I knew from early on that I had no chance to achieve physical perfection.

It was that same 1950s conception of what you should do, that you should be in with the popular kids. My mom, she didn’t like the fact that you didn’t play organized sports. I liked playing street sports. I enjoyed it, had a lot of fun, but knew that I wasn’t ever going to be as good as the other kids. I had other interests—I was smarter than them so I gravitated to more solitary pursuits, playing with models, army men, was super into history.

My mom thought the reading was fine to a point, but didn’t like that I read so much and especially that I took contrarian views of history—to her credit she did print out The South Will Rise again flyers, as I was an eight-year-old Confederate and was distributing these flyers to other Boys Scouts. She wasn’t a villain. She was saddled with a kid with a fucked up leg and a contrarian view and the father of the kid who knocked you up had mental health issues and this kid of his is obsessed with World War II and the Civil War. She was always disturbed by my views even as a child and my grandmother said I was my grandfather’s revenge on my mother.

My dad was a weirdo, a vey self-taught and self-directed learner and by default, him not having any money and his natural inclination, we only saw each other once a month and that was going to the library. There was never a book where he said, “No, you can’t check that book out.” So I avoided social programming by various such ways. When you’re different from other kids physically, you know it, it’s a head fuck. At that point you are biologically cast away and you’re not going to fit in.

If I hadn’t met my friend Matt, the crazy catholic kid from Highlandtown, when I was ten and hadn’t had Boy Scouts, I’d a been a school shooter or hanged myself. Mister Steve, our troop leader for awhile really took a liking to me and he rebuilt cars and trucks and talked to me about history, a mountain man re-enactor who built his own long rifle. He was such an oasis—and he was one of those weird oasis’ that you have when you are beyond your depths as a kid.

Then he left and they totally feminized that troop and these women took over and turned it into a baseball camp with no camping, with Boy Scout uniforms on.

My mother started beating that college drum after fifth grade, constantly beat this drum that “You are going to go to school, and you’re not going to be like your father”—if she wouldn’t have been [makes pounding sound on table] “dooge” “This is what you are going to do,” this status thing for her, to be like her sisters and her other family. It wasn’t about me it was keeping up with the Jones’. I was young and had a very myopic view of the world and didn’t realize that you could be more than a dumb office schlubb after college, had no idea that I could do something cool. I was no way going to spend all that money over four years to be like the people I hated, do the work they hated and live in the place I lived with them, a place which I hated.

They sat me down—her and the step dad, she was driving it—when I was 17-18 and said, “Oh God, you’re going to be like your dad. Your 18 and have no car,” and since I didn’t tell them about my girlfriends and had this menial job and they thought I was some kind of sexual deviant and I was depressed, coming into manhood and looking at this bitch system that I hated with no possible aspiration of the masculine kind.

They dragged me into this shrink office and the shrink gave me a ten question questionnaire sponsored by Pfiᴢer, asking you questions basically all slanted into making you sound depressed. It was so strongly worded that you couldn’t honestly answer a question without sounding like you were depressed. The doctor was some fucking Sikh—culturally and otherwise how is he going to relate to me? They gave me a prescription for Paxil and I took it and threw it into the trash can. She was pissed off when I told her I wasn’t going to take it and she was indignant.

This was at the end point of living with them, still in high school. I went to Perry Hall, graduated Perry Hall. I was saved from the indoctrination and they never got my soul.

The key thing that got me out from under their roof, from that toxic fucking negation matrix, was the crazy bitches, Sansha and Murilia. I was couch surfing, beaten down, depressed, half living with her, half not. She was already living on her own at sixteen. The first time I met her she was a wearing Ramones t-shirt and hanging up a Confederate flag in her room. Her mom was a fuckup and her dad died when she was young.

If I hadn’t had certain people and certain outs—I just got lucky. As crazy as she was that was one of the few voices that was saying , “You can make things better for yourself,” The school indoctrination had so mentally corralled me and the fact that I had dipshit parents prevented me from seeing the indoctrination that had limited my world view. A month later, living on couches though I was, I was no longer depressed.

The whole punk rock scene which I had been into since age 13—even the skinhead stuff—helped me connect with people who were outside of the matrix. As an adult I see that scene now—and others like it—as a socially prescribed way that you can’t feel like a rebel but still stay ensnared by the system. For all the negative stuff—drugs for instance—in the punk rock and skinhead scene you actually met people who read books and traveled and had adventures, rather than sitting on the coach after sitting in your cubicle and nodding yes to the TV. It was good to find yourself in fucked up situations and living life and finding something.

It sounds kind of hokey, but it was really like that.

For myself, I was always attracted to history and there was a thing about punk rock that was highly derivative of older styles, so even with that—that appeal to me—was a kind of reaching back to an older time. This was one of my biggest mental rebellions, living in the past in a weird way because the present seemed so fucking terrible. The past was not great, you find that out reading history, but at least it made sense, not this, this rainbow of lies we were born into.

Moral Minority Survival at the End of Caucasian Time Paperback