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Part Twenty-Five: A Different Box of Crayons

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I walked into a convenience store one night only to hear the music of KMFDM playing on a stereo behind the counter, which I found to be a moderately surreal experience. This led me to strike up a conversation with the guy operating the register and a friendship was born from that simple encounter. We spent countless hours in that damn convenience store; talking about music, books, movies, and whatever inappropriate shit happened to pop into our heads.

I would walk down to that convenience store at night and lose track of time just hanging out there with him, and not exclusively because I had nothing else to do throughout the middle of the night (because I always had things that I could be doing, I’m an expert where it concerns distracting myself almost perpetually). It was an easy friendship routine to fall into, having a number of overlapping interests like we did.

Being altogether too self-involved and not always the most considerate person, I did occasionally tend to take advantage of this new friendship. The number of fountain drinks and gas station hot dogs that I consumed during those visits with him are probably equally without measure…because I have the dietary habits of a mentally challenged person, as anyone spending much time with me would quickly discovery, and so it was difficult for me not to take advantage of the situation.

The truest evidence that he didn’t care about his job altogether too much was not reflected by the copious amounts of food and beverage that I was provided with while spending time there, it was exemplified by the times when I would be standing there and he would suddenly tear off a handful of scratch off lottery tickets and hand me some of them, telling me to scratch them off. We would stand there, scratching off lottery tickets in the middle of the night, waiting until we had obtained sufficient winnings to cover at least the cost of the tickets themselves. Winning at the lottery through a sort of reverse engineering would be the best way to think of it, not so much theft as a calculated form of borrowing.

Sadly, he was transferred to an alternate location that was outside of casual walking range for me, so I was no longer able to spend quite as much time with him at work. He made up for that fact by spending more time in my apartment with me than anyone who didn’t actually live there (though there were times when he would just fall asleep on the sofa or in one of the chairs because he was too tired to worry about the drive home). I would sometimes fall asleep in my recliner with him sitting at my desktop, sifting through my digital music archive, and watching movies…and there were plenty of times when I would wake up with him still sitting right there.

I once described this friend by saying that, while he might not be the brightest crayon in the box, he was like a Crayola Jumbo. He may lack some of the variety and brilliance of those normal Crayolas, but he was thicker and far more durable, less easily broken and seemingly lasting forever. That may have seemed like a bit of a back-handed compliment, and it probably was…but it was intended to be a sincerely complimentary statement at the same time.

One could easily downplay his intellect if they wanted, but I’m not inclined to do so. He is definitely a smarter man than he lets on, maybe smarter than he gives himself credit for being as well…but it’s not his intellect that makes him someone I would always be happy to consider a friend. I’ve rarely met another individual with the sort of compassion and consideration that he’s capable of displaying, and it served as quite the counterpoint to my own lack where those things are concerned. He actively worried about me a lot of the time because, without regular reminders or someone taking note, I would routinely forget to eat anything for days at a time. This was a man who would show up at my work in the middle of the night, unannounced, just to drop off something for me to eat and drink because he happened to be thinking about me. He’s the sort of person who would show up with cash in hand if he even suspected that a friend was in need or dealing with a rough patch.

There aren’t many people out there like him and it’s a damn shame, because the world would be a better place if there were…unless you happen to be a woman, because that man was certainly quite the womanizer. I may have gotten around quite a bit, as you’re well aware (so don’t act fucking shocked when I say it now), but I did tend to maintain good relationships with the women I dated or even casually enjoyed…but my friend, he burned bridges like it was going out of style when the relationship or casual situation ended.

The only conflict that ever really existed between he and I was after we were sharing a house along with the woman who would become his wife a short while later. Were it not for her being present, the conflict might not have become an issue, but she and I definitely didn’t work and play well together. That woman rubbed me all the wrong ways, and not in the sense that I might actually enjoy it…and the feeling was certainly mutual, because she despised me. I may have taken exception with how he treated women at times, but even with all of that taken into account, he definitely deserved someone better than her as far as I was concerned. However, as bad as it got between he and I during that interval where we lived under the same roof, he was the sort of man who went out of his way to rent a U-Haul for me so that I could get everything moved out with the assistance of my little brother all because he wasn’t going to be around to help me with the move.

We gradually dropped out of regular contact after that, but he is still my friend and probably always will be.

Part Twenty-Four: Part 13, My Lucky Number, Continued

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Since my apparent inability to see things through to completion or successfully navigate the currents that would lead me to a successful completion is fresh on my mind and I sidetracked myself when it was my intention to tell you more about the significant relationships in my life, I figure now is as good a time as any…so, let’s get back on track here.

It was after the incident during which my ex-girlfriend was almost assaulted by the guy she left me for that I found myself in the unenviable position of needing to choose between two women who came into my life at approximately the same time and expressed a desire to become involved with me. This is not a fun position to be in, contrary to what you might believe.

I’ll start here with the one I didn’t choose, though I can’t for the life of me determine why I ever made that choice. Maybe I flipped a coin, out of sheer imbecility, and let that arbitrary chance make the choice for me? First off, I want to clarify that, though I may not have chosen her at the time, she and I had managed to remain close over the years and even pursued some intimate experiences with one another as well as some tentative steps towards a relationship.

At that time, however, it could have been taken as a bad sign for the potential between she and I that I stopped in the middle of intercourse so that I could go out to my living room and watch the episode of South Park in which Mr. Garrison was upset about his father not molesting him as a child. That was disrespectful of me, without any question…but what makes it far worse is the fact that I wasn’t even aware that I was being disrespectful at the time. There was a large chunk of my life during which I had little to no capacity to consider how my actions impacted others, not when all that really mattered to me was whatever I felt like doing at the time. Other people weren’t blessed with internal, three dimensional existence when it was inconvenient for me to consider that those things existed.

I was the sort of person who could walk away, mid-coitus, simply because there was something on television…and that is far from a healthy way to live one’s life.

That ability to turn on a dime from an emotional perspective ended up playing out pretty heavily in the relationship that developed between myself and the woman that I did choose out of those two. She and I could be in the midst of a major argument when something grabbed my attention or some random thought or recollection would pop into my head, and the argument would evaporate almost immediately. If I felt like arguing, it could go on for hours…but if I found something else I felt like doing instead of continuing with the argument, that is where my attention would shift without any hesitation. She accused me of not actually caring about the things we were fighting about, and that I was just playing a part when our fights arose. She wasn’t even entirely incorrect.

She and I had a relationship that consisted of more than arguments and disagreement, but it is those intervals of conflict that stand out the most in that relationship for me…perhaps mostly due to how it ended.

As you’re aware, marijuana has never been my drug of choice, but I had a quite nice blown glass pipe that was purchased by the mother of my two oldest children from some random guy who had been peddling his wares through the audience during the final live performance of Alter Noctvm…Alter Idem. She left this pipe behind when she and the children moved out. Even though I rarely had either motivation or occasion to use it, I held onto it for purely sentimental reasons both because it had been purchased by the third (and final) live performance and because it was the only thing left behind as a remnant of the good aspects of my former relationship.

It was necessary to mention the history of that specific piece of glassware because my girlfriend in this piece of personal history took the pipe with her one night while I was at work…and while she and her friends were drinking and getting high that night, a whiskey bottle was dropped on the pipe and it was shattered.

It wasn’t until the next afternoon while she and I were sharing a lunch of chicken and dumpling soup that her mother had made (in her place of employment, I might add, which was an adult bookstore, though they mostly dealt in movies and artificial genitalia rather than books) that she told me about what had happened the night before and informed me that her friend who’d broken the pipe was offering to replace it with one of his own. I was unhappy with the whole situation and I told her precisely why that pipe itself mattered to me regardless of my use for it, all sentimental rather than practical.

Her response was to sarcastically tell me that she was, “so sorry.”

My response to her sarcasm was to throw my bowl of soup at her…not the bowl itself, mind you, but the contents of it. I threw my chicken and dumplings on her and stormed away, walking home.

It was a short while after I’d arrived home that the police showed up, informing me that they had been called by my (now) ex-girlfriend’s mother. Both of the officers apologized to me for the fact that they were arresting me; because, had she and I not been living together, what I’d done would not have been illegal…but, solely because we did share my apartment, the soup incident was classified as domestic violence.

We should take a moment to parse that little bit of information; that an action which was not, by itself, illegal, became illegal exclusively because of relative living arrangements. I won’t pretend that I don’t have some problems with the whole rationale behind that odd and flawed inconsistency. As far as I’m concerned, an act is either illegal or legal, and that’s all there should be to say about it.

I spent the night in jail and, not knowing how the legal system works at the time, I plead guilty the next morning when I appeared in court. That was how I wound up with a domestic violence charge on my adult record. My former girlfriend hadn’t pressed charges, but the state did that in her stead, for something that literally was not illegal.

If I’d known that I would not be stuck in jail for another night regardless of my plea, I would damn well have never accepted the domestic violence charge without contesting it, a charge that will perpetually haunt me. That stupid action of tossing soup and my subsequent lack of understanding as far as how the legal system works has made it so that I am unable to own or carry a firearm (and that kept me from being able to enlist with the military a few years later)…it also prohibited me from taking a job as a paid tutor in the high school where my mother worked when the opportunity arose.

More stupid decisions from everyone’s favorite genius, right?

Have you started to notice a trend here?

Part Twenty-Three: Wasted Potential

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There are times in my life when I’m not even sure if I can still recognize myself when I look in the mirror, and not because I’m getting older or because I’ve happened to gain or lose a substantial amount of weight at that specific time. I wonder if I even know who I am anymore. I know who I want to be, along with the myriad iterations of who I wanted to be at various points in the past…and all I know for certain is that I am none of those things.

I suppose that is not entirely true, I wanted to tell stories and influence people’s minds since before I understood that a person could do that specific thing for a living…hell, since before I ever had a grasp on the reality that people did things for a living at all.

But here I am; one novel (albeit a shitty one) and a collection of poetry (not so shitty, but poetry is really a niche commodity) on the market, multiple novels and short stories in progress, and then there’s this abominable thing that you’re reading presently. I’m sure as shit not making a living from my writing, not even close, but I have made some small amount of money that wouldn’t amount to a drop in the bucket compared to my income from gainful employment. But it has made me some money, regardless of how little.

So, I guess that I have managed to make some small amount of progress towards being that portion of who I’ve wanted to be in my life…but it seems like an abysmally small bit of consolation.

Growing up, there was one word that stands out more than any other, that word is potential. Teachers, administrators, counselors, and family alike all seemed to be inordinately fond of that word. I did well in school for all of my troubles socializing with other children, never failing a class or even really receiving grades below an A or the equivalent, at least not until I stopped showing up for school part way through 10th grade…and yet I always overheard, during conferences and the like, that I had so much potential and that I could be doing so much better if I would just apply myself. Similarly I ended up hearing quite frequently that it was a consensus that I might benefit from feeling that I was being challenged in school, and that the problem was that I wasn’t being challenged at all.

Seriously, I wondered, how much better did they expect me to be doing? Personally I have come to believe that it’s somewhere in the training manual for new teachers that they have to use various iterations of that sort of statement regarding the potential a student exhibits whenever they meet with parents…at least when the student displays at least fair to middling intelligence.

Having that sort of thing tossed casually my way throughout my whole childhood, there was a great deal of pressure that I should make something of myself and do more with my life than I have thus far…at least to this point, I’ve certainly not done anything of note that would indicate that I lived up to that supposed potential. I wonder if maybe, somewhere inside of me, there isn’t my own little imp of the perverse lurking around and riding on my shoulder, encouraging me to do precisely the opposite of what I should be doing in order to capitalize on that potential.

Or maybe I’m just a screw up.

For a long time there I wanted to be a musician, which you’re already aware of by now. It wasn’t an overall lack of talent or skill that stood in my way there, because I did actually develop some small amount of skill where certain instruments were concerned…though nowhere near as much skill as I could have developed if I had devoted more time and energy to those efforts. A lack of faith was the greater hurdle for me, faith in myself and faith in the possibility of anyone being remotely interested in what I was creating.

I had no confidence in my own voice, the same sort of thing that had led to my feigning a sore throat and the like when I was supposed to perform as a soloist in choir…but it was much worse when performing on stage, performing things that I had helped to create, it was far more personal and a source of greater vulnerability for me. My overall lack of confidence served to severely hinder my performance even when recording or working on material with no one else present but my fellow musician. That inability to work with anyone present became worse with time until I lost the motivation to work at all. I’ve always felt bad about my self-sabotage where music was concerned because of the collateral sabotage that it inflicted upon those who wanted to work with me. I was difficult to work with at the best of times, but my lack of faith in what we were doing only ended up making it far more of a challenge.

It’s no wonder that I stopped trying. That sort of thing seems to be a trend with me.

I began attending college at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology at the age of 27, with a double major of physics and chemistry as my focus. I felt invigorated to be in that academic environment, to feel that I was finally doing something that stood a chance of improving my life and building a future of some substance for myself and my family. I always had a passion for science, and it seemed only natural to pursue an education along these lines.

The problem was that I had no choice but to maintain full-time employment while attending school full-time as well. Initially this wasn’t a problem, but over time that sort of obligation begins to take its toll. My GPA began to decline because I wasn’t able to apply as much attention to my coursework and studying as I needed to, especially as I realized that I needed some downtime in order to relax and decompress a bit…because that downtime cut into the time that I should have been spending on my studies.

The stress involved with making ends meet while still attempting to keep myself afloat in school was rough to deal with…but I was treading water with some success as I made it through my first year and a half in college. It was at that time when my two oldest children came to live with me full-time, which hadn’t been the case since they had moved away from the old apartment along with their mother some 9 years before.

Shortly thereafter my youngest also came to live with me full-time due to some problems at home with her mother, and I had a lot more on my plate than I’d had previously. The strain made it more difficult to handle the crowded classrooms and lecture halls, especially during periods when exams were being conducted. Stress can play hell with preexisting anxiety issues, and it certainly did in my case.

I found myself in a position where I needed to withdraw from school, only three years into my pursuit of the double major, prior to my youngest beginning kindergarten. The school days for her were half days, and I had to decide whether I was going to be home with her during the half that she wasn’t in school and be able to get her to class or if I was going to attend the classes that I needed in order to continue with my own education. Obviously, I made the only choice that a parent can make under those circumstances. I placed my education on hiatus, and that hiatus has continued to this day, almost four years later.

I do intend to return to school and finish at least one of the degrees that I was pursuing, if only because I want to finish what I started, but I don’t know when that time will come…hopefully soon. I don’t want that to be a particularly costly (especially in the financial sense) venture that never sees fruition like so many other things I’ve done in my life.

Mine is a life lived halfway when it comes to completing the things that I am passionate about, a life of incomplete goals and half-assed application…but I’ve spent this time sharing so many things with you, with so many things left to share as my story continues, and maybe this can be the next step towards actually completing the things I have started. We’ll have to see…I have a nasty habit of letting myself down, so you should be prepared that I might let you down as well. I’ll try to avoid that though.

Part Twenty-One: How Did We Arrive Here?

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Have I ever told you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?

Of course I haven’t, you’ll have to turn to William S. Burroughs for that particular anecdote. Naked Lunch was a terrific book and it was loosely adapted into a pretty damn interesting movie as well, if reading isn’t your thing…though that seems unlikely since we’re here right now. As far as teaching this particular asshole to talk, you’ll probably have to take your frustrations out on my mother since she was instrumental in nurturing my ability to communicate.

Personally, I love reading…and I am unhappy with myself that I don’t do as much of it these days as I would like. I have my mother to thank for fostering that love of the written word within me. She began teaching me how to read well before I ever got into school, using phonemes before Hooked On Phonics was even a thing. I don’t remember the lessons themselves, but the product of those lessons does indeed remain quite fresh in my memory.

My earliest recollection associated with reading is of my mother, father, and I in the car here in Rapid City when my father suggested that they take me to, “D-I-N-O-S-A-U…” when I blurted out that I wanted to go to Dinosaur Park before he had even finished spelling out the first word. Dinosaur Park, if you’re unfamiliar with the place, is a hilltop collection of concrete formed dinosaurs that would largely appeal only to children, especially little boys…this little boy was no exception to that.

My memory of that time is hazy, but I vaguely recall my father reacting negatively in response to me spoiling the surprise like I had…if that recollection is spot-on, I would not be at all surprised.

Don’t rush to interpret that the wrong way, it was not an indication of my father being opposed to my intellectual development, my father was an avid reader too. For all his faults, he had a decent collection of novels by Stephen King, Peter Straub, and others…including the novelizations of the original Star Wars films. It wasn’t my budding capacity to understand the English language that upset him, just my newly developed capacity to interfere with his intended surprise.

I grew up loving books though, regardless of any negative response to my being able to read at an early age. As a child I couldn’t get enough of them, which is something that remains quite true today as well. I remember insisting on attending the book fairs that were coordinated by my elementary school and eagerly wandering through the tables and counters piled high with new things to read. I always wanted more of them than I could reasonably expect to have.

During my younger years I collected and consumed Hardy Boys books, they were probably my favorites until I started reading classic literature and more contemporary adult fiction. The action and mystery of those books fascinated and intrigued me, the suspense was thrilling, and the fact that the brothers used their minds as much as their assorted skills to prevail over sometimes terrifying circumstances was something that made me feel like I wasn’t a total freak.

Through all of my childhood and adolescence my mother happily encouraged my enjoyment of reading as well as my desire to learn whatever I could about whatever there was available to me. She even took it in stride when her English and psychology textbooks disappeared into the wasteland that was my bedroom while she was still actively taking the classes that required them. She was studying to become an English teacher shortly after my age reached the double digits, and I was right there beside her…repeatedly stealing her course materials and reading through them for nothing more than the sheer pleasure of learning something new.

Not only did my mother heavily inspire my love of literature and learning, but she also directly led me towards my love of puzzles and other things that required critical thinking and analysis. I was putting together large puzzles on a card table in our basement at a very early age, sometimes with my mother or father’s assistance, other times by myself. I enjoyed watching the picture beginning to unfold from the disorganized and disparate components that looked like nothing at all until we put our minds to the task of organizing them and seeing the pattern before it had started taking shape.

It could be argued that my appreciation for artistry was spawned by my mother as well, though I have little to no artistic talent of my own. She was, at one point in the past, quite the artist. I remember digging out pencil sketches and the like that were highly impressive. Comparatively, I can doodle like a champ…but little more than that. My mother still seems to enjoy art of a sort, manufacturing by hand some truly impressive cards, invitations, and the like…also something that I am ill-equipped to replicate. Apparently artistic skill is not something I inherited from her.

I developed quite a love of music at an early age as well, and that one came mostly from my father, perhaps due more to my personal tastes than anything else. I grew up with access to an impressive collection of vinyl and as soon as I was old enough to operate his turntable I was regularly absorbed in listening to albums from artists like Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Quiet Riot, Dire Straits, Queen and others along those lines. I loved just laying back and letting the music carry me wherever it might.

The same way that my mother encouraged my love of literature, my father very much encouraged my love of music by buying me cassettes and then CDs as they became commercially available.

As far as my love of movies, that could probably be traced back to my father as well…not solely because of the countless video rentals that I enjoyed during the weekends I spent with him after the divorce, but also because he accumulated a pretty large collection of movies for himself. That is something of a ball that I took from him, and I damn well ran with it; owning somewhere in the vicinity of 1,500 DVDs, close to 500 or so blu-ray discs, and an unknown number of burned DVDs by this point in addition to my subscriptions to Netflix and the like. Escapism is probably my greatest weakness (certainly my greatest vice), enjoying, as I do, the chance to live wholly different lives from my own…regardless of the medium. I am proud to say however, that my library of books surpasses my collection of movies and television shows…displaying which medium remains my personal favorite.

My family life may have been pretty well fucked up by many standards, and I wholeheartedly concur with that conclusion…but even a broken timepiece is right twice a day, as the saying goes. In this case, my broken and disorganized family was proven to be right in quite a few ways, as far as I’m concerned.

Part Twenty: Miscellaneous Bits & Pieces

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In the process of telling you this story I have been reminded of so many anecdotes that could easily be overlooked, not falling neatly into the framework of another overarching bit of narrative. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it upsets me to know that there will always be stories that I’ve forgotten to tell, no matter how concise I manage to be. This is my attempt to share a few things that might otherwise have been overlooked.

I could tell you about how I used to roll my flaccid penis into a ball within the loose skin of my testicles and parade it around as if I had three testicles but no actual penis, in public and in private with about even distribution. I referred to this creation as the mollusk for whatever arbitrary reason, and I was happy to introduce people to the mollusk whenever the urge to do so arose. I had no sense of shame interfering with these actions.

Similarly there was an almost complete and total lack of shame involved when I would casually draw a face on the head of my penis and use it as a puppet to communicate with people regardless of who was present, barring my children. I suspect that my kids are grateful that I did happen to draw a line somewhere.

There should have been shame though, not because those behaviors merit some degree of shame in and of themselves, but because my penis is nothing to write home about (not that I would be inclined to write home about my penis under any circumstances), even with a massive piece of jewelry dangling from it, and no one should proudly show such a pathetic thing off like that.

Yes, that last part was meant to be a bit of a joke, in poor taste, of course…but a joke, just the same. The behavior itself should have been a source of shame or discomfort in addition to the penis itself being inherently shameful. I’m not entirely serious where this self-deprecation is concerned, but I’m not entirely joking either…a lot of my jokes end up like that.

I should take the time to tell you about the incident when my co-musician began having sex with a girl he was seeing in the landing of a stairwell in one of the apartment buildings downtown and I entertained myself during their intercourse by tossing jellybeans at them, trying to lodge them in his ass crack while he was thrusting and reversing. I don’t think I managed to succeed with a single one, and that was a terrible waste of delicious candy.

Speaking of him, there was a night when he and I were getting drunk at a party in someone’s house, I can’t recall who, if I even knew at the time. There was a girl there who had been wanting to sleep with me and she decided she was going to take advantage of my inebriation. My fellow musician decided that this was a good thing, so he was full of encouragement. The problem was that I had no interest in the girl at the time (though she and I did eventually end up sleeping together at a later date), no matter how hard she tried to spark that interest. In the ultimate example of adding insult to injury, I wasn’t anywhere near obtaining an erection until my fellow musician began massaging my genitals in her place. Things were getting uncomfortable for me pretty quickly at that point, less because of his attempt to jerk me off than because the girl in question was becoming annoyingly desperate and clingy in her attempts to make me sleep with her. The fact of the matter was that, as little interest as I had in sleeping with my friend, he was a great deal more appealing to me than she was that night. I decided that I needed to leave, so I walked to Perkin’s for some coffee and to wait until I was sober enough to make my way home from there.

It wasn’t all sex and deforming my genitals for the purpose of entertainment though, as much as I’m sure you wish it was…maybe I’m not the one who should be ashamed here.

I had a friend, the same one who stayed on my sofa after he couldn’t live with his girlfriend anymore, I mentioned him briefly a short while ago. He insisted on carrying around this stupid pager that didn’t work and served no function whatsoever aside from making him look like a jackass. He insisted he was going to fix it or some such nonsense, for whatever imaginary use that might have provided him. One afternoon I asked him to let me see it because maybe I could fix it, and he handed it to me happily. I didn’t know what I was going to do in advance, but there wasn’t a moment of hesitation before I flung it as hard as I could at the far wall of the living room, or did I throw it all the way into the kitchen at the far wall there, I can’t recall that particular detail…but the important part is that I threw it against the wall.

He looked like he was going to cry as he asked me why I did that and all I could think to reply was that I hated that stupid fucking pager and now he was free to throw it into the garbage where it belonged. The way he looked at me you would have thought I had just strangled his favorite puppy and iced the cake by violating the corpse.

Hopping into the Way Back machine, during my freshman year of high school I briefly dated a basket case girl who wasn’t a half bad poet who had a reputation for being easy, not that I cared altogether too much about that rumor, I was still a virgin at the time. I don’t remember what led to my breaking up with her, but it became quite a spectacle thanks to her melodramatic reaction. She made some stupid comment about how she was going to just jump in front of a car to make me happy, and all I could say in response was, “Wait. No. Don’t do that. I’ll push you.”

She ran away crying and my friend who was the fantastic dungeon master I previously talked about went chasing after her, hoping to maneuver his way from a shoulder to cry on to a penis she could seek comfort from. I don’t think it worked out quite that well for him, but maybe it did…I never cared to find out.

I have a long and well documented history of saying and doing the wrong thing essentially every time the chance arises…and I can’t even pretend that I actively attempt to curb that peculiar little quirk of my personality, even going so far as to minimize it like I just did in order to downplay how bad it really is.

The mother of my older children and I took a brief vacation to Minneapolis/Saint Paul in order to visit a friend who had moved there (that friend being the girlfriend I had abandoned before she and I got together). While we were there we ended up in one of the less pleasant neighborhoods of Minneapolis late at night. As we were turning around in the darkened parking lot of a grocery store I saw a rather large group of what appeared to be exclusively African American teens and young adults just a short distance from where we were changing direction and my first impulse was to put down the window and shout, “What’s up niggas?” Don’t worry; I placed emphasis on the less racially insensitive final syllable of the word. MY ex, who was not my ex at the time, asked me if I was out of my fucking mind or trying to get us killed…and I had to admit that she had a good question.

My common sense is a fairly uncommon thing for me to exhibit, especially when I lack adequate time to really think about what I’m going to say or do…though, even then, I leave something to be desired in that department. That’s the story of my life though; the same could probably be said about me in general as well, that I simply leave something to be desired.

My judgment isn’t always questionable, but where my impulsive actions are concerned, I am perfectly willing to concur with that assessment being entirely correct. To showcase this piss poor judgment, as if I haven’t done enough of that already, there was an incident during my teenage years when I leaped from the bed of a friend’s truck where I had been riding and onto the hood of another friend’s car while we were in motion. No one knew that I was going to attempt something so unbelievably stupid, even I had no idea it was going to happen until I did it. If this idiotic stunt had been something we’d planned, it would be something altogether different, but I could have easily caused an accident or simply gone careening from the hood of the car and ended up seriously injured or dead. At the time, none of those concerns crossed my mind at all, and I think that might be precisely why I’ve had a lot of the problems that I get myself into…no recognition of, or interest in, consequences.

I have two ways of doing things, I either act without thinking or I over think what I’m doing to such an extreme that I think without acting. There is very little middle ground for me, as I tend to bounce back and forth between those two extreme ends of the spectrum without warning. The times when I over think things aren’t of any real importance here, as they don’t lead to any interesting stories, only a form of indecisive paralysis.

Part Nineteen: Binge and Purge, But Mostly Binge

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Drugs are a hell of a thing, and I don’t necessarily mean that in the negative sense that you might assume. Like most things in life, drugs have their ups and downs…they can be just as useful and beneficial as they can be damaging and traumatizing. It really depends on the person more than the drugs in question, and also the timing. If I cared as much about making a good impression as I do being entirely sincere, I would tell you about how badly drugs have fucked up my life and the lives of many of my friends…but I’m a total fucking idiot and I can’t just focus on the negative aspects of my drug history. There were negatives, I assure you of that, it’s just that the positive experiences I had outweighed the negative ones by more than a narrow margin.

With the family history that I have, from both sides of the aisle, it would be a simple bit of reasoning to conclude that I must be hardwired to have a predisposition towards having an addictive personality. Apparently I dodged that particular bullet, or maybe there is a balance of sorts to be found in nature because I already suffer from more than my fair share of psychological issues.

I have never been compelled to seek out drug or alcohol treatment of any kind, I have avoided requiring any sort of intervention from friends and family, and I have somehow avoided any legal entanglements relating to my drug or alcohol use. What can I say? I guess I lead a charmed life in that one particular area.

I am a living, breathing, walking around bit of proof that the horror stories painted with such vivid clarity in late night public service announcements and school assemblies are far from universal truths. Sure, my life isn’t perfect, and I have had some troubling experiences due to my experimentation with numerous substances…but nothing that would adequately deter a classroom full of impressionable youth, I don’t suspect.

I recall the first time I recognized that I was being exposed to drug use. I was on a family vacation back to Minnesota and we were visiting some of my father’s friends, one of whom happened to be my godfather. The men were collected downstairs in the house we were in and I remember recognizing the smell of marijuana in the air as I was walking downstairs. I don’t know why I knew what the smell was, though I can only assume that earlier exposure had left some sense memory without a coherent recollection that has carried through to today.

I’ve heard anecdotes from my father, about alcohol being added to my bottles when I was a toddler by he and/or friends of his, perhaps to put me to sleep or maybe just to watch me stumble around more than I probably already did at that ungainly point in my life…but that seems perverse and sadistic even from my admittedly desensitized standards, even where my father is concerned, so I personally prefer to think of it as a bit of a sick joke on his part because he does have a peculiar and dark sense of humor as well. I can’t remember anything of the sort happening, so I can’t speak to the veracity of such things, but it seemed like something potentially relevant to the tale at hand.

I wasn’t one of those daytime talk show kids born addicted to heroin or any god awful bullshit like that. I wasn’t sneaking behind the gymnasium at ten years old in order to hit a joint. This isn’t one of those stories, and only a sick asshole would be hoping for something like that.

I don’t remember how old I was when I first tried marijuana for myself, but that isn’t particularly important. I have never been a big fan of that particular drug. I have definitely smoked plenty of it, especially during and immediately following high school, but there has never been a point in my life when it was my drug of choice. I’ve sold plenty of it over the years as well, of varying qualities, and I always preferred selling it to smoking it. Money brought me far more pleasure than the drug itself.

It was during high school that I first experimented with cocaine, methamphetamine, LSD, mushrooms, MDMA, and assorted opiates. I preferred all of those to marijuana, though the opiate and MDMA use was not the sort of thing I could picture myself developing a habit out of. There was an instance in the latter half of my sophomore year when I ingested LSD without any warning because a friend of mine handed me a peppermint hard candy in the hallway, while neglecting to inform me that it was playing host to an undisclosed number of hits of acid. I was maybe three quarters of the way through my subsequent class when something started to feel very unusual to me.

LSD isn’t actually like it is portrayed in movies and on television, or it never has been in my experience. Perception is distorted substantially, and the senses do indeed go a bit askew (to the point where minor aural and visual hallucinations aren’t entirely unknown), but you don’t suddenly lose touch with reality and imagine yourself in totally different surroundings. The effects are far more subtle, which can actually make them far more insidious.

The most interesting part about being unexpectedly under the influence of LSD is that you have literally no idea what is wrong with you. It feels like something in between a severe feverish state of mind (but without the sickness and elevated core body temperature) and what I imagine it might be similar to the onset of schizophrenia. You’re aware that something is very wrong, that the way you are processing sensory input is pretty well fucked, and that you are not thinking quite the way you’re accustomed to…and it is disorienting at best. Come to think of it, that’s just how LSD works even when you know that you’ve ingested it…which could lead someone to wonder why anyone would choose to feel that way. No one claimed that it was a sound decision on my part or the part of anyone who intentionally walks towards that lifestyle. If it matters at all, it was another few years before I ever willingly ingested LSD.

My use of drugs beyond marijuana was one of those few and far between situations until my early 20s, mostly due to a pronounced lack of surplus being readily available to a teenage boy here in the middle of nowhere of the upper Midwest. It was after my ex moved out of our apartment with our two children and a good friend of mine moved in that I was in the state of mind that was quite conducive to really enjoying a decline into decadence, and it just so happened that the supply side of the equation was fortuitously shifting in my favor.

Thanks to this friend, there was a reliable and steady supply of quality cocaine available through a biker friend of his with connections to the Hell’s Angels. Even better than that, this individual was happy to front us fairly large quantities of that cocaine on a regular basis, for the purpose of selling it ourselves. Initially he and I did a good job of selling what we needed in order to keep the rest for ourselves without actually needing to pay for any of it. After a while though, it did begin to cost me money, but I didn’t particularly mind. I say that it cost me money because my friend had quit his job shortly after moving in with me, thinking that he was going to simply make his living by dealing the cocaine that we were consuming in greater and greater quantities. If I had to pick a drug of choice though, cocaine would be it.

My friend and I used to do a line and then walk the couple of miles to the Perkin’s where we routinely went for coffee. You can feel free to rattle off the list of negative effects cocaine might have, and I will agree with some of them, but I can vouch for the fact that it worked fucking wonders for my social anxiety as well as my overall level of productivity.

There was one night when we were about to leave for coffee when my friend, as a joke, trailed a line of cocaine from damn near corner to corner diagonally across the 3′ by 4′ mirror that we kept on my bedroom floor for the purpose of dividing and partaking of that fantastic powder. I told you already about how I’d converted my bedroom into a rudimentary recording studio and drug den, right? My friend passed me in the hallway to tell me that he left a line for me on the mirror and I thanked him. I laughed when I saw it, recognizing it for the joke that it clearly was, but taking it as a challenge just the same….I did it all anyhow, half up each of my nostrils. My friend was equal parts irritated, amused, and concerned for my health after that. We were about halfway to our destination when I started laughing and told him I thought my heart was going to explode. That would have been a suitable way for the 20 year old me to have expired, but we know that didn’t happen.

During that same time frame, a hippie friend of mine arrived in town with a strangely regular surplus of decent quality LSD…and my friend and I were positively giddy with that additional tweak to our almost daily drug habit. It became a regular thing for he and I to drop acid and spend the late night hours in the hills with other friends of ours, most of whom were not under the influence of the same drugs we were, which is not the safest way to spend time…but it was really quite enjoyable to say the least.

Where the cocaine was fun and lent itself to my being more productive, the LSD was more of a dark, unpleasant experience that I nevertheless found myself thriving on. It is my personal opinion that anyone who truly enjoys horror, and especially those who wish to create it (whether through literature, art, or film) needs to spend some time under the influence of LSD and spend a good deal of time focusing on self discovery. People talk about bad trips, but I don’t know that I could distinguish between that or any other. I may have forced myself into bad trips if they weren’t naturally heading in that direction more than a few times, and I may have realized just how ill advised that was while still going right ahead with it.

I can talk about how much I enjoyed that time of my life, but there was a lot that made it less spectacular than I like to remember it being. I was still pretty heavily damaged from the events only a few short years before and I was recovering (albeit poorly) from a failed relationship and the sudden absence of my oldest children. I was scraping by, financially, but only barely…what with the friend and roommate who would have made a more successful woman than a drug dealer. This is not the recipe for good, enlightening acid trips like those spoken of by men like Timothy Leary. And, when my disaster of a life wasn’t enough, there was the fact that I would watch movies like In Dreams while under the influence…because that sort of thing definitely sets a person off down the path towards happiness and enlightenment. In fact, I saw both The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense in the theater that summer while under the influence of LSD…which dramatically improved the scare factor of Blair Witch almost exponentially. My friend and I were a solid week into almost constant LSD influence before we picked up a ten strip each for that movie. Prior to the movie we took six hits and wrapped the rest up to save for later. It’s a sign that I was clearly in no state of mind to make decisions when, no more than five minutes into the movie, I felt like we had been there forever and I wasn’t feeling the drug like I thought I should have been, so I opted to take what was left of my acid. Going into the hills that night was made all the more interesting by the residual effects of seeing the movie in that entirely fucked up frame of mind.

Beyond intentionally watching movies that were sure to influence my frame of reference in a truly unpleasant way there were multiple times when I stood in front of a mirror in a dimly lit room, staring at shadows playing across my features, imagining something else taking shape beneath the skin. I became fixated on learning the contours and dimensions of the monster beneath my flesh, and it helped to set my trips off on the correct note for me…because inflicting psychological trauma upon myself is apparently the sort of thing I do for fun.

It took the better part of a year, living like that, but things finally started to really slip out of control for me…which, I think, might have been part of the purpose behind it. Some part of me was in it just to see how far I could push myself before I reached a breaking point. Don’t ask me why I would do that sort of thing, because I haven’t the foggiest notion. It got to the point where time had dilated so badly that my mother called me one evening to find out if I was going to be at my grandparent’s house the next night and I asked her, quite sincerely, if it was already Thanksgiving. She thought that I was joking, but I was not. It was Christmas Eve, and my mother’s side of the family has always gotten together every Christmas Eve out in Piedmont where my grandmother lives to this day. The better part of a month, maybe more, had slipped through my fingers and I had no recollection of where that time had gone. I’d reached nearly the end of my rope, and it might have been a good thing that I’d had that momentary flash of wakefulness or I might have slid further out of control.

It was the end of this particular binge period of my life when I decided that I was going to simply take whatever my friend and I had left and go out for a walk in the chilly night air. Somewhere along that walk I got it in my head that I was going to end up curling up on the side of the road somewhere to die. It isn’t right to consider this a suicide attempt…it was more an acceptance of what would inevitably happen if I were to lie down in the cold night and let nature take its course.

Before letting myself die, I decided to stop and see the mother of my second son, I figured that I would say hello and head back out along my way, since I found myself in the neighborhood where she lived anyhow. You could say that it was my way of trying to say goodbye.

I was almost surprised to actually find her awake when I got there (having no idea what time it actually was), and in a clearly frightened state. A mutual friend of ours was there as well, as support, because the crazy asshole that she left me for had finally snapped. I told you that I would get back to that story, and here you are…so stop being so impatient. I know what I’m fucking doing…sort of. The creep had been obsessively calling her screaming because she’d ended their relationship earlier that day. Our friend asked me if I could stay there so that she could go home, and I agreed. Being in no state of mind to make that sort of judgment call, of course I agreed. I’ve never been very good at declining a request when someone was in need, but especially a pretty woman.

My night had taken an unexpected turn, but I was rolling with it, because that’s just what I do…it wasn’t in me to leave, not with my ex-girlfriend in such a terrified state with a baby boy asleep in his bedroom right there. As surprising as it might be, knowing the toxic nature of my internal chemistry at the time, I actually relaxed and started to doze off in the living room where I’d taken my post just before the banging at the front door began. My ex-girlfriend came running from her room, I don’t know if she’d been able to fall asleep or not, but the noise was such that no one would have slept through it. The banging continued for a long while before stopping just as suddenly as it began.

It wasn’t long before the same sort of frantic, angry beating began at the window to her bedroom, and we quickly when into the room where he was splitting his time between beating at the window and trying to pry it open.

He was gone from there suddenly as well before the banging started up at the back door.

Subtle was definitely not a word that could be used to describe this crazy prick. He returned to the front door, breaking in the door to the enclosed porch before beginning to beat at the door directly leading into the living room where my ex-girlfriend and I were now waiting to see what would happen next. I had enough common sense left in me to attempt calling the police, but she had unplugged her phone because of his repeated calls earlier. I had to locate the phone cord, plug it back in, and call 911. I was just getting through to a dispatcher when the front door came flying open, glass from the window shattering and spreading across the floor. It wasn’t something I immediately registered, but the knife he had in his hand when he crossed the threshold fell from his hand as soon as he saw me sitting there. I was in the middle of trying to explain the insane situation to the operator on the line when he came at me, my ex-girlfriend getting behind me where I was half seated while trying to keep a grip on the phone and maintain a distance from her crazy ex with my foot.

It took some yelling, but he finally got it through his head that the police were on the way and that he would be better off not being there when they returned. He took off running out the door, leaving the knife behind where it had fallen.

I don’t know how the police weren’t able to recognize that there was something clearly quite wrong with me…I was in the worst possible condition to be dealing with the insane, potentially violent situation with her ex and trying to subsequently provide a report for the police. I expected to end up being hauled off myself at any moment, but I apparently maintained my composure better than I imagined I was.

The police left, having taken our statements, and began passively searching for the batshit crazy psycho, and we began cleaning up the mess left behind by his breaking into the house. It was while I had a large shard of glass in my hand when I saw him approaching the house via the sidewalk with a limp. I have never been so proud of my self-control as I was at that moment. I had repeated flashes passing through my mind, second by second, of me leaping from the front step and tearing into him with the shard of glass as a weapon. These images were so visceral and real that I almost feared I was actually doing it, but I kept myself under control…with the glass digging into my palm and the meaty parts of my fingers, I was able to keep myself in check. I told him as calmly as I could manage that the cops were looking for him and that he needed to leave. He claimed that he’d fallen and hurt himself and that he needed our help. He finally did fuck off like we wanted him to and when the police contacted us to let us know he was in custody, they dispelled his bullshit story about injuring himself. The limp and sob story had been an attempt on his part of generating sympathy, which was arguably one of the dumbest fucking things I could imagine anyone thinking.

That was over, and it brought me to my senses enough that my drug use was dramatically diminished over the course of the following month or two…until I had cut the illicit substances out of my life altogether for a few years to come. That will be a story for another time though, since this one has become some enormous fucking monstrosity. Good lord, are you still reading this? Why?

Part Eighteen: Making Friends

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Having spent a little while telling you how I ended up making enemies with a man who has only fairly recently disappeared from my life for an extended period of time, it seems only appropriate to tell you about how I became friends with a man who will likely be one of the best friends I could ever hope to have for what remains of my life.

It’s a funny story how I ended up becoming friends with one of the two closest friends I’ve had for more than the past decade. My former guitarist friend had been living in my apartment with me for a while before deciding that he was going to move to Denver in order to take advantage of the opportunities available to him there; he is still living in Colorado to this day, and it appears to have been working out well for him. He hadn’t wanted to break it to me that he was moving out of the apartment, so he was gradually packing his things and preparing for the move while I was asleep or at work. When I did confront him about it, having not been as soundly sleeping as it might have seemed, I understood his reasoning and didn’t begrudge him the chance to leave.

It should be fairly obvious that I was suddenly in need of a roommate without much by way of advance warning…but I had no options as far as friends who needed a place to stay, no matter how much I didn’t want to be stuck paying the full rent, it appeared that I was going to be stuck with that burden. I was drunk one night, though it would be more accurate to state that I was drunk pretty much every night, and I was out having coffee with a couple of friends when I abruptly asked our waiter (someone I had met a few times and gotten along with during those times, a man who had not so long before been brutally attacked by another friend of mine for seemingly little to no reason) if he knew anyone who was looking for a place to live.

I had unintentionally struck while the iron was hot though, because he was himself looking for a new place to live. This was the beginning of a trend for he and I, fortuitous timing and serendipity would indeed abound as it seemed like we were almost always on the same page when there was no good reason why we should be…it’s just one of those situations when you happen to meet the right person, and things just fall into place in the most peculiar way. One arbitrary, drunken inquiry made of a server who was honestly little more than a passing acquaintance to me and I made one of the best friends I will ever have…and suddenly everything was on a wholly new path for me. No, this isn’t one of those stories. I assure you this is not another iteration of Brokeback Mountain, so dispel those thoughts right now you perverse shit…though there have been plenty of people who have since told us that we behave like an old gay couple, that is entirely irrelevant.

This friend somehow had a more difficult time with people in the workplace than I have, which is no small feat to accomplish. It wasn’t long after he moved in (less than a month, if I recall correctly) when he was looking for new employment after being fired from the restaurant where he’d been working when I asked him to move in. A normal person might have taken this as a bad sign, but I couldn’t have conceivably given a shit less. I was enjoying the fact that I had stumbled across someone with the same passions for literature (and even a lot of the same obscure books), music, science, and movies/television that I had. He consumed pop culture and counterculture in about equal measure, just like I did. I sincerely doubt that I could have designed a more compatible roommate for myself if that had been an option for me, though I would have probably just designed me with a vagina if that had been possible…we will ignore the psychological issues that might indicate, and continue on with the story.

He had (and still has) some problems with depression of the clinical and debilitating variety, which did contribute to some of the only issues that I ever had with this particular friend. Retaining employment was literally the sole point of contention I ever really had with him though. He did find another job after being let go from that first one, but that employment ended up being short-lived. This was where his depression seemed to kick in the most, making it difficult for him to find the motivation required to seek new employment, or bother with cleaning up his part of our shared living space. I can’t blame him though, being fired from a job where you are smarter and more highly qualified than the people you work beneath is never an easy thing to swallow, but it is made far worse when you are predisposed to depression.

There was one occasion when this lack of employment actually got under my skin. A mutual friend of ours was staying on the sofa in our living room after a blow out with his girlfriend led to his no longer having a place to stay. This friend brought with him an old Super Nintendo which was getting some use due to sheer nostalgia more than anything. I was walking out the door on my way to work at the local ABC affiliate where I was employed at the time, when my irritation was triggered by seeing my roommate playing video games in the living room while I was on my way to earn a paycheck. I suggested that maybe he could find a job that involved video games somehow. He looked at me curiously and asked, “Really?”

To which I replied, “Sure, because otherwise I fail to see how this is helping you find a fucking job,” and then I walked out the door and went to work. I felt like my father there for a moment again, because that sort of sarcastic, bitter derision in the form of a jest was something I definitely learned from the years of being his son. I can be a caustic prick sometimes, but I like to think that there is still some wit about me even when I’m in an otherwise unpleasant state of mind.

Joblessness aside, I loved having him as a roommate. Our days consisted of watching rerun episodes of News Radio that were being aired back to back a few days every week, discussing (and sometimes outright screaming at one another about) various scientific theories that we’d yet to study in any formal environment but which we studied in our free time simply because we loved that sort of thing, dedicating every Friday evening to the new episodes of Farscape as they were broadcast on SciFi, and just enjoying books, movies, and video games together. It was a good life that we had together, and I was overall quite content with how things were going for the first time in a good while.

This was a man who had no qualms about standing in my open bedroom doorway, reading Green Eggs and Ham out loud while I was having sex with my girlfriend just because he thought it was an amusing way to inform us that he was home and that the noises issuing from the bedroom were a distraction. It could be argued that this was an appropriate payback  for my stripping down to only a pair of boxers and bodily jumping into bed with him in order to deliver a pack of cigarettes that I’d picked up for him while he was sleeping.

It was during this time, while he and I were living together in the apartment that methamphetamine became a bit more than just a recreational part of our lives, but that is a story that needs to be told all by itself.

In total he lived with me for the final three years that I lived in the apartment that had been my home for a grand total of eight years, and those three years were without a doubt the best I had experienced there aside from the very beginning, when my oldest children lived with me while they were still babies.

The funny part is that we ended up living together in two additional locations over the few years or so that followed, and I have always enjoyed those intervals far more than the gaps between or the time since.

There is little to nothing that I could say here, with this whole episodic journey into my life, that he does not already know…as there is likely no one in my life who has known me even half as well as he does. I’ve never been particularly good about making friends or maintaining the friendships that I have, but this is one of two that I know I hope never to live without. I’m entitled to be a bit sentimental at times, so shut up.

Part Seventeen: The Degenerate

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I was 16 when I met a man who was to become like a persistent virus in my life, destined to come and go repeatedly without any real way of predicting his arrival or the form his departure would take. I was hanging out at a local counterculture establishment known as The Atomic Cafe in downtown Rapid City when I first encountered this individual. He and two friends had made their way to the area only recently from somewhere I can no longer recall, and I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time otherwise I might have avoided meeting them…and my life would have been a far less interesting landscape.

I got a bad feeling about him the moment I saw him walking down the alley towards where my friends and I were hanging out and smoking. It’s difficult to explain, but it felt like I knew him already, even though he had never visited South Dakota in the past…I knew that no good would come of his being there, as if I had caught a momentary glimpse of the future that was ahead of us. It’s funny to me that I dismissed that intuition, because I have never been so perfectly on the mark before or since.

I should tell you a bit more about him, before I get going on our numerous interactions with one another.

It wasn’t too long after first meeting him when he was arrested for public intoxication, which led to him being in jail for resisting arrest and assault. The police picked him up drunk and disorderly and placed him in the back of a cruiser only to have him roll onto his back and kick the window repeatedly until it shattered. He continued fighting, handcuffed, until they placed him into a second car where he immediately began kicking that window as well.

He was removed from the car and forced onto the ground where some of the broken safety glass ended up lodging itself into his jaw, leaving him with a scar that he will likely carry with him as a reminder for the rest of his life. They did finally get him under control and escorted to the jail and he remained there for the next month or so before being hauled off to a treatment facility an hour or so away. I just wanted to share that little bit of his story with you so that I could adequately set the stage, because this man was a real piece of work.

Even though I had only met him a few times and spent small amounts of time with him since he had arrived in town a couple of weeks prior to the incident, he ended up placing me on his visitation list and requested that his friends ask me to come and see him in jail. Against all better judgment, I did indeed visit him quite a few times while he was locked up…to this day I have no idea why.

During the time that he was locked away his two friends left the state, returning to whatever corner of hell they crawled up from, which led to him having no one else to keep him company but the mother of my oldest children, my best friend at the time, and I.

We also visited him while he was in treatment during one of the days when he had a pass. We took him out to lunch, drove around for a while so that he could feel like he had a little bit of clear air, and I even gave him a Christian Death live cassette that I had in the car so that he had something to listen to while he was finishing out his stint in treatment.

After he was released he began a relationship with a friend of mine from Sturgis, and I still feel bad about introducing the two of them, though they did end up producing a pretty adorable daughter who will hopefully turn out to be a more worthwhile human being than either of her parents have managed to.

One night, after my oldest daughter was born, they were visiting us and he ended up downstairs getting drunk with my neighbors in the apartment directly below our own. During that time his significant other was in our apartment spending some time with my daughter’s mother and I. It was a nice night until he inevitably came upstairs, heavily intoxicated and apparently feeling hostile because he started in on his girlfriend almost immediately after coming through the door about the gambling problem she apparently had. We will side step the obvious hypocrisy of the alcoholic tearing into the gambler about the shortcomings associated with their addiction in the living room of their friends’ apartment…no one ever said that he exercised much by way of self-awareness or common sense.

I had to repeatedly ask him to keep his voice down because our daughter was asleep in her crib on the other side of the wall from where he was raising his ruckus. He would apologize, lower his voice, and shortly thereafter begin to increase the amplitude all over again…another example of the long term memory skills of a drunk.

Finally I got tired of the noise and the accumulation of recriminations between the two of them. I reached over to him, grabbed both sides of his face to turn him so that he was facing me, and told him to shut the fuck up. That was when the degenerate bit into the meat of my right thumb and clamped down as hard as he could.

I let go of his head, jerked my injured hand away from his mouth, and lunged at him…throwing him across the few feet into the corner of the room. I attempted to restrain him while displaying remarkable self control under the circumstances, until he lodged his teeth into the nearest part of my body again, which happened to be my inner thigh this time. Even with jeans on, I later discovered that I had an almost perfect dental imprint of punctures in my leg. The bastard had some sharp fucking teeth and impressive jaw strength, I have to give him that. The scar has long since faded, thankfully.

I got him loose from my thigh, dragged him into the middle of the room where I could actually maneuver, and somehow managed to successfully restrain him on the floor with only a small amount of unnecessary violence directed his way.

It was around this time when the neighbors from downstairs came up to find out what the noise was all about. Seeing the guy who was recently drinking with them pinned to the floor and thrashing around like a fucking madman, they thought it was an excellent opportunity to begin kicking him while he was down. I enjoyed watching it and let it happen for a little while before asking someone if they could just call the cops so that I could get the piece of shit out of my home.

The police did show up and he was arrested…and, as anyone who has dealt with abusive relationships can guess, it seems only typical that he and his girlfriend remained together even after all of that. They were such a perfect fit for each other that she was actually upset with my ex and I for having him arrested.

This marked the first interval of peace and quiet while he was out of my life. Like all good things though, this was destined to come to an end.

He and his girlfriend popped back into our lives a while later, something like six months down the road, and there seemed to be no hard feelings. This was, of course, illusory.

One night my ex and I arranged for a babysitter so that we could visit them at their trailer in Sturgis, after being invited to show up at any time. There had been a little get together taking place that night but things had already wound down before we arrived. The degenerate and his girlfriend were in bed and my best friend at the time was passed out drunk in the guest bedroom. I decided to wake my friend up, making a nuisance of myself in order to do so. This apparently pissed off the degenerate and he began screaming at me from his bedroom.

We yelled back and forth for a bit before my ex and I decided to just return home.

Apparently we overstayed our welcome by just a second or two too much, as a large glass ashtray came flying down the hallway, almost hitting my ex in the head as it crashed into the wall next to her right where we were standing as we were about to exit the trailer.

We weren’t oblivious and we took the hint. We rushed outside, followed by the degenerate with a small crossbow in his hands. The crossbow was not the hollow threat that it might have been in anyone else’s hands, and he fired a bolt at us, hitting the ground nearby a little too close for comfort.

As we were trying to get into the car so that we could get the fuck out of there he approached the driver’s side, making it impossible for the mother of my children to get into the car and behind the wheel so that we could leave. I ran around the front of the car to draw him away from her and we ended up wrestling in the gravel of the alleyway.

The noise and activity woke up my drunk friend and he decided that he needed to get the hell out of there before the police showed up, being a minor at the time and clearly under the influence, this wasn’t the worst decision he could make (aside from the driving away element of his plan). As my friend was climbing behind the wheel of his 70s model Monte Carlo I yelled for him to pull forward while maneuvering the degenerate’s head so that it was wedged tightly against the front driver’s side tire and the gravel surface beneath it.

There was no hesitation on my part. I was fully prepared to kill that man with the unwitting assistance of my friend in his car. I was an angry young man still, the damage in me was clearly quite present, and my impulse control was not the best (it’s not so great at the best of times). I suppose that I should be thankful that my friend reversed from where he was parked rather than pulling forward as I had asked him to, but some part of me still feels that I would have been doing the world a huge favor by insuring the degenerate was out of the picture for good, his skull pulverized by the weight of the car.

I was charged for disorderly conduct for my part in the events of that night. The degenerate’s girlfriend had called the cops right after we left, fabricating some bullshit version of events which negated any part that the degenerate had played in order to try and have assault charges pressed against me. I was 19 and this was the first charge on my adult criminal record (though it would not be the last), I plead guilty to the disorderly conduct charge without any attempt to fight it.

One would think that the story might end here, but that would only be true if my life was the sort of thing that makes sense. He was out of my life for a few years after that, but not for good by any stretch of the imagination. I think I knew that he would show up again (and again, and again), there was just something about him that kept on drawing him back to me again, or maybe it’s something about me. Sheer morbid curiosity always motivated me to welcome him back, fully aware of the poor judgment involved in that decision…always operating under the assumption from that point on that I was going to end up having to kill him sooner or later.

Don’t worry, I will tell you more about him later on…also, he is still alive. I haven’t killed him yet.

Part Sixteen: The Weak and the Wounded

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Thankfully memories fade with time and large parts of my childhood blur together in such a way as to make it difficult to discuss with too much detail. I will tell you about my father, along with whatever else comes to mind right now. This is going to be a bit of a memory dump…but I promise it won’t always be bad. My early life may have been plagued by violence but there are plenty of positive memories as well.

My father was an angry man, in fact that would have to be the emotional state that best characterized him in my memories. I don’t know how he got that way, or why, but I can speak from personal experience that it wasn’t the drugs or the drinking that made him into the one and only person I have ever been scared of throughout the course of my life…that would be too much of an oversimplification of things. Situations have frightened me, nightmares and hallucinatory episodes as well, along with various other things (like deceleration trauma, because it isn’t the heights that scare me but the impact subsequent to the fall)…but only one individual ever scared me, and that man was my father. It wasn’t just that he was 6′ 7″ and strong from years of hard work, but those factors definitely didn’t help to ease my fears.

Residual traces of that almost perpetual state of fear from my childhood still resounded when I saw him getting angry even as an adult, regardless of whether that anger was directed towards me…it was enough that I knew he was unhappy. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that echo of childhood fear was the product of persistent PTSD…after the life that I have lived and the things that I’ve experienced (namely the things I have put myself through, or done to myself, for the most part), PTSD would be a suitable partner for the survivor’s guilt anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex would recognize as being manifest in me.

I say it wasn’t the drugs or the drinking that made him what he was to me because I have had ample experience with drinking to excess as well as ingesting pretty much every illicit substance I could get my hands on…repeatedly, in most cases. Sure, maybe those external factors might have triggered it in him, bringing that man to the surface…but it had to be something inside of him that was the driving force behind it. Whatever it was, I was terrified that I had it in me as well, especially after the incident that transpired between myself and the mother of my two oldest children.

Anything could set him off, even something as simple as spilling a glass of water on the floor…other times there didn’t need to be anything at all, maybe it was just something that he brought home with him from something that happened at work that day. I don’t know which was worse from him, his hands or the belt. If it had been something as simple as spankings, I think it would have to be the belt…but there was something about the direct physical contact that made it feel more real and more hurtful to me most of the time, if that makes any sense. Somewhere along the way, as I started to get a little bit older, I began to believe that he wanted to kill me and that it was only a matter of time until he did. Awareness of my mortality led me to suspect that it was something right around the corner from one day to the next. I still recall the first time I saw The Shining, before I had a chance to read the book, and I felt altogether too much familiarity with Danny Torrance, and if there was a fictional character that could perfectly mirror what I saw from my father as a child, it would be that portrayal of Jack Torrance from the film. I don’t know if that helps you to visualize what I’m trying to describe, I’m pretty ineffectual when it comes to this sort of thing.

There was one night in particular when I knew that I was going to die. He and my mother were fighting late at night and I slipped out of my bedroom as quietly as I could in order to find out what they were fighting about, I always assumed the worse and that it was me or something that I had done. I watched for a short while before I saw him strangling her right there in the living room. I knew at that moment, without a doubt, that he was going to kill her and then he was going to kill me too. Whatever happened after that is lost to the past, the memories are a blur from there, and I will take that as a blessing. I don’t know what happened after that, but I clearly was not murdered, so my fears had been unfounded.

He wasn’t always like that though. I have one memory in particular where he was the hero rather than the villain. We were driving home from somewhere when a county Sheriff chasing someone on a dirt bike approached us from behind on the gravel road that led to our house. My father immediately swerved the car over in an attempt to block the dirt bike, but they cut into the ditch and got around us anyhow. He had no reason to get involved in whatever was going on, but he tried to help the officer put a stop to that chase. That man is the father I wish I always had to look up to, the one who would go out of his way to do the right thing. That is the version of my father that I most wanted to be like…the man who tried to be a hero when the opportunity arose and the man who valued hard work, which he does to this day. I doubt I will ever meet another person who puts in the kind of hard work that he does. I told you that he had his good qualities.

One of my favorite collection of memories regarding my father is of the times when he would take me to visit members of our family who worked with the veterinarian in charge of the animals for Bear Country (a local wildlife habitat/tourist spot, in case you are unfamiliar). It was on a ranch out near the local airport where some of my favorite childhood memories took place. There was a pen there in which dozens of baby bears were kept. I was allowed to go over the electrified fence (and once, directly into it, after which I found myself suddenly sitting on the ground and wondering how I got there) in order to play with them. Bear cubs begin to treat you as just another cub after a short while and they are very playful. I probably needed a new pair of shoes after each visit there due to the shoes being chewed on along with everything else. Of all my childhood experiences, having the chance to literally roll around on the ground with dozens of bear cubs, losing track of time while playing with them, is the one I wish I could have shared with my own children. It isn’t something that many people have the chance to enjoy, and I will always treasure it.

Speaking of bears, I was probably five years old when we were at Bear Country on a summer day. One of the adult bears approached our car and began licking the window next to where I was sitting. I didn’t hesitate to roll down the window so that I could pet the bear. Of course my mother and father responded with shock and panic at the unbelievably stupid thing their son was trying to do. You probably think that I was stupid too, but you can fuck right off…I was five or maybe six at the time, you were no genius at that age either.

Sadly, the bear incident was not the first time that I almost got myself killed while doing something totally innocent. One morning I woke up before either of my parents and I decided I wanted to do something nice for them. I was a sweet kid, you wouldn’t know it from the man I’ve become, but I really was. I chose to make pancakes for breakfast that morning. Being no more than four years old at the time, I was no award winning chef…come to think of it, I’m still not much good in the kitchen.

I emptied a box of pancake mix onto a griddle, it took the form of a pyramid of sorts. I then poured some milk onto the pancake mix mountain, and I think I even broke an egg and included both the insides as well as the shell on the growing mound. From there it was just a matter of turning on the burner for me, and we would have pancakes. Instead of a delicious breakfast, my parents were awakened to the shrill chirping of the fire alarm.

There was another incident where it wasn’t my own life that I endangered but the life of my baby brother. We were back in Minnesota for a vacation, I believe we were at Bald Eagle Lake or maybe it was White Bear…it doesn’t matter which one. My brother wasn’t even a year old at the time, I don’t think…so I couldn’t have been more than seven years old myself. I walked out into the water and my brother began crawling after me, because he followed me everywhere at that time. I stood there watching as he crawled into the water and just kept going until he was submerged. My mother and father began screaming for me to do something, but all I did was stand there watching as my brother was possibly drowning. My father got to him and pulled him out of the water, and he turned out to be perfectly fine…but I very nearly killed my little brother simply because I couldn’t do anything more than stand there and watch him crawl towards me even after he was under the water.

Now that I think about it, though I know that I shouldn’t make light of this topic, maybe my father really did want to kill me…but because I was clearly intent on bringing about my own demise out of sheer childhood stupidity, and his method would have been far less gruesome and less likely to include other people on my way down. I don’t care if you think that was funny or not, I think it was kind of a funny thing to suggest, and humor is how I cope with things, so you don’t have any say in the matter.

A couple of years after the divorce I started spending weekends with my father. He and I would stop at a video store on the way to his house where I was allowed to pick out pretty much anything that I wanted. It could be argued that there was a lapse in proper parenting involved in this form of pacification…but I personally loved it.

It got to the point where I was alphabetically working my way through whole genre sections…beginning with horror, followed by science fiction/fantasy, and then action. I may not remember all of them clearly anymore, but there is hardly a movie included in any of those genres released before the early 90s that I haven’t seen at least once thanks to all of those rentals and the glorious thing that was USA Up All Night!

I hope that I’ve done a reasonable job of showing you a fairly balanced portrait of my childhood, that not everything about my early years was a constant, waking nightmare. I have good memories from those years as well, just admittedly not as many.

I can honestly look back on my childhood and state that it wasn’t all bad, but that would have been an impossibility, for it to have been all bad. I do realize that I tried very hard to shift the emphasis to the good parts or the elements that focused on the negative things not directly related to my father, it was a conscious choice on my part, there’s a reason for that…if I can focus on more of the good aspects, and less on the violence and fear, maybe those bad parts will continue to fade just a little bit more.

It’s perhaps foolishly optimistic , but let me have my illusion for the moment, no need to dispel it right away…asshole.

Part Fifteen: …Hollow Be Thy Name

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I’ve already discussed the fact that I was raised in a Catholic household, so it goes without saying that I was a churchgoing child. In addition to the weekly torture that was the sit, stand, kneel repetition that was church itself I was compelled to participate in catechism classes throughout my younger years and confirmation classes as a teenager. I did not complete confirmation though, striking out on my own as I did before I reached adulthood, which means that I can’t be excommunicated from the Catholic Church…and that is just a damn shame.

Reading the Bible was a large part of those studies throughout my childhood, and not those cutesy, illustrated children’s Bibles either. Being a delinquent as you’re aware I was, I was predisposed to getting into trouble more often than other kids…punishment in catechism was to copy, by hand, chapters from the Bible. I suppose that I don’t need to tell you that I became more familiar with the Bible than the other kids in my peer group. In case you are unaware, I feel that it should be known that the Catholic Bible is substantially larger than the versions of that same book recognized as authentic by other Christian faiths, including books that are dismissed by protestants. Over the years I read that damnably tedious thing from cover to cover, not because it was captivating literature by any stretch of the imagination but because there was something about it that genuinely fascinated me beyond the literary quality. This is something I recommend only for those with a serious masochistic streak.

I never was a believer, though I sometimes wished that I could find a way to force myself to be, and I spent a long time going through the motions and trying to force myself into that mold because it was what was expected of me. There are aspects of the faith that I could appreciate and even admire to some extent. As much as I occasionally condemn religion and the religious, there is something special about the sort of history and gravity that accompanies that kind of organization and the traditions it carries with it. There is something solemn and deserving of respect in the Catholic Church, for all its faults (and the same could be said for a number of religious or semi-religious frameworks)…in the same way that ancient architectural edifices and venerable texts are worthy of our respect and study. If you don’t recognize that, you might be a bit touched…I say that with only the utmost respect.

As much as my family raised me to be a good, guilt-riddled Catholic boy, my mother deserves some credit for not only tolerating but actively encouraging my exploration of that and other religions and schools of philosophy. It was my mother who provided me with books like The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Bhagavad Gita as well as textual explorations of things such as Kabballah and Sufism. As many times as she and I have butted heads, including the countless times where screaming matches were ignited by my refusal to go to church, my mother has earned a great deal of respect from me for nurturing and supporting my intellectual development over the years.

There is a strange inverse correlation that I discovered, as the more I studied religion and the belief structures around the world the less I found myself able to take it seriously that anyone actually believed those things. If I ever had any kernels of faith in the things I was raised to believe, it was eroded as effectively as if by geological processes during my teenage years. That lack of faith did nothing to deter my interest in studying those things and I still enjoy reading about those particular subjects to this day. Personally I think that atheists and religious people alike would benefit from actively studying the various belief systems that surround us…regardless of whether they reach similar conclusions to my own.

It’s all very subjective, and I think that is kind of the point. You know already that I don’t believe in any sort of god…but I am scientifically minded enough to accept that there is a chance (however fucking slim) that some sort of god or god-like being could conceivably exist…a very small chance, as far as I am concerned, but a chance just the same. Claiming either that there is or is not a god with absolute certainty is dogmatic either way and equally a product of faith whichever side of the fence you find yourself on.

I am honest enough to accept that there could be something out there that resembles a god, and pretending that I somehow know better would be total bullshit. The one thing that I do feel safe in saying though, is that (if there is a god) it is nothing like any of the things that any religion has claimed it to be. As much as some people rail against it, religion is an entirely human and subjective experience, a thing we assembled in order to come to terms with a strange and frightening world filled with unpredictable and magnificent things. Within any given congregation there will be dozens of people with entirely different perceptions of what their shared deity is and what it desires of them and those around them…and dozens more interpretations of the exact same words located in whatever their sacred text might happen to be. That alone should be enough to wake people up, but we are nothing if not proud and so filled with hubris that we just know that we are special and set apart from everyone else. We assume that everyone else sees the same things we do, or that they could if we just explained it to them.

I am no less guilty of that particular bit of ignorant reasoning. In my late teen years I started trying to put my comparative religious studies to some use by fabricating a new Bible that would collect the common themes that are found in numerous religions and explain away the differences as little more than culturally-imposed nuances that became exaggerated over time to become the divisive bullshit that it is today. I spent a long time writing that worthless thing only to one day realize that there was absolutely no fucking way I was the first to try that very thing and if no one else had succeeded in making a difference, I sure as hell wouldn’t. I knew I wasn’t special, for once…so why can’t you figure that shit out?

It wasn’t entirely out of character for me to try and adopt the role of shepherd in a sense, by trying to develop something comprehensive that could bring people together, nor was it the first time I would dismiss that very thought process. During my time attending Catholic school I went on a trip with some other students to a seminary and Catholic college in Minnesota. I was seriously considering the possibility of entering the priesthood, and I wanted to get a feel for what that life would require of me. We took classes there and lived alongside the actual priests in training. Ultimately a group of us ended up spending a large portion of that time playing D&D, and bonding over a fictional adventure of our own creation rather than the fictional adventure that was the Bible. Strangely enough, the individual who took on the mantle of bard within our party (and all later parties, because playing D&D was one of those things I very much enjoyed doing with my close friends) actually did go into the seminary after high school…and he was a fantastic fit for it, compassionate and intelligent, which goes to show that not all religious people are idiots (even though I sometimes fall for that confirmation bias myself, and there are plenty of people out there who make it difficult not to).

Yes, I know, it seems silly that someone who didn’t believe would entertain the thought of becoming a priest…but there was a sort of logic behind it. I figured, quite sincerely, that no one who devoted themselves to studying scripture and Church history would actually retain their belief in any literal truth to be found in those things. I thought I would be in good company, men who made great sacrifices in order to become teachers and stewards, helping the lost and afraid to find a sort of peace and direction in life…the hoodoo, mystical nonsense was just window dressing as far as I was concerned. In my mind it was something good and noble that I could do with my life that might also save me from becoming the monster I was afraid I was. It was not because I had an unhealthy predilection for young boys…I know you were thinking it, you sick shit. Though I did not become a priest, I did become an ordained minister over a dozen years ago exclusively for the purpose of being able to officiate weddings outside of any religious affiliations. It is legitimately quite appropriate to apply the honorific of Reverend when addressing me, though only a few of my friends actually do…mostly because it is kind of funny to do so.

I have known some fine priests, monsignors, and bishops over the years, all of them good men who deserved my respect…regardless of what they happen to believe. Also, none of them tried to diddle me behind closed doors…or outside, or anywhere else for that matter. This is not one of those stories, as interesting as that might be. In all reality, it doesn’t matter what people believe or don’t believe, there are good and bad apples in every group. I greatly respect the current Pope and I had a great deal of respect for Pope John Paul II as well, for all of his shortcomings. I even joined Catholics from around the world on a pilgrimage to Denver in order to attend World Youth Day in 1993. As much of an irreverent shit as I might have been, there was something beautiful about being there…and attending the ceremony at Red Rocks officiated by Pope John Paul II himself.

Being the sort of kid that I was, I spent the long bus ride to Denver with headphones in, listening to White Zombie and Nine Inch Nails, perhaps offensively striking up a small chorus of us singing along to the song Head Like a Hole. Of course, I spent most of that time fucking off and just being an irresponsible fucking kid. I became friends with someone who would end up becoming one of my best friends during that trip and we spent most of that time finding ways to screw off and generally be bastards…much to the chagrin of the people who were trying to escort us and keep us safe. Sleep deprivation, massive quantities of caffeine and sugar, as well as an overall predisposition to behave like a fucking criminal led to that being one of the most enjoyable vacations I’ve ever had. This friend I made on that trip ended up attending Catholic school with me until we both got asked not to return by the administration, and he was on the trip to the seminary as well. There are so many good memories that I might never have been able to form if I hadn’t gone on that trip and met him…and there were numerous other friends I would never have had the pleasure of knowing had it not been for him introducing me to them. He remains the best dungeon master I ever had the pleasure of role playing with, with a wry sense of humor and a sadistic streak that often led to almost inescapable situations. His friendship was important enough to me that I overlooked the fact that he was one of the two individuals I found in the bathtub with the girl I lost my virginity to, and I must have been important to him as well because he forgave me for sleeping with his girlfriend years later after he asked me if I would let her stay with me when she had nowhere else to go. There was a time when he was being pursued as a felon and I immediately let him stay with me, and it was only because of one of our mutual friends informing the police of his whereabouts that they showed up at my door. Were it not for one particularly diligent officer, he might have eluded them for a while longer, but that cop insisted on thoroughly searching my apartment and located him curled up inside of my dryer. I never would have checked that location, so we both figured it was a safe place to hide. I hated seeing him hauled off, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do. He and I have grown apart over the years, but my memories involving him are still some of my favorites.

It may seem like I have gone off on a tangent there, and I did…but there is an important lesson to be learned from that little anecdote. The Church provided a sort of community, a way to meet people that I might never have met under other circumstances. This is the most important purpose that religion has fulfilled throughout human history, bringing people together and reinforcing that sense of community and belonging…the problem is that infinitesimal differences regarding inconsequential nonsense has led to that being distorted and used to vilify anyone outside of that community. We can’t blame the religion for it, nor the religious people, as easy as it is to cast that stone. In-group/out-group dynamics and kin selection have been hardwired characteristics within human nature since our earliest tribal (cultural) advancements…the same sort of primitive bullshit we’ve yet to cast aside as a species that lends itself to racism, nationalism, sexism, and every other form of discrimination that we exhibit on a dishearteningly regular basis.

As much as I have entertained the thought of burning every religious structure down to nothing but ash, I don’t hate people because of what they believe…it’s what they say and do that makes me hate them, and those things have more to do with who they are as a person than the religious indoctrination they might have been exposed to.

All of this puts me in an awkward position from numerous directions; I’m not rigid and dogmatic enough for hard-line atheists, but I openly deride and mock the beliefs of most religious people on a semi-regular basis. Hell, the simple fact that I don’t believe is enough to place me at odds with certain religious folks. I guess it’s a good thing that I couldn’t possibly care less about how well I fit in, as evidenced by a lot of what I have shared with you so far.

Really, it all comes down to one simple thing for me. Whatever you believe or don’t believe, just don’t  a cocksucker about it and we’re OK…also, lighten the fuck up, this is the real world and nothing is sacrosanct, everything is worthy of ridicule.

Even me.

Especially me.