Preface

Allow me to start by pointing out a few things that are worth mentioning. First, if you're here there's a good chance you found this place by associating with places or people of a similar mindset, if not then you might get your feelings hurt -tough luck, snowflake.

This publication will serve as a looking glass into a plethora of issues that I find myself pondering upon about our current society. Many of them are interconnecting, some are independent, others abstract while a few may be on the fringe. This is not, however, meant to serve as any sort of secular literature preaching about drinking some sort of kool-aid that will solve any or all of society's ailments. In actuality, I fully accept the fact that many of these ideas may be warped, wrong, insensitive or downright wrong. Indeed, these are thoughts that I have personally formed based on my experiences in the world and experiences with others. There was a time in my life when I would have disagreed with a lot of what I will have to say, and I encourage others to do the same. One of the attractive aspects of Buddhism is that it is not a religion in the cliche sense, and teachings do not expect one to take them on face value. Instead, it is a philosophy that has seemingly been created to give insight into the world, for better or worse, and hopes that readers will form their own opinions based on their own life experiences and choose to either adopt, or to not adopt the parables accordingly. My hope is that in that regard, this publication may parallel Buddhism.

Many topics will be broached, mostly of the controversial or sensitive sort. Most of it will not be politically correct, yet will not be overly profane or vulgar (although colorful language may appear). Chronologically speaking, it will be all over the place and everywhere in between. Issues of politics, religion, gender, age and any other aspect of PC culture will be explored, and mostly in a negative connotation as viewed by the mainstream society, or rather I should say, what we are led to believe is the mainstream society. Those who will not agree will very likely use buzzwords such as: sexist, racist, misogynist, alt-right, conservative, islamaphobic, transphobic, homophobic, or any of the other common terms that are flamboyantly thrown like javelins at a target, trying to kill it -even if those terms do not apply.

The central theme around this piece will be how our current society has gone astray into an abysmal hole of decadence, depravity, immorality, and a terrible spiral of over-indulgence in the dopamine receptors. I will make observations into what I perceive to be some of the underlying causes to a disease that we, as a society, have been inflicted, and the associated symptoms. Most of these are generalizations, and as with every rule there are always exceptions. This is not to be a reflection of any individual, nor any group, but rather a bigger picture that I've tried to put together and understand of where we lost our way and what the consequences are for wondering into the dark.

If you are remotely turned away from anything you've read thus far, I would warn against reading further. However, if you are intrigued and wish to perhaps understand the world from the perspective of another human being, I hope you enjoy reading and maybe even connect to the material in some way. In the end, I implore you to think for yourself, disagree, and formulate your own opinions. Then, try to put together your own puzzle. It's entirely possible that some of my pieces fit into yours. Or none of them fit and you just flip the table over. Either way, I do not have any real expectation that this will have any lasting or meaningful impact on anything whatsoever -but it will damn sure feel good to write it down.

History: how did I come to be?

As indicated in the preface, there is no defined linear dimension to what I have to say, but I will try to keep it as organized as minimally required to make sense and to make an argument for the things I comment on. I figure there is no better place to start than how I got to where I am right now.

Growing up, I was like many children in the Great American Experiment in the sense that things weren't always so peachy. From a young age I can remember constant turmoil and chaos within my home and family. Money was always a problem, as was any sort of true stability. There were times when I went to bed on an empty stomach, and had it not been for the meal I had at school, I'd have not eaten anything all day. Some days I came home to a terrible fight between my parents. Actually it was most days. Then, a little later, my parents did what most do these days and decided to get a divorce and put their children right in the middle of it like some sort of fucked up game of chess where we were disposable pawns. I was tossed around from one parent to the other, getting to know my would-be step parents just long enough before they too were thrown out. I lived in so many houses I lost count. I lived with my siblings, my grandparents, both parents and with friends. I did not, however, become subjected to the foster system -and for that I am grateful.

It was not always so bad, though, so I don't want these first words to make it seem as if my life was worse than anyone else's. In many regards I had it good. We had a number of years where some semblance of stability and order was the norm. Eventually, as time went on, my mother proved to be a narcissistic sociopath who abandoned even her children, and went onto live a life as a vagrant and vagabond, sucking the life out of anything she touched. This is when the majority of the stability returned. For about ten years things were somewhat okay. My father remarried the woman whom I consider to be my "mom" to this day and we had a lot of happy memories. Looking back on it, some of the fondest memories that I still cherish were from what I refer to as "the good old days". Still, even that came crashing down when my father proved incapable of being any different from my mother and destroyed our lives yet again through severe bouts of drug addiction, depression, and terrible choices.

I became independent at age sixteen and have been on my own ever since. Twenty some odd years later, I have been successful enough for my liking. I have a good career that allows me to feel like I'm making a positive difference in the world. I'm not really in any sort of debt. I have a comfortable living, though not extravagant or one of excess. Sometimes I struggle just like everybody else -financially, socially, or in any other sense of the word. Oh, and there's the whole thing where I'm not a drug addict nor have I brought children into the world only to throw them into chaos, so I've got that going for me which is nice. Overall I think I've become a somewhat well adjusted adult and have largely put the traumas and inconveniences of my childhood behind me while forgiving and forgetting, in short -I've moved on.

The question then appears, did my childhood and early adulthood impact my view on the world? Well, to put it simply: yes, I think it did. Does that make me a damaged or defective person? No, I don't think it inherently does. What I do think, though, is that our lives are made up of a never-ending series of events and interactions that over time shape who we are and how we see the world, and that many people have experienced many negative things. What we do with those negative experiences is what really defines us. Do we get depressed that our father destroyed the good old days, and just start shooting heroin right alongside of him? Or do we accept that it was a shitty experience, be comfortable in the fact that it is okay to go through something negative, and then try to better educate ourselves so that we have a new perspective on life and become better equipped to deal with the bad parts of life? I definitely feel that it is the latter. Part of me feels like the only way that we're going to be able to survive whatever storm is looming over us as a society is to learn to cope with bad experiences and figure out how we move forward in improving ourselves and our situations.

After surviving early adulthood, I had just as many good parts of my life as any of the negative ones I'd had prior to what I refer to as simply "independence". For the first couple of years of being on my own, I was full of excitement to be out in the world. I was young, full of energy, and anticipating every new experience like it was Christmas all over again. Learning about myself became a bit of a hobby, even if I didn't verbalize it or even recognize it. My self-awareness was still rather lacking, but in retrospect I think I knew on some level that I had been given a chance to reinvent, or redefine who I was and who I was going to be. I got a job. A couple, actually, here and there. Eventually around the time I graduated high school I got an even better job that paid good money for that age. I made some friends, and made some family out of those friends. Hell, I even started to forgive my "real" family by this point and had mostly made amends by the time I was around twenty. They were still distant, though, and that relationship was never truly repaired to one hundred percent, but I visited them and tried to make some connection to them.

This period of about 3-4 years of "independence" was generally without any significant events. My grandmother did pass during this time, which was a pretty significant loss -she was one of the few parental figures who did genuinely care about me and was there for me. My grandparents were actually more parental than my actual parents, so it hurt pretty hard when that happened. Then one of my brothers decided to suck-start a shotgun. So that was bad. It actually fucked me up for a long time, and I'm still not entirely sure that I've accepted it. I remember feeling complete nothing when I got the call.

I simply acknowledged what had happened, quietly got up from my desk at work, and drove to my grandfather's house. We had a nice service. It was small and simple. His girlfriend, whom he'd just had a child with, who coincidentally had also cheated on him and who told him she was going to take his child so that he'd never see it again and run away with her new man, was there. She made a pretty awkward scene where she seemingly wanted to command all of the attention in the world, because she was the victim and could not deal with the fact that he would make it all seem like her fault. Oh, and my brother was only 17. They were still in high school. Bright kid, had his life ahead of him. I miss him dearly. Like I said earlier, still not sure that I've accepted the fact that he's gone, even after this many years. I remember standing beside of the closed casket at the graveyard wishing that I could shed a tear. I was definitely sad, but not in the way I wanted to be.

When you experience the loss of a loved one, something tells you that it should be devastating and there is the expectation that you'd be pouring your eyes out and screaming at the heavens, damning everything to hell because it just isn't fair. But sometimes you don't, sometimes you just stand there, numb, and then live your life for years without shedding a tear only to come to terms with it later. You definitely think about it, and why it happened. You'll start to question why this girl was so important to him that he'd have killed himself. You'll start to point fingers at her, and her evil ways. You'll get really fucking angry with the fact that had she not cheated on him, he likely would have still been alive. Then you'll wonder where you yourself went wrong. Why you weren't there. Why you didn't see the signs. Why he didn't call you in his time of need. What if he did call you and you didn't realize. The list goes on and you never really get any answers, but the questions themselves tend to make you a little saltier and a little more wary of life. You start to look at things and people differently, questioning their intentions. You'll even question your own intentions and interactions.

So the point here, if it isn't obvious, is that I went through a pretty rough patch shortly after being "liberated" in my young adulthood, which then led to a lot of alcohol and substance abuse. Which coincidentally, led to a lot of bad decisions and parallels to my parents that I swore I'd never make. If I had to describe it in any particular way, I'd say that I turned into a piece of shit. So I, very creatively I might add, refer to this period as my "piece of shit years".

I spiraled out of control over the course of about five years with breaks from tomfoolery being very few and far between. Most days I got out of bed around 3PM, still hungover from the previous night, went to my night shift job where I worked into the AM hours only to start it all over. This pretty much happened every single day. Wasn't long before I started to push people away from me. I lost friends after ignoring their very genuine attempts to help me, even when they blatantly told me that I needed help. I wasn't done partying and feeling sorry for myself, so I told them all to politely kick rocks and self-fornicate. About two years into this period I was at the peak of piece-of-shittery and started to slip down the other side. I'd lost my job my way and sense of purpose.

It's worth noting that within the piece of shit years lies a sub-group of "faux-good-times" towards the last three years, which at the time seemed like things were starting to go well again. The friends who never gave up on me got down into the single digits, but still had an arm out ready for whenever I finally fell. In particular, a group of friends started to purposefully harass me into going out with them, and into socializing again. One of the people in this group took a liking to me for some reason, in retrospect I honestly have no idea why she wanted anything to do with such a lowlife piece of scum that I was, but nevertheless a relationship started to blossom.

This girl was a few years older than I was, had gone through some tough times but was mostly doing really well in life, and had the most beautiful personality that I'd ever seen. On top of that, she was very solidly in the upper ranks of aesthetics, far better than any girlfriend I'd had up to that point. Over a few months we grew very close, to the point that we'd share every detail of our lives. If I was at work, we'd be emailing each other all day. She'd send me a picture of a butterfly that she'd taken a picture of, or share with me an intimate piece of poetry she'd written, and I'd reciprocate in-kind. Before long, we moved in together and shared an apartment. I was in love so strongly that I'd more or less snapped out of whatever bullshit I was in, and was actually living again. The pain started to go away and when I looked outside, everything was actually in color again instead of the black and white noise it had been for a few years now. Birds chirped, the sound of water from a mountain stream had a tranquil white noise as it rushed across the rocks, leaves bloomed on the trees, and the sunshine felt warm on my face. We used to sit together in the bed of my truck and look at the stars. It was that cliche romance movie kind of relationship.

But I was also still very much unaware of the world and my surroundings. My piece of shit days had turned into not-so-piece-of-shit-days, so I was blissfully ignorant of anything going on in my life that was not this girl and my absolute love for her and every part of life that she touched. She'd saved my life, because she cared about me and gave me a love I had never had. We never argued in any significant way, always got along, and everything was perfect. Well, until she was waiting for me to come home after a particularly stressful day at work, to break the news to me that she'd been sleeping with another man pretty much the entire time we had been together. My understanding is that she felt trapped by our relationship, because her desire to be with the other man whom was just now becoming apparent to me, was absolutely without question what she wanted in life. Proof of that came in the way of being pregnant with the guys kid and an emotional goodbye, "I don't ever want to see or hear from you again". It's worth noting that I had absolutely no suspicion or reason to be suspicious until I was smacked right in the face that evening with the truth.

Queue "the rock bottom years".

After the piece-of-shit-years came crashing down with my entire reality and world, I went to a familiar place of not feeling anything for quite awhile. Nothing positive, anyway. It would be a fair assessment to say that I sank into depression, but it really felt like every bit of life had been sucked from my very soul in some existential way that demanded I go on autopilot. There wasn't a big fight about the breakup, there wasn't some blaze of glory burning of bridges, I just went to a friends house for a few nights and then got a small efficiency apartment in the city, only a few blocks from where I lived with that girl, and just went to work.

One might describe my state of mind as disconnected, or disassociated, and it stayed that way for probably three or four months -but I honestly can't give an accurate estimate of the timeline for quite awhile. I want to say it was about another four or five years in my life where I don't remember a great deal during the rock bottom years. Honestly dictates that I don't claim to not remember anything, because I do definitely remember some things. From a young age I was always fairly creative. Doesn't mean I was any good at any of it, but I did like to express myself in creative outlets. Once the reality of the situation hit me, while I was living on a raman diet with nothing but an air mattress in my apartment, I quickly got idle hands. Those very same hands picked up the bottle again, but this time harder than ever before. Most nights after work I came home and drank as much as I could physically drink, as quickly as I could do it, and put paint on canvas. Most of my artistic creations were either thrown out, painted over, or destroyed in bouts of drunken rage. I'd typically pass out, only to wake up disappointed that I was still alive, though covered in vomit, and realize I was an hour late for work.

Didn't take long before I lost my job, and ended up bouncing from job after job trying to scrape enough money to not get kicked out, while also supporting my booze habit. There are some jobs that I don't really even remember what I did there, because they only lasted days or weeks. On average I think I was going through a new job about once every month or two, with periods of starving and being late on rent in between. I hated myself and lost pretty much all of my friends. Just about every circle I had was not willing to be around me at this point in my life, except for some unsavory types that I'd met god knows where. Those people sucked me in pretty hard, and shortly after, the booze habit turned into a drug habit which then turned into an unknown period of time that largely seems like a dream or distant childhood memory.

Strange as it sounds, I think I took my first baby steps into self-awareness during this blackout phase. Nothing in particular stands out as a decisive point. There was no singular event or person that came into my life where I can pinpoint when I started to think about life and how things really work, but it definitely started right before I hit the reset button. Leading up to breakup, I'd considered myself to be this free-spirited hippy. If you were to ask me to describe myself, I'd say I was a long-haired, free-love, bleeding heart liberal who loved all things environment, all things green, all things fair and just in the world. I loved people and thought the world could be this utopia where everyone got along together and sang kumbaya, even during all of the turmoils I'd lived through -I was a flaming lefty and was damned proud of that fact. Which is important to consider when I say that I started to feel embarrassed and ashamed of who I was and the choices I'd made. Not only did I still hate myself, I no longer wanted to be myself. Naturally I started to question things and decisions I'd made trying to come up with an explanation as to how I got where I was. Though most of this time was indeed mostly a blur, I can recall some concerted effort being put into thinking about the kind of man I had been.

Here's where I tell you I stopped drinking and partying cold-turkey and turned my life around, but that wouldn't be true. Liquor was still a daily staple for some time, though it started to ease up a bit with lack of funding and lack of sources for funding. I never got to the point of stealing things or screwing people over, that much I am beyond confident in saying. No matter how bad off things got, one things I've always had is a sense of honor that still baffles me to this day. Not entirely sure where it came from, but now I take it as point of pride in my character. So as one might expect, when the money ran out, pretty much everything else came to a grinding halt. I debated just going and living in the forest. Forced sobriety wreaks havoc on the senses, so I had more than one grand idea, but in the end it was a lot more boring than any of that. After being kicked out of my apartment, I called up my brother and told him I needed a place to stay.

This started the "rebuilding years".

Honestly I want to tell you a whole lot of bullshit about how I turned over a new leaf all on my own, and magically became the man that I am today, but that's the stuff of fairy tales. The reality is that my brother had some very specific terms in taking me in, that were not to be violated else I'd be on the street. Part of those terms was to let him help me with the substance abuse, and that I'd have to either go to school, work, or both. For some reason I had found the urge not screw it up, and tried really hard. There were some setbacks, some drunken nights, some regrets, but he stood there holding me up the whole time, never giving up on me. Probably the hardest part, initially, was staying busy. If I didn't keep myself busy, I ended up in trouble. Pretty soon we started working on a truck he had been restoring, and a friend of his threw me some part time work here and there -because hey, I could turn a wrench.

For awhile I just chilled while making a little bit of scratch on odd jobs. Mostly I was healing from several straight years of alcohol poisoning and re-learning how to be an adult. From daily chores, to being there when he needed me to work, to helping him pay the bills and mowing the lawn. In my down time I started to shift my focus into video games, as it was one of my brother's hobbies, and it felt good to reconnect in a way that we hadn't had since childhood. Funny how remembering the good parts of your childhood can bring a smile to your face, because I was definitely smiling when we'd play PC games late into the night remembering how we'd played Nintendo when we were kids. Particularly fond memories were from snow days, when we'd get to stay home from school and sit inside with that faint smell of burning lint as the furnace cranked up, beating each other on whatever game we had while the snow piled up ever-so-quietly like a fluffy blanket. Especially right around the evening time when the sun started to go down and everything looked like it had a hint of blue. I can still smell the hamburger helper and biscuits our parents would typically make for us on snow days.

We got to relive that a few times, at his house, during the "rebuilding years" when I really started to question who I'd been and who I was going to be.

I eventually made the decision to go back to school. I needed to have a proper education, and I was just mostly wasting time turning wrenches and flipping cars, while bumming out in my brother's spare bedroom. I had started dating here and there again, but nothing was giving me a sense of purpose, and each girlfriend quickly became something I lost interest in, while I was pining for true sense of being. I needed to sit down and define who I was, so what better way to do that then put myself through school.

Having sit down and decided on what I wanted to do with my life, I hatched a fairly rudimentary plan and timeline. I figured it'd take me about 3 or 4 years to get an education from the local college, when in reality it was a little more of a commitment than I'd anticipated. Many of my classes were long and demanding in terms of homework. There were several part-time jobs that I held during school which limited my available study time. Several times I caught myself being completely exhausted from being up two or three days straight with maybe a couple of twenty minute naps, trying to balance work and school. There was never a class that I failed or dropped out of, actually it was quite the opposite -I was doing exceedingly well. So well that I even picked up some tutoring here and there, and discovered my love for writing. A couple of the part-time jobs had to be abandoned for different jobs with better flexibility on scheduling towards the end. I scraped by very closely, but I never had to worry about starving -that was something my brother told me from the beginning. So long as I kept on the straight and narrow, and was putting in an effort, if he had food then I had food. I didn't have much in the way of any luxuries, but I got by.

My timeline was fairly accurate, I'd graduated as the first person in my family to have ever attended college and I was stoked. Over these years of rebuilding I'd studied and worked so hard the time flew by so fast it seems like it only lasted a few months. There was hardly any time for drinking or partying, although I did kick back a brews here and there with my brother when he had some extra. It was kind of strange when I came to the realization, though, that I didn't want to drink. For some reason being sober for a stretch had completely killed my taste for alcohol and the hangovers got exponentially worse, so I mostly avoided it -to my surprise, I was no longer an alcoholic and had earned a college degree. Before I could even fully appreciate that fact, I had already landed a job in the career I sat out for, and moved across the country to start anew. It was strange to leave everything behind and be successful for once in my life, so the shock lasted for a bit. Probably wasn't until the first two years had passed before I started to feel "settled in".

Since then, I've spent a lot of time trying to improve myself further. My job allows me the ability of being in the field a lot, which leads to plenty of alone time to think. I'd like to give a whole lot of specific examples of how I started to change my pattern of thinking, but that will come later in the publication as I explore themes and observation, the important part to note is that I spent the better half of a decade improving myself, thinking, observing, writing things down, appreciating what I have, appreciating of who I am compared to who I was, and looking forward to who I want to be. A couple of times a year I still visit my brother for a couple of weeks, I couldn't just abandon him after he was there to pick up the pieces of my life. I hope to eventually have a ranch where I can move him out and we can spend even more time being the men that we are capable of being and enjoying life together. Until then, I dedicate this life-journal to him. I also dedicate it to all of the good, all of the bad, and all of the indifferent I've experienced over the years.

So that's the history, for the most part, to lay down a foundation of who you're dealing with. There are going to be a lot of places from here on out that jump around, tell stories that weren't included thus far, and make a feeble attempt at painting a picture of how I see the world.