WelcomeMy (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) missed chances in my life
I can count all my missed chances in my life lierally on one hand: 5 fingers. By a missed chance I mean something I feel I could realistically tried without severe risk of just being roadkill – things I could have done differently without credibly risking ending up less in life than the little I had. I did not want to be nailed to a cross. I did not want to have no human companionship whatever confinement until I died. Have I been clear about the stakes here? All my life I have lived in terror of abandonment, penury, you name it I credibly feared it. Starting with mother bitch. It wasnot her fault that she was what she was: my parents were born in the loser (typo: working...) class in The United States of America and that made them what they were: It's all the fault of the invisible hand without a mind, much less a soul. But that did not help me not suffer from it. As aothe sad person, my sometime comptuer programming manager, Doug Schaff said:
"They put me off at the wrong stop when I was born." (Doug Schaff)
Herewith the 5 items. The key to each of them is that it did not pose a significant downside risk:
- In St. Paul's School for Boys I could hae asked the Athletic Direcctor, Mr. Tullai, if he would help me develop a program to become physically fit without being degraded in the lockewr room etcetera and so forth. Chances of Success? Unknown. Possible gains? To have developed a sense of self-worth in high school. To not feel I was jus a piece of excrement to be jerked around by the adolts. If I had taken initiative improving my body that might have led to me being more assertive in not being abvused by the adolts around me. Who knows how much it could have helped me to havev I felt I had some personal agency in life. Can you undersstand how emoionally impoverished I was? I could not even have the luxury of feeling hopeless; it was that bad.
- To have got up the courage as soon as I detected that disgusting mole on my chest to have dwmanded my parents take me to a doctor to get it hacked out of my little body. Chances of success? Very high. Possible gains? Massive: to have been freed for my life going forward from debilitating OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Syndrome) fears. To have had a much better attention span. To not always be plagues by harpies in my head. Maybe it would have made the difference that I could havae made something of my life even without having any sense of self-worth (per #1, above).
- John Wild at Yale. Without #2 this probably would not have worked because I lacked the capacity cfor concentration to do a doctorate in philosophy, so we will assume I got #2. Professor Wild liked me. He might hav ebeen able to helpe me get a PhD in philosophy in my 20s, and then, as he told me: I would be "a free man".
- Charles Siegel, my first computer programming manager at Uniteed States Fidelity & Guarangy Company (USF&G). He offered me the opportunity to get promoted in the company as fast as I could do the work, and he even would have given me authority ro requisition other people to get the work done as if I wa a anager wen I was jus a trainee. Chances of success? I do not know. I was foolishly fisxated on computer programming as a locid game (Hermann Hesse's "Glass Bead BGame" novel?). Could I have risen to be socially responsible instead? I do not know. Possible gains? I would h=not hav ebeen a low level wage slave all my life but instead of been able to abcome a somehat higher-paid wage slave. Maybe a manager. Would this have made me heppy? No. I wanted to be an inellectual. But better a higher-paid wage-slave than a loser paid wage-slave.
- Maxine Greene. At Teachers College, when I submittted my essay on morality in modern architecture to Professor Greene she wrote in her comments that she would be willing to help me in my life. I did not take her up on the offer due to my lack of feeling of self-worth, my crippling OCD symptoms and other things. Chances for success? I don't know but maybe good. Maybe I could have become a protegee of hers although I am sure she had many and there was only so much of her to go around but she may have "had connections", or maybe with just a little more help I could hae self-propelled myself a lot farther in life? I don't know.
That's all, folks. Now ther ewas another problem: I was always a terribly lonely person. Having been subjected to that gender apartheid day carcel (St. Paul's School for Boys) and having no escape from mother bitch outside school hours, and then being in the last gender apartheid calss at Yale and being very shy and so forth.... I wanted a sex partner who would be highly itelligent and easy on the eyse and I might as well have wanted to be Phoebus Apollo. As one of my maangers in IBM told me: If wishes were horses then beggers would ride."
Involuntary celibacy was a kind of lemma of an even bigger problem: I could not be happy being a hermit.I di not like the people I was stuck with being around but I was also very emotionally needy. I needed the mother I never had. I needed to be physically taken care of. Living on my own in a different city was intractable. I even tried it once and it lasted one week. Had I been able to be a happy hermit, it would not ahve mattered that Idid not have a soul and sex mate, and, of course, one always reads about perosns having chances meeting in books, so it may have been the Christian cliche of "losing your life to gain it". Who knows?
Well, thank you United Staes of America, land of the free and the home of the brave. I tried; I could have done better, but I did try. And the "18-11-46-503" is the number "my country" assigned to me by the government's Selective Service System; I did not relish to become 129 pounds of hamburger meat for Mr. Lewis Blaine Hershey.
TIhe sorrow and the pity, I could have a clear conscience today if I had cried much of every day all of my life but still have got up, gone out into a world that did not satisfy my needs annd gone through the motions of earning a paycheck for doing wage labor, which was not too bad at first but the job kept just getting more difficult and sucking the energy out of me until I lost most of my mind (memory) and did not want to wake up ever again when I went to bed each nite.. Pass the ketshup, please.
