My Orange Duffel Bag Video #7:
Sam Bracken: Strange and Unusual
I think I was about eight or nine years old when I realized that things were a bit strange and unusual in my household. Picture this: Las Vegas, Nevada, it’s August, 117 degrees, and me and my friend Johnny are out in our front desert.
In Las Vegas, they don’t have front yards, they have front deserts, you know? There’s cactus and tumbleweeds and scorpions and snakes and stuff like that. Johnny and I are out playing in our front desert, doing what I thought at the time was perfectly normal, and that was playing with army men, Bic lighters and explosive devices. Johnny had his army men all staged out and I had mine down here and we were taking the Bic lighters and melting the army men and doing what kids do and having pretend planes come in and bomb things. We had tied a bunch of M-80‘s together intricately inbetween us and as we were really getting into the battle, the crocendo of the battle, we light the fuse of the M-80′s and there’s this huge explosion. Army men and everything are going everywhere. To the great misfortune of Johnny and I, we happen to be playing on a fire ant hill, and as we did this, thousands of ants started going everywhere. Johnny, in such a hurry to get out of the way, slipped and fell right on the fire ant hill, and hundreds of ants lit up on him and just started stinging the crap out of him. He starts crying and screaming and I’m like, “Ah what to do?” I didn’t know what to do. So I’m sort of big for my age, so I scooped him up and I went running into the house and I went, “Mom, mom! Johnny’s hurt!” My mom worked three jobs and she was working graveyards so she was sleeping. Dad was out doing something, who knows what he was doing. No one else was home. I laid Johnny out in the hallway, and I go, “Mom, mom Johnny’s hurt!” The door flies open, my mom was a large woman, and she sees the situation with Johnny and sees that he’s in pain and in trouble and she runs into her bathroom. She picks up a pair of tweezers, comes back, she starts taking the tweezers and pulling the stingers out of Johnny’s wounds. She goes into the kitchen, and she gets baking soda, and she puts it in a bowl and puts some warm water in it and makes a salve, kind of an ointment. She comes back over, starts putting this salve on Johnny’s wounds. Johnny starts calming down a little bit and I look over at my mom and Johnny and Johnny’s eyes are like that big, and I look over at my mom and she’s completely naked. Johnny’s like, “Your mom, uh…she’s naked!” I’m like, “Yeah, so?” Johnny’s like, “That’s really strange, it’s really freaky.” And I’m like, “Oh really? Oh, okay.” That was the time that I thought, maybe I guess people don’t run around naked, it’s not normal to be naked. In our household, it was sort of no big deal.
My Reality
I was raised in an environment that no young person should have to go through. I was born the product of a rape, initially unwanted. I was lit on fire, used as a human dart board. I suffered all manner of abuse; physical, psychological and sexual. My parents were alcoholics and serious drug users, my step siblings were drug dealers and generally crazy. I started drinking and doing drugs at age nine, living on the fringes of the mob and motorcycle gang members. I suffered unspeakable abuse at the hands of those who were supposed to care for me. It’s pretty serious. Another way of saying this, that’s a little more lighthearted, would be, I was raised like a whacked out version of the Brady Bunch on an episode of Cops.
Change is a Constant
A wise and wonderful woman once taught me, we become a reflection of our life’s experiences, good bad or indifferent. An estimated 6.8 billion people live on this planet. Each one of them having different experiences, different hopes, different dreams and different talents. The world is more complex than ever before. There’s economic uncertainty, information overload, life and technology complexities, and families are being torn apart. In the midst of all this chaos, change is one of the only constants in a world full of so many different factors and forces, yet every story is personal, different and unique. There is great power in using personal experiences to teach principals, stories that can give us great insight. Stories can affect the way we see things. The way we see things dramatically impacts our behavior. That behavior produces the results in our life. Most of the time, we are perfectly aligned to get the results we’re currently getting. If you want new and better results, you need to engage in new and better behavior. Another way of saying it is, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. If you want something different, you need to do something different. As a kid, growing up in Las Vegas on the fringes of the mob, motorcycle gang members and drug dealers, my view of normal was quite different than most people and it definitely impacted my behavior and the results in my life.
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