After completing a 3 year journey of attempting to take my production company to new heights, I suddenly seem to have fallen straight back down to square one, after blowing nearly all of my money, making huge investment and marketing mistakes, and even losing many of my old friends and girlfriends. Do not be alarmed – it is not a bad thing that has happened. To allow you to understand this particular story, I feel the only way I can do that is to tell some of the bizarre and twisting events that have happened both leading up to and during these events.

My life consists of existing through different eras, and I think that with virtually everyone, this generally holds true. Your life always consists of an era through which you currently find yourself, but what is interesting to note, is that the modern era structure of someone is no longer being based so much on age as it is being based on both experience and environment. I imagine that about 6 decades ago, the majority of what someone would experience growing up was based on both how society treated age, and also how age treated society. The contemporary occurrences are no different in that respect, but things are shifting as technology grows more diverse, the country’s economy rises even higher, and young adults gain increased exposure to the widespread depth of human experience.

The first noteworthy era of anyone’s life, is often generalized by being called ‘their childhood.’ It annoys me that people so often refer to your younger years as the childhood, because everyone’s childhood is so dramatically different! In fact, what is interesting is that when people are young they seem to be more willing to put their differences aside to work together on things than when they are older. According to a popular myth, the opposite of this is supposedly true. I think that overall, it is not! Children put together in a room without any outside influences acting upon them will often make immediate friends with each other and attempt to find common ground with another by playing games. But at the same time that there is so much commonality among children, there is also such a massive, broad difference that few people realize the level of impact it will have on their later life.

To take a moment to talk about the general topic of age-related development, I want to point out the changes in clothes over the period of time that a person is growing up. Why is it that all children are wearing similar clothes? Why is it that teenagers, once they reach “that age” will begin to separate themselves out into culturally oriented cliques separated by the clothing they wear? Why is it that adults will often wear clothes based on their interests and their financial state, almost entirely based off of those factors? You might ask, does the economy dictate this? Do manufacturers simply make clothes for these age ranges this particular way? No, they don’t, and the economy does not in fact dictate anything. It is market research, but what the people working for these major clothing outlets do not realize is that the separation in the types of clothing clearly shows a reflection on the nature of the age-related developmental portion of the human psyche.

But what exactly is this change? It’s a shift in their consciousness, no matter how small or subtle, that determines what they will deem as their actual identity. While I do not want to stick to talking about only stereotypes, I want to stress that stereotypes are often created off of common societal interpretations of cultural commonalities. A man who has a fairly low income, shops at Wal-Mart expressly for the majority of his goods, and had children very early on in his life will be a much higher candidate for wearing a Harley Davidson t-shirt than one who is earning $150,000 a year, got married at 30, and shops at a central city supermarket. Finance and the socio-economic class of a person will often determine, in part, what they wear, and as a result of the formation of culturally and financially influenced etiquette, will have a drastic impact on their personality. This is part of the reason we will often point to the idea that, “if you start acting more wealthy, you’re likely to become more wealthy.” In essence, it is true – you are shifting your identity in both physical and, at least in part, material times both at the same time when you choose to wear a suit instead of overalls.

You might be thinking at this moment, however, Scott: what does this have to do with me? Well, nothing. But it does have to do with myself, and my own personal story.

Just today, I finally went out and got a new ordinary job. Yes, a W-2, hourly pay, normal, ordinary job. For the past few months, I’ve been living off of nothing but purely savings, commission, and sales money coming to me from my businesses. The job involves working in an Amusements area in a strip of family restaurants. What is also interesting to note is that while I’m returning to get this job in February 2007, I was last hired there in April of 2005. In effect to how my experience working as a games attendant directly linked into the other experiences of my life, I immediately began to feel that now, returning after more than a year of being away, things had come full circle. Let us jump back to April of 2005.

“You just don’t care about anything we do anymore,” she had written me. “And you’ve never got anything to say to me anymore.”

These were the words of my ex-girlfriend of 2 years. Her name was Lily. Now, the story of how Lily and I came together is odd enough, what is even more odd was the uncanny resemblance my life has often had to that of a movie or a novel, which could explain why I ended up writing my book, The Island of Yellow. When I had first met Lily, I had also, just at almost that exact time, began to gain my first understandings of personal development and self improvement on a level that I found effective.

All through the entire period of the 1980’s, countless different personal development books were written by authors who had no qualifications to speak on anything to improving people’s lives, and were often retired almost as quickly as they had been written. I was lucky enough to have, through a bizarre coincidence, stayed up until close to 4:00AM one school night to see an infomercial from Learning Strategies Corporation on PhotoReading. I was sold on the idea quickly enough, and introduced it to Lily when I had first met her. It was freshman year of high school.

I recently wrote a 5 part series on here about the Principles of Seduction. Lily happened to be one of the first girls I ever attempted any methods of seduction or even real life applicable neuro linguistic programming with. Oddly enough, it seemed to have worked. She ended up falling for me, hard, and even cheated on her current boyfriend of the time(who she had been with for close to half a year). On the day we first kissed, she had quite literally climbed on top of me. We took a walk around her neighborhood to view a surreal sunset and talk about the events of her life and my ideas of the inner self. Yes, it truly was a movie-like, romantic sort of coming together…minus that one odd detail of her cheating on her boyfriend, whom she at least broke up with a couple days later. At first, I had given her a powerful impression that I was a proactive individual(which couldn’t be true…could it?), and that I was someone who would care for her in a way no other would.

Somehow, over the course of the next year and a half, her impressions had changed. I went from being the cute intellectual who loved her and would care for her like no other to being the goofy, lazy dork who didn’t know anything about life at all. Can you imagine how her ideas of me changed? To this day, I cannot really figure out what exactly went wrong there. She hated my friends, thought they were low lives and going nowhere. She didn’t like me anymore, because I didn’t really have a knack for conversation during the final months of our relationship – I simply had nothing to talk about and at the time was entirely focused on my ideas and starting my company. The silence drove her to mild misery. We also spent very little time together, but it had pretty much always been that way. My parents would refuse to give me a ride to see her because they had gotten tired of making trips across town. She could not see me because her mother was very strict. Neither one of us had a car or a mode of transportation ourselves. The entire relationship had become frozen, so to speak.

To sum up the reasons I can gather of why Lily broke up with me after two years were: I was lazy, apathetic, and she no longer felt I loved her.

Gee.

But to add to the fairytale that was falling apart, there then came a stroke of irony. After one of her principle complaints was that I had no job and no car, the very next day after she broke up with me, I went to apply at, and was hired to, my new job. Talk about bad timing – I had an event that might have helped reassure her. But enough was enough. By this time, Barton Ct. Productions, the company I was involved with and working to improve, was not even a company yet, but was proceeding to entertain small audiences with amateur short films. Just earlier the previous year we had hosted our biggest party yet and got to show off what the spirit of our group was really all about. I had big dreams of taking this group to higher places, and I began to work on looking into what we could do to make it a legitimate company, a fully functioning entity that could produce the kind of films I got to see every week in movie theaters.

And dreams were about one of the only things I had left after a few months. A friend of mine had helped me get hired, but the bulk of my friends were exclusive to school, and besides being a hotshot in my film making group, I was an eccentric, sometimes freakish, nobody. After the friend who had helped get me hired had left and moved onto other things, the days grew harder, colder, and more lonely. Meanwhile, things were still going well at school, and we were beginning to form a pioneering visual media oriented class, our own class, at the high school that we would run virtually by ourselves, teaching a small group of teens about film making and video production. There was nothing but Barton, the beginnings of my developing music abilities, and the spare cash from paychecks to keep me happy when I felt no one could relate to me and that my girlfriend of 2 years had made a terrible mistake.

For those who have read my book, The Island of Yellow, I can tell you that what I have just described is largely the events that immediately followed. Went out with Lily, broke up with Lily, got a new job, and it was right around the end of Lily and I’s relationship that I think I entered what would be considered the “4th era” of my life. To catch you up on the other three, let us sum up the parts into a whole.

• Era 1 – Age 0-9, days spent living at home, playing with the other children on my street, going to karate classes, and my first few years in elementary school.
• Era 2 – Age 10-14, Island of Yellow era. Developed my ideas for Connections of Social Influence, and idolized young Cacee Kenner with my vision of an outgoing social role model.
• Era 3 – Age 13-16, together with Lily, got John McGuiness out of an abusive home, further pursued my intuitive capability, dived into learning personal development. Was a mild insomniac.
• Era 4 – Age 16-17, had girlfriends Emily and Misty, worked first job, traveled to Florida with Misty, worked my second job at a bookstore, idolized girlfriend Misty with a vision of “Perfection.” Barton Ct. became incorporated. Increased manic depressive episodes.
• Era 5 – Age 18-?, current time frame. Graduated high school. Together with a third long term relationship, my girlfriend Kim. Isolated for months at a time to work on new project Dirty Mechanism, publish book. Began college. Currently seen as a transitional period. Return to my old 1st job and like before, I’ve got very little.
• Era 6 – Future, might be the overall experience of going through and completing college. I intend for the end of this era to be a period marked with greater success.

After my first month of working as a games attendant, I ended up with another girlfriend, Emily. Each girlfriend I’ve had, when I write it all down, can actually be marked with certain characteristics at the end of every relationship. Let me list it out here:

1. Jessica – first girlfriend. With her for 2 years during 7th and 8th grade. I broke up with Jessica after feeling overwhelmed by my life’s state of rapid thought and reality’s chaos. A limited relationship where I was constantly criticized by her overprotective grandfather who she lived with, in addition to her grandmother. Her grandfather was constantly concerned that I was taking advantage of her as a pubescent teenager. Years later when I recently appeared on television, he changed his mind to liking me. Jessica and I were allowed to be boyfriend and girlfriend, but were not even allowed to kiss, hug, or even hold hands. Of course, we did all of that, and more, when no one was looking. Sorry, gramps.
2. Lily – About a year after Jessica, I was with Lily. We both loved psychology. After miscommunication and a break down in connection, she broke up with me after 2 years and a week later was with a new boyfriend. She later got angry with me for getting with a new girlfriend after a month.
3. Emily – Was with Emily for three months and I can honestly say that, even to this day, this is one of the most fun relationships I’ve ever had. We went to see Steel Magnolias together, and perhaps the thing that makes this relationship the most unique was the fact that we scheduled our break up three months from when we first started going out. It was a fling, by deliberate design. While some people claim that is a terrible way to lead a relationship, I have to say I actually had a really great time doing things that way, and from everything I know – so did she. Her parents didn’t seem to like me, and her father was, like me, intuitive. He picked up on very particular facets of my personality without my having to say a word.
4. Misty – Oddly enough, Misty was Emily’s nemesis at one point, and I almost immediately ended up going out with her after Emily. Amusingly, Emily and Misty were friends before I went out with Emily, enemies during the time I was going out with the two of them, and friends after Misty had broken up with me. Misty broke up with me for the reason that she felt “I wasn’t listening,” and similar to Lily’s reasons: saw apathy. Broke up with me twice. Immediately after the 2nd breakup that had happened within 2 weeks of the first one, I had a bizarre nervous breakdown, threw a fit, and possibly as a result Misty never spoke to me again for over 6 months. After showing up to a birthday party she was at, too, she later told me she felt a bit of regret for how she had treated me. We began speaking again and after one time of seeing me, she began ignoring me(for the most part, at least), once again. Quite possibly the most complicated, bizarre relationship I’ve ever had.

I would encourage you to try this same exercise and as you write down all of the details of your past boyfriends/girlfriends or past friends, past events, past life – I want you to take notice to how what you spend your time doing has determined your identity today. Take note of how each and every event that you write down has caused a change, or shift, in the identity of your life.