RULE NO 8: Don't steal

PREFACE: Please don't steal my stuff!
I want to preface this piece of writing with a piece of my mind and my heart.  I am writing some pretty open things here.  I am doing this a lot more openly than a lot of other people.  I do this in the hope that people might get from them something they can use, like acceptance, understanding or courage to speak.  I also understand that a lot of people are struggling to make a living and are just pilfering other people's ideas from the net.   This is called theft of intellectual property.  Please read my writings but don't pretend to have written them or any parts of them..  The net is an opensource, but I think of it like I think of it as a book: highly.  The information contained in the pieces herein is for the most part true, and reliable, but you're going to have to quote the source  If you do, you can call me, "The book guy in Japan" and refer people to my blog.  You can cut and paste the first 9 sentences, and write the Book Guy in Japan now if you want.  I just don't want people stealing my writing, not leaving comments, and publishing my shit.  You will be sued if you go all "Million Pieces, James F" on this.  So, don't.  I am trying to trust human nature. 

Having said that:  I want to write about my childhood, and then blue days. 

MAIN
G'day guys, my name is Grant, I have created a kind of alterego called Garant to explain some of the weird stuff that I've been up to lately.  Some of what I'm doing with my life doesn't seem like the sorts of things I would have done before, I don't feel like the same old me.  I feel like some kind of weird amorphous creation, like I have two voices inside of me.  The first is the one that belongs to the old me, the quiet shy, introverted, calm and logical plain old me.  I like this guy, he's served me well.  He's taken from familiarity and safety to some pretty distant shores.  His is the voice of levelheaded logic.   Then there's this new guy, this dreamer, this creative, wonderfully free, force of unstoppable wild abandonment, who will do anything for a good enough cause.  Let's call him Garant. He possesses a voice of wild and crazy love. 
             So that's me now.  Who was I as a child?  What was I like?  I was always a dreamer, I was always a little bit out to lunch.  I was always thinking, and imagining.  I was also alone and the source of much derision.  One day, I was sitting eating my lunch by myself- it was often by myself- and I didn't even hear the bell ring!  I came back to class.  Hey, what's everyone doing here so early, I thought.  "Why are you late," the teacher asked.  I think his name was Mr Mullett or something weird like that.  This was right before I started being bullied by two pairs of brothers, who were also kind of friends.  Ask Mark and Daniel if they remember that.  I wonder where they are, sometimes, some of those children I grew up with.  I don't blame them for a lot of it.  I was lucky to live in a safe society, in a safe country and go to a safe school.  Because I was always a kind of a Painted Bird.  If you don't know what that is, go and look it up, find out what that book's about because I think its a kind of seminal novel in many ways.  By a guy called Jerzy Kosinski, who also wrote Being There which becamme a Peter Sellars film.   Back again, now, from the dreaming  "I don't know, sir.  I didn't hear the bell ring."  "Where were you sitting?" "Oh, just over there by the steps."  "Who was with you?"  "No-one sir, I was just sitting by myself."  At the time, we were in a kind of composite class.  The grade fives, my class, shared a small building with the grade below.  As some kind of new solution to this friendless child's problems, some of the younger class were asked to look after me.  To let me sit with them for awhile.  It didn't take for long.  Either they didn't want to hang out, or I didn't want to hang out, or perhaps it was just mutual.  Anyway, we fell away after about a week. 
          So anyway, I had that kind of childhood, and maybe as a result, I started borrowing things the very next year.  The first really big thing I took was another boy's electronic chess set. I didn't even know how to play.  The game just interested me, I guess.  I always liked things like that, things with little tiny pieces of puzzles inside of them.  Combinations to solve, strategies to experiment with, until the solution finally emerged.  I became a gifted player, later.   Maybe, people always knew that was me.  I'm not sure.  Anyway, there were school notices about it.  The thief never came forward.  Later my father found the set in my room.  I had buried it at the bottom of my drawers.  "Whose is this," my father asked.  "I don't know, I found it in the paddock.  Someone must have put it there."   Our house was surrounded by spare allotments, so in many important ways, I always lived in a kind of sepaation from others even physically.  Needless to say, none of this was very believable.  "Tell me again.  Where did you get this," my father asked  Finally, I confessed that it wasn't mine.  For some reason, I was never really punished by the school.  But my father, to his eternal credit, taught both himself and me to play.  That was probably the closest we have ever been in our lives together.  My dad took care of me in all of that.  He involved me and our family in the local chess club, that was run at a Catholic school.  Hi, John. By the way are you still playing.  John Harris was my coach, and we had some other pretty good players like Mark, a boy two years above me, and Daniel and Josie.  We all entered the state competition at one stage or another, and many of us won prizes.
          I don't like writing about things like stealing.  I wonder what other people will think of me.  Of course, I do.  And there are parts of me, many in fact, that I will never share, with anyone.  I think everyone is the same.  Or most of us anyway.  But, yeah, I took something when I was a child, and I also broke into a car the next year to see if they had any small change, and I am ashamed of that.  What I would like people, to be aware of though, is that something good can come out of the seemingly bad.    I became closer to my father, learnt to play chess, which led me to friendships with an old man who loves shogi in Japan.  It gave my brother a hobby, too.  Maybe none of that would have been possible if another boy hadn't brought an electronic chess to school and I had never stolen it.  So, I'm sorry, but I did learn how to play, is what I would like to say to that boy.  Also, my childhood indescretions have helped me befriend some pretty unusual people.  I have a friend in Japan who had a rougher childhood than me who thinks he is klepto.  I am one of the few people he can talk about his problems with.  I solved that part of my life over twenty years ago, so now I can help him with his.  So I don't mind being a little more open about things with others.  If I see you lift something, and want me to see you do it, I know you're probably looking for a little bit of help.  You probably need it, just so you don't feel worthless and like a piece of garbage from the street.  By the way, I always tell my friend, mate there are bigger thieves than you, so I wouldn't worry yourself over it too much.  I see a lot of good in you, and you can get better with that.
              Because there was a little bit of that kind of thing in my life., too.  I had some pretty weird obsessions.  With, the smurfs, for example.  The Smurfs, for those who don't know were these tiny little blue creatures that lived somewhere in France under mushrooms or something.  They had their little society and used to collect berries.  A bad wizard called Gargomoyle and his cat Azriel hated their smurfs, or just wanted to cook them for his potions or something.  It was a cartoon and it wasn't REAL, at  least I think not.  They also had figurines.  How I loved those little blue figures.  At the time, it was a bit of a craze.  Collecting smurfs.  I don't know how many other people were into it.  But some people I knew were hooked in a pretty big way.  One friend of mine had just about all of them.  He was a very nice kid a couple of years older than us, whose family was friends with ours.  We were all friends, my brother, my sister and me and their three children. But their oldest boy was a little different from others.  Not a lot, just a little.  But he came from a truly wonderful and loving family.  Maybe they spoiled him a little bit with this one thing.  And I think it was the right thing to do.  I am sure that kid has lived the best of all possible futures.  I can't know that.  I really hope that nothing terribly jaw droppingly sad happened to him.  But that could happen to anyone.  I just know that that family took excellent care of their slightly different child and made sure he had a lot of interests so that he could engage with life and find meaningful occupation later on in life.
          Anyway, about the smurfs.  I had a few board games like monopoly, but I didn't have a lot of people to play with. So I played with the smurfs.   "Whose turn is it now.  Grumpy, your turn.  Well done, Grumpy, you got second prize in a beauty competition, collect $10."  "C'mon, Smurfette, roll the dice."  Of course, I had to roll the dice for them, "Chance.  Oh, no, bad luck Smurfette. You just went straight to jail. " Go directly to jail, do not pass go, Do not collect $200.""  One of my smurfs always got the rates card, and I couldn't really understand how figure out that bit of the game, so I just didn't worry about it.  I liked an even game, so there was a natural flow and flux in fortunes.  I wanted the game to go on as long as possible.  The game was always a little rigged,  I guess.  I always had my favorites, so I probably cheated a little bit so they would usually win.  And we'd pack up the game, until another day, and I'd hide my stolen smurfs away.  Friendless or insecure children sometimes have imaginary friends.  I lacked the imagination for that, so I guess mine were just stolen.  Of course, these games only lasted a couple of months before my parents worked out what was happening.  We met the other family.  I said sorry, and gave back my self-funded smurf collection, and our families remained pretty good friends until they had to move to another city.  I also probably should have asked my parents for some smurfs, but I just wasn't that kind of kid.  Besides, our family didn't have a lot of money.  Only my father was working, as a teacher and he had four kids and a wife.  Those were good days, though.  It would be hard to live as well as my family did doing my father's job now.