biography

[joshking]

APPEARANCE
Standing at 6'7, 230 pounds, he is solid muscle. Grey blue eyes, more narrow than usual and semi long auburn brown hair. Dimples when he smiles. Calloused hands. He can be found wearing baseball caps, jeans, t-shirts, muscle shirts. Some find his appearance rather intimidating until people get to know him, he has always been referred to a giant or sasquatch due to his size even though he always wasn't as big as he is now.

Despite being so tall, you'd expect him to move like a gangly thing but that isn't the case. He moves like he knows his body, long and strong steps. He has a a few scars from the incident with the killer, a hooked shape scar over his left eyebrow and a long white scar down his left arm. He doesn't smile often but when he does, you know it's genuine. Then if he really gets to know you, he'll smile often and a lot, bright and white.

PERSONALITY
Josh has always been on the shy side, when he was younger he was terribly so because he was more or less ashamed of being deaf and unable to communicate like most kids. He was taught to speak from a young age however he was too embarrassed to use his voice, because it didn't sound as nice as other people's. He uses a notepad/notebook to communicate with others. Overtime he has become more confident and less shy about it, but he still won't talk to people vocally unless he knows them well enough and knows they won't make fun of his voice. He is awkward and skittish at first, unable to trust anyone easily because of a few things in his past.

Once you get to know him and he gets to know you, he's easy smiles and hugs if he feels you'd let him. So expect to be glomped, and loved on like no other. Josh has always been very adamant about family, it's very important to him. Family was always there for him no matter what and he always felt he should return the favor. He would definitely put his family's importance above any friends (if he had any family around) unless those friends have become family to him in one way or the other.

As Josh grew older he became more determined and passionate about the things he wanted to do, some of those things being carpentry and painting. He always could get lost in either one especially carpentry, it always spoke to him in ways no person could and he grew to love it much like one would love a child. His pieces are always important to him, and he puts love into each one of them. He has always been compassionate with others, probably due to his own deafness.

Once Josh has made a friend of you, he is a loyal friend and would stick by you through thick and thin no matter the outcome. If you've been there for him, he'll certainly be there for you no matter what. He is also willing to help anyone who helps themselves. He's polite, minding his p's and q's, he was raised right and generally follows his family's teachings on how to treat people. He is active and prefers to remain in shape, because he doesn't like the idea of being overpowered.

Josh hates conflict in all forms and prefers peace, he has never been one to start a fight but that doesn't mean he won't fight if pushed far enough. He is sensitive and is easily hurt by jabs or stones thrown but he won't be vocal about it. He's likely to avoid whoever has decided to pick a bone with him and won't respond to anything thrown his way. They're not worth the effort it takes to communicate anyway. He is not quick to anger but once he is, he can hold a grudge for a long time. He can also be cranky and moody at even the best of times.

HISTORY
Joshua was born on a rainy day on July 2nd, 1983. His mother (Alice) went through a painful eighteen hours of labor but she loved him when he was finally there. Josh is deaf but he wasn't born deaf, he was subjected to many ear infections through his infancy. When he was nine months he had a very bad infection in his left ear that caused him to go deaf then another at eighteen months in his right that caused him to go almost completely deaf. He can barely hear anything at this point and has a difficult time communicating because not everyone can read sign language however he carries around a notepad in order to talk with people and when he has a place to rest his head you can find him with a notebook.

Josh's father (Roland) left early in life when he was six years old. Alice and Roland had martial problems when they got married. Things were not always peaceful at home and they would often fight and bicker with each other over everything that caused a problem in their life. Roland left the fold, leaving Alice to look after two children (Josh's younger brother Joesph as well) on her own. She ended up becoming an alcoholic as a result, escaping her day to day life however she wasn't entirely incapable of taking care of her children. She was able to hold down a factory job for many years without losing it, she always paid her bills first and usually ended up borrowing money from her siblings. Josh and Joe were often left in the care of their Aunt Sharon and Uncle Jeff since Alice couldn't afford a babysitter.

Days spent with these two relatives were happy times, Josh and his brother were subjected to all kinds of wonderful things. They learned to hunt, fish and use guns at an early age. They would spend hours chasing after deer, or sitting in a boat catching dinner for the night. Josh's uncle was also a carpenter, he created all sorts of wondrous things from furniture to vanity pieces of work done with wood and varnish. Josh was fascinated with this and wanted to become a carpenter by the time he was twelve. He would spend so much time in his Uncle's workshop that he became quite a talented carpenter from an early age, his Uncle employed him by the time he was sixteen and his talents only grew. He knew what he wanted to do with his life. Josh grew to love his Uncle so much because he painstakingly went through the trouble of learning sign language as well.

Josh didn't always have happy times though, as a youth he was always short and quite small before he became the monster of a man that he is. Bullies would often pick on him from things about his stature to the fact that he was deaf. At first he allowed it to go on, because he didn't know how to fight back but uncle Jeff took him to a boxing center and taught him everything he could on how to fight. Soon he became a very pissed off tiny thing and showed his aggressors a thing or two about picking on people different from themselves. After that people didn't pick on him so much and through out high school they left him alone.

Josh only had a few friends growing up, mainly people who were deaf themselves or people who knew sign language. He felt ashamed a lot of the time that he couldn't communicate with people by anything other than paper and while he did learn to speak with what little hearing he had with a hearing aid, he hated the sound of his voice considering it never sounded as nice as other people's voices. So he kept to himself quite a lot. Besides carpentry he ended up becoming a lover of art, he always wanted to enjoy music but he figured since he was blessed with 20/20 vision he might as well put that sight to use. He's not quite a talented painter but he's worked hard on becoming better through out the years.

When Josh was seventeen he had his first love, he stayed on his Grandfather's farm for the summer. Fixing fences, milking cows and herding sheep. He loved it more than anything but who he came to love was a girl named Emily Gillete. A beautiful young woman who lived a couple miles away from the farm at her own. She would later come to say she fell in love with him at first sight, and while she didn't know sign language she went through trials and tribulations to get Josh to notice her. She would carry a notebook around and ask him all sorts of questions. He was painfully shy about the whole ordeal but eventually he started writing to her and soon he was falling for her kindness and the bright smile she carried. He even started speaking to her with encouragements even though he was wholly embarrassed to do so.

He was so sad that summer was going to be over that he ended up asking his mother if could stay for the rest of the school year just to be with her. While Emily was very caring and kind, she was also obsessive and controlling. He learned quickly enough when he started hanging out with friends and some of those friends were girls. She would yell at him for so much as speaking to another girl. He hated the yelling more than anything, it always irritated him when someone did it because it hurt his ear and usually he couldn't understand what someone was saying clear enough as he tried to tune it out. And she was manipulating always using his love for her against him in order to spend more time than healthy together. The relationship didn't last long even though he had some self-confidence issues about never finding someone else who would take the time to get to know him like she did. But he realized it certainly wasn't worth it.

After the summer, he went away to college to get his carpentry degree. He already knew everything there was to know but he wanted to work on houses and be able to get any job he wanted anywhere at anytime. Most of all he wanted to travel and learn all there was to know about the world, he always had interests in other countries and was always curious about different cultures. During his time at college he had brief flings with many girls, he became something of a manwhore for awhile. Girls usually flocked to him even though sometimes they were disappointed he was deaf but he was always upfront that he wasn't looking for anything serious anyway.

Then he met Jonathan Kerr. There was no instant attraction but Jonathan ran a club for deaf kids and could hear perfectly, his own sister was deaf and he wanted to help those who also were. Jonathan pursued him constantly and wanted to be with him. Overtime Josh broke down and ended up going on a date with him. He was a little wary about being gay but then Jonathan kissed him and he realized he more than liked it. He loved it. Jon was the second person he fell in love with and it was a pretty good relationship for two years until Jon graduated and ended up going back to his hometown in Maine. They sent letters and e-mails for awhile and Josh even considered moving to Maine but it wasn't what he wanted at the end of the day.

Josh planned on moving to Arkansas for a job offer that would have granted him sixty thousand dollars a year but his mother ended up losing her job and he ended up taking a lesser paying job in his hometown where she lived once he finished college. Joe had already moved out and was pursuing college himself so he was the only one who was able to look after his mother. He tried several times to get her to go to AA meeting but she was pretty adamant about keeping herself on the drink, thankfully she was never a mean drunk but was overly loving and sometimes downright in your personal space. For awhile he ended up becoming a bit of a drunk with his mother, they would drink all night and talk about everything from politics to the deeper aspects of life. He was never afraid to speak in front of her.

When he was twenty five, something happened that made him even more skittish of others. His instincts became more intuned. A man broke into their home and had been watching Alice for several months, he wasn't so much as obsessed with her but a serial killer. He got them in the middle of the night and had them both tied up in the living room. Josh wasn't as strong as the man, the man made sure to beat and keep him gagged in order to keep from trying to protect his mother. His mother nearly died when he stabbed her in almost in the heart. Finding strength from adrenaline, Josh managed to break free of the ropes and attacked the man head on, he grabbed the knife out of his mother's chest and stabbed him as much as he could but the bastard was lucky, despite all the blood, he ended up living. Josh called 911 but had to hand his mother the phone. Paramedics came and the police were able to identify the man as Leslie Gilbert. It wasn't the first time he had tried to kill someone, infact he had succeeded several times in the past. Usually he ended up murdering his female victims and having sex with the corpses.

Josh and his mother spent several days in the hospital. Josh had a couple broken ribs and one of them managed to puncture his right lung but luckily he wasn't damaged in the long run. His lung returned to perfectly normal in no time however after the hospital he decided it was time to work out. He had always been tall and lanky, he never felt the need to build muscle but after that incident wanted him to be prepared for anything. He wanted to be stronger than some sick twisted person that wanted to hurt him or his family. He came to love working out and it was just another love in his life.

Life went on. Alice and Josh went to support groups for survivors, while he felt like he could live without fear ... well as fearless as you can get after something like that. Alice wasn't doing so well, she was staying in the house, afraid to go because someone could see her and Josh ended up escourting her everywhere around the city whenever he got home. She never wanted to be left alone. That was fine by him but he knew he'd have to cut her loose sooner or later. Then Joe came home. He planned on spending a year from school so he could spend time with his family. So Josh got him a job at his business, and taught Joe everything he didn't know about carpentry. The days were good, the days were long, it was just their little family again.

But nothing ever stays the way it should. Josh was having a good year, he got a promotion which rewarded him more money, his family needed it badly and his mom was sobering up. Going to AA meetings. He was going with her as support, sometimes they'd drink together but once he said enough, they stopped. He was even dating a girl named Maria Pillsbury, a beautiful girl who was half mexican and half black and had the most wondrous brown eyes. He thought for once he could trust a girl. She even babied his insecurities concerning females and had her friends talk to him, that she wasn't a manipulative/controlling woman. Of course, he hadn't asked to be babied in any way but she really liked him, he really liked her and they wanted it to work. They would talk so much about everything and she never seemed to mind the notepad. Life was amazing really.