It was in the fifth grade that i gave myself the nickname of Rat. Mem'reh tells me i announced this during an afternoon when i was reveling in sliding down a hillside of brown, dried-up, wild grass on big pieces of cardboard with friends above a playground at skool. i recall this was very meaningful for me at the time as something to let others know just how much i identified with rats and how important they were to me. Looking thru the 7th and 8th grade yearbooks, i see my moniker was fully "in place" as most everyone included "Rat" somewhere in their message-signing. It was somewhere later in hi skool or beyond that Rat turned into ratman. Around 1986, ratman became interchangeable with ratmandu.
i went off to boarding skool for the last three years of hi skool and didn't have rats during that time. But in freshman and sophmore years in college (University of Oregon) i again did, and in the first half of 1976, during which time i switched from being an english to an architecture major, i built the antecedents to the present-day rat haus, described with a collection of blowups -- all that besides my grey cells, apparently remains of them -- in
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Ancestors of the rat haus:
The Rat Cabin and Haus #1, aka the rat victorian
These two precursors of the present-day
moniker of this
web haus were built during a time of
deeply exciting and intensely curious
explorations of consciousness and enquiries
into timeless questions such as who am i?,
what am i?, and what do i want to do with
all i have been given?
As alluded to above, i grew up in a pretty sheltered way
considering the volcanic releases of conscious energy
happening during those years. As the youngest of four, my
three older siblings were out-and-about in society in their
own ways during the life-bursting open sixties as i was
not. i liked to play in the mud, ride bikes back-and-forth
to Ok's house a few miles away, and generally make up my
own realities that included a lot of rat involvement.