When I was about thirteen, there were some things going on in my home which caused considerable issues. My older sister had moved out. Previously, I had gotten along better with my sister, who is about six years older than me, than my brother who is three years older than me. I was the annoying little brother he didn’t want tagging along when he was with his friends but our mother almost always made him take me anyway. As I had mentioned before, my father was abusive. Around this time, my mother was going through menopause and so the entire family dynamic was completely out of sync. The violence escalated as I was coming into my teen years. Oddly, my father never hit me like he did my brother and sister but I’d been kicked and shoved enough to put the fear in me. My brother and I began playing Dungeons & Dragons as an escape. We also became avid science fiction and fantasy readers. My mother was not happy with the mention of ‘magic’ in these things and with the agreement of my father since we weren’t getting our chores done, my mother burnt our game books while we were at school one day. We weren’t allowed to listen to ‘secular’ music, though there was no introduction of any alternative aside from my mother’s church tapes; however I use to sneak audio cassettes of what I considered popular bands and rock bands that I borrowed from friends at school. I think this is when I began to become a huge music lover. This is also when my brother and I both experimented with drinking alcohol. To make a long story short, the combination of elements was probably enough, along with the constant religious programming and summer youth camps, to make anyone eventually ‘turn to God’ for help. One summer, along with a few of my church friends and cousins, I fulfilled the ‘duty’ of the altar call. I became a Christian and even “spoke in tongues” a few times. What I have to say about that is that speaking in tongues seemed to me to be more of a psychological neurosomatic phenomenon than a spiritual one. I became one of those ‘radical’ Christian teens who didn’t follow with tradition. I felt, even then, that religion was a crutch and that spirituality was what we should try to learn more about. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to approach spiritualism and thus religion was my first attempt. I was the guy in our youth class who always asked the unanswerable questions. My youth pastor encouraged me to find out and let him know the answers when I did. He mostly encouraged me to become a spiritual teacher. One of my church friends was a musician and played in a Christian rock band for another church. I teamed up with him and learnt the basics of running a simple sound board and went with them to various churches for ‘youth ministry’. I felt important during this time and that I’d really “found something”. However, it didn’t take long for reality to set in. During this time, I also met a Christian girl from a family with a more troubled home life than my own and was certain that she was the girl I was going to marry. Being as naïve and ignorant as I was, my father being a career Navy man, I joined the military thinking this was the way to get an education and support a family since my parents could not afford to send me to college. I joined the U.S. Navy, like my father, probably with the hopes of understanding this man who never spoke much about anything personal in his life. Unfortunately, what I found was that all the patriotism I was taught to believe and all the religion would not hold its weight in the ‘real’ world. My fiancé broke up with me, telling me she had a new boyfriend, some middle-eastern guy with oil in his family. This was on Christmas Eve. Needless to say this ruined many Christmas’ to come for many years. I had intended to make our engagement final and had the engagement ring with me when she told me and left me that night at her company Christmas party to leave with the guy. I won’t go into the gory details of my depression and all the thoughts this created within me but I will only say that this event lead me to lose my faith in God and religion. I was a good Christian boy who’d done nothing bad to deserve such horrible events and believed that if God existed he must be one sadistic jerk. Out of anger, I considered becoming a Satanist. I had a roommate on base who was one and I soon read the Satanic Bible. This didn’t seem to suit me well enough and instead I became a Nihilist for several years. I considered Satanists to be Christians of another color. However, the strangeness of my childhood would soon come back to me stronger than ever although during this time The Winds would still come, mostly any time I ever spoke of any of the strange and unexplainable events from my past but sometimes for no apparent reason at all. As usual, there never seemed to be any point to their appearance and no message. All it did was make me a bit more on edge but curious.