Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Me: A Comprehensive Speculative Autobiography Inspired By The True Story Of An Idea I Once Had

I was born on a Sunday afternoon. My parents told me my first word was a lie. I soon rose to a position of prominence on the jungle gym at my kindergarten playground. I grew anxious in first grade because I didn't know what the word "study" meant, and refused to ask. By second grade I had already developed strong heterosexual urges. In fifth grade these were explained to me. I was like, "gross!" In seventh grade I had the same teacher I had had in the first grade. This did not inspire confidence. Nevertheless, I broke down and finally asked her exactly what the hell did she mean by "study."

After this, my schoolwork improved. In high school I filled my geometry notebooks with outrageously false proofs incorporating geometric concepts that I had invented myself, such as "perpendiculous." I knew full well that when the teacher collected those notebooks to grade them, she would pass over these without notice. I tried the same thing with my biology notebooks, with decidedly less triumphant results. Apparently wings on a frog is a tipoff.

By college I was ready. Unfortunately, they weren't. I had to hand it to them: their unreadiness for me was more than almost a match for my readiness for them. In the end after a tightly fraught struggle I was acclaimed the victor by forfeit. That's right: the school closed down. Myself and seventeen others were awarded Magna Cum Laude degrees in a class-action settlement that I spearheaded. Then the group of us promptly disappeared into the Los Angeles underground, where we solved problems for hire until I tired of building a machine, flipping a car, and engaging in an interminable yet utterly bloodless machine gun shootout every damn single mission. I struck out on my own.

I relocated in the vicinity of the Chicago region, where I was soon to shift abruptly to the present tense.

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