Maybe it was the fact that it was the waning of the Age of Reagan with all its conservative values and button-down, uber-yuppie pervasiveness that made me decide to volunteer for the experiment with the mad scientist. Maybe it was that I was nineteen and homesick and suddenly unsure that I wanted to be at MIT or if I was even smart enough to be there. Its one thing to be the smartest kid in your high school class in Podunk, Tennessee, and another to discover that you’re slightly below average when compared to your classmates at the nation’s best engineering school.
The 1988 Spring semester was over and I was subletting a rathole from a grad student who was doing a summer seminar at Berlin Polytechnic, working two crummy jobs as a dishwasher and a short-order fry cook and regretting not going home for the summer, but I was trying to be independent and not rely on Mom for any expenses not already covered by my scholarship. Living in my little hovel on ramen noodles and oxygen, by my figuring would leave me just enough for books come Autumn.
Mom was back in East Tennessee, working as a registered nurse and doing her hippie-dippie health food business on the side — growing and selling herbs out of a little shed next to our home back, situated in an isolated hollow that only the most dedicated health nuts and aging hippies bothered to truck out to. I missed her terribly — Mom being the only parent I’d ever had — she not having a clue who my father was other than that his name was John (she’d named me after him), and that they’d met and loved a lifetime’s worth at Woodstock…yeah, that Woodstock. There was no one on the face of the Earth I was closer to.