Plugging Back In

I got all inspired to write tonight, and wrote the below.  Apparently I'm going autobiographical on ya'll...I blame Jason of 22billionenergyslaves, but he blames me...somebodies to blame for this nonsense, and I'm not taking responsibility for it...Jason??  At any rate, here's my unique way of being in the world told as a story for an undetermined amount of time...hope ya'll enjoy. 

It's funny how numbers have a way of actually representing something metaphysical at times. For instance, the number 911. Now I realize that a lot has been written about this number in the last 11 years, and for obvious reasons. My fate has been tied up with this number in ways that I am just about unable to comprehend.

When I was in high school, at age 17, I enlisted in the Marine Corp's delayed entry program. I was the number one recruit, but I was more than just that. I was also a JROTC dork, a "green bean" as the jocks liked to call us. I didn't have a father, and Army Junior Reserve Officer Training Corp offered me three. Colonel Parker, Master Sergeant Brown, and Sergeant Simmons all became like a father to me, as did the brotherhood of high school outcasts, dorks, geeks, and otherwise socially unacceptable teens. Fuck the in crowd, we had the uniform, and guns, and purpose. My freshman year I fell in love with "Recondo." Recondo was our high schools version of the Army's special forces. On Wednesdays they came to school dressed in camouflage BDU's (battle dress uniform) tucked into combat boots with maroon berets. One day, in the beginning of my freshman awkwardness, I saw the Recondo team running down the road in battle dress with ruck sacks on and carrying riffles. I began salivating, and my love affair with 911 began.

Fast forward to my senior year. I'm second in command of the battalion with just one Cadet that I had to salute out of 230 something cadets at my high school, the Battalion Commander. I'm the XO (executive officer) of the Battalion and the Recondo Commander. I was also best recon my freshman, sophomore, and junior years, and I would have been my senior year as well except it was against the rules for the Commander to be best Recon since he had to select best Recon. You see, beyond women, JROTC gave me something to belong to and something to believe in. It also endowed me with the skills I needed to hooliganize all around Spartanburg undetected.  I graduated and was supposed to ship off to Paris Island three months later for Marine Corp boot camp. I walked into the recruiters office, he was always happy to see me, and I dropped my scholarship down on his desk. "I know I'm supposed to ship off in three months, but I didn't expect this. As you can see it's a full paid scholarship to Spartanburg Methodist College. Had I known I was going to have an academic scholarship I never would have signed up for the Marines." I turned around and walked out of his office. I could hear him yelling at me through the shut door. I just kept walking.  

My first year at SMC was great. I had a 4.0 both semesters without breaking a sweat. I was a National Honor Society member, the college paid me to tutor my peers, and my English professor could care less if I showed up to class so long as I turned in my papers and tutored his students. During this time I was majoring in Criminal Justice because I was going to become a cop. Yet, I started writing a book that was titled "An Institution Known As Truth" during my second semester.  The book was my first, and it explored the topics of unrequited love, broken hearts, suicide, atheism, gurus and spiritual awakening.  I was attending a Christian College that featured going to a school chapel for service once a week as a mandatory term for enrollment. I had hard religious questions for the faculty, and they could not answer them. How could they? Ultimately it's just "you just have to have faith." I became very discontent with the college process. Then unrequited love of the Romeo and Juliet variety struck.

My girlfriend of six months or so broke up with me because of her parents. We were at her house late one night (her parents house), and we were in the living room talking about my new found lack of blind faith. I was explaining to her that I didn't believe in God any longer because sending people to burn in hell for eternity on account of the free will that he gave them was sorta bull shit in my opinion. She wasn't really religious, just the superficial, tow the Southern Baptist Party line for goodies religious. Her parents were paying her way at SMC, they were providing her with shelter, they were paying her car payment and insurance; we were 18 years old. Unbeknownst to me, her mother was in the hallway eavesdropping. The next day at school she explained to me that she could no longer see me. You see, her parents told her that if she continued dating me she would no longer have a car, and she'd have to find other means to pay the college monkey. What choice did she have? However, so as not to seem to slighted by fate, she did turn out to be a lesbian. My heart was broken. My Mother was just sticking around South Carolina for me to attend college. That is where all of our family resides, Orange County California. So when I told her that I'd had enough of the south, and I'd like to move back to California... well she only asked me if I was sure once, and off we went.

It was a shock to the faculty. I don't think they understood why I would throw away a free ride. I could have went to any college in the state and it would have been paid for after my second year there. It was just a two year college. I trace back the decisions in my life to that one. This was where my destiny bifurcated into two roads. One road was the world recognizing my intellectual abilities and paying me for them, and the other road was 911. Hindsight is indeed a dirty slut. I arrived in California and stayed for two weeks. My first love was writing me, and calling me, and begging me to come back (as in we lost our virginity to each other while in love for the first time; she broke up with me over Christian guilt for making love to me, followed shortly by fucking some dumb ass jock in a car, followed by him telling her to fuck off the next day, followed by her calling me on the phone while hysterically crying to tell me all about it, followed by me seriously contemplating jumping off of a rail road trustle without the rope and bit of metal).

 My best friend was emotional about me being gone, and he's not emotional. So I took the thousand dollars that my Grandad (mothers father) had saved for me for college, and I drove my happy ass all the way back to the other side of the country. While I was there, I stayed with my 23 year old neighbor (as in my Mom and I lived next to him before we moved), who happened to be a Deputy Sheriff. I had to pay rent for the first time. I had to get a menial job to support myself for the first time. I went to an interview for a telemarketing gig that paid well, and I vomited in my mouth for the first time as a reaction to the man. I lasted a couple of weeks, and I was back in my two door Saturn driving my no longer happy ass back to Cali...for the second time.

I enrolled in Golden West Community College in Huntington Beach. Before I even started class I met Don Miller, who became like a surrogate father to me. He was my guidance counselor, and I said things that an 18 year old wasn't supposed to be saying in ways that 18 year old's don't say things. It wasn't long before Don and I were at his house, talking, reading poetry, drinking wine and smoking Salem Lights. Don is a psychiatrists as is his wife (she's got her own practice). Don designed classes for Golden West in the 70's that dealt with things like self actualization and dealing with death. He brought strays home a lot, and at one point his house in Huntington Beach was pretty much a commune. Don Miller is a brilliant, open, and transparent lover of life. He took me under his wings and taught me about the human psyche. We drank bottles of wine and smoked packs of cigarettes for days at a time. It was free psychotherapy with a father figure who loved me for my struggles. The sky was the limit for me, and I had a very intelligent man with clout to make sure of it. Unfortunately I had to live the "dark night of the soul." Success was something I just didn't want for some reason. I had to trek in the belly of the metal whale to my souls dark night.

I still remember the days leading up to signing onto that 911 document very vividly. I had to get a job working with Viking Freight loading and unloading trucks at a distribution center for money while I was at Golden West. My biological father worked as a long haul trucker for them, and he hooked me up. It was eight miles from my house and it took me 45 minutes to get to work. Southern California traffic sucks donkey balls. Part of the condition of my humanity makes me hate sitting in stop and go traffic on 14 lane highways everyday. Something had to change. I was standing on the docks at work. I had just got done pulling a 2000 pound pallet out of a truck with a manual fork. I was standing next to the trailer at the end of the dock looking at the sun set to the west. It was large, and burning colors tailored for my state of mind, oranges that don't exist on Newton's shortsighted spectrum.  I had the epiphany that I had to get out of Southern California. But how? I was 19 and I didn't know shit about life. I was too chicken shit and had too many father issues to go out on my own. "Diving, deep sea diving, I've always wanted to do that...how could I do that? I know...the Navy, I bet they'll pay me to do it." I left work and never went back. The next day I was in the recruiters office getting the ins and outs and whathaveyous all sorted out. Within days I had signed on the 911 document without saying anything to anybody in my life about it.

The 911 document signed, I went to Don's to break the news. For months I had been begging him to teach me how to hypnotize. I wanted to do hypnotherapy with him so that I could get to the bottom of my daddy issues. He was a little reserved on the matter knowing what it would mean for our relationship to take that next step. I wasn't exactly paying him to be in my life as a psychiatrists. He was officially my guidance counselor with almost 30 years under his belt.  He would always laugh, poor me another glass, and tell me no "fucking way in hell." I showed up to his house to break the news, and before I could he wanted to tell me something. "I've decided to do the hypnotherapy with you. I'll teach you how, and you can eventually hypnotize me as well.  We'll hypnotize each other!!"

"Don, I just left the Navy recruiters office...I ship off in two months." 

I don't know what the green text is all about.  It has something to do with me editing in those places, but not all of the places that I edited does it happen.  Fuck if I know...Google...what the fuck?