2016 was an important year because my suspicions were confirmed. My Dad did give away the family farm. This would be the final cruel joke played on me by my so-called "father" of one half century and counting. He was never a father at all, but just a guy trying to sell more insurance by portraying the outward appearance of a normal family, a facade at best. Problem is, he got away with it for so long that nobody left alive cares if he was faking it the whole time. Well done Mr. Anderson. Here is your Academy Award.
This was evidenced by his recent donation of the crown jewel of his real estate holdings to charity. Donated to some "Horses for Veterans" program, this is the Pennsylvania house on approximately 40 acres in prime Amish Country, which has been in the family since 1981. So much for my dreams of moving back to Amish country, where tradition dictates that the oldest heir inherits the family property. Complete bullshit.
This prize has always been a source of frustration for me anyway, as I was too old to move back in after college and when I did stay there during bouts of unemployment during the 1980's and 90's, my mother would mentally torture me until I hit the road again in desperation. My Dad was always silent of course.
He did hand over 40 acres across the street to my much-younger adopted brother, just to add insult to injury I suppose. Totally crapped on by my stepfather, as usual. I can't wait to change my last name back to my birth name. At least I will be satisfied with the name on my tombstone.
My only recourse is to write about it. I get to leave my little piece of human history, online at least. I've got a lot more dirt to dish out on this subject in book form, coming soon. This summary is just a little insurance, speaking of the business, in case I were to die suddenly, at least the story is out there and will grow online until published in printed form.
Here are some pictures for your enjoyment:
Dave Anderson's Farm donated to charity
Amish Neighbors!
40 Acres Across the Street
Dad #2 married my Mom in 1965
Prepare for a half-century of agony.
If I thought the 80's were bad, they were nothing compared to the decade of the 90's for me, both personally and financially. It seems like the bad start I got in the 80's just kept its momentum going through the entire decade of the 90's, and there seemed to be nothing I could do to stop it. Whatever I tried just seemed to make everything worse, like I had been cursed by a band of gypsies. By the end of the 90's, I would be in debt over six figures, lose my long-time fiancee', lived in eight different places, and have less than $2,500 to my name.
Starting in the fall of 1990, and lasting through about early 1994, I managed to barely scrape by. It was the period of the recession of 1990. I had finally quit the family business, for reasons that remain murky, but it was mostly money; I think my last year there was my highest paid year-around $16,000 or so, which was a fortune compared to my salary from 1983 through 1989. Plus, despite putting in 7 years with the company, I just was not getting any respect. I mean, low pay is okay, if you like your job, but if you have consistently low pay, without so much as an "atta' boy" once in a while, and the job is completely monotonous, you can only last so long. Regardless, I said "see ya' later", and was on my merry way, just before this latest recession hit, if I recall correctly. As usual, my timing was perfectly horrendous.
Looking back on it, I would bet that my Dad hired me just to keep my Mom happy. She could be a nightmare to live with if she was unhappy over something and, despite her contempt for my childless and wifeless ways, she did seem to care about my welfare. That's what a paycheck from dad felt like too, welfare, because it certainly wasn't because he thought I was worth anything, that's fer' damned sure.
This was their game though. Make things impossible for me, impossible for me to achieve any semblance of normalcy. Isolated farm, low pay, control freak parents with a huge chip on their shoulder for whatever reason-I still don't know. Then, when I became middle-aged and unmarried with nothing to show for my life, blame it on me. "Oh, Kurt's a confirmed bachelor. He's just a party boy", my mom would tell people to cover up the results of their half-ass dysfunctional child-raising techniques. I would just get the urge to strangle her at that point.
I think it goes a lot deeper than what I realized at that time. I would be willing to bet that my Dad came along and "adopted" us, my Mom-divorced with a young child at the time he entered the picture, in order to sell more insurance, in the big picture, to be more successful, in portraying the family man image that was so important back in those days in business, the 1960's in America. * That sure would explain a lot of things. In fact, I would bet a million dollars on it.
With us, he had an instant family. It was purely a business move, nothing more, nothing less. Sociopaths will get wealthy, because it takes a sociopath to do such things, to fake a family. I say this because when my mom passed away years later, in 2011, he almost immediately took down every picture of her and threw out all her possessions-emptied the house of her entire presence.
Anyways, there I was in mid-1990 somewhere, driving around in my piece of junk car, well, at least I had a car-things could always be worse, right? But in comparison to my peers, I was doing badly. It really came down to family support. Where I had a hostile, wealthy Dad that was dying to see me fail miserably, friends and acquaintances had an incredible amount of family support, to put it bluntly. Resume's were everything in those days too, before the advent of the internet, and I didn't have anything notable on my resume, except for some vague office-work gopher job.
Plus, there were a lot of new faces around. I remember sitting in traffic, during my job search in the Philly suburbs thinking, "where did all these people come from?" What we didn't know at the time was that we had a wide open border with Mexico, and cheap labor had been flooding into the States since the 80's or even earlier than that. Eventually this massive influx would begin to be felt, in lowered standards of living, increased medical care costs, more-crowded highways, ever-increasing crime rates, and general change in appearance and culture of the population. Now, it merely made the job-search a little harder than when I had graduated from college in the 80's.
Point: If your country is getting really crowded and shitty, and crime is out the ass, chances are the corporations are importing cheap labor, sending existing high-paying jobs overseas, greasing the politicians, and pocketing the profits.
Still it was a golden era, compared to the America that awaited us about 10 and 20 years down the road. I would go back to the America of 1990 (or earlier) in a heartbeat.
After a few months of this. my parents didn't really give me much feedback on the whole situation. I don't think they cared much at that point, what I did. They were set up pretty well, and they had their adopted kid to worry about. I think he was just getting out of high school, or had a year left. Unfortunately, I had never been really close to my "brother". He had always hated me, even though I was there first.
Can you imagine showing up at some guy's house, and resenting him, when he was there 13 years already before you? I really think it was the money that made it so weird. Plus, when he got older he took on the same disdainful attitude towards me that my Dad harbored also. So now I was stuck with double-asshole Dads. I tell you I got terrible luck. It's not like I had any access to Dad's money either, which is all the new kid cared about. They kept me poor as hell. Don't let your parents adopt, trust me.
But, the fact that they had adopted another child and then treated me like crap and the new kid like gold was a sure sign that I should just leave home and never come back, but you're blind to these things when you're younger. I was in denial. "It's just a temporary thing, right?".
Having nowhere really to actually go, I stayed on my friend's couch for a while-he had a little house down by the Susquehanna River, and eventually he rented a room to me for a few months. His wealthy Dad was a friend of my wealthy Dad, but his Dad actually liked him and had given him a house after graduation! Don't get me wrong. I didn't want everything handed to me, but at least take an interest in seeing all your kids get a good start, not just the new guy, if you've got the means and you are a Father! "Fish" was having his own problems though, as the recession was taking a heavy toll on his father's steel company, which had been around since about 1964 or so.
This also got weird, because his parents were good friends with my parents, and I'm sure they were getting a full report on their 30 year-old runaway's status. I can hear it now, "Yep, he's still sleeping on the couch. Should I have him call you? No, don't bother. He's learning a good lesson from all this, that he's only good for yard work."
The Fishers were a real nice family though and huge! I always wondered, what's it like to be related to half the county? I wouldn't know because I've had to move ten or twenty times, but I would think it would be a great advantage in business. Everywhere I have moved, in trying to start a business, everyone is like, who in the fuck are you? Then I go broke and end up leaving town in the middle of the night, only to repeat the cycle somewhere else.
It still breaks my heart that the Fisher family had to be witnesses to the dysfunctional relationship I had with my family at that time. We had already moved to the neighborhood back in 1966 for six months before my new Dad moved us away for seventeen years, probably the best six months of my childhood. Then my parents moved back to the area and of course, everybody was a stranger to me by then. The senior Fisher was an ex-Amishman with an eighth-grade education, who had built a steel fabrication service out of a garage on a country road into a 14 million dollar company in under 15 years or so, an amazing story, really. I don't think there were any problems until he brought the kids into the business, who all had gone through high school and some college. It just goes to show you what a scam formal education is in this country.
My first job search here eventually brought me to a local radio station, where I got a job in advertising sales. I got the idea for this venture from a friend of mine in Philadelphia who had been hugely successful in advertising sales. The only detail left out was the other guy had started right out of college, unlike my 8 years-late entry into the work force. Unfortunately, I sucked at it immediately, and I went nowhere.
Did I look too good? Was it the physical fitness? Jeez, I should have just opened up a gym. "But there are too many of those". Why did I listen to the naysayers? Back to the job interviews, problem is, if you show up anywhere for a job interview and you're in any kind of physical shape, people tend to think you just got out of prison. Plus the male bosses in corporate America of that era were very often screwing half the female staff under them, so to speak. I'm sure this is still true in modern day America, in the few corporations that are still here.
Who knows. I think a lot of the problem with my inability to find a good job or get any business, had to do with the fact that men just didn't want to hire me, or if they did hire me they just made sure that I did very poorly, like the experience with dear old Dad's company. If women had been in charge anywhere, I am convinced I would have scared up a few more opportunities in the job market, even though it was the shitty early 1990's.
In fact, I believe the perfect career for me would have been to skip college-saving four years of wasted time there, and become a hairdresser. It would have been great. I like women, they like me. I'm artistic and have an eye for beauty. A straight hairdresser. Are you kidding me? It would have been a genius move. I guarantee I would have made a fortune.
I believe I made one sale the entire time I was at the radio station (3 months). I think the problem was that it was a really small town, and most of the decent accounts were already locked up by the manager (male, asshole) at the same station, so I was competing with my boss-not a very good arrangement. I did manage to sign up a restaurant just before I quit, and they reported one of their most successful weekends, ever. I had been pestering these guys for months to try radio advertising. Advertising doesn't cost, it pays! That was one of the little taglines in the radio advertising business.
Then I was unemployed again, and still trying to figure out where to go and what to do. I finally got desperate enough to check out my old lifeguard job at the beach (Avalon, NJ), because the Captain (Murray Wolf) was still there from my stint back in 1983 after college graduation (see "The 80's"). I called him, and he said "sure, come back". He was a man of very few words.
I would have to take the lifeguard test again, and it was about six weeks away, so all I did was hang out at my buddy's little house, watch TV, and go swim laps at the local college pool up in Millersville to get in shape. Luckily, I got away with this because they didn't bother to ask for my college ID until the last week before I left to take the test. Try getting away with that these days. Anyways, I got a week off before taking the test, enough time to peak physically, without losing what I had gained in the pool. I passed the test with flying colors on a rough water day.
1983 had been an incredible summer at the beach, because I had roomed with a bunch of buddies of mine from college (Elizabethtown College), and two of them had been hired by the Beach Patrol with me.
This time, things worked out only okay, not great, because it was 1991 now, I was older, and there were no familiar faces around. Unfortunately, I thought 31 was old at that time, but it really is not. Also, 1983 had been such an incomparable experience, that coming back was naturally a big letdown. I don't remember getting laid even once in the summer of 1991, which certainly had not been the case years earlier. It didn't help that, in my mind, I was just an "over-the-hill loser" now, with an uncertain future, instead of a fresh college grad with a supposedly great future. Given a chance to defeat myself, I usually will.
I also remember that the economy was bad in 1991, so bad that Captain Murray was firing lifeguards for the slightest infractions. The inside story was that the town was going broke, and there was pressure to reduce the size of the borough workforce. It's really kind of a miracle I didn't get fired this time, because I had been away for so long and I do remember making a few stupid mistakes.
Plus, we froze on the beach that summer, due to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the South Pacific. Yes, the eruption had been so huge that it affected the entire planet. So the summer consisted of sitting on the cloudy beach in our jackets while a cold wind battered us most days. The sun was a rarity that summer.
By late August all the college boys had left for school, leaving a skeleton crew, including myself, on the beach. This group consisted mostly of older guys and screw-ups like myself who had nowhere to go. It was kind of nice though, because there were very few tourists or kids around anymore, and the volcanic ash had finally cleared up in that part of the world, so we had clear, sunny days in the 80's with low humidity.
The rules were relaxed for the post-season, so we did not have to keep bathers right in front of us, as long as we watched them wherever they swam, Just the same, I did save two children from drowning one morning, while I was setting up my beach stand. It happened so fast, while their mother sat on her blanket some distance away on the empty beach, reading a book.
I was alone, vaguely conscious of two kids, a boy and a girl, about 8 to 10 years old, swimming around, about 20 feet from the beach. Glancing over at them, I suddenly realized to my horror that they had been pulled out by a riptide, and were tiring quickly, starting to sink under the murky water, as the waves rolled over their barely visible heads. They hadn't even made a sound. Dropping my fresh cup of coffee into the soft sand, I grabbed the big orange life preserver, and frantically headed into the surf.
By the time I got there, they were both in dire straits. I swam behind the girl, lifting her head up out of the water, and slipped the preserver in front of her face while she grabbed it as she coughed and choked, and I pulled the boy onto my back, while he wrapped his arms around my neck in a death grip, and that's how I swam back to the beach, holding onto these two kids.
Naturally, the mother was most grateful, and the staff had showed up, alerted by radio by someone, and had recorded it as an official rescue. Pretty cool day at the beach.
On most other days during that September, I spent most of the time working out, and rowing the boat in the warm summer sun, picking up an even golden tan. For pushups, I would hook my feet over one of the crossbars of the lifeguard stand, and do them at different angles. My goal was 1,000 push-ups a day. For dips, I would place the oars under the wooden seat, so the handles would stick out, horizontally. I would do 250 of these. Then, I would row the lifeguard boat back and forth along my designated beach.
At night, I would drop by the local pub on my bike, down a few beers, and then pass out back at the house, with the cool night breeze coming through the screen windows, smelling of salt-air. All my roommates had gone, so I finally had my little bachelor pad, if only for a few weeks. Then, I would wake up in the morning to the sound of seagulls, and head back to the beach for another day. I was in heaven.
If another thing did make our forgotten generation stand out, it was the effect of divorce. Many of us were scarred in new ways. Never before had so many parents casually quit the family unit. Maybe they watched too many Elvis movies in the 50's. The hip-shake was too much for 'em. We didn't die in a war, but part of us died when our parents split up.
After seeing Elvis on TV our young Father's tried to bang anything in a skirt.....
These events actually happened. The names have been shortened to protect the guilty:
High School: I hated school, for the most part. I think it must have been the constant weight loss for wrestling, because in the brief time at the end of each wrestling season, 7th through 12th grade, when I could eat normally, I actually enjoyed school and improved my grades, as I remember it.
Phoenixville High: Great wrestling coach, Lonny Moore. A+ Role model! Not only was he a solid coach, but a master motivator, causing the entire wrestling team to diet like Ethiopians during a drought. It got to the point where if you weren't constantly hungry, missing meals with no body fat, you were looked upon as a traitor. From the archives.....
Lonny Moore coached Phoenixville's wrestlers to five consecutive Ches-Mont League championships during a 16-year tenure. He compiled an overall record of 160 victories and 51 losses for a winning percentage of .758.
We were blessed with a lot of talent though, that's for sure. I distinctly remember Steve McGovern, who went to the state finals on two basic wrestling moves. Here's a guy who wasn't the strongest guy you'll ever meet, but he concentrated on hitting these two wrestling moves from anywhere, mainly the Fireman's Carry for the take-down and the Head Lever-where you pull the bottom wrestler's arm back by the wrist and put your head into the guy's armpit. Then you slip your head under the arm and lift him over for the pin.
So the guy would eventually be dead tired after fighting off the head-lever the whole time he was on the bottom after getting taken down by the Fireman's Carry. Steve beat just about all comers with this strategy, despite being a big pot-head party animal. It was pure genius, really. Exercise was a rare occurrence for Steve, although he did show up for every practice. Here's a newspaper blurb from the archives on Steve's career:
McGovern finished undefeated (43-0) in dual meets and 82-8 in his career before graduating from Phoenixville in 1978. He won two sectional, three districts, and two regional titles and became a two-time state medalist. His career at the University of Maryland was curtailed by injury.
Amazing, but the weed-smoking and aversion to exercise seems to have caught up with Steve in college, wrestling against bigger and stronger athletes. If someone could have persuaded him to train aerobically and hit the weight room, he would have been unstoppable.
This exposes a little-known secret of success in sports, mainly that you don't have to be the best at everything to be a winner, just be the best at three or four basic moves that you practice day and night until nobody can stop them.
Then there was Mark Cagle, one of the best pure athletes I've ever seen, at least in high school. He was a grown man it seemed, and we were still kids. He was another natural. He didn't seem to have any special exercise routine going on. He was just naturally strong and fast. I'm not sure how he didn't win the state tournament....he was the only one of us that went on to do anything meaningful at the college level. From the archives;Cagle, a 1977 graduate, captured four postseason titles and went on to become an All-American at West Virginia University.
It seems that we were tough at every weight class and we were because we won the conference all three years I was there. Luckily I fit in and made varsity all three years, although I missed most of my junior season due to a knee injury early on.
We were ranked top ten in the state in my senior year. Lonny knew how to get results. I don't know if he could deal with today's kids. The discipline we had was not to be valued in later years like it was at that time. They stopped spanking the kids, stopped pushing them, even stopped yelling at them. Now the prisons are full.
My own performance sucked for the most part, after my sophomore year, at least compared to my potential. In fact, my sophomore year was my best year, as the next year I injured my knee early on and missed the season, and my senior year I finally reached my former excellence by, maybe the last few matches, and won the Sectional Championship, despite being insultingly ranked third by the local "experts." Rank me third? Good move if you were trying to totally piss me off. Thank you for the motivation.
Unfortunately, by this time, my body was trying to grow and I had grown tired of starving myself to make weight by the post-season and took a dive at the District tournament, stupidly lost on purpose. I honestly don't remember what I was thinking at the time, to do such a thing. This is probably the most dishonorable thing that I have done in sports, that I can recall.
Regardless, I will never truly know how far I could have gone in that final season of wrestling, which still stings to this very day. My sophomore year was my best year, probably because I didn't have to cut much weight to make the team. The timing of my knee injury early in the next season effectively ended any real mark I could have made in local high school wrestling and the Sectional title at the end of my career was like a fart in a hurricane.
My wrestling career was basically over, at that point. It's just that nobody bothered to inform me of such. Looking back, I wasted a lot of time on some huge ventures that were essentially over; they had reached their peak. Then I would blow another decade or so, trying to "force it" down my own throat, like wrestling another four years in high school and college, a huge waste of time, especially since I was doing it mostly, for my parent's approval.
What I did not realize was that, after my parents adopted a boy when I was thirteen, it did not matter what I did. It was all about the "new kid." It was essentially over right then, between my parents and I. From that point on, I was an afterthought, really. As much as I tried to be, "the good son", the new member of the family could do no wrong and I could do nothing right. My own mother, to her dying day, worshiped this interloper and his every move, ignoring my relatively meaningless existence.
Back to high school wrestling; I'm always talking about do-overs and regrets, what I would have done and could have done and should have done. If indeed I could have started over again from that point, right after that knee injury my junior year, I think my best move would have been to drop wrestling altogether and concentrate on getting my grades up and growing my local lawn business and maybe coming up with some kind of career plan. There's always a better way to spend your time. Unfortunately, I never could recognize when it was time to change my path. I could only look back and agonizingly see it way later.
As it were (was?), I did nobody any good hanging around the wrestling room the rest of the season with a cast on my leg while watching everyone else reap the rewards of a great and winning season, only to get depressed that I wasn't a part of it. There's about eighty nine better ways I could have been spending my precious time. Instead, I never did fully recover from the injury before graduation, even though I eked out an average senior wrestling season at best, only to piss away three more precious years wrestling for free in college, no scholarship. Finally, by some miracle, I scored a one year scholarship at West Virginia University by my senior year in college, after transferring and working my ass off in the wrestling room at my new school, only to finally graduate, still with no concrete career plan and no job prospects. So I basically wasted another five years screwing around with the wrestling with still no career plan, not particularly enjoying the experience and gained next to nothing and everything is forgotten by anyone that matters anyway. Pure idiocy.
Teachers, good, but mean spirited. Eagles fans, you know? A lot of bullies. Real tough, picking on kids. I hope you're real proud of yourself. Maybe they were already jaded by the dope-smokin', hippie baby boomer generations before us, who were no angels themselves. That's how it was for our generation though. We always showed up to pay the price for the hell-raisers that came before us. By the time we showed up, the teachers had hair-trigger tempers. Plus, they were typically miserable, working in that school district, for some reason, and took it out on the students. There was this English teacher, Mr. Blahut, who routinely handed back papers with 25 to 50 F's marked on them. Jeez what a bunch of dicks.
Not all teachers were bad. Favorite teacher, Mr. Aurand, Biology. He got my stupid humor, which actually takes intelligence, I have learned.
Socially, I was inept, to put it lightly. Awkward is a good word. Shy-boy. Probably a result of getting my ass beat regularly by my stepfather in the 60's, who was quite the disciplinarian, but it felt like an ass-beating to me. I got to know the sting of the belt. It got to the point where I would almost piss myself if he looked at me sideways. I mean, to me, he was a giant. A pissed off, giant maniac that was chasing me with a belt. The worst was when he would yank my pants down to my ankles and slap my bare ass in public restaurants, in front of a room full of strangers. Not the best way to grow a confident young man. It always struck me as odd, that a father would humiliate a young boy in such a way, and still baffles me to this very day....
Luckily I got some decent mentoring later on in high school, from Coach Lonny Moore, among others, in school sports. By college, I was almost "normal", but I was still frustratingly plagued by panic attacks until my mid-30's or so, especially during any kind of attempt at public speaking.
In fact, I got a taste of this, probably one of my most embarrassing moments, at least in high school, my ill-timed, first attempt at stand-up comedy, in front of my entire 9th grade English class. We had a writing assignment, "describe how to do something step by step", which we had been required to subsequently read out loud. I wrote a little masterpiece I called, "suicide bit." Problem was, it wasn't supposed to be funny.
I read my little "comedy" piece in front of the class and then, dead-silence. My first lesson in public speaking. I enjoy making people laugh, but this was a disaster. What never occurred to me, at my young age is, suicide is a very common problem. I think, if I had more encouragement, I would have stuck with stand-up comedy. I love going to comedy clubs, but I still can't do public speaking now, without sweating and stuttering like an idiot. I am sure this could been remedied, with some more practice with more tactful material.
Highlight-Homecoming Court w/K.Scott. She was ridiculously cute, and I said about 5 words all night. Eventually, I would probably gladly have made this girl my wife, but her family moved away soon after. My young life shows a persistent history of uncannily being "cock-blocked" by one random thing or another. It's pretty amazing, how unlucky I was. The experience usually went something like this: great opportunity - majorly screwing up of great opportunity - lesson learned - opportunity never occurs again well into old age.....
Enjoyed innocent "dating" with Kathy H., Betsy B., and Sherri M. Clueless about girls, lucky for them. What a sin that the girls were so gorgeous, and I didn't really understand how small this window of opportunity would be. Plus, I had a confidence problem, which is never a good thing.
Linda P., Summer of '77 is ours in eternity. I remember making out with Linda on the living room floor of her parent's beautiful contemporary-style house, tucked into a very private corner near the edge of the Park on Valley Forge Mountain, while Fleetwood Mac's new "Rumors" album played on the stereo. Or sometimes we would walk down the trail behind her house, which led through the woods to an open field overlooking the edge of Valley Forge Park. We would lay in the tall grass, hidden from the world, the warm sun playing upon our young bodies, while the summer breeze would gently toss locks of her long brown hair across her pretty face.There were no cellphones or electronic distractions at that time. They weren't invented yet. I had her undivided attention.
Linda was the type of girl in high school I thought I could never get, remember that esteem problem? She seemed more sophisticated, mature and quite unattainable in my young mind at the time. We all create our own limitations. Regardless, my hormones got the better of me, and one day in the summer, while hanging around the Sun Bowl on Valley Forge Mountain, I boldly asked her out and she said, "Sure, we can go out. Where do you want to go?"
I was completely thrilled. She seemed older than her 17, I guess because she smoked, and she had kind of a raspy, sexy voice-the type of thing that would probably not seem so sexy twenty years down the road-but it was now that mattered. Plus, she had a really cool red Firebird. I felt like I was dating a 25 year old woman, which is a dream come true for any teen-aged boy. This was my first real girlfriend, in that we made out a lot, and more, and hung around together. Linda was hot. She looked like an under-developed Jacqueline Bisset, an actress I also liked a lot. We used to have a game where if we saw a car at night with one headlight out, we would kiss. The summer of '77 with Linda was one of my best summers ever.
Linda Pemberton and I, 1977 - easily my best part of the 1970's.
I know that my destiny was to marry this girl, but my parents so sabotaged my relationship with her that it did not come to pass. They would repeat this nasty little habit a few more times, until I was out of young wifely prospects. They were true cock-blockers 'til the end. Never listen to your parents when it comes to girls. They really don't know anything and long after they're gone you gotta' live with the effects of their meddling. Even if it ultimately had turned out to have been a mistake, I think it would have been my favorite one.
Unfortunately, my parents were totally against the relationship, and eventually banned Linda from the house. I still managed to see her for another year, and even took her to her senior prom at a neighboring high school. My mother was so desperate to stop me from seeing this girl, that she made up some very unflattering rumors about Linda, that she supposedly heard from a neighbor, which caused me to break up with her before I went off to college. Linda took it pretty hard, to my total surprise. I had no idea how fond she had grown of our thing together. Later I found these rumors to be untrue, but by then it was too late. I've always felt bad about how this ended, to put it mildly. You never forget your first girl, that's for sure. Dedicated to Linda:
1978: Sectional Wrestling Champion-I should have done better than this, but my talents were badly managed, and I had a poor attitude. Plus, I lived too far from the high school practice room. Unfortunately, the emphasis was on making weight, more than the technical aspects of wrestling. Still, I had two scholarship offers, from Drexel, and Southern Connecticut State. Sick of losing weight for wrestling in high school, I turned down both offers.
For you young wrestlers with some natural ability in the sport, here are some recommended books, thoroughly reviewed by yours truly. In fact, going through these books makes me want to get back in the game, but my utter lack of health insurance prevents me from such a reckless endeavor. I wish I'd had these books back then. I am sure I could have gone from being merely good to great.
Senior Prom, drank too much. I don't know what I was thinking about here, but I got so wasted, I could hardly speak. The football players had smuggled in some Southern Comfort-some serious whiskey. Sorry Monica B! She had to drive. She was a nice girl, originally from Argentina. Some of the stupid things I did, I have to cringe.
High School ends, thank God. Grad party, 2 beers, made out with class valedictorian. There was only one in those days. It was kind of cool, because she was a scholar, and I was an incredibly dumb jock. I think it was easier to hook up at that moment, because the women knew they wouldn't have to deal with the consequences later at school. That was it though. I tried to call her a few times and continue, but she was not open to anything more. At the very least, she helped me discover the magic of moderate alcohol consumption. I was actually invited to three different proms at three different high schools, and went to two. Looking back, I should have gone to all three. These things don't happen every day, you know.
Revised 04/10/09: My actual story, strange but true.......
Kurt Anderson - The ? Generation:
I remember when I was a kid, old
people were so nice. This group was mostly the World War II
generation-the parents, or more accurately, the grandparents of the Baby Boom generation, but I think the Baby Boomers were more like the Luckiest Generation, in that they escaped the remnants of poverty that plagued earlier waves of Americans. WWII survivors had a lot of opportunity when they shipped back to the states, but it took them a lifetime to take advantage of it. They achieved prosperity just in time to spoil their kids and grandkids, the Baby Boomers and the later boomers, whose parents were of the Depression-era generation. I can't just pick on the Baby Boom generation, of which I am technically a late member. Regardless, they all benefited from the WWII generation's resultant wave of prosperity after the war. Whoever had survived WWII had their pick of jobs, property, and women. This was indeed a rare and opportune moment in world history, and the "Boomers" would be in the best position in human history to profit from such good fortune.
So the
WWII generation would lead to the birth of the largest and wealthiest
generation in history, the Baby Boomers, and later become notorious as the Greediest Generation. Where the WWII people were relatively kind, hard-working, religious and
honest, the Baby Boomers would be relatively atheistic, dishonest, and greedy.
The "Boomers" ahead of us would soak up
all the jobs and cash, and set the tone, well before we showed up. This
would be our lifelong curse. These jokers would be one step ahead of
our generation every step of the way. They were too cool, and yet, by
the year 2009, their presence would be evidenced by the general and mass
decline of Western civilization. Originally 78 million-strong, every
day, they're dropping like flies now, finally. It's actually quite
fascinating to witness, because I think this group truly thought they
would live forever.
Where the WWII generation fought and died for their country, the Boomers would betray their country and be proud of that. How did the Boomers eventually screw later generations and their own country? Here are the six main areas that my exhaustive research has borne out:
As of 2014:
*1) Voted for Spending with Almost no Fundamental Return on Investment, like wars, and instead of paying for it added it to the national debt. Now we have huge debt payments due to their recklessness.
2) To support their lifestyle they voted for tax cuts, allowed funding for colleges to be cut as well as poorly negotiated trade agreements that made short term financial sense but undermined many industries that supported the economy. This fueled the growth of China and India, two countries that now consume the resources we used to have a near monopoly on.
3) They rode the real estate bubble hard. They turned their backs on the corruption of the lending industry because property values were doubling every 5-10 years. They saw their $30,000 starter home go up to $250,000 and thought "free money", not realizing it also meant their kids were all paying for those "tax free gains".
4) They voted massive benefits for themselves with no thought on how to pay for it. Like allowing the social security age to stay at 65 without raising their taxes until much later. Most were contributing at half the rate their kids have to contribute. Over 50% of our health care expenses go for the last parts of a persons life, meanwhile a young person who has an injury can be financially ruined.
5) Valued social issues over long term economic growth. They fought "culture wars" instead of investing for the future.
6) They didn't guard the country for the next generation. They allowed the institutions that supported the young people, like college loans and health care, to run rampant over a bunch of 18 year olds.
Really this is just a starting point and not an inclusive list. I will keep adding to it as long as I am able.
*Source: Reddit.com, MLBAccount 2014
Back to my experience: Starting around 2003 or so, the gray-hairs
started to get meaner and meaner, not all of them of course, but a whole
lot more than when I was a kid through the teen-age years-the sixties
and seventies. I never saw geezers flip the bird when I was younger,
that's for sure. Luckily they abused their bodies so badly from drugs
and partying, they're not living that long, so we're getting rid of them
pretty rapidly, at an increasing rate every day.
This
generation always seemed intent on giving the country away to outsiders
under the guise of affirmative action, wide open borders, and the
liberal agenda. Later on, when they finally realized what they had done,
and the country really did start to slip away, they tried to take it
back through the Tea Party movement, but it was too little, too late.
The damage had been done.
I see that currently, economically, the Baby Boomers are finally getting their due. Maybe there will be justice after all: Tom Brokaw reported in 2009: "(They
became) the richest and the greatest consumers, for good, bad or
indifferent," Brokaw reported from Vancouver. "And now they're in a
stage in their lives — coming into their late 50s and early 60s —
during this economic downturn, when a lot of the assumptions that they
grew up with, that they assumed would be there forever, have not just
been challenged, but have been turned on their head. It's
forcing Boomers to re-evaluate their lives and their expectations",
Brokaw said. "Boomers thought they'd continue working if they wanted to,
but they can't because many are being pushed out. On the
opposite side", Brokaw said. "A lot of Boomers who had hoped to be able
to cut back on working can't afford to. The economy worked for them, and now it's turning against them".
Our generation's appearance on the other hand, Generation X, seemed to be hardly noticed. We just kind of quietly showed up.
There would be nothing to mark our generation, no age of prosperity, like the early baby boomers, no great war,
like our grandparents. We wouldn't get the chance to be heroes, to walk
around with our chest sticking out after saving humanity from some evil empire.
There would be no Vietnam or Woodstock, Charlie Manson, or campus protest for us. We were the wide-eyed innocent children of the sixties.....hypnotized by idealistic TV shows like Gilligan's Island, Bewitched, and I Dream of Genie, too young to comprehend the rebellion all around us. Some people refer to our time as that of Generation X. Actually, we arrived just after the Baby Boomers
and before Generation X. We never had a name. We can best be described
as members of a forgotten generation. We got to college too early to
benefit from computers and the internet, and too late to enjoy the
massive generational party that was the Baby Boomer Generation.
God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves
with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working
jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle
children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No
Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war…our Great Depression
is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one
day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we
won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed
off. -Fight Club
As
far as wars go, we were involved in a more subtle kind of war, one with
no body bags. The corporate culture was being born, especially that of
the "pharmaceutical drug cartel". All in the name of profits, this one dimensional marketing machine would end up dwarfing the sins of the Nazis in regards to the body-count resulting from pushing prescription drugs in the name of health.
For example, take the huge marketing campaign push of the original birth control pill. Corporate had finally perfected "the pill", building on the unfortunate Thalidomide morning-sickness pill disaster of 1958 to 1961 (updated article, 2010).
Their mantra was that the "World is over-populated. Save the world,
blah, blah, blah.....", and we fell for it. The Woodstock generation
screwed like rabbits, with no apparent consequences. If you're white and you were born in the 60's, consider yourself lucky to even be here.
The 40
million-person vacancy left in the U.S. population by the Pill's
popularity would open the door eventually, years later, to a massive
influx of illegal immigrants to take their place. Every effect has a
cause. This one thing would drastically change the face of America
forever, and set the precedent for the huge profits of the drug industry
for the foreseeable future. The emphasis went from health care to
health care profits.
The world was empty then, compared
to now. If we wouldn't reproduce, the Third World certainly made
up for it in later years.
Life's Goals:
In my 30's-to start a successful business and buy a house
In my 40's-to do something right.......
I accomplished none of these goals. In fact, the harder I tried, the further away it seems, I got from achieving even a semblance of any of these basic goals in life. The reasons for this were mostly my fault, mainly due to poor decisions, bad advice, sabotage, the era, and just plain bad luck.
"I've dated guys with a little bad luck, but I've never met anyone with bad luck like you have it."
Ex-girlfriend number 3
I suppose I will die an unsung man, but it won't be for lack of effort.
Now that I'm older, here is what my goals should have been:
In my teens-find a competent career counselor, plan my career path, date a lot of girls...
In my twenties-establish my career and reputation, marry my girl, buy a house...
In my thirties-bank the cash, raise the kiddies....
In my forties-enjoy the fruits of good planning....
Well, this is how our parents did it anyway. It seemed the country was changing, unfortunately for me and my aspirations to accomplish anything meaningful....
Unfortunately, I was raised to be super-fair and honest, which is no way to get ahead in the world as it is, but my mother was very naive in her teachings, and my stepfather was non-existent as a mentor, as he was always away chasing the dollar, except for Friday nights, when he would come home in a rage over his work-week, and I would go hide under the bed. Selling insurance must suck as a job, because he was always pissed off. (1966-70, King of Prussia).
As far as planning, there really was no plan, except to survive college, which I was ill-suited for, except for the wrestling thing. I think, specifically, to begin with, I really regret even going off to college. It's not like I was some academic prodigy, in which case I could understand the push to go to college. My going to college was akin to sending Stephen Hawking to wrestling camp.
When I left for college my parents just got wealthier and devoted all their energies to helping my much younger adopted brother achieve his dreams. He also got a lot of slack because he had been diagnosed with dyslexia. I guess that severe color-blindness condition that I was born with didn't count for much....
So while I was away at college learning drinking 101 and wrestling 102, it gave my brother a chance to look like a hero by helping out on the new 40 acre farm, which soon became an 80 acre farm. He subsequently got a job just working on the farm doing the same thing I was doing before I got sent off to college, except he got to just keep doing it the rest of his life, while I was chasing around the country after graduation paying overpriced rent and expenses and working jobs that I usually hated and that didn't pay much above survival wages.
I would have gotten much further merely by staying in my parent's basement and continuing my lawn business, and keeping my moped and bike rental business at the beach, instead of going off to some far-away college and pissing away the next five years, with nothing to show for it at the conclusion. More importantly, I lost the connections I had nurtured during my 8 years living in a fairly wealthy area, because, as I know now, connections are everything. In fact, I never did recover from college, never bought a home, got married, or sampled anything else meaningful that life has to offer.
Even if I had stayed in that basement, I don't think my Dad would have let me be successful anyway. In fact he spent a fair amount of his energies ensuring I would not be successful, at anything I got involved in. Unfortunately I did not realize this until too late.
Better yet, I should have attended a trade school, plumbing, or carpentry, along with sticking with my two businesses and moved to a tiny house to start, in a decent area. I know a cabinet-maker who lived like a king, up until the latest economic meltdown of 2008 or so. The trades really have been gold through the 80's and 90's, and well into the 21st century. Things have only recently slowed down for the skilled trades people (2009), relatively speaking. I lost count of how many times I was jobless and broke, for months on end, while my plumber or construction buddies had all the work they could handle.
Plus, there's the fortune in living expenses you blow while attending college. I see now why the community colleges are packed. At the very least, you should attempt to buy a house in the town where you attend college, rent some rooms to other students to pay the mortgage, then sell when you graduate. Ah, but experience is something you get.........just after you need it.
That would have been a better plan, but they say we have no real control. Destiny is destiny.
As far as women were concerned, I was always pretty lucky, or unlucky, depending on how you look at it. Since about age 17, I never lacked a girlfriend for long, even through to the current day. I don't know if this will ever change. Put me in any town in America, or even overseas for that matter, and I will acquire a not-bad looking girlfriend in under two weeks. It's not due to low standards either. I've tested this out, numerous times, because I've lived almost everywhere in my quest for constant employment. Sometimes there is just no work where you are, so you gotta' move. I'm sure if I had landed a decent career after college and stayed in one spot and built a business, I would have had 10 children, easily.
Some of my past girlfriends stuck around for so long,waiting for me to marry them, that unfortunately, we both ended up wasting huge chunks of time, waiting for the right time for me to make that magical marriage proposal, when we both could have been dating more successful people. Unfortunately, I was so ill-prepared to earn a living after college graduation, that I never could quite feel right about taking the plunge, as I was perennially poor as a church-mouse. Whenever I did happen upon a good business idea, my parents were sure to sabotage the whole thing, although I did not realize this was going on at the time. That's why it was so frustrating.
Whenever I would bring a decent girl home to meet the parents, my father would make it a point to somehow humiliate me in front of her eventually. The more gorgeous the girl, the worse it would be. I don't know if he was secretly gay, or what, the way he acted.
This went for my mother too, although she wasn't the control freak my dad was. She would just be rude and mean to the girl, not immediately, but would do it in a subtle way, especially if I made the mistake of leaving the poor girl alone with my mother.
I remember I brought this lovely blonde home that I had dated at college before I graduated and my Dad suddenly got the urge to assign me loads of yard work the entire weekend we were there. So, instead of a fun time hanging with the parents and watching football on a chilly Fall weekend, my girlfriend got to sit in a pickup truck and listen to the radio, while I spread mulch all weekend. I didn't bring her around much after that and we eventually broke up anyway, thanks to my crazy parents.
I think what made it worse was that by having such a wealthy father, most of these girls probably assumed he would help me along eventually, but that help never materialized. He usually gave me just enough rope to hang myself and he was usually the one that yanked away the stool, figuratively speaking. Then he would run and tell everyone what a loser I was. But let my adopted brother screw anything up and my "dad" would fall all over himself making one excuse after another for this little prick. Bro would always get a free pass.
My father was truly a step-dad, in that his stuff was his, and he wasn't about to hand anything over to some little bastard kid he happened to hijack to give the appearance of a normal family, just so he could build his insurance empire. This was untrue of course, for the newer adopted child.
Best girlfriend: Las Vegas, 1998-the Older Woman
Worst Girlfriend: West Virginia University, Gorgeous and young but too career oriented, but this was college, so my fault. I made the mistake of assuming that the women were there to find a husband. Some were, but most were not, at least the ones I pursued. If you're looking for a wife, college is about the worst place to look, in my experience.
My advice now: Use college to work on your career. When you're ready to find a wife, the best prospects will be found in a third world country, or temporarily join a religious sect, such as the Mormons, or the Amish, and date as young as legally possible. You want to find the smartest, least-educated woman you can find, who has healthy parents, both physically and mentally. Take a good look at her mother. That's her in 20-30 years. Best strategy: Date and have fun 'till you're about 29 or 30, then go third world. Hopefully you have saved a little money by then, and can travel.
On the other hand, if you want a life of agony, marry a career woman, with lots of education. You will be so screwed! Trust me.
Surprisingly, it really seemed to piss-off my parents when I brought women home to meet them, back in my younger days, when all the women were of prime baby-making age. In fact, looking back on it, the unlucky women I managed to bring home to meet the parents, both in high school and later on through early adulthood in the eighties, were usually looked upon with resentment, but not in an obvious way. I remember getting a feeling about it at the time. The thing was, the better looking the girl was, it seemed the madder my parents got. I am still unsure as to why this was happening. It will always be a mystery to me. I guess it has something to do with the stepfather thing.......I don't know.
I remember, the last really great girl I brought home to meet the parents, it was 1999. By now, at age 39, I had finally figured this thing out-what they were doing. This girl was 30 with a kid- all the good ones are knocked up by then-at least once, right? I had a brief history with this girl, from years before, when we were kids. She was now a statuesque brunette, slightly taller than I, not a rare thing as I was a short man. She was just a real knockout, and personality plus, from Chicago. I was pretty thrilled.
She was very cool, so I asked her, as a favor, to do a test for me, because I suspected that my parents had been sabotaging me with all these girls through the years. She said "okay", so I introduced her to my mother, who was very cordial and polite, "pleased to see you again after so long", etc. So I left them together in the kitchen there, for an hour. I said I had to go to the store or something like that. Sure enough, when I checked back in later, my little girlfriend sat there in the kitchen with the strangest look on her face.
"Well, what happened?", I asked. "Your Mom, she really doesn't want you to have a girlfriend." "What do you mean?", I said. Turns out, Mom had told her all kinds of stories designed to basically get rid of her. This girl was like, "Let's get out of here, and don't ever leave me alone with your mother again, please!"
Years later, after Mom passed away unexpectedly in 2011, I was going through her old photo albums and I found this picture of my-then fiancee' and I from some time in the '80's, except that someone had scratched my face out of the picture, probably my Mother's doing, since she was in charge of the photo albums. So my gut feeling had been right all along. Mom had some deep-seated psychological problems.
Kurt and Y, 1985
So it was true, my mother had been sabotaging my relationships, probably for years. No wonder everything had gone great until they met my parents. If I had paid attention to my intuition on this, I probably would have done things differently. Most parents want their sons to have girlfriends, who eventually turn into wives, so it still took me by surprise. I guess the sons pay for the sins of the father, being that I was the product of a former marriage. That could be it. I really don't know. It could be any stupid reason. Unfortunately, the damage had been done, as I was near 40 years old by the time I figured this out, with really no time left to start again.
My little bio on a class-reunion site from 1999 got so many hits, I thought it might be a good idea to dabble with an uncensored version. Welcome former classmates!
(A Constant Work in Progress-started-1999)
This bit seems to be getting more readable, although it is still all over the place. I am working on making it more compact:
Here it is....................................
Welcome to my live obituary page!
LONG VERSION
This is going to be a great novel.......if any of the characters ever manages to die off before myself so I can publish it without bringing the wrath of half the country of Sweden upon me............
Since this was originally a recounting of life's events for a class reunion website, the bio starts around the high school years-the late 70's, but other events are thrown in later. Events are not exactly in chronological order, but I think it makes for more interesting reading. I don't get any money for this, but I fancy myself a writer and enjoy writing about my seemingly stranger-than-normal life experiences.
Foreword:
"Youth is wasted on the young".... so true, although some of my friends seemed to make the most of it, I certainly did not. I think it was a combination of being afraid of my Dad and over-protected by my classic Italian Mother, being her only child until they adopted another kid five years before I was out of the house. After that, they always said I was not an only child, but that's not the way I saw it. I was an only child. Just because they imposed some stranger's illegitimate kid on me five years before I was out of the house doesn't change that one bit.
"But why so selfish?", you may ask. Well, the kid turned out to be such an asshole that I can't believe that my luck was so bad, in getting this guy, instead of a younger brother I could be buddies with. This new kid hated me from the start. That's why so selfish. Okay. Enough about the brat.
Back to my little life story. Despite the hostility at home, which was really very subtle in my early years, where I didn't even realize it was going on, I was so clueless. Despite this weird dysfunctional family I was stuck with, I still managed to scare up some amazing opportunities before the age of 27 or so, whereupon they promptly dried up. I mean, they just stopped dead. Maybe it was because we, as a generation, had been unknowingly caught in the tail-wind of a long running economic boom in America, or it was just part of being young, but I remember several once-in a lifetime chances that I let slip through my fingers, things that I never hear of happening these days to young people, let alone anybody else. I let them pass like a warm summer breeze, without a second thought. Problem was, I think we all thought these early opportunities would just keep coming, like we were standing at an eternal bus stop, waiting for the next ride to arrive.
The thing was, the optimism in the air was so huge. Everyone seemed to have great expectations for the future. "Just go to college", they said. 'You want to make good money some day, don't you?" There really was not much emphasis on the what; what to major in, what career to pursue, although my mother did push the veterinary profession on me, a lot. I just assumed that I would eventually become a millionaire, at the very least. It wasn't just my delusional thinking. I remember the general attitude was that we would all prosper if we just got educated and worked hard and kept at it. That's what used to work, anyway.
Years later I read a book which cleared up a lot of questions about what had begun to happen upon our graduation from high school back in 1978. The prosperity of the American masses was about to be put through some big changes. Here's a link to that book:Who Stole the American Dream?. Here's a link to another article which explains why the year 1978 was the best year in history for wealth equality: 1978. So, this is why I am haunted by my youth and what-could-have-beens. It just hasn't got any better than that era in America, maybe the world.
I was ruined by the quality of women I was able to date routinely in my teens and twenties, for sure. Why I didn't pick a wife at this time eludes me. I must have suffered from brain fog. Well, that and my lack of finances. I was in the unfortunate position of being a poor kid in a rich neighborhood. My Dad did well in the insurance business, but he had no interest in my being even remotely successful. When it seemed like I was actually pointed in the right direction, like when I started a rental business that quickly became quite profitable at my tender age of twenty, he seemed to go out of his way to sabotage me, for whatever reason. Stepfathers. What the hell is wrong with them? Psychos.
The time to find a wife was definitely in my teens, because I sure had a lot of chances with some spectacular young women, although I was a dud with the women in my high school, for some reason. I seemed to do much better in the summer and with girls from other school districts. I think my high school town was a very tightly-knit community, looking back on it. I also was losing weight and concentrating on sports (wrestling) during the school year, so I probably was simply too damned tired to hook up!
I now greatly regret my excellent safe sex practices in my youth, because this is absolutely the best time to "knock up your girlfriend", get her pregnant, because all the young idiots that got their girlfriends pregnant in high school are proud grandfathers now, bragging on Facebook with their kid's prom pictures, while I cruise around in the twilight years, childless and too ashamed to even show up at the class reunion and my mother went to her grave with no blood grand-kids. The initial so-called "shame" of unwed pregnancy is long forgotten. In fact, I'm sure that their parents were secretly thrilled. Something I see so clearly now, but wasn't apparent back then, unfortunately.
Regardless, I don't know what I was thinking at the time, maybe some version of waiting until later, but you can definitely wait too long. It didn't help that my parents moved a lot. I think I must have lived in about 5 different neighborhoods before I was 18. Shoot, they even moved while I was away at college. (I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye to my old room.) If we could have just stuck in one spot, I'm sure I would have established some lasting relationship with a girl somewhere along the way. As it was, I would fall in love and then we'd move. Fucking weirdo parents of mine.
My fruitless attempts at starting a family actually continued somewhat into my twenties. I experienced a virtual smorgasbord of beautiful women at weddings, at the beach, in clubs at the beach, at college parties, at triathlons in different cities, everywhere it seems. I had the Midas touch for beautiful women, for at least a solid ten year period. Problem was, I was always on the road somewhere, so I could never follow it up effectively. I don't think I was necessarily that good at it-it was just a very good era to be single in America. Keeping that in mind, it was pretty amazing how good I was at it. It ruined me for later in life. For a guy who was mostly broke all the time during and well after college, I was a sure thing with the ladies, through about my late twenties.....
CHECK THIS OUT!
I remember I attended a wedding and reception in Maine, in Bailey Island, in the summer of '86 at age 26. So I was basically at the tail end of my magic years. My college buddy was getting married, a wild man who I never dreamed I'd see walking down the aisle, but there he was... It was an idyllic summer resort-place that the well-moneyed bride's parents had rented for a day or two for the post-wedding celebration. The first night we ran out of food about halfway through the party.
The group had asked me to run to the local Acme back in town and get more lobster. I was like, fine, no problem. So I'm walking around the Acme parking lot in this little town-I believe it was Brunswick, Maine, where I didn't know a soul, and these two high school girls pulled up in a Trans Am. Remember, I was 26 years old by then, so high school girls were off limits to most men my age, but I was relatively short and in very good shape, so I looked much younger. These beauties were looking at me, driving slow, so I waved them over.
One thing led to another and I ended up, first on the couch at the reception, making out with both of them, one on each side of me. I think the groom was more envious of my situation than in his new bride, from the look on his face. So I'm making out with these two high school girls on the couch and the other women are getting pissed, I can tell (such a genius!). So I lead them both outside to a rocky beach not too far from the party somewhere on this Bailey Island place. I distinctly remember it was stormy, and when the lightning flashed I would get a brief look at these girls laying there naked, like a flash bulb going off and....well, never mind. It's probably illegal anyway. Regardless, if I have a grown child anywhere, it's from this event. In my fantasy mind I have this kid somewhere and they probably grew up in this idyllic little town in Maine.....I finally got back to the party, like 12 midnight, and the guests were a bit dumbfounded. It's no wonder I'm ruined for life ever since the eighties ended.
Lesson #1: If you can hook up this easy, enjoy it while it lasts, and try to land a wife before your youth is gone, because it's fairly slim pickings after that time, unless you become wealthy. Regardless, it's still never quite the same, not as genuine as this.
Unfortunately, I could not follow up with my two new girlfriends, because it was before the age of the internet and they were 9 hours away from my then current place of residence. Besides, I figured it was a normal weekend for me.
I couldn't bring girls home at that time anyways, because my Mother was usually so mean to them, that she would end up driving them away. This had been going on for years-since I was about 12 and since I couldn't seem to get into a decent line of work that paid anything in my early adulthood, I couldn't afford my own place and couldn't escape the whole brutal ritual.
The reasons for this escaped me. I always theorized that my slightly delusional mother had transferred her ex-husband onto me; I was him, so to speak, and she was jealous of every girl I brought home. The more attractive she was, the worse my Mom acted toward that girl. "Do you think you're going to marry a nice girl and settle down, after our divorce? Not as long as I'm alive you're not!" I couldn't really analyze and realize this until I was older-and it was too late. I thought it was just me. Regardless, there would never be any "walk down the aisles, no wedding day smiles"......., not as long as I was broke and stuck in the boonies anyway.
I think the problem was I looked just like my original Dad; here's a picture of my parents during happier times before my existence, at the Chicago Airport in the late 1950's:
Is that me? No it's my Dad from Chicago, that prick!
Of course, I was consciously unaware of this at the time. I may have gotten a feeling about it, but I was in denial. Why would my parents be sabotaging my relationships with women? All I knew was that all my relationships would fall apart as soon as my parents got involved. In later days I made sure to keep the few girlfriends I did have in my old age away from my parents, that's for damned sure, but it was too little, too late.
Still, some of the fine women I let go of still haunt me to this day, and always will, I suppose. It's the curse of life. There are no second chances...no rewind and "let's try that again." There was this one girl I met in Wildwood, NJ that is my biggest regret....Actually God, or the powers that be dropped no less than three beautiful virgins into my lap, and I really blew it. There were more than three of course, but these three really drive me crazy, because they were around prime marrying age. You start too early and they're too young. You wait too long and there's a line in front of you. That's how it is. Good fortune in life is mostly about timing.
There was Beth, from Virginia....a virgin from Virginia, all of 16 years old. I know she was a virgin when we went out, because years later she got divorced and ended up on my doorstep in Washington, D.C. for a weekend. She said, "Kurt, I would gladly have given up my virginity to you. You just didn't take it." That just kills me. God must've been up there saying, "Dude! What is wrong with you? I gave you a gift, and you blew it." My chances of ever producing a kid were fading quickly............
Then there was the girl who invited me to escort her in the Homecoming Court in high school, when I was 16 and she was 15. This was truly an honor. I didn't even get her phone number and she moved shortly after that, never to be heard from again. This seemed to be the story of my life, close but not quite. Then there was the girl in Wildwood when I was a 23 year-old lifeguard-a few years older than she was. A real beauty queen. I actually took her virginity, in the back seat of a '78 Chevy Blazer, and whoops, I forgot to get the phone number..........In the days before the internet, the phone number was the one chance you had for follow-up. No phone number and you couldn't find her again, no way. She was lost forever.
Still, it was a great era. I think we, as men, had a favorable sex ratio. There seemed to be two women for every man and I'm talking about attractive single women. I remember, the majority of teenage girls and women in the 1970's were just gorgeous. Natural beauty, thin and healthy, and very clean. Best of all, there were a lot of them, it seems. This changed after the mid-90's or so. I'm not sure what happened to the country, to the world.
U.S. Sex Ratio through the last few decades....
I do remember the animal attraction was such, that in dating young women during my late teens, often on first dates, we would not even manage to get out the door and would end up having sex within 5 minutes after meeting! "Hello, pleased to meet you." Next thing you know, we'd be on the floor.......this is the truth.
One time my neighbor friend fixed me up on a blind date with a girl he knew, whom I arranged to meet at his (parent's) house. I met her in his basement, and we sat on the couch. After the introduction and the usual niceties, my friend left for a few minutes to get something upstairs. When he came back I had this girl on the carpet under a blanket and he was like, "excuse me...." "Oh, sorry about that Eric." She got a terrible carpet burn on her back, which I'm sure she carries to this very day. It was an outrageously great time to be a single guy in America.
Little did I know that I should have grabbed my best pick for a wife right then and had at least one kid, because by the time college got through with me, and then I just about starved my way through the entire decade of the coming 80's, things would never be as good again (for me) as they were at that stretch of time.
I believe there was a war on the white man or something. I couldn't get a decent job in the eighties-even with a college degree-to save my life. They wanted women. They wanted minorities. They wanted handicapped female minorities. That was the big three that would get you a job in about 2 seconds. This came from government imposed regulations. Eventually the corporations grew tired of all the regulations and taxes and moved a lot of the good jobs overseas, but the effects of this would not be felt until after the year 2000.
Anyways, I believe I really would have been better off going to horse-something school instead of college, because my Dad started a thoroughbred horse-breeding operation on 40 acres in Lancaster County, PA while I was in college and he had a need for qualified horse people. My education was of no use in that situation.
Horse-shoeing (farrier) school was like a 6 month course somewhere out in Colorado. Horse training was more involved-more like 5 years+ of on the job training, but it would have beat the shit out of college because college turned out to be four wasted years anyway. So instead of getting out of college and buying my dream house out in the country and working with race horses on Daddy's farm, I ended up working for peanuts shuffling papers in my suit and tie out of his insurance office, for 7 lean years until I quit in disgust with nothing to show for the whole effort but a sore ass from sitting all day.
Regarding my dating powers in the eighties, I just thought it would always be like that, forever young, but that's not the way it is of course. My girl-magnet powers faded. The magic stopped. For short men, there's also a smaller window of opportunity, because you're already at a huge disadvantage in the women department merely by being below average in height.
By the time I was 30, I couldn't catch a cold. I think the problem was more economics than physicalities. Plus I believe my limits were self-imposed. I had always had the confidence to approach beautiful women. Before age 30, it's cute to be living in squalor. Don't worry, soon you'll be making money. I mean, you graduated from college, right? Suddenly, I'm 31 and I'm still working for the Beach Patrol, or unemployed. I must not be all that. There went my confidence right out the window.Suddenly, the magic was about as gone as gone gets. Hopefully there's a do-over somewhere along the way. Problem is, sure, I could do it over, but I still wouldn't know what I know now. That's why I'd like to dedicate this to the youth of America. Learn from my mistakes, and benefit............
Past Life Goals:
In my teens; to be rich some day, or at least comfortable......it never dawned on me that I would be less than wealthy by the age of 40. A lot of us (Late Boomers as they called us) just assumed that we would enjoy the same economic opportunities as our parents and grandparents. Our grandparents enjoyed the opportunities of returning from World War II as heroes to a booming economy, and our parents enjoyed the privilege of being born to this group, at the same time avoiding any major wars themselves, due to their own incredible timing (depression-era children).
But then again, it was a much different time in America, the 1960's and early to mid 1970's. I think our optimism then was pretty huge, compared to the economic doldrums of the decades that followed, when a socialist economic philosophy became more dominant.
I had watched my parents-my Dad, and many of my parents friends, build business empires in a relatively short span of time. It wasn't unusual for many of these depression era children to eventually acquire huge homes in upscale suburbs and finish raising 3 or 4 kids by the time they were in their early 40's. Looking back, it was a pretty amazing era, compared to the relatively lukewarm economic climate that followed in the 80's, 90's, and beyond.
I remember in 1966, we had moved from my original home town of Minneapolis to this little country place, near Lancaster, PA. My Dad was in the insurance business. We lived down a dead-end street next to woods and cornfields. I could have lived there forever, I liked it so much. Our neighbor was an ex-Amish man with an eighth grade education. That's about it for the Amish school system. By the late 1980's, he was getting offers from the larger steel companies of 12 to 15 million dollars to sell the business. He went from a garage business to 15 million dollars in a little over 20 years. It was an unbelievable time to own a business in America, so yes, my expectations were high also.
My Dad was no slouch either in business. By the time he was 30 he had moved us out of that working-class shite-hole of a neighborhood we were living at in King of Prussia to a contemporary style A-frame home on Valley Forge Mountain-otherwise known as Mt. Misery, a very nice area at the time, and still is to this day. It was unreal, the opportunities for someone who wasn't afraid to work a little. If you wanted something, you could just get out there and work for it! There was little to stop you.
My Dad was very driven though, to put it mildly. The four year period from the time he showed up as my Stepfather, 1966, until the time we moved to Valley Forge Mountain, 1970, was hell. Sure it was still hell until I left at 18, but hell looks a lot better from upper-Valley Forge Mountain, let me tell you....
Since my age conveniently goes with the year, it's easy to remember how old I was during different periods in my life. Ages 0 to 10-the 1960's, we were broke as a joke. 1966 to 1970 was the worst part, because that's when my Stepfather showed up-he would beat my ass at the drop of a hat, and he was young and strong as hell, from growing up on a farm in Northern Minnesota, out in the boonies, and quick-tempered as a bobcat.
It sucks being poor. How poor were we? I remember getting slapped for ordering clams at Howard Johnson's restaurant in King of Prussia-a real dive. These weren't slaps like you'd see on a television soap opera. These slaps would just about knock me out, and left me with my ears ringing for hours. I remember getting my ass whipped for buying a Hot Wheels car. My Dad came into my room while I was sleeping, saw the toy in my shelf, woke me up, and proceeded to beat the shit out of me, and then threw the car on the floor, and stepped on it. He was absolutely fucking nuts!
The decade of the 70's was better. In mid-1970 Dad moved us out of that early tract neighborhood in the 'burbs to a custom A-frame house-built from scratch-on two acres in the woods, in a much better neighborhood-meaning "rich". How long did that take? Maybe four years of hard work and struggle? I think Dad had worked for five years before he married my starving Mom's ass in Minnesota, so it was 5+4=9 years of selling insurance door to door before we were living up on Valley Forge Mountain. Nine (9) years to climb out of the gutter-that's not bad. How many 30 year-olds do you know these days who went from zero to a huge new house in 9 years (college or no college)?
Oakwood Lane, Valley Forge Mountain 1971
The problem with growing up in a nice neighborhood like this is, if you are not wildly successful like your parents later in life, you are never happy with wherever you end up living and you end up moving all the time, trying to equal that early luxury. Problem is, the country just went downhill economically and otherwise, after the 1970's.
I got to live here until 1978, when I graduated from high school. Then it was off to college, I guess because I was such an academic genius, right? (Not!) While I was away they bought a place with 20 times the property, 80+ acres of prime Pennsylvania Dutch Country, and moved again, back to our old neighborhood, to an even larger house - about 5,000 square feet, plus two barns and a guest house. Yes, my expectations were high after college, but I had another thing coming.
One small corner of the Anderson Estate - 1983 and later
Of course, I had nowhere near the success of my father, despite all that college, which only seemed to hinder me. Ironically, if I had just stuck with wrestling, I am sure I would have at least equaled my father's financial success, but probably not as quickly. The combat sports really became popular in my early to mid-forties, with the advent of mixed martial arts competition. By that time it was too late-I had been out of wrestling for two decades.
I don't know how many times I would be driving around while out of work, especially after George Bush and Barack Obama became president, and I would pass by some martial arts school where the parking lot would be packed. Hadn't I already been doing this shit back when I was 18, before I left for college? Let me see...."Mixed Martial Arts". Isn't that karate combined with wrestling? Exactly. What was I doing in high school? Karate and wrestling. College is such bullshit. What a grand scam on the American public.
Also, unfortunately, looking back, I think my (Step) Father was sabotaging me, or at least indifferent, strange as that may sound. I am convinced of it. He really seemed to enjoy it when things didn't go well for me.
He did do a good thing though, perhaps unintentionally, by making me stick with wrestling in the beginning. Practice was an hour and a half after school every day, and I hated school to begin with. I made the mistake of letting my Dad hear how unhappy I was with it, and he made me stick with it.
Dad liked to see me suffer and be miserable, but I think he never dreamed that I would actually be good at it. I think he was surprised when I made the varsity team that first year, and went on to eventually receive a few scholarship offers by the time I graduated high school. When I stupidly passed up the scholarships, including a full scholarship offer from Drexel University, he didn't say anything. He probably breathed a sigh of relief. It's funny how clear things are, when you're older and looking back on it. I don't know if it was truly sabotage or just indifference.
I turned down a wrestling scholarship to Drexel U., #8 above...
I had a lot of interests, but no one thing ever stood out as my calling, my talent. I was very intuitive about people, but I did not recognize that as a gift at that time. I enjoyed writing. I also had an eye for beauty and art, being able to pick out beauty pageant winners at the start of the show, or the most expensive knife in the case at the sporting goods store, or rock bands that were going to make it big. I always had a camera, taking artsy pictures of everyday objects, or landscape shots.
I also remember having a pretty good record in backyard wrestling matches in my King of Prussia neighborhood with the other kids between the ages of 6-10. In fact, I only lost once in that four year period, to a much larger boy. Again, these were never recognized as talents, never developed, except for wrestling, and that never paid anything, no cash money.
I remember my three main hobbies by the age of twelve in 1972 were magic, wrestling, and karate-Tae Kwon Do to be exact. My parents never encouraged any further interest in any of these endeavors. If it didn't involve college, they just didn't want to hear about it. I also had the good fortune to be surrounded by some great talent; Steve McGovern, who placed 2nd in the state tournament eventually and held a record for dual meet wins, probably to this day, and Mark Cagle, who eventually became an All American at WVU, to name a few notables.
Scholastic wrestling was really wrestling-lite, compared to the real wrestling, where the stuff was actually very dangerous, such as in the early days of pro wrestlers like Billy Robinson and such. Our wrestling was watered down in comparison. Years later the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Mixed Martial Arts would greatly eclipse scholastic wrestling in popularity and financial potential. Of course, we could not predict such trends and take advantage of them at that time.
My parents were surprisingly dedicated wrestling fans in high school, for a while, but they quickly lost interest after my short high school career-probably because my father was so good at earning a living, that everything else seemed irrelevant to them. Plus they had their new adopted kid to keep them busy also, the curse of my existence.......
I think my Dad was, paradoxically, jealous of the attention I was getting in my wrestling exploits, even though he attended the matches. One night after a big match, the car got stuck in the snow going up the driveway. My Dad had me get behind the massive Oldsmobile and push while he gunned the engine. The tires just spun on the icy surface, but the car didn't budge. He gets out and says, "You go out there and you flex your muscles for everybody, and you can't even move the f--ing car out of the snow."(!) Say what? I just stood there in shock.
This would be the case generally, throughout the rest of my experience with my parents. It really is bizarre, looking back on it, how nasty they grew towards me when I tried to become an adult. It's like it was okay when I was a nothing-kid. In fact, they did not even attend my college graduation ceremony, or my graduation some 15 years later from chiropractic school. It really meant nothing to them, these accomplishments of mine. "Yeah Kurt, that's nice, but show me the money." That was their attitude, and they never did change, not one iota.
Anyways, at the age of 18, I was off to college, which was like the Holy Grail in those days. I didn't even have a major, or a plan, nothing. Wrestling remained in the picture, but I only managed a one year scholarship, at WVU for a season, after pissing away most of my eligibility at a smaller, non-scholarship college. Upon graduation, wrestling was abruptly dropped also, due to lack of career options. One of my enterprising teammates opened a "school of wrestling" after graduation, out near Pittsburgh, and he's still running it to this day, as far as I know, so he did a good thing.
These days, there's always ultimate fighting, but the career is short, and hazardous. I think I would have liked to teach it, you know, have my own little school, but it came along a bit too late for me to gain any of the necessary credentials. I am convinced that if they had it back in the day, I would have had a chance to continue my wrestling career in a prosperous manner in my post-graduate years, which would have been a novel experience, as I had never made a dime from the wrestling. As it were, it apparently was all for nothing, the sacrifice and hard work in college and sports, with no payoff whatsoever, as far as I can tell.
College was considered the answer to lasting career prosperity through the 60's and 70's, although it changed to a much less reliable career path since about the early 80's, when affirmative action and the "war on the white male" really began to take hold, and race and gender preferences took precedence over academic accomplishments and other formerly desirable attributes in the hiring process. In fact, the whole country just got really sloppy and lazy, from the mid-1990's onwards, compared to when I was a kid.
My parents career advice went something like this; Go to college, get good grades, graduate, get a good job, invest in the stock market, max-out your 401(k), cut up your credit cards, and clip coupons . . . then someday, when you are, oh, 65 years old, you will be rich.That was the attitude although it was nowhere near the formula my Dad had followed in his successful path to relative wealth before the age of 40. Success was okay for my Dad, but I had no business thinking I could be anything but average.
Lesson #2: Don't let other people dictate what you should do with your life. They will very often screw up your entire career with their bullshit plans that will surely send you down the wrong road to the poorhouse.
I think the real plan was never for me to be successful at all. My parents really wanted to see me crawl, for whatever reason. Whenever something bad happened to me, my Dad always said, "let that be a lesson to you", or "there's a lesson to be learned from all this." This continued into my 30's and even my 40's! They seemed to be insulted that I ever wanted to be anything more than a "yardboy".
Is there anything worse than coming home from college, to find this huge country estate and there's another guy working your old job in the yard, the one you used to do before you went unemployed for five years in college and you can't find a decent job and he's employed every day you're there? I never could understand why they pushed the college thing so much if they never wanted me to have any kind of success. Maybe they were smart enough to know that college is not the true road to success. Maybe they were truly insane.
Once in a while, when I dared, I would serve my parents up with the same bold statement regarding lessons learned, after some misfortune had befallen them.I remember they lost a bunch of money in some bad venture and I said, well, there's a lesson to be learned from all this. My Dad just looked at me with that blank stare, like when a buzzard looks at you from the dead branches of an old oak tree.
Lesson #3:College isn't for everybody. Stick with your talents and interests, and don't get railroaded into going to college just because that's somebody else's plan for you. Maybe they're just trying to send you on a wild goose chase. If college is part of the long-term plan, then go with it. Otherwise, don't force it. Stay on the path towards your own prosperity, not blindly following what everybody else is doing.
The Lords of Discipline:
Throughout grade school,there were consequences if we got caught doing something bad. They would paddle us at school, and then when we got home our parents would kick our asses again, for good measure. It certainly isn't like that anymore, that's for sure. The only advantage we had growing up, as far as getting away with stuff, was that the technology wasn't there, to keep tabs on us like they can now, with the computers and the video cameras and, worse yet, gps tracking devices. When I went on a date in the 70's, we were where I said we were.
A lot of my junior high and high school classmates smoked "weed", but I wasn't sure why. The peace signs were gone. Rampant drug use in America was one of the many echoes of our long, drawn-out war in Southeast Asia. I also knew that if I ever got caught smoking the stuff, my parents would have grounded me until I was 50.
After about 2004, not only could the parents monitor their teenagers with a variety of computer software and video camera gadgets, but they could actually stick a gps tracking device on the car, and track you live on a computer screen, so you'd better be where you said you were, poor bastards! My era of growing up was much better in that regard. I used to skip school in the Spring time and go hiking in the park, among many other secret, fairly harmless things I got away with.
My friends got away with stuff that my parents would have murdered me for. Let's try a few; how about one buddy who impregnated 6 different girlfriends over a few years, and got 6 secret abortions, or how about one who regularly hauled a bale of weed from South Florida to drop off in a large city up north for $40,000 a trip. How about the one who made bombs in his basement, just for fun?
I remember around my 18th birthday in the Spring of '78, at a friend's house, they spelled out Happy Birthday in high grade cocaine on a huge mirror, and we shared it among us four boys and girls. I had never tried it before-I thought for sure I was going to have a heart attack. For a sheltered suburban boy, this was all a big deal, but luckily one-time events. Oh yeah, try any of that stuff these days, and they'll track your ass right down.....
I had so much fun after turning 18 and between high school graduation and the first year of college, it made me sorry I had to leave town. I finally got to date a girl I had lusted after entirely through high school. I guess graduation made her ease up a little. After my first year at college, my parents moved and she was long gone. I finally had some really close, and trusted friends. It would be the last time....wherever I've lived since has always sucked. The neighbors are strangers. I have no idea who they are. There's no decent hangouts where I know anybody, or anything going on. It's just "strange faces behind every window pane". I watched the country degenerate over the next couple of decades. It seemed unstoppable......
Life After College:
Regardless, my so-called career was a big nothing after college graduation. I was about as lost as someone can get after college. I should have just moved to Australia, and started from scratch, maybe renting surf boards at the beach. I am sure it would have turned out better than the big waste of time I experienced, trying to break into the job market. What a disaster. Now, after relying on older people's bad advice (sabotage) as a youth, I have spent most of my productive years living a second-rate version of someone else' life.
My experience with older people as a youth was that most of them had wasted their lives, were very jealous of my/our youth, were basically completely miserable, and had hoped for the same fate for me/us too. Can you imagine, being jealous of some kid as a full grown adult? What a bunch of psychos! We had depended on the advice of the depression-era generation, and although some may have meant well, they really gave shitty career advice. I guess they were all stuck in the 1950's or something. They were clueless.
"Find something you like to do, and you'll never work a day in your life." - some wise person.
When you find yourself stuck in the wrong field, the best you can hope to do is become self-employed, which is easier said than done. Then you'll find that it is not doing the work that is difficult, but finding the work that becomes the challenge. When you're self-employed, the job becomes irrelevant, and the work becomes marketing your services effectively. Then, you become a marketer, which is much more exciting than some stupid old job, which usually stands for "just over broke". The exception would be sales. If you can sell, your career troubles are over. Truth be told, very few people can sell. It's a talent, like singing, or painting. It's just not as obvious at the start.
Goals-Continued:
In my twenties-to find a job and an apartment and to get laid, or at least date some available women........I can't believe the lack of job opportunities for myself and many graduates in 1983. The silence was deafening. "Hey, I just pissed away 5 years here", but no one cared. I thought college was the big answer. Where are the jobs? We were too early to have computer skills, and too late to ride the economic wave of the fifties, sixties, and post-war seventies.
It got so bad, I had to go back to work for my Dad, who was still a complete prick in business-mode, and he was always in business mode. Work for my Dad? Well shit, I could've done that without going to college. I would have been 5 years ahead already. I was actually kind of psyched to go back to South Central PA-a real garden spot with idyllic Amish Farms and countryside. But I'd been gone since 1966. Everybody was grown up now, strangers. Also keep in mind, I still had no clue how much of a complete dead-end it would to work for my Father's company. I actually believed that if I worked hard and paid my dues, it would pay off! What a bunch of crap we were fed. I was so clueless.
In regards to the "getting laid" thing, sex was actually fun in the eighties in America. It was good, clean fun. Free love was something left over from the 70's, who got it from the 60's. Casual sex was normal and widespread, so to speak, although an oversupply of this was not exactly one of my big problems. Sex didn't become dirty and risky until about the mid-1990's in America, don't ask me how it began to happen.
To make the dating world in the 80's even more ideal, there was a good balance of single men to single women, so we could take our time finding a wife candidate, unlike after the 90's or so, when everybody and their brother moved here to take part in the seemingly endless economic boom. Predictably, it led to a severe shortage of single women, a seller's market, so to speak. These days (2010) it seems that anything female with a pulse is snapped up by the time they are twelve, and people have kids really young, married or not; way different than the "good ol' days".
Fortunately or unfortunately, most of the single women at that time were looking to have a good time too, and further their careers, rather than settle down. It was all about the money. It seems like all the single women were on the pill. So we had a bunch of screwing around, with no apparent consequences. As a result, there are a huge number of single older people around, who never had kids.
Young people looked good too; the majority were in good shape (kinda' like the current state of the Brazilian beach crowd) and obesity and sloppiness wasn't nearly as widespread as it became in the late 90's and beyond in the United States. I still can't get used to the idea of a 300 lb bride, but now it's "normal". It's the physically fit people that stick out like a sore thumb. More about the wasted decade of the eighties later......
Some flashbacks to even earlier days:
Remembering.............
The 1960's:
I was the result of my mom, an airline stewardess back in the glory days of flying, starting in the mid-1950's for Pan Am out of Miami International Airport, until she got married to an airline pilot of the same outfit, in 1959, resulting in my being born way up north in Minneapolis in the year 1960.
This period was part of a general economic growth spurt in the American economy that lasted about four decades. In the 50's and 60's the white man ruled the work force, making money hand over fist, with the wives at home, barefoot and pregnant. This generation would be part of the most prosperous generation in world history, the Baby Boomers. Timing is everything.
Dad was an airline pilot, and they were treated like rock stars at that time. Here he was, great job, new wife, new baby.....
Something definitely went wrong though, because Dad disappeared somewhere between 1960 and '65. I couldn't tell you when. He must have stuck around for at least a year or two, because I have vague memories of the man. Things like watching him from inside the front window, as he walked up to our front door in his pilot's uniform, returning home after a week at work, and me getting all excited. Maybe my mother was holding me up to the window, quite possibly. The excitement must not have lasted too long though, because he apparently was a sick-fuck, according to my Mother's rendition of things. Where other babies would get spanked until they cried, he would spank me after I started crying, until I stopped crying, from lack of air from the pain. This is what my Mother told me. I don't know if it's true, but if it is, he was one sick fucker, per my usual bad luck I suppose......
Other memories have him smoking a cigarette, blowing smoke into his hand, and then pushing the smoke in rings, somehow, out the side of his hand. Another time I remember riding with him in his convertible on a warm summer day, with a brown dog named "Teddy".
The strangest memory, and still very vivid-it must have been when they were separated-Dad had stopped living at home, and he didn't come around much anymore. He picked me up at the house one night, and he had a woman in the car with him. She was a red-haired beauty. It's amazing how even then I was attracted to beautiful women, or had feelings of attraction, although I didn't understand it then, but I remember it just the same, and since then I've always had a thing for red-haired women. Well, he drove around while this girl just kissed me all over my face, and I must have been covered in lipstick, because when he dropped me off at the front door, my Mom took one look at me, and just about fell on the floor. Pretty nasty trick.
After that I did not see him anymore, even though I waited by the window, watching the street, it seemed for hours and days, but he never came home again.
My Mom began dating. I remember feeling uncomfortable about it, but I was just a little boy. I would catch a glimpse of some young man in the next room some weekend morning, and just be completely mystified, "Who is that?" Then the same one kept coming back, hanging around.
5 Years Old.......1965
I remember when my stepfather first appeared on the scene, back in '65. At first I was thrilled to have a new father around. "Isn't this great?" I was an energetic, carefree five year old boy, until my new Dad started spanking me in public whenever I showed any sign of misbehaving, whatever that meant. Then it seemed, it just became a game of humiliation.
Do you want to raise a kid and make sure his future is doomed? Just show up out of the blue one day, and start beating the snot out of him at the age of five whenever he shows any spirit, drive, or curiosity whatsoever.
I remember distinctly, the first time my new "Dad" gave me an ass-whuppin'. We were eating breakfast in Minneapolis at a place called Uncle John's Pancake House. I can't find them on Google search, so they must be long gone. I don't know what I was doing, but my new Daddy stood me up, yanked my pants and underwear down to my ankles in one motion, and proceeded to spank my bare ass right there. I can still hear the slapping sound in my ears, to this very day. The whole restaurant grew silent. You could have heard a pin drop. I think I must have turned red as a beet. Dad #2 was a no-bullshit kind of guy, but I think it was a bullshit thing to do to a kid at that age, especially since he had just shown up on the scene, for Christ's sake.
I also vaguely remember being placed into some kind of pre-school program in the Wayzata area, and I was the shortest boy in the class. Right then and there I should have known that I was going to have a rough life, because the other boys nicknamed me "The Shrimp" the first day of school. When I came home my mother asked, "how was school?" And I said something like, "they said I'm a shrimp", or something close to that. We moved to a number of different school districts for years after that, and I was always getting in fights with some little prick somewhere.
Shortly after Mom married this next guy, he moved us to Pennsylvania, for his new position as a sales manager for the same insurance company out of Minneapolis.
The first place we moved to in PA was actually pretty neat, a little town called Willow Street, in the heart of Amish country. We had an ex-Amish next door neighbor family with a boy my age, and a couple of other brothers and sisters-a very nice family, although they were somewhat spoiled. Truth is, they were the luckiest kids I had ever met, quite a contrast to my situation. Their father ran a little welding shop out of a garage about a mile away, down a country road, which would eventually grow into a 15 million dollar steel fabrication company by the eighties, an amazing story of an ex-Amish, 8th grade dropout, for another time.
What a great location, on a dead-end street, with a cornfield behind it, cool neighbors, big yards, and nothing but country all around. I remember seeing bear tracks in the woods on a regular basis.
They had a decent elementary school here, Pequea Elementary. They really had a good spelling and reading program, based on phonics principles. It was probably very advanced for the time period (1965-66). To this day I am a great speller and read everything in site. I do not understand why they do not implement something like this in the inner-city schools.
My relationship with my new Dad improved some here, if I remember correctly. I think the main reason why was that he was never home, being mainly on the road selling insurance all over the state. He took me on some trips with him, agonizing trips where he wouldn't pull over to let me take a leak for miles, and made me sit in the car for hours while he was inside someone's house persuading the poor guy to sign on the dotted line.
While I was there, my parents let me get a little beagle-mix dog, whom I named "Charlie", although he was a she. This dog would survive the next 17 years, and die while I was away at college, breaking my heart at the time.
Unfortunately, Dad decided that he needed to live closer to the Philadelphia office, about an hour and a half closer, and we moved after six months. An hour and a half drive was a lot in those days, before the age of the internet, it was a massive distance. I made some really good friends in our short stay here. It is interesting, what might have been if I had been allowed to grow up in Willow Street.
When your parents move a lot when you're growing up, there are a lot of "what if?" moments left in your past. I know for sure I left my future wife behind in one of these neighborhoods. Nothing beats the closeness of the relationships you establish with other kids when you're young. These days it may not be like that, with the distractions of the internet and technology, but back then, there were very few distractions, relatively speaking.
I remember staring out the rear window of the car as our little house disappeared in the darkness, when Dad drove us out of Willow Street for the last time. I was more depressed than when we left Minnesota, because I was a bit older and more aware of things by that time.
The move was a traumatic experience, to put it mildly. I hated the new neighborhood. The kids were mean. I got in several fistfights, immediately. The people were different than the wholesome country crowd back in Amish-land. It was here that I discovered my talent for wrestling, although it wouldn't be realized fully until some years later.
My parents adapted pretty well though. A lot of the neighbors were also young up-and-comers, and they were always throwing little parties. Eventually we threw some parties too, and I got to meet all the neighbor's kids. That made it a little better, but I was still only 6 years old. Eventually, I made some friends too. Willow Street became a distant memory..............
Here's Mom with some of her buds from that neighborhood, I believe around 1967. My Mom is in front of the door. Cousin Linda from Vermont is on her right. Mrs. Mattioli is to Mom's left. Mrs. McMurray is halfway out of the picture. All these women were in their mid to late-twenties, a great age to be! Even my mother the ex-stewardess looks trim and healthy. She would later eat herself into a relatively unrecognizable form in the 70's, after they adopted a kid in '73. Cousin Linda would develop schizophrenia and die homeless on the streets of Barre, Vermont. The other two are still living somewhere as desperate housewives, as far as I know.
Here's a picture of me in 1969 with two of my friends from this neighborhood, Mark and Chris(left). Mark eventually came down with a form of schizophrenia also, and eventually died from throat cancer this year (2010). Chris (from Pittsburgh) I lost touch with some time ago. Mark had two ridiculously hot sisters I tried to ask out in later years, but they never did give me the time of day. The dog I'm hugging is "Charlie".
Here is a picture of the place in King of Prussia:
630 General Armstrong Road
"Hell House"
I have since deemed this place, "Hell House", because this is where I received the worst beatings in my life, and even got into a car accident while I was living here, in 1969, which left me with nagging back problems for decades afterward. I was also constantly fighting with the neighborhood kids (the standard bunch of dickheads), but you know.....it toughened me up.
Regardless, this house was cursed. Dad was stressed out all the time, and would come home from work in a rage after being gone all week, probably from rejection on sales calls, and God help me if I pissed him off at all. Sometimes, Friday night, I would go hide, usually in the patch of woods behind Chris' house. When I got a bit older-8 or 9-a bunch of us boys would hang out there, sort of a little gang, when we weren't trying to kill each other. I cruised by there three years ago (2008) and that patch of woods was still there. It was even thicker and deeper.
Dad was working his butt off to be successful in the insurance business during this time period and he was stressed out as hell. He had a hair-trigger temper that could go off any moment.
One time, he was in bed, on a Saturday morning, it looked like he was asleep, and I was standing there talking to Mom about something, and I said something that set him off - I think it was something about being "too lazy to get out of bed" trying to be funny, and quick as lightning he was up and all over me like a cheap suit,with a flurry of punches. I remember standing there in shock after being pummeled and he said, "never call me lazy again." Dad was a fuckin' maniac, trying to sell that insurance.
This would go on through about the year 1970 or so, when we moved to a bigger house, in a nicer neighborhood, and he mellowed out some, thankfully. It's almost like he then said, "Hey, I am a player. I am going to rise above it all....I can do it."
The best part of this shitty neighborhood was Caley Road School, actually a decent experience for me.
Caley Road School, King of Prussia, 1966-70 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade (?):
I was enrolled into this school, in 1966, which had just been built, and still looks the same today-at least it did a few years ago (2008), when I passed by, in the mid-summer. The kids were a little rougher here than I was used to back in Amish country. I remember the first day, I asked another kid, "where do you live?" He said, "I live up my ass." I didn't ask many questions after that.
The neighborhood was more blue collar, or actually a mix of blue collar-steel workers and such, and young executives just starting out in the corporations that would grow five or ten, or more times their size in the next decade or two, or three, during one of the most prosperous times in history to be in on the ground floor of corporate America.
A lot of these young men achieved the American Dream in grand fashion, many ending up owning huge homes, raising large families and enjoying unheard of prosperity (these days) before they reached the age of fifty. Median family income during the 60's rose by 33% (adjusted for inflation). To give it some perspective, during the boom of the early first decade of the 2000's, family income rose just 1.6%, so yes, it was a good time to be hitting the white-collar workforce in this country. Scores of educated, young males, who did not have to deal with affirmative action, crushing tax rates, millions of illegal immigrants and cheap labor, and countless jobs shipped overseas, watched their incomes rise dramatically during that time, if they just put forth a little effort. They thought they were smart, but most were just lucky. It must have just been awesome to have work and to get paid, well, unlike the current economic climate in the economic decline since that time.
I experienced my first crush at Caley Road School, on a cute girl in my music class. I remember her first name was "Jeanne". She had these dorky thick-framed glasses, and brown hair tied back in a pony tail. Anyways, we were in music class, and the teacher gave us an assignment to sing something, maybe our favorite song. We had a week to prepare.
The next week, I think I sang a forgettable version of something like "Light My Fire" by The Doors. Well, Jeanne took her glasses off, and then let her hair down, and her hair just kind of flowed around her face, to me it looked like it was in slow motion for a second or two, like a movie or something. She got up, strolled over to the front of the class, and started singing in this tender little voice, and she looked just great. I sat there staring, transfixed, and I was like, "wow!" I never looked at girls the same after that. She sang, "Leaving on a Jet Plane", by Peter, Paul, and Mary, a song John Denver wrote for the soldiers being shipped out regularly to Vietnam. Vocalist Mary Travers just died of cancer (Oct, 2009). Here she is:
I also remember falling asleep while sitting upright on the couch in the basement here in July of '69, next to my Mom, with the Apollo 11 moon landing happening on the TV. She kept jolting me awake, but I ultimately couldn't stay awake for the big event. I've always needed my sleep.
Anyways, by 1970 - thank God - we eventually moved out of that dump, and into this huge, to me anyways, A-frame custom home on Valley Forge Mountain. It only took Dad 4 years to get us out of "the neighborhood." These days it would take ten times that long, if ever. What a great time to be alive in America. Anything was possible, and it didn't even take that long.
Plus, Dad was in the insurance business, which is the perfect business, if you can sell. In this kind of a business, stuff you sold years ago still pays you a monthly income, as long as they still own the policy. The longer you work, the more money you make and the easier your life gets, and you're not begging some boss for a raise either. Reference: The Invisible Bankers.
Looking back, Dad was a friggin' genius, a genius at marketing insurance anyways. How a backwoods country bumpkin from Northern Minnesota knew all this is a mystery to me. I guess you're born with these gifts. Or else it was a family secret handed down through the generations of bankers in his family. He knew exactly which move to make next. There were no mistakes. He was going to be a moneymaker, period. He seemed to know how to establish a niche within a niche. His niche was insurance. His niche within a niche was making disability insurance available to certain groups and then tailoring the marketing to fit each of those separate groups.
A key part of the marketing was making it appear that the insurance was part of the exclusive access to their given benefits. Benefits are a huge motivator for certain groups, like teachers or nurses, and there's usually a union involved, so they had to be adept at getting in good with the union heads.
The last part of the puzzle was the ability to make the sale using some kind of automatic payroll deduction system. This way the prospect didn't have to cough up the initial insurance premium to commit, they just had to sign a few forms and the insurance premium would be automatically deducted starting with their next paycheck. They were used to that; they were used to having deductions from their paycheck for things like taxes and miscellaneous stuff. They would forget about it, and Dad's income grew like a weed, on autopilot.
For example, he had mailing lists and custom postcard mailers tailored to Nurses Groups in Denver, or Postal Workers in Norfolk, or Pipefitters in the Philadelphia Navy Yard, in which case he would approach the union heads and offer special benefits and perks. The postcards would read something like Disability Benefits Especially for the Denver Nurse's Group-Expires December 30, or something close to that. There was always an expiration date. Better do it now, or you could really miss out.
He was always mailing postcards all over the place, thousands every month. I know because I used to have to stick addresses and stamps on these things in his dingy little office in Norristown in the early days. He would get a small percentage back in the mail showing interest, and these were sold as leads to insurance agents all over the U.S. In turn, he would get a cut of each and every sale, not only when the sale was made, but every year when the policy would renew. After 10 and 20 years, the income was huge, and it was on automatic pilot. It was fuckin' beautiful.
The 1970's:
The first three years of the 70's were among the best years of my life. We were in this big Swiss-style house with huge glass windows with a view of nothing but woods. They called it a Contemporary. These homes were distinguished by the presence of shag carpeting, simulated wood wall paneling and huge glass windows. No neighbors were there to eyeball every move we made. It was very private. I had my own room with the popular wood paneling. I wasn't getting "whupped" anymore, or at least as often. Valley Forge Park was a short hike away, and boy did I take advantage of it.
We did have a prowler one night, shortly after moving in. Some maniac parked his car on Paul Lemon Drive, came through the dark woods and climbed up onto our balcony. He then proceeded to stand in front of the sliding glass doors to my room, and peer in at me, as I lay there sleeping. My Mom, who had ears like a deer into her old age, heard something, awakened and opened the door to my room to see this dark outline pressed against the sliding glass door. The scream was deafening. To this day, I am convinced that this was the older "hippie" brother of one of my high school friends and a neighbor. This older guy was a real party animal and kind of a crazy biker-type who was really into the drug scene.
That's the night I got to meet the local policeman, Tom Marciano, ex-boxing champ and relative of the famous Rocky. What a character! A real nice guy, though who subsequently became a close friend of the family. He checked the area, but Mr. Prowler was long gone. Footprints the next morning showed that the creeper had actually jumped off the balcony and hit the ground running, at a drop of around 12 feet.
Tom recommended that we buy a gun, as Mom was here by herself a lot, with Dad traveling all over the place. They got a Unique Arms .22 automatic, which I got to practice with also, by the age of 12, spurring my lifelong interest in guns and shooting.
Everything was great until sometime in 1973 when, after unsuccessfully trying to have another child, my parents decided to adopt. This was the pivotal moment in my lifetime that determined my entire future, for I am convinced that if my Mother could have conceived a half-brother for us and they had not had to adopt the outsider, I would have benefitted from my stepfather's great success in business.
Actually, my mother told me that I have at least 7 dead brothers and sisters who never made it to term. I'm the only survivor. Maybe I will meet them in heaven. I think people who grow up with brothers and sisters have a huge advantage later in life. It's like comparing zoo animals to animals in the wild. The zoo animals know they're going to be fed and develop almost no survival skills, where the wild animals grow up with a keen sense of survival. Being an only child, I lacked people and survival skills, to put it mildly.
My parents, who were just now (1973) starting to reap the rewards of all their hard work with only myself as benefactor went out and adopted a baby boy, from Wyoming I believe.
At first, I was excited, back in '73, but after I figured out the new kid didn't even like me, and was very jealous of my presence, I wanted to send him back, like we had got him at Sears or something. Thirteen years younger, he would never warm up to me.
The lawyers made a mistake and left the birth mother's name on some paperwork, which I discovered in a drawer thirty-some years later, so I learned the mother's name, not that it would have done me any good. It was probably too late to request that she take him back. Plus, my entire life was fucked by then anyway.
Actually, it wasn't the fact that the kid was jealous of me that made me want to get rid of him, it was the fact that he was so obviously interested in how much money Dad had and very early on, that was alarming. I mean, he knew more about Dad's money than I did, by far.
April '73: Mom with her new bundle of joy...."Leif." I was relegated to my parent's shit-list from that point on. How much of an asshole did Leif grow up to be? Years later, after I gave his kid a car, Leif called me up to complain that the radio didn't work. That's how much of an asshole.......
Regardless, this turned out to be, easily, the worst day of my life, but I didn't know it at the time. What the hell, I would be out of the house in 5 years anyway. If they had just waited a few years, I would have been glad to give Mom plenty of grandchildren, trust me. The new kid immediately gained greater-than-equal status, although I was 13 years older and had gone through all the bullshit with moving all over the place and my Dad's temper, only to eventually miss the good part, the part where they had money. Then this stranger strolls right in to reap all the rewards. That's how stupid my life was and typical of my luck.
To top it off, he immediately became the favorite son, and he turned out to be there every day for the rest of my parent's lives, mainly because they had so much money that he never had to leave home or go anywhere because they just hired him as the "yard guy" when he reached adulthood, so this would be the last time I would get to see my parents without his presence, ever. In fact, my nickname for him eventually became "the Ever-Present One".
So the deck had been stacked against me from the start of this entire bizarre experience. Even my own mother much favored the new boy, even more so as he grew older. "Mom! Traitorous traitor!" I know I was being punished somehow, for the sins of her first husband, that mistake she had made as a young woman that ended in divorce. "Okay, blame me, because I look just like the guy?"
This is a prime example of how having money doesn't actually solve problems. You simply exchange one set of problems for another. If my Father hadn't been so successful in business, they wouldn't have been able to afford to just go out and buy another kid, effectively ruining what was left of my time with my parents as a result. The money was actually detrimental to my entire relationship with my parents, resulting in almost no attention to my career development. I don't think the timing could have been worse for the arrival of the new kid. He made out great, naturally.
In later years, I convinced myself that my father had been secretly gay, although I had no proof of such. It sure made everything else that had transpired make a lot more sense. It was darker than that though. If he was gay, he was psycho-gay at the very least. He had a huge chip on his shoulder like he was getting revenge on someone. He seemed driven by hatred....of something or somebody, which became directed at me almost immediately when he showed up. I certainly was not a bad kid, which would have meant certain death I am sure.
I did some research on his brothers and they all seemed to suffer from emotional problems later in life. The eldest one committed suicide....hung himself in the garage, leaving behind his young wife and two kids. It's my guess that all these boys had been sexually molested at a young age, at the isolated farm where they were raised, by an uncle or some older twisted person. We'll never know for sure, but something caused these boys to grow up crazy.
There is a vague mention in the genealogy archives of an uncle on the property that nobody speaks of.....never-married with a simple grave with just his name on it. I paid the price, though, for these earlier sins; bare-assed spankings and humiliated in public, the horrible marriage, screaming, violent arguments, miserable wife. It was just a cover-marriage(?). Resentful and wicked when I brought girls home. Never on my side. Young boys hanging around the yard all the time in later years. No apparent interest in beautiful women that ever happened to pass by us in the public setting. I mean, not even a flicker of interest. Uh huh. Something was fucked up somewhere.
The scenario in my mind goes like this if I were to rebuild the last half century of this guy's life: Isolated farmhouse. Three young brothers. Some older relative starts molesting these boys at a young age, switching to the next youngest child when he grows bored with the older one. It ends and the boys all leave home, confused about their sexuality. One never gets over the abuse and kills himself. The other one, my stepfather, acquires a ready-made family, my divorced mother and her son (me) to show the world that he's a normal family man in order to be successful in business at the time. End of story.
This is unforgivable in my book. It's like when you hire a lawyer. Personal feelings are tossed aside. You hire a professional to do a job. He signed up to be my father, not some bringer of vengeance.
Reality sucks sometimes, absolutely and this is one example. I've actually never heard of anyone else having this happen, but then again, not everyone is a pain-in-the-ass writer of every detail of his life like I am.
At least, I didn't have to be there to see the preferential treatment of the adopted one, although I tried to come back after college, to fit back into the family a number of times through my adult years, probably due to the lack of opportunity that presented itself consistently after my college experience.
This kid hated me, though. I could feel it. He was so thrilled when they sent me off to college. When I graduated I came back home to find him firmly ensconced in the family business and I was definitely out. They never did let me back into the mix. This was my reward for trusting my parent's advice, a lifelong cycle of poverty.
Everything my stepbrother did was looked upon as good-manual things like yard work and carpentry. Everything I had to offer was looked upon as crap-"did they teach ya' how to build a barn at that college of yours?" All the sudden it was "that college of yours", like I wasn't totally forced to go and it was my choice? I don't think so.
College degree? Big deal. Did not matter. Everything had completely shifted to the "yard-guy" and I was screwed, because I couldn't find a decent job on my wrestling and general business education. In fact, my entire generation and for about a decade after was pretty screwed career wise until the tech boom came along, unless they had family money, connections or both.
The 1980's continued:
I can't believe what a bad idea college was. I never recovered from it. In fact, by the time I graduated from college, my non-college going peers, who had started working after high school in the trades mostly, had 5 and 6 year-old kids already, and were about $100k ahead in earnings, with equity in their homes, and I had yet to go on my first job interview. I think the liberals took over the colleges by that point anyway, and the liberal view is oriented more toward socialism than capitalism and making real money.
Even though there were no jobs upon my graduation-there was a recession at the time, in the early 80's, I managed to obtain a position with my father's insurance company in 1983, supposedly selling insurance. Problem was, there was no base salary, and the senior salesmen I was working with certainly didn't want me taking over their lucrative territories. So this "job" pretty much involved me riding around with successful 50-something salesmen, while they did anything but help me learn the insurance game. We went to the mall, to sports bars, arcades, wherever. Of course, I starved, and learned next to nothing, except how to curse really well.
I was very surprised that my Dad would push the college thing so completely upon me, and then basically have no plans for me in the family business, once I graduated. Remember, this was back when a college degree still meant something, and it was 4 years of fairly hard work, especially for a jock-brain like me.
I do remember though, my Dad was the kind of guy that would go out and buy a Ferrari, and then use it to haul manure.
Of course, it was a mistake to go to work in the family business. But this was no ordinary family business. This involved a lot of fucked up psychological scenarios. There was the adopted brother, which turned my mother into a maniac, trying to prove to my Dad that she could be a good mother, from the guilt of not being able to give him a blood child. So she treated The Chosen One about ten times better than she ever treated me, and when he started having kids, even out of wedlock, forget it, he was gold from that point on.
I sure wish I had known what was going on. I would have gladly knocked up one of my high school girlfriends and got a jump on this little game. My parents had always said, "don't you go getting some girl pregnant". What they were really saying was, "please get a girl pregnant to give your mother something to do and because we're loaded and if you don't make a child we're basically going to treat you like shit at family get-togethers the rest of your life, especially when you're adopted brother is there with his brood because you didn't give us a grandkid." Damn! Damn! Damn!
Then there was the fact that I was descended from another father, the first guy who had schtupped my Mom and gave her a baby, something my current Dad never did accomplish, so they were probably slightly fucked up over that. I am absolutely sure I would have been way better off if I had been fully adopted, rather than with a Step-Dad and blood-Mother. I think most adopted children have it pretty well made, compared to the native born saps that are already there.
So I became the evidence that my Mom had made either a good or bad decision; If I did well, it made my Mom and Step-Dad look bad, and Father #1 look good. If I did shitty in life, it affirmed that my Mom had made a good decision when she had split with Dad #1, and married Dad #2, because I was a reflection of Dad #1 in their eyes. So it was in everybody's best interest, that I be a complete and utter fuck-up. (This is amateur psychology at best, merely my take on things. I have no facts to back this up).
Point: If you end up with a Stepfather, count your lucky stars that somebody showed up to support your Mom's ass, then get out of there as soon as you turn 18. Don't keep hanging around and try to come back home, like I did. You'll just fuck-up your entire life.
Let me revise that: If your stepfather manages to impregnate your mom, and give you a half-brother or sister, it will probably neutralize all that, and you'll be okay. However, if your Mother fails to give your Step-Dad another kid, and they go out and adopt a replacement, forget it. You're about 99 and 44/100% fucked. If your Stepfather's wealthy, it's even worse, because they don't share the wealth. They'll just rub your nose in their high lifestyle and when you drop by you just get to see the adopted kids living high on the hog while you get to go back to your tiny apartment.
Other People's Weddings:
I do remember weddings in the 80's were the best of times for my romantic life. I had amazing luck with the bridesmaids, not like after the age of 40 or so, when weddings became just boring again. Remember, I was a high school loser with the ladies, so this was a big deal for me. I must have attended eight or nine weddings through the decade. I guess I looked good at that time, or it was just the gift of youth, but I remember hooking up with the best-looking women.......in fact, I think it ruined me.
One time ended I up with a bridesmaid, at a wedding in Linwood, NJ, and somehow I lost her panties in the bushes behind the bride's parent's house, during the reception! I remember I sent her upstairs first, and then 5 minutes later I strolled in. I went to the fridge to grab another beer, and this girl's Mom came up to me and says, "that was fast". "Excuse me?", I said, shocked. She said, "Your beer, you drank it awful fast", as I stood there, having a heart-attack.
Point: Enjoy your youth. It doesn't get any better than this, unless you become a pro athlete.
The Family Business:
After two more years of going nowhere in the family business, I asked Dad for something else. He said something like, "you're just not a salesman", and stuck me in the back office, basically stuffing envelopes. Gosh, I didn't even have a window, sitting there in that stupid suit and tie all day, shuffling papers, the big-shot college graduate. What a fucking complete and utter waste of time.
Unfortunately my goal of getting an apartment and getting laid never did materialize, because I was paid like a pauper through the entire80's . I really thought it was a dues-paying process, that it would get better.
By the time I realized what was going on, it was the 90's and nobody was getting laid anymore, not like it was in the 70's and 80's, when I was a young man. I think this made my Dad happy, because he seemed very jealous of my youth anyway, or anything good that happened as a result of such. (see above) The worst thing I could have done, in his eyes, was to make money and have fun. I think he was quite resentful. It's a shame I did not know what was going on at the time.
I could have avoided all this, just by taking the Drexel scholarship after high school, but I turned it down for some unknown reason. I was an 18 year-old moron. Regardless, I will always know that I did my best to fit into the family business.
The 1990's:
Up through the time period of the 80's, it seemed like everyone was educated, good-looking, sane, and relatively disease-free. I don't know what happened when the eighties ended. It became a different country. Aids showed up. It wasn't fun anymore. In society, everything seemed to become a burden, and people lost their sense of humor. It seems like it really picked up speed after Bill Clinton showed up. I think Bill stirred up a lot of racism and unhappiness with his policies, a lot of which still lingers in society today (2010).
The economy did hum along nicely though, under Bill. Unfortunately, I did not benefit from the mid to late 90's boom-times, due to my stupidly returning to college for a chiropractic degree, a move which was the final nail in the coffin, career-wise, not to mention a disaster financially. I think this would have been a brilliant move, if I had done it 15 years earlier. As it were, it utterly ruined my life, simply due to the huge student loan debt accumulated.
It didn't have to be this way. I had asked my Dad to help me in several business start-ups before this point. My favorite idea had been to buy an old tire supply warehouse in Willow Street, PA, my old neighborhood from my youth in the mid 1960's. The early 90's recession had resulted in this local tire company going out of business, and there it sat, a warehouse-sized building for sale. It was on the main drag of this little country town that was on the edge of the endless urban sprawl that is America. I wanted to open a gym there.
It would have been great, even if it barely survived. I could have done something enjoyable for once and lived in a cornfield for cheap somewhere south of town. I could have lived near my parents and had them over for Thanksgiving. I could have enjoyed my youth. I could have kept my friends in Philadelphia and had something resembling a social life. I could have had a place to bring girls home to for once, without my parents looking over my shoulder. But it was not to be. My Dad laughed at my little business idea like it was a joke.
Chiropractic college was a disaster for me because, not only was it no fun whatsoever, and 4 years long, but it still did not lead to a professional income. So there I was, finally out of school again in 1998, saddled with $114,000 in student loans with interest that compounded daily, 38 years old and nowhere to go.
Well, at the time I thought I did have somewhere to go. "I'll go back home now, to The Farm. Surely my parents will have some respect for me now. I mean, I am a doctor now....sort of." Nothing could have been further from the truth however. I left my comfortable apartment in San Francisco, with the cool and comfortable weather and bike trails galore and the Golden Gate Bridge......and went back to Pennsylvania, even though I hadn't even been invited. Looking back, it was such a stupid move.....
Point: If you're over 30, definitely do not go back to college, unless it's for two years or less, or you're wealthy already, and you can pay cash. If college did not pay off the first time, chances are it was a mistake then too. Two mistakes do not equal a correct move.
The Baby Boom Generation:
Another problem was my timing. Our generation followed the huge baby-boom generation, who had soaked up all the good opportunities generally, by that time, and then either shipped the jobs overseas to line their pockets, or imposed affirmative action on us and the war on white men. So I could not exactly go out and find another great job. I just had to sit there and take the abuse, as broke as I was.
It wasn't like the WWII generation, whose men returned home to benefit from the shortage of men and a surplus of women, career opportunities and a booming economy. It must have been unbelievable, to be starting at this time.
My parent's generation, meaning the children of the World War II Generation, the early group, before the hippie generation, had incredible timing. Too late for WWII or Korea, and too early for Vietnam, they benefited from steady economic boom-times. Everything was handed to them. Their timing was even better than their parents. They had the chance to really build something, and that they did.
So the era of American greed produced two groups that would realize unprecedented freedom and prosperity, and it probably would not be this good again, for a very long time, if ever. They were just in time for my generation to show up and get the benefits, or more often, the scraps that were left over.
Point: Don't depend on the generations ahead of you to help you out career-wise, or give you good advice. They are usually so busy building their own bank accounts, that you will not even be a factor.
Just look at all the 70-something politicians and college football coaches who won't step aside and give the next generation a chance. Often they are finally just dropping dead on the job, rather than retire. These children of the Greatest Generation should be known as the Greatest Me Generation.
I remember several instances when I was younger, and talking with aged members of that World War II generation, and they often admitted that they had shamelessly spoiled their children, our parents, because they themselves had gone through such hard times.
Regardless of the reason, it was then that I first learned that you can work really hard and make sacrifices, and often there can be no payoff, or things can actually get worse, through no fault of your own. Well, it is your fault if you trust the wrong people, but young people are naive.
Final Point:
Brown-nosers get ahead. Well, it seems that way anyway. I don't know, maybe it should read, "Brown-nosers get ahead when they kiss the butts of sociopaths, who get rich because they have no conscience." I've met sociopaths and they screw people over and then sleep like a baby. It's quite shocking to someone that has a conscience. It's even more amazing to see many of them profit so well from it and then come to the realization that, the people with "normal" emotions are the ones living a fantasy, that people are basically no good and the bad guys usually win, not like on TV.
I was taught the opposite growing up, an incessant reminder. Moms, dads, aunts, uncles, grandparents — no grown-up missed an opportunity to hammer it home. Maybe this was true for the World War II generation. The good guys did win that one, or so they keep telling us......
If I had dared question these things as a kid I might have wondered, "Gee, if this maxim is so self-evident, why do you folks feel so obliged to keep reminding me?"
Cheaters, I learned, always prospered, except maybe for a few Bernie Madoffs, but he just had a bad ending. It was too late for me. I was a complete straight shooter. My Dad had beat it into me, and I was doomed to walk the straight and narrow, probably forever.
. Here's a link to another article which explains why the year 1978 was the best year in history for wealth equality: 
