@mysteryman,
mysteryman wrote:
What havent you done?
You claim tohave been a minister, you claim to have been a field laborer, you claim to be a singer, etc.
As young as you are, how have you had time to do everything you claim to have done?
I am 51 years old though I am lucky I have not aged much. All of my life looking younger has been an impediment. Sometimes I feel old and I live with a lot of chronic pain which can make me quite a bit irritable.
I am a singer/songwriter/music artist and was a music artist before I was ordained as a minister. At 12 years old I had already taken organ, piano and guitar lessons and was an accomplished singer. I knew at 12 yo that music was exactly what I wanted to do. I was accomplished as a performer then and actually my voice has not changed much since then. I also played 1st clarinet at high school in a band for over 5 years.
I could play a number of songs at 12 yo (mostly on the guitar), actually quite a large repertoire of four/five and six chord songs. My parents let me run wild where I lived. I would just leave and come back a couple days later with my acoustic guitar in hand. I bought that guitar with my blueberry money. My mother insisted that I buy it myself, she worried terribly when I stayed out. We were always close.
It was a Yamaha guitar. I carried and played my guitar everywhere I went. In Maine in the 70s that meant a lot of cool places to play.
My parents had a large garden I was elected to weed, till and toss rocks. I also had to build large rock walls (my dad was a Shriner) and mow a lawn with a gas powered push mower that took me two full days straight to mow.
At 12 years old or a bit younger was when I started a job at the blueberry barons raking blueberries. I got around child labor laws in Maine. We worked from sunrise till 5 or 6 at night for two months starting around August and going 'til the first frost. Stooping all day in the hot sun with heat sweltering off the fields and me with a couple gallon jugs of frozen water . I blueberried for two months per year and I did this nearly every year for 20 years.
I also used to lobster fish, my dad had lobster traps and we would also fish for large cod and haddock, flounder and whatever else we could up pull up with a hook and bait. The whole floor of the boat would be full of fish and we would cut it all up and freeze it for our family.
At 17 yo I had my own rock bands and played dances with hundreds of people partying.
I was a missionary for a year...
I was also a dishwasher in restaurants for 8 0r 9 years then a short order cook for about 3 years. This is typical of the life of any struggling music artist.
I framed art in Dallas Texas for the son of the richest man in Dallas who at the time owned South-fork Ranch (His son may still own it). I framed forty-thousand dollar pieces of art for him, famed art for National Geographic, I framed the art that is hanging in the Mobile building in Houston and a large skyscraper in Dallas . I was 19 years old at the time.
I also sold computers at Sears and earned 50 thousand a year and I sometimes repair computers, I can repair/rebuild "any" PC computer. I am also "highly" proficient in most multimedia software.
I have also had a recording studio for over 25 years and I have sung out professionally in bars for numerous years. I have sung in hundreds of places and had standing ovations in universities, and schools of over 500 people several times. Just me and my guitar. I also attended college and my first semester had a 3.5 GPA. I also went to private schools. I left college because I was pulled directly into the tech industry.
I raised 4 children that were not mine for 20 years of which I am very proud. I pretty much had to put off my music career because of the children but I was able to work on it on the side.
They grew up and finally learned to take care of themselves. I am still in touch with them almost every day but they live their own lives. Each of them are successful in their own way (and none of them turned out gay like me).
All of them have children, fairly large families. I am so proud of them and I know they really appreciate what I did for them.
Cooking for four children, doing their laundry and also taking care of an estate. Driving them to school and buying that special 75 dollar pair of cheer-leading sneakers that all the other girls have.
I have written hundreds of songs and all of them have music also. Around a hundred I have recorded and 50 of them I have online. The rest of them the music is only in my head. When I am gone no one will ever know what melody the words went to.
I lived homeless in my van in a city for two years, all my things were in storage.
I also have music videos online that I edit. They are like stories each one of them.
They are music videos or even operettas. I take classic Hollywood movies, chop them all up, edit and and fit them to classic pop songs and try and tell the story at the same time. Over 60 of them are online at Youtube. Some of the videos took me hours to make, some of them took me days and some even took me a year of periodically collecting the media for the video. Each video came to me as a vivid inspiration and expression.
When I was 18 years old was when I started "studying" the Bible on my own in a concerted effort. I studied the Bible methodically for about 10 years and was ordained at the end of that period. I figured I knew so much that I needed to be ordained. I did not need to be ordained to facilitate anything I wanted to do in my life at the time.
About 5 years ago I became and agnostic. Around that time I switched from the Republican to the Democratic party. This occurred the same day the Tea Party showed up in the city where I live to rally on the streets with their vulgar signs.
I currently work in my modest music studio and occasionally fix computers and give of my technical services when I can.
I write "blogs" (on A2K) mostly have about 50 thousand fans in my social networks. My music has fans and I let fans hear my songs for free, there is not much incentive for them to buy them.
I worked as a cashier in a busy convenience store at in a large city at night for about a year or more. A robber came in with a shotgun, at the right moment I grabbed the gun out of his hands, picked him right up, kicked the front door open and threw him and the gun out into the parking lot.
The next day I was written up in the local Portland Press Herald newspaper as a hero.
I also currently and sometimes play guitar as a street musician. I love playing guitar for people. The number one thing that I am is probably a singer, secondly, a songwriter. I kinda wish they were reversed but I was a singer long before I was a songwriter. Recording new music and networking with fans takes up most of my time.
As you all know I became quite outspoken in politics. I am connected directly with "thousands" of newspapers and media outlets online.
I was in my mid thirties before I ever wondered the difference between Democrat and Republican.
My best subjects in high school were Geometry and English I still remember all of my prepositions and I used to have all of my Euclidean assumptions, postulates, corollaries, axioms and theorems memorized.
I moved from one school to another and in both schools (one of them a private school) I had A+'s in geometry and the teacher would not let me solve the proofs until every student had had a chance to try first. When they would all get boggled I would go up and draw my proof lines on the chalk board and number my statements and use my memorized reasons. I never found a proof that I could not figure out the reasons to solve it.
It makes me feel sometimes like I can solve anything...
