Wow. What is the first thing I remember? I have no idea. I have to think about that. When I was like three we moved to a house up in the West Lake Hills on a road called Canyon View, and when I was six we moved to Boulder. I don't remember anything about our house in the city a couple blocks from Lake Travis on a road called Rockmore. I remember a lot about the West Lake Hills house and Lampenlighter school and the other huge school I went to after that.

The Canyon View house was in a beautiful setting on the side of a hill overlooking the city. We had land down the woods a little bit to a stream. About halfway to the stream we had a tent deck. We had a pool in the back and a green house behind glass windows in the basement. I rememeber seeing trails on the land around our tent deck where we went camping from time to time and my mother telling me they were dear trails.

My parents bought me an army jeep four wheel pedal sit down quadracycle and a batmobile one for my brother. Then they bought me a new BMX bike with training wheels. I really wanted to learn to ride the bike without training wheels but it was difficult because the road in front of our house was dirt and had pot holes all over. Every weekend my father would take the training wheels off and help me try to ride without them. Finally after a few months I could do it. I remember I was four when that happened. After that I would always ride my bike down to the end of the dead end road to a lookout to the city center. I went back there in 2000 and to my surprise that neighborhood was exactly the same as when we lived there. There were no new houses and the road was still dirt. The road leading up to canyon view was paved though and it was dirt before. We had a pool in the back and I could swim to the other side of it by myself since as far back as I remember. We always would be back there swimming. My mom didn't have a job when we lived in Texas so she had a lot of time to drive us around and be with us at home and stuff.

We had a cat named Louise and a Dog named Bisquit. Louise was older than me and was with my dad before he met my mother. The cat jumped into his back yard and he threw his over and he jumped back so he decided to keep him. He was just a kitten then. Then when we were in the Canyon View house Bisquit showed up as a stray and we kept him. He would always run after the car for the longest time every time we would drive away. One time he ran away and some Buddhist friends of my parents found him at the gas station in town and drove him back. One time some Buddhist friends of my parents took us to school and got pulled over by the cops on the way there. We had some neighbors to our South who had four kids and one of them was a girl who was like a year older than me. We visited with them sometimes but I don't remember ever seeing any of the kids. There was another kid on the other side of the road who had a three wheeler and would pull his break and slide it on the driveway. Once our parents were talking ans asked him is he liked being the oldest sibling and he said yes. I think I said yes too when they asked me. There was another kid who lived down the road a ways who I would hang out with quite a bit. Once he had a birthday and we played pin the tail on the donkey. I got him a present that was a rubber band powered helocopter. I was really impressed with how well it flew. There were some other people who we knew who lived further down the coldesack where they lived. It was a really cool neighborhood because there was no threw traffic any where near and was really peacefull with woods all around.

One time I had a big birthday party and a little shy kid who I barely knew gave me a maze bood because they heard I liked mazes. I was excited about it and tried to do a maze there when I got it but it was too difficult and I got frustrated and screamed and threw it accross the room and he started crying and his parents took him home. I wasn't punished for freaking out like that though. One time we had secret santa at school and one girl gave me a coloring book. I didn't say anything there at class but when I came home I complained to my mother that a coloring book wasn't a toy and I wanted a toy, so she bought me a plastic plane that was powered by a baloon. I would have complained about that also but I remembered that a girl in my class received the same thing and she didn't complain so I decided to forget about it. I realized I had a pretty priveleged life anyway. I had my own sand pit next to the pool that was loaded with toys, and my own half geodesic dome jungle gym in our backyard that was fun. My parents told me that I liked to climb a six foot ladder that they had and use it to get up on the roof a lot. They said one time they left me alone with the ladder and when they came back I was hanging from the gutter screaming. I was only like one year old then so I don't remember that. I am afraid of heights though and maybe that's the reason. I'm also afraid of deep water but I haven't heard of any near death experiences with the pool though. Mike got freaked out in the pool once. He was just a few months old and my mom let him go from her arms and I remember seeing him swimming upside down under water like a supmarine with a look of absolute terror on his face, and when she picked him out he was screaming. I thought it was kind of funny but I can't remember if she did that on purpose or if it was an accident.

We did a lot of Yoga at the pool also. My mom was a Yoga instructor and I remember her teaching me moves, specifically the tree where you hold your leg and touch your toes. My parents were kind of hippies in those days and dressed me for the part. I always had to wear dark blue overalls with peace signs sown into them and sandles and stuff. All my classmates wore tight light blue jeans with high cowboy boots and I was always trying to get my mom to buy me tight light colored blue jeans with high boots. One time she got me some boots but they weren't high so I made her get me the high ones so I could look like a cowboy. She was also the only mother who would back lunches with rice cakes and chunky peanut butter and carrots and celery when all the other kids would have peanut butter and jelley sandwiches with white wonder bread and candy bars. I thought it was really cool that I was the only kid who ate healthy. It made me feel like it was why I was faster than the other kids. When we would run from our classroom accross the road and down the long driveway to the main building to where we would have recess and lunch we would always run and I was always the fastest kid in the class. I remember one time a kid from another class beat me who was running bowleggedly, so I tried to run bow leggedly but it didn't work so I stopped that. I only saw that kid once though.

The first school I remember was called lampenlighter and was a one room school way out in the woods. It was divided into two sections, the little kids and the big kids. My brother was on the little kids side and I was on the big kids side. I always wanted to play in the little kids section for break because their toys were better but I was never allowed to, so I would spend the time outside with my friends. One of my friends had a star wars RTD2 doll that I thought was cool. We had a pretty big area to run around and play in. There were no other buildings anywhere in sight. The place had a big round about driveway that my mother would always drive us around to turn the car around to go home. One time

My dad told me the night before I got scared and cried and didn't want to do it, but I have no recolection of that. All I remember was being excited about it. Because I was only ten and it was my first time I had to go to an orientation out on 55th and Valmont where they made sure we knew how to ride bikes. There were about a dozen other kids there. I saw one skinny blond kid there with long blonde hair and thought it was a girl until I saw him racing against me in the race. That was Luke Miller. He ended up beating me. I got sixteenth overall in that race, just ahead of my teamate Dax Richardson who was one year older than me and a lot bigger. The winner, who won every stage in a solo breakaway was Andy Hooker, followed by Peter Lynch and Travis Rosen. My teamate named Kevin was sixth and was really cool. There was another teamate of mine, a little kid with long hair who's father took it really seriously who got like ninth. He wasn't very outgoing though and I never talked to him.

I had a total blast in that race. I was never in a pack of more than two or three kids in any stage, and most of the time I was by myself inbetween kids. After that race I decided I wanted to win it next year. The next year I went to Waldorf for my fifth grade and rode my bike to school everyday, and every day after school I would do two laps of the Morgul Bismark which made my daily riding 32 miles a day. I went on one training ride with Kevin, my teamate from the year before and told him I was going to win and he told me I wasn't. I asked him who was going to beat me and he said he didn't know but he knew there were kids who were stronger than me.

We had a practice race at NBS, National Bureau of Standars, before the start of the Zinger to make fair teams. I had done a bike race camp with Doug Shapiro who was the third American to race the Tour de France and had won Americas biggest bike race the year before, the Coors classic. He told me it was very important to always attack to ensure that you are in the front group, and so on a downhill I attacked and this blond kid who wasn't at the earlier two races that year responded immediately, that was Chris Wherry. I got like 5th in that race in a sprint with Eric Owen that was too close to call.

I knew from the first two races before the Red Zinger that I wasn't among the strongest kids in the pack, but I knew because I was a little guy I was among the strongest climbers, and the first stage of the Zinger that year was a time trail from 13th and College up to Chataqua park, straight up. It was also just a few blocks from my house so I rode that time trail in a furious rage like my life depended on it and I got third just six seconds after Chris Wherry and three seconds after Mike Constantino I think it was. The second stage was a criterium around where Waldorf was near baseline and foothills parkway. I got dropped by the pack but somehow was still third overall at the end of the day. The third stage was the Boulder Mall Criterium. I lead the pack around the start finish area once but pulled the pack for too long until some kid attacked and I got dropped. It didn't change anything though, I still would have gotten the same place if I had of stayed with the pack because I was the weakest sprinter in the top nine kids who usually made up the lead pack. Then we had a team time trail. We had a rest day and Chris Wherry's parents organized a team practice where they set a strategy for us. Kevin was to hammer at the beginning until the first corner and then Brett and Chis and I were to take turns pulling, as they took the time of the third place finisher. I thought they took the time of the third place finisher in the time trail but they took the time of the third place teamate overall. On a hill just before the end they dropped me and I yelled out for them to wait up but they didn't listen. I guess they knew they were going to take Bretts time. It was good they didn't wait either because we only one by one second. We were in first place overall as a team before the team time trail and we won the team time trial, but after they tallied up the points they put us in second overall. Chris' parents got pissed and fixed the screw up.

Then we had a criterium in Longmont that was around a block a few times. That was a cool race because for the first half of the race all the kids stayed in the pack and I was chatting with my teamate Kevin Corzine for a little who was excited to be up in the front group. Then it got broken up into the usual front pack of nine riders and I finished last in that pack like I usually did. The fifth race I think was the Morgul Bismark which ended at the top of the Hump which then was just pasture but now is part of the town of Superior. After that race some guy with a video camera filming something interviewed me and asked me what place I got which was like 8th or something. Then we had a stage in Denver where I got dropped by the lead pack with Eric Owen and he nudged by me in the end. Then we had the NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) race. I was excited about this race because I got third in the time trail on a course very similar to this and wanted to get on the podium again. I attacked right off the bat and dropped everyone except Chris Wherry, Ray Brown, and Mike Hegarty immediately. Chris congradulated me on the steep part. When the flat section started Chis attacked and Ray and Mike barely got on his wheel but I got dropped. I ended up in fourth though which made me happy. Then we had the final race at NBS where the practice race was. Our top nine rider pack stayed together untill the end because it was straight up and straight down so there were no rolling hills for anyone like me to get dropped on. I can't remember what place it got. Probably ninth like always.

After the 85 Zinger I realized I was too small to win it so I didn't train as hard for the next year. Brett Zimmerman called me a few times to train with him, but he was training hard and I coudn't keep up with him. I did the Fort Collins and Denver races in 86 but I don't remember anything about them. In 86 there were like twice as many kids in the pack as in 85 when there were only like 16 kids. I ended up in 18th that year right behind Chis Mishky and right in front of my teamate from the 84 Zinger Dax Richardson. Interestingly enough Dax was right behind me in 84 also. For some reason they changed the rules for the ages and so Dax was racing with me again when he raced with the older kids the year before. One of my teamates that year was Mike Hegarty who was second that year and second the year before. He wasn't outgoing though and our team didn't have any spirit. On the team time trail he was telling us how to ride it like none of us knew what we were doing and apparently didn't remember me from the year before.

I was curious how I fared against the girls that year, and compared my time in the Denver time trail with Casey Clifford who was three months older me. I knew her from the Nordic Ski team and she always got a lot better times than me in the little 3k ski races, but I figured that was because she had been skiing longer and had better technique. I thought I would be a better biker though, but she was exactly one minute faster than me, which would have put her in 8th in my age group compared to my 18th. That made her about halfway between me and Chis Wherry in strength. She was neck and neck with Jessica Whitehall, so the top two or three girls were stronger than me. That was a time trail over rolling hills though, which was an advantage to the heavier kids because the momentum carried by their weight can help get them over the hills, and Casey was a lot bigger than me. With that kind of a time diffence I don't think I would have kept up with her on the climbs either though. That was during the period when girls were bigger than boys. On their 12th birthday the agerage girl is about 4'11" and weighs 84 pounds, and the average boy is 4'7" and weights 72 pounds. She was about average for a girl but I was short and skinny for a boy so I was about 4'4" and 65 pounds. So I was about seven inches shorter than her and about 20 pounds lighter, so it makes sense to me now how she could be stronger than me. I minute was a pretty big difference though on a race that was only a couple miles long, I don't know if I would have even been a good training partner for her. I had a teamate in the 86 Zinger named Mark Farewell who was right behind me in the overall standings and most of the races. He had kind of a bad reputation for being a wheel sucker, and he always sucked my wheel, but it didn't bother me because he could never get around me in the end. Sadly, he was killed the next year while on a training ride on the Morgul Bismark the next year. I always hung out with him after the races. He was really friendly and loved to talk and talk about himself and his family. His dad was a computer assembler or something.

I don't really remember that much about the 86 Zinger. That was the first year Wyndham rode in it. I think he got like 13th or something, better than I got my first year. He was the only kid in the pack who didn't race with bike shorts. He wore long Hawaian shorts which were popular at the time.

This was the last year I raced the Zinger. I could have raced it two more years but I developed a knee disease called Asgud Schlaughter because I had a growth spurt at the same time I was riding and running a lot. I was running because I did track in seventh grade. My knee on the lump below the cap was constantly inflamed and hurt like hell every time I bumped into something which seemed like it happened a lot. I had to go to physical therapy every day after school for ultrasound and was told to stop road racing and not train with sprints so much which I never did anyway. That was when I took up mountain biking I also quit the LERT ski team that year for the same reason. In retrospect cross country skiing was fine for my knees, but my parents probably only wanted to pay for one kid to do the expensive races and training and I didn't get along that great with the kids on the team anyway and I didn't care. I was getting kind of depressed as it was and only had the energy to go home and watch Duck Tales and Quantum Leap when I came home after school before getting to bed at like 8:30. I also remember going on big rides and having sore legs for like five days after that, so I could only ride a couple days a week.

I remember more about the 87 Zinger than the 86 Zinger, but less than the 85 Zinger. I eventually got 25th that year, but was 23rd until I got two flats on the Morgul Bismark and finished last. I was in the middle of the main pack not much before the Hump and our from nowhere came a rock which punctured my front wheel. I said "shit" really loudly and it took forever for someone to bring me another wheel. After I got my wheel and was hammering to catch some stragglers I got another flat on the rear wheel and it took forever to get a replacement. I hammered after that but ended up in last for the day and lost two places. The next day was a hill climb time trail in east Vail. I though that would be a good race to get a place back but I had an aweful day and the kid after me, Andy I can't remember his last name, caught me, which enfuriated me. He tried to talk to me on the way down but I refused to pay attention to him. Then we had a criterium in Vail and I did OK but was dropped pretty much a couple corners into the race. The last race was a criterium in downtown Vail and I was lapped. It was the the second time I was lapped in the Zinger. The first time was in 86 when my mom got confused about time and we showed up seconds before the start of the race. That really upset me. I was happy about that last race though because I beat Andy and thusly beat him overall, he was only one point behind me at the start of the race so I needed to beat him if I was going to beat him overall. I think he was my teamate too. My classmate Stuart Robertson raced the Zinger for the first time that year and I remember seeing him before and after the races, but no matter how much I looked for him, I never once saw him in the pack during the races which I thought was really weird. He must have been in the group just behind me all the time.

I started mountain biking and racing in 87 after the Red Zinger. My first race was the Frisco Challenge. A race which only lasted a few years because the organizers were a bunch of doofuses. It consisted of a BMX style race and then a real mountain bike race. I was a better mountain bike racer because I had good bike handling and it was steady riding instead of sprinting which I sucked at. I won the Junior category but I crossed the finish line from the wrong side so I was disqualified. They gave me a hard luck award. The kid who won it was some sissy from Frisco who was the son of the organizer. He only beat my brother because he had a mechanical. The next year that kid had the nerve to tell my brother that he beat him the year before. I won it the next year too but I went to the start finish area because I could have sworn they said that was where the finish was. By the time I found the real finish the other kids had come in. I yelled at one of the organizers for being so vague and he got pissed. My brother was second but had to wait at a red light because the cops hadn't showed up yet to stop the traffic, and when it turned green this kid from Fort Collins who we drove there sprinted past him and won and won the overall. On the drive home we was flaunting his jacket he won from it like he honestly won the race. I didn't say anything though. I made it a point to never do that race again and heard that nobody like it.

That year we also did the Fall Classic which consisted of a time trail up a steep trail where you have to push the bike a lot. Wyndham won the beginner category and blew my time away. I think pretty much after that he was a stronger rider than me for the rest of the time we raced. I think he was stronger because he was starting to take it seriously after getting his asse kicked in the 86 and 87 Zinger and he was kicking ass at the Nordic skiing and I wasn't doing that anymore. He also had a stocky build which was a good build to have for a kid. It was kind of like having a head start on muscular development. Although there were some skinny kids like Heath Sandal and JP Deaboim who kicked ass in the Zinger.

I raced in Experts that year but wasn't doing very well. I don't know if I did poorly because they were too fast for me or because I just did't race well. I was usually like halfway back in the pack I think. It felt like that anyway. It was fun to be in the thick of a big pack of mountain bikers on single track. One race that had a big pack was the Rage in the Sage in Gunnison. I crashed in the Rage in the Sage on a downhill single track section and took out a Diamond back rider who got hurt really bad. Then I bonked. I got lost at one point and luckily some guy yelled to me and told me I was going in the wrong direction. I took the wrong direction a lot in races and training rides for some reason. On the back side I was only going 13 miles an hour on a slight incline and feeling like shit and Sara Ballantine who won the pro women blazed by me like I was standing still. I got dropped my the junior field in the Iron Horse mountain bike race that year also and crashed and had to drop out because of it.

I did manage to win a race that year though. I think it may have been the last race I ever did. I decided to race juniors in the Steamboat Springs race because Ben Marshall was racing juniors in that race and had been winning every Intermediate race that year. He even beat Ben Allen in a race that I wasn't at. The first race was from the bottom of a ski run to the Rainbow Hot springs owned by a guy named Don Johnson. The juniors were staged with the beginners and Ben and I started on the front line, so we were all alone just the two of us from the beginning. He was riding super fast and just rode away from me. Right after that I took a wrong turn up a dirt road and found myself going straight up a single track trail at the back end of the Expert pack which had started in the heat just before us. It was so steep that everybody was pushing their bikes up the trial, which was something that I was good at because of the kind of rides I did and the fact that my calves were big and strong. I was passing guys one after another like Herbie in the Love Bug. I even passed a pro teamate of mine, a little guy with a mohak called Chris who encouraged me. Then I passed Jimi Killin, but I don't think he was at the front of the group because he didn't appear to be pushing himself very hard. Not long after that I got to a flat section and my right cleat fell out and Jimi passed me again and I gave up on hammering. I also had mechanicals in races all the time. I rode like every day after school and definitely had a lot of mechanicals riding, but it seemed like no matter how much I tried to make sure my gear was ready I would always have mechanicals. Pretty much every thing that could happen did in races, and if it didn't happen in races it happened in training rides. I remember crank arms falling off, pulley's falling off, frames breaking in half twice, wheels breaking, tires exploding, seats falling off. That was in the days before burley strong mountain bikes and shocks.

The next day was a shorter race up and down the ski hill twice, which was short and not my type of race but I was excited to have another chance to beat Ben. I went to the bathroom and when I came back the race had already staged and so I had to go to the back of the pack. I remember Ben looking around in the pack for me and then seeing me in the back looking at him. When the race started I rode as hard as I could to get all the other riders out of my way but Ben was long gone. I rode down the switch backs the people made on the ski slope and caught up to Ben about halfway up the dirt road before it cut onto a single track that took us up to the top of the ski hill. I blew myself out catching him so I just hung on his wheel and let him get to the single track before me, and then he just rode away from me and got way ahead of me before it went down again. After I got to the top of the hill I raced down and cut a switchback making the race official who was supposed to guard the short cut have to jump out of my way which allowed me to catch up to Ben enough to be able to pass him like he was moving in slow motion on the last switchback before the home stretch and so I got to raise my arms in victory. The race official must have been too lazy to bust me for cheating because nobody every said anything. Then next year I told Ben about that and he thought it was funny. It didn't change the fact that he won the overall because he beat me by over an hour in the race the day before because I took a wrong turn and my cleat fell off.

I remember watching the experts race after us, or before us I can't remember. I counted Ben Allen in 8th in the pack which was pretty good. Jimi Killin won the race way ahead of Travis Brown and Lee Hall. I wished I raced with the experts that weekend because maybe I could have won the race on Saturday seeing how I passed everybody, but my cleat would have fallen off just the same. That's the last race I remember doing.

I did the Casper mountain bike race that year also. My teamate Mark Howe drove me up with his buddy and I got last place in the expert hill climb. My teamate from Telluride even beat me after he crashed while riding up hill. It was one of those situations where I couldn't feel my legs and just couldn't go. The next day I crashed at the beginning and broke my look pedal and couldn't clip in anymore, but for some stupid reason I decided to try to finish the race anyway and got lapped by everybody.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 thing 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.

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 joey 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 joey got tackled and a bunch of kids started freaking out saying they got joey slime all over them, which upset joey 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 6'3.5" 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.

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.

Our school was super athletic the whole time I was there. We had Melody Fairchild who was the first high school girl to run two miles in under ten minutes and won the national 5K championship like three years in a row. Saw in the youtube video from before that she only got second once in her high school carreer. Our boys football team were state champions the year after I gratuated and I think our football team in my grade did well. Our girls Softball team were State Champions the year I was a senior. Our cross country team were second at states for the boys and girls the year I raced. Our girls basketball team were State Champions I think three years in a row, I know at least two. They were at the finals my senior year but lost. I saw the game and they were playing better and should have won but were unfairly fowled a ridiculous number of times. After I came home from Chile I briefly had a membership at the YMCA and recognized one of the big Sophmores on that team, Shelly, working there as a trainer. I told her about that game and she remembered how they were fowled. She said it was because they were so big and had a reputation for being agressive the refs over compensated. I remember the newspaper saying something like how the Boulder High Girls were cut out of six foot cookie cutters. I told her I remembered the girls in her grade were really big and she figured around 6'2" but I think they were bigger that that. I saw one of them, a blond named Kate Riddle walking behind Jen Griggs in front of my locker and she was like a giant compared to Jen Griggs who was eye level with her chin and I always considered her to be one of the tallest girls in my grade. I know at least six feet because I saw her standing in line waiting to leave history class in front of Paul Davis who wasn't any taller than her who I knew was at least six feet and behind Ben Marshall who said he was 6'3" and didn't look any taller than her than Kate Riddle, so I think those half dozen or so Sophmore Basketball girls were at least 6'3". Up there with Maria Sharapova.

We also had good cyclists and cross country skiiers there.

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.

Basically my spiritual growth was limited as long as I lived with my parents. Some of the reasons I can think of: Whenever I came up with any kind of outrageous idea, my parents shot them down with their conservative logic. I learned many wonderful facts from them, but learned all I could from them, it was time for me to move on.

When I graduated from High School I worked for a month in the Bridger National Forest outside of Pinedale Wyoming as a campground host; which was a good time for reflection. Then I guided two 16 day backpacking trips in the San Juan mountains in southwestern Colorado.

This was the major breakthrough in showing me what I am meant for. I never really had a chance to lead, and here I discovered that what it took to be a great leader was to respect every member of the group for who they were, and to speak with them on their level of consciousness. Out in nature, you have so many opportunities to show what you believe in without even having to verbally say it. For example, if I go out on a hike with somebody from the city, and when we reach the top of the hill I say to him/her, sort of to myself; "it is beautiful from here, I want to go there and see what it looks like"; he/she would get a gist of what it means to be in nature. And why people go on expeditions to distant and hard to reach places when they never would have know why. Then, maybe they would become inspired to go out and see what living in nature is all about.

When I discovered I was good at this, especially with young people, I knew I was a born leader. So from then on I wanted to be a guide into nature for many reasons: I want to spend time in nature to learn about myself, and the way things work in the natural world. To contemplate how the universe first formed for example, how masses of dirt formed and began to revolve around huge balls of sheer energy. How these planets sprouted simple life, which slowly evolved into a beautiful and complex system of balance in life forms. Then I would like to do my part in making the improvement in consciousness by spreading my honest opinions to others in a respectful and true manner. Being in nature also aligns my bodily energies with those of the earth, which is a very powerful, beautiful, and peaceful feeling. The energy of evolution.

Today was my first day here in the campground. My goals for the three weeks I have here are basically to get back into shape by: Hiking, riding my bike, swimming, working, climbing, stretching, and eating good food. This is very lonely for me, even though there are many campers nearby. I am planning on this to be a growth experience for me, to start me on the path to the bold man I envision myself becoming. A man who is at peace with himself and nature. There is nothing more important than being confident in yourself. Knowing the right thing to do comes from a confidence and awareness within.

James picked me up at 7:30 this morning and gave me a ride up to Elk Heart Park with my bike. From there I rode my bike two miles to the forest boundary. I left the trailhead at 8:00 and got to Seneca lake at noon, and had lunch there for about an hour. Then I spotted my campsite, A NICE PATCH OF DIRT UNDER A BUNCH OF PINES, ALMOST LIKE IT WAS MADE TO BE A PLACE TO HANG OUT AT FOR A DAY. I AM ABOUT 50 FEET FROM THE LAKE, A GOOD DISTANCE TO Get WATER WITHOUT TOO MUCH Trouble.

WAVES OF LONELINESS HIT ME EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE. MY Dad WILL PROBABLY COME BY TO PICK ME Up ON THE 30TH, MY LAST DAY. HOPEFULLY HE WILL BE WILLING TO GO UP TO YELLOWSTONE. I HAVE FOUND QUITE A NICE PLACE TO SIT DOWN AND WRITE IN THIS LITTLE FORT. I HOPE I SEE A BEAR BUT NOT IN MY FOOD. I STASHED THE FOOD IN A PLASTIC BAG ABOUT 30 FEET AWAY, THAT WAY IF I Hear ONE EATING MY FOOD I CAN SCARE IT AWAY WITHOUT GETTING GORED. BY LOOKING AT THE ONLY TRAILHEAD TO THIS NATIONAL FOREST, JAMES AND I HAVE Come to THE CONCLUSION THAT I AM THE ONLY PERSON IN THIS VAST LANDSCAPE. I WAS THINKING OF CLIMBING A MouNTAIN ACROSS THIS LAKE, BUT I HIKED DOWN ONLY TO FIND OUT THAT THE LAKE IS ABOUT TWO MILES LONG. I AM AT THE DEAD CENTER OF IT, AND THE mountain IS DIRECTLY Across FORM ME, MEANING IT WOULD PROBABLY TAKE AT LEAST AN HOUR AND A HALF TO MAKE THE TRIP, IF I TROT. THAT Wouldn't BE A GOOD IDEA SINCE I AM NOW PROBABLY IN THE WORST SHAPE OF MY LIFE. I DON'T WANT TO bE SICK. I will get myself back into shape slowly, no problem taking my time. I have plenty of other chances to hike farther back.

6-25-92

I did the total death march yesterday. 40 miles in two days. 15 miles through rugged terrain down in a valley and back up again through countless switch backs to Summit lake where I camped, then I guess five more miles to the top of Glover peak. 12,068 feet, not too high, but a long way off. Then rode my bike down (eight or so miles) the road to camp. My feet hurt so much toward the end of that nine hour hike, that I was constantly limping.

The bones in my feet felt completely crushed, not to mention the red bloody blisters on my heals. If I ever get blisters with these boots again I will be pissed; they should be broken in by now. Since the heart of that hike I have felt very alone, possibly more alone than I have ever felt in my life. Like what's the meaning of life? I don't want such a dreary existence. I hear all this stuff about hate and pessimism. People like this critic Kurt and this guy Steve (the guys I talked to at Dutch Joe) seem to think that the human race is going to destroy itself, and there is nothing that can be done. This is the worst view anybody could have, even worse than not caring or not knowing. You must be optimistic. Then I hear about Indians hating white people and it makes me sad. We must unite. They have to be optimistic.

I will take it easy the rest of the time I am here and not worry about time. If I want to remain in my tent all day that's fine. Tomorrow (if it doesn't rain) I will go into town to do my laundry and call home. That will be 16 miles of tough exercise, with all my clothes in my backpack.

On Tuesday, my last day, I will do a thorough fire pit cleanup, trash pickup, latrine cleanup, and morning payroll to make the place look good when I leave it. I didn't have to ride all the way back the road to the camp today because James gave me a ride. I called home today and talked to wyndham. He enjoyed the concert and smoked a lot of dubie as always.

I want to be a warrior, not afraid of dorkosity, humiliation, rottenness, embarrassment, what other people think of me, and especially of my own inner feelings. This is a good chance to do that, and I intend to.

We finished the third day hike and are getting to timberline. This is the first half hour solo that we have had so far this trip. George and Colleen put me in charge of teaching the E.K. (Educational kinesthiology, physical exercises that we did to help integrate the left and right sides of the brain and body). After this solo we will do a group balance. The side of this hill is very steep and there are a lot of trees and grass. I had a great time in Boulder.

On the forth of July Mike, Andy, and I hiked up Flagstaff and watched the fireworks, and Andy and I ate mushrooms. It was cool, probably the last time the three of us will hang out.

Friday. We are camped up above timberline, I just took a nap but stopped because the clouds covered up the sun. This is a reiteration of the vision that I had when Andy and I ate mushrooms in Boulder:

There is mother Earth and father sky (space). They are both our parents and they both love us. All living things are brothers and sisters. Even our own parents are siblings to us. When we are little children they take the place of "mama" and "papa" (mother earth and father sky). But when we mature we take in earth and space as mamma and papa because they are our true parents. For males, mama the earth is closer to us in spirit, but when a man becomes one with mama earth (after living with her and studying her, he also has to be at peace with himself). He has cracks at father space (universe), which is the most powerful experience ever for a man.

After more progress he can become one with father space which is a form of enlightenment. Then father universe and mother earth become one and he can relate to all living brothers and sisters. For the female it is the opposite. When she gets in touch with her spirit she is more in touch with papa. Papa displays his being in the: Stars, cosmos, order, massiveness, math, etc., which what intrigues women and brings their spirit initially forth. When women have studied papa enough and have become developed enough spiritually then they have peeks at their true spirit mama, which is what women are more spiritually close to. Mama are the energies of: The earth, ground, infinite support for siblings, the ecology, trees, plants, animals, little things, shelter, and comfort, etc... Then after living with both mama and papa, a fusion of spirit happens, and they are one with all the brothers and sisters. This is when there is no longer much of a difference between males and females, which is enlightenment.

All brothers and sisters are at different stages along this path to connection with mamma and papa. All brothers and sisters put together is mama and papa, all mama and papa is are the conglomeration of the life force of all the brothers and sisters. With mama and papa emerging as powerful globs of brothers and sisters. Mamma is a group of siblings, the planet or world to just them, papa is everything outside. Algae is an example of a primitive sibling. And after a while they grow to plants, then animals. And to what is the most sophisticated being our mother has shown us, the human.

Now I fee like I am just another face in the crowd, which means that everything everybody does is just a variation of "siblings", meaning nobody is special. We're all just a bunch of "marks" and "chumps", and treat all equally because we're all chumps. We're all different but no chump is better than the other. Some siblings are farther along the line to realization, and as far as relationships go that only means that the more "advanced" siblings have a responsibility to take care of the "primitive" siblings, but in a different way than the more "primitive" siblings take care of the more advanced siblings. We all support each other. We all love each other.

So much time has gone by, and so much has happened, time flies. I have learned a lot since the last time I wrote in here. I am becoming very aware of what is going on with my emotions. I feel homesick now. Yesterday I drove back from Boulder, where I have been for a couple of days.

I have decided my major challenges are: Not consuming any sugar, not smoking any dope, not drinking any alcohol, and not drinking any caffeine. The reason I am so homesick, maybe, is because Wyndham is graduating in a couple of days, and the house I grew up in will be sold. All my memories of childhood are evaporating.

Yesterday I jumped Gross reservoir with Mike and Andy, we camped out there. I had an interesting year at the fort, it unraveled a lot of mysteries about people. I was strong for the first part of the first semester, but became very discombobulated because of living amongst college freshman and having angry roommates that I was around with too much. I don't know what I am going to do about housing next year, but I hope to get cool roommates.

I really want to get up at five every morning and be able to survive six hours of sleep a night, or at least know once and for all exactly how many hours of sleep I need.

I have been sleeping a lot lately, it's what my body wants to do. For the first time I am letting my body do what it wants. No forced workouts or tasks, I just do what I feel like, which right now is sleeping. I have achieved great patience this summer, I love being patient like this. I have no motivation to do anything and I don't care. I just sit here in my car all day long and listen to music. I don't even read that much. My major hurdle now is figuring out how to do work on my car.

I'm doing a Green river trip on the 20th with Bruce who has a bus of 14 years which has almost 200,000 miles on it. I will bring along my "Idiots guide to Volkswagen Maintenance" book and pick his brain. When we get back I will offer to do the entire de-rig if he shows me how to do the 3,000 mile tune up.

Here's a letter I found that I was wrote in school and was going to send to my family but never got around to it:

Dear family, being in college I have learned a lot, not only academically but socially and about myself. The main thing I have learned about myself is that I don't really know who I am. There are so many different kinds of people in the world and they all have certain good and bad qualities. I have recently been feeling depressed because people don't understand each other. I think I am discovering that I am different from everybody else. Everybody seems to belong to a certain group of friends that always hang out with each other. I don't hang out with the same people all the time, maybe that's my problem. People seem like they are actors in a movie, like they are always reciting rehearsed lines. People always seem like they are always trying to impress others or make it seem like they are being themselves by being annoying. People will always tell me about things they have done and things they want to do, and I am interested to. But nobody is interested in me, or in anybody else for that matter.

I was interrupted there by Chaz reminding me about the rig for their trip. I didn't know about it because I didn't check the schedule yesterday. Lesson: check the schedule every day because it is very tentative.

This job is good in so many ways: I get good exercise. I meat people from all around the world, study the geology, history, and biology of this area and teach it to people. I learn how to cook, I am in the outdoors, which reminds me I should get a star book and learn the constellations. I love showing people things and taking them places, and showing them a good time. I love exploring all the canyons, and studying petroglyphs, which reminds me I should get a petroglyph book. I also love rowing through rapids and getting the adrenaline rush of not flipping and running skull rapid. Tomorrow at five I will take a plane flight to the put in of our trip, I am very excited.

I am just evolving my task as laying aside fears of letting down my shield of character. Now I don't stress over being too nice, that is selfish and takes too much energy as I have experienced. Now I am grounded and don't smile and say "hi" when I don't want to, that way I don't run out of energy and I can go on forever this way giving pure vibes out, and people respect me even better this way. I don't force myself to
do any tasks like tuning my car. I just sleep most of the day when I get drowsy, and I don't care. I still get negative feelings of nasty people in my past being rudely contrary to me, but now I can see how it is in fact their problem and not mine. It doesn't bother me as much now. I like living in my car, which is a good thing for me spiritually.

I am deciding that this world is in fact the "Near wild heaven" that everybody dreams about thinking it is a past life, it is also the outer hell of destruction. This world provides the ultimate challenge for human kind. To have true equality and respect among all the races and creeds of the world, and in turn we can listen to the wise indigenous and respect and love and understand all the creatures of the world.

I feel such disgust at the killing of minorities and destroying of our world like uranium mining, nuclear weapons, and ancient forest cutting. So much disgust that I would feel justified in actually killing people who are feeding this corruption, and exploding their factories. My outrage grows with my conscience, I hope one day I do something good that helps a lot. We as a species are just starting out in our wisdom. The Native Americans were well on their way, but then we came, for some reason or another, and reared our ugly head bringing with us our technology, which brings only one thing that is good: Science, or a catalyst of some sort to the growth of us.

I sometimes have dreams of space travel, being in true unity with the cosmos and our neighbors could be a good thing in the future. But we need to get our priorities straight, reevaluate our conscience as a whole, because our society as a whole is still in the dark ages and has no wisdom. It is like we are so close to death, but saying that and burying extra food in the basement does no good. It's like free climbing a 500 foot sheer rock wall, don't freak out and give up or fall. Work you brains out in this most crucial time, to reach the top and be on a higher plain. I feel so grateful that I feel like I am on my way to peace with myself. I love this world.

I'm stoned and listening to LIVE. Whenever I get stoned now I really tense up, It's weird.

I just got off a three day Westwater with Grant, he's a cool guy, gets kind of up tight with the kids (we just got off an AA American adventures course). He is eccentric, a real character. I paddle boated through Westwater.

I plan to get up early tomorrow and getting stoned and go on a real big ride up that trail right out back here. I want to work real hard again, and jump start my brain, it has been kind of dead lately. I am starting to read black Elk speaks, hoping it will inspire me. If I am writing kind of strangely, it is because I am picking up on a conversation, just talking, so that is why I am writing like this. I want to go back to college. I have been really looking forward to it, even more than to my mom and my brother coming on a five day trip.

Here are some thoughts that come up when I am stoned: I have to be more clear, more spontaneous, and choosing the right thing to do, for example: I am using up so much energy debating if I should get more stoned or not, well do it. But not now so you don't lose your train of thought, fuck! I wish I had my fuckin goddamn ghetto blaster, that way I could have recorded this shit! Fuck! oh well, I am too tense, don't worry about it. I already lost my train of thought. I will go ahead and smoke! What I have to do is learn to enjoy everything I am doing. I'm freaking out man, I want to get back to my primitive self! Life is such a trip, what the fuck! I am always stressed and fighting, and wanting for some ancient and beautiful peace and love! I love my family and my friends. I want to love people and be myself. I want, just want to grow, I want to trip like this all the time and feel all the beauty and love. I want to ride hard tomorrow, I want to tune my car, I want to stretch, I am stretching, I want to really enjoy doing this this year. I'm all over the place! I'm sent quit voluntarily.

Well I called up Bruce and he told me about were the adjuster screw is and low and behold I fixed it myself. I will save the 3,000 mile tune up for Durango. Today I also tried to change the oil in my Rock Shox, but couldn't even when I called up the bike shop. Tomorrow I will stop by Kaibab and do it before the ride at slick rock with Paul. Tomorrow I will also buy a roof rack for my car, and car seat covers. There are many flies buzzing around me right now, but they aren't bugging me that much right now. I think I will ask Paul to take this upcoming Westwater trip for me so I can go down Cataract canyon with Zane and Alvin and then do a two day Westwater, and then off to college. I did medicine cards today, I feel very energized listening to Calleto's led Zeppelin, but the medicine wheel layout said something like a new path for my sophomore year has something to do with observing the big picture, and just kicking back and watching things happen:

Medicine cards for summer
moon lodge
crow
snow butterfly spider (up)
coyote
pathway
badger weasel
bat bear butterfly
buffalo lynx (Upside down)
sun lodge spread
swan
elk lizard lynx
owl
Medicine wheel spread
snake
bat wolf dragonfly
turkey
school (1st semester)
horse
hawk spider grouse
weasel

I cannot remember what I was going to write. I wanted to write something about why I like rafting. I am psyched about going to school, I think I have a good start on having a calm enough mind to enjoy doing my school work. I think the reason that I don't have many thoughts right now is because I don't need them. I'm just here, that's fine with me on the mental level, but I'm not sure I can take it so easily deeper down, when you have no thoughts; but want them, don't force them.

Later that night: I got stoned and am ready to write now, this journal is perfect to have when I don't go to sleep. So this is what I plan to do when I get to Durango. I want to get that Urt from Smitty, and when I get to school, I will look for land somewhere to put it on. I want to ask the BLM if there are any places, maybe buy land, or see if somebody would let me live there. I want to learn how to do the 3,000 mile tune up, either take it to a shop to do it and watch them, or figure out how to do it from the book, or have someone who knows about them to show me. I want to buy a roof rack so I can strap things up there, so until I get a permanent pad I will live in my van.

I am starting to feel a little about having a change and going back to Durango for a new start studying and staying busy with friends. I think I can live out of a urt comfortably enough, and that would be supreme if I have some land of my own! I actually kind of dig living here in my car, I have everything I need to be happy right here, meaning I could travel anywhere in the country and explore with gas money, maintenance, and food, as my room and board, live off my savings. I dream of going to California next Thanksgiving break, and hanging out with my brother and dad, and check out Eselen. Maybe even bring mike, and maybe mom would come also. I want to drive around and explore the southwest like every weekend. I want to try out kayaking and mountain bike, I want to climb peaks, I want to hang out, I want to learn and observe life.

I feel in a really good place, I feel like I am really living in the moment well. I am looking forward to reflecting on this summer, and looking forward to next summer with new ambitions. I am sure there will be many. I don't want to get depressed of the monotony because I don't want there to be any monotony. I want to always be energized. I want to greet each day with a welcoming smile. I do live like that now, I think I have learned a lot this summer. About people, dealing with them with love and understanding and communication, and being strong at being objective, understanding and acting sincere to everyone. I have lived outside all summer long, so I have had a lot of time figuring things out, watching the sky. I love to stay busy. I love having all these positive vibrations all around me.

I love playing with the current and rowing. I cannot wait to do the trip day after tomorrow with my glasses, and running westwater, I want to coach Ruby down it, that would be a blast! I hope Ann lets me.

I am really looking forward to seeing my friends at school and hanging out with them: Bernie and Judah will be there, Jared and Eric. Andy Paton I will contact. Eric Nevin is going to C.U. next year, that is a bummer. I feel really grounded and whole and humble, willing to keep a positive attitude in the face of anything. I was kind of a freak last year, I don't know why, but I will not be living on campus this year, and living with such craziness.

Last year was hell for me in terms of dorm life. My first roommate, Brian O'Connor just makes me cringe when I think of him. He ripped me out of bed one morning because he said I moved a picture of his; just suddenly flipped out on me, and he was even acting like Mr. bad ass until he wasn't my roommate anymore. He took it all so seriously, he was from L.A., he makes me never want to go to L.A.. my next roommate was Chad Scott. He provoked Brian to spaz, and his roommate, that fat kid Derin. Chad was also crazy, but we liked each other. When second semester came around I just laid really low and studied all the time. I was seriously antisocial. The first semester I was crazy, shaved my head 3 times and grew a huge go-T, and basically was completely open, with all my energy, but it backfired. I didn't stay grounded and opened myself up too much. Last year toward the beginning at the same time I got into the scrabble with Brian, I made friends with Eric Nevin, he was my best friend there, he had such a good attitude about himself, I really needed a friend who said "Yea, were the best". He taught me so much, he felt like my big brother, in a time when I was feeling like a recluse. I really am going to miss him. Andy was my next good friend, we made a sweat lodge, and went to Wacko Tanks for about ten days at thanksgiving break. We got into a squabble one time in Mexico when we got drunk and drove into Mexico. He snapped at me because we couldn't find our way back to the U.S.. I think we were lucky we weren't any worse off. So we sort of drifted, but I think we forgave each other toward the end of the year. He is a crazy bonsai person as far as trying new things and in the out doors. I look forward to telemarking with him at Purgatory this winter. Another good friend of mind toward the end of the year is Jared Clark, we went on many rides, hung out, and I went backpacking with him for a week in Canyonlands with, Eric Owen, Trent, Jason Parker, and Colin and Pooh. That was a great time. I think I am so anxious because I am looking forward to it so much. I have just a couple more trips left, so I should cherish them. It is 3:18 A.M, that is weird I am still up at this hour, I should have showered. I will probably sleep late tomorrow.

Yesterday was an interesting one, I tried to climb Democrat, but weather came as I was nearing the top and I freaked out about lightning, then after a storm I climbed Bross and ran to the other one but as I was just shy of it I freaked out about lightning again which I didn't need to and came back. Today it was foggy and wet all day (now 1:23) a couple hours ago I started to climb the three 14ers I still have to do, but something held me back, I am not ready for roughing it in the wet yet, so I came back. Today is day 8 and my rest day. I hope tomorrow is hot and sunny. If it is like today, I will leave anyway, I will be physically rested up. I set my alarm for 5 this morning, but I didn't get up because it was foggy and I had been cold and felt like I needed more sleep, from now on I will have my sleeping bag zipped at least half way so I don't have to worry about being cold. From now on I want to get up at 5 or when the sun first comes out. Tomorrow I will. Another problem of mine is lightning fright, I am way more than I should be.

From now on in storms I will keep progressing until I hear that electrical buzz, Seth (from the Jane Roberts books) says you don't die unless you choose to. This summer, maybe I needed that experience to show myself how paranoid I was. I was so disappointed yesterday when I bagged out on those peaks for the second time and realized I didn't have to. I need an attitude more like Andy's. The feeling made me so weak in all parts of my being. That way I will get up at 5 tomorrow I ride strong when I have good start and am 7-9.

I got up at 5 A.M.. and ate my pre-cooked meal and hit the trail at 6 A.M.. I was going to climb La Plata peak but I saw I had to go down a cliff area to get to the straight shot there, I totally could have done it but something in me said "no, your pack is a long way away and it's not worth the lightning". So I automatically gave up and turned back. As I was hiking back I regretted not going for it, I could have probably summated and been back at the pack by noon and it was a cloudless sky. I really want to climb La Plata. I have a nice peaceful camp and will hand out here until I climb all five of these mountains, I hope La Plata is possible form this end.

At first I didn't bring bud because I didn't think I would need it. Well, maybe I don't need it but I want it. So I went back and got it. Now I get high 3 or 4 times daily and wish I brought more because I want to be high all day: I want to be high all day, why? So I don't get bored, is that bad? Nothing is bad, just don't fret when you run out, for that is where the sankaras are produced.

This is a solo trip as much or more as a mountain trip. I will get up at one tomorrow. This morning, as with all mornings when I dream well, I was feeling clear and good.

Had neat dreams last night but didn't write them down and forgot them. I got up at one today and thought it was 4:30 stepped outside, and got the stove going until I looked at my watch and it was 1:35 or something that received me because I hadn't even hit REM yet. I ended up ignoring my 4:30 alarm at 6:42, I climbed three 14ers today, Wisconsin and two others. I summated the final of the tree at about eleven and saw a black cloud and decided to take the tree route back, it is much longer and more tedious. I didn't have to, it cleared up for the rest of the day. But the tree hiking was a good experience. Coming back I had my first feelings of loneliness, this is day six I guess and I have at least 10 to go. I hope my food holds out. If it doesn't I will see if I can get a ride into Buena Vista with some people from Mt. Princeton hot springs. I hope I can hike the twelve miles I want to tomorrow, I will get up early.

I smoked pot all day long yesterday and hammered up 9 miles, five being straight up, so I tripped out. I got high this morning and was tripped out all day, which turned into my lonely trippy feelings. I climbed Wisconsin about a thousand or so feet through snow at about 65 degrees then glissaded down the other side.

Saw the dark side of Salida. Salida is a hillbilly town. I bought a pint of whiskey and went to the library until 8:30 and then went to Safeway and the park and drank and then walked back to camp on main street and all over the place were high school kids at about 10:00 p.m. There were 15 at least on a four block strip all driving down to the end of town through the park across the river and turn around and go to the other end of town and then go back up again. I was hiding under the bridge watching the cars turn around. After I finished the whiskey I went to bed at about 12:00 A.M.. I remember seeing a car make the lap at 2:00 A.M.. It was probably pretty regular until then. At some points about half a dozen cars would make the turn around right together, once I looked up and saw about three kids smoking cigarettes right across the street from me. At another point a cop pulled someone over right next to me.

While I as walking down main street everybody was staring at me. I saw two stumbling funny chubby white guys run past me and then run back saying "who called us boy, not him, he doesn't have the balls, he's just a scraggly hippy". Every other car someone screamed something at me. One kid from a car said "Haven't you ever heard of a hair cut?" I said "no" and he said "mother FUCKER!" Then someone else screamed something at me and I ran to my hiding place. There were kids literally every where. As I looked out they were all over riverside park and downtown. But when the sun rose the normal people were back.

Heres the song I thought up last night: Love is the way it is, its the way it is, its the way it is, its the way it is, its the way it is, yea. Why? just look at the un-I -Verse, how did it become that way? Through love, cause its the way it is, yea. What is love anyway? The desire to create beauty and infinite pos-i-bility, yea! So love! Cause it's the way it is, there's no way around it! Just accept me, for the way I am, and you can feel free, to bee you! And be what you wanna become! Because love! It's the way it is, its just the way it is, there no way around it.... don't fight it! It's the way it will be, its the way it's al-ways-been. Uh-hu, yea, come on, lentos go, to where you want to go, cause LOVE!...

I want to write a lot of songs I know I can think of them, it's all part of being an author. I want to make a drum and pound out songs. Hopefully some day with someone else. I think these wacky dreams are good for me because they help me to practice dealing with loving kindness to people who are freaking out, and let me know how I am doing on my path. I don't think I killed that guy in my dream physically, I cannot remember but i think I just kept unhatingly kept pushing him off me until he got sick of it and turned into the people who got into the car with me, like he was my family that I couldn't run away from and he didn't want to separate from me. The people were badgering me, but I parked and my brother and I think someone else and I just stayed there arguing with them and keeping them from hurting us by pushing them off until they just "came down" and transformed. When I yelled at him and told him to buy me a new stove, he just got madder. i think my life calling may be healing people who are seriously freaking out and feel a whole lot of hate and just need someone there to interact with to act as a catalyst to their "coming down" off their intense trip. I was in a trip sort of like that for about half a dozen years and severely for three (jr. high), so I know what it's like and I know I am good at keeping my cool because I did it already and came out with out every being an asshole. through my dreams I prove to myself I can stay a nice, good person to freaking people. It feels dangerous but I never get scared in my dreams, so I know I am that strong, or at least as resilient in real life. Just wave at everybody, especially cowboys and gangsters and old people, because they need it the most, and it makes me feel like I am making the most progress. Where as if I were to consciously great people who look like me. I don't even like people who look like me.

Another song: "You cannot classify the truth, how can you classify infinity", and all, all and one, I was he, and he was she, its as simple as ABC, or 1-2-3. Just think abut eternity and it's the way it should be, my baby, don't you see, try to be me, or else just be, free. Hee, hee, hee, ha, ha ha ha ha la de da, la de da. Sing the song that you wanna sing! and ring it true brotha! whetha your quiet or loud, soft or proud, fast or slow, no or go, yes or no. I'll tell you where I wanna go, and that's there, and that's here, and it's great good, happy, perfect, the way it is, is the way it should be. So how can this be more similar to this, if it's not when you look at it like this or this or this or this. On down the line, towards the oh so effervescent shine of eternal truth. Oh Jah great god spirit of all, as the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. We are greater than you and me, my cutchie, duckie buddy. So help me be, cause it'll help you too through and through, I love you and it make me feel so smooth.

It has been over a year since I have written in my journal. As always a lot has happened. I had a very productive year at school last year I joined Wilderness Defenders. At first it was great, but I got so consumed by the end of the second semester that I was sleeping all day during the week days and weekends. I barely exercised at all, by far my most lax 9 months ever. I learned a lot though, about the environment, what I believe, how I should trust people, what my skills are, etc.. I am a natural born teacher, leader, guide, and motivator. I believed I turned a lot of people on to the environmental movement with my excitement.

In the fall I managed to go on a weekend mountain bike trip with Pooh and Nickey, but my mountain bike broke in half at the beginning of the first ride, but I offered to stay the second day so they could ride. I went bike touring this summer, rode to Moab and hung out with this guy who was born with his legs 180 degrees backwards and didn't say a thing until he was eight, his name was Jim. He used to beat the crap out of people for no reason and has a bullet in his head from gangsters who where mad at him for selling bags of bud too cheap and costing their business. He made a weightlifting world record for the special Olympics though. He was touring this summer from Seattle, he says it's rad but rainy.

I couldn't ride no mores after this big ass ride because of my right knee, so Judah offered to drive my ass back to T-ride, where I hungeth out for about a week and then went on bike a tour with Wyndham down to Sedona Arizona. It was a very fun 10 day tour, we rode a 180 miles on the last day. Then I hung in Telluride for about another week and it rained every day. Then I went to Durango for the third summer session and took English as a second language. I rode my mountain bike about every day until my bike was stolen, so I got disgruntled and stopped riding for about two weeks. Then I went on a 200 mile bike ride to Dolores the long way, I tried to do the whole 240 mile "death loop", but got sleepy and crashed in the post office. Then I went on a group ride and kicked asses, broke off the front for a long time and shit. The next day I done gone went on another group ride and talked to Jaimie Carney, and Chris (Eric's ex-roommate), and got even more excited about the bike season.

I went to Boulder to get me a new van because my piece of shit didn't work no mores. That was when I found out my dad had Cancer and had "three months" to live. I cried and cried that weekend and was really somber the next week, then I cheered up, and flew to California with my mom. After a couple of weeks we came back, and I started organizing the garage, which took about two weeks because I was going places on the weekends. I went to do Iawasca with dad, Wyndham, Mariana, and those other two nice women I cannot remember their names.

The next weekend I helped Eric and his buddies kill ducks for the experience, which I doesn't want to does no more. I tripped booms with Eric and this girlie Julie which was wacky cause I was so wacked, and so was they in their own unique ways. I was wacked because I was making my mom cry because I was "tearing up the house" in the garage cleaning efforts (the neighbors though I was living in there). Now its nice and I've been pumping out in there the last couple days with Tom. I hung out with mike the other day, he and Doug who is mellow and nice. I played his high-fi video game racing sports cars.

I went to Durango day before yesterday because Wyndham wanted to switch cars. The van broke down on the way there, overheated. I didn't really feel good being there, the energy didn't mesh well with me. I left the next morning. I feel really weird now. I love listening to the radio now, all the songs are so great I want to record them.

Mike just came by, we might go running tomorrow.

I am just kicken it. trying to put my riding shoes on again. I have contemplated a lot lately. about myself I have learned a lot. I am trying to get strong enough to workout every day and be active, but at the same time totally taking it easy. I haven't really done anything. I tried to type last night but I couldn't bring myself to do it, didn't think i could think. But I'm doing fine as fuck now. Because I got on a role by busting my arms and swimming. So Wyndham's bike touring in Nepal in a couple of months. wacky. bad ass song on now Dave Mathews what would you say. My typing is wacky now. I am so glad I am typing now.

Dads doing better emotionally now, me too. I want to join the bike team next semester and i will take 13 credits so i will have the time and i will live out of my van so alls well that ends well. and I want to work out.

So here we are in the future. I must say I am having a hard time. I came down here with a hundred bucks expecting $1,600 to be waiting for me, but they didn't have my application, so I have been broke the whole week, not able to afford any books, a car battery so I can drive, or food other than the C.U.B., or anything. I really want money now to I can buy things I need: Battery, Front left light to my car, bike components,
car stereo, rocket box, roof rack, school books, walkman, food.

I want it to warm up so bad because I am so hungry to go on huge rides, at this point even just by myself, but I am glad there are some strong riders on the team. There are two category twos and three more threes that I know about, so I will definitely be pushed and know how strong I am. I am thinking now that I want to do ultra distance mountain bike racing this summer and the collegiate cycling scene. I want to do summer school this summer and student teach next fall to get college over with and get on with my life. I have been having extremely bad insomnia for the last three nights, staying up until at least past one o'clock in the morning.

1-31-97

I rode the group ride yesterday. I didn't ride today because I didn't have a good breakfast, it is gloomy outside, and I am kind of depressed. I don't really care about doing as well on the team as I thought, it is too much to ask considering the tripped out state that I am in. Things will change. My power is pretty good compared to the other riders. I burn out much sooner, but that is to be expected considering I haven't been riding. My main focus right now is to get ahead on school work and stay in decent riding shape, which I always am. My recovery is %100 percent right now, meaning no-matter how hard I ride I am totally fresh the next day. I feel physically invincible, and I think my mind will come around here pretty soon.

I hath come to many a realization today. I started to read Alice Bailey's book esoteric healing, and enjoyed it. It was a slow start. I want to give my senior seminar presentation on it relating to mythology. I feel better about not going riding today. I E-mailed Wyndham and Mike today and called mom, she was worried because she couldn't contact all three of us at the same time. I found out I have $1600 waiting for me because my loan came through. Today was a very intense day, I couldn't make myself ride because it was so gloomy and cold and I didn't have a good breakfast. I thought if I rode I would regret it. I really like that book, it is 700 pages but I will start flowing through it. I feel good now, no regrets. I think I will do a good presentation, and formulate what I think about the world, even if I have to work hard at it will be worth it. I sure hope Roland Jones lets me do it off that book, I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't because teachers have always controlled my creativity. I don't think he will. How exciting to do this presentation, I have something else to get ahead on. I already started that Middlemarch paper. I don't plan on reading that 900 page book, but will do an adequate job on it nevertheless.

I talked to mom today, she said she just had a bad fight with mike and he is "all but moved out". She was in a distressed mood. I sure am glad I was home last semester.

Then I went to Austin where my dad's freind Larry Wells picked me up, and I stayed at his house 20 miles out of town for a couple of nights. He took me back the next morning to get my bike and I rode around Austin. It's a cool place. A huge river runs through the center of it and there are dirt paths along either side, and the capital and this other building that looked like the capital were around. I remember those buildings from when I lived there. There are no skyscrapers there or highways running through the middle of it, so it kind of had a town feel to it. To the west are the hills that rise like a thousand feet up. I rode up into the hills on windy roads that get as steep as possible for some parts and saw my old house. It was up for the market so I couldn't go in, but I went to the back and saw the tent platform and pool. It is one of the coolest houses in Austin, you can see downtown from the living room. Then I went to my original house that I don't remember, but it was two blocks from lake Austin which is cool. Then it got late and I got a flat and I decided to stay in the youth hostel. But it was full and the cheapest hotel is like 60 bucks, so I was going to ride 20 miles to Larry's house but this guy told me that I would get a 50 dollar ticket and my bike confiscated for not having a light, and it was too late to buy one. So I took the bus like 15 miles out of town and rode the rest of the way and got back at like twelve.

We were a couple days from the full moon and the temperature was perfect at night and I noticed I was riding like twice as fast as I did during the day because it was cooler. That day it was hot and I was drinking twice as much water as in Colorado and sweating like a boar. I didn't feel that hot but stopped sweating and totally crashed when I ran out of water. The next day I didn't want to ride to town in the heat so I just hung out and was going to leave that night, but played in the pool with Larry's ten year old daughter. She wanted me to listen to N´syncs album and sing the songs with her. She thinks the short black haired guy is the cutest.

I had all these flat problems, so I ended up leaving the next morning and got the biggest ass wuppin I ever saw. The biggest mountain (hill) range in Texas is in between Austin and San Antonio, so there were all these ups and downs. I didn't have my shirt on to keep cool, but the next thing I knew I was barely making it up the hills because of the heat, and having to get a Popsicle and just rest at every chance I got. It was so hot I was planning on mailing my bike home and taking the bus the whole way, thinking every day would be like this. I was sitting at the station and this guy said ´you look tired, want a ride to san Antonio?' I was like ´thank god'.

He was just babbling away about how he misses his girlfriend who he was married to for 20 years and dumped him three years ago because he was a coke head punk. He said he had a bad attitude about life since then, but then decided everybody just needs to be good to each other and relax. We parked on the side of the road and he lit up a joint for us and I was like, ´I love to get stoned and travel, its the best´. Then he decided he was going to take me the long way to san Antonio via the lake and the river road. At the lake I swam for a half hour or so and he just layed on his pickup and blasted hard rock like KBPI music as loud as it would go. Then on the way to the river road he told me how he wanted to find someone to teach him how to read and that he had never been out of the San Antonio area and he wanted me to write him to inspire him. I said he should scream that he wants to marry his ex-wife from outside her house and make a fool of himself, and he liked that idea. The river road was cool, three were all these houses along the river that you could take a boat down. It seemed like a cool place to live in.

When I got to San Antonio I stayed at a hotel for 25 bucks. I hung out in San Antonio the next day, because I wasn't about to ride in the day any time soon. My back and face were redder that ever and I had a fever from the heat. San Antonio is dope. I went up the tower and took pictures. The sky line isn't as good as Dallas but is is bigger than Austin. The neighborhoods are right next to the downtown area which is interesting. There is a river that they made this big detour out of that goes thought the center of town through the shops and skyscrapers and has tour boats going along it, and canals sprouting off and going into the mall and the convention center. There are even little canals going through buildings that you can walk along. I never saw anything like that and it was classic, a city planners dream. It probably kept them pretty cool too.

I started riding at like seven in the evening and it took me an hour to get out of the city because it was so big. I was psyched because I had a little pack of weed leaves that Marky gave me. It was like a full moon and I rode until about two in the morning with my jersey off. It was the perfect temperature. I put my bag down and just laid on top of it. It was the first time I could just lay there naked all night and not get cold. At like six I started riding and got to corpus Christie at two in the afternoon and toured the USS Lexington, which is the most decorated aircraft carrier from WWII. It looked bigger than the sky big buildings in the city from a long way away, but it is much smaller that the ones today, which would be cool to tour. Its like a thousand feet long, and the hanger area underneath is as big as the deck on top.

Then I had a burger and slept in the bushes for a couple hours until the sun went down and I rode until three in the morning. I started at seven the next day and bridged this 55 mile gap in the heat of the day against gale force winds. I was hot and muggy and sticky and was thinking ´I can't wait until Mexico where I can stay in hotels'. After getting to the next town I rested for a bit in the bushes and then rode into the outskirts of Brownsville and slept for a few hours, but the mosquitoes were bothering me so at like three in the morning I rode into town and slept in the burger joint until sun rise and did my errands.

I bought a pump and a tube and stuff and then went across the Rio Grande into Mexico. The river was a little non moving creek. I rode over the bridge, and when I got to the half way point on the bridge the trash started. Now I was in Mexico, how exciting.