I was born and raised in the village of Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, the oldest of six children.  My father suffered from a severe form of mental illness that began when I was about 9 or 10 and became progressively worse.  At the age of 12 I became an alcoholic as a means of coping with my family situation.

At 16 I watched my father, in a state of extreme psychosis, engage in an armed stand-off with the state police in my childhood home, over an incident involving my dropping out of school.  He eventually surrendered and was driven away in the back of a police cruiser, never to return. He spent the rest of his life in the state mental hospital.

I was on my own from the age of 16, finishing my high school credits in a hippie alternative school called The King Philip Project.  I was the first of only about a dozen students to graduate from that school before it ..... Read more here: https://www.scottlively.net/a-brief-autobiography/