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Life at 33

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  My birthday was the final breaking point of my first marriage. For some reason I have no recall of. Denise and I had fought the entire day. Around 7P Scott called me and asked what I was doing. Impulsively, I asked him to come pick me up to go to a bar. She was incredulous at the notion that I would actually go without her, and doubled-down on the mental torture. I felt an amazing sense of calm and for the first time in seven years had absolutely no emotions about her. I literally left her with jaw dropped realizing that her hold over me had effectively ended. That evening was of no consequence; I don't remember even drinking to excess. But it signaled the turning point for the rest of my life. I coldly told her the next day that I would be moving out for good as soon as I found an apartment, and that we should get divorced. She held her composure around me, but I saw signs during this transition period that when I was gone she was having her typical emotional breakdowns. Befo...
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Life at 32

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Life at 31

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Introduction

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Artist friend of dad's take on 3 year old me “Life can only be understood backward, and can only be lived forward." This truism has for me been both a source of inspiration, and as well a somewhat constraining force which has at times hampered my writing. I am possessed of the belief, whether correct or not, that constructing text is an act of life-affirmation, of creative forces that seek growth, not regression. Writing to me has been a practice of living forward, and so I have managed to dance around the “backward understanding” in my process. I feel though that these omissions have been virtual dead spots in the texts I have constructed in my body of work. Though I may be speaking of an event, fictional or real, from some point in the past, my description is not fully vested with the authority that actual memory can grant. This is the interweaving between one’s memories and fantasies that is capitalized on by prolific writers such as Steven King. So many of his wor...
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But First, Some Pictorial Background

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18 year old Dad and slightly older Mom My first formal pic Baby Bob being held by Maw-Maw and my Aunt Ellen Nattily attired at 2 Me and my beloved Maw-Maw Ida Bell, at 2 A happy 4 year old
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Life at 5

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When you almost burn down an apartment building, it’s hard to call that a “highlight” of one’s year. Yet in the summer of 1963, that’s what I did and unsurprisingly it remains a vivid memory to this day. No way of knowing what gave me and the other kids who participated the idea; perhaps it was watching the nefarious doings of the bad guys on TV westerns on our black-and-whites, but there was no doubt as to the raw material that made it possible – tumbleweeds blown in from the desert by the Santa Ana winds. And what more perfect place to find those tumbleweeds than in Santa Ana California! I recall being the ringleader, not because of some innate magnetism, but instead because I had the crucial element to "fire up" our enterprise – matches I had stolen from the kitchen. The apartments where my Mom Dad and I lived were constructed as an outer ring of housing with an inner courtyard. It was little effort for the pack of kids I roamed with to go out to the parking lot and corr...
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Life at 6

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The advent of my sixth year coincided with the start of elementary school and our next rental housing move several blocks away to 418 North 6th Street. This house was unusual for several reasons. Though when we lived in it from 1964-66 it operated as a rooming house, originally it was built in the late 1800's as a single-family dwelling; a fine example of Victorian-era architecture. After experiencing the opulence of my grandparent's Newport Beach abode, this once fine mansion seemed but a pale shadow of it's former self. We occupied three rooms in the bottom right quadrant of the house, roughly corresponding to what would have been a parlor, formal dining room and kitchen. The bathroom next to the kitchen could not properly be called ours, since it was shared with the renter across the hall. This could have been a difficult situation to endure, but there was a connection to this particular tenant that made things easier - she was my Aunt, Lorena Miller Overstreet. Actual...
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