Educational Background

From 1985 until 1994, I spent most of my time at a small Catholic School on Whalley Avenue.  It was all I really knew of the world, aside from books and television, music and movies.  My house was only 3 blocks from the school, on Elm Street.  

I recall passing through downtown on our way to Mystic, CT, where my grandparents lived, and wondering aloud, "Why is there a castle downtown?" and they told me it was a school, but I'm not sure that I believed them fully at the time.  

My mother finished high school but never attended college.  She found work as a typist, and would obtain manuscripts and put together final proofs for academic journals.  In spite of the importance of her stage in the work, being that she was the last step in the process before things went to print, she was never paid very well but she still liked doing it.  In our first apartment, I recall her office in the attic, full of brown manilla folders on shelves surrounding an old IBM typewriter.  There was a pinball game up there, with the Christmas ornaments and boxes of clothes out of season.  I wasn't allowed to play it when she was working because it was distracting to her.  I remember the one day that Hurricane Gloria came to town, that we sat around playing cards by candle-light.  I was six.  i recall watching a person ride his bicycle down Norton Street in the howling wind and pouring rain.  I was amazed, because I knew how unlikely it would be for me to have permission to ride my bicycle at that exact moment.  

My father received a degree from SCSU for Social Work.  His first job was with the State of Connecticut, followed by a company called CCCI.  I can't remember what that stands for.  He primarily worked with the elderly, assessing their needs and getting them home care, rather than nursing homes.  During this time, he was a fairly attentive dad, got me lots of books and legos, signed me up for tee-ball, and in the process did a fairly decent job of keeping me mentally stimulated.  This only lasted for so long, though, and I can hardly remember his demeanor because it changed so quickly.  In 1992, he was hospitalized for a nonmalignant cyst in his spinal column which nearly left him paralyzed.  The steroids they gave him caused him to develop bipolar disorder, which still remains quite prevalent to this day as a part of his personality.  He never fully psychologically recovered, I don't think.  

That affected my education in such a way, because he was from that point entirely discouraging towards any type of progress that I made, academically.  When it came time to apply to colleges, I tried to encourage him to help me with my applications.  One application was for Yale, and I wanted to be in my hometown because I loved it so much here.  However, my dad threw all of the applications away to the schools that he considered too expensive to afford, disregarding any possibility that I would be eligible for financial aid.   he monopolized my choices and limited them strictly to schools that he thought were affordable.  

I settled on SUNY Purchase, a small liberal arts college in Westchester County, NY.  My father was open to the idea of it, and I felt like they had a decent enough program that I could find my way through it and be OK.  In my first year there, I had a quiet roommate who was studious and got to bed on time, kept the room neat and quiet and we were both able to concentrate and study.  I made the Dean's List those two semesters, which was great.  But I didn't make many friends, and everyone seemed really pre-occupied with their conservatories.  I wanted to be in an art conservatory there, but you were only allowed into one at a time, and unless you were in the conservatories, you weren't allowed really to take the upper level courses.  Since it was also an arts school, my interest was to be in both the music and the film conservatories, but they wouldn't allow it.  So, it was then that I decided I would just drop out completely and teach myself music and video.  It would be much less expensive, I'd be closer to home, where all my friends were, and I'd have the freedom of making my own curriculum.  

This began my period of self education, which lasted the next seven years of my life.  

Work Experience: Farm in Durham

There was one day I was at the Wooster Square Farmer's Market.  And I realized that I could get a job, working on a farm.  So I thought about asking every farmer if they needed help.  Then I determined that wasn't such a good idea, because what if I got hired by a bad farm?  So I would just look at everyone's food, like a customer, and see which farm I liked the most.

The one that I selected was David's.  It was called Starlight Gardens, and it was behind the Post Office next to the school fields in Durham.  We could hear the teams practice in the afternoon.  I had bought myself a pickup truck, from the Koffee Too Blackout Incident.  When I realized that I could potentially get to work outside of New Haven, I felt that a farm would really be the best place, because Dunkin Donuts are the same from here to Beijing.

Maybe someday I'll learn how to cultivate rice on the 4000 year old steppes built into the hills of Southwestern China.  In the meantime, I am experienced at the art of growing as much vegetation on an 8-acre farm as possible, and selling it all at MP to fancy restaurants at a great price.

That was the life, for my friend David. He ran a great farm, and I was sorry to leave when I did.  He barely used any petroleum equipment.  If he had oxen, he wouldn't need any.  But part of the problem with the oxen was that he didn't own the other part of the hill they could graze from, even though it was completely empty of use, aside from being his neighbor's property.

There were four greenhouses, each named after a climate.  Savannah, Tundra, Forest.  No rainforest, though.  Water was expensive.  And did you know that in the Southwest, some companies are claiming, by the power of law, that water is theirs before it ever hits the ground?  You're not allowed to save your own rainwater in some southwestern states, and that's against a person's freedom to prevent them from access to water.  That's beside the point though.

In this relative utopia of delicious greens, freshly grown and still planted into the ground, this was our procedure everyday during the peak of summer harvest.  (Other harvests, such as spring and fall, were different.  And there were growing seasons.  Some culinary techniques were designed to help preserve the food that needed to be eaten later.  Grains are a perfect example of a food that is nutritious and could be stored.

Real security is knowing that your population has a food supply that accounts for it, in the event of a petroleum shortage or lockdown.  It might be possible, in the future, for there to be a war, perpetuated by the Powers that Be.  In this future foe scenario, wouldn't you know that there'd be population reduction? In the words of David De Rothchild, nature has a way of doing that, at times.  And we can't really hold the wealthy accountable for the mistakes of an entire civilization.  Can we?

I would certainly hope not.  But I think things will change.  Not in the way that people expect, though.  We're not going to have a better iPhone next year, with more gadgets and gizmos than ever before.  The economy is in bad shape, and the forecast says it must get worse before it gets better.  How much worse is still up for grabs, but we'll know it's the end when we see signs that things are improving.

Right now, the signs are not there.  But it really doesn't matter on a farm, because all of your food is right there in front of you, and the weight of the world, not to mention the troubles of a torturous military, still spread in great numbers to regions all over the world, still exist these days.  I could say much more about war and the economy, but I will save that for another article later.

In the early morning, I cut the greens from the rows that we had planted just a couple weeks earlier.  It was still dewy out, most of the time, at that point in the morning, if it wasn't actually raining.  I timed my arrival to coincide with the moment in which I could see my hand at full length, with the change of daylight at an average of 15 minutes per 2 weeks, usually.

I cut the greens to be about 6" of clump, above the stem, mostly leaf.  We only cut back the same crop twice before plowing it down and replanting it again.  As I cut, with no more than a small knife, everyone's salad for the day, I placed it into a laundry basket until the basket reached the top.

Once the basket was full, I carried it back into the greenhouse with the sink and electricity.  There was only one, and it was located closest to the farmhouse, where Dave and his wife lived.  I would empty it out into a sink full of clean water, and swish it around in there.  Then I'll pull it all out, let it drip for a second, and dunk it into the other sink, also full of clean water.  This washed off the dirt.

Next, Dave showed me on my first day that there was a washing machine that had been converted to an electrical salad spinner.  The heat connector was off, and the wash cycle was eliminated from its functions.  All it would do was spin-dry the greens.

Once the greens were dry, I would weigh them and put them into 5 pound bags, which would then be driven to the restaurants that had bought them in advance from Dave.  He did the accounting and all of the delivery.  I got the prestigious task of tending to the crops, which by far was the task with the most responsibility, and I liked that.  I got to know the crops, and how fast they grew.  I knew when things were ready to be picked, probably a week in advance.  And I would go back to pick them when I knew they were ready, and sure enough they'd be ripe.  I memorized areas of the greenhouse and as the season progressed, the areas got more difficult to track, because some areas were re-planted and had a different timing about them.  This made picking tomatoes much quicker, knowing where to look.  It's one of the reasons that I was able to accomplish my tasks for the day in record time, compared to the other workers. It wasn't because I was stronger, or even that I knew more about farming.  I just knew where the ripe stuff was, because with my memory I was able to map it all out in my head.  Sometimes the satisfaction would come from plucking the tomato at a point where I was glad that I had waited just one more day to allow it to stay on the vine.

In the farm, there was a spider with bright yellow markers, otherwise entirely black.  I saw my first one in a greenhouse.  It scared the Bejesus out of me.  I thought it could bite me because it looked big enough to have teeth.  But I know that spiders don't eat people.  I would not know that if I watched scary movies, and probably would have reacted with more fear if my mind was subjected to the exposure to fear.   I cautiously averted making physical contact with the spider and continued picking heirlooms.

Later that day, I asked Dave what the deal was with the yellow and black spiders.
He said they were harmless.

Work Experience: The Yale Bookstore.

This is something I've been thinking about for a long time, applying to school.  I thought about it so much on the way to work everyday, at the bookstore.  Then, I started to read while I was at work.  And I thought, not only am I learning things and talking to smart kids all day.  I'm also getting paid.  And to me, that was the best thing about it.

One day I voluntarily drew a map for the general manager, who often seemed confused about where the sections of books were located.  It explained where every department of books were shelved, and I wrote it from memory, just to let him know that I was more familiar with the store than he was.

Amazing, I thought.  He actually liked the map.  Not only did she not take it personally (I believe her name was Martha MacDonald).  She took it personally to the front of the store and placed it in a case.  From that point, at the top of the stairs which led to the basement, there was a map which told everyone where the books were.  It looked like a cross between a Pirate Map, and where I buried my Legos in Edgewood Park.  I should write a song about that.

The other addition I made to the store was a website that was built into the mainframe of the computers.  When I was appearing to be shelving books, or taking down ISBN's, I was actually writing web code and saving it on floppy discs.

I never stole any books or nothing.  All I did was do what needed to be done.  The rest of the time, I would not be forced into busy work.  That was obviously a problem when the little managers started showing up.  It was their game, to make it so they had as little work to do as possible, thus delegating the majority of the responsibility of running the store to the people who were paid the least.  As you went up the pay scale, the accountability went down.

I was highly accountable, and way underpaid.  The best part was that we were free to sign out books whenever we wanted.  I used to take things home and photocopy them.  I had an archive of a wealth of education in my room, at one point.  It was then that I began to believe that the education was in the books, and not in the discussion.

And this is true, for some, but not all.  And that's why I'm applying to school.  Because I've done the reading, and now I want the discussion.  I'm ready to have dialogue.  I want to be taken seriously.  I need to help people while there's still time, and I can't sit idly by, while the world waits in vain for Tom Waits to come back on a train.

I used to walk home in the rain, down Elm Street, back to the barn and my parent's house.  I could tell you more about the barn, but quite later.  Here's the thing that you are probably wondering, and I need you to have faith and confidence in this:  I am not criminal-minded.  What that means is that while I have done things which may be considered marginally legal (like SpacePirate, for example), the intent is never to steal.  I never tried to profit from Space Pirate.  The shows that I did were really hard work, and I did them because I was dedicated to the music of the past.  That's why it's retrospective, I would think to myself.  This was before I was even capable of making mashup music.

I had to figure that out.  So at home, when I wasn't at work, I would be making songs on Reason.  True to form, that software was copyrighted.  I thought to myself that if I ever made a million bucks, I would turn around and give Reason their money.  But the cash just wasn't there.  And the software was awesome.

It doesn't exist anymore.  My 2.5 discs were scratched or got lost on the floor of my room, maybe over at the barn.  It's hard to stay up on those things.  I used to stay up late all night, disconnected from the internet, making song after song.  Sometimes I would actually get intense feelings of elation from the music, at a point of accomplishment, where I felt like the task was finished.  It's difficult, with art, knowing when something's done. In that sense it's alot just like cooking.  But I used to make some marvelous Beat Soup.  I also used to make beats with my feets up, on the console, sometimes while eating pizza.  The pizza was from Pepe's usually, and I had a little trick about that.

It seems that if you called a number over there, they would allow you to get pick-up pies ordered.  That way, you showed up on time, walk right through the line, which at 5pm is straight out the door.  Pick up your pie, pay for it, take it over to Wooster Sq. Park and watch people play frisbee with their dogs.  Hopefully the frisbee is getting tossed the other way, and the dog doesn't mistake it for a pie.

I don't know why I think so much about the future, when life's not tough, I used to think to myself.  Why should I be concerned when I have all the pizza I need?  I have also the wealth to buy the pizza at a price that the piemaker can afford to sell it.  In that sense, I'm all set.  Right?

But we're never all set.  We're looming in debt, and looking to the people who are enslaving us to save us.  That's what we get.  We asked for it.  It took thousands of years, but they're ready to create a marvelous jail cell.  One where human beings are treated like animals, by people who consider themselves nothing more than robotic scientists.  I do not want to be involved in any of this.

But I do recommend something.  I say that the school should make available only to certain students a Biology Lab Zoo.  It creates a greater transparency in the advances of our academic industry.  I would like to see what they're doing with insects these days.

I was first exposed to the Bio Labs at the age of 12.  I took a genetics course, taught by a Yale Undergraduate named Todd, who was from down south and I considered to be someone cool except when he acted like a drippy snot.  One thing he did for us kids was take us to the Bio Lab, which is that tall building behind the Peabody.  We got to go to a floor where they were conducting the experiments he explained to us in the classroom.  Involving mixing genes, like the ones we solved with Punnet Squares.  I asked to learn something more about the technique.  And he said, sorry.  Only if you go to school here.

I remember those words.  But I have since determined that I will not be involving myself in any genetic experiments.  There is too much liability involved.  Even if you might say sorry after a supersized species of locust destroys every farm crop in the midwest, just keep this in focus:  not everyone will forgive and forget when they know it was your pet who sent theirs to the vet.  Or worse.

Tragically I could not relate to their interest in genetic experiments.  I was, however, very curious about when Todd, one day in the wintertime, said, "Kids, do you want to walk back to the classroom inside or outside?

And I was wondering what he meant by that.  "I mean, do you want to take the tunnels?"
"Todd, there is no tunnel here that can take us back to Phelps Gate."
"How do you know that?  You've probably never even seen the tunnels," he said.

So he took us all to the basement of the lab, where there was a door which looked like it was for maintenance workers.  It went down a long corridor which ran alongside large, hissing pipes.

"Those are steam pipes!"  He yelled, above the din.  "They're for heat!"
"I can tell!" I said.  There was one other kid with us.  His name was Antoine.  I don't think he was even listening to our conversation or wondering about why were in the basement.  All he used to think about was basketball.

What I learned from the experience (and this was in 1992) is that apparently the university runs on steam.  There's a place called "Power Plant" and it's not for electricity, which I thought would be crazy, as well. It's a steam generation plant, it gets its petrol directly from the New Haven Harbor, and it is responsible for the heating of the entire university.

Subsequent to that, it contains a series of tunnels which interconnect its pipelines.  They are all large enough for maintenance access, but not the most pleasant thing to walk through.  They have access doors into each of the buildings, in the event that there needs to be some kind of labor on the inside of a room, if ever the case may be.  So essentially, it's access to the entire university, and as of 2003, there was no obvious surveillance, but I'm sure this has changed since then, and I haven't been willing to try going down there, ever since they built that huge video control panel inside the main security office on Bristol Street.

Why am I telling you all of this?  Because I know!  Isn't that important, to the security of the university, that I am making this gesture to befriend it?  As if to say, hey.  I know a lot about you.  Not because I've been spying on you, or anything.  Just because we've been acquaintances for so long.  Let's be friends.