scrapheap blogs

Don’t expect there to be another blog post very soon month by month...

Date: 23.03.2026

This is one of the few times to where, I want to re-write a lot of the blogs I’ve made I the past couple of months from last year to now, to where, I look back at a lot of the blogs I’ve made previous, and just re-tell these series of blogs in a better light, rather than just go out of my way to remake more of these blogs that have essentially the same message that I’m gonna give towards the end of it, because I feel like it would be better off if I did them all in one blog post, rather than in multiple, because it seems like I was harboring a lot of my issues that would pop up in several blog posts, and not just, really coming to the conclusion that: It would 100% be better off if I just stopped venting about shit that doesn’t matter anymore, and that I should just, let go of the past truly and move towards what it is that I want to do in the future going forward.

I’m gonna be doing this into chapters, and really discuss a lot of things that, were discussed before, and possibly weren’t discussed either.

Personal life

So I’m going to start from the first blog post going forward right. It’s true that a lot of my life was honestly embroiled into hardships, and I’m not going to go out of my way to say that it wasn’t because, otherwise there wouldn't a point to this blog post, no one persons life is perfect. When I was at least growing up in school, I was taught to make the best of life that you could, and to constantly make it onto honor roll, because thats what was the best I could do generally at the time in elementary. What I do remember a lot of the time was that, when I first began in elementary, I was getting repeat honor rolls, and getting honor rolls on repeat was, essentially very easy if you knew what you were doing. I stopped getting honor rolls after… Middle School, when I went to Luis Munoz Marin Middle School, Now called Luis Munoz Marin Elementary School, on 663 Broadway, Newark, New Jersey, the reason why they changed the name was because at the time, during the 2011 - 2012 years, the school behind it, Broadway Elementary School was once a prosperous school that I had once went to, with many other kids in the past as well, but what had happened was that, in the area of which the elementary school was at, was not one of the best areas, and was virtually unsafe for kids, and so because of this belief and stigma around the school, it slowly dwindled in enrollment, thus making Broadway Elementary, Merge with the Middle school, turning it into, officially, an elementary school. I knew this over a decade prior to this, as I also enrolled into Broadway Elementary back in the day, and because the school had shut down after I had graduated from LMMMS, It felt like a part of me just… was tossed in the bin, and still feels like that to this day; You begin to feel like this whenever something that you were apart of just, goes away because of something you can’t control, and this is going to be a repeat thing that you’ll notice a lot as I tell you about this chapter.

Previous to any of this, and no, I will not re-write any of this into proper context, the first school I had went to before this was Allgood Elementary. There was a pre-school I do remember going to, that was up a hill that I remember going to back in the day, but last time, I think, when I remember visiting it, either it either turned into an abandoned building, or it became abandoned, was never documented, and then they demolished it and turned it into an apartment building, which I think the ladder is what more than likely happened, because my dad and grandma were there when they were talking to me about it in Georgia, and they even told me that, the land used to be my former pre-school, and now it’s an apartment building. Anyways, Allgood Elementary, whenever I see it on google maps, had changed so much from it’s previous look, it used to have a main building and then it had trailers and stuff that represented classrooms, because the school couldn’t get enough funding at the time to extend the main building, but they were hoping overtime to save that funding to do so, and years later they did, which I’m proud of them for, but regardless, it was the first school I remember going to, on 312 Hard Road, Dallas, Georgia. Now I did write this in a way to explain the purpose of it, because at the time, when I went to both of these schools, this was before the advent, boom of the internet as we know it. Currently in the form of the interweb that we’re in right now is under Web 3, and around this time, we were, I believe around Web 1-2. Before the advent of how the web was, prior to 3, I remember around the time I was in Elementary and Middle School that, things were a lot more simpler at the time, but during the time I was in Middle School, I held massive amounts of resentment towards myself for many different reasons, from the way I looked, acted, responded to things; I essentially didn’t feel like I was myself, and people I think knew that, at the time.

I originally created ctrlgrid.neocities.org, as a place for me to put up my portfolio and to showcase the work that I could do, while on Neocities, and I’ve been here since August 20th of 2025, because I had originally placed this kind of prospect in other areas, like on Wordpress, on Adobe, on Squarespace, and I came to the realization that: A lot of the time you’re just better off doing this from scratch, especially when a lot of graphic designers, just, don’t want to get into code, when coding is fun when you know what you’re doing. I really liked the idea of trying to document my past, and really look towards the future, but what I’ve noticed in the past couple of months is that, I’ve really been harboring towards my past, and not really looking towards my future, and I really want to just, focus on the now, and in the future, rather than sulk constantly in every post I’ve made.

Anyways, what I mostly remember in the times to where I was in those schools was that:

In Allgood:

I had once met the girl that, I thought, was of my dreams (To preface as well, I was in contact with this girl for a while back in school, but what ended up happening was that, we tried to keep each other in contact over through Skype... and then we lost contact I believe it was a couple of months later. Skype ended up closing it's doors by the 5th of May, 2025, and I have not seen this girl in over... a decade I wanna say, and I remember for years going on a "crusade" saying that I'll find her one day... which never happened, and early on I had realized it was basically useless to really find a girl that, probably doesn't even remember me, and I accepted that it was pretty much a lost cause, and that there's nothing I can do about it.). I can’t really go into too much detail about that because, it was realistically a childhood sweetheart kinda thing, though I didn’t know it at the time. My family were essentially nomadic, and we still technically are to this day, and most of what I remember at this time when I was in school was, going out, having a different assortment of days in the later grades, going to gym, I remember there used to be this donut I would eat just about every single morning at the cafeteria, this was when you could eat it, it was called a sun donut, I stopped eating it when they said “It’s not free, you have to pay $$$ for it”, and there were times, though I hate to admit it now, because it costed my parents money that, I would go over to the cafeteria line, steal items, or attempt to, lie about it, whether it was to deceive lunch ladies or it was out of frustration-malice itself, and it had gotten so bad that, one of the lunch ladies had literally gotten fired because, she made racial remarks to me, said something along the lines of “I can’t fucking work for nigger children like you in this school, your parents should have enrolled you somewhere else.”, and from what I remember, she got fired and replaced because of it, and no, I’m not making that up, that actually did happen. We used to live up the road from it, on 559 Hart Road, though the house that sits on that lot today is vastly more different than it once was, to the point that I can’t even bother looking at it, because it hurts to look at. I don’t think of the school in much of a negative light itself, I do think that the teachers at the time were to power-grabby for their own good, and would downplay a lot of the things they would do to students, as there were some teachers that I do recall, being forced into their classes because “I wasn’t doing the work I was told to do.” And therefore “Would need to be moved, and tutored outside of class, until I would get my schoolwork right.”, and, a lot of the time, people think that the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was a horrible act that has lead to a lot of student really degrading the curriculum to this day, but at the time of when it was passed, the reason as to why they would add this act was because of specific reasons like mines, to where I would be moved, be told to do a specific paper, and I would get sent back to class, forcefully, which at the time, and even now, no teacher can enforce such a thing onto students, as that would be considered immoral, and could cost you the job, especially now in days, but at that time, you could get away with it, especially if the kid had a semblance of melanin in their skin apparently. I do think the NCLBAo’01 is outdated, and should potentially, in the future, be revised, along with other things in the grading curriculum, not just the act itself.

Though, outside of these things that I had seen at the time, there were some things I do vividly remember and I’m very fond of. I remember in my later years into school, because even then, schools were being ran by teachers that’re mostly women, and I don’t really think women should be the sole proprietors of schooling, I think it should be a mix of men and women, mostly men, but that’s just me, that whenever we had issues go on, they were dealt with quick. Like, I once remember, I forget which grade it was sadly, but I do remember it was one of the mid-to-later grades in elementary school that, the entire class was blamed for breaking all the crayons in half, and on the first occasion, it was framed because we all had a pizza party after the fact, but then by the second or third time, it was like “Yeah, our teacher is going to kill us if we keep doing this.”, and so we stopped I think after the fourth time. Another time was like, in that time that I remember, on my last day of going to that school, I think I was… grade… 4-5, I had a going away party, and that I was never going to be seen again from this school, which sadly turned out to be true, because since that day, I have never seen any of my school friends or piers since, and it’s been over two decades, and it’s left me wondering if they’re still doing well or not, sad to say, and a lot of the time, I do have more fond memories of going to Allgood, and I have looked at it from time to time again, from when I was in middle school to now, in the past decade, to see how the schools been doing, and it’s safe to say that: It’s doing just fine, a lot better than anticipated; though I have noticed that the racial demographics of the school has changed, which is nothing really to note. I have gone passed the school before numerous times, and I do wish that one day, I could like, possibly save up the money to go there for like a special occasion to go to that school for like a school wide event, but the likelihood of this happening is probably near 0 (Also to preface, after the time that we had the party that week, I did go back to the girl later on a couple of times to let her know how I felt about her at the time, not in the best way to do it, but in the way I thought at the time was just... which wasn't looking back at it, but we did exchange information for our skype stuff and all that. To be completely honest, I didn't know what I was going to get out of a hillbilly family at the time, as most hillbilly families around that time weren't keen on internet usage as most people. Most of them don't even use the internet to begin with, so it made no sense to begin with to "make a crusade to find her", when it was just better off from day one to just, leave her be, and forget about her. I remember her name to this day, but I just have no reason to get into contact with her because, for all I could know now in days, she either is living a good life with someone else in mind, and having a family with someone else, or she's out working doing some stuff, or she's dead, and I hope to god it's not the last. Wherever she's at in life, I'm proud of her, and I'm hoping she's doing fine is all. Under Article 134 of UCMJ, you can't just go out and start harassing people, whether physically or online, that can get you in trouble.). I did also look it up, the NCLBAo’01 was replaced in 2015 with the Every Student Succeeds Act, or the ESSAo’15 and if I had to guess, everyone complains about the previous act because of Bush, and because Bush is Republican, but praises the ESSA because it was Obama, and because he’s a Democrat, if I had to guess, which… I find to be stupid, and even more stupid with even more implications you could make, but I’m not going to go there.

Well, the reason as to why I ended up leaving the school was because around this time, the 2008 stock market crash had happened, and my father was hoping around this time was that: even though the crash was happening, and it was REALLY hitting us hard, what the hope for the next U.S. president was, was that they were going to vote for senator McCain, as his hopes were that if McCain won, that he would keep going on with a lot of the previous policies of the previous president, Bush, and things would go off smoothly from there, we could still continue to live life down in Georgia, and things would be fine… The 2009 voting precession would then have a lot of people become brainwashed into voting for Barrack Obama, because “He’s going to be the next black president of the United States! If you don’t vote for him, then you’re racist!”, which is what I remember would be spouted across the entire United States for 8 years to come and more. You don’t hear many people say that anymore, because that same beliefs and rhetoric is still being used by organizations, and some crackhead you would hear about down the street, screaming something along the lines of “If you don’t give me $7 right now, then you don’t like black people!” Or some dumbs shit like that. I even have had looked into McCain here and there, a lot of the time, McCain wouldn’t have been a good pick either, since a lot of what he proposed was also Democrat policies of the time, and was pretty much a Republican In Name Only, or RINO for short, and it’s not to say that I’m one side or the other, or whatever, I was apart of either sides, at one point of my life, and another, and now I just, do not really hold much of a belief in politics like I do anymore, though this may change, I just would rather keep my beliefs to myself, and I don’t want my politics to be let known about that stuff. (It's already been proven in the past, regardless of what side you take, you're always going to find some people on both sides that... aren't as bright as the rest or the other bunch, so that's generalistically why I don't go and pick either side, amongst other things. Under Article 134 of UCMJ, you can't really say that you're in support or that you deny anything in terms of political heads, and even Department of Defence Directive 1344.10 says you can't even interact with political activities in general, which, I 100% get, I wouldn't bother with that stuff.) This is not an endorsement for whichever political side, it’s just to to show that I have some knowledge in American politics, but not a lot, especially in how it’s changed over the past couple of decades. Well, because of this, and there was realistically no way go getting out to it, regardless of the choice, we had to liquidate our assets from the house at the time, and we ended up moving from Dallas, Georgia, where we could have had a good future in, to Newark, New Jersey.

In Broadway Elementary/Luis Munoz Marin:

By the time I ended up going to broadway, I had noticed that there was something going on with me mentally, behaviorally, and… differently with how I viewed the North and the South. This is called Code Switching, I had to look this up. This relies you having to assimilate, Mirror what’s going on around you, and become a social chameleon… I was none of that, instead when I was living in Newark at the time, I was Masking, I think I developed a form of Imposter Syndrome or Identity Dissonance, I never was a social chameleon, so I never experienced burnout that I recall, because I isolated myself for a majority of the time I grew up in Newark, I definitely was resistant to assimilation, and this lead me to withdraw from the city, as a form of personal preservation. This essentially just became authenticity, the opposite of code switching, I’ve also had to look this up. Because I had gotten so used to this for such a long time, for about, give or take from 2009 - 2013, I saw it as: I only code switched when I saw that it was worth it to code switch, not because other people want me to code switch. This does come up later in life, but I’ll just make a note of it here.

This would then repeat from 2009 - 2013, then again in my sophomore year of high school for three months, in 2015, but by the time that it had happened, I was still used to authentication that, I saw no real need to really code switch, if I knew it wasn’t for me in the long term, especially given that Newark is still pretty much a shithole city in my eyes. I don’t even think much of Newark, or even Ironbound-Newark, or West Side High School at the time, because those fucking areas are filled with some of the worst people that represent United States Citizens as a whole that, I would highly recommend that if you’re in that area, to just find a different place and leave it. I didn’t Code switch because I felt like there was a need to, I authenticated because I knew that if I did decide to code switch in that area, I would be getting into crime, and things that I really shouldn’t be getting into from the get go, and that, there were things out there that were more fulfilling in life, rather than things that are only fulfilling in that moment, and again, not all people that live over in Newark are shit people, I do think there are some that are great, but an overwhelming majority of them make them look bad, to be fair, and that’s why I personally view it as: Why would I want to code switch, when I would have been dead, over ten years ago for something that I don’t want to be involved with, and it’s what’s lead to a lot of discussions amongst some members of my family, to make me think in another way, as a way to gaslight me into thinking that I was wrong, when even at that time, I knew that I wasn’t. Chances are, if I did code switch fully, I would have gotten myself into gang culture, selling dope, doing drugs, and it wasn’t like I did bad things previously before, it’s just that, in this case, it would have potentially lead to my death, and I knew that even before hand. I especially saw this when like, the internet, and especially YouTube was becoming more mainstream. So, When I did enroll into Broadway Elementary, I knew at that time that, things were making me code switch, and even my teachers, mostly female, were telling me to code switch, but I didn’t for my sake, and they didn’t like that. But, in those years, my father had first began his enlistment into the United States Army, and just started to focus on putting me, and my brother into better schooling in the near future, which I’ll get into later, but in these years that I was in, even though I refused to code switch, and focused more on self preservation, and authentication, there were somethings I did learn when I went to Broadway at the time. At that time, I was learning about Yu-Gi-Oh! And Pokemon, and at the time, I was even learning about Bakugan, but, Bakugan… I can get to that later eventually, but I was learning about those two mainly. I really had more of a mix bag with Broadway, I did have some students that I remember go to that school, and apart of me feels like in that area with a lot of the things I saw there, a good percentage of those students growing up, were not going to go out of their way to like, find better pastures for themselves, and in the near future, just stay in Newark for the majority of their lives, if not all of it it seemed, and even I knew it as a kid, just thinking about it. But I did at least learn some things at this school especially that, made me think that “Maybe moving here wasn’t so bad after all.”, but there were some things I remember that came about, like one time where we constantly got harassed by some homeless dude that we let in our house, who got a girlfriend, and even like, tried to fuck in the bathroom with her, someone we barely even knew, and we had to kick him out because of that.

I remember there was a time to where, for months at a time, I wouldn’t even make an attempt to go to school, and I remember my parents were being threatened with jail time because of it, so much so that the police once had come up to my front door, to ask where I was, and I lied about where I was at one point. Unironically the police didn’t believe me at first, bluffed about it, and then said that: I am me, Obviously, and that I need to dress up for school, and I even closed and shut the door to get away from them, hid from them, and never came back from it for several months, but when the aspect of my parents going to jail because I had missed out on so much school came up, I just said “Yeah, I’ll go.”. This, had such an adverse effect on me that, for a couple of years, I would honestly argue this had stunted my knowledge of what I should have known for years in school, and has lead me to be more of an isolationist, and resistant to assimilation in the area. I also do remember the house I lived in at that time, and its what lead me to believe that, at that time in the early days of when I was living in Newark that, I was more of my authentic self, which I would argue is for better or for worse, but if you ask me, later on, it would be for the better. But, eventually, I would go to the school, and so I would end up moving from this school, to another elementary school, but that’s for later. (This is to preface as well, I'm in no way saying that if I were to enlist that I would go AWOL. Under Articles 85-86 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, it references that any act, thereof, where an enlisted member of any service branch of the United States Leave's post without proper authorization to leave, can be subjigated to punishment, and desertion of post, while similar, is even worse. Going AWOL can lead to: reduction of pay, reduction of rank, a dishonorable discharge, if it's over a month, and confinement of up to a year. Going on desertion can lead to: A Dishonorable Dischaege, No Pay, Reduction of Rank, 5 years in confinement, loss of VA benefits, and can affect your career, and can give you a record on your criminal record. What I had learned as a kid from deserting school was that: Not only did it make me dumber in respect, it also made me less likely to, in the future, want to go out of my way to desert where I'm supposed to be, for any amount of time, so to this day, I don't desert or go AWOL on where I'm supposed to be for any reason, and if I have an issue with whatever is going on in my life, I make attempts to make that seperate, rather than conjion the two together, and get stressed out and worried about something that, I can reasonably deal with later.)

When it came to me going to Luis Munoz Marin Middle School, now Elementary School, this was a couple of months after the fact that my blood parents had divorced, and separated. This was due to the fact that, my mother was pretty much a mental manipulator, didn’t want to do what she was told, was told many things to bypass the system, to make money off of other peoples expenses and dimes, all because of fallacies and because “I’m your mother, and I gave you life, and you have to do what I say.”, which case, what I have to say is: Fuck you, no, that’s not how that works when you have kids, go eat shit. When I first went in, I was dealing with a heavy period of depression. It wasn’t unique or special — plenty of people go through difficult chapters in their lives — but it was real, and it shaped how I saw myself at the time. What mattered most was learning to talk about it, getting support, and making decisions that moved me forward instead of staying stuck. That experience taught me something important: hard moments are temporary, and the best thing you can do is keep walking, keep choosing the next right step, and let yourself grow past whatever you’re facing.

That’s what I did, and it’s what helped me become the person I am now. Now in days, I don’t look into what I thought I was in the past, because that was over ten years ago, now I’m in the now, I don’t have any thoughts of stuff that I did back in the day, I do see myself in a better light than I did back in the day, and if anything, I feel like I’m better off living how I am now than I did at that time. It didn’t help that people didn’t like me for who I was because, I was essentially a social outcast, but I learned that: You’re way better off being who you are, rather than being apart of a group, because groups come and go in waves, and just because you’re apart of a group now, doesn’t mean that group is going to be there forever. Like when I was in middle school, I knew that I wasn’t going to be apart of my pier group forever, and realistically, I know only like maybe… one person I keep in contact from that era, and I may only contact that person like… once a year, if that. I haven’t come into contact with that friend group from graduation, and I don’t have any plans to.

Main reason being that: When I was transferred from Broadway, to LMMMS, I only reconciled with some teachers from Broadway, though, none of them even bothered to be like “Oh yeah, I remember you.” Because I get that in their profession they were in high stress of losing their Job when I was there in LMMMS, so much so that the librarian of Broadway was literally at risk of losing her job for several months when I was in LMMMS that, one day she couldn’t handle the job, and just quit, which fair on her. A lot of the elementary school teachers that I even had at the time, didn’t even remember me when I went to that school, while I was there, and even admitted to my face as such, which was a bummer, but it’s not like I could do anything about it, because it was so long ago at that time, even longer now. The only teacher I remember that remembered me, briefly for the NJASK was my art teacher, and she remembered me only for that test, and nothing more. Every other teacher when I was at Broadway, pretty much just forgot about most of their students, which, I don’t blame them. When I was in LMMMS, I maybe knew about… 6 students that were enrolled with me to that school at the time, from Broadway Elementary to LMMMS, and I think only one of them graduated from the same school with me at that time, of class of 2018. Since then with LMMMS, I don’t think really too much of it, there was a time I had to go for summer school because I was essentially failing all my grades, getting D’s and F’s at the time, and I had gotten so many failing grades that I had to go to summer school at Rafael Hernandes Middle School, and I hated it so much, but knew that if I didn’t pass Summer school, I would be held back by a grade, and later on if I didn’t pass the NJASK, I wouldn’t be able to graduate, but what I did was enough for me to get to the next grade regardless. For that time I went to RHMS, I fucking hated going there, because I was relentlessly bullied there, and I remember no one liking me, and I remember even just reacting to the thought of me going there with so much volatility that I legit said to my mom one time, shouting and screaming that “I WOULD RATHER BE HELD BACK A GRADE, THAN GO TO RAFAEL-HERNANDEZ!” And what I said at the time fell on deaf ears.

I did get up a grade, there was nothing I could do about it, so I ended up going back to LMMMS, and a year or two after that, graduated. Again, maybe once a year, or once every couple of years, I talk to my one friend I graduated with, and keep up with things that I went to with… now in days, things have became so distant with me on this area and time of my life that, I no longer really think of Middle school as much anymore, and I think it’s more of a message of: If you need help, go and get your help, you never know how wondrous just talking to people in general is, or getting a paid psychiatrist is like.

Now in between the time that I was in Broadway Elementary and Luis Munoz Marin Middle School, now Elementary School, you may have noticed that I said I had transferred out of Broadway, and the school I went to was:

Lincoln Elementary School on 301 Harrison Street, Nutley, New Jersey. Now granted, this was early 2010s, so a lot of what I remember from this school, I do look back on fondly, but what I will say that, I respect this school a lot more than LMMMS or even Broadway Elementary in my personal experience, not towards the same length as Allgood, but to the same level. I remember this was also around the time that schools would allow students to go outside of the school for lunch, which they no longer allow because… now in days were kind of on a witch hunt for pedophiles now in days, which makes a lot of sense, but even at that time, before pedohunting was even a thing, after the years of Chris Hansen essentially doing the same thing with Dateline, at that time in LES, students were just able to go out and eat at restaurants, but in groups to prevent students from just waltzing around on their own and getting kidnapped. There’s a Burger King, two blocks away from the school that we all used to go to, and come right back from school to, that’s still there to this day, though it’s fame now has pretty much gotten down to shit I would argue. Main reason being that, this specific BK used to own a little side area to where you could essentially play little games here and there, that were big in the 80s - 90s, but by the time we got there, they were in the middle of being dismantled, and by the time I got older, they had essentially made that digital play place, into a row of more places to sit and eat, which is depressing.

But this isn’t to say I don’t hold more respect for LES, because this was when I actually got to understand more about joining cliques with friends, and treating my piers more as friends, and to get to know my friends more and shit, so instead of me just like, going to school and hating it, I loved it for a certain amount of time, and then hated it, and then loved it again. I think the reason being was that, the higher edge schools reminded me more of being a kid again, and seeing that my father had enlisted, and when he did enlist, that he was making so much money to where we could essentially lived like how we did back in Georgia was starting to pop up, I saw it as an opportunity to just, live the life that I once loved again, and that I could take full advantage of it, and not have to authenticate myself, and just go full into code switching once more, and so that’s what I did. Well, around this time, my parents were having more arguments than usual, they were having issues with me watching stuff I probably wasn’t supposed to, my mom was using my fears of whatever the fuck I was watching, against my dad, and everything was spiraling into a way to where, I would eventually lose everything, all because my mother was a fucking dumbass, and didn’t fucking know anything about me, and what I wanted out of life, and if I went against her wishes, and went for what I wanted in life, that I was wrong, that I was always going to be in the wrong, and I saw that and went “Fuck you, you fucking fat piece of shit, I’m not going to sit down and take that, and if I did, I would go back to what I once was.”, but that was later in life, but at that moment, she was seeking a “psychiatrist”, at the time, and was being fucking stupid with the money she used the shit with, and she ended up fucking everything up, and we moved out of Nutley because of her own negligence. I’m not saying the stuff that I say because I’m solely putting the blame on her, no, it was purely because of her, because of the words, and actions she took, that I now resent my mother, and what she did for our family, that I now just refuse to speak with her, looking back at all the writings I made in the past, and I’ve pretty much cut her out of my life, and don’t have any consideration to call her “Mom” anymore, and that’s not the devil coming out of me, that’s me being truly me, that’s me saying that: Things didn’t work out because of what she did, not because of me.

By the time I had noticed that, I wasn’t going to live in Nutley for very long, I was so distraught about the fact that I couldn’t stay, because it was going to be Georgia 2.0 again, and I genuinely didn’t want to leave, but I remember my teacher at the time, Mr. Balcatto at the time, told me “sometimes things happen and they’re not meant to be.”. At the time of be leaving LES, I was such in distraught and distress that, I knew that my teachers saw that stuff, and just like how it was in Georgia, they threw together a going away party for me, This was still at the time where you could throw parties with cakes and pizza, and it meant a lot to me at the time. At this time, even though it was at the expense of teachers pockets, we had several of them, I remember in Allgood, we had them on special occasions, or on holidays, and it was the same with LES, and sometimes with LMMMS. By the time I had left LES, and transferred to LMMMS, I ended up just realizing the position I was in, and I knew that the best thing to do for the next three years or so was to stay my authentic self, and to never code switch until I got out.

This was also around the time I ended up going to Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, on South 9th Street in Newark, which is now Uncommon Schools North Star Academy Fairmount & Liberty Campus, and all I got to say is that: If you went to that school like I did temporarily… I feel your pain, I’ve been threatened death many times from students when I was at that school, and MLKJr.ES was one of the few times, outside of LMMMS, and BWES (Broadway Elementary School for short), to where I was actually beaten, threatened to be stabbed, almost shot, etc., because I didn’t code switch or complied with pier demands. I remember it was so bad at MLKJr.ES that, I actually had to run away from a gang of students that, jumped me so bad, one of them had a knife, and I legit had to crawl up a fence, and jump it, and run, because I genuinely did not want to get stabbed, and I had to skip school and run back home because of it. All I remember was running down Central Avenue, Going up towards Broadway, running right towards Oriental, and running back home, and I saw my big brother, and told him what happened, and he said “You can stay inside then, and hide. Don’t look out of the window, they’ll find you.”, and I had to skip school for the day. Since then, as weird as what I’m about to say right, Martin Luther King Jr. on S 9th Avenue, from what I remember, was getting a bunch of reviews at the time from parents, saying the same stuff, if not similar, and since I believe, a little before I graduated middle school, the place had completely shut down, and has since been replaced, and I think that that’s great, and it should stay that way. I think this was the nearest ever time that I had ever gotten threatened with death directly, and I never went back, except when I was told to. To this day, I look back and go “If I had a kid, and that kid had something like that happen to me in the future, starting that day, they’re not going back to that school, idc if I gotta go to jail and get a record for not taking them, I’m transferring them somewhere else.”, but my mom told me that you’re going there whether you like it or not, which… motherfucker, that was life or death, I don’t want to take my kids to a school where that’s implied, ever.(Looking back as I'm reading up on this, this was what you're supposed to do in cases like these, that you run, and you hide, and run, and never look back, which is exactly what i did. Even though yes, I ran home, and never went back to school that day, as I explained to my mother what happened, next day, I did go back to school, because everyone essentially told me that I had to, and that day going forward, were a series of attempted stabbings from other students upon me that, I really tried hard to avoid, and while I've almost gotten stapped before, I never once had it actually go through completely because... It's obvious that, stabbing people for any decernable reason is wrong, not even I would do that. But this was an issue with the school at the time, and the school has now been replaced, and I've never heard an issue about the school since then. I even remember back in the day, people doubted that this had happened, and people are still going to doubt that this had happened in general, and I'm going to say it straight away to you: You weren't there when this had happened, I had to do everything I could to get away from those people and I was unwilling to become a statistic just to prove my innocence, I've had many threats and attemps done in my life with people, this was the first time it happened, it wasn't the last.)

By this time, I ended going to that school LMMMS, and just about transferred out of MLKJr.ES, and graduated from LMMMS.

Higher Education