20121206bio
Forward: Ok, I’ve been given a challenge to tell my life story. This is a space where I can start that process.
The plan:
A one page version. First paragraph started below.
A ten page version. That’s what I’ll work on this week.
A 100 page version. If I get that done someday, I’ll feel done.
A 1000 page version. That’s just extra space for footnotes, digressions, shovelware of other stuff I’ve written, and so forth.
Here’s the reddit post that kicked it off. There’s also a related request by tynan of tynan.com, I’ll see if I can find it.
[–]arbivark
[-1] 4 points 17 hours ago* (5|1)
prete3nd you only have $1000. put the other $1000 in the bank and forget you have it. consider buying a $25 tent at walmart. check couchsurfing.com for somebody who will let you put the tent in their back yard. do plasma. focus on job before hotel room. it's tough at first but sometimes it gets better. i could put you up, but i'm in indianapolis, probably not somewhere you'd want to be.
when i was 21 and had $2000, i got a ride to boulder, got a job as a dishwasher, slept in a friend's closet for a month, learned to dumpster dive, and worked my way up. i'm still a bum, but i get by.
[–]ihaveananus
1 point 11 hours ago (1|0)
I'm interested in what your life story is. Is there somewhere that I can read it?
permalink
source
[–]arbivark
[-1] 2 points 4 hours ago* (2|0)
that's very interesting. i guess i should write it up. give me a week.
my webcomic is autobiographical, but not concise.
http://www.stripcreator.com/comics/arbi posted Dec 10th, 2012 ( permalink )
short version: raised rich but somewhat abused, have trust issues. escaped into books, we didn't have the internet yet. escaped to college. failed to learn anything marketable. when i was 21 and had $2000, i got a ride to boulder, got a job as a dishwasher, slept in a friend's closet for a month, learned to dumpster dive, and worked my way up. i'm still a bum, but i get by. shit jobs, girlfriend, world's lowest paid teamster, law school, girlfriend left, turned down by the bar because crazy, moved to indiana, shit job, bought house, waiter, jr partner in public interest law firm, didnt work out, was rich for 3 years, ran for office a few times, nervous breakdown, lost the money, jail, 2nd nervous breakdown, been supporting myself for 5 years doing medical studies, i'm in one now. took 4 pills an hour ago and they've done blood draws twice since then. waiting to hear if my $10,000 offer on a $15,000 house has been accepted or not. the plan is to buy a house a year next 4 years so i could retire and be a landlord.
Abstract, currently unedited: I am a living American. This is my story, in one page, then ten pages, then maybe later 100 pages. I’m 52, never accomplished much, unpublished. I’ve read 1000 books, and some of the better ones were biographies, but it helps to be someone who is already famous and has done interesting things. Only rarely do you get a good biography written by someone who hasn’t done much, but writes about it well. I liked “confessions of a rock lobster†in that genre. I don’t write well. Jyoti Mishra was the first person who suggested I write a book.
posted Dec 10th, 2012 ( permalink )
Born 1960. Carrcroft could be considered a suburb of Philadelphia. We were about 5 miles from downtown Wilmington Delaware, or 4 miles from the train station to Philadelphia, a few hours to DC.
Wilmington is a company town and my father worked for DuPont as a research chemist at the Experimental Station. It is just down the street from the mills where the Dupont family first made gunpowder. E I Du Pont de Nemours had studied with Lavoisier, who invented/discovered the chemical revolution. His father, Pierre Samuel DuPont, was an aristocrat, economist, a tutor to kings, who fled France during the revolution. The Du Ponts became known as the merchants of death, and diversified into things like TNT, leaded gasoline, lead paint, DDT, nylon, and plastics. My father would invent new kinds of rubber foam. He took early retirement at 62 and at 69 he died of pancreatic cancer as did many of his coworkers. He’s been drafted during Korea as a noncombatant CO and may have worked in the nerve gas division – he never talked about it. There was a lot we never talked about.
Our house was brick on a quarter-acre, 4 br, bought new in 1960 for $30,000, sold 10? Years ago for $200,000. Carrcroft had an old part, houses built in the 1920s or earlier, and a new part, little boxes, 8 models, build by a developer in 1960. But as people lived in these houses, they modified them. When my kid sister was born, we turned the garage into a bedroom and built a new garage. The family next door built a playroom and master bedroom off the back of theirs, and had grape vines since don was a winemaker as well as a chemist. 3 kids. The oldest was my sister’s best friend, was a cheerleader, swim team and homecoming queen. [redacted] The family across the street put in a pool. Leonard was something more blue collar, maybe an engineer. He married a twin, and the other twin lived with them and was a secretary downtown. I guess she rode the bus. Their son Ronald was my best friend off and on. We’d play base runners and smear the queer –all the fun of football, none of the rules. All the kids on the street would play hide and seek, kickball, tag. Kate was English, red hair, freckles, and smart, went to Friends private school. Frannie went to catholic school and I never really got to know him but he was close with Ronald. Carol and Kenny were Chinese. Harold Anderson’s mom remarried so now he was H B Kendall. Nobody was black. The blacks we saw were maids who would come on the bus once a week to clean houses. Across the creek, the Jewish kids at our school lived in their own development, Green Acres. Between the sons of scientists and the jewish kids, this was a good school for a nerd like me, although I stood out as the shortest boy, picked last for sports, with my nose in a book usually. Kids would come and go as their fathers got transferred to different dupont plants, but my father turned down any chance of promotion to raise his kids in one place.
We had a tv, which got 4 channels. Around 1972 we got a bigger tv that was color and got the more disreputable UHF stations, 17, 23, and maybe it was 51. Those would play syndicated sitcoms so we could come home from school and watch bewitched or gomer pyle or the banana splits show. We had a hi-fi and a few Beethoven records, but ours was house without music,and I didnt discover music,and Bowie, till 8th grade. My tastes run to bluegrass and early punk but mostly these days I listen to pop club stuff, and a bit of country. I’ve always liked protest music, of whatever genre.
We were only allowed to watch an hour a day, and UHF was frowned upon, so I went to .. oh, now I realize we didn’t have UHF when was 8, so that’s why we went to Tommy’s house to watch speed racer and astroboy. Tommy Lundberg lived the next street over and a block down. He was my best friend when I was 7 and 8. I was probably not his best friend. I can’t sort out, now, if he was my first crush, or if we were just friends. He had a split level house. He moved away, never wrote, and there are 8 Tom Lundbergs on facebook. He probably wouldn’t remember me. When I was 12 my friend kevin reed had a brother. Colin, aka Roddy, 10, who I definitely had a crush on. Never told him of course. My main crush in those years was Jaffrey Spinney, a Daryl Hannah type with long blond hair. Never told her. Ran into her in college and she didn’t remember me. There were a couple of acres of woods behind the elementary school, and a spring-fed creek that wound its way through the acres of little boxes, and I could usually be found at the creek or in the woods. One day when I was 12 we followed the creek past the woods to where it joined the other creek that separated our neighborhood from green acres, through a tunnel under the highway (I-95, Delaware exit 5, Marsh road is route 3 or 9 or something) into a magical kingdom, where the creek ran down a waterfall into a flooded quarry, and kids would gather from all over to swim and cliffdive and probably smoke cigarettes. But when we got home it was dark and I was late for dinner so I got beat with a belt, a fairly common occurrence in our house, so I never went back there. Now most of that land is no longer the William Dupont estate but is Bellview Park.
My world was pretty small. I didn’t learn to ride a bike til I was 8, but even then I wasn’t allowed to leave our street. Meanwhile my older brother was trusted to take a bus downtown to the scout office or the library or wherever, never mind the riots and the national guard and all that.
posted Dec 10th, 2012 ( permalink )
My brother was 4 years older, and got straight As back before grade inflation, and was a scout leader and played in the band and the school play and ran track and was a golden boy. In those years he was still thin and still had hair. For fun he’d repair old tvs and in junior high got a job running a computer for the university. So he was a lot to live up to, and I never did. We got along ok. These days he lives near google and is a computer wizard. They knew he was smart but it always surprised people when my standardized test scores were as good as his. I was an underachiever, a hippie who thought school was a prison getting in the way of my time to read and hang out at the creek. I had no motivation for school until I got to college. I went to class, got Bs and was paroled a year early at 16 for good behavior. I have an older sister who is a bit like me. She was into horses and biology and became a forest ranger and married a lumberjack.
Past the highway and bellview was our high school and jr high. We rode the bus to jr high, but walked the mile to high school, or rode a bike, or hitchhiked. It was uphill both ways and sometimes snowy, but we did have shoes. I didn’t have a car til I was around 20, although I got my license when I was 16, taking drivers ed in summer school.
Junior high was tougher. I got bullied and there wasn’t much upside. Some hot girls. In those years I was reading books about how to survive alone in the woods off nuts and berries, skills I figured I would need. I also read nearly every science fiction book on the rows of shelves in the public library downtown, which is where I got most of my sex ed. From the books, not the library.
While most kids learn such things in the gutter, I was a sheltered kid. I remembered being puzzled by some greek vases at the british museum when I was 12, and the next year when I ran into the world circumcision in a book I put two and two together as the truth horribly dawned on me. My parents had had my penis mutilated, for no good reason, and in the matter of fact bland sadistic world, never bothered to tell me. There were a lot of betrayals like that in those years, as I learned more about the US role in international relations. I was against the war, a pacifist, but for Nixon. At 13 I became vegetarian, although I couldn’t practice it until the first day I left home. Robert Heinlein novels had a big influence on me, and by 16 I was Libertarian. By 20 anarchocapitalist, extropian in my 20s.
I went through a period around 14 of being a streaker and a peeping tom as my emerging sexuality didn’t have any outlet. Then at 15 I was science lab partners with a bisexual lesbian with long red hair, from the artists colony of Arden. I guess she’d lost her scholarship to Tower Hill school somehow and was stuck with us plebians for a couple years. She was a living Heinlein heroine and I fell in love. It took me a year to come out of my shell enough to tell her, and by that point she had another boyfriend, so this was my fist bisexual polyamorous relationship. My first kiss was a peak experience. We never took it further. It was an emotional roller coaster ride. She had multiple personalities and suicidal tendencies. We broke up after a few months although I stayed in touch with her for years, in a stalkerish kind of way. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve let that go. She introduced me to my second girlfriend, after dating my college roommate for a bit. She also, at 21, explained to me how safewords work.
We both graduated a year early, although she ended up repeating her senior year at Choate before going to college at Kenyon. Choate was JKF’s school and Kenyon was Paul Newman’s. Hitchhiking to ohio to visit her was my first long hitchhiking road trip; there’d be more. Finding and then losing my first lover was devastating to me. I now recognize depression when I experience it, but at the time I had no frame of reference. I’m not sure how I got through that summer, probably holed up with a book.
posted Dec 10th, 2012 ( permalink )
School
Carrcroft elementary, mr pleasant jr and senior high, u of del, suny H George school, Naropa, CU, Missou,UMKC, iupui.
Sex 2 serious girlfriends, no boyfriends, 8? female lovers, 40 or 50 one night stands with guys. At least 5 guys where it was more than one night, but less than a boyfriend. 4 hookers. 18 years of lapdances at the club. [redacted.]
Love
Money. When I was a kid, my allowance was 50 cents a week. When I went to college, I got $1000 a year from a trust fund set up by my grandfather. When my father died when I was 38, I got about $100,000 and a small share in the texas ranch oil rights worth around $40,000. I lost the stock portfolio 3 years later but kept the oil. I get a check of around $500/mo from the oil. I’m made around $100,000 in wages during my life. I’ve made $65,000 from doing medical studies these past 5 years. I was a philosophy major to learn how to be happy being poor. I’m frugal, cheap, a miser. Scottish heritage, depression values, pioneer stock.
Jobs donut maker donut truck driver dishwasher houseman mcdonalds ecocycle recycling technician paperboy nyt, janitor realtor merchandizer warehouseman law librarian law clerk warehouseman again temp courier waiter headwaiter junior partner.
Politics. Offices held. Election lost. Lawsuits won and lost.
Philosophy
Travel 46 states, 7 countries.
History
Places I have lived in Delaware, Colorado, Missouri and Indiana. That’s Wilmington, Dover, Newark, Boulder, Hannibal Columbia Kansas City Indianapolis. The first 17 years in Wilmington, the last 18 in Indianapolis.
Ancestors. Kings, an emperor, 10 pilgrims, a senator, a pirate, a bunch of farmers. A slaveowner,an abolishitionist. Quakers, Presbyterians, Methodists. English, welsh, scots, French Germans a candaian, Belgians a swede some irish. One catholic. The richest man in Ireland and the poorest.
posted Dec 10th, 2012 ( permalink )
Redditors who quit a "steady job" to follow a passion: what's your story? What did you leave, what did you start, and how has it turned out? by Fadelightin AskReddit
[–]arbivark
[-1] 1 point 7 hours ago* (1|0)
It was about 14 years ago. I had a job I liked as the headwaiter at a Tibetan restaurant run by the dalai lama's nephew. I came into some money from my grandfather, but I kept working for awhile, but there was this one violent busboy who hated me (I can be kind of abrasive) so I told the boss it was him or me, and he didn't back me up, so I quit. I took a saturday off to go to a fetish party in new jersey,and when the plane took off I knew I wasn't going back to work. I still haven't. That place closed about a year later and Jigme was killed a year ago while marching for Tibet.
I had a friend who was a well-known rich jewish hippie lawyer, and together we started a public interest law firm to do a project I had outlined in my LLM thesis a few years before. My hope was the two of us, both half-assed lawyers, would be, together, able to do the work of one lawyer. But I underestimated the weaknesses of both of us, and the project never really came together, and by the third year I was kind of freaking out and thinking I'd better quit and get a real job again. We bickered, he got mad and fired me, deleting the files of the work we had done. A year later my home was burglarized, taking the computer with the rest of the work I'd put back together. I went crazy,and during a couple of months when I was non-functional, I lost the money my grandfather had left me on a stock deal that went bad, when Converse went bankrupt. Chuck Taylors are now made in China by Nike. Meanwhile, the federal judge in our town had stalled our case for 5 years, and then threw it out for bogus reasons. I got the 7th circuit to reverse the dismissal,and it next went to the state supreme court, then back to the 7th, but Judge Posner tossed it for a different reason leaving me with only something called a dubitante opinion from Judge Westerbook (which explained why I was right.) There've been a handful of law review articles about my case. I was working on the appeal when I was falsely arrested, held in jail for three weeks, tortured, had a second nervous breakdown. The clerk of the supreme court returned the appeal because it was filed a day late. The false charges against me got dropped a year later, but I was broke, and not really able to hold a job again. For the last 5 years I've been supporting myself doing medical studies, which is where I am today. I haven't been making enough to afford to keep my law license active, so I let that go. I've been doing a few pro se cases about voter ID, but not doing them very well and I've been losing. I might get my law license back this year (drivers license too for that matter, i've been going greyhound lately.) I'm haggling with the VA over a house I want to buy; my current plan is to buy a house a year with study money and make enough as a landlord to get by, and just do the legal stuff as an expensive hobby.
. . . .
ok, that's it for today. stay tuned, comics fans.
posted Dec 10th, 2012 ( permalink )
The next year, at 17, I went to college instead of senior year. The local university had set up an honors program located on the campus of a small Methodist college at the state capital, Dover. 100 other freaks like me. Also 1000 or so Wesley College students, but we didn’t really associate with them. The first day there they had lentil loaf as the vegetarian option, and I was finally able to practice my vegetarianism. At home you ate was put in front of you and liked it. My parents are good cooks, mom in the Julia Child style, dad in traditional American farm dishes. She was born in France in 1929. Her parents were French teachers from Kansas City. He was born in Texas; I’m not sure why Texas because his father was a farmer and banker in Fort Morgan Colorado. They lost the farm, the bank and his mother’s general store in the flood of ’35. He sold the farm to cover a run on the bank, so his neighbors were happy, if Depressed. He’d given an acre of land on his farm to be the schoolhouse, and he was on the board of education, so he was hired as the principal, then as a math teacher, then got a job as the treasurer for two cousins who were oil wildcatters. I guess that’s how they ended up in Kansas City. When the cousins didn’t have cash to pay him, they’d give him mineral rights instead, and his estate was eventually worth 2 million. He died of cancer in 1968, and his money sat in a trust fund in blue chip stocks like IBM for 20 years 4 kids, 16 grandchildren, so when my father died at 69 of cancer, I got $100,000 in stock and some mineral rights in Texas. So my parents were bridge partners in Kansas City when they were 12 and went to school and church together. Her father was a professor and French department chair at UMKC. In 1993, not sure what I wanted to do next after law school, I lived in Kansas City in their old neighborhood for a year, getting an LLM, working at a title company, and then did a medical experiment that earned me $1000 to move to Indy with. I’d passed the bar in Indiana, mostly just for practice, but then Missouri turned me down for the bar there because I’m crazy.
I got to Indy, broke, rented a room at Stewart house, set up my vt-100 dumb terminal, opened up the wants ads and took a job at a produce warehouse, loading trucks for a year and a half. I made $40,000, saved every other paycheck, and bought a house for $17, 500. That was the house that burned this February. I had one interview for a law job, but there were 100 other applicants, and I found that discouraging. It was hard to find a next job. I temped briefly at a bank and then Charles Schwaab. When a check bounced, I went and got a job that day as a courier delivering packages for $6/hr. Then I got a part time job as a waiter at the Snow Lion, and went full-time there after being promoted to headwaiter.
I went to work for the Snow Lion because they had the best food in town, Tibetan dishes by Chef/Entrepreneur/Activist Jigme Norbu, whose uncle is the dalai lama, but it wasn’t vegetarian, so I had mixed feelings. So anyway there I am at the dining hall the first day of college getting the lentil loaf. I took artsy-type classes, a bunch of humanities classes, thinking I would be a journalist. My real goal was to be a science fiction writer, but I figured I should make a living as a journalist to get in the habit of writing. If I had it to do over I would have taken the science and advanced math classes they had there, but I didn’t realize the science degrees were so much more marketable.
My father’s first day on the job as a scientist for DuPont, he made more than my mother’s father at the peak of his career as a college professor. My grandparents complained a lot about how poor they were, but they had a black maid, so I figure they were better off than she was. My grandfather had grown up on a farm in North Dakota. When he graduated from the one-room schoolhouse, they made him the teacher and principal, but he got out of there as soon as he could. I don’t think he was in WWI, so I’m not sure how he ended up in France in the 20s. My grandmother’s father was a successful furniture salesman in Chicago.
One of the classes we took that year was civil liberties, reading opinions by Brennan and Marshall. This was 1978, shortly before the court took a turn to the right in the Reagan years. At least three of us in that class that I know of became lawyers, maybe 5. Jim and Di, and me, and I don’t remember if Grace and Henry were in that class. On the weekends we’d go to the main campus in NewArk, have adventures, try new drugs and for me Sunday nights were meetings of the gay student union.
My grades weren’t good enough to transfer to Northwestern for journalism. I should have just applied there as a freshman and transferred my credits, but what did I know. I knew very little about how colleges worked, it was just this mythical land after public school. The main reason I was there was to get away from my father and because I had no clue about how to find a job. Moving to the main campus the next year was disillusioning. Suddenly I was a small frog in a big pond, and drifted. I moved off campus, living on a drug dealer’s back porch for awhile, taking the few journalism classes offered, winding up as a philosophy major. I didn’t cut my hair in college, often went barefoot, ate Saturday dinner with the hare khrisna, Friday vegetarian dinners with the crowd from the food co-op. Anyone but me could tell I was crazy.
I flunked in and out. Sometimes I’d have an emotional crisis and flunk a semester, or get A’s to get re-admitted. By my 5th year I’d run out of money, and was not officially enrolled, but most of my professors let me attend classes anyway. I got 100 credits there but never graduated. I worked one summer as a scoutmaster at the scout camp I’d gone to, then got a ride to Boulder Colorado to try to start a new life, with a tent and suitcase.
I got jobs as a dishwasher and janitor. I slept in the park and on rooftops for a couple weeks, then stayed in Jia’s closet for a month, then got my own place, a one room second story apartment that one entered through the bathroom or the window. Boulder had tight zoning controls, so a lot of the housing was unofficial. Winters are mild, but last for 6 months, since Boulder is a mile and half high, right at the edge of the Rocky Mountains. My high school girlfriend Brooke was there, living with her girlfriend in a house of all women, and I met Lindy, a young punk girl who had just come in off the streets, after losing her aerospace engineering scholarship. Like the protagonist of Mark Twain’s the 5,000 pound note, I had a check for $2000 but no ID to cash it, so Lindy helped me do that, and I’d bring her bagettes (sp?) from the French bakery I was washing dishes in, and by April we moved in together, a basement apartment across from campus. She’d gone back as a math and religious studies major while working as a hotel maid at the historic Boulderado, where she loved her coworkers and hated her boss. (9:10 am, piss in a cup, stabbed, then a timed breakfast, then dose, then a day of blood draws, every 15 minutes at first, then for longer and longer intervals. I’m writing this while in a medical study.) I bounced around more dishwashing and janitorial jobs, while dumpster diving on the side. Boulder is a town for spoiled rich kids, and at the end of the semester especially they throw away their food and clothes and furniture and fly off somewhere, so by checking the dumpsters I was able to find stuff. The best thing I found was a teddy bear named G T Bear, Gummi Theodore Bear. He wore a business suit and had a ring to pull so he could say things like “You’re on your way to the top!â€, but when I found him the ring was broken so he had to ad lib. He wanted us to buy him a Ferrari, which is how Lindy and I ended up going to law school a few years later. You don’t say no to the bear. He went to classes with us and was joined by a growing family of more bears, also mostly found in dumpsters. Law school went ok, but neither of us got rich from it, and GT never got his Ferarri. One year I got him a membership in the Ferarri Club of America.
My best job in Boulder was at Ecocyle, Ecological Recycling Inc., running cardboard recycling at a mall, but the price of cardboard crashed and I got laid off. With that on my resume, I got appointed to the Boulder County Energy and Environment Committee, the first of several appointed positions I’ve held. I expected to have a career in politics. I started working on campaigns when I was 10, worked with Biden on the Carter campaign when I was 15, and was speaker of the house in a YMCA-sponsored thing kind of like Boy’s State. (It was co-ed, and Brooke’s and my first kiss was while at a Model UN event in DC.) I’d liked sitting in the Delaware Speaker of the House’s chair. My mother was an unpaid lobbyist for various civil causes and knew most of the state politicans personally. Before marriage, she had worked for the state department. I like to tell people that my father as a mad scientist and my mother was a spy. I ran Vern Etzel’s campaign for state Auditor when I was 20. I have run for school board, township advisory board, county clerk, judge, and state representative. I run as a Libertarian or Republican, so I don’t have to worry about winning.
posted Dec 12th, 2012 ( permalink )
I had one semester in grad school at Naropa Institute, in Buddhist and Western psychology, but they correctly thought I wasn’t ready for it. Met Allen Ginsberg there a few times. Lindy graduated and was going to leave town, looking to move to some small town somewhere. I convinced her to let me come along. We packed up my 64 dodge PowerWagon panel truck and headed east. We had dinner with my cousins in Kansas City and the next day went to Hannibal Missouri where she wanted to see where Mark twain was from. I noticed we could buy a house in Hannibal for around what we’d been paying for a years rent in Boulder. I didn’t notice there were no jobs. We were there a year. I was a realtor, but didn’t make any money at it. Hannibal was like stepping out of a time machine to 50 years ago. Lindy was cute in Boulder but in Hannibal she was the prettiest girl in town, and looked about 18 so she’d get hit on by high school kids.
She was an assistant manager at a health food store, then worked in a car parts factory, and came home one day and said we’re going to law school. So we did. She got accepted 4 places, offered a scholarship by Mizzou, so that’s where we went. We rented the top half of a house called Liberty Hall for $250/mo. I got a job as the world’s lowest paid teamster, loading trucks 50 hours a week at the Coca-cola warehouse. I took the LSAT and got a 47 out of a possible 48. I finished my degree, through the mail at Western Illinois University, 4.0, which I’d found via Dr. John Bear’s Guide to Alternative Degree Programs. Dr Bear has 40 PhD’s, mostly from diploma mills. Mizzou turned me down the first year I applied, so I kept working in the warehouse, read Lindy’s lawbooks, and applied again, pulling any strings I had, which got me an interview, which got me in. Lindy went off to London for a semester,and when she came back we weren’t still together, something she had left out of her daily letters. We are still friends, and 20 year later I still think about her. We were not always happy. She has an Irish temper, and I can’t deal with angry people. But we were together 6 years, the longest anybody has ever put up with me. I’ve mostly been alone since then.
John Keiffner [redacted] prosecutor, called. Guy who stole my checkbook is in jail, possible $430 in restitution.
posted Dec 12th, 2012 ( permalink )
Law school was fun. I do ok when it’s just an exam at the end of the semester and few papers. The professors were really smart, so I could talk to them. The students weren’t quite as smart, but most of them worked harder than I did, so I graduated right in the middle of my class. I didn’t get any loans. I had money saved from the teamsters job, a little stock my grandmother had left me, I got a scholarship my second year, my tuition was in-state, and I worked. I worked two years twenty hours a week in the law library, was a law clerk for a sole practitioner downtown, edited summaries of depositions, tutored, spent a summer as a law clerk to the Missouri Public Service Commission, did research for one professor and editing for another. All this was much easier than loading trucks 50 hours a week. I was also vice chair of the Mo, Libertarian Party, Vice-chair of the Boone County Energy and Environment Commission, Vice-President of the Missouri Equal Justice Foundation, treasurer of the school’s Federalist Society, ran for school board, and in my final semester did an internship for a judge on the Missouri Supreme Court.
Once a week I’d drive out to the gay dance club in the woods, have 3 drinks, and drive home at high speeds on the back roads, as an outlet for the depression I was in from Lindy leaving me. I graduated. Not sure what to do next, I spent a year in Kansas City as mentioned above and moved to Indy.
posted Dec 12th, 2012 ( permalink )
says: