The first time I was onstage, I felt like the audience was breathing with me. I don't know if I was good or not; I just knew I was having a ball, and for the first time, I felt I belonged somewhere.
Marx, as we have seen, solved it by declaring capital to be a different thing from product, and maintaining that it belonged to society and should be seized by society and employed for the benefit of all alike.
My second freshman year of college, that's year two of seven, my father got very sick and though he was going to die. He gave me a Rolex, a bottom of the line one. I wore that watch everyday. He didn't die. On my 40th birthday, he gave me a very nice Rolex that belonged to him. That's the one thing we connect on: the watch.
I remember an old Singer sewing machine at home that belonged to my grandmother. It had a pedal. My mom taught me how to use it when I was 12 years old. I used to find it so intriguing, how a flat piece of material could be made into an object that had so many uses.
If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you'd resign in protest.
When my parents were like, 'We're going to the Northwest,' I thought, 'You've gotta be kidding me.' I was so depressed. The cold weather really did not agree with me. When I moved back down to L.A. at 16, I felt like it was home - it was where I belonged.
You have different stages in your career where you have different things to prove. And early on, like most people who move to Nashville, I wanted to prove that I belonged here, that I belonged in this format, that I had a love for it.
In the third grade, a nun stuffed me in a garbage can under her desk because she said that's where I belonged. I also had the distinction of being the only altar boy knocked down by a priest during mass.
If you look at the Intercontinental Champion, historically, that has always belonged to the best of the best in-ring talent, the best wrestler, whatever you want to call it, that came out night after night, produced night after night - and that will be me.