When I made the decision to become a writer:

It was in the spring of 2007 I was dressed up in my bright red dress shirt, slick tie, newly shined black shoes, fresh hair cut and shave, letting my minitruck warm up early in the morning to go to my weekly breakfast networking meeting. I missed both weeks prior and my plan that day was to make up for it by showing up early, bright-eyed and filled with a rejuvenated enthusiasm hooting, “har har har” or something like that as I walked in. When I locked my front door after saying goodbye to my dog, Saint Mook, I started to unlock my truck I just couldn’t do it, I could not get in and drive to the meeting. Instead I went back in my house, gave the Mook a meaty treat, unbuttoned my shirt, made some coffee and started writing longwinded prose. Several minutes after the meeting started the president of the club sent me a text message asking me if I was okay. “Overwhelmed” is what I sent back and I was overwhelmed. For years I just wasn’t happy doing what I was doing. After college I started a brain washing business and I had it going pretty well after running it for six years and finally making what people commonly call “good money” I just could not bear the thought of doing it anymore. The more success I had at the business the worse I felt. The weekly meeting brought me a ton of business and money, but something just wasn’t right about it. Truly, I am a bit of a slob. The thought of paying someone to clean my brains seems awfully ridiculous to me even if they are dirty. As far as my values go I just don’t really care about things like brains, lungs and colons. It is just the way I am. I don’t care about it. I would rather live in a cabin with plywood floors, wood burning heat and a picnic table to sit at and fuel my temple in between creative fits. I am not trying to be anti-bourgeois or live like a bird, that’s just my taste and I am just not capable of understanding why people would assign so much value to these material items, stainless steel microwaves and china hutches full of plates. So when I was selling my service even though I knew I was doing a good job, providing value and service, it just meant very little to me. On top of it meaning very little to me I felt like I was encouraging something of little value to be valued in the world. I felt like my body and mind where always against me, my whole life was a Sin and that’s how I took it and I still take it whether it really is or not isn’t much concern to me. I take it that way because I was capable of more and I knew I was. My labor was not a labor of love and I had reached a point in my life where that was the only labor I was capable of. I love being the brain cleaner, but finally it got old as all things do. In the winter prior to this I had begun to write. Not only was I writing I was reading, going to lectures, researching and expanding my mind. My girlfriend who I thought I was going to marry suddenly sabotaged and broke up our relationship in December that year. It was an event that forced me to look deep into myself, reflect and call upon unseen forces to guide me. I was fueled with almost an unlimited enthusiasm for self-discovery after that, vowing to live the life I wanted sick and tired of suffering. I set my primary objective to pursue my labor of love and write. I had always been a whimsical poet my whole life never paying much attention in school, busy scribbling lyrical epics in the back of class or just daydreaming, thinking of dark heroism and being a genius of some kind. I always found intellectual stimulation and truth in the rap songs I heard growing up, something about freestyle rap seemed so far different from other music, it was like freedom recorded. It came out of spontaneous thought; free thought. Older people never much appreciated any of the truth the freestyle of these poets reviled or would validate any of it. “Ban the filth” said they. I always thought the rapper was a genius, a self-reliant genius who spoke more truth than any of my teachers or so called leaders and even the so called, “mentors” I would later encounter. I would have gotten to where I am faster without a mentor. I say, “Beware of people who want to help you or say they can help you get where they are for a fee. Instead, call on ghosts as mentors, but still ghosts don’t know where you your going as well as you do.” I have heard Les Brown (a popular mentor) talk smack on Fifty-cent. He even called him “fifty-cents”. What an idiot, that Les Brown. How can a peddling inspirational speaker talk trash on a real artist who is successful by what God gave him? I was taught to obey authority, raised a “Christian” and stayed one until I finally picked up a bible for myself and knew I could write poetry as good as that even though the authorities wouldn’t agree, but I always had a real beef with authority anyway. I am not a big fan of people selling snake-oil which is all authority amounts to. All through the grades my mind wondered during almost every subject except for psychology. I have always wanted to learn things that aren’t taught in school and when I was in school mostly what I thought about was them not the subjects being taught. I have always been intrigued by the human mind and the current human condition and their inner connections. Not only that, but my high-school psychology teacher was the only adult I knew that could also see the genius in artistic works such as music. Roman Pettibone related psychology to real life by showing me how new discoveries where reflected in art and music. He was the first artistic influence I ever had even though he wasn’t an artist he did appreciate it like one. During that time of my life I was a punkarocker, I was in a band called the “Temporally Patient Time-Bombs” needless to say we never made it big or got a record deal or I would be on tour. My other artistic influences where N.W.A., Easy-E and Bad Religion. Later on in college the only professors who really ever seemed to have any answers about any of the important questions in life was some of the professors of psychology. I had a lot of questions going into psychology, questions like: What is the purpose of life? How can I make the suffering go away? Why can’t I just have some peace? I was raised in a family that encouraged ignorance, racism, ego, and set the pattern of my life in motion for destruction and suffering by time I got to college I was miserable. Even though I was fully melted into America’s famous pot, poor worried and bog-trodden, it didn’t seem that way to me, sure I was worried and bog-trodden, but in my mind I was separate from everyone and everything else and thus I was living a lie because I wasn’t separate. Everything that happened in the world also happened in me. No matter what successes I had on the outside by appearances was empty and superficial. Even though my mind was in another reality during school I always got good grades and went to college quickly picking up psychology as my major area of study. For the most part I saw college as a continuation of high-school, mostly rote memorization and the learning of superficial facts that would soon be forgotten. I wasted more time trying to learn German than I did playing Super Mario Brothers when it first came out, my mind just doesn’t work that way as far as learning languages. I found college classes pointless and boring, but I loved learning about myself so I decided to go on the track towards graduate school in psychology. I soon found out I couldn’t deal with being a conformist enough to even bring myself to apply for graduate school. I was also shy, inhibited and generally pretty antagonistic and angry most the time. After a few independent study classes with graduate students working on forgiveness and hope studies and the University of Kansas I soon was repudiated by the academic environment. I was also emotionally unstable during college, I couldn’t focus or take a breath. My neurotic behavior in college was also because of a girl mostly. Had I been more stable I may have went on with graduate school, the opportunity was all there I just didn’t want it because I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t deal with the plot before me, I was incessant analyzer of information and the more I thought the cloudier my perception of reality became. While I was in college I worked as a produce dude at a grocery store. It sucked; I hated it. Everyday I dealt with people in their most primate mode of life as they gathered food. I woke up at 4:20 AM to be at work at 6:00 and build the “wet-rack”. The wet-rack is the rack that sprays all the lettuce, spinach, greens, cabbage, broccoli and other vegetables that need water. At night someone would take it all down and store it on big green racks in the cooler then in the morning I would go through it all, putting back what was good and throwing away what was rotten. I made it nice and pretty and all the different vegetables would be level all the way down and then right before the misters began to spray water a loud “Singing in the rain” came on the loudspeaker. Soon after college I started my own business cleaning brains, it wasn’t anything I wanted to do, but it was a simple business I could run, make a living and propel myself to financial freedom with in order to do what I really always wanted to do (live in the woods with nature and write). As for not becoming a conformist, the business I was running required it to. So yes overwhelmed is how I was feeling that morning, I was being pushed forward by the frustration of living out of harmony with what I really wanted to do, but I was also being ushered onward by inspiration. On a daily basis poetic rhyme was flowing through me. I was thinking clearly and writing down the vision I was seeing for my life, painting the picture I saw in my mind. I was highlighting the things in my life I had that I wanted to grow with gratitude and with diamond hue emblazoned tears; the vision embraced me so that I was continually thankful for everything in my life because I knew a wonderful becoming was in the works. The struggles, the suffering and emotional pain I experienced up until then all put me in a position now to act upon my vision of what I wanted my life to be, to spend my days doing what I wanted to do, taking life for better for worse as my plot and planting a garden there. By making a detailed record of my vision people and events began to organize around me. My mistakes began to work for me, my whims seemed to lead me to the knowledge I needed to accomplish my goals. I was planting seeds and abandoning them in the soil of my mind. Later that day when the president of the networking club called me I explained that I just had to move forward and obey my whims. I made a decision to create the life of my dreams and acted on it. I made the decision to abandon my former life and life the life I want back in 2007 and now I am living in that creation. In July of 2008 just over a year after making the decision to become a full-time writer I found a cabin with plywood floors in the woods, quit cleaning brains permanently, I live each day according to my whims and write to my hearts desire. I sit around writing, drinking coffee and beer all day if I want to, hike in the woods with my dogs, read the classics, paint craziness, take pictures, make videos raise chickens, smoke tea and I have a record of it all.