by Joe Kirkpatrick

You haven't heard of "Classmates.com?" 

Evidently you are not as young and computer literate as I am then!  "Classmates.com" is an internet website where you can find an old classmate, contact them, or read their autobiography of what they have been doing or accomplished since leaving school.  Not everyone who participates in classmates writes an autobiography, but for those who do, I have never read one that wasn't an account of a model life, something like, "after school, I met the love of my life.  Alfred came from an old money family; so working was never a problem for us.  We had three beautiful children - Alfred IV is a surgeon at Johns Hopkins, Mary Martha is a pillar in the Junior League, and sweet Betsy occasionally returns to Broadway to star in a play, when she is not working with starving children in Africa.  Alfie and I usually just spend our time these days on our yacht, sailing to our home in the islands."

Well, I wrote an autobiography for myself, but I wanted mine to be a bit more realistic - a bio that more of the classmates could parallel their lives

to.  My biography is as follows:

Mine is a sad story.  In school, I was a band nerd with no looks.  I got out and married a woman who was ugly as home aide sin.  We had two kids, and they both ended up so ugly they had faces only a mother could love.  There would have probably been more kids, except for that tragic accident where I fell out of a second story window and ended up straddling a wrought iron picket fence.  At every job I ever had, the boss always picked on me, so I'm not able to work.  If it hadn't been for food stamps, free cheese, and free school lunches for the kids, I don't know how we would have made it.  Even though we ended up in the projects, the good guy upstairs must have really been looking out for us recently:  Just after we got our last big screen TV down at the rent-to-own place on the corner, the place burned to the ground, destroying all of their records, so I guess we get to keep this one.  I'm looking to a better life after 2005 - my boys up for parole then, and if he gets out on time, we're going into the credit card business - he tells me he has learned a lot about that on the inside.  Until then, search your heart, and send us a little love offering to help get us by.

You know, I must have been in a class with a bunch of unfeeling people - in the year since I posted my bio, I haven't received the first love offering.