smooth

GRAVEL

10.  I was involved in a string of crimes when I was two years old which left me talented and perceptive in a certain way. There were two trials. The one involving my parents' divorce involved my appearance in court, and the proceedings were permanently sealed, which as my mother pointed out years later, was extremely rare. Afterwards, in Houston, Texas, a preschool teacher did something to me so horrendous, I developed a permanent wariness regarding authority figures and one-level-removed puppet masters. Even later, my stepfather, unawares of these earlier developments in my career, betrayed me in an unimaginable way, and as a result, I lost all interest in schooling of any kind and was transferred from the smart kids' class in third grade, not to the middle kids' section, but to the slow kids' assemblage, where we were allowed to look out the window. All along, I'd been cultivating an ability to forget these & other incidents, watching and waiting. It wasn't until the artist, Sufi and Gurdjieff teacher David Daniels met me and perceived what I had buried, that he engaged me in a multi-decade path to achieve some balance in my life, and achieve, through his artful indirection, first memories. It's funny. In the years of my personal being-excavation, inner scaffolding construction, and sound psychological bridge building, I was called (from scant contact, fleeting impressions & zilch evidence) mean, ruthless, stodgy, wise, psychotic, immature, hallucinative, effeminate, gay, ossified, stuck-up, a bitch, holy, genuine, a fucking snot, yet the facts are still these. My father and mother met at Harvard and Wellesley and always had my best interests at heart. I married the daughter of my pediatrician in a high Episcopalian church, and got a divorce three years later because of her mother's machinations, I majored in mathematics at Dartmouth College and left when I got a programming job at IBM, and finally, under the influence of David Daniels, got published in avant-garde literary magazines and refereed computer science journals, and spent my entire inheritance studying Japanese. It's funny. Over the years I got wildly accused of many things, though no one ever thought to tell me I'd been skewered like a shish-ka-bob, yet that's exactly what happened. I've always gone for broke.