The Legend of onemorebrown

There once was a boy who was born in Los Angeles California to two high school dropouts. His father was an abusive alcoholic and his mother was an abusive bi-polar agoraphobic religious zealot. This boy ran away from home at 15, stole a motorcycle, was arrested, and spent his teenage years in juvenile hall and group homes. When he turned 18 and was released from custody he worked in fast food and played drums in punk rock and death metal bands. Then when he was 23 he found out he could go to a community college in a program designed to get him into the workforce. While taking classes at the community college he also worked and lived at a mortuary while experimenting with LSD and mushrooms. Having somehow survived all of that, he completed his studies at the community college and then transferred to San Francisco State University where he was homeless his first semester. He eventually earned a Bachelors degree in philosophy and ended up playing drums in a jazz-funk fusion band.

That boy was me.

In 2002 I moved from California to Connecticut where I thought I would get my PhD in philosophy. For various reasons (I haven’t got that far in these memoirs), I decided to transfer to the CUNY Graduate Center and moved to New York in the summer of 2003. I had a whole summer in New York living in Harlem and waiting for classes to begin at the Graduate Center. It was then that I first tried to write a general timeline of events in my life that had led me to this point in my life. I didn’t know anyone out in New York and had now where to be so I ended up trying to write a rough draft of some things about my childhood. I quickly realized that, though my memory is good, it is regular human memory!

Given what we know about the way memory works one should be aware that a lot of this is reconstruction and therefore biased and subject to errors. I don’t have much memorabilia from before 20012 or so, and I quickly found out that my version of event disagreed with those of people who were also there. I tried to collect as much information as I could and so from 2003-2013 or so I was just trying to reconstruct the timeline of my life from 1971 until I earned my bachelors degree in 2000.

I have previously written some general outlines and vague comments about my past in the following places.

These previous attempts give the general gist of things and may fill in certain details but they all focus on the time in question from a particular point of view -my influences towards becoming a philosopher, or the influences on the ideas in my dissertation- they do not just aim to provide a general accounting of the time period.

Then in 2017 my family and I bought a house and moved out of the City the suburbs of Long Island. I decided that I would try to organize the writing I had done up until that point and then decided to edit them into blog posts. What results is a somewhat traditional story, the story I have told myself and others. Hence a legend. I have done a fair amount of research trying to get details straight but if you know something about something I am posting about feel free to share it in the comments!

The Legend of onemorebrown

  1. I Transfer to SF State: January-March 1997
    • This was the first of these reflections, prompted by the realization that I had hit the 20 year anniversary of transferring to San Francisco State University [written in 2017]
  2. The Beginning: 1971-1977
  3. One Wild and Crazy (and Endless) Summer: The Summer of 1997
  4. Circa 1987
  5. 2007-2017: Ten Years at LaGuardia
  6. I am not a Number, (Nor am) I a Free Man: 1987-1990
  7. So long, and Thanks for All The Freedom: 1990-1994
  8. A Long Strange Trip and A Short Time to Get There: 1994-1995
  9. The Mortuary: 1995-1997
  10. A Man of Letters: 1997-2000
  11. Afterword and Afterwards