Vidya

The drive up to Boulder took two full days as normal. The Oldsmobile station wagon was full of plants in the back and Bisquit and Luius, our dog and cat. I remember sitting in the back street and playing games guessing exactly how far a mile away was. I remember one hill where I pointed to the top of but it was in fact two miles away. We stayed in the same Holiday Inn we always stayed in when we drove to Colorado, as we called Boulder and the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center back then. The holiday Inn was cool and made it feel like we were on vacation. It had a sauna, a hot-tub, and a pool in the central plaza. We made one stop at a restaurant near a car dealership and I was looking at the cars with my brother Wyndham. Said when I grew up I wanted to buy the brown Chevy van, but Wyndham wanted the pick-up.

We rented a house on sixth street on the hill for six months that was really cool. It would have been cool to own that house because it was right next to the foothills. There was a little playhouse accross a streem that we played in. There was a nice six foot Buddhist lady who lived in the house with us in the upstairs and she told us that there were little people the size of action figures living in that area in holes, and during the day they make little houses, and I believed her and hoped I would see one. The back yard was nice because it surrounded the house and had a gold fish pond in it. One day while Wyndham and I were running and sliding down the living room in our sock, he hit his head on the couch and had to get stitches.

Then we bought the house on Mariposa street and moved in. That house was huge and I used to brag to my friends that it was one of the biggest houses in Boulder. It had four staggered levels. In total the house had thirteen bed rooms, three bathrooms, and an indoor porch looking over a big living room. A dining room, two living rooms, two outdoor porches, a play house, a gaint kitchen with a central table with cubbards, and a big patio in the back and a patio in the front. In the back we had a basketball court surrounded by skunk river in the back with a patio area, and a large garded on the other side and one of two back yards separated by a big bush. I loved living there but it was too expensive to maintain so we sold it after six years and bought a smaller on at 1445 Balsam.

We moved to Boulder in the summer of 1980, just before the start of the school year. I went to first grade at Vidya, a Buddhist school. At this school we all had to dress up. The boys in full piece suits and ties, and the girls in identical plad dresses and bow ties. I had to take the bus all the way accross the town to school in the north part of town out of boulder valley. I remember on the first day of class we went on a walk on a field trip and the first kid I talked to was Jonothan Mckeever. He was the tallest kid in the class and we were talking about how we had the same sandwiches. He became my best friend after that, but his best friend was Jesse Grimes who lived two doors down from him. I remember I told him he and Jesse were best friends but he said they weren't; but that was after they started having some problems. Some of the other kids who I hung out with and spent the night at their houses the most were Michael Bandack, Jessie Grimes, Bindu Pomoroy, Solly Hampern, Claire Malory, Jeremy King, Mickey Halpern, Waylon Lewis, and Jessie Lock. Some of the other kids in my class while I was there were Naomi Weber, Megan Susnis, Rachel I can't remember her last name, Cara Baker, Kaylee I can't remember her last name, and Alexis I can't remember her last name. I remember I went to Alexises birthday party once, and Naomi Weber had parties and stuff. Wyndham went there too and was a year behind me. I think his best friend there was Anthony Rich, and later on Jessie Siciliano. Some other kids in his grade were Adam Arthure, August Simineli, Yanos Porps, and a bunch of other kids who I can't remember now. I remember some of the kids in the year ahead of me too, although I didn't hang out with any of them. There was Magnus. I remember he was a really fat kid who would play tag with all of the other kids and run and jump on the roof of one of the buildings and he was the only one who could do that so they coudn't touch him. I remember thinking that was weird because he was the fattest. There was Hardy, I went to his birthday party once. There was also Geysar, who we called Sir Geysar because he was Rempoches son, and then Vajra Rich.

Vidya was a one house primary school that I think consisted of the grades from one to six. My classroom the first year was in the room on the ground floor and our teacher was Mr. Brown. He was a friendly guy with a mustache and drove us around to our many field trips in his green van. I heard the year before I got there Claire Mallory fell out of the back of it when it was going, then she fell and broke her leg on a school field skiing trip to Eldora which I missed. That was before I ever went skiing. I remember I was eight the first time I went skiing.

In the bus we used to sing songs with Jonothan Mceever leading them. He would sing a verse and then all the other boys (and maybe girls but I can't remember) would repeat what he said. He was the leader. He was unpretentious though. He was the leader because he was the leader, maybe because he was the tallest. One time he led us boys around the school yard and two kids stayed back and built the fort we were building and when we came back he formally gave up his leadership to them. I think it was Solly and Bindu. That didn't last long though, Jonathan was the leader. I was a follower. I remember he had gotten in a fight with Cara Baker, who was his best friend. Their families went out to eat at a restaurant and they got in an argument and she pushed him down the stairs and so he told all of us boys to be mean to her. One time Clair went over to my house to hang out and Cara was over at her house and then we went on errands with my mom and I refused to talk to Cara the whole time. Clair asked me if I hated Cara in front of her and I said yes. After that Cara went home. I felt really bad about that. Jonathan tried to turn me off to a new girl called Misti too but I knew better by then to let someone else effect the way I treated someone else. Cara was actually a really mellow down to earth girl.

Another kid I hung out with a lot and spend the night with a lot was Michael Bandak, but he would always invite me over and then hang out with other kids which didn't really make a lot of sense. He had a BMX bike and told me it had a category five balance rating. He was a big talker but in the end wasn't that athletic. One time we took him skiing at Hidden Valley and he couldn't figure out how to use the pully lift so we pretended we were stunt men the rest of the day on a snow pile and lost track of time until my dad found us and was furious. Michael was kind of a bully too. He would grab the little kids by their ties, but he would to it at the same place every time. At the bottom of a hill. So I would run down the hill and through him and the other kid and break the connection so the kid could run away. I did that a bunch of times, until once he saw me and held on tight and didn't let his grip loose. I don't remember what happened after that though.

Vidya was cool because it was a small school where all the kids pretty much knew each other throughout all the grades and the parents knew each other and we all went to the same Bhuddist summer camps together and stuff so it was kind of like one big happy family. Sometimes we would all play soccer together in huge teams. I wasn't good at soccer even though I could run and kick well because I felt like it was rude to call out for the ball because it was like I was robbing the ball from the other kid who was also calling out for the ball. I thought it was good enough to just be in the right place to get the ball passed to me but it never worked like that. The kid who called out for the ball was the one who had it passed to them. I was in little league for a year when we had a team just for us Vidya kids, but I almost never had the ball and never got a goal because I never called for it, so I quite that pretty quick. I also didn't like going after a ball if someone else was going after it. I felt like it was rude to physically fight over a ball, and I didn't really care that much anyway. One time when we were having a huge game at Vidya every last kid swarmed over a ball and I was the only kid other than the goalies to not be involved and just stood there watching. Then the ball just shot out of the pack at me and I kicked it over the crowd into our goal and I was a hero. Nobody seemed to realize that I wasn't even in the melee; it was just luck that the ball came right at me.

One kid who was opposite me in terms of athletic aggressiveness was Solly Halpern. I remembe the first time I saw him we were playing capture the flag and I was supposed to take a flag off him to make him out but he just pushed me away and ran off and I just stood there looking at him wondering who that was and making sure to remember to play that aggressively. He couldn't ride a bike though. One time I spent the night at his house and I tried to teach him to ride his bike but he wasn't very interested. Then his mother made us both do chores for what seemed like the rest of the day. She made me clean out the rotten dog food. I thought that was kind of rude and that my mom would never make a guest help do the chores at my house. Then we went to Kalee's house to make some cookies or something. Solly was always hanging out with different kids, especially the girls.

Another kid I was good friends with was Jesse Grimes. His father helped us buy our land up in Fox Creek and he went up there with us. But later he started having problems with me and I thought it may have been because he was jealous because we had land and a big house. Jonothan told me he was having problems with him too. I don't remember the details of any of that.

We used to have lots of parties at kids houses too, and it seemed like we hosted most of them because our house was so big. One party we had Jeremy King ran all over our back yard with all the boys running after him like a back of dogs.

In third grade my parents put us in Uni Hill for some reason. I still have the class picture from that. My best friends in that class were Ben Marshall and Nathaniel Daw. Towards the end of the year I was making friends with Paul Davis. One time I spent the night at Paul Davis' house and we made spears out of sticks with knifes tied to the ends of them and threw them in his front yard. One of his favorite activities was pigging out. We went over to his house and he said "lets pig out". He was a creative kid. The teacher was Mr. Yeager who published childrens books. Mr. Yeager really liked me because I was a quiet obedient kid. He was cool because I usually remember teachers having problems with me. Complaining to my parents that I didn't pay attention enough and stuff like that.

In fourth grade we went back to Vidya, but towards the end of the year I started feeling like I was a black sheep.This was about the time I started realizing that I was different and seemed to instill animosity from people for no apparent reason. It is a quality that I still have until this day. Not so much now because I'm not involved in any group, but I'm so used to it by now that I actually try to act weird just to make people not like me. I have a lot of reasons for that which I will explain somewhere else. Starting in fourth grade I couldn't get kids to do anything with me and wasn't invited anywhere which infuriated me. Once Noah Mclellan threw a rock past me at recess and I knew it was to try to piss me off so I threw it past him and he started screeming at me so I screemed at him and all of a sudden all the boys sided with him and ran off. Then Michael Bandack started doing things to make me angry. Once at a baseball game he said something which pissed me off so I ran off and didn't go back to class, so I had to have a meeting with Mr. Vissor who was really cool and took me to his house to show me some artwork. Mr. Vissor brought Michael in his office with me to talk things out but he didn't really want to admit he didn't like me. I decided I had finally had enough when I asked Solly (who I had never had a problem with) to do something with me and he said "I wish I could but I can't so I won't". I had heard him say that to kids before but I never thought he would say it to me, and when he did I decided once and for all there was something fishy going on.

Waldorf

I told my parents I hated the Buddhist kids because they were mean to me so they took us out of Vidya and put us into Waldorf a few weeks before the end of the school year. Waldorff was another private school that already had two other Buddhist kids who had defected from Vidya. Jesse Lock and Kalee. I think Jesse had defected to Vidya for the same reasons I had; he wasn't really getting along with the other kids. I'm not sure about that though. He was a moody kid with messy hair who was kind of an outcast. In the beginning he was really happy about me going to Waldorff, but suddenly without any fights or arguments with me decided he wasn't my friend anymore and was only going to talk to my brother. He never got a rise out of me though because he was so black and white and honest about how he felt about people which I respected. One kid who really hated me for no reason though was Kalee Russel. She was always viciously insulting me and calling me names. One time playing some kind of hopscotch game she started screeming at me and calling me names so I ran off and didn't go back to class at the end of recess. The next day some ugly hairy guy with a big mustache who taught the class next door was yelling at me and telling me I was a bad kid for running off like that, and I thought to myself that was rude and inapropriate of him to bother me about that because I wasn't even his student.

My teacher was a South African guy named Paul I think, who was really friendly. My class was mixed with class below, so Wyndham and I were in the same class. Waldorf was suppossed to be a different kind of school. More experiential learning or something like that. But as far as I was concerned it was just a school for stupid kids because none of the kids seemed to be able to read and we were never asked to ever do anything acedemically difficult; just draw and stuff like that. Class sure was fun though. We had a Japanese class. My mom who had recently been to Japan with Chogram Trunpa Rinpoche and a bunch of his students told me that in Japan the people smack when they eat to show they like the food. One day our Japanese teacher, who was a friendly little woman who's mother saw the Hiroshima explosion made some kind of Japanese doe goup for us and I smacked to try to show her my appreciation and she looked at me like I was crazy.

Some of the kids I remember from that class were, Jeramiah and Orion Molfese who were Wyndham and I's best friends because they were two brothers our age. Jesse Lock, Kalee Russell, some hot blonde girl named Cilily, a cool kid named Rudy, Cedra who was supposed to be the coolest kid in the school but always smelled like he pooped his pants. He was a nice kid though. Once I made him upset but I can't remember why. I remember when he was upset with me he was genuinly upset and not trying to fight back by trying to hurt my feelings or anything, which I found interesting. I never hung out with him though. A blond kid named Cassidy who's parents always had big parties for him and made him into kind of a primadona. Jesse Lock. That's all I can remember now. One time during recess I rode my bike down a grassy knoll and Jesse Lock was in my way so I slammed the rear brakes on to try to stop but I hit him and knocked him down<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/13868867@N06/2139257654/" title="scan0410-2 by kylepounds2001, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2186/2139257654_f3c6a0cdb6_o.jpg" width="952" height="680" alt="scan0410-2" /></a> and his wind out of him. It was an accident but he thought it was on purpose. There was also a kid named Brian who was fat and kind of the school outcast and bully. One time he I went in the bathroom and he was in there with my brother and another kid and he wanted the light off to piss off the other kids. I turned the light on and he turned it off, so I turned it on and he pushed me and I fell down backwards. My brother was there and I became furious and attacked him and we got in a fight. I think we fought for a while and then I ran outside and got a rock and came back in and he was still in the bathroom and he saw I had a rock and he hid in the corner and I threw it at him but missed and he picked it up and tried to throw it at me but I ran for another rock, but when I came back the teacher was there and broke stopped us. A few weeks later we were wrestling and jovially talked about that. We kind of became friends after that incident because he had stopped trying to cause problems. One kid who really had big problems with me for absolutely no reason at all was Kalee Russell. One time I saw Orion and some other kids kicking pine cones on the roof to see if they could get them in the gutter, so I tried to do it and she ran up to me sceeming that I couldn't do that and scratched me on my shoulder and I started bleeding. I was furious because she was watching them kick the pine cones up there and didn't say anything to them, but when I did it she pouched on me. I stood there looking at my arm bleeding for a couple minutes thinking about how she had singled me out and became furious. So I walked up to her while she was reading something on a wood sign that someone had scratched "I hate Kalee" (It wasn't me who wrote it), and I punched her in the back twice as hard as I could. I got her really hard. The first punch knocked her into the sign and the second one knocked her down. I remember seeing her mother who was the recess supervisor frantically running over so see if she was alright and I went inside into the classroom. Demetrius Johsnon's sister ran in and yelled at me for that before the teacher came in and said, "I realize you are really angry with Kalee". He was really cool and didn't try to make me feel like an asshole. She never bothered me after that though, and I never regretted hitting her because what she did was totally out of line. There was another girl in that class called Jessica who was tall and really mellow and friendly. One day I think Brian was complaining nobody liked him so we had an anomonous vote to see who liked and disliked who. I don't remember the results or who I voted for. But I remember that I voted that I didn't like Cedra even though I had no problem with him at all. I voted that way because I was jelous that he was so popular and everybody liked him. After the vote Jessica asked me if I was the kid who voted that I didn't like him and I said no. To this day I have no idea how she could have possibly known that because I never had a problem with him. She must have been able to tell I was jelous somehow. Jesse Lock said he was "perfect". I though that was kind of faggy but didn't say anything.

We went on a class field trip one weekend up to Leadville and camped out at a campsite near a lake. My mom accidentally drove over Orions feet but he had big boots on and it didn't hurt him. One day we went into Leadville with my mom and Jessica and an adult chaperone who was shorter than Jessica and did a tour of the old mining museums. Jessica and I were laughing at a construction worker who's pants were falling halfway down his ass and he didn't have any underwear on. We also did a tour of a fish farm outside of the town. Then we went to Fairplay and did a tour of Southpark. I was roomates with Cassidy in the main street historical hotel.

Sixth Grade at Uni Hill

We transferred over to Uni Hill for sixth grade along with Demetrius Johnson and his sister. Demetrius was in my class and so we hung out. We also hung out with a Korean kid who had just come over from Korea named Duriung Shin and a skinny red headed kid who liked to boast that he came from Scottish descent. There were two other kids who I hung out with to a lesser extent, a karate kid named Lucas and Jeremy Appel. Toward the end of the year I was starting to be more friends with those two. Those two kids were kind of bullies, at least they liked to fight and liked to chase after us. Lucas tried to get us to chase after him but I wasn't into that. One time when we were at the library he wanted to show me his running karate kick by having me stand still and let him run up to me and give me a flying kick to the chest. He said it wouldn't hurt but I told him no way. That was probably a good idea. Jeremy and I got along pretty well, although he liked to grab me and not let go. Once he destroyed my clay SR-71 that I made, but I think I did something to piss him off. There was another kid in our class called Dylon Hunter who was proudly independant. He didn't seem to have any friends and didn't seem to want any. Once he did something to really piss off Lucas and we looked over and saw him getting choked and was totally blue in the face. Lucas was furious and Dylon wouldn surely have blacked out if the teacher hadn't have interfered. I can't remember any of the girls in that class for some reason other than megan and I'm not even sure that was her.

Our teacher was Debra Cowen and she was cool. She had an older assistent teacher who had an old green van who she would use to take us on field trips. One field trip we went to Mesa Verde and some other ruins. I think is that class was also Megan Susnis who was my classmate at Vidya a few years ago. We were running around and Megan tagged me and Demetrius and some other kids were saying that she could run faster than me and for some reason that really upset me so I pulled my hat over my head and refused to talk to anyone. Later that night Demetrius appologized and said he just liked to "push people's buttons". I was the fastest kid in the class and I must have revelled in that reputation. On the way back to Boulder Dylan Hunter hung out on the back end of a VW van all spawled out. I was jelous he got that good position, but he was the tallest and needed it the most. We stopped on Wolf Creek pass at the look out and had a hike somewhere nearby. There was a hispanic girl with a hairlip in my class who was in a small group with me Demetrius, and Isabelle. I got into a tusstle with that girl and she through me flat on my back and then started jumping up and down screaming that she beat a boy. I got up and was kind of embarrased and was glad the whole class didn't see it. It made sense though because she was bigger than me. Just from size and strength alone probably most girls that age could beat up most boys, they just don't know it.

There were two sixth grade classes at Uni Hill and ours was the one for the creative, or remedial, kids while the other one was I guess you could call them the normal kids. My parents were always trying to get me into the remedial classes because I was alwasy spacing out in class. Some of the other kids in the other class were Evan Dehoog and Paul Davis. Evan had an adopted sister who was one grade younger than us named Sophia. She decided she didn't like me and was always verbally abusing me. I don't know why she targeted me. Maybe she felt tough by beating up on an older boy who was a lot smaller. She really hated me though. She was so nasty that she never got any kind of a rise out of me because her attitude was so puzzling. I would just shake my head every time she would say something which seemed to make her even more pissed off. Once I was up a jungle gym with Du and she came up to us twisted my arm and told us to get off so we did. We were going to go back and start trouble but decided against it. Another time she told me she was stronger than me or something so I told her that we should push the merry go round against each other. Before we started all these kids were gathered around taking bets on who would win. They were saying that I was older but she was bigger. I got a good foot hold and was winning until Dylan pulled my foot out so I quit and got angry at him. Another time at Crossroads mall Du and I tried to go to the bathroom but she blocked the way and didn't let us pass. She was with her best friend who was a girl in our class who was pretty mellow. I think her name was Isabelle.

There was another girl who was one year younger than me called Ashley Levey who decided whe like me and asked me if I would be her boyfriend so I said yes. She wanted to meet me after school so I could meet her mom and I went to the front of the school and she went to the back and we missed each other. Then I decided against it for some reason but she wanted to confront me about it so I hid but my friends told her where she was and she found me. She was trying to make me feel guilty by telling me I told her I would be her boyfriend and now I didn't and I was a lier. I remember her saying, "All my friends think you're a dog but I think your hot". I got embarrassed and started crying and she said, "Are you crying?" and so she left me alone. Then Demetrius' sister came up to me and started screaming at me telling me I was being rude to Ashley and then ran off. I think the only times she ever talked to me was when she wanted to tell me off for being mean to one of her friends. I can't remember her name though. My brother told me Ashley wanted to be his girlfriend also before she targeted me. I don't know why I didn't go for it because she was a really pretty blond girl but just wasn't my type.

7th Grade

This was the weirdest time of my entire life. I don't know why but I was totally tripped out throughout all of Junior High, and mainly in 7th grade. Because of the new format of going to different classes throughout the day kids didn't hang out with the kids in their class anymore but with their own little clique, and I couldn't become a part of a clique. I didn't want to humiliate myself my trying to hang out with some kids only to be rejected, and I never talked in class because there was never an opportunity to talk about what we were studying so I was pretty much invisible. I lived a couple blocks from school so I got an off campus pass but they took those away because as a belated response to Chance Mcarty getting hit by a car the year before and being in a coma for like three months. When I had to spend lunch at school I just sat in the hallways by myself. One time a group of girls asked me if I was new and that made me really paranoid.

I didn't like school. The teachers were always going off on angry diatribes and trying to humiliate the kids, and a lot of the time I felt like they were targeted me especially, although that was probably mostly just paranoia. I was a really paranoid kid and felt like kids were always talking shit about me behind my back. One time I was looking at a Guinness book of world records in an idle class in a library with Doug Jones and we were sharing in the incredible feats, and the nect day he came up to me and excitedly said, "Hey Kyle, wasup?!" like he was my buddy, and I got all paranoid like he was making fun of me so I refused to talk to him. I probably really weirded him out. I was the least social kid in the school in seventh grade, but I wasn't the weirdest. There was another kid named Royal Smith who everyone liked to make fun of because he was overweight, super emotional, and didn't seem to shower. I met him in ninth grade when we were both helpers in Mrs. Doran's girl's choir class. Then we hung out at lunch. One time we were all playing football at lunch. Paul Davis said something and then somebody sarcastically said, "Yeah we all know you can kick everybody's ass Paul". Then Royal got tackled and a bunch of kids started freaking out saying they got Royal slime all over them, which upset Royal and later on I heard he was caught banging his head against Mrs. Doran's metal door before class started. Another weird kids was Mike Chapin, who became my best friend. The first time I noticed him was in seventh or eighth grade and I think it was Doug Jones said pointed to a kid with a big curly afro and a thick wool sweater walking accross the field by himself and said, "You see that kid? Whatever you do don't hang out with him, he's the biggest loser you will ever meet". I didn't say anything, but that made me interested in him because I wanted to know what was so weird about him. I first made friends with him in eighth grade when we had a drama class together. I got along with Mike great because he was a good conversationalist. He liked to talk about everybody like he was anylizing them, and was always open to what I had to say and wanted to hang out with me.

The kids I hung out with the most in 7th grade were my Korean friend from sixth grade Du Shin for the beginning part of the year. But he started hanging out with Mike Wehinger and ignoring me. A big pet peeve of mine has always been when I'm with a group of people and I am being treated like the third wheel or the odd man out. I would rather not hang out with anybody. I started hanging out with Moses Jenkins who was changing his name to Chris and a cool kid from Ethiopia. One day we skipped school in the morning and went on a big hike through the grave yard and up in the flat irons. I don't think I got in trouble for that though.

8th Grade

In eighth grade I made friends with Mike Chapin and he introduced me to a group of kids he called, "Ronnie Erhart and those guys". This group consisted of Ronnie Erhart who wasn't the leader, as there was no leader, Doug Jones, Kael Russel, Mark Palmer, and Shawn Fleming. Probably some other kids who I can't think of now. Mark Palmer would envite me to walk around the campus with him and he became my best friend for a while. I took him up to our place in Tiger Run four miles outside of Breckinridge for a weekend one time. One time he found a five dollar bill on the ground. I didn't have the greatest relationship with him though because he struck me as kind of a primadona. In ninth grade we was nominated for being one of the outstanding kids of the ninth grade because he always dressed up in the theme day outfits, and I told him he was nominated because of the outfits and he said he was nominated because of his personality. In retrospect he probably was nominated for his pesonality. He was one of these happy go lucky kids who the teachers liked.

The teachers didn't like me. They would target me like I was one of the bad kids, probably because I would have trouble paying attention. I would always doze off in class, which is a problem I have had all the way up through college. Most of the time I would be stuggling to keep my eyes open and my head upright, nevermind pay attention to what the teacher was saying. It was the weirdest thing. I would feel perfectly fine right before class, and then within ten minutes of the class starting I would feel like I had been up for days and just needed to pass out. Every time the teacher looked over at me they probably saw some weird kid with a peculiar grimace on his face and took it to mean that I was scowling at them or something. One time Mr. Reno, a little guy who was an asshole who nobody liked who lived a block from Mike Chapin. He said something like, "You can't use pencils, like THIS guy", and angrily pointed at me. I was embarrassed because I had just gotten a buzz cut to my scalp from a senile old barber near Ideal market who could only give 50's haircuts and I had a hoodie on to hide it. I think he broke my pencil too. In ninth grade this guy was our teacher sponsor on the ninth grade off campus committee and he was really cool for that.

Mrs. Doran also gave me some weird treatment. She never acted especially rude to me, but she gave me a B in choir when all the other kids got A's. I though maybe that was because I wanted to be a Bass and she wanted me to be a Tenor. I didn't really care about grades but I thought that was weird as I showed up every day and sung my heart out.

Another teacher treated me really strangly. The ninth grade physics teacher Mr. Walker. For some reason I can remember a lot of the kids in that class: Me, Mike Chapin, some weird kid from Chicago who liked to dress in spandex biker shorts, Brent Stevenson, Mike Mcormack, Adam Wright, Brie Minger, and Genny Guidry. Brie asked me to change seats once so Genny could sit with the girls which I happily did. Anyway, this guy Mr Walker, who was actually a pretty good physics teacher, was giving out our grades on the final day. I had a B+ in the class going into the final exam and I got an A in the test, but when he gave me the final grade it was a C. I showed Mike and he said I needed to confront the teacher, so I went up there and he angrily told me to get lost because he was busy so I went back to Mike and Mike told me to not give up, so I went back to him. I patiently waited there and when he was done I calmly explained to him that I had a B before the test and got an A on the exam so how could I have a C in the end. He looked things over, and then frowningly fixed it and didn't look at me or apologize, so I think he must have done that on purpose to fill his quota for C's. I think teachers feel insecure if they give out too many A's. The same thing happened to me in College but when I got the final grade it was too late.

9th Grade

In 9th grade I started hanging out with Du Shin and Mike Wehinger again. We would find Mike Chapin in the lunch room and try to get him to hang out with us but he wanted to be alone and watch the goings on in the cafeteria. If you ever wanted someone to give commentary on people it was Mike. He was cool about it though. He wouldn't talk down about people, he would just give interesting objective insights. I remember we played a lot of basketball and being surpised about how good Mike Wehinger was because he didn't seem particularly athletic to me.

One day in Mr. Reno's class we were venting about how it was unfair that not even the ninth graders could go off campus, so the teacher suggested we start a committee to write a proposal and get signatures from merchants around the area. I was the only boy in that committee, although that wasn't the reason I joined it. Brie Minger was the president and I was the secretary so I was the one who dealt with Mr. what's his name to get what we wrote proofread. Another girl on it was Gina Butcher who was the sister of Susan Butcher who won the Iditarod. Gina wanted to be an astraunaut. I asked her if she wanted to be an astranaut because she was interested in space or because she liked the technology and she said, "both". There were a few other girls on it but I don't remember who they were. Later on Brie used that as a platform to be the school president or something. One of the people who vouched for her was this little hispanic 8th grade girl who just a few weeks beforehand was talking major trash about Brie in the Choir class that I was the helper for. I wondered what happened to get her to change her mind like that. They must have been friends and had a falling out and then made up again in that span of time.

Being a helper in that girls choir class was interesting because half of it was just girl gossip. One girl even walked up to me and tried to flirt with me. They even gossiped about me, because there was a big seventh grade girl who had a crush on me and was relentlessly leaving all these love letters in my locker. I was flirting with her on our field trip to Disney World earlier on in the school field trip and she decided she liked me. Mark Palmer said she was doing the same thing to him before she set her sights on me. I didn't want anything to do with her because she was a seventh grader, but I should have gone for her because she was huge, she was like five nine or something and I was like five six. I would love to have a girlfriend who is three inches taller than me nowadays. I remember one of the girls saying, "She's a seventh grader and she's taller than Kyle." I just sat there and didn't say anything.

The field trip to Disney World was fun. It was cool to be in a place that was perpetually warm and humid and seeing all the thick petaled grass everywhere.

I was pretty good in all the subjects as long as I was staying awake, except for Math which I was totally lost at. I wasn't chosen to be in the remedial math class my ninth grade year though. I must have slipped through the cracks on that one. Maybe it was a geometry class, I wasn't too bad at geometry. There was a big boned blonde student teacher college girl there who was about 6'4". I remember she stood up next to Jeremy and Bjorn, and Jeremy was one of the tallest boys at about 5'11" and was tiny compared to her, like eye level below her chin and way skinnier too. I heard them ask her if she played basketball and she said no but she played Volleyball. She said she had been that tall since she was 13. She was still taller than our Mather teacher when she was sitting down on the table next to his desk and he was standing up. I got a shock one day when the bell rang and everybody walked out in the hall and Paul Davis who was the tallest kid in the school at about 6'1" walked by her and he was also about eye lever to her chin and thinner. There was also a female math teacher who liked to dress in high heals all the time there named Miss Tinelli who was like 6'3", just as tall as Mister Donavon the shop teacher and Mr. Runnels the government teacher. Mr. Runnels like to brag that he was the little brother of the famous wrestler Dusty Rhodes.

I was always athletic, but the only time I joined in any sports team was in seventh grade when I joined track. I didn't race it in eight or ninth grade because of my knee disease and because I had no energy from school. I think Mike Chapin was on track that year too. I did the mile and got fourth in districts which was the biggest race of the year. I got a 5'40". Pete Vordenburg who was the winner of districts for the ninth graders got a 4'40". Our star runner for the seventh graders who won districts was Cedric Hustved, who was a confident blond kid who was only there for seventh grade. He told me he did the Red Zinger but wasn't that good. I went to Base Line with a lot of kids who did the Red Zinger Mini Classic: Ryan Gear, Cedric Hustved, Chris Wherry, Adam Wright, Me, Stuart Robertson, Garrett Kolar, Arrian Wheeler, my brother, JP went to baseline for a while, Ryder and Casey Clifford, Jessica Whitehall, and Genny Guidry. Out of those kids the Cliffords, Chris, Jessica, Jenny, and Arrian actually won the Zinger. My brother won three stages and got third, and I heard Jessica was junior national chamion, and Chris Wherry was USPRO National Champion in 2005. Jenny raced up and won, and Chris and Arrian won it multiple times. That's pretty impressive for kids within four years of each other from one school. Arrian was a pretty confident kid. I remember in seventh grade he was the only kid in the school who would go to school with a tee shirt that was ripped all the way down the sides so you could see his ribs and stomach. He was one grade below Wyndham but raced in his age group in the Zinger so they were friends.

Base Line totally tripped me out. I remember walking to the bus stop after school (I don't know why I didn't ride my bike to school) and thinking that there had to be something beyond this dismall world of closed mindedness. I got the impression the teachers were all grumpy old farts who didn't believe in life after death and that life was all dog eat dog. My seventh grade science teacher Mr. Wistler liked to go on about how if anyone every broke into his house he would kill them and he had every right to do so. It was weird stuff like that, plus seeing how cruel kids were to each other. One time walking along the crowded hallways one younger kid turned around and scowled at me and said, "Hey what do you want!", and I had no idea what he was talking about. Kids liked to push each other around in the hallways also. One time the gym teacher mister Green was giving us a football class and he asked me to pass him the ball, so I threw it over hand to him like I thought balls should be thrown and it apparently hit him too hard and knocked his wedding ring off so he hurled it at me in a screaming rage and angrily ordered me to help him find it. It's just too bad there is so much negativity in Junior High and to a lesser extent High School. It seems to me that most of the negativity starts with the teachers acting so paranoid and argrily towards the kids, and to kids like me who don't mean any trouble.

High School

10th Grade

I was origionally locker partners with Du Shin but he only lasted at Boulder high for a few weeks because he transferred to a prep school out east, so I got my locker to myself. Mike met a skinny 6'4" kid with long hair named Andy Ritchey on the cross country team and introduced us so we hung out at lunch. Andy was a road bike racer and was on the same team as a couple kids I knew from the Zinger, Jared Clark and Eric Owen. I never rode with him though. I was still racing mountain bikes, but I mostly went mountain biking after school, and when I went rode riding I went by myself. I never rode with Wyndham. He flat refused to ride with me. He had enough of his own biking buddies to ride with such as Arrian Wheeler, David and Ingrid Alongi, JP Deaboim, and Genny Guidry. Andy and I would always walk up to the UMC cafeteria at CU and all around. I joked we got pretty good excersize from all the walking, because we pretty much walked the whole time.

I had a drama class which was fun. There was a 5'9" kid named John I think who was in there, plus another cool hippie kid whos name escapes me. I remember that kid John was 5'9" because he was taller than me and later on like just a few months later I was 5'10" and thought about how I had grown. I guess most kids don't finish growing until the end of their 10th grade year. Until their like 16. Plus Emily Mcdonald and a fiesty girl named Alison Yester. The teacher was an old ditzy woman who tried to show us how to act like we were in a beautiful field and put on a wide smile and exageratedly put her hands out and swung around. Emily Mcdonald got flustered and said, "I've been acting since I was three and I can tell you I wouldn't act like that if I was in a field". The teacher didn't know what to say. That class was a blast though.

I had a health class with a kid who's name I don't remember who lived with his sister who was into Scientology. He took me to their office in a basement on Pearl Street and I saw Benji Reed there. The guy there had me hold an E-meter which L. Ron Hubbord supposedly invented. This thing was the most amazing thing I have ever seen and I would love to get one. It was a contraption that had two metal holds that I was told to hold and the guy pinched me, then he told me to think about how I felt when he pinched me and every time I thought about it the meter went up! My friend introduced me to a couple people there who were doing a detox program that consisted of fasting and hanging out in a sauna that was there or something. They put me into a room and played me video for me that didn't tell me anything about what scientology was. It was pretty much the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in my entire life. The video consisted of a guy who got in a car accident or something and was told he would never walk again. Then someone gave him a copy of Dianetics and it showed him eagerly reading it and then lo and behold, he baffles the doctors and is walking because he read the book. And that was the video. Back then there were commercials about Dianetics all the time on the TV where they would give a common philisophical question and show what page the answer was on. I took notes on a few of the questions and the page and then went to that page and ther was never anything about the question on that page, so I never read the book. Later my friend said his sister who got him interested in Scientology got dissilusioned by it but he remained a dedicated follower. I don't remember him saying anything worth remembering about it though.

I was in a World History class with some grumpy old dude who wasn't a bad teacher. One time we were watching a video about something and everybody was sleeping so he slammed a book down on the desk as hard as he could and startled everybody and then screamed that we shouldn't sleep during that old fashioned film strip video. Another time he was out of class and Terence or somebody slipped out of the back window and he came back and noticed someone was gone and asked us who it was but nobody wanted to snitch so he took role call again and found out who it was. I sat next to a 100 pound long haired rocker kid who liked to talk all the time to a rocker girl. He told her "girls fuck me over", and she said "I don't fuck you over". He had a funny looking skater friend who reminded me of Alfred E. Newman come in and sit down next to him whick totally weirded out the teacher who would eventually kick him out. That kid was Chris Stuckensneider. Once we were playing some kind of game where there were two groups divided up against each other and there was a girl leader. On one aswer Alex Tayler told the girl what to say but she listened to another girl which was the wrong answer but Alex's was the right one. He didn't say anything but I could tell he was livid.

I had a photography class with Andy in the art building which was torn down that summer. The teacher was a grumpy short fat dude. One time he accussed Andy and I of skipping out on class when we were just going to get something like we were a couple of delinquints.

Those are all of the classes I can think of right now. But more will probably come up to me now that I have written this. I will think about how I wrote about my 10th grade year and what I wrote and then bam something new will come up.

11th Grade

I had a class in 11th grade that was some kind of health class. I needed that class for some credit and the lady teacher tried really hard to get me in for some reason. There was a skrawny curly haired Jewish looking kid in there who was the school president called Ari Walker who wouldn't stop talking. I Don't remember what he said but I don't think much of it had to do with the subject. We were asked to represent our lives in a drawing, and I drew a really disturbing one of a kid stuck in hell trying frantically to get out. I didn't really like school. In retrospect I should have dropped out after sixth grade and educated myself. Most of the time I was just sleeping through class. I got plenty of beauty sleeps though which probably lengthened my life some. I sat at the back left corner of this class and remember looking out of the window into the courtyard and noticing that my sight was going, so I got glasses. This was before contacts I suppose. That's the only thing about 11th grade I remember besides having long hair.

12th Grade

12th grade was my break out year as far as socializing goes because I joined the Cross Country team and became a member of that social clique of sorts. There were Cross Country parties, and the runners went to the school dances with each other. In the summer before 12th grade I had decided to quite mountain biking and Mike Chapin talked me into joining the team. He took me out on a bunch of runs and pushed me hard telling me I had to suffer if I wanted to make varsity. He was a better runner than me at the time and I really enjoyed running with someone faster tham me. One run I went out with Mike and a kid who out ran me but didn't join the team for some reason. Cross country was fun. Every day after school we would go on group runs and do intervals and mini races and stuff. The coach, Guy Zakrevsky, who was know as coach Zak, took it really seriously. Along with Mike, the best runners on the team were three Mexican kids named Jorje Hinjos, Jesus Delgado, and Fransisco Gutierez. There were some other good runners there too like Andy Ritchey, Nathan Osgood, and Vance Little. There were some other fast girls on the team, like Faith Harvel, who was second in States to Melody Fairchild, who was on our team the year before and was the first high school girl in the world to run two miles in under ten minutes. Some other fast girls were Joy Little, and some other underclass girls who's names I can't remember just now.

The first race was at Fairview and was called the Pat Patten Invitational. We won that race as a team and I got 8th place, so I met my goal to get in the top ten. I got a time of 18:10. Mike got like fifth or something and Jesus got like second or something like that. I can't remember what the second race was but I was on varsity by then. One of the earlier races was a huge race at Fairview and I succomed to the temptation of running way out in front of everbody to get my moment in the sun. I remember someone saying that I was going to blow and sure enough I did. I ended up in 192 place. After that the coach put me into junior varsity and didn't even chose me as an alternate for a race down in Pueblo where the states were going to be held. I ran one race in Junior Varsity which I won pretty easily. My teamate was second. That race was intersting because like half the kids in the top half of the pack were from our school. After that I was back in Varsity and the next race I remember was Leagues which we won, and I got sixth. Then there was Districts. My team didn't do so well in that but I did, I got 8th. I think I got a time of 17:07 which I think was my personal record but that was a hilly course. By then Mike wasn't doing so well. He had a crazy theory that if he starved himself he would lose weight and therefore run faster. Jorje even came up to me in the hallway in school one day and asked me if he was emotionally OK and I said he was. Mike was still on varsity, I think he was still one of the fastest apart from me and the Mexicans, but his times were slipping. He was running really well in the earlier races. In one race in Denver he got a 16:43 which was the 17th best time ever for Boulder high. I was excited for states because I had done well in Leagues and Districts.

Going to the State Championships in Pueblo was fun because we all rode together in the bus and stayed in a hotel together. The night before the meet we were all hanging out in each others rooms, and I went for a walk into the field nearby with some of the girls and told Zacharaiah Sitchens story of the Nephalime and planet X. I can't remember who went first in the race, the boys or the girls.

Jesus and I were in the top ten. I remember that after the first mile I think it was we got a time of 5:10 and I felt great, but then out of the blue with about a half mile to go my biceps suddenly gave out on me and my arms fell down alongside me and I was running like some kind of lame doll or something and all these guys started passing me like I was standing still. The last person to pass me was Eric Owen, and I ended up in 29th place. Maybe I overextended myself and had no idea from all the excitement, or maybe I just had a bad day. Jesus cracked for some reason too and ended up in 21st. Fransisco ended up beating Jesus in that race. I was really upset and sat down and started crying and then Stephanie Kroner and Olivia Bice came up to me and asked me how I was doing as if they didn't notice I was upset and I cheered up. Then the coach cheerily ran up to me and told me we got second, so that was pretty good. The girls ended up getting second also. So putting the boys and girls together we actually won. Faith who was our best female racer got second to some girl who had been beeting her that year, and Jorje got like fifth or something.

There were like three dances after that and I went with Faith for a couple and then their friend Shanon who was on the team the year before for prom. That was the only year that I went to a school dance or a school party for that matter. I showed up for a couple days of track that spring but after a run up mount Sanitas with Fransisco and some other kid coach Zak yelled at me and told me I never listened to him and then started talking to someone else and pushed me. That's when I asked Shannon who was there if she noticed that he pushed me. That was the first time I talked to her. I decided later to not bother doing track because Zak was just going to be rude to me. Mike told me he asked him to ask me to give my uniform back but he never gave me one in the first place.

In twelvth grade I was hanging out with Arrian Wheeler for a bit and he introduced me to Jo Jo, Leiah, Mina, and Naomi, who were really cool precocious and alternative Sophmore girls. One time Andy and Mike and I bumped into them on the hill and we went to the planetarium where they had a light show with Led Zepelin. During the end of the school year I had a job bagging groceries at Ideal market with a bunch of other Boulder High kids who were working there also. One day we went cliff jumping up at Gross Reservoir with Alison Yester who I worked with and Andy and Jo Jo and Alison suggested that Andy and Jo Jo go to prom together with Shannon and I and Nick and I think Faith.

In the winter I went skiing a few weekends with Nick Spitzer and his friend Josh Mcvay. Nick brought his video camera with him and filmed us jumping cliffs and stuff. My dad talked me into joining the Eldora Volunteer Ski patrol that winter also which I did a few weekends but that wasn't fun at all, the people weren't very nice and I just worked. One day the ski patrol boss made me yank the ticket of one guy who was super bummed. I think I quit not long after that and started skiing with Nick and those guys again.

LERT

I did LERT for two years. In sixth grade and in seventh grade. In sixth grade Wyndham and I were the youngest kids on the team along with Eli who was even younger than Wyndham. People seemed to ignore the fact that Casey Clifford was only three months older than me. I remember there was a race in Steamboat that I wasn't allowed to go to because I was too young and I said, "Well Casey is going", and he said she was one of the big kids. I did't say anything about that though. She had a brother who is a couple years older than me named Ryder so that was probably why. Ryder was really cool. He was the only kid on the team who acted like he wanted to be friends with me. He was alwasy saying how he wanted to go on training rides with me but I never really showed any interest for some reason. He was a strong rider too. He got second to Bobby Julich in the Zinger and then second to Eric Meyers and then finally won it in 87. There were some other good athletes on that team. Casey was really good and placed highly in the Junior Olympics and won the Red Zinger. Then there was Pete Vordenburg who went to the Olympics twice, one time straight out of high school. There was another kid named Corey who I heard was a top placer in collegiate skiing. Corey was like two years older than me and I almost beat him in a 5 k race one time in Winter Park. Usually my races were ony 3 k's and the longer the races the better for me because I had good endurance. In a ten k race in Frisco called the Frisco Gold rush I got third to Andy Hooker who won the Red Zinger. My second year of LERT Andy joined out team and I heard he was a top racer in college. There was another kid their age named Chad who didn't seem to like me. He liked to give me indian burns because I told him he couldn't make me say uncle, and he had no mercy either. There was also a girl named Sarah Daney who was the daughter of the team organizer Dave Daney. She was a top racer in Junior Olympics too. I never talked to her though. In fact I never talked to any of those kids except for Ryder. The problem was they were all older than me except for Casey who I didn't talk to either. One time my hands were really cold and Casey let me borrow her gloves to get back to the car. Once she accused me of almost breaking like three pairs of skiis after stepping inbetween them to get to my seat. I didn't say that I stepped between them instead of on them. For some reason I never defended myself when I was a kid. I was afraid of causing more problems with other kids because I had already had enough of them. In seventh grade Kirsten Boshen and her brother Thor joined the team. She was my age but she was only on it for a few weeks. There was one other kid who's name I can't remember from Fort Collins who was my age and a lot faster than me, but he didn't go to all the training sessons after school. There was a mellow kid who joined in seventh grade named Lorenzo Worster who was Wyndham's age who picked it up quickly.

LERT was really fun because the huge trail system was like a winter playground labyrinth that we could explore every day after school. We would have time trails all the time on all the different sections and got to compare our times with each other and ourselves from beforehand. For some reason I don't remember how I faired compared to the other kids. I was faster than Wyndham and Eli, but not as fast as the other kid my age or Casey who was my age. I always wished the races and time trails were longer so I could have a chance to beat the other kids. Three K's was just too short for me.

I didn't join the team again in 8th grade because of my knee disease and my parents didn't encourage it. That was about the time Wydham's bike race friends and some bike race kids my age joined the team. I think Arrian, Dave and Ingrid Alongi, JP, Jenny Guidry, and Jessica Whitehall were among them. I don't think any of the new kids did very well in the races, but by then Wyndham and Lorenzo had their skills down and were getting top two or three at the races to a kid who won the Junior Olympics. Wyndham told me at his last race he did with JP he smashed that kids time but then found out he accidentally took a short cut and the kid accused him of doing it on purpose. Wyndham said he probably would have beat him.

Summer of 92' After High School

My parents told me they wanted me to be a camp ground host in Wyoming as a kind of retreat. I was there like a month or something. I think I have a real time journal about that already.

 

Freshman Year of Fort Lewis College

I was excited about going off to college because of the change of scenery. I think I hit the mountain bike trails pretty soon. Back then there were trails all over the campus and just behind it which was great because I could go off on short jaunts like every day. I was enrolled in a special all in one class that was in the same room with the same kids all day. The classroom was in the basement of the dorm building right next to mine which was cool. I was interested and involved for the first couple weeks until I became bored and disengaged. The two teachers, Lillian Lang and some other lady weren't very bright and to be perfectly honest, I don't remember anything from that class other than a couple juvenile assignments. One was to describe a field trip we made to the Grand Canyon. We were supposed to break up into