by Casey Heinzism "DNatureofDTrain"
Joined: Mon Aug 20, 2007 9:10 am Posts: 353
Location: Grace Marsh, Wisconsin USA
Casey Jones.. Casey Jones.. Casey Jones...
sighs...
Where to begin....
Around the age of 3,.. I used to dream of running a Steam Engine, with various people......
Then I would wake up to realize I was no longer a 6 foot 4 tall Man, to discover I was a tiny three foot tall little girl...
I would cry and scream, as I so badly wanted to be that man again.
I hated the people I was around accept Dad, and my Grandparents, as everyone else was lying all the time and mean to each other...
Yet always demanding we be truthful.
I would take off to the woods and marsh, and Play secretly pretending I was working on the railroad, and running those steam engines...
I found it was a passion I have had every since I can remember to work on the railroad...
I was then fascinated by the Legend of John Henry..
The world would say I wanted to be a Train engineer, and I would say no, because as far as I was concerned I already WAS a train engineer..
I wanted to work the tracks....
I already done firing of a locomotive, and was good at it, although I worked tracks too prior to that working up the line in seniority.. but it was working the tracks that I was drawn to at this age.
But I knew a tiny little girl could not work the railroad or lay tracks.
So, I spent my time secretly training myself to do so, I knew I would have to be fast, so I ran through the woods catching wild animals..
I knew I had to be strong so I climbed trees and jumped out of them both to keep myself strong but also to train myself to be tough, and tough
It was.....and just for fun of course.
I know I'd have to be able to lift heavy things so, I took it upon myself to make the woods look decent, as I had a thought that if I marry someone someday I'd marry in these woods, as the woods was sacred to me,
Just as was to my Native Ancestors..
So I often would drag huge logs and entire dead trees around the woods. Did this all the time until around middle school age, when I took more interest in doing martial arts solo forms and Tai Chi meditation to calm my nerves and Track - Strength.
As I would then ponder well..
Jones is Irish...
I have some Irish too.. But, I am never suppose to forget that I am American Indian so I figured the small 3 foot child I was was just the Native American growing up to catch up to the 6 foot 4 tall Irish man.
But John Verses Dna began... Dna was always demanding of free will she would not respect you unless you expected her.
John on the other hand Demanded high respect from everyone....
And gave it strongly to most anyone until the proved they did not deserve it...
Later on Dna accepted this as well.
But, as I grew up... and grew older I started to understand this was not normal.
And I started to realize how people deemed dreams as not being real at all.
But I knew it was real, it was real memories is was who I was.
I found myself parallel dreaming of my past life at the same age I was as I grew up along with bits and pieces of memories here and there.
I then found myself because I was the little train loving child being forced to face the topic of Casey Jones with people that did not seem to know squat about him.
I would try to set them straight, and then eventually I get so darn mad I refused to discuss Casey with everyone.
He was that Train driver..
No the word is LOCOMOTIVE ENGINEER you stupids...
Just petty things like that really bothered me, and I had not a reason for it to be so.
It did not make sense to me then and it does not make sense to me now.
But, it has happened all my life.
This double life of DCL and John Luther "Casey" Jones...
Around the age of 6 I realized that the adults were not gonna listen to me and when they did.. they blew it off as childhood imagination and they told me to stop making up stories...
I was not telling them stories I was telling them the truth...
It was hard to understand me do to a speech problem..
I eventually gave up really trying to talk to them at all, other than inter mediation between the children, or becoming demanding to adults to just leave me alone, and let me be...
I also was always getting into trouble for being the one to set things straight.
When someone was out of line there was always an adult there who was encouraging me to take care of them, as in physically fight them, as they were an adult and they could do nothing. As many encouraged me to handle it the wrong way through violence.
This bullocks got me into a nasty habit of hitting people although, I knew from Johns Life that hitting was wrong...
However the same was happening to me unfairly, as I could not get people to stop bullying and hitting me
I was so sensitive I cried about everything in my kindergarten years..
Until the day they harassed me about Trains so much I could no longer cry
..until really bad growing pains hit my feet around third grade.
I would come home crying and an adult would dig her nails into me and shake me yelling at me to stop crying, and the others would yell and stomp around too...
saying to stop it or shut up.
So I often took off to the woods and marsh and enjoyed my outdoor adventures
.. I discovered numerous big sink holes and used to pretend they were caves and pretend to be John Henry, or try to stabilize them with sticks to keep them open, eventually they collapsed or I would find my siblings found me and I would collapse them to keep them out cause they were to stupid with how they behaved to play in them safely with me.
Although it really was not safe at all.
But young children that age do not realize that.
One particular sink hole used to open up twice a year so I could wander under a large amount of family property.
I used to race on foot our 15 passenger van my dad was driving.
I discovered if I went through the sink hole it was less running time.
As they could not figure out how I was getting from my grandparents to home so fast.
>:) (devil face)
... but eventually I got good enough to keep up without cheating as well..
...as I learned to take a small path the horses, deer, and my cats created.
We used to call them cat trails. Racing up and down them were fun.
There was also a giant patch of milkweed that grew there. So it was really fun in the fall to take off down the cat trails and watch the fluff go a flying all over from those milkweeds.
We used to have contests of who could make the most fluff smoke flying down those paths, and who went the fastest.
After this we used to team up lock arms and compete in little train races, and take turns pretending to be a waving semaphore I often played the signal doing, red, light, green light game with railroad semaphore or lantern signals...
....other times as my brothers and I did this my sisters would play freeze tag and statues you had to guess who they were.
I was to obvious as I was always Prince or John Henry, laughing.
I kept bugging my Dad, I want a train..eventually he my Grandpa and I built a wooden Train playhouse.
All of us kids enjoyed playing it...
Our favorite game was usually me on foot chasing and stopping the run away train as they invented many scenarios of how this train ended up a runaway
...of course in our plays. I always successfully stopped it.
It is to bad around the age 13 when my severe depression hit, I destroyed that old play train...
Although the roof and what would be the boiler was already all torn up from years of naughty kids sitting on the top of it...me included.
My brother said,
"If you hate trains so much now, then go destroy that train play house.."
I did and was raving about being mad that I would never be able to work on the railroad and hated my life..
..and hated ever loving trains... to begin with.
A couple days later my brother asked me,
"What was going on?".
He said,
"People seemed to like you better as Mother Nature than what I seemed to be now?.."
I said the school banned Mother Nature...they will not let anyone call me that or me allow me to use it, the name.
They do not want me using nicknames at all only Dna.
And this is what you get, a ticked off Dna..
That no one cares about...
My brother then pointed out my martial arts friends, and encouraged me to practice with him and them, and that helped me...
I also got into professional therapy too.. just in time as well.
I had this urge to drive spikes..
I had no spikes..
So I took a oak tree branch and drove 6 inch long oak tree sprigs about the size of spikes or larger into the ground.
I got very good at this..
I eventually realized when I helped build the horse corral I had no problems of single striking a nail into the corral With one single swing without denting the wood.
I had fun being a show off about it.
I was once asked by a man named Ken Hendricks,
"Is it true you can pound long nails with a single swing and not damage the wood."
I said,
"Yes?.."
He would bring wood and nails and line them in the driveway and have me demonstrate it..
First one was a little slanted as it was awhile since I did it.. but I straightened it up with a single tap as I moved it back up and barely in the wood.
Just as he said was saying you need to set that a little deeper, and boom it went.
His jaw dropped and he said keep going in a row.
So I did.
I always had to yell my respects to John Henry as I begun..
Ol John Henry! I would yell then thwop.. thwop.. down the row as he picked up the wood inspecting it shining a light on it he wanted me to train people to do that.
I did not know how to train people to do it.
But it was fun. I do regret not taking a job with him.
He died many years ago falling off a roof.
As a young child there was very few people I would play locomotive engineer around.
I always knew it was safe to play this around my grandparents and they thought it was so cute.
They had the strangest little smurf train set, you would wind up and then it would go...
I'd lay there winding it up letting it go for hours.
I would eventually fall asleep... as they tried to carry me or gently walk me into a bed or to a sleeping blanket.
Another fun memory which was rare as most of the time we all did not get along was that of setting up a Lego train set on the dining room table..
We all enjoyed that...
I usually took to running my own toy trains around alone..
I had some noisy ones one of those that bumped into things turned around and smoked bumped around that one made me laugh as it was so realistic looking yet so funny as a real train would never do that...
Then there was one that had records and played train songs I been working on the railroad, 500 miles, down by the station was my favorites..
Did not take long for my family to happily realize I enjoyed playing with the real record player just as much as I pushed my wooden trains around.
We even had this silly game called train tiger.
It was a giant tiger with two locomotives as its front paws it had to learn to do everything with its back feet.
So we did silly things like learning to write with our feet an such as part of the game of adaptation.
When not doing that we did tag, and cowboys, and Indians, and cops and robbers,...
but they always made me play the good guy, laughing...
or the hero but they as villains gave me a challenge..
We liked to play investigative games too and a lot of hot and cold to find things...
But it always fell back to the same things in the end that I wanted to do.
I wanted to listen and dance to music, pretend to work on the railroad, playing with trains, Sing, or enjoying the woods and marsh. Then later my dogs and cats.
My life would have been so empty had I not had my Cats and Dogs.
We also loved to play with the electricity and play static tag shocking each other around the house..
We were naughty.. sticking our tongues on batteries, and grabbing the 2 volt electric fence, and each other on and off..
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