The Man Who Saw Tomorrow
Well, I've been educated to be a writer so I might as well start writing...
My mother and I used to go to the movies a lot. I'm talking about from the age of 7 and into my teens. We saw all the Disney films when they were re-released. Films like Pinocchio, Dumbo, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the Aristocats and other animated pictures. Sometimes we saw films that scared me a lot and I sat there with my eyes closed for much of the time. Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were two pictures I sat through that way for much of the time. We used to go to this little movie theater in a shopping center next to the Grand Union supermarket on 9W. One day we went to see a film about the Old Testament that scared me a lot. It was showing a scene about the idol made of gold and there was a voice over saying, "Thou shalt not have any false idols" and things like that. I got very scared and we left the theater.
Another time we went to see a movie about Nostradamus. It showed how there was going to be a great war in the future and New York was going to be destroyed. It depicted a man in the middle east launching rockets against the United States. It showed the Statue of Liberty breaking into pieces and gave an analysis of Nostradamus' lines which went something like "War will come when the two twin brothers fall." And this may have been not part of the movie but I could swear from the longest time that it said the President of the United States at the time of the war was a man named "Gore". I don't know whether I dreamed this up or if a movie like this actually existed. I remember Orson Wells was in the movie.
I thought to myself at the time, and we are talking about the early 1980s that it was extremely unlikely that this country would ever elect a person with such a bloody, warlike name, the name "Gore" to me signified carnage and horror. Much to my surprise a woman named Tipper Gore came out with the PMRC in the mid-80s and had some things to say about rock and roll music. She wasn't attacking the kind of music I liked so it didn't bother me. I wasn't aware that she had a husband who was a politician at the time it seemed very doubtful that we would have a President Gore.
Anyhow, this gives a general picture of the state of my mind at the time. I thought there was going to be a great war that would tear this country asunder. I also had seen footage of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II and thought we were very close to living in a post-apocalyptic age. I was a Catholic and went to St. Gregory's church in Stony Point. There was a bald priest there who used to excoriate the parishioners there. Maybe that got to be too much for my mother so we started going to the church at the Don Bosco Marion Shrine behind my house, very simply pews and an altar. No showiness, it was a poor church. This entire complex was behind my house where I grew up, it was acres and acres of peaceful secluded land. It was a retreat and I spent countless hours there for many years walking the path and observing the statues of the Joyful Mysteries and Sorrowful Mysteries of Jesus Christ. Eventually we stopped going to mass there and started going to church at a place called Letchworth Village while also was a residential complex for the mentally ill and developmentally challenged.
That gives you a good picture of the three churches that were most important to me while growing up: St. Gregory's, Don Bosco and Letchworth. My father never attended mass with my mother and I. I don't remember my sister going either, I may be mis-remembering but I only recall going with my mother, especially to Don Bosco. I even took Annie Armstrong there in 2004 on Easter. We went to the outdoor mass where there was a great big statue of Mary. It was bigger than life, about two stories tall. It was very inspiring. I felt good going with Annie Armstrong, she was very receptive to going to mass with me but it hurt me when she did not go up to receive communion. That told me something about her religious nature. I guess she was Protestant, she came from South Carolina and maybe she was Baptist or Protestant? I really didn't know at the time and still don't know.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I used to take Michelle Quinn up to the big outdoor church at Don Bosco and one time I asked God to marry us in his eyes. I was writing a lot about Michelle Quinn at the time, that was before my head injury. I think these women meant too much to me, I took there affection for me too seriously. I wish I could have treated them lightly and casually but I guess I wasn't built to handle things that way. So I guess the point I'm making is that there was this retreat I used to go to with my mother and I used to find other women and take them up there too. That sounds right to me.
Anyhow I used to be a great artist. Like my ambitious was to be Picassso or Chagall or something. I didn't paint, I would draw and later do charcoals and watercolors. My mother used to take me to New Jersey to this place called Pearl Paint all the time to buy art supplies. Visual paintings used to come into my head all the time, it was like I was a young Vincent Van Gogh. I also remember that when I was in the Gifted and Talented Program at Thiells Elementary and at Farley Middle School I used to spend most of my time drawing for the other students and trying to entertain and amuse them. This continued into high school. In chemistry class taught my Mr. Piropato I used to create this magazine called chemistry magazine which has little cartoons about the students in the class and some dialogue that I made up. These little cartoon magazines or comic books would get passed around the classroom during class. It was mostly to entertain Jacob Goldfarb, to show him what I could do and trying to impress him and Ruth Richardson. I didn't like chemistry but I had proven I could be the top science student in Mrs. Lenzinger's biology class the year before. I like the way she taught, I didn't like the way Mr. Piropato taught at all. I wonder if my schizophrenia was responsible for the way I behaved. I was also very active in art class and debating whether to be a writer or an artist. I was paranoid too at the time, in the sense that I felt I had a finite amount of time to make my mark. This may be observed by the fact that I used to make drawings of the girl's faces in the yearbook instead of actually talking to them. I was very quiet and rarely spoke. People noted that I was "stoic".
My mother put it into my head that I was in danger of being taken away by a stranger. She had told me a story of when she was almost abducted when she was a young girl growing up in New York City. She had to open a big, heavy door to get away from a man who was a sexual pervert. My mother had a hard time growing up. Her father was a police officer who was killed in the line of duty when she was very young and from there her life went downhill. She and my father met at age 10 and they decided to marry each other from a very early age. They got married at age 19 in January 1962. The Beatles hadn't yet arrived in America, I think.
So this gives a little picture of me growing up, worried about a nuclear holocaust happening in the 1980s and worried that I was going to be drafted and taken away from my mother. My vague appreciation of history had taught me that we go to war every 20 years or so and I worried that the 1980s was going to be that start of the next war. I was scheduled to turn 18 in 1990 and I was worried that I would be drafted into the army. As it turns out the war started in 2002 and I was assigned to an infantry base in Jackson, South Caroline for a couple of weeks until I quit or they most likely made me quit. At one time my ambition was to go to West Point and marry Regina Pappalardo. My dreams never involved work, or the idea of going to work. I hardly know what work is, to be honest. At one time I wanted to be a journalist, that much I know. Then I decided to be a writer. My hero and guru has always been Henry Miller, the metaphysical-slash-surrealistic writer. I also wanted to be like Alan Watts, I once told Dr. Alan Hornstein, the psychiatrist I was seeing when I was having problems with my father after my car accident.
So anyhow I
My mother and I used to go to the movies a lot. I'm talking about from the age of 7 and into my teens. We saw all the Disney films when they were re-released. Films like Pinocchio, Dumbo, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the Aristocats and other animated pictures. Sometimes we saw films that scared me a lot and I sat there with my eyes closed for much of the time. Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were two pictures I sat through that way for much of the time. We used to go to this little movie theater in a shopping center next to the Grand Union supermarket on 9W. One day we went to see a film about the Old Testament that scared me a lot. It was showing a scene about the idol made of gold and there was a voice over saying, "Thou shalt not have any false idols" and things like that. I got very scared and we left the theater.
Another time we went to see a movie about Nostradamus. It showed how there was going to be a great war in the future and New York was going to be destroyed. It depicted a man in the middle east launching rockets against the United States. It showed the Statue of Liberty breaking into pieces and gave an analysis of Nostradamus' lines which went something like "War will come when the two twin brothers fall." And this may have been not part of the movie but I could swear from the longest time that it said the President of the United States at the time of the war was a man named "Gore". I don't know whether I dreamed this up or if a movie like this actually existed. I remember Orson Wells was in the movie.
I thought to myself at the time, and we are talking about the early 1980s that it was extremely unlikely that this country would ever elect a person with such a bloody, warlike name, the name "Gore" to me signified carnage and horror. Much to my surprise a woman named Tipper Gore came out with the PMRC in the mid-80s and had some things to say about rock and roll music. She wasn't attacking the kind of music I liked so it didn't bother me. I wasn't aware that she had a husband who was a politician at the time it seemed very doubtful that we would have a President Gore.
Anyhow, this gives a general picture of the state of my mind at the time. I thought there was going to be a great war that would tear this country asunder. I also had seen footage of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II and thought we were very close to living in a post-apocalyptic age. I was a Catholic and went to St. Gregory's church in Stony Point. There was a bald priest there who used to excoriate the parishioners there. Maybe that got to be too much for my mother so we started going to the church at the Don Bosco Marion Shrine behind my house, very simply pews and an altar. No showiness, it was a poor church. This entire complex was behind my house where I grew up, it was acres and acres of peaceful secluded land. It was a retreat and I spent countless hours there for many years walking the path and observing the statues of the Joyful Mysteries and Sorrowful Mysteries of Jesus Christ. Eventually we stopped going to mass there and started going to church at a place called Letchworth Village while also was a residential complex for the mentally ill and developmentally challenged.
That gives you a good picture of the three churches that were most important to me while growing up: St. Gregory's, Don Bosco and Letchworth. My father never attended mass with my mother and I. I don't remember my sister going either, I may be mis-remembering but I only recall going with my mother, especially to Don Bosco. I even took Annie Armstrong there in 2004 on Easter. We went to the outdoor mass where there was a great big statue of Mary. It was bigger than life, about two stories tall. It was very inspiring. I felt good going with Annie Armstrong, she was very receptive to going to mass with me but it hurt me when she did not go up to receive communion. That told me something about her religious nature. I guess she was Protestant, she came from South Carolina and maybe she was Baptist or Protestant? I really didn't know at the time and still don't know.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I used to take Michelle Quinn up to the big outdoor church at Don Bosco and one time I asked God to marry us in his eyes. I was writing a lot about Michelle Quinn at the time, that was before my head injury. I think these women meant too much to me, I took there affection for me too seriously. I wish I could have treated them lightly and casually but I guess I wasn't built to handle things that way. So I guess the point I'm making is that there was this retreat I used to go to with my mother and I used to find other women and take them up there too. That sounds right to me.
Anyhow I used to be a great artist. Like my ambitious was to be Picassso or Chagall or something. I didn't paint, I would draw and later do charcoals and watercolors. My mother used to take me to New Jersey to this place called Pearl Paint all the time to buy art supplies. Visual paintings used to come into my head all the time, it was like I was a young Vincent Van Gogh. I also remember that when I was in the Gifted and Talented Program at Thiells Elementary and at Farley Middle School I used to spend most of my time drawing for the other students and trying to entertain and amuse them. This continued into high school. In chemistry class taught my Mr. Piropato I used to create this magazine called chemistry magazine which has little cartoons about the students in the class and some dialogue that I made up. These little cartoon magazines or comic books would get passed around the classroom during class. It was mostly to entertain Jacob Goldfarb, to show him what I could do and trying to impress him and Ruth Richardson. I didn't like chemistry but I had proven I could be the top science student in Mrs. Lenzinger's biology class the year before. I like the way she taught, I didn't like the way Mr. Piropato taught at all. I wonder if my schizophrenia was responsible for the way I behaved. I was also very active in art class and debating whether to be a writer or an artist. I was paranoid too at the time, in the sense that I felt I had a finite amount of time to make my mark. This may be observed by the fact that I used to make drawings of the girl's faces in the yearbook instead of actually talking to them. I was very quiet and rarely spoke. People noted that I was "stoic".
My mother put it into my head that I was in danger of being taken away by a stranger. She had told me a story of when she was almost abducted when she was a young girl growing up in New York City. She had to open a big, heavy door to get away from a man who was a sexual pervert. My mother had a hard time growing up. Her father was a police officer who was killed in the line of duty when she was very young and from there her life went downhill. She and my father met at age 10 and they decided to marry each other from a very early age. They got married at age 19 in January 1962. The Beatles hadn't yet arrived in America, I think.
So this gives a little picture of me growing up, worried about a nuclear holocaust happening in the 1980s and worried that I was going to be drafted and taken away from my mother. My vague appreciation of history had taught me that we go to war every 20 years or so and I worried that the 1980s was going to be that start of the next war. I was scheduled to turn 18 in 1990 and I was worried that I would be drafted into the army. As it turns out the war started in 2002 and I was assigned to an infantry base in Jackson, South Caroline for a couple of weeks until I quit or they most likely made me quit. At one time my ambition was to go to West Point and marry Regina Pappalardo. My dreams never involved work, or the idea of going to work. I hardly know what work is, to be honest. At one time I wanted to be a journalist, that much I know. Then I decided to be a writer. My hero and guru has always been Henry Miller, the metaphysical-slash-surrealistic writer. I also wanted to be like Alan Watts, I once told Dr. Alan Hornstein, the psychiatrist I was seeing when I was having problems with my father after my car accident.
So anyhow I
posted by Andrew B. Noselli at 8:18 AM
1 Comments:
Nice one, good to see you writing again.
Hope you are well
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