A New Kind of Timeline...

I was born...soon, I was shaving regularly.

My looks improved.  Doctors attributed it to a diet of Wonder Bread, Spam and Velveeta cheese.

Timeline: 

Eat your heart out...Zuckerberg

I also remember being born.  The experience was very disturbing for me.  Some woman was screaming incessantly and this guy with a bad haircut was pulling on my head.  His breath smelled like sardines.

Later, I heard my first swear word.  Pretty sure it was me talking.

When I was floating around the uterus, my mother was apparently watching old Roy Rogers films.  I was born very bow-legged and developed an abnormal interest in horses and sweaty leather.  Since we couldn't afford a horse, I had a turtle.  It took a month for it to follow me home.  I named it Trigger.

 

 That's my Sis and I with Mom.  We did this a lot when the TV news guy said an A-Bomb might be coming.  We also ran in the hole when Dad drank too much.  Seems we stayed in the whole a lot back then.  One day, Mom forgot to close the lid and Dad fell in it.  We never went down there again.  Mom said  that we didn't have to worry about A-bombs anymore.  Pretty soon we moved to another house. 


In high school, I mostly dated lesbians, girls with eating disorders and ones that didn't bathe regularly, shave their legs or wear underwear.  I experimented with sex, but it was mostly by myself.  Well, sometimes the turtle would join in.  He finally ran away, though it took him three days just to get down to the corner.

This was my high-school sweetheart.  Her name was Rocky.  She let me feel her up sometimes.  I kinda liked her, but one day I left her alone in my room and afterward I noticed my hamster was missing.  I'm pretty sure she took drugs a lot because she always smelled like formaldehyde.  Maybe that was okay, because I used to have a cockroach problem until she starting coming over.  She left me her collection of Frank Zappa albums and moved to France.  I think it was France.  Maybe Nebraska.  I did learn later that "brown shoes don't make it."  So I don't wear them.

After to listening to Frank Zappa for a couple of hours, I became a radical.  Pretty sure I was on the left side of things, but some days it was hard to tell.  I lost my draft card somewhere, so when we demonstrated about stuff, I burned my library card.  The other hippies said that didn't count so I wasn't allowed to have any solidarity with the brothers and sisters.  So I became a party animal instead.  That made me throw-up a lot.

                                                               It was hard to be a party animal in Seattle.  Maybe it was the building code or something, but I kept having to move shortly after I had a party.  So I bought a bus.  I filled the back of it with couches and foam rubber and invited people to come over for Ripple and LSD.  They didn't know I was going to actually drive the bus in my condition, so it was very exciting for everybody.  We all wore different costumes and in the summer we sometimes just drove around naked since it was pretty warm.  The police would look at us kind of funny, but most of the time they just asked us
to go somewhere else.  We weren't sure where that was exactly. 

[image: lolpix.com]

Some time later, I left politics and formed a grunge band for cross-dressers with my sister.  She had recently flunked out of beauty school and seemed to have a lot of issues.  We couldn't play guitars or anything, so we just growled a lot.  Mostly people threw food at us, but at least we ate regularly.  Sis didn't sleep much due to an amphetamine habit, so she took to practicing her beauty school skills while I was sleeping.  Then she switched to dental college and I had to kick her out.  The neighbors didn't like all the screaming.

Then I had to go to jail briefly.  It was a nice jail.  On Sundays we had something yellow for breakfast.  I didn't do it -- whatever it was.  I shared my cell with a famous arsonist.  Actually, I think most arsonists end up famous one way or the other.  I had the top bunk.  He had matches.  Sleep was difficult most nights.  Eventually they released me for 'lack of evidence.'  I told them I'd take a look around.  See if I could find it.

They kept my fingerprints though.  The guy was having so much fun that we decided to do my whole hands.  Of course in all the excitement, he did my left hand twice.  That might be a problem later.

[image: wiki commons]

The saga continues...one day Don Quixote's horse speaks to me in a dream...in Italian.

Can't tell you what he said cause...hell, I don't speak Italian.  I was pretty sure it was something like, "Go west young man and date better women."  Since I lived in Seattle, he must have meant Japan or someplace like that.  Or, the horse was speaking metaphorically.  Horses do that sometimes.  But since the turtle wandered off, I was back on the notion of getting a real horse.  Thought it might improve my image.  I know that sometimes guys get cute dogs just to meet women...so, tie my horse outside Starbucks and wait for a pretty woman to say, "What the fuck!?"  However...this horse wasn't Starbucks material as it turned out.  He didn't stay anywhere for too long.  Apparently, he required heavy doses of tranquilizer in order to hang out around people.

Sadly, like Dad, he wandered off and fell in somebody's bomb shelter.  I never did get a new girlfriend, but I did meet a lot of nice people from the fire department.  They kept telling me how lucky my horse was, not knowing the horse in quite the same context as I did.  They said they'd have him out in a 'jiffy.'  I figured that was just long enough for me to catch a bus. 

Some days I miss him, but mostly I don't.  Then I decided to go to horseshoeing school.  No, I don't know why.  At first I thought it might be fun and I'd get rich, but it was a little like my sister's adventures in dental college.  A lot of blood and not too much repeat business.  So I became a 'horseshoeing advisor' instead.




I hired some assistants and mostly we drank beer.  Sometimes the horse drank beer too.  Then we'd have the horse look through a Sears catalog and pick out some nice shoes.  Horses can't seem to hold their liquor so we'd end up with pizza, magazine subscriptions and boxes of Enzyte.  Business was bad.

But then I discovered polo shirts.  Seems that intelligent people always wear polo shirts and dark glasses -- even in winter.  I advertised myself as a 'sensitive' farrier and only accepted women clients.

Mostly I got crank calls, but every so often I'd get a real customer.  Trouble was, they'd end up doing most of the work since I didn't want to get my polo shirt dirty and it was really hard to figure out all that proper balance stuff with dark glasses on.  So I took a break and became a Thoroughbred farm manager.  Not sure how you manage a farm with no employees and seemingly fewer horses, but figured it was worth a try.  



The owner of the farm sent me a photograph and said, "Well son, it kinda looks like this here."  So I figured, boy this job should be a cinch!  Turned out he lied more than I did.

[image: depts.washington.edu]

This fellow was the old manager.  Turned out he had been dead for close to a month.  The only horse I could find on the place was one that spent all day walking in circles.  Mostly backwards it seemed.  The vet said it might be rabies.  Or not.

Once again, Rocinante came to me in a dream...no, more like a hangover.  He said...

Never mind what he said.  It was kind of personal and since he was a horse, he didn't talk in English, Italian or much else.  But it seemed that he was strongly suggesting that I too, go on a quest.  Quests are a little like occupational scavenger hunts only you don't have a specific list.  So I went off and joined a circus.  Trouble was, it was a Russian circus.  Being new, I got all the hard jobs.  I had to ride a horse upside-down, which might have made me a better horseshoer, only I couldn't really take notes during the show.  My boss told me it was okay to fall off sometimes because the audience really enjoyed that part.  I didn't though.

Then one day, I found the boss's sword.  Seems in the Soviet Union that whoever has the sword gets to be the leader.  In America, it is much more complicated.  You have to vote for a bunch of people you don't like, just so you can impeach them later for doing a terrible job.  They call it democracy.  Not sure what that really means.
Once I became boss, I demanded a cut on the action.  They told me I was "being a bad little communist," so they sent me to China where they said I needed to be 're-educated.'  So now I think "socialism is good" for the Chinese.  Personally, I'd rather have a percentage of the gate...or maybe a gas station.
So I moved to New Zealand and became an exotic dancer.  Mostly I danced with older, thick-ankled women who were overly curious to know if I wore underwear.  Actually I did, but that was because...well, wool itches.
Turned out to be a lot like socialism though.  The tips were terrible and everybody seemed to smell like wet sheep.


Since exotic dancing is fairly strenuous I was able to lose a lot of weight.  So I went back to America and became a jockey.  It was hard since most of my riding experience was upside-down.  That made it difficult to get regular work.  Since I could only afford the $1 menu at McDonald's, I quickly became too fat to be a jockey.



So I joined an Islamic militant group for white guys who were too fat to be jockeys.  The outfits were nice, but we had  a lot of trouble around airports and nuclear reactors.  However, when we went to Mississippi, people kept taking us out to dinner and buying us drinks.  We didn't all sit at the same table.  Instead, they'd sit across the room and wink at us all the time.  Figured it was some Islamic custom we didn't know about, what being new to militant stuff and all.

So, I moved on to journalism and sometimes I'd have to interview myself because a lot of people were reluctant to talk to me "on the record."  That was okay, since I was more interested in myself anyway.

And then one day, I decided that being a grown-up wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Just maybe that was Don Quixote's whole point.  Quests are wasted on adults.


So...feel free to create your own timeline!



[images: wiki commons & the author]