Chapter 1 - Part 1

I was concieved in a small second story apartment kiddie-corner to the hospital where I would be born a short nine months later. My parents had happily celebrated their recent wedding with me as the result.

It was a cold North Dakota mid-November morning the day I was born. My father had rushed to the hospital from work to welcome me into the world at 8:30 in the morning. He worked, as he would for the first twelve years of my life, both full time in a restaurant and in college at the local university. My mom was still normal then. The hidden and secret illness hiding below the surface. I was a perfectly healthy 9 pound 10 ounce baby boy.

My parents had met at a catholic shrine. My mother had been working in the bookstore and my father had been working at painting a set of statues. They had been a twelve piece set of pre-world war II way of the cross statues. When I was sixteen, during one of my better periods in my life, I remember helping him strip and repaint these same statues.

My first years were pretty standard as babies go. My brother was born about a year and a half after me. I don't really remember alot about the first years.

My first sparkles of intellect shined through in the form of reading. At first my parents had thought I was remembering tv commercials as I was reading billboards for big macs and such on the side of the road.

... More later... it's getting late. :)