The foundation of my philosophy.

So anyway, I think like three people read this blog. I've done nothing to market it to increase hits and not only that- I keep deleting it in fits of annoyance and frustration. I am a little obstreperous, I admit.

So anyway I think it all started with Jack London and the "call of the Wild" That book had a huge impression on me at a very impressionable time in my life. Another influential book was "One flew over the Cuckoo's nest" By Ken Kesey. I read these books as a child struggling to survive in public school, and not having things go very well, being diagnosed with ADD and being tested poked, prodded and examined by school psychologists.

There is a theme that ties these two books together. Both are very philosophical books. One interesting thing to note is that London was strongly influenced by Nietzsche. So I actually was influenced by Nietzsche as filtered through the mind of, the Autodidact, adventurer, former pirate cum socialist, Jack London.

Kesey's book was narrated by an Indian in a mental institution and was about an Freewheeling Irish gambler and bare knuckle brawler who was lobotomized, and basically destroyed by this thing called "the combine" which, I saw then even as a young child, represented Society. I got the concept that society is this big machine that demands submission and conformity and that it operates through violence.

So this idea was born into my young, mind, perhaps unconsciously at first, that I was in a sense a free and wild animal, fallen into the hands of a great machine that was seeking to mold in a way that it saw fit. I knew that if this machine were to be successful, part of me, the better part of me, would have to be killed or at least horribly maimed. It was a machine that was seeking to commit a horrible crime against me.

I also began to fantasize that I was really not a white kid but an indian. Perhaps my Dad planted that seed in my mind. He once mentioned to me that we had some Indian blood from way back. I fantasized that My soul was indian, I didn't put it in those exact words, but I imagined that somehow it had turned out that outwardly I was Caucasian but inwardly Native American.

Also at this time I developed a Messianic complex. I believed I was the second coming of Christ, only this time, instead of the Jews, I was coming to redeem the Indians. I felt that that was my mission in life.

These are ideas I had when I was between 10 to 12 years old.

So these were seeds planted deeply into my psyche. I also will add, however, that I don't believe myself to be a Tabula Rasa. Because first of all, if I were, I would have imbibed all the shit the Public school system was trying to feed me. I was a precocious child, I had a certian intellectual temperament, early on and these were a couple authors, whose writings deeply resonated with me. I found them to be kindred spirits.

As a child I was always drawn to exploring woods and swamps and catching turtles,frogs and cray fish and grass hoppers and other wild animal I was able to observe and examine. One summer I raised an orphaned rabbit and released it into the wild. I also loved dogs.

When I was a kid, in the late 70's early 80's there were no leash laws, or if they were they weren't strictly enforced, so there always seemed to be stray dogs around, not really strays, but peoples pets that were allowed to roam free. So I came into the habit of observing these dogs and imagining which ones would be best able to go North like Buck and eventually revert to the wild and become a wolf again. Most dogs I observed fell short in this regard.

I became fascinated by wolves and read everything on them I could find in my local and school libraries. I felt had a deeply spiritual connection with them.

I also at some early point in my childhood withdrew into my sketchbooks. I was constantly drawing. I never drew cars or battleships, but only wild animals, especially large predators, such as big cats, wolves, grizzly bears, etc. The people I portrayed were pirates, vikings, barbarians and as I reached puberty naked women with large breasts. Those were my chief areas of interest. I was never interested in anything related to machines or man made inventions. I also became fascinated, like many boys my Age with Conan the Barbarian as portrayed on cover Art by Frank Frazetta, though I never read the books themselves.

I should also mention one other book, "Early Man" by time life books. I was deeply effected by the artist portrayals of the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnon. They were beautiful relistic paintings, containing scenes of daily life with spectacular wild vistas containing large Megafauna of the Pleistocene. I believed that these paintings, stirred within my Fossil of Ancestral memories, from when I lived during those times.