I Could Be Wrong, But...
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X Marks the Spot
©2008 David Boyne
In the 1970s, when I was in high school, usually stoned, I would stare
out the windows of class. I would think, "Will I ever, ever, ever,
get out of here?" And for some strange reason, "When the year
2000 comes, I'll be forty-three."
I suspect it was a failure both of courage and of imagination that kept
me from envisioning what I might be like, what my life might be like,
at age 43 in the Year 2000. I was 17, and while I could discover that
the word LIVE was the word EVIL spelled backward, and be moved enough
to stencil this on the back of my denim jacket, I didn't have the creativity
to daydream of hover cars or cities on Mars or violent urban dystopias,
like the one portrayed in A Clockwork Orange. In truth, I was not confident
that I would live to make it to age 43 in the Year 2000.
But one day high school did end. The very next day life started happening
to me. And yes, it all happened in the blink of a cosmic eye and suddenly
the Year 2000, dubbed Y2K, was nigh, and I was 43. I had survived high
school, my 20s in 1980s-Manhattan, an elated marriage, a dispiriting divorce,
and a stint as a step-dad in training. These dramas and numerous lesser
scenes had been acted out on stages in New Haven, Connecticut; St. Augustine,
Florida; New Orleans; Bangor, Maine; Providence, Rhode Island; New York;
San Francisco and Portland, Oregon. If there is a pattern in my life,
it is this: When I've been in a place long enough to make a mess requiring
vast expenditures of energy to clean up, I move. I once moved from an
apartment on the fourth floor of a building to an apartment on the fifth
floor of the same building to avoid cleaning the mess I had made in the
first apartment. But most often when I move, it is to a new city.
Read the rest of X Marks the Spot in the ebook, Quo Vadis, Dude?
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