My old man stuffed me so full of pride, I was like a turkey at Thanksgiving, or a water balloon, or a sausage or an I-don’t-know-what, but let me tell ya’ -- I was fit to burst with it!  It’s taken me my whole life through to try to work this damned pride out of my system, but I can still feel it in there, coursing through my veins.  I know I’ve still got a long way to go before I’ll manage to flush it completely out of my system, but, believe me, I’m working on it.  It’s like a toxin: I’ve got to get rid of it before I can feel that I’ll be able to really function at 100% of my capacity.

Yeah, I know:  they say that pride’s supposed to be a good thing, that you’ve got to take pride in your work, etcetera, etcetera.  But with my old man, it was different.  It was all about how I, as his son, was better than everyone else, had to expect more of myself than anyone else, and, of course, had to do everything he said in order to maintain this high value.  It was kind of like brain washing, or heavy duty propaganda.  Something like that.  I think that on some level the human brain is hard-wired to respond to this kind of conditioning.  I have no idea why this is, however;   not the faintest.  If you’ve got any ideas, please let me know!

It gives you a totally warped out look on life, and not just your own life, but all life.  Everything that happened in my life I interpreted through this filter, and so I misunderstood it all.

What I want to know now is, is there a right way to look at things, a correct perspective, or is it all just, like, wherever it is you’re coming from, well then, that’s how the world is going to look to you and that’s it.  I know that the more you see the more you can work to alter this “where you’re coming from” viewpoint because there’s more input, but you have to try, you have to make an effort.  As far as I’ve been able to tell, that’s about it; you never really manage to escape from where you started, just adapt and maybe, if you’re lucky, change.

Yeah, I guess there may be those instance in which someone gets so fucked up by life, that lose all sight of who they originally were, and actually escape, I guess these are the true mutants.