I was born on June 26, 1979, in a small village near the Isthmus of Panama.
My ancestors were hardworking, anti-Semitic immigrants who left their respective homelands of Belarus, Crete and Turkmenistan with hopes of a better life. They fled their homes in search of opportunity, and they were able to find it with relative ease, aside from my maternal great-grandmother, who had lots of trouble finding opportunity as a camel-hump hairstylist in the United States. They settled in Wisconsin, mainly due to its large dairy history and reputation as a place tolerant to incompetents. On a related note, everyone in my family is intolerant to lactose.
My mother and father moved from their modest home in Madison, Wisconsin, where they both worked as pin setters at the 4th-most popular bowling alley in the city. They decided on the Isthus of Panama mostly because of the locations proximity to both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. My father, though he grew up in a place totally devoid of any natural bodies of salt water (Nebraska), found himself at home near the sea. He took a job as an apprentice in a small fishing conglomerate, and it was while gutting a mackerel that he proposed to my mother. My mom didn’t much care for the ocean, but she agreed to move to the IoP because of her love of my dad and her love of all things isthmus. Growing up, she had always been fascinated by the word, even hanging a poster on her wall with her original acrostic poem using the word isthmus (I swear to heaven, my underwear smells). So when Ted asked her to move there, she didn’t hesitate to say ‘yes’.
I was born during the rainy season, which is why my parents wanted to originally name me Downpour. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed and they chose ‘Jason’, named after an old friend of my father’s who had gone on to become a successful procologist in Lansing, Michigan. He is my godfather, and always is gentle when giving me my annual examination.
We moved to the United States after the birth of my younger brother, Brian, who everyone in the village was expecting to be a girl my parents were going to name Zelda, after a street performer they met while on vacation in Los Angeles. She was a kind woman, a woman we’d know as Auntie Z until her untimely death at the hands of a rival street performer named Bowser.
We lived in squalor for the first 10 years of my life, bouncing around from trailer parks, to seedy motels, and from homeless shelters to highway underpasses. My parents couldn’t find consistent work in Dunedin, so they did whatever odd jobs they could to make ends meet. My father, among other things, cleaned port-o-lets after reggae concerts, dressed as a chicken to advertise for KFC, and even operated a titl-a-whirl at the Florida State Fair. My mom, who at this point was unable to stand for extended periods of time due to her severe irritable bowel syndrome, took whatever work she could. Here IBS was so bad that I remember her soiling herself twice during a 15-minute parent-teacher conference when I was in fifth grade. She worked as a secretary at a Tarpon Springs sponge shop, collected tickets at the box office of New Port Richey’s only all-transvestite burlesque theater, and sold old baseball cards to children poorer than we were.
I moved out of our double-wide when I was 14 and a sophomore in high school. I took a job as a bagger at a local Winn Dixie, and I supplemented my income by pocketing $10 for every $11 I saw in the register. After being accepted to the University of Florida, my family held a huge party celebrating the fact that I was the first in our family’s history to not only go to college, but also the only one to graduate high school without being arrested, impregnated, humiliated, defecated and undulated.
My years at the University of Florida were interesting, to say the least. My roommate my freshman year was a Zimbabwean student who arrived in Gainesville and the United States three days before classes began. Needless to say, he wasn’t used to wearing clothes, since he didn’t in Africa, and would spend the better part of his dorm room time totally naked. It made playing video games quite distracting. Though my good friend Tony Fernandez seemed to enjoy Jambique’s company. I did well in my classes, achieving straight A’s for the first time ever for my family.
Sadly, the memories of my sophomore and junior years are cloudy and shrouded with mystery. It was during the first month of sophomore year that i was introduced to mushrooms. My family has a long history of opium abuse, but mushrooms are hallucinogens, and the visions I saw were both funny and disturbing. My girlfriend, a senior member of the campus’ Hare Krishna, was supportive of my desires to experiment with drugs, but my penchant to shower regularly really irked her. My cleanliness was the downfall of our relationship. The only other things I remember is one night waking up naked at the entrance to the O’Connell Center, throwing up on my Linguistics professor, and having a menage-a-trois with the Helga, the manager of the campus Chik-Fil-A and Betty, a retired member of the Gators athletic training department.
Senior year brought a lot of perspective in my direction. I was without my previous girlfriend, or so I was told, who left me apparently because I wouldn’t stop singing “Mony Mony” while she was studying for a midterm. I was gaining weight at a rapid pace, because of my yearning for 20-ounce Cokes and binge trips to the Boar’s Head Deli. I got it together, though, and before graduation, I was weighing a svelte 215 pounds. My GPA ended up a slightly-above average 2.87, but I did the best I could.
Upon graduation, I began freelance sports writing, started teaching, and the rest, is history. I currently work as a substitute teacher for Pinellas County Schools, and I’m hoping for a full-time job in the fall. If not, I have a standing offer from the Florida State Fair to operate the tilt-a-whirl any time.
Please continue to check this page and the other parts of this website for updates and musings. Thank you and “goodnight now!”
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