I've read the last few entries in your blog and now understand you better. You are a counselor who is in the business of helping people seek out and mitigate their pain. I suppose that is what you are trying to do with me.

My posts are not intended to cause pain, at least I don't believe they are. If people are hurt by them it is their own guilt that is the source of their pain. Anger is the flip side of fear, two Januses on the same head. On debilitates, the other empowers. I have dug deep into my own psyche and discovered this truth first hand and weeded it out.

If you truly want to know about me, here is my life story in a nutshell:

I was born in 1950. My mother was a school teacher until she married at the beginning of the First Great Depression, then she was a full-time housewife. My father was a carpenter and then a milk man, eventually turning his love of poker into a full time profession. Gambling was illegal, but my father was a Mason who went to school with a couple of boys who later became the chief of police and the mayor of a small town in southern California. They let my father open a card room where men could gamble with poker chips since gambling with money was forbidden. My father made a very good living selling and buying poker chips and playing cards. Being a consummate sports fan, he also gave odds and took bets on the side for games. He was a bookie.

I have two older sisters who are now in their eighties. Their lives were substantially different from mine. They were encouraged in school, were members of sororities, went to college in foreign lands, married had kids and lived uneventful suburban lives. We are close. I know they love me and I love them. They have helped me tremendously and I know that without them I would be a street person today.

I was born late in my parent's life. I know I was loved, was the little prince. But my father's fast life caught up to him and he died when I was 9. My mother, who had already raised her daughters couldn't handle the death of my father. She essentially broke down and though I still had all of my material needs taken care of, had very little support from her emotionally.

I resented being sent away to school. I didn't like the structure of it or the fact that I had to learn things like math and reading. I wanted to play outside in the sunshine. In grade 8 I could only read 86 words per minute. Mom paid for a remedial reading program. Even with that I never did very well in school. The angst of going to school gave me radical headaches. If I couldn't talk my mother into letting me stay home, I'd down 5 or 6 aspirin. I'm pretty sure that my deafness comes, at least in part, from that.

I had very little in the way of guidance. I played and slept in my school clothes. I'd sleep until it was time to catch the bus. I seldom brushed my teeth or ate breakfast. I never did homework. Mom gave me a quarter to buy lunch at school. All of this seemed normal to me at the time. I became totally passive.

Mom put me in a marching band to keep me out of trouble. I played the trumpet. I was good at it but it didn't do much for me. The best part of being in the band was that while I wasn't popular in school, I was quite popular in the band. Without that no doubt I'd really be a weirdo.

I was draft age during the Vietnam war. My mother wasn't about to let her beloved husband's only son be killed in that imperialistic farce. She wrote letters, made phone calls and did everything a good citizen could do to prevent my conscription; a totally impotent waste of time. Another of my father's Mesonic friends happened to be a military advisor sent to Vietnam in the early days of the war. I'm pretty sure he was CIA, but nobody ever alluded to that. He suggested we go to Canada. I was 17. My grades sucked, so no student deferrments. At 62 years old she upended her life, pulled up stakes and we moved.

I went to grade 12 in Canada, flunked the first time and dropped out the second. I went to work killing the forest as a logger. Dropping out of school was the best thing I had ever done in my life. I got close to Nature. I felt so free. I'd been interested in Zen since I was 16 and I read as many books on Eastern philosophy and psychology as I could. I was finally starting to learn. That lead me into drugs.

I was 17 the first time I got drunk, 19 the first time I smoked pot. Drugs were hard to find in those early years but I was determined to expand my consciousness. It wasn't about getting "loaded" for me like it was for my friends. It truly was about an inward search for meaning. I probably did LSD, peyote, mescaline, and mushrooms about 60 times before I finally quit. The last few trips I learned nothing new so it was time to move on. I was never interested in heroin, speed or cocaine, though I did do coke a few times in my 20s. It did nothing for me. Coffee had more impact.

Mom always told me that the 20s were the best years of your life, that whatever you did in your 20s you would look back on those years with a particular fondness. Since my father died at 55, his brother at 58, and their father at 52 I decided that retirement was probably not an option for me and so I'd better not squander my youth developing a career I'd never see the end of. Logging paid well, kept me in shape and gave me a couple of months each year to allow me to travel. I probably hitch hiked 10,000 miles in my 20s, went to Mexico several times and Guatemala during the height of it's revolution. I always traveled on 2nd class buses, stayed in cheap hotels or hostels, camped on the beautiful beaches and lived the idyllic life of a vagabond. I discovered that the poorest folk were by far the happiest. Mom was right. Those were the best years of my life. I journaled it all. That's how I learned to write.

I was one of the pioneers in hang gliding in the little town in BC where I lived. It was a rush, frightening and, in those days, very dangerous. I wasn't really an adrenaline junky and, after crashing a few times, decided to quit. By then I was married and had a son. Time to grow up, dammit!

The war was over, mom kept getting pneumonia and so I moved my family back to California. Another son was born. I had no education so was limited in my employment options. I started a landscape maintenance service. I saw the opportunity for expansion, but, lacking ambition worked only enough to get by. I loved my wife and kids but hated being married and all the responsibility. Work was not fulfilling for me. Solar was something new and interested me so I took some courses and became a "solar installer." President Jimmy Carter subsidized solar with tax credits and created an artificial demand. I enjoyed that work and felt I was doing something worthwhile for the world. Then Reagan was elected and his first official act was to remove the solar panels from the White House. The public demand ended with the tax credits for solar. The public only cares about money. The government is only about control. Dead end job.

Computers were just beginning to take off. Someone suggested I get into that. It didn't really interest me but I needed to do something to provide for my family, so I took out a loan and took a technical course to fix computers. Though I had a company car, gas credit card, retirement plan, health, dental, and life insurance, I absolutely hated my job. I fixed grocery store point of sale systems and mini-mainframes. It was a disgusting city life. It all ended when I crashed the software of a newly opened 22 lane grocery store, losing 24 hours worth of sales records. The store had been having problems since it's opening and I had been there every day trying to fix it, so I had a great rapport with the store manager. I told my boss what happened, that it was entirely my fault. I expected to be fired, but after the store manager bragged me up, I got offered a management position at double my salary. But I would have had to move. My kids were in school and I had a mortgage. That just wasn't going to happen so I quit. My wife was devastated. I was ecstatic.

My wife was increasingly unhappy and I thought it was because I couldn't provide well enough for her. 15 years into the marriage she told me that she had been sexually abused by her grandfather for 10 years, from the time she was 4. This admission didn't affect my feelings for her, but it explained a lot of her peculiarities. By then I was a chiropractor.

I had a friend who was a chiropractor. He seemed to have a great lifestyle. He was sort of a Bozo, so I figured if he could do that then so could I. My mother had died and I had a bit of inheritance, so I decided to go back to school. I now consider that a mistake.

I had to do the undergraduate prerequisites and then attend Chiropractic school for 3 years. I aced it all. The school was in Los Angeles, about 130 miles from where I lived. I spent weekends at home but lived in LA 4 nights a week. Inner city Hell. I missed out on much of my children's lives and I regret that. My wife and I drifted apart and we ended up getting divorced.

By the time that shit hit the fan, I had two chiropractic offices and a fitness center. I had no free time and was deeply in debt and my kids were almost old enough to move out. The divorce zeroed me out. After that I sort of drifted. I closed my fitness center because I lost interest and concentrated on my two chiropractic offices.

Chiropractic is, like yours, a profession that deals with other people's pain. In the beginning I had compassion for my patients, wanted them to learn how to better take care of themselves, but it mostly fell on deaf ears and in fact drove some of them away. I found myself not accepting a patient if their attitude was bad. I was still doing rather well, but then the insurance industry began to balk at payments and I'd spend more time doing paperwork than treating patients.

Then I fell out of a tree hanging up a rope swing for my girlfriend's grandson and broke my leg in 5 places.

During my 6 months of recovery 2 other chiropractors moved into my territory. It cost my $16,000 to have my leg fixed. I zeroed out again. I closed one office and limped along with the other. In a firestorm in 2003 my girlfriend's house burned to the ground and she moved in with me. In another firestorm in 2007 my house burned down. I was almost done.

I relocated my office to another location and just as it was getting off the ground, the financial crisis of 2008 hit. Now I was finished.

My youngest son and I had purchased a property in Canada to protect it from logging right before I broke my leg in 2003. He moved up there in 2004 and started a tree service. I moved there in 2009. I couldn't get a decent job and the red tape to get a chiro license was not worth the bother.

I worked as a cook in a restaurant and as a nurseryman selling trees and shrubs until, at 62, I took my social security. I began to build a cabin on my son's property and keep bread on my table by again doing landscape maintenance part time for cash.

I'm 68 years old. I never planned for this and never in my wildest nightmares thought I'd ever be this old. It isn't pretty.

I look back on my life with few personal regrets, though. In retrospect, it was a very interesting journey and I know of no one I whose journey I would have preferred. Maybe the destination, but not the journey.

Now, perhaps you know me better. I was like you at one time, wanting to help people while doing my part to make the world a better place. I'm sure I helped many people, but I see no progress in the world's conditions. The world is a much crueler, sicker, and unfriendly place than when I arrived. People are more deluded and misinformed and their lives unnecessarily complicated and the future looks bleak.

Steemit was my one last stab at trying to educate. I see now that, like every other endeavor to improve people's lives it is a waste of time. I plow too deep. You probably get it, but most people don't. Instead of offering a nice, hot cup of coffee to wake people up, I tend to dump a pot of boiling coffee over their head. I do it in frustration, a last ditch effort before I die.

Young people think that these times are different for them than they were for my generation. That's programmed delusion to keep them on the treadmill. Only life bestows experience and teaches us that the more things change, they more they stay the same.

50 years ago I began to recognize the mistakes of our beliefs and culture. I also began to see what was needed to improve it. I thought people would listen, but they only give lip service to wanting change. What they want is comfort, convenience, status and peace of mind, things that are not only unattainable and worthless but damaging.

I had only one teacher in my life that affected me, a history teacher when I was 16. He wanted his students to learn to think for themselves. He was reviled by his peers and the parents of his students. He eventually lost his tenure and drifted into obscurity.

Thinking for yourself is a treasonous act. He opened my eyes to delusion and deceptions and I used to be grateful but now I'm not so sure that it wasn't a disservice to me. Life would have been more harmonious had I remained blind, remained ignorant and simply drifted with the other flotsam and jetsam of humanity.

Perhaps it is time to stop reaching out and complete my inward journey instead, to see why Mohammad had to go to the mountain and the Buddha to stop striving and sit under the Bodhi tree. All outward manifestations are impermanent and without consequence. There is no salvation for humanity and consciousness itself has no need for it.

Thank you for your interest, Erika.