My Early Years

I have been a loner all my life. While I was growing up I had 2 best friends who did not consider me to their best friend. One of them used me heavily and the other ignored me altogether.

My mother used the theory of tough love because that is all she knew. She was never kind to anyone, let alone anyone in the family. It just wasn’t in her to be civil. My father on the other hand was a push over and so nice it hurt. He is still going strong in his nineties. He was, however, cheap beyond belief so my mother divorced him after 25 years of fighting with him every day. My mother turned me off so badly when I was eight years old that I almost did not recover. She turned me on to the phrase look, but don’t touch and I took it to an extreme and did not touch anyone for over 24 years after that. To say I was overly sensitive was an understatement. I was and still not outgoing at all. I am an outright introvert. I live in my mind and always have.

I am the son of a granite man. I grew up in a family business that I assumed I was going to take over. I loved the wholesale monument business and still do today, but this was not enough to hold onto the business, as my father kept on socking away funds for retirement. We operated on a very small profit margin. I saw the writing on the wall and went to college and got an engineering degree along with an accounting major while I worked at granite. As predicted, my father sold his business for scrap when he was old enough to retire and I went into engineering. One of my younger brothers kept the quarry open and sold blocks. My other younger brother became an accountant. We all went to the service during the Vietnam War period. I tried to commit suicide from sheer boredom and got out on a medical.

I was very proud of being a good religious person until I went to my first adult sermon. I never went back. I became an Objectivist under the Ayn Rand philosophy until I found that no one could actually live like an Objectivist should. I was and still am very anti-social, but I did search out and marry another Objectivist. She is completely independent of me and we get along famously. I used to be good looking and fairly bright so I would spend all my time predicting what the world would do and building my ego up. I realized real soon that no one cared about my solutions or anything else I had to say so I retreated into myself.

As an engineer, I worked for DOE as a contractor. I retired form there early convinced I could make a decent living at the stock market. I started a wholesale monument firm and began cutting stone when I retired from DOE. I did okay, but I began to get very bored with it all and so I went back to work at an Air Force base using my engineering and accounting skills. I am there today, cutting stone on the weekends with my brother.