[endthematrix]

How was your early family life?

[Ronin]

Family of six kids, I was next to the youngest. No father, he’d ran off before I was old enough to remember. In fact my biological father was probably not the man my mother was married to.

Welfare of course, that and “commodities” which meant government cheese, powdered milk, dried split pea soup, 100 pound bags of potatoes.

Meat was mostly venison and bear donated by hunters and distributed by local churches. We got dragged down to the “city” by the welfare lady and were treated like zoo animals by the kids in public school because we didn’t know anything.

Mom learned that California paid a lot more in welfare than Washington, so she learned how to drive, rented a car (stole it basically) and loaded us all up to drive to Oakland. Family broke apart soon after that.

I ended up with my eldest sister in Berkeley because she thought a skinny kid could pan-handle spare change better than she could, being a fat teenager. This was mid-sixties as I recall and I was about 6 at the time.

It took about a year, maybe less before the cops finally cornered me and threw me in the children’s shelter. Summer of love my A$$. It was vicious on the streets.