Len Kennedy, Esq.: A Brief History of Me

A Brief History of Me

by

Len Kennedy, Esq.

Hell is — other people!

— Jean Paul Sartre, No Exit

At 4:44 a.m. on December 19, 1972, at St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I was ejected from my mother’s cockpit. I went places, I did things — yada, yada, yada . . . blah, blah, blah . . . et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. . . .

And after high school, I made the mistake of joining the Army, but shortly after completing Basic Training, my knee serendipitously snapped backwards, and after surgery — and some excruciatingly painful physical therapy — I got a medical (honorable) discharge. And since I was in the military for over six months when all was said and done, I’m now technically a disabled veteran. Ain’t that some shit?

I then attended college, majoring in social psychology, and I dropped out a little over a year later for pragmatic reasons (i.e., money) — but I may just drop back in someday. I subsequently worked for about three years in a plastics factory, a year or so in data entry, and a couple years as a customer service representative. (I tried my hand at freelance gynecology, for a while, but there aren’t a lot of openings around here.) I’m currently a freelance writer — which, of course, is merely a euphemistic way of saying I’m unemployed. But that isn’t to say I’m not working tirelessly: In addition to dashing off my usual drivel and slipslop, I’ve been writing some short articles on long topics — “serious” disquisitions on important subjects, such as cognitive dissonance theory, Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy, and death.

Well, in truth, I’m not entirely unemployed, merely underemployed (which, unfortunately, is all too common in today’s economy): I work part-time — thirty to thirty-five hours a week — as a shift manager at the local Pizza Hut, where I worked when I first came home from the Army about seventeen years ago. I was a bit hesitant about working there again, because that kind of job seems a bit infra dig for someone my age, and it pays a lot less than what I’m used to making, but there’s a dearth of jobs in this dinky little town—and only a handful of crappy jobs even within a fifty-mile radius—so it’s going to have to do for now, until the current recession abates and the job market rebounds.

I’m a Gimp!

In 1995, due to a genetic abnormality (something else I can blame on my parents), I suffered what’s called a spontaneous pneumothorax, in which my left lung collapsed because a bleb — a blister on the surface of the lung — burst, causing air to seep into the pleural space between the lung and the chest cavity.

That first time my lung collapsed, all the doctor had to do was insert a tube into my chest cavity and suck the air out of it, thereby reinflating the lung. But in 1999, in the middle of March, my lung collapsed again, necessitating surgery to prevent it from happening yet again. And this second collapsed lung was far more serious than the first — it was what’s called a tension pneumothorax: The pressure from my chest cavity filling up with air was forcing my heart up into my rib cage, and if I hadn’t gotten to the emergency room as quickly as I did, I undoubtedly would have died.

Shortly after my lung surgery, my father — whom I never knew, since he left when I was just a little munchkin of one and a half years old — died of bone cancer. (We Kennedys aren’t exactly known for our longevity.)

On the day I was notified of my dad’s death, I still went to work (after all, there is no “my dad just died of bone cancer” in team). But since I have the sometimes-annoying habit of dealing with stress with humor — and the more intense the stress, the more vicious the humor — I sent hundreds of hilarious e-mails, one of which implied that a certain adulterous middle-aged woman in upper management was an old whore. Too many people found the e-mail funny and forwarded it to friends of theirs, who in turn forwarded it to friends of theirs — and it eventually got forwarded to the woman in management who was the butt of the joke (and she apparently didn’t share my sense of humor). So I wound up getting fired the next day.

So within the span of a few short months, I almost died of a collapsed lung, my father died of bone cancer before I ever even got a chance to meet him, and — the very next day! — I got fired from one of the few jobs I could actually tolerate.

But life’s full of inconveniences — one learns to adapt.

Speaking of inconveniences, in 2004, once again in the middle of March, my right lung collapsed. And yes, goddammit, I then had to have surgery on that lung. But, fortunately, the surgery is fairly permanent — and I only have two lungs — so, although it’s possible that one of my lungs could collapse again sometime in the future, it’s highly unlikely, Haile Selassie.

After my first lung surgery, I quit smoking and started walking, biking, and lifting weights like a madman. And now, after my second lung surgery, I’m once again exercising assiduously. In many ways, I’m in even better shape now than I was when I was in the Army: I can even curl a 100-pound barbell seven times — without cheating — which is something I certainly couldn’t do back then.

And I suppose life would be awfully boring if there weren’t continually new obstacles to overcome. And vaginas. Life would be dreadfully boring without vaginas.

But Enough about Me

Now I’m going to talk smack about other people. For example, people who have written things that I later thought up independently. I was so certain that I was the first to coin the expression “Only the young die good,” but it turns out that some schmuck named Oliver Herford was the first person to make that particular cliché reformation.

And perhaps even more annoying are those people who independently think up and publish things that I thought up years ago — e.g., Toby Young, who authored a book titled How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.

Well, I tried selling a book with that exact same title to a few literary agents a few years ago, at least two years before his book came out. But as much as I’d like to think that he got my idea from a writer who heard it from a literary agent who happened to read my earlier book proposal, it’s quite probable that he just independently thought up the same reformation of How to Win Friends and Influence People. After all, there are only so many ways to juxtapose words in a meaningful manner — and very few of them are actually funny.

So, basically, what I’m saying is that other people suck. And, just last night, your mother said the very same thing to me: “People suck — and I’m certainly no exception . . . I’m sucking right now, as a matter of fact.”

Well, Anyway . . .

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my writings. If you’ve had half as much fun reading them as I’ve had writing them — I will have had twice as much fun as you . . . because, believe me, I had a ball. Maybe two balls.

Back to Top of Page