Homeless

A few weeks ago, a good friend asked me why I don't have any children yet. Here is his answer. 

And it starts with me being homeless. 

Hobo beard, Oct 2011. Hi Olek!

I first became homeless two weeks after my 18th birthday. It was early Summer in 1995 and I had been out playing basketball with one of my church friends when I came home to find all of my belongings stuffed into large garbage bags and thrown out on the front lawn. My parents had gone through the trouble of collecting some phone numbers and had called around so all of my other friends had beat me to the scene, my future brother in law had even defiantly parked his pick-up truck on the front lawn. It was a strange moment being a half dozen teenagers trying to make the mature decision of what to do with the virgin ginger who sang on the church choir. Fifteen minutes into our deliberations, my parents continued to hide in the darkened house and sent out my baby brother and mentally challenged little sister to tell us that if we didn't take my stuff off of their lawn soon, they would be forced to call the cops. So I left.

I spent a few months hopping from bedroom floor to bedroom floor, all of my friends were from church and I had earned a reputation with all of their parents by always being polite and for cleaning up after myself when I came over for supper, so it wasn't a hard sell. It wasn't that bad, actually. My life was mostly awkward moments and a complete lack of privacy, but I had a roof over my head and food to eat. However, to this day I sometimes still sleep on the floor just to keep in practice, like I might need to get used to it again someday.

So much of my life has been running away from that moment, chased by the most common phrase I remember hearing from my mother;  not an "I love you", but a resentment flavored "The day you grow taller than me, I'm going to chop your legs off", repeated weekly from the time I was six until I grew too strong for her to bully me anymore. And like a lot of survivors of domestic abuse, every intimate relationship I have tried to forge since then has been covered in her hand prints and I have always struggled to wash them off.

She was rarely physical with me, she didn't escalate into that direction until she started abusing my younger brothers and sisters. Not often, but she would sometimes trade slaps with my sister for up to thirty minutes at a time and she wasn't above using her weight to try to crush one of us if we wouldn't obey. Her cruelness was casual and beastly, usually a lash out for some perceived slight to her fragile ego or limited intellect. My father was frequently stressed and angry, joining in the continual shouting, but he is a genuinely nice guy who only recently started to realize the damage my mother did to all of her children, so I try not to hold onto that. He did apologize for my childhood last month, so that's something. He's trying, and that's all anybody could ask for.

Or you could ask for a cat, some drugs, and a balloon necklace, whatever really.

I once estimated that I had fought with my mother an average of once per day from the age of five until I was 18. That's almost 5000 arguments, blows, thrown objects, broken doors, missing hugs, and one six foot bookcase that I pulled off of the wall in front of my mother so she would stop following me around the house screaming in my face when I was 17. I knew this wasn't normal, I became the perfect guest at the houses of my friends so that I could praise from at least somebody's mother, but I didn't realize what was being done to me.

Even I didn't figure this out until just recently.

My sister and I got married at about the same time. She had been dating one of the guys, the one we nicknamed 'Biff', and had been kicked out of the house at 17 because they told us that my sister had become infected with her boyfriend's "evil spirit". I let her stay at my apartment for a while, the one I was finally able to afford after getting hired on at McDonalds (my parents wouldn't let me work when I was at home, so I had no money), but eventually her and Biff got together and she had a couple of girls. Neither marriage survived. My sister dedicated her life to her children, finally marrying a good man who treats everyone better than they treat him, and having three more boys, the last one is only five weeks old. I met him on the Fourth of July at a friend's BBQ where my sister had taken her kids. And they are beautiful. All of them, really. My oldest niece is an introvert who was hiding in the car reading a book, my youngest niece, finally a teenager, loudly announcing to the room how I am her favorite uncle made my heart happy in a way that is unreachable except by the words of children.

And I have always loved the girls, probably more than they know, but I missed something with them growing up. When 13 first learned to walk she would hug everybody. And I mean everybody, we were positive she would get kidnapped, if you can call it that when it looks like she's volunteering. It was harrowing for her 21 year old mother. 13 stayed equally as friendly as she got older, which I always took as good news. I hope that no matter what happens to her in life, that the warm core of her heart that constantly reaches out to people always has a chance to flourish, it is a beautiful gift. Granted, it's easy to get along with kids when you're an uncle, but the oldest nephew, who looks like me a bit, has been trying to help his mother with the chores since he could stand. He used to throw clean clothes back into the washing machine because he thought it was helping. HOW ADORABLE IS THAT YOU GUYS?

Almost this adorable.

Even then I missed it. Until the BBQ, when I was sitting with my curly headed, two year old nephew for the first time. We were watching He-Man on VHS and I casually observed what a chill little dude he was. He was leaning into the corner of the couch, hands draped comfortably across his lap, when he nodded and gave me a smug look. And that's when the last piece of the puzzle I didn't even know I was trying to solve fell into place. Because I sure as hell didn't invent the smug look, but I perfected it on my branch of the family. And the one thing everyone is so surprised about when they get to know me is fact that I'm surprisingly kind and nice to the people I care about. Somewhere, at the core of me, is the same heart (almost) that beats in my niece, that beats in my nephews, that beats in so many of us, and why I had assumed otherwise is just another reminder of how much there is to learn. My sister and her husband have worked hard to be good parents to all of them, but I know these kids. They are good people.

And, I guess, so am I.

At my heart I am an incredibly nice guy. Almost disgustingly nice. I used to think it was a weakness, a desperate attempt to gain attention, but this last year has been full of self-reflection and self-improvement and I am going to be entirely honest about myself here when I say that that's the kind of person I genuinely want to be. Nice.

And a crazy pirate. I would love that job.

Gone are my years of accepting any attention I could get from someone, no matter what the cost to me, and I have finally managed to rebuild enough of myself that there haven't been any new burn marks in years, but in looking forward to the rest of my life all I see still are hard choices. I know things will get better because I am making that happen with a tremendous amount of work, but when the life of the Normies calls out to me, like it did at the BBQ, an old tendril of mood strikes out at me and drags me below for a bit to be with her.

"I have never loved you." The giant says, with cold blue eyes and clammy, pale skin. "No one will ever really love you." It doesn't matter that she never says these words, that she is incapable of being this precise with her hatred, but with lifetimes trapped with her inside me, it can be hard to move. My arms are too short to make her love me, if only I could hold her one more time maybe she could love me.

But now I know how my mind works and I can navigate out of that. I have been forcing a lot of change upon myself lately, all for the better, with the intent to manifest a different destiny than the one I was working towards. Things are going well, I've lost a considerable amount of weight and have recently gone through a growth spurt on stage that made it so I could quadruple the amount of time I had for standup. I'm happy most of the time and that's as good as things can be. I am positive.

Yet inside are wastelands of pollution, and minefields hidden in every direction that brings me close to people. Domestic abuse tries to multiply by changing you into the kind of monster that puts it into others. And I am not blameless of this, I have enjoyed hurting many people in my life, and I am sure none of them truthfully deserved it. I have always been terrified of seeing my mother in the mirror, so I have avoided it. So when you ask me why I don't have any children, when you follow it up with the compliment that I have so much to give someone as a parent, it breaks my heart because I do. I know I do, but there is a wide chasm between me and the type of person I need to become to trust myself, and I don't know if I will ever be able to build a bridge large enough to cross it. I want desperately for someplace to feel like home, but it never has, and I'm sometimes afraid that it never will. I try so hard to build things only to watch them burn to the ground time and time again, always leaving me homeless and alone in the cold.

Thanks Mom. 

Why I am an Atheist.

I really wanted my second post to be light-hearted, something for the kids, ya know? But I guess I chose the name of this blog for a reason. My writing has traditionally been without purpose, more to shape my voice and to appease my ego than anything else, but as I age I find I need more goals in life. Damn it.

Lately on Facebook I've been caught up in several conversations about the lack of belief, traditionally called atheism, and it never ceases to amaze me how few people truly understand the condition. I'll write on it a lot here in the future, but first let me explain why I'm an atheist before we move on to the less important details.


I was the first of five born to young parents, my father recently out of college and starting on his first career. At the time they had taken the common route of falling away from their parent's belief system, dabbling into what my father now refers to as the 'occult'. Stories from this time are vague, after their conversion back into the fold when I was 5ish the early 80's and late 70's are hardly referred to at all. I remember being left at my Grandparent's house so that my parents could head to the river to be baptized and they have been in that river ever since.

I'm going to glaze over a lot of the details of my childhood; the deaf mother, the two younger siblings born with special needs, the constant conflict with my parents (my best guess is that I actively fought with my parents an average of six days a week for twelve straight years until they packed all my stuff into bags, threw it on the lawn, and called my friends while I wasn't home right after I turned 18), even though these issues had a lot to do with the person I've become. While it was a general sense of rebellion and lack of trust in authority that pointed me towards Atheism, I was still a strong proponent of the faith until my twenties, only identifying myself as an Atheist after a lot of introspection and investigation (a common theme among atheists is introspective conversion). What made me an Atheist was how I felt about it.

My family had a long history of jumping churches, eventually my mother's persecution complex would kick in and she'd accuse the church of ostracizing her, or my father would find some conflict of theology and we'd move on to another church. This happened a lot, sometimes it seemed like more than once a year, but it did let me observe many facets of the Christian faith.

I first faked speaking in tongues when I was about 8 or 9; I did it to impress my parents but deep inside I was torn up with guilt in it not being real. I devoured the bible studies my father would teach in our house, refusing to play with the other children and sitting with the adults and mostly just listening and reading. I tried to read the Bible at least a dozen times, but it just couldn't hold my interest, and this is despite the college age reading level I developed before I left school in the sixth grade. I would lift my hands during the charismatic church services, and bow my head when prayer was offered, but deep inside it always felt empty. I joined church choirs, hoping that the gift of music I inherited from my very religious grandfather would be the gateway to the mind of God, but no amount of attempt was powerful enough to get past the silence. When I was 16 I started to develop pain in my knees and I would force myself to kneel and pray, believing that the needles in my legs were his way of edifying me, spending hours there until the silent tears ran down my cheeks, always begging for relief and hoping that God would reward me for my faith. There was never anything there other than cheap church carpeting and the quiet prayers of those next to me. 

There were bible vacations held over the summer, bible camps when I got older, and after we started homeschooling even my curriculum was filled with God's truth. As my own desperate attempts to reach God bore no fruit, and the adults in my family showed even less ability to translate God's love to me, I started to lock onto the information given to me and that's when it started to happen.

My father is a big nerd and I love that part about him. He was a computer geek back in the 70's and we were on the internet in our house back when there were only 4 colors available and you had to use your phone to call a university to log in. He exposed me to science fiction as a child, even taking me to the drive-in to watch Empire Strikes Back when I was too young to sit through the entire thing. But the thing about science fiction is the first part of it, the science. I inherited his love of science, even creationism for a while, but the problem with science is it makes you think. I'm not suggesting that only thinkers are atheists, or that it is not possible to think and come to a different conclusion, but once you open up that door, it is nearly impossible to close.

I eventually got married to a Catholic, one church being the same as any other to me at this point, and I went to my first Catholic mass. Say what you will about all the extra deities the Pope's people have, but they do understand how to translate the glory of God. Their architecture is beautiful and they behave like a group of people who truly believe that the God of the New Testament is the same one who was capable of all that genocide from the old Testament. There is an element of fear and ritual to their version of Christianity completely lacking in anything I had previously experienced and suddenly it all came together.

By the time my Father was convinced that God wanted him to sell everything he owned and hide from the end of the world up in the mountains, I was pretty much done with the whole thing. I took an intellectual step back and started to actively research it from an outside point of view. Once I reached this point than it was a simple matter of deciding what to believe. I spent years in dark places, the foundation of my entire universe had been removed from me by the simple facts of living through it, but eventually I found myself on the other side, absolutely convinced that all the fear, guilt, shame, and panic I had experienced throughout my life because I could not feel what I was supposed to feel was unnecessary.

Eventually, as I matured in my new views on life, I found authors and people who had blazed the trail before me and it all made more sense, but that doesn't change that I'm an Atheist because of how I feel. Despite how the entire Atheist world view is one built on rational thought and reasoning, no amount of those things has ever convinced the faithful they were wrong; that takes emotion and time, something all humans are born with plenty of.

It's been years since those moments, but it has defined who I am. Some of the best people I have ever met will disagree with me until the end. I am well armed now with logic, quotes, reason, and passion, but that is not my Genesis. It all started with a boy waiting for his parents to return from the river, wondering why he was left behind...