1968-Present

(some memories)

1968 Born "John David Coleman" at 3:01 A.M. in Klamath Falls, Oregon; exactly on the Pisces/Aquarius cusp (with the moon in Scorpio, and Sagittarius rising).

1970 Eugene, OR.  First Distinct Memory: I swiped some LSD from a friend of my mother; was taken to Sacred Heart Hospital, but was not  treated.  Learned my colors and toilet trained: remembered my "big golden dream" as if it were a huge landmark, like watching the stationary moon from a speeding car.

1971 Seattle, WA.  Moved into a Radha/Krishna ashram for two weeks.  My mom snuck in toilet paper, as we didn't want to use our left hands; I had my head shaved except for a long ponytail which was hastily shaved off by my grandfather soon after leaving the temple.

1972 Vida, OR.  Sordid yet innocent sexual experimentation with neighbor kids in the bathroom.  Mother's sexuality a curiosity for awhile.

1973 Mother remarries, and I now have a Jewish ("Casten") dad, and a Celtic ("Inskeep") mother.  The wedding is advertised on the radio, and there is a huge celebration at a community hall.  We fly to Los Angeles and stay at the Mayfair hotel: I have a closet for a room, and I get fabric scraps and egg-flour glue for Christmas.  We have fun flying paper airplanes out of the windows several stories up, watching one go into a cab car.  We move to a house in El Segundo, and watch an airplane land without landing-gear.

1974 We move to a run-down flat in Syracuse New York, witness the blizzards and thunderstorms, violent gangs, a flooded park which people traverse with canoes, a flooded basement which turns off the heat (landlord was sued), and my newborn sister, who was born with a hole in her heart, catches pneumonia.  We Move to a high-rise building, and one day after school, my parents have moved, and a neighbor puts me on a bus that goes through a couple of states on its way to the Bronx.  The Bronx grade school is a fortress, with TV-dinner lunches, and not as many lessons as in Syracuse.  I ride in my Uncle Joel's cab around NYC (I did not know at the time that Uncle Joel had robbed a bank, or that stops by the candy store may have been food for his junkie habit).

1975 Back in Vida, OR., I wait for the school bus by an old braying donkey.  I daydream my way to last in class.  I take some psilocybin with my parents, and hallucinate Popeye holograms, and watch the movie "Sleeper."

1976 Now in Aloha, Oregon, I'm doing better at school, and I begin to make some good friends.  I start to read, take up hobbies, and like creative toys and drawing.  We neighbor kids get in trouble by convincing one of our group to try a pill we found.  Luckily, nothing happened.  The early confusion of youth begins to settle down into habit, routine, ritual.   The Portland Trail Blazers win the NBA championship.  My sister has open-heart surgery, heart-failure, almost dies, and recovers for a long time at Dornbecker Hospital: I enjoy the company of the other kids, especially one with huge hands, who I push around the ward in a cart.  I myself end up going to the hospital one day, when I daydreamingly ride my bike into a house.  This sort of thing has happened before (telephone pole, parked car).  Some friends and I win the school's newspaper recycling drive.  We eat pizza with the winnings.  My dad studies Television at a PCC, and I get a look behind the camera, especially when he gets a job as camera man for the Blazers.  By this time, he and mom divorce.

1979 Mom, sister, and I move to an old trailer at Agate Beach, Oregon.  I love the stormy beach, and explore a graveyard by the lighthouse with friends.  I get my own television, and begin to watch old movies on WTBS.  The class difference between myself (on welfare), and a friend whose dad is a bank VP, is stark: he introduces me to Richie Rich comic books.  Another friend and I skate-board on ramps, and steal some dope from his surfer brothers.  Later, I get greedy and overdose on a huge batch of liberty-caps: fish-eye tears, and emotional turmoil as I listen to Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene on headphones.

1980  We move into town, Newport, and I begin Jr. High.  I get challenged to a fight after school one day, and the kid breaks his hand on my face.  An acquaintance suggest that I won, since a bone was broken.  My black eye was a badge of shame, especially with the girls I began to really notice.  Certain people were just to be avoided, some where to be longed for.  I got into pretending to be a spy, James Bond like, with a friend, and we both got into Micronauts.  We picked up a piece of opened candy off a store floor once, and were eventually trailed and confronted a few blocks away by a manager.  We lied, and said we got the candy elsewhere.  I began to use TRS-80 computers at school, where I got an award for algebra; and while finding a screwdriver solution to the Rubik's Cube in a Scientific American, I found an advertisement for a Sinclair computer-- I ordered one, but soon after I got it in the mail, my family moved to Bend, Oregon, for the drier air that would help my sisters sensitive lungs.

1981 In Bend I began to play Dungeons and Dragons, programmed various games on my little computer, and hung out with friends-- riding bikes, getting in snow-ball fights, and discussing all sorts of personal secrets.  Masturbation was on the horizon, and obsessive crushes on girls developed.  My mom bought me an Atari computer, and then my programming really began to take off.  I started High School, was a bit of a nerd, but enjoyed most of my interests that I shared with my friends.

1983 Moving back to Eugene, I was delighted to have my first computer game accepted to be published.  Having few friends, and some luck already, I dedicated myself to programming, to some measure of success.  My Sophomore and Junior years I met two good friends, my best friend, who had a job and a car, and a girl who took a fancy to me.  I began to get mostly A's in school, Lettered in Soccer, went to Boys' State, but never seemed to succeed matching up the girl(s) I liked with the girls that liked me.  I began to listen to new wave music, and went to a disco on some weekends.  Making-out with clubbing girls with acne could be a little disappointing.  Drive-In B-movies were a blast-- but never had enough sex in them to satisfy my teen lust.

1986 Failing to enter Stanford (I blamed it on a teacher of mine who forgot to submit the recommendation form he was supposed to fill out for me), I entered the UO.  My Computer and Information Science advisor was unimpressed with my claims to computer knowledge, and I drifted towards the journalism route.  Parties were an obsession, and joining a fraternity became a natural consequence.  I met many friends there, and was re-introduced to dope and LSD.

1987  Gave my virginity to an acquaintance who first hinted that she was in love with someone else and it subsequently became clear that I was not to fall in love with her--a fumbley and unmemorable experience in all.  I was honest about the drug use when I joined the National Guard-- the recruiter didn't seem to mind, and I did get the highest score he'd seen on the comprehensive military entrance exam.  Boot camp was no written exam.  It pushed me deep, sick inside myself, as I tried to maintain a low inconspicuous profile there: my body could barely take it, and my mind just followed my body.  I learned much about my body, mind, the military, and institutions in general: it was an "accomplishment" that one would not want to have ahead of one-- exploding grenades, crawling under machine gunfire, marching for miles, breathing in a lung-full of teargas. etc.  I returned from boot camp, got drunk, stoned, and fried-- and used my concentration to burn a hole into the sun of my consciousness: I opened a dictionary at random and pointed to the first word I saw: "Brahma." I began to take notes.

1988 My second year in college, I re-discovered the humanities, and fell in love at first sight in a metaphysics class.  Alas, that relationship was to remain in my imagination.  I began to feel my way into English and Philosophy, especially poetry, existentialism, and critical thinking in general.

1989  I made a couple of cassette tape music collage's and hid them with some poetry in locations for my dream girl to find, to no avail.  After a heavy acid trip and a dose of Nietzsche and Joyce in the summer after my 3rd year in college, I wrote "Humbled Beyond a Word"-- a poem that was to haunt me with paranoia for sometime afterwards.  I saw her for the last time, and didn't even know it.

1990  I tried my hand at some water-color painting early in 1990, and came up with what I was later to call the Last Icon.  I had sex for the last time that January, and have been celibate ever since.  Reality was replaced by an active imagination, and many love interests of the mind.  Poetry had found me, shy, dreamy, intense, and crafty.  I began to take myself as an artist seriously (not that anyone else really did-- but my poetry has had an emotional impact on my friends).  It was all about possibilities of potential talent fulfilled.

1991 1990-1991 was my year to live alone, and I loved it.  I really enjoyed my privacy, although I visited friends often-- it was a time for monkish experiments of the mind.  I was really getting into being me, and I was ready to have a serious romantic relationship.  I fell in love again, and the clues were everywhere that this was going to happen.  For the next ten years, it never did.  I began to feel as if I were watched all the time, and that people were giving me clues through double-talk, innuendoes, and hints, about a promising future of love and money; both of which I'd sort of given up on for a time, to be that celibate monk artist poet-- which I felt content with.  I began to talk to a wall-hanging that I suspected was tapping back signals to me.  One for yes, two for no, three for I love you, etc.  But the communication was never clear enough to prove something in my mind.

1992 I moved back in with some friends, and rotated roommates for the next couple of years while I completed my M.A. in Philosophy; all the time, being watched, and talking to the wall, and never knowing if I had already slipped out of sanity.  I got into postmodernism backwards, studying it from the vantage point of the history of philosophy.  This proved to be just my cup of tea intellectually, and my years of computer programming, and consequent interest in Artificial Intelligence complimented my studies of deconstruction quite well-- I had an intellectual angle to pursue.  Since the 1988 "Brahma" incident, I had all this time been taking notes for a grand poem: Post-Digital Revelation.

1994 What I began to suspect in 1993 became my reality at the start of 1994: the cameras turned into microphone/speakers and moved strait into my head.  I was engaged with the observer(s) strait from the mind now, every waking hour-- even a movie starlet was communicating with my mind.  Paranoia pointed to a logic professor, and I was arrested in a Romantic Poets class after punching out of the UO via the professor's face.  He seemed prepared for it, almost manipulating the situation-- I'll never forget the way he tried to corner me, with his head tilted back, sneering at me just before my knuckles made contact.  He was an ass enough, that he deserved that upbraiding, even if he wasn't responsible for the voices in my head.  Things didn't turn out well.  After a stint in the mental health hospital ward in the county jail, I was tortured in my head and body for years.  Ears ringing, bleeding, violated, molested, sexually assaulted, nightmarish emotions, and excruciating repetition of harassment tactics aimed at me by a team of people evidently concerned about somehow raising money by doing this to me-- millions if not billions of dollars for charity, and then diverting money away from what they perceived as bad politics.  Arguments boiling out of arguments, and me beating myself black and blue-- with a raccoon's mask of black eyes.

1996 After actually taking the medications for almost a year (and medications for medication side effects), the chemical lobotomy sneaked me off into a near emotionless coma for the next seven years: a time of routine, dry mouth, constipation, anxiety, worry, dread, phobias, and paranoia that the public was hip to my work and talking about it everywhere through innuendo.  Eight hours of TV. a day, and two for reading: I read over two hundred books on cognitive science, deconstruction, etc.

2000 I begin Meditating 20 minutes a day and pray nightly. My sister Dies.  My mother has terminal liver disease with less than years to live.  My sister's six year old son might some day be my responsibility.  I can barely wipe my own ass right.... more to worry about.

2003 Soon after I switched medications to Abilify, Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida wrote me back, I got eyeglasses... and my voices returned to a constant assault, but this time offering a bit of hope.  Life was still crap, but I was too wrapped up in my head to worry about it.

2004 The arguments are all about politics now.

2005 Undergo Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (my experimental "study" at Yale), and it helps quite a bit.

2006 Work on my art and poetry.

2007 Balancing a life of madness and responsibility. Finally publish the book-length poem "Post-Digital Revelation."

2008 Working on Post-Egoism (and waiting....) Publish "Ana Voog - Dreaming on Stage" for the artist Ana Voog. Finish "The Rhythm of The Chill" - a book of poetry, art & photography.

2009  Complete Music CD Albums: "American Power Projection" and "Melody Method" under the moniker The Rhythm Messiahs. Establish Post Egoism Media. Publish "Samsara Gate" for the artist Sara G. Umemoto. Sign Brenden "nerBeater" MacDonald to Post Egoism Media.

2010  Won the crazy argument in my head. My artworks appear in three galleries. Release The Rhythm Messiahs' "Daymare" + Tie-dye Laces' "Sky Dreams," Publish "The Return of the Magnificent Ninny and Other Poems" for Raj Dronamraju and "The Weekly Press Standard Edition" for Bruce Allen Bayard.