My Road-misguided beginnings

When I was younger I was a lonely child, even among other people.  Like most intelligent, loners I used to read for hours, maybe days at a time, pausing only to take enough naps so that the next day I could do it again.  I learned to love libraries and the books in them.  In military school after lights out, I would hide under the sheets with a book and flashlight, not concerned with the morning or the world outside of the book I was reading.

Responsibility and blindness prevented that.  Responsibility even prevented suicide, although it can be said that you've accomplished everything you’re going to accomplish before you die.  So I thought about it after the oil spill when everything really went to shit.  The pressure would lead to sleepless nights and back pain which will be important to understand later.

I was compelled by my mental disease to secure my identity.  Making money seemed a way to do this.  My nascent writing would later occupy this role for me.  My writing was not yet ready to come out and so the only thing I had was my financial legacy.   

This need to be responsible, or what I thought was responsible, was exacerbated by my programming.  Part of my programming was the need based on the view of my great grandfather, grandfather and father to leave the family a quantum leap richer than the generation before.  My great grandfather had begun this without a financial legacy, but had brought the country out of the old country before everything went to hell, my grandfather grew up in the land of opportunity and began the tradition of putting all his additional money into realestate.  My father continued the tradition by concentrating all of his efforts on real estate.  I went commercial in the same vein.  If not for a series of disasters, this programming would have ensured that I would never live a happy life, I might be happy, but I would not truly live.  

My neurotic compulsion would always keep me keyed genetically to this empty endeavor of amassing wealth rather than to any other, more important feature of life.  It is odd, because the patriarch of the new world came over essentially penniless and settled in the least likely of places and founded a business that can only be described in terms of what it wasn't; an easy life.  I do not know enough about whether he was happy or not, whether he questioned every wrong turn, I suppose in the beginning he could always say, I least I got out of Europe, to a new world, the land of hope, opportunity and last resorts.  I could not escape the financial prison that I had built for myself.  There was no new world for me to escape to.  Or so I thought.

I felt then deep inside, as I feel now.  If I could just fulfill this quantum leap in wealth, then I could go on with my own life.  This I could start living instead of my grandfather, my father, maybe even my great grandfather living my life for me.

The real estate investments were good at first, stucco and palm trees, pools that were more ornamental than functional.  The functional pools would come later, with their own loads of corruption.  The brief success of achieving the quantum leap forward would soon be followed by the exponential leap back.  And for a brief period of time in the middle, I would see a world much bigger than the one I lived in before and after, and while I was with her, I would live in that world.