Introduction

I am setting this biography down, not because my story is entirely extraordinary, but rather because in many respects it is entirely ordinary. The extraordinary regularly seems to make it's way into my life, then quickly leaves. My life has always been this way. Spurts of madness punctuate what is mostly a fairly typical, if asymetric, life.

Palatial Estates of Phantasm

My earliest memories are mostly fantasy, I think. I remember events that I probably couldn't have been aware of, and places I've only been to once in great detail. Like a palace rebuilt and decorated by newly woven thoughts and ideas, these are palatial estates of phantasm. I dream them, and they dream me. Most of my childhood was school and Nintendo, travelling and summer camps, church and playing outside. I grew up on a modest farm, mostly we grow oranges, olives, and prunes; sometimes cotton figured into the equation also. We always had a gaggle of animals some of which I liked but mostly I ignored them for pursuit of the almighty Fun. There was an old reservoir still hanging around from the WWII period, which had been converted into a swimming pool. I remember my dad when he still had a few close friends that came around, and they would toss me back and forth across the pool. I felt like I was flying. I still dream about this. I've always dreamed of flying. I went through a long period where I thought that if I concentrated on mathematics hard enough and also stayed fit, I'd get to go up in the Shuttle. Space Camp was always too expensive, and by the time my parents were willing to consider it, I was too old. My dreams of NASA ended with the Challenger incident. The pool was also a strange symbol for me, because it represented a false sort of affluence. Other people had pools because they had enough income to put one in. We had a pool because it wasn't too inconvenient to re-fit the reservoir. Similarly, the pool was surrounded by pomegranates because it was too inconvenient at the time to remove them. Walking the edge of the pool was always a dangerous business, because the pomegranate branches grew thorny mini-branches on them and avoiding them was difficult sometimes. Of course this was the best reason to do so also. We climbed on old broken equipment and created new worlds in junk. Palatial estates of phantasm.

Somewhere in the midst of all these waking dreams, I began to look for something. Searching and hunting lead me further into the groves of oranges and olives which surrounded the house. Sometimes I would invent excuses for my wandering, imagining that I was searching for elves, or learning to be a soldier, or even searching for whittling sticks. The sense of longing for something still not seen remained (and still does) and I wandered further, until I started riding my bicycle out as far as I could go. I could not find what I was seeking. One night I awoke, having had an intense dream of searching for something, and I was amazed to see that the ceiling, the walls, the floor, and all the objects strewn about my room were glowing. They glowed with a shimmering bright blue color, and individual particles of the material swirled and orbited each other in a living pattern. This was too much to believe. I thought that maybe something was wrong, and it was then that I noticed that the particles were actually spiders. I could feel them crawling over my body, and I was terrified that they would bite me and I would die a horrible death. I ran, trying to brush them from my skin, but more replaced those I flung to the ground. I barely made it down the stairs to the front room, and crept into the living room. I was more terrified of my parents being angry with me than I was of the spiders. I laid down on the living room couch, and realized that the spiders were still there. I thought about knocking on my parent's door, but I heard them making strange sounds. I knew they would not help me. There was no escape. And so, I faced my worst nightmare on the living room couch, and forced myself to simply breath in and out in a steady pattern that slowed gradually, until I fell asleep. Life was kind to me, and allowed me to forget.

During this whole time, I had strange things going on, that often left me speechless. They were always in the background, but they were constantly interjecting themselves into my reality, much to my chagrin. Like I said, they weren’t that big of a deal, and it never entered my mind to think of them as anything more than daydreams. There were a thousand of these little episodes, and unlike the vision of blue energy, they weren’t all very memorable.

I think it started with the recurring dream. It was the only recurring dream I ever remember having. I was walking through my parents’ kitchen, and an animal leapt at me. It was a serpent with green eyes. I ripped it in two, and out of its belly came an alligator. I ripped it in two, and out of its belly came a vulture with red eyes. I ripped it in two also. In the dream, I was always amazed at my ability to react so quickly. I took the carcasses which seemed to wither or deflate, and walked to the front door. There stood my mother and father holding the door open for me. I walked toward them and a garbage man appeared holding a small wooden box, into which I placed the now wilted bodies of the three creatures. I had this particular dream over and over for the 2 years before I had the vision of blue energy, I believe.

As I mentioned before, I quickly forgot about the vision, but that didn’t stop me from continuing into new territories. I would divide my middle and fourth finger (like Spock) on both hands, then touch the finger tips together, and stare through an elongated diamond of a window. The world seemed different through that window, and it was something I continued to do on occasion, but only absent-mindedly. I was also far-sighted for a time, a problem that corrected itself eventually, but taught me to unfocus my eyes. Much later on, this became the key to reactivating the vision of blue in a repeatable way. I also used to experiment with staring at the sun, then looking at objects through the optical illusion. There were times that I could hear a voice prompting me to do certain things, like staring at a person until everything but their face faded out into something like the static on a non-channel on your television. This was intended to help me hear the other person’s thoughts, but I’ve never been able to do so. By crossing my eyes in various ways, I would try to look through my hand. I learned to cup my hands in different shapes to change the sounds around me. I tested and probed the limits of my senses, but never did I have a plan or an agenda. I was just daydreaming. Most of all, I must emphasize that it never occurred to me that any of this was worth mentioning to anyone else.

I liked school for the most part. I typically wanted to jump ahead to "the good stuff" which I defined as anything above what I was supposed to be learning by normal standards. I had usually already read that part on my own time. I liked reading textbooks and listening to Paul Harvey on talk radio (I still bear a grudge against the country-western station that took my talk radio station's place even years later). I complained after the first day of school that they had not yet taught me to read. I usually admired my teachers, and wanted to be their friend, perhaps because I would have felt more adult than my classmates, perhaps because I didn't socialize well within my peer group. I read encyclopedias and dictionaries when I could get them, but mostly science fiction (like Heinlein) and fantasy. I especially liked books that explained the mechanics of magic and pseudo-scientific explanations of inventions that didn't yet exist. In 4th Grade, I read Atlas Shrugged for a BookIt pizza, then agonized over the 10 page report that I felt was necessary to describe the ideas that the book had given me. That year was a turning point of sorts. That year, I met Hamada. Hamada was a young man from Kenya, born in Nairobi. His parents moved to Porterville for some reason unknown to me. He and I became friends rather quickly, and I discovered that he didn't believe in Jesus. He was a Muslim, and not wicked or lost or foolish as religious authorities seemed to imply. His father was kind to him, and taught him patiently. I was awestruck to see this, because although my father was an intelligent man, he was not very patient with people. They took me with them to visit their family in LA, and I vaguely remember strange food cooking, and veiled women. That year Hamada and I took on a bully. There wasn't much physical violence involved, but the guy kept calling Hamada, "Tamale", as though he were from Mexico. Our class, all firmly with Hamada, managed to beat his class (a grade above us) at a game of soccer, and he stopped bothering us. Hamada left that next year, but the concepts of tolerance and solidarity would stick with me for much longer. As I kept learning, I grew to love chess, and got an Official Chess Federation rating, but didn't like tournament play, so my skill languished. Mostly I read, played video games, and learned to use my dad's Apple ][+. I went through periods where I would focus all my attention on one thing, then finish and forget that I had ever been interested in that thing. Dragon Warrior, Apple Basic, Dragon's Keep (one of Sierra Online's originals), Final Fantasy, and Zork, then onward soldiers to PCs and batch files, bigger games, and then BBS'es. In part, this progression was the result of one teacher who gave me a chance. In 5th Grade, I had a nice teacher who had just gotten out of seminary and decided to teach for awhile. He introduced me to languages, specifically Greek because he said Hebrew was difficult for him. The rest of the class hated learning Greek, but I really wanted to learn it more than anything else. I felt like my peers were now holding me back. That's where the BBS'es came in. There, learning was prized above all things. Writing batch files and learning how to disable your memory manager so that Ultima VII could run it's proprietary Voodoo memory manager granted one status. It was my first encounter with meritocracy. Some time during 4th or 5th grade, I remember having a contest with a friend of mine named Matt, where we created password programs on Apple ][ floppies. Eventually we figured out the peek/poke codes that would allow us to disable Ctrl-Open Apple-Reset that let us past the initial program and was always an easy cheat. Then we started putting multiple passwords on the disks. We kept solving and redesigning, until I realized the only way to win was to give him a program with no password. I still dream of this, even years later: My dad speaking to me, "How do you win the riddling contest? Ask a question without an answer."

The Beauty of the Baud

After 5th Grade, I went to a new private school in Visalia. This private school was slightly different than the one I had gone to before. They treated 6th Grade as a part of Junior High, and so we had a class schedule instead of a single teacher. The kids were different as well. Most of them came from a single church, and about the same background. They were primarily Dutch, and were heirs to dairy farms. Because of milk subsidies, although you'd think that we were all equal in that our families were involved in agriculture, they were in a different income bracket altogether. Some had their own cars and houses, and although they couldn't drive on normal streets, there were enough dirt roads on that connected on their collective properties that they didn't need to. This was the world I stepped into. I laid low for most of the year, and just tried to blend. I didn't do so very well, but I didn't make too many waves either. I made a couple of friends, had a girlfriend (sort of), but mainly I couldn't wait to get home and work on my computer. I discovered Compuserve (when it was entirely text-based) and joined a writer's group (some play on words involving demons and unpublished writers - quite hilarious really). It was also the time period during which I discovered the Hacker's Manifesto by the Mentor. I began to believe in vague, amorphous ideas about information. Then partway into the school year, I was asked to show the new kid around school. He had bright red hair and glasses. Nothing too atypical, but he possessed an air of nerdiness that he still carries to this day (proudly, I might add). That first day of class cemented both our friendship and my eternal disgust with that school. It was later in the day, and it was time for P.E. We were playing basketball at the time, which I neither liked nor disliked. It was obvious that Andrew, the new kid, hated it though. The P.E. teacher decided to pass Andrew the ball... without any warning at all. He basically bounced the ball off of Andrew's face, knocking him to the ground and bending his glasses in the process. Andrew tried to be gracious, picked himself up, and started to fix his glasses. The P.E. teacher proceeded to take them away, then try to fix them himself, only managing to snap them in two. In my own melodramatic aescetic, I think of this moment as the time the War began. The War was my battle against Authority without Merit. The P.E. teacher also happened to be the Geography teacher. So one day at lunch, Andrew, Ben (another friend), and I took one of his test booklets and dropped it back behind the filing cabinet after putting it in a grey Mervyn's bag that blended with the cabinet. For several weeks we were assured that the test would be postponed until found. Eventually the pressure got to Ben, and he told everything. I got a D in Geography. It was worth it from my point of view, because it proved that the P.E./Geography teacher knew as little about Africa as we did. I had proven to myself that adults were not to be feared or mindlessly obeyed, but questioned, examined, and treated normally. I had lost the battle, but won The War. I spent some time with Alice, who was a nice girl who could sing and play the harp. I spent most of my time in awe of her. I don't think we ever did more than hold hands, and the dynamic was more like a courtship than dating. The next year, we broke up because I changed schools again. I was also advancing on the computer front. Andrew and I hung out more and more often, sometimes went to the local computer user's group with my dad and his, even started a BBS. We tore phones apart and studied (black) box diagrams. We chatted and gamed, surfed AOL and gave out gaming advice like we were pros. It was a good time for me; it allowed me to forge a new identity away from my parents, who tended to downplay my accomplishments. I had started to break through the barriers of normalcy I had placed on myself.

To be continued...