My Early Childhood

(I think that I needed something easy to start with and this seems as good as anything?)

I was born a week before my due date because my mother thought that going sailing on choppy Lake Erie would be a good idea for Memorial Day.  I don't really know many specifics, but I was born at exactly 5 PM, which I think is a little cool.  I was conceived a good 8 months and 3 weeks earlier, about a month after my mother started going to college at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania as an art major.  She didn't really get to do a lot of art, being there only a semester.  My uncle told me that my father, who's name is Tim and that is all that I know, looked a lot like a white version of Prince.  I say that they should have figured it all out just from that.

My mother, at that time, was a scared, young 18 year old girl.  Regrettably, I do not have much more than that.  Not from this stage.  My uncle was a boy of 15 and I guess he was pretty excited to become an uncle.  My grandmother and grandfather were a happy, very Christian couple.  My grandmother attended Christian Womens' Club every Wednesday and my grandfather was a respected supervisor at the local G.E. plant.  My great-grandmother, Gigi, having lost her husband 2 years before, was becoming something of a socialite.  And I think they were all thrilled to have me.  It certainly seems that way, based on the home videos.  I guess it was because of me, at the tender age of 2 months, that they bought a VCR and a video camera.  I was destined to be spoiled.

I guess I had pneumonia at the age of two, but who's counting?  No, I have three first memories, and no way to know which was actually first.  In one of them, the family is going out for dinner and I'm the last one out of the house.  My grandmother asks me what time it is and I run back to the VCR.  "Six.  Zero.  Zero," I shout out and am very proud of myself.  So are they.  Second memory, my grandmother and I are at a Rite Aid.  I'm browsing the kid aisle and I find a pair of underwear with my one true love on them, He-Man.  I remember asking my grandmother if we could buy them and she says no....  So I purposely shit my pants so we have to.  Even then.... even then....  The third is picking tulips from the garden for my mother and telling my grandmother that I found them growing on the beach.  I don't even know.

My memory is filled with a lot of those little flashes.  I could list two dozen more, but none of them really seem relevant.  All I do know is that when I was very young, I had a penchant for carrying around baby dolls and this fascination developed into Barbies.  I blame the Barbies bit on always watching soap operas with my grandmother.  Well.... that and the fact that she bought me Barbies in the first place.  I had three Barbies and one Ken.  And, naturally, Ken was sleeping with all of them.  And, naturally, they all found out.  So the three Barbies would concoct a plan to trap Ken and tie him up and then dangle him over a bridge (being a yardstick) and taunt him before plummeting him to his death.  This was when I was 3 or 4.

Oh, and my love of He-Man and the Sword of Destiny that he held aloft to gain fabulous magic powers was slowly replaced by a love of She-Ra.  Girl power, I dunno.

I was raised largely by my grandmother.  My mother spent all of her time working as hard as she can, saving up as much money as possible.  By the time I was 5... and she was 23 (which just fucking ASTOUNDS me), she bought us a large down payment on a house.  We moved out of my grandparents house, which rocked my little world, and into a life of our own.

I think that was pretty hard for her.  Part of me admires that in her, I don't know how I would have done, last year, trying to raise a 5 year old who I didn't know all that well.  We would run out of garbage bags and she would fill the trash with paper shopping bags from Giant Eagle.  Once, we were trying to eat breakfast and she'd forgotten to buy milk, so we tried eating cereal with water.  I refused and she tried anyway.  I remember her breaking down in tears halfway through her bowl.

Those days were pretty intense, but we learned to grow up together and trust each other.  My grandparents still played a very large part of my life.  I'm sure they still played a very large part of hers.  I think back to that time and while it is all still very fuzzy...  it is also fond.

And then she got married.

Thesis Statement.

I certainly want to consider myself to be a writer and by that, I don't mean my profession.  Even though it's what I am.  I like to consider myself as a writer meaning my soul and very existence of being.  Why I think this way, though, I am not quite sure because since high school - when I actually could write frequently - and now - when I know how to technically write - I've only produced a couple of short scripts, maybe a few poems, some pretty decent college papers, and a great deal of whiny blogs where I either exult or bemoan my pathetic existence.  I've had writer's block for a good, oh, let's say six years.  If I actually am a writer, I should be ashamed of myself.

Which leads me to the need of finding a way to cure this writer's block.  Over the past six years, I always ditch whatever I happen to be working on, hoping that a new project will bring forth the flow of inspiration.  It never does.  And I need to find a new tactic.  So, when I stopped to consider what I actually find myself being both passionate and free-flowing about when I do happen to start writing... invariably, it is myself.  Writing blogs about myself, my ideas, my politics, my hopes, dreams, and fears... I have no problems with these.  I've lately found myself being especially more passionate about gay rights.  Maybe now, years later, I'm finally ready to own it.  Maybe I've finally grown and developed enough to understand what I need to be saying and why I need to be saying it and, well, how to say it.  I see injustice in the world and it makes me angry and I feel like I need to fight it.

Hold that thought.  Circle back to the beginning and take the other road now.  I have one hellaciously dramatic life.  The shit that happens... you wouldn't believe.  People I know are constantly commenting on this... I personally believe it's the reason that I don't watch television anymore.  Everything seems boring in comparison.  Take this and meet it up with the first thought, and I'm left with what I see as one option.  I'm hoping it works.  Ideally, this idea will solve a number of my issues.  In the least, it will hopefully help at least one of them.

I'm going to write a memoir.  I know, I know, I'm 24.  What the fuck do I have to write about at 24?  I should be three times this age before I have lived a life worth commenting about...  Except, I don't believe that is true.  I think that I have a certain perspective that is, while not unique in the world, at least warrants listening to.  Growing up gay, Catholic, and with depression has certainly screwed me up for life and why shouldn't other people want to hear about it?  Heh.

I'm setting up this blog as a trial run for this memoir.  I certainly have a lot of memories that I want to write about.  Maybe they will work and maybe they won't and this is what I need all of you for.  Everything I'm going to say in this blog is true (although I will change most names to protect the innocent.... or to protect myself from the guilty).  And at the very least, things are going to be presented as I remember them, which is as close to the truth as I have.  I'll be approaching this entire thing with no-holds-barred.  I'll probably cross at points into potentially embarrassing territory, but I'm willing to deal with that as long as you are.  Just as a warning, though, some of these memories are pretty dark in my head.  I don't know how they will translate out onto paper and I guess we will find out together.  If anything is too dark, though, I will want your feedback on that.  If I really am going to turn this into a memoir, eventually, I don't think it will work if the entire book is too serious and dark.

I know where this is going in my head, so I also need a level of trust from all of you.  I'm not going to present you with this memoir in book format, nor in chronological format.  I'm going to write about whichever memories are strongest to me at any given moment and as a result, you may get bits and pieces of my life, scattered all over.  Just warning.  I really don't know if this can turn into a memoir but I'd like to find out.  At least, the frequency I want to write with can hopefully alleviate my writer's block and, as an added bonus, getting all of these memories out will hopefully be pretty therapeutic.  So, please, join me on this journey if you will.  I don't know if I can do it alone.

You're about to get to know James Walter Gardner Campbell pretty fucking intensely.  And... for that matter.... so am I.