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11.10.2011

Memoirs of a Hunter's Son... Part 1

This blog post, and the series of postings to come, will be a tale of anguish, terror, occasional joy, and yet be completely true to the best of my recollection. This is an autobiographical set of writings which detail my life from 1975 to today. On occasion, some of the details captured in these postings may contain topics and instances of violence, abuse, and sexual references. For the most part, I will strive to keep everything as PG Rated as I can, but I am not making any promises.





Memoirs of a Hunter's Son... Part 1:


One of my earliest memories is waking up to the noise of people talking in the next room. The light came on and my brother called my name to wake me up. Mom leaned down to me on the bottom bunk of the bunk-bed my brother and I shared while we were living in my grandmother's basement. She gently shook me awake and told me she had a surprise for me. The next thing I recall is suddenly seeing my daddy for the first time in a long time.


The context in which the previous memory resides must be filled in for you to comprehend what emotional impact and resounding fear brought to and followed this moment captured in my memory. My father was a man who indulged in every substance he could find which allowed him to escape the pressures, pain, memories, and fears of living in a world where he had always been told he would never be good enough.
Dad was the oldest son in his family, and received an indecipherable amount of abuse, neglect, and accusations throughout his childhood. Other than that, I know very little. Rumor has it that - when his parents would go out to the movies or to parties or shopping, my father - as a child of 10 years - would be locked inside the cabinet in the kitchen of the farmhouse he lived on. Upon his father's return home, he would be beaten if a single tear or flicker of resentment was seen in his eyes or on his face.
The damage to a child's mental state makes the man he will become a bitter, isolated, terrified soul. My father escaped from his memories of anguish and pain by drinking, smoking, snorting, and injecting anything that would numb the pain. As a child myself, I had little awareness of the snorting or injecting, but full knowledge of the drinking and smoking.
The chain of physical, psychological, and even sexual abuse continued with my father upon my siblings, myself, my mother, and anyone who was in my dad's way when he was upset. The scars in my mind are more ingrained within my being than the markings left to this day on my flesh from my father's abuse. The majority of my memories from childhood are so filled with agony and terror that my subconscious has hidden them away behind a wall of depression and fury. 
So, upon reflection of what my father was, what he did to my family and myself, I shall return to the tale of memory with which I began this posting.


I awoke to my mother's face, so loved and beautiful back then, before father had his way with her, by battering and bashing and breaking her jaw... Mom picked me up and carried me into her bedroom and - to my sand-man dreary, sleep-filled eyes and groggy mind, I saw my father. The joy in my brother's eyes and the smile on his face was something I remember with bitter sibling jealousy - an emotion I had no name for at the tender age of 8 years.


Mom set me down and I ran to Dad and let him scoop me up as I wrapped my arms around his neck and gave him my best and longest bear hug ever. 


My father was always doing things which would end with him behind bars. Every time he would do something he knew was illegal, he would always assume he could never get caught. For several years he had been in jail. I had known his presence and his face and his voice and his smell from my infancy, and would remember it all my life, whether I thought I could or even wanted to, but for much of my life, Dad had spent a lot of time in prison or being his party animal self with an unknown quantity of women at every party he went to...


After the bear hug, I recall little of detail. Occasionally, these images repeat their presence in my mind at odd moments.  The years following this moment of happiness in my youth would be terrifying and filled with bruising, bleeding, broken bones, silent tears while hiding in the closet, endless screams of pain as my father's leather belt would lash its way across our backsides until we bled out and could hardly walk, much less sit down, and rare, but precious moments my father would take us for a wild ride in the van and get us some ice cream...


These memories are cruel, but I must open the gates and let the compressed oceans of darkness find the light.

11.01.2011

Assumptions about me: Sports...





Being a 6'3" tall man with big hands, large shoes, and an attitude that just seems to confuse people I meet, I have had to deal with so many stereotypical assumptions throughout my life.


At family reunions (on my mom's side) I have been and will always be "the short one," as most of the men in my family exceed 6'4" and a few even stand taller than 7 feet. You can very likely guess where I am headed with this height thing, can't you?


SPORTS (And why I hate them):

  • When I was a child, I would wake up every morning before school early enough to wolf down over-sugared cereal and watch my favorite cartoons: Scooby Doo, The Flip Side, Dungeon Master, He-Man, and of course Transformers.
    • My mom, brother, and sister and I lived in my grandmother's basement at the time and shared the house with our grandparents and mom's older brother, my Uncle Bob.
    • Uncle Bob, being the first male born to my grandparents, was thus the inheritor of everything in the house, including all of the televisions he personally bought for the household.
    • Having never had a true father figure in my life, I had no one with whom I would ever learn to enjoy, take part in, or even watch sports of any kind.
    • Every morning, during Scooby Doo, Uncle Bob would come out from his room and do stretches, exercizes, and the like - right in the center of the living room.
      • This forced me and my siblings to sit directly in front of the television, a mere 12 inches or so away from the screen.
      • This eventually lead to my need for corrective lenses, as I had ruined my vision by constantly sitting too close to the television.
    • While on most occasions, Uncle Bob would simply wait until after his exercizes to take over the almighty television and change the channels, there were countless other instances when he immediately changed the channel right in the middle of our cartoons.
  • So, there's the setup... Now here's the clincher:
    • Since the television was bought and paid for by Uncle Bob, he was the "god" of the TV.
    • Every time he changed the channel - right in the middle of Scooby Doo, he would turn on sports...
      • Tennis
      • Golf
      • Bowling
      • Football
    • Can you imagine the sheer rage and tantrums I went into when - right as Fred was about to pull the mask off the monster - Uncle Bob suddenly switched to some guy whispering into a microphone as some other guy held a long stick with which he tried to slap a 2-inch ball across half a mile in order to land in a 4-inch hole?
  • Thus, we arrive at the core of all hatred I have toward sporting events, sports broadcasting, and people who quote statistics like they were presenting information more valuable than gold...
    • I grew to hate golf, bowling, tennis, and especially football (which seemed to be on all the time when I got home from school).
      • Uncle Bob seemed to take no interest in teaching me or my siblings the rules of the game or how it could entertain.
      • The Physical Education teachers at school all assumed that every student had complete knowledge of how to play every type of sport, so they did not bother explaining anything to anyone.
    • Despite having grown, matured, and educated myself, I still find the fascination with sports an enigma.
    • I can tolerate and ignore sports games when they are shown on television in someone else's home.
    • I have blocked and locked all of the sports stations on my Dish Network DVR at home - you'll never guess the password!
  • And yet, due to my height and build, people assume I play (or have played) basketball or football.
    • When I deliver food on major football or basketball days to homes where men gather to watch their big-screens, I have to fend off their questions of who I am rooting for, or the declaration of the current score.
    • Short people always ask me if I played basketball in school.
      • I did not.
      • I once had a PE class where they had us playing football and baseball alternately, and I had to ask everyone how to play or what the rules were.
        • Everyone gave me weird looks, as their own fathers had raised them from birth to know every in and out of every sport imaginable.
        • People would laugh at my ignorance and inability to know the difference between a home run and a touchdown.
  • So --- why do I hate sports?
    • I just do.
    • I do not comprehend the fascination of watching other people run after/run away from/swing sticks at balls.
    • To me, sports are for the jocks of the world who have nothing better to do with their time or their life.
    • To me, Sports is a complete waste of time.

10.31.2011

Embrace ... What?

Random Quote of the day:
" Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos. "
 -- David Cronenberg --

The name's Xoandre.* I'm a dreamer.

By embracing the silence I find in the little moments of a busy life, I have discovered a way in which I may become calm from the storm of insanity within and without my self.

I write fluidly, grammatically correct, and with attitude and passion. Sometimes I will write whole paragraphs that are legitimate and procedural sentences which extend to as many as 200 words or more.

In a life filled with tragedy, romance, passion, pain, (pathological lies,) desire, terror, and a dash of absolute schizophrenic hysteria, I have found that I must take a moment every now and then to cool my soul, soothe my rolling boil of a mind, temper the tantrums that are ready to leap from my calloused, perfunctory exterior of apathy and indifference... in order to retain what shreds of opportunity and personality I keep holding on to (with bleeding palms).

I consider myself a wordsmith, having educated myself in the United States Public School System which has been embalmed and is about to be thrown in the blazing furnace of cremation by the radicals who wish only to make a quick buck off whatever they can cut from their disappointing and malnourished budgets.

Politics, hope, hate, passions, and even Presidential ambitions will be posted on this blog. Yes, I said it: I would love to try my hand at running this country. However, I have come to realize that the act of residing in the White House may not mean that I can make, propose, or enact the sweeping changes I have envisioned for the USA or the world at large.


Aww, shucks, another fella who wants to rule the world. What else could I be?

I am apathetic to the causes which drive so many wild. I find myself enraged and confused at the acts I see and hear other people embracing as if everyone does and feels the same as they do: habits such as smoking; worshiping invisible people; consuming large quantities of alcohol; spending real, hard-earned money on fake, non-existent online gaming and worthless trinkets; and wasting their time in bars, watching sporting events, or even accelerating while approaching a red light or stop sign. GAH!

Yes, I am random, and I am madly going to call out the way people do things, why they do them, and why they should not even consider continuing to do them. 

I have lived a sheltered, unpretentious, difficult life filled with anger, fury, pain, and occasional peace or even joy. What I say here may put some of you off, enrage you, confound you as to my lack of knowledge on certain things, and - in general - make you re-think some of the ways you act or think in your lives.


What does it truly mean to "Embrace the silence?"
Embracing the silence is akin to "Stop and smell the roses" but has more meaning when you extrapolate what "the silence" could actually represent, and how you might choose to embrace it.


So, let me end this first posting on my new blog by saying the following:

To solve the problem of seat up, seat down, or seat wet all over, both men and women alike should simply close the toilet lid before they flush. Then, when the next person arrives to use it, they have to lift the lid regardless. This works in more ways than you may think: by closing the lid BEFORE you flush, you reduce the spray of micro-particles of urine and fecal matter into the air around the toilet (on to - say - your toothbrush)...




* Xoandre is pronounced (zoh -- and -- err)  Like Xander but with an "o"...