10 Years With Brody (Intro)
This September 2015 marks ten years of Brody being an “adult”. When he thinks about it, it causes him pain instead of joy but for the past decade he had been living someone else’s life, not his own. Now almost twenty nine years old he sits, rocks back and forth, and ponders just how in the hell he is still alive after all that he has been through. He feels like he’s come a long way though, and indeed Brody has shown improvement. However, like a flower that has been picked will very slowly die so was Brody slowing dying inside while he searched for himself. A picked flower chosen too soon.
Growing up, Brody heard many people tell him that he “stepped in a pile of shit” however none quite like he heard from his best friend Paul, whom he would end up sabotaging in the end in a drug induced mania. Brody knew what he had stepped in and just how bad it was…All he could think was “ FUCK!”. You can’t step in a pile of shit and not know it, and if you do then you really need to read the rest of this book because you need help son! Sometimes it takes a little while for the smell to reach your nose and by that time you are lifting each of your legs one at a time to inspect each shoe for the “foreign contaminant” you just stepped in. For some, they find it on the first lift of the shoe. Not for Brody. For Brody it takes, like it always has, second, third, and even fourth time to get it correct.
Imagine that if you will for just a moment…I don’t know what you see in your mind but in my mind I see a man who has stepped in a pile of shit and looks like he’s playing hackie sack alone performing new and unseen of moves and he gets a new whiff of shit smell each time he raises his leg up to hit the hackie sack. All the while he’s scrambling to find the foreign contaminant and remove it, yet still standing in the pile of shit that he walked into in the first place.
Brody never took anyone’s advice seriously because he thought that everyone was out to get him. Perhaps it was years of nonstop bullying in grade school, perhaps it was because his mother was an alcoholic and his father a workaholic, perhaps it was the teachers at Truckee Elementary, Sierra Mountain Middle School, Tahoe Truckee High School, perhaps it was the moon, the air, the wind, perhaps…OR perhaps is was Brody all along. I choose to pick the latter. Brody did indeed step in a pile of shit this time. This time he had gone too far. This time, there was no turning back. This time, there were casualties. Brody struggled with this concept of being a nomadic wanderer since he was in 7th grade and had to draw a “dream Nomad vehicle” and why not, there wasn’t anyone who loved him, or so he thought.
B.N.O.E: Such a sad way to go through life! You need to know that you are LOVED and you are SPECIAL you are UNIQUE, no one can do what you do!
The struggle of feeling loved but thinking you are hated would soon take over every thought, every action, and every move he would make. He kept people CLOSE but the closer they got the further away Brody would push them back. He allowed his fears of being able to be honest with no repercussion get the better of him. He was so concerned about what everyone else thought of him that he turned into a ‘Brody-Monster’ and thus he created an alter ego named “SLAMMIN’” He packed up and ran away as is tradition for him. He finally said “fuck it I’m out” with no intention of ever coming back alive. You see, for Brody, it was never about the money, but rather the connections that we feel when we are around one another, the party, the party is a perk. It’s always been about people for Brody. But we don’t want to get to ahead of ourselves now do we?
Let’s just back this up for a hot minute here. In order to understand the type of person Brody was before he “stepped into a pile of shit” I went directly to the source. The people he has loved the most and sad to say those are the same people he hurt the most.