Bruce's Pad
BIOGRAPHY
Some of my favorite childhood pics. From left to right:
Kindergarten photo from Hoover School,
Melrose, MA in 1975; with Chlomosis the cat around age 4-5; and First
Grade photo from Hoover School,
1976. Doesn't the third one look really patriotic!
Perhaps a harbinger of things to come, e.g. leading
a nationalist party.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
I was born at Farren Memorial Hospital, in the village of Turners Falls, in the town of Montague, Massachusetts on November 6, 1970.
Ironically, the facility is now a nursing home--perhaps I'll return there
someday! In a photo album my father, who wrote a journal entry on the experience of bringing me into this world, mentioned (paraphrased): "I drove, which was unusual."
(My mother usually insisted on driving after getting spooked by a traffic
incident.) My parents went to the hospital at the wee hours of the morning and I showed up at 7:43 AM. As a humorous side note, I celebrated my "1/3 century" on
March 6, 2003 at 7:43 AM by having breakfast with friends.
The food was terrible, and I missed my "2/3 decade" celebration
and now I've crossed the threshhold of age 40, by writing a therapeutic
workbook and beginning research for another, National
Federalism.
I come from humble working-class roots. My mother was a housewife who at times worked as a hairdresser and a dental hygienist. My father was a math professor at the time of my birth at Umass-Amherst, some 20 miles south of where we lived. So humble was our life, and so tight was the money coming in, that my mother used to wash the family's clothes and linens by hand in the bathtub, lacking funds for the local laundromat. (I still do that occasionally when I forget a shirt at laundry time.) My father was and is a brilliant mathematician whose talent caught the eyes of the powers that be at universities culminating first in a tenured position at Rivier College and then teaching at Eastern New Nexico University.
My family moved around Massachusetts a few times when I was really young--to Forge Village (part of Westford) when my dad worked as a math professor at Middlesex Community College.
One of the highlights of his teaching days there was being part of a
unionization drive among faculty; to this say I can still picture the
placard he made depicting then-governor Dukakis in the most hilarious of
caricatures.
We then moved to Melrose in the early 1970s and then on to Nashua, NH in 1977 where my real formative years took place. Class of Nashua High School, 1990 and Class of 1994 at Rivier College (also in Nashua and my father taught there as well).
I had planned to attend graduate school at the Sociology/Anthropology Department at Northeastern University right after college. However, I was somewhat aimless for a year or so, unmotivated. When my mother died of lung cancer in 1995 I found myself out in the workplace instead, a Gen-X'er trying to find himself. My first stop was a 2-month stay on the island of Martha's Vineyard off of Cape Cod, where I worked at a health food store as well as running movie projectors at a tiny island movie theater. A humorous note: once as I switched between the two projectors during a 20th anniversary showing of the movie Jaws, I forgot to turn the lantern on in the secondary projector. The whole theater went dark and I wound up apologizing to some 200 people and handing out movie passes. Life has its embarrassing moments and I learn every day how imperfect I am and how important it is to appreciate what life brings us in every waking moment.
From the Vineyard I moved to Boston where I couch-surfed for several weeks in the homes of activist acquaintances (to this day I am grateful for their hospitality) until finally renting a room in a crappy boarding house and getting a job at a Mailboxes Et Cetera place (now renamed UPS Store). I then worked at a couple other retail jobs until nearly slicing my finger off in a meat cutter accident. With a large bandage on my finger and doctor's orders to steer clear of work for a week, I decided it was time for a change in careers and to stop wasting my education.
So during a snowstorm sometime in March 1996 I walked all the way from the Broadway subway station to Pine Street Inn, a large Boston-based homeless shelter agency to apply for a job. When I walked in, the receptionist looked at me--ripped jeans, bushy beard and covered in snow--and commented, "No, no, the entrance to the shelter is around the corner." I laughed and said I was there looking for a job. "You walked all the way from Broadway in a blizzard to apply here?" she asked, astonished. "Yes, maam," I replied. "Well," she said, "I think we can find you something." I was hired within days to work at the Anchor Inn shelter for men with substance abuse problems out on Boston Harbor's Long Island. That was where I cut my teeth in the human services field. I was finally doing something with my education and was ecstatic! I was to work for Pine Street on-again, off-again for 12 years.
A few months later the managers at the shelter were going to cut my hours there so I transferred to Park Street, a Pine Street Inn-run, Department of Mental-Health funded group home for women with mental illness in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood. By then I'd moved out of what had proven to be a crack house (where the other occupants helped themselves to my belongings to pawn for their next fix) in with a roomate near my new job.
I worked at Park Street for 4 years, learning a lot about psychiatric disorders and how to work with clients who suffer from them. Then in the summer of 2000, having smashed my ankle in a fall from a roof, and having become unsatisfied with my life in Boston, I moved briefly to Thunder Bay, Ontario (still with the restless Generation-X bug in my veins) to be with a woman I'd met online. However, she was caught up in the alcoholic habits not uncommon among First Nations in Canada, prompting me to fly to Minneapolis. There I hooked up with some friends. During my brief stay in Minneapolis I worked at a residential program for people with co-occurring disorders (both substance abuse and mental illness problems).
I hated the job and returned to Boston, crashing first at a Salvation Army shelter (for one night) and then sleeping on a pile of pillows in the back room of a Communist bookstore (those were my politics in my youthful naivete). I re-employed with Pine Street Inn, and worked for 6 months on the overnight homeless outreach team. We'd go out at 9 pm every night until 5 in the morning, looking for unsheltered homeless people and giving them food, blankets, and encouragement. The hours were wreaking havoc on my sleep cycle, and the sleeping arrangements were killing my back, so back to the group homes I went. I worked at PSI's Warren Street home for men with psychiatric disabilities until 2008, leaving briefly to try my hand at managing a group home at another agency, Vinfen Corporation. Management, if you haven't tried it, is very overrated. However, its product, leadership experience, is priceless.
During my tenure at Warren Street my procrastination at going to grad school ended and from 2004 until 2007 earned my Master of Science in Human Services online at Capella University. This degree opened some doors for me, along with earning a certificate in substance abuse counseling at Umass-Boston. In April 2008 I started working as a substance abuse clinician at Habit OPCO in Brockton, Massachusetts where I'd just bought a house--a small miracle for a young man who'd not long before been semi-homeless for a few months. My brother helped me out with the down payment.
So I went from semi-homeless, directionless 20-something to Master's level clinician, LADC1-licensed (licenced alcohol/drug counselor) in the space of a decade or so. As it is said, there seems to be nothing constant in life but change. Fortunately life has awarded me with largely positive changes.
Over the years I have dabbled in community activism, going from extreme left to
the "right" (although these days I prefer the dichotomy of right
versus wrong), beginning with a string of campus-based socialist organizations
I finally abandoned socialist organizations, as I came to view their ideas to be
obsolete not to mention odious) and finally landing in the Guardian Angels citizens patrol group, which I joined in 2007 initially in Boston but then co-founded a chapter in Brockton.
I also volunteered for SMART Recovery, an organization that provides self-help groups to people with addictions both online and in small-group formats. SMART
was also instrumental in gaining me group-therapy experience that later
translated into my present job as a drug counselor.
Two years ago I traveled to Cali, Colombia and Lima, Peru--to visit my girlfriend's family and to
film two documentaries, which can now be found on the local
Guardian Angels site. I'd grown fond of Latin American culture in
a previous tour of Venezuela, where, despite a robbery (the thieves stated
"Gracias, senor" as they made off with most of my travel funds),
I thoroughly enjoyed touring Caracas, a city which in early 2006 was
experiencing some radical social change; loudspeakers blared everywhere
with propaganda and speeches of Chavez were constantly on the TV in my
hotel room. Today, I do not support Chavez as his socialist
mismanagement of the economy is apparently driving it into the
mud. As I walked around Caracas, I could not help but wonder if
Venezuela was becoming the next Cuba.
Today I live in a 3 bedroom house in Brockton with my girlfriend Anita, our dog Shayna and our three cats, Lynx, Ry and Thatcher--all three of which were former strays, making interaction between them resemble an episode of Jerry Springer.
The economy may be in the toilet right now with the current
regime's policies set to make things worse as skyrocketing deficit spending
threatens to turn America into a glorified banana republic. This situation
has propelled me redefine my own sense of politics, outlined in a new website National
Federalism which promotes the American
National Federalist Party.
I quote the movie Terminator 2: "There is no fate but what we make for ourselves." I plan to help as many people recover from addiction as possible, help as many kids stay out of gangs as possible,
and try to the best of my talents and abilities to leave my country in better
shape than when I entered it.
----Bruce Burleson.