Why?

It all began when I was a little boy. I assume like most little boys I was doing things that I was not aware of and some of those things saved my life. As you will come to see, I have kept a great many of those things with me to this day; I refused to grow up in the traditional sense. In so many ways I am still that little boy and that is exactly how it should be. This is where it all began.

When the woman who gave birth to me married for the second time she moved my brother and I to a small town on the Missouri river named Hermann. It's a hilly town, and old German town, old buildings with lots of history. The founder of the town has skulls on his grave stone. It is said they hated him for placing the town in such a hilly spot. Even as a child in art class, drawing sketches of his tomb I wonder why you would hate someone so much as to put skulls on their tombstone when one could have simply moved to another place. I am assuming that the hills made life hard before our modern technology came into being.

At the edge of this town is the bridge that crosses the river. It's a new bridge now, but the one that existed when I was a child was a very scary bridge. Whenever a semi or a big farm truck was coming from the opposite direction I was never sure if we were going to make it or not. I would always be afraid that we were going wreck and crash off the bridge into the river. When I was a child I was terribly afraid of heights.

Driving into Hermann, as soon as one gets off the bridge there was a gas station immediately to the left and across the street from it was a pure white Christian church. It is still there to this day. This is the church our mother chose to attend. I do not have any bad memories of the church itself. No priest or preacher ever molested me or picked on me. For all intents and purposes it was probably just a regular run of the mill Christian church; full of lies. It is hard to say looking back if those lies saved my life or not; all I know is it changed my life forever after.

I do not know how old I was when this occurred inside me. It was an ongoing process. I have never been able to know the days, months, or years. Still to this day I have to ask my girlfriend regularly what day it is. It is simply something I do not keep track of. I could have been seven or eight. It is hard for me to know because I have spent so much of my life attempting to forget those days. But the lie they told me in that church scarred me for a long time. It affected the path of my life. It was still haunting me in my twenties on the deeper levels of my heart as I was still searching for the truth.

You see, when I would go to church we would sing, "Jesus loves me! This I know, For the Bible tells me so; Little ones to Him belong; They are weak, but He is strong," and then I would go home to be beat, ridiculed, abused, and neglected. I would lay in my bed at night and wonder what I had done wrong that god did not love me. As I got older this belief solidified into something different; hatred. But my little mind then could not understand. If he loved me, he would protect me right? That is what all of the adults told me, that is what the Bible says. During my childhood I was thoroughly convinced by my family and the church that something was wrong with me. Not even god loved me. It was bad enough that my mother did not love me, but god too? It was more than I could bare.

By the time I was thirteen I openly cussed at god, to god, about god to anyone that would listen. From my perspective that mother fucker through me under the bus. I was just a kid. What could I have possibly done to deserve what happened to me? My seven or eight year old mind was simply helpless, my thirteen year old mind was no longer willing to lie down and take it. Angst is not strong enough of a word. If you stick with me through these stories you will see like I did; it is amazing that I lived through my teens and twenties. Most people raised like I was are dead or in prison for life.

I was born a wild child. As Plato once said, some are cast in copper, some bronze, some silver, and some gold. Plato did not know about platinum back then I guess. Looking back on it now, it is clearer what was happening. A wild child was born to people who did not know how to take care of themselves let alone raise a wild child.

Somehow, a thought occurred to me, and I have stuck with it to this day. In my angst, in my hatred, I just wanted to know why? I wanted to know why it happened.

As they say, seek and you shall find, and find I did. I did find the truth. That question saved my life; why? Now I see that I was extremely lucky. I was forced to see it for what it was. So many people never do this because from their perspective it was just fine, but what they do not realize is that just because they were not abused and beaten; it was not just fine.