Staring NEAR the Past…
“I'm mighty proud of where I come from. It's ruined my life, literally, but I'm proud.” Local Charlestown native, The Boston Globe
I know it's been short notice, NoOne, but I suppose I have more to say. If you'll indulge me, I wanna scratch a little further at the scabs of what's fresh in my mind.
OFP has been producing content, and even members of OFP have outside of OFP. In some cases, my colleagues met my colleagues. Ozymandius of OFP runs a show called Rise and Grind, in which he has a meeting with Sammy of NxP. It blew me away a bit, given Ozy met with us right at Corpsemen before then too in a private Discord chat. I had a few meetings and tasks as well to do as far as content creation, so I couldn’t linger.
NXP has been seeing some of my boredom killing hobbies and… they wonder if I want to put more of myself out there… they must not know me very well do they Nemo? I guess maybe they don't, if they did they'd realize I hate encores. I keep telling everyone I don't really know what to do with what I do ( or make ), or say most of the time. But then again no one in the past 6 months knows my real name, much less the real me even; less than that, the me that exists most the time. I guess possibly they should, it should help them get it a bit more.
You see…
As a kid, I was normal in a lot of ways for my environment. I was a Spanish speaking first generation American citizen in Miami, Florida. Nothing odd there. I was raised by my grams - who loved me the most out of her grandkids -, I suppose she doted on me because I was the eldest male of my generation. My uncles were hard men with rough jobs, that made them even more rigid of disposition. They were extremely self-sufficient and could easily cook, clean, and provide for themselves without anyone to help. My mother was a single working woman who went to school while juggling the job and the kid. She eventually met my dad when I was 9, and he and his family took me in as his own.
I was pretty sheltered; as my relative who cared for me couldn’t leave home (or pursue me if I were in trouble), I spent most of my earliest years indoors. When I wasn’t in school I would inhale video games, books, movies and what I would learn later was called anime. Along with comics and an obsession with martial arts and Ninja Turtles, I soon showed an aptitude for memorization and mimicry; my mother would recount watching me act out full movies word for word, with my action figures as the cast.
Things were pretty typical except that despite my jovial nature I possessed an extreme foreboding, uncertain, and over analytic mentality that I locked away in silent obedience. That can prove a valuable skill, or it can catalyze into quite the detrimental quality when a kid has little self esteem. This can be compounded in the young mind of a child, who seeks answers to the world's mysteries. But much to my naive stupidity, I would live under the presumption that I'm part of a country that tries to live up to less than easy ideals. That even if nothing is perfect it was only a matter of time; with modern thinking and technology, by the time I was at my current age we would reach utopia…
But the real problem was when I started to learn just how recent and hypocritical the things I was wrong about believing were. No one is perfect and I wasn’t a harsh critic at first, but more and more truth became caustic. One day, I’ll never forget, my mother went to Blockbuster Video when they still existed. She returned with my older cousin and a movie whos title is unimportant, based on the apartheid era of South African history. It, very much like many other historical events, had a lasting impact on me as to the true capacity of what I did not read in books or learn from school. It shook me in a way I don’t think I can accurately describe; the level of inhumanity in the condition of one’s treatment of another person, was something I’m not sure I could forgive the world for… as egotistical as that might sound. I thought that maybe one day there would be justice, an equanimity that never came to pass.
Ever since then, my age and deluded nature has never ceased to impress me as to what we would stoop to when left to our own devices. The greed, corruption, hypocrisy and utter celebration of people and events in which these things led to success made me realize an obvious truth. But I think that is enough for me for now… have a good one Nemo…
Signed,
Woodward Forest-Lich
