A little about me [Part 1]

My name is Joshua and it is perhaps the most consistent aspect of my life which has followed me through the years.  Sure there were many periods of my life where I was known as something other than Joshua.  Names such as "Frog," "Magot," "Amp," "Santo," were hung on my being throughout various phases of my life, but Joshua has always been with me underneath it all.  I am proud of my name.

I was born into a seemingly comfortable situation back in April of 1977.  I had two loving parents who owned a home in a nice neighborhood along the foothills of Southern California.  There was a pool, a caretaker, a comfortable amount of wealth.  However, I don't remember any of this.  By the time I was 3 my parents had divorced and this modicum of comfortability was shaken up and split down the middle.  In fact, I don't have any recollection of a time when my parents had ever been together.  Throughout the years they have remained good friends though.

Much of my life was spent moving back and forth between my two parents.  My father was a relatively stable man who afforded a comfortable living through his profession as an accountant.  My mother, however, was the the exact opposite of any sense of the word "stable."  More on this later.

I don't recall ever really having a real childhood friend.  Every year it seemed like I was in a new school, in a new area, starting over from the very beginning.  As a result my social skills were, quite seemingly, extremely underdeveloped.  I suffered from "shy-kid" syndrome of the highest severity.  If you experienced anything similar in your upbringing, then I'm sure you recall the gut-twisting emotions you must have endured each and every time you had to stand in front of a new classroom of children.  Thirty little strange faces staring back at you like you were some alien come to visit them from another planet.  There was a feeling of isolation from knowing you're constantly the "outsider" to these social circles of children and many of whom share lifelong bonds with each other.  Needless to say, I spent a lot of time (when I wasn't playing the role of "easy prey" to the schoolyard bully) alone in my childhood years.

Certainly there were years when I would forge a closeness with another pariah or a group of outsiders, but these bonds were always short-lived.  It wasn't until I was fifteen years old that I began to make any lasting and solid bonds with other human beings outside of my family circle.  It was at this time that I moved away from the Los Angeles area of Southern California with my mother and landed myself in the country sticks of Southwest Michigan.

Culture-shock is not a severe enough word to explain the experience of actually having to live in a place like that.  Fortunately, I did have some exposure to country living as I grew up.  Every summer my parents would send me back east, to Michigan, to stay with my grandparents.  These are perhaps my most treasured childhood memories.  I don't remember having ever met many other kids in L.A. who had the opportunity to actually get out of L.A. and experience another way of living.  Certainly this knowledge of two worlds, city versus country, helped further my feelings of isolation from the world around me.

My first year in Michigan was perhaps the most difficult year of my childhood life.  Being the school pariah was nothing new to me, but this was something far worse than just being the loner dealing with the occasional school bully.  I was a city kid in a country school.  For the first time in my life, I really stood out.  I wasn't just another lost face in a crowd.  The kind of attention I received was nothing short of miserable.

That year it seemed as if the entire school had singled me out.  Groups of kids would go out of their way to push me over, pick fights, call me names, etc.  One time I remember being in the locker room after gym class when one kid who enjoyed making my life hell more than any other, Mike Mennsinger, surrounded me with a group of his buddies, pushed me over, and sprayed deodorant in my eyes.  If you've never had deodorant in your eyes, trust me, it doesn't belong there.  My face felt like it was on fire.  I went to the office crying and thoroughly humiliated (which of course did not improve my standing in the vicious tightly-woven social circles of Smalltown High, USA).  I went home and swore to my mother I was going back to L.A.  Life was really Hell at this point.

I never did go back to L.A.  I finished out my year there in that small little town.  Looking back I've always been surprised that I didn't do anything drastic in that time.  Suicide had always been on the front of my mind.  My mother, knowing I was miserable, made plans to move us out of Redneckville and moved us a couple towns over to a town that was a little less degenerate.

So here I was, second year in Michigan, on my way to my second school...some things never seem to change.  It was my sophomore year and once again I knew nobody save one familiar face that followed me to this new school from our former.  This familiar face, Julieane, ended up becoming one of my most dearest lifelong friends and to this day we still have a very strong connection.  I'm sure you'll read more about her as I blog more about my life, but for now you get the idea.  She's important...and so are many of the people I met in this new town.  Bridgman.

It was here that I say life really began for me.  I was able to establish a real identity and a position amongst peers.  As human beings, I think we often take the necessity of acceptance into a social circle for granted.  It is of the utmost importance to healthy human behavior that an individual finds a place of belonging with other human beings around them.  Without that, the sense of loneliness is far too overwhelming to sustain any sense of life, but I'm getting off track with that, back to the flashback.  It was here, in Bridgman, that I began making friends, real friends, life-long friends.  I didn't know how to handle it at first really.  I was fifteen years old and learning social skills I should have learned when I was six.  Of course, the friends I found were also, for the most part, outcasts and pariahs in their own rights.  There was a common thread of dysfunctionality that seemed to tie us all together.  There seemed to be a genuine value and a rare understanding that each of us placed on the importance of having found one another.  It was a magical time.

As I said, most of us were pariahs and outcasts before coming together as a group of friends.  Together we became rebels, dreamers, artists and poets.  It wasn't long before we found ourselves on a very surreal path of music, drugs, sex, non-conformity...if society told us not to do it, we did it.  We were out to buck the system at every turn we made.

More than rebels and outcasts, most of us were also highly intelligent.  The more and more we found what we considered truth and enlightenment outside of the educational institutions, the more and more we drifted away from said institutions.  A few of my friends did graduate high school and went on to college, but a handful of us (myself included) did not.  At 17, I was a high school dropout and preparing to embark on an adventure that would soon change every dynamic of my life.  It would change how I lived, how I perceived, what I considered truth, what I dreamed of, everything.

It was the early spring of '95.  My friend Julieane and I had both dropped out of school.  Throughout the previous year my friends and I had discovered these events which took place around the country called Rainbow Gatherings.  Mostly these were events were hippies, vagabonds, travelers, rebels and outcasts could all come together for a week or two some place deep within a National Forest.  At the time use of money at these events was looked down upon.  All exchanges of goods were done by barter.  The food was free.  There was a fire to keep warm by.  And most importantly, there were hundreds of other like-minded individuals gathered in one place to celebrate life and an alternative way of living it.  We were in love from our first experiences with these gatherings.  So back to it...it was the early spring of '95...

Julieane and I decided, since we weren't doing anything at the time, that we should just take off and go across the country to attend a gathering in Oregon.  So as whimsical and free-spirited as we were, we did just that.  We took off and had the ride of a lifetime.  We were young, we were full of life, and we were seeing the country on our own terms.  Doing the things we wanted to do the way we wanted to do them.  Living out a dream from inside a dream.

Oregon was beautiful.  There were so many wonderful and colorful people that we had met.  There was love in the air and music in our souls.  We danced, we played, we worked, we fed, we ate, we were alive.  I met a handful of kids who had been traveling for quite some time and I fell right in with them.  The group of us were nearly inseparable the entire time we were at this gathering.  I remember the day Julieane came to me and told me she was pregnant.  I had eaten mushrooms (I think we all had) and we had spent the day in a meadow near some natural rock springs.  When she told me, she said she had to leave as soon as she could back for Michigan.  I wasn't ready to end the dream yet, so I told her to go without me.  And so she did!

So there I was, alone in Oregon with a small tent and a dirty hippie bag full of dirty clothes, rocks and odd trinkets I had picked up.  When the Gathering was over, I left with my new-found friends and we traveled to another in New Mexico.  This was the National Gathering.  At this gathering there were hundreds of thousands of people.  It was wonderful.  So I traveled a bit with them throughout that summer and the year until I finally made it back to Michigan.  I believe I stayed there through the winter before I left again the next Spring.

The next time I left Michigan, I didn't leave on a road-trip.  Two friends of mine and myself, we got on to the highway, stuck our thumbs out, and away we went on another adventure.  Wanderlust was beginning to consume me.  It just felt so natural.  It was the feeling of childhood.  The constant moving, the unknowns, the unexpected, the dangers, the excitements, it was just like childhood.  I experienced so many wonderful things on these journeys of mine, many that I will share in later blogs.  This one is already far too long!  If I have any readers at this point, I'm impressed!

I think I'll wrap this up for now.  I'll pick up where I left off in my next blog.