“They fuck you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do” - Phillip Larkin


I’m naive to think anybody would be interested in reading a short biography about a twenty something aimless college student. Yet, this is for me. Not my reader.

21 years ago in Akron Children’s Hospital your humble author was born into an America ruled by Ronald Reagan and a planet with 5 billion residents. I like to think most of them were morning the death of Andy Warhol. I was born, immediately rushed to an ICU and that’s where I lived the first several weeks of my life. My mother suffered the same fate. Before I achieved self-awareness my body was invaded, raped and permanently scared. It was all in the name of Hippocrates. I’m grateful.

We all are left with only a handful of memories of childhood. We all wish we can remember only the good times; birthdays, ballgames and parades on main street. Unfortunately, we can’t always remember what we want. The residue is all that remains, a smell or a sound or a particular phrase.

Childhood for me was a mix of good and bad, as is typical. Strawberry picking and physical abuse appear in my head side by side, neither holds more clout than the other. They are pasted in a collage fashioned from the smell of cut grass and the sobering reality of a bee sting.

One of my favorite memories as a child is, interestingly enough, of the humidifier my mother used to set in my room when I was sick. I was a sickly child in general. The steroids and “breathing treatments” given to me kept my body ticking as my mind wandered into fantasy. The humidifier represented, to me at the time, an undying protector found in my mother. My coughing would worsen throughout the night and she would feed me cough syrup every 3 hours. I pretended to hate it. Eventually, mom would stop coming with cough syrup. I had to sneak downstairs and get it myself.

At a young age I discovered my unrelenting curiosity and my knack for mischief. I didn’t keep either a secret; I flushed toilets when people were in showers, I put soap into dinner. I did it all. I quickly became resourceful. Dad would sleep on the couch, mom would be working and I would be climbing on kitchen drawers to reach the candy jar. I went largely unnoticed. Positive reinforcement was rare, corporal punishment was expected in my house.