Saturday, November 08, 2003

Welcome / My Life Part I / Dilettante Writer

Welcome to The Non-Adventurous Life of sudrakarma. From now on this will be the place where I post comments on the news of the day, bitch about life & people, or just to dispose of mental debris that would otherwise clog my mind.

Here's a quick synopsis of my life to date: I was born youngest of three to a working-class family that had major issues with alcoholism and drug abuse: Alcoholic, pill-popping mother with artistic inclinations and a passive-aggressive father with no ambitions other than keeping his alcoholic wife relatively quiet. At fourteen I picked up the guitar. At fifteen I followed my brother to a Hare krsna temple to work for a summer (It shaped my worldview - more about this later). At sixteen I discovered peer pressure and various types of intoxication (including sex). I worked as club musician from my late teens and throughout my twenties. I gave up the exitement and glitz of bowling-alley celebrity when I turned thirty and started a family. Since I had little or no job training up to that point other than some dead-end jobs (basically I drank, smoked, screwed around when I should have been finishing college - I dropped out after the second year with an A- average due to depression), I took whatever steady work I could find - it turned out to be maintenance. I've been a maintenance man for eight years now and, though it pays the bills and I've learned so many wonderful and useful things like, how to burn the first three layers of skin off your scalp while attempting to solder a 3/4" copper pipe over your head, behind a water heater and pinned against a wall. That pretty much sums up my joy in becoming a maintenance man instead of, say, a writer.

But I do write. In fact, I'm writing now. I write music reviews for a Michigan-based indie website that an acquaintence and I started three years ago - so you'll be hearing about that too from time to time. Of course, I don't make any money at it. Actually, I never really tried but that gets into fear psychology, self-image, confidence and other issues that may take years and thousands of dollars of therapy to address (or perhaps, just one little 'blog ).

So there it is and here I am and welcome to my non-adventurous, yet highly-analyzed life and pastimes. - Sudrakarma

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