Chapter 1

Growing up in Texas was both easy and hard. I have one older brother and my parents are still together after thirty seven years of marriage. Apparently we had some run-ins with poverty, but I never noticed. My father was usually away working for the military, or some night job to make ends meet, or eventually medical school. When he was around times were usually filled with energy as he vented his exhausting efforts of work related whatever into some adrenaline packed activity that left most of us just hanging on for the ride. For instance, on the weekends my parents would drive all night Friday to either Colorado or New Mexico. Once there, we would collapse into a cheap hotel and just as soon as we were asleep it was time to get up. Dawn had come and there was snow everywhere. We had landed on a mountain and for the next two days I would be in ski school while my father pushed the limits of his equipment and his body beyond the boundaries of the ski mountain. Sunday night would come and they would check out of the hotel and we would load up into the car and drive all night back to our home in Texas.

When I was very young, my father had a Jeep Wrangler, CJ7 or something like that. Jeep hasn’t changed much, so it probably had a 4 liter inline six cylinder engine. Of course it was four wheel drive and of course he had to test its functionality as often as possible. Well, back then the rear seat belts were just straps with a buckle. There was no auto spring loaded tension adjustment; you had to pull the strap tight by hand. I forget how old I was, but I do know that I was not strong enough to get the strap sufficiently tight about my waist. Nevertheless, we were off on some 4 wheeler’s dream driving up very steep plateaus at insane speeds. Funny thing about a plateau, it doesn’t have a peak like a normal hill or mountain does, so we had to make up the rest along the way while we sailed through the air awaiting touchdown. Oh yeah, remember that seat belt issue I mentioned? Well, it kind of meant that I was free floating just above the back seat during every such jump we took. I look back on that now and wonder how I didn’t slip out of the seat belt entirely and get left behind.

My brother and I are five years apart, so until about the time he reached high school, we got along fairly well. I looked up to my brother and did anything I could to try to gain his acceptance or praise. Naturally, this made me a very gullible child and I ended up doing most of his chores under the pretense that if I did this then he would be my best friend. Well, I am here to tell the world, taking out the garbage for someone does NOT make them your best friend! It is a nice thing to do, and friends should occasionally take out each other’s garbage, but in no way should a friendship ever hinge on the fact that someone has never taken out someone else’s garbage. But I was five, and it was a pretty good lesson to learn anyways, so I consider it water under the bridge.

He and I played G.I. Joes for a while, but even that was stressful. He had the new figures that were able to kill all the older figures that I was allowed to play with, so I started inventing lasers for all my guys. That pretty much ended the G.I. Joe thing, so I started playing with my newly inherited G.I. Joes out in the yard. There were some really big tree roots out there and they made for awesome forts and hideouts and battlefields.

I like to think of this as the point in my life where isolation became prevalent. I didn’t have any friends and my brother’s priorities were shifting. I somehow had to figure out a way to fill the void so I believe that I started to tap into my imagination. Now, this may not be the place for this, but I’m going to share it anyways. At some point after I learned I was bipolar I created a metaphor for my mood cycles. That metaphor was and still is a dragon. The metaphor goes like this: deep within the darkest depths of my mind and imagination resides a dragon. He has no name yet, and I don’t know if he ever will. He spends much of his time sleeping, but he is always aware and his memory is brutal and unerring. While he sleeps, I am free to do as I like, occasionally borrowing strength from his presence or finding comfort in his presence. I suppose I think about him now because during my mood cycles, manic or otherwise, I have been flooded with memories of my past. Self defeating memories, like the one time I bit my dog’s ear and it bit me back. Well, that dog spent the next week boarded up in its dog house and I feel terrible to this day. Some memories you should just be able to let go of, but not me. My dragon keeps track of all the terrible things I did in my life and knows precisely the right time to remind me of them.