Tom was born in Harlem in 1979 as a goat. Later on in the late 80s, due to massive medical advances, his sperms were repeatedly altered until he was a human, as his parents had wanted in the first place. This was around when I met him.
Hi, I'm Marc. You may remember me from such places as Hamden. I will be the narrator in this autobiography of Thom Walter Murphy VII.
Tom is still part polar bear. Take a look at his legs & you will see what I mean. "His ticklish legs?" you may ask. Yes. He is ticklish in many areas & those are 2 of them.
Tom likes computers & as of this week has 4 of them. One for each nostril. Now, although he doesn't actually have 4 nostrils, the 2 that he has are so sizable as to warrant such an overstatement. He can fit a quarter horizontally into either one. In addition, he can fit his whole hand into his mouth, making it hardly a lie to say that he has 2 mooth. Why is Tom like this? Put plainly, it's because he has too much damn skin on his head. A more in-depth answer would involve relaying the highly technical medical details of his transformation from goat to human, but those are some boring details, so I won't tell you them.
Tom has no foreskin. Where did it go?
Note that the above is a physical description of Tom since becoming human & moving to Hamden, Connecticut. The previous Tom I knew not & cannot describe.
It must have been around 1989 that Tom moved to Hamden because that is when I met him in school. We did not attend the same schools but were students in the same school system (the Hamden one) & were both in that school system's TAG programme (Tough And Gentle). This is where we met once a week while 2 teachers played Tough & Gentle (or good cop/bad cop as it has since been more popularly labeled) to "straighten us kids out." We were under government watch way early. Most people don't realise it, but our government is on the lookout for potential "internal terrorist types" (free-thinkers & such) very early on & this programme was one of the many guises they used in schools across the nation to try to steer us down the proper, American path. This was the place where Tom & I talked about Nintendo.
2 years later, we began High School at Hamden High where students from all areas of Hamden are enrolled together in one big bucket of learning. Here our relationship developed further, so I can tell you more about him starting with this point. One note, though: I am going to basically exclude any information about his computer-related activities, 1, because you can learn more than enough about them by looking around the web page that you are at right now &, 2, because I don't know very much about those activities. Computers have had a large role in most of his life but have had practically nothing to do with any of our time together. I was never into them & didn't even have a computer in my house until I was 17 or 18, so that stuff didn't have anything to do with what we did.
Tom likes very much to draw & write, especially humourously. He's a sucker for humour. Much of high school was spent making infinitely clever drawings together or for each other or not, or sometimes just writing up insanely witty writings. This kind of stuff kept high school from sucking too much. Outside of school he would go all out with the works & make movies with folks like me & others, a couple of which were puppet movies that we crafted the puppets for. The first of these puppet movies was the beginning of music-playing taking a larger role in his life. We decided that this particular scene in the movie would sound good with us playing music to it, so he got his violin & I got his Dad's guitar & we played for the deadly crash scene. We also played again in the movie for the party scene. The songs were quite lovely & later it seemed like a good idea to start playing music together more. That's when we formed Spastic Moose, the logical union between the head of Mooseware Productions & the founder of Spastic Records & Spastic Studios. This union has proven to be quite fruitful as well as splendid with some of mine & his most favouritest musics having come out of it. He started getting better at playing guitar & drums at this point. Later, he played in other short-lived bands with hideous names such as Is Science Necessary?, Guided By Guided By Voices, & others (or maybe just one other).
Tom will not eat tomatoes or apples. For him, they are more trouble than they're worth.
Tom went away to college in Philadelphia last year. That was a year ago. At the present time, he is back in Hamden. At college, he played with his computer all the time. While in Hamden, he has taken breaks from it occasionally to buy shoes, play music with me, & be filmed playing music with me for a documentary about Spastic Moose.
This is the end of my autobiography of Tom, but is not the end of The Saga Of Tom, for he is still breathing, & as long as he is breathing, he can at least breath into one of those tubes that lets you do stuff with a computer even when the rest of your body is paralyzed.
-- Marc 3 Poirier, 7.2.98