M's Awesome if Lengthy 2003 Autobiography

This is the autobiography that M (okay, and me) wrote in fall of 2003 for a very difficult PITA school assignment. This is before he went to the lovely hippie school where he's learning useful things like growing shiitake mushrooms and retiling the art room. At any rate, we rediscovered it tonight and it is just so great, we're sharing. If you think it's long now, you should have read it before I edited it down a bit.

My Autobiography
August 28, 2003

Background/Ancestors

I am a mutt. I am an American with Irish, German, English, Dutch, Scottish and French blood. I’m about ½ Irish and the rest is all mixed up. I personally am a Pict. They paint themselves blue and scream at their enemies and make them run away. The first time the Romans saw them they ran away in terror. I would like to believe that my ancestors were Picts. My ancestors were definitely Celts. They might have been Gauls like Asterix and Obelix. They almost certainly fought the Romans, but they lost. Caesar and the Romans tried to conquer the world and almost did. They didn’t conquer Ireland though. There were Vikings in Ireland about 800 years after the Romans. There might be Viking ancestors in my family.

Birth – 5 years old

I was born at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore city, Maryland on December 8, 1991. It was a Sunday and I was born at 9:30 at night.

When I was very little, until I was 5½ we lived in Highlandtown in East Baltimore. I don’t remember much about it but I do remember this kid Colin who was my best friend when I lived in Highlandtown. I also remember when I got really mad at my Mom because I was screaming at the top of my lungs because the ice cream truck was coming but she didn’t hear me and then I went upstairs and I wouldn’t talk to her because I was mad so she told me to come and watch this cool thing on TV about war and I said, I don’t like war, so then she said, well, there’s a cool thing on about tigers, so I went and watched the thing about tigers with her and then I wasn’t mad anymore.

We used to go to a lot of different places. We had a mini van and there were drawings all over the ceiling and everywhere. All the children made the drawings. There were plastic dinosaurs glued all over the dashboard.

We went to the Hopkins Spring Fair every year. I remember riding on the small train in the Hopkins fair. There was a hollowed out tree in the part where you could get food where Valentino and I went when it was raining to eat our hotdogs. Noone else knew about it.

We went to the beach in the summer time. One time me and my sister had a beach ball and we lost it in the sea at Ocean City.

We also used to go to Rock Hall Maryland where our friend had a house. I remember Rock Hall; there was a rope swing and a boat. It was a sail boat and I went sailing in the boat. Sometimes I went sailing with my dad. Sometimes I went sailing with my mom or Max or our friend Billy. One time I saw a string ray; it wasn’t scary because I was on the boat and it was in the water. Toby, our dog, was young then and he would swim and swim and swim. He swam from boat to boat and he climbed up on our boat. When I was very little, I got a concussion in Rock Hall when I fell on the heater thing in the floor. I had to go to the hospital but I don’t remember that part.

I went to Bolton Hill Nursery School in Baltimore. One time I went over to my friend’s house and he gave me Sunny Delite for the first time. I couldn’t make up my mind whether to go to his house or to stay in my mom’s car and eat my doughnuts. I remember we used to play tag in Bolton Hill Nursery School and I would sing the song from the Hobbit movie. I loved to build with blocks and I did that every day with this other kid. My other friend’s name was Tarver; she came to my birthday party and gave me a big stuffed lobster. I still have it.

Elementary School Years

When I started school we moved out to the country, to Hereford Maryland. We lived right by the woods and there were lots of deer everywhere. Our neighbor was awesome. He was the best neighbor ever. He bought me candy bars and he talked in a funny voice. His name was Mr. Smitty and when he was younger he drove the school bus. He was so cool. He liked to go the track and bet on the ponies. He told stories about snakes and he called them Mr. No Shoulders.

There was a very old shot up gangster car out in the woods behind our house next to a burned down house. I think I know what happened. I think that the gangsters were going to get some money from some other gangsters but the other gangsters were bad so they got into a whole gunfight and the gangster who were trying to get their money hid behind the car and got shot at. The money was in the case in the trunk of the car. So then the gangsters died and the other ones lit the house on fire and couldn’t get the money because the cops were coming. But we couldn’t get into the trunk of the car because it was a tree had grown up behind the car and blocked the trunk. The hinges still worked though. That was a good thing.

Before kindergarten even started I busted my lip playing on the monkey bars at after school. I remember exactly what happened. She had warned me not to get on the monkey bars, but I did anyway. And then, I think it was like the fifth bar, the whole thing like shifted and I was falling. My front two teeth went right through my lower lip. I was then rushed to the emergency room where I waited for a while with painkillers in my mouth. When my mother tried to comfort me and handed me a cup of water I tried to drink it but the water fell through the hole in my bottom lip like a waterfall. My mom laughed and then she started to cry. When I was waiting there a boy was rushed in the doors on a stretcher with 12 doctors standing around him. Then they put me to sleep and stitched me up. When I was done I came out and the doctor gave me some stickers. For the next week I could only eat snowcones and icecream – soft things.

I started kindergarten at 7th District Elementary School in Parkton Maryland. My kindergarten teacher was evil. She got mad at me because I didn’t want to sing and I didn’t want to go on stage for the kindergarten show. Alex was my best friend. He had glasses. Pokemon came out and I was really into Pokemon. My teacher also complained about me having ladybugs in my hair and ladybugs everywhere. Our house was full of ladybugs.

I was in second grade when we got Fred. I was in the basement getting a ball I had just thrown down when a cat just came up and jumped into my arms and I picked him up and brought him upstairs. He had been down in the basement for three days but my mom was trying to ignore him. My sister and her friends were feeding him though. He was all skinny and his tooth was broken but he still loved me. We took him to the vet and the vet said he had asthma and broken bones and he thought he was going to die. He’s okay now. In fact he’s big and fat. I named him; I just looked at him and guessed his name was Fred. He looks like a Fred.

School wasn’t much fun and we didn’t have much freedom. The best part of school was recess and lunch: the only time you really got to talk to your friends. One time on the last day of school in fifth grade I tried to start a food fight. I was about to throw a biscuit when Mr. Jessup grabbed my arm and said, “If you throw that biscuit, I’m gonna break your arm.” And I said, “Too late, it’s already been broken.”

When I was six I went to my first year in Vermont where my friends have a log cabin made out of logs. We went every summer until we moved to North Carolina. In Vermont there was my favorite festival/carnival kind of thing called Bread and Puppet. It was really fun because they gave out free garlic bread and there were giant people on stilts wearing masks and you couldn’t even tell they were people. The whole thing was outdoors. Me and my friends and my family always sat in the front and me and Valentino would go off and try to catch grasshoppers that were everywhere. There were a whole bunch of grasshoppers. The people dressed up and the giant puppets tell stories. One of my favorite stories was when this guy got shot in the parking lot and he died. There were two people dressed up as cows too who ran around in the field and pretended they were cows. At the end of every Bread and Puppet there is a pageant. You can be in it. I was in it one year. I was a chair. In the pageant the bad guys set fire to the good guy but then the good guy is reborn at the end. The bad guys run away.

Family

My parents got divorced when I was 2½. I live with my mom but I spend parts of the summer with my dad. My dad lives in West Virginia in the middle of nowhere in a log cabin. My dad was born in Baltimore city like me. My dad makes stained glass. He likes the Civil War. He has a big gun called a muzzle loader. It shoots a big round ball made out of iron. He has two dogs named Doorstop and Shiloh. Both dogs are black and Doorstop has white spots.

I also have a brother named Max. He lives in New York. He is 18. He likes skateboarding. We have the same dad but not the same mom.

My mom makes me write paragraphs and won’t let me watch my show, which I think is not very nice and I’m getting aggravated because this is hard even though my Mom is doing almost all the typing. We live in West Asheville North Carolina. We have two dogs named Theo and Toby and a cat named Fred and a goldfish named Alfred. My mom takes me camping a lot. She likes to go hiking; I don’t like it because it’s boring.

When we got Theo we were at Earthfare when there was puppies outside, and we got one. We named him Theo and he was so cute. He looks like a full bred collie and partly a german shepherd. Theo is a year old now. My other dog Toby is 12 years old and Toby is very cute, just like Theo. Toby looks like a german shepherd. He is old and his bones hurt but he is still very cute.

I have a sister. She goes to college in New Paltz New York but she lives here in the summers. She is a girl who lives in her car and knows a lot of bums. That’s not true, says my mom. She has a lot of weird friends. We fight a lot because she’s mean and she hits me so I hit her back and then she starts to cry because nobody likes her and she’s a poor sobbing meanie who can’t afford to buy her poor brother an enchilada nirvana from Taco Bell. She works at the movie theatre which is good because I can watch movies for free and eat popcorn and soda for free.

My gramma lives here in Asheville too. Sometimes I stay at my Gramma’s house and look at my grandfather’s war stuff. He was in WWII.


Interests/Hobbies/Sports

My interests are video games, guns, swords, watching videos, playing outside, shooting my bb gun, making fires, spending money, camping, fishing and bike riding if I still had a bike. My favorite thing is fireworks. I love the way they shoot into the air and explode; the way they smell; the smoke, the loud noise and the angry neighbors who call the cops, so you run from them and hide.

Videos I love watching because there is stuff in the movies that you can’t do but they can. Like in the Matrix they do all kinds of weird moves that you can’t do, like going very slow. Watching videos is fun because you get to see what other peoples’ lives are like.

Videogames are fun because they make you feel like another person in another world. Video games also take a lot of skill. There’s lots of different kinds of video games. I have a PS 2 and a PC. I play games on both of them but actually since I’ve beaten all my PS 2 games I’ve kind of pawned them all and now I only play PC games. I like PC games better anyway because I can actually afford PC games more than I can afford PS 2 games. The graphics are the same and I like the controller better – I like the mouse and keyboard more than the joystick. Well actually there is a keyboard on the PS 2 controller but it’s not the same. On PC right now I’m playing Alice and Dungeon Keeper. I was playing Morrowind but I gave up because I can’t get through the door; they won’t let me, so I’m just done playing that game.

I don’t know why I like fire but I just do. Maybe it’s because it is capable of making such damage. I also like to look in the fire at night or on a camping trip. I like guns because I like the way they look the way they work, and capable of making such damage and the uses of them. Such as, if you were hungry and you had to go hunting and kill a deer so you could eat it for your survival.

I like playing outside with my friends. We usually play kickball and hide and go seek tag and dodgeball. Sometimes we have rock wars. Sometimes we go to the new park and play hide and go seek tag.

Fishing and camping are fun because there are lots of things to do in the woods. You get to make fires and go swimming and have splash wars with big rocks. You throw rocks right next to your friends until they splash you until eventually one falls on your toe and then you get mad. Then you have a rock war to settle the feud. You get to cook your own food over the fire on a stick. Fishing would be more fun if I ever caught anything but you never catch anything.

Favorites

My favorite movies are Gladiator, Gangs of New York, The Patriot, Robocops I, II, & III, Lord of the Rings, the Matrix I & II, Triple X, Harry Potter. They are all action movies where a lot happens and things explode. In every single one of those movies something explodes or gets set on fire.

My favorite books are the Moomin books by Tove Janssen. They don’t talk down to you and they all have fun all the time. I also like the books by Bruce Coville especially The Alien Stole My Gym Shoes.

My favorite food is sushi. I also like hamburgers. I like those cheese things at Asiana because they’re really good. I like mashed potatoes because they’re nice and creamy and fluffy and they’re good with gravy. I like chocolate and chocolate ice cream and chocolate cookies and chocolate oranges. I like fried dough at the fair with chocolate and powdered sugar and applesauce on it. I also really like Cornish game hens. I like food. I can remember everything I ate on any trip. On our last camping trip, on the first night we had steak. Mmmmm, steak. With A-1 sauce.

My favorite animal is a panda. My favorite fake animal is a dragon. I have dragon posters all over my walls. I like to wear dragon shirts and I have some dragon statues from Chinatown and two knives with dragon heads on them.

My favorite colors are red, black, gold and blue.

My favorite number is 89764467008765446534433211235688886654440.

My favorite video game is grand theft auto vice city but I’m not allowed to play it.

My favorite restaurant is Asiana Grand Buffet. The place is the bomb. I like it because there’s lots of food there and you have lots of choices of what to eat.

Goals

I want to graduate from 6th grade and pass high school and then go to college. I want to go to college because it’ll open a better career choice for me and because my mom and sister say it’s fun.

I used to want to live in the middle of nowhere in the middle of China and have lots of pandas and tigers in separate cages. I don’t want to do that anymore because I’ve thought of a better hobby. My better hobby is I want to invent a deep sea machine that will go so deep and suck up all the water and the fishes and everything big (it’s going to be a huge machine) and spits it back out and any remains, like say Atlantis, will be in the open. Then I want to be the one who discovers that dragons are real. We’ll know that they’re real because their bones will be on the bottom of the ocean. Then after I have proven that dragons are real and got the remains of Atlantis back up I’ll have tons and tons of money and then I’ll give some to my dear old mom who’s helping making this story. Then I’ll make my own theme park, my first underwater theme park with all water rides underwater and I’ll live underwater with all my sea creatures and dragons.

Then, when I’m old, I’ll move up to the mountains and let my kids work at the underwater park and I’ll train pandas and dragons to be my friends and train the dragons to be vegetarians so they’ll eat grass and bamboo like the pandas. I’ll have genetically altered bamboo so they’ll never run out of bamboo and grass.

When I’m really old I’ll develop an anti aging potion to make me young again. I’ll drill to the center of the earth and find papier maché parrots and hippies being trapped by pig monsters like the movie Journey to the Earth’s Core. No not really.

I have some other goals too. I would like not to get expelled. I want Uncle Bill to come home and bring me a present from Angola.

This is what I want my job to be when I am grown up. When I grow up I want to be a Navy Seal. I want to be a Navy Seal because I like to swim in the water and sneak around in the dark and I also like guns. When I become a Navy Seal I want to help out my country in difficult situations.

The End