Gregory George Lewis edit
Born:
- Month: May
- Day: 30
- Year: 1959
Location:
- City: Long Beach
- State: California
- Country: United States of America
- Planet: Earth
- Galaxy: Milky Way
- Supercluster: Virgo and Laniakea
Early Spark of Self-awareness edit
One of my first reportable memories was of me crawling on the grass in our backyard in Bellflower, California, "stalking" a bowl of dog food. Our dog Gretchen was a brown colored dachshund. It was summer time. A fence made of vertical brown wooden slats separated our house from the house next door. It was covered in vines with red flowers. My mother was in our yard talking with an older neighbor named Rose. Rose said, "Look at Gregory, he's eating the dog food!" My mother hastened over to me and scooped me up. Rose and Mom were laughing.
Because I was crawling, I must assume I was still a baby and pre-verbal. Yet, I remember understanding what Mother and Rose were saying.
Bellflower We lived on Carfax Avenue. We had orange trees. Beyond the cinder block fence that demarcated our back yard was a sort of wild, desert area with tumbleweeds and snakes, owned by the Edison Company (obviously not part of this particular memory), where the city's power lines ran on tall steel framed towers. This tract of undeveloped desert ran parallel to the San Gabriel River. The San Gabriel River was really a concrete channel, with a raised levee on each side. Teenagers rode their motorized minibikes (remember the minibike?) on the path at the crest of the levee.
Jenkins Market. Ernie Pyle Elementary. Bellflower High; the Bellflower Buccaneers.
Artesia At nine years old, I remember telling a schoolmate, "I don't know how to use my brain." I believe I was loading a piece of fish onto a sea-green Bakelite platter in the cafeteria line at school. I have distinct memories of a fear of dying at around that age. At night, the floor to one side of my bed was a swamp full of crocodiles.
Just before all this, however, I was in a desperate situation. My mother and father both worked, so my brothers and myself, and later my sister came along, were deposited daily with an abusive sitter. Bert was a neighbor from Carfax Ave., Bellflower. That meant that from morning until later afternoon/early evening, we spent our days away from our home neighborhood. Even though there were plenty of kids in our own neighborhood my age, me and my brothers could only play with them on weekends. Those were horrible years. I attended Ernie Pyle Elementary, miles from my own neighborhood in Artesia. While wasting away in Bert's (the sitter's name) backyard I indulged in a redemptive escape fantasy, in which the Starship Enterprise (a feature of a brand new television series called Star Trek, which first appeared in 1966) would beam me up on my 10th birthday, and I would become an interstellar hero, complete with a red uniform bearing the Federation badge, and a phaser. I rehearsed the escape fantasy, while wasting away during the Bert years was a bad dream I would some day awaken from. Me and my brothers plotted complex escape plans, which we never effected.
When I turned 11 it was apparent the Starship Enterprise would not be beaming me up. Did I give up my fantasies? Not at all. My endemic character was and remains a dreamer. If one is predisposed to dream, he remains a dreamer, even if the dream fails to materialize. The dreamer will maneuver his existence within a wide margin of uncertainty, where the demarcation of reality is fuzzy and ill-defined. This gives one the illusion that life is mysterious, magical and possibly subject to the will. I imagine the spittle bug, lolling around in its mucous cocoon thinks similarly.
For a little while I lived in an idyllic period, surrounded by my immediate family, and especially my neighborhood friends. From the middle of fourth grade to the middle of seventh grade I basked in a period of redemption from the brutal Bert period. I started to learn about girls, and girls even came to my house to visit. I entered a junior high school of some 300 students of my age. I walked to school with my best friend Mitchell Higa. From fourth grade to sixth grade I attended John Niemes Elementary, which was only a few blocks away. I loved being at Miemes. In the seventh grade I went to Fay Ross Junior High School, which was also in Artesia, but was a little bit of a walk: west on 169th St., then north on Jersey Ave, then east on 166th St., then south on Pioneer Blvd.
Alas, for reasons that were beyond the control of a 12 year old, my family sold our house in Artesia and moved to a bucolic Massachusetts town called Florida. We arrived in the Town of Florida at night, during a blizzard on February 14 (Valentine's Day), 1972, having crossed the country in a red and white Volkswagon minibus. Within the week I was enrolled in a small consolidated school comprising 100 students, from 1st grade to 8th. This was a culture shock.
It was winter, and it was the first time I had been exposed to the chronic condition of cold winters (my family had taken two trips to the mountains when we lived in California, when I learned that snow wasn't really made of sugar. Also, I took a trip to Texas with my mother when I was 9, and I got mild frostbite on my hands and feet, which was the most painful sensation I had hitherto experienced).
Nothing really got better. We lived on a farm, surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins, and lived with my maternal grandparents. They soon came to hate us, or at least me. I was a useless city kid who wore tennis shoes. I didn't know how to drive a tractor, and knew nothing about farming. My cousin Steve told me, "You might as well throw those away (pointing to my tennis shoes) and get yourself some work boots like mine." My heart sank.
My mother made us go to church. It was a local Baptist church. Although we were in a Sunday school in California, church proper was something new to me. On my first day I decided to sit in the chair at the very back of the church, just behind the rows of pews. "You can't sit there!" scolded Steve. "That's for the Host!" Well, I had no idea what a "host" was, but I didn't think he could be very important if they reserved the most rickety, uncomfortable fold-up bingo chair for him.
Later This section will need development, as it comprises the nearly 50 years after moving to Massachusetts. I graduated from a vocational high school, studying to become an electrician. I then went to Fitchburg State College and North Adams State College, majoring in psychology. I worked in mental health and human services for about six or seven years, then fell back to menial labor at a truss factory, got married, then worked for an investment firm. First Investors Corp, which I hated, then enrolled in an electronic technician course at Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner, Mass., which I loved. To this day I count electronics as one of my passions. After graduating with a technician certificate I worked for a small computer company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts for several years. My employer was something of a White supremacist who believed that the White man was planted on earth by aliens, and everyone else was "mud people". He would tell jokes about Jewish people and Jesus. Just like my final days at the truss factory, I dreaded going to my job. My boss sent me to clean a computer on Christmas Eve. I was looking forward to getting my paycheck, and hopefully a bonus. But when I returned to the shop, my boss had ditched me. I was furious--this wasn't an accidental oversight.
My wife (German-Irish) didn't understand what a half-Jewish man working for an anti-Semite with occasional outbursts of Nazi sympathy was like. I left the job and started working for myself.
Divorce, Depression, Joblessness
Syracuse
The Florida Keys and South Florida
Back to Massachusetts
Mom
Dreams edit
I was in a dark chamber, like a grotto. There was a raised platform in the center of the room, I was standing at the edge of the room. On the center of the raised floor was a large globe, which appeared to be like glass, with a milky, swirling opaqueness in the center. A young woman, perhaps in her young twenties, was standing on the outside of the globe. She was thin, had straight reddish-blond hair. Her hands were raised, as if feeling the outside of the enormous sphere (eight feet in diameter?) I shouted, "no! no!", but it was too late, as the girl "fell" into the sphere. After that, she was inside, swimming in the inner liquid like an embryo in an egg, looking out, but she appeared oblivious to me, as if she were unable to see out. (The dream where Gregory George Lewis witnessed his daughter's soul enter her mother's womb)
Original Quotes edit
"Mediocrates was the understudy of So-socrates" (First said during Gregory George Lewis's employment at the Blasland, Bouck & Lee corporation in Syracuse, New York, where creative solutions were discouraged in favor of more expensive and inefficient conventional ones, and where the quality of being an obsequious worm was proportionate to salary and rank.)
"I got tricked into covering town politics the way a porn star is tricked into a triple penetration" (First said after writing on town meetings as a correspondent for the West County News.)
Education edit
John Niemes Elementary, Artesia, California - ~1964
Ernie Pyle Elementary, Bellflower, California - ~1964 - 1968 (elementary curriculum)
John Niemes Elementary, Artesia, California - 1968 - 1971 (elementary curriculum)
Faye Ross Junior High School, Artesia, California - 1971 - February 1972 (elementary curriculum)
Gabriel Abbott Memorial Consolidated School, Florida (Town of), Massachusetts - February, 1972 - June, 1973 (elementary curriculum)
Charles H. McCann Technical Vocational School, North Adams, Massachusetts - September, 1973 - May, 1977 (electrical program; high school diploma)
Fitchburg State College, Fitchburg, Massachusetts - September, 1977 - May, 1978 (psychology major)
North Adams State College, North Adams, Massachusetts - September, 1978 - January, 1982 (psychology major; bachelor of arts degree )
Mt. Wachusett Community College, Gardner, Massachusetts - September, 1990 - May, 1991 (electronics engineering and computer technician)
University of the Rockies, Colorado Springs, Colorado - July, 2009 - April, 2012 (general psychology; master of arts diploma)
Religious Beliefs edit
I believe in God, and vow to believe in God till my dying day. However, there is a whole lot of other stuff going on in the Gestalt of existence, in and outside of the present universe.
Political Views edit
I was brought up by average American conservative values. Even though Dad was a Democrat and Mom was a Republican, they were both blue collar working Americans with values common to the mode population in the 1960s. Don't waste your time and mine pretending you don't know what those are.
During my college years, I became a liberal Democrat. Later, being exposed to wealth in Florida, and coming to realize the Democratic Party was encroaching on our liberty, as well as confiscating my wealth, I came to concede that the Democratic Party was systematically deconstructing my country.
Websites & Domains edit
gregorygeorgelewis.com[1] (Kind of dead right now)
Previous domains registered:
bearman.com
interdatacentral.com
earthboar.com
webanautics.com
popgnosis.com
popgnology.com
licensedtolive.com
newsketeer.com
strawberryshortcode.com