ChainLightning

Username: ChainLightning

Real name: Michael J. (aka Chain)

DOB: January 31, 1966

Location: Big Lake Twp, MN

Occupation: Unemployed

Join Date November 26, 2005

Staff Level: Global Moderator / Admin

About Me:
I was born an only child. Grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis/St. Paul in Minnesota and, by the age of 11, was working summers and weekends on my grandparent's farm in Rush City, a small farming community about a third of the way between the Twin Cities and Duluth, MN. The winters were spent snowmobiling and hiking, both around home and at the farm.

School was my worst chore. I went to a Catholic elementary school for my first six grades, after kindergarten, then moved to the public school system. I wasn't impressed. The only thing that even remotely attracted my interest was lunch. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I was up to my neck in drugs, which REALLY made 'open lunch' interesting. My senior year was the year of change: I stopped smoking pot, I had already quit doing other drugs, such as LSD, hashish and mushrooms.

I also got a job and my license while still a senior. Though I got the job before the school year started, it proved to be a fateful employment. I lost my license only 8 days after getting it: DUI. In those days, the first DUI was a mandatory 90 day revocation. When I got my license back 'I kept my nose clean', as my dad would have said, until nearly Christmas; My second DUI in less than a year.

Another stint without a license. Still working at the same place: a car wash. The plan wasn't so much, "what to do with my life"; it was more, "get my life back under control." Treatment, work day in/day out, save my money (to buy a car and to pay car insurance, which was unbelievably high, after all) and just keep plugging along.

When I finally got my license back (no car or insurance yet), I got my third DUI. I was still IN outpatient treatment at the time. I finally realized it (me getting DUI's) wasn't a fluke. SOMETHING had to change.

Fortunately, the treatment center I was going to was run by a couple of very spiritual people. Not religious, spiritual. The wife was full-blooded Ojibwe and she honored her heritage and ancestry. In the very same meeting that I was so humbled to admit I just got my third DUI, July 28th 1986, I was arguing the Satanist belief with a more nature-based understanding and it's application to sobriety.

Native American.

I had to read up on that. While growing up, I had Indian friends (never knew which tribe they were members of) and it just REALLY interested me. I spent alot of time in book stores and libraries; I had to find SOMETHING to fill my time, in place of alcohol. I was floored by alot of what I read, it made so much sense to me, deeply moving epiphanies ensued.

The months rolled by and I kept working at the car wash and reading anything and everything I could get my hands on, not in historical data but in practice and ceremonial aspects. On December 21st of that same year, my life changed again. The accident that broke my legs. (Technically, only one femur was broken. The other knee was badly demolished, but the bones were intact.) I was standing behind a car, at work, when IT got rear-ended by a run-away car with no brakes. I was crushed between them.

Six months in a wheel chair and a TON of soul searching. I couldn't GET to a library, it was too much strain on my mom just getting me to doctor's visits and therapy. It was an eye-opener, actually; A big reason for my current cynicism towards others, as well as producing just the right setting for philosophical advances, personally.

I lost several friends during that time. People that couldn't "cope", or didn't know how to deal with a cripple. Others were more interested in the bar scene. I learned a bit of self-sufficiency, anyway. As soon as the snow melted, I took my wheelchair out for a ride. Heading to my best friend's house, some 6 miles away, I had to cross two highways and make it up one long hill. THAT was fear. And it wasn't to see a friend, it was to DO IT MYSELF.

Skipping ahead to after the wheel chair, and after getting my driver's license back (which was an AMAZING feat, in itself), after finding sober (biker) friends and assorted skin art, and finding a new hangout. I hooked up with hot little Darksider. At the time, I thought she was 'the cat's meow.' (Later, btw, she and her friends would be called Goth's, and I thought they were completely different things. Musta been a phase. Dunno

) Anyway, she had a nice collection of occult books, that she had never read, but liked to show off.

I read them.

Wouldn't you know it? Apparantly the kinds of things I had adopted in my day to day life, as well as my spiritual beliefs, had a name? It was, and is, called Paganism.

Added:

In 1999 I lost my dad. April 21st. That was a BAD Wednesday. After a very bad week. My mom was in a different hospital, for congestive heart failure, at the same time my dad's kidneys and liver shut down. I could, seriously, write a novel about just those last days, alone. But, I survived them. The gun somehow unloaded itself. The candles put themselves out. And I was alive, to be with my dad, when he left us. I don't know how.

That fall, I got my first computer. Reluctantly. My dad had worked with computers for years and loved it. So, I had to see. I had to do it. I bought a Compaq with a great big 19 Gig hard drive (which was one of the biggest drives on the shelf, at the time). RAM? Isn't that a truck? In less than 3 months, I'd taken the thing apart, upgraded components and modified way too many things for a novice to be playing around with. But I did it. I don't know how.

In that same time, that's when I met Allie. Actually, it was her husband I met, first. In an AOL chatroom called Ask A Witch. He's still a friend, after what? Over 8 years, now? And I'm married to his ex-wife: she and I were handfasted in 2000 and married in '04. It's a little daunting to set out a plan similar to the events that have occurred around me. Allie's youngest, Alissa, with her brain cancer and how it was even found. Allie's second bout with breast cancer. In fact, it's fairly unbelievable just looking back on it. It's like magic. You live through it all and still can't believe it happened, right before your eyes. I don't know how, but we survived.

It's amazing. It's life. And that's my story.

Religious Interest

I simply refer to myself as Pagan. Not Neo-Pagan, or Eclectic, just Pagan. Some of the things I do could be labelled as witchcraft, but I don't adopt the term. Many of my attitudes and understandings are of a more Heathen nature, I don't adopt that term, either. Where I live, and the amount of action and respect I give the woods, here, have some calling me a Druid. But not me.

Why? Some would ask. Mostly, because I laugh at phrases like "the Olde Religion". I'm a cynic, remember? Belief isn't what someone else says, it's what you feel, personally. I don't want to be limited, or defined, by what someone ELSE says I'm supposed to be. I'm just trying to live my life; survive, as it were.

My belief system has helped me stay sober. It helped me through the death of my father. It brought my (now) wife and I together. I believe it has saved my life on much more than one occasion. Whether I say Mother Nature, Lord and Lady, God or Goddess, I believe there is more to ME than just cells or molecules. There is SPIRIT. And I don't give it a name.

Namaste.

To read more about me, you can check out my Member of the Week interview.