Friday, January 31, 2014

I laughed in his face.


Rachel had a nice car for a poor person.  I came to learn that Rachel was always on her A game when it came to material possessions.  I also came to learn that the poverty in which she was raised deeply affected her and she had a tremendous drive to not appear poor.  If one is in debt, one is still poor, just without the appearance of being so.  She wanted nice things, cars, clothes, furniture, etc.  It was her drive for going to college, her drive in life, and even though she fell from the path a time or two, she saw it through in the end.  Being 18 years old, no one really knows what is going on though, else she would not have been with me. 

We both partied a lot back then, it was the thing to do.  There wasn’t really anything else to do in our minds.  Sometimes there would be people at our apartment partying before we would even get off work, but this time we went to a country bar some thirty minutes from home. 

We were both intoxicated when we left the bar, and neither of us was old enough to even be in there.  I was in rare form like I so often am.  This did not stop me from driving though; I would just drive with my left foot.  I was speeding to get back to Fulton, drunk, being a typical dumb ass.  Drunk as I was I didn’t notice the highway patrol cruising along between two other cars, and Rachel didn't notice him either, so obviously I just blew right past him.  I was driving over 95 mph on I-70 heading back towards Kingdom City. 

Thinking back now, I am lucky I didn't die or kill someone else because when I hit that exit ramp I never really slowed down.  I almost lost control of the car at the top of the ramp because I was going so fast and I couldn't maintain the turn.  I had veered completely out into the oncoming lanes.  Had it not been so late at night someone would probably have died.  I have always been thankful, thinking back that no one was in the oncoming lane, and even better was that the highway patrol didn't see that bit of complete and utter stupidity. 

A deep part of me simply wanted to die, but my guardian angel just wasn't going to let that happen. 

As soon as I got the car righted again, I saw the lights coming up behind me.  I immediately pulled over and began trying to stash the beer.   Rachel had an open can between her legs and we had an open 12 pack in the back.  Our drunkenness didn't allow us to do a very good job of hiding what was going on.  We were busted.  The fact that I was in a cast and on crutches saved me from getting a DWI right on the spot because this prevented the officer from performing his field sobriety tests.  But since I was exceeding the speed limit by more than 30 mph he decided to take me in which would also allow him to use the BAC machine at the station.  Rachel rode with us back to the Calloway County Jail where she had some friends come and pick her up.  Because she was so obviously drunk the officer wasn't going to allow her to drive the car back to town. 

When we arrived at the jail the officer immediately had me do a BAC.  Somehow I blew under the limit.  How I passed this I still have no idea because I was very intoxicated.  Possibly those machines are a scam. I have always been, and still am to this day a light weight, but that night I had over a 12 pack of beer in my system, so I should have easily blown over the limit.  The officer was visibly pissed off and letting me know it too, but some legal technicality prevented him from drawing blood to prove how drunk I was.  This is the same jail that my mother had worked at so the jailers called her personally, but she told them to just keep me; she wasn't going to post my bond. 

The woman who bailed me out was also named Rachel.  Her ex-husband was a local cop and he informed her that I had been arrested.  She had let me stay with her for a bit when I first moved back to Fulton because Rachel was staying with her sister and her sister didn’t always want me around.  We all worked at Golden Corral together so we were pretty familiar with one another.  She took me back to her place afterwards and I crashed.  Everyone agreed with me on not liking JoAnn.  I think the only people who liked her were the ones she fucked.

It just so happened that the same day that I robbed that bank on Feb. 11th 1993 was the same day as my court date for speeding on the highway that night.  I had been charged with a minor in possession as well.  I obviously didn't make it to court that day even though I did make it safely to the county jail.  After being arrested for the bank robbery I would be making it to the next hearing no matter what. 

None of my family was willing to pay for a lawyer for any of my legal difficulties so I was awarded a public defender.  Awarded is a good word I think when said with a sarcastic tone.  The criminal justice system is a scam and is possibly the most unfair institution in our country.  Justice does not exist, it is purely political.  It is just certain people providing for themselves by throwing others under the bus.  There is no difference between a modern judge and an 18th century king.  Judges love to convict and fine ignorant poor people so that they can maintain their paycheck.  My public defender didn't even talk to me about the driving violations.  I was just ushered in and ushered out of the court room.  Expedient is the word.  They just want that paycheck.

Being incarcerated for a serious crime like I was did not excuse me from having to appear in court for the driving violation and the MIP.  The good part was that I got to get out of the jail for an hour or so to appear in court.  Even though it was very humiliating to be seen publicly in a green jump suit shackled and chained, at least I wasn't in a cage.  I could see the sun.  I could breathe fresh air.  I got to be outside for the briefest of moments; from the van to the door of the courthouse.  The jailers never fail to make sure you feel like an animal. 

I have never forgotten the look on the judges face though, when he read off my penalty for the driving violation and MIP.  Can you believe it?  He took my license for 90 days. As soon as he said this I just busted out laughing right in the middle of the court.  I knew I was not going to be driving a car for years, but apparently he did not know I was about to be sentenced to a minimum of 10 years in the Missouri Department of Corrections. 

In my mind at the time, none of these people cared about me or anyone else in that room for that matter, and this is still my point of view now.  It wasn't my angst blinding me to the situation.  It was the situation generating my angst.  The justice system is a business and it has nothing to do with justice.  It is simply a business.  It is merely a means for a few people to feel powerful and maintain wealth. 

I've spent some time in a court room in the past year of my life.  It’s been over two decades since then.  I am in a small town much like Fulton, and I can assure you nothing has changed.

My savior was a book.


When I was a kid I loved that game Dungeons and Dragons.  Honestly, I just loved fantasy.  I didn't have the imagination to really play the game.  The rules of the game itself ruined the fantasy. Rolling the dice all the time for every little thing that one does is boring.  I wanted to fantasize, not follow rules and roll dice.  I just liked to read the books, collect them, and roll make believe characters so I could pretend I had magical powers too.

Over the years I had acquired quite a collection of books for the game.  Never having any money as a kid this was not easy to do because JoAnn hated it.  She would literally tell me they were satanic.  I had some coveted hardbacks too, the dungeon masters guide, a collectors edition gods and demi-gods, which was my favorite, and the players guide.  I had quite a few all in all.  If they were really satanic my grandmother would not have been buying me the books.  Then one day I came home and they were gone.  JoAnn had burned them.  Without saying anything she just burned my prized collection. 

In jail, JoAnn could no longer affect my life directly, or at least that is what I wanted to believe.  It turned out the bitch could still get to me, but it was rare and far between.  I can't remember if I mentioned this or not, but prior to my being in jail she had worked there for over a year.  I think that is one of the reasons the jailors there were actually decent to me considering what a punk I was.  They all knew JoAnn.  Most of the dudes had probably slept with her. It seems that at least once the bitch helped me out in life. 

In jail they would hand out books.  My mental training on a different level had officially begun.  In those days I stuck with fantasy.  Being that there was nothing else to do I read quite a bit.  In my ignorance though I was only reading fiction.  Being that I've spent nearly the past decade only reading non-fiction the fiction stuff just isn't very informative, but it was an escape from the confines of this seemingly nasty world in which I lived.  Despite my situation I could go to faraway lands.  I could ride dragons, slay kings, and cast spells.  A great many of those books were exactly written that way, where the main character would find a magic portal to another world only to find out he had to save that world.  How could I not relate with that?

One thing I did figure out about those books is that they all use the same archetypes in their stories.  Good vs. evil; a small band of good working against all of evil.  Often times, just a solitary figure with a few friends would save the world.  In my loneliness I could readily identify with that.  It's interesting that one can see this playing out in real life.  It turns out those books weren't entirely fiction after all.  I think in the long run those books kept the bitterness from consuming me.  Alone in my cell I straight up mowed through some books.

It wasn't until I got to FRDC that I acquired my first real book.  All the books I read in jail were fantasy fiction.  Even for me it is difficult to imagine how ignorant I was back then.  It just can't be explained how ignorant I was.  Sure, all of us were pretty ignorant at seventeen, but I didn't know anything about the world at all.  Literally nothing.  I was ignorant compared to the rest.  It’s that whole IQ thing in effect.  It’s dangerous to be really smart, yet totally ignorant.  It’s the will to power with no direction or awareness.

In my own mind everything was about survival and females; nothing else.  Survive the crazy; find a female who will love me.  The dysfunction that was JoAnn and company kept me as ignorant as could be.  We never watched TV.  We never talked about anything important.  We never learned anything.  We never had any friends.  I grew up living with people who were as ignorant as could be.  People who hid me from the world because I was so whack.  They had to have been embarrassed because of me, but they never realized that they are the ones who made me that way.  They forced it on me, then blamed it on me.

When I got my hands on my first real book; my life changed forever.  Through books I was finally able to be around intelligent caring people.  People like me.  Deep down that is what I was meant to be too.  I just got dealt a shitty hand of cards, and the stakes were really high. 

He is still to this day my favorite fiction author.  I've read all of his books.  John Steinbeck is amazing.  That first real book was The Grapes of Wrath.  That is the thing about him though; it's not really fiction.  Those stories are real even if the exact details are not.  It's that thing about memory.  No one has perfect memory, especially concerning emotional moments, so all biographies, all stories are fiction, yet they are true.  The things that happened in that book really happened, but the part that opened my mind was that it is still happening.  The people who pick the food that we eat are often starving themselves.  That’s modern slavery without the whip.  They, those in power, learned to allow people just enough choices in their lives to prevent them from seeing that they are slaves. 

You see, the people in power learned to use debt as the whip.  Debt became the chains.  If you read that book you will be forced to realize this is not the land of the free, but the land of debt slavery.  This country was founded on debt, not freedom.  The land of the free is advertising propaganda.  When the drought came, those people lost everything and starved to death because the banks took everything from them.  What is crazy is that it was never the banks land in the first place, and it's still happening to this day.  Thousands and thousands of people went to California to starve to death while picking food for those with money. 

Can you imagine your family starving to death while picking food for other people?  It shouldn’t be hard to imagine considering that it is still happening right now.  It isn’t just happening with food either.

I think I finished that book in a couple of days, and I have never been the same since.  It partly opened my eyes to the plight of the woman who gave birth to me.  She was born a slave in a sexist society.  Just like me she had been thrown under the bus.  I do not show her sympathy though because of what she did to me.  I leave that to others.  I will leave that to you.  In my life those who harm me must be held accountable the same way I hold myself accountable to those whom I have harmed.  She gets no love from me until the wrong has been made right.  What kind of dick would I be to expect someone I have harmed greatly to love me?

Thousands of books followed.  I quit logging them after I got to nine hundred and something.  I was even tallying the total pages read.  It helped me feel like I was doing something while I checked off the days.  It was something that was mine.  An accomplishment.  It was something no one else was doing.  My only regret now, was that it was almost entirely fiction reading back then.  I can't help but wonder where I would be now if it had all been non-fiction the whole time.   

Thursday, January 30, 2014

The safest I had ever been


I am worried that this part of the story could be taken wrong by the wrong kind of people.  I worry about lots of things.  Maybe we will get lucky and none of those types will ever read it.  That someone out there might take what I have to say in regards to the effects of this on my life as being justification for this procedure on others would be outrageous to me.  Do not use my abuse as justification for the abuse of others.  Even in a slight degree this would be terrible to me.  I have studied the effects of thoughts so let me be clear that it is abuse.  It is torture.  I believe there were thousands of other ways it could have come about if people actually had my best interest in mind, but this was the way it happened for me.  I had to make the best of what I had or I wasn’t going to survive.  I do not condone this technique used by the criminal justice system, but all the same it saved my life. 

Locked away in a cell all by myself was truly the safest I had ever felt in my entire life.  Emerson claims that one does not know what they are meant to do in life until they have done it.  It turns out that I was meant to spend massive amounts of time alone in this life.  I use the word massive because I mean it is a lot compared to most other people I have ever known.  I would never have known this fact about myself I don't think without it having been forced on me.  Possibly you could say I was lucky.

I wonder how I could have ever figured out this fact about my personality if I had not been in that situation as I was.  It is not something I could see myself ever guessing and getting right living on the outside.  Seriously, who just wakes up one day and goes, "You know what, I need to spend tons of time alone in life to be happy."  Who does that?  It's not that I don't like to have friends and a social life, I just have to recharge the batteries.  I definitely have my own mental world that requires a lot of energy. 

It really makes that life lesson hit home, about not knowing what you are meant to do until you have done it.  Out in society I would have never been alone ever.  My mother issues would never have allowed it.  That seventeen year old me feared nothing in life more than being alone.  Without something really drastic I would have been doomed in life.  Because of how I was raised it created a maddening feeling inside me feeling alone.  A panic.  An energy that wreaked havoc on my psyche. I would have always latched onto anyone I could.  Even after being forced into this situation I still had to fight it for a long time after getting out. 

Raised like an animal, I was now caged like one.  That is where I found myself; in an eight by eleven cage.  It also made me realize for the first time what an animal I was.  Not totally of course, I was only seventeen, but it was the beginning of the process even though I didn't realize it at the time.  I would end up spending over half a year solitarily confined before this part of the incarceration story is over.  All that time alone gave me a chance to realize things about myself that I couldn't have realized in constant proximity with people who never had my best intentions in mind.  Even now I don't really know how to communicate the glory of it. 

There I was at seventeen facing my greatest fear right in the face, yet doing so in the safest environment I have ever known in my life.  It seems spiritual to me now looking back. 

For the first time in my life I was completely aware of how I alone I was in the universe.  Yet no one could hurt me.  No one could use me.  No one could get to me at all.  I couldn’t have killed myself if I wanted to.  Armed guards were literally protecting me.  Those cops more than anyone else in the world had my best intentions in mind as far as my physical protection was concerned.  It’s true they just wanted a paycheck, but they still weren’t going to let anything happen. 

Reinforced glass, electronic doors, concrete walls, everything bolted down.  Safe.  I was finally safe.  I had to do horrible things to be safe.  Isn’t that ironic?  I never really wanted to hurt anyone in life, but I was so angry at the world I couldn’t contain it.  For the first time in my life I could think my own thoughts and I would not be punished for it.  There was no one there to punish me. 

It was the kindergarten of my mental training in life.  In there, all alone, I was free to think as I pleased.  No harm could come to me because I was as far down in the hole as I could get.  It really couldn’t get much worse, and absolutely no one was going to help me.  Another life lesson shoved straight into my being; there is no one to take care of me, but me. 

I am not kidding about the kindergarten metaphor either.  It took me over two decades to finally get comfortable with my own loneliness, and I've spent more time alone than anyone I know.  I’ve practiced a lot.  If I don't get alone time I don't feel good, but the cultural pressure to not be alone is tremendous. Most people don’t understand when you need weeks at a time alone.  It’s hard on those I live with when they actually like to be around me.

It's been a theme in my life; being alone has a price, and so does not being alone.   It's really no different than not having parents because everyone just immediately assumes something is wrong with you if you don't.  It immediately conjures up negative energy in this culture.  Yet the spiritual benefit of not having parents is profound.  Most people think something is wrong with a person if they are alone so they never discover what it is for themselves. 

Doing months of solitary confinement at seventeen and eighteen saved my life quite literally.  Without that time I would never have been able to calm down enough to survive what was to come.  But again, there are thousands of other ways, with the help of others that could have been used to help me calm down.   I am not talking about drugs either.  All I ever needed was someone who understood my situation, but there is no college degree for life. The justice system simply is not apathetic to abused people so they just throw us in a cell.  It was a cruel thing to do considering my situation, yet it saved me all the same.


I don't remember how long they kept me in the hole while in county jail.  It was several months all said and done.  They needed that cell for other things so they literally cleared an entire cell block just for me for a while.  I still had a couple of months to go before my court proceedings were finished, and then I had to wait in line to go to FRDC.  Fulton Reception and Diagnostic Center was less than a mile from the jail I was in, but the waiting line didn't care.  The prison system was over crowded then like it is now.  It's a big business keeping poor people poor. 

Even while in my own cell block, all alone, I still wasn't allowed to have my shoes.  Cops love to feel powerful.  Who was I going to kick while in a cell block by myself?  Myself?  I didn't care.  I have no problems showing law enforcement all the deference they want.  Being maced and having your ass kicked by multiple cops just isn’t worth it.  They can kill you and not get into any trouble.  My ego and I were getting to officially know each other.  My struggle in life isn't with the police, or the justice system, but with the culture that allows it.

It's amazing the things we will tell ourselves to stay alive.  I didn't really want to die anymore.  I flipped the switch on my own, with my own mind.  I took some control of my life.  It is amazing how easy it is to figure out certain things while talking to one’s self all alone all the time.  You get to know things about yourself you just can’t learn any other way.  How do you describe the view from the top of a mountain to someone who has never even seen a hill?  You can't.  They have to climb it, and see it with their own eyes.
You ever seen that Tom Hanks movie where he gets stranded on an island because of a plane crash?  Spend a couple of months all alone and you will talk to yourself too.  Talking to myself literally saved me.  It grew me up mentally.  I became my own friend.  I was all I had.  Whether you realize it or not, you are all you have too.  Being alone frees one from external criticism.  For the first time in my life I got to be me, fucked up as that was.   

I had to start somewhere.  I was perfectly aware that sketchy times were coming my way. 

Embarrassing is not the word.


I had not been in jail a week.  I had not yet overcome my stage fright.  In the cell block there is only one toilet and it sits out in the open.  This means with twelve to fifteen people sharing the same toilet for an entire day, every day, everyone is just sitting there while you use it.  Once they get us out of our cell for the day there is no going back in.  Everything happens in plain view for all to see, all the time.  My problem was peeing with a room full of people right behind me.  They made fun of me though, standing there forever trying to pee, so I eventually figured out how to pee under the pressure.  I will do anything to avoid being made fun of.  You see, my pride wouldn't allow for it, if they could pee publicly, so could I.  I was too young to be in there.  It's going to be a long ride. 

So there I was, sitting up on top of the steel picnic table that is bolted to the floor watching the Prices Right at like ten or eleven in the morning.  It's the only channel they allow on the TV.  Elbows on my knees with my hands under my chin, waiting.  It’s all there is to do in there.

I don't remember why on this particular day, but there were not many other inmates in the cell block, it must have been a court day or something.  Maybe I just felt like I was the only one in the room.  I was sitting there practically all by myself when I saw something out of the corner of my eye.  I turned to look, and right there in the hall outside the cell block looking at me through the glass was a group of high school students taking a tour of the jail.  I knew all of them.  I had just been attending the same high school with them the previous year.   I just kind of waved, I didn't know what else to do.  Embarrassing really isn't the word.  Reality was rushing in.  It was starting to slam home in my mind. 

This was my first bitter taste regarding my new situation in life, my first realization of my loss of freedom.  I watched them leave and could not leave with them.  This was my first taste of knowing that my life was going to be very different now.  Of course back then I had no idea what it would mean in my life that my peers were going to college and I was going to prison.  I had no concept of how this would forever change my life.  I had no idea what this would mean for the adult me, in terms of wisdom and life experience.  Looking back now, I would not change going to prison because as it is now, I still got to go to college and still have those experiences that everyone else got to have.  I made sure of it.  I lived life.  I lived that dream.  While no one else had hardly any of mine, and never will have the experiences I obtained in prison.  Some of the lessons I learned about life and what it is to live, well, I don't see how those same lessons can be learned out here in society without actually being incarcerated.  I have often pondered this situation, and it seems true to me, that freedom cannot be appreciated in its deepest levels until one has lost their freedom. 

When another grown man tells me when and where I can go I don't feel free.  Who would?  It's degrading.  This prison business was a long ride.  I would suffer anything at all if I knew I would be free for doing it.  I value my freedom over all other things. It turned out that prison set me free, spiritual life in effect.  This life of mine has been about breaking free of attachments.  Going to prison saved my life in a weird way because it forced me to break free of certain attachments that I probably would never have been able to break free of out in society as it is.  The cultural pressure is just too strong.  This is one of the reasons so few wake up.  
Most people have no clue what freedom really is. 

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

We stomped his ass.


I learned in jail not to keep track of the days. It only makes the passing of time worse not knowing how much time you’re going to get.  Not ever able to be outside in the sun makes for long weeks.  Cops, the justice system in general, loves to humiliate and hold power over people’s heads.  The public defender said they were contemplating giving me 35 years.  The beginning of my pacing career had begun. The feds didn’t pursue charges in federal court.  I was constantly contemplating how I ruined my life.

On this day though, my stomach was hurting pretty badly.   I just figured I had gas because of the area in which my stomach was hurting. It was not a serious pain, more like a cramp. As the day went on, nothing unusual occurred, typical jail day; cards, dominoes, Price is Right echoing off the cinder block walls from the TV fourteen feet up on the wall, smoking cigarettes, and the same old bull shitting all day. My stomach never quit hurting though, so I started to worry.

I pushed the buzzer by the door to the cell block to get the attention of the guards, to tell them my stomach had been hurting for hours now. They soon came through with some Rolaids or Tums or some such. I promptly chewed them. I was starting to really worry.  The worst pain is always the long pain and I wanted my stomach to quit hurting. After another four or five hours went by and I told the guards again when they come by with the daily matches, that my stomach was still hurting and that I thought something was really wrong.  We weren't allowed to have lighters so the guards brought books of matches around twice a day.  It is much easier to be persuasive in person than it is across a small walky talky sounding speaker on the wall. Gas cramps do not last ten plus hours and stay in the same spot of the abdomen, so something had to be wrong. Someone called the sheriff and he made the decision to have me taken to the hospital.

Having to transport an inmate for any sudden reason is extra work for jailers and they rarely appreciate this. They like everything to stay on a tight schedule with the least amount of disturbances to their valuable boredom; to them I found laziness to be a virtue. It was late in the evening by the time they got me to the hospital. They obviously were not concerned with my health, but were simply doing their job.  I had to be fully shackled, complete with a black box, which is a small black metal box that fits over the hand cuffs and fastens them to a chain that goes around your waist, in order to be transported. It is apparently common for people in jail to fake illness in an effort to escape.

I learned later that the humiliation of being transported only gets worse in prison; in county jail they don't strip search you every time you’re transported.

Off to the hospital I went.  By this point all I could think of was for my stomach to stop hurting. After being moved to a special room away from the main ER the doctor thoroughly humiliated me.  I mean, who doesn’t want a finger stuck in their ass with a bunch of people standing around watching?  He decides that I need my appendix removed, an appendectomy. How a finger in my ass helped him figure this out is still beyond me. Upon this news the nurse came in to prep me for surgery.

She decided to put an IV in my hand, instead of my elbow joint for some reason. I must have been making her extremely nervous, chained to the hospital bed as I was, cocky and arrogant as ever, with cops standing over me. She destroyed the top of my hand trying to get that thing in, and she could have only been getting more nervous because of the way I was death gripping the hospital bed.  Because of the pain I was giving her a murderous look.  One of the guards was just laughing, he thought it was funny she was hurting me; this guy was one of those ones that hated criminals and didn’t mind showing it publicly. Finally, somehow, she got the job done.I am not sure if she had ever done that before.  They probably gave the fucking new person the inmate for a guinea pig. 

Drugs! I had been patiently waiting for this moment as soon as the doctor said surgery.  I was anticipating it. I never make it to ten like they ask you to do; out like a light.  No more pain.  Glorious.

I spent the next two days in the hospital. I remember waking up and my stomach hurting even worse than before I went under. I was quick to discuss this with my nurse and she assured me that it was definitely my appendix that had been the problem, and the doctor came in to affirm this, which finally relieved me of worry. Having an incision in my stomach really let me know just how much I use my stomach muscles, which is only every single move one makes. Holy crap was I vulnerable; the worst feeling in the world.

I was even more annoyed by the fact that they gave me a soda to drink, 7up or Sprite, and having had no soda for weeks, this only gave me gas. So now, not only do I have an incision, but also horrible gas to go with it, which I could do nothing about because of the muscle relaxers. Whew!  I needed more drugs.  By the way, if you have never experienced this, those muscle relaxers really work well when they use it through the IV; straight to the blood.  Straight to the head. 

I was still annoyed though.  It wasn't just the physical discomfort from the surgery and the gas; the thing that really had me annoyed was the guard’s constantly exerting their power over me. I am sensitive and can always tell when someone is asserting their power over me just so that they can feel better about themselves. Being in close quarters with some of them like that in a hospital room was horrible. People who work in jails as guards aren’t exactly the most intelligent caring people. As if they would not have acted like an animal too had they been raised like I had been. 

It is doubly worse because of how uncomfortable it is to have your feet chained to the bed 24/7, the cuffs dig into your ankles, plus it forces you to lay on your back with your legs straight all the time. I could not even walk, so I couldn’t have escaped even had I wanted to.  I had absolutely no intentions of trying to escape either, and they knew it, but I just had to be shackled to the bed. The guards all knew me by this point, so keeping me chained to the bed was only really a power struggle, and the guy in the orange jump suit has none of that. There were a couple of jailers who were kind to me though.

Well it just so happened that one of the guards didn’t like one of the inmates that was in the same cell block as me. I didn't like either one of them.  This particular guard or this inmate, no one did. The inmate’s name I think was Paul, but we called him Goldie Locks, and I don’t remember the guards name at all; I'll call him Barney. Barney really hated Goldie Locks, and he loved to tell me about his hatred.  

Goldie Locks had long blond hair with a natural wave to it and this guy had some serious issues. He was being held in the Callaway County Jail because it was, at the time, the most secure jail in the state, or so the county boys would brag anyways. His case was being heard in Columbia MO if I remember correctly. He had killed an elderly lady with a baseball bat and then he supposedly had sex with her. Goldie Locks would constantly sit around and talk about killing cops and escaping, stabbing people, and just being weird as hell in general.   The dude was seriously sketchy.

When I got out of the hospital, they did not put me back into my cell block immediately. The cell block they had me in was full of rapists, murderers, and other violent criminals.  I would not have been able to defend myself with my stomach as it was, so they kept me with the work release guys for a week to let my stomach recover. Those guys weren’t much of a threat to me because they had much more to lose if they messed with me. Once my stomach was right, they put me back into the cell block with the rapists and murderers.

A week or so later I got into a verbal spat with Goldie Locks because he was doing his typical annoying bullshit.  He was talking shit to me about how if he had been in the hospital and they had taken off his shackles, he would have escaped. He would have killed them if he needed to. After a while, a fella gets tired of hearing this bullshit all the time, so I told him to shut his mouth or some such.  He grabbed an ink pen off the table and threatened to stab me with it.

Time stopped, all senses were full go.  That blessed moment when one is fully alive with no thoughts clouding the sensation.  Didn’t he know I lived for these moments?  I just smiled at him and told him he better put the ink pen down before he gets himself hurt.  Did he not know I had been being beat by grown men all my life?  Did he not know he was going to need much more than an ink pen?   The guy that I robbed the bank with was already on his feet standing behind Goldie Locks.  He and I were linked.  We rarely had to speak in times of danger.  We operated on the same level. 

Being threatened in front of everyone like that, in such a way, was something I could not let go.  It is immediately sensed by everyone, and everyone judges accordingly.  I could not be the kid that gets punked by Goldie Locks.   I know the hair on my neck was at full attention and I was ready to go right there on the spot. It was too risky though.  It’s too easy to get caught by the guards for fighting, in jail or prison, if the fight is spontaneous.   Fighting when locked up is almost always a planned event. If you are in imminent danger, then fight you must, but since he put the pen down, I was no longer in immediate danger. A short stare off ensued and then we just went about our business.

Till later that is. What Goldie Locks did not know was that Barney told me while in the hospital that he would make sure no one saw anything if something were to happen to him.  The guards hated this guy.  Goldie Locks was not aware that Barney was on shift.  Everyone hated this guy.  Goldie Locks had no clue what danger he had brought on himself by threatening me.  I've never in my life backed down from a fight.  It was later in the evening, supper was finished up.  After the guards came through and collected the plates they wouldn’t be back until lights out.  By peering through the tinted glass in the evening one could see if there were guards in the bubble watching the cell block or not.

One of us jumped up onto the steel table and kicked Goldie right in the face while he was watching TV; the other was immediately punching him to keep him pressed up on the table. He was trying to slump to the floor so one of us just pulled him out from the table and then we began kicking him, punt style, back and forth on the floor. It is nearly impossible to have a sense of time when the adrenaline is flowing. Testosterone plus adrenaline multiplied by a dangerous environment equals pure violence. We kicked him for some time; I don't remember now how many kicks I got in, but it was a lot. He had broken ribs and his face was destroyed.

We made him clean up his own blood and then sit at the table till lights out. We made him hide in the shower when a guard did a walk through.  No one else in the cell block said a word the rest of the evening. It was eerie.  Everyone in that cell block was scared.  At seventeen I put fear in the minds of murderers and rapists.  It was a powerful feeling.  The combination of fearlessness and ignorance is powerful.  My partner and I didn't talk either. Everyone knew Goldie had it coming.  Everyone was glad it was not them; everyone knew the cops were going to find out. All the other inmates were all in a bind now; what we would do to them for snitching on us? The cops are professional at getting people to snitch. 

Goldie was a moderately tough guy actually. He kept us all wide awake till after 2 a.m.  He finally hit the buzzer in his cell and asked for medical attention.  Tough as he was, he couldn't hang.  He was wheezing and groaning horribly from the pain.

I was laughing about it.  He was going to get his chance to escape while in the hospital.   He was all talk; he didn't make use of his chance to escape like he said he would. He was only truly capable of preying on children and old people. When it came to people who fight back, he had nothing.  I made sure he knew it. 

The cops immediately began their investigation after getting him to the hospital.  The other inmates immediately told them what happened. One would be a fool to think it would go down any other way. When they questioned me I just laughed and asked, “Why are you even bothering to ask me?” They already knew damn well what had happened. To my surprise though, Barney and Co. made good on their word, because none of them claimed to have seen a thing. In a court of law, one inmate’s word does not hold up against another, so if a cop does not witness the crime there is no viable proof.

I was charged with a misdemeanor assault charge. I was told that they had to charge me with something or Goldie Locks would be able to sue them for something or other. No way was I going to let that douche bag be benefited by suing someone because of something I did. So I took the misdemeanor.  I already knew I was going to prison for a long time, so what was another misdemeanor to me? It was not like I believed that a public defender would get me out of the charge. He did threaten my life after all.  He was in there for murder after all.  Anywhere else, at any other time, that incident would have easily been serious felony charges. That plea bargain was a real bargain as far as I was concerned because we stomped his ass.

I saw him passing in the hall a couple of weeks after the incident. Goldie Locks was coming back from the hospital after a checkup. I only got a brief glimpse of him passing by. I was in solitary confinement, the hole, for beating him like I did. The jailors took my shoes for the rest of my stay.  It was the beginning of many many months of solitary confinement. 

The hole was outside the main cell blocks, so through a 24" by 4" window in the door I could see people pass by as they went in and out of the jail. It was the only human contact I received except when I was fed.  His face was still morbid looking.  I could not recognize him still, other than by his hair. Whenever I tell this story in person, sometimes people seem sympathetic about the fate of Goldie Locks. I have never felt bad for what I did. My only hope is that after that stomping he ceased his babble bull shit about killing people and escaping.

He is, to this day, in the Potosi maximum security prison, serving life; he doesn't ever get out of his cell there. For what he did to an elderly lady, and who knows who else, his life is in constant jeopardy on the inside and outside.  Because of this he is kept locked up at all times: that was someone's grandma after all, someone's mother, aunt and sister. An ass stomping was the least I could do. 

All alone in the world.


I finally turned seventeen.  A moment I had been waiting seventeen years for.   I was as willful as I had ever been. Full of angst, energy, and pent up emotions; I was fearless and completely ignorant. This is not a good combination at all.  I was a senior at the Fayette High School. My mother moved me and my brothers there, to a farm in the middle of nowhere, in order to accommodate her fourth husband. She completely uprooted me, yet again, for another man. 

I was a good wrestler, it was one of the only things I loved to do, and I was extremely aggravated that my mother had moved me to a town where there was not a wrestling team, just so she could be with another man. Aggravated is not the word.  I was furious.  Wrestling was practically all I had.  It was the only way I had to express myself without actually harming others. 

During my senior year at Fayette I took out as much of my animosity on the football field as I could, but it only helped so much. I had lost all my friends again, my girlfriend was now out of my reach, and I found myself once again in hostile territory; that strange and chaotic world of a small town high school, where it was just like it is today, all the guys hated me and all girls did even if they pretended they didn’t.  Silly girls, nothing but drama.  Back then I did not understand all that drama; it was a painful experience for me.  I have always had a thirst for the truth; why can’t people just be honest? 

The tension was mounting between JoAnn and I.  With the coming of my seventeenth birthday she could no longer force me to stay home, and she was losing her authority and her power over me.

That year the football team was having an exceptional year. I don't remember our record but we did not lose too many games. It had been since the 70's or something since a Fayette football team had made it to the state semifinals. I always downplayed our success because it was only a 2A school.  I won't lie and say it was never fun; it was fun to win football games. My previous high school football years had been spent on a losing team, such that we only won one game each year. So playing for Fayette was definitely a change of pace in terms of winning.

The problem was that I knew football wasn’t going to get me into college. Playing for a small town team, at 6' tall and 205lbs, I was one of the three biggest guys on the team. This caused me to play positions I would never play at my size on a college football team. 205lbs guys don't play offensive tackle or defensive tackle on a college football team, so I knew I was not being noticed by any college scouts like some of the other guys.

Being thoroughly convinced of my own worthlessness applying my intellect wasn’t even an option.  I was good with the academic stuff, but my own internal self-talk destroyed any chance of that getting me into college.  In my mind it was all about wrestling. 

My junior year at Fulton High my wrestling record was 23-8 as a heavyweight wrestler. This is significant because at that time the heavyweight weight class went from 190lbs to 275lbs and never in that season did I weigh in at over 205lbs. I must have been somewhat of a good wrestler to win against so many guys that I literally could not put my arms around. My coach would ask me to try and gain weight; I was always the only guy on the team not spitting in a cup on the way to weigh-ins. Who knows what I could have accomplished my senior year wrestling for a state champion coach, but she took that from me too.

This was a major source of bitterness in my life.  I had my parents been nurturing even a little bit regarding my athletic ability I would have been an Olympian.  As I got older, the more aware of myself I became, the more aware of this fact I became; bitterness on top of bitterness. 

Somehow I managed to play an entire football season without any injuries. This was always a wonder to me, even now, considering my angst and extra high energy levels at that time.   My accident prone nature should have been off the charts. I had always been very accident prone, but as you will see, getting through that season without an injury did not mean I had somehow cured my accident proneness. A couple weeks after the season ended, while playing volleyball in a P.E. class, I came down on someone else's foot after spiking the ball and completely rolled my ankle. When I hit the ground everyone just laughed at me, so I bounced right back up to my feet and did everything I could to not limp as I walked off the court.

I walked half way across the gym to a water fountain, trying to play off the fact that I was hurt, then managed to walk all the way back across the court. I sat on the stage that is typical in most small town high school gymnasiums, and patiently waited for class to end. My ankle was really swelling up fast and my pride was flared up as well.  By the time class was over I could not put weight on my foot at all. Ashamed, I called for coach Varner to come help me because I could not stand on my foot.  He also happened to be the head football coach.  I couldn't walk after having sat down for ten minutes. He helped me get down to the locker room and put me on a bench to see how bad it was.


First he moved my toes towards my knee then back towards himself and it didn't hurt much.  My ankle was alarmingly big by this time.  Then he moved my foot side to side and my foot literally just kind of popped completely to the inside.  The bottom of my foot was completely at a right angle from where it should have been.  If you have ever seen the movie Misery based on the book by Stephen King then you can see it perfectly.  It’s the part when she hobbles the guy lying in bed by hitting his foot with a sledge hammer while there was a wooden block between his shins to keep him from running away; that’s what it looked like. It was just like that without the wooden block or sledge hammer.   My foot went completely to the side, where it should never go.

Coach paled a bit and just kind of smacked my foot back into place. By this time it didn’t even hurt really because it was so swollen.  He went and called a doctor immediately. I knew then my mom was going to be pissed, because this would only cost her more money. I was going to hear yet again about how I cost her money.  That ever present feeling of shame that her poverty was my fault somehow. It must have been my fault that she got pregnant at sixteen with no high school diploma too.


So there I was, cast on my right foot, no future, no family, no life. Living in the middle of nowhere, with a woman I despised, whom was married to a man I had no respect for at all, attending a high school that I didn't like or fit in with whatsoever. I had no job and due to my foot being in a cast I was not going to get one anytime soon. This meant staying in a place surrounded by nothing but things I hated, wounded and gimped. 


This was not an option; my will had been bent on getting away from her for a long time now. Nothing was going to stop me, not even my right foot in a cast. All I had was angst, hatred, ignorance and more energy than I knew what to do with. The tension between JoAnne was getting really bad; I was not listening to her at all, not doing anything she wanted. I would come home drunk and high, I would voice my dislikes and animosity openly and it was ruining her sway over my younger brothers.


She finally said the words that I had been dreaming of all my life.  What seemed like forever came down to a single moment; she told me I could move out and that she wouldn't call the police. I called Rachel and immediately made plans to get back to Fulton. Rachel had an apartment there, she was going to college, she was coming to get me; we would be living together.


I could never have said it out loud back then even though I did have the sense of it. I knew I had no future whatsoever. Deep inside I knew this to be true whether it actually was or not.  There really wasn’t anyone even capable of helping me.  I had no self-worth whatsoever. I had been raised like an animal.  Brain washed by step fathers to believe I was worthless, and no one ever to set that right.  Raised by a woman who convinced me that nothing I ever did was good enough, how could I not believe what they said was true? All my experiences verified their beliefs about me.  It really was all I knew and the only thing my mother never failed at was betraying me for another man.


I dropped out of high school.   I had missed a lot of class right before finals due to my ankle and I had to get away from my mother. My life depended on it.  My hatred of her was consuming me alive.  I was convinced that I could not go to college because of money.  She had never helped me do anything else, so why would she help me get to college?  She didn't graduate high school either.  The difference was that I didn't drop out due to pregnancy.  College was never an option in my mind because that was where people with money went.

I knew nothing of life because of the way I had been raised, because of the way in which JoAnne had kept me ignorant. Not willfully, but because she herself was so ignorant.  My life of crime was beginning anew, and even though I didn't consciously know it then, prison was just around the corner. Everyone could see that fact but me.  My self-destruction mechanism was priming up for a full go. I was all on my own now and all I knew was hate.

The never ending unlearning.



I can see where a lot of people will totally disregard what follows.  It's like convincing a Christian that their idea of god is incorrect; so ingrained since birth are they that they cannot see through the fog of culture even if you smack them right in the face with some truth.  It is no different with gender.  The evidence is overwhelming, so if you think what this culture is selling is how it really is you probably are not going to like this one.  If your identity regarding being a man or a woman is based on what this culture says that is; you are a sexist. 

Sexist: Believing that one sex is inferior to the other in a variety of attributes.   Resulting from or relating to the belief that one sex is inferior to the other in a variety of attributes. 

Be careful here.  Don’t formulate that opinion before continuing.  Put it aside.  Don’t be the sexist who doesn’t even know they are sexist.  Don’t be the atheist that still follows Christian dogma.  Don’t be the female who never learns logic, or the male who never gets in touch with his emotional content.  Don’t think that just because you have good intentions for the opposite sex that this means you are not sexist.  It goes much deeper than that. 

In what follows it is important to realize a few truths regarding so called modern psychology.  Psychology is just like everything else; there are those who know what is up and those who do not.  Unfortunately, it all gets wrapped up under the same label.  It is no different with anything else, preachers, scientists, astrologists, doctors, on and on that list goes, with those who know what they are talking about and those who do not.  Discerning the difference takes some work. 

Sadly, a great deal of psychology is under the bent of producing the greatest number of efficient workers.  It is not designed to produce true, healthy individuals.  True healthy individuals do not increase GDP.  If one falls outside of what psychology has determined to be the best human then there is something wrong with that individual.  This concept is taught from birth in this culture.  This is a flawed way in which to view the human being.  This whole idea of defining what is and what is not a flawed human being is quite devastating to our culture, when it is flawed human beings defining the terms.

In psychology there are a great deal of assumptions that get casually looked over all the time.  The implied truths beneath the "study" are ignored in face of the research itself.  It is quite important to have some sense of self before delving into the field of psychology.  It's the same as forming one's own worldview regarding metaphysics; if one of the foundational beliefs is off just a tiny little bit, the whole system is incorrect.   Unfortunately the majority of psychological work done under the term of gender has made such a mistake.  It's all done with very subtle flaws in worldview.  Because of some false premises in the very beginning, the whole system is whack.  This doesn't mean that there are not tidbits of truth within it, but that one must carefully sift through to figure out what is what.  In this case, I am speaking specifically about the use of the words regarding gender.  Males are this way, females are this way, and to stray from this guideline somehow means one is not normal.  I am here to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth.

It is important to understand that no matter what label one uses, or what system one builds, there will always be exceptions, anomalies.  Anomalies have anomalies.  Realizing this, it immediately becomes impossible to make a statement regarding gender.  We can't even say that all females will have a vagina, or that all males will have testicles.  We have already admitted that no matter what we say, we will find an anomaly.  If I say, all men, are such and such a way, one will immediately be able to find a man who is not, but is a man all the same.  A classic stereotype is the idea that women are meant to raise children.  The second one makes this statement one can find women who are not ideal for raising children, yet they are women all the same.  I can easily find men more than capable of nurturing children.

The issue is the labeling we use.  The fact that words do not exist in the mind, but images do is critical to understand.  When we use the word female, for each of us, an image comes to mind that happens to be much more than just the word female.  Pointing this out immediately makes the issue quite deep.   Because of our birth in this culture, we were steeped by the collective conscious, its images and ideas, regarding what it is to be male or female.  This was imprinted on us as children before we could realize it was happening.  The issue is that this culture was built on lies and that as children we have no way to keep it from being imprinted into our minds. 

It's not really a competition, but we are defined in our relationship with others, so on a certain level it is impossible to not compare.  It is how we achieve context in our own inner world.  I see things in others and relate those ideas to my Self.  I don't know that I can say that I have ever known anyone to be more hyper masculinized than I.  It has definitely been one of the more defining qualities of my life, and because of this, what it means to be a man has been of the upmost importance in my life.  Besides loving a woman, nothing has been more important to me.  Being a man and loving a woman are hand in hand.  Ultimately though, I decided I was not going to let anyone else define what a man was.  As I became more aware of the situation I realized I didn't know any real men.  I took some advice along the way, from lesser men, but I was forced to create my own definition. 

More than any other phrase in life, "Don't be a pussy," was ingrained into my mind.  This term is quite negative in my mind.  It rings in my mind still to this day.  Raised as I was, I was ingrained to believe being female was the worst thing possible, the worst imaginable.  This caused my life to be quite uncomfortable as a child because my personality is quite feminine.  I was at war with myself before I was four years old.  I was completely brainwashed to associate being feminine with being weak, which meant I was brainwashed to think I was weak.  I was constantly told that the way I was, was weak and inferior, and that something was wrong with me.  It was a source of great shame, yet in the end, the most masculine thing a male can do is be feminine.  Oh the irony. 

Realizing this intellectually is one thing, integrating it emotionally is another thing all together.  I know a fifty year old man still tormented in life because he can't emotionally accept that his feelings are quite feminine.  Like me, using this broken cultures labels he is a woman in a man's body.  I understand his pain.   I didn’t want to be this man though, still lost at 50.  I had enough awareness to see this future for myself if I didn’t do something about it.  Upon actually, physically becoming a grown male, my emotional content was for all functioning purposes; destroyed.  What made this process of unlearning inevitable was that my personality is quite androgynous and in this culture there is no room or acceptance of such a thing, so there wasn’t really any help available to me.  For many years in my life it looked pretty bleak.  It was either figure it out, or be a fifty year old emotionally tormented male.  That is just not my thing.  It isn't sexy at all.

It's like the twins who created stories for why they were perfectionist; I created stories for why I was both a man and a woman internally.  I blamed external forces for the way I was internally.  Naturally at first it was all mixed up.  The truth is, I am what I am, just like everyone else, for no other reason than that.  It is what it is.  That is the real truth.  I am not male or female.  I am just me.  It is this culture that generated the image of male and female, and this culture was designed by sociopaths.  The meanest, cruelest, most crazy of people designed this culture.  It's easily verifiable.  Still to this day bigots are given a voice in our culture.  That is why women still are not treated equally.  It is why discrimination still exists; bigots are given a voice. 

The people who raised me gave me nothing but lies.  They swallowed the culture whole without asking a single question as to why, and without even realizing it, forced it upon me.  Luckily for me it was my wish to know the truth, and that brought me out of the mess.  The truth set me free.  The truth is, there is no one certain way that anyone acts because of their gender.  Gender has absolutely nothing to do with one's true sense of Self, which means it has nothing to do with our innate personality.  At the best it can only be said to affect our personality, but mostly it is the culture which does this.  It is this culture that ingrains the female/male polarity into our minds.  Having a vagina or testicles has nothing to do with how one feels as a person.  We use these labels because of this culture, not because it has any bearing on the truth of what it means to be a human being. 

There are no female qualities or male qualities, there are only human qualities and they are equally distributed among us all.  These psychologists, who are broken themselves, measure broken people, not whole and fulfilled people, and then proceed to speak as if they do know what is what.  The reason for the seeming stereotypes is because of a system that perpetuates lies.  We all believe that certain qualities are feminine or masculine because there are so many who buy into the lie that our gender causes us to be some certain way.  It just habitually gets passed on generation after generation.  Psychology perpetuates the lie.  Christianity practically enforces it still to this day.  In 2014 there are still more than a few churches, worldwide, which openly degrade women. 

For most people it is so overwhelming that they never get out of it, and then there are ones who cannot keep from getting out of it no matter what the circumstance. 

I can attest to this personally because no matter how hard those who raised me beat and humiliated me, no matter how hard this culture tried to shame it out of me; I am in touch with my feminine side more than ever.  The first step-dad would whoop my ass for being wild, then whoop me some more for crying like a girl for being whooped in the first place.  I promise, the dude tried really hard to make me a "man."  More than a few times I was punched in the head because I was crying after being whooped with a leather belt.  I consider myself to be living proof you can't beat or ridicule the personality out of someone.  I am still as sensitive as ever, I just stopped beating myself up for it.  That was the most damaging part of it all; they taught me to beat myself up too. 

I don't mind being labeled femininely anymore.  It can be uncomfortable, outnumbered as I am, but with age people don't really say the stuff to your face like they do when you're a kid.  People stuck in this culture have quite a problem with that statement, "I am a woman on the inside," simply because their eyes describe to them a six foot tall, alpha male in physical form, with a really deep voice, which leaves them quite unprepared for the emotional, intuitive side of me that is pretty much just a woman.  So blinded are most by culture, that sentence doesn't even make sense to them.  It's kind of hilarious and sad all at the same time. 

I used to say that there is nothing more powerful than a woman in a male body; a woman with balls.  As I came out of my shell I began taking pride in it.  So what if I act like a woman?  It's not like anyone can stop me.  It's exhilarating to stop caring what others think.  Embracing the power of emotion and intuition, and then combining that with the physical ability to carry out any and all actions is a very glorious feeling that I wish everyone could know.  What could be more powerful in social settings than to have all the human qualities at once, logical rational thought, with intuition and feeling?  I did not have the disadvantage of being raised second to males.  I was treated like a male.  I had the advantage of being toughened, a girl raised to be a man.  


Looking back no one had any idea what I was going through.  All anyone ever saw me as was a male.  I was being raised to be something that I was not.  People are often so sexist that can’t comprehend someone being feminine, yet not gay.  No one when I was a child was even capable of considering that I was so feminine because that would mean I had to be gay.  They were so ignorant all they could say was that there was something wrong with me.  At the very least that is how I always felt.  Because I have a male body I was pushed, driven, and literally forced to be tough, and to overcome my inner self to achieve in the material world.  To be a man you can't have feelings. 


I am not, in any way shape or form, claiming that I know what it is like to be an actual female.  I know what it is like to be a young boy with feelings and intuition abused in a sexist society.  Even describing me as a woman on the inside is not accurate, it’s just that I am forced to use the images this culture generates to express an idea in words.  I am not a woman on the inside; I am who I am on the inside.  This whack culture just happens to think the way I am on the inside is that of a woman. 

I cannot even imagine living in a world where everyone just unconsciously expects me to be a lesser human being, which is what happens to females.  I am saying though, that by accepting my Self, as I am, I know exactly what it is like to be emotional and intuitional like a female.  This tells me that anyone can do the same.  I know more than a few females who I relate with quite openly, and they can attest to this ability.  They are also the primary reason I was able to overcome what was done to me.  Without the help of my female friends I would not have been able to undo what was done to me.  Their friendship and understanding gave me the ability to discover my true Self.   They can also attest to how quickly it freaks out a stereotypical sexist male if I were to be my true self in their presence.  I've tested this many times, and it never fails to freak out sexists.  Dudes don't know what to do with a bitch with balls. 


Luckily for me, I have never let the negative attitudes of others completely prevent me from doing my thing in life.   As if I could ever stifle my emotions just because someone else said I should.   Somehow, in all that mess, I still managed to love myself just enough to peek through the bullshit.   I believed that crap when I was young, but now I know better.  Instead of driving those abilities out of myself, I learned to embrace them.   I have not found a single reason as to why girls are not taught to develop a logical thought process and boys are not taught to be in touch with their emotions and intuition.  That simple change would bring about a major shift in world problems.  It is not a crazy idea that we all be capable of both.  All humans should have these traits regardless of gender. 

How much further along would we be as a race if we all embraced this?

I believe that males are just as suppressed by this patriarchal culture as females are. Most people never actually get an education because they believe they are educated.  Most people never discover the truth regarding god because they already think they know what that is.  The majority of men never actually become men because they believe they are already so, more often than not, simply because they were born with a penis.  They believe they are superior to a female simply because they are male, therefore, they never actually become superior.  It is just as devastating to falsely believe one is superior as it is to believe one is inferior.   On both sides of the gender issue the lies are keeping everyone from achieving their potential.  It could almost be said that it is worse for the male in this regard because it is easy for the female to see she has been repressed. 

For every woman that does not fulfill her potential because she inherently believes she is weak, there is a male failing to do the same because he never figured out how to get in touch with his own emotional content.   Doomed on both sides to only ever be 1/10th of what one is capable of.  It is just as crippling to stifle boys emotions as it is to tell girls they can't climb a tree because they might get hurt.  I say let him cry and let her fall down.  Crying is the emotions getting stronger.  These ideas literally suppress generations of boys and girls, keeping them from ever fulfilling their potential. 

A classic example and I have seen this many times, is when a new father finds his son doing feminine things.  Like playing with dolls, dressing them, and so on.  Certain fathers become quite distressed by this, which I find to be quite ignorant.  The poor child, before he is even old enough to speak clearly is already being suppressed by his father’s false ideas regarding gender.  The child is already doomed to be only a fraction of his potential because his feminine side is being stifled before he even knew he had feminine qualities.  The child may never know it.  Most children never have a chance.

Can you see the frustration of this?  It frustrates me because I can't even discuss it without using the labels of a broken culture.  I need to create my own words and define the terms.  Can you see how it happened to you?  Male and female qualities; these ideas do not exist in reality.   The images these labels generate in our minds are precisely the problem.  These qualities portrayed as they are by society are neither feminine nor masculine.  Dressing dolls is not a feminine quality, it’s a human quality.  If you identify a child dressing up dolls as being feminine, you friend, are a sexist.  Crying is not a feminine quality.  Being tough is not a masculine quality.   Dressing up in outfits is not feminine, but human, unless of course, you are being raised by a homophobic sexist.  Then one will be quite aware of the differences, forever after suppressing one or the other, until that day comes when one snaps out of it, if that day ever comes.

I speak from personal experience, as one who has suffered the ridicule of a sexist society all my life.  One who, like most I assume, never really gets to be himself, in public at least, because of the overwhelming sexism in the culture.  Always wearing a façade to prevent the ridicule of bigots?  Even if it does not bother me emotionally that they do so, it still has an effect.  Their thoughts are things too. 

Ultimately though, I can say it with complete confidence; being in touch with one's Self, no matter what that might be, despite whatever this culture might say, is the only way to go.