More about myself.

Let's see, where to begin?... Ah, well for starters, as mentioned on my home page, my name is Mike and I'm 19 years old. I came into existance within a hospital that was outside of Coloma, Michigan. (Coloma didn't have any hospitals suited for live birth.) So anyways, it was on that rather cold day that I was welcomed into the world with open arms, not to mention a variety of tools which aided the Doctors quite well. *jokes.*

Let's just say that the environment that I was born into wasn't exactly warm... However, I was really too young to remember the weather being harsh, that much. So anyways, I was a happy child growing up in a tight-knit, christian family. My relatives were my closest of friends, at that age... My cousins would hang around me and we'd have a ball playing outside and running around the house, which was a large 2-story farmhouse. Eventually, two years after I was born, I was introduced to my younger brother Matt. We got along great, and were really close to each other. I still laugh every time I see our older photos of us, back in the day...

To further add to the story, I lived in Michigan for about 3 years, before my folks were called down to Miami, Florida for missionary work... Thus, my parents, along with me and Matt, packed up all our things and traded cold, icy weather for a trip to warm and sunny beaches.

So basically, thus far, you've got me pictured as the rowdy little kid, of two parents who went to church every Sunday with me, and who really loved me. I can see your senses are accurate!

We arrived here, and that's when I was introduced to many of the younger kids of several youth group leaders... So I had a big chance at making a lot of friends here in the new place where I lived. It was all fun and games, and I continued to grow older. I was with a really good group of friends, who never teased me at all, and thus I was used to being friendly and playful.

Then, one day, we moved to a new house, with neighborhood kids.... While friendly most of the time, they did introduce me to the pains of bullying and teasing, which was a shock for me since I wasn't used to that at all.

I think that, at that point, I began a downward spiral. I got into trouble more often, and I had difficulty keeping on top of daily routines, such as chores and the like. I'd tick off my mom so much just from that. Hehe....

Ok, so every kid has his rebel stage, and we toughed it out and it wasn't too much of an issue, for most of the time. Then, on one particular day, my dad got me my first Nintendo system, and it introduced me to the aspects of what hardcore gaming is all about. Atari was awesome, don't get me wrong, but 8 bits of gaming power all pressed into a neat little unit? Now that's something even my 9 year old brain could comprehend! Mario and Duck Hunt.... Wow, two very good classics that I'll remember forever. Anyways, I devoted a lot of time to that as a kid, and the rest is history!

My Grandparents, on my Dad's side of the family, are two of the most wonderful people in the whole world. I, as a 10 year old boy, loved to go there and experience Grandpa's homemade ice cream (I still do, to this day! *smiles.*) and get little hugs and kisses from Grandma. My Uncle Eric was considered by me to be my mentor for everything Nintendo. Him and my Uncle Wes would enlighten me with their knowledge of various things, and they both would always let me watch them play the more violent types of games, (which were supposed to be off-limits to me.) and I was thrilled to death for that! Good times, I remember....

Anyways, many more years passed and I remember coming to know friends who were outside of my fellow churchgoers. I met Sam at a 4-H meeting and we became fast friends! We were crazy kids, man. Then of course, a couple of years flew by and Chris came into the picture. He was much more seriously oriented towards matters, for his age, and that's one thing I admired about him. So eventually, we found a common like in the wonders of such films as Monty Python, and magazines like Mad. We all 3 became good friends.

Each of us, including my brother, had our roles in the group. Obviously, we looked towards Chris as our leader. Sam was comic relief, by all means. I was always the more quiet and collected one, and then we had Matt... who was kind of loud, and kind of odd at times, but it balanced things out.

Chris introduced us to his friend Adam, who was shy but nonetheless crazy, and thus we completed our circle of friends. From then on, we held many little get togethers so that we could stay up and play games, watch movies, and the like. Eventually, we got into Roleplaying, pro-wrestling and comics... So our nights were well-spent together. Lots of fun!

Speaking of which, wrestling at that time seemed to be our most favorable subject, so eventually we got our friends together and formed our own backyard wrestling league, called the CWF. (Championship Wrestling Federation.)

Adam was with us for awhile, but couldn't make it to practices, so we had to eventually let him go from the roster. Anyways, Chris and Sam became heels (Bad guys) and formed a tag team, while me and my brother Matt became faces (Good guys) and also formed a tag team.... Yep, ALL 4 of us made up the entire roster!

I would love to have been able to tell you that we were really good, but.... By God, we sucked oh-so horribly.... But we had a blast, even though we couldn't put on any live shows. We all went through several name changes.... I went from Doomsday to Ballistic Wonder.... And from Ballistic Wonder, to my last name: KidMike. (And now you know where I get my tacky nickname from! Go me!)

We kept up the matches for quite sometime, but then we just got tired of us being so sucky at what we did, so we put the league into permanent retirement, and moved onto other things... Namely, starting our own rock band!

Now, at that point, we had no musical talent whatsoever. Matt had an old drum set, from way back... But he never touched it until this point. Otherwise, none of us had instruments. So, we perfected our art of begging the parents for money. In the meantime, we found an acoustic guitar and they stuck me on that. Sam wanted to be bassist, but we didn't have one of those... Chris was lyricist, and frontman.

Anyways, we toiled and had several practices and we got semi-good, but we still needed instruments... Eventually, I was FINALLY able to make a stop at MARS music, and pick up my very first electric guitar... *sniff* I was so overjoyed. It was nothing special, just a black Fender Squier, and a 15 watt electric guitar amp... But that was enough to get me started.

Then came the glorious day, when Sam finally got his bass guitar.... We got together, and vowed that we would get really good. We jammed, and practiced and practiced... We looked up tabs, and listened to our CDs to find which song was within our skill range... We found Rage Against The Machine to be our saving grace. We worked on Calm like a Bomb, and Testify for the entire day, and learned to play them both! We sucked at playing them at that point, but we didn't care! We were a band! We had played two of our favorite songs, all by ourselves!

We continued to practice, and practice.... And I was slowly becoming better at guitar, despite that I had never picked one up in my entire life up until then. We had a talent show coming up, and we decided to cover, "Pinch me." by Barenaked Ladies, and even though we did a pretty lousy cover, it was also our first! We even came up with a name, that night. - "3 poor guys and 1 jew killing the devil!" Creative, eh?

I also in the meantime began getting more into the Internet, and I was eventually signed up for an online school system called Florida High School, and I sometimes posted on the student forums... I was 17 at the time, and that's when I met a girl over the school forums, who would eventually become my girlfriend. - Her name was Katie. I'll explain more about her, on another page. I wouldn't hold your breath for a happy ending though. If you are, you'll be in for a shocker.

At this present day and age, I'd like to say that our band is still going... We had to get Chris off of vocals, because he wasn't really all that good, but that's ok. - He's on rythm guitar now. We've traded frontman positions over to Sam and myself, and we take turns on lyrics, respectfully. We're not quite as sucky as we were back then, instrument-wise, and we're gearing up for a comeback concert, as soon as possible!

Anyways, I guess there's nothing really much to say at this point... I've told all the details of my life up to this point, and if I could remember more I'd go back, but I think this will suffice for now! Thanks for reading, and congratulations on finishing it ALL!.... I think I write too much stuff as it is.