Dad’s Guide to Life: Criminals or Christians
Dear Sons,
We just spoke about my first major lie. A defining “milestone” in the path to my “enlightenment” at 41, and ongoing. I decided to start this blog/journal, because I feel like I’ve had my third major awakening in the journey of “enlightenment” or “self discovery” or “Self creation”, and all these stories need to be shared, because, as we mentioned, if it went any differently, well, there’d be no lessons to teach, and no one to teach them to. All of this is leading to a big place, and I can’t really explain to you where I’m at, without sharing where I was. This is all leading somewhere to a greater conversation for all of us. We do, however, have to start at the beginning, relatively speaking. Last story covered the first 10 years. This one will skip ahead a few.
The Lost Years:
Since I’m not going to go too deep, that 10 year old who went through a hair pull, an accusation of being less than handsome, drinking pee wine coolers, and then getting the worst punishment ever for a ten year old…. I was down in the dumps. I hadn’t seen a human peer in 30 days, my wrists hurt, and I was feeling rejected. Emotions are very strong at this age, as most of them are still 10x stronger than a dulled down old guy’s. So on day one of freedom, after school, I went to all my friend’s houses. The short story is, most of them were not interested in me anymore, because I was the town “pyro” and they didn't want me to burn their house down.
- Reminder: Kids can be nasty to each other.
So I felt even worse now. Now I had my first label. The pyro. So, I did what any logical 10 yr old would do, I ran full speed to the end of the street and out on to the main road in front of a speeding MACK truck. I want to remind you, that THIS IS NOT OKAY. I had my whole life to live. Truth be told, I didn’t want to shorten that life, I just wanted some attention, I went a little too extreme. Luckily, one of the “good” kids from down the street felt bad that he snuffed me a few minutes earlier, and chased me down the road. He dragged me back to my parent’s house and told them what I had done. I don’t really remember much else from that. Needless to say, I got the attention I deserved, not so much wanted, in way of a child psychiatrist twice a week. I spent the next year crying to a stranger about my life. “YOUR LIFE?! YOU’RE ONLY 10!:” Exactly. I was only ten and I was crying about “my life”. Wanna know something? I had a person I could talk to that was interested in what I was feeling, and I had never felt anything before to need that, and now that I started feeling stuff because I set my friend’s shed on fire, I think I needed it. I spent a year with this “Dr.”, and I truly believe he helped me get through the period of time in which emotions are very hard to control for a young human on a huge world. I got out when I was 11. We had a good cry because this person was my confidant. I have no idea what his name is, what he looks like, nor do I remember anything about the doctor, but he was my best friend from ten to eleven.
Newly released and practicing dealing with my emotions, ages 10–12 were breezish. Everything was fine except for mean kids. I wasn’t a star baseball player at age 12, I was getting good, but not there yet, so some of the other guys razzed me some. The neighborhood kids were all joining forces into this weird “good/bad hybrid” kids. Sometimes they were cool, other times they were just insane. And as we got older, the shenanigans got worse. They retired from peeing in drinks and graduated to throwing large rocks at us riding our bikes, we stopped throwing tennis balls at cars, and started dipping them in gasoline and lighting them on fire and throwing them at cars, we were breaking into dark, unlit houses, and then leaving because we didn’t want to steal. I was in Jr High school now, and there was a group of kids who liked to pick on me for being quiet and farting a lot, which stemmed from the kids I went to elementary school with who went to the same Jr High. Needless to say, I didn’t like Jr High very much.
Now, in 1993, things were getting a little crazy. That summer, I got fed up with the bullies. I was doing my paper route, and I got hit with a rock. Johnnie(real name changed for his protection, no disrespect bro)was hanging out waiting for me to ride by so he could throw rocks at me. I got pissed, but didn’t do anything about it, so he started making fun of me more. My neighbor and my mother talked me down from the ledge, and then told me to go kick his ass. It was the only way to make it stop. So I marched up there freaking out, pretending I was confident, and initiated a fight. He was on top of me faster then a lightning strike hits the ground, and wailing on the back of my head. I firmly planted my hands on the ground, and started to feel an immense amount of strength pour into my body, and the next thing I knew, I was doing a push up with a 300 pound fat boy on my back. When I got up high enough, I rolled out from under him, threw my leg behind him and pushed him over it. While he was falling I was already on top of him wailing on his face. I had to be stopped. When the fight was over, I ran home crying. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, and I was full of rage, regret, pain, sadness, adrenaline, and all sorts of other dopey chemicals that my brain was dumping out. About a half hour went by, and Nonnie’s sidekick “Buster” came to the door, and said, “I knew you would kick his ass, I tried to tell him, see yah later kid” From that moment on, I had earned respect in the neighborhood, and those guys never threw another rock at us ever again.
This is where the top of the story comes into play. I could have simply left it at beating up the neighborhood bully and walking away, but instead, since I had some level of respect, I joined their little band of bullies and started hanging out with the “Bad” kids again. It’s the summer of 1993, I went from bullied to bully. Foe to Friend. Bad to Bad Ass. But it was time to choose a High School.
By mid summer of 1993, everything the “Bad” kids were doing, was exponentially growing in severity. We were now stealing from the houses we broke into, we were slashing people’s tires with knives we were carrying, we were spray painting public property, we were throwing gasoline soaked flaming ROCKS at cars now…It was just getting bad. I had a choice to make.
Where was I going to go to highschool, with the sinners or the saints? The criminals or the Christians. I wasn’t particularly tied to either group in any married type of way. I liked the bad kids because they were fun and dangerous and exciting, and I liked the good kids because they made me look like a wholesome angel to my parents. (Which I was a wholesome angel, I just did stupid shit). This choice would be the first major choice of my life, and depending on which choice I made, it would decide how the rest of my life would go. So, I took a break from the mayhem and carnage for awhile, and really put some time into the decision presented before me. “WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO TO HIGHSCHOOL”. On one side of the coin, I could go to school with “The Criminals” and keep doing cool mean stuff, but then it occurred to me, that if it got too serious, I’d get kicked out of school, and dad would probably pull me from piano lessons, baseball, and drum lessons, So that was a hard know based on those imaginary consequences we spoke of last story. I could go to school with the Christians, private school, uniforms, better shot at a good college to play baseball at so I can go pro, nicer kids, smaller classes, I could deal with the God stuff. We went to church every Sunday, and I relatively believed and feared God like any good kid should. Being part wholesome good kid, I made the first right decision of my entire life. I chose to go to school with the Catholics. I didn’t go for religion, I just knew I had a good shot at making the baseball or football team and NONE of my friends were going to go there from Jr High. I was finally free of them.
So I went to my parents, and told them I wanted to go to Cardinal Spellman, and that I would give it my all to get into a good college. So dad joined the reserves and mom took on extra daycare kids to make it happen, and they paid for four years of tuition for me. This was the right thing to do. Things were getting a little too crazy even for me on the “Bad” side.
Day 1: Highschool 1993
Right off the bat, I realized two things. First, every single one of my verbal assailants from Jr. High school were ALL in the same high school. I didn’t get rid of a single one and I knew that at some point, I had to do what I did in the neighborhood if I was going to get through this unscathed. Secondly, I realized that I had a huge opportunity to send my life in a great direction, knowing that if I did well, kept my head down and big mouth shut, that I could get into any college, and be a ball player.
So I joined the football team, baseball team, and any other thing I could think of to be part of as many groups as possible. Then I discovered a group of people that, above all else, I needed to be part of. There was a specific group of people, who all came from the same school, I assume, about 20 deep, that contained six football players, some of which were my friends from my pre-highschool baseball league, where I had become a batting hero, and fourteen girls in skirts. I needed to be in that group, because prior to that, I barely noticed girls, but I had no idea they dressed that way until the first day of High School. There was a prerequisite to joining this group however, and it was either be a way cool, muscular football jock, which I was on the team, just not as big as those guys, and you had to rip cigarettes.
So everyday for a week, I made myself sick learning to smoke cigarettes until it felt normal and I stopped throwing up from hacking out a lung. Within a couple of weeks, I was now also part of an after school, during study, during lunch smoking gang full of hot catholic, church going high school girls and their headbanging football player friends. I was in! Little did I know, I wasn’t that cool, and little did I realize, because I refused to see it, that those girls were nothing but a distraction.
Within sixty days of making a terrible decision to start smoking to meet girls in highschool, it got worse from there. A new game called “MAGIC: THE GATHERING” came out and I saw a couple of kids playing it on the steps at the end of the day one day, and I wanted to know what it was about, so I asked them and they told me about it, and I was feeling into it. They invited me to play sometime, so I bought a few started decks, and carried them around with me until the next time I saw them playing, which was on a Saturday morning, after a Friday night football practice, and we all hung out one of guy’s houses afterward. I wanted to watch them play that night, and they said they’d teach me in the morning. What I also noticed was, they were smoking reefer and drinking beers while they played. So the next morning, for breakfast, I smoked weed and drank beers, ya know, because it was “cool”. Another horrible mistake. I barely learned how to play MAGIC(which is a cool game, I still play it almost 30 years later, ill teach you sometime), and I was now smoking butts, reefer, and drinking at the age of 13. How dumb can a kid get? What’s the bottom line here? YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO WHAT THE OTHER KIDS DO TO BE COOL. I consciously chose a criminal free life some weeks prior to school starting, and immediately engaged in criminal activity with the christian catholic school kids to look “cool”. This was the beginning of a dark path of self destruction before I even had a chance of self creation.
Over the course of the next few years, I made even more bad decisions, especially the more in shape, muscular, tough, or popular(never really was too popular)I got, the poorer my decisions were. I fought every kid who said anything bad about me, I didn’t always win, but they never said bad things to my face again. Is this a good thing? Not really? I got in alot of trouble at the school that was supposed to be cleaning up my potential path of horrible human being, like my old “bad” friends were doing. We were supposed to win the Superbowl, but we were too drunk and lazy in 1997 to care. We partied constantly when we should have been sleeping, and for a kid who wanted to play professional baseball, you’d think I’d take care of my body better. Well, I didn’t, and I paid the price for it.
I demanded acceptance but was a different person for all the different groups I was in, I had a girlfriend who loved me, and I cheated on her with various girls because I needed to feel powerful, I was a potential athlete with dreams, with a smoking and drinking problem that was 20x bigger in 1997, then it was in 1993. Why was I making such piss poor decisions?
My parents got divorced when I was 15 or 16 years old, I don’t really remember, but I was pretty messed up about it for a long time. I guess I was just rebelling. It was a terrible time. I was selfish because I was angry. I did alot of damage to my relationship with my mom and dad because I was so mad at the world. I hurt friends, I hurt my girlfriend, I hurt my other girlfriends, I hurt everyone around me. I was violent, damaging one house, and damaging the property of my deceased grandmother at the other house. This did not go well at either house, but I feel like it did more damage at dad’s.
By the time I graduated high school, I put on a happy face, and went out to tackle the world. Everyone was proud that I got through it unscathed. Deep down however, I was hurtling toward rock bottom fast. I was experimenting with drugs secretly, and I was seriously depressed, because I had no idea who I was and why I didn’t just do what I said I was going to do. Instead I had to destroy myself to “look cool.” HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?
My choice of Christians over Criminals didn’t matter. Either choice I made, me personally, couldn’t handle the responsibility of focusing on self, and accomplishing some of the early dreams I was chasing. I knew I was born for something big, but I decided to let myself be distracted by girls, and having friends who didn’t bully me by doing as many crappy things that I could do to be accepted. I went into high school believing that God was going to guide me, and I would become the greatest 3rd basemen of all time for the Boston Red Sox. When I left highschool, I quit believing in God, I didn’t replace him/her/it with anything, just simply gave up on it, and I was the most mediocre athlete of all time, who had shown promise to be a great musician or athlete, and threw it all away for worthless popularity.
The lesson here boys, is that if you are fortunate enough to have a dream as early as I did, to show talent for multiple avenues of awesome, go after them, skip all the bull. Girls will come later. Drinking alcohol, butts, reefer, all those things are bad for you if you ever want to be what you want to be, because they will TAKE YEARS off your life and WASTE time that you could be spending on your dreams. Every minute you can spend on WHO YOU WANT TO BE, COUNTS. If you smoke a cigarette every 3 hours for 20 years for 15 minutes like I did…. is 53 hours of my life I could have spent working out, writing a song, practicing piano, saving up for a drum set, working on my swing, working on pitching, learning…growing, instead, I wasted it, and those 53 hours of smoking, could EASILY turn into YEARS lost if the health effects of smoking cigarettes for prolonged amount of time, catch up to me. Thankfully, they have not yet caught up to me, but it’s early yet…i quit because you were coming and I want to be here for you for as long as possible in case you need a shoulder to lean on, or a tough situation to figure out, or somebody to talk to .
Being popular is nothing in comparison to how awesome you feel when you accomplish something you LOVE doing. I see that now. Drinking wastes time you could be spending on your goals and dreams.
Remember, when you have a dream, make goals, and spend a MINIMUM of 1 hour a day on those goals. Always keep moving toward them.
