Cards and Letters

   I stood in the store for a long time looking for the right card that could convey my feelings and show that I was thinking of someone at one point or the other in their life. I was never able to find one every time I stood in the store looking for a card I would hear an inner voice saying write them a note you dork and I stand there in the card aisle laughing to myself looking like a nut to those standing around me.This happens way to often trying to find a card that is personal and says to that person how you feel about them.

   The whole card thing is like pulling your own teeth when you are looking for that special card. For instance on Fathers Day my Father was incapacitated with Multiple Sclerosis so those Dad mowing the yard or golfing,fishing etc never worked but each year I would look through hundreds of cards trying to find that card to say just the right thing. I would often be forced to just grab what ever they had sign it and send it off in the mail but never felt the card said what I really wanted even after writing a personal note inside. Now days you can make your own cards on the computer but there was a time you had to pick from the lousy selection at the cards they had at the store. I often end up going with the humorous card and I feel that just says more about my personality than the person I am sending the card to.

   I over the years saved a few cards that really meant something to me or because of who sent them. My Grandfather Elsie used to without fail send every year each grandchild a card with one crisp dollar bill in it and I saved everyone of them, the cards that is not the dollar that bought candy. At the time I did not realize how special those cards from him would be to me latter in life until that first year after he passed I did not receive my card from him. I saved all my graduation cards and a few special cards sent by friends or family members over the years. I know some people who save every card they get, saved in boxes usually old shoe boxes in a closet or stashed in the attic or basement. Boxes and boxes of old Christmas cards Birthday, Mothers Day etc sent by people all over the US. and the world. Those cards often set in the dark saved for some future reason that never comes. Left in boxes in dark places until the passing of that person and then are often discarded by loved ones left behind because those cards and letters often mean nothing to them and I am sure they wonder why they were saved in the first place.

   I every so often do a sort of spring cleaning and go though boxes of saved items and rethink if I should hold on to them or toss them out. It always seems I spend more time strolling down memory lane than cleaning but do let a few things go now and then. I am not a hoarder by any means but some items I have a hard time separating from. I have come across old love letters from X girlfriends and poems I wrote and post cards sent saying wish you were here. I wonder if they really wished I was there or just rubbing it in that they were on some awesome trip having a blast without me? Those Family Christmas letters sent to catch you up on what was going on in their lives through out the past year. I do love those do not get me wrong but always when reading them I wonder if their lives were really that fantastic and wonderful and why most omit any bad things that happened. I thought about writing one of those a few years ago but after looking it over thought dang if they read that they will be sending the men in white coats to rescue me.  

   Being that person who has the daunting task of sorting through a loved ones items that has passed can be emotionally draining. Looking at a persons life spread out before you in cards letters photos and little saved items you have to make the decisions on what stays and what goes. Even after it is all sorted out you feel like a wicked ogre as you place the discarded items in the trash as if you personally are diminished their legacy left behind. I worked for a brief time at a retirement complex and when many of those people pass with no family their belongings are boxed up and put into storage in case some person materializes and wants to claim them. Most places hold those items for a set time and if not claimed they are placed into the dumpster. I was once given the task of hauling many of those boxes to the trash and as I put them in the dumpster the lids fell off and each persons life spewed forth in cards letters and old photos from the past. I did not even know any of those people but I felt a tear come to my eye as I lowered the lid on possibly the only things they had left behind.

   As I closed the lid on those boxes sprawled in the dumpster I thought to myself .....I hope I do not outlive my loved ones and that I live my life so that I am surrounded by others when I pass and not alone in some old folks home. I do not want to be just a box of cards and letters etc thrown upon the trash heap. I hope I leave good memories behind for someone and that they think of me now and then and that thought brings a smile to their face and maybe even a laugh or two.  

   Before my Sister passed away from cancer I went with my Mom to sort through her things and box up her life. That day is burnt into my brain and was a very difficult day fingering through her personal items knowing she was still with us but so sick she could not do it her self. I found a box of cards and in there were cards I had sent her when I was very young and they had my chicken scratch writing almost unreadable. I was touched she had saved them and that they had survived all that time. She had moved many times and had a rough life but there those cards and letters were saved in a shoe box and had made the journey with her. We boxed everything up and loaded the items in the car taking them back to my Parents house were my Sister was staying and would in the end take her last breath. After she passed her belongings were divided up between her kids and many items made there way to the trash. I had not taken the cards and letters because it did not feel right to take them while she was still alive. Those cards and letters were lost in the shuffle and I never saw them again but have the memory that she cared enough to keep them all those years.

   People often ask why or how I remember certain events in my life. Often it is because I had saved some little reminder of that time a post card or souvenir I had bought but mostly it is because I have a letter or a card and the fact I kept journals. I kept journals for many years and while in the Army I trusted the United States to ship many of my items when I ended my tour of duty that was a bad choice on my part. One of my boxes that had been shipped disappeared and was never seen again. In that box was many letters, journals and cards from my past also one of my photo albums and a book of poems I had wrote and one book of poems that a friend had written and given to me before I left to go into the Army.  Many of those memories are lost but I am sure stored someplace in my brain but were I do not know.   

   I guess all this rambling I am doing is me trying to say I hope in the end when I must go on to the next adventure the universe has planed for me that I am not just a box of old cards and letters left behind that ends up in a dumpster or on the curb for the trash person.  I hope my time here will have been spent well and that in some way I leave an impression on those I have come in contact with and that it is a good impression.

Creative Constipation.

   I have often heard it said that anything we do or say has been done before or said before aka history repeating itself. I thought about that statement and if that is true I thought then why the hell do we bother to speak or to create art etc if it has all been done before? I feel the reason we bother or at least the reason I do is because although it may have been said or done before it was not done or said exactly the same way and certainly not with my personal imprint upon it. No two people think the same way, no two people feel the same way, we each have something new or at least a new spin on the old to contribute. It amazes me the people who are placed in high regard for their writings or their art work or the fact the conveyed a thought that is embraced by the masses yet people who are more creative and talented go without being noticed. Although they may go unnoticed that does not make their contribution any less important. Many of the great artists and writers of the past never became great until their death and someone stumbled upon the fact they had done great things. Their works sell for millions but they received little to no monetary benefit from their creations.

   I have heard in the Art world it is often the person in the know that becomes a success. This meaning if they are mingling with the right crowd who spread the word about them and their talent is how they progress and become sought out for that talent. I have heard people who can sing that never become famous, and those that sound like a rusty hinge become the latest thing and make bundles of money with little or no talent at all. Is it the luck of the drawl? or the fact they are more motivated than others to become famous? I have no answers for this all I know is if fame and fortune are the only reason you create I feel sorry for you. I create because it gives me pleasure I write because it helps clear my mind so that I am able to create. I may not be what one would call a great artist I just use a canvas the same way I use my writing to purge emotions and clear my head.  I like to craft items and re-purpose items because for some reason it gives me pleasure. I can see potential in most anything and the possibility for it to become something beautiful or have a second purpose after it has served its original purpose.

   Some say I have a creative mind I feel I have a practical mind practical in that I would rather take an old dresser that someone else has discarded and refurbish it or re-purpose it making it convey my personality rather than buy a mass produced item that everyone has. If I refurbish or re-purpose an item I have the only one of its kind and to me that makes that item priceless. Some people are happy to live in carbon copies of a magazine photo they copy the look and feel comfortable in that atmosphere I am different in that I want to create my own space one that is more my personality. I have found that hard to do when living with another person who also wants the space to convey their personality and clashes with my own vision of what I want to see.

   I lived with a person who was what I call a stacker. They liked to fill a room to the rafters with items and stack one upon the other. I feel closed in and the space never feels clean to me in that type of environment. I have lived with someone who needed everything visible all the table tops full of items cluttering the space but they liked the fact they never had to look for anything it was all visible. That environment drove me crazy and also never felt clean and always felt unorganized to me. I have lived with a clean freak that had to have everything spotless 24-7 no room for even a spec of dust. I may like things clean but I am not that obsessive that I have a melt down if a towel is left on the floor. I came to the conclusion that how a person is with the space in which they live has much to do with their mental state. I will not go into my personal impressions of each so as not to offend after all it is your space and I feel you should live as you wish if it is not unhealthy for you or those around you that is all I will say on that issue.   

   I live now in a house with others who do not share my views on how the space I live in should look and after years of fighting I have given in and try not to let the lack of my personal imprint bother me so much. I am not a total minimalist but I like things in there place so when I look for them they are were I left them. I like less in a room because it makes it easier to clean. I like to personalize the furniture in a room either by painting it or creating it and those I live with like function more than personality. I as a person who is artistic need an environment that feels a certain way and that will encourage my creativity. I live with people who do not understand that as they are not the artistic types and I feel as if it is a struggle when ever I want to be creative or change the living space to feel more like me. I know this sound like winning but believe me I am not I am just conveying the thought that I need to create and have a comfortable space in which to do so.

   Most who are artistic will understand the need to have a space all their own that they can feel their creative juices and let them flow. I like to be able to work on something walk away from it and when I return be able to pick up were I left off. It seems my items are always in the way and need to be moved for one reason or another so when I get a chance to get back to it I spend most of my time searching for my tools brushes etc that I lose my creative force before I get started. I once had a little studio set up in the basement and had it set up so that I felt very comfortable and at the time able to paint and very prolifically. My little space was needed for something else and I moved everything to a small room next to the stairs. I have not been as creative in that space and feels closed in to me and for some reason sucked the creativity out of me.

Maybe it is not the space maybe it is me maybe it is my environment being so not me or conveying my personality maybe, maybe,maybe. What ever the cause I feel backed up in a sort of mental constipation and have so many ideas in my head but not able to get them out. It can be a sort of hell for a creative person to not be able to purge those images that pop into their mind. Maybe I have a sort of writers block and I am using my environment as an excuse for not buckling down and putting my paint brush to canvas. All I know is that I am at a point of creative explosiveness and if I do not find an avenue soon to let some of the pressure out I can not say what it may cause. So I write in my blog today in an attempt to release some of that emotional constipation and maybe give myself a push to start creating again.       

Emotional Fortress

   After all the years of searching for that one person I could click with in that way one does with that one person on a level that no words can describe and only that person can understand. After all that searching with no luck at last I would reach an epiphany that would require me to end my search and take time to repair and cleanse the cluttered life I had made for myself. This epiphany came to me while I was reflecting back on the road I had traveled, and the people who had joined me along the way on my journey down that long road that had eventually brought me to the empty lonely place I ended up at.

   I would realize it was not the world or the people along the way that had beating me down it was in fact me who was the problem and I had alone held myself in bondage. The bondage of fear and self pity and hatred that I had engorged myself in had built impenetrable walls around my heart and those who tried to get in were met with brick and stone. I taught myself to hide the fact I was trapped within my own sickness and twisted view of the world and thought I was doing so to keep myself safe. There were those who joined me on my path and would occupy space inside the walls of the fortress I built at the end of the path. I would let them in my fortress after making them swim the mote full of sharp barbed wire and flesh eating creatures and scale the high brick and stone walls and once they were in I felt comfort in the fact I was not alone in the suffering and allowed them to become trapped with me thinking I was saving them from the world. 

   Once they had made there way in I would unknowingly proceed to feed off of their life force  living life through them and not with them or for them until the day would come they had been fed on to long and would have to break away before their life force was drained completely. I did not know how to give of myself or what they wanted of me I only gave what I felt was needed and my twisted view of what others wanted was clouded by what I thought I myself needed. When they would at last gain their freedom from me I would view them as weak and proceed to justify them leaving as it being their misdoings and not mine I found it easier to deflect blame than it was to reflect it. At the time I saw no responsibility on my behalf for the troubles only seeing their faults and what I felt they had done wrong. Then on occasion after making someone jump through hoops and swim the mote doing all they could to show me love I would freak out because I would realize they had gotten too close and broken through my defenses. So for their efforts I would reward them without realizing it by doing all I could to push them away and return to my fortress where I thought I was safe and leaving them locked outside. No amount of their pounding on the drawbridge doors would shake me to allow them ever to get back in and they would eventually tire of the effort and walk away. 

   I wallowed in my little world I had built and as I did it got darker and darker and still I could not or would not accept that I alone held the key to unlock the door and let the light in.  It was after all the place I had spent so much of my life and even though it felt very unhealthy at times it was familiar and change scared the hell out of me so there I was stuck in a world that became darker and darker each day. I can not pinpoint what day or what event it was that forced me to pick up my hammer and start chipping away at the walls but the fact I did is all that matters now.   

   Taking down those walls was the only way I could let in that person that I could have that special connection with and be able to give back as much life as I received from them.  The first walls that had to come down was the trust walls and those had been built with reinforced steel beams and with the rocks and stones that had been hurled at me in the past. As each stone fell it would have to be examined to figure out why it was placed there in the first place. The first few stones to be removed took a lot of work and energy to pry them from the mortar that had held them in place for so long. Those first stones were emotionally draining to revisit the day they were placed there but as each stoned was removed the next became easier to remove. Some days whole walls would crumble down because the one stone I removed was placed there to support all the others.

After the demolition of much of the fortress I felt I was ready to allow someone in to possibly help me in my demolition of the past and help me build a better place filled with light and life.That first effort to let someone in failed tragically and once again I had no feeling of blame. I took life and love and once again knew nothing of how to return it so in the end the person had to walk away to save them self from being pulled down. This would be a recurring situation in my life until the day of that epiphany I spoke of early on in this little story. That epiphany was that the person I was looking for the one I needed to click with in a way that can never be described by words and only understood by that person was in fact myself. I would also come to the conclusion that until I could make that relationship work I could not give love light and life to another being. 

Thanksgiving on The Farm

   With Thanksgiving coming up I started thinking of Thanksgiving gatherings from the past. At some point I remember we started as a family spending this holiday by piling into a vehicle and making a trip to Ohio and my Uncle Russ and Aunt Carole's farm. We would often arrive late at night after the long drive and after a few hellos and long time no see's we would be shown to a bed and fall asleep. I loved visiting their farm it was much bigger than ours and they had a two story farm house and large barns and a dairy barn were they milked the cows. We would sleep in rooms on the second floor and the rooms were chilly but the beds had heavy covers that once you snuggled in you were very warm. It would not take me long to fall asleep and with the chill in the air and the warm covers I would sleep like a rock.

   The next day we would awake early to stirring in the kitchen and the smell of breakfast being made wafting up through the heating grates in the floor. It was always a proper farm breakfast with eggs, bacon, toast, etc. and then everyone would head out to do chores. I never saw the work at their farm as chores for some reason it was more fun than the work we did at home. My older cousin Donny always would let me help him even though I am sure I was more of a hindrance than a help. He was like the big brother I wish I had and would rough house with me until I would get to overzealous and he would have to show me who was boss and let me know it was time to chill.

   My Uncle Russ was this big guy with broad shoulders who liked to joke and pull pranks on people sometimes pushing buttons and making ya mad but I liked him and respected him just the same. My Aunt Carol was a farm woman she could cook up a storm and then go out and slaughter a pig or do the farm work as good or better than any man. She had a cackling laugh but not high pitched lower toned and could be very caring but also very stern. 

   They lived in an area of Ohio that had many Amish families and as a kid it intrigued me how the Amish lived and was lucky enough to become friends with one of the families. One Amish kid who was close to my age was named Toby and when he was not working on the farm we would take of on long walks climb trees etc. Toby spoke German and very little English but we seemed to communicate just fine. I was able to learn so much about Amish life and as a kid thought their way of life was so cool. I had thought at one time I would like to become Amish but the downfall for me would be the strict religious aspect. Not saying it is a bad thing just not in line with my beliefs.

   For Thanksgiving there would be a huge table filled with all kinds of things to eat the usual things like mashed potatoes and beans,corn,stuffing, and turkey but there was always some wild game included in the feast. Rabbit,Squirrel,Venison, etc. They would always have me try it and tell me it taste just like chicken. My thought was if it taste like chicken then why the hell not just eat chicken. I was never and still not crazy about venison and not because it was Bambi I just do not like the taste. Rabbit is OK and Squirrel is kind of more work than it is worth  but if it was all i had to eat I would. I do think those meals I ate there made me less afraid to try different things as I got older. I have eaten alligator,snake,and even chitlins which although gross in thought tasted pretty good. I have even eaten insects and other things that sound gross but tasted pretty good. I do not mind trying food items if I am told what I am eating but I hate for anyone to feed me something and after I am done eating inform me what it was and my Aunt Carol was always good for that. She meant no harm but she did not understand we had to eat what was on our plate that was my Dads rule so even if I hated it I would choke it down regardless. My Dads Dad taught me to use my mashed potatoes to cover the taste of things I did not like. I hated peas and my Grandpa knew this so he showed me how to cover them in mashed potatoes and swallow fast so I did not have to taste them. He taught me so many things of how to do as I was told but do it in a way that made me feel I had control.

   My Aunt Carol kept a box of toys in the living room mostly older toys my Cousins played with at my age and when ever I could I would dig them out. There was a plane made of metal that was my favorite the doors opened and the landing gear worked and the wings folded up. I would spend hours playing with those toys and looked forward to any chance I had to dig them out.      

   My favorite thing to do at the farm was working in the Dairy barn and watching the milking machines pumping the milk from the cows and watching it go up in the tube that led to the huge holding tank. A large tanker truck would come and pump all that milk out and that was interesting to see for me as a kid. The cows seemed to know what order to come in the barn and always a leader cow who was like the queen bee of the heard. Some cows would come in and not be milked and when I asked why I was told they had an infection or some other reason they could not be milked. I was in total awe of the whole operation and never missed a chance to hang out with who ever was doing the milking when it came time to milk.

   Some times other cousins would be there for Thanksgiving but most of the time it was just my Dad Me and my Sisters so I was kind of on my own being that my sisters were all older than me. My Mom stayed at home to watch the animals on our small farm and I think also to have some alone time for herself sneaky Mom real sneaky LOL. When the other Cousins were there I would have someone to ride horses with and go off exploring in the woods and farm fields and often getting into some sort of trouble . As I got older we visited less and less and in my teen years we stopped going down to visit all together. There is not a Thanksgiving that goes by that I do not have memories of those times spent on that farm. 

It Is Said You Should Never Assume

   Did you know me? Do you know me? you only know what I want you to know, you only see of me what I want you to see. There is so much more to me than the face I wear or the shell called a body I occupy. There are thoughts and feelings I have never shared with any other living being some are so dark that you may think me insane if I was to blurt them out. I am for the most part very open and will tell people how I feel or think if they ask me or I feel they really need to know. I share my life stories not to ask for pity for the things I have gone through in my life but for the purpose of letting others know we all have pain and we all stumble along the way. Maybe just maybe my story is read by someone who has been through something similar or even worse in many cases. Maybe my story will let them know they are not alone or a strange outcast because of the things that have happened in their life or the feelings they are having. We all have things in our past that may not be so called proper conversation in polite society but I feel that many have been silent for far to long and in doing so are causing major damage to their inner peace and that of others. 

   I once was very guarded with my life experiences and would never dream of sharing them with one person let alone spilling them to anyone who took the time to read them. I have spent so much time and effort in my past trying to appease others and respect their feelings but in the process never demanded the same in return. I have often in the past let other peoples problems and feelings rule the way I lived my life. Living to only please others is no way to live and along the way I lost myself and allowed my dreams of life to fall to the wayside. I have learned that I must make me happy, and no one person or thing can do that for me it is my responsibility to do that for my own well being.

   Do not get me wrong If I can help another person I will do so but I have also learned that they need to help them selves and I alone can not save them from themselves. I can only give them a hand along the way but in the end it is their choice to sink or swim. This sounds harsh but most of you know I speak the truth and almost all of us have tried to help someone and are left feeling lost when the person just keeps sinking. Often my kind of help was only enabling that person to continue on a path of going nowhere and blaming the world for their demise. I once wanted or needed to lay the blame for my problems on someone else and I found it was easier than taking responsibility for them and owning them. I did not realize that by blaming others for my mistakes and shortcomings I was doing damage to myself and in effect holding myself and my life in a sort of limbo.  Once I learned and am still learning that fact and started owning my life and all the things I have done in it and working to correct what I can, things seemed to run much smoother for me. Holding anger or hatred for those who had wronged me in the past only served to make my life and my path harder than it needed to be. Yes I still hold grudges and have anger because after all I am human and in no way perfect but I am working to let those things go. Those that will tell you that their life is perfect are either robots or fooling themselves life is not perfect and would be a big snore if it was. The highs and the lows in life let us know we are alive, think of it this way if a heart monitor has a flat line that means your are done so how can we expect life to be a steady line and never fluctuating?  

   My family and friends are often shocked by the fact I speak freely about my feelings or my addictions and my many many short comings and they act as if I should never speak of such things. I guess I am shocked that those truths shock them and their reaction in the past made me feel like a was a weirdo and that I was the only one who felt this way or had done such things. We as a society have chosen to keep things secrets like Rape,Molestation,Drug use, and many other problems in society and in doing so have allowed many of these things to keep happening in the background unseen and unspoken about. Opening lines of communication for victims of those or other things inflicted on them may help to bring it out in the open and help them deal with those things and feel better in their lives. When you are told not to talk about something it makes you feel as if it is bad or that you are bad for speaking about it so we internalize it and there it sits and eats away at our inner peace, or that was my experience I should say. Some things should be kept to ones self but being to secretive can cause harm in the long run. So yes I put it out there and tell the stories of my life those stories that many others  would fear to talk about but it is to me a way of cleansing and letting go of the things that hold me back. The way I do it may not be for everyone and that is fine but I do think if you do not have some sort of outlet or a way of dealing with life's problems you will sooner or latter explode and when you do it will more often than not be in a very unhealthy destructive manner and harm those around you as well as your self.  

   I do find humor in just about every aspect of life and that has gotten me through some rough times and yes I can often take that humor to far or use it at inappropriate times. I have learned that humor became part of my personality as a defense mechanism and as I did with the drugs used the humor to ward off things I could or would not deal with. Although I would much rather laugh then cry I found sometimes I needed to let myself cry and not try to make a joke and cover my true feelings. There is a place for humor in my life and is a large part of my personality but I am learning to use it correctly and appropriately.  I hate to see others suffer or feel depressed so I lead off with a joke and try to get them out of their funk but I am learning that is not always the best response in every situation some times people need to feel those feelings so they can work through them. So I will still lead with a joke but if I see that is not what they need at the time I can be compassionate and a good listener and let the humor wait for a more appropriate place and time.   

   Anger as a child was a problem for me when I showed it I was chastised or punished and was never taught how to let it out or how to deal with it so I taught myself to hold it all in. This was not good because it would boil and fester until it would erupt and come out in an explosive rage. I would get so mad I would black out and lash out and afterward I would have no memory of what had happened. This was a scary feeling to lose control in that way but I had no clue how to keep it from happening. My Mom would often have to hold me down until I wore myself out. I know now that this was not the best approach to deal with my problem but at the time she felt it was the only way. I would after feel embarrassed and ashamed of my actions but also hated being held down and that anger never left and the holding down would only drain my energy, trying to fight my way free from being held down but the anger was still there.   

   I still have moments when my anger comes out in ways it should not but it is much less often and more controlled than it was in the past. When I stopped using drugs that anger was one of the many things that came back to haunt me being that I had never dealt with it in a healthy manner so as a grownup I would be forced to learn like a child to deal with it.  That was hard when you are grown and you are throwing basically a childish tantrum in front of fellow coworkers or friends and I am sure looking the total idiot to those viewing the meltdown. They would look at me as if I had lost my mind and in a way I had. So that was one more thing to add to the list of things to work on and learn how to control. The list would grow and grow and often feel overwhelming and at times I felt like giving up and going back to the way I had always dealt with life masking my feelings with some drug. I am glad that I was given the mental tools in rehab to see that the past drug use had not gotten me anywhere so going back was not an option I wanted to go forward and not backward.  I have come a long way in this area and for me my higher power was the one thing that made it possible for me to find some inner peace and let some of the built up steam out in healthy ways. I think the reason I loved playing football so much is because it was a legal way to take out all the built up bull shit on another human being. Not that I wanted to hurt anyone else but it felt good to smash into another person as hard as I could and not worry about hurting them or getting any flack for it. I never thought I was any good at football but in later years I was told by more than one backfield player that when they played college ball they missed me blocking for them on the line.

    I see so many younger people taking the same path I had taken in my past and I cringe when I hear them talk about their drug use in such a nonchalant manner. I also know as I did they will have to make their own way and learn their own life lessons all I can do is hold up a caution sign by telling about what it has done to me. I say that and laugh to myself  because I heard the same stories from grown ups as precautionary tails and I still did it my way their stories fell on deaf ears. I think back to those After School Specials that tried to reach kids with the hip music and the hip talk and a life message that made most kids laugh because the hip music or hip talk  was over done or so outdated it was laughable. The stories in those specials were often so trite and over the top it was much like watching a B Horror flick its just so bad but you just can not stop watching. To be fare there where some good ones but one stuck in my head that was so bad with Scott Baio as a teenage who turns to hard drugs I think it was called Stoned the lingo in the movie was over done and the whole thing to me at the time was so unrealistic. I mention all this because although they tried to reach kids with a message the stories and the feelings were written by grownups and maybe unknowingly had interjected their preconceived notions and views about being a young person. The makers of many of those films I often wondered if they had contact with teenagers at all it was as if they just assumed that is how they talked and acted  making the kids in the roles look so unrealistic that the message was lost in translation.

When I speak to a younger person I do not try to be hip < dated word or speak as if I know what they are going through or feeling I just tell them the path I took and how it effected me in my life. It may fall on deaf ears but maybe a few things will sink in and help them to avoid some of the pit falls I experienced. The old saying when I grew up things were blah blah blah is used often but the thing is it is not the time I grew up things have changed and the world is different in so many ways I can not fully know how a person growing up now feels I can only assume based on my own life experiences.