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.