An Odyssey of Oddities

By Jeremy Eichenberger

A wild ride through a mixture of wacky and dangerous adventures. A journal for truth seekers and vagabonds alike. No adventure too small or dangerous for this is the price we all must pay to truly live free. My story is both sad and inspirational while providing a fresh look at the many problems we may face during these grand adventures. A positive outlook on failures to promote a new understanding to the ultimate question. Why are we here?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887936284

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An Odyssey of Oddities

Jeremy Eichenberger

Copyright © 2023 Jeremy Eichenberger

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

ISBN 979-8-88793-617-8 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88793-628-4 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Foreword

Fifteen Rules to Becoming a Man an Odyssey Through Oddity

Be Your Age! The Ignorance in Youth is a Gift not to be Squandered

You Aren't Fucking Special

Make Friends, Real Friends

Crikey! Would You Look At that Fur Seal!

Shenanigans: Rum is for Pirates

Learn to Appreciate the Little Things. Life Doesn't Need a Cash Price to Be Valuable

What is a Blessing Really? Would You Even Know It if You Had One?

Trapped in the Abyss

Life is Tough So Get a Helmet

I still don't like chicken noodle soup for this reason.

Adversity Builds Strong Men. Failure to Adapt Builds Victims

Don't Take Yourself So Seriously!

Stop Comparing Yourself to Others

Way of the Warrior, Not the Wieners

Learn to Lose

The Gift from the Grays

Find Love, and I Mean Real Love, not that Fake Shit Like on TV

What is Your Legacy?

Be Bold, Be Brave, Don't Quit, Never Surrender!

Pursue Happiness

Self-Care and Mental Health

It all must end someday. Let's talk about a proper death

Bucket List

Just Because It Shines, Doesn't Mean It's Gold

Epilogue

Miyamoto Musashi Quotes

Literature

About the Author

Foreword

I want to start off by saying thank you for picking this book up. Writing this book has been very cathartic for me and has allowed me to finally forgive myself and others for so many things. It has sparked a passion in me to finally start living again. I hope this will help at least one person. I wrote this for those who are lost and are seeking something to be hopeful for.

Originally this book started off as a series of sloppy letters I had written to my son, Kaydin Broady Eichenberger. I started writing these letters because I was convinced I wouldn't be around to see him grow up. In fact, to be honest, most days I thought it would have been better if I wasn't. I truly believed I had nothing left to continue going. I simply couldn't find any joy.

By the end of this book, I hope you can see the message I am writing to all the lost and broken fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters. I spent years lost and broken, and worst of all, I wasn't even aware for most of it. My life was a roller coaster of chaos and anarchy with a very slim chance of survivability. It took years to find a purpose again. Most importantly, it took work, lots of work.

If you take anything away from reading this, take this simple truth: Failure is necessary for building a strong foundation. Over many years filled with epic failures and truly awesome adventures, I discovered who I was meant to be. I needed to fail, so I could learn what simply doesn't work. Now in my forties, I consider myself a bit of an expert in the art of failure, but all the same, I am a renewed and stronger version of the man I knew I wanted to be.

I will make this promise to you, it's in our darkest hours we truly can begin to understand how strong we really are.

Keep going! Keep Fighting! Never give up!

Fifteen Rules to Becoming a Man an Odyssey Through Oddity

Be your age! Understand that growing up isn't all that's cut out to be.

Make friends, real friends; there is a difference.

Learn and appreciate the little things.

Seek adventure, kick down your walls, and experience life.

Challenge your mind. Never stop learning; do not fall victim to the trends.

Learn to love yourself because at the end of the day, nothing else really matters.

Travel the world, immerse yourself in new cultures. Do not let the opinions of others stop you from living.

Find beauty in the world wherever that takes you. It's your life so fucking live it how you please.

Find your passion in life. Find your purpose. Your career is not who you are. If you love doing it, it will never feel like work.

Never stop improving, build yourself up. Sometimes we just need a complete overhaul, and that's okay.

Have faith in something despite what others may think.

Know loss be; prepared to not always win. Real loss is heartbreaking, and it will shake your foundation.

Pride and honor are not equal to arrogance. Be humble rather than being humbled.

Learn to love someone.

Do not fear death. Understand it is simply just part of living, and if you have lived a good life, it was all worth it.

Be Your Age! The Ignorance in Youth is a Gift not to be Squandered

There is a difference in being mature and getting yourself into situations way over your head in efforts to prove a point.

Throughout my life, I have struggled to fight off the urge to jump into things headfirst. Now at times, this has worked out, but there have been more consequences for these actions on many occasions than I was clearly prepared for. I have found myself in situations that were far beyond my grasp both mentally and physically. These mistakes have forced me to become somewhat hardened because both the laws of man and the laws of polite society do not care if you don't realize how serious things can get out of control in a matter of seconds.

In my case, I felt a certain amount of invincibility in most cases because more often than not, I didn't take any time to reflect on the severity of these situations. In most cases, both criminal and social, this just means a fine from the courts or a short hospital stay from time to time. Now no lie here, but I honestly was pretty naive to how the world works.

As I grew more comfortable with pushing my luck, life began to become very exciting. This is what I was searching for. I enjoyed a good rush from the completion of something so reckless despite negative consequences. My brother, Bobby, and I were kings at getting injured doing foolish things, but life wasn't ever boring. It was a toss-up between the high from running from cops in a borrowed vehicle or snowboarding some super sketchy backwoods ramp or off my mom's house because hell, why not, right?

This freedom wasn't without consequences. Sure, there were significant injuries and some legal troubles, but I had no fear left in me. You see, I came to the conclusion that death itself is a woman, and she will come for you if you allow her to. I respect her for what she must do, and she has come close to taking me, but each time I think my ticket is punched, she gives me another chance. I was sure the night I got stabbed that it was over, and to be honest, it would have made sense, and I couldn't have even been mad about it.

Yet I am still here. I am here to tell my stories and inspire the next group to just fucking live. Quit making excuses and just live. I have been told God saved me that night. Maybe that's true, but I am not religious, so honestly, I will leave that up to you all on what saved me. I can remember clearly thinking I dodged death one more time, but maybe that's a little mistaken the more I think about it. I am of the opinion that maybe she allowed me to carry on for this purpose. The purpose is to teach people that we fear something so uncontrollable and unpredictable that we won't allow ourselves to live. That's the true punishment. I would rather live a short life full of great adventures than a long one, hiding from everything that goes bump in the night.

My perspective is simple to understand. I refuse to be scared into a life wasted. If I am going to have my ticket punch, I want it to be great. I want to go out like a badass.

This mentality led me down a path of self-discovery and self-destruction. Now you may think that these two paths don't intersect in our day-to-day lives, but this is a huge mistake made by a lot of younger men eager to grow rapidly into adulthood without direction or a clear understanding of the consequences for these lapses in judgment with catastrophic outcomes. I guess the polite way of saying this is I was mostly a drunken idiot whose poor decision-making skills should have gotten me killed or put in prison on multiple occasions.

My eagerness to be grown started early on. I would say, the transition into this flawed idea I had built in my head of what was acceptable behavior for a young man is. Due to this misconception of the overall idea what it meant to be a man in today's world, I often found myself in dangerous situations mixed up in a world of trouble, solely caused by my inability to grasp the seriousness of my situation. All I really cared about in my early years was getting as far from my situation as I could get, and this would require some serious finagling on my part with some artistic viewpoints on the laws of man.

These artistic viewpoints allowed me a certain amount of moral immunity, in my opinion, to what acceptable behavior would look like. At this point, I am hoping I have grabbed your attention enough to deep dive into the world of depravity I found myself in for many years.

This downward spiral into excessive drinking, drugs, and criminal behavior seemed all too easy given my understanding that the outside world consisted of a premise: there are two types of people—the haves and have-nots. I was of the have-nots group, I guess. From as early as I can remember, I was embarrassed about my living situation and the lack of flashy objects to show off to my peers. This unreasonable obsession with wanting to be a part of the cool kids group built a mentality in me that made it easy to justify illegal and, at times, immoral behavior in my later years. All I can really say is I knew I didn't want to struggle like my parents did.

*****

Short story

From as early as I can remember, my mother went out of her way day in and day out to provide everything she could for me. I won't forget the amount of sacrifice she put in to provide me a comfortable life. She went out of her way to make sure I didn't see the stress and heartache that life dumps in your lap if you aren't as fortunate as the upper class. However, with that being said, I still saw the repercussions from this self-sacrifice as her bright and shining outward self started to crumble slowly from years of abuse in her professional and personal life. I watched a woman who rebuilt herself on several occasions start to fade into a sad and defeated version of her former self because that's just how life is sometimes, and life just isn't fair at times. This is a direct quote from her while she tried to hide the tears caused by how truly horrible life can be at times.

As I was very young, during the beginning of this beatdown from outside forces, I didn't really understand the real story or causal factors while watching this great woman slowly implode in front of me. What I did see and hear were many arguments between her and my father and loud, over-the-top sobbing at all hours of the day. What I could be sure of is there was a force that was slowly breaking down someone I had seen so full of joy at times in my life slowly slip away year after year.

Observing this slow decline in passion for life started to shape my idea as to what I needed to do to avoid this impending death march into a colorless existence of just accepting our predestined path.

End short story.

*****

With these as examples of what I was up against, I knew early on I needed to really be ready to do whatever it would take to get what I wanted in life. Which really made it easy to justify just about any type of action or behavior. This seemed like the best response at the time, but I would find out later how mistaken I was on many occasions.

If I had to put an age on when this mentality started to become a serious problem, it would have to be my late teens. The descent into madness was fairly quick as I was determined to not be some whipping boy for the world to treat like shit. As I had spent many years already getting dunked on by every jock and prep within a fifty-mile area, it was easy for me to justify most actions with little thought.

Now for whatever reason I never really found my thing. I would watch everyone around me and study them with curious fascination. It was weird to me that they were able to just stroll through life with little to no effort. Unfair if you ask me. While for myself, I apparently was a special type of target because my ass kickings came from all angles. On many occasions, I spent my lunch hour hiding in the music room playing the guitar or purposely getting ISS, so I wasn't tripped downstairs or assaulted with a burrito. Yeah, I shit you not. I was literally assaulted with a burrito in school to which I was then suspended for using bad language.

Since finding my niche wasn't going so well, I jumped in with a crowd that really didn't care about anything. I mean, nothing which at the time was fantastic. Now we did still catch hell from a few groups, but there were a lot of us so not exactly a great idea for some would-be attacker. Our little group of misfits had every kind of weirdo and exiled immigrant you could imagine.

This kicked off my tour into what could be best described as my punk rock phase/skate rat phase. It didn't take long to fall madly in love with the punk rock culture and attitude because it was so open and specifically lack rules and reason. This was perfect for me as a wholesale answer to how I felt on the inside. I finally had a place where I belonged, and the best part was, I didn't ever have to feel sorry for anything. This culture of people came from all walks of life to form an army of pissed-off kids that wanted to just drink and fuck shit up!

Over the course of three years, I embraced this lifestyle with every fiber of my being. I truly believed this was the greatest thing ever. I finally had an outlet for all this pent-up aggression for all the unfairness I had witnessed growing up, and the best part being there weren't really consequences for much, or so I thought. During my senior year in high school, a small group of us started a shitty punk rock band called Idle Minds, and almost overnight, we went from quiet nobodies to hometown heroes. It was crazy how fast things moved in a moment like this. I went from this skinny dork from a lower-class neighborhood to a celebrity in a couple of months. This by far was the greatest feeling ever and was super addictive. I was hooked immediately. I finally had the attention I was searching for, and I wasn't about to give up this feeling anytime soon.

These years of my life were probably the closest I have ever felt to being free and I mean truly free. I didn't have a care in the world. We lived as if we were going to die the next day every day. Now you may be curious what being punk rock meant in the early 2000s? Well, to put it as simple as I can, we were little shitheads constantly pushing the laws of decency and forcing the general public to just deal with it.

*****

Short story

Now at the time, none of us were of age to drink, but this wasn't an issue for us due to the size of the town we lived in and our ability to get some of the older kids to buy us booze anytime. This access meant we had to party like rockstars in undisclosed areas as much as possible to prevent any unwanted attention from The Man. To this day, I still can't believe half the shit we got away with over the years.

One night, specifically at Jim's Creek in Butte, Alaska, we were attempting to start a bonfire as it was pretty common for us back then. We were having some issues finding some fire starter as we were never really prepared for much back then. We sent one of the many partygoers in search of some kind of paper or fire starter.

It wasn't very long before an army of youthful anarchist returned with a solution of epic proportions. As the over-the-top lifted true Alaskan party truck returned, it was the content in the bed of the truck that had everyone intrigued. It was a whole newspaper dispenser full to the brim with, you guessed it, newspapers. Now here's the problem with the current situation. All we really needed was the newspapers from inside this machine, so honestly, what do you do with this now empty machine? Well, if you guessed drag it behind the truck while you and your drunken friends ride it like a ghetto carnival ride, you would be correct. This night went down in history among groups of troubled youth.