I recently took my first trip back up to Alma in over 7 years. I wanted to visit the cemetery where my Aunt Mollie, Uncle Maurice, and Grandma & Grandpa Altman are buried. I haven’t gone to Alma since Uncle Maurice’s funeral and my Grandfather had died in 2006, but did not have a formal burial… so there was never an official ceremony for me to say goodbye. Even though the last time I saw my Grandpa Altman, I walked away knowing that was the last time I’d see him alive. I didn’t know what to expect when I got there. I kept thinking of how different my life would be if they were all still around. The mandatory commutes up to Alma for Easter and X-Mas, passing Uncle John's Cider Mill, the lake with all of the beaver houses, the old oil refinery with it's torches burning, and ending up in a shaded driveway and running to the garage side door to kick off my shoes before stepping on a thick white shag carpet of the living room. A warm welcoming home was suppose to be waiting for me... one that I had such a hard time leaving that as a way to keep my brothers and I from fussing, Grandma would give us all those orange marshmallow circus peanuts. Instead, there was no beavers in that lake and the refinery was long gone... there was no loving family waiting there expecting us.
I brought flowers and I made sure the tombstones were clean. My dad had said there had been some delay in updating the tombstones with the date of death’s, so he asked me to make sure they had finally done so. I thought I would sit there in front of their graves for a good while just talking out loud as if they could hear me. I brought Anne because in a way I wanted her to “meet” these relatives that meant so much to me. I had my best friend there and I would've liked to have him hear my brother and I tell stories about when we were kids and the connection we felt with this part of our family.
Anne just stood behind me with her head down, my brother could hardly look at the graves without crying, and Kevin quietly stood to the side respectfully. All I did was kneel down at both tombstones and said a silent prayer before kissing the dirt. Then I left. I don’t know why. It took no more than 10 minutes. There was little reflection of these 4 people and the lives they lived. Truth is I guess I didn’t know them very well. I was apart of my dad’s second family. It was Chris, Beth, Eddie, and Mike that grew up with them. Kevin, Andy, and myself hardly had a chance too. It’s making me think about things that I don’t want to think about.
The plots around my Grandparents and Great Aunt & Uncle have since been filled. I guess I always thought my dad would be buried with them, but I saw with my own eyes that that isn’t the case. I don’t know what will happen. All I know is I’m not involved. My father is in his 60’s and in poor health. He doesn’t expect me to take care of him during his last years like he did for his father. My dad has his fourth wife and a third try at a family with Lena and Gregory. The truth is I don’t know him very well. I don’t know many of his stories or much of what he did with his life. When he passes, I won’t have much more to remember of him than I do of Aunt Mollie, Uncle Maurice, and Grandma & Grandpa Altman. At least those 4 always had each other. I wish I had what they had or at least shared in theirs. They have always been the only real family I ever knew. All that this last trip to Alma did was make me realize that I don’t feel like I was related to them.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
My Life List
These are the things I want to accomplish with my life. I chose these 26 items because I believe they are unique to my desires... that and 26 is my lucky number. Much of this was inspiration by Dr. John Goddard, so Google him!
WWII
1. Visit the USS Arizona Memorial on December 7th
2. Visit Normandy on the anniversary of D-Day
3. See the entire length of The Maginot Line
4. Shoot an authentic Luger P08 Pistol & M1 Garand
5. Retrace Band of Brothers campaign… Brécourt Manor, Carentan, Eindhoven, Bastogne, Foy, Berchtesgaden
6. Pay respects to the fallen at the Nazi Extermination Camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, & Warsaw.
Travel
7. Cross an ocean by ship
8. Visit the Air & Space Smithsonian in Washington D.C.
9. Go to Scotland to retrace my heritage
10. Go to a UFC event
11. Take Anne to a Mass said by The Pope
12. Get Andrew Jackson to leave the country
13. Have a shot of vodka in St. Petersburg
Fish
14. Own an ocean-worthy fishing boat
15. Catch a fish that I would never swim with
16. Catch a Sailfish or a Marlin and have it mounted
17. Go to a fish market in Japan with Kevin Knowles
Accomplish
18. Grow a full beard
19. Live abroad
20. Earn a College Degree
21. Learn to speak French fluently
22. Learn to play the Harmonica
23. Become familiar with Opera
24. Become a cheese connoisseur
25. Write a cookbook and get it published
26. Meet my great grandchild
WWII
1. Visit the USS Arizona Memorial on December 7th
2. Visit Normandy on the anniversary of D-Day
3. See the entire length of The Maginot Line
4. Shoot an authentic Luger P08 Pistol & M1 Garand
5. Retrace Band of Brothers campaign… Brécourt Manor, Carentan, Eindhoven, Bastogne, Foy, Berchtesgaden
6. Pay respects to the fallen at the Nazi Extermination Camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, & Warsaw.
Travel
7. Cross an ocean by ship
8. Visit the Air & Space Smithsonian in Washington D.C.
9. Go to Scotland to retrace my heritage
10. Go to a UFC event
11. Take Anne to a Mass said by The Pope
12. Get Andrew Jackson to leave the country
13. Have a shot of vodka in St. Petersburg
Fish
14. Own an ocean-worthy fishing boat
15. Catch a fish that I would never swim with
16. Catch a Sailfish or a Marlin and have it mounted
17. Go to a fish market in Japan with Kevin Knowles
Accomplish
18. Grow a full beard
19. Live abroad
20. Earn a College Degree
21. Learn to speak French fluently
22. Learn to play the Harmonica
23. Become familiar with Opera
24. Become a cheese connoisseur
25. Write a cookbook and get it published
26. Meet my great grandchild
Monday, June 22, 2009
The Pivot Questionnaire
Originally created by Bernard Pivot, host of "Bouillon de Culture", as a formula that may express the true nature of whomever answers with honesty... this 10 question template has garnered recent fame as being administered by James Lipton at the end of every episode of "Inside the Actor's Studio" to his guest of honor. I invite everyone who reads this to answer the questionnaire for yourself. You must explain the reasoning behind your answers as well. Perhaps in my comment section of this post?
1. What is your favorite word?
Slurpee --- What other word means something that everyone enjoys, is just flat out fun to say, is not dirty even though it kinda sounds like it ought to be, and the only possible way it is associated with negativity is if it‘s being used to cheer someone up? A slurpee is the most simple of treats and is cheap enough for pretty much everyone to have at least one in their lifetime.
2. What is your least favorite word?
Handicapable --- Only able-bodied people are offended by the terms “handicapped” and “disabled”
3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Expectation --- I always get very excited when people ask for my opinion. The feeling of being relied on and trusted is very rewarding. The most important thing in life is to feel that you have a purpose. When someone has sought you out for your knowledge, expertise, and is depending on your help… that pressure pushes me to do my best and I try to always aim to surpass their expectations. That satisfaction is intoxicating.
4. What turns you off?
Certainty --- If someone clearly screws something up but defends their actions. If someone is trying to convince others to believe in a religion or other divine truth because that person proclaims to be an expert authority. If you mention you’re occupation to someone and they start giving you advice on that topic because they read one book about it 6 years ago. I can’t deal with someone else’s opinion of certainty. The only exception is the love for one’s spouse, otherwise no. Being absolutely certain of something means that your mind is closed, cannot be changed, and you are unwilling to learn new information. To “not want to learn” is a waste of purpose.
5. What is your favorite curse word?
Shit --- It’s so versatile and can mean so many things, both good and bad… much like “fuck”. However, I feel that “fuck” has lost most of its punch as an insult due to overuse. And I also feel that when you want to use it as an insult, “shit” matches up with non-curse words much better that “fuck” does. For example… “You stupid dumb fuck!” could just as easily be used to rib one of your friends for missing a pass while playing frisbee… “You pathetic little shit” on the other hand can only have one inflection. “Shit” is also the original religious curse word and is best suited with use in the animal world.
6. What sound or noise do you love?
A perfect harmony to the melody of a song being performed live by a male acappella group.
7. What sound or noise do you hate?
Power tools in a hospital operating room.
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
Military Officer --- I’ve always dreamed of having the honor to serve in the military like my dad did. An officer’s uniform is so poignant and powerful. The disciple and respect that a soldier carries is something I’ve always envied. Plus, the heroism and glory in war movies has always gotten to me as I am a huge history buff.
9. What profession would you not like to do?
Social Worker --- I’ve never been able to tolerate hearing people complain about their lives when they don’t want to help themselves or their own continued decisions are what had screwed them up to begin with. Of course, there are the people that get put in bad situations that they are not in control of such as domestic abuse and whatnot… but if I had to deal with the former and the latter groups for every single day of my career, then I would never have a upbeat day. You’re always dealing with the most depressing situations of social human existence. There would be nothing rewarding for me to get out of bed for each morning. And what if I’m having a bad day to begin with? How could I possibly be expected to help someone else with their problems? So my hat is off to anyone that has to do that day in and day out. It’s just not for me.
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
“Who do you want to hang out with first?”
1. What is your favorite word?
Slurpee --- What other word means something that everyone enjoys, is just flat out fun to say, is not dirty even though it kinda sounds like it ought to be, and the only possible way it is associated with negativity is if it‘s being used to cheer someone up? A slurpee is the most simple of treats and is cheap enough for pretty much everyone to have at least one in their lifetime.
2. What is your least favorite word?
Handicapable --- Only able-bodied people are offended by the terms “handicapped” and “disabled”
3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Expectation --- I always get very excited when people ask for my opinion. The feeling of being relied on and trusted is very rewarding. The most important thing in life is to feel that you have a purpose. When someone has sought you out for your knowledge, expertise, and is depending on your help… that pressure pushes me to do my best and I try to always aim to surpass their expectations. That satisfaction is intoxicating.
4. What turns you off?
Certainty --- If someone clearly screws something up but defends their actions. If someone is trying to convince others to believe in a religion or other divine truth because that person proclaims to be an expert authority. If you mention you’re occupation to someone and they start giving you advice on that topic because they read one book about it 6 years ago. I can’t deal with someone else’s opinion of certainty. The only exception is the love for one’s spouse, otherwise no. Being absolutely certain of something means that your mind is closed, cannot be changed, and you are unwilling to learn new information. To “not want to learn” is a waste of purpose.
5. What is your favorite curse word?
Shit --- It’s so versatile and can mean so many things, both good and bad… much like “fuck”. However, I feel that “fuck” has lost most of its punch as an insult due to overuse. And I also feel that when you want to use it as an insult, “shit” matches up with non-curse words much better that “fuck” does. For example… “You stupid dumb fuck!” could just as easily be used to rib one of your friends for missing a pass while playing frisbee… “You pathetic little shit” on the other hand can only have one inflection. “Shit” is also the original religious curse word and is best suited with use in the animal world.
6. What sound or noise do you love?
A perfect harmony to the melody of a song being performed live by a male acappella group.
7. What sound or noise do you hate?
Power tools in a hospital operating room.
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
Military Officer --- I’ve always dreamed of having the honor to serve in the military like my dad did. An officer’s uniform is so poignant and powerful. The disciple and respect that a soldier carries is something I’ve always envied. Plus, the heroism and glory in war movies has always gotten to me as I am a huge history buff.
9. What profession would you not like to do?
Social Worker --- I’ve never been able to tolerate hearing people complain about their lives when they don’t want to help themselves or their own continued decisions are what had screwed them up to begin with. Of course, there are the people that get put in bad situations that they are not in control of such as domestic abuse and whatnot… but if I had to deal with the former and the latter groups for every single day of my career, then I would never have a upbeat day. You’re always dealing with the most depressing situations of social human existence. There would be nothing rewarding for me to get out of bed for each morning. And what if I’m having a bad day to begin with? How could I possibly be expected to help someone else with their problems? So my hat is off to anyone that has to do that day in and day out. It’s just not for me.
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
“Who do you want to hang out with first?”
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Six Degrees Of Contemplation
I’d like to explain the six major focuses I’ve had in my life since my fighting days ended. Being raised in a harsh little bubble like I was while never having it shown to the outside world until I was 16; what I would do when I got out of that situation held a strangely enormous amount of significance for me, which I still carry. I believe that is why I still plan things out in great details far in advance. Otherwise, I feel very lost and anxious. I want to always be prepared for the opportunity that lifts me out of anything I’m unhappy with in my life, so that I may act quickly. I care for others of course, but my highest priority is the best life possible for my wife and I.
Coaching
After the 1999 world KSW tournament, I knew there was no possibility of ever competing again. Not only that, but I couldn’t hope to learn any new style of martial art. I was stuck at the same rank and styles that I knew and quite frankly, were already bored with. I’m a 2nd degree black belt in Kuk Sool Won, a freshly-awarded blue belt in Brazilian Ju Jitsu, a seasoned kickboxer, an eager-to-learn-more boxer with about a year of experience, and I had just started Thai boxing. When I was about to leave the hospital, a nurse that had seen how depressed I was about losing my ability to compete suggested that I should either write a book (which I think is lame and people have told me that for my entire life) or that I should coach. The problem was that BJJ blue belts can’t instruct, my injuries prevented me from kicking or taking a hit in the head, I was still sharpening up my boxing (since I couldn’t be taught boxing until I was 11 years old and had a permit), and I hardly knew anything about Muay Thai yet. So all that I had left was my Kuk Sool Won merits… which didn’t promise much. I couldn’t teach white, yellow, or blue belts because that would involve more demonstration on my part that my body wouldn’t allow. Black belts don’t train other black belts unless you were at least a 5th degree black belt. Which only left red and brown belts, whom only were focused on learning weapon combat and required more supervision than demonstration. Even though weaponry techniques didn’t apply to MMA, which was my real passion at that point, this would have been just fine as a way for me to remain with the sport. Except that the average age of a Kuk Sool Won red belt or brown belt was between 16 - 20. I, on the other hand, was one of the rarest of black belts to have earned my rank at such a young age… having the option of being at the training center rather than at home with Diana meant that I was training 4 times as much as anyone else at my gym. I had accelerated through the ranks and now was expected to either move onto another style of martial arts or coach fighters that maybe were as much as 8 years older than I was. Needless to say, I wasn’t very eager to do this, but it was all I had left in the fighting world. I tried it for about 4 months and my Sabunim (5th degree black belt that I had to answer to) did everything he could to help accommodate me. But trying to tell a bunch of high schoolers not to be childish with his or her weapon when you yourself are attending middle school… that was never going to end up well. I couldn’t stand the things my own students would say about me behind my back. I was switched to 8 different classes in 4 months and I still couldn’t work with any of them. I finally felt as if I took less punishment at home with Diana than with one of my classes that I was suppose to be teaching. I could never go back after that. I wasn’t a fighter anymore. It was the only thing that I ever thought about for 9 years straight. Trying to coach was just my sad little attempt to try to hang onto all of that hard work and accomplishment… but I failed. Looking back, that was definitely the root of my future drug problem and it wasn’t long after that until I began purposely misusing medications.
Theatre
While I was in the Beaumont Medical Center to recover from my back and head trauma, I was “volunteered” to join a kids rehab theater troupe by my dad. I absolutely refused to go and was being dragged there kicking and screaming… but then my dad made me a deal that involved getting me a slurpee, so my hands were tied! It took a lot of sessions for me to want to come out of my shell in the troupe. Then one day, a kid that was 2 years older than me did a monologue… and he really fucking sucked! So I thought “what the hell, I can do better than that”. So I did a scene with the rehabilitation counselor from an old Martin & Lewis movie “Sailors Beware”… the first time I ever acted; I played Dean Martin. From there on out, I was totally hooked. On stage, I was able to speak up with confidence and really just act upbeat with my head held high. The only thing I had some difficulty getting use to was looking people in the eye. Being so use to sneaking around my own home as to not wake Diana when she had passed out on the floor or just being prone to hiding my face so she wouldn’t hit me; it was refreshing to speak up, stand up straight, and vainly take some attention for myself. I started to sign up for any community theater program I could find. I started working on accents and diction. I began to understand tech work like lighting and sound. Most excitingly, I was clearly a natural for stage combat choreography since I was the only person my size with an advanced knowledge of martial arts. Dancing, on the other hand, was something that I never really enjoyed and I only strived to be barely passable. All in all though, I became a good asset to have in a production and it felt like a way for me to escape. It was fun. But the people that I started to meet and associate with turned out to be surprisingly cold and selfish. Everyone involved in drama and acting was just more concerned with their own talents and exasperating their past merits to achieve… not so much as respect… but more of an attempt to be worshipped by peers when they weren’t around. It was all about bragging about your skills and past roles. Which was rather ass-backwards as I noticed that these actors were too stuck up to listen to anyone else’s input or feedback. Even if some pansy ass drama kid, who had never run a mile or lifted a weight in their life, had to learn how to properly use stage combat to make it both look good on stage and be safe at the same time, they would bitch and moan about me critiquing their physical ability to do certain stunts. They were so incredibly insecure about being talked down too. Talk about fucking daddy issues! They weren’t growing or adding skill sets to their resume yet their egos would balloon further and further as more novices joined a production. To top it all off, no one cared what I had been through or my problems in life because their life in a rich Okemos suburb… when mommy didn’t buy them the newest gaming system until it was already a week old… with the only experience of seeing ethnicity was getting lost in old town Lansing was clearly so much more harder than mine life! So even though I couldn’t stand the type of person involved in theater programs, I wanted to keep acting for two reasons. First reason being that it gave me a chance to speak up and be heard for the first time in my life. I wasn’t going to let some stuck up jerks take that away. Secondly, I was adamant about annoying all of these committed/spoiled actors by being better than them and getting major roles so they have to work with me! If they aren’t going to be good people and treat anyone with respect, then I was going to shove in their faces the fact that they couldn’t get rid of me. Make them put effort into dealing with me because I was better at them at sometime. Then I could just walk away from acting when I didn’t want to anymore… something that was absolute blasphemy to them. So I would take their merits for myself and just hoard over them the fact that I wasn’t going to pursue acting full-time. I’m not sure if that makes me look like an ass or not… but unlike those kids I had to be involved with, I don’t care what they thought of me.
Music
I started singing because I thought it would get me better roles in theatre. I joined all of my grade school choirs as a Bass 2, but I could sing Baritone if needed. I never really thought much about my singing ability until my former best friend Craig decided that he was going to team up with our other stoner friends and make a grunge band. Craig was always a good guitar player and our buddies Jamie and Bobby (who were half brothers and happen to be Craig‘s neighbors) already were playing drums and guitar respectively with another band. That other band split up when the bass player got caught selling at school and went to juvie. So Bobby was going to teach me how to play bass guitar… which never ended up working because my of my hands, so I just ended up singing and Craig played bass. We came up with the name “Shattered Dreams” from all of the glass Jones Soda bottles we would chuck in a vacant parking lot outside of the mobile home community where they all lived (and my dad lived there, which is how we all met). Our songs were pretty short and fast… almost punk. Jamie was a shitty drummer but he could do the double bass pedal really well. Craig just jumped around and acted like a lunatic most of the time (speed and cocaine will do that to a guy). I had a pretty decent gravely grunge scream that I did constantly, but I wasn’t much of a writer at the time. Lucky for me, we played so fast during a three minute song that I only had time to repeat 2 phrases over and over again. The band was really centered around Bobby’s guitar solos. He was an amazing musician and he was the first person that got me into metal. The band started to get quite a following, thanks to Bobby‘s solos and the fact that Jamie & Bobby knew every drug dealer in town… everyone knew they were the ones to go to if you couldn’t find something. Anyway, every other Sunday, we would play this free show in a Brighton area park that came to be known as The Sunday Millpond Concert or “SMC”. Shattered Dreams was the token local band. We’d always end the show by breaking some fake glass… candy glass… that we got from the cool prop & comic book store down the street. For our very last SMC show, we arranged ahead of time to get a giant sheet of candy glass for me to jump through! It was awesome but people were freaking out when they saw this skinny teenager jump through a sheet of “glass”. I had to take off my long sleeve shirt to prove to some anal parents in the crowd that I wasn’t cut or bleeding. We announced that none of the glass we broke on stage was real and then we got booed… it was kinda funny. After playing together for almost a year, Jamie and Bobby moved to Wyoming because Jamie’s mom had family there and wanted her kids to get away from the drugs we were all doing. Craig took Bobby and Jamie leaving pretty hard. I was only in Brighton to visit my dad on weekends and Craig was otherwise all alone. When Craig’s dad skipped town, that was the last straw for him. After he committed suicide, I never wanted to do drugs again and I cut ties with everyone I had known in Brighton when my dad moved to Howell. Which also meant I had no way to vouch for my experience if I wanted to be in another band. So I didn‘t think about music for awhile until I was a fundraising head of my high school drama club. I was put in charge of an event called the band showcase. In the year previous, the event was a giant flop and was ultimately canceled from the future drama club schedule. But I saw who that had been in charge of it and how they clearly didn’t know how to go about it. Besides, some of my friends were in bands and I knew we could get a line up set easily. After 5 months of planning as the event coordinator, the event sold 300 tickets and the funds I produced ended up paying for equipment that were essential in landing the rights to do “Grease” as the spring musical (which was a big deal in Okemos). The showcase itself was awesome! A lot of the musicians came up to me afterwards and said it was one of the coolest things their music had ever been apart of. Every band got to have their own special effects and there were side shows between sets. Some of the special effects I built the sets around were fog machines, strobes, blacklights, flash pots, and the hardest one to pull off… a giant retractable video screen with some controversial political videos that were used during an instrumental band. I had watched and ok’ed the videos prior and my faculty adviser didn’t mind them, but the band started getting a bit of flak for it after the show until I took the blame for them. While some protested, others thought it was pretty powerful and it was all eventually forgotten about. But I think that was the first time I realized the influence of a music video with a meaning… which I would ultimately explore with my TV show. The contacts I made during the band showcase had gotten me involved in the local scene again and when I started making music videos, I had plenty of bands excited to work with me. I started booking and putting together house shows. I even participated in countless small projects or filled in as a temporary vocalist from time to time. I knew so many musicians that people started to come to me to ask if I knew anyone wanting to form a band or replace a member in an existing band. The most successful example of that was when I paired my friends McGowan and Jason together for a project. They’ve gone on to be incredibly popular and successful in the 6 or so bands they’ve made together… they’re still actually working with each other to this day. When I came to college, I was in an area where I didn’t know any musicians or venues. So I decided to start singing again to find a somewhat established band and have them introduce me to this new scene. I did just that and formed “So You’d Ask“. The guitarist Justin became a really close friend and he was very skilled technically. However, he lacked a lot of big event experience and hadn’t really successfully worked with other guitarists before, but he knew it and that was the reason he wanted to work with me. Justin had been apart of this trio from his high school for a good while, but they had only played one show and they weren’t very serious about their music as a group. The bass player was a music major at EMU, so he had his idea of how the songs should be played despite having never played the local scene himself. The drummer wasn’t much liked by the other two when I first joined, but they put up with him because he owned all of the equipment. But I never had a problem working with him and he started improving in great strides after SYA was formed. I thought he was a cool guy, I guess it was just a personality clash with the bass player. I quickly realized that these guys and the other bands they knew had never really performed outside of their home area and were no where near as serious about their projects like McGowan, Jason, and everyone else I knew back in Lansing. I decided to bring in Kevin Knowles to make SYA more a of rap rock thing. The idea seemed to be making the others start to realize that they had to step up their game and we started gaining some momentum. Then while I was planning a summer tour, I think the realism of playing for people that weren’t friends or family started getting to Justin and there was also a personal issue between me and the bass player that got pretty complicated. I bailed out of the whole mess and went back to Lansing to try to get things moving again there. I found a few projects at first, but I had too much going on and Mosh Pit Productions began to slowly fizzle out. Meanwhile, Kevin picked up the pieces of SYA and tried to push forward with it as Stax Hungry. But eventually, it was clear to even Kevin (who hadn’t had much band experience himself) that he had too a high level of commitment that the others just couldn‘t match. I always thought it was a damn shame that I didn’t know Kevin during my TV show days. I am positively certain that I could have found him a group that would still be going today. Anyway, so after SYA fell on its ass, I didn’t have the drive to start over again and I didn’t have any contacts in Ypsi anyway. A few years later, time numbed all the bad things about doing a band and I got that itch one last time. I decided that I’d go for broke just to see if it was worth it all. I joined a really cool band with label connections called “Burning Gaia”. I loved the hippie-like philosophies that they wanted to portray and the experimental jazz-like sound mixed with metal that they had. There were tons of instrumental songs for me to write lyrics for… but there was a problem. The rhythm guitarist had an ego about “his” music. He would not rewrite, speed up, slow down, or shorten any of his existing songs for me to adapt lyrics to them. So I was pretty restricted on what I could do. But hey, I didn’t mind that much because I got to be really cool with the drummer James. So I ended up writing three songs and asked the rhythm guitarist… since they were “his songs”… how he wanted me to sing them (high, low, spoken word, screaming, etc.). He would never give me an answer or suggestion. So I sang them how I wanted too, but then he’d say it sucked and I wasn’t doing it right… without giving me an idea of why it was wrong. So there was clearly a problem. On top of that, the brand new lead guitarist was getting sick of the apparent inability to change the pre-existing set list since he was already the front man for another band. He would end up leaving Burning Gaia as well. Even after contracts were all set up, when I found out that the bass player was depressed and starting to use heavy drugs, I didn’t want to be around that again. I got my fill while working with Shattered Dreams. I left, much to James’ protest because we were working very well together, and decided that I didn’t have it in me anymore to do anything with music.
History
Despite having been active on the local music scene and being in pretty much any play or musical I heard about, I never really thought about any of those things seriously enough to do them for a living. So in high school, I was trying to narrow down the interests I had left… after MMA… that I was passionate enough to do for a career. That list became very short and all that was left was my love for 2nd world war history. I have always been a huge all-around history buff and I seem to know more useless WWII factoids then just about anybody. So I thought a history degree would be a relatively easy thing for me to attend college for. It was the only thing I thought I had left. So for the last two years of high school, I immersed myself in how to write out homework and how to write a lesson plan and how to come up with a grading system and etc. Realizing quickly that I wouldn’t necessarily like lecturing about something I enjoy to a group of snot-nosed kids that don’t even care, I started to cling to history as if it were my only chance to MAYBE be successful. It was just around that time when a knew hobby and ambition just fell into my lap.
Film
I started developing an interest in film work towards the end of my Junior year of high school. A Senior head of Studio 26 that went by the name of “Casey O’Seiter” for his TV show; had heard through a guitarist that I was working with at the time that I knew a lot about martial arts. Casey and I were both in the bass section of Concert Choir, so he approached me after class one day to ask if I could do something for a music video to use on his TV show. I thought it sounded like fun, plus the spring musical had just ended and I had nothing to do after school anymore. So I came up with a storyline and pitched it to Casey. He loved the idea and he had never filmed an elaborate hand-to-hand fight scene before, so we were both excited to start. I enlisted the help of a classmate Terrance because I knew he was a gymnast and as the love interest, I got my friend Alexis to take part… mainly because Casey had a crush on her at the time. I decided to put the song “Slow Motion” by Nickelback to the video as an excuse to slow down some of the cooler-looking stunts. The video turned out great and ended up going on the air. I was in the editing room with Casey during that project which is where I met Jacob. Jacob had just released his independent film/parody called “Requiem For Caffeine” and had a lot of publicity behind his projects. With me pitching ideas as a producer for Studio 26 at this point, we did a few shorts together before the school year ended. The Okemos Public Schools Telecommunication Coordinator and my soon-to-be mentor Matt Ottinger was so impressed by our work together that he had given Jacob and I the green light for our own series for the next school year. I was stoked and wanted to get as much work on it done before the summer ended. I made constant attempts of scheduling time with Jacob, but he kept blowing me off. He was more interested in doing movie parodies for fun rather than coming up with original ideas for projects. When I confronted him about it at the beginning of the school year, he announced that “he was too good for Studio 26” and went on to make parodies with his own personal equipment. Admittedly idolizing Quentin Tarentino, Jacob wanted his work to speak for his expertise and help him bypass film school and traditional training to put him directly into the business. Of course the irony was he had nothing but parodies in his film resume and therefore, didn’t actually have any work of his own other than the little he did with me (which he couldn‘t use since it was a collaboration). Last I heard of Jacob, he had changed his major at U of M from film studies to art appreciation… oh sweet irony! Anyways, I was stuck in Studio 26 with the green light for my own show, no knowledge of advanced film editing or camera operation, no film crew as Casey had graduated and my association with Jacob combined with my less-than chivalrous reputation from the drama program had left me alienated from the experienced studio heads. That is where Matt Ottinger came to my rescue. He recognized that Jacob kinda screwed me over and he took me under his wing. I became a protégée of sorts… staying way late after school, diving nose first into equipment manuals and technique comprehension, and assisting him with any event taping I could. I had come to find out later that during the first 3 months of my Senior year, I had memorized and practiced everything that is taught in the first 3 years as an undergrad in film school. So with no one around for me to go to with certain needs, I taught myself the skills necessary to be a studio head. But despite all of this, it still takes time to write, film, and edit scenes… especially since I was doing it all by myself. However, by the end of my first semester, my best friend Andrew had taken notice to all of the excitement I had for my TV show and he decided he wanted to learn about it too. On top of that, there were some incoming freshmen that wanted to learn more about television production but couldn’t stand the nerdy snobs that made up 90% of the Studio 26 staff. So suddenly overnight, Andrew and I became the “cool” option for the freshmen that didn’t like the studio heads that had already shunned me. Now I had interns. So with a newly formed film crew to support Mosh Pit Productions, a show format, an opening video completed, and a custom built set for tapings, Blacklist Expressions debuted on January 26th, 2005 and went on to become the only successful TV show of the ‘04 - ’05 season… which was a very unforeseen accomplishment since there were two other predominant film crews (and 3 smaller crews) within Studio 26 at the time that had at least 4 times the number of people that Mosh Pit Productions had. With the successful release of Blacklist Expressions and the completion of our independent film “Where There‘s Smoke, There‘s Fire”, I felt that I had a real goal to strive for when I left for college. I always had an artistic way of looking at things, but I was never any good at drawing or painting because of my hand weakness. But with digital motion picture, I could do all the work on a computer and make totally unique pieces of film work. So I enrolled in EMU because it was the school with the best film department that I could afford to go to. But even before I was out of Okemos High, I found a real job in the film industry. I was spotted filming one of my music videos for Blacklist Expressions outside of a local business chain. A man named Todd came up to me and asked how experienced I was with the camera I was using. I lied and said 3 years because at that time, it had only been 6 months… but again, I had learned the equivalent of 3 years as a college undergrad, so what the hell, right? It turns out that Todd was a host of a fishing show called “Clearwater Adventures” that had a 12 episode contract with the UPN Detroit network. He got the show by just setting a camera up with a tripod and walking whatever fish he caught up to it. But UPN said he and his partner needed more dynamic shots to get on the air. When I mentioned to him that I use to go fishing all the time when I was younger, that pretty much sealed the deal. Todd was with me while I did the editing for the video I was shooting when he met me… so as he could get a feel for my individual technique. He liked what he saw and after I finished that video, we went to the UPN Detroit station to schedule 16 shoots and discuss compensation. The 16 shoots would occur at 8 different locations around Michigan and we’d shoot for one morning and one evening at each river or lake. As the equipment operator, I was paid $110 dollars per shoot. I was technically getting ripped off for the amount of work I was doing, but I knew that and I didn’t even care. It was more money than I had ever seen before in my life (other than the college fund my grandparents saved for me and Diana stole to paid for a Beamer and a finished basement on a foreclosing house), plus I knew that as the ink was still wet on my high school diploma, I knew the this opportunity was nothing less than a gargantuan lucky break. I only ended up doing 10 shoots before the UPN network became absorbed by the CW network and the new channel had cut off the funding to finish the remaining episodes. We also lost our Sunday mid-morning timeslot and only six episodes were ever aired… in syndication at 3:00am. I didn’t really mind that much though. Couldn’t really brag to my friends about everything I was doing with a boring fishing show, but I was paid in full for the work I did. Besides, I had to start preparing to move into the dorms shortly after shooting ended anyway. So I put my film desires on hold temporarily for the time being. I moved into Best Hall, got my first cooking job at DC1 because it was within walking distance of my dorm, made a lot of new friends including Kevin Knowles; whom I consider a best friend or “brotha from anotha motha” as he would put it, got a few prerequisites out of the way, decided to see what I could do with the music scene in the area, fell in love with my spouse-to-be, and just all around enjoyed life for the first time as an adult. Then during my 2nd semester at EMU, I took my first film class that counted towards my Electronic Media & Film Studies major. I had Professor Cooper and he was very cool, but the class felt like the biggest waste of time since women‘s pro wrestling. Half the class was struggling and failing out on stuff I just breezed though in the 3 months I studied under Matt Ottinger. I was suddenly shaken by my sense of elitism among my college-level peers and I didn’t like it one bit. I didn’t want to be farther ahead than everyone. I wanted to be in college because I wanted to be challenged and be around people I could learn from. But instead, I was the only one in the class of over 100 people who had already interned under an accomplished Telecommunications Coordinator and had real in-the-field experience. I couldn’t stop myself from slacking off and only showing up for the exams, which I would ace without trying. I knew that I would be dragging myself through years of all these kinds of classes that didn’t have the option of testing out of. Then when my academic status finally reached my level of film knowledge, I would have lost my interest in pushing forward. My past accomplishments would be more than 2 years old and therefore irrelevant. I totally freaked out. I had put all of my hopes, goals, and life plans on doing film work. I had never put so much focus, effort, time, sweat, and tears into something I was that good at since martial arts. I didn’t tell anyone around me, but in my mind, I completely shut down. I was working with people that didn’t have the desire that I felt I had, so I didn’t feel there was anyone I could lean on or who could lift me out of this slump of slumps. To make matters worse… my grandfather was dying, my dad was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, my girlfriend’s family wanted us to stop seeing each other, my MD seemingly went into overdrive and my body became overrun with pain, and I relapsed on morphine. I felt so low and like I was good for nothing. I was just complicating other peoples lives. I never realized before then that emo was a real state of mind and not just a pussy poser trend. I started making some of the worst decisions in my entire life. I was shutting out half the people around me and was get used by the other half. I kept getting played and taken advantage of, which just made me hurt my relationships with Andrew, Kevin, and Anne even more. I couldn’t take it anymore. I was faking every smile and upbeat attitude so as no one would ask me about anything. When my bad decisions started to blow up in my face, my friendship with my guitarist Justin was ruined and before he could kick me out, I moved all my shit out of his house (where I was living after the dorms) and stuck it all in some cheap storage unit that eventually got broken into. I went back to Lansing to save my relationship with Anne and to beg Andrew for his help. Andrew and his mom Betty didn’t enjoy me being there and we all knew it. But I was giving them money to put up with me and I think that they just kinda tolerated the situation. I never told them this, but I truly believe that they saved my life that summer before I could get back into drugs or became suicidal again. So this breakdown, which had started simply by being in an ungodly boring film class that I couldn’t test out of, took a toll on my performance in my other classes as well. Without film pushing me, I didn’t know why I wanted to be in a University anymore.
Chef
After I left Eastern Michigan, my life was slowing being put back together. My dad had fully recovered from multiple surgeries, Anne moved to Ypsi, we became financially independent, I adopted Jack, I was approved for SSI, and we found a comfortable place to live. I proposed to Anne and we were married 5 months later. After doing a few odd jobs, thoughts and worries of being able to provide for my new growing family started to overwhelm me. Without fighting or film to push forward with, was there anything left for me to pursue as a career? I had no answers and I decided to just focused on Anne and her education, income, and sanity. I put together her class schedules and found her jobs. I handled our finances and we bought a car. I kept our home clean and I’d prepare meals for her. Before I was with Anne, I couldn’t even boil water. But with Anne’s celiac disease requiring a gluten free diet and all of this spare time I suddenly had on my hands, I decided to look through my grandma’s old recipes and start watching the food network. Anne is a great cook and baker in her own right… she will always get the credit for teaching me how to cook. I started developing a real interest when I realized the satisfaction I got from giving someone a great meal was the same warm feeling I got from showing off a music video or winning a tournament. The problem was that cooking professionally generally requires a good amount of standing and hand dexterity… something my MD won’t allow. So I put cooking in the file under hobbies for a long while. Until one day, Anne sat me down and really spelled it out for me. She said she would be perfectly happy if I was just a homemaker and stay-at-home dad. I don’t need to have the pressure on me to give us a wealthy life. I can just be a full-time husband. And since she is ok with that, why not just go all out and try to make some cash by doing something I love and that I’m getting better at every day? I might as well go about it unconventionally to see if I can make it as a chef despite my disability. Not having to worry about being the sole source of income will also take the stress out of it all… making it just plain fun! If I fail or can’t do it anymore, then we’d just back doing what we were planning for in the first place; being a single-income family instead of getting two paychecks. So thanks to my beautiful wife, I’m moving forward again. She has given me a purpose in life and something to be proud of. I will soon be heading into the Michigan Career & Technical Institute For Disabled Adults to study Culinary Arts and I‘m hoping to become a chef for a hospital or hospice program. Even if this all doesn’t work… I’ll still always be a great cook, a film aficionado, a history buff, a music enthusiast, a theater lover, and a MMA encyclopedia.
Coaching
After the 1999 world KSW tournament, I knew there was no possibility of ever competing again. Not only that, but I couldn’t hope to learn any new style of martial art. I was stuck at the same rank and styles that I knew and quite frankly, were already bored with. I’m a 2nd degree black belt in Kuk Sool Won, a freshly-awarded blue belt in Brazilian Ju Jitsu, a seasoned kickboxer, an eager-to-learn-more boxer with about a year of experience, and I had just started Thai boxing. When I was about to leave the hospital, a nurse that had seen how depressed I was about losing my ability to compete suggested that I should either write a book (which I think is lame and people have told me that for my entire life) or that I should coach. The problem was that BJJ blue belts can’t instruct, my injuries prevented me from kicking or taking a hit in the head, I was still sharpening up my boxing (since I couldn’t be taught boxing until I was 11 years old and had a permit), and I hardly knew anything about Muay Thai yet. So all that I had left was my Kuk Sool Won merits… which didn’t promise much. I couldn’t teach white, yellow, or blue belts because that would involve more demonstration on my part that my body wouldn’t allow. Black belts don’t train other black belts unless you were at least a 5th degree black belt. Which only left red and brown belts, whom only were focused on learning weapon combat and required more supervision than demonstration. Even though weaponry techniques didn’t apply to MMA, which was my real passion at that point, this would have been just fine as a way for me to remain with the sport. Except that the average age of a Kuk Sool Won red belt or brown belt was between 16 - 20. I, on the other hand, was one of the rarest of black belts to have earned my rank at such a young age… having the option of being at the training center rather than at home with Diana meant that I was training 4 times as much as anyone else at my gym. I had accelerated through the ranks and now was expected to either move onto another style of martial arts or coach fighters that maybe were as much as 8 years older than I was. Needless to say, I wasn’t very eager to do this, but it was all I had left in the fighting world. I tried it for about 4 months and my Sabunim (5th degree black belt that I had to answer to) did everything he could to help accommodate me. But trying to tell a bunch of high schoolers not to be childish with his or her weapon when you yourself are attending middle school… that was never going to end up well. I couldn’t stand the things my own students would say about me behind my back. I was switched to 8 different classes in 4 months and I still couldn’t work with any of them. I finally felt as if I took less punishment at home with Diana than with one of my classes that I was suppose to be teaching. I could never go back after that. I wasn’t a fighter anymore. It was the only thing that I ever thought about for 9 years straight. Trying to coach was just my sad little attempt to try to hang onto all of that hard work and accomplishment… but I failed. Looking back, that was definitely the root of my future drug problem and it wasn’t long after that until I began purposely misusing medications.
Theatre
While I was in the Beaumont Medical Center to recover from my back and head trauma, I was “volunteered” to join a kids rehab theater troupe by my dad. I absolutely refused to go and was being dragged there kicking and screaming… but then my dad made me a deal that involved getting me a slurpee, so my hands were tied! It took a lot of sessions for me to want to come out of my shell in the troupe. Then one day, a kid that was 2 years older than me did a monologue… and he really fucking sucked! So I thought “what the hell, I can do better than that”. So I did a scene with the rehabilitation counselor from an old Martin & Lewis movie “Sailors Beware”… the first time I ever acted; I played Dean Martin. From there on out, I was totally hooked. On stage, I was able to speak up with confidence and really just act upbeat with my head held high. The only thing I had some difficulty getting use to was looking people in the eye. Being so use to sneaking around my own home as to not wake Diana when she had passed out on the floor or just being prone to hiding my face so she wouldn’t hit me; it was refreshing to speak up, stand up straight, and vainly take some attention for myself. I started to sign up for any community theater program I could find. I started working on accents and diction. I began to understand tech work like lighting and sound. Most excitingly, I was clearly a natural for stage combat choreography since I was the only person my size with an advanced knowledge of martial arts. Dancing, on the other hand, was something that I never really enjoyed and I only strived to be barely passable. All in all though, I became a good asset to have in a production and it felt like a way for me to escape. It was fun. But the people that I started to meet and associate with turned out to be surprisingly cold and selfish. Everyone involved in drama and acting was just more concerned with their own talents and exasperating their past merits to achieve… not so much as respect… but more of an attempt to be worshipped by peers when they weren’t around. It was all about bragging about your skills and past roles. Which was rather ass-backwards as I noticed that these actors were too stuck up to listen to anyone else’s input or feedback. Even if some pansy ass drama kid, who had never run a mile or lifted a weight in their life, had to learn how to properly use stage combat to make it both look good on stage and be safe at the same time, they would bitch and moan about me critiquing their physical ability to do certain stunts. They were so incredibly insecure about being talked down too. Talk about fucking daddy issues! They weren’t growing or adding skill sets to their resume yet their egos would balloon further and further as more novices joined a production. To top it all off, no one cared what I had been through or my problems in life because their life in a rich Okemos suburb… when mommy didn’t buy them the newest gaming system until it was already a week old… with the only experience of seeing ethnicity was getting lost in old town Lansing was clearly so much more harder than mine life! So even though I couldn’t stand the type of person involved in theater programs, I wanted to keep acting for two reasons. First reason being that it gave me a chance to speak up and be heard for the first time in my life. I wasn’t going to let some stuck up jerks take that away. Secondly, I was adamant about annoying all of these committed/spoiled actors by being better than them and getting major roles so they have to work with me! If they aren’t going to be good people and treat anyone with respect, then I was going to shove in their faces the fact that they couldn’t get rid of me. Make them put effort into dealing with me because I was better at them at sometime. Then I could just walk away from acting when I didn’t want to anymore… something that was absolute blasphemy to them. So I would take their merits for myself and just hoard over them the fact that I wasn’t going to pursue acting full-time. I’m not sure if that makes me look like an ass or not… but unlike those kids I had to be involved with, I don’t care what they thought of me.
Music
I started singing because I thought it would get me better roles in theatre. I joined all of my grade school choirs as a Bass 2, but I could sing Baritone if needed. I never really thought much about my singing ability until my former best friend Craig decided that he was going to team up with our other stoner friends and make a grunge band. Craig was always a good guitar player and our buddies Jamie and Bobby (who were half brothers and happen to be Craig‘s neighbors) already were playing drums and guitar respectively with another band. That other band split up when the bass player got caught selling at school and went to juvie. So Bobby was going to teach me how to play bass guitar… which never ended up working because my of my hands, so I just ended up singing and Craig played bass. We came up with the name “Shattered Dreams” from all of the glass Jones Soda bottles we would chuck in a vacant parking lot outside of the mobile home community where they all lived (and my dad lived there, which is how we all met). Our songs were pretty short and fast… almost punk. Jamie was a shitty drummer but he could do the double bass pedal really well. Craig just jumped around and acted like a lunatic most of the time (speed and cocaine will do that to a guy). I had a pretty decent gravely grunge scream that I did constantly, but I wasn’t much of a writer at the time. Lucky for me, we played so fast during a three minute song that I only had time to repeat 2 phrases over and over again. The band was really centered around Bobby’s guitar solos. He was an amazing musician and he was the first person that got me into metal. The band started to get quite a following, thanks to Bobby‘s solos and the fact that Jamie & Bobby knew every drug dealer in town… everyone knew they were the ones to go to if you couldn’t find something. Anyway, every other Sunday, we would play this free show in a Brighton area park that came to be known as The Sunday Millpond Concert or “SMC”. Shattered Dreams was the token local band. We’d always end the show by breaking some fake glass… candy glass… that we got from the cool prop & comic book store down the street. For our very last SMC show, we arranged ahead of time to get a giant sheet of candy glass for me to jump through! It was awesome but people were freaking out when they saw this skinny teenager jump through a sheet of “glass”. I had to take off my long sleeve shirt to prove to some anal parents in the crowd that I wasn’t cut or bleeding. We announced that none of the glass we broke on stage was real and then we got booed… it was kinda funny. After playing together for almost a year, Jamie and Bobby moved to Wyoming because Jamie’s mom had family there and wanted her kids to get away from the drugs we were all doing. Craig took Bobby and Jamie leaving pretty hard. I was only in Brighton to visit my dad on weekends and Craig was otherwise all alone. When Craig’s dad skipped town, that was the last straw for him. After he committed suicide, I never wanted to do drugs again and I cut ties with everyone I had known in Brighton when my dad moved to Howell. Which also meant I had no way to vouch for my experience if I wanted to be in another band. So I didn‘t think about music for awhile until I was a fundraising head of my high school drama club. I was put in charge of an event called the band showcase. In the year previous, the event was a giant flop and was ultimately canceled from the future drama club schedule. But I saw who that had been in charge of it and how they clearly didn’t know how to go about it. Besides, some of my friends were in bands and I knew we could get a line up set easily. After 5 months of planning as the event coordinator, the event sold 300 tickets and the funds I produced ended up paying for equipment that were essential in landing the rights to do “Grease” as the spring musical (which was a big deal in Okemos). The showcase itself was awesome! A lot of the musicians came up to me afterwards and said it was one of the coolest things their music had ever been apart of. Every band got to have their own special effects and there were side shows between sets. Some of the special effects I built the sets around were fog machines, strobes, blacklights, flash pots, and the hardest one to pull off… a giant retractable video screen with some controversial political videos that were used during an instrumental band. I had watched and ok’ed the videos prior and my faculty adviser didn’t mind them, but the band started getting a bit of flak for it after the show until I took the blame for them. While some protested, others thought it was pretty powerful and it was all eventually forgotten about. But I think that was the first time I realized the influence of a music video with a meaning… which I would ultimately explore with my TV show. The contacts I made during the band showcase had gotten me involved in the local scene again and when I started making music videos, I had plenty of bands excited to work with me. I started booking and putting together house shows. I even participated in countless small projects or filled in as a temporary vocalist from time to time. I knew so many musicians that people started to come to me to ask if I knew anyone wanting to form a band or replace a member in an existing band. The most successful example of that was when I paired my friends McGowan and Jason together for a project. They’ve gone on to be incredibly popular and successful in the 6 or so bands they’ve made together… they’re still actually working with each other to this day. When I came to college, I was in an area where I didn’t know any musicians or venues. So I decided to start singing again to find a somewhat established band and have them introduce me to this new scene. I did just that and formed “So You’d Ask“. The guitarist Justin became a really close friend and he was very skilled technically. However, he lacked a lot of big event experience and hadn’t really successfully worked with other guitarists before, but he knew it and that was the reason he wanted to work with me. Justin had been apart of this trio from his high school for a good while, but they had only played one show and they weren’t very serious about their music as a group. The bass player was a music major at EMU, so he had his idea of how the songs should be played despite having never played the local scene himself. The drummer wasn’t much liked by the other two when I first joined, but they put up with him because he owned all of the equipment. But I never had a problem working with him and he started improving in great strides after SYA was formed. I thought he was a cool guy, I guess it was just a personality clash with the bass player. I quickly realized that these guys and the other bands they knew had never really performed outside of their home area and were no where near as serious about their projects like McGowan, Jason, and everyone else I knew back in Lansing. I decided to bring in Kevin Knowles to make SYA more a of rap rock thing. The idea seemed to be making the others start to realize that they had to step up their game and we started gaining some momentum. Then while I was planning a summer tour, I think the realism of playing for people that weren’t friends or family started getting to Justin and there was also a personal issue between me and the bass player that got pretty complicated. I bailed out of the whole mess and went back to Lansing to try to get things moving again there. I found a few projects at first, but I had too much going on and Mosh Pit Productions began to slowly fizzle out. Meanwhile, Kevin picked up the pieces of SYA and tried to push forward with it as Stax Hungry. But eventually, it was clear to even Kevin (who hadn’t had much band experience himself) that he had too a high level of commitment that the others just couldn‘t match. I always thought it was a damn shame that I didn’t know Kevin during my TV show days. I am positively certain that I could have found him a group that would still be going today. Anyway, so after SYA fell on its ass, I didn’t have the drive to start over again and I didn’t have any contacts in Ypsi anyway. A few years later, time numbed all the bad things about doing a band and I got that itch one last time. I decided that I’d go for broke just to see if it was worth it all. I joined a really cool band with label connections called “Burning Gaia”. I loved the hippie-like philosophies that they wanted to portray and the experimental jazz-like sound mixed with metal that they had. There were tons of instrumental songs for me to write lyrics for… but there was a problem. The rhythm guitarist had an ego about “his” music. He would not rewrite, speed up, slow down, or shorten any of his existing songs for me to adapt lyrics to them. So I was pretty restricted on what I could do. But hey, I didn’t mind that much because I got to be really cool with the drummer James. So I ended up writing three songs and asked the rhythm guitarist… since they were “his songs”… how he wanted me to sing them (high, low, spoken word, screaming, etc.). He would never give me an answer or suggestion. So I sang them how I wanted too, but then he’d say it sucked and I wasn’t doing it right… without giving me an idea of why it was wrong. So there was clearly a problem. On top of that, the brand new lead guitarist was getting sick of the apparent inability to change the pre-existing set list since he was already the front man for another band. He would end up leaving Burning Gaia as well. Even after contracts were all set up, when I found out that the bass player was depressed and starting to use heavy drugs, I didn’t want to be around that again. I got my fill while working with Shattered Dreams. I left, much to James’ protest because we were working very well together, and decided that I didn’t have it in me anymore to do anything with music.
History
Despite having been active on the local music scene and being in pretty much any play or musical I heard about, I never really thought about any of those things seriously enough to do them for a living. So in high school, I was trying to narrow down the interests I had left… after MMA… that I was passionate enough to do for a career. That list became very short and all that was left was my love for 2nd world war history. I have always been a huge all-around history buff and I seem to know more useless WWII factoids then just about anybody. So I thought a history degree would be a relatively easy thing for me to attend college for. It was the only thing I thought I had left. So for the last two years of high school, I immersed myself in how to write out homework and how to write a lesson plan and how to come up with a grading system and etc. Realizing quickly that I wouldn’t necessarily like lecturing about something I enjoy to a group of snot-nosed kids that don’t even care, I started to cling to history as if it were my only chance to MAYBE be successful. It was just around that time when a knew hobby and ambition just fell into my lap.
Film
I started developing an interest in film work towards the end of my Junior year of high school. A Senior head of Studio 26 that went by the name of “Casey O’Seiter” for his TV show; had heard through a guitarist that I was working with at the time that I knew a lot about martial arts. Casey and I were both in the bass section of Concert Choir, so he approached me after class one day to ask if I could do something for a music video to use on his TV show. I thought it sounded like fun, plus the spring musical had just ended and I had nothing to do after school anymore. So I came up with a storyline and pitched it to Casey. He loved the idea and he had never filmed an elaborate hand-to-hand fight scene before, so we were both excited to start. I enlisted the help of a classmate Terrance because I knew he was a gymnast and as the love interest, I got my friend Alexis to take part… mainly because Casey had a crush on her at the time. I decided to put the song “Slow Motion” by Nickelback to the video as an excuse to slow down some of the cooler-looking stunts. The video turned out great and ended up going on the air. I was in the editing room with Casey during that project which is where I met Jacob. Jacob had just released his independent film/parody called “Requiem For Caffeine” and had a lot of publicity behind his projects. With me pitching ideas as a producer for Studio 26 at this point, we did a few shorts together before the school year ended. The Okemos Public Schools Telecommunication Coordinator and my soon-to-be mentor Matt Ottinger was so impressed by our work together that he had given Jacob and I the green light for our own series for the next school year. I was stoked and wanted to get as much work on it done before the summer ended. I made constant attempts of scheduling time with Jacob, but he kept blowing me off. He was more interested in doing movie parodies for fun rather than coming up with original ideas for projects. When I confronted him about it at the beginning of the school year, he announced that “he was too good for Studio 26” and went on to make parodies with his own personal equipment. Admittedly idolizing Quentin Tarentino, Jacob wanted his work to speak for his expertise and help him bypass film school and traditional training to put him directly into the business. Of course the irony was he had nothing but parodies in his film resume and therefore, didn’t actually have any work of his own other than the little he did with me (which he couldn‘t use since it was a collaboration). Last I heard of Jacob, he had changed his major at U of M from film studies to art appreciation… oh sweet irony! Anyways, I was stuck in Studio 26 with the green light for my own show, no knowledge of advanced film editing or camera operation, no film crew as Casey had graduated and my association with Jacob combined with my less-than chivalrous reputation from the drama program had left me alienated from the experienced studio heads. That is where Matt Ottinger came to my rescue. He recognized that Jacob kinda screwed me over and he took me under his wing. I became a protégée of sorts… staying way late after school, diving nose first into equipment manuals and technique comprehension, and assisting him with any event taping I could. I had come to find out later that during the first 3 months of my Senior year, I had memorized and practiced everything that is taught in the first 3 years as an undergrad in film school. So with no one around for me to go to with certain needs, I taught myself the skills necessary to be a studio head. But despite all of this, it still takes time to write, film, and edit scenes… especially since I was doing it all by myself. However, by the end of my first semester, my best friend Andrew had taken notice to all of the excitement I had for my TV show and he decided he wanted to learn about it too. On top of that, there were some incoming freshmen that wanted to learn more about television production but couldn’t stand the nerdy snobs that made up 90% of the Studio 26 staff. So suddenly overnight, Andrew and I became the “cool” option for the freshmen that didn’t like the studio heads that had already shunned me. Now I had interns. So with a newly formed film crew to support Mosh Pit Productions, a show format, an opening video completed, and a custom built set for tapings, Blacklist Expressions debuted on January 26th, 2005 and went on to become the only successful TV show of the ‘04 - ’05 season… which was a very unforeseen accomplishment since there were two other predominant film crews (and 3 smaller crews) within Studio 26 at the time that had at least 4 times the number of people that Mosh Pit Productions had. With the successful release of Blacklist Expressions and the completion of our independent film “Where There‘s Smoke, There‘s Fire”, I felt that I had a real goal to strive for when I left for college. I always had an artistic way of looking at things, but I was never any good at drawing or painting because of my hand weakness. But with digital motion picture, I could do all the work on a computer and make totally unique pieces of film work. So I enrolled in EMU because it was the school with the best film department that I could afford to go to. But even before I was out of Okemos High, I found a real job in the film industry. I was spotted filming one of my music videos for Blacklist Expressions outside of a local business chain. A man named Todd came up to me and asked how experienced I was with the camera I was using. I lied and said 3 years because at that time, it had only been 6 months… but again, I had learned the equivalent of 3 years as a college undergrad, so what the hell, right? It turns out that Todd was a host of a fishing show called “Clearwater Adventures” that had a 12 episode contract with the UPN Detroit network. He got the show by just setting a camera up with a tripod and walking whatever fish he caught up to it. But UPN said he and his partner needed more dynamic shots to get on the air. When I mentioned to him that I use to go fishing all the time when I was younger, that pretty much sealed the deal. Todd was with me while I did the editing for the video I was shooting when he met me… so as he could get a feel for my individual technique. He liked what he saw and after I finished that video, we went to the UPN Detroit station to schedule 16 shoots and discuss compensation. The 16 shoots would occur at 8 different locations around Michigan and we’d shoot for one morning and one evening at each river or lake. As the equipment operator, I was paid $110 dollars per shoot. I was technically getting ripped off for the amount of work I was doing, but I knew that and I didn’t even care. It was more money than I had ever seen before in my life (other than the college fund my grandparents saved for me and Diana stole to paid for a Beamer and a finished basement on a foreclosing house), plus I knew that as the ink was still wet on my high school diploma, I knew the this opportunity was nothing less than a gargantuan lucky break. I only ended up doing 10 shoots before the UPN network became absorbed by the CW network and the new channel had cut off the funding to finish the remaining episodes. We also lost our Sunday mid-morning timeslot and only six episodes were ever aired… in syndication at 3:00am. I didn’t really mind that much though. Couldn’t really brag to my friends about everything I was doing with a boring fishing show, but I was paid in full for the work I did. Besides, I had to start preparing to move into the dorms shortly after shooting ended anyway. So I put my film desires on hold temporarily for the time being. I moved into Best Hall, got my first cooking job at DC1 because it was within walking distance of my dorm, made a lot of new friends including Kevin Knowles; whom I consider a best friend or “brotha from anotha motha” as he would put it, got a few prerequisites out of the way, decided to see what I could do with the music scene in the area, fell in love with my spouse-to-be, and just all around enjoyed life for the first time as an adult. Then during my 2nd semester at EMU, I took my first film class that counted towards my Electronic Media & Film Studies major. I had Professor Cooper and he was very cool, but the class felt like the biggest waste of time since women‘s pro wrestling. Half the class was struggling and failing out on stuff I just breezed though in the 3 months I studied under Matt Ottinger. I was suddenly shaken by my sense of elitism among my college-level peers and I didn’t like it one bit. I didn’t want to be farther ahead than everyone. I wanted to be in college because I wanted to be challenged and be around people I could learn from. But instead, I was the only one in the class of over 100 people who had already interned under an accomplished Telecommunications Coordinator and had real in-the-field experience. I couldn’t stop myself from slacking off and only showing up for the exams, which I would ace without trying. I knew that I would be dragging myself through years of all these kinds of classes that didn’t have the option of testing out of. Then when my academic status finally reached my level of film knowledge, I would have lost my interest in pushing forward. My past accomplishments would be more than 2 years old and therefore irrelevant. I totally freaked out. I had put all of my hopes, goals, and life plans on doing film work. I had never put so much focus, effort, time, sweat, and tears into something I was that good at since martial arts. I didn’t tell anyone around me, but in my mind, I completely shut down. I was working with people that didn’t have the desire that I felt I had, so I didn’t feel there was anyone I could lean on or who could lift me out of this slump of slumps. To make matters worse… my grandfather was dying, my dad was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, my girlfriend’s family wanted us to stop seeing each other, my MD seemingly went into overdrive and my body became overrun with pain, and I relapsed on morphine. I felt so low and like I was good for nothing. I was just complicating other peoples lives. I never realized before then that emo was a real state of mind and not just a pussy poser trend. I started making some of the worst decisions in my entire life. I was shutting out half the people around me and was get used by the other half. I kept getting played and taken advantage of, which just made me hurt my relationships with Andrew, Kevin, and Anne even more. I couldn’t take it anymore. I was faking every smile and upbeat attitude so as no one would ask me about anything. When my bad decisions started to blow up in my face, my friendship with my guitarist Justin was ruined and before he could kick me out, I moved all my shit out of his house (where I was living after the dorms) and stuck it all in some cheap storage unit that eventually got broken into. I went back to Lansing to save my relationship with Anne and to beg Andrew for his help. Andrew and his mom Betty didn’t enjoy me being there and we all knew it. But I was giving them money to put up with me and I think that they just kinda tolerated the situation. I never told them this, but I truly believe that they saved my life that summer before I could get back into drugs or became suicidal again. So this breakdown, which had started simply by being in an ungodly boring film class that I couldn’t test out of, took a toll on my performance in my other classes as well. Without film pushing me, I didn’t know why I wanted to be in a University anymore.
Chef
After I left Eastern Michigan, my life was slowing being put back together. My dad had fully recovered from multiple surgeries, Anne moved to Ypsi, we became financially independent, I adopted Jack, I was approved for SSI, and we found a comfortable place to live. I proposed to Anne and we were married 5 months later. After doing a few odd jobs, thoughts and worries of being able to provide for my new growing family started to overwhelm me. Without fighting or film to push forward with, was there anything left for me to pursue as a career? I had no answers and I decided to just focused on Anne and her education, income, and sanity. I put together her class schedules and found her jobs. I handled our finances and we bought a car. I kept our home clean and I’d prepare meals for her. Before I was with Anne, I couldn’t even boil water. But with Anne’s celiac disease requiring a gluten free diet and all of this spare time I suddenly had on my hands, I decided to look through my grandma’s old recipes and start watching the food network. Anne is a great cook and baker in her own right… she will always get the credit for teaching me how to cook. I started developing a real interest when I realized the satisfaction I got from giving someone a great meal was the same warm feeling I got from showing off a music video or winning a tournament. The problem was that cooking professionally generally requires a good amount of standing and hand dexterity… something my MD won’t allow. So I put cooking in the file under hobbies for a long while. Until one day, Anne sat me down and really spelled it out for me. She said she would be perfectly happy if I was just a homemaker and stay-at-home dad. I don’t need to have the pressure on me to give us a wealthy life. I can just be a full-time husband. And since she is ok with that, why not just go all out and try to make some cash by doing something I love and that I’m getting better at every day? I might as well go about it unconventionally to see if I can make it as a chef despite my disability. Not having to worry about being the sole source of income will also take the stress out of it all… making it just plain fun! If I fail or can’t do it anymore, then we’d just back doing what we were planning for in the first place; being a single-income family instead of getting two paychecks. So thanks to my beautiful wife, I’m moving forward again. She has given me a purpose in life and something to be proud of. I will soon be heading into the Michigan Career & Technical Institute For Disabled Adults to study Culinary Arts and I‘m hoping to become a chef for a hospital or hospice program. Even if this all doesn’t work… I’ll still always be a great cook, a film aficionado, a history buff, a music enthusiast, a theater lover, and a MMA encyclopedia.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Is This Change Or Revolution?
"Hope… I’m sorry, but I don’t want be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible. Jew, gentile… black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each others happiness, not by each others misery. We don’t want to hate or despise one another. In this world, there is room for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls. Has barricaded the world with hate. Has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness; hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent… and all will be lost. The airplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men. Cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all. Even now, my voice is reaching millions throughout the world. Millions of despairing men, women, and little children. Victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say, do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed. The bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of man will pass and dictators die. And the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes. Men who despise you; enslaved you. Who regiment your lives. Tell you what to do, what to think, and what to feel. Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle. Use you as cannon-fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men. Machine men; with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate… only the unloved hate. The unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers, don’t fight for slavery. Fight for liberty. In the 17th chapter of saint Luke it is written, “The kingdom of god is within man. Not one man nor a group of men, but in all men.” In you, you the people have the power. The power to create machines. The power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful. To make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world. A decent world; that will give men a chance to work. That will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie… they do not fulfill that promise; they never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world. To do away with national barriers. To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason. A world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
Can you hear me? Where ever you are, look up. The clouds are lifting. The sun is breaking through. We are coming out of the darkness and into the light. We are coming into a new world, a kindlier world. Where men will rise above their hate, their greed, and brutality. Look up... The soul of man has been given wings and at last, he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow… into the light of hope… into the future... the glorious future. That belongs to you, to me, and to all of us. Look up! Look up… "
In my opinion, this monologue from Charles Chaplin's last film "The Great Dictator" is the most powerful, timeless, and simply the greatest speech in all of cinematic history. I was reminded of the astounding effect this had on my approach to my film work and politics during the last presidential election.
I don't give any notice to someone's beliefs, statements, ideology, causes, investments, or how they vote. The fact is that unless a nuclear winter occurs, Barack Obama will go down as one of the top ten best United States Presidents of all time... and a good part of that is due to George W. Bush. Who is without a doubt, one of the top three worst presidents of all time; along with Hoover and Harding. I am proud that the candidate I voted for is making such a big impact on American history because I have had more than my share of opinions and problems with our government. I do still have tentative plans to move overseas in the future. However, for the first time in my life, I'm proud to call myself an American... as cheesy or cliche as that may sound.
Alright, that is the only take on my political views that I will voice in this blog...
Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes. Men who despise you; enslaved you. Who regiment your lives. Tell you what to do, what to think, and what to feel. Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle. Use you as cannon-fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men. Machine men; with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate… only the unloved hate. The unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers, don’t fight for slavery. Fight for liberty. In the 17th chapter of saint Luke it is written, “The kingdom of god is within man. Not one man nor a group of men, but in all men.” In you, you the people have the power. The power to create machines. The power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful. To make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world. A decent world; that will give men a chance to work. That will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie… they do not fulfill that promise; they never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world. To do away with national barriers. To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason. A world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
Can you hear me? Where ever you are, look up. The clouds are lifting. The sun is breaking through. We are coming out of the darkness and into the light. We are coming into a new world, a kindlier world. Where men will rise above their hate, their greed, and brutality. Look up... The soul of man has been given wings and at last, he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow… into the light of hope… into the future... the glorious future. That belongs to you, to me, and to all of us. Look up! Look up… "
In my opinion, this monologue from Charles Chaplin's last film "The Great Dictator" is the most powerful, timeless, and simply the greatest speech in all of cinematic history. I was reminded of the astounding effect this had on my approach to my film work and politics during the last presidential election.
I don't give any notice to someone's beliefs, statements, ideology, causes, investments, or how they vote. The fact is that unless a nuclear winter occurs, Barack Obama will go down as one of the top ten best United States Presidents of all time... and a good part of that is due to George W. Bush. Who is without a doubt, one of the top three worst presidents of all time; along with Hoover and Harding. I am proud that the candidate I voted for is making such a big impact on American history because I have had more than my share of opinions and problems with our government. I do still have tentative plans to move overseas in the future. However, for the first time in my life, I'm proud to call myself an American... as cheesy or cliche as that may sound.
Alright, that is the only take on my political views that I will voice in this blog...
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Basiphobia & Dysmorphophobia
While denying, adapting, explaining, and doing anything other than living in peace with it... I have a variation of Muscular Dystrophy called Charcot-Marie-Tooth with an unknown subtype.
Incorporating both sensory motor neuropathy and peroneal atrophy with an uncommon level of pain severity results in eliminating the possibility of being classified in the most common subtypes of CMT. Despite genetic testing and EKG's, all test prove to be inconclusive and nothing can be done to confirm which rare subtype I have; outside of a dangerous and experimental nerve biopsy. Basically meaning that because I fall within the smallest percentile of those who have CMT, I'm a low-importance in research and treatment. Theoretically, a cure for CMT could be found and it still would not be of any help to me.
I've shown oddly advanced symptoms at a young age. Experiencing weakness, pain, and muscle tremors in my hands and lower body. It cannot be predicted whether or not I will develop problems with my breathing, vocal cords, optical control, equilibrium, gastrointestinal system, or spinal stability... these have appeared in the rare percentile of patients in which I am considered. What sets me apart from those patients and completely eliminates me from taking part in experimental treatments and drug trials is my other conditions, injuries, and operations that are unrelated to my Muscular Dystrophy.
Incorporating both sensory motor neuropathy and peroneal atrophy with an uncommon level of pain severity results in eliminating the possibility of being classified in the most common subtypes of CMT. Despite genetic testing and EKG's, all test prove to be inconclusive and nothing can be done to confirm which rare subtype I have; outside of a dangerous and experimental nerve biopsy. Basically meaning that because I fall within the smallest percentile of those who have CMT, I'm a low-importance in research and treatment. Theoretically, a cure for CMT could be found and it still would not be of any help to me.
I've shown oddly advanced symptoms at a young age. Experiencing weakness, pain, and muscle tremors in my hands and lower body. It cannot be predicted whether or not I will develop problems with my breathing, vocal cords, optical control, equilibrium, gastrointestinal system, or spinal stability... these have appeared in the rare percentile of patients in which I am considered. What sets me apart from those patients and completely eliminates me from taking part in experimental treatments and drug trials is my other conditions, injuries, and operations that are unrelated to my Muscular Dystrophy.
I have had eight concussions, a scratched cornea in my right eye, a repeatedly dislocated left shoulder, a cracked solar plexus, and three inoperable herniated disks. My right knee was scoped and I've endured sprained or torn leg & pelvic muscles. I've broken all my fingers, toes, ankles, ribs, wrists, and my nose on multiple occasions. I've popped my ear drums several times, needed numerous minor cosmetic reconstructive surgeries, and I'm about to undergo complete dental reconstructive surgery in the near future.
In my early teens, I developed an addiction to morphine and other painkillers. I have had three major relapses since then which were followed by three spiritually-altering detoxing periods. The first moved my beliefs from unsure to christian, the second from christian to atheist, and the last detox moved my beliefs from atheist to something that I just cannot describe. I wouldn't categorize it as agnostic, but I actually wouldn't try to or want to categorize it at all. I was with Anne during my last relapse and detox. So when I got through it all, I felt that I had realized a personal understanding and indifference towards any powers that may be. I did know, with absolute certainty, that there was someone watching over me and that they would always be there to help me through the toughest times in life... that just turned out to be Anne.
According to a psychologist (whom I have little respect for) that I had been assigned to as a part of my physical & occupational therapy, I showed the signs of a few different types of social phobia's. One of them was Basiphobia (fear of walking or standing) with the core origin of that fear stemming off of a possible case of Dysmorphophobia (fear of a bodily defect not noticeable to others). This sat oddly well in my mind since I was probably the only person to ever be happy to go from walking unassisted to using a cane. Not just because I fall down a lot, from either tripping over my drop-foot or my knee just giving out, but because it strangely made me feel more independent. Before I had my cane, I only felt comfortable around a few select people that knew I needed (but was too proud to ask for) help sometimes. Even some close friends were too oblivious to know when I was struggling. For the longest time, my friend Monica from OHS even didn't believe that I had Muscular Dystrophy. You can't blame her though because all she had to go on at the time was my word, which doesn't mean much to most.
Strangers would give me so much shit when I politely asked for help with opening a door or letting me walk near a handrail. I think that's why I grew out my hair for dreadlocks and got facial piercings... because people then tended to leave me alone or get out of my way. When I got my cane, people would be embarrassed if they were blocking the elevator door or offer me their seat in a crowded cafe... which I always met with a humored smirk. On top of falling over less often, I could silently make others aware that I was struggling without having to make myself ashamed about it. I didn't feel any kind of self-consciousness from sticking out of the crowd. I had already made myself the dark kid with crazy hair and metal in his face, plus I finally felt more like me. The headbanger image was just not who I was. I worked with some bands, even sang in a few groups, and I had more than my share of degenerate friends in trench coats. But in my mind, I always thought of myself as the martial artist. I never felt comfortable as the headbanger... despite how awesome I pulled it off in my humble opinion! The cane gave me back who I really was. I was a fighter who couldn't fight anymore. I think that also gave me an excuse for the cane that wasn't based on my Muscular Dystrophy. In my head, I was using the cane because of injuries that took away my ability to fight and to coach. At least there is more truth in that manifestation than the headbanger could have ever represented.
The cane took away so many of these lies... but now the realization is that under all of the masks, I am in more pain than ever before. It has nothing to do with anything I ever did to my body in the past and there is no way to relieve it. I am disabled, handicapped, and in denial about it all. It takes everything I have to not let it define who I am. I cannot be the cripple. But it won't let me be the martial artist. Quite frankly, I don't know what to do about it.
In my early teens, I developed an addiction to morphine and other painkillers. I have had three major relapses since then which were followed by three spiritually-altering detoxing periods. The first moved my beliefs from unsure to christian, the second from christian to atheist, and the last detox moved my beliefs from atheist to something that I just cannot describe. I wouldn't categorize it as agnostic, but I actually wouldn't try to or want to categorize it at all. I was with Anne during my last relapse and detox. So when I got through it all, I felt that I had realized a personal understanding and indifference towards any powers that may be. I did know, with absolute certainty, that there was someone watching over me and that they would always be there to help me through the toughest times in life... that just turned out to be Anne.
According to a psychologist (whom I have little respect for) that I had been assigned to as a part of my physical & occupational therapy, I showed the signs of a few different types of social phobia's. One of them was Basiphobia (fear of walking or standing) with the core origin of that fear stemming off of a possible case of Dysmorphophobia (fear of a bodily defect not noticeable to others). This sat oddly well in my mind since I was probably the only person to ever be happy to go from walking unassisted to using a cane. Not just because I fall down a lot, from either tripping over my drop-foot or my knee just giving out, but because it strangely made me feel more independent. Before I had my cane, I only felt comfortable around a few select people that knew I needed (but was too proud to ask for) help sometimes. Even some close friends were too oblivious to know when I was struggling. For the longest time, my friend Monica from OHS even didn't believe that I had Muscular Dystrophy. You can't blame her though because all she had to go on at the time was my word, which doesn't mean much to most.
Strangers would give me so much shit when I politely asked for help with opening a door or letting me walk near a handrail. I think that's why I grew out my hair for dreadlocks and got facial piercings... because people then tended to leave me alone or get out of my way. When I got my cane, people would be embarrassed if they were blocking the elevator door or offer me their seat in a crowded cafe... which I always met with a humored smirk. On top of falling over less often, I could silently make others aware that I was struggling without having to make myself ashamed about it. I didn't feel any kind of self-consciousness from sticking out of the crowd. I had already made myself the dark kid with crazy hair and metal in his face, plus I finally felt more like me. The headbanger image was just not who I was. I worked with some bands, even sang in a few groups, and I had more than my share of degenerate friends in trench coats. But in my mind, I always thought of myself as the martial artist. I never felt comfortable as the headbanger... despite how awesome I pulled it off in my humble opinion! The cane gave me back who I really was. I was a fighter who couldn't fight anymore. I think that also gave me an excuse for the cane that wasn't based on my Muscular Dystrophy. In my head, I was using the cane because of injuries that took away my ability to fight and to coach. At least there is more truth in that manifestation than the headbanger could have ever represented.
The cane took away so many of these lies... but now the realization is that under all of the masks, I am in more pain than ever before. It has nothing to do with anything I ever did to my body in the past and there is no way to relieve it. I am disabled, handicapped, and in denial about it all. It takes everything I have to not let it define who I am. I cannot be the cripple. But it won't let me be the martial artist. Quite frankly, I don't know what to do about it.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Reluctance
There is so much of me that I haven't shared. Even with my wife and the dwindling number of an already small amount of trustworthy friends.
The details of my upbringing... the absolute devastation of having what defined me, torn away... the discouraging cowardliness that led me to shun my two only other interests in life... the realization of a progressively deteriorating disease... the inept way I've dealt with what is said behind my back in theatre, MDA camp, and while coaching... the fear of everything keeping my last attempted stride at a life meaning out of reach.
My objective is not false modesty, acknowledgment, or pity. The last time I had written publicly, it turned into a medium to satisfy those that followed it. I was not able to express my emotions and events from an honest, un-sugarcoated perspective. However, keeping all of these thoughts and memories to myself is having me lash out at the one person I care more about than any other. I am not going to let anything disrupt the one thing I have to be proud of in my life... a successful marriage.
The details of my upbringing... the absolute devastation of having what defined me, torn away... the discouraging cowardliness that led me to shun my two only other interests in life... the realization of a progressively deteriorating disease... the inept way I've dealt with what is said behind my back in theatre, MDA camp, and while coaching... the fear of everything keeping my last attempted stride at a life meaning out of reach.
My objective is not false modesty, acknowledgment, or pity. The last time I had written publicly, it turned into a medium to satisfy those that followed it. I was not able to express my emotions and events from an honest, un-sugarcoated perspective. However, keeping all of these thoughts and memories to myself is having me lash out at the one person I care more about than any other. I am not going to let anything disrupt the one thing I have to be proud of in my life... a successful marriage.
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