How I became me.
There are insanely good reasons why i am the way I am. I can't explain them all, i just know that one day i woke up to be this fairly large dude with a giant heart that hates almost everything about humanity. Though, just like the proverbial drunken prom queen , i spread wide open to accept humanity into my heart of hearts to try and help them.
I started off as a young man growing up in a coal town in Kentucky. It was awful. Black soot rained from the sky when it actually did rain and it just smeared across a windshield that you can never seem to quite get clean. I grew up quick, having my first paying job from the time i was 13 years old. My father couldn't work. My mother worked two jobs and the money that my mother made my father spent it on his mistress and on alcohol. Though at that age i wasn't familiar with either concept so i just worked for my forty or fifty dollars a week. I would go out and buy a new toy and then give the rest to mom because she always seemed like she needed it for some reason or another. Life was hard. Some day we didn't' have water. Some days we didn't have power. Some days dinner was oatmeal. I was smart enough not to ask for seconds. after the first time i did it. because then my mother would sneak back into the kitchen and reheat her oatmeal and add more butter and sugar too it and bring back to me. I caught on fairly quickly.
The next year would actually change things and make things a little better. I grew several inches over the summer and when i went to work on the farm again the next spring i could actually do quite a bit more work. after all i was fourteen years old, and what fourteen year old doesn't want to spend the summer working. I did learn though. I learned I had a violent temper when pushed. I learned that I was a quick learner. and i learned that my violent temper would be the end of me if i didn't learn to control it. I also started making $5.75 an hour. I was making real money then. I started paying bills at the house. and still had a little bit of money left over to pay for my lunch at school. I also started having lots of questions in my life. the first one that comes to mind. the one that probably defined me the most of the next several years was. " Is god real" I searched High and low and asked questions till pastors, priest, friends, family, parishioners all alike ducked out of sight when they saw me coming.
That Fall i stopped attending church, i felt it wasn't for me anymore. I felt that i had to many questions and not enough answers. When school started up i found that i had a job to do on the weekends. no longer did i have my weekends off to be a teenager. I climbed in to my fathers 1979 sky blue ford falcon. the one that I had to start with a screw driver, because i lost the keys to it, and drove it 40 minutes across town to a fish farm where i would work from 6 am till we here finished for the day. Most of the time i made it home by 8 pm. The money was nice and i was helping mom on the bills and i no longer had to eat crappy free lunches at school.
Now remember me saying the most important question was "Is god real" at this point I still believed in a god, i just wasn't certain what god it was at the time.
Several years progressed and I found myself living on my own. I was 18 out of high school working full time. I had my own place which was constantly littered with crazy friends that was either too high, or too drunk to move. that was life. that was my golden years, or so I thought.
That was the year i learned what alcohol was, who my friends and who were leaches. and that believing in god was the most ludicrous thing i could ever do.