My Life. Part 5.

Living life on my own terms

Doing the day-to-day seemed to be simple

    A common theme in my life is to take action after much self contemplation. The problem with that is that I forget to communicate my thoughts with those whom it affects the most. And that I forget to take into account whose lives I'll be jumping into after I take action. In hindsight things would've gone a lot smoother for me if I had let those whose lives I was important in know what my current thought processes were before I took action. It probably has something to do with the fact that I was an out of control little bugger, and no one really knew what I would do next, and yet everyone wanted to have a say in that. I was searching for my independence, so could you blame me for being a little devil-may-care?

    I told my father that I was on a plane back from New Zealand, and I got in contact with my mother who picked me up from the airport. I spent a whole three days with her in which I learned that she was experiencing a major psychotic episode of paranoid delusion where she assumed that the 'Wiccan practitioners' were casting devilish curses and laughing at her through seemingly random symbolism that she was finding. I was quite distraught to see her in this state, and was thoroughly confused. I called my old time friend Sheldon and he told me to come over to his apartment that he was renting with the help of a friendly trolley driver. I did so by calling a taxi which cost me around $80(!). I learned there that Sheldon had been doing way too much cocaine and crack, two things which I don't personally do, but since he was my friend I decided I wasn't going to pass judgement. I left his place shortly after and found my way back to my father's house, for my brother Anthony's wedding.

    The wedding was lovely, it was on Anna Maria right on the beach, with all of the friends whom I had known for a while growing up with Anthony. I stayed with my father for two weeks during this time. I was convinced by my father to buy a scooter, and got my old job back as a chef. I found an apartment through craigslist with decent rent that wasn't too far away from work, and lived there for a good three months. Then I found out the lease holder was a rapist (Sheldon got sexually assaulted one night he spent over) and I moved out as soon as I could find another place. Unfortunately that meant living in the heart of the ghetto in Bradenton, Florida. I lived there for only one month; there was a plethora of cockroaches, and the place smelled god-awful. I didn't judge while I was there but I did not like this place one bit. I'm not sure why my father let me live there. Was it through apathy? Or something entirely different?

    Desperate, I went over to my fathers' once again to look for apartments and managed to find a very good place to live in the south part of the island, with a beach view. It was a communal living situation with four bedrooms sharing one bathroom and kitchen area. I lived there for the next seven months until finally there was a falling out at my job and the place shut down for an indefinite amount of time. I didn't have enough money to pay for rent to wait it out, so I decided I was going to travel once again, this time I bought a one-way ticket to Portland, Oregon, and had found a job being a door-to-door activist for an eco cause out there. 

    I wasn't sure where I was going to sleep and I made some friends on the bus who seemed to know more about the world than I, so I was more than willing to group up with them instead of trying to get a job where I would be miserable at. At first there were three and a dog but I quickly realized that the one with the dog was very very ignorant. I managed to hold myself back from physically attacking the guy from some of the nonsense that was coming out of his mouth, but the other man and I were on the same page when we were presented with an opportunity to ditch the guy. Turns out I was the only one who actually had the means to live, and this guy made me spend almost $200 on him while I naively agreed to it, in the form of food and hotel rooms when we weren't sleeping outside. 

   When I decided enough was enough was when I found out this guy was indebted to a drug dealer from the past and the dealer was forcing him to sell weak edibles playing them off as being good. I had moral objections to that so I sent him on his merry way with a backpack and even gave him some money. I just wanted to be done with him. I joined up with a new road-dog (travel buddy) who called himself Pippy and played the Ukelele. He showed me ways to get around in the world and made me feel safer than I ever had with these two other homebums. Already on my trip to Oregon I had been in Eugene twice and Portland once.

    Pippy had a friend who knew a mushroom grower and we had a chemical experiment where we made some trippy lemonade out of some Amazonian Cubensis butts. Over a pound of them and about a gallon of lemon juice concentrate was used in some cheesecloth and we waited a whole three days while it extracted. The result was fabulous and we drove up to Portland with a mason jar of the tincture in our hands, and the knowledge that this was a gift from the heavens. We proceeded to dose the entirety of the Portland riverside hippy and dirty kid community with mushroom tincture that really knocked you on your ass. Just, so good. I met this group of five younger hippies who were trying to hop a train into southern Oregon. 

    I linked up with them and accidentally lost my road-dog, which was OK. I knew that he was safe and now I knew how to handle myself a little better as a homeless kid in the USA. So after a couple of nights of failed attempts at catching a train we finally caught one one night, only to discover that we had hopped on before the yard, where all the cops check the trains to make sure no one is doing what we were! We almost got caught, but thankfully we realized what was happening and ran for the road, and we were in the clear, though we hadn't gotten far. We decided the best course of action was going to be hitchhiking. We hitched all the way down the coast in a matter of a week, from Portland down to Ashland, Oregon. There one of the travelers had taken us to return a dog which was being held from this guy who wasn't responsible enough to take care of it, but now was seeming to have changed for the better.

    To be continued...

Peace, Love, and Harmony

~Faaabs

My life. Part 4.

Turning my back against the world as I know it

I knew I had no clue what I was doing. That's why I did it!

    So turning back the page a little bit. I finally graduated from high school, and celebrations were in order. In less than two weeks I was on a Greyhound bus from Sarasota, Florida to Manchester, Tennessee to go to a three-day music festival. Bonnaroo 2013. It was amazing, just me and a tent with a sleeping bag. Except for the last day which I woke up in an island surrounded by rainwater. Yeah, I've never been one for dry humor anyways. 

    From there I spent more time up in South Elgin, Illinois with my mother's side of the family, making sure to see them before I took off to the other side of the globe. I spent six weeks out there before visiting my half-brother James who lived in San Francisco. He invited me to come out to Outside Lands 2013 music festival with the promise that I could stay in his apartment in the meantime. I did, and I went, but being the INFP introvert that I am, hardly left the apartment and hardly even spent time with my brother when I was in the festival grounds anyways! I was there for ten days too. It's things like that that I look back on and kind of regret, because I feel like I missed out on something. I had fun, in my own way, but in the long run I have fun like that anyways and it's more akin to comfort than fun. 

    So after a thirteen hour flight I landed in the north island of New Zealand, in the biggest city of Auckland, home to just over a million citizens. Not that many, and even less true Kiwis (which is what the locals refer to themselves as) in that place than elsewhere, most of the people being of Asian descent. I.E.P, or International Exchange Program, was the company whom I paid to help get me situated into the land of the Kiwi, whoch ended up being a great decision on my part. At the young age of eighteen I never felt lost or out of touch with my surroundings because of the resources and help that IEP provided for me.

    Within two weeks I was on a bus to Hawke's Bay, NZ, heading out to work on an Organic farm. I learned some Muay Thai, and how to make a real outdoor barbeque, as well as how to communicate with many Europeans. Then I was off to Wellington where I spent the next three weeks blowing $2000 with no reservations. I had a blast. I stayed at the Rosemere Hostel where there were people of all ethnicities coming together to make a living and enjoy themselves. The bars were literally minutes away from where we slept, and I found a beautiful place just a fifteen minute walk away where I would meditate every morning. That really helped center me out and ground me, much better than coffee in my opinion!

    I took a ferry down to Picton, after stopping by an outdoors shop to pick up camping supplies. I envisioned a grand outdoors solo adventure for myself, but didn't know the first thing about outdoors life. The ferry connects the two islands and is about a three and a half hour journey. So after a couple nights in Picton I went down the road less traveled, which wound its way across the coast of the south island via foot and thumb. I got picked up by some oyster farmers in New Zealand who agreed to take me where I was going if I would join them for their day of work out on the water. Afterwards one of the men let me live on his farm in Blenheim for several days and had me work his grapes for room and board. He dropped me off in the town proper and I got another job at a hostel, doing day labor very similar to what I had just done.

    The hostel could hardly find me any work and I left after about three weeks there. I hitched a ride with a group of four french people who had a van going down to Christchurch, and we stayed at a cheap hostel there. I stayed longer than they did, actually, because they didn't think it was a clean enough place to live at. I didn't care, and I went out and found a job with South Pacific Seeds as a Roguer, which meant I got to spend all of my time either being driven or walking out in fields. I was with Czech, Romanian, Italian and Irish people, as well as several Kiwis. I had a blast. I moved apartments to be closer to work and learned how to play darts there. I had a ton of fun while it lasted.

    I had been told there was a job I had qualified for with the same company in a small ski town called Methven that I followed. I decided to walk and eventually hitched a ride out there. I didn't know what I now know about packing light, and it was a real struggle, but a kind person turned around and gave me a ride after sticking my thumb out for one for a while. I bought a week's worth of rent and a week's worth of groceries and called the company the day before to confirm my job. They told me they had no idea what I was talking about, and that all the positions for that job had already been filled up. I got very depressed and didn't know what to do.

    I looked up all of the local backpackers hostels in the area and finally found some work as a housekeeper for room and board. I enjoyed it thoroughly and went through a couple short jobs in the meantime which kept falling through. I eventually found a job listing on a community board near the center of town with Cairnbrae Seed Cleaning, which paid me well and I even had a neighbor who gave me a ride to and from work every day. It couldn't have been better, in my opinion. I worked there for three months and with the money I made, went skydiving and bought myself a ticket back into the states to see my brother's wedding.

I'll continue this tomorrow, faithful reader!

Peace, Love, and Harmony

~Faaabs

    

My life. Part 3.

So... You're telling me that there isn't a point?

I refuse to believe that. But why do I still feel so lost?

    I began my own quest into spirituality in the seventh grade. I had to take the school bus every day to school and we always arrived an hour early, which made me very sleepy before class. I began spending a lot of time in the school's library. At first it was for the comfortable leather couches in there, for sleeping of course, though under the guise of doing my homework. And then I began doing some searching on the computers there. I discovered this new skill called Lucid Dreaming and found forums with thousands of members dedicated to the pursuit of conscious dreaming. I became very interested in this and started practicing myself and keeping a record of my dreams.

    The border between dreams and spirituality is transparent. I fluidly crossed into the realm of Astral Projection, Meditation, Universal Principals, the power of Thought, and the illusion of Reality though I also sifted through a lot of misinformation along the way. I had to develop a keen sense of discernment because I was so young and there was so much content out there, most of it being bullshit garbage that was designed to get your money from you. I studied UFO's, alien life forms, binaural beats, science fiction and fantasy as well as government conspiracy theories and free-energy technologies.

    I eventually purchased a guidebook called Our Ultimate Reality by Adrian Cooper which truly ignited my spiritual fire and my thirst for knowledge. I read that book from cover to cover, was fully engrossed in its teachings and began to truly question the world around me and what it meant to be a human being on the planet earth. I was instilled early with the belief that the one truly beneficial thing a person can do is to be of service to others before serving oneself.  This made sense to me. If you can give something to somebody else, why would you chose not to? 

    I began to use that book as a foundation for how I lived my life. Still spending most of my time in the library at school, I began to refine my searches based on what I had learned to shore up gaps in knowledge and gain information from other sources to match up what I had learned from what they were teaching. It added up! We are not just physical beings, I learned. We are metaphysical and have multi-dimensional consciousness. We have dreams that don't exist on this physical plane, what was that supposed to mean? All of these questions that I was hungry to answer.

    I got a job my junior year of high school after I turned sixteen, according to the dictation of my father. I was developing a severe addiction to video games, which was fine. I had nothing else to do, and the school I was attending had no scholarly culture about it. The teachers were obsessed with making sure their students passed their tests so they could get better district grades for the high school so in turn the teachers would get bonuses for the sheer number of students passing their grade. All you had to do was the bare minimum and you would be fine. I was always good about taking short bursts of raw information and processing it internally and just remembering what was taught. Studying was not a thing that I did, and homework was rarely done either. I still managed to get out of high school with a 3.5GPA. 

    My job was working in an Italian Restaurant as an "Apprentice Chef". I found out that I hated working in restaurants, but I loved learning. "Everybody has got to eat." and "It's good to put a trade under your belt." were all things that I was told as I was doing the day-to-day, school,work,sleep, repeat cycle. I spent hardly any money, and convinced my father to buy me a one-way ticket to New Zealand. I paid a company to help find me resources in the country and keep me able to survive for a year. It was a great experience.

   But what was it all for?

I'm going to write a few more of these posts, but for now I'm signing off.

Peace, Love, and Harmony

~Faaabs

My life. Part 2.

What have I got to lose?

What have I still to gain?

    I was born in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. My father had two sons before me, and the same for my mother. An only child with four half-brothers who share genes with me has been an experience. Shortly after my birth, my father and mother decided it would be best to move us to Florida. My father's parents followed suit shortly after, and paradise was ripe for the picking.

    Unfortunately, this was not the case. Unbeknownst to my father, or perhaps known but deemed in his mind irrelevant, my mother was going through a spiritual crises and had developed mental issues in her brain which caused her to act out in a cycle of manic-depression every two to three years. Now diagnosed with Bipolar disorder, she is acting in a more positive light towards her situation. But back then... Confusion and the internalization of anger within my mother caused a split in their marriage, eventually causing them to get divorced. My father carried on doing what he does best, working, and my mother sought a new direction in life as well as a new, female life partner. Most of these decisions were hastily made, and I was thrown between the two and forced to see counselors and move schools constantly as a young child as the court system tried their best to understand the situation and find out which parent was most suited to take care of me. 

    Meanwhile, to escape from the chaos for a small period of time, my grandparents became the main pillar in all of my and my brothers' lives. I was to take a flight from Tampa International Airport every summer since the age of two years old to Chicago O'Hare Airport and spend the summer break spending time in a stable household, being taken care of by a loving grandmother and a caring grandfather. I interacted with my aunts and uncles and their children, and had some semblance of fun. To keep us busy we would participate in a dance program, as well as being present for Sunday church and many family gatherings where we would stuff our faces and then go swim until dark.

    I went into a program at a public school for the intellectually gifted in first grade, and got to relax a little bit and disconnect from the other students. I enjoyed it, as we were given peculiar tasks such as critical thinking and creative studies to develop less focused on areas of study, ones that weren't as touched on in a standard public classroom setting. This was short lived, as I moved again to a different area in Florida and started the whole process of friend-building and learning my surroundings over again.

    It wasn't until the fifth grade that I settled into an area with my father. I had been bouncing back and forth between my mother and my father, sometimes for a year, sometimes half a year, and now it was decided that I was to spend the school years with him and see my mother on regular basis, starting out at once a week and then moving back to once every two weeks for two days at a time. I had lacked the social skills to verbally express myself fully and this basically meant that I got locked inside of my own shell with no self-esteem to fully express myself in the world. 

    The one form of expression that I latched onto and made my first friend with was skateboarding. The other was video games. I started playing video games at the very young age of three years old, with the PC and Nintendo 64 being my main sources. When I was staying with my mother, my father would get me video games from the Blockbuster to play on Playstation 2 or original Xbox and that would be my weekend. I got very good at enduring long hours in front of a screen and learned absolutely nothing about myself in the process. I had a lot of fun though.

    I skateboarded for ten years! I made some great friends in the sixth grade who were five to eight years older than I and I learned all about "culture". Which meant partying, smoking, and generally being a little mischievous twat to everyone else. Skateboarding in places that you didn't belong in and running away from the cops was a pretty normal afternoon for us. I had a lot of fun with my first friend who became best of buddies with me. We skateboarded nearly every day together. 

    I'll continue this in another post, it's getting a little long.

Read on, dear reader.

Peace, Love, and Harmony.

~Faaabs

My life. Part 1

Am I missing something?

The quest for knowledge is the road less traveled.

    I'm searching for a sense of identity. I don't want this post to just be about some regurgitated garbage that I heard somewhere five years ago. I want to clearly express my current feelings and avoid the all-too-easy route of summing up my problems and explaining them by using old analogies, metaphors, and misquoted statements by famous people that I learned somewhere at some point in my past. Helpful as they are, I'm making a personal statement right here to take responsibility for my own current mental state and state of being at this point in my life.

    So, to get started, let's address the title. I feel fed up with my current existence. I got consumed in altruistic pursuits and enraptured in this quest to be this Angel to those who were less fortunate that I was at that current point in time. I became so happy being able to provide for others, sometimes for mutually beneficial pursuits but more often than not to my own personal loss. I felt happy being able to give back to my friends and community. I felt like I was finally contributing to society.

    Had I lost sight of what was truly important? Is where I am at now just the Universe's way of telling me that I was doing it wrong, that I put too much trust in my fellow man and that I ought not to have? Why should I believe that? It wasn't in the egotistical pursuit of gain that I performed all these acts of random kindness. I simply wanted to perform random acts of kindness, and instill the feelings within myself within the world, in the hopes that I was sewing seeds for the future. Seeds of benevolence, gratitude, and trust in one another. Was I giving to the wrong people, and being blinded by what should have been the right choice?

    I should probably give some background into my life. I shall do so in my next post.

Thank you for reading, as always.

Peace, Love, and Harmony.

~Faaabs

Wellington to Picton

Auckland & Hawke's Bay

Day 11: New Zealand

Hello, people of the world! Kia Ora from New Zealand, that means hello in the Maori language. The Maori people are really nice, they love their culture and they are very down-to-earth. Their culture is so vivid and intense, just like their mythology. The thing that sticks out to me is that everything has a meaning, every place has a story behind it.

You can check out the story of the creation of the world and New Zealand by going to this website here --->
http://eng.mataurangamaori.tki.org.nz/Support-materials/Te-Reo-Maori/Maori-Myths-Legends-and-Contemporary-Stories/How-Maui-brought-fire-to-the-world

So right now I am writing this from a community computer at an organic farm in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand. I am harvesting vegetables for salads which I prepare and pack to be shipped out to all of Hawke's Bay. It's nice work, not too stressful, but not boring either. I think I will stay here for a while, we will have to see. I have made friends with the other people living here, and we make good dinners together and have good conversations too. There are three French people, one German, and one Vietnamese girl. It makes for a lot of misunderstanding and hilarity often ensues.

We are a musical family, in a way. I play the harmonica & ocarina, the German plays Piano and guitar and so does the owner, a native born and raised in New Zealand. 

I am settling in here and I plan to make a good life for a month or so before moving on. In the meantime I plan on exploring the area in my free time and preparing for the REAL travelling out in the wilderness. 

See you around,

Phil

New Zealand: Day Two

   Hey there, Phil here checking in for day number two in New Zealand.

Last night I played the most intense game of Jenga I have ever played in my life.

A while ago in Chicago

Had a lovely day today in Chicago. Architecture boat tour down the Chicago rivers. Hope you like these pictures as much as I do!

 More pics below!

Hometown

   I came on here to write a post to you all. I wanted to write about my time in Wisconsin, in the town of Saint Germain and everything that I did, but I've decided to talk about something greater than all that. For the past few years, I've taken the six hour drive up from Elgin, Illinois to Saint Germain, Wisconsin with the Martin clan. I call them the Martin clan because they are a family of eleven, and everywhere they go, they get noticed. It could be their giant white twelve-seater van, or it could be the way that Elizabeth screams when Jacob pushes her to move faster. Either way, I'm stuck with them because they're my family.

   Even so, that sounds kind of crazy, right? A normally only child, whose favorite place is in the solitude of his bedroom to be with a family of eleven? What business do I have being smack dab in the middle of the Brady Bunch? But that's just it. I feel at home with them; I feel more myself than I could ever be when I'm in my own comfort zone. They're always on the go. The Martins have learned that in order to refrain from tearing each other to pieces, they have to keep themselves occupied. And in Wisconsin, that means fishing, boating, shooting guns, roasting marshmallows, watching movies, and reading books, just to name a few...

Bonnaroo!!

  June 13th -- June 17. Within these four days lies both happiness and sadness, joy and elation, and dejection and sorrow. When I first arrived at Bonnaroo, I had just gotten off of the greyhound bus and was walking, thankfully, with a lovely friend that I decided to tag along with, Luna is her name. We ended up getting a ride from this old lady in a white car who had been giving rides to walking Bonnaroovians all day long. Unfortunately Luna had to meet her friends, so I was off on my own! I found a nice place to set up tent, but I couldn't get the feeling out of my head that I was performing and improvising the whole time. It sucked. Finally Friday night when I saw Paul McCartney (tears were shed people, let's admit it) that I really came around and started to enjoy myself. After that, I started to have FUN. I started to meet cool people and even met my most favorite singer and got an autographed album and a hug from her!!!!!

   Hi everyone! This is Phil B. signing in for the first time on this new blog... Here's to many more!

To start, I'll let you know a little bit about me: My name is Phillip Biddulph, I'm 17, my birthday is June 24, 1995, and my favorite color is blue. I just graduated high school (THANK GOD \o/) and now I plan to travel to somewhere completely different and outside of what is normal for me. In other words, I'm going New Zealand baby!!! 

   No matter what happens on this crazy journey, good or bad, I'll have it right here on this nifty little webpage. Don't you worry!