Part of putting your stuff out there is the consideration of boundaries. People may hear an idea and think it’s a bubble off, or not well-founded… or they may feel intruded upon as they have a similar feeling – but I’m not sure why. So I thought I would take a moment and put a few things down that give my readers an inside view of what makes me, me.

Let’s hit some facts right out of the shoot. I was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania to a young couple. I am told I was a wanted pregnancy and while I have a few good memories of the toddler years (yes, I remember them) I have a lot of stains as well. My mother was a nurse and my father was a high-precision machinist. His job was a combination of production and art… and I fear that combination did him in a bit.

The bullet points are:

• We moved a bit when I was young
• They both smoked – yuck
• They both drank
• Neither had a clue or seemingly a goal to raise kids
• They split when I was 6 years old
• My sister was a new-born – it was 1973

Pre-sister

I was spoiled even though they didn’t have much. I had my own, private rocking chair. I had a crazy collection of Hot Wheels. I saw Gary Mathis and Denise Williams on the Merv Griffin Show. I was living a high life. I even got my own bicycle when I was four at the apartment complex and took to it naturally.

My best friend was Kenny and he had a bike too… in the same complex. The cool part about the apartments for a kid in the 70’s was a sense of freedom. I could go “outside” and hang with Kenny or the older kids. The older kids would dare me to do stunts on my bike, and I could… so I earned their acceptance. This led to things like street hockey and football all before turning six.

Even though I had already tied on my first hangover (Thanksgiving 1972) I feel this was a good time. My dad would drink, get really pissed off sometimes and I would lock myself in my room. Only once do I remember him kicking through the door. That night, my Mom saved me.

Happy Birthday Sister

To my surprise and without warning, I was yanked from the apartment complex and placed in a new suburb of Philadelphia. My parents had apparently bought a fixer-upper… their first house. It was a pit.

Another surprise was that the drunken foolishness I had grown used to was actually the ending of a marriage. My father had decided to hop into his Yellow VW Bug, with the manual twist handle sunroof, and tell me he would see me soon.

This was an incredibly odd sensation as my mother was on the porch holding a baby.

My new sister was the baby. Yep, this was my first real sense of true disappointment. I had put up with the yelling, the laughing, the singing, the drinking, the un-assuredness of living with drunks… but this was different.

Here I am in a new neighborhood, a house instead of a complex… a road in front instead of a parking lot with lots of open space. A house that was a far cry from “Nice” and a new bedroom that had a whole in the floor that led to a creepy, damp, musty basement. Add to that… a sister that I inherently loved more than life itself… but had little knowledge on how to help.

I learned quickly, and my mother tried, oh, she tried to get decent help with the baby while she had to go back to work. But let’s be honest – this was before nurses were the heroes of society. She was not well-paid, and my father had adopted the dead-beat role on demand.

I’ll save you the torment of years, but I will share two things with you, as my parents would try every now and then to make something work.

One… I came home from school one day and walking in the door, nearly fell straight to the basement. My dad was in the house with a friend. They were laughing and kicking back with a box of 12 oz. Budweisers. My dad thought the going outside, then opening the slanted doors to access the basement was stupid… so he cut a giant hole in the Living Room floor erasing about 30% of the living area to put in some steps leading to the basement.

Remember the part about the damp, cold, musty basement? Yeah, now we had direct access to that.

Two… when someone gave my dad an old above-ground pool, he thought that was awesome. But seriously, who wants to climb up to a pool? So, he helped me dig a hole in the yard to submerge the pool. Do you have any idea how many Budweisers it takes to watch an 8-year-old dig a hole that big?

When he got it all in place, he found it necessary to replace the liner… so he took the money my uncle had sent for school and bought a liner for the pool. He built a deck around the pool and I will admit — it was wonderful for a season. Being able to look at this resort-style addition to our humble home was astonishing.

The next spring, Dad realized he had not winterized the pool correctly. So in a tizzy, he collapsed the pool into the hole we had dug and commanded me to relocate the mound in the yard we had made the year earlier, back to its original location. Shovel, Pick ax, and wheelbarrow were once again my friend… but this time there was no resort experience to look forward to. The pool was my expense, my labor, and my loss. A valuable lesson to an 8-year-old.

Cancer

Fast forward to the age of 15. Life is much different now. I am way too independent, and have taken to riding bicycles as far as any human would want to venture. I would take day tours to New Jersey, the inner city of Philadelphia, the rolling hills of Bucks County. Oh, how I loved this freedom.

I had started working at a very young age, so while the family is not wealthy, nor holds any status in town… I usually have cash in my pocket. Nobody ever told me how to manage money… so I became a “Work harder – work faster” kind of guy.

One day… I slowed down.

I continued to slow down over a span of months… soon I was sleeping 18-20 hours a day. This is not an exaggeration. The issue was my mother had no idea that this had happened. She worked nights, and I would get my sister off to school, then hide under my bed and go back to sleep. The schools had long before written me off and knew my home life was largely independent.

After more than a month of this, it became obvious something was wrong beyond a teenage phase. Mom took me to the hospital. They ran tests. They had determined that I had a nodule on my thyroid and they would simply remove it.

I did a little research (Yes, I sucked at school, but never sucked at learning) and asked the doctor to do a needle biopsy to be better prepared. With mom in the room, they literally laughed at me. They said it was IMPOSSILBE for me to have cancer in my thyroid and that nobody my age had ever had it before. By now I had turned 16 and was riding a motorcycle as the only transportation I let myself afford. This was my passion.

I was prepared to have a quick operation where they would make an incision about one inch long, and remove the nodule that was interfering with my thyroid. A month or so later, I was waking up after surgery…

Blink blink – I see a priest and my mother crying… fade to black.

Blink blink – I see Mary Beth from school… a girl I had a wicked crush on… fade to black.

Blink blink – I see the room full of neighborhood kids… fade to black.

Finally, I come to and am awake. I realize I have to pee. I get up and slowly walk myself to the restroom. When I finish my business, I turn to the mirror and I see a big white towel clipped together around my neck. I think to myself “man, my throat is sore… I wonder what it would feel like if they slit my whole neck open?” I lift the towel up.

There is a line of staples, like a railroad track from one side of my neck to the other.

Phaseless, I lower the towel and resume my position in the bed. By the age of sixteen I am already numb to the incompetence and dependability of people that are supposed to be in charge.

Then like a flood, I begin to recount in my mind what a disaster the surgery was. It was a student hospital and they literally almost operated on me before I was completely asleep… and the last thing I heard before conking out was “Oh, shit?!?!”.

Is Race a Thing?

Later that year, I went on a self-destructive path. The doctors messed up the operation and decided to over-prescribe medication in the hopes my body would flush the excess synthetic thyroid. Their plan backfired. I became an energized lunatic.

My parents were not keeping up with the bills, so I began to pay household bills and the tuition to Catholic High School. I fell behind on the tuition. In their defense, I took it for granted. I saw the church busing in minority kids from the city for free and even paying for their commute. Surely that wouldn’t throw out a recent cancer survivor that was paying his own way, from a broken home…

I was wrong.

In fact, the last thing Mr. Achuff said to me as he fired me as a student was “A kid like you will never amount to anything in this world.”

A few short years later, I was holding down multiple jobs. One of them was at a hub for UPS. I worked the outbound. I loved it. I held the load record in that facility for years, worked training and taught others my methods, and took every opportunity to move forward.

Time and time again, with influence from the Union… I was told I would be promoted in a week or so… only to be replaced with a lesser-performing person of color. Managers would tell me to my face that they were pulling for me, but their numbers were off, so they had to go in another direction.

Just think — only another 20 years or so until society tells me it was my privilege that let me get ahead.

Translate to Today

While there are countless other details to give you a background. What you see in me now is a guy who swore off medical professionals until his fiance forced him to go, before the wedding. I went 13 years without seeing a dentist!

I have little trust of leadership I don’t personally vet and put on a pedestal myself. A great example is I respect the position of Police Officer, Military Officer, teacher, etc… but consider them dubious until I verify their information.

So when you look at the last half-decade in our cesspool of Politics, Corruption, and Medical mishandling – I am not surprised. This is what I have seen for 40 years.

The people that we are supposed to trust to have our best interests have consistently let me down, from the very beginning. When I was twelve, one of my mother’s friends was actively courting me. While nothing ever happened between us… I had seen the woman naked – more than once. This is not a good thing for a young man. She was my mom’s friend and should have helped my mother rear me… not show me her boobs.

Stories like this pour out of this era. The 70’s were a wild time and the 80’s took someone like me and set me lose to my own ends. I made money. I spent money. I partied. Only once or twice did an adult ever say “Hey, what the hell are you doing?!?!”.

It’s Not Right Or Left

I talk to some folks and they are like “How did you get so conservative?” or “You right-wingers are all alike.” It’s not a Right or Left thing. There is plenty to find wrong in each party. I look at our current situation and am in shock. How in the world are we stuck looking at Biden vs Trump? We can do so much better.

But this is where my book comes in. If people on a wholesale basis would own the junk that makes them complete, embrace their natural call to leadership, and stop laying down… the unnatural poor leadership of our era would not have so much power.

People might wonder about my issues… I think that is kind of funny. But here goes nothing…

• If my daughter tells a man in the ladies’ restroom assaulted or accosted her – it isn’t min I feel sorry for.
• When the teachers that are supposed to teach foreign languages are consistently not teaching language – but the advantages of alternative lifestyles, I disagree.
• When my son can check out sexual filth at the school library – I object. (Newsflash – if you could get fired for reading it out loud in your company’s break room… it doesn’t belong on the school bookshelf.
• If we keep calling the killing and sterilization of our children “Healthcare” – we are confused.
• If someone disagrees with you – that doesn’t mean they hate you.
• Unelected officials have ZERO clout in my book. The World Health Organization, and World Economic Forum need brought back down to “Clubhouse” status… not authorities.
• The phrase “Conspiracy Theorist” and its meaning are incongruent.

If you had told me ten years ago that rich people and politicians were flying young people to a private island to express their perversions, I would have thought you were crazy. Now look where we are.

Choose your friends wisely, and stay open-minded and vigilant at the same time. I thought you deserved to know.