Skip to main content

Angry Youth


When I was young I was often angry. Angry about how I felt slighted, by one thing or another mostly. Angry about injustice. Angry that children didn’t have rights, that we could be conscripted to fight and die by a political system we didn’t have a voice in.

This anger gave me strength and it gave me power. It drove me toward the political system, not away from it, and I determined at a young age that I would become the youngest and angriest president ever.

The anger wasn’t directed toward any one person and it wasn’t driven by evil. It was anger directed toward enabling positive change in the world. Our country had just pulled out of Vietnam, Nixon had just resigned office, and no-one seemed to know what was next except the inevitable nuclear holocaust and societal collapse that so many people were prophesying.

Into this mix I saw the world as a place that needed help. I lashed out and took swipes. At times I was taken down, “put in my place”, by adults who were less angry but stronger than I was. I ran for student council in High School but that was a farce. I voted as soon as I turned 18 but then, in the mists of life and the pea-soup-fog of booze, I drew back and grew less angry.

As I aged I lamented not keeping that fire burning longer, Though I didn’t stay involved in politics and counter-culture activism, I look with envy on the movements of our recent history. If I were younger I would have been an Anarchist, a member of the The Anonymous group activities. I am currently a huge Greta Thunberg fan. In our current political-separatist-state I wish more than anything that there was a viable third-party. Maybe someday there will be. For now, I am just getting angry again.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Life Changing

It is hard to explain how I feel, now that I have found my calling. I remember when I was a little boy and my dad used to say how much he loved his work, how he was always excited about it, and how it didn’t feel like work to him. As I grew older I envied him, and anyone else who had that experience, because I didn’t share the sentiment for most of my adult life. Let me be clear, I never hated my job. I just didn’t feel like it was what I was supposed to be doing. I felt that there was something much more important that I should be doing with my life than working for someone else. And now, having finished my first book and being well on my way with writing my second, I am loving every moment of it. The most amazing thing about writing, for me, is that I can spin off on tangents and follow rabbit holes and when I am done, as long as I come back to somewhere near the surface where I started, no one knows that it wasn’t a perfectly orchestrated writing technique that I had plan...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Truth

My childhood was not normal. I had many unusual opportunities and life experiences; I grew up on a pseudo-ranch with a cow named hamburger and we lived in a caboose for part of the year. I was fortunate to have a loving family and I was given opportunities for which I am forever grateful. I was curious and sensitive to my own feelings and the feelings of others, a trait that is not common in all young boys. I may not have been the most well-behaved kid but I was careful to try and not hurt anyone, and when I did I felt awful about it and I made amends as best as I could. I was never afraid to tell the truth. This book is a testament to that. I can’t say it was easy - telling the truth never is - but I grew more confident each time I told a story that hurt me in the first telling. Each subsequent story, no matter how painful, became more and more important for me to tell. I didn’t write under an alias, a pen name, to hide my identity. I originally decided to do it because I d...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daily Routine

My routine is to write on the bus. I work in Seattle and live in Tacoma and so my writing salon is the Sound Transit bus, the 590. Both the north-bound (in the morning) and the south-bound (in the evening) is my literary capsule, driving through time and space while I am cocooned in my thoughts. I often write about people I see on the bus. If any of my characters seem familiar, and you take the 590, I may be writing about you. My inspiration often comes from seemingly inconsequential occurrences. As an example, seeing the rivulets of water tracing the glass on a rainy day, or overhearing a conversation between two people where one person says, in exasperation, “They can’t keep us in suspense like this!” From these small happenings I spin great tales in my head, with ideas cascading off of one another and building momentum until I spill over with excitement about the images that I conjure up with my vivid imagination. And then I get to my destination and I get off the bu...
Post a Comment
Read more