my grandfather. he would take me to work with him doing construction/repair. we would run red lights and drink lots of coffee.

he taught me not to take shit from anybody and that you’re only as capable as you let yourself be.

oh yeah, he also taught me that when you have nothing left to lose you grab the world by the balls and take what you want. he wanted to rob some banks when he got sick. we had to watch over him in shifts when he was terminal or he was going to sneak out and go on a bank robbing spree at 80. His reason, "what are they going to do? lock up an 80 year old dying man and pay for his medical bills?”

he was probably one of the most positively influential people in my life. he came from nothing and built a small empire with personal connections that spanned from common folks all the way to mob ties and politicians.

he was owed some favors that he never had to cash in, but it’s far better to have the mob owe you rather than the other way around.

My boxing coach. He gave me a lot of self-confidence and support.

Grandpa on my mom’s side.

Dad’s a pice of shit, but Grandpa was always there for us.

My neighbor Nick, he was a long haired Jesus-esque hippy who ran forest schools for inner city kids who didn’t do great in classrooms.

He also managed the forest in one of the areas thought to be an inspiration for Tolkien.

He taught me to whittle, about having a greater respect for nature. His partner ran a potions club (during the height of Harry Potter popularity), which was mostly identifying and collecting herbs and plants to make balms, syrups and creams for our parents.

He and my dad built me a playhouse on stilts (like 7 foot high, so we could still store things under it)

For a couple of my birthdays he did a forest schools type thing where we would go out to the woods, build dens, forage food, start a campfire using a bow drills etc

One of the birthdays, he’d brought a fishing rod along; the plan was to catch some invasive rainbow trout. After about 10 minutes we here “Oh bloody hell” and turn around to see he’d hooked a huge native brown trout, which we manage to get back into the water. He tries again and this time only manages to hook a tiny thing as small as my hand, luckily my mum was ready the camera this time!

My dad was a racist, misogynistic, and homophobic asshole with a bad temper when I was growing up. He wasn’t a very good figure.

My early days gifted me a kind, old black man (I’m white) who taught me a lot about just being a good man. I was young, so I didn’t understand until much later, but I credit him with a lot of my kindness and patience.

Later in my teen years, after the aforementioned fella vanished, it was honestly George Carlin as weird as that sounds. His stand-up did a lot to help shape my views and break away from the bigoted programming my dad tried to force into me. He wasn’t perfect, but he did have a lot of pretty progressive views and ideas, especially for the times the material originally released.

After losing him, I just learned from people. Right wing and/or heavily religious rhetoric continued to push me left and eventually satanic.

My old girlfriend’s dad and I got along well. He was a real independent guy. We played a lot of chess, I’ll tell you what. When I was staying with him sometimes we’d wake up and play chess from sunup to sundown.

My grandfather’s neighbors were all like close uncles to me and I feel my grandfather was often more of a father to me than my father because my father had to work a lot.

Nobody, really, not even my dad, who was a highly erratic, hedonistic, vain, angry and two-faced man.

I read books/texts written by men with varying degrees of wisdom and maturity (or written about them), took what I found important and spoke to me and discarded the rest. If we’re being honest, two certainly made an impact on me and made me feel “seen”: Diogenes and Jesus. Solomon came much later (and Muhammad, for those who believe, was just accurately sharing a message from the Divine so I don’t know if I can include him here), in my mid 20s, so I’m not counting him. But I went through a lot of Greek and continental philosophy and there is much to learn therein, if anything to “deprogram” yourself if necessary and to learn to think in earnest, but I find many conclusions flawed and/or disruptive to uhh eudaimonia and the result of emotional instability/depression and/or getting lost in the sauce, losing connection to reality because they stayed in abstractions (Nietzsche, Schopie and Hegel, for example). Evidently, they wouldn’t do, but the big dawg and the J-man? They get it. 😀

PS: I don’t remember much of my maternal grandpa, but the little I do recall shows me he was a faithful and loving husband, a responsible family man, and an athletic teetotaler (my grandma drank though, lol). Now that I think about it, maybe he impacted me more than I gave him credit for, my memory is just garbage but some things remain.