The following was found amongst Randy’s books. It was hand written and enclosed in a Penn State checkbook holder he must have gotten from his sister along with the following photo:

Randy was 18 years old when he wrote this.

1/1/81

What am I going to do this year? It is now ten minutes into the first hour of the 81st year of the 20th century. And here I am. Wondering what the hell is wrong with life. I mean, why is it so hard to get what you want. Why are people so fucked up, always making bad choices, basically just disoriented and unable to coincide with life. “People's minds are what’s fucked up,” I tell myself. Your personalities are merely casts from your environment. Your surroundings are what shaped you, molded you, brought you into perspective. It is my belief that a person’s basic character is formed and set in the first year of his life, and really, starts seriously taking shape by the 1st week. Children’s minds become the seedling of the mother and the aura of the parents, and is a dominant force in the child’s growth. If they are happy, sad, mad, or scared, the child intuitively feels this totally based on instinct. It just knows, is aware of, can sense, what is going on. It is a sponge that absorbs any type of liquid it is set in. If the liquid is blue, it turns blue, red, and it turns red, green, and it turns green. Whatever. But it is this liquid that dyes the sponge for the rest of its’ life. Whatever happens in the remainder of his lifetime is formulated through this taint. Physically, it is a miniscule, self inflected pressure that centers itself in the center of the skull. This pressure causes us to change our awareness and adapt to the given needs.

So far what I have been explaining is the process of an animals’ mind’s development from birth until the infant age is passed, an animal is shown and adapted to this new way of survival. No longer is he warm, comfortable, and carefree. He must do everything on his own. Breathing, eating, and merely functioning is no longer free. And it is how we must survive this strange new world that determines how we will act to live in it. Reference: I have two black cats. They are identical except that one is male, slightly larger and older, has opener eyes and the tail is fluffy. The female has smaller looking eyes and its’ tail fur is pressed down flat on its’ bone.

The female cat was born into a poor neighborhood, in the outdoors. Dogs were constantly present, and the mother had her hands quite full. Between hissing at the dogs and trying to keep them away, and trying to find food for the kids, life was practically too much for her. We found two of her kittens in our backyard, and whether the mother had taken them and abandoned them or they had run away, we’ll never know, but we found them, one unable to see because its’ eyes were partially shut from birth or whatever, and the other with squinty eyes and hissing madly. My mom picked them up, and brought them into the house. By the way, we had been looking for two black cats for almost a year because my mom had promised them to me for Christmas, but we had been unable to find any. We didn’t know of all the cats around us.

In a month and a half, we took them to a vet and had to have one put to sleep. It had an irreversible disease and would have died anyway. So my mother and I went to a pet store and found another black cat, and brought him. The two cats had a difficult relationship for awhile merely because the original surviving cat couldn’t get used to the new one because he was ‘invading’ her territory. But after a few days they were getting along fine. A few more and they were brother and sister.

Needless to say, we have two cats, one, a female, who is mad and scared of the world (in a slight, instinctive sense) who reacts to dogs by hissing and arching its’ back, and one who is male, and is very assured, alert and quietly and strongly superior.

The first one is explainable because her mother was in such a state of fright and freaking worry about food. The latter one is calm and self assured because that was how his mother was. Born in captivity, he never had to worry about food, dogs, etc. All I’m trying to say is that our basic instincts materialize as soon as we are in a society where we need and utilize them. But what happens when our basic instincts are no longer brought into need. When it’s no longer survival of the fittest but survival of all. What happens is that we adapt to the point where we are still fighting for what we want, it’s just in another form. Instead of needing food, because we really never went hungry, we needed what3ever we got enough of to know what it tasted like but never enough to satisfy ourselves. In most of our cases, it was love. We got some, and it was nice, and warm, and comforting. But we wanted more when we needed it, and we didn’t always get it. So we developed a taint in our minds which was a pressure in our brain. Something begging but not getting, because we couldn’t express ourselves in a sufficient way to get it. We cried, but it didn’t always work. And this just made it worse. If you’ve ever felt the tension in your head while you are crying hard, this is what is always present, just to a lesser degree. Our stained color.

So we live in this world with the feeling of not being satisfied and not being able to get what we want. We persevere and try, to the best of our ability, but we just can’t express ourselves in the way we really feel satisfied with. What we need is to have our dye removed, our brain unlocked from its’ rigidity so that it can get what it wants with its’ newly developed powers of communication and freedom to do whatever he can to live according to preset standards.

Everybody tries to achieve it. When you eat something sweet, or overeat, or anything merely to get pleasure. But we can never be satisfied because that is the way we were imprinted and brought up. Mind and body have a tough time working together because they did when they did when they were a child. It couldn’t express itself enough to get what it wanted. So we imprint ourselves thinking this, and it sits in the back of our mind ruling over and deciding everything we do and why.

What we need is the key to unlock this door, to remove this stain that is keeping an incredible stressing pressure to underlie all of our actions and decisions. It all comes into play in adulthood. We start to realize more and more of what we want, and either can’t get it or it doesn’t really satisfy us enough. We realize we must make money, so we get a damn good paying job but we aren’t satisfied with it. Or we want to have a good time and it isn’t good enough. You didn’t enjoy yourself to the extreme where you are totally relaxed and satisfied.

We continually try to synch our mind and body together (it’s everywhere from religion to sports to writing to martial arts) but nothing ever brings us to that total feeling of being happy, relaxed, and satisfied. We try and we try, but nothing seems to do it, neither totally nor easily. But we go on regardless of what we get because we have to. We must exist because we’re supposed to, so we adapt ourselves as best we can into society into something that is either totally different of what we’d like to do, or something that somehow is an indication of how we have grown to need this ever constant satisfaction. A cook likes to prepare things that satisfy him. He is satisfying himself, or at least that is how he expresses himself. Whatever. What we need is to be tuned into the world to the point where our mind and our body are in perfect synch, we know what we really [want and] we get it for ourselves, and we are totally relaxed and tension free because we aren’t worried about getting more because we know we can get as much as we need or want, be it money or love.

We need our minds brought forward and exposed and applied to this strange way of life, where it’s no longer a survival of the fittest, but survive to be happy. We aren’t worrying so much as to whether we will live or die as we are to what it takes for us to enjoy ourselves to the point where we don’t need anything else. We get whatever we want and don’t need or want any more than that. We are satisfied, happy, and relaxed. This, my friends, is what must be accomplished. 1/1/81 2 a.m. It is this that I must accomplish, and until I do I know I won’t be entirely happy or satisfied with myself or relaxed. So what will I do until who knows when? I will exist, trying to get what I want but never really succeeding. We can try, but it will never totally satisfy. It can’t. We’ve already accepted that fact decades ago.

We need a brain change. A brain unloosening, a letting go of all our old fears and dissatisfactions. When we are truly satisfied with ourselves is when we can start truly caring about other people. RJL

1/10/81

‘Know Thyself’ is an ancient phrase that sums up the entire existence of man. What we are trying to do now that we no longer need to fight in the law of ‘Survival of the Fittest.’ Now it has taken a different turn. Since we don’t have to merely survive, we have evolved into living! But what is living? It is an evolution where you survive no longer by your physical makeup, but by your mental makeup. It has turned from all animals being mentally prepared the same and ‘kill or be killed,’ to an existence where we are all of one race but as mentally varied as there are people in this whole crazy world. We were all brought up and taught to ‘survive’ in this strange, civilized world according to our parents’ conditioning for it and our true experiences with it. So in actuality, we are brought up in this world as screwed up as our parents were, and the process may soon terminate itself. You see, since we don’t have to ‘survive’ ourselves, we go to the next dominate want or need of human life. And that is the warm, loving, carefree existence it had in its mother’s womb. Because this is its first true, permanent memory. Everyone has had, and everyone wants more of it. It’s between the wanting and getting that mankind has run into its problem. Because once we were brought into this world and immediate needs such as food and shelter were taken care of, man wanted what he had first, and was really all he knew. He tries crying and in later stages anything that will draw what he has come to accept as a replacement for it, attention. Some withdraw or just say or know ‘I don’t need it!’ but alas, everybody wants it. Face it. It’s our first experience in this world. It is what we are conditioned for.

So. The reason we can’t get it is because we don’t really know what it is. We just ‘want it.’ And this is why people ‘want’ everything they want in life. It’s because we didn’t know how to ask for it.

We couldn’t say ‘I want it’ because we didn’t know what ‘it’ was.

So we are brought up in this world wanting something and not really knowing what it is or how to get it. As a result, all of our inferiority, lack of confidence, EVERYTHING that a human has been known to lack or be or something, is built into us depending on how our parents and society adapted us to it.

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