A week ago, I met an up-and-coming author. He told me I should start writing down my thoughts. He didn’t say anything about sharing them with the world, but here we are lol.

I’ve been hunkering down against a storm that dumped ten inches of snow on my world. From my window, it looks like a postcard—actually, it looks like garbage. Just a tall building with too many windows and nothing appeasing about it. But the thought of digging out the car is already making me bitter.

The cold outside isn’t why I’m writing. I’m just annoyed and wanted to make a point. I’m writing because of the cruelty of the world—a cruelty that feels a lot like this weather: angry and mean. I understand this snow might be nostalgic for some, but for me, it awakens memories. The not-so-warm ones.

I’d like to believe the world is a good place, full of people who genuinely care. Instead, it feels like we live in a culture that manufactures heroes at such high speed and volume you’d think you’d bump into one on every street corner.

The irony is that this cold, rugged weather transported me back twenty years to a summer when I was too short and still trying to make sense of the chaos.

I grew up in a town that felt dark. I can still hear the shouting of the boys on the soccer field—just a patch of dirt for a poor village. They were running and kicking a ball as high as they could, looking like a scene from a movie. The ball was a sphere of fire. Some kid—a hell of a smart one—had figured out gasoline. The scene was total chaos. The kids were ecstatic, acting like a stone-age tribe of cannibals.

I wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t a nerd or a genius; I just looked different. My application to join got denied repeatedly. Sometimes they gave me notice—a little blue stamp.

Eventually, the ball melted away. The “cannibals” wanted something more novel, something more alive. They snatched out a chicken. They poured the gasoline. They lit the fire. Their “ritual” resumed, louder and scarier than before, like they were sacrificing a creature to gain favor with a god—certainly not a merciful one.

That moment refuses to leave me. Those boys grew up; they took over from the previous generation. Some failed, some did well, many traveled. I wonder if it bothers them now. I wonder how much of that darkness they carried with them.

For reasons I’ve already explained, my childhood was a solo act. When it rained, I’d hit the streambanks to hunt for frogs and crabs. I’d catch them and make them my “friends”—a very one-way friendship, I admit.

My mother, knowing I was poking around in snake territory, would stand on the balcony and scream my name into the valley at 5:00 PM. She is an insistent woman. I’d eventually crawl back home, caked in mud, to face her famous line: “Joe, you will see!” It was an empty threat; We both knew it.

She’d strip me down and put me in a hot shower—a warmth so comforting I’d sometimes fall asleep right there on the bathroom floor near the water bucket. It’s a habit that fortunately (or unfortunately) follows me to this day, though now there is no blue bucket. While I slept that evening, she would quietly release my “pets” back into the wild. I’m still thankful for that.

But not every encounter I had with animals ended so mercifully.

As I hit adolescence, I started doing what everyone else did: bird hunting. I always felt removed from the violence because the birds were always dead before they touched the ground. But one day, a bird didn’t die. It lay there, very much alive.

I was fourteen, trying to be a “man,” terrified of looking weak in front of my friends. I finished the job. I wish I hadn’t.

So I wonder: were those little kids the up-and-coming heroes? Am I any better?