This is the next part of the story of me, see 2 entries back for the last part.
We moved when I started 8th grade, from an old brick house near the city park to a farm house 30 minutes outside of town. I was not happy about moving. I loved a lot of things about living in the city; the places you could go, the commotion and chaos, swimming in a pulsing sea of humanity you could ride like a wave from one strange reality to the next. It isn't always a comfortable journey but can be a captivating one.
Around this time i got into early goth and industrial music and started wearing black a lot. Yes, I was one of those coffee-drinking, over-dramatic "nobody understands me" teenagers. I started to go see local hardcore, punk, and industrial bands at grimy all ages venues that popped up and disappeared every few weeks. I was looking for something that combined what I loved about the piano, the creativity of art, and the illusion of magic, and it seemed like popular music could allow for that type of show. I could play piano but not guitar, and I kept working on cheap keyboards and with my voice hoping to be the next Trent Reznor. I recorded my first original songs around this time, overdubbing bad casio tones and melodramatic lyrics into a cheap cassette recorder.
I was thin and bad at farm work, and my mentality and lifestyle stuck out in the local community like a tomato in a bowl of ice cream. I vowed to live in the city when I got older and to avoid nature at all costs. now, 20 years later, I am just starting to give nature another shot.
The awkwardness of Junior High continued for me at a different school. This place was near a local chemical plant, I remember one day the plant caught on fire and from miles away you could see a huge plume of violet red smoke rising from it. The chemical plant survived the fire and carries many of the better paying jobs in town to this day. Due to children of the plant workers this school had a better budget than Franklin. I remember classrooms with big windows, carpet instead of tile, nice computers.
The new school had a gifted program, so I went there for a period instead of taking woodshop and home economics. At this level they let us study what we wanted, I remember we worked on a terrible horror movie for a while, doing a magic show, spending the rest of the time working on a bad superhero comic. We also visited the creative team at a local advertising agency and received a visit from a local political cartoonist.
We had a few electives among our courses. I took a creative writing course, and took art both years. The art teacher was a wonderful woman named Mrs. Palmer. My art improved a lot under her instructions. After my first year with her I could draw a recognizable portrait of someone and could use acrylic paints. I came back and spoke with her class and shared some of my work years later when I was in college.
Like many others Junior High was an uncomfortable, dorky phase for me. I had glasses and braces and bad hair. I was interested in girls but had no game yet. Just before the last day of 9th grade there was a "lock-in" at the local Y, where people stayed up all night playing basketball, swimming, and trying to surreptitiously get high or make out. A beautiful girl named Amber approached me and we talked for the rest of the night. She sat with me the last day of school but I did not ask for her number. I believe she was the first girl to be interested in me. I went into Summer before high school encased in a room covered in art projects and band flyers, wondering if I would see her again. With the start of high school things changed again and my journey continued. |
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