The Debris Field

I never thought that I would "make it" after leaving high school.  Having lived a life so far of being ridiculed by both family and friends, I didn't have the best self esteem there ever was.  I grew up with a mother whose "post" was always in the kitchen holding a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other.  I grew up with a father that was the nicest man that walked the face of the earth, but he put up with a lot of crap.  If you ever crossed him, he had a temper.  Although he would get frustrated and angry at times when he spanked, he never abused us.  As described earlier, I grew up with a brother who never could say anything to me without ridiculing me.  I went to catechism on Saturdays only to find priests stumbling around from having too much wine, or speaking coarsely to the parishioners as one did to my mother when I had an altercation there and I didn't even start it.  There was a nun I knew that once she met a man, she couldn't rip that habit off soon enough to get in bed with the guy. I was surrounded by such fine examples that I could almost just throw up.  These fellow classmates in high school that tried to "save" me for Christ also were in the backseat of their boyfriends car hammering it out contrary to what they would preach to me.  When one of these students parents found out what their nice daughter was doing, they yanked her from school and moved to Georgia.  Never heard from her again.  I even had an art teacher who couldn't even speak decent English ridicule me of a craft project that she gave each of us to do.  Because she didn't understand the design of it, it meant nothing to her and therefore, was nothing but crap to her.  It was the yin and yang Chinese design symbolizing how things interact with one another.  Because of her public ridicule of me right there in class, it's a wonder Adolf Hitler was not reborn again.  Being bombarded by all these people, plus the ridicule adding to the stress of trying to find myself, I was having this dream every night of being run over by a train.  Every night.  I would wake up in a cold sweat and then go back to sleep once I realized it was only a dream.  Some people don't realize what they do to another when they constantly ridicule.  Or maybe they do and it's sad that they don't feel guilty that they drove their victim to suicide.  They walk away, unfeeling of what they do and absolve themselves with the graciousness of God.  Contrary to that, some parents try to boost their children with everything that they do is right, when one can see that what they do is definitely wrong.  There is a matter of encouraging a child, but when the child is electrocuting a creature to death, I can't see why the parents write it off as a science project.  This being described in The Train Runs No More.  Again, Karma came back around on that one.

Having excelled in my field of aircraft work, ascertaining a salary that I found quite liveable, and having money left over at the end of the week that I didn't know what to do with, I found quite astonishing to myself.  I looked back at my classmates and those that I still heard about were making merely a living.  Big deal.  What I was doing, I did not even have to sell drugs doing it.  I built quite a bank account too.  I am so glad that I never hooked up with one girl from school who married a fireman only to wind up getting herself beat up on a daily basis and raped after.  She was merely looking for a financially supporting father to her daughter.  She wasn't looking for a husband that could love her and her love him.  She deemed me not capable of being financially supportive.  She found one of those, weeks after she left me.  It was so quick, I know being loved by her did not enter the picture.

Having this element of life to grow up with, I left, but I left with baggage that I thought cared for me, and later turned out that she also only wanted to be taken care of.  Without going over the same history again, I kept my chin up and marched on through the "mud of life" and am still doing well.  It just takes time and patience to find that satisfaction.  Some try to find it immediately, some search for a while, others never find it.  When it is found, others are not happy for you and never will be.  They try as much as they can to disrupt that satisfaction that has been found.  If you ignore them, that only pisses them off more, and they try to rub you out of the picture.  So they did that.  So what?  If people are that easily led that they can forget all about you, then they never cared for you in the first place.  All you can do is just step over the debris and keep on marching.  It's either you or them.  Who is most important?  You or them?

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.