Chapter 1: Humble Beginnings
As far back as I can remember…well, I don’t really remember much. I remember fights and arguments. I remember flashes of landmarks where I grew up. I remember faces but not names of kids I went to school with, but nothing worth telling really. I was an infant and probably had nothing of value to say…probably. It sounds biased but I was always told that I was one of the smartest babies my family has ever seen. Considering I was the first grandchild to come out it’s no surprise really why they would think that. I digress, the main thing is that I’m not really sure where to start this blog. Do I start with loose tales of my infancy told by others? What I hazily remember from my adolescence that would have no meaning? Or do I start where I first “turned on” and started recording data? I think the latter is best:
It was my 6th birthday. I was with my mom and cousin Mikey. We had just moved from McAllen, Texas to Corpus Christi, Texas and I think my mom was sad for me. No other 6 year olds were around to celebrate with me just my younger cousins. She must’ve taken pity or something because the day after my birthday party, we went to Circuit City! See, my dad and mom had one last combined effort to my birthday gifts as they split the cost of a brand new Xbox game console. This thing was top of the line and way better than the PS One we had back in McAllen, so I was pumped. There was nothing that could stop me from grinning ear to ear at my birthday party, until I got home and revealed that there was only one game to play…Tetris. Now can you really imagine a 6 year old sitting down long enough to play Tetris? For those of you that don’t know, Tetris is a game involving different shapes made of 5 two-dimensional squares. These shapes fall from the top of the screen and the object of the game is to make an entire row of tetris pieces until you get bored or die (probably from boredom). Don’t get me wrong, Tetris is a fun game to play in the office or somewhere where the only other option is to watch the sun rise and set, my point is that Tetris is not a game for a 6 year old to play.
So, back to Circuit City, my cousin Mikey was there because he was technically the oldest in the cousin hierarchy by about 3 years. My mom had recruited him so he could help her pick out games that would be suitable for a kid my age. Mikey was a good kid, but he had a bit of a mischievous side to him. He had tried to get my mom to buy me Grand Theft Auto for the wrong console, but luckily she was not that dumb. She turned to me and told me to look at the covers of all the games with the green cases and pick two that I thought I would like to play. I had never been given so much free choice in any sort of matter. It had always been an uphill battle to get my mom to buy something that she didn’t deem necessary. I was stunned, I couldn’t really decide. The pit in my stomach bubbled and churned. My eyes began to water. I started to do the pee pee dance. Oh shit.
I crapped myself right then and there in front of the game isle. Not just a little bit either, like a full grown man sized BM. I turned on. My brain started recording. I was forced to remember this moment as the first registered moment of consciousness in my life for the rest of my life. I remember feeling that I had to go, but didn’t want to go in a public bathroom so I held it, but the way I held it as a six-year-old child was to sit down on the floor and place my shoe right in my crack and hope it holds all the excrement out of my pants. It wouldn’t. So I had to tell Mikey to get my mom, who then scoffed and held my hand as she picked me up off the floor and looked under me to see if it had leaked onto the CARPETED floor (fun fact about the 90’s and early 2000’s I remember was that almost all stores were carpeted which is gross to look back on when you think about how many kids did have a leak from their bum) and took me to our car. Gameless and embarrassed of myself I said sorry to my mom who looked back at me in my car seat and smiled.
“It happens”
So as far back as I remember, I’ve been in my getting in my own shit. Constantly trying to get out of it and apologizing to those who have to help me get out of it. And it’s exhausting. There is only one thing I have been able to do to get out of my own shit and that’s write. And I hope that this writing thing will help me sell out either by getting noticed by someone who wants to offer me a job writing advertising or wants to pay me to write more of my life’s story, which is not very funny or exciting, but there are a few more good stories in there that can be told. Or I use this as a way to get out of my head and put something positive and creative out there instead of the dark, depressing poems that sit in my journals waiting to eventually be burned in a fireplace or a cremation furnace when I die of old age. Either way, I plan to sell out via this blog.
