Flashback to February 1992:
My first year at C.H.S.. The memory is still fresh of the nearly debilitating stomach cramps and nausea I would feel as I would pull into the school parking lot at the beginning of each day. I would want to throw up as I walked to first period, Video Production. I tried different breakfast combinations, but nothing would work... the nausea would remain. Rolaids and water became my breakfast desert (thank god, I had second period prep that year).
In February, my first period class had changed to the infamous "Advanced Grammar" SAT preparation course, they of the limited motivation. In the afternoons, I would race home to begin dinner for my new wife of only two months. Anything to avoid thinking about school. At nights after dinner, I would confess to Lisa that I wasn’t sure if I could do this anymore.
I had told Bob Bonds, when he became my first principal, that I could conceive of a time at which I would retire from the PVUHSD, some forty-some-odd years down the line. But in year six, I would sit huddled on the floor of our bathroom, crying, telling Lisa I couldn’t take it anymore. Forty years? Bullshit. I wasn’t sure I could take six.
I couldn’t let her down, though. She had married me, and I had become Neanderthal-Man. Man provide for woman. Man no quit job. Man deal with it.
And I did. Even loved it by June, when I was planning for the next year’s production of Romeo and Juliet and beginning to write my first screenplay (burn-out wish fulfillment).
[In most works, flashbacks tell a great deal about the current situation.]
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