The Caveat

March 22, 2007

They say reflection is good for the soul. I'm not sure who "they" are but if it's true, my soul is in better shape than the rest of me; I've been given plenty of time to do nothing more.

My name isn't important, not here between the electronic folds of something I've been told is a necessary journey, a place where I can purge all the weird and awful things I've been through and will probably continue to experience as I record events here, for the world to see. Don't try to find me in the real world because you won't. In YOUR reality I don't exist. It will be so much easier for you, that way, easier to read and continue trying to put a face and a name to the one who sits behind the words being created. Is my story real? That's for you to determine as you see fit. If you decide not, that's what you need to believe for yourself and I'm okay with that even though you may not eventually be. If you know it to be as truthful as the formation of what I write, than in some ways I'm sorry for you. That means you understand how these things could be real.

My father was a fishing guide during my childhood, one of a myriad of occupations he undertook in a fruitless attempt to discover who he was, or so he said. I believe he just didn't know how to make a decent living for himself or anyone else, hence the paltry childhood I endured. The bulk of my young life was spent in the wilderness, in a house built of wood not far from Lake Michigan's outer, most rural region, the place where my father eeked out his meager living at the expense of the rest of us. "The rest of us" consisted of my crazy mother, a woman who couldn't be bothered to come out of her room for much of anything, and my two sisters. The sisters were older than me by quite a few years and left home pretty early on in my childhood, leaving me to bear the brunt of adults who should never have been parents.

Sometimes, when my mother decided she needed company of some sort, she would pull me into her dark, cavernous bedroom, sit me on her bed and regale me of tales a child, especially her child, should never be privy to. My father was out being a "fishing guide" so there was no one to protect me from these tales or from this woman who filled my head with pictures no child should have to endure. My memory of these early years are dim, thank God, even as I know my poor, "reflective" soul retains far too much of what she put me through. I remember the lace of the intimate apparel she wore, torn and rotted by then, while she spinned around in that dusty, dirty, dark bedroom and relived a time in her life when there were no children and there was no singed part to her face, the one she hid from public view as long as I ever knew her.

I'll stop here for now. I can only take so much of this god-awful reflection before I have to stop, rid myself of that which lurks always just below the epidermis of my body. I have to wonder...how many will find this small missive of mine, and when they do, how many will return? Curiousity, remember, has killed more than a cat.




March 26, 2007

There was a fire once, which disfigured my mother's face. You hear all those warnings about smoking in bed before dozing off. My mother is living proof that it's not advisable. Even more tragically, she wasn't the one who did it. My father was always a lazy bastard, the sum of what I heard about his role in what became of her once-attractive features. She really did look hideous for as long as I had to look at her.

It was later that I come along when my mother was long past reality; she probably had no concrete understanding of my birth. It was my sister Margaret who fed me and cared for me until my father told me one day, in his gravelly, rough voice that she'd had enough of the wooden house in the wilderness and left me for bigger and better things. The bitch left me to contend with our crazy parents.

So it was that my mother and her partially ruined face and completely ruined mind would give me unwanted details about her life before kids and a husband and mental ruin. She was a dancer in Chicago once upon a time, and men "loved" her in ways she talked about way too graphically for most people, much less her young son. She wanted me-or whomever she thought she was speaking to-to believe she was more than a stripper, but even at eight and nine and ten I wasn't stupid. I do believe she wanted bigger and better things than she ever actually found, even as a dancer in Chicago.

She married my father because she was pregnant with Margaret, even though she had no idea whether he was her father. As an aside, I doubt he was. Margaret was tall and didn't look a thing like the rest of us. She was light and blond. I am short with dark hair and those who-knows sort of eye color. My parents were both dark haired and Margaret didn't look a thing like either of them. Or me, or our other sister who was named Darlene. I have only the smallest memory of Darlene. I never really knew her at all. It should give you a clue about what kind of life we had with our parents that neither Margaret or Darlene came back after they packed up and took off. I was left to the crazy parents and all I ever wanted to do was escape...God did I ever want to escape.

I tried to block out mother's stories. Sometimes I would hum with my hands over my ears, and that's when she would begin to dance, twirling and swirling in some sort of drunken weave she thought was fabulous. I'd stop humming after a bit but she would just keep on going until she fell in a heap and I'd stare at her, loathing her even when I was a child. To loathe your mother when you are only a boy...I'm not sure but I believe that could be the beginning of madness. Every child loves his mother, but not the ones who become something more--or less, it depends on your perspective--than human. I became something else entirely.



March 28, 2007

You may have noticed--I don't always have access to a computer, but when I do I've decided to write, to allow this venue to be my therapy-of-choice, a way to soothe my jailers into a false complacency, thinking they're somehow "redeeming" me in yet another way. I've been told it's cathartic and maybe so. For the first time in my life I'm actually looking back without that pure white-hot rage simmering directly underneath my skin. They've given me a "life coach" and I'm supposed to adhere to his advice so what the hell. Here I am within the cyber walls of a place where no one can know who or what I am and I can, supposedly, freely tell all. No one on really wants me to do that, by the way-

I loathed my mother, you'll remember. I wasn't any more enamoured of my father. He wasn't home often; when he was he would cook a meal, invite me to sit and eat with him, ruffle my hair a little because I think he supposed it was what he should do, then he'd ease back in his brown leather recliner, the only decent piece of furniture in a shabby living room, and begin to snore in sync with something like Wheel of Fortune or a ball game of some kind. Once again, with mother passed out in her room, I was left to become what I did.

I would often glide down to the pond behind our house (more of a shack, really), where I'd catch fish with my bare hands and sometimes talk to them. I didn't have anyone else to talk to! I told them about my crazy, sex-loving mother and my snoring, ignoring father. Then I'd stone them with rocks and pebbles until they were dead. I didn't even take them up to the house for eating. I've been asked, before, what I felt when I looked at them. The answer is nothing. I didn't know I was even supposed to "feel" anything for a fish. I left them on the banks of that pond and would wander back to the house and into my room. More often than not I fell asleep with my clothes on, on top of the clothes already there.

I don't want anyone to feel sorry for me. That's not why I'm telling you this. I want you to understand where I come from. To be honest, I don't know if I might have turned out any differently had my parents been nurturing and more parent-like. Maybe it's genetic, what I turned into. Maybe it's not, but I'll never know. Wait, that's not quite true. I do feel it in myself, this incessent need to do what I've done and be who I am. I'm sure it has something to do with the solitary way in which I was raised, but I don't think that was all there was to it. Mostly it's just me. That's scary for some people to understand. They like to think they can "prevent" species like me from becoming real. They can't. There is no way to prevent more of me from emerging out of the shadows, and don't ask me how I know that. I just do; it's some kind of anomoly, a little facetious aside by the gods of fate that there is really no control over. If you're lucky you'll catch us before we've gone too far.



March 31, 2007

I don't want this to be nothing but a history of my life so I'll focus on something else, today:

Why do I do it? I've been asked that question so many times I will most likely scream at the next person who asks it. I know "people" want some sort of answer they can deal with, like I'm sick or misunderstood or unhappy or was severly abused as a child...but it's not about any of that.

Lots of humans have been abused and don't go on to great infamy. Lots of humans deal with being misunderstood or unhappy or whatever the next excuse asked of me might be. Why do I do it? Because I have to. I have no choice in whether I do or I don't...when I don't give into what aches to be released, I feel it growing like a cancer cell, getting bigger and stronger and louder and making me weak with need and I can't ignore it. I cannot ignore the call to give into what every piece of me knows is necessary to continue with my own existance, and in the way of most living creatures, I'm hardwired to do whatever it takes to keep living. I am powerless to stop or "learn" to stop and not perform the tasks I know I've been sent into this world to perform. And that's another thing. I DO believe in God. I do believe in all that comes with a God of this world. Do I believe I'm damned to hell? I'm not so sure of that. But if I am or not, it makes no difference in what I do with my life. It's like I already wrote and too many of you don't want to believe but it's REAL...I am powerless to NOT be who I am.

God's honest truth.



April 3, 2007

I don't believe I'm "bad." I do believe some of what I do is bad, but it's not the sum of who I am. There are humanistic parts to me, parts others see and consider to be examples of my goodness. I'm not good, that I know, but I also am aware of the dualistic nature that is me.

When I was twelve we moved out of the wilderness. Somehow or other the almighty school system caught up with my parents who hadn't schooled me ever. I don't know if they did with my sisters, something I've never been interested enough to delve into or ask about, but I was never sent to school until then. I learned to read and count and add and subtract all on my own, but being thrown into school in seventh grade...now that was damned hard.

I didn't wear the right clothes or say the right things or look and act right in any way. They started out laughing at me, named me "scarecrow" because of my horrific thinness and straw-like hair which stuck out every which way. My father's old blue jeans and the faded, well-washed shirts I wore gave the monikor some validity, as well. It took just once of giving into it, once when I was hauled into the principal's office and suspended for a week and told to never, ever perpetrate such madness upon a fellow classmate ever again...and I was left alone.

I eventually decided, after figuring out how to fit in and make nice, that I would make high school a different experience. I started to mingle, force myself into social situations where I opened my mouth and made pleasant conversation and learned how to be what was called "normal." Once I figured it all out, it wasn't too bad, although it was also around this time, when I knew myself to be an entirely unknown species from the rest, that I felt it. I knew then I wouldn't be able to stop it. No one else knew, to my immense credit, that I wasn't like them at all. Until recently I hid it in a way that frightened even me. The duality of my nature knew I should be stopped somehow, some way, for the good of the perpetuation of the species that should survive. But still my own need to live stands paramount inside my brain.



April 26, 2007

I am unable to continue with this ongoing story, but no matter. Thanks to a forgiving judge I'm being released tomorrow and the "life coach" will be in the past, a footnote in my life and I'll not have to sit and write like this, again. I probably should. While I've been incarcerated I felt compelled to relay my story, but now all I can feel is elated that I'll soon be no longer behind walls, concrete or plastic or any of a kind not in my own choosing. I've made a decision that should these folks ever find themselves on the scent of who and what I truly am, I'll end my life, the one I work so methodically to protect, ironically, before I'll again be unable to think or perform for myself. In a way I feel a bit unnerved that I've been released without anyone here being wiser, knowing what exactly they're turning loose onto a society unequal to my needs and prowess. Perhaps someday they'll discover what they've done. But not today, and not tomorrow.

I put to you a sort of caveat: I will be out there in your world, lurking inside the shadows of my pleasantness and utter inconsequential face. I am not the gang banger full of tattooes or the gun-toting teenager hell-bent on letting the world know he's angry and why and how. I am not so easily uncovered. I am your neighbor, your co-worker, your bowling league partner, your child's Sunday School teacher.

I will, in this electronic haven of anonymity, also advise those of you who were lucky enough to stumble in: Keep your eyes forever open and listen to your instincts. I prey on those who do not hear their inner voice. Listen or become nothing more, in your humanness, than the meat of my existance.

For you, a hopeful farewell-