Peter.

I haven’t posted anything since this summer, so to get the juices flowing again, so to speak, I’m posting a short piece I did for a writing class last year. My class was given two short stories to model their own short story after. I, of course, picked “The Hitman” by T.C. Boyle. We didn’t have to use the same type of subject matter, although I did – albiet in a much more updated fashion. I also wanted to try my hand at reproducing the feel of the detached, brief paragraphs that made up the original. I based my character on Richard Kuklinski, a.k.a. the late “Iceman” from Jersey City.

“Peter”
a short story in the style of “The Hitman” by T.C. Boyle

Childhood
Peter spends most of his days locked in a room with no windows or furniture. His father drinks all the time and beats him. He breaks chairs on Peter’s back and leaves him crumpled in the corner. Once, he beat Peter so badly that the boy was in a coma for two days. His father thought that he had killed him and decided to take his body to the landfill. Peter woke up amid the garbage and the rats and, after two days of wandering, found his home again. Peter’s father left Peter’s brother, Tommy, at the landfill too – only Tommy never woke up. Peter eventually forgets he had a brother. Peter’s mother likes to beat him too, but she prays out loud when she hits him.

The Neighborhood
Peter is big and ugly and stupid and everyone knows it. The neighborhood kids throw rocks at him and call him names that he doesn’t repeat, even to himself. Sometimes his father calls him the same names. One time, at school, a boy named Richie threw Peter down a flight of stairs. Peter broke his nose and some ribs. When Peter went home, his father wouldn’t take him to a doctor. He just hit him while Peter’s mother prayed and screamed. Peter doesn’t go to school anymore. He leaves his home before sunrise every day and finds stray cats and dogs and kills them.

First Kill
Peter is a little older and bigger, but he is still ugly and he is still stupid. The neighborhood kids are also older and bigger. Now instead of throwing rocks at him and calling him names, they chase him and beat him the same way his father and mother do. One day Peter limps home after such a beating. His father demands to know why he is covered in his own blood. Why he won’t fight back. Peter doesn’t understand so his father punches and kicks him until it becomes hard for Peter to think. When it’s over, Peter goes to the bathroom to yank out his loose teeth and wash the caked blood from his eyelashes. He decides to do something. He rips the towel rod from the wall and goes out hunting with it. When he finds the neighborhood children, he bares his teeth like the dogs that he kills. He uses the rod to hurt all the children and sends them limping, running, and dragging away with broken bones and a new perspective. All except Richie, who had thrown him down the stairs at school. Richie is too hurt to move. His blood is everywhere. Peter drags Richie off the street and into a vacant lot where homeless men live in boxes and dumpsters. He beats Richie with the towel rod until Richie stops moving. Peter finds a homeless man passed-out inside a shelter made of garbage. He wipes Richie’s blood on the homeless man and folds the man’s fingers around the ruined towel rod. Peter goes home.

The City
Peter takes the ferry into the city every day now. He can afford this because he steals anything he can get his hands on and sells it. He likes to go at dusk. He prowls the forgotten, deserted areas of the city and murders homeless men and stray animals. He does this because he knows no one, not even police care about them. He uses knives, hammers, guns, rope, his hands, and matches, among other things to confuse anyone who might try to stop him. Peter comes home at dawn and stands over his father’s drunken, passed-out body and imagines how he will kill him. Then he leaves in search of more things to steal and sell. He never sleeps.

Father’s Death
Peter’s father loses his job and comes home in a foul mood. He is nursing a head wound from a bar brawl and is extremely drunk. He finds Peter leaving for another one of his trips into the city and begins to beat on him. Peter has grown to an extraordinary size, much bigger then his father. He doesn’t feel the little man’s blows. When his father is finally tired, he starts to spit on Peter. Peter wipes his face and grabs his father by his thinning hair. He pitches him downstairs into the basement. Peter hears his father’s neck crack on the cold stone floor. He takes a bottle of whiskey from the liquor cabinet, empties half of it into the sink, and goes down into the basement and empties the rest onto his father’s dead body. He throws the bottle into a corner, it shatters, and then he leaves. He goes to the city and kills twelve men that night in a variety of ways. To him, they all look like his father.

A Man
Peter is a man now. He steals enough to rent his own apartment. He breaks his mother’s collarbone before he leaves home. He goes into the city now, not just to kill, but to have sex with prostitutes. He never hurts them. He has killed forty-eight men.

Pool
Peter loves to play pool. Before he finds a whore for the night, he likes to play a few games. Sometimes, he plays for money. He always wins. Peter meets many different people and some of them like to steal just like he does. Some of these men pay other men to steal for them, as long as they are given a piece of whatever is taken. Peter likes this idea. One night, Peter beats a man at pool who doesn’t want to pay up. Peter breaks the man’s jaw and gets his money. The men he steals for begin to realize that Peter may be useful in other ways. They ask Peter if he would mind hurting people for money. Peter doesn’t mind. They ask him if he would mind killing people for money. Peter doesn’t mind that either. He likes it.

The Rats (1)
Peter goes hunting by himself in the woods one day. He finds a cave and in the cave are hundreds of rats. The rats are eating a deer carcass that they managed to drag inside. Peter admires their determination to move the dead animal and watches them devour the entire deer in less than two hours. He begins to form a plan.

Mother’s Death
Peter’s mother gets brain cancer and dies praying and screaming in a hospital bed. He doesn’t go to her funeral. He doesn’t care and is glad that she’s dead. That day he kills four homeless men and breaks a stray dog’s legs. The men’s faces still look like his father’s.

Contracts
Peter has killed almost one hundred people, mostly for his new friends who give him a folder with a picture and an address inside. Peter finds the person in the picture and kills them. He always brings back something to show that the job is done, like a finger, or a piece of skin with a tattoo on it. The men burn the folder and give Peter a stack of $100 bills. Peter never counts the money.

The Rats (2)
The men Peter works for give him a folder one day and tell him that not only must he kill the person in the photo, but he has to make them suffer. Peter remembers the cave. He finds the man in a parking lot. Peter throws a garbage bag over his head and stuffs him into his own car. He drives to the woods and then drags the thrashing man through the brush to the cave. Peter takes the garbage bag off the man’s head and ties his hands and feet together to keep him from crawling away. For good measure, Peter breaks the man’s knees. Then Peter sits down and he waits. The rats come and they’re hungry. The man only manages to scream for an hour or so, then his voice box is shredded and the rats eat his face. Peter watches until there is no more man left, only his clothes and some bones. Then he leaves. He drives the man’s car into a lake and watches it sink. He walks home.

Promotion
The men Peter works for give him more and more money every time he kills someone. He doesn’t even have to steal anymore. He still enjoys the prostitutes, but he can afford better ones now, without sores and missing teeth. He owns an apartment and a car. Peter is happy, but he still thinks about his father. He wants to kill him again. He never thinks about his mother.

Bodies
Peter has killed nearly one hundred and eighty people. The men he works for begin to consider that they may have used Peter too much. That he knows where too many bodies and body parts have been hidden. They begin to wonder about things like trust and dishonesty. They know Peter is unlike anyone else. They also know that Peter could kill them one day, if they made him angry enough. Peter knows this too.

Death
The men find Peter when he is asleep and shoot him with guns that don’t make any noise. Peter wakes up when he feels the bullets entering his body. He grabs the nearest man to him and breaks his neck. The other two become frightened and stop firing long enough for Peter to lurch out of bed – his whore has been shot too and she falls to the floor, dead – and he grabs them both. He smashes their heads together until they don’t have any heads left. Peter drops them and goes to the dead woman on the floor. Peter curses the men and feels sorry for the whore. She was his and she had never done anything bad to him. She never beat him, or called him names. She only made him feel good. Peter loves all his whores, only he doesn’t know what that means. He realizes he’s been shot in half a dozen places, but he isn’t dying. Peter goes into his bathroom and uses tweezers to pull the slugs out of his body where they didn’t pass all the way through. It isn’t the first time. He doesn’t make any noise, even when he pours whiskey over all the wounds to keep them from rotting and killing him. Peter slumps down on the closed toilet seat and tries to think. Soon he is tired and begins to doze. He doesn’t hear the man sneak into his apartment. This man has been told to wait outside Peter’s door and only to come inside if something goes wrong. The man finds Peter asleep and shoots him in the face. Peter wakes up, but realizes he is blind and then he can’t think anymore and he falls into the bathtub and dies. The man leaves as quietly as he entered. That night he kills thirteen homeless men. To him, they all look like Peter.

Interview: Die Young

This interview was supposed to appear in the fourth issue of the ‘zine I’ve been doing, but I’ve recently lost almost complete interest in putting the shit together. I can’t even think of enough ramblings to put in this thing. At any rate, I’m posting this interview with Die Young because I don’t want to see it go to waste. They’re one of the few worthwhile bands that still exists in the hardcore scene today and I’m honored that my former band, Meantime, got to share the stage (so to speak) with them the few times that we did. The interview is with Daniel, the vocalist and all-around Die Young renaissance man, again, one of the few worthwhile people in the hardcore scene I’ve had the pleasure of actually conversing with. Die Young just released a new 7″ entitled “Loss” and a retrospective entitled “Through the Valleys In Between.

1. What do you do in Die Young and can you give me some band history (releases, labels, tours, etc.)? How did you guys get involved with two Floridian labels (Eulogy and DON)?

My name is Daniel. My comical stage name is “The Rev. White Devil.” Believe it or not, I did not give that name to myself. It is actually a combination of two different nicknames that friends of mine started to call me when I started fronting Die Young some 5 and a half years ago. In general, I write the music, the lyrics, book the tours, do the webpage, do the artwork for releases, the merch designs. You name it. I’m the last standing OG member so eventually everything just fell into my lap. I think the newer dudes in the band feel a little intimidated trying to jump in and help me out. And I suppose having a history like Die Young has may be a bit intimidating to a newcomer. We’ve toured the world—4 continents, 20+ countries, and we’ve toured North America countless times in the past 5 years, all the while releasing record after record on label after label (Eulogy, A389, SA Mob, Alveran, Still Life, Immigrant Sun, TDB, and more). Our relationship with Eulogy and Double or Nothing Records, I feel, began long before DON existed or long before the prospect of us striking up a deal with Eulogy. We used to play a lot with the South Florida band On Our Own back when they were around, and just about everyone working at those labels these days played in On Our Own at one point and have been long time fans of Die Young.

2. Anything you’d like to mention about touring in East Asia and Alaska?

Make sure you go exploring those regions before you die. You’ll know what I mean when you get there. There’s not much to do in Alaskan cities, but the wilderness is immense and diverse, and of course that is the real attraction. East Asia’s got everything—amazing beaches, cities, mountains, great food, great people, and wildlife that is nothing like here in North America. As far as hardcore scenes go, places like Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia all have something fresh and special going on.

3. Where can people get copies of your ‘zine “The Message”? How many issues have you done and will there be any more?

I usually have them available at all Die Young shows, but I have been slacking lately, and I haven’t kept the two issues I have done in print. I need to make some more immediately. I figure I will do a third issue soon. For now, if you are interested in picking a copy or copies, feel free to email me at ingodwerust@hotmail.com and we will work out an order.

4. A cliche question, but you can elaborate however you want: lyrically, what inspires you to write what you write?

Lately it has just been a sense of loss in my life—hence the title of the new 7-inch. It’s a sense of loss stemming from the consciousness I have about what is happening in the world we’ve inherited. You know, I’ve had it well all my life. A home, a family, the only poverty I’ve ever come to know is by my own doing (because I have chosen to make a life out of playing punk rock for the time being). But there’s always that safety net of my middle class American background to fall back on. I am sure there are plenty of people who think I’m an ingrate because this corrupt system has obviously provided for me very well, or that we’re ingrates in this band because we try to raise questions about the nature of the world order we all live under, and we criticize it despite our good fortune as middle class American kids. I understand that doing so may seem ungrateful, but you know, how am I supposed to react when I go to Costa Rica and I hear Costa Ricans talk about simple farmers who live in the mountains who are being pushed off their lands—lands that they have been on for centuries–for larger commercial farms and factory farms because of programs put in place by CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement)? Or how I am supposed to feel about my own tax dollars (even if it is not many of them) helping to fund a sham of a war in the Middle East? Or what about really good people that I know who have been protesting animal cruelty industries–in a completely lawful manner—that are being spied on by the feds, or being put on no-fly lists by the federal government. You know, what the fuck is that? It seems that people doing their best to resist oppression in this world are either cast out as the bad guys by the real bad guys, or they are just squashed entirely. What I am getting at is that these are just a few problems in our society, and though my life may be one of privilege, I can still recognize that we are connected in the web of the world—by economics, if nothing else. The list goes on really. But what I am ultimately getting at is that things are REAL fucked up, and that it is overwhelming to realize how big things are, and how much bigger than each one of us they may actually be. It feels like the weight of the world. So when I write these songs, even if they are not typically uplifting or positive, I am aiming to spread awareness. Awareness might not seem so desirable in a world that is so fucked up, but I think awareness is potent—it can break our hearts and wear us down, but it is important to go through that process getting your heart broken, so that when we finally hit rock bottom we will at last become invincible and able to get up and fight for whatever it is that we love in our daily lives. I want to help spread awareness because it is essential to fostering resistance, and what the world needs is more resistance to the status quo.

5. What are some of Die Young’s musical inspirations?

We’ve always essentially been a 90’s hardcore band that started in the year 2002. Musically we’ve always drawn the most influence from bands like Catharsis, Integrity, Trial, Buried Alive, Ringworm, Tragedy, and even Earth Crisis or Indecision. But lately I’ve been listening to a lot of non-hardcore and I’ve really gotten into listening into anything with cellos or violins, and female voices. That really shows on the new 7-inch, as we were able to work in a couple female vocal harmonies and an instrumental interlude with a 12-string guitar accompanied by a cello. I think brings a lot more depth and wider scope of emotion to the table for the band. At this point, I’m not just into conveying brutal rage. I want to convey rage and frustration, like always, sure, but I also want to convey an honest sense of defeat and hopelessness, and even agony, because that’s how I feel these days.

6. What initially attracted you to this lifestyle? What were the bands that opened the doors for you? What influenced you to become vegan and straight edge?

The initial attraction was a culmination of a few things. I was always into aggressive rock music as a kid, but I found hardcore and Straight Edge when I was 15 and a lot of friends of mine were getting hooked on drugs. I tried drugs, sure, but once a couple of my friends started doing coke I was really creeped out because they started to become different people. Luckily I found Earth Crisis and that introduced me to a whole line of people at hardcore shows who thought that NOT doing drugs was in fact the cool thing to do. It just gave me a base to break away from all the apathy I had previously been surrounded by. Animal rights was generally synonymous with the 90’s hardcore and Straight Edge movement, so it was only a given that I would be introduced to ideas like vegetarianism and veganism. I quit eating meat when I was 15, but it wasn’t until 3 years ago that I decided to become vegan, and I attribute that to the amount of information I had gathered over the years, be it reading or watching documentaries, or maybe just talking to people. There was a point where I realized that the dairy industry was and is one and the same with the meat-packing industry, because they are both based on factory farming; they are all based on the enslavement, malnourishment, and abuse of sentient beings. I tend to think that anyone who is vegetarian but refuses to be vegan just isn’t informing themselves enough. But don’t get me wrong—if that’s you, I am still stoked that you don’t eat meat (it’s better than you making no sacrifices at all!).

7. How do you think things have changed within the hardcore and punk rock scenes since when you first became interested?

I don’t want to go on some rant about this subject again. I am sure I sound like a broken record to everyone who knows me well enough. So I will appease you with a metaphor: hardcore for me is a lot like the Garden of Eden. In the beginning (for me) it was a pure place, where everything was perfect, and it gave me everything in my life to be satisfied. It supplicated the void mainstream America put in me. Now though, we’ve gone through a fall from grace. Things are fucked up, we’ve been cast out of that perfect naïve time, and there’s a lot of shame and regret to go around. In America that’s how it is atleast. In other parts of the world the hardcore scene is still young and the most amazing thing ever. I fear it is just a matter of time before those scenes, too, unravel. I sincerely hope not. But you know, the one thing that is a constant positive in hardcore is that in every city there are atleast 5-10 kids who get it: that understand grassroots networking, and the DIY ethic, and the need to resist and live an alternative lifestyle. There will always be those few people in and because of this subculture, and that’s the small ray of hope that we’ll always have here.

8. What has kept this band going all these years of relentless touring? Do you ever get sick of it? What could you see yourself doing if you had never been a part of this band?

In some ways I’d say we’ve persevered through the years of touring because we’re passionate about what we do, but sometimes you start to feel jaded and burned out, especially when the crowds are not as enthusiastic as the band (which is a characteristic of the United States, not so much anywhere else), and then sometimes all that’s left inside of us is a desire to not go home and not go back to work. We just did a 9 week North American tour, and by the end of it we wanted to go home, but not necessarily because we were looking forward to being stationary for a while, or having to go back to some shitty job—not at all! haha—but it’s just one of those things where you do one thing for too much or too long so you want something else. At this point we are definitely sick of touring in the United States. For all the work we put in we often feel like we don’t get it back from the kids. I don’t mean to talk down or insult the tight core of people who support us in North America, because we certainly appreciate their support, but I mostly feel like the majority of hardcore kids—the masses, if you will, haha—are just rotten people, as rotten and generic and mediocre as the rest of society. In fact, they may as well just be the rest of society. I’ve seen enough flat-brimmed hats to know that hardcore isn’t hardcore anymore—it’s just a few degrees a way from being as lousy as mainstream rap. And you know, I think the tight core of kids who really support Die Young, and really care about the things we are conveying, totally understand that. So I would expect that they would have seen this coming from us for a long time. From here on out, and US shows we play will only be select shows to get us to an airplane somewhere to go to another continent. Okay, so what could I have seen myself doing if I had not started this band? Hmm, well I really don’t know, because I really did start this band out of the sheer desperation of not knowing what else to do with my life. When I was in school, for the year that I attempted to do that, I thought I would major in English or Philosophy, and I thought I would go on to be a teacher. Being a teacher, to me, seemed like a meager but sufficient living, and likewise it seemed like a good way to connect with people/kids and make an impact in the world. But after a year of jumping through hoops in college I was so depressed because I felt like I was doing all those things because they were what my family and society expected of me. I had to be honest with myself: what I really wanted to do was explore the world and play music. I can’t see myself ever going back to school at this point. I feel like I’ve learned more through traveling and meeting people, or just reading in the van haha, through Die Young anyway

9. It’s an election year. What do you think of the candidates? What are you most concerned about, socially, politically, ethically? Do you vote?

I have voted in the past, yes. I will try to vote this year, but I need to figure out how to do that being that Die Young will have me in Europe a month before and 3 weeks after the election. I do not vote because I think that it matters so much. Rather, I vote for the symbolic meaning of it—the notion that something like democracy might be able to one day exist, or the notion that we should be in the practice of being involved with how our society functions. That’s really what’s important, because every 4 years the public puts another figurehead into the oval office (or do they?) and nothing changes. It really doesn’t matter who gets into that oval office. What matters is if we learned to get involved and network within our communities for change. That is where it all begins if it is going to happen at all. I think one of the things that I’ve been most concerned about lately is that so many people I encounter these days really do seem to think that a Barack Obama, or John McCain, or Hillary Clinton, whoever, in the office is going to bring about some kind of dramatic change. It bothers me that these people have so much faith in this system, that they think it could all be as simple as that. How much is going to take to desecrate their faith in the system? The ever-rising death-toll in Iraq and Afghanistan? The prospects of more US offensives in South America? The oil and energy crisis? These are things that can’t be fixed by simply replacing a few people, because in many ways they are just repetitions of past mistakes and injustices that this system has always thrived on.

10. Being that you’re a Texan, has this country’s latest administration been especially hard for you to bear? Do you recall his term (terms?) as governor?

I was probably between the ages of 13 and 17 when GW was gov’ner of Texas, so I wasn’t conscious of much. I knew he was governor, but that was about it haha. Though GW is from Texas, I’m not especially embarassed by him because I am not some sort of Texas “nationalist” like a lot of Texans are haha. I was born here, he was born here, I didn’t really have anything to do with any of that. And as far as the quality of his presidency goes, I don’t think he is particularly worse than most presidents in US history. Sure, just about every single one of the motherfuckers were more eloquent than GW, but FDR was a warmonger all the same, who passed a law against people being “anarchists” (what the fuck?), JFK lied to drag us into a bullshit imperialist war in Southeast Asia, and LBJ (another Texan, whaddaya know?!) kept the lies going to keep us in that war for quite some time. All of these people, and nearly all of those who came before, in between, and after the ones I just threw out for example’s sake are generally one in the same, and likewise they all generally deserved to be executed at the hands of the people.

11. Christianity. Does it have any place in the realm of hardcore and punk rock? Is it anyone’s place to decide? What about something more broad like spirituality (i.e. Hare Krishna, Rastafarianism)?

It’s definitely no one’s place to decide about this, because if there’s one thing I’d like to never see in hardcore or punk rock it is centralized authority. I would hope that the general concensus of hardcore kids worldwide is that god, religion, and authority have no place in our underground, but that is wishful thinking. Personally, I don’t really have a problem with spirituality in the general sense. Even as someone who considers himself an atheist, I would still say I am a spiritual person. I find deep meaning and connection with certain things, like natural things–the elements: sun, wind, water, etc. Fuck, even the great anarchist/feminist/atheist Emma Goldman would often refer to many experiences in her autobiographical works as “spiritual” even though she had pages upon pages devoted to waging war on the idea of god. The fact is that we are human beings, and we think symbolically, but we don’t know everything, so when we connect to things in life that give us a sense of meaning or purpose or connection to some sort of life force that we perceive as “bigger” than ourselves, even if that force is some kind of mental or emotional conjuring, we’re bound to get spiritual sensations from those experiences. That’s beautiful, and I’d even say it is one of the great perks of being human. As always, it’s just when these kinds of feelings become organized and institutionalized that they become dangerously dogmatic and socially destructive. As much as Die Young has criticized western religion, and Christianity specifically, I want to be specific in saying that we’ve never been here to dictate what people think or do. We are here to criticize aspects of our society that we feel to be blind or hollow. We just want people to think about them. For example, the song “Graven Images” may seem to just be blatantly offensive to Christians, but if you really read it through and through you will understand that that there are lines that are sympathetic to the Christian community–to the progressive Christian community, anyway. I want to start a dialogue about faiths between faiths, even a dialogue between faiths and those who don’t believe. The other day we actually had a youth pastor praise that very song (Graven Images) saying he agrees with our frustrations with modern Christianity. I think that’s amazing. That’s exactly what I wanted to happen from having written that song. I want to see objective thinking; I want to see Christians understand that is their responsibility to examine the tennets of what they follow, and to analyze the problems their institution has created for itself and the world, and I want them to fix it. And that goes for any religion. I don’t criticize eastern religions so much, because those are not the religions that govern western society, but that doesn’t mean I think they are really any better. Nevertheless, I still uphold that there are many beautiful aspects of all faiths, and though I generally do not relate to any of them, or adhere to any of them, I still think there is some value to them and what they have contributed, for better or for worse, to the world.

12. Any new bands you’re excited about? Native to Texas or otherwise?

Native to Texas, I am the most stoked on Mammoth Grinder from Austin, The Golden Age from Corpus Christi, and Lie and Wait from San Antonio. Granted, there’s a bunch of great stuff coming out of Texas these days but I really don’t have time to drop all of their names. Around the world I am really digging Dead City from Memphis, Words from Quebec City, The Separation from Northen California, Anchor from Sweden, KDC from Puerto Rico, and so many other bands. Our current bassist and guitarist, Kayhan and Jeff, play in awesome band called Legion from Birmingham, Alabama. I am pretty sure they are a staple “This Is For You Fest” band at this point haha. Hey, by the way, would it be lame of me to drop Meantime’s name in this interview? I hope not haha, because I actually really like Meantime.

13. What’s something you’ve been concerned with lately, related to hardcore or otherwise? Here’s a space to vent, rant, or whatever.

Very few things concern me about hardcore these days. It’s mostly like dead like punk is mostly dead, so bah-humbug to that shit! I’ve actually been trying to focus on bigger issues in Die Young. I don’t care about saving the scene anymore, I just care about finding the few people in it that care about bigger issues–you know the issues that really apply to the real world. I want to find the people here that are ready to put masks on and sabotage the cops. I want to find people here that are ready to sink whaling ships and commercial fishing vessels. I want to meet people that are willing to burn down animal testing laboratories, or open the cages on fur farms. I want to meet people here that are concerned with justice–not that phony shit in the courts, and not the mob rule of the masses, but the justice that comes from tight-knit groups of people being vigilant and uncompromising, and SMART! There’s a lot of shit that needs to be done in this world, and singing or talking about saving our precious little underground social bubble isn’t going to do much to get those things done. Anyway, I figure side-stepping the issue of the hardcore scene by talking about the bigger issues at hand will only make the scene better. So that’s two cops with one bullet, but too bad no one really gives a shit haha.

Thanks go out to Daniel and Die Young for answering my questions.

Whew.

It’s been weeks since I felt like writing anything in here, but – fuck – you gotta watch these. Parents: beat your children. And then… kill yourselves.

“Hats off, Carrie Fisher: or “How I learned to stop worrying and love the boob.”

There is a point in all of our lives – and I’m talking to all of the men in this vast audience – where we go from finding females absolutely repulsive, to being basically at their beck and call for the rest of our miserable fucking existences.

As a young child on the playground, I was just like any other boy. I treated all the girls in my class as if they had bullseyes on their clothes. And I would hit these bullseyes with just about anything I could get my little hands on – be it dirt, rocks, excrement, another kid – whatever. Why? Because they were afflicted with cooties. Or the coot, as I’ve heard the old-timers sometimes refer to it.

And if I knew one thing as a wee lad, I knew you didn’t want that shit. To this day, I have no idea just what the cooties can do to you, but if you have a penis and are under the age of ten, you do not want to be any where near them. Every little boy with half a brain knows that. And if yours doesn’t, you should think about getting a new kid.

Now, your average elementary school is co-ed, leading me to believe my life was in constant danger, I did what I had to do to survive. And sometimes that involved forming a boys-only posse and herding my female classmates into the center of the playground and raining down justice upon their upturned little faces. It was basically like wiping out a leper colony.

And I’ll never forget those times.

As young boys we regarded girls as disease-ridden creatures that came whence from places that could not be named, at least not in any language that the human tongue was capable of speaking. So to actually “like” a girl was unthinkable. It was a betrayal of all that made you a boy. When you watched the “Little Rascals” movie, didn’t you just want to beat the shit out of Alfalfa? I’d be damned if that was going to be me. Girls. Who needs ‘em, right?

And then…

…as I said, there comes a time. And when that time comes, you are never the same. I believe I speak for most of the males in my generation when I say that my time came about a fourth of the way through my first viewing of”Return of the Jedi” at age nine. I really do believe that is the point when we all turned the corner and began to see females in a new , much more confusing light.

I can explain. See, to most guys my age, the “Star Wars” saga is the greatest story ever told. I mean, Jesus doesn’t hold a candle to it – be serious. Those movies were the best thing to happen to me since Batman. I loved them when I was a kid and I still love them, thank-you for asking. And which one is every sane and rational person’s favorite installment? “Jedi.” Yes and why is that? For starters you get Jabba the Hutt, Han Solo frozen in carbonite, Boba Fett, a maskless Darth Vader, the Sarlaac and the Rancor, speeders, Ewoks, the Battle of Endor, the Emperor shooting lightening bolts out of his fucking fingers -

- but what’s this? Princess Leia? Is that you? What happened to your donut and/or ear muff hair-do that we’ve all come to know and love? You… you’re not wearing your traditional sexless white robe… you’re… you’re like 80% naked… in a bikini made of metal… and there’s a chain… around your neck… connected to a leash… I mean, what… what’s going on? Oh wow… I feel… weird… is it hot in here?

And I salute you, Carrie Fisher. For being brave enough to don that iron-clad Huttese two-piece in the year of our lord 1983, and subsequently turn an entire generation of boys into… well, into pre-adolescents at least.

We’re still not men yet, are we?

The Waffle House Fiasco.

When we sat down, I immediately knew something was awry. There was this faint odor in the air. I couldn’t quite place it at the time, but I was thinking something along the lines of a dirty dishrag, or perhaps some B.O. leftover from the booth’s previous occupant. I didn’t really pay the notion too much mind; we were in a Waffle House, so, in all fairness, I was expecting a little filth with my meal.

So there we were. I had the inside seat and next to me was my main man and hetero-life compatriot, Chris Tharp. Seated across the table were Jay and Millissa, two girls we barely knew. Apparently that’s the reason the only thing we could come up with for us to do was to have a substandard breakfast at 1:00 am.

Our waitress seemed to have been beaten senseless recently, as she was unable to complete a full sentence or form a coherent thought while she was trying to take our orders. After the mental struggle she had dealing with Chris’ vegetarian diet (“Whatchu mean, no bacon? You want sausage instead?”), I thought she was going to have a stroke, but she somehow managed to get the order to the the cook, who probably thought Chris was gay. Keep in mind that the smell had somewhat abated by this time. That or – and looking back now, I’m almost ashamed to say it - we had just gotten used to it.

It happened when we had finished eating and were just about to slide out of the booth. That was when I saw Jay’s eyes literally bug out of her head.

She looked directly at me. “I hate you.”

Needless to say, I was stunned. Sure the meal hadn’t been that great and it had been my idea to go to Waffle House, but that was no cause for -

“I just stepped in shit.”

And of course, that was when I smelled it.

We scrambled out of the booth and sure enough, Jay had her foot, sandal and all, smashed into one big bastard of a turd. The rest of us began frantically checking ourselves for traces of feces, but it seemed that we three had somehow managed to escape Jay’s fate.

I’m going to pause the narrative here for just a minute because I know what you’re all thinking: “How the hell could a piece of shit be sitting under your table and you didn’t immediately place the smell? I mean, it’s shit! Only an idiot could shrug off something that palpable. What are you an idiot? Do you like the smell of shit, idiot?”

Of course not. I’d like to remind all of you about something. There’s an aspect to shit that a lot of people don’t seem to know about and that is the odor seal. You see, when a good-sized chunk of shit sits for a while (and in this case, I believe this particular chunk had been there for quite some time), it hardens and the odor becomes less intense. In fact, you may not smell it at all, depending on the length of time that it sits. Sure, a fresh shitball is going to bowl you right over the second it hits your nostrils, but one that’s been sitting for a few hours really doesn’t have that same affect. It has a very faint scent, if it has one at all, and that is due to the outer layer hardening into the odor seal.

And that’s how said ball of shit stays, until something or someone comes along and breaks that seal by say - stepping on it.

I’m a bit foggy on what happened next. Looking back, it just seems like a chaotic blur. I know I was dry-heaving and I believe Chris was screaming. Jay had passed out and Millissa was holding back a stream of vomit. And thank God for her discretion on that front because we didn’t want that spraying out and going all over the place. Shit was bad enough. But shit and vomit? Mixed with the inbred funk of a Waffle House I think that formula might have been enough to kill everyone in the diner and level the entire block.

Our waitress came over to our table with a mop and bucket. She didn’t even look surprised, which of course still boggles my mind to this day. It was then that she actually began mopping Jay’s foot. Just mopping away, slopping dirty water all over the top of a foot that had shit on the bottom of it. At that point I ran outside screaming. I know Chris fell down and – I’m ashamed to say – I left him behind. I know. It’s not something I’m proud of. And it’s forever damaged our friendship. But this is shit we’re talking about here.

When Jay regained consciousness, she ran screaming for the bathroom. The waitress followed her and obliged her request for a “fuckload of bleach” which Jay proceeded to dump all over the lower half of her body.

Surely all this was enough. An incident like this is more than an adequate problem for the senses to deal with on even the best of days. But like they say, when it rains, yes, sometimes it does pour. And what happened next was so incredible, I’m almost hesitant to speak about it.

I was standing outside, trying not to sick up my breakfast into the bushes, when a Jeep crammed with about seven people roared up and parked right out front. An obviously drunk girl staggered out, wearing a large puffy white jacket. She went inside the Waffle House and headed for the bathroom.

It was then that I saw through the window, Jay coming out of the bathroom, a look of intense weariness on her face, holding her shit-sandal out in front of her, obscuring any view she had of the oncoming puffy jacket girl.

“My God,” I thought. “That drunk bimbo is going to walk right into her.”

And she did. But what is so surprising to me is that even after the turd was transferred from Jay’s sandal to the sleeve of the girl’s white jacket… the girl didn’t even notice. She just kept right on trucking. Straight into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

Jay came outside with a look of absolute shock and awe on her face.

“I just… got shit -”

“- all over her jacket, I know!” I finished.

By this time, Millissa had regained most of her composure and stopped Chris’ sobbing. She pulled him from the floor of the diner and they both came outside. They hadn’t seen what had just taken place and when I told them, it was Chris who passed out. Poor bastard. It was just too much for him.

The girl came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, walked right past us, and got back into the Jeep. The Jeep had at least seven people in it. And I personally saw that shitstain rub off on at least two of them.

They just drove off. I’d say more, but I don’t have that much control over the English language. If I could find the proper words and somehow bend them into a coherent sentence that could even begin to describe the type of cosmic forces that must be at work here; forces that can actually gave life to a Waffle House turd and allow it to travel via jacket sleeve out into the world… well, I wouldn’t be writing a blog, now would I? I’d be in another dimension with Lovecraft and Poe playing horseshoes, or cricket, or some shit.

Of course, there was nothing left for us to do then but get into our respective cars and go our seperate ways. Jay adamantly refused to say anything to the management of the Waffle House, something I can only chalk up to shock. I still think there’s a lawsuit in it, but because she blamed me for the whole thing, she wouldn’t listen.

Ever since that day, I’ve been plagued by the obvious question: just how in the hell can a piece of shit get into a restaurant and under a table? And then how can it just sit there unnoticed? It wasn’t just a smear. It was a fucking log. Could it have come from an animal? A dog, perhaps? Even though it’s a Waffle House, I don’t think they actually allow pets to accompany their owners inside. Considering the conditions, I don’t think it would be safe for any type of domesticated animal in there. We’re talking about low grade meat here. What if you and Spot come in for some breakfast and they’ve run out of sausage? Would you like to know what the caliber of the average Waffle House employee is? Watch Deliverance. Do you think someone like that would have any scruples about tossing old Spot into the frier?

Which of course then begs the question: was it a person? Could it actually be that a human being went in there for a plateful of waffles and just decided to drop trough and pinch one off right there in the booth? Or maybe - and God help us all if this is the case - he or she brought the turd inside with them, perhaps concealed in a newspaper or pocketbook, and planted it there for the next unsuspecting customer?

It’s thoughts like these that keep me up at night.

“What am I? A pine tree?”

I utter this phrase probably 7 or 8 times a day at work. See, I’m trying to find out if maybe, unbeknownst to me, my DNA has suddenly rearranged itself and I’ve turned into a conifer. Because even though I’m in the act of serving someone food, or perhaps ringing them up, I’m being ignored as if I were a fucking tree.

I work at a diner. We’re talking minimal social interaction here. You tell me what you want and I’ll make sure you get it. Do I want your life story? No. Do I need to tell you mine? No. There is no relationship here. But do I want an order barked at me without so much as a “please,” a ”thank-you,” or even a “can I have…”?

What I’ve become accustomed to is people doing everything they can not to make eye contact. Mumbling is usually the preferred method of communication. Money is then tossed in my general direction and all the while I’m treated to the customer’s one-sided cell phone conversation.

Here’s the thing. It takes a fraction of a second to be courteous. “Hi. Can I have a… thanks.” That’s it. That’s all you need to do. That and get off your fucking phone. Treat people like they’re people. Service jobs are bullshit. No one wants to work one. That’s why when I go out to a restaurant, a coffee shop, a fast food place, or a conveneince store, I take my own advice. People don’t realize how belittling they can be. Do I care that you’re some white-collar, business criminal shitbag with a Mercedes and a disposable income? If you’re on the other side of the counter, you’re a customer. Nothing more, nothing less. A customer that, until they prove otherwise, should be treated with common courtesy.

“Deal with it. It’s not a nice world.” This is a very true statement. Who am I that I should expect anything less than minimal courtesy at my workplace?

Well, I’ll tell you. I’m the guy that will spit in your drink and then in your food. I’ll sneeze on your silverware and blow my nose on your napkin. And then I’ll give you decaf coffee with your lunch instead of regular when you have to make that four hour drive and you need to be awake and alert. Then when you drive your car off the highway and it flips, turning into a flaming, cartwheeling ball of wreckage and destruction, the intense heat fusing your body with your steering wheel, you’ll have only yourself and your shitty manners to thank.

Here we go.

“If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.” – George Carlin