A Wanted Man - a true story

By Michael P. Glaesemann

This book is an autobiographical sketch about a child of the 60s who becomes heavily involved with drug abuse and alcohol addiction. After trying the usual methods available for recovery, such as medication, therapy, counseling and other methods, he is still in despair, lacking any real purpose for living. While contemplating suicide, he makes a decision to read a book which he has been told is responsible for much of the mental illness and misery in the world. He decides to read that book, the Bible, from cover to cover and word-for-word, as one would read any other book. He does so over a period of two years without a mentor, creed book, family member, or spiritual guide. The reader will be surprised at the unexpected decisions he makes as a result!

• Language: English
• Publisher: McGraw Creek Publishing
• Release date: Sep 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986889313

Book preview

Chapter 1:  My Early Life

I was born in 1956 near the headwaters of the Mississippi River in a northern Minnesota town called Bemidji.  I was the oldest of four sons, and grew up in the Midwestern states.  We were the typical American family.  My dad worked hard while we boys played hard.  After we moved onto a small farm in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, Dad worked for the highway department while my mother stayed at home taking care of us and the animals.  Looking back, I know that’s more than what a lot of children get nowadays.  There were always plenty of eventful things to do for me and my three brothers.  I learned to drive an old International pickup truck when I was seven and ride my dad’s solid iron, vintage Arctic Cat snowmobile.  I soon learned to play baseball when I was nine.  But my first love in those days was riding horses.  Raising sheep, chickens, a few cows, and horses was a big part of our lives. I suppose they gave us some sense of responsibility and the meaning of hard work.  Along with all these were the many friends with whom we fished, rode bikes and fought many army battles with sticks for guns and rocks for bombs.  My fondest childhood memories belong to this time and place.

As for religion, in my elementary school days in Rhinelander, we regularly attended St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. My parents owned a Bible, but as in many homes, it was not used for anything more than a center piece on a small table in the living room.  We never thought ill of the Bible; we simply knew it was an important book.  I remember my evening prayer before bedtime was reciting the twenty-third Psalm word for word, which was stamped into a gold-colored metal plaque above my bed.  My parents taught me to memorize it and say it as one would say a prayer before bed, but I did not know what a psalm was, nor that it was something written in the Bible.  My father was raised in a Lutheran home, while my mother was raised in the Catholic faith. My mother told me that they chose to christen me as a baby by a Methodist minister who later became my godparent, but I can’t remember ever having attended a Methodist church when I was older.

When I was eleven, my dad started working a new job with a computer company.  This meant leaving Rhinelander and moving to Duluth, Minnesota.  It was hard for me to say goodbye to my close friends and watch our country life slip away into a big city.  Our new home was a massive four-story house located on Woodland Avenue.  We went from one hundred acres of farm land to a half-acre yard.  However, there was a brook running through the back, which was only a small consolation compared to our old farm’s winding creek that was full of fish, birds and muskrats.  Dad knew I needed a hobby or interest of some kind, so when I was twelve, he bought me a Stella guitar and sent me to weekly lessons for about a year.  I wasn’t too thrilled about it.  I can still remember Dad looking at me, and in a firm tone, he said, You’re going to do something.  I had no special interest in anything; I just liked a little bit of everything.  Music would later become a passion for me, a passion I owe completely to my dad.   In Duluth, we became irregular in church attendance and eventually quit going altogether.  I had attended Lutheran Confirmation classes, but my parents allowed me the choice to be officially confirmed.  I declined.

After moving to our new home in the city, it seemed to me that our happiness and closeness as a family began to fade.  No one seemed to know why or what to do about it. A huge wave of social changes was occurring, and we were all being swept away in it.  My brothers and I simply learned to ride the current not knowing when solid ground might appear again, unaware of the consequences for which all of us boys would later pay dearly.  Late night arguments between my parents began to increase, but they remained together, keeping our family intact.

After two years, we moved to another small farm north of Duluth.  It was here that my love for the guitar began to develop.  One night, Mom and Dad had visited the local university theater.  Mom came home excited about the young musician who had performed there.  He was short, wore large wire-rimmed glasses, sang, and played a twelve-string guitar.  He was also a songwriter, and one of his songs had been recorded by the group Peter, Paul, and Mary. He had also released his own record albums, and Mom was determined to purchase one as soon as possible.  A few weeks later, she brought home an album—John Denver’s Rhymes and Reasons. Mom and I became instant fans.  I talked my dad into trading in my old Stella six-string guitar for a Harmony twelve-string.  I quit my weekly lessons and learned chord progressions from the guy with whom my dad made the trade, and was soon learning music on my own.

From those days, I memorized music by ear, listening to many of John Denver’s albums. From this beginning, I bought more albums, learning songs from James Taylor, Gordon Lightfoot, Judy Collins, Dan Fogelberg, Joni Mitchell and more.  In my junior year of high school, I developed a friendship with another musician named Rick who liked old country songs and the Beatles.  He also learned most of his music by ear.  We eventually created our own two-man band and named it Longhorn, largely because his dad was living in Texas.  We got a job playing in a local bar, which to everyone’s surprise, drew large nightly crowds.  We also played for a few weddings and anytime someone would have us.  Looking back, getting country music and rock-n’-roll out of a varying combination of electric and acoustic guitars, and adding a harmonica now and then, was quite an accomplishment.

Even though we had become less interested in church, I was not completely without thoughts about God.  On one occasion, I had been hunting in our woods on the farm during a cold, overcast winter day.  I stood against a tree until dark listening to a partridge rustle in the snow and the constant tapping of loosened birch bark rattling against the trunk from the winds winding through the thicket.  The solitude of the natural things around me was pleasantly fascinating in its simplicity.  I unloaded my gun and would never head out on my own to hunt again.  The following summer, I would go alone into the woods listening to the sounds and observing little creatures scampering and flittering here and there. I began to ponder with curiosity in my heart about the existence of God.  This was the first time I considered where the universe came from.  I weighed two possible ideas:  either the universe came from nothing, or it was created.  I knew it had to begin somewhere.

At that time, I knew nothing about evolution or natural selection.  I knew nothing about creationism, or the Bible either, as I mentioned before.  Observing that living things died, and in their death, something new began to live again in their place, I became drawn to piecing together a puzzle I never before assembled.  Rain, heat, summer, or winter, good or bad, all things worked together too well to be here by happenstance.  The only thing out of balance in the world was human behavior.  Human beings could not create life or anything similar that exists in the earth, but rather, they could preserve it or destroy it.  The idea