Take an Interest in your Life

Note: I wrote this after I finished writing this article below. Though it was helpful for me to write this free flowing article it didn't go the way I had originally intended. end note.

Often, we all get bogged down in the monotony of life and lose both faith and hope as a result. So, it is vitally important for all of us to take an interest in our own lives and the lives of those around us if we want to survive well and for others in our lives to survive well also.

I can remember graduating High School and though graduation was wonderful and my parents came to it and I even gave a speech at my graduation, there was also a foreboding for me about graduating High School. Though I was young and tall and strong and handsome and I could always find a girlfriend, even then I knew life was about a lot more than getting, having and keeping a girlfriend. So, I experienced a foreboding regarding graduating High School that I wasn't sure that I would even survive past 25 with then.

In some ways looking back now this was a self fulfilling prophecy for me because I wasn't yet seeing the whole picture yet just like most kids just out of high school. But, I was also very lucky for my era because I wasn't going to get drafted ever into the Army like all my friends because I had had childhood epilepsy which gave me a deferment from the draft unless the U.S. went into an all out war with some other country.

So, both then and now I felt very lucky but also guilty because of all my friends being drafted or having to go to college to get a student deferment so they could stay alive and mentally and physically well then.

So, feeling guilty that I was not dying or going to die or going to get wounded or going to get PTSD like almost everyone on the front lines of the Viet Nam War got was something I had to live with every day. This was about feeling patriotic about being an American whether or not I agreed with the U.S. being in Viet Nam in that war in the first place.

So, this also led to my despondency about life at that time. I knew I was not prepared emotionally for career, or having a family at 18, or 19 or 20 and not even by 21. This made me more and more confused about my life in many ways. On top of this when I first went to college and took a Social Science Course it conflicted with my family's religious training of Creationism and being a natural intuitive made it even more confusing by sensing the belief systems of all the other college students that mostly in this secular college believe in Evolution. This caused me to drop out of college and go to work because I was so upset with this at the time then in Fall of 1966. So, I got a job working nearby in Hollywood at a Travel Publications company that published large books at that time of hotels all over the world because at that time there was no internet. So people all over the world bought these books to know about all these hotels all over the world. I had planned to only work there one semester but my mother needed an operation and my Mom and Dad asked me to work another semester so that put me out of college for one year. So I did this for them since they didn't have health insurance to help them pay for the operation. Now it was Fall of 1967. I was interested in building an ideal female companion as a robot. (Don't ask me why because it is funny to me now). I got the idea from "Star Trek" on TV when this beautiful blonde girl on a planet that Captain Kirk "William Shatner" falls in love with turns out to be just a very sophisticated robot. So, I majored in Computer Data Processing at my college. Doing this got me a job part time almost immediately at the Glendale Board of Education processing IQ tests and other mark sense tests for students throughout Glendale from High School Through college. As I learned to program computers and operate all the different IBM computers based upon punch cards then I became proficient with the IBM 1620 computers and IBM 360s(360s were the main workhorse mainframe computer used in the U.S. back then (because there were no microprocessors yet. They didn't get invented until the 1970s.) So just working with computers meant you were working with millions of dollars of equipment. So windows were not there around mainframes and peripherals because they didn't want them stolen by people who saw them there.

Back to Taking an interest in your life: Though I followed my interests into Logic and computer programming, still something was missing. In the end even though I was logical and loved computer logic and computer programming, still in the end I was also an intuitive and so by going too deep into computers I was just losing myself in a not very good way in the process. Because being an intuitive is about being in the moment and following your instincts and intuition. Otherwise, your intuition and often you being alive goes away. So, I then got a job automating a warehouse with computers while I went to Night School for my college courses. Then finally I got a job working midnight to noon 7 days a week which looking back now was really crazy. But then I was 20 and what did I know?

I bought myself a brand new Camaro (1968) because I was making a lot of money but I couldn't get used to a 12 hour a day graveyard shift and eventually because of it had a minor accident in my Camaro and ruined my front bumper from lack of sleep. Within a couple of weeks of that an Angel Came to me while at work and said to me, "You did all this in Atlantis! You will not be allowed to go down the same path again! You will either quit this job now or you will be fired!"

I was really upset. I knew the angel was right but I was also a proud young man. My computer career had taken off. I was making a lot of money. But I also knew the angel was right. I was Lost!

So, because I couldn't give up my job I eventually got fired because I couldn't get enough sleep to do my job right and I got sick and still kept working anyway, despite what the angel said. When I got fired "Basically for being too proud to quit a job I couldn't do because I couldn't get enough sleep" I was lost because my career just crashed from my young stupidity and I knew it. I had no on to blame but myself. I was crushed by myself and I felt I had let down all my friends and family and I was lost.

This was in early 1969 and I would say from this moment on until my son was born in 1974 I was on the verge of suicide. (What's really amazing is I never thought this through this far before. I always had blamed my being suicidal on breaking up with my girlfriend and having to leave my childhood religion. However, it started with this last computer job in February 1969.

By the way 1969 was the single most crazy insane year in my life. I turned 21 that year. If you ask anyone who was a young adult that year likely they will agree with me. That was a completely nuts year for the world and everyone in it.

Anyway, this article didn't go where I thought it was going to at all, so hopefully you are entertained by it anyway.