Aaron

I just had a strange experience reading Danielle's post below. My own personal history echoes her life in uncanny ways. I was born in Charleston -- West Virginia's capital city. As I've met many people who can't locate us on any size map, I'll just mention it's east of Kentucky and is definitely also in "The South." I grew up in a region where many folks are plagued by mindsets mired in rampant and vicious bigotry. For example, my great-grandfather was in The Klan. Though, as my mom disclaims continually, there were (and still are) so few African-Americans on Elk River, my great-grandfather wouldn't have recognized an African-American if she or he had walked up and handed him a crisp, new, shiny dollar bill. Spectrums of ignorance to hatred flourish in such places. For example, the real rednecks I grew up with wore KKK themed t-shirts to school and scraped horrid words into their desktops with their pocket knives. I remember one popular t-shirt that featured four or so silk screened white-hooded men surrounded top-and-bottom with the slogan: "The Real Boys in the Hood."

Through my '93 freshman and 95' junior years, I attended Herbert Hoover High School. Needless to say, my being a die hard anti-racist punk kid with pink hair and baggy clothes didn't wash well with most students and staff alike. Feeling the threat of a fight was a daily occurrence. A fight was too often a weekly one, and I was suspended and nearly expelled for myriad shit more times than I care to remember.

What I can never forget is the exact spot where Hoover lies on the banks of the Elk River near the fringes of Clendenin -- a town that, according to the year 2000 census had a population of exactly 1, 116 folks. Now, if you follow the Elk ten miles downstream, you'll pass under the Elkview Bridge, which is just down the road a piece from the three-stored, blue vinyl house my Dad, Uncle, and Grandfathers, some twenty years ago, had huge hands in building. After spending the first eight or so years in a little red brick house on the Elk up in Clendenin, I grew up in that blue house near the Elk in Elkview. Follow it for ten more miles downstream, you'd be dumped out the Elk's mouth into the much larger Kanawha River, right in lower-left ventricle of Charleston's slow-thumping heart. So, there it is. For my entire life, I've felt as if I'm the middle point on a twenty mile stretch between the country and the city. Every person in every car headed south that passed me snagged and caught my imagination under its tires. All those tires wore me thinner and thinner like a hobo's boot heel.

All this is to say, I can explain my wish to escape maybe through the following notion. Ok, I quoted 1, 116 people in Clendenin, right. According to the 2000 census, Charleston had a city population of 53, 421 with a metro area population of 303, 950. 53, 421 divided by 1, 116 equals 47.9. This equation can act as a ratio for how I felt then about my potential as a worker/artist. So, let's agree on like 49:1. I guess I always felt like, maybe if I can get the hell out of Elkview, West Virginia, I could maybe be 49 times the worker/artist I would be if I got stuck on Elk River, forever. I just felt doomed.

But, I do have love for Elk River -- my Elk River -- even with all its faults (akin to Danielle, and maybe even to what LeAlan and Lloyd express about "the Ida Bees" in Our America). Similar to Danielle's quoting of Hugo, I had to leave Elk River to understand my ambivalence for my place of birth. Since, I've managed to learn some cool facts about West Virginia: we were home to hardcore Abolitionists like John Brown, and throughout the 1900s West Virginia coal miners and labor organizers continually fought the United States Army and ruthless mine guards over issues of mine safety and fair hourly wages. And they won! As I come from a long line of coal miners, facts like these tend to make me feel a deep, though conflicted, sense of pride.

I left Herbert Hoover the first month of my senior year, and I graduated from Hurricane High School in 1996 (pronounced "Her-uh-cun" down in southern West Virginia). After Hurricane, I spent three semesters at a community college outside of Charleston, but mostly I just skateboarded, went to punk/hardcore shows with my friends all over the east coast, worked as a janitor on a few occasions and an Emergency Room Registration Clerk, got tattooed a bunch, lived in my parents' house, and spent a ton of time having no fucking clue what I wanted to do with my life other than not live on Elk River and be a janitor, forever. So, a few days after my nineteenth birthday, I moved to Morgantown, WV on the banks of the Monongahela River, 142 miles north of Elkview and my Elk River. From fall 1998 to the end of fall 2001, I was enrolled at West Virginia University (WVU), and I worked some while I studied and finished a double Bachelor's in Journalism and Sociology. While there, some friends and I started a non-profit, Positive-Youth Foundation based in Greencastle, PA, with the aims to teach and support kids nationwide as they hurdled all the obstacles and frustrations they encountered while organizing against bigotry in their own communities and schools. That meant I spent all my free time outside of school traveling two hours over Interstate 68 to Greencastle to work in our warehouse and tour to promote our cause/non-profit with bands like Green Day, Rancid, AFI, No Doubt, Hot Water Music, Blink 182, Alkaline Trio, Bad Religion, many others, and at numerous festivals and festival-style tours, like Vans Warped Tour. I also spoke in front of meetings and gatherings as diverse as the Washington State Women Voters' Caucus and the North American Anarchist Gathering. Through our non-profit work, I traveled through every province of Canada and every state in the USA but Hawaii and North Dakota. I lived and/or spent tons of busy days and rawkus nights in big cities like LA, Seattle, Portland, DC, Baltimore, Philly, and the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. I always liked Chicago the most though. At times, the memories are near suffocating. And, after all this so-called "living," I was worried. I found myself still a touch lost, even though I was off Elk River.

After disagreements with a friend, I left PYF in the summer of 2003 and was feeling pretty much like a waster. To make ends meet, I worked at Ticketmaster taking phone-in ticket orders for a couple months back in Charleston. Then, I moved back to Morgantown and re-enrolled at WVU to study English and Creative Writing. I always knew, if I ever quit PYF, I would eventually return to university to study poetry.

Three years later, it was summer 2006. I've finished another Bachelor's degree, this time in English, and I've moved during another August to yet another city, Chicago. I've spent the last two years completing my MFA in Poetry here at CCC, and I just finished up my degree less than a week ago. This is my second year teaching in our Bridge program.

All these ramblings still leave the following unanswered though: am I forty nine times the person I would be if I'd remained on Elk River? Frankly, I hope so, but I don't know. Though, I can tell you, I've started pondering a new ratio for my possible potential. Chicago's city population of 3 million divided by Clendenin's 1, 116 equals 2,688.2. So, that's a ratio of 2,688:1, which is a big number really.

Well, if you made it this far, thanks for reading all of this. If you skipped down to here from somewhere even in the middle, can't say I blame you. Regardless, I'm excited to get to know all of you. I'm here if you need anything. THANKS to Danielle's post for provoking all this writing!