📜 My Heart Laid Bare: A Partial Testimony

Birth seems the most fitting place to begin.
I was born on August 19, 1982, at Portsmouth Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia. My birth certificate lists my Father and Mother as eyewitnesses. I was their firstborn—and only child from that marriage. My father had a daughter from a previous marriage, making her my older half-sister.

🧸 Early Memories and the Mystery of the Crab

My earliest memories trace back to a second-story apartment on Bainbridge Boulevard in Norfolk, VA, where I lived with my father around age 2 or 3.

• I remember spilling cereal while trying to serve myself.
• I remember jumping on my parents' bed and splitting my lip on the foot rail.
• I remember waking early, flipping through channels, and discovering Pinwheel on Nickelodeon.
• I remember opening my toy box and seeing what I thought was a live crab. I ran to get my dad’s future third wife—but when she looked, the crab was gone.

Was it real? Or just imagination? That moment still puzzles me.

👪 Family, Faith, and the First Fractures

My biological parents divorced before I could form lasting memories.

• I believed my dad’s third wife was my mother until age 7, when I noticed I had three sets of grandparents.
• A phone call with my biological mom revealed I had two more siblings—a brother and a sister.
• That discovery sparked a curiosity in me: a desire to learn what I didn’t know.

Around this time, I began attending Great Bridge Church of Christ in Great Bridge, VA.

• I was baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
• It was the first time I heard the names Jesus and God.
• Innocence was lost soon thereafter.

🔄 Born Again, Bit by Bit

The concept of being “born again” eluded me then.
But over time, it revealed itself—strangely, and often in ways society finds contemptible.
This testimony is not a full autobiography, but a partial unveiling of the thoughts and experiences that shape my literary ambitions.

🗡️ Suicide, Vanity, and the Samurai Code

I’ve contemplated suicide—not from despair alone, but as a form of honor, akin to Seppuku, the ritual suicide of the samurai.

• Seppuku was a way to die with dignity, to escape shame or torture.
• It was a final act of agency.

Benjamin Franklin once wrote in his autobiography:

“Perhaps I shall a good deal gratify my own vanity... being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the possessor, and to others that are within his sphere of action.”

Some of my maternal ancestors—Samuel Willard Saxton, Grace Birgfield, and Robert Murphy—inspire me to write autobiographically.
At 32, a full autobiography felt premature. But a partial testimony felt right.

🖋️ Poe’s Challenge: My Heart Laid Bare

Edgar Allan Poe once wrote:

“If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize at one effort the universal world of human thought... all he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—‘My Heart Laid Bare.’”

But to write it truthfully? “The page would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.”

🌍 A Revolution of Innocence

I’ve fancied suicide.
I’ve fancied vanity.
I’ve fancied revolution.

But now, I fancy a revolution not of myself, but of higher power for the innocent—especially children.

• No payment required but my own affirmative action.
• No ambition but to push corruption as far into the past as possible.

If this is conceivable, then the rest will follow.