The Portrait of a Schizo As a Human of Importance! An Epiphantic Fantasy!

CABOOSE Team. The last version of this web-post ran on for about seven typed pages. Some themes cannot be expressed in the five paragraph format that we learnt in high-school. The author has copied these notes for inclusion in a synopsis of a thirty-year journey that will appear in a text on which he is working.

This walk started on September 4, 1988 with Greg Mantooth his position coach at Vanderbilt University driving him beyond the point of exhaustion during the last series of sprints at the end of practice the day before classes began. “$%^@% don't you ever quit on this field!” was what the author heard when he tried walking the last twenty yards of the last three hundred yard sprint. We had six that evening. Just over a mile. He had given all that he had, but that was not good enough. What haunts him until this day is a simple fact recorded in the national news during 1987.

A lineman whom he never met was run until he suffered heart failure by this same coaching staff. His name was Sonny Bishop. Was “$%^@% don't your ever quit on this field!” that last thing that he ever heard. The medical staff at VUMC had gotten the coaches involved off the hook for any serious charges such as manslaughter or murder in some certain degree, by declaring that the young man had a congenital heart disorder.

Yet, the author had arrived a year later and been run until he became disoriented. Instead of permitting him some rest, the coaches tried having him drug tested. For the fault and the problem must lie in the author's lap. Eventually, he was placed in VUMC. But, the head coach at the time, Watson Brown, accidentally transposed the years on his age. Seventeen became seventy-one. He was placed in a geriatric ward.

The only nurse on duty was quite frightened having a disoriented 245-lbs athlete who stood well-over six feet tall on her floor that evening. Following Greg Mantooth's advice, not a physician's, she medicated him with a tranquilizer so he could sleep through the night. She awoke him so she might do so, although his full facilities had returned earlier that night and he was peaceful.

In some ways, bad has only become worse for the author. This tranquilizer has been forced upon him for many years and varying associated diagnoses. None which ever stick, seeing that nothing is truly wrong with him. Although not easily overwhelmed, he can ramble at times. He has many memories which weigh on his mind.

If Mel Brook's is interested in making a High Anxiety-Life Stinks sequel. the author definitely has a script for him. 

In other ways, the author is poised for a great success. His K-12 education was top-notch and coupled with a semester in a computing elective at Vanderbilt, he held a solo weekend brainstorming session, in the Spring of 1989, that has produced more than one Turing-caliber idea.

Through familial contacts at Sun, many of these ideas became part of JAVA and he can solidly claim that he drew the first Duke doodle, which was a tear-drop, and not nearly as polished and professional as the current one used at Oracle or found on the web.

This work was all done before earning a couple of post-baccalaureate degrees at state schools. One was in computer science and the other was in software engineering.

Life has taught that we all have a part which we must play.