I've been wanting to share lately, about how my life has come to be what it is. I wasn't sure if I wanted to write a book about my life experiences, or if that would be too much of an undertaking to share about what has happened and that a personal diary would be better. I decided to settle on some sort of mix of the two, here, which I will use as a public diary of sorts, but without any expectation that it will be read.
It will be useful to share my stories, cathartically and sort-of, but not really, publicly. I do have a social media following where I can share these, but my followers mostly follow me for a different reason.
They care about the stocks and bonds of the financial markets, but probably aren't as interested in the stocks and bonds that I found myself locked in during my personal life. That's okay. It's important to me to be useful to people and I don't want any performance anxiety of making my story good enough for them. This place will be a place for totally free expression, without worrying about how it will impact my follower count.
So, who is Lizquidity? Well, I'm Liz. Or that's what I go by now, anyway. I used to go by Scott before I trooned out and took myself out of the gene pool. A few people still call me Scott. That's okay too. I'm not a tran who cares too much about what pronouns you use for me, or what you call me. Transition is itself a method of self expression, and its primary purpose should be for finding internal validation. If others want to provide me the dignity of honoring my chosen name and pronouns, that is their choice.
How I wound up who I am is probably more interesting than who I am, though, so I want to share my life's story here. This is all only my perception. But it is what I believe to be true. I can't be certain that I have it right, because I have an amnesia about the part of my life that charted the course for everything that has come after. Quite simply, I don't know entirely what is true or what really happened to me. I only know what I feel and have been able to piece together from public records surrounding the incident. With that disclaimer out of the way, here is my story.
When I was born, my family had a ranch that we lived on up in the mountains of northern California. It was a happy ranch. We had horses, and chickens, and ducks, as well as a great big snake we let stay on the property to eat all the rattlers. The atmosphere was pleasant, and some of my favorite activities were wandering around the ranch and enjoying its activities.
It was pleasurable to go to the creek and catch tadpoles with Grandma, or to go pick some of our peas and pop them fresh right out of the pod for a midday snack. They were always so yummy; I haven't had peas that have tasted quite so sweet than I did then. But my favorite activity was to go visit our horses with Grandma.
One of our horses in particular was a good friend of mine. I will call him S. for purposes of the article, though of course that is just an abbreviation of his true name. He was my favorite, and he loved me too. For good reason! My favorite thing was to go visit him in the field -- we had 40 acres or so -- and share a meal with him.
The meal would invariably be a Dad's Rootbeer Popsicle, not to be confused with dad's rootbeer popsicles; it was a brand, they didn't belong to my father exclusively, however much he might have liked that to be the case.
S. was a big animal compared to me, as I was just a baby kid at the time. So I always knew that if I didn't get the first bite of one of the rootbeer popsicles, then I wasn't going to get any! A horse being as a horse is, S. would chomp down a whole root beer popsicle in no time. They were nice, cool treats for him, especially during the summer time, so I couldn't blame him for his gluttony. It just meant I had to get my share first.
I would go and sit on the wooden fence, and Grandma would call him up to me. I would suck on my popsicle for a bit, lick it around, and them chomp some down. After eating about half of it, I would give S. the rest of the popsicle and then show my affection by petting him. He was one of the best friends, and sharing my time and popsicles with him was always a lot of fun.
Unfortunately, that time didn't last very long. For as pleasurable as life on the ranch acreage was, partaking in the love of our crops, animals, and nature, home life was... rough. Dad wasn't a nice man then. And he would be abusive towards the rest of the family when he was drinking, which was very often because he has a problem with alcohol.
Eventually Mom decided enough was enough, and that they were going to get a divorce. She just wanted out, and so Dad kept most of the good family assets. He kept the appliance store, which used to be a Sears catalog store, that they ran in town together. He kept the financial assets. And he kept the ranch, which he sold.
As a result of that, S. was shipped off to the glue factory and I never saw him again, or to my memory even got to say goodbye...
Okay, that last part is a little bit of a joke. Using humor is a good way to take the sting out of things.
He wasn't shipped off to the glue factory. I am told that he was shipped off to live with a new family up in Montana. But I still never saw him again. That was 26 years ago now, as of 2020. Sometimes I wonder if he is still alive. He'd be pretty old for a horse. I wonder if he'd remember me, like I remember him. I still miss him so much. I love you, S. I always will. I'm so sorry we couldn't live our lives together. I pray that your new family loved you just as much as I do.
It makes me really... frustrated, and sad that I couldn't do anything. To have S. taken away, and not be able to stop it. But I was 3 or 4. There was nothing I could do. Not really. Sometimes bad things happen in life and you just have to accept them, however much you wish they didn't happen. It's not always fair or right. It just happens! And as much as I miss S., and love him to this day, I do know there's nothing I could have done. Fate decided for me! It has a habit of doing that.
We -- we being me, Mom, Grandma, Grandpa, and my brothers -- had to move off the ranch, but Grandma & Grandpa were retired and Mom didn't have a college degree, so it wasn't like we could afford to live in a place as the ranch house by ourselves anymore.
Actually, we couldn't afford to live in a house at all. We were broke. "B. R. O. K. E. Broke!" as Dad liked to rub in. He wanted to hurt Mom by hurting us, in hopes that she would come back to him. But that just made her all the more determined not to, and to try to make more of her life. That meant going back to school to get an education, so that she could provide a better life for our family in the future.
In the meantime, though, that meant we didn't have much of an income. Not enough to rent a house, anyway, after paying for the mortgage on the town movie theater, which along with the suburban was the only asset Mom got out of the divorce.
It wasn't an asset that was necessarily a good one to have. It was a one screen theater, and in the mountain town of 500 people that we lived in, the movies that we got for it were always a month or two old. By the time we got them, a lot of people had already seen them in the "city," which was about an hour and a half's drive down the canyon.
That theater never did turn much of a profit, except for the week we aired The Lion King. It was more of a liability than an asset, really! But it also gave us a place to live, because underneath the sticky floors and stained seats of the movie theater, there was a rollerskating rink that came with the property.
We would rent out that skating rink for birthday parties and such on occasion, but it wasn't a big earner for us. So we decided it would be a better idea to just go ahead and live in the skating rink instead.
Now, the town thought that was kinda bizarre. It was a small enough town where people talked. A real life Mayberry except like... real, you know? Some people were neighborly, of course, but in a town like that stories get told and rumors get started and a week later the whole town believes your brother is selling drugs out of the old insurance office.
But I'm getting ahead of myself by a few years. Back to the skating rink.
Moving into the skating rink was no easy task. I was a little kid, so I didn't have to do much of the work. But the adults had to convert the entire skating rink into a living area. This was done kind of haphazardly, because we were on a budget. We put up drywall to create rooms on the skating rink floor, and converted the old concessions area into a kitchen. We had a small living room situated on the skating rink floor, in front of the bedrooms and adjacent to the emergency exit.
We also had two restrooms, of the commercial variety. That meant we actually had urinals in our home, which is not something a lot of people can say was a thing in their lives. Although we were poor, we were blessed with an abundance of bathroom technology... for a short time, anyway. It was decided removing the urinals was the best course of action after all when I kept trying to use them to wash my hands.
It was actually a lot of fun to live in as a kid. You don't really know enough to have class shame at that age, and the skating rink floor was quite cool and comfortable. The only problem with the whole situation is that the floor of the theater -- the ceiling, now, of our home in the skating rink -- was too high up for the drywall to go all the way up to it. This meant that the rooms were all open air, and anyone could hear anyone else who got too loud.
That wasn't a problem for me, at age 4, but my brothers were just entering their teenager years and as you might imagine that resulted in a number of awkward situations for them. But it was home, and it was all we had at the time, so we all made it work, together.
Life was hard for the next few years. We managed to keep food on the table thanks to Mom working while going to school, which was just enough when paired with Grandpa's military retirement and income from Grandma's psychic card readings business.
This was where I started going to school. The skating rink was just down the hill from the the elementary school, so it was very convenient to get to and from. Up in the mountains, a lot of kids had to take hour long bus rides to and from school every day, which seems like it might be kind of terrible but fortunately I always lived close enough that I never had to deal with any of that.
Kindergarten itself was okay, and I got to make some new friends in class and invite them over to the skating rink to play. Back then you didn't really do much except arts and crafts in kindergarten, though, and I remember not being very good at it on account of my manual dexterity was, and remains to this day, terrible. I don't have much skill with scissors, pencils, pens, brushes, or anything like that, which made it hard to participate in kindergarten.
It also made it difficult for me to be able to learn some of the other basic tasks that were expected of children that age. My family had the hardest time trying to teach me how to tie my shoes... such a hard time, in fact, that the gave up entirely and I didn't tie my shoes on my own for the first time until a friend taught me how when I was 29.
I had a hard time with the "bunny goes in the hole" talk. It never worked. But it wasn't really entirely my fault, either, on account of my family didn't have a whole lot of time to teach me. Mom was usually off either at work or at school, and Grandma and Grandpa didn't really care one way or the other. If velcro worked well, then why did I need to know how to tie my laces anyway?
Dad wasn't much of a help, either. He was intent on waging his war against us to make Mom's side of the family look as terrible as possible, so he never helped me learn either. Sometimes I would go over to his store for visitation, or stay over at his apartment at night, so it's not like he didn't have access to me. Actually, him having access to me was exactly the problem and resulted in my years-long childhood psychological breakdown.