Despite not having grown up with any kind of formal religious observance, it seems I spent my entire childhood in a quiet corner compulsively praying. This scrupulous sense of religiosity was first triggered around my forth birthday, when I was treated to an outing at a local cinema to view the classic Disney film Bambi. It was at the precise moment when the little fawn's poor mother's life is cruelly ended that I bore my very first neurosis.
From that moment on, in the grown-up spirit of a world champion neurotic, I began taking exquisite care in obsessively strategizing each and every possible worst case scenario my wild imagination could muster. I probably needed a shrink then, perhaps even more so than the Divine intervention I sought to protect my family from a similar fate to Mama Bambi, but psychoanalysis was definitely far too sophisticated of a prayer goal for a shy little boy to come up with all by himself.
I didn't start out with any of the formal training that a Yeshiva education would have provided me to more constructively channel those irrepressible spiritual instincts. So I drew from the liberal m