My childhood was pretty standard fare really. Went to school, played with my friends, did my homework, watched Alex P. Keaton become an alcoholic. All this, of course, was in addition to 3 hours of daily piano lessons while kneeling on a pillow case full of steel ball bearings and bedtime stories read by Chairman Mao played through my Teddy Ruxpin doll.
Dad immigrated to the US in 1975 aboard a shipping container packed with copies of Pong. He met Mom in customs during a security sweep. She, coincidentally, was wretching violently on the same cargo ship in a shipping container packed with Coleco Visions smelling of dead fish. Dad put food on the table working long hours at a local wicker seat cushion factory. A piece of shrapnel embedded in his buttocks during The Great War of 1950 made it impossible for him to fulfill his dream of becoming the prefectural squat-thrust champion while simultaneously destroying his ability to defecate sitting down.
By the time I was 16 Dad was hooked on milkweed extract and convinced that if he drank his body weight of it every day for a year, he'd become a giant Monarch butterfly. The stress on Mom was considerable and it eventually led to the failure of her budding chain of East German laughter therapy clinics ( Mein Gelächter ist Gift ). Dad died 2 years later in a freak hang gliding accident outside of Mexico City.
After graduating from university with a degree in Logic and Scientology, I set out to explore what the world had to offer. It was an intensely exciting time for a young, educated, communist pianist. I spent 5 years traveling the globe doing whatever job would pay me enough to put food in my stomach and Tiger Balm on my genitals. I lived in the Alps teaching snow blind St. Bernards how to bark in braille, traveled to the Middle East to help build Emperor penguin hatcheries for downtrodden Iraqi crab fishermen and romanced thick wristed Baltic women using limericks written in Gaelic.
As magical as that time was, as rewarding as those jobs were, I eventually started to feel....unfulfilled. It was in my 5th year of adventuring across the world, while working as a aquatic spelunker and marine proctological examiner, that I had an epiphany. Despite the noble nature of my work, regardless of the countless enlarged whale prostates I had been able to massage back down to the size of a Volkswagon Beetle, at the end of the day it still all boiled down to scat play with the world's largest mammal. Yes, it was time to return home to Chicago.
