Mark's Pages

School

"That the present in general is not primal but, rather, reconstituted, that it is not the absolute, wholly living form which constitutes experience, that there is no purity of the living present — such is the theme, formidable for metaphysics, which Freud, in a conceptual scheme unequal to the thing itself, would have us pursue. This pursuit is doubtless the only one which is exhausted neither within metaphysics nor within science."

—Derrida

"I must admit that in many respects my education has done me a great deal of harm."

—Kafka

Rolando Elementary (1962 – 1965)

• Soft blankets spread patchwork over a floor of padded mats.
• We had a pretty tiny world.
• Scratchy voice over school PA: The President is dead.
• My childhood friends were Wes, Pam, and Lulu.
• From the beginning I'm contrarian.
• Childhood fascination for transistor radios.
• The kids were very conscious of the musicianship of those bands.
• Marbles are for keeps.
• My first encounter with dishonesty revolves around marbles.
• Scale the chainlink fence.
• The boys are riveted by antlions.
• It was quite a long walk for a second-grader.
• My two friends are in their Brownie uniforms.
• My mother doesn't understand how much I love my friends.

Whittier Elementary (1966)

• I was ever the contrarian.
• The caliber of the teachers was undeniably less.
• Mike and Rodney, the cool boys in third grade.
• Iron filings.
• That's not true.
• The IQ test was fun.

Martha Farnum Elementary (1966 – 1969)

• Sketch: Mr. B.
• Memorize the street names.
• Complex route.
• Sometimes I would take an earlier bus.
• The kids were so mean!
• I don't think I'd ever lied before.
• I felt for those picked-on kids.
• The girls' hands are clammy.
• Clickety clack clack clack.
• As a child my mother relayed the comment made to her by the teacher of the gifted class...
• There's a girl I love in school.
• I should explain the game of teamball.
• That cultural disconnect had an outcome with resonance.
• Somehow I missed my bus home from school.
• I'm on the cool tile floor at home, my mother's apartment on Cowley Way.
• I can't spell.
• For a time I was bullied every morning by an older boy who upon arrival would kick me in the shin exactly once.
• I loved a girl there, for three years. Jean.
• The San Diego Police Band is here to teach us cops are cool...
• I'm walking my friend's little brother home from school.
• I published an occasional "newsletter"...
• We have a little class band.
• One of the most confusing experiences was near the end of sixth grade.
• The drugs at this moment are model glue, reds, weed, and alcohol...
• After the first year, my mother gave permission for me to withdraw.
• That school is all tore down now.

George W. Marston Jr. High (1969 – 1972)

• Stacks and stacks of combination locks new in boxes...
• "No."
• Because I have opted out.
• In Junior High I kept a record one year of when I did and did not go to school.
• "Busted him for ripping off."
• Because I spent my lunch money on drugs I went for the most part without lunch...
• One of the gym teachers seeks to correct some appalling behavior he's witnessed in the showers.
• By middle school nearly all the girls in my neighborhood had been either raped or molested...
• I'm struggling to stay awake.
• We have a very fast runner.
• A single book changed things.
• A kid at school had a father who was a dead Marine.
• Around the time of the Kent and Jackson State shootings the kids stopped reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
• Another unexpected milestone, this time from the bargain bin at FedMart.
• But there was one moment with one teacher I'll always remember with gratitude.

Clairemont Sr. High School (1972 – 1975)

• Box of voices. It started early.
• I'm high on rum and LSD.
• For me, "adolescent onset" lasted about four years...
• First days back from summer break...
• Turns out I had a counselor.
• I've known people who've heard that story and replied...
• Little landlord lawyer from a little long ago town.
• Beautiful golden Cynthia, the minister's daughter...
• There was a girl who acknowledged her drug use.
• There's a simple reason I was not caught up in the Modoc Massacre.
• I should underscore: I was never a loner.
• This was the Led Zeppelin era.
• It's Christmas, I'm fourteen or fifteen, when for the first time I replace evasion with confrontation.
• My Marine friend had a neighbor who was a navy combat pilot on active duty bombing North Vietnam.
• I re-entered the gifted program suddenly without warning after learning toward the end of tenth grade that the kids were almost entirely unsupervised.
• Change began to percolate when Nasty Debbie raved about Dostoevsky.
• Where even the reading rebounded: amplifying and focusing the darkness I was experiencing.
• Next was naturally The Bell Jar.
• It's so fucking stupid they teach literature chronologically.
• I have a girlfriend there, for a short time. I'm not nice to her.
• Why am I in the Model U.N.?
• Then I no longer needed the lies.
• I began dramatically challenging The Adult Authorities to notice me.
• Those were the wrong people.
• With whom then was I genuinely friends?
• I'm on the school's small grassy lunch court watching a no-neck with a varsity letter belittle one of the special-ed kids.
• One day in twelfth grade beautiful Cynthia approached me to say, "You'd better start going to English class."
• I met three girls at Windandsea.
• Then there is Fire in the Lake, and it all blows apart in an instant.
• I find no surprise in the fact that the white-collar kids loved those programs.

Gap Year (1975 – 1976)

• The worst, where I had the full panoply of classic symptoms...
• Those people were false.
• I followed the reading where it led.
• Anarchism is inevitable.
• The organizer of the first Anarchism study group I attend is Jorj...
• This period of adolescent onset began to fade when I met the right woman.

University of California, San Diego (1976)

• I can't follow this.
• There's one class I enjoy, the only small one I'm allowed to access.
• On the Revelle College quad competing sectarian groups have sited their literature tables.
• I realize I'm becoming pedantic.
• I've learned only recently that Jameson had been a professor at UCSD at roughly the times I was first present there.

Johnston College, University of Redlands (1977 – 1981)

• It feels like being parachuted into a foreign city without a map.
• The usual off-campus types, usually off campus.
• Martyr to her own beauty and the cruelty of others.
• "You are very dangerous woooooman..."
• Tall girl...
• Redlands had an aura of exoticism to me.
• My first experience with Chinese food, ever...
• "Kerook," he says, declaratively, looking at the book I'm reading.
• Parallels with the young Adolf Hitler.
• I think one of my favorite recurring experiences of university was Rocco's Restaurant in Riverside.
• She was consistent in wanting more time.
• Falstaff without depth.
• Mysterious, unapproachable, intimidating.
• Queen Bee on the dormroom floor, hive of drones attending.
• I had a very underage teenage girlfriend who'd introduced herself to my radio voice.
• They were a clique of NorthEastern children of privilege.
• "Kay–YOU–oh–arrr: left-handed radio."
• Our chemistry professor taught an explosives class. Really.
• I'm told by third parties that the Dean of Students rates my story in this month's Forum the best undergraduate fiction he's ever seen.
• Greyhound station, Los Angeles.
• Elitism was part of our cultural context in academe...
• Conversion came suddenly, although there'd been signs.
• I liked the pretty neighbor girl from across the wide shared patio.
• I took the pretty neighbor girl to the Ken one summer evening...
• Letters to Lise.
• They tell me I've written the best faculty evaluation in the history of the school.
• He seems not to understand that when one's mouth is open one's ears are closed.
• My girlfriend pulls a boy toward his room by his sweatshirt strings.
• Professor Falstaff loved bricolage.
• We all went Punk and New Wave overnight.
• I am struggling with Althusser.
• A football player threatened me, in a very specific way.
• Family near the tide pools shoot us cold and angry looks.
• College friends, biker friends.
• I've been given a master key.
• I came home from my radio shows just as dawn broke...
• I went to college to learn to differentiate between competing revolutionary tendencies.
• Keith and I are definitively confused regarding the meaning of "abstraction".
• A schoolfellow named Richard sussed how to cheat the dryers.
• I loved a girl there...
• Summers I'd read...
• I love studying in the bowling alley.
• Second summer home, a kid I'd hung with four or five years earlier wanted to talk philosophy.
• When I started reading I gave up the drugs.
• I took the Greyhound, most of the time.
• New semester...
• I like my History professor very much.
• Tension between left and right.
• A high school girlfriend followed me.
• In Paris our professor is, well, himself.
• The soldiers at first were nervous...
• Persecuted by all for poor social skills.
• College students near the end of a cross-country road trip, daybreak, truckstop diner, Needles, California.
• "I like avant garde art. Only not when it goes too far."
• The apogee of my academic experience was a course on Ulysses in my third year.
• City man in grey and bowler, with briefcase.
• Five or six very old and shrunken women...
• In Rome our professor at last connected carnally with the undergraduate he'd pursued for months.
• She saw me as socially incapable...
• We fought over sleep schedule.
• Mysterious, unapproachable, intimidating.
• I'm taking Microeconomics at the University.
• We thought we were "Structuralists"...
• We had to hunt for the books.
• We were close then.
• She made out with my academic advisor.
• That one wanted to wrestle.
• "Now that's a piece of writing..."
• Withdrawal.
• I couldn't keep up.
• Guitars in the lounge.
• Professor Falstaff has a new accomplice.
• "The people... united... will never be defeated!"
• Our elitism was part of our downfall.
• We're told the University of Redlands will close our college because the University's accreditation is threatened.
• That we were actually what was already labeled "Poststructuralists" became clear to us only later.
• Thus our assimilation of "French Theory" was always ambivalent.
• My encounter with these materials was distorted even further by my failure to learn French.
• "Do you want to be in school right now?"
• By the time they closed my college I was already done.
• We visited that old building.