Welcome to Life
Starting something new is always hard, but exciting.
I like to reminisce some nights, and my ramblings are annoying to some, granted. But I think you’ll enjoy the first installment of: If You were to Ask My Parents.
They’d tell you that I was a “Why” child. From my earliest moments, I had to be told why, and the joke was always, sometimes logic was the answer, sometimes threat of pain, usually let him decide and he’ll come around. Which is true, given the option of the easy or the hard tends to make you see the easy as the right course of action. This was not always the case in life lol.
The parents latched on to their very little first born stubborn little boy, and I was asked if I gave them permission to have a little brother lol, apparently I needed convincing but ultimately agreed this was a good idea for all of us.
Bill, or as he goes by professionally John, after our maternal grandfather, was born with some minor complications towards successful life, and that is honestly my first real cognitive memory, being in hospital rooms, and Ronald McDonald’s house, and sleeping in bed with Daddy because we had to get up early the next morning, for a drive up to Charlottesville.
Lots of time in the car, strapped in. So I learned to read “stupidly quick, you hand him a book and 4 minutes later he’d want another” to quote Mom. By the time Bill was healthy and life got “back to normal” I was a voracious reader, my father took great glee in this, as he’d been giving me harder and harder things to read and comprehend since about 3.
I read and comprehend, and ask why? Why is this happening today, what is the purpose that this story services, who is behind the information being given and to what purpose? Where is this happening? The rabbit holes open and I start reading, as a young boy this was troublesome as the internet was 5-7 years away, but newspapers and periodicals became my new ‘tism. Everyday I would read the newspaper front to back and usually have cut most of the comics out before anyone else could, I loved Calvin and Hobbs, The Far Side, and Peanuts.
I would make the news of the week board for the house, unprompted mind you, I just told Mom one day what I wanted and why, and boom. Dad told me later in life that he was conducting his own intellectual experiments on both Bill and I, fill us with knowledge and see in which directions they gravitate. I did learn C++ at 5, interests change lol, to John’s credit he learned it at 3 and never stopped.
The other ‘tism was being outside, no confines, run yourself crazy, find weird rocks, catch grasshoppers, and ants, learn spiders don’t like to be fucked with lol. Dig holes, see if you can dig to China, build forts in the woods, harass cattle off the property, build fences, hunt ground hogs with Dad, learn to shoot, start hunting them on your own. Take the dogs on day long patrols around the property hunting for rabbits, groundhogs, coyotes. The hunting trips were seldom successful, most times I’d be happy if I’d gotten a good shot on one of the 200 feral cats on the property, a never ending battle for 15 years
When I start to get swept up into the revolutionary rhetoric abounding in this country today I do like to take a step back, and say I had an idealistic childhood, but my parents fought and worked everyday for it, we talked around the dinner table every night, and I started to see that history is a circle.
Because I was the newsboy for the family I developed an uncanny ability to see political patterns, macroeconomic movements, and geopolitical struggles happening. Dad would listen to my little boy rants, Mom would just wonder where and when I’d read some anecdotes I’d pull into conversation.
What is happening today in this country is really a repeat, but faster of the late 1970-90s. Social media, and the internet have given us the availability of knowledge on an ahistorical scale. Some of us Gen X kids are just standing back in our baggy jeans and band tee shirts, smoking cigarettes and not talking about Fight Club.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=7bX76VR6oQE&si=1qna54vNMKXRmbNT