Bodhisattva

Holden Caufield, that famous lost generation rascal once said the best place to start is the beginning.  The problem is, I don’t really know where that is, so I’ll start where I start remembering.



         The first thing I can remember really clearly is knowing I was adopted.  I don’t really know if I knew what that meant, but I knew that’s what I was.  My parents got me from…well, fuck, I don’t really remember where they got me from.  But they got me, I know that much.  They paid a hefty price, filled out some paperwork, and low and behold! They had a bouncing baby boy.

         The next thing I remember is being terrified.  I was mortally afraid that God was going to come back and take his children home before I got to see the new movie being advertised at the time.  No joke, I was absolutely convinced that He was a-comin’.  My parents really love God, see. 

         Next, I remembering really, REALLY liking media.  Like, I mean, media of any kind.  T.V., Radio, Movies, whatever.  If it had to do with entertaining people, I was all about it.  This, contrasted with my parents’ affinity for the Almighty presented quite the problem for me early on.  I wanted to watch HBO, they wanted me to watch the 700 Club.  I wanted to listen to the Beatles, they wanted me singing “Great is Thy Faithfulness”.  Yikes.


         So not a lot happened when I was young.  I mean,  I guess a lot did happen, but not a lot of it is pertinent to this story, so I’ll leave it omitted for the time being.  What you need to know is that around the age of thirteen I started questioning things.  I don’t know what things exactly, I just started to get the distinct impression that something wasn’t right.  I had been lied to somehow.  The world was not as small and encapsulated as I was led to believe.  Coincidentally, this was about the same time that I started listening to REAL music.  People like Ani Difranco, and Bob Dylan.  Paul Simon and Jeff Buckley.  Bob Marley and Joseph Arthur. People that really had something to say about this life.  So yeah, all this intense, moody music combined with an innate sense of something deeper in life that I was somehow missing out on proved to pretty much shape the next few years of my life.

         By the age of sixteen I was a regular angst-filled youth.  I hated anything that even remotely resembled authority.  It’s ok, though.  I’m pretty sure that being rebellious and distrustful of the establishment is part of the job description at that age.  Adding to my normal misunderstood teenage misery was the fact that I was balls deep in indoctrination at my private Christian school.  Needless to say, the only thing that helped me graduate was the immense amount of psychotropic drugs I ingested while attending there.  God bless our society’s tendency to replace counseling with pills.  Hell, by the time I graduated high school, I’d already been diagnosed ADHD, Bi-Polar, and clinically depressed.

         Finally, eighteen, along with graduation, came, and I was free…or so I thought.           My parents and I had gone back and forth for the past year as to where I would be seeking higher education.  Of course my mother wanted me to continue my bubbled-in dogmatic education at a  private Christian college.  I, on the other hand, had developed a longing to help other kids like me, kids that felt like something was wrong and didn’t know who to talk to, much less what to say.  I wanted to be a counselor.  My mother wasn’t having it.  So the “compromise” was seminary.  The way I figured it, pastors are essentially counselors, right?  What the hell, I said, why not give it a shot?  So off to Bible College I went.
         And back from Bible College I came, after about two and a half years of smiling and nodding, and “yes sirs” and “no ma’ams”. 

         This is where the story actually begins, I guess.