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News: Did Humans Colonize the World by Boat?
Research suggests our ancestors traveled the oceans 70,000 years ago
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jun/20-did-humans-colonize-the-world-by-boat
 
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Layne Staley

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Christiana Hanaman
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« Reply #15 on: March 20, 2011, 06:55:36 pm »

Having just woken up, he's unshaven and wearing a Suicidal Tendencies jersey and blue sweat pants -- likely the same outfit he wore to bed last night. "The only thing more relaxing is fishing. That's the one thing I can do where I don't think about the band or my bills or nothing. It's just quiet **** peace." "Jerry's a very complex person," says his sister, Cheri. "He's very guarded of himself and especially of those whom he cares about. It's very hard, because he has so many different sides to him, and it just depends on what side you get in the morning. I never, ever thought he would be as big as he is today. I thought he would end up working for Safeway or at a video place or something." Adds a close friend of Cantrell's, Metallica's drummer, Lars Ulrich: "He's a lot like me. There's always something going on in his head. In terms of mood swings, I think we're both like a VU meter, bouncing back and forth between being really happy and an **** and being really into something and not." Cantrell, whose great-grandfather was a Wild West train robber, was born in Tacoma, Wash., in 1966. At the time, his father was a soldier fighting in Vietnam, and his mother, an amateur organist and melodica player, was raising Cantrell, his older and younger sister. "One of the first memories I have was my dad coming back from Vietnam in his uniform when I was 3 years old," says Cantrell, "and my mom telling me that he was my dad." After the war, Cantrell's father bounced from one Army base to another, including stints in Germany and Alaska. But three years in Vietnam took their toll on his father, and when Cantrell was 7, his parents got divorced. "My dad was trained to be a **** killer," says Cantrell. "After that, you can't just come back home and say, 'OK, everything's cool. I'm going to work 9 to 5 now.' That **** scars you forever. We had a lot of problems and occurrences because of that." Despite the hardships, Cantrell knew from an early age what he wanted to do with his life.

Shortly after he learned how to write, he documented his goal in a Dr. Seuss book called 'My Book About Me,' filling it the sentence, "When I grow up I want to be a . . ." with the words 'rock star' in sprawling cursive letters. A few years later, Cantrell moved back in with his mother and began vandalizing his neighborhood with friends -- egging cars and smashing mailboxes with baseball bats. Soon after, he discovered sex. "I was busted by the cops, trying to get a blow job in a park when I was 17," he says. "The thing that scared me most was that my grandmother had a **** police scanner, and she used to listen to it every day and tell me when my friends got busted. But that night one of her crystals went out for that channel, so she couldn't hear anything. That was a godsend." By that time, Cantrell was jamming regularly with friends and acting in lead roles in high school plays. At the age of 20, he suffered his first great loss when his grandmother died of cancer. Six months later he found out his mother was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer. "She and my grandmother both spent most of their time in the house in the medical bed doped up on morphine and wasting away daily," he remembers, his voice cracking slightly. "My other relatives would come over, and there were some pretty tense times between us because they didn't understand me at all. I played the guitar 10 to 12 hours a night. It was a way of escaping the pain that was right in front of my face. I wasn't playing loud or anything, but they said it was probably bugging my mom, which was bulls**t. She wasn't even conscious. If anything, it was helping her because I was playing for her, and maybe she could hear me just a little bit while she was down there." A few months later, Cantrell got into a physical confrontation with his uncle and was kicked out of the house. A few days after that, Cantrell's mother's life support was shut off, and he wasn't able to be with her on her deathbed. "I was really angry with them for a long time," he says. "It was stupid childhood anger, but it caused a lot of distance between me and my family. That's a drag because I really love them all." Shortly following his mother's death, Cantrell moved in with Staley at the Music Bank.
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