Wow-weee. Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Dane, I'm 20 years old, and despite my rather unbeknownst social ineptness I have managed to live through a fantastic number of adventures and escapades. I owe my eternal gratitude to the hippie movement and the so-called grateful dead family for gifting me with the experience of a lifetime. Anyways, I thought I would use this first post as an opportunity to share an abridged version of my life story.
Several blocks from my home where I grew up in west Seattle, Washington, united states was my first elementary school. Most of the classwork we did didn't involve any homework, and time was usually spent doing arts and crafts, reading, and learning about local native American culture. Most everyone in the school and everyone in the neighborhood was a little bit eccentric, and for the most part I never seemed to see any significance of this, perhaps from not being exposed to it until so late in my life. My parents got divorced in the second grade, and I started living in two separate homes, alternating every two weeks from the custody of one to the other. After the fourth grade, at my mother's will, demanding that I receive a conventional education rather than silly arts and crafts and countless stories about salmon and coyotes, I was withdrawn from that school and enrolled in to catholic school.
The class I became a part of had all known each other quite well since kindergarten, and it consisted of only 25 kids. I was hesitant to make friends with them, although they, too (even though I wasn't too keen to it at the time) were quite eccentric. Looking back, there were plenty of invitations toward friendship that I declined simply because I didn't see clearly how to maneuver about the social playing field properly as to keep up the momentum and spontaneity of verbal interaction. Middle school came about, and as hormones began to emerge I developed a particular negative attitude toward social interaction with anyone who didn't have the distinct sub-cultural personality of the kids in my neighborhood at home. They all began smoking pot and listening to rap music and drinking booze around this time, and not long after I followed suit, enjoying their company much more than the uniformed, soft and whiny private schooled kids. After the 7th grade, I was withdrawn from Catholic school due to several rather hostile incidents with my classmates, and transferred to another eccentric school on an island across the Puget Sound from Seattle.
The same life pattern emerged at this school as well, only I was welcomed by a group of kids who shared the daily 2-hour commute, and began to spend time hanging out and was well appreciated for adding a humorous element to the group, for although I wasn't the greatest at sharing their specific interests I could usually draw a collected laugh from the group in one way or another. As high school began to progress, everyone seemed to either be shifting their interests toward hooking up with girls or serious academics. Having little skill with either, I began to stray from the pack, yet again.
After my sophomore year I decided to drop out and begin participating in a program called Running Start, where in liu of the last two years of high school, the student instead takes community college courses equivalent to the requirements to high school graduation, thus earning an Associate of Arts Degree and their diploma simultaneously. I connected with a large network of similar friends, succeeded in my studies, met a girl, fell in love, she tried to wake me up but it didn't work and we broke up, I met other girls and had many short-lived relationships, most of which being predominantly physical. Aside from that first girl, I didn't share that essential mutual feeling of emotional attachment, at least not until later.
During the summer after my last year as a minor, I was introduced to the counterculture of hippies, whose allure of bright colors, peaceful music, unconditional acceptance, and mind-altering psychedelic hallucinogens (which I didn't find to be too inspiring, rather just extremely pretty, like music for the eyes that could turn even a simple concrete wall into the most fantastic symphony of dancing colors and patterns you literally could never imagine). I went to several festivals, enjoying the sensation of being part of something very big, a massive gathering of souls from so many different places and walks of life. just as I denounced the catholic school culture in favor of the rap music partying culture of my neighbors, I then denounced the rap music partying culture of my neighbors for the outdoorsy, organic crunchy granola vibes, dreadlock wearing ganja rasta, hippie-trippy folks.
After this life changing summer, full of mind melting acid consumption, a hitchhiking journey between Washington and California that lasted two weeks and two festivals, and a total conformity to the image of the culture, I moved to Olympia Washington and lived away from my parents for the first time with two other students. It was the first place I called from browsing Craigslist rooms for rent, and both of them were quite miraculously very eccentric as well (some people say Olympia gravitates these kinds of folks, others say its the water). I finished the last quarter of my Associates Degree with the best grades I had ever earned (two years early, no-less), met a beautiful girl at a hippie-themed "spirit-animal party", began selling exotic hippie herb tea blends and making a great deal of money at it as well, and decided to transfer to the Evergreen State College in winter to learn environmental science, something I assumed I had a natural skill in after receiving a 4.0 in a lower-level class.
I moved to another house on the other side of town, and me and the beautiful girl from the spirit animal party grew very close, very intimately, and enjoyed each others company through the simple smalltalk and sweet silence of our youthful romance. She was very socially outgoing, and could talk and talk and talk forever about the smallest little things, and I would try my hardest to listen but usually came up short of the intentions of it. She tried to wake me up, but I wouldn't pay any attention. Just like I wouldn't pay any mind to when everyone else tried to wake me up. When things began to become unimaginably real, I would get upset. I suppose since she and the others enjoyed my company more when I was satisfied, people gave up trying to be the catalyst for change. It's a lot easier to draw with chalk on walls made of smooth concrete than walls that are made out of bricks. But me and her loved each other dearly, even though we were at such different places in our lives.
I began knotting my hair in to dreadlocks, skipping my very difficult and socially demanding environmental science, politics, and policy analysis course to sit around brewing teas from the exotic hippie herb blends that I peddled. After re-connecting with an old acquaintance, tycoon and fellow tea enthusiast from summer, I began wholesaling the tea to two key coffeehouses, and managed to gain financial self-sustainability from my parents. In my environmental science/policy analysis program, I received a meager 2/16 credits, but was no longer interested in school. Not long after that first quarter was finished, I decided to follow the tycoon to the center of northern California to learn how to grow my own herbs and vegetables.
For six months I spent every day of my life in a worn-down cabin in the hills. The struggles of maintaining my plantation, much of the time alone, with devastating pitfalls around each and every corner, as well as pinching pennies on an very tight budget, left me battered by the agony of loneliness and despair. For reasons that are probably better left unexplained, that place was dangerous. There is an action-packed screen-play waiting to be written about that experience, but it might be better suited for another thread, and I would certainly do good to protect myself as to the memory of the true account of what really happened up there. But believe me, if packed in to a 90 minute film, it would be one of the most exciting action and suspense thrillers Hollywood has seen in a long time.
Upon my return to civilization in the fall, I felt completely feralized by the social deprivation of the hills. I was a dark brown color, perhaps as tan as a Caucasian person can naturally get, with sloppy, different sized dreadlocks hanging like a mop off of the top of my head. Everything was very quiet for a while as I didn't know what to talk about with anyone. I couldn't just burst in to the past; that summer that was my entire world for no relevant reason, and I couldn't step in to anyone back in Seattle or Olympia's world like everyone else so easily did. I was trapped in silence of not being able to escape my own reality, a silence brought on by pain and a desperate desire to suppress my unenjoyable experiences like a volcano that was just about ready to burst and decided not to.
To keep from sitting still, and perhaps to avoid the need of paying rent and committing to a social life that my abilities simply could not afford, I sought shelter in the rat race, the grunch (gross universal cash heist) of giants, as eccentric visionary Buckminster Fuller so aptly coined. My days were spent driving extremely long distances from coffeehouse to cafe to storage to distributor, often 10 or more hours behind the wheel of my mercury minivan at a time, which I could sleep in anywhere if I was ever tired and didn't want to bother with the inconvenience of a motel. In between destinations I would squat quietly at the residence of business associates and loose affiliates, and frequently at the home of a man named Adrian, whom was never home to sleep in his bed, perhaps off enjoying some exciting life that left him with no time to stay where his rent was paid.
In the late winter I met up with a man named Luke, a former-evergreen student whom helped me establish clients in other states, and I helped by offering a well paying job as a distributor. He was way in to the hippie scene, and although I had cut my dreadlocks out shortly after returning from California and drifted away from that culture, I decided to hop on the band-wagon and attend show after show, going to as many as 4 musical performances a week, mostly "jam bands" and electronic, for a very long extended period of time. Although I didn't talk too much to the strangers I crossed paths with at these events, I would like to think that I became a very good expressive dancer, usually straying to the outskirts of the crowded, cramped writhing blob of attendants.
I soon fell in to this sort of--loose tribe-- a band, if you will, of other nomadic travelers going to the same events and doing the same things we were doing. It soon became everyone in the tribe's goal to wake me up from leaning against the concrete walls of the venues, silently watching everyone else's conversations in disbelief. I had come to the delusion that they all were crazy for saying such unbelievable things about magic, and energy, and chakras, and rebirth, and tarot readings, and horoscopes, and stories that just couldn't possibly have happened, like saying they had been in skydiving competitions or abducted by aliens. I came to the delusion that these people were crazy, and back in the real world where my mom and dad came from nobody ever talked such nonsense.
Then rumors arose that Adrian, whose vacant bed was the most common place I would rest my head those months of wandering, was addicted to heroine. I believed it, and said that the perpetrators who brought such vile poison to our communities should be reprimanded by force, that we had to take control of the drug epidemic that was plaguing the scene in whatever ways we could without snitching. As time went on, more and more barely familiar names of friends of friends in the band were rumored to be suffering from heroine addictions. People I had known loosely since the year before were all said to have become dope fiends, and I believed it as the truth.
Then, on the day before my 20th birthday (literally. fate paints the motion pictures of life too perfectly, it seems) Adrian invited me in to the woods at the Evergreen State College to "trip" with him. He told me he was getting clean, and that the last time he was trying to quit the stuff he just ate a bunch of acid, and it was a completely life changing experience. He said he was going to eat ten, and although I wasn't going to go that deep I would do four. We sat in almost complete silence in the grass for quite a while. Waiting, patiently, as our minds began to change. As things began to intensify, he got up, and told me it was time to move on, and we began walking down to the beach. Suddenly it hit me. This man, although pale in complexion and good at holding his face muscles a strange way for a long time, was of good health. It was me... And then everything else started rushing forth, like a crack in the hoover dam that busted out full force sending a massive tidal wave of painful understanding, as a poor fisherman looks up to the sky and sees a wall of water standing above him, and then he is crushed and drowned slowly.
"If you want you can dip.." He said, picking up on my facial expressions, which undoubtedly exhibited intense fear and confusion being unleashed for the first time ever. "Do you want me to dip?" I responded. "I just don't know if you're the right guy to help me quit heroine." I paused for a long time. "I'm gonna run off and probably get really.... really weird." I said, as I held out my hand and slapped his, finalizing my departure with our hands making fists and our knuckles tapping together. And that was the exact conversation word for word, as I will never forget, when I acknowledged to myself for the first time that there was something big going on in the world, something that my entire experience all throughout life has reflected. It was at that moment I realized that the world I lived in wasn't one that I shared with everyone else, but it was a world created and so dramatically shaped and sculpted by the people in it, constructed just especially for me. More often than not, references to the past and the future were a bent reflection of that exact moment the words were being born. Just imagine watching one million tons of concrete as an entire dam crumbles to rubble. It was terrifying.
I sold the last of my tea, which i had grown more and more disinterested in throughout spring, and have been hiding in my parents homes, alternating back and forth every few weeks like I did back when I was a child. I now have a complete inversion of a conventional sleep schedule, fear social interactions or lack of desire to do the things that used to make me happy. Even going to gas stations to buy cigarettes is a complete drain because I have nothing to say besides hello, Marlboro special blends please, and thank you very much. Buying groceries is the most painful because of the long awkward silence as I wait for all of the items to get scanned, knowing the big bags of peanut M&M's and the salmon i bought will give a weak excuse as to why I am speechless.
I just want some nice girl who feels comfortable around me when I'm quiet like I had before, only now that I'm awake I can finally begin to grow, again. Friendship and love are the two pieces to this puzzling life that I'm lacking. Hopefully this community will help me grow stronger as a person to meet these goals.
05 Jul 2010, 3:27 pm
