President Of The United States..... LOL will write more later, for now i need a nap, took my little brother out for the youth turkey season this morning and have had two hours of sleep, success was ours which is a story for another time as well!

have a great day everyone
Brandon

For those of you up until -now- compelled to call me Tmercier, I'd be more than glad to settle for ''Travis'', since its my name. :) Had I realized the volume of members when I joined I probably would've gone with something a little more general. lol
I'm 25 years old. My parents divorced when I was 5.

My father is a returning alcoholic after 26 years of being sober. I'm not sure he will live to see my children if I have any. He is one of the hardest working men I've ever known, and despite our faltering relationship has given me a lot, while having almost nothing to give.
My mother nearly died several years ago from a freak accident, so I can really appreciate still having her around despite a variety of health problems.
I have 3 half brothers and 3 half sisters, so you can say I was an only child. I was a straight A student until grade 6, and scored in the 96th percentile on the MEA's (Maine Educational Assessment---where I was born and raised). I have an IQ over 140, sometimes I find this hard to believe. I failed to graduate High School with the rest of my class because I refused to do one of the longest oral presentations I had been assigned in my 4 years there, and was "sick" for my 3 opportunities to make the presentation. That of course wasn't my only reason for failure, it just pushed me right into summer school, after which I received my diploma. If you can't tell I was pretty socially awkward up until this point. :)

After HS I spent some time looking for random ''just-over-minimum'' jobs, and was in and out of the workforce until I decided to fulfill my mother and step-father's wishes (big mistake) and go to a bible college (school) in Schroon Lake, NY. It was here that I guess you could say I lost my faith, what of it I had anyway. I was not happy here, but I did learn some things.

Since then I've moved to southern PA with my brother, worked my way up a ladder of low-paying jobs, several moves around MD, several long term relationships, and am now living with the girl I'm probably destined to marry. We've lived together over a year now, and I think I'm finally learning what it is to make sacrifices and decisions to be with the one you love. Relationships are no piece of cake and sacrifices don't come light due to the nature of being human. Give me a lollipop, I want the whole candyshop. lol Anyway...

Edit::: Aquarist sounds more artsy fartsy, therefore...well. I like it. :)

Love and Life....probably the two most dangerous words in the human language eh? lol .......but at the same time the two most core desires and struggles we have during this short stay on this planet....vey interesting.

I grew up in a house with alcoholic father figures....my biological father has been sober for 26 years now and we are finally getting around to that "father / son" relationship....the step father {who is no longer in the picture} was a rageing drunk and pretty much worthless...........I spent a little time in a bottle myself and proved the fact that alcoholism is most likely a genetic desease ........i drink very rarly now and when i do it's one beer every once in a great while...i guess i fear returning to "that" place again ....it wasn't a nice place.....

I dated my wife 22 yrs ago.......we were that passonate young love for a while and then i decided {like a dumb ass i might add} lol that she was to young and we broke up ..........the silly things kids do.......... i then did a 4 year hitch in the Marines and saw the world ...mostly the dessert......chased women....drank.....and ended up married to wife number 1 ......bad idea......had a little girl whom i haven't seen in over 11 yrs now {very sad situation and a very long story, she is the same age as my step daughter , 15}...............3 yrs later divorce number 1 .......................

.i had moved to Kansas and ended up an electronices technician and a construction foreman building gas stations...........started going to church got brain washed and met wife number 2............after 9 yrs and a massive accumulation of stuff she started volenteering at a local zoo and ended up screwing the zookeeper for a few months .................................divorce number 2 .......... i then spenrt a couple years trying to recover from a 250,000.00 dollar lose of my money, house, investments, cars...etc etc.............when i decided to move back to NY and go into business with my family...there was a brief relationship with an 18 yr old in there {i call it a recovery relationship........} and after stalking my highschool love , lol, I am married to the woman I should have stayed with 22 yrs ago................

BUT


My mantra in life has always been and continues to be .................................

"you must go through everything you did, good, bad, ugly, great, lose, and win to be the person you are right now....................if you change one single thing in your past you won't be who you are today"

And for that I am truely thankful for my history............I sit in my little rental house looking at my little salt tank........married to the most wonderful woman in the world....i have a beautiful 15 yr old step daughter....barly getting the bills paid, busting my ass pretty much 7 days a week establishing my company.............................AND I WOULDN"Y CHANGE A THING !!!!!!!!!!

So life and love are worth it all .........


AL


PS . . this post has been great.....I didn't write my entire life history but it has been a great ....inventory excersise for sure ..i don't know that I've ever wrote it all down in one sitting.....ver interesting and thought provoking to say the least ...........thanks

I really enjoy reading about the people I've gotten to know on this forum.

I get to hear a lot about peoples lives as a massage therapist slaving for a large Spa, Burke Williams. I was one of the most requested employees at their Sunset Blvd Hollywood location. Putting your hands on people is really an intimate thing to do and I loved being able to make a woman, who had requested a woman to massage her but couldn't have one at the last moment, I loved being able to make her feel comfortable and "safe". I was the guy chosen for those customers and It gave me a lot of satisfaction to see them walk out with a smile one their faces. I know good massage therapists can make up to 100 grand a year doing $100 massages on the side, but at the point I was really starting to get work in the more posh hotels and the entertainment community, my back gave out and I had to pretty much stop doing massage. The MRI showed degeneration in 4 of my 5 lumbar disks so I had to stop with the massage assembly line.

Adam. I haven't heard about the Jehovah's Witnesses in years. If it makes you feel a part of something greater than yourself and it fills you with happiness, good for you! I am of the belief system where I believe in everything (all faiths do exist), and nothing ( all faiths eventually attract entities that are like flies to the honey) and degrade from their original purity.

I like to believe that regardless of your faith, if you KNOW deep inside that you have a personal connection with God nobody can take that away from you. I interpret Jesus's message differently than most Christians. I believe he wanted us to know that ALL of us are sons and daughters of God just as he is a son of God. I believe Jesus was an enlightened soul and what makes him different than us is because he remembers and is fully aware of who he is and we have forgotten. It takes many years and lifetimes to humbly evolve your being so that the seductive karmic attractions have not the ability to lower your sights from the creative omnipresent creator. All our ups eventually become downs, and then ups follow the downs again until we eventually learn to sit back and bask in the infinite stillness, fully alive, and full of the presence and awareness of God. I believe that we are all on a journey of remembering our relationship with God.

God has sent part of him/her self (us) out into the world with our memories erased, and it is our job to remember our divine connection and grace, and through each of our unique journeys we come closer and closer to the realisation of ourselves as the infinite creator.

All people on this Earth are brothers and sisters to each other, and through death and rebirth, death and rebirth, we eventually realise that you are part of me and I'm a part of you. We dance a cosmic dance together growing apart, coming back together, growing apart to experience other parts of ourselves, and coming back to the family that is greater than that of our mothers and fathers.

I believe It's Gods way of bringing it's children back to itself. Eventually, after many many more worlds of experience on higher and higher levels of existence, we come to know our most intimate connection to ourselves. We realise that we are the God who sent ourselves away and we rejoice in the knowledge of who we are, the one who started it all, a unique and complete synthesis of all people, animal, plant, and mineral live.

Everything is alive. The water cradled in the canyon as it flows to the sea is conscious of every rock it flows over, every pool that cradles it. It's a primitive consciousness, but it is alive. The whole earth is alive. It's a living organism among many in the universe, and every molecule eventually finds itself as part of a mineral or plant, a divinely created organism is manifested that grows from seed to flower back to seed, every unfolding leaf, every flower that grows is written in the plants DNA.

Religions are usually started by more or less enlightened beings and are pure in their conception. But all religions eventually attract more and more undeveloped beings who can be parasites to the initial perfect conception. These less realised beings eventually poison the vessel and in time that vessel must rupture, all beings inside scatter, and according to their karmic attractions they again find another vessel less corrupted than the one before.

This is the journey of life, and as Brandon says, it is a journey true to only ourselves and it's exactly where we're supposed to be, and as the plant grows without aid from seed to glorious plant, we grow as part of a greater yet invisible plant along lines we are not usually very aware of toward a promised flowering, toward an experience of heaven, a celebration of life.

The journey of life is a cycle of us origonally consciously deciding to eat from the fruit of life, to choose to forget our identity as God, to then live our lives according to what we are attracted to, and to though failure and success, death and rebirth, to invariably grow closer to that which created and sustains us until we remember once again that we are one, the one who started it all, the one who is all present, the one who exists in all space and time, God.

The mistakes some make when they are undeveloped is that we sometimes think we are "the" God when we should be thinking we are a small part of God. We must find our place with all others and find our dance through life, humbly sharing this body together that is within the body of the creator, dancing with our brothers and sisters until we naturally and with knowledge true in our hearts come together as one.

Does this make sense? It should. We have brains designed to think and contemplate. I believe there are no real contradictions between what we've observed in science and what we know beyond a shadow of doubt to be true.

Don't know why I started talking about this. I know many are stuck thinking that their religon separates them from those who have it wrong. I believe that we were meant to come together sharing the simple things of life. We weren't meant to create separation, though in a higher sense there must be separation in order to then come together again.

Wow, just when I was thinking fish people were generally a little dull.

I think god is a fish. It's easy for people to follow a powerful being who comes with a manual. But if a god really wants to see the true nature of a human, give the human the power.

Zambize