Continued

The thing about when we were young is that sense of Hollywood neediness - that feeling you tend to remember when you get all grown up. If you let that feeling take over, you end up bitter that the adventure was never had. Many of us never stop to consider that maybe it's our fault we never got to do anything amazing - we weren't brave enough to quit our job and look for something better. We weren't brave enough to join the army, weren't daring enough to risk having sex for the first time, weren't adventurous enough to actually work to take that trip to France.
I know people who have never left their house, never been on a date, never lived. I mean sure, I've had some damn hard times over the years. I've loved and lost. I've been beaten and thrown around. I've been on the bottom of the barrel. But I've also went driving cross country just because I felt like it. I managed to get a wife-beating bastard put up on federal charges for trying to force his wife to miscarry. I've helped a homeless girl get back on her feet, slid off a mountain in my car, and sang with such powers the sea waves literally divided around me in straight arcs of glittering sea foam.
The thing we never truly realize as children is that an adventure is not one unless it is riddled with hardship. Adventures are not fun until they're over and you're sitting by the campfire, telling the next generation of dreamers all about it.
So my older brother and I were young, and it was the mid-80's - a time I've come to notice that a lot of big events happened. A lot of the UFO information began to get disclosed, several reports of mass UFO abduction have been made, the energies themselves experienced an influx of activity. Off to the side of it all was my brother, me, and a host of other teenagers who found ourselves suddenly having memories of times long ago and far away from us. As I've talked about before, we remembered entire planets out there - cultures, foods, clothing, drink. Political drama.
And we'd formed that group I talked about before. My function back then was to "find the others" and I did after my fashion. I'd find the others in school, carry them home, and we'd form our little think tank groups just because that seemed the right thing to do. Part of that I realize now is spawned from the adolescent's natural inclination to group in cliques. (What a useful tool.) But then there was the other part - the part where we knew we each had our place in that clique. We knew one of us was the seeker, one was the battery, one the book, and so forth.
Inevitably, the clique that formed around me and my brother ended up with one goal: we wanted to build a stargate. We didn't try to build it using technology, even though we knew that this stargate required a special black rock. We hung out in an old church bus my father had converted to a home when our family was really down on its luck, and the emergency exit in the back was our portal.  We'd spend hours gathered in front of it sending our energy into the framework, trying so hard to get it open.
I was more fixated on escaping than the others. I just wanted out. At the time we believed the theory that books are born from alternate universes was true, so we had chosen Anne MacCaffery's Pern as our destination. Even when I was by myself, I would work on pouring energy into that doorway. Or I would spend hours plotting how I was going to survive the dangers when I got there; how I would find other people, what I would do if I didn't speak their language.
There was only one time anything happened from our efforts - and it was more my effort than anything. I was home alone. This was at the time "Matt", my brother, had started to cut me out of the group fun.
So there I was home alone - just me, the empty trailer, and my bedroom doorway. I randomly decided to open my own portal and just leave. I planted my feet in front of my doorway, put up my hands, and began to concentrate.
I don't know how long I stood there working on pouring energy into that pinewood frame. Maybe it was only a few minutes and maybe it was an hour or more. It was over in a flash when a simple yet extraordinary thing happened. The empty space of the door glowed a bright, neon blue.
It only happened for a second - the minute I realized my efforts were working another equally extraordinary but definitely more annoying thing happened. Something in my head slipped out of place, like a jolt or realization, and the power stopped. The glow disappeared. My doorway was closed to me.
It's a problem I've dealt with my entire life, even until today. I'll start to do something neat - like long distance telepathy. I'll realize Hey, it's working! And then the short circuit happens and everything stops. No matter how I try after that I can't get anything to work again.
So no matter how I tried there in front of my doorway, I couldn't get that blue glow to happen again. I tried for a long time, too.
If you relate, then we can chat.