around. Plus, he was always a lot of fun to hang around. Like C, our lives have taken different turns, but we find time to reminisce about the old days and take in an anime now and then.

Kevin is the one nerd who is not ashamed of being a nerd, and lives his life in an annoyingly apathetical way, but it’s only annoying because part of me wants to cut out that feeling of overwhelming responsibility and enjoy what I have. Though I don’t envy his perverse sexual urges that compel him to have wrestling matches with his male friends. You think I’m kidding. Despite this, Kevin is a great friend, and I’m glad he managed to stick around, even if it’s mostly due to his apathy towards doing stuff.

Joe is, to say the least, an interesting fellow, the best example of this being when he used walk around in Oregon’s business district wearing body-sized cardboard box. Despite this, Joe always had a strong desire to be a nerd and just settle down, but he’s also a social creature, and puts on antics because he like to make people laugh. I don’t see him very often, but when I do, he expresses goals that are similar to mine. Despite the fact he’s constantly nearing the insane mark and runs with a crowd I would sooner run over with my car, I still see a lot of similarities between us, and I enjoy his company.

Jamie was my first and last serious failure at love. While I wouldn’t call the experience of young love gone array positive, it was because of her I resolved to take the positive from a bad experience and learn from it, and this lesson (as well as the fact I got my nervous first kiss out of the way with her) eventually led to me dating my future wife, so it all worked out in the end. Jamie ended up marrying her lifelong sweetheart and we’re still friends, and I’m glad I met her.

I really don’t have many people that I would call role models, because I have been keenly aware that these are people and therefore loaded with flaws, just like everyone else. However, I have two English teachers to thank for giving me the proper encouragement to pursue writing, even if it’s only as a hobby. These two are, as previously mentioned, Misses Heintschel and Mister Cooney. Misses Heintschel taught me that writing can be fun, and I’ve taken that concept and run with it ever since. Mister Cooney enforced this, and showed me that intelligence and humor are not two mutual concepts. I would love to have him for a teacher again, even if it means taking the most basic course.

I also have to recognize Misses Morrin, my eight grade English teacher, who should be locked up for letting C and I ride our creativity to whatever station the train jumped track to. Because of her liberal regulations on creativity, my psyche will forever have imprinted on it images of flying toasters, frying pans, and evil lunchroom ladies. If you loved (or hated) Meatloaf Dead, you have Misses Morrin to partly thank for it, because the story concept originated in creative chaos that was her class. In fact, if you hated that story, it’s all her fault.

When I got to Owens, my opinion of teachers actually dropped a little, because I was finding people with less control over their classroom and students. This is the nature of the college beast, and teachers have to try harder to get their students to voluntarily respect them. It wasn’t until my Creative Writing degree that I found not one, but three English teachers that impressed me, and I had them all during the same semester.

Shannon Smith provided honest feedback and a guiding hand that was just enough for me to improve upon writing to a point where I found my stride, though I don’t want to give the impression that I agreed with him all of the time. Eric Wallack provided the kind of laidback dignity that made studying the writings of the Holocaust less of a daunting task, and his likable personality led him to become a chair for the school’s Performing Arts Center (and I’m not complimenting him because he controls certain things that have a bearing on me at my job). Finally, the late Jim Lang provided a brutal honesty that made his classes enjoyable, and he vaguely reminded me of an elementary school science teacher I liked. To be honest, I think the only reason I even bring him up is because he thought even my half-assed writing was brilliant, so he was good at stroking my ego, to be sure. Really, I was fortunate to have him as an instructor before he passed away.

I should also mention my department, which consists of an assortment of characters that make the workday, at the very least, interesting. Mark, my boss, gets the biggest kissing up, because he hired me, but he’s also a nice guy to work for. Holly and Micah are the sort of eccentric people that work fun. Our little group feels like a sort of extended family. A certifiable family, but one of the reasons I enjoy going into work. It almost makes me sad that my promotion moved me to another part of campus, so I don’t see them all the time. Almost…

If I missed anybody and you feel left out, then you must not have been all that important. Tough noogies.

I’m kidding, of course, but if I go on, I might as well change a few numbers on this article and dedicate it to my fiftieth birthday. For now, I look forward to the next twenty-five years, dread the twenty-five years after that, and… well, I’ll probably be dead sometime during the next, so I shouldn’t worry about that too much.