I’m in a rough place right now, my life has been sheer Chaos for so long, I can’t tell where I’m headed or even where I’m coming from.  I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my recent years, yet the regrets I had have transformed into something new.  I have grown significantly from each and every one of my mistakes, and the events that I once had regret for now turn to assets that I can found my new found Being upon.

It took my Mom leaving me her mortgage payment on a house 1000 miles away from my new home after she died to teach me what it is to be a man and pay my dues.  It took a slew of dead end jobs at 60-80+ hours a week to give me vision on what a future truly is.  It took me many heartbreaks over the love of friends, family, and women to show me that I need to heal…

What Lies Ahead, Is going to be a Long Road.

I need to change.

And for no one but Myself.

I have made the impossible happen in my life; each and every month that I paid my bills was a HUGE victory for me in the struggle to accomplish the implausible.  I felt the joy of being a man, and the pride of achievement and what it means to be valiant and faithful in myself and my abilities as a person.

I used to think that was what life is about…

The struggles that we build our character from will mold us to become the best we can be.

Perhaps that still holds some truth… but my struggles have taken something that I never knew to be so precious before today.

My Time.

I’m sure that if they were to give out medals for living reckless and wild and still managing to hold it all together, that I would have a very strong neck.

But they don’t.

And even if they did, it’s just a medal.  It’s just something to represent my efforts… an inanimate object that bears no weight on the present or the future.  It would only represent what I spent a lot of my time on.

It would merely represent my past.

Now that I’ve lived it, now that I step even further back and see life in a larger scope, it’s not worth it.

It’s just not.

I have goals to purchase a home of my own…  I thought I would have done that by now, but alas, one awful thing after another continues to occur to me… I continue to hurt myself by continuing on this same errant path of self fulfillment.

No more.

No more allowing some asshole I’m renting the house in “Midwest” out to to dictate my even keel, and my level of personal harmony.

No more.

No more letting my heart rule my life uncontested… letting the stubbornness of another inflame me, the mood swings of a woman, or her wrath and negative opinions to take control of my destiny… no more shitty attitudes… no more negative consequences to loving someone with all I’ve got.

No more.

While I admit to being disappointed with many of the events that have unfolded over the past 5+ years, I have always managed to maintain a positive aura about myself, a hope and passion for life of sorts.

I have to confess…

My light has never been dimmer that it is right now.

I need to make some major adjustments, and change a lot of my outlook.

I’ve known this for sometime… but I’ve lacked the capacity to do anything about it…

It became apparent to me when what I once thought to be one of my greatest strengths and my best assets, turned out to be my greatest of flaws.

I had no idea HOW to change… to evolve further in my personal development.  I SLAMMED into a proverbial wall and I’ve been throwing it in Reverse, Revving up to 7 grand, and dumping the clutch, slamming right back into it over and over for FAR to long.

I’ve duct taped and crazy glued my life together for years, all in hopes of a brighter future…  yet I haven’t made any personal developments that aid me in my accomplishments.  I’ve just done what I always do.

Grind it out with what I’ve got, and hope for the best in the end.

That might fly for coaching a football team, but it’s not going to help me become a better man.

I discovered something beautiful.

Namaste

What it means to me is the mutual respect and appreciation of Being.  My own Being and the Being of others as well.

Being – the absolute of a human’s existence, which all humans possess.

It is the field of energy that comprises all life, thought, and emotion.

For the first time, I’m not so stubborn that I’m not willing to listen to another perspective on what it means to be personally fulfilled.  I’ve been a fucking hard case all my life, only with time and consequence have I learned which battles to fight, and which to avoid.

It’s interesting how much of what I am only scratching the surface of has been exactly what I have been seeking…

That which I’ve been seeking for All My Life.

Yoga, Enlightenment, Meditation….

Its wild how they have all managed to interconnect somehow, and illuminate a path that is as modest as it is long.

I began taking Yoga Classes about 2 months ago, and it’s been nothing short of phenomenal.  The way my body has become twisted and imbalanced over the years, directly reflected my mental condition as well.  Not only am I completely warped physically, but my mind is too.

But now I see…

I have issues that I never got around to dealing with.

I mean, even as a kid I knew I was aching for something to alleviate the stresses that continued to build inside me, I was one of few kids who had back and knee problems without being diagnosed with some kind of a disease growing up.  I believe it to be a manifestation of what lurked inside my head.

I was always a loner, I was always more content just going home and being by my DAMN self after school. I never WANTED to join any sport teams, or even belong to any kind of a club.  My family always knew that I was… odd.  Mom was convinced that I was going to be some kind of rocket scientist and constantly had me take all these IQ and cognitive skills tests just about every state we went to.

She did give me a sense of pride in myself for my intellect and cognitive reasoning.  I’ll always appreciate her for that…  but that’s a DANGEROUS tool to be giving an 8 year old boy when it’s the ONLY tool he’s got to hold on to.

I became arrogant and cocky in regards to my school work as a result.  Yet, I was completely insecure with myself.  I finally decided, fuck the world, they don’t understand me.  They never will.  I’ll just be myself anyway,

“No one else likes me, but at least I like me.”

I got to a stage where I began embracing my “unique attributes” and started enjoy the reactions I would get from self deprecations from the name calling.

You’re a:

“Freak!”, “Dork!”, “Loser!”, “Geek!”, “Fag!”, “Pussy!”

“Yea, so?” I would reply.

Fuck em.

I began to realize that I was above all that negative influence.  And looking back on myself as a child, I see how egotistical I really was, despite the non-existent self worth and confidence.  I couldn’t be broken like all the other kids in class that the bullies would pick on at school.

I was fucking bullet-proof.

Eventually, I just chose not to learn anymore, I hated school, and I loathed the people there.  If I have an IQ over 160, why the fuck should I listen to anyone?  I’ll just hustle my way through the class work and make good enough grades to keep these assholes off my back so that I can sit in my own head and stay EXACTLY the same.

It’s bizarre how much I am still like I was almost 20 years ago.

Sometimes the more things change… the more they stay the same.

The difference now being that I DESIRE the change and I am both willing and able to work on myself and grow away from such a close minded mentality that I am so much above the bullshit.  I’ve often resisted that which I know to be good for me, and succumbed to the ease and temptation of that which is destructive to my life… and to my Being.

That has got to stop.

As a Child and Adolescent, I recall doing things I knew to be wrong… I would steal cigarettes even if I already had some, just because I wanted to, I would lie to my divorced parents just so I could get my way, I would manipulate the situation so that it favored my agenda.

As I grew up, I began to see the consequences of such actions.  I realized that I had been trespassed against in ways similar, and that my conscious was getting the better of me.

Even as a child… I learned these valuable life lessons.

I was just too bewildered to know what to do with them back then.

Most kids my age weren’t experiencing such powerful life realizations, I really had no one else to relate to…  So I began seeking the company of older, seemingly wiser individuals.  Now… if you’ve ever had a sibling or have had to be responsible for a younger person when you were a teenager, you know that it’s nothing short of ANNOYING to have some snot-nosed little kid be your shadow.  Needless to say it was difficult for me to experience fulfillment and acceptance in my early years.

What amazes me is the way other kids in my class and I would become gravitated towards each other as a result of our differences in the rest of the population.  They would see me get picked on and shunned from the “popular” groups, and they would experience the same type of treatments I brushed aside… that somehow brought me to meet some of the best people I’ve ever encountered in my life.

Real True Friends.

Guys that would be there through anything… If I got my ass kicked, they’d still be by my side.  If I got insulted and the whole class laughed about it, they would still be there with me playing Nintendo after school, If a girl embarrassed me in front of every other girl in the room, they would still be around to go hiking through the woods while we took the long way home.

That’s a real friend.  That’s something I’ve been lacking in my life… something I never knew to be so important until I grew older and distant from personal relationships.

Certain defining moments pass through my mind from those days past.  Most of my memories of Elementary School are scattered and confusing because we did so much moving up until I was about 11 years old.

Mom and I grew very close… she was my world and I was hers.  Particularly after she divorced my first step-father, we had it rough…  She was always an amazing woman when she was fighting her way back up to the top…  She had the most incredible determination and willpower I have ever seen anyone possess.  She made the world listen to her, and fought for what she felt was best for those she loved, particularly…

Me.

I admired her… and I didn’t realize how much until right this moment…

Damn…

…………………………………………………

………………………………………………….

I miss her more than words could ever describe, she knew actually how to calm me and inspire me when I was down.

She was just awesome…

She actually understood me…

No has ever since.

She had a way of making me feel less complicated, of getting me to a place that was less complicated for others to understand me too.

I’m feeling like a great big asshole right now.

It’s because I don’t think she ever knew how much I truly appreciated her…

She Never Will.

Hell…  I didn’t even know how much I appreciated her, until she wasn’t there.

Rather than sit here and bawl all fucking day and crawl inside this half empty bottle of Smirnoff, I’d rather reflect on the good times…

After Mom got back on her feet again after another of her many many falls from grace, we moved into the old 3810 Van Hook Avenue Duplex in Lindenwald, a suburb on the east side of Hamilton “Midwest” for what was the third time.  We lived in A first, then after her “Florida Epiphany” we lived in B for about a year… then… back to A again.

-shrugs-

Whatever.

I was happy as long as I had my Saturday Morning cartoons and a Super Nintendo.

I recall spending a LOT of time by myself back then, I was mostly a good kid.  I could have been out thuggin’ the streets of the East Side, but I still had my West Side pride.  So fuck those bitches, they were all just a bunch of punks.  I hated most of my peers because they were so abrasive and down right bastards.  They would lie, cheat, steal, pooch, maim, rape, pillage, and plunder any and everything.  They were a band of heartless souls that I chose not to associate with.  Funny thing is… most of them are still that way.  “Midwest” doesn’t have the largest Prison system in the country for no reason at all.  The reason is because of all the Hamilton’s in “Midwest”.  There are so many things wrong with it…  and frankly, I can’t see any end in sight.  Hamilton is still the same as it was when I was growing up.  Empty and hollow, and dying slowly.  Much like the people that it accommodated…

As years passed, my friends I had made would come over to my house after school and we’d play video games, have pillow fights, watch TV, and otherwise trash the house haha.  I was pretty good about keeping things neat, that’s about all I ever had to do really, just make sure the place wasn’t destroyed when mom got home… from the bar….

I learned quickly that I did NOT want to endure the wrath of my drunken mother after a long hard day.

Real fuckin’ quick.

Even though life had its hang ups, over all, I always thought things were good.  Certainly better than what they once were before!  Mom and I used to live in the basement of one of her good friends from high school… with her husband and son.

That was not exactly the best experience I’ve ever had, but it taught me a lot about what it means to never give up, and to keep struggling… because it did pay off.  And it paid of huge…  Mom and I were closer than ever, and we stuck by each other, through anything and everything.

Sure, I could have had it better with my dad, he wanted me to live with him…  but what is “better”?  Having to become a robot clone of conformity?  To have my creativity demolished by the small minded mentality of my fathers’ side of the family?  He meant well… he really did…  but he had no fucking clue.

“Metallica is satanic, I don’t want you listening to them.  They have a song called ‘The God That Failed’, everyone knows that Satan is the God That Failed, and the song tells you to Follow the God that failed, so that means they are telling you to follow Satan, and I won’t allow my son to follow Satan.”

Right…

Thanks Ben, for Taping it for me onto a blank tape.

And MegaDeth too.

-grin-

I used to get taken to the Barbershop for a “hair cut” which typically turned into a “low top fade”

Exactly like Dads…. Hm.

Even as a kid, I knew the score.  I loved him… but I found it hard to respect his values.  Let’s just say we never did see eye to eye on very many things while I was growing up.  Mom was always far more enthusiastic and fun.  She taught me the most valuable lesson in life that I will cherish for the rest of my days.

Life is for Living.

Dad is full of regrets and “Wish I had”‘s  he’s full of guilt and regret for things that he really was never equipped to handle in the first place…  but he lacks the ability to forgive himself completely.  He has never been the kind of guy that gets a lot of respect based on his person, only his actions.  He’s a good man.  He works so that he can provide for his family and give them all a better life.  He cares deeply for all those that he loves and he has a kindred passion inside that tends to expose itself when he is in his worst moments.  I just wish there was a way to get him to open his eyes, and see the world from a higher plane of existence.  He only sees himself working until he dies, not living to enjoy life after he retires… hell… late at night after a few drinks he begins talking about how he doesn’t think that he will live long enough to retire…

Probably not they way he eats all that greasy home cookin’ and smokes 2 packs of menthols a day…

I’ve seen the better side of him… the man that drove all the way to Indianapolis when I lived there with my mom and step-dad JUST to fly a kite with me for a few hours one sunny afternoon.  The man that used to get excited to see his boy when he would get me for a few weeks at a time during the summer when I lived in Tennessee.  The man that would make anything my heart desired out of wood and ingenuity…  The man that would video tape my goofy ass doing dumb shit and show it off with the utmost of pride to all our friends and family.  The man that would help me when I had no one else to turn to… that would pull my car out of the snow, or help me put new brakes on, or take me out to eat if I was hungry, or even just give me enough gas money to get me by for a little while until my next paycheck…

He’s a good man.

And I’m glad that I never turned my back on him and the rest of his side of my family when I had so many thoughts of doing so as a kid for the treatments that I used to endure… and the iron fist he attempted to rule me under.

He just didn’t know any better.

When he was my age, I was already 6 years old, and I had been living with mom since she got custody of me after they divorced when I was 3.

I couldn’t imagine that…  I’m still reeling over some silly college girl I dated for a year, but try adding getting DIVORCED to your high school sweetheart who is the mother of your child, who is already 3 years old!

And I think I have it bad…

No wonder I feel like he envies me sometimes…

No wonder why he has some simple cliché to feed me when I’m feeling down and out and I talk to him about it.

No wonder.

It wasn’t until I was 16 and had a car of my own that I really started coming around like I had when I didn’t have much choice is the matter.  I grew closer to them than I ever had been before… I had my high school sweetheart living close by to my grandparents’ house, and a new take on life.  I was able to be who I always wanted to be, without restrictions… I know Dad HATED my hair, and much of the things that I enjoyed, but that actually made it that much more fulfilling to know that I needn’t concern myself with what he thought about me, only that I was still going to be me, and love him despite himself.

Things have a funny way of working themselves out…

What I find most interesting about what I see in the mirror today as opposed to 10 years ago is that I still have the capacity to love despite my powerful negative emotions.  I had a LOT of shit happen to me that should have turned me cold and hard… like the rest of the kids my age.  Shouldn’t I carry all the same baggage and resentments as the other kids who have been through what I have?  Shouldn’t I have fucked up outlook on life and see myself becoming like my father in 20 years?  Why don’t I relate to these people?  Why does it seem like I don’t belong around them?  Why do I feel so isolated?

Why don’t they understand me?

It’s because I’m not like them.

I can’t explain it… but I’ve always felt that way.

In SO many ways I feel like my life really didn’t even begin until I was old enough to drive… and I really didn’t begin to truly learn myself until I moved here to Florida almost 7 years ago exactly.

Funny thing…

Most of the people I knew from School NEVER DID start learning themselves… until… well… now.  Now that they have kids of their own, and bills out the ass, with shitty jobs and little or no support from their families until they are downright desperate… at best.

I consider it a privilege to be unique now that I am looking at it for what it is.

Life happens, whether you’re ready for it or not… and I sure as shit haven’t EVER been ready for ANYTHING that’s happened in my life…  I’ve never had it together really, and I have no one to blame but myself.  Look at me right now… writing this when I should be changing the oil in my car, cleaning out my closets, shopping for new clothes, working on getting my house shit in “Midwest” taken care of…

This shit has got to stop.

It’s time for me to become a better man, and build a foundation that I can stand upon in the long run.

I admit to being completely de-motivated by the recent events in my life… but I’ve always bounced back.  And now that I have a map to inner peace, all I need is the compass to let me know I’m headed in the right direction, and the desire to find the way.

My Way.

I believe that my Awareness of Being is my compass…

For the first time ever, my efforts have an obtainable goal…  a worthy goal.

I’m worth it.

Namaste

#182391712