Day one: What was I thinking?

Well, here we go. I have lived for 40 years now, and what do I have to show for it? So very little (posession-wise), yet so much.
The purpose of this blog will be two-fold. To give a glimpse into the life of a man, and a taste of what life feels like in this modern Seattle (and American) world. Maybe it is also a diary of sorts, just to see if I can remember what has happened so far. I have forgotten so much, and I feel like I am sliding deeper and deeper into that gray void of lost time. But, more on that later.
Let me start with a bit of background. I grew up "poor" in the Eastern side of Washington. The only true friends I have to this day are the ones I made in grade school. It is not that I can't be friendly, it's just that I have been burned so many times by "friends" over the last 30 years that I can truly only trust 4 people on this whole planet.
I grew up not have much, but never wanting for anything. What was there to have back then anyway? An Atari with Pong? A Huffy Dirt bike? Number 2 issue of a Marvel comic called "Thing 2 in 1"? I had sun soaked summers and cold, snowy winters. I kissed girls, fought with boys and played Risk board games for 24 hours straight (NEVER start with North America!!). I learned what true joy and true pain was by the time I was 12. My parents divorced when I was young, and I lived with my mother. I experienced true fear during that process. My mother was not an intelligent woman, but a smart one. When my 18th year came, I joined the Army to escape what was to be a certain life of nothing happening.
Boy, did something happen then! I traveled past the edge of my town for the first time to exotic lands like Kentucky and Texas. To be fair, Germany was a blast. I just didn't know how much MORE fun it could have been until much later in life. I encountered true love, true ignorance and true racisim. All of them shocking, all of them shaping me into someone I would have never imagined I would be. I got married to a high school sweetheart right before deploying to (West) Germany. Ahh, I can almost taste the remenants of that hazy elixr of love. ......We survived three Army bases, an attempted murder and a child, yet we still failed eventually. Is that not the fate of teenagers in "love"? To this day, some of the decisions I made back then are monuments to stupidity, yet I am still alive and surviving. I am waiting to make even more outlandish mistakes, but that is the process of life, eh?
Well, that is all for tonight. But, what I can tell you is this" almost every sentence so far can be a story in itself. For those who are interested, I may even tell them.....