Scott W. Martin

Introduction

Most of the time I get to writing my biography and I think "Who cares?" In a moment of self realization Ive begun to understand what gives me this impression. I used to feel that usually when a person writes out their life story, they end up writing about boring and trivial events that happened in their life and go into way to much detail about things that have no real interest for the reader. Having said that, understand that I now feel differently about the matter. I have realized that I am, having read very few biographies, not really an expert on the subject and that I probably have no real idea what Im talking about. This aside, I hereby promise to do my best to highlight the life I have lived with out adding any of that really boring crap about how much I loved G. I. Joe and how Lady Jane led me to a curiosity in the opposite sex. Up until this point I see my life as being strange, sad and uneventful. This is the life that I will portray. With the introduction covered, let me say that I never really watched G. I. Joe and that my curiosity in women was originally spawned from a porno mag carelessly left in a barn which was eventually found by a cousin who in turn showed me.

Growing up

I was born and spent the first part of my life in an upcoming ghetto in Charlotte North Carolina. When I say upcoming ghetto I mean that when we moved in, most of the windows didnt have bars on them. A decade later I was asked by a friend of mine if I was f*****g nuts for wanting to drive down the road and check out the place where I used to live. He literally looked at me as if I was nuts and said Whatre you f*****g nuts? Im not driving down there even in the day time.
While growing up I can remember my parents fighting constantly. Their fights were never violent towards each other or us. Sure, there was the occasional fist or family pet through the wall, but all in all their fights never amounted to anything more than a way for my parents to express their mutual hatred for each other. Every time my parents fought we were told to go to our rooms. Eventually this led to me staying in my room quite often. This, coupled with being the only white family on the block and experiencing forms of racism most people dont care to believe in, made life unpleasant to say the least. I have these vague, far gone memories of me going to see the elementary schools psychiatrist. I remember molding things out of clay and being asked about my home life. The strange part is I honestly dont remember having any idea about what she was talking about. Who knew that my life wasnt what the text books considered to be normal.
My father never really spent a lot of time with us when we were little. Im pretty sure there was a time where he worked out of the house and we still attended after school care. There are a few scattered memories but not much else. I was about 10 when he had a nervous break down. To this day I dont know what events led up to this but I can see him vividly lying on the floor in the kitchen with the phone in his hand, crying and screaming uncontrollably as our Mother hurried to get us out of the door. Shortly after that my parents divorced for reasons I wont get into. It is important that you understand that I've never blamed my father for who he was, after all if it werent for him I wouldnt be here. I see it to be unfortunate that he never took time out of his day to spend with me, yet fortunate in the fact that he instilled in me a strong sense of how not to treat my son. It is also important for you to understand that my father and I now have a good relationship which I treasure more than he probably knows.

School

In school I experienced a wide array of what I choose now to define as torture. I was belittled and picked on by the other kids quite frequently for reasons I dont care to remember. When I went to my parents for advice my father told me a story of how he stood up for himself in school. The story involved my dad getting so mad at a particular individual that one day during track he ran out in front of him, stopped, and unexpectedly rammed his fist into the guys stomach. Incase your wondering, I never did gain up the nerve to give anybody a swift punch while they werent looking. The whole idea, to put it simply, just seemed wrong.
You probably dont believe me, I know, but I never really understood school. My parents, through their constant fighting, gave me very little to go on and not relating well to the other students never really gave me a good sense of why I was there. I could best define my concept of school, at the time, as being a place where I was held down and forced to learn never understanding what exactly it was that I was supposed to benefit from. After feeling hopeless, alone and lost for several long years I finally decided that I would do much better on my own and dropped out school and, in a way, life itself.
I asked my father recently why I never remembered him taking the time to help me with my homework. He recounted that I would regularly tell him that I had no homework and that eventually he stopped asking about it. Its still not clear to me if he actually believed me or not. Why he chose not to devote time and energy into my development Ill never know. I often think, however, that it was probably better of this way.

Love

From the ages of 15 to 18 I became a hardcore hopeless romantic. I believed that the love shared between a man and a woman was what I needed most in this world and that I was going to find it no matter what. I went through a lot of empty relationships trying to find my soul mate and lost parts of heart from constantly picking it up and piecing it back together. I always hate to hear that famous phrase It is better have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. Samuel Butler obviously never experienced anything close to the amount of pain I feel at times. When you dont know what youre talking about, you should just keep your mouth shut.

Work

Aside from constantly ripping out my heart and offering it to anybody I thought might care, I worked. Ive had more jobs than I can count on both hands and they range from being a waiter at Dennys to designing web pages for a budding internet mall company. Let it also be known that I have never had a problem surprising those who thought I "couldnt" simply because I lacked a formal education. I find it extremely unfortunate the way our current system looks down upon those it failed to force into its idealistic mold of how it thinks we should be.

Oblivion

Somewhere around 16 or 17 I basically stopped caring about everything. I was living with my father who was living with his parents when he found out that he was going to have another child. My father moved out, trying to do the right thing, and I decided that it was best to stay with my grandparents than to move back in with my mother. My memories have always been a bit sketchy (and I mean always) but when my grandfather became sick I moved back in with my mom. For the next few years its like everything gets grey. I never had that many friends and when I moved back in with my mom I didnt do much of anything except work, smoke cigarettes and watch hours and hours of television. This went on for longer than I care to admit. Im not going to try to explain to you what its like to shut out everything and exist only in the confines of your room. Self imprisonment admittedly was a mistake in that it only further isolated me from everybody else, but at the time I really didnt feel as if I had another option. Eventually I realized that if you sit around waiting to be saved there is a better chance youll die first.

Falling In Line

I got a job at Wal-Mart which had a surprising impact on my life. For that moment in time I consider myself to have been truly happy. There I met people who I can best describe as being real and genuine. There were a lot of beneficial things learned from this experience. The unfortunate part, I felt, was that these people werent part of my life when I was younger.
I became cross with a manager one day and walked out. This led me to Hickory living with a friend of a friend and working part time at a bar and grill as a short order cook. Life was fun and nothing seemed to matter. This included the fact that I was living in a roach infested trailer with no hope of escape. After finding out there was a good chance that my roommate was going to loose his house and that I could very possibly become homeless I became desperate and, in that, turned to God.

God

Ive always considered myself Christian and very spiritual. Finding a church to belong to has been somewhat of a problem however. I find most of my fellow Christians to be ignorant and quick to push you away if they disagree with you in the slightest. Throughout my life, God (for whatever the reason) has always had more faith in me than I have ever had in myself. That day, on my knees, praying for release, I received my answer. Before I said amen the idea popped in my head to call a friend of mine who I hadnt spoken to in several years. I called him the next day and he told me that he had a job opening at the place he worked at. This is how I found myself working at the Charlotte Rescue Mission.

Life goes on

Five years later I found myself writing very little. Recently I've had a lot of friends come to me for advice and a bit of good old constructive criticism. I enjoy it to an extent but find it very hard to inspire through my criticism. I feel like I can point out rooms for improvement, but doing so in a way that doesn't cause the writer to become discouraged is hard to say the least. So needless to say I've been reading a lot and pretending to be an editor and really just trying to pick up some of my unfinished works and completing them.