What Is Going On.

This may get heavy. My life just took a major turn for the worse. My aim here is to tell my story, just in case.

I do not like to speak this way - I would prefer to retain my dignity, and to overcome things silently. I am having a difficult time seeing into the future right now, though, so here goes.

Growing Up.

Growing up in my family was not easy. Envision two codependent, narcissistic entities who have no business being in charge of themselves, let alone you, somehow controlling everything around you.

Now, throw that into a blender - with constant movement due to financial instability, a favorite child (not me), a violent and unstable father with a need to claim credit for things he has not done (multi-domain valor thief!), and a mother who takes those stresses out on you.

We had moved seventeen times by the time I was 17 years old.

My mom worked, and my dad stayed home. He had a back injury.

Have you ever met a person who had all of the financial sense of a donut?

I noticed very early on that this describes each of my parents- financial donuts, both. This financial donutry is what led us to our frequent moves. My parents always had money to smoke - not always to keep us from living in a tent.

Tents aside, it was my job to fan the flames for my 'rents. I remember them sitting us down and asking us whether we thought they should remain married. Of course a kid wants their parents to remain together. That's beside the point - I am not married to either of you. Why are you asking me?

Being Born.

I was born post-term, and my youngest brother premature. That is two out of three born in unusual time.

Despite the fact that nearly all post-term births are managed and planned by doctors, my father was not in the room with us. He was somehwere else, with unclear details as to where. He always tells me a story about how he had to crawl through what he describes as one of the world's worst ice storms to get to me. How incredible of him. I wonder if my mom did any of the labor.

Without implying pre-birth certainty, I believe that both of these terms may have been influenced by my dad's violence toward my mother. As a result of my post-term birth, plus the intense and volatile dynamic into which I was born, I developed early cognition. My dad used to joke that when I was born, I read the label on the side of the machines to the doctor: "Made in Tay-wan."

I do not recall that, and I doubt its veracity. What I do recall, however - one of my earliest memories - is the image of my dad violently trapping my mother, who was pregnant with my brother. He did this by slamming the door shut on her arm. He does not seem to like it when people exercise the power to leave on their own terms.

The Father.

As a kid, I always wanted to be like him.

He was a large, tall man who projected what I believed to be confidence. He had been in the Army, and claims to have set records during training. In the field of sport, he excelled in basketball - legend said that he could do any dunk you'd seen on TV. No woman dared be "unpleasant" in his vicinity - he'd let them know. And he was having his Big Gulp (styrofoam or plastic cup to be later cast aside as litter). Nobody was going to take Big away from him. He was going to have his Jeep or his truck, and his Big Gulp, and his Big Mac, and all that. He just wasn't going to work for it. Or put it to use for anyone - certainly not the family and community surrounding and enabling him.

Fond was he of retelling story of Marvin Gaye and his father - Marvin, Sr., who shot and killed Marvin with the gun Marvin had purchased for his father. This seems to have been my dad's favorite way to re-skin "I brought you into this world, and I can take you out."

He seems to thrive when others around him are making headway, but not so much that it casts suspicion or guilt onto him. You have to do just enough to keep him happy, but not so much that he feels like he has to do something. As such, I knew that I was doomed when he did a load of laundry three days ago. Yikes.

His back injury should have healed with any physical therapy effort within weeks, but he managed - through persistence and laziness - to scam The System, despite clear and warranted skepticism from all around. He secured his assistance, and proceeded to lie down in comfort for the next 40 years, using his disability status to garner sympathy. I say this not as a competition, but as a point of reference - I am not judging him baselessly. I have had a back injury of my own. I slipped a disc. He fractured a spinal process. That is one of the little hook things on the back of a vertebra. This is a serious injury, no doubt, but the slipped disc tends to be more "debilitating" (according to AI), with the spinal process injury he suffered generally being more readily treatable. It took me 3 or 4 months to get back into movement shape, following my injury.

He's a gambler, too - poker and blackjack. SSI, disability, the last few dollars of each month (which would otherwise have added up to a number of stable months for the family)? Blackjack got that.

He swears he knows what he's doing. But here's the deal. When I was sixteen, he began to understand how strong my math brain was. He saw an opportunity.

Under guise of bonding, he began to teach me blackjack, and to nudge me toward card counting. His real intent, it seems, was to train me as his casino dog. Except that his counting system was basic. I told him so, and offered improvements - at the time, I was able to predict the next card, down to suit, with something like 25% accuracy - higher if we count situations where I had predicted, say, a two of clubs, and received a two of spades. Alas, my system was "too complicated for anybody to use" (it was counting by ones and twos). So we agreed to use only his, and never to speak of mine again. I quickly lost my interest in gambling. He also lost my interest gambling.

I do not remember one holiday without a C____ tantrum. One Thanksgiving in Tennessee, he forced himself out of the passenger seat, and walked down the road screaming about the method of turkey thawing my mom had proposed.

Further, he would make this big show of "leaving" the family, walking away, knowing that we three brothers would cry and cry and guilt our mom into taking him back.

The Mother.

Not only was I regularly threatened by my father, but my mother as well - she was more comfortable with physical violence toward children. My dad would cry when he would spank us, sobbing, "this hurts me more than it does you!" (sure). Her favorite pastime until I outsized her was to snatch me up by my head and neck, twist her face up into a mangled mess of facial features, and call me a "psycho".

It doesn't stop there. Following my labeling as a "psycho", she enjoyed threatening to send me to a doctor, to have them give me shots which would make me "normal."

When we were alone with her, she seemed beyond pleased to light into our dad's reputation and character - not telling us anything he might've done, just insulting him.

She tried to run him over with us in the car, sought to recruit us in keeping him locked outside in the cold, and so much more.

She has been out of my life for a long time, now, and I do not think of her often. I do not know whose fault my parents' behavior was. My dad was bad to her, and she was bad to him. Both were bad to me. That is what I know, and what I remember.

The Brothers.

We three peas go together like peanut butter and macaroni.

One seems to be lost - torn between a drive to self-define, a desire to be like a paternal influence, and a need to assert this complex identity. He wants to follow in footsteps, though does not seem aware of where that path may lead. He is the clear parental favorite, and always has been - with one caveat: when my dad would leave us and return, he would tell me that I was his favorite. The other is quiet, withdrawn. Through decades of experiencing awful treatment at my hand (downstream of my mom treating me poorly), he has arrived at a position that it may be better to self-isolate than to experience pain again. Can you blame them?

The Self.

Confidence looks different to me today than it did back then.

I am selfish and vile - an unlikable "dick" who never does anything for anyone. A real psycho.

- or -

I am a passionate and deeply principled autodidact, whose goal is to catalyze the healing of the land and its people for as near to free as I am able. Preferably with as little notoriety as possible.

I am not without my flaws. I have punched a couple of holes in the drywall, and I have called people the "r" word. What's worse - when I was young, I would repeat the cycles put onto me by my parents, by echoing them onto my younger and smaller brothers.

Still, for much of my life, I have provided free value to all around me, deliberately doing so in the shadows. Consider these swamp restoration efforts. A friend healed herself from addiction while in my company. Thanks to what's going on, I have to start doing my work in the open - so that misinformed individuals may never again throw in my face my current place. I have given up a lot of life, and a ton of energy to an effort which has only received me insults and violence.

What Was.

Upon recognizing my parents' financial donutry for what it was, Eight-Year-Old-Me made a request - no more birthday or Christmas gifts for me; just money. Do you suppose that I made this request in jest? Or was it greed? My parents told me that it was ingratitude.

I call it "pragmatism." I understood that these parents were not that. Still, my brothers deserved a parent, and I deserved stability. This sentiment informed my drive to receive only money. I knew that I could stockpile it, and provide it to my parents as a loan. My dad taught me that interest existed, and I took it from there. I was not interested in interest, but he didn't care that I didn't care. He was going to tell me that it existed.

I would later figure out, on my own, how interest works.

Knowing about interest did not protect me. We still got evicted - though less so. We still lived in tents. And I was still naive enough to let my dad pull the refund on my student loans - he promised to pay it back.

Never happened. Go look up "indentured servitude," if you aren't familiar. The statute of limitations on a defaulted private student loan in Michigan is 6 years. This means that for six years, any owner of my debt could have taken civil action against me. What's worse - this happened before the age of AI. I thought the statute was ten years, and lived as such.

I was forced, paralyzed in panic with no guidance or support, to live as a ghost - a shell.

What's Current.

I am sitting in a McDonald's. During each of the last two nights, I have slept wrapped up in a shit coccoon on the lattice porch of a stranger. He saw me walking, and offered me porch shelter in exchange for a trip to the store.

I have red marks on my neck from where my dad tried (and failed) to choke me. My muscles are sore from walking endlessly, and from absorbing the force of my brother's blocked haymaker attempts.

I feel electric. It is sunny out, and although tonight is going to be freezing, today's weather is gorgeous.

Earlier, though? I thought it would all end.

What's Coming.

If the last decade was my ghost era, and things aren't ending, that makes this one my phoenix era. Home or no home. Belongings or no belongings. We are rising, and we are shining.

I have a vision - collective stewardship of the land. I believe that I can still build a community for the broken and the healing and the Others. I don't think that I can save the world, but I think I can teach a lot of people that the world doesn't have to be like this.

Burn bright, and burn long, beautiful phoenix.