Since I was a boy I have had this nagging sensation that I was different. Something in me had gotten in too deep when I had peered into the void and left me forever changed. I can remember the exact moment that it happened too. I watched my father come home from work unhappy with the cruel pantomime that his life had become. He flopped down on the couch, a slumped ruin of what might have at one time been a strong free spirit. The feeling that overtook me as he pitifully took a hold of the remote control and cracked open a beer waiting for his dinner to be served so he could help me with my homework and shuffle himself off to bed was one that I have a difficult time to describe but even more than a feeling, it was a revelation.



They lie to you from day one. Someone tells you that you can be anything, that you are the commander of your own ship. They drill it into your soft and undeveloped skulls that everyone is special and with that sense of being special comes the sense of entitlement from those that are better than you that will be your undoing. From the minute you are old enough to understand the words the people who are literally breeding you to be complacent little sheep start to teach you that everything is out of your control all the way down to the pitiful excuses for feelings that you feel. It is embedded even in the language that we speak.



“Johnny makes me angry.”



The minute you accept that I am the one making you angry or situation x can truly dictate the way you feel you have already given up a measure of control of your own life.



Moreover they tell you that you can be anything but only if it is something that you are “cut out” to be. The institution of standardized testing does the very thing that human beings in all of their weakness love to do, make people fit into specifically labeled boxes. Sick and sad, sick and sad, sick and sad, all the way down the assembly line.



I can remember thinking something has got to be done here.



That’s when IT woke up. Something deep inside me stirred within the confines of a darkened room and started to breathe. Eyeless and hungry it started to grow.