Week 17HJ (Hero’s Journey)

I am going to tell you a story.  It is my hero’s journey.  It is me, returning to that which I was meant to be, and at some points in my life, while a child and at sporadic times throughout my existence, it bursts through the cement and did its thing.

I am a creative force of nature.  That may sound arrogant, but I don’t care.  When I choose to do something, I do it, and even in my line of work, which has most always been on the mechanical fields of some sort, it includes a mass amount of hands on creativity and building/engineering.  There is a lot of conceptual visualization in this brain, often lost on others until they see the final product come to its fruition.  I can see an image of something in my head, and then I can build it.  I turn ideas into things.  Often this is done deductively, not inductively.  I build things and craft custom things (boat work/fiberglass/structural/bodywork/custom paint jobs/custom chopper work/etc.) deductively.  I write music and songs inductively.  Those things kind of grow on their own, and just need a little push here and there until they become a finished product.  The video documentary work I do, which is an intrinsic central ideal of my DMP, is done with a mix of both, but I’d say around 70 percent deductively.  But back to the journey, and the possibly perception of arrogance.

I thought I learned to play chess at the age of 5.  I was wrong.  About a decade ago, my mother corrected me on that.  It was 3.  And I beat adults.  A lot.  As in, most of the time, and it was getting hard to find good opponents.  By the time I was in about 5th grade, I had read the entire volumes of the encyclopedia Britannica.  I was ravenous, but not just for knowledge, it was actually for escape.

I was raised into a cult.  I never knew anything else, and on top of that, my father was a physically abusive tyrant who expressed his identity to me through acts of terror and lots of other things that I need not go into detail here.  But every kind of abuse you can think of was for me at least a weekly experience, so safety was found outside of the home.  That is one of the biggest reasons why I am dedicated to this program.  I’ve been through lots of therapy and counseling.  But for whatever reason, they aren’t too good at the whole reprogramming the identity that the subconscious hangs on to as a blueprint.  And, as we learned, the higher the emotional charge, the deeper the implant of experience.  I am becoming what I was born to be, not nurtured to be, but born to be faster and with less dead weight through the MKE process.  And we will get to that.  As a by product of this, I am feeling the formative perceptions slip aside.  They will never disappear, once subby has known something, it will always know it.  Years ago I came up with my own system, and called it suppression and replacement.  Knowing that focus is key, and you cannot forget something, what you can do is focus on something else.  Don’t fight evil, turn from it.  It exists, it is there, and you are powerless to control it.  But you are powerful to set that thought aside and think of something else.  Whatever you want.  I worked this process, but I worked it in reaction to my environment and the necessities that my past had drilled in to me.  I never wanted to feel vulnerable ever again.  So I became the best at fighting in an illegal fighting circuit.  I even mastered the spiritual aspect of it, and found as a process for improvement, that in weakness there is strength.  May sound contradictory, but we can only grow stronger in the areas we accept as weaknesses.  The worst part about our ego is the idea that we can think we know something.  As soon as that happens, we really are plain out retarded.  If you are offended by that word, do your work and look it up.  Big difference between being born with a condition and being born without a condition but choosing to be stupid.  That’s the red in me talking.  I’m telling my hero’s journey, I am going to read yours, and you will tell yours the way that only you can, and I will love it and love you for it.

So I suppressed everything else except my double life of a good little cult follower during the week and a life of violence every saturday night for at least two years.   During my working days, I worked on my breathing exercises, opening and closing the energy gates, contracting and expanding the diaphragm and holding my breath.  I visualized activities constantly, ran up and down bluffs that had no trails for exercise, and morphed into a binary thing.  No expression, no emotion, just a meat suit meant for one thing- to never feel physically vulnerable ever again.  No matter what.  But it, like so many other things, was not what I was meant to be.  And I am okay with that, because people like that are disturbed individuals who belong in special forces and other weird occupations that have short life expectancy’s.  They are not good for society as a whole.  I know this because I was this.  But something kept popping up, and I will tell you about that now.

I remember when I was eight and in third grade.  I had a teacher named Tad Voss.  This was a man among men, a real scholar, poet, woodworker, creative genius and inspiration to many.  Not so much to me, as I didn’t need inspiration to be creative and build things.  Anyway, one day during quiet time, he heard a constant repetitive sound that he couldn’t place.  When he finally found out what it was, he was overjoyed.  See, I had gotten bored.  I realize now that a lot of it has to do with social programming and conditioning men to be gender neutral, but at least back then we still had an hour recess and tall swings we could break our legs on.  The absolute worst thing you can make boys do is sit still for 8 hours a day.  Society, I hate you for that.  But you’ve got yours coming, there are less intelligent but far more masculine cultures ready to take over for your sins.   Not my problem now, my problem then was sheer unadulterated boredom.  Holy crap did I get bored easy.  Take a kid who gets good at chess at three and then force his ass to sit and read dick and jane and see how he feels about you later in life..  Anyway, this noise Tad was hearing..  I had taken some construction paper and cut out a silhouette of a car about 4 inches long and an inch and a half tall.  Mind you, this was back when paper was thick and could cut you and half the class  down if you made a good paper airplane out of it.  Construction paper was no joke, and I am sure the homeless people liked it back then better than the flimsy shit they produce for kids these days.  Anyway, we also had the pleasure of sticking ourselves with pins when we wanted, so I grabbed a crayon, took that wrapper off of it, cut about a quarter inch off of it, and did this four times to make myself some wheels (I could do that with the non-safety fiskars of the times) then shoved the crayons on to the pins and used the pins like axles for the crayon wheels- the pins being stuck through the car cutout and the other crayon wheels stuck to the other side of the pins.  It was brilliant.  It rolled great.  If you ever remember a good crayola crayon, you may recall that the very center of it was a tiny bit softer than the rest.  So the pins kind of self-aligned, and when set together close to the car section, it held the car section of construction paper upright.  Within 5 minutes, all the kids around me had built them too, and we were racing them.

Tad took this opportunity to get the whole class involved, and we actually spent almost an hour a day for a week engineering pin cars.  This led to an all out hot wheels and matchbox event the next week including tracks and all.  It was fun.  It was engaging.  it was living.

Tad told me something I never forgot.  Even in the pit, bashing another man’s face into a swim ladder.  He told me I was the boy who could create something out of nothing, and to keep being creative.  As I recall this now,  it brings tears to my eye.  I’d like to say eyes, but since my brain surgery my right eye hasn’t shed tears yet.  I believe it will someday though, so I will keep remembering these things, and when I finally shed a teat from my right eye, I am going to cry and cry and cry until snot covers my shirt.  Be glad its not your shirt, I am big enough and dangerous enough to take it from you.  But I won’t.  In fact, these days, I’d like to buy you a shirt and a coffee.  If you don’t like coffee I will find out what you do like and get you that.  Or I can paint you some abstract art.  I do more of that now too.  But I am off topic.  I cried right now because I betrayed what I was meant to be, but knew instinctively that I was supposed to be creating, not destroying.  i used excuses, all that bs, and should have known that while I lived in Northfield MN and started teaching my style and way of self-defense/martial arts, it was my soul attempting to right itself and do what I was meant to do.  Create and share what I create.  I had created a free form martial art style, and was sharing it.  Not the best use of my time, but I did gain some lifelong friends as a result. Plus I got to break people when my students invited me to an outdoor music festival where fights broke out all the time.  It’s like giving a honey badger a free ticket to a bee hive.  But  it’s not what I was meant to be doing.

I was very intuitive, and still am.  When I was around 9 or 10, my father brought me out to some random extended relative who did his own reloading.  I was told that the metal he was melting down was lead, and that was it.  I felt the ingots prior to them being melted for shaping, and promptly told him there was something else in  there.  At least three something else’s in there.  My dad’s a dick, by the way, and I have nothing to do with him.  I cut him out of my life shortly before I got excommunicated from the cult for good reason.  Anyway, about 4 years after the reloading intuition and being told nothing about it, I was installing some cam bearings for an engine my dad was rebuilding.  The cam bearing installation rental tool failed to come with instructions and my father was at wits end as he could not figure it out.  He went inside, I messed with it and a half hour later had them installed, and correctly.  I had never done that before.  He promptly decided I was too smart for my own good and gave me a good beating for it.  Shortly thereafter he mentioned that the guy who was doing the reloading mentioned that there had been lots of people who asked about the ingots.  His pat reply to everyone including me when queried about their contents was simply lead.  Out of all of them, I was the only one to recognize that there was something else there, and to also get right how many other metals were included in the mix.  Would have been nice to know that at the time, that someone had recognized aptitude and given me a compliment, but hey, my dad’s a dick.  Go figure.

My name is Orren Marshall.  I create things, and this burning desire to create things has been a part of me since I was born.  When I went to Mexico I used the beach as my canvas and I drew godzilla in the sand holding a flower telling everyone to take the flower.  The next evening it was a disco rollerskater with a boombox and bell bottom pants.  After that it was a Harley rider headed into the ocean.  I got standing ovations from people in the hotels above floor 5, as they were so big you kinda had to be up that high to see the whole picture.  These took hours.  I loved every second of it.  I can’t go through life without creating.

All the bullshit, all the abuse, all the fighting, all the drag racing and high speed car junk, motocross, adrenaline rush junkie type stuff- all of it is incorporated into my DMP now with the creative life at the very pinnacle of my existence.   My second camera guy is also my marketing guru, and he is willing to help on a dime with my projects and why?  Cause he is in the lower rankings of MMA here in MN.  He doesn’t look at any of my artsy stuff lightly, and is all in to help with all his marketing talents because he knows I can beat the shit out of anyone.  How weird is that..

My day job is infinitely flexible thanks to my history in fabrication skills and such with custom projects.  I am sure with a simple request, I could get access to Jay Leno’s garage, as my employer rubs shoudlers with the guy.

This is the hero’s journey.  This is my hero’s journey.  Even the dumbest sidetracking has somehow and is somehow serving a purpose with my ultimate purpose and coming full circle with my creative calling.  I see doors opening, not because of the project itself, sometimes, but because I can relate to some of the gatekeepers in ways that are pretty unique.  Being excommunicated from a cult is kind of a rare experience, and then becoming an ordained minister to perform weddings for your own DJ company raises more glasses than it does eyebrows.

Point is, and there is a lesson to everything as I return happy and whole and powerful and harmonious full circle to my center, my reason for existence- for a while I thought all the bullshit I went through and especially all the dumb stuff I did to myself along the way had no reason for existence within my main life’s reason for being.  Wrong.  I’m forgiven.  You’re forgiven.  I don’t know when, but every thing you did and every thing someone else did to you is going to be necessary, but only when you accept your calling.  Until then its all chaos and toilet paper.

This was long.  Good, I’m glad.  It makes sure that only people who can read and have some discipline will get to know me.  Those who skip over it, well, I won’t skip over you, but you will certainly be hearing about me in the future.  And I hope to all creation that I will hear about every one of you through all sorts of channels.  Because this is life.  And it is pretty freaking awesome.