This is the first of three chapters in a story I'm writing. The working title is The Life, Love and Conceits of a Social Reject. The chapters are titled respectively: Life, Love and Conceits.

I wanted to write it informally, as I would write a story to send to a friend online. I'm not sure how well I've managed to do that, but any feedback is appreciated. I've wanted to write this story for a long time, and I do have some people who I should be asking to critique this, but I'd rather get it from anonymous people on an internet message board, to be honest.

I'm 22 now, or thereabout, and I'm becoming more aware of the fragility of my life with every passing day--so I decided I had put my memoirs on hold for long enough. I'll try to keep this short, because I believe I have very little to say.

Where to begin? I suppose my birth was a life-event worth marking.

I was born in the hospital of a small Canadian city of about 20,000 people to an Ojibwe couple who already had one eight-year-old child they didn't want, my older brother Craig. I was named Steven Wolfgang Lufkin, size and weight lost to time. Not a name that makes it immediately obvious that I was native, which I found fitting since my skintone was a shade brighter than that of the people who I supposedly descended from. My brother told me that right when I was born my parents started fighting about my colour, my father didn't believe that I was his son--an idea I would cling to hopefully in my early life. That is, once I learned to hate.

My parents had lived on the Ojibwe reserve for most of their lives. They were young when I was born, I would guess in their mid twenties; they were teenagers when my brother was born.

Alcoholics and drug addicts, my parents fit in well on the reservation they decided to raise their family on. I guess it wasn't much of a decision, they couldn't support their addictions without the free housing and whatever other perks they were given for living there. They certainly weren't going to work for the whiskey they had long ago swapped their blood for.

My earliest memory is of yelling "I hate you mommy" (which was apparently my first sentence) on the stairs of my childhood house. I don't know what made me so angry, there is nothing to the memory except for those words, tears, and purposely banging my head against the stairs--a practice my brother would later tell me that I had been prone to.

Next up is kindergarten in a predominantly white class. It was surreal, like another world entirely; brightly coloured paintings of friendly looking animals on the walls, toys and books and stuffed animals in every corner, a nice teacher and assistant that didn't hit me even when I deserved it. I can still picture that room perfectly. The timeout chair was in a corner by a poster of a smiling hippopotamus, whom I came to know intimately. But the memory my mind latches onto most strongly is of sitting in a circle around the teacher, we all had our little backpacks on and were ready to go home for the day. I remember dreading the bell ringing, I wanted to keep listening to her talk forever.

The rest of my memories for a few years after that all center around my home, I won't include them here because I don't think they're important to the story. Suffice to say my brother seemed to hate me, my father beat me for no other reason than that he had laid eyes on me, and my mother was usually unaware of my existence. I remember her crying for me when I had been hurt on a few separate occasions, later I would decide that those tears were the only thing of value she had ever given me.

At age ten I lost my virginity, the girl was from my reserve and was a year older than me. That lasted a few weeks and then we never spoke again. This sounds really bad, but for where I grew up it wasn't that unusual. A lot of ten year olds feel hardcore for stealing a cigarette--I've seen ten year olds smoke crack and snort oxycodone and heroin stolen from their parents or siblings, it's a fucked up place to grow up.

At that age I knew how to hunt grouse and tended to shoot every small animal I saw, usually just leaving the carcasses to rot.

I was 11 the first time I got lost in the woods, all I had was a .22 with more ammunition than I needed, a knife I had stolen from my brother, and my clothes. I went out hunting in the game preserve just outside our reserve one morning and didn't find my way back until the next night. I didn't even have a sweater, I remember sleeping with my head and arms inside my t-shirt, trying unsuccessfully to warm up. I don't remember being scared but I know that I was, I was always scared of the forest at night. The next day I stumbled upon a dirt road, and guessed the right direction to the highway. A few hours later I was home safely, I brought three grouse home with me. No one had noticed that I hadn't been home the night before. My brother rarely slept at home in the room we shared and my parents never checked in on me. I never told them about that night I spent alone in the woods and I think that is probably when I first decided that I didn't need my parents at all.

At twelve years old I discovered punk music. I was at a new friend's house, a kid I knew from school whose parents liked me for reasons that have never been clear to me. I think they knew what my life was like, even though I never talked about it, because they would always keep me there for as long as they could. That kid was more like a brother to me than Craig was. Even when we fought I would stay there and we would do our own thing until we decided we could be friends again. He had a golden shepherd that loved me, she was the first animal, maybe the first thing, I ever really loved. She incited my love of animals and I stopped shooting chipmunks and songbirds.

One day we were playing Risk with a few other suburban kids--I always won when we played risk. My friend had his sister's music playing on the computer near us and I wasn't really interested in it until the song I Want to Conquer the World by Bad Religion came on. I restarted it like ten times until I knew the lyrics by heart and after that day I developed a sudden interest in punk rock. His sister listened to bands like Nofx, Less than Jake, Goldfinger, Rancid, MxPx, and a lot of other 90s punk, so that was my introduction. My favourite was always Bad Religion, the lyrics struck me like nothing else. Can't Stop It became my theme song.

I'm incurable but durable it's easy to see Lack of restraint is a complaint of those around me I know that others postpone Gratification well I lack that affectation

Let's get it right there's no end in sight And I Can't stop Can't stop Can't stop it Can't stop Can't stop Can't stop shocking but I just can't stop it That's right

Uncontrollable I'm inconsolable My pleasure center is the shelter for a reptile I hate when I gotta tolerate Frustration see I lack the motivation

So, yeah, I became a punk at an early age. Started listening to Anti-Flag, the Casualties, Minor Threat, AFI, The Clash, Misfits, The Adicts, and a bunch of other stuff. Mostly Warped Tour-level 90s bands.

Shortly after this my friendship with the kid who accidentally introduced me to punk sputtered and died. I saw him a lot over the next few years and we still got along but we never deliberately hung out.

The first book I remember reading was George Orwell's 1984 because there are so many punk songs about it. I got it from the public library and when I returned it two days later the librarian, impressed when I said that I had finished it already, suggested Huxley's Brave New World, then Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheight 451.

Over the course of the next year I began reading heavily. I had always been egotistical, I felt like I was smarter than most people, especially kids my age, and I thought that every book I read extended my advantage over them. I read Orwell's Animal Farm, which gave me an interest in Communism. Somehow I heard about Karl Marx's Communist manifesto and when I couldn't find it in the library I stole it from a used book store. I didn't understand most of it, but I liked what I understood. I researched Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky and Che Guevara at the public library instead of attending eighth grade.

It was around this time, grade 7 actually, that I met my best friend, Matthew. I knew when I met him that he was gay, which he didn't even admit to himself at the time. He was teased a lot. One day when we were walking after school a kid who was a year older than us was harassing him, calling him a fag and making fun of him for whatever he did at school that day. This wasn't the first time this happened while I was around, but this time I couldn't take it for some reason. The older kid was riding his bike around us while we walked and when he passed in front of me one time I pushed him and he went tumbling off his bike. I was an above average size kid myself, but he was the biggest kid in our school, probably outweighed me by forty pounds, so he wasn't used to anyone calling his bluff. He grabbed me and wrestled me to the ground, I remember getting my head banged on the sidewalk which opened a cut that needed eleven stitches, but I kept fighting him. I hammer-fisted him a few times from below, opened up his lip, bloodied his nose and gave him a black eye. He got up and rode away on his bike sobbing, probably having been beaten for the first time in his life unless his father was anything like mine.

I remember getting up covered in blood, which I soon realized was coming from my forehead. Matthew's dad drove me to the hospital and I got my stitches. Other than that cut and some bruises on my head I wasn't hurt that bad, I don't think he even hit me once, just rattled my head against the pavement.

After that me and Matthew were basically inseparable, he started standing up for himself and soon no one picked on him any more. A combination of our friendship and punk music made me anti-racist, anti-sexist, and, more to the point, anti-homophobic.

Matthew's life seemed strangely sad to me. His family was upper-middle class, which to me made him a rich kid, but he didn't know his mother, hated and was hated by his step-mother, and loved but was basically ignored by his father. I think his father was disappointed that his son was gay, he never openly hated Matthew, but he never made much of an attempt to return the affection Matthew had for him. Never taught him anything or took him anywhere, and only even seemed to talk to him when Matthew started a conversation.

I wasn't used to feeling bad for people. I thought that most people had easy lives compared to mine and that no one really had a right to complain if they had a roof over their head, warm food, and didn't have to constantly fear a beating. Matthew changed my perspective. He was sadder than I ever was and I had a lot of respect for him, he wasn't weak mentally or physically, but he was depressed from the time I met him. Eventually he would become anorexic, and start cutting and burning himself. He died for a few seconds one time and was rehabilitated over the next four months. But I'm getting ahead of myself, that happened when we were seventeen while in this story we are still only fourteen or so.

When I discovered the band The Germs I was enthralled by Darby Crash because I thought he was much like me. I loved his entire story including his suicide, which he had planned since he was sixteen and executed at the end of his five-year plan. Reading about Darby lead me to Nietzsche.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche became something of an enigma to me. I was still in eighth grade when I started reading Beyond Good and Evil, which incited my interest in religion. I had never given any serious thought to religion, I had never attended church and hadn't been told what to believe as a child so atheism came naturally to me.

When I read about the Will to Power, it reinforced everything I believed in. I had long been taking advantage of people--lying, cheating, stealing. I wouldn't call myself a pathological liar because mostly I lied for a purpose, because I thought I could gain something from it, but sometimes I would just lie because I could. I realized at a very young age that I could deny something infinitely and no one would be able to know for sure, even if they had strong reasons to believe, that I was lying. I used this to my advantage often, I got out of a number of criminal charges because I never caved in. Mischief mostly, a few break-and-enters of abandoned houses.

I always felt like there was a certain power I had with words, and with cleverly orchestrating circumstances to fit my purposes, which I thought was gained through necessity and struggle. Nietzsche's strength through pain.

I think it is worth noting that I don't today think any less of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche than I did when I was younger, but I think I understand it differently today.

I first slept on the streets of my city when I was 13, and it became more frequent when I was 14. At 15 I never went home except to steal food, and some other supplies that I had trouble stealing from stores. I stole an electric heater that my dad used when he went ice-fishing and the next time I went there, he caught me coming in. I thought he was out because his truck wasn't there, but he was sitting right in the kitchen, drunk, when I opened the door. He asked me if I 'borrowed' his heater and I said no. He got angry and jumped up, yelling and trying to grab me as I ran back out the door. He yelled that he'd kill me if he caught me in the house again, as I ran away, and I believed him. I never went back.

The band Leftover Crack and it's previous incarnations Choking Victim and No Commercial Value were a game changer for me. They ruined most of the other music I listened to because they all seemed so Disney after listening to Stza glorify suicide and school shootings, be completely honest about substance abuse and self-hate. It all seemed so raw, so real, like he was just pouring his emotions out into the microphone with no filter whatsoever, which I had never experienced before. Plus they were anti-racist, -sexist and -homophobic.

Gay Rude Boys is still one of my favourite songs--about anti-racist punks who are homophobic.

You know I'm not pc, I'll shoot your kid at school, 'Cuz he's gonna grow up to be a fucking asshole just like you.
You can celebrate your unity til every gay is dead, But why don't you stop your fronting with real unity instead?
And on a better dime on this shitty little globe We would crucify the racists and be bashing all the homophobes!

Starts out trying to offend whoever he possibly can, and then finishes off with a condemnation of arbitrary hate--that's legendary.

I shouldn't say that it's one of my favourites as if that differentiates it from most of their other songs though because a lot of them are among my favourite songs to this day. Ya Can't Go Home was my theme on cold nights, I have to include the complete lyrics here because it is so pertinent to my story.

It's too cold to sleep tonight We could freeze to death I warn It's so hard to want to fight When you wish you were never born

This time you're gonna have to choose You can stick with me, but you're gonna lose But it's the same thing that I hear Ya can't go home and ya can't stay here Ya can't go home and ya can't stay here

And I'd do anything it takes I wish that I could change it all But I'll drown in the pain of my mistakes Cause when I'm done searching, you know I'm gonna fall

We'll get a bottle to keep us warm A little fuckin' shelter from the wicked storm But it's the same thing that I hear Ya can't go home and ya can't stay here

This is the kind of song you can't write without having lived the kind of life I've lived. I don't know what kind of life these guys live today, but I know for sure that they've been in a similar position as me. Most people don't think to say "it's too cold to sleep tonight" but it's a thought you become accustomed to living on the street or

First of all, I'm a poetry writer not a story writer so don't feel inclined to take my advice - you probably know better than me. :P I really liked the story it was easy to read and definitely captured my attention. I was thinking perhaps for the lyrics from the song, "Gay Rude Boys", you could set them up into stanzas like the other lyrics in this story. I know it's a much shorter quote but I think it would fit a little better.

Also, a few sentences almost feel like partial thoughts. Or that they're not extended on enough, such as how your character learned to hunt and would leave the carcasses to rot, and that he lost his virginity at ten years of age. (I assume the latter will probably be extended on in the "Love" chapter though.. :P).

I noticed a few grammar mistakes but I'm afraid this is much too long of a chapter for me to fully go through right now. Sorry about that!

My favourite part in this chapter is when your main character talks about how sad Matthew's life is. I personally find Matthew's life easier to relate to and think he's a great character! Good job on the chapter! I'd definitely read more :).

When you say you want to write informally, do you mean that you want the style to be:

1. more free as it in in stream of consciousness?
2. or have structure but be written in a relaxed, conversational voice?

:) Knowing the answer will help me assess your work, as there are difference elements in both of these. Namely, means that it's light and conversational, but the thoughts are coherent and not jumpy. means that everything is coming out as it's the thought the way it's thought, so going off topic is okay.

, congrats on writing! :) It's always great to get out something you've had banging around in your head for a while!

Any help is appreciated :P

I put those lyrics into stanza-format as you suggested and as for those partial thoughts, I actually had a more in depth explanation of how he lost his virginity typed up but when I read the writing forum rules I decided against including it. I wasn't sure that even mentioning it would be considered pg-13 and thought that expanding on it would probably get this thread locked. It will be in the final edition though. Also, I hadn't been planning on mentioning it except in passing in the Love chapter. I'm trying to write it semi-chronologically, though the narrator tends to get ahead of himself and have to double back to cover details, and I hadn't planned to break that pattern until the last chapter, where he will discuss how he now feels about some of the more important details of his life.

Oh, and as for how he learned to hunt, I played with the idea of adding a segment in there about how Craig had taught him how to shoot and that it was really his only fond memory of his older brother. But I couldn't decide between adding it or keeping it out because the narrator is admittedly self-absorbed and, as you probably noticed, has not as of yet gone into great detail about anyone other than himself. The obvious exception is Matthew, who will be expanded upon further in the next chapter. But I decided to forego deciding whether or not to add that part about Craig until a later edition. Your opinion on it would be appreciated though :)

I like Matthew too, in fact this story is meant to be almost as much about him as it is about the narrator. My idea was to basically only have three characters who would all be explored in depth while most of the other characters were not given a second thought, until the final chapter when a few of them would be given a second thought and little more. The third character hasn't been introduced yet, by the way.

Thanks for the support and feedback :)

More like , I suppose.

I want this to read as thought it was written by the narrator, a by no means unintelligent young man, and a lover of literature, but not really an experienced writer.. He's trying to write it chronologically but tends to keep going on a particular story until it's done, because he gets swept up in the mood he creates, and then go back to cover details that may have been happening at the same time, such as what he did with Matthew's story.

The best way I can think of to describe it is that I want it to read like a story told, not a story written.

I wrote it pretty quickly and tried not to re-arrange or alter anything after it had been put to paper to try to keep to this style. I'm not sure it worked out exactly as I had hoped, but I think it worked out better than I should have expected for my first try.

Thanks for the response, I appreciate it.

It looks good in stanzas! I may be a little biased though :P Oh yeah, I suppose that would definitely not be pg-13 haha I'm sure you wrote it very well though and with both those partial thoughts fixed I have zero complaints. Maybe if Craig happens to die or become injured you could include the memory of learning to hunt as a flashback for the main character? Just a circumstantial suggestion! I think this is an awesome story with interesting characters who you seem to be developing very in depth and I would definitely take the time to read the whole thing! Please tell me you'll be posting the other chapters eventually :P

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll take it into consideration as I write the next two chapters. And yes, I'll be posting the others :P Love will hopefully be completed some time this week when I have a few hours in the morning to do so, I never feel much like writing in the evening. I already have the basic skeleton for the next chapter figured out so it shouldn't take me too long to type up, but there's still a lot I haven't decided on for the final chapter so I don't know when I'll get around to finishing that up. Hopefully writing the Love chapter inspires the rest of the decisions I have to make and maybe you can help me with some of them :)

thanks again for the support!