A small tool to view real-world ActivityPub objects as JSON! Enter a URL
or username from Mastodon or a similar service below, and we'll send a
request with
the right
Accept
header
to the server to view the underlying object.
{
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"content": "<a href=\"https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/elon-musk-spacex-aim-to-launch-sn15-mars-rocket-prototype-tuesday/ar-BB1fJlNK\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/elon-musk-spacex-aim-to-launch-sn15-mars-rocket-prototype-tuesday/ar-BB1fJlNK</a><br /><br />Something to look forward to tomorrow, Tuesday 5/4/2021.",
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"published": "2021-05-04T01:00:03+00:00",
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"content": "https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/elon-musk-spacex-aim-to-launch-sn15-mars-rocket-prototype-tuesday/ar-BB1fJlNK\n\nSomething to look forward to tomorrow, Tuesday 5/4/2021.",
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"content": "Two pioneering web services of the internet age, Yahoo and AOL, have been sold again after the latest owner failed to revive their fortunes.<br />US telecoms giant Verizon is selling its media assets, which include the two companies, to a US private equity firm in a deal worth $5bn (£3.6bn).<br />Verizon bought Yahoo in 2017 and AOL in 2015 for a combined $9bn.<br />Yahoo and AOL were once trailblazers, but were subsequently overshadowed by firms like Google and Facebook.<br /><br />Under the sale of the media assets to Apollo Global Management, Verizon will retain a 10% stake in the division.<br />Verizon bought the two brands in the hope of a quick entry into the digital advertising market, believing they still had enough resonance with consumers.<br /><br />Yahoo and AOL were pioneers in offering a wide range of free and informative web services to consumers, long before Google came into existence.<br /><br />By providing free web mail and chat messenger services, the two firms had a cornerstone for online advertising on the market, as most internet users in the early 2000s were accessing their websites and software on a daily basis.<br />Yahoo also provided everything from the news, weather reports, sports results and movie release dates; to message boards, its own version of eBay - Yahoo! Auctions - and real-time markets data.<br /><br />But over the last decade, Yahoo and AOL have faced an uphill struggle against more powerful rivals like Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, ESPN, Fandango and Weather.com, due to a saturated internet market.<br />Verizon also made a mistake in failing to acquire Yahoo's equity stake in Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, as well as Yahoo Japan, where Yahoo! Auctions is still thriving.<br /><br />'Tremendous potential'<br />Apollo says there is still a considerable opportunity to build the two brands into a digital media and online advertising powerhouse.<br /><br />\"We are thrilled to help unlock the tremendous potential of Yahoo and its unparalleled collection of brands,\" said Reed Rayman, private equity partner at Apollo.<br />\"We have enormous respect and admiration for the great work and progress that the entire organisation has made over the last several years.\"<br />David Sambur, co-chief of Apollo, added: \"We are big believers in the growth prospects of Yahoo and the macro tailwinds driving growth in digital media, advertising technology and consumer internet platforms.\"<br />Verizon bought Yahoo to combine its search, email and messenger assets, as well as its advertising technology tools, with the AOL platform.<br />But the sale was overshadowed almost immediately after it was disclosed Yahoo had been subject to two massive cyber-attacks. Verizon eventually negotiated a $350m price cut for the acquisition.<br />However, today Yahoo's homepage still commands a huge audience, as \"netizens\" check their Yahoo! Mail accounts.<br /><br />The brand is considered to be one of the top news aggregators on the internet, and is the eleventh most visited website in the world, with 3.8 billion visits over the last six months, according to web analytics platform SimilarWeb.<br />The sale by Verizon comes after it disposed of blogging platform Tumblr in 2019 and news website HuffPost last year.<br /><br />",
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"published": "2021-05-03T17:50:44+00:00",
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"content": "Two pioneering web services of the internet age, Yahoo and AOL, have been sold again after the latest owner failed to revive their fortunes.\nUS telecoms giant Verizon is selling its media assets, which include the two companies, to a US private equity firm in a deal worth $5bn (£3.6bn).\nVerizon bought Yahoo in 2017 and AOL in 2015 for a combined $9bn.\nYahoo and AOL were once trailblazers, but were subsequently overshadowed by firms like Google and Facebook.\n\nUnder the sale of the media assets to Apollo Global Management, Verizon will retain a 10% stake in the division.\nVerizon bought the two brands in the hope of a quick entry into the digital advertising market, believing they still had enough resonance with consumers.\n\nYahoo and AOL were pioneers in offering a wide range of free and informative web services to consumers, long before Google came into existence.\n\nBy providing free web mail and chat messenger services, the two firms had a cornerstone for online advertising on the market, as most internet users in the early 2000s were accessing their websites and software on a daily basis.\nYahoo also provided everything from the news, weather reports, sports results and movie release dates; to message boards, its own version of eBay - Yahoo! Auctions - and real-time markets data.\n\nBut over the last decade, Yahoo and AOL have faced an uphill struggle against more powerful rivals like Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, ESPN, Fandango and Weather.com, due to a saturated internet market.\nVerizon also made a mistake in failing to acquire Yahoo's equity stake in Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, as well as Yahoo Japan, where Yahoo! Auctions is still thriving.\n\n'Tremendous potential'\nApollo says there is still a considerable opportunity to build the two brands into a digital media and online advertising powerhouse.\n\n\"We are thrilled to help unlock the tremendous potential of Yahoo and its unparalleled collection of brands,\" said Reed Rayman, private equity partner at Apollo.\n\"We have enormous respect and admiration for the great work and progress that the entire organisation has made over the last several years.\"\nDavid Sambur, co-chief of Apollo, added: \"We are big believers in the growth prospects of Yahoo and the macro tailwinds driving growth in digital media, advertising technology and consumer internet platforms.\"\nVerizon bought Yahoo to combine its search, email and messenger assets, as well as its advertising technology tools, with the AOL platform.\nBut the sale was overshadowed almost immediately after it was disclosed Yahoo had been subject to two massive cyber-attacks. Verizon eventually negotiated a $350m price cut for the acquisition.\nHowever, today Yahoo's homepage still commands a huge audience, as \"netizens\" check their Yahoo! Mail accounts.\n\nThe brand is considered to be one of the top news aggregators on the internet, and is the eleventh most visited website in the world, with 3.8 billion visits over the last six months, according to web analytics platform SimilarWeb.\nThe sale by Verizon comes after it disposed of blogging platform Tumblr in 2019 and news website HuffPost last year.\n\n",
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"content": "EPL: Man United, Liverpool clash postponed after fans invaded pitch <br /><br />Manchester United’s clash against Liverpool was postponed after furious fans stormed Old Trafford in protest at the club’s owners on Sunday, while Arsenal kept Newcastle waiting to confirm their Premier League safety with a 2-0 win at St James Park.<br />Manchester City would have been crowned English champions for the third time in four seasons if second placed United had lost to Liverpool.<br />But Pep Guardiola’s side saw their hopes of a title party put on hold after ugly scenes several hours before kick-off at Old Trafford.<br />The Glazer family, already disliked by many United supporters, were widely criticised for their leading role in the failed breakaway European Super League.<br />That prompted United fans to call for a demonstration before the Liverpool game and an angry mob of 200 protesters pushed down security barriers outside Old Trafford before running onto the pitch.<br />Fans waved anti-Glazer banners and set off green and yellow flares — the colours of United’s Newton Heath founders.<br />One protester was filmed picking up a camera tripod from a pitchside media position and hurling it onto the pitch. <br /><br />Others tried to get down the tunnel, while another took a corner flag and some swung from the crossbar of one of the goals.<br />A flare was fired towards a television commentary gantry and small sections of the turf were damaged.<br />There were also clashes as fans tried to break police lines outside, with officers drawing batons to keep the crowds back and bottles and other projectiles thrown. <br />A line of riot police, backed by horses, eventually pushed the crowds away from the stadium.<br />Both United and Liverpool’s players were in their team hotels when the breach occurred.<br />Some fans also blockaded the entrance to the Lowry Hotel where the United players and staff were staying.<br />The scheduled 1530 GMT kick-off was delayed while Premier League chiefs discussed the situation, with United eventually announcing the postponement at 1640 GMT.<br /><br />“Following discussion between the Police, the Premier League, Trafford Council and the clubs, our match against Liverpool has been postponed due to safety and security considerations around the protest today,” United said in a statement.<br />“Discussions will now take place with the Premier League on a revised date for the fixture.”<br />Pressure is mounting on the United States-based Glazer family, who bought the club in 2005.<br /><br />The angry scenes at Old Trafford came after a smaller group of United fans broke into the club’s training ground last week to protest against the Glazers.<br />– ‘No place in football’ -“Our fans are passionate about Manchester United, and we completely acknowledge the right to free expression and peaceful protest,” United’s statement added.<br />“However, we regret the disruption to the team and actions which put other fans, staff, and the police in danger.”<br />A Premier League statement added: “We understand and respect the strength of feeling but condemn all acts of violence, criminal damage and trespass, especially given the associated Covid-19 breaches.<br /><br />“Fans have many channels by which to make their views known, but the actions of a minority seen today have no justification.<br />“We sympathise with the police and stewards who had to deal with a dangerous situation that should have no place in football.”<br />Arsenal won for the first time in four games in all competitions thanks to Mohamed Elneny’s first Premier League goal and a superb strike from Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.<br />Fourth bottom Newcastle remain nine points clear of the relegation zone with four games left.<br />Thursday’s Europa League semi-final second leg against Villarreal has already been billed by Gunners boss Mikel Arteta as the “crucial moment” in Arsenal’s season.<br />Arsenal will try to overturn a 2-1 first leg deficit and they enjoyed the ideal preparation on Tyneside.<br />In the sixth minute, Hector Bellerin ran onto David Luiz’s long pass and cut his cross back to Aubameyang.<br /><br />Aubameyang miscued his attempted shot but the ball ran to Egypt midfielder Elneny and he smashed a fine strike past Martin Dubravka from the edge of the area.<br />Aubameyang killed off Newcastle in the 66th minute with his first goal in seven games.<br />The Gabon forward met Gabriel Martinelli’s cross with a superb flying volley from six yards.<br />Newcastle had Fabian Schar sent off in the 90th minute for a late challenge on Martinelli.<br />Tottenham host Sheffield United in the day’s late game.<br />AFP<br />",
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"published": "2021-05-02T18:30:55+00:00",
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"content": "EPL: Man United, Liverpool clash postponed after fans invaded pitch \n\nManchester United’s clash against Liverpool was postponed after furious fans stormed Old Trafford in protest at the club’s owners on Sunday, while Arsenal kept Newcastle waiting to confirm their Premier League safety with a 2-0 win at St James Park.\nManchester City would have been crowned English champions for the third time in four seasons if second placed United had lost to Liverpool.\nBut Pep Guardiola’s side saw their hopes of a title party put on hold after ugly scenes several hours before kick-off at Old Trafford.\nThe Glazer family, already disliked by many United supporters, were widely criticised for their leading role in the failed breakaway European Super League.\nThat prompted United fans to call for a demonstration before the Liverpool game and an angry mob of 200 protesters pushed down security barriers outside Old Trafford before running onto the pitch.\nFans waved anti-Glazer banners and set off green and yellow flares — the colours of United’s Newton Heath founders.\nOne protester was filmed picking up a camera tripod from a pitchside media position and hurling it onto the pitch. \n\nOthers tried to get down the tunnel, while another took a corner flag and some swung from the crossbar of one of the goals.\nA flare was fired towards a television commentary gantry and small sections of the turf were damaged.\nThere were also clashes as fans tried to break police lines outside, with officers drawing batons to keep the crowds back and bottles and other projectiles thrown. \nA line of riot police, backed by horses, eventually pushed the crowds away from the stadium.\nBoth United and Liverpool’s players were in their team hotels when the breach occurred.\nSome fans also blockaded the entrance to the Lowry Hotel where the United players and staff were staying.\nThe scheduled 1530 GMT kick-off was delayed while Premier League chiefs discussed the situation, with United eventually announcing the postponement at 1640 GMT.\n\n“Following discussion between the Police, the Premier League, Trafford Council and the clubs, our match against Liverpool has been postponed due to safety and security considerations around the protest today,” United said in a statement.\n“Discussions will now take place with the Premier League on a revised date for the fixture.”\nPressure is mounting on the United States-based Glazer family, who bought the club in 2005.\n\nThe angry scenes at Old Trafford came after a smaller group of United fans broke into the club’s training ground last week to protest against the Glazers.\n– ‘No place in football’ -“Our fans are passionate about Manchester United, and we completely acknowledge the right to free expression and peaceful protest,” United’s statement added.\n“However, we regret the disruption to the team and actions which put other fans, staff, and the police in danger.”\nA Premier League statement added: “We understand and respect the strength of feeling but condemn all acts of violence, criminal damage and trespass, especially given the associated Covid-19 breaches.\n\n“Fans have many channels by which to make their views known, but the actions of a minority seen today have no justification.\n“We sympathise with the police and stewards who had to deal with a dangerous situation that should have no place in football.”\nArsenal won for the first time in four games in all competitions thanks to Mohamed Elneny’s first Premier League goal and a superb strike from Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.\nFourth bottom Newcastle remain nine points clear of the relegation zone with four games left.\nThursday’s Europa League semi-final second leg against Villarreal has already been billed by Gunners boss Mikel Arteta as the “crucial moment” in Arsenal’s season.\nArsenal will try to overturn a 2-1 first leg deficit and they enjoyed the ideal preparation on Tyneside.\nIn the sixth minute, Hector Bellerin ran onto David Luiz’s long pass and cut his cross back to Aubameyang.\n\nAubameyang miscued his attempted shot but the ball ran to Egypt midfielder Elneny and he smashed a fine strike past Martin Dubravka from the edge of the area.\nAubameyang killed off Newcastle in the 66th minute with his first goal in seven games.\nThe Gabon forward met Gabriel Martinelli’s cross with a superb flying volley from six yards.\nNewcastle had Fabian Schar sent off in the 90th minute for a late challenge on Martinelli.\nTottenham host Sheffield United in the day’s late game.\nAFP\n",
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"content": "If e go cost my peace then I go take my leave if e no be money do not disturb me please!! It is what it is!! <a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=Adekunlegold\" title=\"#Adekunlegold\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#Adekunlegold</a>",
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"published": "2021-05-01T17:20:54+00:00",
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"content": "If e go cost my peace then I go take my leave if e no be money do not disturb me please!! It is what it is!! #Adekunlegold",
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"content": "<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />This book is dedicated to the white man; whose holding down of me for so many years was my only motivation for writing it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Prologue<br /><br />Most Americans are so brainwashed by the nonsensical, misleading double speak that our government starts shoveling down their throats as kids that, by the time they reach adulthood, they feel an ignorant responsibility to scold others for doing things that they were raised to believe are shameful and morally inferior. <br /><br />The problem with that kind of mentality is that it often backfires and, in actuality, makes those same people look like uneducated sheep, who’ve forgotten how to think for themselves, as citizens of one of the very few countries in this world where thinking for themselves is a right they’re born into.<br /><br />I was barely nineteen when I started getting nagged and ridiculed by people who believe that seeking professional help, and medications, prescribed by a doctor, are the more noble and responsible ways of coping with my emotional problems than popping pills, smoking pot and drinking myself stupid all the time were - because using drugs and alcohol to dull my pain was, in their words, “just a temporary and self destructive solution”.<br /><br />For the record, I quit drinking, using street drugs and (illegally) popping pills, cold turkey, during the summer of 2010; but it wasn’t because I wanted to. <br /><br />I was forced to cease my run as a participant in the non-stop barrage of Irish carnivals I’d become so accustomed to attending over the years because my body and mind were making it clear to me that they could no longer handle the damages and stresses that my Keith Moon like lifestyle was causing them. <br /><br />Prior to that, I’d spent the previous decade burning the candle at both ends; strictly as an alternative to putting a gun in my mouth. <br /><br />I did that partly because I’d deluded myself into thinking that my tireless consumptions of giggle grass and lunatic juice would eventually be the cure for what was ailing me upstairs, but largely because I resented the snide labels and insinuations that the general public hurl in your direction after you seek the very same professional help that they originally ridiculed you for not seeking in the first place.<br /><br />The problem with partying like Charlie Sheen all the time, amongst other things, is that if you don’t catch on to what you’re doing within a reasonable period of time, you’ll eventually become a monster you can no longer control and probably find yourself dropping dead outside of a bar owned by Johnny Depp before you’re even old enough to rent a car.<br /><br />If you’re one of the lucky ones, from what I’ve been told, you eventually wise up to reality, stop downing tiger blood every day, clean yourself up, find Jesus if you have to, and completely change the way you choose to deal with the demons in your life.<br /><br />Hell, I thought about checking myself into rehab and attending AA meetings for years, but my pride and self-respect never allowed for it. <br /><br />That isn’t to say that I feel as if I’m above anyone else who struggles with drug and alcohol dependencies, and you’ll never hear those words come out of my mouth. <br /><br />The only reason I still have people in my life who care about me is because I finally reached the point where I had to accept the fact that I was going to permanently alienate all of them if I didn’t stop trying to Jim Jones my sorrows away.<br /><br />There were only so many hundreds of times that people were going to willingly look the other way while I intentionally drank abusively and pissed on their computer equipment, or cursed out their fathers, or hit on their girlfriends, or lost control of my legs and broke their toilet seats with my head, or walked around their apartments naked in a blacked out stupor, or puked all my innards out onto their living room floors, or woke them up at all hours of the night to engage in drunken wars of thumb.<br /><br />How many times can you wake up half and halfed on your neighbors’ front lawn at the crack of dawn , or lament to your best friends, for hours and hours in a row, about how badly you want to shoot yourself in your head, or try to drown yourself in a lake, or show up to work hammered and tell your managers to go fuck themselves before you have no other choice but to put the bottle down and consider driving down the road less traveled?<br /><br />I remember being so despondent, on Cinco de Mayo 2010, that I locked myself in my bedroom, in an apartment I was sharing with my three best friends’; Dennis Gesel, Tim Piskorz and Dennis Viterna, and tried to end it all by chasing Tylenol PM and OxyContin pills with a quart of Smirnoff vodka that tasted like nothing but watermelon. <br /><br />Instead of dying though, I blacked out drunk and (allegedly) paraded around our apartment balls naked and screamed the Canadian national anthem into a beer funnel after I cracked an empty wine bottle over my head and danced on our dining room table like Carlton Banks.<br /> <br />I was told that, from there, I broke my nose playing air guitar, shattered our bathroom mirror with my fist because I thought it was Richard Simmons trying to pick a fight with me, fell down a triple flight of stairs and then ran outside in a botched attempt to initiate a game of naked chicken in the middle of a chronically busy four way intersection. <br /><br />I probably would have died that night had it not been for those three grown men tackling me to the ground and carrying me back into our apartment, kicking and screaming, and then ganking my “party supplies” before locking me in my room for the rest of the night, from the outside of my door, with a steel folding chair. <br /><br />I most certainly would have been arrested that night if Gesel hadn’t fabricated a story for the cops about a beloved member of my family dying earlier in the day.<br /><br />Suffice to say, that rousing night of tomfoolery wound up being the last of a lot of straws for me. <br /><br />After ten years of making a man out of my liver, and punishing my brain for turning it’s back on me, I sobered up for six months and pursued what most people had been telling me, ad nauseam, was the responsible channel for dealing with my problems.<br /><br />I balled up a figurative roll of toilet paper, then wiped my figurative ass crack with<br />what was left of my figurative pride and self-respect and entered therapy in November 2010. <br /><br />I don’t know how it makes a woman feel when she has to walk into a mental health clinic and beg for help, but it was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life.<br /> <br />For as proud and self assured as I was about one day being able to crush my crazy into powder on my own, the realization that it was something I would never be able to do on my own was more embarrassing and demoralizing than the time a nun walk into a one stall church bathroom and caught me masturbating with a Fleshlight. <br /><br />As I stood in front of that clinic for the first time, doubtful that I would actually enter it, the angel on my right shoulder told me to swallow my pride for once and get my ass in there, while the devil on my left shoulder said: <br /><br /> “You’ve had twenty three years to find solutions to your problems and you failed every time you tried one. Why waste your time with this psycho babble bullshit when you can just go home and kill yourself?”<br /><br />Five minutes of back and forth passed before I allowed the angel to win a three way debate we shouldn’t have needed to have. <br /><br />Had I allowed the devil to win this one, I would have definitely been dead before I turned thirty.<br /><br />After two excruciating, forty five minute therapy sessions, I was told I’d been suffering from my depression and anxiety and disturbing thoughts and night terrors and rampant fantasies of suicide for the last twenty-three-years because my brain was plagued by an untreated mental health disorder playfully known in the mental health community as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.<br /><br />I was told that my P.T.S.D., which is what causes most of my crippling depression and anxiety problems, was most likely triggered by the “what the fuck is going on here?” experience of watching my year and a half old brother get murdered by a deranged meth addict who didn’t particularly fancy children. <br /><br />Upon receiving those diagnoses, it was suggested to me that I spend the majority of every day of the rest of my life popping various combinations of legally prescribed pills in an attempt to keep my demons at bay. <br /><br />It took nearly two years of trial, error and near death experiences to get me onto the right <br />cycle of medications. <br /><br />Unfortunately, the “right cycle” doesn’t always translate into the outcome you’re hoping for.<br /><br />Some of the pills worked. Some of them didn’t. <br /><br />Some of them improved my moods. Some of them made my moods worse than they were before I started taking them. <br /><br />Some of them made me a healthier person physically and some of them did the exact opposite.<br /><br />I swallow four different anti-depression and anti-anxiety pills every day, and I still suffer from the same feelings of hopelessness, apathy, rage, anxiety, depression and nihilistically driven mood swings that I suffered from when I was still drinking. <br /><br />I often wonder what the point of making prescription sleeping pills as dangerously powerful as they are is if they do nothing to wipe out night terrors. <br /><br />I also still continue to suffer from the same types of disturbing thoughts and contemplations that constantly used to rocket through my brain when I was an out of control lush. <br /><br />I vividly remember a period of seven hours, during some random day in 2011, when I couldn’t stop grinding my teeth and wondering how it would feel to blow my girlfriends’ head off while she was performing fellatio on me. <br /> <br />I hate taking these goddamn pills every day! <br /><br />The pills I take when I wake up in the morning make me feel frustratingly lethargic and half brain dead all day. <br /><br />There are times when I’m so yakked out on pharmaceutically manufactured complacency that I have a hard time finding my cell phone when I’m holding it. <br /><br />I constantly lose my car keys in my pants pockets. <br /><br />I have a hard time remembering how to use a washing machine I’ve owned for five years. <br /><br />I can tell you exactly what I was doing on New Years Eve 1997, but, thanks to these pills, I often can’t seem to ever remember why I open my fridge; in spite of the fact that my stomach is growling. <br /><br />The only reason why I know what day of the week it is anymore is because my pill divider is labeled and I’ve literally lost count of the number of times I’ve almost been killed by a motor vehicle because I forgot I was standing off a street curb and waiting until it was safe <br />to cross.<br /><br />The tranquilizers I have to take just to fall asleep at night aren’t much safer. <br /><br />The goddamn things are so strong that, although they do knock me out cold within twenty minutes, they also frequently paralyze my respiratory system while I’m sleeping. <br /><br />I constantly wake up an hour or two after falling asleep, clutching my chest like Redd Foxx, because my Seroquel pills cut my air supply off just enough to make me feel like I’m going to choke to death in my bed. <br /><br />I don’t know if this happens because I suffer from undiagnosed sleep apnea that the Seroquel makes worse of if Seroquel is just poison; or both.<br /><br />It takes ten minutes of concentrated breathing before I feel comfortable lying down again after my attack is over and another half hour or so before I feel comfortable enough to try falling asleep again.<br /><br />I almost died in a hospital emergency room after one of my Seroquel pill episodes <br />because the lazy, indifferent staff who work there either couldn’t understand why I was having breathing problems, thought I was faking them or just didn’t really give a shit. <br /><br />I have to work out constantly just to keep the ridiculous amount of fat that prescription drugs pack onto my body off of me so that I don’t involuntarily enter into the realm of morbid obesity and suffer a fatal heart attack. <br /><br />If that’s not bad enough, I also have this quirky habit of waking up at exactly 2:30 every morning screaming at the top of my lungs like someone just dropped a 10lb bowling ball on my exposed toes. <br /><br />That’s just the product of the (multiple times a night) terrors that my sleeping medication is supposed to help suppress. <br /><br />I wake up screaming so often that I’ve already undergone four major throat surgeries to repair torn vocal chords.<br /><br />I don’t even realize these screaming episodes are happening until I snap out of the mania, saturated in sweat, and sorrowfully come to terms with the fact that the pillow I was hatefully strangling the life out of wasn’t actually Tyler Perry’s neck. <br /><br />I hate that motherfucker, with a violent, burning passion; but I digress.<br /><br />As stated previously, I hate taking these pills.<br />They just barely serve their purpose and, sometimes, they don’t even do that. <br /><br />In my case, the purpose of these drugs isn’t to cure the severe depression and anxiety that makes me want to blow my brains out all the time. <br /><br />The pills I choke down every day are designed specifically to both bleed me dry financially for the rest of my life and slowly prolong the inevitable. <br /><br />I’m also certain that my daily consumptions of these pills is taking years off of my life by attacking the functioning ability of my internal organs. <br /><br />It’s a crapshoot no matter how I look at it though, because I know I’m playing Russian roulette with my health every time I swallow these fucking pills. <br /><br />Yet, sadly, I also know that if I stop taking them, it will only be a matter of days before my depression becomes so overwhelming that it will drive me to walk into my living room dressed like Groucho Marx and blow my brains out with a shotgun in front of my family.<br /><br />So I guess my question for all you members of the holier than thou club, as it pertains to the proper way of coping with your problems, is this: <br /><br />When you abandon the immoral and illegal coping mechanisms that you subscribed to, as necessary, because they were destroying your body and mind, just to turn around and adapt to the moral and legal ones that you have to entertain every day of your life until the day you die, in spite of the fact that those coping mechanisms are also destroying your body and mind, what makes the legal avenues any more healthy and responsible than the illegal ones?<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />CONTENTS<br /><br /><br />Chapter 1: Home, Sweet, Home<br />Chapter 2: “Sorry, I Already Wrote the Ticket”<br />Chapter 3: A Nightmare on Seneca Street<br />Chapter 4: ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’<br />Chapter 5: Dancing Away My Hunger Pains<br />Chapter 6: God is a Fucking Asshole<br />Chapter 7: ‘Mommie Dearest’<br />Chapter 8: Who’s Your Daddy?<br />Chapter 9: Powdered Milk & Welfare Cheese<br />Chapter 10: There’s No Place Like Hell <br />Chapter 11: How the Mighty Have Fallen<br />Chapter 12: Fat Chicks Need Love, Too?<br />Chapter 13: No Time for Tears <br />Chapter 14: The Summer of Death<br />Chapter 15: Shake Your Groove Thing<br />Chapter 16: When I Bite Into a York Peppermint Pattie<br />Chapter 17: Better Off Dead<br />Chapter 18: “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da; Life Goes On” <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Home, Sweet, Home<br /><br />Buffalo, New York is affectionately known as the City of Good Neighbors to people who can stomach the putrid taste of bullshit. <br /><br />That classification is a misnomer at best. <br /><br />The truth of the matter is that Buffalo, New York is nothing more than a festering cesspool of broken promises, abandoned businesses, lost Super Bowls and embittered hockey fans who can’t take pride in anything beyond the creation of a style of chicken wing spiced hotly enough to burn our tongues off.<br /><br />I was born into this hell hole on August 12, 1981; to Peter C. Taboni III and Dawn L. McLaughlin. <br /><br />My father was so ecstatic when my mother told him she was pregnant with me that he celebrated the news by trying to punch her in her face for “trapping him”.<br /><br />She reacted quickly enough to dodge his punch and he wound up breaking his hand on a brick wall. <br /><br />This wouldn’t be the last time that my old man would severely injure one of his hands in the name of trying to punch my mother into unconsciousness, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself here.<br /><br />Living in Buffalo blows just as hard as living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania probably does. <br /><br />The only legitimate difference between the two cities that I can think of is that I can’t remember watching anyone in Buffalo ever spitefully throw snowballs at Santa Claus.<br /><br />Buffalonians misleadingly pride themselves on coming together as one when times get tough. <br /><br />That fallacy, including dozens of others that have come to improperly define this dumpster fire we call a city, makes me the sickest. <br /><br />Buffalonians don’t give a fuck about anyone except ourselves. <br /><br />Most of us have lived in this shithole for so long that it’s forced us to adapt to a cruel mentality of personal selfishness and societal indifference for the sake of our individual survival. <br /><br />We come to each others’ rescue every once in awhile, but that only really happens after a crippling snowstorm demolishes our city, or after a commercial airliner randomly falls out of the sky and kills 50 people, or when our food banks need turkeys on Thanksgiving, or during the football and hockey seasons; when we gather en masse to watch both of our <br />major professional sports teams fail with such consistency that “There’s Always Next <br />Year” has become the half hearted slogan we’ve begrudgingly adopted just to keep ourselves from giving up on them entirely.<br /><br />Beyond that, we all pretty much hate each other, and ourselves. <br /><br />Most of us are always broke; no matter how many jobs we work, depressingly out of shape, miserable about the weather; regardless of the season, hooked on drugs and alcohol, defeated by our abysmal job market, products of broken marriages, and extremely bitter about the fact that every aspect of our local government is untouchably corrupt.<br /><br />There’s certainly no shortage of fat, unethical scumbags who put suits on in this city every morning and call themselves politicians either. <br /><br />I’m not going to beat that dead horse, though, because that problem seems to be a universal one. <br /><br />New York States continuously dumps impossibly high taxes into our laps every year, too. <br /><br />The official reasoning for this bullshit is that it’s the only way Albany can pull our state budget out of the red, but all it really does is dig Buffalonians into deeper financial holes than the ones they were already trying to climb out of; in spite of the fact that employment opportunities, of any kind, are so scarce here that we regularly stab each other in the backs to seize one of the very few that come along during a given year.<br /><br />Most Buffalonians are so weary of getting fucked by the great state of New York that it makes our assholes sore. <br /><br />At some point you have to wonder what sense it makes to tax a city, of less than 300,000 people, into oblivion every year, in the name of balancing the state budget, while simultaneously cutting desperately needed education, healthcare and public assistance funds, just so the Big Apple can pump billions of dollars into constructing brand new stadiums for the New York Yankees, Giants and Jets, that they didn’t need in the first place. <br /><br />Our lakes, ponds and creeks are too polluted to swim in. <br /><br />Our annual murder rate is abhorrent. <br /><br />Our park system is lackluster at best and, if you travel far enough into downtown Buffalo, you can gaze in awe at a collection of gigantic, awkwardly positioned windmills that most likely serve no purpose.<br /><br />Buffalo does have Niagara Falls to prostitute out to tourists. <br /><br />What we conveniently neglect to mention in our tourism brochures, however, is that the <br />only side of Niagara Falls worth visiting is in Canada; and you can’t even go there without a passport now.<br /><br />There really is no point to making the exhausting pilgrimage to the American side of <br />Niagara Falls unless you enjoy giving your hopes up for no reason or you’re just one of those crazy assholes in search of a breathtaking place to commit suicide. <br /><br />A disheartening portion of our brethren leave this city immediately after they turn eighteen, or immediately after they graduate from college, because a once proud and profitable city is now a ghost town, with no future, that people only continue to live in because they’ve either had the same job for thirty nine years, can’t afford to leave, or just can’t handle the reality of living thousands of miles away from the people they care about.<br /><br />There’s a scene in the classic movie, Office Space, where disgruntled computer programmer extraordinaire Peter Gibbins conveys to his therapist, in an almost futile tone, that every day of his life is always worse than the day that preceded it. <br /><br />There have been millions of Buffalonians, over the last couple of decades, who have been cursed with the misfortune of being able to relate to that sentiment. <br /><br />This is the (very disturbing) story of one of them.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />”Sorry, I Already Wrote the Ticket”<br /><br />Meter maids are the lowest forms of human scum in the entire United States; having narrowly surpassed child molesters for the title when the first parking meters were installed in New York City in 1960. <br /><br />I hate meter maids so much that I would happily waste a million dollars trying to get Ted Kaczynski released from prison before I would donate one dollar to help cover the cost of chemotherapy treatments desperately needed by a meter maid suffering from a treatable form of cancer.<br /><br />Meter maids are worthless, indifferent, infuriating wastes of life who only do what they do for a living so they can spend forty hours a week making everyone else’s lives as miserable and frustrating as theirs are. <br /><br />If I had the power to do it, I would force a law through Congress that would allow American citizens to murder meter maids, whenever they felt like it, without consequence.<br /><br />Let’s see how amusing you quarter whores think it is to stand next to a parking meter, frothing at the mouth, just so you can write me a parking ticket the second my meter expires if I’m ever granted the right to shoot your brains out for doing it. <br /><br />“I’m sorry, sir. I WOULD take that bullet back, but I already used it to kill you!”<br /><br />I hate child molesters with a passion. <br /><br />One of my lifelong dreams is to murder one and, if I had the power to do it, I would force a law through Congress that would allow American citizens to murder convicted child molesters, whenever they felt like it, without consequence.<br /><br />If the politicians and law enforcement officials that run this country had any juevos, they’d figure out a way to legalize the murder of a convicted child molester as soon as the jury finished reading its verdict.<br /><br />I don’t think anyone in this country would lose sleep at night if courtroom security guards suddenly had the authority to take a freshly convicted child molester to the front steps of a courthouse and shoot him, or her, to death in front of the media. <br /><br />I would wake up with a smile on my face every morning if I got paid to slowly castrate child molesters with a steak knife in front of their victims’ families every day.<br /> <br />I just hate meter maids more than chomo’s because meter maids have the legal right to make a career out of consciously stealing money from people with zero apprehension or remorse; and there isn’t a goddamn thing that the rest us can do about it. <br /><br />At least child molesters can get thrown in prison and murdered by other inmates for the <br />A Nightmare on Seneca Street<br /><br />Having said that, if you ask the average person what their first memories of life are, they’ll probably speak fondly of their first toys, or a vacation they took with their family, or a sleepover they went to, or cartoons they enjoyed watching, or even a birthday party at an amusement park that they were invited to.<br /><br />Makes sense, right? <br /><br />Growing up is supposed to be, for all intents and purposes, an exciting time filled with positive, fresh experiences and blissful moments that help mold you into a productive member of society while lavishing you with heartwarming memories to reflect upon as an adult.<br /><br />I know I’ve never heard a well adjusted adult ever say something like: <br /><br />“When I was two, my dangerously insane father locked me in a dog cage for a week and dumped buckets of ice water on me, and poked me with a live cattle prod, while he gnawed on raw steaks and clucked like a chicken the entire time”. <br /><br />This isn’t a perfect world though and, as such, not everyone is entitled to a childhood that plays out as famously as others. <br /><br />It’s just one of the many sad realities of life that people will bitterly mock you for complaining about.<br /><br />After my mom’s very brief marriage to my dad hit the skids, at the beginning of the 1980’s, my father, being the responsible, passionate parent he was, disappeared from the picture completely. <br /><br />My mother then, being the responsible, passionate parent she was, forced me and my two brothers, Michael and Steven, to live in an apartment, at 914 Seneca Street, with her scumbag, meth addict boyfriend du jour, Leroy Colts. <br /><br />Consequently, my first memories of life involve my brothers and I getting the shit beat out of us daily by Leroy. <br /><br />My mother not only never tried to stop him from beating us but also, at times, actively participated in and encouraged the behavior.<br /><br />The first time I was molested, that I can remember, was when Leroy forced me into a bedroom in that apartment, under the guise of changing my diaper, and started doing things to me with his tongue that a man in his late teens isn’t legally free to do to a two and a half year old boy in this country.<br /><br />I don’t think my mother ever thought Leroy was capable of doing something that <br />disgusting to a child, but when you date a guy named Leroy, shouldn’t your instincts tell <br />you that he’s probably a child molester? <br /><br />When I started screaming, mostly likely in horror, my mother asked Leroy what the fuck was going on. <br /><br />He told her to close the fucking door and go back into the living room. <br /><br />Once the door was locked, Leroy grabbed a metal spoon and smiled at me like Ted Bundy. <br /><br />What he did to me from there makes me too nauseous to dictate on paper, so I’ll leave it to<br />your imagination to piece together how that potential Law & Order scene ended.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’<br /><br />My next Norman Rockwell style memory revolves around a tragedy so mind boggling and unnecessary that it all but guaranteed I would live the rest of my days as an emotionally distant, socially awkward misanthrope who’d forever struggle with trust issues galore and frighteningly unhealthy anger problems. <br /><br />My 18-month-old brother, Steven, was badly beaten by Leroy on a March 3, 1984, and then held to the bottom of a bathtub full of water until air pockets from his lungs stopped bubbling to the surface. <br /><br />Leroy initially tried to convince police that Steven had drowned accidentally by falling into the tub, but that theory got shot to shit rapidly when Stevens’ coroner noticed manual strangulation marks on his neck.<br /><br />Leroy’s decision to get jacked up on methamphetamines that night and redefine what it meant to be a babysitter, by chasing me into a closet so he could slowly and maliciously murder my brother, destroyed both my family and, by coincidence, any chance I’d have of ever again knowing the joys of sanity.<br /><br />As the story goes, my mother had gone to her mothers’ house to wash laundry that night and, since my grandmother didn’t feel like dealing with kids that evening, my mother decided, in her infinite wisdom, to leave two infant babies, and an almost three-year-old child, in the care of a nineteen-year-old, strung out meth addict who decided that killing a baby was less stressful than caring for it. <br /><br />Mike and I were next up on the chopping block that night. <br /><br />There’s zero doubt in my mind that we’d both be dead today had it not been for the cops who busted into our mini house of horrors just in time to save our lives. <br /><br />Sometimes I wish they hadn’t saved me because I’ve selfishly wasted far too much time over the last twenty years wondering why Steven died that night and we didn’t.<br /><br />Why wasn’t it me who died in a bathtub that night? <br /><br />Did fate decide that day that my life was more valuable than Steven’s? <br /><br />Why would a supposedly loving god, that I’m supposed to worship unconditionally, allow something this horrible to happen to three innocent children?<br /><br />Where was our father when all of this was happening? <br /><br />Should I just blow my brains out with a shotgun, or hang myself from a ceiling with barbed wire, or take a bubble bath with a toaster so I don’t have to think about this crazy shit anymore?<br />Would doing any of these things even ease any of my pain? <br /><br />What if I kill myself and wind up having to shamefully explain to Steven why two lives had to end so senselessly should our paths cross in the afterlife? <br /><br />What if I kill myself and reunite with Steven and don’t have to explain anything to him because he’s still eighteen-months old there? What if there is no afterlife to take into consideration? <br /><br />If there’s no afterlife, would there even be a point to killing myself in the first place?<br /><br />Tormenting queries like these tear me apart on the inside routinely. <br /><br />I’ve been told that a theory known as Survivor’s Guilt is what drives this never ending battle to understand something that I’ll never realistically be able to come to terms with. <br /><br />I’d have spilled buckets of tears over this situation by now if I weren’t so bitter about it.<br /><br />I casually day dream about how delightful it would be for me if I could hunt Leroy down, handcuff him to a chair in an abandoned warehouse, Reservoir Dogs style, and slowly end his life in the most heartless and painful ways possible. <br /><br />When I was twenty four, I devised a disturbing plan to get revenge on that scumbag which involved taking him to a beach and talking to him about that night over some beers; under the false pretense of burying the hatchet. <br /><br />Then, after his skin was sunburned to my liking, I was going to knock him out with chloroform, drive him to my basement, tie his arms and legs to a table made of nails and then tickle his feet with feathers and slowly gouge his eyes out with a metal spoon at the same time; while using a pair of the highest quality headphones in existence to blast the sounds of a Barry Manilow greatest hits CD into his ears.<br /><br />I’ll probably never get the opportunity to live out those fantasies though, because even if Leroy isn’t dead yet, I’ve been told that the piss drinking coward changed his name legally and, as such, I have no means of contacting him. <br /><br />I’m at an age now where I’ve learned to care about needs beyond my own, so it would probably be best for everyone in my family if that day never transpires anyway.<br /><br />Five years ago, I would have had no reservations whatsoever about killing that motherfucker and spending the rest of my life in prison for premeditated, aggravated, first-degree murder. <br /><br />However, I’m an uncle to two kids now that I love more than I love myself, so I don’t want to force my niece, Sophia, and nephew, Steven, into the unfair position of only being able to talk to me through a thick glass window for the rest of my life if I don’t have to. <br />As a result of that night, my mother was sent to jail for six months, our entire family was <br />destroyed irreparably, in every way imaginable, my father lost a son, I became an unbearable prick and Mr. Colts was sentenced to, I believe, seven years in prison. <br /><br />SEVEN YEARS!<br /><br />Apparently that’s all the time the justice system in New York State felt that a man who murdered a baby, while he was whacked out of his mind on crystal meth, deserved to spend in prison.<br /><br />The only comfort I’ve ever been able to take from the outcome of that night of <br />satanic shenanigans is that Leroy didn’t kill Steven in Florida. <br /><br />Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have been convicted of anything expect lying to the police.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Dancing Away My Hunger Pains<br /><br />Mike and I were shipped off to foster care after Stevens’ death because my mother was in jail and my father was still a loser who didn’t feel any sort of obligation to be a man and father the children he’d fathered. <br /><br />We were sent to different foster homes, so I didn’t see Mike again until he was about three-years-old. <br /><br />I could rattle off thousands of reasons for why I no longer believe in God, and the brutalities I suffered during the time I spent in my first foster home could swallow up a sizeable portion of them.<br /><br />From the minute I entered foster care, until some point during my fifth year of life, every day I spent in the system was a devastating battle to avoid succumbing to the heart hardening knowledge that no adult on earth gave a shit whether I lived or died anymore.<br /><br />The only difference between the soul crushing sentence I served in foster care, and the one Amanda Berry served while she was locked in a basement in Cleveland, Ohio for ten years, is that I was legally kidnapped and forced to live in Hell. <br /><br />In retrospect, I probably could have been yanked off the street and locked in the basement of a child molesting psychopath for ten years, instead of living in foster care, and it most likely wouldn’t have made a goddamn difference in the context of how I was molded into the person I am today.<br /><br />I was lucky enough to only be placed into two foster homes while in care of the state; from the best that I can recollect. <br /><br />I say I was lucky because there are millions of children in America that get shuffled through foster home after foster home, from the day they’re born until the day they’re of legal age to escape it; assuming they aren’t dead or in jail before then.<br /><br />I only vaguely remember what life was like for me in my first foster home. <br /><br />As I was being driven up to it by my caseworker, I remember blurting out, “These aren’t houses. Why are we here?”<br /><br />She then proceeded to tell me, in the most deadpan tone ever, that this is where I was going to be living now. <br /><br />I started crying hysterically when she said that because “where I was going to be living now” was in a trailer park.<br /><br />I’d never seen such a disgusting, unsanitary living environment in my life. <br /><br />As I looked around, I noticed things like overflowing garbage cans, garbage in the streets <br />and on peoples’ lawns, clothing hanging on clothing lines, people drinking water from garden hoses, piles of dog shit covered almost entirely in bugs, guys who were having award winning ass ripping contests, shameless drug abuse and kids who were so dirty that I started to wonder if bathing was a sin. <br /><br />Most of the adults living in this glorified landfill were slobs who clearly didn’t give a shit about their appearances. <br /><br />They carried paper spit cups for their chew spit, wore ripped jeans, ripped shorts, stained shirts, jeans with holes that were purposely cut out of the knees, sneakers without socks, sneakers with gaping holes in them and aged hats with quips emblazoned on the fronts of them that I was still too young to find the humor in.<br /> <br />The crackling sounds that the gravel beneath our moving tires was making, as we continued forward, just made me cry harder and harder. <br /><br />One lady, dressed in black jeans, green flip flops and a sleeveless flannel shirt with a soft pack of Marlboro cigarettes nestled snugly into the shirts’ front pocket, looked into the window on my side of the car and smiled at me while we were driving past her. <br /><br />She had noticeably unwashed hair, her well past middle aged tits sagged to her belly button like half filled water balloons and I almost went blind when I looked at her teeth because of how yellow they were. <br /><br />As we pulled up to the trailer I was to assigned to, I begged my case worker to send me back to my mom. <br /><br />Given my current surroundings, it seemed worth the risk.<br /><br />My trailer was just as big a dump as all the other trailers in that park. <br /><br />It was painted white, but it hadn’t been touched up in so long that most of it looked moldy. <br /><br />Multiple parts of the trailers’ roof top exterior were rusted and there were two motorcycles parked on the side lawn; one for a woman and one for a man. <br /><br />The people who were going to be my new parents, whose names I never knew, were bikers. <br /><br />It was obvious to me by the way they dressed, smelled and carried themselves. <br /><br />It’s like the old saying goes, “If it walks like a biker and it talks like a biker, it’s probably a scumbag.”<br /><br />My case worker and I got out of the car to introduce me to my new family while tears were <br />still cascading down my face. <br />A few minutes later, she got back into her car, drove away, and I never saw her again. <br /><br />I thought about running away as soon as her car disappeared, but where was a diaper bound three-year-old going to run away to?<br /><br />I knew my life in this trailer was going to be miserable from the second I entered it. <br /><br />It was dirty beyond description. <br /><br />It looked like these people only cleaned up after themselves when they absolutely had to and I literally had to kick trash and empty beer cans out of my way just to get to my room.<br /><br />It should go without saying that I lived in filth the entire time I was stationed in that mobile home. <br /><br />I was also treated like dirt for no reason. <br /><br />I was rarely bathed, criminally underfed and always afraid for my life. <br /><br />I basically lived the life of one of Kathy Lee Giffords’ sweatshop clothing sewing orphans; with the sole exception being that I didn’t earn five cents a day for all the times I got whipped with a belt.<br /><br />I never had a toothbrush in that trailer, so the morning routine at that place started with the wife making breakfast. <br /><br />If I was awake when it was made, I ate. <br /><br />If I wasn’t awake, I didn’t eat until dinner. <br /><br />I guess it was asking too much of these people to wake me up in the morning so that I wouldn’t go hungry for the rest of the day.<br /><br />During the times that I was fortunate enough to eat breakfast, I wasn’t allowed to eat at the kitchen table. <br /><br />I was usually dragged by my hair or arm, with my cereal in my hand, and forced to cry and eat at the same time, in the same room I spent most of my days locked inside of. <br /><br />When breakfast was over, I either got my diaper changed or I didn’t. <br /><br />Whether or not that happened depended exclusively on the mood those people were in on a given morning. <br /><br />After breakfast, I always got locked in my room, alone, for hours at a time, so that those clowns could go do whatever they had to do that day without having to deal with the added <br />stresses of dragging a three-year-old around with them or paying for a babysitter.<br /><br />I spent most of my afternoons lying on a bed, in a room without windows, staring at yellow walls, struggling to control my bowels and wondering persistently what the fuck I’d done to deserve the life I was living. <br /><br />It was also during this time period that I started developing my sleeping issues and night terror problems. <br /><br />There was a collection of children’s books in my room I used to flip through to kill time. <br /><br />They were called Golden Books. <br /><br />They were extremely animated books and the covers, along with pages in between, were littered with cute little animals. <br /><br />The problem with these books, for me, is that there is also a picture of a growling lion stamped into the center of the back covers of most of them, and I was mortified by the sight of lions at the time.<br /><br />I spent so much time flipping through those books every day that, whenever I fell asleep, I’d have persistent nightmares about either the Golden Books lion charging out of a wall to eat me alive or of someone on a motorcycle flying out of that same wall to run me over.<br /><br />I don’t think I ever ate lunch while I was living in that trailer because no one was home during that time of the day and I wasn’t a locksmith. <br /><br />Dinner time came with the same caveats as breakfast. <br /><br />I ate dinner more often than breakfast, but that was only because I was so famished from not eating all day that the hunger pains in my stomach wouldn’t allow me to sleep until I ate something. <br /><br />I wasn’t allowed to eat dinner in the kitchen either.<br /><br />Bed time at that place was never a pleasant experience for me either. <br /><br />I either fell asleep crying or got my entire body whipped with a belt first; an act aided mostly by my current foster fathers’ nightly trysts with a bottle of whiskey. <br /><br />The case worker in charge of my file must have noticed eventually that I was being neglected and abused because I was moved to my second foster home shortly after one of her very few visits.<br /><br /><br /><br />God is a Fucking Asshole<br /><br />I was reunited with Mike, sometime in the late 1980’s, when I was transferred to a foster home located on a pristine looking street named Lakewood; in a suburb of Buffalo known as Lackawanna, New York. <br /><br />I don’t know if he’d beaten me there or if we were both sent there on the same day, but I didn’t care. <br /><br />I was just happy to be with my brother again and relieved to know that he wasn’t dead, too.<br /><br />The house we were going to be living in looked like a castle compared to the shitholes I’d previously inhabited. <br /><br />It was two stories tall, painted lime green and kept clean as a whistle nearly twenty four hours a day. <br /><br />The outside front of the house, which wasn’t fenced in, had a decent sized lawn, a mini porch that led to an immaculate looking garden and a concrete driveway that led from the sidewalk to the front door. <br /><br />That driveway was so wide and long that you could park a full sized van in it and still have enough room left over to play basketball.<br /><br />The backyard, which was fenced in, was so massive that kids could run around in it comfortably despite the fact that it contained a six foot tall tool shed, a pool deck/patio that you could throw parties on and a swimming pool so enormous that ten people could play volleyball in it. <br /><br />The inside of the house consisted of a basement, kitchen, dining room, living room, bathroom, attic and four bedrooms that were much bigger than any bedrooms I’d ever seen. <br /><br />This house was, and still is, located in a quiet neighborhood, with little street traffic, that is totally void of the every day hassles and bullshit you have to tolerate when you live in the city. <br /><br />All of our neighbors were really nice people, so making friends was an extremely easy thing to do. <br /><br />It felt as if I were upgrading from living in a disgusting inner city alley to living in that perfect American neighborhood that you thought only existed in movies like The Sandlot.<br /><br />The house is located about three blocks away from a now useless Bethlehem Steel plant. <br /><br />There was also an Off Track Betting building at the beginning of our street as well as a <br />playground and makeshift beach located at the south end. <br /><br />We never got to swim in that beach while we lived there because it’s an extension of Lake Erie which was, and still is, constantly being over polluted with factory waste and toxic chemicals.<br /><br />I remember standing on the front lawn of my new home that day, grinning from ear to ear, and thinking to myself that I was in Heaven and that I was never going to let anyone take me out of it. <br /><br />Victory, as Stewie Griffin likes to say, was mine! <br /><br />I was so happy that day that I probably could have pissed sunshine. <br /><br />This foster home, that I was madly in love with, was run by the husband and wife team of Frank and Debbie Green. <br /><br />To the best of my knowledge, they were never able to bear children of their own, so I guess raising foster children was a welcome alternative to being childless for them.<br /><br />Debbie was a middle aged, stay at home wife. <br /><br />She was a disciplinarian when she needed to be but also the most loving foster mother a kid could ever hope for. <br /><br />Frank was a middle aged, technological genius who was never too full of his own shit to be a goofball but, like Debbie, he also brought the hammer down when a situation called for it.<br /><br />Aside from the occasional spankings we got when we knew we deserved them, we were never abused physically or mentally by either of them. <br /><br />Corporal punishment was something that Frank and Debbie didn’t seem to have ingrained in their DNA. <br /><br />I loved Frank and Debbie unconditionally, and had no problem whatsoever with leaving the foster part out of the equation when people would ask me who my parents were. <br /><br />As far as I was concerned, my birth parents no longer existed. <br /><br />They had become an expendable figment of my childish imagination by then and, if fate had decided that I was to never see either of them again, I wouldn’t have had a problem with it. <br /><br />I actually hoped and prayed that I’d never see either of them again because the only three <br />intangibles I could associate either of them with were death, misery and pain; and I <br />couldn’t see how that would change just because we hadn’t seen each other in a few years. <br /><br />The Green House was littered with enough kids, by the time Mike and I got there, to make it obvious to me that Frank and Debbie either really loved kids or they just did a masterful job of pretending that they loved kids so that they could continue receiving the checks they were getting from the state to harbor us.<br /><br />By the time Mike and I got to the Greens’ house, there were already two young boys and two teenaged girls living there. <br /><br />Most houses with six kids and two parents living in it tend to feel cramped and overcrowded, but I never felt like that was a problem.<br /><br />After settling into what I believed, at the time, to be a normal life, I actually thought that God was on my side for once. <br /><br />I started school, wore clothes that didn’t come from a homeless shelter, had more toys than I could ever play with, a safe places to play at after school, three nutritious, filling meals every day and a cozy, clean bedroom to sleep in every night.<br /><br />I discovered showers and junk food there, learned what Saturday morning cartoons were and gleefully attended church every Sunday because I wanted to thank God personally for finally cutting Mike and I a break.<br /><br />The holidays at that place were some of the best days of my life.<br /><br />On Easter, our house was decorated with things such as life sized, stuffed Easter bunnies<br />and actual Easter eggs and baskets. <br /><br />Our personal Easter baskets were always filled with so much candy that I would be toothless today if it wasn’t for parental discretion.<br /><br />On the Fourth of July, every inch of the inside and outside of our house was draped in American flags and other decorations to represent the pride we had for our country. <br /><br />Frank was a veteran, so this was always an especially meaningful day for him. <br /><br />Our street closed off for every 4th for a block party and, at nightfall, fireworks exploded all over the neighborhood for what seemed like hours.<br /><br />On Halloween, the interior and exterior of our house was transformed into a full blown haunted house. <br /><br />It was easily the coolest thing I’d ever seen. <br /><br />Since we lived in a well to do neighborhood as well, our candy scores at the end of the night <br />weren’t too shabby.<br /><br />I always had an extra pep in my step during the Christmas season because our house was completely decorated like the North Pole and I still believed in Santa at the time. <br /><br />Christmas morning was the best day of my life when I lived with the Green’s. <br /><br />There were so many presents in the living room on Christmas morning that they usually camouflaged the tree and barely left any standing room. <br /><br />I can’t ever remember opening that many presents in any of the other places I’ve ever lived.<br /><br /><br />The good times I had while living with the Green’s far outweighed the bad; but there were bad times. <br /><br />Bed time for the kids at the Green house was 8pm during the school year; including Saturdays and Sundays. <br /><br />To help wind us down after the normally crazy days we’d put in as physically active children, we were allowed to watch two hours of television before bed. <br /><br />The mistake that Debbie almost always made, that she probably never caught on to, was that she quizzically chose to limit our viewing options to rated R movies, with no noticeable concern for the fact that we were young children who had to go to sleep after the movies were over.<br /><br />I watched so many R rated movies during my time in that house that I credit that exposure specifically for birthing the disturbing, inappropriate creativity I’m currently unleashing in this book. <br /><br />By the time I was six, I had already seen every Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser and Sleepaway Camp movie released to that point.<br /><br />All of those movies were tremendous mind fucks for a kid my age, but the movie series that started intensifying my sleeping issues and night terror problems was the Puppet Masters franchise. <br /><br />The idea that a gang of puppets could walk around a city and randomly kill people, for no discernable reason, in ways that Al-Qaeda terrorists would salute, was hard enough for me to swallow. <br /><br />I was deathly afraid of, and severely disturbed by, all of the puppets in those movies, but the puppet that was directly responsible for my fear of going to sleep at night, as a six-year-old, was a puppet named Tunneler. <br /><br />Tunneler was a puppet with a drill on his head that killed people by, no surprise here, <br />drilling holes into their brains. <br /><br />The right side of my bedroom in that house was next to a hallway, with a dresser in it, and a lamp on top of that dresser that was only inches out of my view. <br /><br />When the lamp was turned on at night, the reflection of the lamp shade looked eerily similar to Tunneler’s drill head. <br /><br />Since our bedroom doors weren’t allowed to be closed, I spent most of my nights that year staring at that reflection and shivering in fear at the thought of Tunneler drilling a hole in me and killing me if I fell asleep. <br /> <br />It didn’t help my cause that, on the left side of my bed, there was a huge, curtainless window that gave me a complete view of our front yard, the street, and all of the houses on the other side of that street. <br /><br />So if Tunneler couldn’t get to me from our hallway, I feared that all the other puppets had to do was shatter my window and do the job for him.<br /><br />I was also molested, for the second and final time, in that house. <br /><br />I was still six when it happened and, because of that, I can remember every single second of it.<br /><br />I was watching cartoons on our living room couch when one of the teenage girls I lived with, Leah, came into the living room. <br /><br />When she saw me lying there, she slowly positioned herself on the couch so that her entire chest was resting on my legs. <br /><br />After staring at me for a few seconds, she pulled my glow in the dark Thunder Cat’s pajama pants and underwear down and started blowing me. <br /><br />It didn’t matter to her in the least that I wasn’t yet old enough to get an erection. <br /><br />Twenty five years ago, part of me thought it was sort of cool to have a slightly overweight, sixteen-year-old butter face give me head when I was only six. <br /><br />Today, I’d rip her goddamn throat out with my bare right hand and fuck the hole in her neck until she choked to death for doing that to me.<br /><br />Leah wasn’t very long into her one woman dick sucking marathon before Debbie got curious and walked into the living room to try to find out what we were up to. <br /><br />I was too afraid of what would happen to me if I told her, so I kept my mouth shut. <br />Leah just smiled at Debbie and told her we were just “fooling around”.<br /><br />The perturbed look on Debbie’s face when she asked us what we were doing led me to believe that she’d already known the answer to her question. <br /><br />The fact that she did nothing to stop it from continuing left me unspeakably puzzled. <br /><br />When the sexual shenanigans were finally over, Leah left the room and I stared blankly at the television while I tried to process what had just happened to me. <br /><br />I honestly didn’t know if I should have been pissed off or indifferent.<br /><br />I later came to the conclusion that I wasn’t happy with Debbie for not protecting me from essentially being raped, but I was so used to being left for dead by that point that I didn’t let it eat at me.<br /><br />The worst of the bad times at that place came shortly after I turned seven. <br /><br />Debbie sat Mike and I down and told us that she had something important to tell us that we probably weren’t going to like hearing from her. <br /><br />I’m pretty sure all of the color drained from my face immediately after she said that because the only thing I could think of that I wouldn’t like hearing her say was that our stay with her was over.<br /><br />She then proceeded to explain to us that foster care is normally a temporary living situation for children and, as much as she wanted to keep us under her roof, the state had decided that my mother was fit for parenting again and there was nothing she could legally do to keep us away from her. <br /><br />I started crying like a baby when she said that because I felt this overwhelming sense of dread flush over my entire body. <br /><br />I knew that the best days of my life were officially over, at seven fucking years old, and I was fucking furious about it. <br /><br />I spent what little time I had left with Frank and Debbie trying to have as much fun as there was left for me to have while living in complete denial about the upcoming change in my living situation. <br /><br />I constantly tried to convince myself that I wasn’t really leaving. <br /><br />I tried to brush Debbie’s words off as a product of one of the many night terrors I was so used to having.<br /><br />I lived in that numbing denial for two or three more weeks, but I was forcefully snapped <br />out of it one afternoon when a car my mother was driving pulled up to our parking lot. <br /><br />She got out of that car, pleasantly introduced herself to Mike and I as if we’d never met before, and gave us both a hug that made, at least me, sick to my stomach. <br /><br />The first time I ever thought about committing suicide was when my mother told us that it was time to go home. <br /><br />I lightly puked in my mouth after she said that because, as far as I was concerned, I was already home and she was tearing me away from that home with zero concern for what I wanted or for how being torn away from it made me feel. <br /><br />My mothers’ unapologetic apathy for the way my brothers and I ever felt about any changes that she made to our lifestyles, necessary or otherwise, became a trend for her that didn’t die until the day she did; and I always hated her for it.<br /><br />After saying my tearful goodbye’s to Frank and Debbie, and my foster siblings, and our wonderful neighbors, and my life as I would have preferred it, I got into the back of my mothers’ car and sat in my seat with my head down.<br /><br />Two thoughts ran through my mind as we drove away forever from concrete familial stability and all the comforts that came with it, “I’m never going to be a happy person”, and, “God is a fucking asshole”. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />‘Mommie Dearest’<br /><br />After leaving the Green family back in Lackawanna, my mother brought Mike and I directly to her apartment in South Buffalo, New York. <br /><br />When Mike and I got back to my mother’s apartment that day, we had three life altering surprises waiting for us. <br /><br />The first of those surprises was a brother named Jeffrey that my mother gave birth to while Mike and I were in foster care.<br /><br />The second surprise was a bun in her oven that my mother would name Patrick. <br /><br />I didn’t find out that Patrick was only a half brother to the three of us until after I graduated from college in 2004; when she suddenly stopped trying to beat everyone to the mailbox on days when she knew that a child support check would be waiting for her inside of it.<br /><br />Learning that Patrick was only a half brother to me was stunning, but it never drove me to treat him like anything other than my brother. <br /><br />The fact that my mother purposely withheld that information from me, for fifteen years, was so far beyond infuriating and offensive to me that I seriously considered punching her in her face for lying to me for that long. <br /><br />The third surprise that awaited Mike and I that day turned an occasion that should have been a happy one into an unprovoked way for my mother to torture us emotionally. <br /><br />It also set the stage for the seventeen years of hell that living with her, and eventually my father, was going to rain down upon us.<br /><br />In yet another of the thousands of cunt moves that my mother would pull on her children over the next twenty years, she brought Mike and I into her bathroom and showed us two purring kittens sitting on sheets of newspaper in her bathtub.<br /><br />Don’t worry; there wasn’t any water in this one.<br /><br />She told us that the kittens were welcome home presents for us and that we could name them whatever we wanted and keep them for as long as we took care of them. <br /><br />Six days later, the sick, evil bitch loaded me, Mike and the kittens into her car and forced us to release them into an enormous nature preserve in South Buffalo named Tift Farms. <br /><br />She forced us to do that because, surprise, it’s incredibly difficult for a five-year-old and a seven-year-old to shoulder the daily responsibilities that come with raising cats; especially when those kids had never had pets before and had no idea how to care for them. <br />I suppose she could have shown us how to properly care for them, but that would have required her to give a shit.<br /><br />Mike and I were visibly upset for days over what my mother made us do to those kittens and she couldn’t have cared less if someone paid her to try. <br /><br />It actually made her smile to see us traumatized like that. <br /><br />The best way to describe the kind of person my mother was for most of her life would be to say that she was a mirror imagine of the way Joan Crawford was portrayed in Mommie Dearest; sans the unreasonable hatred for metal coat hangers.<br /><br />My mother was a physically lazy person who viewed her children as nothing more than nuisances she could exploit for financial and personal gains. <br /><br />If she cared about any of the four of us in the ways that a mother is supposed to care about her children, she wouldn’t have smoked, consumed alcohol and abused illegal narcotics for the entirety of all of her pregnancies. <br /><br />To her, we were nothing more than tools that she could use to bleed the welfare system dry, until we all reached adulthood, so that she wouldn’t have to bother working for a living. <br /><br />When the welfare well ran dry around 2003, she started selling portions of all of my fathers’ pain pills every month to keep her head above water financially. <br /><br />That went over with my father like a fart in church, but he had no choice but to tolerate it. <br /><br />She also took perverse pleasure from the fact that her kids were born healthy enough to be treated like slaves. <br /><br />As such, I became one at the age of seven. <br /><br />It was my job to keep our apartments clean almost every day and God help me if I refused. <br /><br />That abuse of power didn’t stop until 2001, when I was twenty and ninety miles away at college.<br /><br />My mother was an intellectual person, so she preferred verbally abusing her kids over beating them, but that in no ways means that she didn’t kick our asses whenever she felt like it. <br /><br />She used to beat us almost as badly as my father did, and whether what we did to drive her to beat us was intentional or not was totally irrelevant. <br /><br />She pushed me down a flight of stairs, that started on the second floor of a duplex, when I <br />was ten, because I tripped over a nightstand and accidentally broke my first pair of <br />embarrassing looking welfare funded eyeglasses. <br /><br />She tried to subtly kill me by way of food poisoning at around the same time, failed, and threw a school desk at me instead. <br /><br />It probably would have crushed my skull had it connected. <br /><br />She beat met senseless on my thirteenth birthday for defending myself in a fist fight because I threw a punch hard enough to burst blood vessels in the right eye of the kid who started the fight. <br /><br />I hated my mother for most of my childhood because of all the horrible things she did and said to her kids, but I also respected her for at least trying, as basically a single parent, to raise us the right way even though she knew that she lacked the mental equipment necessary for the job.<br /><br /><br />Any respect I may have had for her on a personal level disappeared after I graduated from eighth grade and she told me that I was too stupid to apply to a prestigious public high school in Buffalo just because she wanted to force me into a private, all male high school. <br /><br />I never figured out whether she forced that on me to further her legacy as the queen of emotional torture or because she was trying to turn me into a homosexual; but I hated her for the rest of her life for doing it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Who’s Your Daddy?<br /><br />My father was a worthless piece of shit. <br /><br />I hated his guts from the day I met him until the day he died. <br /><br />The only lessons my dad ever (indirectly) taught me about being a father were negative. <br /><br />My biggest regret about cremating him after he passed away was that I lacked the foresight to bury him so that he’d have a grave to dance on. <br /> <br />After spending north of a decade doing everything he could possibly think of to avoid being a father to his children, my dad moved in with us sometime in 1990; effectively locking the gates of Hell behind him and swallowing the key.<br /><br />My father didn’t move in with us because he felt guilty about being an absent parent for so long, or because he missed his kids, or because he loved my mother and desperately wanted to make up for lost time. <br /><br />He moved in with us because he was a drug and alcohol abusing, eighth grade drop out who never learned how to read at an adult level, never had a drivers’ license and never knew how to function as a self-sufficient adult.<br /><br />If my father could have found anyone else on this planet to take care of him for the rest of his life besides my mother, none of his kids would have ever seen him unless we accidentally crossed paths with him in public; and we all would have been better off for it.<br /><br />The man-child I was forced to call “dad” was a physically and verbally abusive dirtbag who spent the majority of my childhood getting wasted as often as he possibly could and either passing out in random sections of our apartments or using his deplorable condition as justification for beating the living shit out of my mother and her kids with startling ferocity.<br /><br />You’d think that a guy who’d already lost one of his kids to unforgivable violence would, at the very least, TRY to treat the ones he had left humanely; but that wasn’t my old mans’ style. <br /><br />He was also an emotional retard who never made any attempt to connect with his children, on a positive level, until it was too late. <br /><br />I resented my father tremendously for making me feel like I had to carry the load of being a father to my own brothers, starting at the ripe old age of eleven, just because he didn’t feel like putting in the effort.<br /><br />Some people say, in jest, that their father never hugged them and then laugh hysterically at the absurd nature of the comment they just made. <br />My brothers and I used to say that, too, but we never had the privilege of being able to <br />laugh after we said it. <br /><br />His contempt for us was so intense throughout his life that, on the rare occasions that we did try to hug that dickhead, he’d push us away and ask us if we were faggots. <br /><br />The best part about living with my dad was when he wasn’t home. <br /><br />At least then I didn’t have to spend all day worrying about which brother I’d have to jump on top of to keep my dad from killing. <br /><br />One of his favorite pastimes was using a fight with my mother as an excuse to walk out on us for five straight days without saying where he was going when he left of telling us where he was when he came back. <br /><br /><br />I didn’t really care where he went when he left. <br /><br />I was just glad he was gone. <br /><br />I was more concerned with praying that my dad would overdose fatally, or get hit by a truck, or get killed by one of his drug dealers while he was gone so that he couldn’t come back.<br /> <br />I hated every minute I had to waste dealing with that mother fucker while he was home. <br /><br />His idea of spending quality time with his kids usually involved heart warming activities including, but not limited to: telling us how much he hated us, threatening to kill us in our sleep, whipping steel toe boots at our heads, pulling our hair out, pounding us into the ground with his fists, turning the cold water on in the kitchen sink when we took showers, slamming us against walls with the intention of cracking our skulls open and sending us to bed without dinner; just because he thought that was funny. <br /><br />Any chance he had of earning my respect dissolved faster than a water bound Alka Seltzer tablet when I was twelve and was forced to watch, in complete disgust, as he broke his right hand on the back of my mothers’ head after punching her in it.<br /><br />I promised myself that day that, as soon as I matured enough physically, I was going <br />to beat him to death, in the blindest rage possible, and tell the cops that he was trying to molest me so that I wouldn’t go to jail for murder.<br /><br />Unfortunately for me, that physical maturity didn’t culminate until he’d already morphed himself into a walking cripple, in the year 2000, after dicking around at his factory job one day, most assuredly under the influence and breaking some of the most important bones and vertebrae in his back and neck.<br /><br />After he broke his back, he became such a shell of the merciless, violent ass wipe that he <br />was before suffering that injury that beating the shit out of him at that point would have <br />been about as satisfying as winning a fist fight against Stephen Hawking.<br /><br />I’ve heard it mumbled that if you look hard enough, you can find the good in everybody. <br /><br />The asshole who first said that obviously never knew my father. <br /><br />My dad was such a lowlife that he would steal our birthday and graduation cards when they came by mail so he could use the money in those cards to feed his addictions. <br /><br />I went to bingo with my mom for the first time when I was nine. <br /><br />I played my own boards, but my mother had to call bingo and collect my winnings for me because I was way too young to gamble. <br /><br />I walked away with $17 that night. <br /><br />When my father learned of my financial triumph, he waited until I fell asleep that night and stole the money out of the dresser drawer I tried to hide it in so that he could buy a case of beer and a pack of cigarettes.<br /><br />My parents were so broke, so often, that my mother had to borrow money from people just to put presents under our Christmas tree every year; with the understanding that the money would be repaid when my father received his Christmas bonuses from work. <br /><br />Some of the most violent fights I ever witnessed my parents engage in when I was growing up were instigated by my mother after my father changed his mind in regards to how he decided to spend that bonus money by pissing it all away at bars.<br /><br />My father was the kind of scumbag who would make life miserable for everyone in our household specifically because he didn’t want any of us to be happy. <br /><br />If he had to feel miserable and dejected about life all the time, then so did we.<br /><br />My mother bought me another cat when I was in fifth grade. <br /><br />I named him Spuds. <br /><br />I loved Spuds like he was my child. <br /><br />I fed him thrice a day, always made sure his litter box was clean, rough housed with him when we were bored and even let him sleep in my bed at night. <br /><br />Spuds made me happier than any human had up that point and there wasn’t anything I wasn’t willing to do to reciprocate that sentiment; within reason. <br /><br />What I knew for a fact was that I damn sure didn’t want to let my mother force me into <br />unfairly abandoning another cat. <br /><br />What would later happen to Spuds, at the hands of my shit head father, really made me wish I would have. <br /><br />Four months after I got Spuds, my father started noticing how happy that having a cat was making me and chose to put an end to that nonsense by killing Spuds. <br /><br />He went about that by, again, bravely waiting until I fell asleep, taking Spuds out of his cage and repeatedly slamming him to the ground, from a second story balcony, until Spuds was dead. <br /><br />Then, just to rub salt in my wound, he left Spuds’ mangled remains on the floor of our front porch so that my dead cat would be the first thing I saw when I woke up for school.<br /><br />I was horrified and bewildered when I found Spuds dead. <br /><br />Most of his teeth were missing. <br /><br />He was soaked in his own blood, his left eyeball was dangling from its socket and I’m pretty sure every bone in Spuds’ body was broken. <br /><br />When my dad noticed me sitting in tears next to my dead cat, he responded by laughing at me, calling me a pussy and walking away like I was actually crying over spilled milk.<br /><br />The brutal killing of my cat by my father was merely one in a multitude of horrible and unnecessary things he’d do to ensure that the day of his death would also be one of the happiest days of my life.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Powdered Milk & Welfare Cheese<br /><br />Most of the families in the neighborhood I grew up in, including my own, survived day to day, week to week, month to month and year to year on part time, minimum wage jobs and welfare checks. <br /><br />If you were a kid growing up in South Buffalo, New York in the 1990’s, and you found a packet of paper food stamps on the sidewalk, you were either revered like a king by your friends or you got your ass kicked by teenagers who then took those food stamps and traded them to Mom and Pop stores for beer and cigarettes. <br /><br />I hated living on welfare. <br /><br />Living on welfare for as long as we did made me feel more worthless than my parents did. <br /><br />My brothers and I wore worn out, hand me down clothes and coats every day, got our boots and sneakers from Payless, if we were lucky, had to go to a community center to get most of our Christmas presents and constantly got badgered and assaulted by bullies and kids who’s families didn’t need welfare because their dad’s could pass drug tests and their mom’s weren’t too lazy to work for a living.<br /><br />The only benefit to living on welfare as a kid, and being forced to dress like you’re homeless because of it, is that whenever you do get the shit beat out of you by bullies, it isn’t for the purpose of stealing the expensive attire that adorns your body. <br /><br />Being a product of New York States’ welfare program in the 90’s also meant that you had to choke down some of the most disgusting, lazily produced “food” known to man. <br /><br />I used to think that astronauts had it rough in the culinary department when I was a kid until I had to use a butcher knife to slice through my first, foot long brick of slimy, and sometimes moldy, welfare cheese.<br /><br />Our milk came in powder form. <br /><br />Our peanut butter, for some stupid reason, came in five pound cans that you had to open with a can opener and then cover with Saran Wrap after each use. <br /><br />Welfare approved food was so awful in the 1990’s that it made the free breakfasts and lunches I ate in grade school taste like they were prepared by world renowned chefs.<br /><br />Food was such a precious commodity when I was a kid that my mother actually used measuring cups to portion out every meal for her kids so that we wouldn’t run out of it after a week.<br /><br />By the time 1997 rolled around, my body was so fed up with being poisoned by the only consumables you could purchase with food stamps that I haven’t been able to eat chicken on the bone in over sixteen years and I will not even nibble on Freezer Queen dinners of any kind unless I’ve been starving for two days straight and have no other reasonable alternatives. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />There’s No Place Like Hell<br /><br />Whenever some Christian fundamentalist nutjob tries to frighten me with their unsolicited, improbable assumptions of the horrors that await me in Hell, because I no longer believe in God, I just snicker and rhetorically ask him or her how he or she would describe the world we live in currently.<br /><br />You right wing, bible thumping sycophants can assault my eardrums with anecdote after anecdote about the fire and brimstone driven tortures I’m doomed to spend the rest of eternity enduring until your lips fall off and it’s never going to make me flinch.<br /><br />I’m not afraid of the Hell that I’ve read about in the Holy Bible; in part because I don’t buy any of it, but mostly because I’ve already lived in a real one. I spent every single day of the 1990’s trapped there. <br /><br />It wasn’t called Hell back then, though, and it wasn’t ruled by Satan either. <br /><br />Back then, it was called the Taboni House, and it was ruled by two heartless, sociopathic tyrants named Peter and Dawn.<br /><br />I was only out of foster care for a week when I came to the discouraging conclusion that the chances my brothers and I had of surviving into adulthood, with my mother as our sole guardian, were, at best, slim. <br /><br />After my father moved in with us, I didn’t believe that any of the four of us had a snowballs’ chance in bible Hell of living long enough to celebrate our eighteenth birthdays.<br /><br />When two adults, who hate each other passionately, place themselves under the same roof for ten years, along with four children that they wish had never been born, the environment created by all of that never-ending resentment and detestation makes fantasizing about what life will be like when those kids are old enough to vote meaningless.<br /><br />My mother punched me in my face when I was eleven, at around two in the morning on a school day. <br /><br />When I showed up at school five hours later, I had to lie to one of my teachers by telling her that my face was swollen because I was running around our apartment and accidentally cracked my head against a doorknob.<br /><br />For a large quantity of 1991, my brothers and I would be jolted out of our beds, some time between midnight and three o’clock in the morning, on days when we had to regularly wake up for school at six o’clock. <br /><br />All we’d hear before we’d get out of our beds were the terrifying sounds of our parents screaming at each other as loudly as they possibly could. <br /><br />By the time we’d come out of our rooms to try to figure out what the fuck was going on, <br />their screaming matches had already escalated into full blown warfare that involved the two of them throwing silverware and glass dishes at each other.<br /><br />When our neighbors would hear us begging and pleading with our parents to stop fighting before someone got killed, they’d immediately call the police who, after receiving about a half dozen of these panicked phone calls, knew exactly what they were in for when they came to our apartment.<br /><br />When the cops eventually arrived to break up the, by now, extremely physical fights that my parents were usually engaged in, my brothers and I were already in the process of trying to do it for them. <br /><br />After the cops were able to put an end to the situation by threatening to arrest my parents if they continued on with their bullshit, my mom and dad would spend the rest of their mornings in separate rooms while I sat on my bed and seethed with rage.<br /><br />I got so tired of being forced to deal with these particular fights that, after the cops left the scene of probably the seventh or eight one, I stood in my bedroom doorway and sarcastically sang the Brady Bunch theme song loudly enough for my parents to hear me in the living room. <br /><br />That infuriated my mother so much that she darted toward my bedroom and punched me in my face for having the nerve to be so disrespectful. <br /><br />As I sat on my bed, angrily using a pillow to contain the blood gushing from my nose, she started screaming at me and telling me that everything that ever went wrong in our family was our father’s fault. <br /><br />She always used the fact that my dad didn’t really care about any of us as a way to excuse all the violence and dysfunction that both of them forced upon us for a decade for no reason. <br /><br />She then told me, in no uncertain terms, that she would either kill me or place me back into foster care if I ever disrespected her like that again, but at least the dish throwing fights ceased after that night. <br /><br />My parents spent the rest of the 1990’s abusing drugs and alcohol, fighting in front of us, taking their personal and financial frustrations out on us physically, bending over backwards to make every major holiday as miserable as possible, getting us evicted from every apartment we lived in, transferring us from grade schools so often that I can’t remember the names of all of the ones I attended and treating us like slaves. <br /><br />Both of my parents were lazy slobs. <br /><br />Most of our apartments looked like garbage dumps, after two weeks of going <br />unmaintained, because my parents refused to clean up after themselves. <br /><br />Because why do that when you have four kids you can treat like Cinderella?<br /><br />My father used to watch me spend two hours cleaning a kitchen that was literally no bigger than a two man prison cell. <br /><br />Immediately after I finished cleaning that kitchen, the piece of shit would walk into it and turn it into a disaster area just so he could make himself potatoes and onions for dinner. <br /><br />Life as a kid in the Taboni household was an experience I wouldn’t have wished on my worst enemies in the 1990’s and there are still times when I wonder how any of us survived it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />How the Mighty Have Fallen<br /><br />I was so mentally and physically exhausted after I graduated from college, during the spring of 2004, that I took a vacation to Tampa, Florida that June. <br /><br />I never would have left Tampa, but I had no choice but to come back to Buffalo after a job offer at a radio station down there fell through. <br /><br />This would mark the first of many failed attempts on my part to escape New York State entirely.<br /><br />I wasn’t as sorry that I had to leave Tampa as I would have been if it weren’t for the unbearably hot temperatures, aimlessly wandering alligators and multiple hurricanes that smacked Florida in the face two weeks after my departure.<br /><br />I used the rest of the summer of 2004 to recharge my batteries and settle on which field of journalism I was going to pursue. <br /><br />I was only twenty three at the time and still naïve enough to believe that the world was my oyster. <br /><br />I just assumed that a career in the journalism business would be looking for me as soon as I began searching for it. <br /><br />I began the process of firing out resumes sometime in the middle of December. <br /><br />Since there weren’t any companies taking my bait yet, I accepted a minimum wage job at a family owned chain of beer selling stores in Buffalo called Consumers Beverages, toward the beginning of April 2005. <br /><br />I knew I was lowering myself professionally by taking this job, but I was still a heavy drinker at the time so, in a way, it felt like I was being paid to work in raging alcoholic heaven. <br /><br />Of the two or three dozen minimum wages jobs I’ve had in my life, my job at Consumers was the only one I actually loved showing up to every day.<br /><br />The job wasn’t very physically or mentally demanding. <br /><br />The extent of our duties included stocking product, mopping the floors, keeping the bottle return area clean and organized, bagging ice, working the registers and feigning adoration for the bigwigs whenever they chose to grace us with their presence. <br /><br />It was a tiring job sometimes and I did have days there when I wanted to strangle the life out of customers for returning $60 in beer cans ten minutes before close, but for the most part, I couldn’t complain…yet.<br />It helped store morale tremendously that my manager, Tony, and my co-workers were a <br />blast to work with all the time. <br /><br />We only worked with one bitch during my time there, but I got her ass fired when she tried to get me fired, on a false sexual harassment charge, because she was ugly, on the inside and out, and I refused her when she asked me out on a date because of it.<br /><br />Most of the customers were polite, decent people as well. <br /><br />The only drawbacks to working there were that it was a minimum wage paying job and an eight mile round trip on foot for me. <br /><br />There was no air conditioning in that building either and we only got paid every two weeks. <br /><br />Other than that, I was happier than a pig in shit for most of my employment there.<br /><br />Consumers Beverages is an insanely busy place during the summer for obvious reasons. <br /><br />It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that we sold beer to over a hundred customers a day when I worked there. <br /><br />We also sold to a lot of regulars at that place so often that we grew to know most of them personally. <br /><br />One of the regulars I eventually developed a close rapport with was a guy named Dan. <br /><br />Dan came into our store every single day, at exactly 12:30pm, and purchased the same item; a thirty pack of disgusting tasting, socially antiquated Genny Cream Ale. <br /><br />The more I cashed Dan out, the closer we became. <br /><br />Over time, he started letting me in on the details of his life and told me that he was a forty-eight-year old former lawyer, from Chicago, Illinois, who’d moved to Buffalo to become a partner at the Cellino and Barnes law firm based in downtown, Buffalo.<br /><br />Dan walked up to my register on a hot day in August, with his thirty pack in hand, and we exchanged our usual pleasantries. <br /><br />Nothing seemed out of the ordinary during the bulk of this transaction until I noticed that his hands were shaking uncontrollably. <br /><br />Any alcoholic worth their salt knows that the shaky hands of an abusive drinker are a sign of alcohol withdrawal. <br /><br />I liked Dan a lot, so the fact that he was suffering from the brew shakes that early in the day had me concerned for his well being; especially at his age. <br />So, after handing Dan his change, I asked him if he’d ever considered slowing down on his <br />drinking for the sake of his health. <br /><br />He then told me that he’d been drinking every day for the last five years and had no intention of quitting any time soon. <br /> <br />Since it was a slow day, I followed up my previous question by asking Dan why he felt the need to drink thirty beers every day. <br /><br />I wasn’t trying to sound condescending or judgmental. <br /><br />I was the last person in the world at the time that had the right to ridicule anybody’s drinking habits. <br /><br />I was just genuinely curious.<br /><br />After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, Dan broke down and explained to me what really brought him to Buffalo. <br /><br />The story he proceeded to tell me was so chilling and disturbing that I still regret asking him to elaborate on it to this day.<br /><br />According to Dan, whose last name he eventually told me was Thompson, he was a very successful prosecuting attorney in Chicago, Illinois in the 1980’s and 1990’s. <br /><br />He won so many of his cases during his twenty year career that his net worth exploded into the multi-millions by 1998. <br /><br />He was also voted Illinois’ Most Ethical Lawyer by the Chicago Tribune that same year. <br /><br />Dan was also blessed, at the time, with a beautiful, supportive wife, a $4 million dollar mansion in the Chicago suburb of Palos Park, a $ 1 million vacation home in Denver, Colorado, a jet black Mercedes Benz and a six-year-old daughter named Aimee who he cherished more than all of his successes in life combined.<br /><br />Dan was also, due to the nature of what he did for a living, one of the most at risk men in Chicago. <br /><br />His life was always one bullet away from being over because most of the nefarious types of people he prosecuted, successfully or otherwise, were members of Chicago’s Russian mob. <br /><br />According to Dan, he received written death threats weekly from members of the DiFronzo crime family. <br /><br />After years of receiving what he assumed to be empty threats, Dan began brushing the <br />letters off as “dick measuring contests” that he never thought about again after discarding <br />them in the trash.<br /><br />Unfortunately for Dan, his bravado and indifference finally pushed some members of that mob too far and six members of the DiFronzo crime family, offended by his years of no retorts, took a different approach to totally destroying Dan’s life.<br /><br />On the afternoon of October 8, 1999, six hired guns of Johnny “No Nose” DiFronzo drove a black jeep, with heavily tinted windows, to his daughters’ school at the end of the school day. <br /><br />As Dan’s wife, Sarah, and his daughter Aimee were approaching their car to drive home, three of the hitmen forced the girls into the jeep, at gunpoint, and sped away from the school.<br /><br />After travelling roughly thirty five terrifying miles, with their mouths taped shut and their arms tied behind their backs, Sarah and Aimee were driven another six miles into a desolate, densely wooded section of Illinois State Park.<br /><br />Sarah and Aimee were forced out of the jeep at gun point and had their arm and mouth restraints removed. <br /><br />From there, their captors handed Sarah a shovel and told her to start digging. <br /><br />When Sarah, sobbing uncontrollably at this point and paralyzed by fear, asked why she was being forced to dig a hole, their captors told her that she was going to bury her daughter alive in it that day.<br /><br />Sarah screamed upon hearing this news and initially told the hitmen that they might as well put a bullet in her head because there was no way in hell that she was going to dig her own daughter’s grave. <br /><br />To force Sarah’s hand, one member of the crew grabbed Aimee and threatened to blow her brains out in front of Sarah if she didn’t start digging. <br /><br />Terrified at the thought of watching her daughter get killed, Sarah dug the grave for five hours while her captors laughed at her, mocked her and raped and sodomized Aimee the entire time. <br /><br />When Sarah finished digging the grave, a gun was forced against her left temple and she was ordered to put Aimee’s near lifeless body into the grave. <br /><br />After Sarah complied, she was then forced to cover her own daughter in six feet of dirt. <br /><br />To prolong the physical and emotional agony the girls were suffering, Sarah was only permitted to drop one shovelful of dirt onto her daughter every sixty seconds. <br /><br />As such, it took almost two hours to completely bury Aimee.<br /><br />The lead hitman then informed Sarah that, since her daughter was now fully submerged, they would drive away and leave Sarah with the shovel so that she could at least try to save her daughter’s life. <br /><br />But as soon as Sarah started digging, the lead hitman crept up behind her and blew her brains out. <br /><br />They then left Sarah’s dead body sprawled across the top of her daughters’ grave and drove away.<br /><br />Dan told me that he completely fell apart after the police found the bodies of his wife and daughter. <br /><br />He quit his practice and didn’t leave his house again for two months. <br /><br />He told me that he walked into a Greyhound bus station on Christmas day and only bought a ticket to Buffalo because it was the first bus headed out of Chicago when he got there. <br /><br />He also told me that he spent the duration of his bus ride pondering different ways to commit suicide. <br /><br />As his bus pulled into the Greyhound station in Buffalo, he’d settled on the idea of drinking himself to death. <br /><br />The fact that he was still alive after drinking thirty beers a day for five years only added to his already crippling depression.<br /><br />Dan walked out of our store in tears after he told me his story and I never saw him again. <br /><br />He might have been too embarrassed about opening up to me so much to ever come back, but I never knew for sure. <br /><br />I assumed that he’d finally died from liver cirrhoses, but I’d hoped that telling me his story had inspired him to seek help and try to repair his shattered existence.<br /><br />I managed to last eight months at Consumers, but that was about it. <br /><br />My first four months as an employee there were some of the most fun months of my working life, but the last four of them were nothing but miserable; as was the case with almost every minimum wage paying job I’ve ever had.<br /><br />During my last four months there, almost everyone I enjoyed working with started quitting or transferring to different stores. <br /><br />Most of the newbies who replaced them were assholes. <br /><br />I was sick and tired of waiting two weeks for a minimum wage paycheck, the customers didn’t seem as affable as once they had, my manager and I were frustrated with management for constantly fixing things that weren’t broken and it was all so demoralizing and deflating to me that I eventually just stopped giving a shit.<br /><br />I started checking out mentally at Consumer’s around the middle of August 2005 and spent the next four months quietly reducing my responsibilities to my job by cutting corners everywhere I could and doing the least amount of work that I could get away with doing every day.<br /><br />I chewed on my frustrations for as long as I could until I finally quit in early December, without notice, because I got robbed by two grown men dressed like circus clowns on a night when I was working by myself.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Fat Chicks Need Love, Too?<br /><br />I started 2006 off with a bang by breaking my right leg almost completely in half, on April 19th, while I was fucking an obese, fifty-two-year-old woman in her asshole in her bathroom.<br /><br />Up to this point in my life, I had been a college graduate for roughly eighteen months and was getting bank robbery frustrated about my financial and career employment statuses; or lack thereof to be exact. The most subconsciously disingenuous thing people used to say to me during this time was:<br /><br /> “Don’t stress out so much about being unemployed. You’re still young and extremely talented. You’ll find a job eventually.”<br /><br />The problem with rage inducing, patronizing reassurances like this is that landlords, grocery stores, utility companies, student loan sharks, credit card bill collectors, used car salesmen and HMO’s don’t give a shiny shit at all about how young and ripe with potential you are. <br /><br />All they give a fuck about is your money and when they can expect you to give it to them.<br /><br />So to supplement the income I wasn’t earning from the career in journalism that I still didn’t have, I took $1,500 that I stole from my drug dealer and went into business for myself as a male prostitute. <br /><br />I wasn’t interested in doing business like the typical whore that has to carry a gun on him, wait for business to approach him on street corners, give his pimps most of his money and then get smacked around for not earning enough. <br /><br />So I created a website to lend some professionalism to my newly chosen career path; all the while hoping and praying that the fed’s wouldn’t catch on. <br /><br />To give my new business venture as a male whore even more credibility, my site included extremely saucy pictures of myself, false testimonials from fictional women and a page on the site that offered different price packages, for women of differing financial backgrounds, which looked exactly like this:<br /><br />The Basic Bang Package: $65<br /><br />This package is perfect for closet sluts, on a tight budget, who just need a quick bone job before you head off to your mid-afternoon bartending jobs. <br /><br />For $65, I will show up at your house, wearing whatever clothes I woke up in, most likely drunk as a skunk and reeking like my shower is broken, screw your brains out for three minutes, if you’re lucky, and then lie to your face by implying that I enjoyed myself while I struggle to fight back vomit.<br />The Premium Party Package: $130<br /><br />This package is perfect for romantic women, with looser budgets, who just want to spice up your humdrum existences every once in awhile. <br /><br />For $130, I will show up at your house, sober, in a pea soup green polyester suit from the Salvation Army and a pair of bowling shoes, with a family sized plate of cooked Freezer Queen Turkey, a bouquet of flowers I ripped out of the ground at a cemetery on my way to your house and a totally insincere smile on my face. <br /><br />The sex session in this package lasts one hour, if you’re lucky, with fifteen minutes designated for cuddling afterward, and, at the end of the date, a sexy slap on your ass for a job well done.<br /><br />The Dutch Oven Deluxe Package: $250<br /><br />This package is perfect for married women who just aren’t getting any from your well to do husbands anymore. <br /><br />For $250, I will show up at your house, wearing a clean suit, and present you with a box of Whitman Sampler Chocolates, a reasonably priced bottle of champagne and a dozen red roses I bought at a grocery store on my way to your house.<br /><br />The sex session in this package lasts two hours, if you’re lucky, with thirty minutes designated for cuddling afterward and the added bonus of me voluntarily listening to you complain about your problems until I just can’t stand it anymore. <br /><br />The Super Premium Dutch Oven Deluxe Package: $500<br /><br />This package is perfect for trophy wives who just want a piece of ass from a guy who isn’t older than the Apollo 11 moon landing. <br /><br />For $500, I will show up at your house, wearing nothing but a bowtie and a smile, and present you with a tray of cooked shrimp, a bottle Dom Perignon and two bouquets of roses I purchased in advance from 1-800-FLOWERS.<br /><br />The sex session in this package also lasts two hours, if you’re lucky, with one hour designated for cuddling afterward. I will also bathe you, listen to you complain about your problems, clean your house and cook you dinner, naked, before I leave.<br /><br />I launched my male prostitution website on January 25, 2006. <br /><br />I checked my inbox for interested parties every day, but didn’t receive an email from one interested party until April 19, 2006, when a woman named Norah said that she was interested in the Basic Bang Package. <br /><br />I wanted to kill myself after reading her email because I knew exactly what to expect from <br />a woman who only wanted to pay $65 for sex; and it wasn’t going to be pretty.<br /><br />Norah lived in a third floor project housing apartment, in the crime activity mecca of South Buffalo known as the Old First Ward, so I wasn’t exactly excited about showing up there. <br /><br />$65 is $65 no matter who gives it to you though, so I rode my ten speed bike to her apartment, in a snow storm, in the exact condition that the Basic Bang Package warranted.<br /><br />I had been drinking heavily and binging on hippy lettuce the night before and passed out at around eleven. <br /><br />I was too hung over the next morning to care about showering and changing into clean clothes. <br /><br />When I knocked on Norah’s door, with a look on my face that likely screamed, “I wish I was dead”, she answered it wearing brown lingerie that a woman who didn’t weigh 360lbs would have a hard time squeezing into.<br /><br />Her body smelled like she’d been spraying shit scented perfume on herself and she was also a regular chewer of tobacco, so the natural teeth she had left in her mouth were blacker than Usain Bolt. <br /><br />I couldn’t believe how green her toe nails were, but that nose crumpler paled in comparison to the physically impossible amount of greasy, slimy rolls of fat that dribbled from her stomach to her knee caps. <br /><br />I also didn’t care for the fact that she wore a patch over her left eye in what was probably the world’s laziest attempt to protect me from the potential diseases it was riddled with. <br /><br />After giving each other a once over, she pulled me against her blubbery body and tried to kiss me on my mouth, but her breath smelled so terrible that I quickly turned away and got assaulted with a peck on my cheek instead. <br /><br />Her apartment smelled like dog shit; due mostly to the fact that she had a dog whose shit she rarely bothered cleaning off of the floor. <br /><br />Cages with dead birds in them hung from her ceiling with dirty wash cloths in them, too. <br /><br />She offered me a glass of wine from a fresh box of it that she had in her fridge, but I declined her offer for a glass and slammed the entire box myself. <br /><br />I didn’t do that because I enjoy the raunchy taste of boxed wine. <br /><br />I just wanted to simultaneously shake a hangover and get hammered enough to not be able <br />to remember anything we did that night the next day; and for the rest of my life for that <br />matter.<br /><br />Her apartment was almost impossible to walk through because she was a pig and a hoarder. <br /><br />She had seven hundred cans of tuna fish in her living room, fifty nine boxes of Lucky Charms in her dining room and the largest magazine collection in her hallway that I’d ever seen.<br /><br />I’ll never understand why anyone would want to brag to people about the fact that they own 2,000 copies of the May 2003 issue of Fat Slobs Magazine, but she couldn’t seem to contain herself.<br /><br />When I asked Norah where she wanted to have sex, she said that her dining room had space but that her bedroom was probably the most sanitary place in the house. <br /><br />What a crock of shit that was!<br /><br />The only thing sanitary about her bedroom were the napkins of the same name, that were strewn carelessly across her room and, from the best I could tell, being used to scrub menstruation blood off of her mattress.<br /><br />Aggravated and desperate to get this car wreck over with, I took her into her bathroom and started banging her doggy style. <br /><br />In order to complete the task at hand, I closed my eyes as tightly as humanly possible and pretended that I was making love to Leelee Sobieski on a yacht in the Bahamas. <br /><br />About thirty seconds into our session, I slipped awkwardly on a moldy piece of pork fat that was foot ground into the floor next to the toilet. <br /><br />The slip caused me to fracture my right leg after banging it violently against a heating vent pipe. <br /><br />After screaming like a girl, I noticed that my fractured leg was stuck between the toilet and a scalding hot heating vent pipe. <br /><br />Because of the break in my leg, and the burns to it that the pipe was adding, I quickly tried to keep my balance by wrapping my right arm around Norah’s sweaty gut so I could wiggle my broken leg out from between the toilet and the pipe as fast as fucking possible. <br /><br />In the process of trying to free myself, I caused Norah lose her grip on the toilet seat and she slipped. <br /><br />All 360lbs of her slimy, disgusting body immediately came crashing down onto my chest. <br /><br />The stress that her fall put on my already fractured leg ended up causing it to break almost <br />completely in half. <br /><br />I was in so much pain after the second break that I screamed like a girl, again, and begged Norah to get her fat ass off of me and go call an ambulance because I couldn’t stand up; much less walk.<br /><br />When she noticed how much distress I was in, she reacted by walking into her kitchen and making herself a triple decked bologna and cheese sandwich. <br /><br />After she finished the sandwich, she drank a 20oz can of Pepsi in three gulps and then fired out one of the manliest belches I’d ever heard come out of the mouth of a woman. <br /><br />She was about to go ape shit on a $4 bag of Doritos until I threatened to drag myself into her kitchen, by my arms, and stab her to death if she didn’t put the goddamn bag down and call an ambulance for me. <br /><br />The first EMT that saw the condition my leg was in got sick to her stomach and puked all over my face. <br /><br />After that happened, I asked Norah if I could borrow the shotgun under her bed long enough to blow my brains out with it.<br /><br />During one of the bumpiest ambulance rides I’ve ever taken to Mercy Hospital, I noticed that I still had a condom on my dick that was covered in Norah’s fecal matter. <br /><br />With no other non humiliating options, I quickly pulled if off with my bare hand, when the EMT’s weren’t looking, and jammed it into my left back pants pocket.<br /><br />When I arrived at the hospital, a nurse instinctively shot me up with Demerol when she saw how injured my leg was. <br /><br />Why she chose to shoot a narcotic painkiller into my neck is something I never got an answer for. <br /><br />I then spent an unreasonable amount of time lying on a gurney that the EMT’s decided to park next to a room occupied by a guy who was dying audibly from testicular cancer. <br /><br />I spent twenty more minutes pointlessly filling out health insurance paperwork while I drooled on myself and listened to that thirty-eight-year-old cancer patient repeatedly scream for more morphine. <br /><br />As I was being wheeled to the x-ray room on my gurney, unbuckled, I fell off of it and landed on my broken leg after the nurse who was taking me there timed a right turn wrong and tipped the gurney over. <br /><br />After my x-rays were taken, I had to sit on a bed for another two hours before a doctor <br />finally came in the room to tell me that I’d suffered compound fractures of both the tibia and fibula in my right leg and that I would need to go into surgery immediately.<br /><br />The surgery to repair my leg took two and a half hours. <br /><br />I was awake for one of those hours because the anesthesia the surgeons used to knock me out wore off. <br /><br />They had to reset my leg bones and insert a rod into my tibia before they could close it up. <br /><br />I was kept in the hospital for another week so they could monitor me and make sure I didn’t develop any infections or blood clots in my surgically repaired leg.<br /><br />After I was released from the hospital, I went straight home and pulled my website down permanently because, instead of selling my body for a quick $65, I ended up with a badly broken leg, that took eight months to heal and a hospital bill for $38,000 because I didn’t have health insurance. <br /><br />In the end, fucking fat women for the equivalent of a weeks worth of gas money, and spending three quarters of a year on crutches, just didn’t seem worth it to me anymore.<br /><br />I spent the rest of 2006 rehabbing my leg at an outpatient facility. <br /><br />There were a couple of months during rehab when I honestly thought that I was never going to walk again. <br /><br />When I was home, I crashed on my couch, collected disability checks, that I’d only obtained fraudulently, counterfeited money, abused alcohol, marijuana and painkillers and got wheeled everywhere I had to go by my friends and people in my family who actually fought over who was going to help me run my errands on a given day because they enjoyed mocking my situation so much.<br /> <br />I wasn’t thrilled with the way 2006 had transpired and I was definitely glad to say goodbye to it. <br /><br />My leg had healed completely by the end of that year and, despite the chronic pain I was living with because of my broken leg, I was actually very optimistic about 2007.<br /><br />I was miffed that I was now nearly three years out of college and still not employed as a journalist, but I remained positive about 2007 because what choice did I have? I certainly didn’t see how my life could possibly get any worse.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />No Time for Tears<br /><br />2007 was the worst year of my life, for so many reasons, that I would combust spontaneously if I tried to remember them all. <br /><br />I could have all of my limbs amputated in a train wreck today and I still wouldn’t fall into the same emotional gutter that I was stuck in during 2007.<br /><br />The fact that I had the indirect strength to not commit suicide in 2007 is something I’d be insanely proud of if I could ever wrap my mind around why I didn’t do it. <br /><br />I had so many reasons to French kiss a Remington that year that I think my inability to secure a firearm may actually be the only reason I wasn’t dead at twenty six.<br /><br />For starters, my relationship with my parents was destroyed beyond repair after a verbal sparring match we’d engaged in, on Christmas Eve 2005, while I was roasted like a pig on at least a thirty pill smorgasbord of painkillers, sedatives and muscle relaxers that I stole from my aunt a couple hours prior.<br /><br />The argument with my parents started over the fact that my aunt called my parents that night and blew me in for stealing her pills, on Christmas Eve, at a time when she knew that I was already dangerously close to murdering my parents. <br /><br />The meat and potatoes of the fight, however, had to do with the fact that I’d finally snapped and decided that their decade’s long passion for mentally and physically abusing their own children was something I would no longer tolerate.<br /><br />We screamed at each other for roughly half an hour. <br /><br />Things got extremely ugly when they had the nerve to ridicule me for being a worthless drug addict. <br /><br />I threw it into their faces immediately that if it wasn’t for all of the horrible shit they’d put me through over the previous twenty four years, because of their own drug and alcohol abuse, I probably wouldn’t be a drug addict to begin with. <br /><br />I then proceeded to explain to them that the same reasoning was most likely why the rest of their kids hated their guts as well <br /><br />My father tried to be a tough guy at the absolute worst possible time in his life that he could have tried to be a tough guy. <br /><br />He stood face to face with me and threatened to punch my teeth out if I didn’t stop being so disrespectful. <br /><br />I smirked like an asshole at him after he said that and told him that if he didn’t get the fuck <br />away from me, very quickly, that I would break what was left of the functional bones in his <br />surgically repaired neck. <br /><br />That was the first and only time I ever saw the fear of God in my fathers’ eyes.<br /><br />My mother had a phone in her hand and was threatening to call the cops on me, so I calmly walked out of their house and promised them that they’d never see me again; which was a far healthier alternative to my initial parental separation plan. <br /><br />I was so burned out on their bullshit that, three weeks before that night, I started concocting a serious plan to lock them in their house while they were sleeping and burn it to the ground while I skipped in circles on their front lawn until the cops showed up to throw me in jail. <br /><br />Fortunately for me, cooler heads prevailed and we just didn’t speak to each other from that night until three months before they both died in the summer of 2008.<br /><br />By 2007, the strains and stresses caused by how that situation had played out were starting to burn me out mentally and emotionally for reasons I still don’t understand. <br /><br />I remember a day in 2006 when I drank for at least eight hours straight and hunted my father down so that I could spit in his face in front of all of his friends at his weekly poker game. That was one of the most satisfying moments of my life. <br /><br />Then there was my well documented drinking problem, which, by the middle of 2007, was something I could no longer control. I was such a bitter, confused, frustrated, miserable, inconsolable prick during that year that I used any excuse I could think of to rationalize getting hammered every day. <br /><br />I spent more nights than I didn’t that year getting trashed and puking violently into toilets until what looked like sludge was spewing from my mouth.<br /><br />Whether it was partying on weekends, watching UFC pay per views, chugging 40’s during the nine month long NHL hockey season, watching NFL football games on Sundays, drinking just so I could sleep or simply celebrating Wednesday because it only happens 52 times a year, you could rest assured that when I was conscious at any point in 2007, I was more than likely drunk and/or stoned out of my mind.<br /><br />I drank abusively every single day for the first six weeks after the Buffalo Sabres were eliminated from the 2006-2007 NHL Stanley Cup playoffs by the Ottawa Senators. <br /><br />That was second playoff run in a row where our team was supposed to win it all and didn’t. <br /><br />It wasn’t much longer after that elimination that the Buffalo Sabres organization completely imploded in ways it has yet to recover from. <br /><br />I haven’t had any faith in that team since.<br /><br />I suppose that out of the 365 days that came and went in 2007, I was probably only sober for a total of 40 or 50 of them…maybe.<br /><br />To make matters worse, good friends of mine were spending massive portions of 2007 trying heartily to commit suicide for reasons that were trivial to me at best. <br /><br />Most of them failed spectacularly, but two of them did succeed.<br /><br />My friend Bob was on a mission to fatally overdose on deadly cocktails of cocaine, acid, speed, pills of any kind and alcohol because he was pissed off about his parents’ impending divorced. <br /><br />Bob never had it all going on upstairs. <br /><br />I don’t like to call people crazy when they haven’t been professionally diagnosed as such, but Bob was crazy. <br /><br />That was just something you could detect by talking to him for more than ten minutes.<br /><br />He worshipped a six inch plastic penguin, walked around in public in his underwear, regardless of the season, started screaming arguments with himself in the middle of a conversation he was having with you, ran as fast as he could into brick walls with his arms behind his back the whole time, pierced his ears with carpenter nails, lit bottle rockets while the stems were driven deeply into his asshole and usually pissed himself if he didn’t feel like searching for a toilet.<br /><br />Bob joined the military and was dishonorably discharged within two years, to the surprise of nobody that new him, for things like desertion, sleep walking during drills, drug usage and mental health problems. <br /><br />I stopped communicating with Bob after his fifth overdose because I couldn’t handle the stress anymore. <br /><br />We weren’t close friends to start with, so I was able to cut ties with him more easily than I had to with others.<br /><br />I still have no idea whether he’s alive or dead. <br />I don’t really care either. <br /><br />Rumor has it that he finally accomplished his goal of not being alive anymore by racing his ten speed bike directly into an oncoming train. <br /><br />I doubt that ever happened, but it wouldn’t shock me to find out that it did.<br /><br />My friend Todd, who never really cared about anyone but himself, got so depressed after <br />his fiancée’ broke off their engagement that he washed a recently filled bottle of her hydrocodone pills down with a bottle of Captain Morgan and tried to hack his left arm off with a meat cleaver in his apartment kitchen. <br /><br />Why he tried to smoke himself by cutting his arm off with a meat cleaver is a question I’ll never be able to give you an answer to. I guess he figured that hanging himself wouldn’t have been painful enough.<br /><br />His ex called me in hysterics the next morning to tell me what happened. <br /><br />When I showed up to his apartment to check on him, his front door was wide open and his entire apartment was saturated in blood. <br /><br />There was blood on the door, blood all over his refrigerator, sink, counter and kitchen floor. <br /><br />There was blood all over everything in his living room and his bedroom wasn’t spared either. <br /><br />The smell and sight of that much blood was almost more than I could stomach. <br /><br />I was positive that Todd was dead. <br /><br />I couldn’t envision how someone could lose so much blood at one time and live to tell about it. <br /><br />His apartment literally looked like a crime scene. <br /><br />All that was missing was caution tape and homicide detectives. <br /><br />Since I couldn’t find him anywhere else in the apartment, I kicked Todd’s bathroom door in and found him lying naked and unconscious in a bathtub painted in blood, vomit and stomach bile. <br /><br />I had been dealing with thoughtless suicide attempts from Todd for well over a year, <br />so I spent a few minutes contemplating whether I should bother calling an ambulance or just leave his apartment and let him die. <br /><br />This may sound heartless from the outside looking in, but I really wanted to just let Todd die in his bathroom that morning so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the stress anymore, but my conscience wouldn’t let me do it so I called an ambulance. <br /><br />His condition was stabilized in his kitchen and then he was rushed to the hospital to get his arm stapled back together. <br /><br />That was the first stunt he pulled in 2007 that landed him in a mental hospital for seventy <br />two hour observation, but I was far from the last. <br /><br />Thirty six hours after Todd was released from the mental hospital, he went back to his ex’s apartment and held a gun to his head in a last ditch attempt at terrifying her into reinstating their engagement. <br /><br />When she insisted that their relationship was over for good, he pulled the trigger and she screamed louder than I do every time I piss. <br /><br />She ran into her apartment to call 911 for help after he, as far as she knew, had just blown his brains out all over her hallway. <br /><br />The only reason there wasn’t a dead body in the hallway when she came back out was because Todd’s gun wasn’t loaded. <br /><br />He was forced into the mental health ward of the Erie County Medical Center for three more days for his troubles and charged with illegal possession of a firearm when he got out. <br /><br />My ex-girlfriend Crystal reacted to the news that she was going to lose her house, due to exploding mortgage rates, by slamming eight shots of absinthe and chugging Vermouth until she passed out. <br /><br />When she woke up, she got into her 1999 Chevy Corsica and drove it into a fence surrounding a grade school playground. <br /><br />It was just dumb luck that she crashed into that fence on a Sunday. <br /><br />She didn’t spend any time in jail for the accident, but she was put on twenty months probation, lost her license for five years, got fined $1,000 and was ordered to perform 200 hours of community service. <br /><br />The fact that she could have killed children on that playground that day made me furious enough to never talk to her again either. <br /><br />My friend John has a younger sister named Bridget. <br /><br />She tried to hang herself after reading her rejection letter from Yale. <br /><br />She tied the loose end of a noose around the fan in her living room ceiling, tightened the actual noose around her throat and kicked away the foot stool she was standing on.<br /><br />She was only swinging in the breeze for a few seconds before her body weight tore the fan out of the ceiling. <br /><br />As Bridget was falling wildly to the floor, she cracked the back of her head on the corner of <br />a solid oak coffee table, split it open, badly, and needed one hundred and fifty seven stitches <br />to close the wound.<br /><br />I was an acquaintance of a nutjob, single mother named Callie in 2007, too. <br /><br />She drank twelve ounces of Drano, swallowed a bottle of Excedrin, and slit her wrists because she didn’t want to face prosecution for smothering her three-month-old baby with a pillow. <br /><br />Some guy in an apartment across the hall from her heard her screaming frantically and called for help when he saw her convulsing and foaming at the mouth.<br /><br />Callie had her stomach pumped, spent six weeks on suicide watch at the Erie County Holding Center and was convicted of second-degree-murder. <br /><br />She would have been slapped with first-degree murder charges, but her lawyer managed to convince a female D.A. that Post-Partum Depression was the reason why Callie did what she did to her baby.<br /><br />The two people I knew back then, who actually successfully committed suicide, were a guy my friends and I used to call Scuba Steve, and a MySpace friend I had from Las Vegas.<br /><br />Steve lived on the top floor of a ten story apartment building on the east side of Buffalo and, being the disturbed fuck he was, Steve called all his friends to his apartment on April Fools Day for what we were told was going to be just another hootenanny. <br /><br />When we arrived at his apartment, he was standing on the roof of it, drunk beyond reason, with a bowling ball tied to each of his ankles. <br /><br />Before anyone had a chance to talk him down or find out why he was up there to begin with, he spoke in tongues briefly and then jumped to his death. <br /><br />Everything happened so fast that we didn’t even realize he was dead until we looked down at the sidewalk and saw his brain matter slowly dripping into a sewer drain. <br /><br />Nobody knows what Steve said that night, or why he killed himself, because Steve was an eccentric person, but no one ever noticed any signs that he might be suicidal.<br /><br />The other guy was a MySpace friend of mine named Carl. <br /><br />Carl was a licensed pilot and a psychotropic drug addict who lived in Sin City. <br /><br />He got into the passenger side of his Cessna one day, trashed on Ativan and Stelazine and accidentally committed suicide by performing a 10,000ft parachute jump without a parachute.<br /><br />I was so tired of losing sleep over suicidal and dead friends that I became a social recluse <br />for a few months out of necessity. <br /><br />I just couldn’t deal with the cavalcade of misery anymore. <br /><br />I woke up screaming a lot in 2007 because I was having nightmares about everyone’s attempts succeeding.<br /><br />I also spent most of 2007 nursing a list of injuries longer than Ron Jeremy’s dick. <br /><br />Within a span of ten months, most likely because Jesus hated me, I fell off a ten foot ladder and chipped bones in my right elbow that still haven’t healed. <br /><br />I had my right cheekbone broken and a third of the vision in my left eye destroyed permanently after a minor league soccer player kicked a soccer ball at my face as hard as he could. <br /><br />I also took a full speed kick to my garbage and coughed up blood for two days just because my nephew thought it would be funny to kick Uncle Pete in his balls. <br /><br />I was almost cremated alive that year after jumping into the bed of a pick up truck owned by my friend Dennis, with a lit cigarette in my hand, because a five gallon jug of gasoline had “accidentally” spilled all over the bed of the truck. <br /><br />We were headed to a bar to watch a hockey game and it was dark outside at the time, so I didn’t notice the spill until I landed in it. <br /><br />I tried to run into my apartment to shower the gasoline off, but after two hours of soaping myself silly, I still stunk like gasoline and didn’t get to watch the game. <br /><br />I ended up smelling like a pickup truck engine for three days.<br /><br />I also broke my right wrist during a game of tackle football, twisted my right ankle, for the 500th time, while walking to a bus stop and damaged it enough to cause a high ankle sprain. <br /><br />I broke every toe on my left foot in an ATV riding accident, needed fifteen stitches in my left hand after a drinking glass broke while I was washing it and suffered a severe concussion after getting sucker punched by a scumbag New England Patriots fan.<br /><br />I had to get a rabies shot after being bitten by a Doberman Pinscher, developed an unbearably painful cyst in my lower jaw that I couldn’t get removed for a month, blew my right shoulder out trying to bench press 605lbs, had my appendix taken out and bled from my nose so often that I thought I might have a brain tumor.<br /><br />I was also three years out of college by 2007 and still juggling multiple minimum wage jobs <br />I hated so much that I started seriously considering blowing my brains out with a shotgun on the front steps of Buffalo City Hall; just so I wouldn’t have to continue working these meaningless, degrading, dead end jobs anymore. <br /><br />I decided that if I really was going to kill myself there that I might as well do it on a Monday morning so that I could make the employees there even more distraught about the weekend being over.<br /><br />I hated one of those jobs so much that I literally had to beg my legs to walk me into that particular place of employment every day, while tears of frustration and despair streamed down my face. <br /><br />I won’t mention the name of the company I was working for at that time, but I will say that working there wound up being one of those “be careful what you wish for” situations.<br /><br />By June of 2007, I was so exhausted and enraged by everything that was happening around, and to me, that, in a desperate attempt to stop myself from using a gun to give my brains an Ernest Hemingway massage, I regularly got wasted out of my mind and wrote a book of short stories about people who blow their brains out titled, appropriately enough, “No Time for Tears: Tales To Blow Your Brains Out To”.<br /><br />That literary accomplishment wound up being a backwards form of catharsis because it did stop me from blowing my brains out, but I also dedicated so much time and energy to writing that book that I actually managed to permanently brainwash myself into romanticizing the idea of blowing my brains out someday. <br /><br />I now know for a fact that I’m going to blow my head off at some point in the future. I just don’t know when.<br /> <br />My mind has been so shot since I wrote that book that I’ve knowingly and unknowingly verbalized my intention to end my life with a shotgun blast to my head, or have quietly thought about doing it, every single day since July 7, 2007.<br /><br />As if life wasn’t kicking me in the balls rapidly enough already, I was also forced to start dealing with student loan creditors who began harassing me multiple times a week, by phone, and multiple times a month through the mail. <br /><br />I stopped receiving state and federal tax returns from 2007 forward because I couldn’t, and still can’t, afford to pay that enormous amount of money back.<br /><br />I don’t even know how many years in a row my student loans have been in default for anymore.<br /><br /> It’s not something I can’t think about for more than ten seconds without wondering if I’d be better off trying to climb that Mount Olympus of debt or fatally overdosing on sleeping pills. <br />The only hope I’ve had of catching a financial break over the last five years came in 2008 when the most treasonous and incompetent president in American history decided to disingenuously cut checks to Americans, in my tax bracket, for $600. <br /><br />I was excited about that for a grand total of two minutes. <br /><br />My excitement got crushed when I heard that college graduates with outstanding student loan debts would never see a penny of that money. <br /><br />Way to help rebuild the economy you destroyed, George.<br /><br />I remember one lady in particular who called me, from one of the many collection agencies that were determined to make every day of my life a living hell that year, and suggested that I get a job at Burger King in an attempt to “be an adult” and honor the financial aid contracts I’d signed in college. <br /><br />I could tell by the condescending tone in her voice that she honestly believed that I could afford to pay my loans back and was purposely choosing not to because I enjoyed getting phone calls three times a day, from people like her, that regularly reinforced by status as a loser. <br /><br />It took every ounce of self-control I could muster to just hang up on her rather than stay on the line and explain to her, in graphic detail, exactly what she could do with her attitude and bullshit suggestion.<br /><br />Some asshole with an Indian accent called me a couple weeks later and told me that his company was going to be forced to garnish my wages if I didn’t start paying my loans back voluntarily. <br /><br />I laughed out loud when he said that because what were they going to do? <br /><br />Dip their hands into the monstrous $150 paychecks I was bringing home at the end of a good week?<br /><br />I called his bluff and dared the guy to garnish my wages because that would have been much easier on me financially than spending $20 bucks on gas to have someone drive <br />me to Wal-Mart to pay for a Money Gram four times a month was. <br /><br />My wages never ended up getting garnished, though.<br /><br />When I thought things couldn’t possibly get worse for me in 2007, they did. <br /><br />I ejaculated uncontrollably all over my legs while wearing a $750 suit and giving a speech at a wake. <br /><br />A GEICO agent laughed in my face when I tried to save 15% or more on my car insurance. <br />I saw a kid who couldn’t have been older than five get run over and killed by a drunk driver. <br /><br />I beat a carnival dunk clown half to death after he told my pregnant girlfriend that he hoped she “popped out a stillborn”. <br /><br />She miscarried a short time later and the emotional strain of losing our baby spelled the end of that relationship<br /><br />I was working a graveyard shift at a gas station when I saw a guy burn to death in his car after it exploded because he unknowingly sped out of our parking lot with the gas pumping nozzle still in his tank. <br /><br />The day before that, I sold a $20 lottery scratch off ticket to a guy in his 60’s that was a $10,000 winner. <br /><br />I had to force myself not to choke him to death because he wouldn’t stop rubbing his winnings in my face. <br /><br />I accidentally threw a paper bag filled with $3,000 in the garbage and didn’t realize it until the day after my trash pickup day. <br /><br />I was saving that money to help cover the cost of my best friends’ open heart surgery. <br /><br />To make some of that cash back, I accepted a three night a week job as an erotic poetry reader at a retirement home in Kenmore, New York. <br /><br />The job only paid $30 a week and the male seniors at that place excitedly popped Viagra while I was reading the poetry. <br /> <br />I started winding the summer of 2007 down by getting into bar fights with people I didn’t even know, having unprotected sex at parties with women who weren’t disgusted by how inebriated I was, experimenting with crack cocaine and fantasizing about what my current life would be like if I hadn’t so obviously been Hitler in my previous one.<br /><br />My drug and alcohol abuses were so out of control that I was making it impossible to carry on meaningful relationships with people I cared about. <br /><br />I couldn’t save money for dick due to an enraging combination of working for minimum wage and endlessly trying to Cheech and Chong my way out of hangovers so I could drink more. <br /><br />I was so tired of being alive by August that I spent the majority of my twenty sixth birthday walking around a cemetery in Hamburg, New York and resenting all the dead people lying beneath me because I wasn’t one of them. <br /><br />I spent hours walking around that cemetery trying to find the coolest looking gravestone in the yard so that I could die on it after stabbing myself in my jugular vein. <br /><br />I don’t know if it’s because I’m crazy or if it’s because I’m crazy, but I find <br />something very humbling about walking around cemeteries, for hours at a time, and staring at random gravestones while wondering what life was like for each of those people while they were alive. <br /><br />On the more disturbing end, I also wonder what their corpses look like after being buried in the ground for so long.<br /><br />As the fall of 2007 approached, I sat in my car one night and tried to kill myself with exhaust fumes. <br /><br />I had no home to call my own at that point. <br /><br />I still don’t. <br /><br />I had no career options to look forward to at the time. <br /><br />I still don’t. <br /><br />I started to seriously doubt my ability to succeed professionally in Buffalo because the job market and financial infrastructure here has been a laughing stock since the steel industry collapsed.<br /><br />I was also extremely bitter about the fact that I had contacts in the journalism business from my days in college, yet nobody who could help me break the glass ceilings at the Buffalo News had had any desire to. <br /><br />Apparently, once you graduate from the esteemed School of Journalism at St. Bonaventure University, and they can’t suck anymore tuition cash out of you, you cease to exist to anyone who works there.<br /><br />When the exhaust fume suicide attempt didn’t kill me, I decided to compound my already unmanageable personal and professional sorrows by bringing a cocaine addiction into the picture. <br /><br />I probably used cocaine a dozen times in 2007 and still have no idea what the recreational benefits of using cocaine are supposed to be. <br /><br />That addiction obviously didn’t last very long for me because of how expensive and pointless it is to be addicted to cocaine, but I still chuckle at the irony of blowing lines and watching people get arrested on episodes of Cops and Dog the Bounty Hunter on drug use and possession charges. <br /><br />I spent the rest of 2007 abusing drugs and alcohol, working for minimum wage, arguing <br />with people about my drinking problem, struggling to not go postal and trudging through life miserably. <br /><br />It was obvious to me by then that I was never going to amount to anything, so I stopped caring about everything.<br /><br />The fact that my outstanding abilities as a writer and journalist didn’t mean anything at all in Buffalo only served to reinforce that personal sense of certainty. <br /><br />The only thing that kept me going mentally, besides drugs, alcohol and denial, was a thought in my head that God might finally be done screwing with me and start concentrating His efforts toward rewarding me for all the suffering I had endured. <br /><br />I was 1000% certain that there was no way He could justify dumping anymore bullshit into my lap. <br /><br />Not after the three years of hell I’d just survived. <br /><br />That’s what I thought, anyway. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />The Summer of Death<br /><br />By March of 2008, something in my head was telling me to let go of the anger I had been harboring for my parents and leave the past where it was. I didn’t know where that train of thought was coming from, but it wouldn’t go away until I did as it told me.<br /><br />My mother and I were watching television in her living room when the news of George Carlin’s death broke on June 22, 2008. Prior to that day, Buffalonians were still reeling from the recent deaths of hometown heroes Jimmy Griffin and Tim Russert. <br /><br />After we finished drinking in the details surrounding Carlin’s death, we talked about how much it sucked that George Carlin was dead, and then my mother made some cryptic remarks about famous people dying in threes and about how she’d be lucky if she lived anywhere near as long as Carlin did. <br /><br />I call her remarks cryptic because she was found dead on her living room couch by one of my brothers, a mere five days later, in the early morning hours of June 27, 2008. <br /><br />She was forty four years old.<br /><br />The coroner who performed her autopsy concluded that she’d died from natural causes related to an enlarged heart, but the timing of her death, and the circumstances surrounding it, lead me to believe that she’d just played with fire and gotten burned. <br /><br />To put it bluntly, I’m convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she committed suicide.<br /><br />My mother had been struggling with a circus of serious health problems for almost as long as I’d known her; exacerbated primarily by thirty years of drug and alcohol abuse. As a result of these medical sorrows, she had multiple surgeries performed on her stomach and reproductive organs before she turned thirty five.<br /><br />Her physical health had deteriorated so greatly by 2006 that she was forced to hook a breathing mask up to her face when she went to bed at night so that she wouldn’t choke to death in her sleep. <br /><br />As far as her mental health was concerned, she’d spent all of her adult life battling severe depression, anxiety and multiple personality disorder issues and, instead of seeking professional help for her problems, she just continued to self-medicate. Add a midlife crisis and alcohol abuse into the equation and you’re basically begging your mind to give up on you.<br /><br />Anyone who knew my mother during the last months of her life knew that she had completely lost her mind and that it was never coming back. <br /><br />You could see it in her eyes and demeanor. <br /><br />I even made a comment to my friend Tim, the night before she died, that I didn’t think <br />there was much of anything going on upstairs for her anymore. <br /><br />She’d just reached a point where she couldn’t handle the stress that came with what she’d allowed her life to become anymore. <br /><br />She felt so defeated and beaten down all the time that she didn’t even bother trying to hide the fact that she was abusing pain pills and crystal meth anymore.<br /><br />I believe she committed suicide that day because she was a drama queen in every sense of the phrase, and what better day to kill yourself than on a day when people from all over the country will be arriving in town for a family reunion? <br /><br />I know she wanted to die that day because she purposely didn’t wear her breathing mask to bed the night before, even though she knew she needed to wear that mask to keep herself alive. <br /><br />It all just seemed too well thought out to be a coincidence.<br /><br />Our family decided to cremate her after her uneventful wake because her death was so bewildering and unexpected that none of us believed we could handle the emotional devastation that would come with giving her a mass of Christian burial. <br /><br />She also hated the idea of spending the rest of eternity trapped inside a box under six feet of dirt.<br /><br />The next four weeks were filled with confusion, depression and white hot rage for me. <br /><br />There are two types of people you can expect to meet after you lose a parent: the people who truly want to carry you through one of the worst familial losses a person can suffer, and the people who just want to capitalize on the death as much as possible and then disappear from your life forever after the smoke clears.<br /><br />My mother wasn’t even a box of ashes before some of her friends began raiding her house for valuables. I almost punched one of her friends in her head for trying to drive off like a rat with a set of my mothers’ sterling silverware. <br /><br />My father became unbearable after my mother died. <br /><br />He seemed genuinely shattered over her passing and lashed out at people because of it. <br /><br />I personally had a hard time feeling sorry for a guy who was mourning the loss of someone he treated like dirt for thirty years.<br /><br />June turned to July without much hoopla. <br /><br />I spent the majority of the month after my mother died cleaning her house out with my <br />grandmother so we could re-sell it. <br /><br />My dad made appearances at the house whenever he could, but that didn’t happen very often because his relationship with his dead wife’s mother was a strained one when she was alive.<br /><br />Life seemed like it was slowly getting back to normal after the shock of my mother’s death molded into a reality we’d all began to accept. <br /><br />Then my father decided to shake things up by dropping dead from a heart attack, on the front lawn directly across the street from the house my mother was found dead in, on the afternoon of July 25, 2008.<br /><br />He had just turned forty six on July 5th.<br /><br />There’s no tasteful way to mourn his loss both because the world is a better place without him in it and because his death was also of his own doing. <br /><br />In what would become his final act of earthly scumbaggery, he woke up that morning and spent all of it smoking pot and intentionally overdosing on no less than six different prescription medications while simultaneously babysitting his then two year old grandson.<br /><br />He sealed his own fate that day because, in spite of four week long pleas from concerned friends and family members who basically begged him to not kill himself in response to the death of my mother, he selfishly, but far from surprisingly, did the very thing that he was asked not to do. <br /><br />I’m absolutely certain that it was my father’s intention to die that day because most of the pills he overdosed on were pills he’d refused to take for years because of the way they made him feel.<br /><br />What he didn’t know, on the day he died, was that he was suffering from terminal emphysema. <br /><br />So he would have died from that disease within a relatively short period of time anyway had he not decided to kill himself. <br /><br />His wake was a farce because most of the people on my father’s side of the family suffer from some very entertaining forms of mental illness. <br /><br />His paranoid schizophrenic sister, Lorraine, was one of the first people, outside of his immediate family, to arrive at the funeral home. <br /><br />She proceeded to make a spectacle out of herself by charging into the room he was laid out in and screaming at him to “stop fucking around and get out of the coffin!” <br />She had to be forcibly removed from the premises after trying to pull him out of his casket to perform CPR.<br /><br />The wake was also marred by family and friends of my father who spent most of the wake standing in the parking lot of the funeral home smoking cigarettes and marijuana pipes while they took inappropriate bets on which of them would be the next to go. <br /><br />It’s beyond common knowledge that no man on my father’s side of my family has ever lived into his mid-fifties. <br /><br />As the wake was wrapping up, I saw a joint in his suit coat pocket. <br /><br />So, as a final “fuck you” to the bastard, I stole the joint and smoked it in celebration on the way out of the funeral home. <br /><br />Two weeks after my father died, my great grandfather on my mom’s side passed away. <br /><br />I never met the guy and he was in his nineties when he kicked the bucket, so his death didn’t affect me personally. <br /><br />Six weeks after my great grandfather died, my sister-in law’s father died from a heart attack, while he was having sex, on October 2, 2008. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Shake Your Groove Thing<br /><br />I was significantly more stressed out professionally and personally in 2009 than I was in 2008. <br /><br />I was now five years out of college and I still couldn’t land a job of any kind in journalism. <br /><br />My male whoring business ended in disastrous failure. <br /><br />I was completely destitute and now my parents were dead. <br /><br />The only pro that I could take into 2009 was that people in my family, that I cared about, were taking an extended break from dying.<br /><br />I was at my wits end when I was randomly surfing the internet and happened upon a Craigslist add, on January 6,, 2009, that was posted by a guy who was searching for male strippers to perform at a night club he owned north of the border.<br /><br />In an act of blind desperation, and with literally nothing to lose, I packed what little belongings I had and flew to Calgary, Alberta, Canada to spend the first half of the year dancing at a hole in the wall strip club for women called The Tub Thumper. <br /><br />This club was located on the outskirts of Calgary in a small town known as Okotoks; which is basically like saying, “This club was located in the middle of nowhere.”<br /><br />The Tub Thumper itself looked like a retired, dilapidated farm barn. <br /><br />It was constructed entirely out of sheet metal and slowly rusting itself into uselessness. <br /><br />The clubs’ visible surroundings consisted of nothing but trees and shitloads of snow. <br /><br />There was only one road available for navigating your way to and from this club. <br /><br />The road itself was fashioned from dirt and it stretched for what seemed like miles. <br /><br />I was creeped out by how secluded this place was. It was so secluded from the rest of the world that it made me wonder if the club was even being run legally.<br /><br />The only two things that club ever smelled like most of the time were cigarette smoke and shame. <br /><br />The owner of that dump, who’s named I’m not allowed to mention lest I long for my entire family to be slaughtered, never bothered to tell me, before I accepted the job, that this strip club catered exclusively to pregnant women.<br /><br />I seriously doubt that I would have taken the job had I known in advance that I would be <br />pole dancing, almost completely naked, in front of pregnant women every day. <br /><br />At least I’d like to believe I wouldn’t have. <br /><br />I was so desperate to get out of Buffalo, again, that I’m not sure if it would have mattered if he did warn me.<br /><br />I used the stage name Pistol Pete while I was dancing at the Thumper. <br /><br />Part of me settled on that name because I thought it would draw me more customers and money, but I mostly used the name as a way to compensate mentally for the embarrassing lack of girth between my legs that kept me from finding a stripping job in the states. <br /><br />I tried to land a stripping gig in Florida a few months before I left for Canada, but none of <br />the club owners I contacted down there seemed too enthusiastic about hiring a guy with the <br />the nickname, ‘Six Inches of Sexy’. <br /><br />So instead of getting to tear my clothes off in front of some of the hottest women on the planet every day, and relaxing on warm Florida beaches during my free time, my biological inadequacies forced me into tearing my clothes off in front of pregnant women every day during the freezing cold Canadian winter. <br /><br />I developed a full blown crack cocaine smoking habit almost immediately. <br /><br />I inhaled crack smoke every day for the six months I was up there. <br /><br />My addiction to crack was a fairly easy habit to feed since about 100% of the crack I bought was being sold inside the club I was stripping at by a guy named “Sticks”. <br /><br />Sticks was a 275lb Canadian “pimp” who always wore a gray suit with a pink necktie and immaculately shined black dress shoes.<br /><br />He also carried a loaded six shooter in his vest at all times and had this hilariously misguided idea that reeking like Stetson cologne would somehow distract single women away from his lazy eye deformity and the massive gut that sagged over his belt.<br /><br />Most of the people at the club who associated with Sticks thought he was an asshole, but they tolerated his shit because he could procure you any drug you desired within a few hours. <br /><br />The five drugs I saw Sticks sell the most were crack, speed, angel dust, cocaine and ecstasy. <br /><br />The strippers I worked with referred to these drugs as “Show Time Sunshine” because they were used mostly to amp us all up for our performances. <br /><br />Sticks was a nice enough guy when you were on his good side, but he also reveled in finding <br />creative ways to humiliate and torture you physically if he fronted product that you <br />couldn’t pay him for when he came a searchin’. <br /><br />I was only working at the Thumper for two weeks before I got a taste of the carnage that Sticks was capable of.<br /><br />He came into the club one day while a guy named Mark was dancing. <br /><br />Mark saw Sticks walk in and tried to bail, but Sticks caught Mark and dragged him off the stage by his thong. <br /><br />After punching Mark in his face repeatedly, Sticks threw him to the floor and proceeded to beat him with a pipe wrench in front of every terrified patron and employee in the club. <br /><br />Since Mark couldn’t stand on his own after the clobbering he’d just endured, Sticks dragged him out of the bar by his hair, with one arm and into the parking lot in front of the club so he could finish his assault by breaking both of Mark’s legs with an aluminum Louisville Slugger. <br /><br />I later learned that Mark had been dodging Sticks for over a month and popping off at the mouth about how stupid Sticks was for advancing him three grams of cocaine and an ounce of marijuana. <br /><br />I never saw Mark again after that fiasco and I did feel that Sticks went overboard that day. <br /><br />He nearly killed a guy over a couple hundred bucks, but what I saw him do to Mark ensured that I would never miss a payment to Sticks.<br /><br />Being a male stripper in a country as cold and void of ambience as Canada, as you can<br />probably imagine, sucked total dick. <br /><br />I was losing ten pounds a month because I was choosing the pipe every day over eating. <br /><br />To make matters worse, I was also struggling with crippling depression because I could never stop thinking about how much of a waste of time and money graduating from college had become. <br /><br />I badly missed the very few people back home that I didn’t want to jam butcher knives into the stomachs of and I hated my stripping job passionately. <br /><br />The routine, pun intended, had gotten really old, really quickly.<br /><br />I constantly thought about blowing my brains out at the end of one of my shows. <br /><br />I hated being alive and I only made enough money at the end of every shift to cover the <br />costs of my addictions to crack and hard liquor. <br />I didn’t bother drinking beer anymore because I was so bitter and suicidal at that point that even the alcohol percentage in Canadian beer wasn’t strong enough to drown my sorrows anymore.<br /><br />A typical day in my life up there started with me waking up in the club owners’ basement, at about noon, viciously hangover, while I mumbled under my breath about how much I hated God for not letting me die in my sleep. <br /><br />I almost never ate breakfast or lunch because, although it was free, I never found the prospect of eating moose testicles and biscuits and gravy every day especially appealing.<br /><br />I slept on a soiled cot every night that a guy named Francois had recently died on after an accidental heroin overdose. <br /><br />I had access to one pillow that was torn open at the middle and my blankets were whatever discarded clothing I could find. <br /><br />The basement was dangerously overcrowded by starving, drug addicted male strippers that purposely abused their stashes. <br /><br />After waking up, I’d spend the next three or four hours smoking crack by myself and chugging liquor in that basement in mostly empty attempts to psyche myself up for work. <br /><br />I’d then stumble up the stairs that led from the basement to the dressing area of the club, at about 5pm, sit in my prep chair and play one round of Russian roulette while listening ironically to the song ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’. <br /><br />I’d be so smashed by 7pm that I could barely stand. <br /><br />I’d then go crawl behind a changing curtain and strip off everything I was wearing except for a banana yellow thong with the word “PISTOL” sewn in black onto the ass end of the thong. <br /><br />I still had enough of a gut left at the time for it to just barely sag over the front of it. <br /><br />For reasons I’ll never be able to explain, pregnant Canadian women go crazy when they see a guy who looks as physically decrepit as Scott Weiland dancing nearly naked on a stage while his stomach jiggles like pudding.<br /> <br />I was never in any condition to perform thanks in large part to my chemical dependency issues. <br /><br />I only made it to the stage every night thanks to a few rails of coke and a few cans of Red Bull. <br /><br />I danced from 7pm until about 11pm every night. From 11pm until 3am, I was forcefully made available for lap dances. <br /><br />It took everything I had to stop myself from crying in disgust and racing out of the private dance rooms whenever I had to give a lap dance to a woman; especially when she was in her third trimester. <br /><br />Then, at around 3am every night, I’d stumble back into that disgusting basement and either shoot heroin to help me fall asleep or intentionally overdose on OxyContin. <br /><br />As the end of May approached, I came to the realization that I was totally burned out on Canada and stripping and being habitually broke. <br /><br />I knew it was only a matter of time before I cracked and got the fuck out of that country for good.<br /><br />The final straw for me came on the last Saturday of the month. <br /><br />I had just finished stripping for the night and immediately headed toward a broom closet that we used as a champagne room so I could give a $20 lap dance to a pregnant woman named Betty. <br /><br />I started her lap dance, while simultaneously fantasizing about huffing spray paint until my heart exploded, when I suddenly felt a stream of warm wetness splash down my naked left thigh. <br /><br />Thinking it was probably a drink, I looked down to reassure myself and quickly realized that Betty’s water had broken all over me. <br /><br />I was so horrified and disgusted by what had just happed that I vomited all over Betty, ran to the bathroom to clean up, got dressed, ran out of the club, stole a car from the parking lot, drove directly to Calgary International Airport and caught a red-eye out of that country faster than Speedy fucking Gonzales.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />When I Bite Into a York Peppermint Pattie<br /><br />I arrived back in Buffalo about ten days before the one year anniversary of my mothers’ death. <br /><br />As soon as I got off the plane, I walked straight out of the airport, stole another car, dwelled on my worthlessness for awhile, drove out of the parking lot, got into an accident, fled the scene, made my way into downtown Buffalo and then blocked all the left lane traffic on a skyway by parking my car at its summit.<br /><br />My plan was to get out of the car, hurl myself over that skyway, plummet 110ft while I laughed the entire way down and then die by belly splashing into the frigid lake below before anyone had a chance to stop me.<br /><br />I was now five years out college and had officially given up all hope of ever obtaining a career in journalism. <br /><br />The way I saw it, I had been on the outside looking in for so many years that, even if I did manage to somehow weasel my way into a position at a local radio station or newspaper, it would have been next to impossible for me to adapt to the non-stop advances in technology that the business had adopted over the last half decade. <br /><br />Everything was going according to plan on the skyway until I made the critical mistake of getting lost in thought while standing on top of the skyways’ concrete fence for too long. <br /><br />After what felt like hours of standing there, a guy jumped out of his car, raced toward me, and pulled me off the fence by my shirt. <br /><br />I never saw him coming and cursed at him like a sailor for impeding on my date with destiny. <br /><br />The guy pulled me down with so much force that I banged my head off the street and had to use my shirt as a bandage. <br /><br />I was so pissed off about having my life saved that day that I drove to a diminutive neighborhood, in North Buffalo, known as Black Rock, to meet up with a drug dealer named Raven. <br /><br />Raven and I hadn’t spoken since my mother moved my family out of Black Rock in 1999, but I figured that Raven would never leave.<br /><br />Business was always plentiful for him there, so it wouldn’t have made any financial sense for him to leave. <br /><br />After hitting up a mini mart to purchase a York Peppermint Pattie, I drove the thirteen <br />blocks to his house. <br />I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that I didn’t get shot at or carjacked during that ten minute drive.<br /><br />Raven and I caught up on old times for a little while, but Raven could tell by the look on my face that I was having an extremely bad day and sold me a full sheet of LSD for half price; supposedly to help me mellow out. <br /><br />Before he had the chance to explain the safest way for me to ingest it all, I yanked it from his hand and pressed the entire sheet against my forehead; while also biting into my York Peppermint Pattie. <br /><br />Within seconds of both frying my brain with hallucinogenic acid and biting into that York Peppermint Pattie, I got the sensation that:<br /><br />I had been kidnapped, while vacationing alone in Mexico, and was being held against my will in a maximum security prison, in Guadalajara, on bogus crack cocaine trafficking charges…..<br /><br />…..at a time of the year when so many people were on Spring Break that nobody would notice that I was missing for at least a week, and the temperature there was always a sweltering 104 degrees, and I was always violently ill, and the death row and criminally insane inmates shared the same living quarters in general population and.....<br /><br />…..the persistent sounds of prison guards torturing the mentally retarded inmates made me want to bang my head against a wall until my brains exploded all over my cell; which was already filled to my ankles with various types of excrement because…..<br /><br />…..our cells had no modern day plumbing, our toilets were buckets, our bedding was always wet and moldy, and our bodies were constantly ravaged by diseases and open sores because…..<br /><br />…..we were locked in our cells twenty three hours a day, with no access to laundry rooms and medical facilities, and the ceilings in our cells were slowly imploding because they were made from Owens Corning fiberglass insulation and…..<br /><br />…..the guards beat us with nightsticks every two hours, and my celly always stole my <br />meals, and guys constantly committed suicide, and our one hour of recreational time every day was spent watching our backs because…..<br /><br />…..race wars always broke out in the weightlifting yard and bets were taken regularly in regards to which skinhead would be the next to get shanked to death on the basketball court by the hand of a MS 13 gangbanger and…..<br /><br />…..I was always terrified to sleep at night because the last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was the stomach turning smile of my homosexual cellmate while he held lotion and a box of tissues in his hands and…..<br />…..I always had to stand in the showers, clutching a knife I’d carved out of a toothbrush, because guys wanted to rape me and I wouldn’t pick my soap up after they slapped it out of my hand and…..<br /><br />…..I was never granted access to a lawyer, the Mexican media or any of my friends or family during my unlawful incarceration and I finally went bat shit crazy after being sentenced to life in prison for something I didn’t even do!<br /><br />Needless to say, I was so freaked out and unnerved by that acid trip that I never again touched a York Peppermint Pattie.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Better Off Dead<br /><br />I took on my final minimum wage paying job ever, at the end of June 2009, at a slave labor camp that masqueraded as a family owned restaurant named Bella Pizza. <br /><br />The only differences between this pizzeria, and a genuine slave labor camp, is that employees at Bella get paid and are allowed to go home after working twelve hour shifts.<br /><br />My job at Bella Pizza was, without question, the worst minimum wage paying job I’ve ever had. <br /><br />I hated this job so much that I quit after five months and promised myself that I would blow my brains out before I ever worked for minimum wage again; even if it meant that I’d have to sink low enough to live on welfare again to financially support that promise.<br /><br />All of the managers who worked at Bella Pizza during my run there were insufferable assholes who treated their employees like shit; with the sole exception being a guy named Eric who also happened to be a close friend of mine. <br /><br />We all worked ourselves almost to death, for between eight and twelve hours a day, every day, for well beyond seven days in a row at times; in a steaming hot building that didn’t have built in fans or air conditioning.<br /><br />There are four different working stations in this pizzeria; the registers, the pizza making station, the sub making station, and the station where all the side orders are made. <br /><br />I spent my entire run there working in the side order station. <br /><br />The order machines regularly spit out order slips with such blind, horrendous consistency, especially on weekends that, after only one week on the job, I started waking up in the middle of the night sweating because I heard those goddamn machines beeping in my dreams. <br /><br />I’d made so many chicken wing and finger orders by my second week at Bella that I graduated to having nightmares about gangs of chickens trying to peck me to death. <br /><br />The cooking oil we used to deep fry things like chicken wings, onion rings, jalapeno poppers and French fries was so worn out and goopy by the middle of the week that it made me sick to look. <br /><br />There was many a time when I quietly feared giving customers food poisoning because of how dangerously unhealthy the oil in those vats was allowed to get before it was finally changed out. <br /><br />I never saw such blatant disregard for a companies’ anti-drug usage policy in my life as I did when I worked at Bella; and I’ve had jobs at Burger King and McDonald’s. I never faulted any of my co-workers for using drugs to get through the day at that place. <br /><br />The environment was so chaotic and hostile every day that illegal drug use was literally the only thing that kept some of us from killing each other sometimes. <br /><br />I was just stunned by how casual and carefree the abuse was.<br /><br />Some employees openly smoked pot and popped pain pills in that place on a daily basis as if it were no more detrimental to their freedom and job security than drinking a cup of Pepsi. <br /><br />Some of the people that worked there, who had monthly scripts for pain killers, would dump their pills out onto their working stations, in full view of active security cameras and sell them to each other like they couldn’t have cared less if it got any of them fired and/or arrested. <br /><br />I’m convinced that they only got away with doing shit like that because of how hard it is to keep people employed in a hellacious working environment where nobody in management has any respect or appreciation for you or how hard you work for them.<br /><br />I’m not throwing stones by any means. <br /><br />I was so miserable at Bella that I started eating Percocet pills like Skittles, after my second week on the job, because ALL of the managers decided, behind my back, that they were going to fire me, with no notice, if my game didn’t start improving. <br /><br />I was so offended by how gutless and unprofessional it was for them to do that to me that I purposely waited three months longer to quit that job than I wanted to just so that I could fuck those guys over as badly as they originally wanted to fuck me.<br /><br />I was also hazed the entire time I worked there by a disturbingly corpulent, nineteen-year -old dickhead named Jay Coleman <br /><br />Jay treated me like shit for four months because he knew that I would never take a swing at him due to the potential jeopardy that it would put my friend Eric’s job in.<br /><br />For the first month that I worked with him, Jay and I got along great. <br /><br />Then, for reasons he never explained to me, Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde and he we went from liking me to hating my guts at the snap of a finger. <br /><br />I can’t say for sure what caused him to sour on me so unexpectedly, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with me eventually running out of the disposable income I needed to continue buying his Percocet’s.<br /><br />This fat piece of shit used to do things like look over my shoulder and criticize me for <br />how many fries I was putting into a chicken finger dinner on days when the paper in the order machines couldn’t keep up with the actual orders being processed into it.<br /><br />I only ever really worked 3-11pm shifts at that place. <br /><br />So whenever I worked my station, with people I liked, one of us would always finish making the last of the orders for the night while the other two guys cleaned the entire station so that we could get out of that place on time. <br /><br />It was bad enough that I had to constantly walk four miles, at eleven at night, through some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Lackawanna, just to get home after work. <br /><br />The last thing I wanted to do was be stuck at that pizzeria longer than I had to be.<br /><br />Once Jay caught wind of this information, all hell broke lose between us. <br /><br />Every time he and I worked that shift together, from that point on, he would wait until five minutes before Bella closed, pull everyone except me out of the side order station, and force me to clean it, by myself, with the lights off while he loudly chastised me for only mopping the floor three times. <br /><br />Because of childish bullshit like this, there were times when I couldn’t even leave Bella until the time I would have normally gotten home.<br /><br />I was filled with so much hate and murderous rage every time I left that place, mostly because of Jay, that instead of having four miles to walk it all off, I found that I was even more hateful and murderously angry when I got home than I was when I left work. <br /><br />My feelings of rage and depression, related specifically to working at Bella Pizza, became so overblown and unmanageable that I eventually had to start taking fifteen sleeping pills just to fall asleep at night. <br /><br />The only reason I stopped abusing sleeping pills was because my brother Mike was scared that I was going to accidentally overdose on them one night and die in the same manner that Heath Ledger did.<br /><br />Every shift I put in at Bella Pizza amounted to a fate worse than death. <br /><br />I flirted with nervous breakdowns at that place more often than I hurled obscenities at Jay. <br /><br />I thought about walking out during the middle of a shift, and never coming back, dozens of times.<br /><br />The dangerously high levels of stress and anger that boiled inside of me for the five months that I worked at Bella made it clear to me that I was a dead man walking if I couldn’t find an acceptable excuse for quitting that job. <br /><br />Had I continued working at Bella Pizza for any longer than I did, I either would have killed somebody or dropped dead, in the side order station, from a rage induced brain aneurism.<br /><br />I finally got the excuse I needed during the third week of September when I watched the mother of a newborn baby get a leg and a half chopped off of her body after some piece of shit, ripped out of his mind on downers, sped down a heavily populated street, during lunch time and lost control of the four door car he was driving; which resulted in this poor woman getting sandwiched, from the waist down, between the front of his car and the back of a mini-van, at an impact of over thirty five miles an hour. <br /><br />This dickhead was so incoherent and oblivious to what he had just done that, instead of putting his car in park until medics arrived, he made the life threatening decision to put his car in reverse and allowed that poor woman, along with what was left of her legs, to crumble to the ground. <br /><br />I was so appalled and enraged by what I had just seen that I would have killed that guy if my body hadn’t been frozen in disbelief by what he’d just done.<br /><br />When this woman hit the ground, her entire lower body looked like a spaghetti food fight. <br /><br />I snapped out of that disbelief quickly enough to call 911, but the real heroes that day were the guys who used their pant belts to keep her from bleeding to death in the street.<br /><br />I was walking to Bella when all of this happened, but I still had an hour before I had to be there, so I remained at the scene until I could give the cops a verbal and written statement of what I saw. <br /><br />Once the madness had subsided, I really had no desire to go to work. I was angry, confused, disgusted, shocked and fully aware of the fact that spending eight hours in a pizzeria, after watching the lower body of a woman get shredded like it had been put through a meat grinder, was something I couldn’t handle doing.<br /><br />All I wanted to do was spend the rest of that day at the hospital she was taken to so that I could know, for my own sake, that she was alive and that she was going to recover. <br /><br />I felt extremely guilty about the fact that I was close enough to pull her away before she got hit, but didn’t because I thought the guy in the car would slam on his breaks in time to avoid hitting her.<br /><br />When I asked the manager in charge if I could have the day off, in light of all of the craziness I had just experienced, my request was met with an emphatic, “NO”! <br /><br />Instead of being sympathetic to my situation and finding someone to cover my shift for the <br />day, like any human being that isn’t a total scumbag would, my manager on duty that day forced me to work with food for the next eight hours while I fought back tears and vomit every time I looked at pizza.<br /><br />My relationship with the people who ran Bella Pizza became confrontational and irreparably damaged from that day forward. I was already furious about the fact that they once planned to fire me without notice. <br /><br />So forcing me to work on a day when I watched a woman nearly bleed to death in front of a Burger King only intensified my desire to fuck them over as badly as possible.<br /><br />There were only two things you could do at Bella Pizza, in 2009 anyway, that would earn you an automatic pink slip; stealing food or money and no call, no showing one of your shifts. <br /><br />As the end of November approached, I decided that it was finally time to pay all of the assholes in that place back for all of the hell they’d put me through for the previous five months by no call, no showing a shift I was scheduled to work on a Sunday afternoon during the NFL football season. <br /><br />Leaving Bella Pizza short staffed on a Sunday afternoon, during football season, is like forcing a firefighter to extinguish three house fires, at the same time, by himself; and I loved every goddamn second of that day. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da; Life Goes On”<br /><br />I never worked another minimum wage paying job again after I quit my job at Bella. <br /><br />The only other (taxable) income I’ve earned over the last three years came from a summer job in 2010 that my friend Tim and I got cleaning up after construction workers at an abandoned building in downtown Buffalo that was being restored to house a Unites States Passport office.<br /><br />I hated this job, too. It was hot, dirty, dangerous, exhausting, backbreaking labor that would leave me in tears when I got home every night because of the strain that the job was putting on my already badly damaged lower back. <br /><br />I’ve been struggling with crippling, round the clock pain in my lower back since I injured it at McDonalds in 1999, and working this job caused me so much physical grief that I would wake up the morning after every shift temporarily paralyzed from the waist down; as I do to this day.<br /><br />This problem only gets worse as the years pass. <br /><br />I’ve been desperately trying to get my back fixed for thirteen years, but every doctor I’ve presented my back pain to either couldn’t find anything wrong with me, thought I was lying to score pain pills or told me that the pain was just in my head.<br /><br />I also hated this job because our boss spent the entire summer we worked for him kissing our asses and telling us how grateful he was to have such dedicated workhorses on his payroll, only to then go back to his office every day so he could try finding people to replace us because he despised paying us a whopping $10 an hour. <br /><br />The only things I enjoyed about that job were that I was working with my best friend and that we were left largely unsupervised for most of the week.<br /><br />Our job at the passport office was only temporary, and given the shape my back was in at the time, along with my brains’ blatant refusal to allow me to seek minimum wage employment ever again, I saw no other option but to live on public assistance until I could find a career in journalism. <br /><br />I’m now nine years out of college and still don’t have one.<br /><br />In the years since that construction job ended, I’ve passed time by living with my brother, collecting welfare checks, downing prescription drugs, lifting weights and helping my brother and his wife raise their children. <br /><br />I’ve gone out of my way, every single day since my nephew was two, to ensure that neither of them is forced to grow up in the same traumatic, emotionally detrimental environment that the my brothers and I did; and I’m happy to do it. <br /><br />My childhood turned me into a bitter, cynical, miserable oaf who chews on hate every day <br />and is too scared to get married and have kids because of how terrible a husband and father his dad was. <br /><br />So if my niece and nephew can grow up to be happy, stable, productive members of society, who don’t hate their parents and uncle because of how we raised them, it will, in some strange way, make me feel as if my life has come full circle. <br /><br />I don’t know what the future holds for them, but as long as they don’t grow up to be like me, I will die a happy man.<br /><br />",
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"content": "\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis book is dedicated to the white man; whose holding down of me for so many years was my only motivation for writing it.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPrologue\n\nMost Americans are so brainwashed by the nonsensical, misleading double speak that our government starts shoveling down their throats as kids that, by the time they reach adulthood, they feel an ignorant responsibility to scold others for doing things that they were raised to believe are shameful and morally inferior. \n\nThe problem with that kind of mentality is that it often backfires and, in actuality, makes those same people look like uneducated sheep, who’ve forgotten how to think for themselves, as citizens of one of the very few countries in this world where thinking for themselves is a right they’re born into.\n\nI was barely nineteen when I started getting nagged and ridiculed by people who believe that seeking professional help, and medications, prescribed by a doctor, are the more noble and responsible ways of coping with my emotional problems than popping pills, smoking pot and drinking myself stupid all the time were - because using drugs and alcohol to dull my pain was, in their words, “just a temporary and self destructive solution”.\n\nFor the record, I quit drinking, using street drugs and (illegally) popping pills, cold turkey, during the summer of 2010; but it wasn’t because I wanted to. \n\nI was forced to cease my run as a participant in the non-stop barrage of Irish carnivals I’d become so accustomed to attending over the years because my body and mind were making it clear to me that they could no longer handle the damages and stresses that my Keith Moon like lifestyle was causing them. \n\nPrior to that, I’d spent the previous decade burning the candle at both ends; strictly as an alternative to putting a gun in my mouth. \n\nI did that partly because I’d deluded myself into thinking that my tireless consumptions of giggle grass and lunatic juice would eventually be the cure for what was ailing me upstairs, but largely because I resented the snide labels and insinuations that the general public hurl in your direction after you seek the very same professional help that they originally ridiculed you for not seeking in the first place.\n\nThe problem with partying like Charlie Sheen all the time, amongst other things, is that if you don’t catch on to what you’re doing within a reasonable period of time, you’ll eventually become a monster you can no longer control and probably find yourself dropping dead outside of a bar owned by Johnny Depp before you’re even old enough to rent a car.\n\nIf you’re one of the lucky ones, from what I’ve been told, you eventually wise up to reality, stop downing tiger blood every day, clean yourself up, find Jesus if you have to, and completely change the way you choose to deal with the demons in your life.\n\nHell, I thought about checking myself into rehab and attending AA meetings for years, but my pride and self-respect never allowed for it. \n\nThat isn’t to say that I feel as if I’m above anyone else who struggles with drug and alcohol dependencies, and you’ll never hear those words come out of my mouth. \n\nThe only reason I still have people in my life who care about me is because I finally reached the point where I had to accept the fact that I was going to permanently alienate all of them if I didn’t stop trying to Jim Jones my sorrows away.\n\nThere were only so many hundreds of times that people were going to willingly look the other way while I intentionally drank abusively and pissed on their computer equipment, or cursed out their fathers, or hit on their girlfriends, or lost control of my legs and broke their toilet seats with my head, or walked around their apartments naked in a blacked out stupor, or puked all my innards out onto their living room floors, or woke them up at all hours of the night to engage in drunken wars of thumb.\n\nHow many times can you wake up half and halfed on your neighbors’ front lawn at the crack of dawn , or lament to your best friends, for hours and hours in a row, about how badly you want to shoot yourself in your head, or try to drown yourself in a lake, or show up to work hammered and tell your managers to go fuck themselves before you have no other choice but to put the bottle down and consider driving down the road less traveled?\n\nI remember being so despondent, on Cinco de Mayo 2010, that I locked myself in my bedroom, in an apartment I was sharing with my three best friends’; Dennis Gesel, Tim Piskorz and Dennis Viterna, and tried to end it all by chasing Tylenol PM and OxyContin pills with a quart of Smirnoff vodka that tasted like nothing but watermelon. \n\nInstead of dying though, I blacked out drunk and (allegedly) paraded around our apartment balls naked and screamed the Canadian national anthem into a beer funnel after I cracked an empty wine bottle over my head and danced on our dining room table like Carlton Banks.\n \nI was told that, from there, I broke my nose playing air guitar, shattered our bathroom mirror with my fist because I thought it was Richard Simmons trying to pick a fight with me, fell down a triple flight of stairs and then ran outside in a botched attempt to initiate a game of naked chicken in the middle of a chronically busy four way intersection. \n\nI probably would have died that night had it not been for those three grown men tackling me to the ground and carrying me back into our apartment, kicking and screaming, and then ganking my “party supplies” before locking me in my room for the rest of the night, from the outside of my door, with a steel folding chair. \n\nI most certainly would have been arrested that night if Gesel hadn’t fabricated a story for the cops about a beloved member of my family dying earlier in the day.\n\nSuffice to say, that rousing night of tomfoolery wound up being the last of a lot of straws for me. \n\nAfter ten years of making a man out of my liver, and punishing my brain for turning it’s back on me, I sobered up for six months and pursued what most people had been telling me, ad nauseam, was the responsible channel for dealing with my problems.\n\nI balled up a figurative roll of toilet paper, then wiped my figurative ass crack with\nwhat was left of my figurative pride and self-respect and entered therapy in November 2010. \n\nI don’t know how it makes a woman feel when she has to walk into a mental health clinic and beg for help, but it was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life.\n \nFor as proud and self assured as I was about one day being able to crush my crazy into powder on my own, the realization that it was something I would never be able to do on my own was more embarrassing and demoralizing than the time a nun walk into a one stall church bathroom and caught me masturbating with a Fleshlight. \n\nAs I stood in front of that clinic for the first time, doubtful that I would actually enter it, the angel on my right shoulder told me to swallow my pride for once and get my ass in there, while the devil on my left shoulder said: \n\n “You’ve had twenty three years to find solutions to your problems and you failed every time you tried one. Why waste your time with this psycho babble bullshit when you can just go home and kill yourself?”\n\nFive minutes of back and forth passed before I allowed the angel to win a three way debate we shouldn’t have needed to have. \n\nHad I allowed the devil to win this one, I would have definitely been dead before I turned thirty.\n\nAfter two excruciating, forty five minute therapy sessions, I was told I’d been suffering from my depression and anxiety and disturbing thoughts and night terrors and rampant fantasies of suicide for the last twenty-three-years because my brain was plagued by an untreated mental health disorder playfully known in the mental health community as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.\n\nI was told that my P.T.S.D., which is what causes most of my crippling depression and anxiety problems, was most likely triggered by the “what the fuck is going on here?” experience of watching my year and a half old brother get murdered by a deranged meth addict who didn’t particularly fancy children. \n\nUpon receiving those diagnoses, it was suggested to me that I spend the majority of every day of the rest of my life popping various combinations of legally prescribed pills in an attempt to keep my demons at bay. \n\nIt took nearly two years of trial, error and near death experiences to get me onto the right \ncycle of medications. \n\nUnfortunately, the “right cycle” doesn’t always translate into the outcome you’re hoping for.\n\nSome of the pills worked. Some of them didn’t. \n\nSome of them improved my moods. Some of them made my moods worse than they were before I started taking them. \n\nSome of them made me a healthier person physically and some of them did the exact opposite.\n\nI swallow four different anti-depression and anti-anxiety pills every day, and I still suffer from the same feelings of hopelessness, apathy, rage, anxiety, depression and nihilistically driven mood swings that I suffered from when I was still drinking. \n\nI often wonder what the point of making prescription sleeping pills as dangerously powerful as they are is if they do nothing to wipe out night terrors. \n\nI also still continue to suffer from the same types of disturbing thoughts and contemplations that constantly used to rocket through my brain when I was an out of control lush. \n\nI vividly remember a period of seven hours, during some random day in 2011, when I couldn’t stop grinding my teeth and wondering how it would feel to blow my girlfriends’ head off while she was performing fellatio on me. \n \nI hate taking these goddamn pills every day! \n\nThe pills I take when I wake up in the morning make me feel frustratingly lethargic and half brain dead all day. \n\nThere are times when I’m so yakked out on pharmaceutically manufactured complacency that I have a hard time finding my cell phone when I’m holding it. \n\nI constantly lose my car keys in my pants pockets. \n\nI have a hard time remembering how to use a washing machine I’ve owned for five years. \n\nI can tell you exactly what I was doing on New Years Eve 1997, but, thanks to these pills, I often can’t seem to ever remember why I open my fridge; in spite of the fact that my stomach is growling. \n\nThe only reason why I know what day of the week it is anymore is because my pill divider is labeled and I’ve literally lost count of the number of times I’ve almost been killed by a motor vehicle because I forgot I was standing off a street curb and waiting until it was safe \nto cross.\n\nThe tranquilizers I have to take just to fall asleep at night aren’t much safer. \n\nThe goddamn things are so strong that, although they do knock me out cold within twenty minutes, they also frequently paralyze my respiratory system while I’m sleeping. \n\nI constantly wake up an hour or two after falling asleep, clutching my chest like Redd Foxx, because my Seroquel pills cut my air supply off just enough to make me feel like I’m going to choke to death in my bed. \n\nI don’t know if this happens because I suffer from undiagnosed sleep apnea that the Seroquel makes worse of if Seroquel is just poison; or both.\n\nIt takes ten minutes of concentrated breathing before I feel comfortable lying down again after my attack is over and another half hour or so before I feel comfortable enough to try falling asleep again.\n\nI almost died in a hospital emergency room after one of my Seroquel pill episodes \nbecause the lazy, indifferent staff who work there either couldn’t understand why I was having breathing problems, thought I was faking them or just didn’t really give a shit. \n\nI have to work out constantly just to keep the ridiculous amount of fat that prescription drugs pack onto my body off of me so that I don’t involuntarily enter into the realm of morbid obesity and suffer a fatal heart attack. \n\nIf that’s not bad enough, I also have this quirky habit of waking up at exactly 2:30 every morning screaming at the top of my lungs like someone just dropped a 10lb bowling ball on my exposed toes. \n\nThat’s just the product of the (multiple times a night) terrors that my sleeping medication is supposed to help suppress. \n\nI wake up screaming so often that I’ve already undergone four major throat surgeries to repair torn vocal chords.\n\nI don’t even realize these screaming episodes are happening until I snap out of the mania, saturated in sweat, and sorrowfully come to terms with the fact that the pillow I was hatefully strangling the life out of wasn’t actually Tyler Perry’s neck. \n\nI hate that motherfucker, with a violent, burning passion; but I digress.\n\nAs stated previously, I hate taking these pills.\nThey just barely serve their purpose and, sometimes, they don’t even do that. \n\nIn my case, the purpose of these drugs isn’t to cure the severe depression and anxiety that makes me want to blow my brains out all the time. \n\nThe pills I choke down every day are designed specifically to both bleed me dry financially for the rest of my life and slowly prolong the inevitable. \n\nI’m also certain that my daily consumptions of these pills is taking years off of my life by attacking the functioning ability of my internal organs. \n\nIt’s a crapshoot no matter how I look at it though, because I know I’m playing Russian roulette with my health every time I swallow these fucking pills. \n\nYet, sadly, I also know that if I stop taking them, it will only be a matter of days before my depression becomes so overwhelming that it will drive me to walk into my living room dressed like Groucho Marx and blow my brains out with a shotgun in front of my family.\n\nSo I guess my question for all you members of the holier than thou club, as it pertains to the proper way of coping with your problems, is this: \n\nWhen you abandon the immoral and illegal coping mechanisms that you subscribed to, as necessary, because they were destroying your body and mind, just to turn around and adapt to the moral and legal ones that you have to entertain every day of your life until the day you die, in spite of the fact that those coping mechanisms are also destroying your body and mind, what makes the legal avenues any more healthy and responsible than the illegal ones?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\n\nChapter 1: Home, Sweet, Home\nChapter 2: “Sorry, I Already Wrote the Ticket”\nChapter 3: A Nightmare on Seneca Street\nChapter 4: ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’\nChapter 5: Dancing Away My Hunger Pains\nChapter 6: God is a Fucking Asshole\nChapter 7: ‘Mommie Dearest’\nChapter 8: Who’s Your Daddy?\nChapter 9: Powdered Milk & Welfare Cheese\nChapter 10: There’s No Place Like Hell \nChapter 11: How the Mighty Have Fallen\nChapter 12: Fat Chicks Need Love, Too?\nChapter 13: No Time for Tears \nChapter 14: The Summer of Death\nChapter 15: Shake Your Groove Thing\nChapter 16: When I Bite Into a York Peppermint Pattie\nChapter 17: Better Off Dead\nChapter 18: “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da; Life Goes On” \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHome, Sweet, Home\n\nBuffalo, New York is affectionately known as the City of Good Neighbors to people who can stomach the putrid taste of bullshit. \n\nThat classification is a misnomer at best. \n\nThe truth of the matter is that Buffalo, New York is nothing more than a festering cesspool of broken promises, abandoned businesses, lost Super Bowls and embittered hockey fans who can’t take pride in anything beyond the creation of a style of chicken wing spiced hotly enough to burn our tongues off.\n\nI was born into this hell hole on August 12, 1981; to Peter C. Taboni III and Dawn L. McLaughlin. \n\nMy father was so ecstatic when my mother told him she was pregnant with me that he celebrated the news by trying to punch her in her face for “trapping him”.\n\nShe reacted quickly enough to dodge his punch and he wound up breaking his hand on a brick wall. \n\nThis wouldn’t be the last time that my old man would severely injure one of his hands in the name of trying to punch my mother into unconsciousness, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself here.\n\nLiving in Buffalo blows just as hard as living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania probably does. \n\nThe only legitimate difference between the two cities that I can think of is that I can’t remember watching anyone in Buffalo ever spitefully throw snowballs at Santa Claus.\n\nBuffalonians misleadingly pride themselves on coming together as one when times get tough. \n\nThat fallacy, including dozens of others that have come to improperly define this dumpster fire we call a city, makes me the sickest. \n\nBuffalonians don’t give a fuck about anyone except ourselves. \n\nMost of us have lived in this shithole for so long that it’s forced us to adapt to a cruel mentality of personal selfishness and societal indifference for the sake of our individual survival. \n\nWe come to each others’ rescue every once in awhile, but that only really happens after a crippling snowstorm demolishes our city, or after a commercial airliner randomly falls out of the sky and kills 50 people, or when our food banks need turkeys on Thanksgiving, or during the football and hockey seasons; when we gather en masse to watch both of our \nmajor professional sports teams fail with such consistency that “There’s Always Next \nYear” has become the half hearted slogan we’ve begrudgingly adopted just to keep ourselves from giving up on them entirely.\n\nBeyond that, we all pretty much hate each other, and ourselves. \n\nMost of us are always broke; no matter how many jobs we work, depressingly out of shape, miserable about the weather; regardless of the season, hooked on drugs and alcohol, defeated by our abysmal job market, products of broken marriages, and extremely bitter about the fact that every aspect of our local government is untouchably corrupt.\n\nThere’s certainly no shortage of fat, unethical scumbags who put suits on in this city every morning and call themselves politicians either. \n\nI’m not going to beat that dead horse, though, because that problem seems to be a universal one. \n\nNew York States continuously dumps impossibly high taxes into our laps every year, too. \n\nThe official reasoning for this bullshit is that it’s the only way Albany can pull our state budget out of the red, but all it really does is dig Buffalonians into deeper financial holes than the ones they were already trying to climb out of; in spite of the fact that employment opportunities, of any kind, are so scarce here that we regularly stab each other in the backs to seize one of the very few that come along during a given year.\n\nMost Buffalonians are so weary of getting fucked by the great state of New York that it makes our assholes sore. \n\nAt some point you have to wonder what sense it makes to tax a city, of less than 300,000 people, into oblivion every year, in the name of balancing the state budget, while simultaneously cutting desperately needed education, healthcare and public assistance funds, just so the Big Apple can pump billions of dollars into constructing brand new stadiums for the New York Yankees, Giants and Jets, that they didn’t need in the first place. \n\nOur lakes, ponds and creeks are too polluted to swim in. \n\nOur annual murder rate is abhorrent. \n\nOur park system is lackluster at best and, if you travel far enough into downtown Buffalo, you can gaze in awe at a collection of gigantic, awkwardly positioned windmills that most likely serve no purpose.\n\nBuffalo does have Niagara Falls to prostitute out to tourists. \n\nWhat we conveniently neglect to mention in our tourism brochures, however, is that the \nonly side of Niagara Falls worth visiting is in Canada; and you can’t even go there without a passport now.\n\nThere really is no point to making the exhausting pilgrimage to the American side of \nNiagara Falls unless you enjoy giving your hopes up for no reason or you’re just one of those crazy assholes in search of a breathtaking place to commit suicide. \n\nA disheartening portion of our brethren leave this city immediately after they turn eighteen, or immediately after they graduate from college, because a once proud and profitable city is now a ghost town, with no future, that people only continue to live in because they’ve either had the same job for thirty nine years, can’t afford to leave, or just can’t handle the reality of living thousands of miles away from the people they care about.\n\nThere’s a scene in the classic movie, Office Space, where disgruntled computer programmer extraordinaire Peter Gibbins conveys to his therapist, in an almost futile tone, that every day of his life is always worse than the day that preceded it. \n\nThere have been millions of Buffalonians, over the last couple of decades, who have been cursed with the misfortune of being able to relate to that sentiment. \n\nThis is the (very disturbing) story of one of them.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n”Sorry, I Already Wrote the Ticket”\n\nMeter maids are the lowest forms of human scum in the entire United States; having narrowly surpassed child molesters for the title when the first parking meters were installed in New York City in 1960. \n\nI hate meter maids so much that I would happily waste a million dollars trying to get Ted Kaczynski released from prison before I would donate one dollar to help cover the cost of chemotherapy treatments desperately needed by a meter maid suffering from a treatable form of cancer.\n\nMeter maids are worthless, indifferent, infuriating wastes of life who only do what they do for a living so they can spend forty hours a week making everyone else’s lives as miserable and frustrating as theirs are. \n\nIf I had the power to do it, I would force a law through Congress that would allow American citizens to murder meter maids, whenever they felt like it, without consequence.\n\nLet’s see how amusing you quarter whores think it is to stand next to a parking meter, frothing at the mouth, just so you can write me a parking ticket the second my meter expires if I’m ever granted the right to shoot your brains out for doing it. \n\n“I’m sorry, sir. I WOULD take that bullet back, but I already used it to kill you!”\n\nI hate child molesters with a passion. \n\nOne of my lifelong dreams is to murder one and, if I had the power to do it, I would force a law through Congress that would allow American citizens to murder convicted child molesters, whenever they felt like it, without consequence.\n\nIf the politicians and law enforcement officials that run this country had any juevos, they’d figure out a way to legalize the murder of a convicted child molester as soon as the jury finished reading its verdict.\n\nI don’t think anyone in this country would lose sleep at night if courtroom security guards suddenly had the authority to take a freshly convicted child molester to the front steps of a courthouse and shoot him, or her, to death in front of the media. \n\nI would wake up with a smile on my face every morning if I got paid to slowly castrate child molesters with a steak knife in front of their victims’ families every day.\n \nI just hate meter maids more than chomo’s because meter maids have the legal right to make a career out of consciously stealing money from people with zero apprehension or remorse; and there isn’t a goddamn thing that the rest us can do about it. \n\nAt least child molesters can get thrown in prison and murdered by other inmates for the \nA Nightmare on Seneca Street\n\nHaving said that, if you ask the average person what their first memories of life are, they’ll probably speak fondly of their first toys, or a vacation they took with their family, or a sleepover they went to, or cartoons they enjoyed watching, or even a birthday party at an amusement park that they were invited to.\n\nMakes sense, right? \n\nGrowing up is supposed to be, for all intents and purposes, an exciting time filled with positive, fresh experiences and blissful moments that help mold you into a productive member of society while lavishing you with heartwarming memories to reflect upon as an adult.\n\nI know I’ve never heard a well adjusted adult ever say something like: \n\n“When I was two, my dangerously insane father locked me in a dog cage for a week and dumped buckets of ice water on me, and poked me with a live cattle prod, while he gnawed on raw steaks and clucked like a chicken the entire time”. \n\nThis isn’t a perfect world though and, as such, not everyone is entitled to a childhood that plays out as famously as others. \n\nIt’s just one of the many sad realities of life that people will bitterly mock you for complaining about.\n\nAfter my mom’s very brief marriage to my dad hit the skids, at the beginning of the 1980’s, my father, being the responsible, passionate parent he was, disappeared from the picture completely. \n\nMy mother then, being the responsible, passionate parent she was, forced me and my two brothers, Michael and Steven, to live in an apartment, at 914 Seneca Street, with her scumbag, meth addict boyfriend du jour, Leroy Colts. \n\nConsequently, my first memories of life involve my brothers and I getting the shit beat out of us daily by Leroy. \n\nMy mother not only never tried to stop him from beating us but also, at times, actively participated in and encouraged the behavior.\n\nThe first time I was molested, that I can remember, was when Leroy forced me into a bedroom in that apartment, under the guise of changing my diaper, and started doing things to me with his tongue that a man in his late teens isn’t legally free to do to a two and a half year old boy in this country.\n\nI don’t think my mother ever thought Leroy was capable of doing something that \ndisgusting to a child, but when you date a guy named Leroy, shouldn’t your instincts tell \nyou that he’s probably a child molester? \n\nWhen I started screaming, mostly likely in horror, my mother asked Leroy what the fuck was going on. \n\nHe told her to close the fucking door and go back into the living room. \n\nOnce the door was locked, Leroy grabbed a metal spoon and smiled at me like Ted Bundy. \n\nWhat he did to me from there makes me too nauseous to dictate on paper, so I’ll leave it to\nyour imagination to piece together how that potential Law & Order scene ended.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’\n\nMy next Norman Rockwell style memory revolves around a tragedy so mind boggling and unnecessary that it all but guaranteed I would live the rest of my days as an emotionally distant, socially awkward misanthrope who’d forever struggle with trust issues galore and frighteningly unhealthy anger problems. \n\nMy 18-month-old brother, Steven, was badly beaten by Leroy on a March 3, 1984, and then held to the bottom of a bathtub full of water until air pockets from his lungs stopped bubbling to the surface. \n\nLeroy initially tried to convince police that Steven had drowned accidentally by falling into the tub, but that theory got shot to shit rapidly when Stevens’ coroner noticed manual strangulation marks on his neck.\n\nLeroy’s decision to get jacked up on methamphetamines that night and redefine what it meant to be a babysitter, by chasing me into a closet so he could slowly and maliciously murder my brother, destroyed both my family and, by coincidence, any chance I’d have of ever again knowing the joys of sanity.\n\nAs the story goes, my mother had gone to her mothers’ house to wash laundry that night and, since my grandmother didn’t feel like dealing with kids that evening, my mother decided, in her infinite wisdom, to leave two infant babies, and an almost three-year-old child, in the care of a nineteen-year-old, strung out meth addict who decided that killing a baby was less stressful than caring for it. \n\nMike and I were next up on the chopping block that night. \n\nThere’s zero doubt in my mind that we’d both be dead today had it not been for the cops who busted into our mini house of horrors just in time to save our lives. \n\nSometimes I wish they hadn’t saved me because I’ve selfishly wasted far too much time over the last twenty years wondering why Steven died that night and we didn’t.\n\nWhy wasn’t it me who died in a bathtub that night? \n\nDid fate decide that day that my life was more valuable than Steven’s? \n\nWhy would a supposedly loving god, that I’m supposed to worship unconditionally, allow something this horrible to happen to three innocent children?\n\nWhere was our father when all of this was happening? \n\nShould I just blow my brains out with a shotgun, or hang myself from a ceiling with barbed wire, or take a bubble bath with a toaster so I don’t have to think about this crazy shit anymore?\nWould doing any of these things even ease any of my pain? \n\nWhat if I kill myself and wind up having to shamefully explain to Steven why two lives had to end so senselessly should our paths cross in the afterlife? \n\nWhat if I kill myself and reunite with Steven and don’t have to explain anything to him because he’s still eighteen-months old there? What if there is no afterlife to take into consideration? \n\nIf there’s no afterlife, would there even be a point to killing myself in the first place?\n\nTormenting queries like these tear me apart on the inside routinely. \n\nI’ve been told that a theory known as Survivor’s Guilt is what drives this never ending battle to understand something that I’ll never realistically be able to come to terms with. \n\nI’d have spilled buckets of tears over this situation by now if I weren’t so bitter about it.\n\nI casually day dream about how delightful it would be for me if I could hunt Leroy down, handcuff him to a chair in an abandoned warehouse, Reservoir Dogs style, and slowly end his life in the most heartless and painful ways possible. \n\nWhen I was twenty four, I devised a disturbing plan to get revenge on that scumbag which involved taking him to a beach and talking to him about that night over some beers; under the false pretense of burying the hatchet. \n\nThen, after his skin was sunburned to my liking, I was going to knock him out with chloroform, drive him to my basement, tie his arms and legs to a table made of nails and then tickle his feet with feathers and slowly gouge his eyes out with a metal spoon at the same time; while using a pair of the highest quality headphones in existence to blast the sounds of a Barry Manilow greatest hits CD into his ears.\n\nI’ll probably never get the opportunity to live out those fantasies though, because even if Leroy isn’t dead yet, I’ve been told that the piss drinking coward changed his name legally and, as such, I have no means of contacting him. \n\nI’m at an age now where I’ve learned to care about needs beyond my own, so it would probably be best for everyone in my family if that day never transpires anyway.\n\nFive years ago, I would have had no reservations whatsoever about killing that motherfucker and spending the rest of my life in prison for premeditated, aggravated, first-degree murder. \n\nHowever, I’m an uncle to two kids now that I love more than I love myself, so I don’t want to force my niece, Sophia, and nephew, Steven, into the unfair position of only being able to talk to me through a thick glass window for the rest of my life if I don’t have to. \nAs a result of that night, my mother was sent to jail for six months, our entire family was \ndestroyed irreparably, in every way imaginable, my father lost a son, I became an unbearable prick and Mr. Colts was sentenced to, I believe, seven years in prison. \n\nSEVEN YEARS!\n\nApparently that’s all the time the justice system in New York State felt that a man who murdered a baby, while he was whacked out of his mind on crystal meth, deserved to spend in prison.\n\nThe only comfort I’ve ever been able to take from the outcome of that night of \nsatanic shenanigans is that Leroy didn’t kill Steven in Florida. \n\nOtherwise, he probably wouldn’t have been convicted of anything expect lying to the police.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDancing Away My Hunger Pains\n\nMike and I were shipped off to foster care after Stevens’ death because my mother was in jail and my father was still a loser who didn’t feel any sort of obligation to be a man and father the children he’d fathered. \n\nWe were sent to different foster homes, so I didn’t see Mike again until he was about three-years-old. \n\nI could rattle off thousands of reasons for why I no longer believe in God, and the brutalities I suffered during the time I spent in my first foster home could swallow up a sizeable portion of them.\n\nFrom the minute I entered foster care, until some point during my fifth year of life, every day I spent in the system was a devastating battle to avoid succumbing to the heart hardening knowledge that no adult on earth gave a shit whether I lived or died anymore.\n\nThe only difference between the soul crushing sentence I served in foster care, and the one Amanda Berry served while she was locked in a basement in Cleveland, Ohio for ten years, is that I was legally kidnapped and forced to live in Hell. \n\nIn retrospect, I probably could have been yanked off the street and locked in the basement of a child molesting psychopath for ten years, instead of living in foster care, and it most likely wouldn’t have made a goddamn difference in the context of how I was molded into the person I am today.\n\nI was lucky enough to only be placed into two foster homes while in care of the state; from the best that I can recollect. \n\nI say I was lucky because there are millions of children in America that get shuffled through foster home after foster home, from the day they’re born until the day they’re of legal age to escape it; assuming they aren’t dead or in jail before then.\n\nI only vaguely remember what life was like for me in my first foster home. \n\nAs I was being driven up to it by my caseworker, I remember blurting out, “These aren’t houses. Why are we here?”\n\nShe then proceeded to tell me, in the most deadpan tone ever, that this is where I was going to be living now. \n\nI started crying hysterically when she said that because “where I was going to be living now” was in a trailer park.\n\nI’d never seen such a disgusting, unsanitary living environment in my life. \n\nAs I looked around, I noticed things like overflowing garbage cans, garbage in the streets \nand on peoples’ lawns, clothing hanging on clothing lines, people drinking water from garden hoses, piles of dog shit covered almost entirely in bugs, guys who were having award winning ass ripping contests, shameless drug abuse and kids who were so dirty that I started to wonder if bathing was a sin. \n\nMost of the adults living in this glorified landfill were slobs who clearly didn’t give a shit about their appearances. \n\nThey carried paper spit cups for their chew spit, wore ripped jeans, ripped shorts, stained shirts, jeans with holes that were purposely cut out of the knees, sneakers without socks, sneakers with gaping holes in them and aged hats with quips emblazoned on the fronts of them that I was still too young to find the humor in.\n \nThe crackling sounds that the gravel beneath our moving tires was making, as we continued forward, just made me cry harder and harder. \n\nOne lady, dressed in black jeans, green flip flops and a sleeveless flannel shirt with a soft pack of Marlboro cigarettes nestled snugly into the shirts’ front pocket, looked into the window on my side of the car and smiled at me while we were driving past her. \n\nShe had noticeably unwashed hair, her well past middle aged tits sagged to her belly button like half filled water balloons and I almost went blind when I looked at her teeth because of how yellow they were. \n\nAs we pulled up to the trailer I was to assigned to, I begged my case worker to send me back to my mom. \n\nGiven my current surroundings, it seemed worth the risk.\n\nMy trailer was just as big a dump as all the other trailers in that park. \n\nIt was painted white, but it hadn’t been touched up in so long that most of it looked moldy. \n\nMultiple parts of the trailers’ roof top exterior were rusted and there were two motorcycles parked on the side lawn; one for a woman and one for a man. \n\nThe people who were going to be my new parents, whose names I never knew, were bikers. \n\nIt was obvious to me by the way they dressed, smelled and carried themselves. \n\nIt’s like the old saying goes, “If it walks like a biker and it talks like a biker, it’s probably a scumbag.”\n\nMy case worker and I got out of the car to introduce me to my new family while tears were \nstill cascading down my face. \nA few minutes later, she got back into her car, drove away, and I never saw her again. \n\nI thought about running away as soon as her car disappeared, but where was a diaper bound three-year-old going to run away to?\n\nI knew my life in this trailer was going to be miserable from the second I entered it. \n\nIt was dirty beyond description. \n\nIt looked like these people only cleaned up after themselves when they absolutely had to and I literally had to kick trash and empty beer cans out of my way just to get to my room.\n\nIt should go without saying that I lived in filth the entire time I was stationed in that mobile home. \n\nI was also treated like dirt for no reason. \n\nI was rarely bathed, criminally underfed and always afraid for my life. \n\nI basically lived the life of one of Kathy Lee Giffords’ sweatshop clothing sewing orphans; with the sole exception being that I didn’t earn five cents a day for all the times I got whipped with a belt.\n\nI never had a toothbrush in that trailer, so the morning routine at that place started with the wife making breakfast. \n\nIf I was awake when it was made, I ate. \n\nIf I wasn’t awake, I didn’t eat until dinner. \n\nI guess it was asking too much of these people to wake me up in the morning so that I wouldn’t go hungry for the rest of the day.\n\nDuring the times that I was fortunate enough to eat breakfast, I wasn’t allowed to eat at the kitchen table. \n\nI was usually dragged by my hair or arm, with my cereal in my hand, and forced to cry and eat at the same time, in the same room I spent most of my days locked inside of. \n\nWhen breakfast was over, I either got my diaper changed or I didn’t. \n\nWhether or not that happened depended exclusively on the mood those people were in on a given morning. \n\nAfter breakfast, I always got locked in my room, alone, for hours at a time, so that those clowns could go do whatever they had to do that day without having to deal with the added \nstresses of dragging a three-year-old around with them or paying for a babysitter.\n\nI spent most of my afternoons lying on a bed, in a room without windows, staring at yellow walls, struggling to control my bowels and wondering persistently what the fuck I’d done to deserve the life I was living. \n\nIt was also during this time period that I started developing my sleeping issues and night terror problems. \n\nThere was a collection of children’s books in my room I used to flip through to kill time. \n\nThey were called Golden Books. \n\nThey were extremely animated books and the covers, along with pages in between, were littered with cute little animals. \n\nThe problem with these books, for me, is that there is also a picture of a growling lion stamped into the center of the back covers of most of them, and I was mortified by the sight of lions at the time.\n\nI spent so much time flipping through those books every day that, whenever I fell asleep, I’d have persistent nightmares about either the Golden Books lion charging out of a wall to eat me alive or of someone on a motorcycle flying out of that same wall to run me over.\n\nI don’t think I ever ate lunch while I was living in that trailer because no one was home during that time of the day and I wasn’t a locksmith. \n\nDinner time came with the same caveats as breakfast. \n\nI ate dinner more often than breakfast, but that was only because I was so famished from not eating all day that the hunger pains in my stomach wouldn’t allow me to sleep until I ate something. \n\nI wasn’t allowed to eat dinner in the kitchen either.\n\nBed time at that place was never a pleasant experience for me either. \n\nI either fell asleep crying or got my entire body whipped with a belt first; an act aided mostly by my current foster fathers’ nightly trysts with a bottle of whiskey. \n\nThe case worker in charge of my file must have noticed eventually that I was being neglected and abused because I was moved to my second foster home shortly after one of her very few visits.\n\n\n\nGod is a Fucking Asshole\n\nI was reunited with Mike, sometime in the late 1980’s, when I was transferred to a foster home located on a pristine looking street named Lakewood; in a suburb of Buffalo known as Lackawanna, New York. \n\nI don’t know if he’d beaten me there or if we were both sent there on the same day, but I didn’t care. \n\nI was just happy to be with my brother again and relieved to know that he wasn’t dead, too.\n\nThe house we were going to be living in looked like a castle compared to the shitholes I’d previously inhabited. \n\nIt was two stories tall, painted lime green and kept clean as a whistle nearly twenty four hours a day. \n\nThe outside front of the house, which wasn’t fenced in, had a decent sized lawn, a mini porch that led to an immaculate looking garden and a concrete driveway that led from the sidewalk to the front door. \n\nThat driveway was so wide and long that you could park a full sized van in it and still have enough room left over to play basketball.\n\nThe backyard, which was fenced in, was so massive that kids could run around in it comfortably despite the fact that it contained a six foot tall tool shed, a pool deck/patio that you could throw parties on and a swimming pool so enormous that ten people could play volleyball in it. \n\nThe inside of the house consisted of a basement, kitchen, dining room, living room, bathroom, attic and four bedrooms that were much bigger than any bedrooms I’d ever seen. \n\nThis house was, and still is, located in a quiet neighborhood, with little street traffic, that is totally void of the every day hassles and bullshit you have to tolerate when you live in the city. \n\nAll of our neighbors were really nice people, so making friends was an extremely easy thing to do. \n\nIt felt as if I were upgrading from living in a disgusting inner city alley to living in that perfect American neighborhood that you thought only existed in movies like The Sandlot.\n\nThe house is located about three blocks away from a now useless Bethlehem Steel plant. \n\nThere was also an Off Track Betting building at the beginning of our street as well as a \nplayground and makeshift beach located at the south end. \n\nWe never got to swim in that beach while we lived there because it’s an extension of Lake Erie which was, and still is, constantly being over polluted with factory waste and toxic chemicals.\n\nI remember standing on the front lawn of my new home that day, grinning from ear to ear, and thinking to myself that I was in Heaven and that I was never going to let anyone take me out of it. \n\nVictory, as Stewie Griffin likes to say, was mine! \n\nI was so happy that day that I probably could have pissed sunshine. \n\nThis foster home, that I was madly in love with, was run by the husband and wife team of Frank and Debbie Green. \n\nTo the best of my knowledge, they were never able to bear children of their own, so I guess raising foster children was a welcome alternative to being childless for them.\n\nDebbie was a middle aged, stay at home wife. \n\nShe was a disciplinarian when she needed to be but also the most loving foster mother a kid could ever hope for. \n\nFrank was a middle aged, technological genius who was never too full of his own shit to be a goofball but, like Debbie, he also brought the hammer down when a situation called for it.\n\nAside from the occasional spankings we got when we knew we deserved them, we were never abused physically or mentally by either of them. \n\nCorporal punishment was something that Frank and Debbie didn’t seem to have ingrained in their DNA. \n\nI loved Frank and Debbie unconditionally, and had no problem whatsoever with leaving the foster part out of the equation when people would ask me who my parents were. \n\nAs far as I was concerned, my birth parents no longer existed. \n\nThey had become an expendable figment of my childish imagination by then and, if fate had decided that I was to never see either of them again, I wouldn’t have had a problem with it. \n\nI actually hoped and prayed that I’d never see either of them again because the only three \nintangibles I could associate either of them with were death, misery and pain; and I \ncouldn’t see how that would change just because we hadn’t seen each other in a few years. \n\nThe Green House was littered with enough kids, by the time Mike and I got there, to make it obvious to me that Frank and Debbie either really loved kids or they just did a masterful job of pretending that they loved kids so that they could continue receiving the checks they were getting from the state to harbor us.\n\nBy the time Mike and I got to the Greens’ house, there were already two young boys and two teenaged girls living there. \n\nMost houses with six kids and two parents living in it tend to feel cramped and overcrowded, but I never felt like that was a problem.\n\nAfter settling into what I believed, at the time, to be a normal life, I actually thought that God was on my side for once. \n\nI started school, wore clothes that didn’t come from a homeless shelter, had more toys than I could ever play with, a safe places to play at after school, three nutritious, filling meals every day and a cozy, clean bedroom to sleep in every night.\n\nI discovered showers and junk food there, learned what Saturday morning cartoons were and gleefully attended church every Sunday because I wanted to thank God personally for finally cutting Mike and I a break.\n\nThe holidays at that place were some of the best days of my life.\n\nOn Easter, our house was decorated with things such as life sized, stuffed Easter bunnies\nand actual Easter eggs and baskets. \n\nOur personal Easter baskets were always filled with so much candy that I would be toothless today if it wasn’t for parental discretion.\n\nOn the Fourth of July, every inch of the inside and outside of our house was draped in American flags and other decorations to represent the pride we had for our country. \n\nFrank was a veteran, so this was always an especially meaningful day for him. \n\nOur street closed off for every 4th for a block party and, at nightfall, fireworks exploded all over the neighborhood for what seemed like hours.\n\nOn Halloween, the interior and exterior of our house was transformed into a full blown haunted house. \n\nIt was easily the coolest thing I’d ever seen. \n\nSince we lived in a well to do neighborhood as well, our candy scores at the end of the night \nweren’t too shabby.\n\nI always had an extra pep in my step during the Christmas season because our house was completely decorated like the North Pole and I still believed in Santa at the time. \n\nChristmas morning was the best day of my life when I lived with the Green’s. \n\nThere were so many presents in the living room on Christmas morning that they usually camouflaged the tree and barely left any standing room. \n\nI can’t ever remember opening that many presents in any of the other places I’ve ever lived.\n\n\nThe good times I had while living with the Green’s far outweighed the bad; but there were bad times. \n\nBed time for the kids at the Green house was 8pm during the school year; including Saturdays and Sundays. \n\nTo help wind us down after the normally crazy days we’d put in as physically active children, we were allowed to watch two hours of television before bed. \n\nThe mistake that Debbie almost always made, that she probably never caught on to, was that she quizzically chose to limit our viewing options to rated R movies, with no noticeable concern for the fact that we were young children who had to go to sleep after the movies were over.\n\nI watched so many R rated movies during my time in that house that I credit that exposure specifically for birthing the disturbing, inappropriate creativity I’m currently unleashing in this book. \n\nBy the time I was six, I had already seen every Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser and Sleepaway Camp movie released to that point.\n\nAll of those movies were tremendous mind fucks for a kid my age, but the movie series that started intensifying my sleeping issues and night terror problems was the Puppet Masters franchise. \n\nThe idea that a gang of puppets could walk around a city and randomly kill people, for no discernable reason, in ways that Al-Qaeda terrorists would salute, was hard enough for me to swallow. \n\nI was deathly afraid of, and severely disturbed by, all of the puppets in those movies, but the puppet that was directly responsible for my fear of going to sleep at night, as a six-year-old, was a puppet named Tunneler. \n\nTunneler was a puppet with a drill on his head that killed people by, no surprise here, \ndrilling holes into their brains. \n\nThe right side of my bedroom in that house was next to a hallway, with a dresser in it, and a lamp on top of that dresser that was only inches out of my view. \n\nWhen the lamp was turned on at night, the reflection of the lamp shade looked eerily similar to Tunneler’s drill head. \n\nSince our bedroom doors weren’t allowed to be closed, I spent most of my nights that year staring at that reflection and shivering in fear at the thought of Tunneler drilling a hole in me and killing me if I fell asleep. \n \nIt didn’t help my cause that, on the left side of my bed, there was a huge, curtainless window that gave me a complete view of our front yard, the street, and all of the houses on the other side of that street. \n\nSo if Tunneler couldn’t get to me from our hallway, I feared that all the other puppets had to do was shatter my window and do the job for him.\n\nI was also molested, for the second and final time, in that house. \n\nI was still six when it happened and, because of that, I can remember every single second of it.\n\nI was watching cartoons on our living room couch when one of the teenage girls I lived with, Leah, came into the living room. \n\nWhen she saw me lying there, she slowly positioned herself on the couch so that her entire chest was resting on my legs. \n\nAfter staring at me for a few seconds, she pulled my glow in the dark Thunder Cat’s pajama pants and underwear down and started blowing me. \n\nIt didn’t matter to her in the least that I wasn’t yet old enough to get an erection. \n\nTwenty five years ago, part of me thought it was sort of cool to have a slightly overweight, sixteen-year-old butter face give me head when I was only six. \n\nToday, I’d rip her goddamn throat out with my bare right hand and fuck the hole in her neck until she choked to death for doing that to me.\n\nLeah wasn’t very long into her one woman dick sucking marathon before Debbie got curious and walked into the living room to try to find out what we were up to. \n\nI was too afraid of what would happen to me if I told her, so I kept my mouth shut. \nLeah just smiled at Debbie and told her we were just “fooling around”.\n\nThe perturbed look on Debbie’s face when she asked us what we were doing led me to believe that she’d already known the answer to her question. \n\nThe fact that she did nothing to stop it from continuing left me unspeakably puzzled. \n\nWhen the sexual shenanigans were finally over, Leah left the room and I stared blankly at the television while I tried to process what had just happened to me. \n\nI honestly didn’t know if I should have been pissed off or indifferent.\n\nI later came to the conclusion that I wasn’t happy with Debbie for not protecting me from essentially being raped, but I was so used to being left for dead by that point that I didn’t let it eat at me.\n\nThe worst of the bad times at that place came shortly after I turned seven. \n\nDebbie sat Mike and I down and told us that she had something important to tell us that we probably weren’t going to like hearing from her. \n\nI’m pretty sure all of the color drained from my face immediately after she said that because the only thing I could think of that I wouldn’t like hearing her say was that our stay with her was over.\n\nShe then proceeded to explain to us that foster care is normally a temporary living situation for children and, as much as she wanted to keep us under her roof, the state had decided that my mother was fit for parenting again and there was nothing she could legally do to keep us away from her. \n\nI started crying like a baby when she said that because I felt this overwhelming sense of dread flush over my entire body. \n\nI knew that the best days of my life were officially over, at seven fucking years old, and I was fucking furious about it. \n\nI spent what little time I had left with Frank and Debbie trying to have as much fun as there was left for me to have while living in complete denial about the upcoming change in my living situation. \n\nI constantly tried to convince myself that I wasn’t really leaving. \n\nI tried to brush Debbie’s words off as a product of one of the many night terrors I was so used to having.\n\nI lived in that numbing denial for two or three more weeks, but I was forcefully snapped \nout of it one afternoon when a car my mother was driving pulled up to our parking lot. \n\nShe got out of that car, pleasantly introduced herself to Mike and I as if we’d never met before, and gave us both a hug that made, at least me, sick to my stomach. \n\nThe first time I ever thought about committing suicide was when my mother told us that it was time to go home. \n\nI lightly puked in my mouth after she said that because, as far as I was concerned, I was already home and she was tearing me away from that home with zero concern for what I wanted or for how being torn away from it made me feel. \n\nMy mothers’ unapologetic apathy for the way my brothers and I ever felt about any changes that she made to our lifestyles, necessary or otherwise, became a trend for her that didn’t die until the day she did; and I always hated her for it.\n\nAfter saying my tearful goodbye’s to Frank and Debbie, and my foster siblings, and our wonderful neighbors, and my life as I would have preferred it, I got into the back of my mothers’ car and sat in my seat with my head down.\n\nTwo thoughts ran through my mind as we drove away forever from concrete familial stability and all the comforts that came with it, “I’m never going to be a happy person”, and, “God is a fucking asshole”. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n‘Mommie Dearest’\n\nAfter leaving the Green family back in Lackawanna, my mother brought Mike and I directly to her apartment in South Buffalo, New York. \n\nWhen Mike and I got back to my mother’s apartment that day, we had three life altering surprises waiting for us. \n\nThe first of those surprises was a brother named Jeffrey that my mother gave birth to while Mike and I were in foster care.\n\nThe second surprise was a bun in her oven that my mother would name Patrick. \n\nI didn’t find out that Patrick was only a half brother to the three of us until after I graduated from college in 2004; when she suddenly stopped trying to beat everyone to the mailbox on days when she knew that a child support check would be waiting for her inside of it.\n\nLearning that Patrick was only a half brother to me was stunning, but it never drove me to treat him like anything other than my brother. \n\nThe fact that my mother purposely withheld that information from me, for fifteen years, was so far beyond infuriating and offensive to me that I seriously considered punching her in her face for lying to me for that long. \n\nThe third surprise that awaited Mike and I that day turned an occasion that should have been a happy one into an unprovoked way for my mother to torture us emotionally. \n\nIt also set the stage for the seventeen years of hell that living with her, and eventually my father, was going to rain down upon us.\n\nIn yet another of the thousands of cunt moves that my mother would pull on her children over the next twenty years, she brought Mike and I into her bathroom and showed us two purring kittens sitting on sheets of newspaper in her bathtub.\n\nDon’t worry; there wasn’t any water in this one.\n\nShe told us that the kittens were welcome home presents for us and that we could name them whatever we wanted and keep them for as long as we took care of them. \n\nSix days later, the sick, evil bitch loaded me, Mike and the kittens into her car and forced us to release them into an enormous nature preserve in South Buffalo named Tift Farms. \n\nShe forced us to do that because, surprise, it’s incredibly difficult for a five-year-old and a seven-year-old to shoulder the daily responsibilities that come with raising cats; especially when those kids had never had pets before and had no idea how to care for them. \nI suppose she could have shown us how to properly care for them, but that would have required her to give a shit.\n\nMike and I were visibly upset for days over what my mother made us do to those kittens and she couldn’t have cared less if someone paid her to try. \n\nIt actually made her smile to see us traumatized like that. \n\nThe best way to describe the kind of person my mother was for most of her life would be to say that she was a mirror imagine of the way Joan Crawford was portrayed in Mommie Dearest; sans the unreasonable hatred for metal coat hangers.\n\nMy mother was a physically lazy person who viewed her children as nothing more than nuisances she could exploit for financial and personal gains. \n\nIf she cared about any of the four of us in the ways that a mother is supposed to care about her children, she wouldn’t have smoked, consumed alcohol and abused illegal narcotics for the entirety of all of her pregnancies. \n\nTo her, we were nothing more than tools that she could use to bleed the welfare system dry, until we all reached adulthood, so that she wouldn’t have to bother working for a living. \n\nWhen the welfare well ran dry around 2003, she started selling portions of all of my fathers’ pain pills every month to keep her head above water financially. \n\nThat went over with my father like a fart in church, but he had no choice but to tolerate it. \n\nShe also took perverse pleasure from the fact that her kids were born healthy enough to be treated like slaves. \n\nAs such, I became one at the age of seven. \n\nIt was my job to keep our apartments clean almost every day and God help me if I refused. \n\nThat abuse of power didn’t stop until 2001, when I was twenty and ninety miles away at college.\n\nMy mother was an intellectual person, so she preferred verbally abusing her kids over beating them, but that in no ways means that she didn’t kick our asses whenever she felt like it. \n\nShe used to beat us almost as badly as my father did, and whether what we did to drive her to beat us was intentional or not was totally irrelevant. \n\nShe pushed me down a flight of stairs, that started on the second floor of a duplex, when I \nwas ten, because I tripped over a nightstand and accidentally broke my first pair of \nembarrassing looking welfare funded eyeglasses. \n\nShe tried to subtly kill me by way of food poisoning at around the same time, failed, and threw a school desk at me instead. \n\nIt probably would have crushed my skull had it connected. \n\nShe beat met senseless on my thirteenth birthday for defending myself in a fist fight because I threw a punch hard enough to burst blood vessels in the right eye of the kid who started the fight. \n\nI hated my mother for most of my childhood because of all the horrible things she did and said to her kids, but I also respected her for at least trying, as basically a single parent, to raise us the right way even though she knew that she lacked the mental equipment necessary for the job.\n\n\nAny respect I may have had for her on a personal level disappeared after I graduated from eighth grade and she told me that I was too stupid to apply to a prestigious public high school in Buffalo just because she wanted to force me into a private, all male high school. \n\nI never figured out whether she forced that on me to further her legacy as the queen of emotional torture or because she was trying to turn me into a homosexual; but I hated her for the rest of her life for doing it.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWho’s Your Daddy?\n\nMy father was a worthless piece of shit. \n\nI hated his guts from the day I met him until the day he died. \n\nThe only lessons my dad ever (indirectly) taught me about being a father were negative. \n\nMy biggest regret about cremating him after he passed away was that I lacked the foresight to bury him so that he’d have a grave to dance on. \n \nAfter spending north of a decade doing everything he could possibly think of to avoid being a father to his children, my dad moved in with us sometime in 1990; effectively locking the gates of Hell behind him and swallowing the key.\n\nMy father didn’t move in with us because he felt guilty about being an absent parent for so long, or because he missed his kids, or because he loved my mother and desperately wanted to make up for lost time. \n\nHe moved in with us because he was a drug and alcohol abusing, eighth grade drop out who never learned how to read at an adult level, never had a drivers’ license and never knew how to function as a self-sufficient adult.\n\nIf my father could have found anyone else on this planet to take care of him for the rest of his life besides my mother, none of his kids would have ever seen him unless we accidentally crossed paths with him in public; and we all would have been better off for it.\n\nThe man-child I was forced to call “dad” was a physically and verbally abusive dirtbag who spent the majority of my childhood getting wasted as often as he possibly could and either passing out in random sections of our apartments or using his deplorable condition as justification for beating the living shit out of my mother and her kids with startling ferocity.\n\nYou’d think that a guy who’d already lost one of his kids to unforgivable violence would, at the very least, TRY to treat the ones he had left humanely; but that wasn’t my old mans’ style. \n\nHe was also an emotional retard who never made any attempt to connect with his children, on a positive level, until it was too late. \n\nI resented my father tremendously for making me feel like I had to carry the load of being a father to my own brothers, starting at the ripe old age of eleven, just because he didn’t feel like putting in the effort.\n\nSome people say, in jest, that their father never hugged them and then laugh hysterically at the absurd nature of the comment they just made. \nMy brothers and I used to say that, too, but we never had the privilege of being able to \nlaugh after we said it. \n\nHis contempt for us was so intense throughout his life that, on the rare occasions that we did try to hug that dickhead, he’d push us away and ask us if we were faggots. \n\nThe best part about living with my dad was when he wasn’t home. \n\nAt least then I didn’t have to spend all day worrying about which brother I’d have to jump on top of to keep my dad from killing. \n\nOne of his favorite pastimes was using a fight with my mother as an excuse to walk out on us for five straight days without saying where he was going when he left of telling us where he was when he came back. \n\n\nI didn’t really care where he went when he left. \n\nI was just glad he was gone. \n\nI was more concerned with praying that my dad would overdose fatally, or get hit by a truck, or get killed by one of his drug dealers while he was gone so that he couldn’t come back.\n \nI hated every minute I had to waste dealing with that mother fucker while he was home. \n\nHis idea of spending quality time with his kids usually involved heart warming activities including, but not limited to: telling us how much he hated us, threatening to kill us in our sleep, whipping steel toe boots at our heads, pulling our hair out, pounding us into the ground with his fists, turning the cold water on in the kitchen sink when we took showers, slamming us against walls with the intention of cracking our skulls open and sending us to bed without dinner; just because he thought that was funny. \n\nAny chance he had of earning my respect dissolved faster than a water bound Alka Seltzer tablet when I was twelve and was forced to watch, in complete disgust, as he broke his right hand on the back of my mothers’ head after punching her in it.\n\nI promised myself that day that, as soon as I matured enough physically, I was going \nto beat him to death, in the blindest rage possible, and tell the cops that he was trying to molest me so that I wouldn’t go to jail for murder.\n\nUnfortunately for me, that physical maturity didn’t culminate until he’d already morphed himself into a walking cripple, in the year 2000, after dicking around at his factory job one day, most assuredly under the influence and breaking some of the most important bones and vertebrae in his back and neck.\n\nAfter he broke his back, he became such a shell of the merciless, violent ass wipe that he \nwas before suffering that injury that beating the shit out of him at that point would have \nbeen about as satisfying as winning a fist fight against Stephen Hawking.\n\nI’ve heard it mumbled that if you look hard enough, you can find the good in everybody. \n\nThe asshole who first said that obviously never knew my father. \n\nMy dad was such a lowlife that he would steal our birthday and graduation cards when they came by mail so he could use the money in those cards to feed his addictions. \n\nI went to bingo with my mom for the first time when I was nine. \n\nI played my own boards, but my mother had to call bingo and collect my winnings for me because I was way too young to gamble. \n\nI walked away with $17 that night. \n\nWhen my father learned of my financial triumph, he waited until I fell asleep that night and stole the money out of the dresser drawer I tried to hide it in so that he could buy a case of beer and a pack of cigarettes.\n\nMy parents were so broke, so often, that my mother had to borrow money from people just to put presents under our Christmas tree every year; with the understanding that the money would be repaid when my father received his Christmas bonuses from work. \n\nSome of the most violent fights I ever witnessed my parents engage in when I was growing up were instigated by my mother after my father changed his mind in regards to how he decided to spend that bonus money by pissing it all away at bars.\n\nMy father was the kind of scumbag who would make life miserable for everyone in our household specifically because he didn’t want any of us to be happy. \n\nIf he had to feel miserable and dejected about life all the time, then so did we.\n\nMy mother bought me another cat when I was in fifth grade. \n\nI named him Spuds. \n\nI loved Spuds like he was my child. \n\nI fed him thrice a day, always made sure his litter box was clean, rough housed with him when we were bored and even let him sleep in my bed at night. \n\nSpuds made me happier than any human had up that point and there wasn’t anything I wasn’t willing to do to reciprocate that sentiment; within reason. \n\nWhat I knew for a fact was that I damn sure didn’t want to let my mother force me into \nunfairly abandoning another cat. \n\nWhat would later happen to Spuds, at the hands of my shit head father, really made me wish I would have. \n\nFour months after I got Spuds, my father started noticing how happy that having a cat was making me and chose to put an end to that nonsense by killing Spuds. \n\nHe went about that by, again, bravely waiting until I fell asleep, taking Spuds out of his cage and repeatedly slamming him to the ground, from a second story balcony, until Spuds was dead. \n\nThen, just to rub salt in my wound, he left Spuds’ mangled remains on the floor of our front porch so that my dead cat would be the first thing I saw when I woke up for school.\n\nI was horrified and bewildered when I found Spuds dead. \n\nMost of his teeth were missing. \n\nHe was soaked in his own blood, his left eyeball was dangling from its socket and I’m pretty sure every bone in Spuds’ body was broken. \n\nWhen my dad noticed me sitting in tears next to my dead cat, he responded by laughing at me, calling me a pussy and walking away like I was actually crying over spilled milk.\n\nThe brutal killing of my cat by my father was merely one in a multitude of horrible and unnecessary things he’d do to ensure that the day of his death would also be one of the happiest days of my life.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPowdered Milk & Welfare Cheese\n\nMost of the families in the neighborhood I grew up in, including my own, survived day to day, week to week, month to month and year to year on part time, minimum wage jobs and welfare checks. \n\nIf you were a kid growing up in South Buffalo, New York in the 1990’s, and you found a packet of paper food stamps on the sidewalk, you were either revered like a king by your friends or you got your ass kicked by teenagers who then took those food stamps and traded them to Mom and Pop stores for beer and cigarettes. \n\nI hated living on welfare. \n\nLiving on welfare for as long as we did made me feel more worthless than my parents did. \n\nMy brothers and I wore worn out, hand me down clothes and coats every day, got our boots and sneakers from Payless, if we were lucky, had to go to a community center to get most of our Christmas presents and constantly got badgered and assaulted by bullies and kids who’s families didn’t need welfare because their dad’s could pass drug tests and their mom’s weren’t too lazy to work for a living.\n\nThe only benefit to living on welfare as a kid, and being forced to dress like you’re homeless because of it, is that whenever you do get the shit beat out of you by bullies, it isn’t for the purpose of stealing the expensive attire that adorns your body. \n\nBeing a product of New York States’ welfare program in the 90’s also meant that you had to choke down some of the most disgusting, lazily produced “food” known to man. \n\nI used to think that astronauts had it rough in the culinary department when I was a kid until I had to use a butcher knife to slice through my first, foot long brick of slimy, and sometimes moldy, welfare cheese.\n\nOur milk came in powder form. \n\nOur peanut butter, for some stupid reason, came in five pound cans that you had to open with a can opener and then cover with Saran Wrap after each use. \n\nWelfare approved food was so awful in the 1990’s that it made the free breakfasts and lunches I ate in grade school taste like they were prepared by world renowned chefs.\n\nFood was such a precious commodity when I was a kid that my mother actually used measuring cups to portion out every meal for her kids so that we wouldn’t run out of it after a week.\n\nBy the time 1997 rolled around, my body was so fed up with being poisoned by the only consumables you could purchase with food stamps that I haven’t been able to eat chicken on the bone in over sixteen years and I will not even nibble on Freezer Queen dinners of any kind unless I’ve been starving for two days straight and have no other reasonable alternatives. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThere’s No Place Like Hell\n\nWhenever some Christian fundamentalist nutjob tries to frighten me with their unsolicited, improbable assumptions of the horrors that await me in Hell, because I no longer believe in God, I just snicker and rhetorically ask him or her how he or she would describe the world we live in currently.\n\nYou right wing, bible thumping sycophants can assault my eardrums with anecdote after anecdote about the fire and brimstone driven tortures I’m doomed to spend the rest of eternity enduring until your lips fall off and it’s never going to make me flinch.\n\nI’m not afraid of the Hell that I’ve read about in the Holy Bible; in part because I don’t buy any of it, but mostly because I’ve already lived in a real one. I spent every single day of the 1990’s trapped there. \n\nIt wasn’t called Hell back then, though, and it wasn’t ruled by Satan either. \n\nBack then, it was called the Taboni House, and it was ruled by two heartless, sociopathic tyrants named Peter and Dawn.\n\nI was only out of foster care for a week when I came to the discouraging conclusion that the chances my brothers and I had of surviving into adulthood, with my mother as our sole guardian, were, at best, slim. \n\nAfter my father moved in with us, I didn’t believe that any of the four of us had a snowballs’ chance in bible Hell of living long enough to celebrate our eighteenth birthdays.\n\nWhen two adults, who hate each other passionately, place themselves under the same roof for ten years, along with four children that they wish had never been born, the environment created by all of that never-ending resentment and detestation makes fantasizing about what life will be like when those kids are old enough to vote meaningless.\n\nMy mother punched me in my face when I was eleven, at around two in the morning on a school day. \n\nWhen I showed up at school five hours later, I had to lie to one of my teachers by telling her that my face was swollen because I was running around our apartment and accidentally cracked my head against a doorknob.\n\nFor a large quantity of 1991, my brothers and I would be jolted out of our beds, some time between midnight and three o’clock in the morning, on days when we had to regularly wake up for school at six o’clock. \n\nAll we’d hear before we’d get out of our beds were the terrifying sounds of our parents screaming at each other as loudly as they possibly could. \n\nBy the time we’d come out of our rooms to try to figure out what the fuck was going on, \ntheir screaming matches had already escalated into full blown warfare that involved the two of them throwing silverware and glass dishes at each other.\n\nWhen our neighbors would hear us begging and pleading with our parents to stop fighting before someone got killed, they’d immediately call the police who, after receiving about a half dozen of these panicked phone calls, knew exactly what they were in for when they came to our apartment.\n\nWhen the cops eventually arrived to break up the, by now, extremely physical fights that my parents were usually engaged in, my brothers and I were already in the process of trying to do it for them. \n\nAfter the cops were able to put an end to the situation by threatening to arrest my parents if they continued on with their bullshit, my mom and dad would spend the rest of their mornings in separate rooms while I sat on my bed and seethed with rage.\n\nI got so tired of being forced to deal with these particular fights that, after the cops left the scene of probably the seventh or eight one, I stood in my bedroom doorway and sarcastically sang the Brady Bunch theme song loudly enough for my parents to hear me in the living room. \n\nThat infuriated my mother so much that she darted toward my bedroom and punched me in my face for having the nerve to be so disrespectful. \n\nAs I sat on my bed, angrily using a pillow to contain the blood gushing from my nose, she started screaming at me and telling me that everything that ever went wrong in our family was our father’s fault. \n\nShe always used the fact that my dad didn’t really care about any of us as a way to excuse all the violence and dysfunction that both of them forced upon us for a decade for no reason. \n\nShe then told me, in no uncertain terms, that she would either kill me or place me back into foster care if I ever disrespected her like that again, but at least the dish throwing fights ceased after that night. \n\nMy parents spent the rest of the 1990’s abusing drugs and alcohol, fighting in front of us, taking their personal and financial frustrations out on us physically, bending over backwards to make every major holiday as miserable as possible, getting us evicted from every apartment we lived in, transferring us from grade schools so often that I can’t remember the names of all of the ones I attended and treating us like slaves. \n\nBoth of my parents were lazy slobs. \n\nMost of our apartments looked like garbage dumps, after two weeks of going \nunmaintained, because my parents refused to clean up after themselves. \n\nBecause why do that when you have four kids you can treat like Cinderella?\n\nMy father used to watch me spend two hours cleaning a kitchen that was literally no bigger than a two man prison cell. \n\nImmediately after I finished cleaning that kitchen, the piece of shit would walk into it and turn it into a disaster area just so he could make himself potatoes and onions for dinner. \n\nLife as a kid in the Taboni household was an experience I wouldn’t have wished on my worst enemies in the 1990’s and there are still times when I wonder how any of us survived it.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHow the Mighty Have Fallen\n\nI was so mentally and physically exhausted after I graduated from college, during the spring of 2004, that I took a vacation to Tampa, Florida that June. \n\nI never would have left Tampa, but I had no choice but to come back to Buffalo after a job offer at a radio station down there fell through. \n\nThis would mark the first of many failed attempts on my part to escape New York State entirely.\n\nI wasn’t as sorry that I had to leave Tampa as I would have been if it weren’t for the unbearably hot temperatures, aimlessly wandering alligators and multiple hurricanes that smacked Florida in the face two weeks after my departure.\n\nI used the rest of the summer of 2004 to recharge my batteries and settle on which field of journalism I was going to pursue. \n\nI was only twenty three at the time and still naïve enough to believe that the world was my oyster. \n\nI just assumed that a career in the journalism business would be looking for me as soon as I began searching for it. \n\nI began the process of firing out resumes sometime in the middle of December. \n\nSince there weren’t any companies taking my bait yet, I accepted a minimum wage job at a family owned chain of beer selling stores in Buffalo called Consumers Beverages, toward the beginning of April 2005. \n\nI knew I was lowering myself professionally by taking this job, but I was still a heavy drinker at the time so, in a way, it felt like I was being paid to work in raging alcoholic heaven. \n\nOf the two or three dozen minimum wages jobs I’ve had in my life, my job at Consumers was the only one I actually loved showing up to every day.\n\nThe job wasn’t very physically or mentally demanding. \n\nThe extent of our duties included stocking product, mopping the floors, keeping the bottle return area clean and organized, bagging ice, working the registers and feigning adoration for the bigwigs whenever they chose to grace us with their presence. \n\nIt was a tiring job sometimes and I did have days there when I wanted to strangle the life out of customers for returning $60 in beer cans ten minutes before close, but for the most part, I couldn’t complain…yet.\nIt helped store morale tremendously that my manager, Tony, and my co-workers were a \nblast to work with all the time. \n\nWe only worked with one bitch during my time there, but I got her ass fired when she tried to get me fired, on a false sexual harassment charge, because she was ugly, on the inside and out, and I refused her when she asked me out on a date because of it.\n\nMost of the customers were polite, decent people as well. \n\nThe only drawbacks to working there were that it was a minimum wage paying job and an eight mile round trip on foot for me. \n\nThere was no air conditioning in that building either and we only got paid every two weeks. \n\nOther than that, I was happier than a pig in shit for most of my employment there.\n\nConsumers Beverages is an insanely busy place during the summer for obvious reasons. \n\nIt wouldn’t be a stretch to say that we sold beer to over a hundred customers a day when I worked there. \n\nWe also sold to a lot of regulars at that place so often that we grew to know most of them personally. \n\nOne of the regulars I eventually developed a close rapport with was a guy named Dan. \n\nDan came into our store every single day, at exactly 12:30pm, and purchased the same item; a thirty pack of disgusting tasting, socially antiquated Genny Cream Ale. \n\nThe more I cashed Dan out, the closer we became. \n\nOver time, he started letting me in on the details of his life and told me that he was a forty-eight-year old former lawyer, from Chicago, Illinois, who’d moved to Buffalo to become a partner at the Cellino and Barnes law firm based in downtown, Buffalo.\n\nDan walked up to my register on a hot day in August, with his thirty pack in hand, and we exchanged our usual pleasantries. \n\nNothing seemed out of the ordinary during the bulk of this transaction until I noticed that his hands were shaking uncontrollably. \n\nAny alcoholic worth their salt knows that the shaky hands of an abusive drinker are a sign of alcohol withdrawal. \n\nI liked Dan a lot, so the fact that he was suffering from the brew shakes that early in the day had me concerned for his well being; especially at his age. \nSo, after handing Dan his change, I asked him if he’d ever considered slowing down on his \ndrinking for the sake of his health. \n\nHe then told me that he’d been drinking every day for the last five years and had no intention of quitting any time soon. \n \nSince it was a slow day, I followed up my previous question by asking Dan why he felt the need to drink thirty beers every day. \n\nI wasn’t trying to sound condescending or judgmental. \n\nI was the last person in the world at the time that had the right to ridicule anybody’s drinking habits. \n\nI was just genuinely curious.\n\nAfter a few moments of uncomfortable silence, Dan broke down and explained to me what really brought him to Buffalo. \n\nThe story he proceeded to tell me was so chilling and disturbing that I still regret asking him to elaborate on it to this day.\n\nAccording to Dan, whose last name he eventually told me was Thompson, he was a very successful prosecuting attorney in Chicago, Illinois in the 1980’s and 1990’s. \n\nHe won so many of his cases during his twenty year career that his net worth exploded into the multi-millions by 1998. \n\nHe was also voted Illinois’ Most Ethical Lawyer by the Chicago Tribune that same year. \n\nDan was also blessed, at the time, with a beautiful, supportive wife, a $4 million dollar mansion in the Chicago suburb of Palos Park, a $ 1 million vacation home in Denver, Colorado, a jet black Mercedes Benz and a six-year-old daughter named Aimee who he cherished more than all of his successes in life combined.\n\nDan was also, due to the nature of what he did for a living, one of the most at risk men in Chicago. \n\nHis life was always one bullet away from being over because most of the nefarious types of people he prosecuted, successfully or otherwise, were members of Chicago’s Russian mob. \n\nAccording to Dan, he received written death threats weekly from members of the DiFronzo crime family. \n\nAfter years of receiving what he assumed to be empty threats, Dan began brushing the \nletters off as “dick measuring contests” that he never thought about again after discarding \nthem in the trash.\n\nUnfortunately for Dan, his bravado and indifference finally pushed some members of that mob too far and six members of the DiFronzo crime family, offended by his years of no retorts, took a different approach to totally destroying Dan’s life.\n\nOn the afternoon of October 8, 1999, six hired guns of Johnny “No Nose” DiFronzo drove a black jeep, with heavily tinted windows, to his daughters’ school at the end of the school day. \n\nAs Dan’s wife, Sarah, and his daughter Aimee were approaching their car to drive home, three of the hitmen forced the girls into the jeep, at gunpoint, and sped away from the school.\n\nAfter travelling roughly thirty five terrifying miles, with their mouths taped shut and their arms tied behind their backs, Sarah and Aimee were driven another six miles into a desolate, densely wooded section of Illinois State Park.\n\nSarah and Aimee were forced out of the jeep at gun point and had their arm and mouth restraints removed. \n\nFrom there, their captors handed Sarah a shovel and told her to start digging. \n\nWhen Sarah, sobbing uncontrollably at this point and paralyzed by fear, asked why she was being forced to dig a hole, their captors told her that she was going to bury her daughter alive in it that day.\n\nSarah screamed upon hearing this news and initially told the hitmen that they might as well put a bullet in her head because there was no way in hell that she was going to dig her own daughter’s grave. \n\nTo force Sarah’s hand, one member of the crew grabbed Aimee and threatened to blow her brains out in front of Sarah if she didn’t start digging. \n\nTerrified at the thought of watching her daughter get killed, Sarah dug the grave for five hours while her captors laughed at her, mocked her and raped and sodomized Aimee the entire time. \n\nWhen Sarah finished digging the grave, a gun was forced against her left temple and she was ordered to put Aimee’s near lifeless body into the grave. \n\nAfter Sarah complied, she was then forced to cover her own daughter in six feet of dirt. \n\nTo prolong the physical and emotional agony the girls were suffering, Sarah was only permitted to drop one shovelful of dirt onto her daughter every sixty seconds. \n\nAs such, it took almost two hours to completely bury Aimee.\n\nThe lead hitman then informed Sarah that, since her daughter was now fully submerged, they would drive away and leave Sarah with the shovel so that she could at least try to save her daughter’s life. \n\nBut as soon as Sarah started digging, the lead hitman crept up behind her and blew her brains out. \n\nThey then left Sarah’s dead body sprawled across the top of her daughters’ grave and drove away.\n\nDan told me that he completely fell apart after the police found the bodies of his wife and daughter. \n\nHe quit his practice and didn’t leave his house again for two months. \n\nHe told me that he walked into a Greyhound bus station on Christmas day and only bought a ticket to Buffalo because it was the first bus headed out of Chicago when he got there. \n\nHe also told me that he spent the duration of his bus ride pondering different ways to commit suicide. \n\nAs his bus pulled into the Greyhound station in Buffalo, he’d settled on the idea of drinking himself to death. \n\nThe fact that he was still alive after drinking thirty beers a day for five years only added to his already crippling depression.\n\nDan walked out of our store in tears after he told me his story and I never saw him again. \n\nHe might have been too embarrassed about opening up to me so much to ever come back, but I never knew for sure. \n\nI assumed that he’d finally died from liver cirrhoses, but I’d hoped that telling me his story had inspired him to seek help and try to repair his shattered existence.\n\nI managed to last eight months at Consumers, but that was about it. \n\nMy first four months as an employee there were some of the most fun months of my working life, but the last four of them were nothing but miserable; as was the case with almost every minimum wage paying job I’ve ever had.\n\nDuring my last four months there, almost everyone I enjoyed working with started quitting or transferring to different stores. \n\nMost of the newbies who replaced them were assholes. \n\nI was sick and tired of waiting two weeks for a minimum wage paycheck, the customers didn’t seem as affable as once they had, my manager and I were frustrated with management for constantly fixing things that weren’t broken and it was all so demoralizing and deflating to me that I eventually just stopped giving a shit.\n\nI started checking out mentally at Consumer’s around the middle of August 2005 and spent the next four months quietly reducing my responsibilities to my job by cutting corners everywhere I could and doing the least amount of work that I could get away with doing every day.\n\nI chewed on my frustrations for as long as I could until I finally quit in early December, without notice, because I got robbed by two grown men dressed like circus clowns on a night when I was working by myself.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFat Chicks Need Love, Too?\n\nI started 2006 off with a bang by breaking my right leg almost completely in half, on April 19th, while I was fucking an obese, fifty-two-year-old woman in her asshole in her bathroom.\n\nUp to this point in my life, I had been a college graduate for roughly eighteen months and was getting bank robbery frustrated about my financial and career employment statuses; or lack thereof to be exact. The most subconsciously disingenuous thing people used to say to me during this time was:\n\n “Don’t stress out so much about being unemployed. You’re still young and extremely talented. You’ll find a job eventually.”\n\nThe problem with rage inducing, patronizing reassurances like this is that landlords, grocery stores, utility companies, student loan sharks, credit card bill collectors, used car salesmen and HMO’s don’t give a shiny shit at all about how young and ripe with potential you are. \n\nAll they give a fuck about is your money and when they can expect you to give it to them.\n\nSo to supplement the income I wasn’t earning from the career in journalism that I still didn’t have, I took $1,500 that I stole from my drug dealer and went into business for myself as a male prostitute. \n\nI wasn’t interested in doing business like the typical whore that has to carry a gun on him, wait for business to approach him on street corners, give his pimps most of his money and then get smacked around for not earning enough. \n\nSo I created a website to lend some professionalism to my newly chosen career path; all the while hoping and praying that the fed’s wouldn’t catch on. \n\nTo give my new business venture as a male whore even more credibility, my site included extremely saucy pictures of myself, false testimonials from fictional women and a page on the site that offered different price packages, for women of differing financial backgrounds, which looked exactly like this:\n\nThe Basic Bang Package: $65\n\nThis package is perfect for closet sluts, on a tight budget, who just need a quick bone job before you head off to your mid-afternoon bartending jobs. \n\nFor $65, I will show up at your house, wearing whatever clothes I woke up in, most likely drunk as a skunk and reeking like my shower is broken, screw your brains out for three minutes, if you’re lucky, and then lie to your face by implying that I enjoyed myself while I struggle to fight back vomit.\nThe Premium Party Package: $130\n\nThis package is perfect for romantic women, with looser budgets, who just want to spice up your humdrum existences every once in awhile. \n\nFor $130, I will show up at your house, sober, in a pea soup green polyester suit from the Salvation Army and a pair of bowling shoes, with a family sized plate of cooked Freezer Queen Turkey, a bouquet of flowers I ripped out of the ground at a cemetery on my way to your house and a totally insincere smile on my face. \n\nThe sex session in this package lasts one hour, if you’re lucky, with fifteen minutes designated for cuddling afterward, and, at the end of the date, a sexy slap on your ass for a job well done.\n\nThe Dutch Oven Deluxe Package: $250\n\nThis package is perfect for married women who just aren’t getting any from your well to do husbands anymore. \n\nFor $250, I will show up at your house, wearing a clean suit, and present you with a box of Whitman Sampler Chocolates, a reasonably priced bottle of champagne and a dozen red roses I bought at a grocery store on my way to your house.\n\nThe sex session in this package lasts two hours, if you’re lucky, with thirty minutes designated for cuddling afterward and the added bonus of me voluntarily listening to you complain about your problems until I just can’t stand it anymore. \n\nThe Super Premium Dutch Oven Deluxe Package: $500\n\nThis package is perfect for trophy wives who just want a piece of ass from a guy who isn’t older than the Apollo 11 moon landing. \n\nFor $500, I will show up at your house, wearing nothing but a bowtie and a smile, and present you with a tray of cooked shrimp, a bottle Dom Perignon and two bouquets of roses I purchased in advance from 1-800-FLOWERS.\n\nThe sex session in this package also lasts two hours, if you’re lucky, with one hour designated for cuddling afterward. I will also bathe you, listen to you complain about your problems, clean your house and cook you dinner, naked, before I leave.\n\nI launched my male prostitution website on January 25, 2006. \n\nI checked my inbox for interested parties every day, but didn’t receive an email from one interested party until April 19, 2006, when a woman named Norah said that she was interested in the Basic Bang Package. \n\nI wanted to kill myself after reading her email because I knew exactly what to expect from \na woman who only wanted to pay $65 for sex; and it wasn’t going to be pretty.\n\nNorah lived in a third floor project housing apartment, in the crime activity mecca of South Buffalo known as the Old First Ward, so I wasn’t exactly excited about showing up there. \n\n$65 is $65 no matter who gives it to you though, so I rode my ten speed bike to her apartment, in a snow storm, in the exact condition that the Basic Bang Package warranted.\n\nI had been drinking heavily and binging on hippy lettuce the night before and passed out at around eleven. \n\nI was too hung over the next morning to care about showering and changing into clean clothes. \n\nWhen I knocked on Norah’s door, with a look on my face that likely screamed, “I wish I was dead”, she answered it wearing brown lingerie that a woman who didn’t weigh 360lbs would have a hard time squeezing into.\n\nHer body smelled like she’d been spraying shit scented perfume on herself and she was also a regular chewer of tobacco, so the natural teeth she had left in her mouth were blacker than Usain Bolt. \n\nI couldn’t believe how green her toe nails were, but that nose crumpler paled in comparison to the physically impossible amount of greasy, slimy rolls of fat that dribbled from her stomach to her knee caps. \n\nI also didn’t care for the fact that she wore a patch over her left eye in what was probably the world’s laziest attempt to protect me from the potential diseases it was riddled with. \n\nAfter giving each other a once over, she pulled me against her blubbery body and tried to kiss me on my mouth, but her breath smelled so terrible that I quickly turned away and got assaulted with a peck on my cheek instead. \n\nHer apartment smelled like dog shit; due mostly to the fact that she had a dog whose shit she rarely bothered cleaning off of the floor. \n\nCages with dead birds in them hung from her ceiling with dirty wash cloths in them, too. \n\nShe offered me a glass of wine from a fresh box of it that she had in her fridge, but I declined her offer for a glass and slammed the entire box myself. \n\nI didn’t do that because I enjoy the raunchy taste of boxed wine. \n\nI just wanted to simultaneously shake a hangover and get hammered enough to not be able \nto remember anything we did that night the next day; and for the rest of my life for that \nmatter.\n\nHer apartment was almost impossible to walk through because she was a pig and a hoarder. \n\nShe had seven hundred cans of tuna fish in her living room, fifty nine boxes of Lucky Charms in her dining room and the largest magazine collection in her hallway that I’d ever seen.\n\nI’ll never understand why anyone would want to brag to people about the fact that they own 2,000 copies of the May 2003 issue of Fat Slobs Magazine, but she couldn’t seem to contain herself.\n\nWhen I asked Norah where she wanted to have sex, she said that her dining room had space but that her bedroom was probably the most sanitary place in the house. \n\nWhat a crock of shit that was!\n\nThe only thing sanitary about her bedroom were the napkins of the same name, that were strewn carelessly across her room and, from the best I could tell, being used to scrub menstruation blood off of her mattress.\n\nAggravated and desperate to get this car wreck over with, I took her into her bathroom and started banging her doggy style. \n\nIn order to complete the task at hand, I closed my eyes as tightly as humanly possible and pretended that I was making love to Leelee Sobieski on a yacht in the Bahamas. \n\nAbout thirty seconds into our session, I slipped awkwardly on a moldy piece of pork fat that was foot ground into the floor next to the toilet. \n\nThe slip caused me to fracture my right leg after banging it violently against a heating vent pipe. \n\nAfter screaming like a girl, I noticed that my fractured leg was stuck between the toilet and a scalding hot heating vent pipe. \n\nBecause of the break in my leg, and the burns to it that the pipe was adding, I quickly tried to keep my balance by wrapping my right arm around Norah’s sweaty gut so I could wiggle my broken leg out from between the toilet and the pipe as fast as fucking possible. \n\nIn the process of trying to free myself, I caused Norah lose her grip on the toilet seat and she slipped. \n\nAll 360lbs of her slimy, disgusting body immediately came crashing down onto my chest. \n\nThe stress that her fall put on my already fractured leg ended up causing it to break almost \ncompletely in half. \n\nI was in so much pain after the second break that I screamed like a girl, again, and begged Norah to get her fat ass off of me and go call an ambulance because I couldn’t stand up; much less walk.\n\nWhen she noticed how much distress I was in, she reacted by walking into her kitchen and making herself a triple decked bologna and cheese sandwich. \n\nAfter she finished the sandwich, she drank a 20oz can of Pepsi in three gulps and then fired out one of the manliest belches I’d ever heard come out of the mouth of a woman. \n\nShe was about to go ape shit on a $4 bag of Doritos until I threatened to drag myself into her kitchen, by my arms, and stab her to death if she didn’t put the goddamn bag down and call an ambulance for me. \n\nThe first EMT that saw the condition my leg was in got sick to her stomach and puked all over my face. \n\nAfter that happened, I asked Norah if I could borrow the shotgun under her bed long enough to blow my brains out with it.\n\nDuring one of the bumpiest ambulance rides I’ve ever taken to Mercy Hospital, I noticed that I still had a condom on my dick that was covered in Norah’s fecal matter. \n\nWith no other non humiliating options, I quickly pulled if off with my bare hand, when the EMT’s weren’t looking, and jammed it into my left back pants pocket.\n\nWhen I arrived at the hospital, a nurse instinctively shot me up with Demerol when she saw how injured my leg was. \n\nWhy she chose to shoot a narcotic painkiller into my neck is something I never got an answer for. \n\nI then spent an unreasonable amount of time lying on a gurney that the EMT’s decided to park next to a room occupied by a guy who was dying audibly from testicular cancer. \n\nI spent twenty more minutes pointlessly filling out health insurance paperwork while I drooled on myself and listened to that thirty-eight-year-old cancer patient repeatedly scream for more morphine. \n\nAs I was being wheeled to the x-ray room on my gurney, unbuckled, I fell off of it and landed on my broken leg after the nurse who was taking me there timed a right turn wrong and tipped the gurney over. \n\nAfter my x-rays were taken, I had to sit on a bed for another two hours before a doctor \nfinally came in the room to tell me that I’d suffered compound fractures of both the tibia and fibula in my right leg and that I would need to go into surgery immediately.\n\nThe surgery to repair my leg took two and a half hours. \n\nI was awake for one of those hours because the anesthesia the surgeons used to knock me out wore off. \n\nThey had to reset my leg bones and insert a rod into my tibia before they could close it up. \n\nI was kept in the hospital for another week so they could monitor me and make sure I didn’t develop any infections or blood clots in my surgically repaired leg.\n\nAfter I was released from the hospital, I went straight home and pulled my website down permanently because, instead of selling my body for a quick $65, I ended up with a badly broken leg, that took eight months to heal and a hospital bill for $38,000 because I didn’t have health insurance. \n\nIn the end, fucking fat women for the equivalent of a weeks worth of gas money, and spending three quarters of a year on crutches, just didn’t seem worth it to me anymore.\n\nI spent the rest of 2006 rehabbing my leg at an outpatient facility. \n\nThere were a couple of months during rehab when I honestly thought that I was never going to walk again. \n\nWhen I was home, I crashed on my couch, collected disability checks, that I’d only obtained fraudulently, counterfeited money, abused alcohol, marijuana and painkillers and got wheeled everywhere I had to go by my friends and people in my family who actually fought over who was going to help me run my errands on a given day because they enjoyed mocking my situation so much.\n \nI wasn’t thrilled with the way 2006 had transpired and I was definitely glad to say goodbye to it. \n\nMy leg had healed completely by the end of that year and, despite the chronic pain I was living with because of my broken leg, I was actually very optimistic about 2007.\n\nI was miffed that I was now nearly three years out of college and still not employed as a journalist, but I remained positive about 2007 because what choice did I have? I certainly didn’t see how my life could possibly get any worse.\n\n\n\n\nNo Time for Tears\n\n2007 was the worst year of my life, for so many reasons, that I would combust spontaneously if I tried to remember them all. \n\nI could have all of my limbs amputated in a train wreck today and I still wouldn’t fall into the same emotional gutter that I was stuck in during 2007.\n\nThe fact that I had the indirect strength to not commit suicide in 2007 is something I’d be insanely proud of if I could ever wrap my mind around why I didn’t do it. \n\nI had so many reasons to French kiss a Remington that year that I think my inability to secure a firearm may actually be the only reason I wasn’t dead at twenty six.\n\nFor starters, my relationship with my parents was destroyed beyond repair after a verbal sparring match we’d engaged in, on Christmas Eve 2005, while I was roasted like a pig on at least a thirty pill smorgasbord of painkillers, sedatives and muscle relaxers that I stole from my aunt a couple hours prior.\n\nThe argument with my parents started over the fact that my aunt called my parents that night and blew me in for stealing her pills, on Christmas Eve, at a time when she knew that I was already dangerously close to murdering my parents. \n\nThe meat and potatoes of the fight, however, had to do with the fact that I’d finally snapped and decided that their decade’s long passion for mentally and physically abusing their own children was something I would no longer tolerate.\n\nWe screamed at each other for roughly half an hour. \n\nThings got extremely ugly when they had the nerve to ridicule me for being a worthless drug addict. \n\nI threw it into their faces immediately that if it wasn’t for all of the horrible shit they’d put me through over the previous twenty four years, because of their own drug and alcohol abuse, I probably wouldn’t be a drug addict to begin with. \n\nI then proceeded to explain to them that the same reasoning was most likely why the rest of their kids hated their guts as well \n\nMy father tried to be a tough guy at the absolute worst possible time in his life that he could have tried to be a tough guy. \n\nHe stood face to face with me and threatened to punch my teeth out if I didn’t stop being so disrespectful. \n\nI smirked like an asshole at him after he said that and told him that if he didn’t get the fuck \naway from me, very quickly, that I would break what was left of the functional bones in his \nsurgically repaired neck. \n\nThat was the first and only time I ever saw the fear of God in my fathers’ eyes.\n\nMy mother had a phone in her hand and was threatening to call the cops on me, so I calmly walked out of their house and promised them that they’d never see me again; which was a far healthier alternative to my initial parental separation plan. \n\nI was so burned out on their bullshit that, three weeks before that night, I started concocting a serious plan to lock them in their house while they were sleeping and burn it to the ground while I skipped in circles on their front lawn until the cops showed up to throw me in jail. \n\nFortunately for me, cooler heads prevailed and we just didn’t speak to each other from that night until three months before they both died in the summer of 2008.\n\nBy 2007, the strains and stresses caused by how that situation had played out were starting to burn me out mentally and emotionally for reasons I still don’t understand. \n\nI remember a day in 2006 when I drank for at least eight hours straight and hunted my father down so that I could spit in his face in front of all of his friends at his weekly poker game. That was one of the most satisfying moments of my life. \n\nThen there was my well documented drinking problem, which, by the middle of 2007, was something I could no longer control. I was such a bitter, confused, frustrated, miserable, inconsolable prick during that year that I used any excuse I could think of to rationalize getting hammered every day. \n\nI spent more nights than I didn’t that year getting trashed and puking violently into toilets until what looked like sludge was spewing from my mouth.\n\nWhether it was partying on weekends, watching UFC pay per views, chugging 40’s during the nine month long NHL hockey season, watching NFL football games on Sundays, drinking just so I could sleep or simply celebrating Wednesday because it only happens 52 times a year, you could rest assured that when I was conscious at any point in 2007, I was more than likely drunk and/or stoned out of my mind.\n\nI drank abusively every single day for the first six weeks after the Buffalo Sabres were eliminated from the 2006-2007 NHL Stanley Cup playoffs by the Ottawa Senators. \n\nThat was second playoff run in a row where our team was supposed to win it all and didn’t. \n\nIt wasn’t much longer after that elimination that the Buffalo Sabres organization completely imploded in ways it has yet to recover from. \n\nI haven’t had any faith in that team since.\n\nI suppose that out of the 365 days that came and went in 2007, I was probably only sober for a total of 40 or 50 of them…maybe.\n\nTo make matters worse, good friends of mine were spending massive portions of 2007 trying heartily to commit suicide for reasons that were trivial to me at best. \n\nMost of them failed spectacularly, but two of them did succeed.\n\nMy friend Bob was on a mission to fatally overdose on deadly cocktails of cocaine, acid, speed, pills of any kind and alcohol because he was pissed off about his parents’ impending divorced. \n\nBob never had it all going on upstairs. \n\nI don’t like to call people crazy when they haven’t been professionally diagnosed as such, but Bob was crazy. \n\nThat was just something you could detect by talking to him for more than ten minutes.\n\nHe worshipped a six inch plastic penguin, walked around in public in his underwear, regardless of the season, started screaming arguments with himself in the middle of a conversation he was having with you, ran as fast as he could into brick walls with his arms behind his back the whole time, pierced his ears with carpenter nails, lit bottle rockets while the stems were driven deeply into his asshole and usually pissed himself if he didn’t feel like searching for a toilet.\n\nBob joined the military and was dishonorably discharged within two years, to the surprise of nobody that new him, for things like desertion, sleep walking during drills, drug usage and mental health problems. \n\nI stopped communicating with Bob after his fifth overdose because I couldn’t handle the stress anymore. \n\nWe weren’t close friends to start with, so I was able to cut ties with him more easily than I had to with others.\n\nI still have no idea whether he’s alive or dead. \nI don’t really care either. \n\nRumor has it that he finally accomplished his goal of not being alive anymore by racing his ten speed bike directly into an oncoming train. \n\nI doubt that ever happened, but it wouldn’t shock me to find out that it did.\n\nMy friend Todd, who never really cared about anyone but himself, got so depressed after \nhis fiancée’ broke off their engagement that he washed a recently filled bottle of her hydrocodone pills down with a bottle of Captain Morgan and tried to hack his left arm off with a meat cleaver in his apartment kitchen. \n\nWhy he tried to smoke himself by cutting his arm off with a meat cleaver is a question I’ll never be able to give you an answer to. I guess he figured that hanging himself wouldn’t have been painful enough.\n\nHis ex called me in hysterics the next morning to tell me what happened. \n\nWhen I showed up to his apartment to check on him, his front door was wide open and his entire apartment was saturated in blood. \n\nThere was blood on the door, blood all over his refrigerator, sink, counter and kitchen floor. \n\nThere was blood all over everything in his living room and his bedroom wasn’t spared either. \n\nThe smell and sight of that much blood was almost more than I could stomach. \n\nI was positive that Todd was dead. \n\nI couldn’t envision how someone could lose so much blood at one time and live to tell about it. \n\nHis apartment literally looked like a crime scene. \n\nAll that was missing was caution tape and homicide detectives. \n\nSince I couldn’t find him anywhere else in the apartment, I kicked Todd’s bathroom door in and found him lying naked and unconscious in a bathtub painted in blood, vomit and stomach bile. \n\nI had been dealing with thoughtless suicide attempts from Todd for well over a year, \nso I spent a few minutes contemplating whether I should bother calling an ambulance or just leave his apartment and let him die. \n\nThis may sound heartless from the outside looking in, but I really wanted to just let Todd die in his bathroom that morning so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the stress anymore, but my conscience wouldn’t let me do it so I called an ambulance. \n\nHis condition was stabilized in his kitchen and then he was rushed to the hospital to get his arm stapled back together. \n\nThat was the first stunt he pulled in 2007 that landed him in a mental hospital for seventy \ntwo hour observation, but I was far from the last. \n\nThirty six hours after Todd was released from the mental hospital, he went back to his ex’s apartment and held a gun to his head in a last ditch attempt at terrifying her into reinstating their engagement. \n\nWhen she insisted that their relationship was over for good, he pulled the trigger and she screamed louder than I do every time I piss. \n\nShe ran into her apartment to call 911 for help after he, as far as she knew, had just blown his brains out all over her hallway. \n\nThe only reason there wasn’t a dead body in the hallway when she came back out was because Todd’s gun wasn’t loaded. \n\nHe was forced into the mental health ward of the Erie County Medical Center for three more days for his troubles and charged with illegal possession of a firearm when he got out. \n\nMy ex-girlfriend Crystal reacted to the news that she was going to lose her house, due to exploding mortgage rates, by slamming eight shots of absinthe and chugging Vermouth until she passed out. \n\nWhen she woke up, she got into her 1999 Chevy Corsica and drove it into a fence surrounding a grade school playground. \n\nIt was just dumb luck that she crashed into that fence on a Sunday. \n\nShe didn’t spend any time in jail for the accident, but she was put on twenty months probation, lost her license for five years, got fined $1,000 and was ordered to perform 200 hours of community service. \n\nThe fact that she could have killed children on that playground that day made me furious enough to never talk to her again either. \n\nMy friend John has a younger sister named Bridget. \n\nShe tried to hang herself after reading her rejection letter from Yale. \n\nShe tied the loose end of a noose around the fan in her living room ceiling, tightened the actual noose around her throat and kicked away the foot stool she was standing on.\n\nShe was only swinging in the breeze for a few seconds before her body weight tore the fan out of the ceiling. \n\nAs Bridget was falling wildly to the floor, she cracked the back of her head on the corner of \na solid oak coffee table, split it open, badly, and needed one hundred and fifty seven stitches \nto close the wound.\n\nI was an acquaintance of a nutjob, single mother named Callie in 2007, too. \n\nShe drank twelve ounces of Drano, swallowed a bottle of Excedrin, and slit her wrists because she didn’t want to face prosecution for smothering her three-month-old baby with a pillow. \n\nSome guy in an apartment across the hall from her heard her screaming frantically and called for help when he saw her convulsing and foaming at the mouth.\n\nCallie had her stomach pumped, spent six weeks on suicide watch at the Erie County Holding Center and was convicted of second-degree-murder. \n\nShe would have been slapped with first-degree murder charges, but her lawyer managed to convince a female D.A. that Post-Partum Depression was the reason why Callie did what she did to her baby.\n\nThe two people I knew back then, who actually successfully committed suicide, were a guy my friends and I used to call Scuba Steve, and a MySpace friend I had from Las Vegas.\n\nSteve lived on the top floor of a ten story apartment building on the east side of Buffalo and, being the disturbed fuck he was, Steve called all his friends to his apartment on April Fools Day for what we were told was going to be just another hootenanny. \n\nWhen we arrived at his apartment, he was standing on the roof of it, drunk beyond reason, with a bowling ball tied to each of his ankles. \n\nBefore anyone had a chance to talk him down or find out why he was up there to begin with, he spoke in tongues briefly and then jumped to his death. \n\nEverything happened so fast that we didn’t even realize he was dead until we looked down at the sidewalk and saw his brain matter slowly dripping into a sewer drain. \n\nNobody knows what Steve said that night, or why he killed himself, because Steve was an eccentric person, but no one ever noticed any signs that he might be suicidal.\n\nThe other guy was a MySpace friend of mine named Carl. \n\nCarl was a licensed pilot and a psychotropic drug addict who lived in Sin City. \n\nHe got into the passenger side of his Cessna one day, trashed on Ativan and Stelazine and accidentally committed suicide by performing a 10,000ft parachute jump without a parachute.\n\nI was so tired of losing sleep over suicidal and dead friends that I became a social recluse \nfor a few months out of necessity. \n\nI just couldn’t deal with the cavalcade of misery anymore. \n\nI woke up screaming a lot in 2007 because I was having nightmares about everyone’s attempts succeeding.\n\nI also spent most of 2007 nursing a list of injuries longer than Ron Jeremy’s dick. \n\nWithin a span of ten months, most likely because Jesus hated me, I fell off a ten foot ladder and chipped bones in my right elbow that still haven’t healed. \n\nI had my right cheekbone broken and a third of the vision in my left eye destroyed permanently after a minor league soccer player kicked a soccer ball at my face as hard as he could. \n\nI also took a full speed kick to my garbage and coughed up blood for two days just because my nephew thought it would be funny to kick Uncle Pete in his balls. \n\nI was almost cremated alive that year after jumping into the bed of a pick up truck owned by my friend Dennis, with a lit cigarette in my hand, because a five gallon jug of gasoline had “accidentally” spilled all over the bed of the truck. \n\nWe were headed to a bar to watch a hockey game and it was dark outside at the time, so I didn’t notice the spill until I landed in it. \n\nI tried to run into my apartment to shower the gasoline off, but after two hours of soaping myself silly, I still stunk like gasoline and didn’t get to watch the game. \n\nI ended up smelling like a pickup truck engine for three days.\n\nI also broke my right wrist during a game of tackle football, twisted my right ankle, for the 500th time, while walking to a bus stop and damaged it enough to cause a high ankle sprain. \n\nI broke every toe on my left foot in an ATV riding accident, needed fifteen stitches in my left hand after a drinking glass broke while I was washing it and suffered a severe concussion after getting sucker punched by a scumbag New England Patriots fan.\n\nI had to get a rabies shot after being bitten by a Doberman Pinscher, developed an unbearably painful cyst in my lower jaw that I couldn’t get removed for a month, blew my right shoulder out trying to bench press 605lbs, had my appendix taken out and bled from my nose so often that I thought I might have a brain tumor.\n\nI was also three years out of college by 2007 and still juggling multiple minimum wage jobs \nI hated so much that I started seriously considering blowing my brains out with a shotgun on the front steps of Buffalo City Hall; just so I wouldn’t have to continue working these meaningless, degrading, dead end jobs anymore. \n\nI decided that if I really was going to kill myself there that I might as well do it on a Monday morning so that I could make the employees there even more distraught about the weekend being over.\n\nI hated one of those jobs so much that I literally had to beg my legs to walk me into that particular place of employment every day, while tears of frustration and despair streamed down my face. \n\nI won’t mention the name of the company I was working for at that time, but I will say that working there wound up being one of those “be careful what you wish for” situations.\n\nBy June of 2007, I was so exhausted and enraged by everything that was happening around, and to me, that, in a desperate attempt to stop myself from using a gun to give my brains an Ernest Hemingway massage, I regularly got wasted out of my mind and wrote a book of short stories about people who blow their brains out titled, appropriately enough, “No Time for Tears: Tales To Blow Your Brains Out To”.\n\nThat literary accomplishment wound up being a backwards form of catharsis because it did stop me from blowing my brains out, but I also dedicated so much time and energy to writing that book that I actually managed to permanently brainwash myself into romanticizing the idea of blowing my brains out someday. \n\nI now know for a fact that I’m going to blow my head off at some point in the future. I just don’t know when.\n \nMy mind has been so shot since I wrote that book that I’ve knowingly and unknowingly verbalized my intention to end my life with a shotgun blast to my head, or have quietly thought about doing it, every single day since July 7, 2007.\n\nAs if life wasn’t kicking me in the balls rapidly enough already, I was also forced to start dealing with student loan creditors who began harassing me multiple times a week, by phone, and multiple times a month through the mail. \n\nI stopped receiving state and federal tax returns from 2007 forward because I couldn’t, and still can’t, afford to pay that enormous amount of money back.\n\nI don’t even know how many years in a row my student loans have been in default for anymore.\n\n It’s not something I can’t think about for more than ten seconds without wondering if I’d be better off trying to climb that Mount Olympus of debt or fatally overdosing on sleeping pills. \nThe only hope I’ve had of catching a financial break over the last five years came in 2008 when the most treasonous and incompetent president in American history decided to disingenuously cut checks to Americans, in my tax bracket, for $600. \n\nI was excited about that for a grand total of two minutes. \n\nMy excitement got crushed when I heard that college graduates with outstanding student loan debts would never see a penny of that money. \n\nWay to help rebuild the economy you destroyed, George.\n\nI remember one lady in particular who called me, from one of the many collection agencies that were determined to make every day of my life a living hell that year, and suggested that I get a job at Burger King in an attempt to “be an adult” and honor the financial aid contracts I’d signed in college. \n\nI could tell by the condescending tone in her voice that she honestly believed that I could afford to pay my loans back and was purposely choosing not to because I enjoyed getting phone calls three times a day, from people like her, that regularly reinforced by status as a loser. \n\nIt took every ounce of self-control I could muster to just hang up on her rather than stay on the line and explain to her, in graphic detail, exactly what she could do with her attitude and bullshit suggestion.\n\nSome asshole with an Indian accent called me a couple weeks later and told me that his company was going to be forced to garnish my wages if I didn’t start paying my loans back voluntarily. \n\nI laughed out loud when he said that because what were they going to do? \n\nDip their hands into the monstrous $150 paychecks I was bringing home at the end of a good week?\n\nI called his bluff and dared the guy to garnish my wages because that would have been much easier on me financially than spending $20 bucks on gas to have someone drive \nme to Wal-Mart to pay for a Money Gram four times a month was. \n\nMy wages never ended up getting garnished, though.\n\nWhen I thought things couldn’t possibly get worse for me in 2007, they did. \n\nI ejaculated uncontrollably all over my legs while wearing a $750 suit and giving a speech at a wake. \n\nA GEICO agent laughed in my face when I tried to save 15% or more on my car insurance. \nI saw a kid who couldn’t have been older than five get run over and killed by a drunk driver. \n\nI beat a carnival dunk clown half to death after he told my pregnant girlfriend that he hoped she “popped out a stillborn”. \n\nShe miscarried a short time later and the emotional strain of losing our baby spelled the end of that relationship\n\nI was working a graveyard shift at a gas station when I saw a guy burn to death in his car after it exploded because he unknowingly sped out of our parking lot with the gas pumping nozzle still in his tank. \n\nThe day before that, I sold a $20 lottery scratch off ticket to a guy in his 60’s that was a $10,000 winner. \n\nI had to force myself not to choke him to death because he wouldn’t stop rubbing his winnings in my face. \n\nI accidentally threw a paper bag filled with $3,000 in the garbage and didn’t realize it until the day after my trash pickup day. \n\nI was saving that money to help cover the cost of my best friends’ open heart surgery. \n\nTo make some of that cash back, I accepted a three night a week job as an erotic poetry reader at a retirement home in Kenmore, New York. \n\nThe job only paid $30 a week and the male seniors at that place excitedly popped Viagra while I was reading the poetry. \n \nI started winding the summer of 2007 down by getting into bar fights with people I didn’t even know, having unprotected sex at parties with women who weren’t disgusted by how inebriated I was, experimenting with crack cocaine and fantasizing about what my current life would be like if I hadn’t so obviously been Hitler in my previous one.\n\nMy drug and alcohol abuses were so out of control that I was making it impossible to carry on meaningful relationships with people I cared about. \n\nI couldn’t save money for dick due to an enraging combination of working for minimum wage and endlessly trying to Cheech and Chong my way out of hangovers so I could drink more. \n\nI was so tired of being alive by August that I spent the majority of my twenty sixth birthday walking around a cemetery in Hamburg, New York and resenting all the dead people lying beneath me because I wasn’t one of them. \n\nI spent hours walking around that cemetery trying to find the coolest looking gravestone in the yard so that I could die on it after stabbing myself in my jugular vein. \n\nI don’t know if it’s because I’m crazy or if it’s because I’m crazy, but I find \nsomething very humbling about walking around cemeteries, for hours at a time, and staring at random gravestones while wondering what life was like for each of those people while they were alive. \n\nOn the more disturbing end, I also wonder what their corpses look like after being buried in the ground for so long.\n\nAs the fall of 2007 approached, I sat in my car one night and tried to kill myself with exhaust fumes. \n\nI had no home to call my own at that point. \n\nI still don’t. \n\nI had no career options to look forward to at the time. \n\nI still don’t. \n\nI started to seriously doubt my ability to succeed professionally in Buffalo because the job market and financial infrastructure here has been a laughing stock since the steel industry collapsed.\n\nI was also extremely bitter about the fact that I had contacts in the journalism business from my days in college, yet nobody who could help me break the glass ceilings at the Buffalo News had had any desire to. \n\nApparently, once you graduate from the esteemed School of Journalism at St. Bonaventure University, and they can’t suck anymore tuition cash out of you, you cease to exist to anyone who works there.\n\nWhen the exhaust fume suicide attempt didn’t kill me, I decided to compound my already unmanageable personal and professional sorrows by bringing a cocaine addiction into the picture. \n\nI probably used cocaine a dozen times in 2007 and still have no idea what the recreational benefits of using cocaine are supposed to be. \n\nThat addiction obviously didn’t last very long for me because of how expensive and pointless it is to be addicted to cocaine, but I still chuckle at the irony of blowing lines and watching people get arrested on episodes of Cops and Dog the Bounty Hunter on drug use and possession charges. \n\nI spent the rest of 2007 abusing drugs and alcohol, working for minimum wage, arguing \nwith people about my drinking problem, struggling to not go postal and trudging through life miserably. \n\nIt was obvious to me by then that I was never going to amount to anything, so I stopped caring about everything.\n\nThe fact that my outstanding abilities as a writer and journalist didn’t mean anything at all in Buffalo only served to reinforce that personal sense of certainty. \n\nThe only thing that kept me going mentally, besides drugs, alcohol and denial, was a thought in my head that God might finally be done screwing with me and start concentrating His efforts toward rewarding me for all the suffering I had endured. \n\nI was 1000% certain that there was no way He could justify dumping anymore bullshit into my lap. \n\nNot after the three years of hell I’d just survived. \n\nThat’s what I thought, anyway. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Summer of Death\n\nBy March of 2008, something in my head was telling me to let go of the anger I had been harboring for my parents and leave the past where it was. I didn’t know where that train of thought was coming from, but it wouldn’t go away until I did as it told me.\n\nMy mother and I were watching television in her living room when the news of George Carlin’s death broke on June 22, 2008. Prior to that day, Buffalonians were still reeling from the recent deaths of hometown heroes Jimmy Griffin and Tim Russert. \n\nAfter we finished drinking in the details surrounding Carlin’s death, we talked about how much it sucked that George Carlin was dead, and then my mother made some cryptic remarks about famous people dying in threes and about how she’d be lucky if she lived anywhere near as long as Carlin did. \n\nI call her remarks cryptic because she was found dead on her living room couch by one of my brothers, a mere five days later, in the early morning hours of June 27, 2008. \n\nShe was forty four years old.\n\nThe coroner who performed her autopsy concluded that she’d died from natural causes related to an enlarged heart, but the timing of her death, and the circumstances surrounding it, lead me to believe that she’d just played with fire and gotten burned. \n\nTo put it bluntly, I’m convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she committed suicide.\n\nMy mother had been struggling with a circus of serious health problems for almost as long as I’d known her; exacerbated primarily by thirty years of drug and alcohol abuse. As a result of these medical sorrows, she had multiple surgeries performed on her stomach and reproductive organs before she turned thirty five.\n\nHer physical health had deteriorated so greatly by 2006 that she was forced to hook a breathing mask up to her face when she went to bed at night so that she wouldn’t choke to death in her sleep. \n\nAs far as her mental health was concerned, she’d spent all of her adult life battling severe depression, anxiety and multiple personality disorder issues and, instead of seeking professional help for her problems, she just continued to self-medicate. Add a midlife crisis and alcohol abuse into the equation and you’re basically begging your mind to give up on you.\n\nAnyone who knew my mother during the last months of her life knew that she had completely lost her mind and that it was never coming back. \n\nYou could see it in her eyes and demeanor. \n\nI even made a comment to my friend Tim, the night before she died, that I didn’t think \nthere was much of anything going on upstairs for her anymore. \n\nShe’d just reached a point where she couldn’t handle the stress that came with what she’d allowed her life to become anymore. \n\nShe felt so defeated and beaten down all the time that she didn’t even bother trying to hide the fact that she was abusing pain pills and crystal meth anymore.\n\nI believe she committed suicide that day because she was a drama queen in every sense of the phrase, and what better day to kill yourself than on a day when people from all over the country will be arriving in town for a family reunion? \n\nI know she wanted to die that day because she purposely didn’t wear her breathing mask to bed the night before, even though she knew she needed to wear that mask to keep herself alive. \n\nIt all just seemed too well thought out to be a coincidence.\n\nOur family decided to cremate her after her uneventful wake because her death was so bewildering and unexpected that none of us believed we could handle the emotional devastation that would come with giving her a mass of Christian burial. \n\nShe also hated the idea of spending the rest of eternity trapped inside a box under six feet of dirt.\n\nThe next four weeks were filled with confusion, depression and white hot rage for me. \n\nThere are two types of people you can expect to meet after you lose a parent: the people who truly want to carry you through one of the worst familial losses a person can suffer, and the people who just want to capitalize on the death as much as possible and then disappear from your life forever after the smoke clears.\n\nMy mother wasn’t even a box of ashes before some of her friends began raiding her house for valuables. I almost punched one of her friends in her head for trying to drive off like a rat with a set of my mothers’ sterling silverware. \n\nMy father became unbearable after my mother died. \n\nHe seemed genuinely shattered over her passing and lashed out at people because of it. \n\nI personally had a hard time feeling sorry for a guy who was mourning the loss of someone he treated like dirt for thirty years.\n\nJune turned to July without much hoopla. \n\nI spent the majority of the month after my mother died cleaning her house out with my \ngrandmother so we could re-sell it. \n\nMy dad made appearances at the house whenever he could, but that didn’t happen very often because his relationship with his dead wife’s mother was a strained one when she was alive.\n\nLife seemed like it was slowly getting back to normal after the shock of my mother’s death molded into a reality we’d all began to accept. \n\nThen my father decided to shake things up by dropping dead from a heart attack, on the front lawn directly across the street from the house my mother was found dead in, on the afternoon of July 25, 2008.\n\nHe had just turned forty six on July 5th.\n\nThere’s no tasteful way to mourn his loss both because the world is a better place without him in it and because his death was also of his own doing. \n\nIn what would become his final act of earthly scumbaggery, he woke up that morning and spent all of it smoking pot and intentionally overdosing on no less than six different prescription medications while simultaneously babysitting his then two year old grandson.\n\nHe sealed his own fate that day because, in spite of four week long pleas from concerned friends and family members who basically begged him to not kill himself in response to the death of my mother, he selfishly, but far from surprisingly, did the very thing that he was asked not to do. \n\nI’m absolutely certain that it was my father’s intention to die that day because most of the pills he overdosed on were pills he’d refused to take for years because of the way they made him feel.\n\nWhat he didn’t know, on the day he died, was that he was suffering from terminal emphysema. \n\nSo he would have died from that disease within a relatively short period of time anyway had he not decided to kill himself. \n\nHis wake was a farce because most of the people on my father’s side of the family suffer from some very entertaining forms of mental illness. \n\nHis paranoid schizophrenic sister, Lorraine, was one of the first people, outside of his immediate family, to arrive at the funeral home. \n\nShe proceeded to make a spectacle out of herself by charging into the room he was laid out in and screaming at him to “stop fucking around and get out of the coffin!” \nShe had to be forcibly removed from the premises after trying to pull him out of his casket to perform CPR.\n\nThe wake was also marred by family and friends of my father who spent most of the wake standing in the parking lot of the funeral home smoking cigarettes and marijuana pipes while they took inappropriate bets on which of them would be the next to go. \n\nIt’s beyond common knowledge that no man on my father’s side of my family has ever lived into his mid-fifties. \n\nAs the wake was wrapping up, I saw a joint in his suit coat pocket. \n\nSo, as a final “fuck you” to the bastard, I stole the joint and smoked it in celebration on the way out of the funeral home. \n\nTwo weeks after my father died, my great grandfather on my mom’s side passed away. \n\nI never met the guy and he was in his nineties when he kicked the bucket, so his death didn’t affect me personally. \n\nSix weeks after my great grandfather died, my sister-in law’s father died from a heart attack, while he was having sex, on October 2, 2008. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShake Your Groove Thing\n\nI was significantly more stressed out professionally and personally in 2009 than I was in 2008. \n\nI was now five years out of college and I still couldn’t land a job of any kind in journalism. \n\nMy male whoring business ended in disastrous failure. \n\nI was completely destitute and now my parents were dead. \n\nThe only pro that I could take into 2009 was that people in my family, that I cared about, were taking an extended break from dying.\n\nI was at my wits end when I was randomly surfing the internet and happened upon a Craigslist add, on January 6,, 2009, that was posted by a guy who was searching for male strippers to perform at a night club he owned north of the border.\n\nIn an act of blind desperation, and with literally nothing to lose, I packed what little belongings I had and flew to Calgary, Alberta, Canada to spend the first half of the year dancing at a hole in the wall strip club for women called The Tub Thumper. \n\nThis club was located on the outskirts of Calgary in a small town known as Okotoks; which is basically like saying, “This club was located in the middle of nowhere.”\n\nThe Tub Thumper itself looked like a retired, dilapidated farm barn. \n\nIt was constructed entirely out of sheet metal and slowly rusting itself into uselessness. \n\nThe clubs’ visible surroundings consisted of nothing but trees and shitloads of snow. \n\nThere was only one road available for navigating your way to and from this club. \n\nThe road itself was fashioned from dirt and it stretched for what seemed like miles. \n\nI was creeped out by how secluded this place was. It was so secluded from the rest of the world that it made me wonder if the club was even being run legally.\n\nThe only two things that club ever smelled like most of the time were cigarette smoke and shame. \n\nThe owner of that dump, who’s named I’m not allowed to mention lest I long for my entire family to be slaughtered, never bothered to tell me, before I accepted the job, that this strip club catered exclusively to pregnant women.\n\nI seriously doubt that I would have taken the job had I known in advance that I would be \npole dancing, almost completely naked, in front of pregnant women every day. \n\nAt least I’d like to believe I wouldn’t have. \n\nI was so desperate to get out of Buffalo, again, that I’m not sure if it would have mattered if he did warn me.\n\nI used the stage name Pistol Pete while I was dancing at the Thumper. \n\nPart of me settled on that name because I thought it would draw me more customers and money, but I mostly used the name as a way to compensate mentally for the embarrassing lack of girth between my legs that kept me from finding a stripping job in the states. \n\nI tried to land a stripping gig in Florida a few months before I left for Canada, but none of \nthe club owners I contacted down there seemed too enthusiastic about hiring a guy with the \nthe nickname, ‘Six Inches of Sexy’. \n\nSo instead of getting to tear my clothes off in front of some of the hottest women on the planet every day, and relaxing on warm Florida beaches during my free time, my biological inadequacies forced me into tearing my clothes off in front of pregnant women every day during the freezing cold Canadian winter. \n\nI developed a full blown crack cocaine smoking habit almost immediately. \n\nI inhaled crack smoke every day for the six months I was up there. \n\nMy addiction to crack was a fairly easy habit to feed since about 100% of the crack I bought was being sold inside the club I was stripping at by a guy named “Sticks”. \n\nSticks was a 275lb Canadian “pimp” who always wore a gray suit with a pink necktie and immaculately shined black dress shoes.\n\nHe also carried a loaded six shooter in his vest at all times and had this hilariously misguided idea that reeking like Stetson cologne would somehow distract single women away from his lazy eye deformity and the massive gut that sagged over his belt.\n\nMost of the people at the club who associated with Sticks thought he was an asshole, but they tolerated his shit because he could procure you any drug you desired within a few hours. \n\nThe five drugs I saw Sticks sell the most were crack, speed, angel dust, cocaine and ecstasy. \n\nThe strippers I worked with referred to these drugs as “Show Time Sunshine” because they were used mostly to amp us all up for our performances. \n\nSticks was a nice enough guy when you were on his good side, but he also reveled in finding \ncreative ways to humiliate and torture you physically if he fronted product that you \ncouldn’t pay him for when he came a searchin’. \n\nI was only working at the Thumper for two weeks before I got a taste of the carnage that Sticks was capable of.\n\nHe came into the club one day while a guy named Mark was dancing. \n\nMark saw Sticks walk in and tried to bail, but Sticks caught Mark and dragged him off the stage by his thong. \n\nAfter punching Mark in his face repeatedly, Sticks threw him to the floor and proceeded to beat him with a pipe wrench in front of every terrified patron and employee in the club. \n\nSince Mark couldn’t stand on his own after the clobbering he’d just endured, Sticks dragged him out of the bar by his hair, with one arm and into the parking lot in front of the club so he could finish his assault by breaking both of Mark’s legs with an aluminum Louisville Slugger. \n\nI later learned that Mark had been dodging Sticks for over a month and popping off at the mouth about how stupid Sticks was for advancing him three grams of cocaine and an ounce of marijuana. \n\nI never saw Mark again after that fiasco and I did feel that Sticks went overboard that day. \n\nHe nearly killed a guy over a couple hundred bucks, but what I saw him do to Mark ensured that I would never miss a payment to Sticks.\n\nBeing a male stripper in a country as cold and void of ambience as Canada, as you can\nprobably imagine, sucked total dick. \n\nI was losing ten pounds a month because I was choosing the pipe every day over eating. \n\nTo make matters worse, I was also struggling with crippling depression because I could never stop thinking about how much of a waste of time and money graduating from college had become. \n\nI badly missed the very few people back home that I didn’t want to jam butcher knives into the stomachs of and I hated my stripping job passionately. \n\nThe routine, pun intended, had gotten really old, really quickly.\n\nI constantly thought about blowing my brains out at the end of one of my shows. \n\nI hated being alive and I only made enough money at the end of every shift to cover the \ncosts of my addictions to crack and hard liquor. \nI didn’t bother drinking beer anymore because I was so bitter and suicidal at that point that even the alcohol percentage in Canadian beer wasn’t strong enough to drown my sorrows anymore.\n\nA typical day in my life up there started with me waking up in the club owners’ basement, at about noon, viciously hangover, while I mumbled under my breath about how much I hated God for not letting me die in my sleep. \n\nI almost never ate breakfast or lunch because, although it was free, I never found the prospect of eating moose testicles and biscuits and gravy every day especially appealing.\n\nI slept on a soiled cot every night that a guy named Francois had recently died on after an accidental heroin overdose. \n\nI had access to one pillow that was torn open at the middle and my blankets were whatever discarded clothing I could find. \n\nThe basement was dangerously overcrowded by starving, drug addicted male strippers that purposely abused their stashes. \n\nAfter waking up, I’d spend the next three or four hours smoking crack by myself and chugging liquor in that basement in mostly empty attempts to psyche myself up for work. \n\nI’d then stumble up the stairs that led from the basement to the dressing area of the club, at about 5pm, sit in my prep chair and play one round of Russian roulette while listening ironically to the song ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’. \n\nI’d be so smashed by 7pm that I could barely stand. \n\nI’d then go crawl behind a changing curtain and strip off everything I was wearing except for a banana yellow thong with the word “PISTOL” sewn in black onto the ass end of the thong. \n\nI still had enough of a gut left at the time for it to just barely sag over the front of it. \n\nFor reasons I’ll never be able to explain, pregnant Canadian women go crazy when they see a guy who looks as physically decrepit as Scott Weiland dancing nearly naked on a stage while his stomach jiggles like pudding.\n \nI was never in any condition to perform thanks in large part to my chemical dependency issues. \n\nI only made it to the stage every night thanks to a few rails of coke and a few cans of Red Bull. \n\nI danced from 7pm until about 11pm every night. From 11pm until 3am, I was forcefully made available for lap dances. \n\nIt took everything I had to stop myself from crying in disgust and racing out of the private dance rooms whenever I had to give a lap dance to a woman; especially when she was in her third trimester. \n\nThen, at around 3am every night, I’d stumble back into that disgusting basement and either shoot heroin to help me fall asleep or intentionally overdose on OxyContin. \n\nAs the end of May approached, I came to the realization that I was totally burned out on Canada and stripping and being habitually broke. \n\nI knew it was only a matter of time before I cracked and got the fuck out of that country for good.\n\nThe final straw for me came on the last Saturday of the month. \n\nI had just finished stripping for the night and immediately headed toward a broom closet that we used as a champagne room so I could give a $20 lap dance to a pregnant woman named Betty. \n\nI started her lap dance, while simultaneously fantasizing about huffing spray paint until my heart exploded, when I suddenly felt a stream of warm wetness splash down my naked left thigh. \n\nThinking it was probably a drink, I looked down to reassure myself and quickly realized that Betty’s water had broken all over me. \n\nI was so horrified and disgusted by what had just happed that I vomited all over Betty, ran to the bathroom to clean up, got dressed, ran out of the club, stole a car from the parking lot, drove directly to Calgary International Airport and caught a red-eye out of that country faster than Speedy fucking Gonzales.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhen I Bite Into a York Peppermint Pattie\n\nI arrived back in Buffalo about ten days before the one year anniversary of my mothers’ death. \n\nAs soon as I got off the plane, I walked straight out of the airport, stole another car, dwelled on my worthlessness for awhile, drove out of the parking lot, got into an accident, fled the scene, made my way into downtown Buffalo and then blocked all the left lane traffic on a skyway by parking my car at its summit.\n\nMy plan was to get out of the car, hurl myself over that skyway, plummet 110ft while I laughed the entire way down and then die by belly splashing into the frigid lake below before anyone had a chance to stop me.\n\nI was now five years out college and had officially given up all hope of ever obtaining a career in journalism. \n\nThe way I saw it, I had been on the outside looking in for so many years that, even if I did manage to somehow weasel my way into a position at a local radio station or newspaper, it would have been next to impossible for me to adapt to the non-stop advances in technology that the business had adopted over the last half decade. \n\nEverything was going according to plan on the skyway until I made the critical mistake of getting lost in thought while standing on top of the skyways’ concrete fence for too long. \n\nAfter what felt like hours of standing there, a guy jumped out of his car, raced toward me, and pulled me off the fence by my shirt. \n\nI never saw him coming and cursed at him like a sailor for impeding on my date with destiny. \n\nThe guy pulled me down with so much force that I banged my head off the street and had to use my shirt as a bandage. \n\nI was so pissed off about having my life saved that day that I drove to a diminutive neighborhood, in North Buffalo, known as Black Rock, to meet up with a drug dealer named Raven. \n\nRaven and I hadn’t spoken since my mother moved my family out of Black Rock in 1999, but I figured that Raven would never leave.\n\nBusiness was always plentiful for him there, so it wouldn’t have made any financial sense for him to leave. \n\nAfter hitting up a mini mart to purchase a York Peppermint Pattie, I drove the thirteen \nblocks to his house. \nI was pleasantly surprised by the fact that I didn’t get shot at or carjacked during that ten minute drive.\n\nRaven and I caught up on old times for a little while, but Raven could tell by the look on my face that I was having an extremely bad day and sold me a full sheet of LSD for half price; supposedly to help me mellow out. \n\nBefore he had the chance to explain the safest way for me to ingest it all, I yanked it from his hand and pressed the entire sheet against my forehead; while also biting into my York Peppermint Pattie. \n\nWithin seconds of both frying my brain with hallucinogenic acid and biting into that York Peppermint Pattie, I got the sensation that:\n\nI had been kidnapped, while vacationing alone in Mexico, and was being held against my will in a maximum security prison, in Guadalajara, on bogus crack cocaine trafficking charges…..\n\n…..at a time of the year when so many people were on Spring Break that nobody would notice that I was missing for at least a week, and the temperature there was always a sweltering 104 degrees, and I was always violently ill, and the death row and criminally insane inmates shared the same living quarters in general population and.....\n\n…..the persistent sounds of prison guards torturing the mentally retarded inmates made me want to bang my head against a wall until my brains exploded all over my cell; which was already filled to my ankles with various types of excrement because…..\n\n…..our cells had no modern day plumbing, our toilets were buckets, our bedding was always wet and moldy, and our bodies were constantly ravaged by diseases and open sores because…..\n\n…..we were locked in our cells twenty three hours a day, with no access to laundry rooms and medical facilities, and the ceilings in our cells were slowly imploding because they were made from Owens Corning fiberglass insulation and…..\n\n…..the guards beat us with nightsticks every two hours, and my celly always stole my \nmeals, and guys constantly committed suicide, and our one hour of recreational time every day was spent watching our backs because…..\n\n…..race wars always broke out in the weightlifting yard and bets were taken regularly in regards to which skinhead would be the next to get shanked to death on the basketball court by the hand of a MS 13 gangbanger and…..\n\n…..I was always terrified to sleep at night because the last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was the stomach turning smile of my homosexual cellmate while he held lotion and a box of tissues in his hands and…..\n…..I always had to stand in the showers, clutching a knife I’d carved out of a toothbrush, because guys wanted to rape me and I wouldn’t pick my soap up after they slapped it out of my hand and…..\n\n…..I was never granted access to a lawyer, the Mexican media or any of my friends or family during my unlawful incarceration and I finally went bat shit crazy after being sentenced to life in prison for something I didn’t even do!\n\nNeedless to say, I was so freaked out and unnerved by that acid trip that I never again touched a York Peppermint Pattie.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBetter Off Dead\n\nI took on my final minimum wage paying job ever, at the end of June 2009, at a slave labor camp that masqueraded as a family owned restaurant named Bella Pizza. \n\nThe only differences between this pizzeria, and a genuine slave labor camp, is that employees at Bella get paid and are allowed to go home after working twelve hour shifts.\n\nMy job at Bella Pizza was, without question, the worst minimum wage paying job I’ve ever had. \n\nI hated this job so much that I quit after five months and promised myself that I would blow my brains out before I ever worked for minimum wage again; even if it meant that I’d have to sink low enough to live on welfare again to financially support that promise.\n\nAll of the managers who worked at Bella Pizza during my run there were insufferable assholes who treated their employees like shit; with the sole exception being a guy named Eric who also happened to be a close friend of mine. \n\nWe all worked ourselves almost to death, for between eight and twelve hours a day, every day, for well beyond seven days in a row at times; in a steaming hot building that didn’t have built in fans or air conditioning.\n\nThere are four different working stations in this pizzeria; the registers, the pizza making station, the sub making station, and the station where all the side orders are made. \n\nI spent my entire run there working in the side order station. \n\nThe order machines regularly spit out order slips with such blind, horrendous consistency, especially on weekends that, after only one week on the job, I started waking up in the middle of the night sweating because I heard those goddamn machines beeping in my dreams. \n\nI’d made so many chicken wing and finger orders by my second week at Bella that I graduated to having nightmares about gangs of chickens trying to peck me to death. \n\nThe cooking oil we used to deep fry things like chicken wings, onion rings, jalapeno poppers and French fries was so worn out and goopy by the middle of the week that it made me sick to look. \n\nThere was many a time when I quietly feared giving customers food poisoning because of how dangerously unhealthy the oil in those vats was allowed to get before it was finally changed out. \n\nI never saw such blatant disregard for a companies’ anti-drug usage policy in my life as I did when I worked at Bella; and I’ve had jobs at Burger King and McDonald’s. I never faulted any of my co-workers for using drugs to get through the day at that place. \n\nThe environment was so chaotic and hostile every day that illegal drug use was literally the only thing that kept some of us from killing each other sometimes. \n\nI was just stunned by how casual and carefree the abuse was.\n\nSome employees openly smoked pot and popped pain pills in that place on a daily basis as if it were no more detrimental to their freedom and job security than drinking a cup of Pepsi. \n\nSome of the people that worked there, who had monthly scripts for pain killers, would dump their pills out onto their working stations, in full view of active security cameras and sell them to each other like they couldn’t have cared less if it got any of them fired and/or arrested. \n\nI’m convinced that they only got away with doing shit like that because of how hard it is to keep people employed in a hellacious working environment where nobody in management has any respect or appreciation for you or how hard you work for them.\n\nI’m not throwing stones by any means. \n\nI was so miserable at Bella that I started eating Percocet pills like Skittles, after my second week on the job, because ALL of the managers decided, behind my back, that they were going to fire me, with no notice, if my game didn’t start improving. \n\nI was so offended by how gutless and unprofessional it was for them to do that to me that I purposely waited three months longer to quit that job than I wanted to just so that I could fuck those guys over as badly as they originally wanted to fuck me.\n\nI was also hazed the entire time I worked there by a disturbingly corpulent, nineteen-year -old dickhead named Jay Coleman \n\nJay treated me like shit for four months because he knew that I would never take a swing at him due to the potential jeopardy that it would put my friend Eric’s job in.\n\nFor the first month that I worked with him, Jay and I got along great. \n\nThen, for reasons he never explained to me, Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde and he we went from liking me to hating my guts at the snap of a finger. \n\nI can’t say for sure what caused him to sour on me so unexpectedly, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with me eventually running out of the disposable income I needed to continue buying his Percocet’s.\n\nThis fat piece of shit used to do things like look over my shoulder and criticize me for \nhow many fries I was putting into a chicken finger dinner on days when the paper in the order machines couldn’t keep up with the actual orders being processed into it.\n\nI only ever really worked 3-11pm shifts at that place. \n\nSo whenever I worked my station, with people I liked, one of us would always finish making the last of the orders for the night while the other two guys cleaned the entire station so that we could get out of that place on time. \n\nIt was bad enough that I had to constantly walk four miles, at eleven at night, through some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Lackawanna, just to get home after work. \n\nThe last thing I wanted to do was be stuck at that pizzeria longer than I had to be.\n\nOnce Jay caught wind of this information, all hell broke lose between us. \n\nEvery time he and I worked that shift together, from that point on, he would wait until five minutes before Bella closed, pull everyone except me out of the side order station, and force me to clean it, by myself, with the lights off while he loudly chastised me for only mopping the floor three times. \n\nBecause of childish bullshit like this, there were times when I couldn’t even leave Bella until the time I would have normally gotten home.\n\nI was filled with so much hate and murderous rage every time I left that place, mostly because of Jay, that instead of having four miles to walk it all off, I found that I was even more hateful and murderously angry when I got home than I was when I left work. \n\nMy feelings of rage and depression, related specifically to working at Bella Pizza, became so overblown and unmanageable that I eventually had to start taking fifteen sleeping pills just to fall asleep at night. \n\nThe only reason I stopped abusing sleeping pills was because my brother Mike was scared that I was going to accidentally overdose on them one night and die in the same manner that Heath Ledger did.\n\nEvery shift I put in at Bella Pizza amounted to a fate worse than death. \n\nI flirted with nervous breakdowns at that place more often than I hurled obscenities at Jay. \n\nI thought about walking out during the middle of a shift, and never coming back, dozens of times.\n\nThe dangerously high levels of stress and anger that boiled inside of me for the five months that I worked at Bella made it clear to me that I was a dead man walking if I couldn’t find an acceptable excuse for quitting that job. \n\nHad I continued working at Bella Pizza for any longer than I did, I either would have killed somebody or dropped dead, in the side order station, from a rage induced brain aneurism.\n\nI finally got the excuse I needed during the third week of September when I watched the mother of a newborn baby get a leg and a half chopped off of her body after some piece of shit, ripped out of his mind on downers, sped down a heavily populated street, during lunch time and lost control of the four door car he was driving; which resulted in this poor woman getting sandwiched, from the waist down, between the front of his car and the back of a mini-van, at an impact of over thirty five miles an hour. \n\nThis dickhead was so incoherent and oblivious to what he had just done that, instead of putting his car in park until medics arrived, he made the life threatening decision to put his car in reverse and allowed that poor woman, along with what was left of her legs, to crumble to the ground. \n\nI was so appalled and enraged by what I had just seen that I would have killed that guy if my body hadn’t been frozen in disbelief by what he’d just done.\n\nWhen this woman hit the ground, her entire lower body looked like a spaghetti food fight. \n\nI snapped out of that disbelief quickly enough to call 911, but the real heroes that day were the guys who used their pant belts to keep her from bleeding to death in the street.\n\nI was walking to Bella when all of this happened, but I still had an hour before I had to be there, so I remained at the scene until I could give the cops a verbal and written statement of what I saw. \n\nOnce the madness had subsided, I really had no desire to go to work. I was angry, confused, disgusted, shocked and fully aware of the fact that spending eight hours in a pizzeria, after watching the lower body of a woman get shredded like it had been put through a meat grinder, was something I couldn’t handle doing.\n\nAll I wanted to do was spend the rest of that day at the hospital she was taken to so that I could know, for my own sake, that she was alive and that she was going to recover. \n\nI felt extremely guilty about the fact that I was close enough to pull her away before she got hit, but didn’t because I thought the guy in the car would slam on his breaks in time to avoid hitting her.\n\nWhen I asked the manager in charge if I could have the day off, in light of all of the craziness I had just experienced, my request was met with an emphatic, “NO”! \n\nInstead of being sympathetic to my situation and finding someone to cover my shift for the \nday, like any human being that isn’t a total scumbag would, my manager on duty that day forced me to work with food for the next eight hours while I fought back tears and vomit every time I looked at pizza.\n\nMy relationship with the people who ran Bella Pizza became confrontational and irreparably damaged from that day forward. I was already furious about the fact that they once planned to fire me without notice. \n\nSo forcing me to work on a day when I watched a woman nearly bleed to death in front of a Burger King only intensified my desire to fuck them over as badly as possible.\n\nThere were only two things you could do at Bella Pizza, in 2009 anyway, that would earn you an automatic pink slip; stealing food or money and no call, no showing one of your shifts. \n\nAs the end of November approached, I decided that it was finally time to pay all of the assholes in that place back for all of the hell they’d put me through for the previous five months by no call, no showing a shift I was scheduled to work on a Sunday afternoon during the NFL football season. \n\nLeaving Bella Pizza short staffed on a Sunday afternoon, during football season, is like forcing a firefighter to extinguish three house fires, at the same time, by himself; and I loved every goddamn second of that day. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da; Life Goes On”\n\nI never worked another minimum wage paying job again after I quit my job at Bella. \n\nThe only other (taxable) income I’ve earned over the last three years came from a summer job in 2010 that my friend Tim and I got cleaning up after construction workers at an abandoned building in downtown Buffalo that was being restored to house a Unites States Passport office.\n\nI hated this job, too. It was hot, dirty, dangerous, exhausting, backbreaking labor that would leave me in tears when I got home every night because of the strain that the job was putting on my already badly damaged lower back. \n\nI’ve been struggling with crippling, round the clock pain in my lower back since I injured it at McDonalds in 1999, and working this job caused me so much physical grief that I would wake up the morning after every shift temporarily paralyzed from the waist down; as I do to this day.\n\nThis problem only gets worse as the years pass. \n\nI’ve been desperately trying to get my back fixed for thirteen years, but every doctor I’ve presented my back pain to either couldn’t find anything wrong with me, thought I was lying to score pain pills or told me that the pain was just in my head.\n\nI also hated this job because our boss spent the entire summer we worked for him kissing our asses and telling us how grateful he was to have such dedicated workhorses on his payroll, only to then go back to his office every day so he could try finding people to replace us because he despised paying us a whopping $10 an hour. \n\nThe only things I enjoyed about that job were that I was working with my best friend and that we were left largely unsupervised for most of the week.\n\nOur job at the passport office was only temporary, and given the shape my back was in at the time, along with my brains’ blatant refusal to allow me to seek minimum wage employment ever again, I saw no other option but to live on public assistance until I could find a career in journalism. \n\nI’m now nine years out of college and still don’t have one.\n\nIn the years since that construction job ended, I’ve passed time by living with my brother, collecting welfare checks, downing prescription drugs, lifting weights and helping my brother and his wife raise their children. \n\nI’ve gone out of my way, every single day since my nephew was two, to ensure that neither of them is forced to grow up in the same traumatic, emotionally detrimental environment that the my brothers and I did; and I’m happy to do it. \n\nMy childhood turned me into a bitter, cynical, miserable oaf who chews on hate every day \nand is too scared to get married and have kids because of how terrible a husband and father his dad was. \n\nSo if my niece and nephew can grow up to be happy, stable, productive members of society, who don’t hate their parents and uncle because of how we raised them, it will, in some strange way, make me feel as if my life has come full circle. \n\nI don’t know what the future holds for them, but as long as they don’t grow up to be like me, I will die a happy man.\n\n",
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"content": "Big Brother Naija Season 5 winner, Olamilekan Moshood Agbeleshe, professionally known as Laycon released his debut album in the early hours of Friday and it has debuted at number three on the worldwide iTunes album chart.<br />The album titled, Shall We Begin, is his first album after dropping several singles and two mixtapes- Any Given Monday (the playlist), Any Given Monday II. The rap artiste has also released two EPs-Young Black and Gifted, Who is Laycon.<br />On his recent project, Laycon collaborated with other notable Nigerian artistes like DMW’s Mayorkun on the song Verified, Joeboy on Kele, Terri on Jeje and Teni on Want You Back.<br />His massive fan base, known as the Icons took to Twitter to congratulate him on his debut.<br />Praising the artiste’s delivery, <a class=\"u-url mention\" href=\"https://www.minds.com/buchi_laba\" target=\"_blank\">@buchi_laba</a> tweeted, “Laycon <a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=SWBOutNow\" title=\"#SWBOutNow\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#SWBOutNow</a> Is Beautiful! He has always said the music is a priority and he delivered. I love the way he carefully picked his collabos!! Levels. It was the start of the album with his mum praying for him! AND SO SHE SPOKE! He rapped, sang and flexed, Shall We Begin”(sic)<br /><br /><a class=\"u-url mention\" href=\"https://www.minds.com/OlisaOsega\" target=\"_blank\">@OlisaOsega</a> tweeted, “The reviews I’m seeing on Laycon’s album is heartwarming. Everyone has one or two good things to say about the album. Less than 12hrs since the album was released, it’s making numbers already in different countries. Please don’t stop streaming, let’s get the numbers even higher.”<br />Applauding the body of work <a class=\"u-url mention\" href=\"https://www.minds.com/LTemzzz\" target=\"_blank\">@LTemzzz</a> tweeted, “The songs on that album are mind-blowing sha. Laycon did extremely well.”(sic)<br /><br />Another icon <a class=\"u-url mention\" href=\"https://www.minds.com/omokwalksola\" target=\"_blank\">@omokwalksola</a> wrote, “The most amazing thing about Laycon’s album is, the more you keep listening, the more you keep having a new favourite song. <a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=SWBtheAlbum\" title=\"#SWBtheAlbum\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#SWBtheAlbum</a>.”<br />The 12 track album is Laycon’s first body of work after his N85m win at the BBNaija lockdown edition in 2020. Shall We Begin features previously released singles such as Wagwan, and Fall For Me featuring YKB.<br />",
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"content": "Big Brother Naija Season 5 winner, Olamilekan Moshood Agbeleshe, professionally known as Laycon released his debut album in the early hours of Friday and it has debuted at number three on the worldwide iTunes album chart.\nThe album titled, Shall We Begin, is his first album after dropping several singles and two mixtapes- Any Given Monday (the playlist), Any Given Monday II. The rap artiste has also released two EPs-Young Black and Gifted, Who is Laycon.\nOn his recent project, Laycon collaborated with other notable Nigerian artistes like DMW’s Mayorkun on the song Verified, Joeboy on Kele, Terri on Jeje and Teni on Want You Back.\nHis massive fan base, known as the Icons took to Twitter to congratulate him on his debut.\nPraising the artiste’s delivery, @buchi_laba tweeted, “Laycon #SWBOutNow Is Beautiful! He has always said the music is a priority and he delivered. I love the way he carefully picked his collabos!! Levels. It was the start of the album with his mum praying for him! AND SO SHE SPOKE! He rapped, sang and flexed, Shall We Begin”(sic)\n\n@OlisaOsega tweeted, “The reviews I’m seeing on Laycon’s album is heartwarming. Everyone has one or two good things to say about the album. Less than 12hrs since the album was released, it’s making numbers already in different countries. Please don’t stop streaming, let’s get the numbers even higher.”\nApplauding the body of work @LTemzzz tweeted, “The songs on that album are mind-blowing sha. Laycon did extremely well.”(sic)\n\nAnother icon @omokwalksola wrote, “The most amazing thing about Laycon’s album is, the more you keep listening, the more you keep having a new favourite song. #SWBtheAlbum.”\nThe 12 track album is Laycon’s first body of work after his N85m win at the BBNaija lockdown edition in 2020. Shall We Begin features previously released singles such as Wagwan, and Fall For Me featuring YKB.\n",
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"content": "Big Brother Naija Season 5 winner, Olamilekan Moshood Agbeleshe, professionally known as Laycon released his debut album in the early hours of Friday and it has debuted at number three on the worldwide iTunes album chart.<br />The album titled, Shall We Begin, is his first album after dropping several singles and two mixtapes- Any Given Monday (the playlist), Any Given Monday II. The rap artiste has also released two EPs-Young Black and Gifted, Who is Laycon.<br />On his recent project, Laycon collaborated with other notable Nigerian artistes like DMW’s Mayorkun on the song Verified, Joeboy on Kele, Terri on Jeje and Teni on Want You Back.<br />His massive fan base, known as the Icons took to Twitter to congratulate him on his debut.<br />Praising the artiste’s delivery, <a class=\"u-url mention\" href=\"https://www.minds.com/buchi_laba\" target=\"_blank\">@buchi_laba</a> tweeted, “Laycon <a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=SWBOutNow\" title=\"#SWBOutNow\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#SWBOutNow</a> Is Beautiful! He has always said the music is a priority and he delivered. I love the way he carefully picked his collabos!! Levels. It was the start of the album with his mum praying for him! AND SO SHE SPOKE! He rapped, sang and flexed, Shall We Begin”(sic)<br /><br /><a class=\"u-url mention\" href=\"https://www.minds.com/OlisaOsega\" target=\"_blank\">@OlisaOsega</a> tweeted, “The reviews I’m seeing on Laycon’s album is heartwarming. Everyone has one or two good things to say about the album. Less than 12hrs since the album was released, it’s making numbers already in different countries. Please don’t stop streaming, let’s get the numbers even higher.”<br />Applauding the body of work <a class=\"u-url mention\" href=\"https://www.minds.com/LTemzzz\" target=\"_blank\">@LTemzzz</a> tweeted, “The songs on that album are mind-blowing sha. Laycon did extremely well.”(sic)<br /><br />Another icon <a class=\"u-url mention\" href=\"https://www.minds.com/omokwalksola\" target=\"_blank\">@omokwalksola</a> wrote, “The most amazing thing about Laycon’s album is, the more you keep listening, the more you keep having a new favourite song. <a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=SWBtheAlbum\" title=\"#SWBtheAlbum\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#SWBtheAlbum</a>.”<br />The 12 track album is Laycon’s first body of work after his N85m win at the BBNaija lockdown edition in 2020. Shall We Begin features previously released singles such as Wagwan, and Fall For Me featuring YKB.<br />",
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"content": "Big Brother Naija Season 5 winner, Olamilekan Moshood Agbeleshe, professionally known as Laycon released his debut album in the early hours of Friday and it has debuted at number three on the worldwide iTunes album chart.\nThe album titled, Shall We Begin, is his first album after dropping several singles and two mixtapes- Any Given Monday (the playlist), Any Given Monday II. The rap artiste has also released two EPs-Young Black and Gifted, Who is Laycon.\nOn his recent project, Laycon collaborated with other notable Nigerian artistes like DMW’s Mayorkun on the song Verified, Joeboy on Kele, Terri on Jeje and Teni on Want You Back.\nHis massive fan base, known as the Icons took to Twitter to congratulate him on his debut.\nPraising the artiste’s delivery, @buchi_laba tweeted, “Laycon #SWBOutNow Is Beautiful! He has always said the music is a priority and he delivered. I love the way he carefully picked his collabos!! Levels. It was the start of the album with his mum praying for him! AND SO SHE SPOKE! He rapped, sang and flexed, Shall We Begin”(sic)\n\n@OlisaOsega tweeted, “The reviews I’m seeing on Laycon’s album is heartwarming. Everyone has one or two good things to say about the album. Less than 12hrs since the album was released, it’s making numbers already in different countries. Please don’t stop streaming, let’s get the numbers even higher.”\nApplauding the body of work @LTemzzz tweeted, “The songs on that album are mind-blowing sha. Laycon did extremely well.”(sic)\n\nAnother icon @omokwalksola wrote, “The most amazing thing about Laycon’s album is, the more you keep listening, the more you keep having a new favourite song. #SWBtheAlbum.”\nThe 12 track album is Laycon’s first body of work after his N85m win at the BBNaija lockdown edition in 2020. Shall We Begin features previously released singles such as Wagwan, and Fall For Me featuring YKB.\n",
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"content": "Big Brother Naija Season 5 winner, Olamilekan Moshood Agbeleshe, professionally known as Laycon released his debut album in the early hours of Friday and it has debuted at number three on the worldwide iTunes album chart.\nThe album titled, Shall We Begin, is his first album after dropping several singles and two mixtapes- Any Given Monday (the playlist), Any Given Monday II. The rap artiste has also released two EPs-Young Black and Gifted, Who is Laycon.\nOn his recent project, Laycon collaborated with other notable Nigerian artistes like DMW’s Mayorkun on the song Verified, Joeboy on Kele, Terri on Jeje and Teni on Want You Back.\nHis massive fan base, known as the Icons took to Twitter to congratulate him on his debut.\nPraising the artiste’s delivery, @buchi_laba tweeted, “Laycon #SWBOutNow Is Beautiful! He has always said the music is a priority and he delivered. I love the way he carefully picked his collabos!! Levels. It was the start of the album with his mum praying for him! AND SO SHE SPOKE! He rapped, sang and flexed, Shall We Begin”(sic)\n\n@OlisaOsega tweeted, “The reviews I’m seeing on Laycon’s album is heartwarming. Everyone has one or two good things to say about the album. Less than 12hrs since the album was released, it’s making numbers already in different countries. Please don’t stop streaming, let’s get the numbers even higher.”\nApplauding the body of work @LTemzzz tweeted, “The songs on that album are mind-blowing sha. Laycon did extremely well.”(sic)\n\nAnother icon @omokwalksola wrote, “The most amazing thing about Laycon’s album is, the more you keep listening, the more you keep having a new favourite song. #SWBtheAlbum.”\nThe 12 track album is Laycon’s first body of work after his N85m win at the BBNaija lockdown edition in 2020. Shall We Begin features previously released singles such as Wagwan, and Fall For Me featuring YKB.\n",
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"content": "The organizers of the Big Brother Naija reality television show, Multichoice Nigeria, has announced that plans have now been concluded for an open audition call for the Big Brother Naija Season 6 from Monday, May 3 till Sunday, May 16, In a statement sent to interested participants are expected to record a two-minute video of themselves stating why they should be picked to be a housemate in Season 6 of BBNaija. Following this, they are to log on to www.africamagic.tv/BBAudition to fill out the online registration form and upload their videos. The online audition is free and open to Interested male and female participants, who are of Nigerian nationality with a valid identity document, and must be 21 years of age by June 1, 2021. <br /><br /><br />The Chief Executive Officer, MultiChoice Nigeria, John Ugbe said: “We are strengthening our investment in quality content with another season of BBNaija. BBNaija has become one of the most anticipated TV events across Africa and this season promises to be even bigger and more entertaining.”<br />The popular reality TV show, which makes a return for a sixth season later this year, has already topped previous seasons as MultiChoice Nigeria earlier announced a grand prize of N90 million which is the highest for a reality TV show on the continent ",
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"published": "2021-05-01T20:55:50+00:00",
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"content": "The organizers of the Big Brother Naija reality television show, Multichoice Nigeria, has announced that plans have now been concluded for an open audition call for the Big Brother Naija Season 6 from Monday, May 3 till Sunday, May 16, In a statement sent to interested participants are expected to record a two-minute video of themselves stating why they should be picked to be a housemate in Season 6 of BBNaija. Following this, they are to log on to www.africamagic.tv/BBAudition to fill out the online registration form and upload their videos. The online audition is free and open to Interested male and female participants, who are of Nigerian nationality with a valid identity document, and must be 21 years of age by June 1, 2021. \n\n\nThe Chief Executive Officer, MultiChoice Nigeria, John Ugbe said: “We are strengthening our investment in quality content with another season of BBNaija. BBNaija has become one of the most anticipated TV events across Africa and this season promises to be even bigger and more entertaining.”\nThe popular reality TV show, which makes a return for a sixth season later this year, has already topped previous seasons as MultiChoice Nigeria earlier announced a grand prize of N90 million which is the highest for a reality TV show on the continent ",
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