About

On the subject of me…

It was May 31st, 1978 at around 10 a.m. when my mother gave birth to a baby boy.  The first thing my mom told me I did when I was born was let loose a golden stream.  I suppose I had been holding it until I was out of the womb.  I was born in Dayton, Ohio not too far away from where my grandparents on my mother’s side currently live.  It was a different time and a much safer place then it is now.  I lived only two years of my life in Dayton before my dad decided that he would like to find a job working for the church.  They decided that the best place to do that would be in Lynchburg, Virginia where Liberty University was.   For those of you who aren’t familiar with that institute, it was one of the biggest Christian learning facilities there was.  My father got a job working for a local printing company as a means to support his family while he went to school.  My sister was born not too long after we moved to Lynchburg.  My parents told me that shortly after bringing her home that my response was “okay, done, take her back now”.  I guess I wasn’t too happy that I wasn’t the only child anymore.

We lived in Rustburg at the time in a small duplex where someone almost always was renting the down stairs while we had the upstairs to run around in.  I often wonder if I was to revisit that house if I’d remember any of the sights and sounds.  I know I made a couple of friends in the neighborhood, but for the life of me I can’t remember their names.  I don’t have too many memories of being there other than being the first to stumble across a yellow jacket’s nest and being stung quite many times before I was rescued by my mom and dad after most likely hear my screams.  The rest of the memories I assume are happy ones.  I remember when winter rolled around that we had a very large hill in the backyard that we would all sleigh down and almost always end up in the woods that were behind the house.  After all it was a very large hill and we would always pick up much more velocity than we intended.

After living there for a couple of years, the family decided that we were starting to out grow that house and move into the Lynchburg city limits.  We lived in a nice split level house and everyone had their own room (no more bunk beds with my sister).  We became friends with a couple of the kids there too and attended a new school in the area.  When I started school, it was originally at LCA (Lynchburg Christian Academy) which was a school own and operated by L.U., but with that came many high tuition costs which a low budget family like ours couldn’t afford for long.  After my second grade year we were transferred to a public school called Sandusky Elementary.  My new friends went there so it wasn’t a hard move to make and besides at that age you really don’t have many problems with the other children.

After being at that home for I believe 3 or 4 years we all decided that the same problem arose.  The house wasn’t as big as it used to be and it was time that us children had more room and the family moved to Campbell County where I was transferred to yet another school, but this time it was Tomahawk and Brookville Middle School.  There I would finish my education and we wouldn’t be moving for quite some time.  We weren’t the exactly typical family when we moved there.  Dad was working mostly nights so we never saw him and mom worked days, so we saw her at dinner time and in the morning before school.  School was a little rough for me and during middle school I was constantly picked on  from the beginning till the end.  I wasn’t really the fighting type although I could have physically taken my bullies, the mental motivation wasn’t there.  I endured this abuse from pretty much the beginning of middle school until the beginning of high school when maturity slowly kicked in and my friends became more protective of me.  I suppose I shouldn’t get too ahead of myself though.

Back in middle school life went on normally for us kids, but I suppose that not seeing each other had taken its toll on my mom and dad.  I remember pretty clearly when dad came home and told mom that he had found someone else.  “A girlfriend” is how he put it and mom was none to happy about this.  She kicked my father out (or he left), I can’t remember which one.  I don’t remember too much about my feelings at that time, but from what my sister told me, I pretty much blocked out everyone and became very angry with the situation.  I suppose now that I look back on it, it’s a part of my life that my mind doesn’t wish me to remember.  I do remember though that once the separation kicked in, that we saw dad a lot more than we had in the past.  I suppose he wanted to enforce the fact that it wasn’t our fault.   I think I’ve always thought that it was good that it happened this way.  We saw more of him than we had ever before and it’s much better than being in a house of anger and hatred.  I know that it hurt my mom to go through this and it wasn’t easy on us, but I believe that sometimes God has a bigger plan in mind and even though it was painful at the time; things have worked out for the best.

I suppose that I can’t skip over my middle school years without mentioning a couple of people that made an impact on my life in that time.  I can’t exactly remember what grade I was in, but I somehow managed to land me a girlfriend while I was in middle school.  Her name was Jennifer and she would be pretty much my very first serious girlfriend.  I have vague, yet fond memories of us visiting Skateworld, which has sense changed its name but it’s still basically the same place.  We would skate around and hang out with each other.  I can’t say that it was love because you really can’t tell when you’re that age.  We would frequently visit her dad’s house (not sure what happened to her mom) to swim around in the pool and play video games.  I remember with almost perfect clarity my first kiss though.  We were both sitting in the living room playing Super Mario and at the time it was a single player game.  I told her that I wanted to play and she gave me an ultimatum.   She told me that if I kissed her that I could have the controller.  I guess I thought it was a good idea so I gave her an innocent kiss on the lips in exchange for playing the game.  I don’t think I’ll ever forget that and how lovely that it was.  From there the kisses where more frequent and more involved.  We really weren’t at the age were sex or going farther than making out really crossed our minds.  I do remember that we graduated to “french kissing” shortly after that first kiss though.  I ended the relationship sort of abruptly, because I had the wild notion that I could do better than her.  It was a stupid and immature decision that a kid would choose, but I was a kid and didn’t give much thought to how much it would hurt her.  I do count this as one of my many regrets in life.  After that relationship it was quite some time before I would date anyone else.  In fact it wasn’t until high school where I met my next ‘girlfriend’ if you would even call her that.

In high school I hung out with what was called the ‘reject’ crowd.  We mostly hung around like bums and were always caught in the bathroom smoking these horrible menthol cigarettes.  Lucky for us though the janitor that would always catch us was a very cool individual who never turned us in, but instead just kicked us out of the bathroom with a grin.  We were a group of mixed ages and sizes which I suppose is why no one really messed with us.  I wasn’t picked on by anyone then because of the friends I kept and the knowledge that most of them were considered ‘badasses’.  The only person that tried to pick a fight with me was a person named Donny, but he could never actually coax me into fighting him.  I had never physically fought anyone except for the few karate classes I took as a child.  I had a couple of high school romances while I was in school, but nothing that carried past high school so much.  It was in high school though that i discovered how much I enjoyed playing with computers.  I got quite the reputation as a computer nerd without the picking on part due to my friends.  I really should thank them for that.

Since high school is really when my parents split took hold, I spent most of the time in my room playing on my computer.  I talked my mom into buying me my own phone line which I used to run a B.B.S. (before internet was popular) and I made lots of cyber friends through those ‘boards’.  They were basically like forums, but you could download files at blazing dial-up speeds.  I made a very good friend who worked at a local software store because he frequented my BBS due to its large collection of Star Trek backgrounds and cute little sound files.  His name was Tom or better known as Elwappo.  I remember the first time I met him, I went to the mall and strolled into the local Babbage’s.  He was on the ground cleaning the shelves that the games were stocked on.  He was a rather large fellow that was wearing black pants and a white button up shirt.  We talked for a long time about Star Trek and everything else that followed.  He was a bit older than me and could drive which was a big change in my life.  He would sometimes pick me up from high school to go out to his place and play games on computer systems that were far superior to mine.  The high tech games like Doom wouldn’t even think about running on my Packard Bell which ran my BBS.

I shortly afterwords discovered the internet through Lynchburg College which is where my mom had become employed.  It was a simple text based system, but opened my eyes to wonders I had never imagined.  A place where you could download files without even the mention of a download quota.  This is also where I discovered a little thing called IRC (Internet Relay Chat).  You have to think that at this time it was a small community and not the large collection of people that it is now.  Everyone on there was pretty much friends and knew each other by nick names or handles.  I would of course frequent the #teens chat room which is where I met a bunch of my online friends.  I even had a cybergirlfriend which lasted for quite some time.  This relationship wasn’t meant to be of course.  She lived in Utah or Iowa and when I got my nerve up, I sent her a picture of me (via snail mail).  Once she received this picture I didn’t see her log on for quite some time and became worried about her.  When she finally did log in, I asked her what she thought and she told me “You just don’t look like the person I want to spend my life with”.  This of course sent me into a very dark place of self loathing and hating the way I looked.  I suppose in a way I never really recovered from those hateful words and to this day still don’t think highly of my physical appearance.  Luckily I had made a couple of other friends in IRC that helped me through this tough time.  I had seriously depressing thoughts that almost drove me to suicide, but with the help of a special friend named Carrie, I was able to pull out of these thoughts.

I can’t continue without mentioning something about Carrie in this about me section. She was a huge part of my life and a very good friend.  I loved her as much as one friend could love another and still today don’t know where she is or how she is doing.   I can only hope that her life has turned out well and she is happy, because of all the people I have met in my life; she deserves it most of all.  As I mentioned before I met her through IRC and we became very good friends.  We all hung out in the same channel (room for IRC) and would talk about anything and everything in our lives.  We would always talk about meeting each other in real life some day and fortunately for me it happened.  I was visiting my family in Ohio when my mom’s new boyfriend decided he would go to Indianapolis to watch the races.  I some how talked my mom into letting me meet these people and Carrie would pick me from the speed way.  I was walking around for a while and decided to hit up the front area of the speedway.  I sat down and was waiting for her arrival, not really knowing what she looked like or what she was driving.  I then saw a car fly across the street and right up to me, then saw Carrie jump from the car and yell “BEEEEEN!!”.  I knew it had to be her.  We hugged and she took me around the city, to her house so she could pick up some things for our small trip to Illinois where we would meet up with the rest of my friends from IRC.  I swear we were doing at least 100 mph to get there and once there I finally got to see all the people who had blessed my life with their computers.  That night I was exposed to pretty much everything good, bad, and evil.  I smoked my first cigarette, drink my first beer, smoked my first joint and threw up all because of it!  It was a very awesome night that could have its own paragraph, but I won’t bore you with the details.

Once I returned from my trip, I told my sister all the things I had tried and she explained to me that she had been doing that for a while now.  I asked if it would be okay if I hung out with her next time she went to do these things.  I had no idea that through my experiences in Illinois that it would bring me closer to my sister than I had ever been before.  We were finally brother and sister, the way that no one had been before.  The fighting and picking on one another had faded away and was replaced by love and caring.  I know that drugs are bad… but I can honestly say that without that, I don’t think things would have turned out the same between her and I.

The next couple of years were spent being a bad student, drinking and smoking at school, and having lots of parties.  I met my second real girlfriend while doing all of this.  Her name was Shannon.  This would be the person to set my bad luck with women trend.  She would be the person I would lose my virginity to and the first person to break my heart.  We both decided dating simply enough after holding hands while hanging out at her house.  I think we had dated for maybe a month before we all decided to take a camping trip together.  My sister, her future ex-husband, her and I went to Piney River.  There we all got way too drunk to really know what was going on.  Before I knew it I was staggering around and ended up in the same tent as her.  I must say.. that was probably the worst experience of my life.  It was way too difficult to pull of while drunk and in general not a pretty sight.  I’ll leave it at that.  A couple of months later I would walk in on her feeling up another guy at a party she didn’t know I would be at.  Again I ran into problems with the opposite sex and again Carrie would pull me through this tough time with comforting phone calls.  I really think she helped me through many of the bad parts of my life and what’s sad is I can never repay this debt.

After a messy break up with Shannon, in my infinite wisdom I decided it would be a good idea to date another one of my sister’s friends.  Since the last one turned out so splendidly I thought this would be a good idea.  It’s funny, but thinking back I really was a stupid youth.  I wonder once I get older if I’ll look back at my thirties with the same disdain.  I started dating a girl named Tonya.  She was very sexually adventurous and she taught me that sex could actually be enjoyable and not the horrible experience that I had with my previous girlfriend.  I suppose that things were good for a while before the drama and head aches came knocking again.  She decided one night that she would stay with her friend and some how magically her ex boyfriend showed up.  Needless to say.. stuff happened between them and again I was broken hearted.  I decided to forgive her and continue with the relationship only to have more drama with her ex boyfriend, her and I.  I know now that she really wasn’t worth all the fuss.  She was a pathological liar and severely twisted in the head.

While all this was happening, my school work suffered.  I ended up not finishing high school, but instead picking up my GED which was a mistake, but by the time I realized it and tried to get back into high school they refused because I already had a diploma or equivalent.  I had screwed up my educational life by this time with very poor decisions.  I really can’t tell you what I was thinking back then, but it must have made sense back then.

I’m going to stop with this for now and add more later. :)