Back to Nick's Homepagey this time I was ready to graduate from high school, a process made infinitely more difficult by the fact that I had yet to attend such an institution. Nevertheless, "there is a time for everything under heaven", and the time was at hand for my matriculation. I wonder if all the things for which there never seems to be time are actually things which belong over heaven. At any rate, I was never one to let mere impossibilities stay me from my chosen, er, choices and I have the diploma to prove it. Of course the crayon is a bit smudged now, and the paper bag is becoming brittle with age, but time can never erase the memories of the halcyon days (I always wanted to use that phrase--it's sounds so erudite [I always wanted to use that phrase, too, for pretty much the same reason]) of my non-existent high-school career.
fter high school there was really no choice but to go to college. I called in a few favors, let the right people see the right Polaroids, switched a few urine samples, and got accepted to MIT, the Midlands Institute of Trucking. Although many people seem to associate MIT with engineering, it is most famous for its School of Truck Driving, with the School of Diesel Engine Repair coming in a close second. For my undergraduate major, I chose Refueling Technology. With supreme dedication, I managed to make it through those four long, grueling days with a 3.7 GPA, and was quickly accepted into the graduate studies department.
t was only a short time, however, before I began to realize that the graduate department was not up to the same high standards I had come to expect during my undergraduate career. To tell the truth, my advisor had at first insisted that there was in fact no graduate studies department at all. I had to bribe him to get him to admit there even was such a thing. My disillusionment continued when I began to have difficulty finding both my professors and my classrooms. Then, seemingly as soon as the check had cleared, my advisor went back to his old story and began claiming once again that there was no graduate program.
t seemed for once that I was stymied. So I went to Brazil and joined a band of itinerent banana pickers. During the growing season, we traveled the supermarkets of Rio de Janiero, picking bananas and carrying them to the checkout counters. Day in and day out we labored, until the store managers learned to recognize us and had us arrested. We weren't long in custody, though, since they couldn't figure out what crime we had committed by moving bananas from one part of a store to another, so they gave us a cursory beating and let it go at that. We decided there wasn't really much of a future in picking bananas anyway, so off we went to Bolivia to search for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was an exciting time and a rewarding one, in the sense that one can be rewarded without actually receiving any recognizable benefit, but it was not to last. It was only a matter of time before we unearthed the horrible secret of Butch and Sundance: they were both dead.
nce again I found myself all alone in a foreign country as the gang drifted apart. Some blamed me, saying that it had been my job to equip the canoes with paddles, but I quickly forgot those unkind words in the arms of one of the local village girls. In fact, together we built a thriving business selling them to the countless revolutionary groups who wandered aimlessly around the region in those days, overthrowing governments and massacring villages in fits of ennui. We began presenting awards to warlords who showed the most ingenuity in their massacres, and for most government troops killed in a single attack, greatest number of victims from a single family, etc. It was a real boost for business. It was during this period that I realized I had a knack for business. Or a horrible lack of taste, which when you think about it is pretty much the same thing.
More to come (save yourself before it's too late)...