I see through the world through a truly different lens. My mother had custody of me when I was a child, and I spent every summer until I was 13 with my father. He died in a horrific single car accident in 1992.
My mother was a transient, working a number of entry level jobs to make ends meet. We lived in neighborhoods where I was a latchkey kid at six years old, with instructions to rush home, stay away from the windows, and to call her office to let her know that I had made it home safely.
My father, on the other hand, was equally poor, but stable in his back hills country Missouri values.
Suffice it to say that traversing between my mom’s apartment in Los Angeles and my father’s single wide trailer in the middle of nowhere Pike County, Missouri was always a massive culture shock.
A whole lot of my childhood meals were plucked from the nearest food pantry, but I never really minded that all that much. I had a mom that loved me, and a father that loved me. They hated each other with a passion they attempted in vain to keep at bay in their interactions with me. They were polar opposites in all but one regard: they both had a temper that would not allow them to take a loss.
This obviously created for a short and volatile marriage that saw my mother running half way across the country to get away from my father when I was just a few months old. I never really saw his dark side, but I always knew it was there, bubbling under the surface like a volcano due to erupt.
I did take one big thing away from that weird and bipolar childhood: Perspective.
What I saw were two people that seemed on the surface to be wildly different, but for at least a brief period of time, they liked each other enough to bone me into existence. I’m grateful for that, and I think my wife and kids are as well.
More importantly, they weren’t all that different. They had marked differences in their views on politics and how to raise a child, to be certain. My mother would have certainly voted for Obama twice if she had been alive for both of those elections, and my father would have been horrified at having to vote for Trump to avoid a Hillary presidency.
At his core, my father was a decent, but deeply flawed man. He had a variety of antiquated tendencies as it pertained to the fairer sex, race relations, and masculinity in general. He died at the age of 33, long before he had any opportunity to open his eyes and see that people are people, and most of the criticisms that he had in the race conversation were criticisms that he could have easily pointed at himself were he to be more intellectually honest. He loved his kids. He was willing to sacrifice on our behalf. He was a tough son of a bitch with a closet full of firearms, many of which were not entirely legal, particularly after a few aftermarket alterations.
My mom was the product of a broken home, raised by a stepfather that loved her intensely, but never worked a day in his life, aside from fronting a gospel band in suburban Saint Louis. His younger years had seen him in enough bar brawls to put any UFC fighter to shame, and selling off his kids’ toys to feed an alcohol habit that he kicked later in life. My mother frequently spoke about her “dad” with extreme reverence, while simultaneously having nothing nice to say about him.
She met her biological father for the first time when she was 25. I met him a few years later, and he seemed to take pride in having a few off-brand grandchildren that his wife of a few decades could lay no claim to. He was a deeply selfish and uninteresting cross-country truck drive, whose biggest claim to fame was siring an Olympic volleyball player represented by my long estranged aunt.
My mother had no clue where she was going or what she was doing most of the time, and she had witnessed enough AA meetings in her life, though not being an alcoholic herself, to have fully consumed and digested the old “one day at a time” mantra. We survived by the skin of our teeth most of the time, and I became very adept at inviting myself to dinner at my friends’ houses several days a week while my mom attempted the tried and true method of escaping poverty through attaching herself to men she thought would give her a leg up.
Anyway, there’s a little backstory for you. I’ll get more specific as time goes on, but I’ll shorten it up by saying the following:
My childhood was a hot mess that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, and I wouldn’t take a moment of it back because it taught me to see the world as it actually is. It taught me how to struggle. It taught me how to survive. It taught me how to be tough and handle adversity. It taught me how not to raise my children.
So I’ve been happily married for 20 years to the love of my life and have children that I adore, and I’m pretty sure they feel the same way about me. At least they act like it.
So here’s my purpose:
I want to show people that we aren’t that different. Regardless of our race, our social status, our wealth category, or our politics, we really aren’t that different.
The media has been doing a stellar job over the course of the last couple of decades of making us all believe that the worst among us are the norm, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is absolutely not the case. To that end, my goal is talk about how I feel about things, and what leads me to feel that way. This will supplement my YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com/@callofodin, and I hope you’ll subscribe to me there.
Instead of stating my opinions as undeniable fact, I’m open to changing my mind if you can present a meaningful argument that doesn’t devolve into name calling. The minute someone calls you a mother fucker, you have won the argument. I’ve won a lot of arguments.
My desire with this little blog of mine is to start conversations between people who wouldn’t otherwise have them. To inject a little bit of reason into controversial topics. I’ll say some things here that you will disagree with, and that is perfectly fine, and I won’t take offense as long as you don’t.
Just know this: I can defend how I feel with logic, reason, compassion, and what I feel is simple common sense. I never yell or scream. I never insult. It’s a waste of time and adds nothing to a conversation.
You might be appalled at some of the shit that I think, and I welcome your dissent.
You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever the fuck they’re calling themselves this week at @EricssonRagnar.