who is Kyle

earliest memories (pay attention to challenging the person who is acting like the role they’re supposed to play.) Challenging the status quo

• Mom constantly 😊 (

• speech therapy (doctor like character prescribing a rigorous pattern to follow to break a habit)

• Doctor(s) making my own braces, tonsils out, stitches in my foot (doc recommends psych therapy)

• family therapy

• Grandpa trying to manage our craziness by forcing good behavior in house.

• James not following through with promise to BMX race

• More about James

  • (mom telling me the truth about pregnancy against her will)

  • hiding during visitations - police coming to the house

  • Dylan’s relationship with his dad

• Ms. Woods kindergarten slapping ruler - Cassy peeing in chair

• Ms. Bond hurting herself and substitute teacher all year nightmares of paperwork

• the stomach pains / tomato soup nightmares

• slipper surface running nightmares

• falling on side yard nightmares

• pogs and slammers

• new swingset on playground - finding rubies

• David Tomlinson (the real trouble maker) in Mrs. Wilson

• car show ‘fear factor’ competition

Ok I’ll try and explain. You tell me what is ‘me getting in my own way’ vs ‘me trying to carve my own way’

When I entered the woodworking world I was a teenager. My uncle was a builder and a woodworker and so was my dad. The table that we ate at as kids was made by my dad. It was a thick oak table with a darker wood pinstripe laminated in. I laid my first wood flooring (these were intricate squares tiles with a geometric pattern) when I was in 7th grade. So I got into woodworking and cutting boards were the thing. It allowed an unbounded creativity exploration of wood species. I could get any wood species and go crazy with glue ups to make something useful. Literally EVERY THING was seen through wood.

I made artistic stuff, bike ramps, tools, furniture, forts, a surfboard, guitar, sunglasses, bicycle wheels, an entire bicycle, a mezzanine in the garage, my mom even let me make my own flooring… and hard glue it to the concrete in her house. I saw everything in wood. I wanted to make anything and everything myself out of wood. That was all “hobby” based before anyone ever “hired” me. I got into any process that could be done. Carving, steam bending, joinery, as many techniques as I could find. It was going to woodcraft/woodworkers source to read magazines and look at what was being done. Furniture ads and subscriptions based publications Fine Woodworking was like “elite” level And I don’t remember the internet at first. All the examples were kinda old-timers. Doing old timey things. Like Victorian furniture or hand carved corbels (my uncle was into that) any “fine” woodworking was stale in flavor and it seemed like the more master level the worse the design was.

When the internet was a thing there was a guy. He called himself “the wood whisperer”

We see this in our current society again and again. It is not very long after one begins to understand a skill that they reach a state that is great for being a teacher. And this was that guy (there is another common alternative, where the super high master level person becomes the teacher. that's a conversation for a different day) The woodwhisperer was more for entertainment than teaching (not that I couldn't learn from watching - it just required too much time dedicated to deriving a helpful incite worth acquiring) Y'know? ...and here is what I have in question for you about whether or not I am standing in my own way. When I watched this guy I could see the effort was greater to captivate attention, to mock successful formulas (that on screen performances had used to keep us entertained, think Rene Gerard - mimetic theory)  and to figure out how to monetize his audience - more so than the woodworking itself and the level of woodworking/craft and genuine authentic workmanship was all false. It was the third take - you know.  and that really sums up a huge percentage of the "content creator' world. They understand the basics and the real work they're doing is curriculum building and figuring out the technicalities of how to capture this content, how to formulate this content, how to reenact doing the 'thing' (or whatever it is) --- and therein-lies-the-problem. For me I want the world to come at me so real, so raw, so candid that I can easily get sent into a cognitive vertigo if I sense anything is a reenactment. As a kid I had a hard time getting into any "story". That was anything from reading, to watching television or movies. I got frustrated with even video games because of the lag in the controller or inaccuracy of reality that would happen on screen. Thankfully we have evolved into a lot of very useful (informative and educational) free-to-access digital content and that has proliferated enough (even despite many efforts to put it behind a paywall) But due to my autodidactic nature from a young enough age as a kinesthetic learner (in a world that is trying to force me to sit down and read - starved from the shop class opportunities) I found myself "too confident" in too many worldy constructed societal environments where I was "supposed to be the student" and the adult broke character. Literally the director would call.... "CUT"

examples.

I was raised by my mom - by herself. She dealt with a lot, having 5 boys. Oftentimes when I would get into trouble that wasn't solvable for her like most day-to-day things that she could send me to my room for (if I became too hard for her to handle she would make me call my dad. And I would call-out this "role' of disciplinarian that my dad had to play)