Trying to find myself

Being that my brother was nine years older than myself, and I invaded his territory right from the start, I was never appreciated by him.  As I said earlier, whenever he escorted me to school amongst his friends, I either had to walk in front or in back; never with.  Whenever he was having conversations with his friends and I came around, it got quiet until I left.  I don't recall ever being included in anything.  So, I had to find my own entertainment.  I had to invent one person games or play with my HO scale race track by myself.  I was able to be amongst the neighborhood boys, but I don't think I ever felt I was "with" them.  "Mr.  Mischief'" always was able to turn a nice game amongst the boys into a game of mischief and always someone wound up getting hurt, and always he would run home like he had nothing to do with it.  Sometimes the mischief would even wind up getting me into trouble with my own parents, so I learned better to play alone than with because I was tired of getting into trouble.  Since there was little association with the brother, there was little discussion about how to act amongst others or how to approach girls.  As a family, we didn't talk about things like that and if we did we were teased to no end.  There is a difference between being teased and being harangued to death.  I was harangued to the point that I grew up not liking to be teased.  I later in life had to teach myself that some teasing is okay and that I needed to accept some forms of teasing.  As a young teenager, my brother was doing something "special" for my parents in the back yard.  He had his friends over to help and I was allowed to help to a point, but then when the conversation turned, the teasing began.  In front of his friends, the teasing turned to being humiliated and I had just about had enough.  To find out the detail of what really happened read The Train Runs No More.

During my upbringing I had to attend catechism every Saturday and go to Catholic Church on Sunday.  That was in the days of the mass being said in Latin.  In those days I learned that the priests were alcoholics.  Even some of the nuns were also.  The nuns I had in catechism for teachers, if they caught you disrupting the class or not paying attention, they would walk up and whack you across the knuckles with a ruler.  If you cried out, you got whacked again.  I suppose that that was there idea of teaching respect.  Today, the Catholic priests are legalized child molesters.  Later in life, I "tested" other religions and found that the preachers of those religions were nothing more than fakes, womanizers, and money launderers.  Needless to say when someone comes to me and announces that they are a Christian, a red flag goes up like a penalty flag thrown at a football game.  This is digressing away from the story at hand though.  As stated earlier, I had to learn how to approach girls on my own and I did not learn to be successful.  What I did learn was that several of these girls were trying to save my soul through the works of God, but funny how they would discover them in the back seat of a car with their boyfriends.  I don't think they were preaching the word of God though.  I ascertained that these women that I approached and tried to show some likeness to, were nothing more than hypocrites.  And as far as the guys I hung around with, they must have been about as dorky as I was because they allowed me to hang around with them and we fed off each one's energy.  I mostly watched and listened so that I might learn from them what to do and what not to do.  I was trying to find myself in this path of which I had to follow.  My mother used to tell me when I would hang with someone that wasn't quite of  desirable character to her she would say, "If you play with trash, it will fall in your eye every time".  How right she was and I didn't listen.