home

spirits and hypocrisy

listen to my lists

pop cults

propaganda

art of rex

downloads

wicked old stuff

rexelsewhere

my life began in very coincidental, yet inconsequential circumstances - much the same way it has resumed. i was born on the 27th of february in 1977. they didn't weigh me metrically, so i was coincidentally born at seven pounds and seven ounces. i was also born on a sunday, which many people refer to as "the seventh day." mom says i completed the family and that the number seven symbolically means "completion." i suppose she could've thought of something nice to say for whatever number i was dominantly disposed toward. apparently, i was what parents refer to as a "surprise," which is just a nicer way of saying "accident." she had her own reasons for saying such things, however. just a few months before i was born, my father died of the "big c". i used to joke with my family that i saw dad coming to heaven on the way to earth, but i have changed my theological beliefs since then. now i believe that pre-earth souls occupy different space than earth's dearly departed.

the sevens aren't quite over. obviously i made the family complete since dad's death saw to it that the family wouldn't be growing

any more (at least not through ways other than more marriage). but if seven truly means completion, the fact that i was child number seven in a family of seven truly might mean something. my six sibs and i are actually strangely similar, even for a family.

we're actually most similar in the fact that we are so completely different from our mother. i used to wonder if my mom was actually an adoptive parent. i wondered if it was possible that perhaps instead of adopting all of us, we as a family adopted her.

this is me in a rare early moment of pure contentment.

i think the biggest reason that i tend to emphasize the similarities of my brothers and sister is because i see the whole of us as very different from other families. most other families go through intense lows and spats at some times and at other times go through teary periods of sublime joy together. our family just quotes movie lines to each other, so i don't recognize differences right up front. anyway, one of my middle brothers (dale) recently finally pointed out an easy method to tell us apart by using the seven

dwarves from snow white fame:
sleepy: mary kaye
sneezy: peter
dopey: dale
bashful: jeffrey
happy: andrew
doc: michael
grumpy: jonathan (me)

actually this isn't very accurate at all, but at least it shows some difference. some are quite obvious. happy fits andy. mike was designated doc because he just received his doctorate and he's the only one of us who has done so. the less-obvious dwarf analogies are perhaps expectedly reaching. for instance, sleepy only fits my only sister, mary kaye, because my brother dale (the one who thought up the whole seven dwarves thing) once saw her fall asleep drinking a glass of water. unfortunately, my designation is obvious and fitting. i'll speak more of it later.

i grew up with the clan in a place on the east side of utah in a place called roosevelt. one time when i told a kid i was from roosevelt, he put it down by saying that it was a place where everyone in town gathered to watch the traffic light change. very small town. it was home to me, so i never considered it "small." it was just there. it was home. i never had a desire to leave, because the only people i cared about were there.

our house was plenty comfortable and perfect for night games. lots of places to hide. the yard went all around the house with a giant weeping willow in the southeast corner. some form of fence surrounded the property with adjacent bushes. the place faced south and the back had a huge balcony on the northeast side and a basketball hoop on the northwest. the west part of the property was a gigantic garden that is still probably home to dozens of dirt-clogged plastic green army men.

of course most of my time at this great childhood home was actually spent indoors. i came into the earth just as a few new leaps in mind-numbing technology were being brought to pass. when i was a few years old, our family purchased an atari 2600 along with a color tv. my mother surely wouldn't have exposed me to such things if she realized that they would possibly influence me more than her. a couple of years later we enjoyed the fine mental cuisine of cable television. for me, cable just meant more outlets of animation. besides my weekly "transformers" fix, i also had several first run disney favorites.

i think the cable had a different impact on my brothers. it is a fairly well-known fact that people who grow up in small towns only listen to country music. my family was the huge exception, possibly because we tend to love spite so much. this was about the beginning of the music television age. somehow, we became the only small-town folks who never, ever listened to country music.

i liked literature with pictures. i still like literature with pictures. i'm not sure if my obsession with comics is still alive because of some kind of freudian childhood association. the comic strip peanuts had a very profound effect on me. i would laugh nervously at it and then get deeply depressed over it. i laughed because charlie brown's life was so intensely tragic and i just latched onto it. it was about then that i felt that, on average, i was down a lot more than i was up (and hence my perpetual grumpiness). it could just be a wrong perception, but i blame peanuts for it.

if i remember right, my first kiss was in first grade. i think her name was mandy. a few guys had to hold me in place when it happened, as kisses were more like violent crimes back then. had i known how many years it would be, before another such opportunity would arise, i'm sure i would've put up less of a struggle. back then, though, girls were the enemy. i guess it's programmed into every young boy at an early age, because i can't really figure out the source of the apparent animosity. perhaps it was early flirtation. my family recognized a need to leave my only-beloved town. as i mentioned, my sibs didn't always connect well with the people in roosevelt. they mostly looked up to our extended family living elsewhere - mostly provo, utah (roosevelt could be one of the only places in the world where its people flee to provo for a less sheltered life).

the earliest shot i have of all the groovers together. notice the socks and sandals. pictured left to right: jeremy tuck, peter ivie, jon madsen, j.r. fillmore, jake willis. actually jeremy wasn't really a groover, but we had him hang out with us to make ourselves look better by comparison.

i, along with the family, came to provo at the very beginning of 1986. about five minutes later i fell into a gang called the groovers. the groovers were and continue to consist of me, the guy across the street (peter), the guy across the street from him (jake) and the guy up the hill (j.r.). our gang mostly consisted of us sitting outside wondering what to do while the rest of the neighborhood had parties and enjoyed themselves. eventually our main talent and pleasure became downplaying the enjoyment of everyone around us. like just about everything else, i didn't realize how much the groover philosophy would affect me, and probably the other groovers.

during the initial groover period i began to immerse myself in two more works of literature: calvin and hobbes and bloom county. calvin and hobbes needs no explanation. it mostly deals with the perception of mankind through the eyes of two separate philosophies. bloom county has a split personality between the ultra-real and the fantastically absurd. the strip actually won a pulitzer, i assume for its political commentary. amazingly, it also displays heart and charm completely out of left field.

i finished up elementary school at provo, but that summer i moved once again. this time the family didn't come along. my mother had decided to get remarried and since everyone else was old enough, i was the only one who had to tag along with mom. the new husband's place was in a town called draper, which was still in utah. the transition gave me an extraordinary opportunity to really exercise my talent for spite. 12-year-old boys are full of spite anyway, but i felt i was justified by having more. my whole life having one parent was actually normal. i was the only one in the family who considered single-parenthood normal, yet, during this period, i was the only one exposed to double-parenthood. needless to say, i never made the situation easy for mom.

i grew out of unjustifiably hating girls when my body told me to think differently. i had no idea the battles would go on with different weaponry though.

i lived out the wonder years in draper. middle school and high school in the jordan school district were very sub-par. for some reason all my friends were learning foreign languages in seventh grade when such things weren't even offered to me. the other half of drivers' ed was a class on drugs instead of car maintenance. even the teasing from the other kids was pathetic. the derogatory word for a smart kid was "bio." etymologically speaking, the term makes absolutely no sense.

in eighth grade i fell into another gang. we didn't have a name. we mostly watched videos and copied each others' video games. sometimes we'd throw food on parked cars. when i say "sometimes" i mean "every day," and when i say "parked cars" i mean "one specific car in the teachers' lot initially chosen randomly, but painstakingly targeted no matter what kind of precaution the owner took." actually, only one of us (not me) targeted the car. he's a nice guy, so i won't mention his name.

by ninth grade i started not caring about appearance. my hair went curly and i went months without cutting it. i also began wearing sweats to school. i have two theories about my slobbiness: 1. i was unnecessarily into fashion fads in eighth grade and wanted to make up for it and 2. i wanted to practically put to use the naive philosophy that looks don't matter and we should just appreciate what's on the inside and all that. i suppose in middle school, everything you wore communicated something, even when you didn't want to communicate anything.

also during this period of ninth grade coming-of-age self expression i met a weird bloke named brent. up until this time i kept a journal periodically (usually as an outlet for my bad mood), but this brent fella didn't just write every once in a while. he used to carry a personal log with him. i was very impressed by his diligence in recording the world around him. he used to say that his book of thoughts would be a very important resource for the world someday. i stole his practice of writing books throughout the day in the years that followed.

after beginning high school (high school began sophomore year in the crappy jordan school district) at the darkness known as alta high school, i realized i was getting pretty used to the whole salt lake county thing. i had plenty of friends (some were even girls) and i my high school colors were black and red, which i thought fit me pretty ok. unfortunately, while i was enjoying myself, my mother and my stepfather weren't (with no thanks from me as i mentioned earlier). they separated and my mom and i waited out the divorce back in good 'ol provo.

of course moving back to provo had its advantages. the groovers were still there, i knew a lot of great places to eat, byu used to have a pretty good arcade etc. there were, however, some problems that i hadn't anticipated. going to school at timpview high school was notoriously cliquish. i really wasn't sure what my place was as a kid who wasn't really new, but was last seen in that town attending elementary school. also, mom, sensing that the move affected me more than it did, put me into therapy. the therapy didn't really do too much except gave me a little prestige as someone who actually had therapy. another problem was that the acceptable music of choice among my old friends and the school in general was "classic rock." my zealous beliefs in what was known as "modern rock" made this transition a bit "rocky."

a rare photo of ammon "cutting loose."

during my reunion with provo, i of course met a few new faces. one of the most notable was this weirdo named ammon. ammon was the school liberal, which, at the time, didn't fit well with my own happy valley conservative beliefs. strangely, the two of us became pretty good friends. this is probably because ammon, like me, was a "mod" and he was the only other peer i knew who enjoyed m*a*s*h. he joined my circle of friends and was dismayed that he was just about the only one not in therapy.

the finished product will come soon!