Comments:
Hey folks...
The blurb at the bottom of this form asks me what I've been up to since 1979, and since I don't have the space to write a book, I'll condense. After high school, my ADD led me to four different colleges with five different majors, and I ended up with a degree in guitar performance from MCC in Waco. Before, during and after college, I made a living playing and teaching music for several years. I was lucky in the fact that I got to make a living while traveling (a woman in Italy once told me that I was a very LONG man, meaning that I was pretty tall), and I have been to 32 foreign countries and 30 of our United States. I played with a couple of bands that got signed to major labels (Sons of the Desert, Deryl Dodd, TC Taylor) but I never won a Grammy. I have either opened or headlined gigs where I shared the stage with George Jones, Merle Haggard, Garth Brooks, Asleep at the Wheel, and probably 100 other notable country music stars. To roughly paraphrase Rutger Hauer in "Blade Runner", "I've... Seen... Things... in my time..."
I've dragged my wife through a riot in Peru, had most of my clothes and all of my money stolen in Rome, I've signed up to be a Zapatista in Mexico, been cavity-searched in the airport at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and I've had an AK-47 pointed at me on the Iraqi border. I've been past the Arctic Circle twice and within 600 miles of the South Pole once.
In 1987, I went to work part-time for a bunch of hippies at Half-Price Books, and I stayed there off and on for almost 12 years. I started out in Rogers, moved to Temple, Waco, Dallas, Houston, back to Waco, and now I am working my way back toward much smaller communities. Although I don't think I'll go full-circle and end up back in Rogers, I may end up in the middle of West Texas on a 1000-acre spread with no neighbors for miles.
I have been a camel wrangler, a cattle soother, a bookstore manager, a musician, a salesman, an actor and a professional mascot (I was the Half-Price Books bookworm, and my wife was both Precious the Water Drop for the City of Waco and one of the many Louie the Lightning Bugs for Houston Lighting and Power). I applied for a job in Antarctica, and I was accepted to Clown College but didn't go (They weren't going to let me start out as the Human Cannonball). I did, however, get to portray Zoltan the Magnificent while riding a camel in the Ronald McDonald Circus parade in Nashville. I have been to Graceland several times, and August 16 always brings a tear to my eye.
My daughter Paisley was born in 1991. At that point, I was forced into growing up, and although it took a few more years, I am proud to report that my wife and I were granted custody of Paisley in 2004, and since then, we have lived in the quaint little burg of Venus, TX, about 30 miles south of the hustle and bustle of the Metroplex. I am now a humble promotional merchandise salesman for a company in Midlothian, although I have still been known to ROCK now and then. My wife is a marketing director for some well-known magazines (no, not Penthouse or Juggs), and our daughter is now a senior at VHS. I have two stepsons, Cole, who is a firefighter in Friendswood and is busy right now cleaning up after Ike, and Nick, who is a budding pre-med student at San Jac in Pasa-Get Down-Dena. For whatever I might or might not have been in the past, now, I'm mostly just Paisley's Dad and Terri's Husband.
I hope that we are able to get something together sometime next spring. Feel free to contact me in the meantime...
Your Senior Class Treasurer,
Kyle Mathis
