Moving on.

Upon inspection it would seem life had a harsh reality growing up in Woodburn, Oregon. Yes, harsh it was and there was no way to escape the type cast of early pattern installments. It appeared as if the best choice was to accept the assigned role making life a little less violent. The unfortunate outcome of this acceptance was never really knowing who you were or that there was potential to become something else. My role within the family, and so it seems my community, was a fixer type person. Inside my family, I was charged with diverting attention away from systemic problems due to the inadequacies of my parents ability to parent. In my community I was the someone to listen to other peoples issues there by helping them to find appropriate fixes. You see the problem don't you? I rarely received the positive attention necessary to help me develop in to the best John Howe possible. It would be years before I found out there were other possible personal outcomes available to me.

I won't bore you with the many examples of the fixer inside my family. My repertoire of techniques generally involved creating some kind of ancillary distraction to, as I said, divert attention from the real problem. I could do this through disruption of family norms, general misbehavior, or by appearing to excel in school. I say appearing because in reality I was a C+, B- student. I simple had the good fortune of following one year behind my sister who was a real in school problem for my parents. By comparison, I appeared to be a straight A person. I played sports and was okay but nothing exceptional. It was enough, however, promote effective diversions. At home, a simple misbehavior was consistently blown out of proportion often leading to intense physical abuse. Then, John was the problem needing the focus. This negative attention was not something you went looking for but, it was better than no attention at all. I came to truly understand the meaning of "a child's place is seen and not heard". As I grew older, I refined these roles. They remained, or so I thought, effective for me even after the violence began to abate.

With my peers I became the class clown and pseudo confidante. Just like the Pagliacci the clown character from the opera of the same name, no took me serious and I was not worthy of a girl friend. When the time came a nice girl showed interest I could not believe nor see myself as good enough for her. Oh, they would seek me out to talk about other students, boy friends or girl friends who were doing them wrong but, it was never for friendship. My personal life was awful. So much so, I started making up elaborate stories for strangers even to the point of changing my name. And this was the way it went. When I came to the end of my high school days I was still the after thought person in social gatherings. I was the one with no feelings or respect.

The end result of this fixer role was that by the time I reached 18 years I had no clue who John Howe was. I tried but, always failed to break out only to be slammed back into my roles. All through High School I drank heavily trying to dull the emotional pain. I figured the only way out was death. Suicide was a "sin" against God and Heaven knows my parents never missed an opportunity to tell me how much I had pissed him off. So, I settled on Vietnam. I would go and not come home alive.