The large, open-spaced house is nestled on a lush hillside off Spur Loop Road with a westerly overlook onto the Atlantic Ocean in the tropical city of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Spur Loop Road is a road which circles a ridge of a hillside replete with cinder block houses and corrugated roof tops so that when it rains during monsoon seasons, the patter of rain is thunderous on roofs of houses.
The doctor who stitches my forehead when I fall head first onto cement from the top of washing my mother's Renault 4 automobile lives a half mile down the road. The doctor is the same doctor who administers seven rabies shots in my stomach when I am bit by another neighbour's dog. During the seventh rabies shot, the doctor releases hold of the syringe with needle in my gut and I stop screaming at the pain, bewildered. Rabies shots hurt. Doctors, lawyers, wealthy business people, government officials, etc. live in the Spur Loop Road neighbourhood.
One evening, on a Sunday night, after having spent a weekend out of the city at Tokeh Beach where I learn to steer the Renault 4 down sand tracks sitting on my mother's lap, my mother, father, brother and myself are sitting on the large veranda of the Spur Loop House playing board games when my dad is alert to a red and white, Coca-Cola box truck which is parked a short distance from the front gate up the driveway.
Sensing commotion, I venture up the driveway to the gate and peer into the culvert street where my dad is wielding a baseball bat banging on the box truck and yelling for my mother to call a friend and tell the friend to bring a gun. My dad turns to see me at the gate and yells for to go inside the house, which I do but not before I glimpse the back of the box truck open and some ten to fifteen African men clamber out of the truck scurrying from my dad into bushes.
I wonder at the time how my dad knows the box truck is an ambush plot orchestrated by the gate watchman whom my dad employs, but now I see that it is obvious to anybody who can calculate many variations of any situation or circumstance from experience. For one thing: it is unusual for a Coca-Cola box truck to be parked in front of the Spur Loop gate on a Sunday evening and not to have the watchman notify anybody in the house of it. Either way: we survive possible mutilation, thanks to my dad's irate temper while wielding a baseball bat!
Africa is very beautiful. "Ah! But, Your Land is Beautiful," as Alan Paton's book is titled. I am born in Lubumbashi, Zaïre, live in Freetown, Sierra Leone until 8 years old when I pack for English boarding school in Bracknell, Berkshire until I am 10 years old. At ten years old, I fly to New York City from London, UK where I am greeted by my dad and brother at JFK airpot for a crowded subway ride into Manhattan on the afternoon of a rained out Diana Ross concert at which people riot.
At 15 years old, I pack for prep school in Massachusetts leaving NYC and at 17 years old: I find myself in Atlanta finishing high school at a public school because I am kicked out of prep school for drinking. I apply to one university, San Francisco State University, leave Georgia and drive a pick up truck across the country to San Francisco meeting with a friend from grade school on his way to Washington State.
I live in SF for one year and a half until December 1993 when I drive with a futon in the back of my truck to Idaho where I meet my family over Christmas. I sleep in the back of the truck on a futon in ten below temperatures. I drop off the truck at an uncle's house in Arkansas driving across the country from Idaho with my dad, my second time driving across the country. Leaving the truck in Arkansas, I fly to Gaborone, Botswana where I stay with my parents for six months until May 1994.
By June 1994, I am in Maine for a brief two weeks and on the road to North Carolina where I stay at a beach town sleeping in my truck. I drive to Georgia where I visit with family and then across the country for the third time where I sleep a night at James Canyon, New Mexico, which is at a ten thousand foot elevation up a steep, mountainous road.
Long story short, I live out of a truck with a futon for three years in Bellingham, Washington where I catch up with the grade school friend whom I meet in Chicago my driving from Atlanta heading west to San Francisco. In 1997, I move to Maine.
All told: I drive across the country eight times and visit Africa and Europe countless times over my life until 27 years old when I move to where I live now in Portland, Maine. I live out of a bag for the first twenty-seven years of my life and call home is where you hang yourself now. I seldom leave the house and do not like to with an anxiety off the rector scale about being stopped by police forty-five times in Maine. I would not board a plane or travel further than within northern New England as to say if I board a plane: they'll reroute it to Bangor! My primary wish for my life is to die never having been a convicted criminal. In a world where "all cops are criminals and sinners saints," it is very easy to be falsely accused and such instances happen to me in regards to authority at about the same frequency as racially profiled people.
I don't know why people are scared of me that they think that they have to call police on me, but they call. It is kind of like my "hurry up and wait" bumper sticker: I think that it incites road rage directed at me where some other drivers honk when behind me and flip the finger at me while crossing the double yellow to go around me when I am trying to parallel park. If I parallel park with signals while someone crosses the double yellow to go around me parallel parking and I ding their vehicle, it is not my fault: the other driver crosses the double yellow. Sometimes, I think that I am born just to be the cause of everyone's problems or that I live my whole life just for someone to invade my rented apartment, beat me up and have police tell me "don't call us anymore!" Anyway, that is the most of what my short history consists without ranting, I hope!
The doctor who stitches my forehead when I fall head first onto cement from the top of washing my mother's Renault 4 automobile lives a half mile down the road. The doctor is the same doctor who administers seven rabies shots in my stomach when I am bit by another neighbour's dog. During the seventh rabies shot, the doctor releases hold of the syringe with needle in my gut and I stop screaming at the pain, bewildered. Rabies shots hurt. Doctors, lawyers, wealthy business people, government officials, etc. live in the Spur Loop Road neighbourhood.
One evening, on a Sunday night, after having spent a weekend out of the city at Tokeh Beach where I learn to steer the Renault 4 down sand tracks sitting on my mother's lap, my mother, father, brother and myself are sitting on the large veranda of the Spur Loop House playing board games when my dad is alert to a red and white, Coca-Cola box truck which is parked a short distance from the front gate up the driveway.
Sensing commotion, I venture up the driveway to the gate and peer into the culvert street where my dad is wielding a baseball bat banging on the box truck and yelling for my mother to call a friend and tell the friend to bring a gun. My dad turns to see me at the gate and yells for to go inside the house, which I do but not before I glimpse the back of the box truck open and some ten to fifteen African men clamber out of the truck scurrying from my dad into bushes.
I wonder at the time how my dad knows the box truck is an ambush plot orchestrated by the gate watchman whom my dad employs, but now I see that it is obvious to anybody who can calculate many variations of any situation or circumstance from experience. For one thing: it is unusual for a Coca-Cola box truck to be parked in front of the Spur Loop gate on a Sunday evening and not to have the watchman notify anybody in the house of it. Either way: we survive possible mutilation, thanks to my dad's irate temper while wielding a baseball bat!
Africa is very beautiful. "Ah! But, Your Land is Beautiful," as Alan Paton's book is titled. I am born in Lubumbashi, Zaïre, live in Freetown, Sierra Leone until 8 years old when I pack for English boarding school in Bracknell, Berkshire until I am 10 years old. At ten years old, I fly to New York City from London, UK where I am greeted by my dad and brother at JFK airpot for a crowded subway ride into Manhattan on the afternoon of a rained out Diana Ross concert at which people riot.
At 15 years old, I pack for prep school in Massachusetts leaving NYC and at 17 years old: I find myself in Atlanta finishing high school at a public school because I am kicked out of prep school for drinking. I apply to one university, San Francisco State University, leave Georgia and drive a pick up truck across the country to San Francisco meeting with a friend from grade school on his way to Washington State.
I live in SF for one year and a half until December 1993 when I drive with a futon in the back of my truck to Idaho where I meet my family over Christmas. I sleep in the back of the truck on a futon in ten below temperatures. I drop off the truck at an uncle's house in Arkansas driving across the country from Idaho with my dad, my second time driving across the country. Leaving the truck in Arkansas, I fly to Gaborone, Botswana where I stay with my parents for six months until May 1994.
By June 1994, I am in Maine for a brief two weeks and on the road to North Carolina where I stay at a beach town sleeping in my truck. I drive to Georgia where I visit with family and then across the country for the third time where I sleep a night at James Canyon, New Mexico, which is at a ten thousand foot elevation up a steep, mountainous road.
Long story short, I live out of a truck with a futon for three years in Bellingham, Washington where I catch up with the grade school friend whom I meet in Chicago my driving from Atlanta heading west to San Francisco. In 1997, I move to Maine.
All told: I drive across the country eight times and visit Africa and Europe countless times over my life until 27 years old when I move to where I live now in Portland, Maine. I live out of a bag for the first twenty-seven years of my life and call home is where you hang yourself now. I seldom leave the house and do not like to with an anxiety off the rector scale about being stopped by police forty-five times in Maine. I would not board a plane or travel further than within northern New England as to say if I board a plane: they'll reroute it to Bangor! My primary wish for my life is to die never having been a convicted criminal. In a world where "all cops are criminals and sinners saints," it is very easy to be falsely accused and such instances happen to me in regards to authority at about the same frequency as racially profiled people.
I don't know why people are scared of me that they think that they have to call police on me, but they call. It is kind of like my "hurry up and wait" bumper sticker: I think that it incites road rage directed at me where some other drivers honk when behind me and flip the finger at me while crossing the double yellow to go around me when I am trying to parallel park. If I parallel park with signals while someone crosses the double yellow to go around me parallel parking and I ding their vehicle, it is not my fault: the other driver crosses the double yellow. Sometimes, I think that I am born just to be the cause of everyone's problems or that I live my whole life just for someone to invade my rented apartment, beat me up and have police tell me "don't call us anymore!" Anyway, that is the most of what my short history consists without ranting, I hope!
