This is my book. From start to finish in all warts and glory my life and its curiosities will be laid bare for all to see.
Hello,... i'm amazed you've stumbled across this little page as far it's embryonic state in weblog terms of the great and swelling ranks i'm a tad late moving from Usenet and Paper! ....
But its going to be growing, growing with more words each day, mostly my own, ...but i am hoping for a few Wiki-style collaborators to join perhaps the fray as i progress.
Pretty much starting from the day i was thrust into this world onto a kitchen table on the slopes of Mount Etna which floats atop the isle of Sicily in the Med, just outside a small townlet that goes by the name of Santa Margherita. . .
As the octogenarian midwife took 2 hours to plod her way up the mountainside, my father his not uncharacteristic patience whipped out the bread knife and unceremoniously severed the maternal link and that was that ... I was Human , and with (at the time) 1 head, 2 arms and 2 legs I was to head forth, go forth and multiply.
But what i hadn't accounted for was the uniformed and unquestioning manner in which i was expected to go forth , I never intended to be any type of rebel or one who would incite type of mutiny or upheaval in others.
I simply wanted - and still aspire to - to be a normal kid who for the most part would be ignored as he went about his everyday trials and experimentation's upon the planet i'd been plonked upon .
The system though seemed to have different ideas. Me, happily avoid schooling at all cost -actually at a cost of £25 English pounds in a 1975 courtroom appearance for my mother - i went off into the world, as i tried to just remain unnoticed , i was more often picked out of the crowd and asked to explain myself.
There is an early singular example of this i can give in order for you , the reader to get an idea of how early this young life was already being asked to question where i fitted in and if indeed i actually wanted to.
One early memory is a chill Autumn day in an England i had literally just set foot upon the previous week and was thus far enjoying the crispness of September mornings on my face as i trotted to school for my first few days accompanied by my Brother who was 4 months my junior - this is possible due to the fact my mother has brought him home with the bread one morning in Rome as we travelled back thru Italy toward the UK , his American mother had mistakenly become pregnant by an Italian father, the babe was not 'Right' she was on her way to drop him at the children's home, thus my mother bundled him up , asked what she had called him during the 3 days he'd been alive and brought him back to the bus and fed us both as twins upon her lap, which was fine because there wasn't a great deal of 'proper food about for the adults.*footnote i shall elaborate in a separate post - my 2nd day at school as i sat eating my lunch with a fork in hand simply scooping the canteen creation of the morning into my mouth I felt a 
tug on my lanky blond locks from behind followed by the booming voice of a strikingly pale bespectacled male teacher who proceeded to announce to the dining hall "This Lad, This Lad, Is a Fork. Have you seen a fork before Lad?" Yes, yes i have, i replied. "then why are you using it lie a shovel boy?" I was just eating my pasta. " Ahhh Yes, Italian aren't you?" not really, 'i do come from Italy and places like that tho' "Attention everybody Montana is going to show us how to eat spaghetti the Italian way" i was shaking in my over sized big brothers boots, this was the first time in my life i'd been spoken to not just the same as anyone else in the room big or small alike. So - 'ok you kind of turn your fork upside down and twizzle it round then eat it quickly before it falls off again' " Upside Down? A Fork in England , Lad is used with the prongs down to impale your meat whilst your knife is held in the left hand to slice the meat, two utencils .Use them. " 'I don't eat meat' i replied hesitantly, "What!? Don't Eat Meat? whats wrong with your mother , I should think she needs her brains examining and tell her to get you a haircut whilst shes at it."
Later the same week my class teacher attempted to cut my hair in front of the class.
The following week i was caned for not wearing underpants to school (discovered as i changed for gym, i wasn't aware of anything until all the boys and girls across the other side of the hall started to snigger a trickle of laughs which soon flowed into a fully fledged ridiculing hysteria. The PE Teacher(physical education in that era of UK education) noticed the commotion. took me promptly to the headmasters office who had the almost instantaneous brainwave that a caning would sting through trousers with no underpants so very much more that i would surely never omit to put my pants on again.
Oddly.... I don't wear underpants to this day! :) .... I cant' see the point, whadda ya do? leap out of bed jump into your Y-Fronts then Exclaim "Righty Ho! Now i'm ready for anything the day can chuck at me" ... Me? I just like to get up, have shower, then pull on a pair of crisply laundered tight blue jeans and stride forth into the day head, - Actually blue jeans can equally be replaced by gentleman's suit trousers Brown cotton is a variety i particularly like. Ideally as the wonderful literary cynic Bill Burroughs had once noted , that if i were able i would buy 7 brown slack Cotton suits with 7 pairs of bracers attached and cotton shirts of quality to match, then dressing & clothing is simple , simply pull one off the hanger each day and you've got it.
If any of the above sounds familiar , intriguing or even a bearable tale to follow on casual evenings i shall be starting from the womb then across Europe with my parents in Red London Double Decker Bus, then onward thru artistry, failure, carpentry, Working as an anchor locker boy on one of the last great fishing schooners of the Mediterranean, amputation, cabinetmaking, drug dealing, Organic veg production, farming small scale cannabis indoor industries, 10 years on the British music festival scene pumping out what in the end where extraordinary quantities of very reasonable Organic Falafels. and swift exits to European Van powered journeys of misguided yet well intended bouts of discovery......
Bare with me , .... it'll be a daily effort , true to the word.... unless incrimination crops up (no pun intended!:))
my name by the way is Rae Montana.(for this purpose, the Christian name my father gave me is simply to unpronounceable due to the fact it comes across so appallingly in print because of accents and the like)
