Bruce Brownlee:
CLASS OF 1968
Westwood High SchoolClass of 1968
Westwood, MA
University of Massachusetts Class of 1977
Boston, MA
Beloit CollegeClass of 1972
Beloit, WI
Westwood Junior High SchoolClass of 1964
Westwood, MA
Westchester Elementary SchoolClass of 1962
Los angeles, CA
Bruce's Story
Life
Don't you mean "autobiography"? Or perhaps there is more to this than the usual nonsense. (Also, please note: "Bio" means "life," and I'm fussy about this sort of thing.)
I will therefore take the "Life" as having something to do with Time-Life, possibly a subscription series in which I figure largely, for reasons I cannot conceive; and I will take "Biography" as meaning that this should be written in the third person, as in The Education of Henry Adams (good) or some several frothing gesticulations from Norman Mailer (bad.)
For purposes of this Biography, I am tempted to refer to myself as "Bruce," which is obvious but clear. Neither obviousness nor clarity is a concern of mine here, however, so I will refer to myself as "Machine Molle," for reasons that few can fathom, and even fewer care. Variations, abbreviations, and odd little plays on the "MM" motif cannot be entirely ruled out. "Muddy Mouse" comes to mind.
Disclaimer: much of what purports to be fact in this brief yet compelling piece will be compromised by faulty memory, a tendency to pursue several mental directions at once, and a great love of making things up.
Machine Molle was born too long ago. This happened, that happened, etc. He went through some odd phases. He had some fleeting chemical experiences, and some fleeting sexual experiences. Sometimes both at once. However, due to the family nature of our radio program here, I cannot deal with matters of uncontrollable lust in shockingly explicit detail. However, you can probably imagine these lurid scenes yourself.
At some point he attended Beloit College. At some point he left Beloit College. A few years later he went to a degree mill from a rival brand, under the nom de guerre of Muddy Mouse. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, four point oh, with few as surprised as Mud himself, who had never before done anything perfectly, unless it was to make a perfect arse of himself. Somewhere in there he married, to a young lady he had first met at Beloit some years prior. Please do not imagine this.
The Mole got a job, of course, but as matters stood all of the PBK 4,0 grads were short order cooks, taxi drivers, hopelessly insane, or, worst of all, attending graduate school.
Suffice to say he hated every job he ever had, but was careful to refer to them as "challenging." An individualist to the point of neurotic misanthropy, he did his very best impersonation of a "team player." He soon lost hope, however, when words like "interface" and "user-friendly" started being used by "consultants" -- usually people with too many teeth who could smile while reciting absurd disconnected neologisms while appearing to be unamused and seeming to understand themselves.
His son lives in Dublin. He is still on his first marriage, which is gratifyingly unfashionable. He reads many hundreds of books, but he haven't finished Gibbon yet. He listens to many, many, many CDS, as opposed, he supposes, to looking at them, which renders digital decoding problematic. He plays a Roland XP80 synthesizer, and synthesizes everything from untempered sonatas to the heat death of the universe. It's a hobby. Listeners to his improvisations can be transported to realms of musical ecstasy one moment, then cover ...Expand for more
their ears and throw themselves from the nearest window the next. One does what one can. The CD is scheduled for release in September, 2024, assuming that his insidious plans to introduce another useless "indie" label are not undermined by sensible folk. He does other things, but they are largely uninteresting, except to archeologists working in the future, and hideous eyeball creatures on Alpha Centauri who monitor every human action, perhaps due to cold scientific detachment, perhaps due to attention spans long enough to verge on the comatose. But this is speculative -- although Matching Mousse's calculations are difficult to interpret in any other way.
A melancholy story, that -- but a wise and, one hopes, deeply profoundly moving.
School
This hitherto blank space is as good a representation of my high school experience as any. Also, I tend not to answer standard questions, as they are quite uninteresting, and my answers would be evasive, quirky, risible, obfuscatory, and partly true. This would not do.
Perhaps I'll update this as I recall this or that, especially that. I may have to use elaborate euphemisms
and metaphors and rhyme to misrepresent my youth. Keep tuned. Despair not.
College
Attended Beloit College for obscure reasons with poor results from fall 1968 to fall (in both senses) 1969. Like many of my generation, I was a fairly shallow layabout with interests in chemicals, bland philosophizing, the sexual revolution, odd clothing, attempting to be very a thoroughgoing nonconformist with the other thoroughgoing nonconformists, sleep, strange travels by thumb and boxcar, and avoiding any factual knowledge at odds with my opinions, which were groundless but seemed obvious. In these matters I was successful to a greater or lesser degree, in inverse proportion to difficulty.
After this, my parents washed their hands of me, and might with good reason have done so considerably sooner. Hope springs eternal.
Now on my own, and realizing that life was sometimes inconvenient, I worked by day and read hundreds of books by night, returning to college in 1974. The reason I chose the University of Massachusetts was that I could afford to foot the bill through the sweat of my brow, allowing taxpayers to pay the rest. I graduated in 1977, with a to me implausible 4.0 GPA. Perhaps this was grade inflation or a persistent clerical error. I learned a great deal, however, while cultivating a distaste to the even-then straitlaced conformity among academicians, and acquiring a large vocabulary of meaningless buzzwords, many of which are still in widespread use, and have become ever vaster in their lack of content. I was encouraged to attend graduate school for further puffery in exchange for indoctrination, but preferred honest work instead. This may seem a harsh judgment, but the nuanced version is much longer, if not quite so bleak.
I have fond, even very fond, memories of some people at both colleges. I have forgotten a great many. And still others have seared themselves into my brain by virtue of seeming awful in retrospect. I do not exclude myself from this last category. Personal, scandalous, and illicit pursuits during these times are recorded elsewhere, or the evidence destroyed.
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