Because
public school had been such a resounding failure for me socially I
was not really interested in going back to middle school. Middle
school in my home town was a bit of a ripoff anyway it was just a
single separate hall included in the elementary school and we had
lockers for the books and supplies we didn't use that much. I stayed
home for some home schooling which consisted of reading the World
Book Encyclopedias. I used to think I was the only one who liked to
do that but after seeing the massive popularity of Wikipedia I guess
the world is just lousy with needs, geeks and dorks. I liked the
World Book because they had lots of diagrams and pictures and also
some step-by-step instructions for projects a young man could build
relating to the topic. I was also reading a lot of the classics Tom
Sawyer and then Huckleberry Finn, the Lord of the Flies, 1984, Brave
New World, . I also read a ton of Erma Bombeck books that my mom
loved and I read because they were sometimes funny but a lot lighter
than the dystopian horrors that are classic. I spent most of my time
building, improving and rebuilding forts. I was also a big fan of
hybrid machines that I would make out of parts from my dad's
appliance business. I built a microwave gun from a magnetron I had
salvaged from a microwave. I had villainous fantasies about putting
it in a nondescript box of some sort and leaving it on to cook all of
the passersby. That thought actually scared me after I thought it
down to its logical conclusion and I destroyed the gun so no one else
would be able to turn it on. All in all just a lazy school year
building my repertoire and savoir-faire (those are both
words I learned that year).
