February 11, 2007

When I was 8, my family moved from our home state in the midwest to the east coast, where we are now. We moved because of my father's job at the USDA: back home he researched in a university, but he was moved to a government site near a university campus to research under a published scientist in my father's field.

The move was the most scarring experience of my life. Before it, I was a relatively well-adjusted, outgoing kid, then I morphed to a shy, introverted messed-up weirdo in the space of 3 months. I wasn't old enough to understand how many changes moving would put me through: but I had an idea.

Learning that I would be leaving my hometown, my extended family (we were, still are, very closely knit), my friends, and everything I had ever experienced scared me signifigantly. I didn't know it then, but by moving from a small midwestern town, where my parents trusted that I would be ok (until the Matthew Shepard thing), to a more densely populated suburb on the east coast, my parents were giving up a large amount of freedom for my sister and I. In some ways, my town lacked things that others took for granted like large shopping centers. But that is a small price to pay for a lot more freedom. I remember visiting my cousins and being amazed at how they could walk anywhere they wanted, if they told my aunts and uncles first. I had to ask my parents for a ride wherever I wanted to go, and my parents were reluctant to have me go anywhere. The move made them more worried because of the higher crime rate on the east coast.

But it was more than freedom that moving took away. It also robbed me of confidence, replacing it instead with fear. I became intensely germaphobic, and used to wash my hands until they were raw. I developed paranoia, and thought that everyone could hear what I thought (I still, after years of therapy, haven't quite gotten over it).

Moving alienated me from myself and everyone else. It created rifts where there were none before. Saying this, I now pose a question to you all:

What Fucked You Up?

Most of times that come and go from week to week I am busy with various projects and will only sign in for my E2 account when needing to update my good friends here with important details of my life. Unbeknownst to most I will check in but not sign into account to see what good friends of E2 are involved with. This morning I see that the theme of the day is "What fucked you up?" and I felt the need to make special appearance in order to respond to query related to statement made by good friends who launched exploratory committees as to answering this personal question for themselves.

First it is important to say that the answer to the question for me personally is "Nothing really" in that I know I am quite sane and of solidly good mental health. This may confuse average reader of low average intelligence who will be driven by poor education to ask question of good friend Behr as to why he respond to stated query of "What fucked you up?" when it is obvious nothing has "fucked up" Behr and Behr is obviously developed in good way to handle life with much joy and lightness.

The answer to this query made by you to good friend Behr is that Behr has experienced much that could be used as an excuse for what overpaid shrinks and pipe-smoking arseholes with bad suits would say give him reason to be clinically "fucked up" but since Behr is well, the tales I will spin will remind you that a person can handle quite a lot without having any mental or emotional problems later in life.

As I have already told good friends and loyal patriots, your friend Behr grew up in a house next to the Berlin Wall after being born in the Middle East to a father who was an accomplished spy and information smuggler and a mother who was Lebanese and also bearded to some degree as well as being cruel and harsh when times called for it. My father was often not being around, as his job called for much travel, and my mother's hip replacement surgery and unpleasant disposition made travelling with father a bent proposition. So, we stayed in our little cottage adjacent to the Berlin Wall and did the best we could for ourselves, despite having to try to muddle through difficult times in a country that was in much disarray after having been twice in the span of thirty years been the victim of unprovoked attacks by the imperialist nations of England and France.

Mother was never particularly well, and so father arranged for us to move to Baltimore in the growing nation of America, where she had greater access to specialists and people with reasonably good medical training. This did not prove to be enough to help her recover from seeing a photograph of my father in a European smut magazine where he was depicted groping the St. Pauli Girl and even though this was a cardboard stand-up figure of a girl and not a flesh and blood girl, his antics were enough to push my mother over the edge.

My mother, or madre, as she would be called if Santa Anna was able to complete his conquest of the United States, always looked after me due to my not often having a father figure in attendance during formative years. She was very suspicious of girls I would date and would refer to most as deadbeats and floozies and forbid me to see them a second time. When I became engaged to Vera, an exotic dancer who performed respectable oral sex upon reasonable businessmen for extra cash, mother flew into a rage. Not long after the engagement, she viewed the photographs of father with the slutty beer girl and made the horrific decision to dissolve herself in acid.

I was in my twenties at the time and not long out of the empty nest syndrome. I looked in on mother from time to time but also had my own apartment, or flat if you are from imperialist England. It wasn't actually my apartment but rather belonging to a rock musician who let me live there in exchange for looking after his possessions, which mostly consisted of a lot of guitars and other instruments of a musical nature. Vera loved hanging out at the place and I had convinced her it was my place and that I was a rock star. This was before I learned that rock and roll is a hotbed of communism and homosexuality, but eventually I was able to learn these things once I was out of my naive and formative years.

Since website seem to not let me write more than this without giving me an error of type #500 due to length and scope of important revelations Behr post two part exposition at risk of offending sensitive type persons. Go now to read Behr continuing at February 12, 2007.