Raptor Girls 003

In 2015, I had just finished therapy at Artschool after a horribly abusive relationship where we would fight over food drugs and money, to which I became extremely unstable and would end up having a few handful of, for lack of a better term, Freak Outs, or full on psychotic breaks, on designer Drugs we would find at the head shops or on the internet, from a variety of JWH-018 derivatives to Bathsalts, to Hawaiian Baby Rose Wood Seeds (HBRW contain LSA) from online suppliers, my early twenties had began to spiral out as I watched others ascend towards their top potentials, to which my parents would shame me out of family gatherings over. These legal drugs were a result of being arrested after only the 5th time of my ingestion of cannabis where I was arrested only short of a month after my 18th birthday in January of 2009. As to stay out of trouble in my head was a compromise to keep a promise to my mother that I would stay out of trouble. Semantics.

From Spring of 2009 I had spent the better half of high school working on my solo album  I Frown Upon Pessimists by my moniker The Dynamx a largely electronic based album that I would sit in my basement studio working on while I was grounded for getting arrested til the end of the school semester. That Spring my father would take me to see one of my favorite movies Coraline in 3D, it was one of the only things outside of maybe a few trip to the mall my father would share with me while I was under strict punishment.

During that time I also withdrew from the Peer Resistance club as it didn’t feel right to continue to entertain high schoolers and teach them about the dangers of Sex and Drugs after being arrested for Marijuana and didn’t want to conflate the two issues.

As apart of my probation I was to attend some 15 Alcoholics Anonymous and/or Narcotics Anonymous meetings alongside a weekly sponsor meeting where we would meet up at McDonalds until I was to leave for College in Chicago that summer.

The Last Trimester of high school was dedicated to art and music where from what I remember, would Somewhat as Follows, 6:30am Jazz Band 7:30 Concert Band, 8:30 Symphony Band 9:30 Pottery 10:30 Lunch 11:30 Graphic Design 12:30pm Choir and 1:30 Writing/English and then usually afterschool I would have some sort of commitment such as Marching Band or pit band, and if that wasn’t happening I would drive home or go to Kyle’s to hang out.

At the end of the year I was to conduct the symphony band at the closing ceremonies for the high school senior class of LEHS 2009

At the yearly Senior Lock-In everyone would settle in and have a fun time with games and fun booths like hairstyling booth and popcorn, even a hypnotist, where everyone got to spend their final days with each other and say their final goodbyes. Shortly after Kyle Turner Stemm and I would head out to the Metamora Campground and camp out in a tent and spend the night Slamming a bag of cigars that night and plan for the future and discus other important Coming of Age rites of passages. That I night I came out to my friends as Bi-Curious and that I had some exploring to do alongside my Music and Art Career. To the Gangs Surprise Turner had vaguely expressed some similar feelings about his sexuality and it caused the group to self reflect. Kyle and I shared one of our favorite Bright Eyes songs Easy, Lucky, Free and moved into our college lives on our fondness for indie music.

Later that summer I would attend my first music festival at Lollapalooza and see a ton of solid indie acts such as Arctic Monkeys, Los Compensinos and Animal Collective, as a gift from my Cousin Jeremy along side my white Shawn White Burton Snowboarding Backpack, it was then he would also have his big day as he married Stacy into the Schlaud/Elis Family. It was the night of my cousins wedding where I would be passed a torch and drink one of my first sips of Alcohol and get buzzed with my mom, aunt and the rest of my family, something I had never witnessed my parents do my entire life till that point. I still have dreams about this night being buzzed in the shuttle from the church and seeing my mother unmasked and slightly more vocal about accountability in the family and how her life feels more like a game of “not it” than it mirrored the strict rules and law she would enforce at a much more personal level over the next several years I would introduce Marijuana and black and art culture into the family as a life long legacy of reconnecting with my lost Polynesian roots in California. This too would also be used against me as a reward to my sister as my father would pass this back towards my sister and my aunt Lani and Cousins PJ and Ginger. 

The deal was to be honest with my mother about the changes I would make in my life such as getting piercings and smoking and that I would follow the laws when it came to smoking and wouldn’t smoke or partake in anything illegal, apart from underage drinking. To which I would be accountable she in turn would help fund my lifestyle in college. This ended up being quite half-hearted from my mothers side and extremely manipulative once the financial aid checks started coming in, where colleagues would receive their full share of financial aid in refunds, my mother would keep a large portion of mine to pay off the interest of student loans. She would also go without saying that a portion of those loans would be put in my name, which was not apart of the deal of me going to college as we would have the kind of discussions that would start off as circle arguments and would linger so long that they would have to continue over the course of several months even years. It became evident that the further I would lean into my passion for rediscovery of my native history the more I would be met with resistance from my mother, even unconditional love and kindness from my mother and her side of the family.

Years later once confronted she would gaslight and punish me into feeling shameful for even attempting to live a life with a solid friend group that would not only encourage me but support me for following my passions in music and art and give me positive roll models that I could build with. This took several years to accomplish as I spent the first half of College mirroring my sister as she would move in with her boyfriends and they would live together and attempt to mirror my older cousins in their traditional university environments. Something my sister and I paled in comparison to their high achievement sporty preppy frat/sorority lifestyles that preceded them. 

It would take years and several psychedelic break throughs before I would truly realize this level of adulthood that was held in such high regard in my family and would only be recognized by my peers and completely missed and lost on the rest of the family that would truly appreciate my greatness in these areas of achievements and would virtually have nothing to show for it for the family and their focus at times and in environments that would matter to them, as mine would be outside of their reality in a psychedelic realm of shamanism, hinduism and spirituality, when I would suffer for the better half of 3 years to find a level of perfectionism as I would discover LSD and MDMA, the substances responsible for my therapeutic rediscovery of my lost families coming of age traditions between my cousins my sister and I.

By 2010, I had started seeing Kate Vogel, After my friend/roommate Mike would introduce me to Kate and Lauren that spring, As soon as school got out she took me down to North Carolina to visit her aunts house, a local photographer and Air B&B owner. I got to know her family a little bit through the hiking and dinners we would share together, and late at night Kate and I would get to share a cabin together for the first time where we would soon explore our sexuality and become familiar with drug use. I built my first pop bottle bong out of tinfoil and a pen and we would get ripped on K2 as we would look at the stars and listen to music.

But there would soon be trouble in paradise, the party was over when one day I approached Kate outside after a meal where she started screaming at me out of nowhere, Crying wolf, it shook me up, once we came down from the cabin her family only assumed the worst, we were almost separated for the rest of the trip. 

The Summer of 2010 I started bringing back Music with me such as Dubstep and Death Grips to show my friends as we could be found blaring it out of my ’01 honda accord as it would likely be one of the last summers I would spend at my parents house. It was during that summer where I would reunite with people from high school after spending a year in Chicago. An overall refreshing experience after spending a whole year on probation I would finally gain freedom and frequent back and forth from Chicago as my sister had moved out there for a few years during my transition from high school to college. 

I would visit Downers Grove a suburb of Chicago and weave myself into their local circle of youth culture as I would visit my girlfriend Kate.

My drug use would lead to several awakenings and other extremely cerebral experiences, I was highly addicted to K2 and would waste hundreds of dollars a month on my habit with my friends. From 2010 to 2011 high highs and low lows. Me and my hometown friends would smoke that whole summer as I introduced a few friends from my college in Chicago to my hometown.

By the summer of 2017 I would meet up with Jocel over Fetlife where we would bond over our smoke and hang sessions and would also blur the lines between platonic and casual hook-ups while she was still seeing her roommate/boyfriend. She invited me to her mothers house where I got to meet her parents and roll one up with a couple of Libertarian leaning boomers, they were very hospitable and we ended up taking a bunch of pictures outside for the weekend. As the year went on I leaned more into my feminization and she would eventually share her hand-me-downs with me and would take me out to cup of soup for my first public outing as a trans girl that summer. We would later attend Prime Music Festival, which was one of the last music festivals I have been to in the past 10 years, as lockdown would essentially change the entire landscape of touring musical artists from then til now.

That Summer I was still attempting to grow and sell mushrooms in bulk to the point where I could flip it and sell a pound of cannabis for up to $5-7,000 in Chicago but needed a steady income. At that point I had one foot in Chicago and one foot in Michigan and wanted to bridge the gap between legal hometown cannabis farming and prohibition era bootlegging and Inner-city Drug dealing to even the odds of importance within the entertainment industry and gain access to lucrative opportunities between the art community and the psychedelic community.

At that time I felt somewhat left out of the bag as I was spending a large portion of my time focusing on a live-in girlfriend and full time college. Between that and my parents pressuring me to get a job and the pressure to be the perfect son I had a hard enough time trying to make my life about live music as things changed from academics to performing, my parents very half heartedly funded my college career and would keep the tuition refunds I was to receive to end up paying off the difference between tuition and their paychecks. My parents blame me to this day for having to have paid up to $300,000 in College tuition, and that they did all the pushing for a failing degree in Audio Engineering, and that allowing me large amounts of money would simply mean more “Drug Use” which at the time was mostly Cannabis, as I was extremely cautious to experiment with anything harder than that as my religious trauma which had haunted me from my first mushroom trip did not leave room for error.