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It was killing me to fight my way through my deadlines this week, as the searing pain in my shoulder has made it difficult to type. Of course this hasn’t stopped me from fighting my way through writing this, but my inability to take care of myself properly adds to my charm. I have something that a doctor would call a “region six pull of my trapezes major” but more commonly referred to by football players as a “stinger.” It’s not actually my shoulder that hurts but it is where I feel the pain, and it is actually caused by sleeping wrong on my neck. It’s really sad because I don’t even have some sort of heroic story involving small children and family pets being dragged from burning buildings to explain my limp arm. Yep, that’s me. Get in the best shape I have been in, in many years and then walk around like an invalid because I slept wrong.

I used to do this a lot back in the married years, believe it or not and as the pain is absolutely killing me these days it has forced me to admit that The Mother of all the Evils’s actually did have something good about her. She was able to pinpoint the source of the “stinger” and usually force it out in about 5 minutes. Of course then I would go off to work and she would fuck all the neighbors, so I never found it to be that great of a trade off, but then again I have never been in this much pain from it either. If I could locate her these days I might go ask her to fix it since she’s still fucking all the neighbors anyway. In the end my youngest daughter had the time of her life yesterday as I had her stand behind me and locate the “stinger” and then spend about 20 minutes punching it until my arm started moving again. What is it with little girls that makes the concept of punching their father like a trip to Disney World? She practically wrote a blog about it after she called all of her friends to tell them. I get the feeling that the next PTA meeting is going to suck when the other fathers in town come and confront me about why their daughters keep punching them now.

I have found that biting off more than I can chew in the writing department these days doesn’t help the shoulder, but it sure as hell has renewed my ability to crank it out. After I started writing “The Chosen Ones” with what little time I had, my mind opened up better to continue adding to “The Slammer.” With that when I started writing “Fear of the Dark” it started opening up that massive writing block I had for the “Twins of Kane” and somehow that started making the corny sports and political articles come out. There was a time when I was worried that I would never be able to write anything but right wing rantings, and in the end the political process took care of that. Could there have ever been a worse set of political politics to follow in the history of America? I mean seriously, Franklin Peirce is rolling over in his grave and moaning “No Mas Senior!” We have officially gotten to a point in American politics where both sides are completely dedicated to voting against the other side, and not for the candidate themselves. Don’t even think to blame Bush for that, but blame yourself and the idiot standing next to you, and that includes me as well. This may be the first election for President I will write myself in. I have done that in local elections, and once in a great while in state elections, but have never done it for president before. Jeremy Crow in 08’ .. You could do worse.

On that note, God smiled on me again. I was starting to get behind on my bills. It happens to us poor people from time to time, especially when things like gas and food keep going up, but as I have managed to do over the last couple of years, I relied on my credit cards. Like what has usually happened over the same last few years, something would “happen” to fix that as long as I don’t “depend” on it. Sometimes it would be a circulation bonus inside my mouse fart {which is nothing to sneeze at because a circulation bonus can most times be like 600 bucks dropped in your lap}, or other times it could be an IRS rebate check {thanks George}, or in many cases {like this one} it could be a company profit sharing check. I have mixed feelings on this one actually, but I did need the 500 bucks. I felt sorry for the GM of the company who had to come in at 11pm to explain to everyone on the crew what a “profit” check is. You get a share of the profits when there is a share of the profits to be had. Our business has been through the roof, and we have been working a lot harder than usual so most of the chowder heads that I work with have been crabby because they didn’t get “their profit check” last quarter. I tried to explain to a few of them that in an asphalt plant {which we work in} all raw materials {flux, rubber etc} are made from fossil fuels and the price on all of those things tripled, so the company is ok, but there are no profits. Let’s just say I work with deaf inbreds and they are never going to get it. The president of the company decided to give everyone a flat 500 dollar bonus for all their hard work, and they all complained. I need the 500 buck but part of me was screaming “fuck them, and let them learn about the real world the hard way.” At least they have jobs these days, and you get paid hourly to do the job. What do I know?

On the love life front; I don’t have one, and that appears to be ok. I think I have fallen into my comfort zone again, where I don’t have to force myself into anything that would in the end become a hassle. I know that probably sounds really bad, but it isn’t. I have {on occasion} come to grips with my limitations, and the most agonizing realization of my limitations is the fact that I am not capable of having a relationship. My responsibilities to my kids, as much as I hate having them are what they are. I haven’t the resources or the facilities to maintain even a sick relationship, much less a healthy one. I know quite a few people were put off by the way my last “dating” scenario ended, but I wasn’t that damaged by it because taken at face value it was completely correct. I either end up in situations that I can’t maintain because I can’t afford them, or I end up in situations that I can’t maintain because I haven’t got the time the other person in the scenario requires. It isn’t completely my fault but it definitely isn’t the fault of the innocent {sometimes} victims that I take hostage {date} either. As I always say, “Life isn’t so bad when you get used to it,” and apparently I am back to being used to it ;8o)

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The Twins of Kane – Leviticus 3.6

That last statement was a bit of a shock to me to say the least, because a girl has to have her secrets after all. For a while there I thought it was the only secret I actually had from Lou, so it was doubly shocking. He didn’t take his gaze away from the field where we both knew his bane was going to appear sooner or later. I was a bit intimidated by how he and I both were on even footing when it came to the whole time issue, and how we both didn’t follow the conversations or paths that we had already been through. In this reality that I have been forced into, it is starting to take on a very weird continuity of its own.

I said to him in a matter of fact sort of way, “Why don’t you just wait over there, where you know he is going to show up in a few minutes?” and then continued to look around like I was going to see Darius hanging out in the bushes somewhere.

Lou let out a little sigh as he replied, “Because he has probably figured out what is going on by now and will have his own way of changing his outcomes like I had at the Diner,” he continued to stare out into the field and hadn’t looked at me since he had sat down, but added, “There are some really strange differences between Darius and the rest of us, because he is still absorbing information as he goes along. I think there is a possibility that a lot of the things that he can do against the rules of reality might in fact be because he doesn’t know he can’t do them.”

That made absolutely no sense to me at all when he had said it. I was still finding it hard to grasp the difference between omnipotence and, well omnipotence. You’re kind of raised in a world where you believe that God and all those around her just basically do what they want when they want, and they are just omnipotent. Of course I still haven’t gotten past my bias that the church lied to me about her gender either. What in the name of all of these entities entitles one to do certain things and others to not do other things, and who is basically in charge after all?

“The angels are all a very lawful people,” he started talking again and it startled me to have him give me information without prying it out of him. “There was this game I had created back in the seventies called Dungeons and Dragons, it was supposed to be my gateway to the minds of the young, in one of my maniacal moments of awe inspiring world domination …”

“Oh my God, you really did create Dungeons and Dragons, like all the whacko priests on television were always telling everyone?” I asked a bit foolishly, and almost instantaneously wish I could have stopped my mouth so my brain could catch up.

With a chuckle he replied, “No I didn’t create Dungeons and Dragons. It was about to be a brilliantly ironic speech with some humor mixed in, until you screwed it all up,” his gaze continued out into the field. He started up again, “Why is it always things that attract total pimple faced losers, and other total Cretans who have nothing better to do that follow things like a cult, that get accredited to me? Can you see how offensive that actually is?” again he started chuckling, “I mean those Vampire erotica weirdoes are just trying to figure out ways to have sex, and the Satan worshippers hanging out in the woods, usually are just sick of being beaten up at school and think I can do something about it, like I don’t have better things to do than grant wishes to people who can’t get a date on their own. They should all blame God like I do.”

Tenuously I started the question, “Was there a point to all of this before I interrupted?”

He finally looked at me, God it’s amazing how easily I forget how drop dead gorgeous he is until he looks at me and I swoon at him. I think most movie stars or famous models would find humor in the way their gaze would do that to a woman, but as time has gone on, I started noticing even through the misty glow of adoration, that Lou did not in the least. “I was going to point out that of all the things I supposedly had created to steal the hearts of the young, Dungeons and Dragons was rather well thought out. Most of the little, I guess you would call them ‘dorks’ that played that game religiously went on to structure the world as you know it now,” he looked back out into the field and I was able to regain my composure. “I really liked that game and would sneak onto earth to get a good game going for a few weeks until I had to go back …”

I couldn’t help myself, “So God is out doing her thing and the devil is in Toledo playing Dungeons and Dragons, you couldn’t make this stuff up,” and I started laughing pretty heartily.

“I play Warcraft too,” he added as a bit of a fore thought, which had me nearly peeing myself, “The point was that the one thing in that game that I really liked was the fact that whoever created it had human nature, and more over the nature of deity down to a very simplistic nature, but it was almost perfect,” and with that I stopped laughing because I could tell I was about to get some enlightenment. He started again by saying, “Every character had a ‘nature’ to them which as I said was pretty close to the truth in all reality, but they separated the two halves of human nature which most people overlook. Along side of the ability to be good, bad, or neutral, they also had the ability to be lawful, chaotic, or neutral, and this is a big step to understanding all nature.”

I gave him my stupidest blonde stare, and he took that to mean, “explain this to me further, mere human here” and he did. “My nature might not actually be ‘evil’ as the books have me written out to be, but at best I am ‘nuetral’ which would mean that I can watch the world go by and not really give a crap about it. Strict apathy is perhaps how you would explain most deity. Realistically God isn’t exactly perfect, but being a woman I would never tell her that,” his lips parted into a strange grin, like it usually does when he gets a dig in on God. “The other side of it all is how we actually behave in respects to our nature, versus our personality. All of the angels and God are ‘lawful’ in everything they do. We are not allowed any certainty of neutrality or chaos in any of that or else the world would be mired in things that make pathetic human politics and the simple earth cleaning natural disasters seem like a baby’s diaper that needs changing. It can be a nuisance but in the grand scheme of things it is nothing compared to simple entities that can make giant cracks in the world on a whim,” he smiled more broadly. “As the root of all evil in the world I can assure you that my lawful nature has kept me well within the ‘rules’ of how we play. Perhaps one day I would get sick of hanging out with murderers, rapists, and every other piece of filth that this planet has handed over to me in Hell, and simply obliterate you all in a comet. My lawful nature interferes with that.”

As a certain dawn of recognition came over me, I then piped up, “You think that Darius isn’t plagued with this problem that the rest of you have?” He looked at me again, and I contained my need to rip off all of my clothes and beg him for the kind of sex you see in the videos. I distinctly started noticing at this point in our ‘relationship’ that his charm and beauty was getting far worse and effecting me stronger and stronger, while at the same time my will to resist was getting stronger. It didn’t seem to be getting stronger as fast though. Of course I didn’t actually notice any of this until I was free of his gaze and could think of something other than “rape me, I beg you rape me!”

He looked toward the opening at the end of the field where Darius had come along as he had before to start tempting him. He didn’t move or change his expression but started talking again, “That’s my bane Stacey. I created an angel when I shouldn’t have and I didn’t have the foresight to instill lawfulness into it,” he frowned, and it made my heart sink to see it. “I don’t know what goes through his infinitely evolving mind, and what scares me at this point is that he might become the first to be ‘omnipotenter’ than the rest of us if I don’t get to him and drag him back to hell,” and I could actually sense his straining with what came out next, “I do know this though. If I cease to exist like I had planned all along, when I pass the time I can remain in real time, he will cease to exist,” again he had his cute smirk, “then again perhaps you all will revert back to being immortal and walking naked through the garden of Eden. I don’t know for sure, that far back or if I would be replaced with a different evil, because God will never allow the credit for evil to revert back to her either.”

I was about to say something. I can’t remember what but I am sure it was going to be brilliant and solve all of the problems of the world in one fell swoop, but Lou stepped over me before I could say a word, “Then again, that is all moot because you my dear keep dragging me and my friend over there back and forth in time, but always within the boundaries of when I can remain here. More to the point, you Stacey are holding all of the angels hostage, and none of us can figure out how to stop that either …”

The word “either” floated limply in the air as he vanished again, in that speed that was so fast that he simply leaves my sight all together. Darius was gone too, and for the most part it was exactly the way it had happened the last time, aside from a different conversation. I was exhausted. I was all of a sudden very lonely. … To be continued

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Fear of the Dark – Chapter 1.4

Sometimes it is hard to make a graceful exit, and other times it is downright impossible. Now aside from it being less than graceful Timmy’s exit was rather abrupt. Gina’s mother had decided on just what little she actually heard that Timmy was NOT going to be around her daughter any longer. Gina stayed silent, and Timmy assumed that more than anything else she probably wanted time to deal with the messages she had written already before she attempted to start explaining anything to her mother. For his own part Timmy was pretty shocked at what he had read. Actually we are back on the subject of understatement that comes up quite a bit here, but Timmy was shocked enough to not want anything to do with that book until he was alone. This included the unusually long cab ride back to the rectory.

Walking back into the rectory he started to have different feelings on the matter. He did have an impartial observer who could probably assist him in these things, who might even be just as curious as himself on the matter. Of course he didn’t appear to be here as well, so Timmy cracked open the book once more and started to read it aloud, as old habits are a lot harder to break than one would think. “It was officially the last day I would ever be known as Reverend Timothy Mahoney, “and he paused only to get the shudder out of his system, “and the first day of what would become the insane battle for control of my own mind, as death took me and left me inside the boundaries of the city. As I write this I still don’t know what created me, or what great disaster had befallen me to allow God to forsake me as this, but I know the horrors of how to create evil. God bless our children for they know not what they do, and when I awoke from death, I was curled up in a dumpster, most likely thrown there by whomever it was that took my worldly possessions. Again, I know that what had transformed me into the monster that scrawls this horrific confession was NOT on the island. It never could have made it here and some fluke chance had brought me here before my death. I also know that without careful planning, I could infest this plague upon the island that had once been safe from creatures such as I.”

The voice startled Timmy as it chirped out on the way into the rectory, “Well I see you found another monster book to occupy your time. I was worried you would start reading some of God’s words and overburden your cluttered head,” and with a small chuckle Reverend Peterson sat down at his own desk holding half a bagel with cream cheese that he was working on. “I should have been born a Hebrew, I just can’t get enough of these things and pork makes me sick to my stomach,” he added as an afterthought.

“Would you mind if I read some of this to you, it has me a bit perplexed. It was left behind for me by the other God after he attacked the sicko last night?” Timmy asked a bit tenuously. After a brief nod, he started again from the beginning and read as far as to the point Reverend Peterson strolled in.

“Are you looking for some sort of confirmation that you aren’t the creature that wrote that book?” he asked with a funny look on his face after Timmy put the book down and looked at him. After a bit of a hesitant nod, Reverend Peterson piped right up, “You were here doing Bingo until eight o’clock last night dummy, and by that time the police were already taking her and her father to the hospital,” and he shook his head a bit, “You’re good with God and all that but the cops are right, stick to your own business if you miss the simple things, and get hung up on the complicated. I’m sure if you were to go through the past eleven years you had hundreds of witness’s eyes on you during almost all of the attacks. They always seem to happen right when night falls and most nights you don’t leave until several hours afterwards.”

Staring directly across the room at him Timmy realized that he did have to be the stupidest person in this room at the very least. The obvious thought was that this monster had come to New York at the same time he did and he felt a strange kinship with it. Of course the creepiness of having the creature pretending to be him was there still as well. “Why do you think he said that he was me?”

“I haven’t got a clue my son, but I can tell just by the first two paragraphs that the thing is extremely intelligent, and probably has a lot more going on in there than to just jump out and say, ‘look at me, I am me’ so you may have to keep reading until you figure out his riddle for you. It makes sense if you think about it. He got your attention more now didn’t he?” and squeezed more of his bagel into his mouth. “I mean seriously, don’t you spend a little too much time in the daylight to have bloody ambitions at night?”

Timmy chirped right up, “Theoretically the sunlight thing has been a recent addition to the mystique of a vampire. Bram Stoker, who basically wrote the original, had pointed out at great length that vampires can walk around during the day, they just lose all of their power and are weaker than the average human during those hours,” and then he looked down at the book as if he were going to scan it for something, just to turn up his eyes and realize that that wouldn’t do it.

“As my father would say, ‘get your head out of your butt kid, you can only see what you already know in there’ and it applies here perfectly. You can run off quotes from Bram Stoker, but you can’t even acknowledge what you did last night. That is so wrong on so many levels,” and then he shoved the last piece of bagel in his mouth.

“You aren’t so dumb for an old man are you?” Timmy asked with a wry smile.

“On the contrary, I am the stupidest old man you may ever meet, but I hide it well by quoting my father and keeping track of the calendar. How about you continue with that book? I don’t have anything scheduled for the afternoon and it appeared to be getting to the good parts,” and then he stood up, “After I get some coffee of course, your voice can be droning to a man who doesn’t use your face to stay awake.”

Timmy started adjusting himself in his own chair as Reverend Peterson walked in carrying the entire coffee maker and two cups. Another thing that makes these two the perfect complement to each other is they both drink their coffee black. Episcopal religion never called drinking coffee a sin as the Catholic Church once had, so score another one for the good guys. A few minutes later he had poured them each a cup, dispensed them and was sitting back down behind his own desk with one foot up. “I’m actually excited that running water isn’t a wives tale because that is one of the things all those stupid movies leaves out of the mix,” he threw out there after picking up the toothpick from his bagel to pick at his fingernails.

“So you think that is why he can’t leave the island?” Timmy asked and then said, “and why the island was protected until he got here, never mind, you’re right. The crucifix was a bit of a kick in the teeth too wasn’t it?”

“Theologically speaking that one is still on the table, because many have believed that the belief in the cross was what gave it power,” he continued to scrape his fingernails as he added, “you could just assume that the cross will harm someone that is evil without the belief that God is guiding it and be well dead before you can even consider your own failings. Perhaps his own belief in God and what appears to be love for him keeps him protected from it as well. Perhaps all of these authors never actually having met a vampire for what would be obvious reasons, doesn’t really know anything and makes it up as they go along,” and with the last bit he smiled.

Timmy again started reading from the book, “I don’t remember all of what happened in my first night back from the dead, I don’t remember being dead, and I don’t remember being killed. I only remember the fever, and the feeling like I was going to die, as I made my way into the city. My mind had been on getting myself someplace where I could rest, and it was as if the second my body had passed over the land of Manhattan I had simply ceased to exist. I remember when my eyes opened, and I remembered the thirst, the awful thirst that has plagued every single one of my days since,” Timmy plaintively looked at the Reverend and then continued, “It was all darkness, and upon opening my eyes, I could not see. I could feel my eyes open and it hurt, but my instincts guided me to the first thing I needed to bring back my sight, the curse of those like me, and it came in the form of a small child,” and with that Timmy gasped but read on, “God bless me father for I know not what I do, as I was every bit the child, perhaps more so, that I took into my arms and drained the life out of,” and Timmy looked at the Reverend and added of his own mind, “This looks like it is going to get a bit rough.”

“He’s explaining things to you, and he is being honest Timmy,” the reverend looked up thoughtfully, “and I have a feeling that it might get pretty horrible in part, but then again it’s been pretty horrible to read about in the papers too.”

Before Timmy could even start back into the book, he added another of his own thoughts to the mix, “There’s just a horrible feeling as I am reading this, because it isn’t just random thoughts from the mind of an author. In all reality this could be the actual events of the greatest serial killer in the history of the world,” and he paused to see the reverend nodding, but at the same time with a sweep of the hand encouraging him to read on. “As the life of the small boy, no more than ten or eleven years old, was being drained from him, he screamed out in horror. My ears were slowly starting to come into their abilities as my eyes were filling with the world with every drop of the child’s blood that flowed into my throat. As I look back on that moment in my new existence, I have gone over all of the scenarios that I had read in the horror books or seen in the movies. Nothing about it was willing, romantic, inspired, or fantastic. It was the sounds of a little boy being murdered, and with every last moment of his life, he struggled, screamed, cried, kicked, and in the end fell limp and dead, like an uncared for doll in the middle of the streets,” and again Timmy gasped.

“Well there’s another plus for good side,” the reverend chirped up, “I never really could stomach all that romanticized, bliss and joy that they play up in all of the Vampire books,” and after gazing at the stunned look on Timmy’s face he went on a bit forcefully, “Timmy my friend, you are so jaded. Murder is murder, and I never particularly liked the fact that all the authors made it seem that evil could give everyone some false sense of love and bliss in being murdered, or converted to the evil side of things,” and then he let out a bit of a chuckle. “Actually I really liked the movie ‘The Lost Boys’ and not just because it was kinda funny, but because when the vampires in that movie went out to murder it looked like a murder. I think a lot of people missed that in all the confusion,” and he motioned Timmy to continue as he sipped his coffee.

Timmy looked towards the book as if it were something dirty, but continued all the same, “I learned almost everything that I needed to know in that very instance. I was less like the human baby that needed a year of training to actually take care of myself in a rudimentary fashion, and was more like the horse that simply jumps up onto its legs moments after being born. This didn’t mean that I knew everything, but I knew the things that were important at the time. The most important being that I wasn’t going to do that again, if I had to find the devil himself and force him to kill me,” and with that Timmy smirked and then continued, “My body was not normal anymore, now that I had eyes in which to see, and simply looking down I could see that my hands were enormous, my arms were the size of tree trunks, and my legs were much larger than that. Technically speaking, if I were still human I would be the largest human in pure mass that had ever lived. I practically jumped twenty yards or so to the nearest car so that I could look at myself in the mirror. It was every bit as hideous as I had assumed with my over sized face and the blood still dripping from my chin. I was a monster, and there was no doubt about that,” and the words trailed out and then died in the air.

Timmy cleared his throat and continued into the book, “The rumors of the vampire’s strength are for the most part true, but I have come to believe that my strength is no different than what my new found size would dictate. I perhaps am about ten times as strong as a human, but at the same time I am about ten times as large as a human. This became evident the moment I decided what I needed to do with my foul incarnation. Without thinking twice about it, I went to the side of the nearest building and tried to climb up it like a spider, as I had read about, or seen in the movies. Don’t believe everything you read, but I did realize that I could use my brute strength to swing from window ledge to window ledge and pull myself up the building. Perhaps my arms have even gotten longer, but my height still stood at about six foot five inches. Imposing as it had always been, but not exactly supernatural in stature,” Timmy stopped for a moment and then said from his own mind, “Gina told me that was what he did after he left the scene.”

“It would serve his purpose to be on top of the buildings, since the sewers are filled with running water,” the reverend then added while tapping his fingers together, and again waved Timmy onward.

“After thrusting myself upon the roof, I found it abandoned. It wasn’t like one of those charming roofs that you see on New York City television shows, with a garden, a patio, or whatnot, this one was simply a tarred roof, that stood about a story taller than the buildings around it. It was exactly what I wanted. It was exactly what I needed. It would be the perfect place for me to lay down and wait for the sun to come and get me.” … To Be Continued

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This is a repost of my writings from Itching For Coffee ... Where I often post writings with other talented writers ...

The dog days of dieting are upon me. I happen to be lucky in the regards that if I want to lose a lot of weight fast, I can simply not eat, lift a lot of weights and let the muscle burn the fat off. A lot of men are like this, and it is one of the fortunate attributes of the gender. I noticed after the Mother of All the Evils’s left me, that anger led to testosterone, and by sheer fury I could bulk up in all the right places and lose the fat everywhere else, and that methodology has always stuck with me. At that time of course I went from a pathetic 220 pounds of fat, dumb and happy, and shrunk down to a measly 148 pounds at one point, but I had a lot of help with that. Since she had left me when I was in the hospital with Chicken Pox, I was already on the way to losing the first 30 pounds because of the pneumonia. I don’t suggest that route for anyone, but fate was on my side at the time I suppose. The weight lifting came along in there because I was so weak when I got out of the hospital that I couldn’t even lift my 8 month old daughter.

The rage of the betrayal kinda took all of that and made it out to be something far worse eventually. I was completely exercise bulimic, so that no matter how much I ate, I was guaranteed to run into the gym and work it out of me so hard that I gained no nutrition what so ever. I had that wonderful heroin physique and a horrendous temper, and aside from all of my other problems I was rather pathetic on top of it all. When the doctor finally changed my meds it all turned around anyway, and I started actually putting on muscle and at the end of my last “health” spurt, I was maxed out at about where I am now, although I looked a hell of a lot better. Of course I was about 5 years younger too, so that would stand to reason. At that time I was about 175, with a 30’ waist, 42 “ shoulders and chest, and I was able to ignore the fact that they don’t make clothes to fit people like that. This is a big secret in the mind of a hopeless physical manipulator {aka anorexic, bulimic} because clothes made for normal people will always make you look and feel fat.

Now I am struggling a bit again. I seem to have a better grasp of my mental facilities, but that is probably more a symptom of age more than anything else. After years of being in an impossible to fathom online relationship, and coming to grips with the fact that it was not only impossible, but perhaps more to the point, foolhardy, I was already well on the path to the level of “not giving a shit” that I had to be at to get as out of shape as I was this time around. I finally was looking at having to get larger pants so I could sit around and wallow in my self pity and eat, when I finally had enough of that. I went from 210 to as low as 178 and now am back up at 182, but my waistline is smaller still than 178 so I am assuming that I am on the turn around. The turn around being that point where you have stripped most of the fat and are now at the point of putting on heavier muscle. I still feel fat, and I still feel bloated all the time, and I actually don’t like looking at myself, which is the real reason I take pictures of myself every day. History has dictated that I am an idiot and I have to stay above the dangerous phase of getting in shape at the expense of my health. Well I figured the best thing to do at this point is take my last 50 bucks and buy some new clothes. Thank God for Wal-Mart because 50 dollars will buy you a week’s worth of clothes, and despite my body disfixiation, I can feel cool enough in Wal-Mart bought clothes. Go figure huh?

Wal-Mart is now stocking “athletic fit” clothing which filled me with a bit of jubilation. I never learn my lesson though, because I have fallen into that “athletic fit” trap all throughout my existence, and like anyone else that sells “athletic fit” clothing they are simply to make pudgy people feel better about themselves. My new “athletic fit” clothing are too tight in the shoulders, and way too baggy in the middle and when I first put them on they made me feel fat. Pretty sad huh? The trick during times like these that an old roommate of mine once told me when she was sick of killing myself through diet many years back is to turn to the side and look at yourself that way. This is why I remember to take pictures of myself from the side too, despite the vanity of it. From the side a guy can see his “shape” regardless of the clothing that he wears, and it works for women too, as long as they don’t assume they have to be shaped like a ballerina anyway. I do fit back into my old suits that had been tailored for my physique but again I had my affirmation that I am filling out more in the right places as the shoulders are tight. I am not thrilled in having to step up to 1X shirts just to move my arms, but then again they should stay tucked in easier ;8o)

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It has been a long hard week patrolling the streets of Megalopolis, but our favorite super villain turned super hero, the man with no plan, the Caped Pervader, the one and only Superdaddyman, keeps ever underfoot of those that would be out to create chaos. This summer he has been doing an internship program for another once diabolical {still is} fiend who is in need of a few extra high school credits, and perhaps can find herself to become a mere fraction {which is far superior to most} of the great warrior of good which is known as the Superdaddyman. Although she lacks the technical skills of “cuteness” that the vicious evils’s known as Captain ADHD, and Imtoocutus have to real in the single mommies for our hero, Lazius Boycrazius does have a certain level of intangibles that can be of use to the Superdaddyman at this time {she brings him Ice Coffees when she gets off work} and perhaps can finally fulfill her destiny as the Caped Pervader’s sidekick, Superdaddydaughter!

Now at this time it may be a tall order for her, as it is hard to live in the shadow of the greatest super hero known to Megalopolis, but her training has been going merely pathetic, as opposed to just plain awful. She was able to point out one of the women that has a propensity to bend over a lot at the hostage swap site {bus stop} for the other two evils’s. Although not completely a bad looking woman that she had spied out for our crime fighter, she was saddled with the look of “hooked on welfare” and never wears skirts. Two very bad signs, but of course this is a start for any up and coming crime fighter in this fair city. In time the Superdaddyman should be able to mold her into a proper look out for those things that are important. In the mean time the Superdaddyman may have to teach her how to drive the Superdaddymobile, so that he can assess all of the situations without crashing it while fixated on a particularly interesting subject.

Another attribute that the burgeoning Superdaddydaughter has which can probably be honed into a very valuable asset is that she does laugh at just about every stupid thing that comes out of the Superdaddyman’s mouth. Many years of unsuccessful dating and marriages have taught the Superdaddyman that this is an extremely hard quality to find in anyone, much less a sidekick. Her youth and high school status of course create a whole new level of issues though as she can fall into a relatively harsh fit of “the giggles” that are almost impossible to tame. On one occasion when the interning Superdaddydaughter was completely enthralled in her own silliness, the Superdaddyman made one of his rare slip ups and muttered “Holy McCrackflurries Batman” which completely sent her over the edge. Aside from the accidental blasphemy of uttering the name of a lesser super hero, it rendered the girl wonder almost useless in the interrogation of the prisoners after they had been released into our custody. It does appear to be almost impossible to bring evils’s who have spent the day running around like lunatics at the detention center {camp} when the faithful {oh that even sounded stupid on this end} sidekick, is incapable of doing anything but slap her knee and mutter “Holy McCrackflurries Superdaddyman!”

Now of course you still have to worry about your new sidekick’s blithering ideas as well, but then again Megalopolis wasn’t built in a day, was it? She had been assuming that if she were to bring the evils’s McFlurries that she could make them happy, and keep them quiet for the ten minute drive from the drop off area to the Casa di Evils’s. This we would assume comes with age and superior mental abilities like the Superdaddyman often displays. {damn that only seemed like half a compliment for some reason} Through the reason of a Superhero the Superdaddyman knows full well that nothing is going to keep a 7 year old female evils’s happy or quiet, up to and including a X-box and a gag. He’s tried both of these in the past and it was never a pretty picture. The Superdaddyman also understands that no 7 year old female evils’s is going to allow {by vow of death} her 9 year old male evils’s inmate to enjoy his or be silent either. The scenario started by her being infuriated that Lazius Boycrazius had gotten her the wrong “type” of McFlurry. The Superdaddyman knows that whipped ice cream and sugary substance tastes the same regardless of the sugary substance, but then again he is still on the Superdaddydiet and might just be grumpy. Upon refusal of eating said whipped ice cream with sugary substance, she then proceeded to do something to make her happy, also known as pinching her brother. This then led to a tirade of anger and yelling from him and a slap, then followed by screaming from her. Curses! Foiled again!

Of course the true meaning of why none of these tricks of hers seem to be working is because she had been getting these bribes for them too frequently. The Superdaddyman took his new assistant, to the undersecretary, of the second cousin, of the roommate of a sidekick and explained to her the error and why it appears to be none functional. In all hopes she would simply be able to store this information in the event that some day she would have to take over in the shoes of the Superdaddyman, he simply assumed that the information would evaporate from her head within a few days. As a 15 year old wanna be crime fighter she probably should have rolled her window up, so that it wouldn’t fly through her ears with such veracity, and perhaps she wouldn’t have repeated the same mistake the next day. Of course the windows were down, and the same scenario repeated itself the next day. For all of the insurmountable mental abilities of our favorite crime fighter it appears that he doesn’t seem to learn from his own mistakes sometimes too. Like especially, don’t ever invite your enemies into your fold ;8o)

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The Chosen Ones – Chapter 1.4

I guess now that I let the cat out of the bag, I should give you all a little background on the whole “daughter” thing. It would have been a wonderful story had it been allowed to end in a Disney movie. I managed to get out of that hospital back when I was seventeen obviously. It came at a cost though, because the family was on a Jew hunt to say the least. My father was no help because he was simply a Jew in name only. He was in the middle of the whole shake down that was trying to gain fifty percent of that grocery store. I of course had to learn this while I was in hiding upstate, but news trickled in to me from others in the old neighborhood. I was totally immersed in a Yiddish society which was desperately trying to change my identity for me. It was a different set of circumstances then what they usually worked on, but needless to say these weren’t exactly Bugsy Siegel fans either. I wasn’t the first mob child they had hidden, and was introduced to distant relatives of many that simply wanted out of that world.

That overly glamorized world that most of the shlubs watching HBO on Sunday nights seems to think is the life, isn’t for everyone. There just so happens to be many who know the difference between right and wrong. I suppose that for many years I had, and I’m still pretty sure that my mother had. I did stop hating God while I was being nursed back to health and sanity by his children upstate, and more over I might have actually grown to love God. It never hurt anyone after all to love God. My copy of the bible unfortunately disagreed with so many of the tenants that I had been teaching myself over the years. It appeared that murdering my father was a no no. Unfortunately it was out of the question to murder a bunch of skuzzy Italians as well, and appeared to have no indulgences for “even if they eat and act like pigs” or “even if they are Godless fucks who violate every last word in the bible,” and it all seemed to bleed out of me as I concentrated my efforts into being a better person myself. I was free of it all after all and there was no reason for me to continue to leak hatred. The Rabbi that got me out of it all even told me in strictest confidence that for all he knew there could be a hell, and if there was I may never have to see my father again.

I never actually graduated from a traditional high school. It didn’t really matter because my new identity said that I had, and I figured I was pretty up on my reading and writing. I was a new person completely by the time my eighteenth birthday had rolled around officially, even though my new ID had said that it had passed six months prior. It had to be that day of course that the New York Post came in with the story that my guardian angel back in the city had been gunned down in front of the very hospital that I had met him at. I was beside myself, and it took many people to work on me for days to get my temper under control. The disease that my father and his chosen family had infected me with was pulsing through my veins and the story itself ripped all of those old memories of hate to the front of my brain. A long train of Italian names witnessed “blacks” do it, and I knew the usual pile of shit when I read it. My evenings were spent talking to the new found God that I had embraced, and my mornings were spent in the company of others.

I never read between the lines in all of this though. How could I? As far as my own little world went I didn’t even understand the full scale of the crap that I had left behind. I assumed that being out of sight and out of mind would mean that the family had kissed me off, and they were simply going about their own business as usual. I should have remembered how my mother disappeared. I should have remembered what it means to be an embarrassment to anyone in the family, and most importantly I should have remembered that I wasn’t leaving a family of human beings I was leaving a pack of animals that should be slaughtered and extinct! There I go again, but it isn’t really easy to talk about.

I don’t know how they knew, but they knew. They always seemed to know, and despite their inability to learn, if you don’t adapt to the hunt, then you get taken down like an antelope. I had been in the same place too long, and like they always seem to do, they found the right person or people to give them the information that they wanted. I’m sure that my own father had a part in that as well. As much as I love my people they always seem to assume that their parents mean the best and that all Jews are ok deep down inside. Of course it wasn’t my father that had come to collect the family secret. It was a full scale captain and a few of his crew that came into my little village and started mingling around to get the information that they needed on a five foot nine boy that probably only appeared in the area over the last year.

There is no word for “tact” or “skill” in Wop. Actually if I was to be completely honest with you, they seem to appreciate a fabulous disaster more than the next person for some ungodly reason. The rooming house that I was living in had over twenty people in it, at any given time. In contrast the diner that I had been flipping burgers in usually had a small portion of that, and it was also exactly where I would be any day between the hours of five am and two pm. I can almost guarantee that they knew that before they burst into the rooming house at eleven am and started killing everyone. Twenty three people died, and every last one of them I had called friends and meant it sincerely.

The town constable showed up at the diner knowing exactly what they had gone to the boarding house for, and he wasn’t alone. News travelled slowly in the region, but the police had gotten the call from the house next door, and intelligence dictated top him what a Cadillac full of Italians was doing in a house full of gunfire. They pulled the car in behind the old metallic diner and waited there. Centuries of persecution and death had taught many in this community exactly how to deal with these types of criminals, and I watched four fat Guido’s get gunned down out front of the diner as I was pouring coffee. The diner emptied out to see why it had happened and that was when I found out about the rooming house, and collapsed on the spot. Again I was infuriated that I didn’t get to kill any of these men, but on the same side of the coin I was sad that the towns’ folks had to see this. That was nothing compared to the personal guilt I had because of the murders on my behalf. I hated again, but I knew exactly what the town faced as long as I was in it. At the same time, I took solace and comfort in the way the constable dealt with the problem, and the way he took me aside afterwards to explain some things to me.

“Nobody should ever blame you for the actions of others,” he started while we watched the town recyclers dragging the bodies up into the back of a garbage truck. They had no respect for the bodies, and it would have been looked upon as sinister, to anyone who didn’t know what brought their dead bodies to this point. The town mortician and a gang of volunteers were dutifully taking care of the bodies on the other side of the town, but these bodies were being treated properly in my opinion. There was no look of shame on the constable’s face as he watched along with me, the compressor cramming the bodies in with everyone’s kitchen trash, to be taken to the landfill. “You don’t ever treat them with respect, they don’t deserve it. You don’t ever sink to their level, but you don’t ever give them respect.”

His English was good, but the fact that he usually spoke Hebrew would have been obvious to anyone. He explained to me the centuries of hatred and strife that his family had dealt with many times when he came in for his morning breakfast. I had always envied his ability to place everything into black and white as easily as he could, and tried to get as much from him as possible every morning. It was refreshing his outlook on “necessary evil” and “unnecessary evil” and then again it was even more of a history lesson to see it put into context like this. I’m sure as I stand here today that he might not have been too happy with the way I was playing with my food before I ate it, like the way I punished my father for his sins before I sent him to hell but my self righteousness now would be understood if not at least tolerated. You don’t cry for the roaches that finally walk through the roach motel, and you don’t shed tears for the monsters of our time as they get eradicated.

This was when I had made the decision to take advantage of my anonymous status and head for the homeland. I had been encouraged to seek out the love of our people in the middle east by the rabbi, even though he himself wasn’t much up for the violence that goes on in that part of the world. I on the other hand was starting to get the feeling that I was to be surrounded by violence whether I liked it or not, and I had only my pathetic excuse for a father to blame for all of that anguish. At least in Israel I could segregate those that hated me for who I was, and why I was with a certain level of impunity. I was after all so full of hate that going somewhere that I was hated by the obvious was better than staying here and being hated by the obvious only to me.

This was where things had gotten rather interesting again, but in a different direction. I had a family there that was related to one of the families that I had been very close to back in upstate New York. They had alerted the proper authorities that I was coming for a “pilgrimage” and that I would submit to the usual entry processes. Israeli intelligence is quite a bit different than what anyone in America could understand. I had a waiting party at the airport, as most of my history was vague at best, and my honesty didn’t help matters at all. Well actually to be honest with you my honesty had helped out quite a bit. The Mossad agent who was put in charge of getting to the bottom of who I actually was, and put together all of the pieces of whether or not I belonged there or could be trusted happened to be a breathtakingly beautiful woman. To be blunt, she actually looked a bit evil, and treated me rather poorly to begin with, but in time became quite fascinated with my inner knowledge of the New York/New Jersey Mafia, that she started spending more and more of her free time checking in with me to talk about it all. Long after I had been deemed a person in need of Israeli protection she was still coming around to talk. Then do more than talk. ... To Be continued

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The Slammer – An Ever Growing Web Novel – Chapter 5.7

The taped fingers, the batters glove, and the catcher’s mitt were the only thing keeping Lily’s hand from expanding to the size of a watermelon. Her ego didn’t allow her to admit that she lost the feeling in her hand a couple of hours, and seven innings ago, but of course, today had been her most productive day in the Major Leagues. Her brother has struck out nineteen batters, all but one on less than six pitches. No ball has been hit past the infield, and it is starting to look like he will get that perfect game, since only one batter, Christian just to be fair, had gotten 2 balls in his count. It’s gotten to the point where the batters are swinging at everything and missing. Two of the players, again including Christian, had stood in on “The Slammer” and took a try at it as well. The fans thought it was funny.

Despite the fact that Jay had totally destroyed her hand, her bat had been on fire, and she has yet to get out herself. Two home runs, a very hard hit single and an amazing two triples are to her credit today. Other teams hate seeing a catcher with the speed of a center fielder, but then again they can’t seem to stop her if she wants third base on a double either. Tug had already jubilantly told her that no Red Sox player had ever gotten two home runs and two triples in the same game, but it was her thirteen runs batted in that will put her on ESPN tonight for a hell of a lot more than her looks. The two of them would be the force to give nightmares all by themselves if it weren’t for the fact that the twenty four to zero beat down that they have going into the ninth inning would signify that it isn’t all those two.

Actually Jose has socked four home runs in the game, and the only thing killing his RBI count is the fact that Lily keeps clearing the bases before him. This was his first day back as well, and the team really missed his defense at first base, but he decided to come back with a bang at home plate too. This is turning into one of those statement games that would usually send the rest of the league into hysterics, but the fact that it is against the team that has to look over their shoulder at them makes it all that much more sweet. The cherry on top of the sundae was written on the green monster, as it looks like the second place tie is going to end as well. The Orioles are killing the Yankees as well.

Lily was heading up the stairs to the field when Tug grabbed her arm. “You need to rest that hand, it’s starting to look really ugly,” and Lily looked at him very strange. She looked down at the end of the bench where Jay was still sitting there. Her first instinct of course was to wonder how they were going to get Jay to pitch to someone else. He was after all at the end of a perfect game, and probably the most dominant perfect game in history, but she saw a mop up guy running into the field from the bullpen after looking in the other direction. He was being followed out by the back up catcher.

“You’ve got to be kidding me?” Lily shot out instantaneously when she realized what was going on. “You’re going to pull Jay from a game like this?” she followed up afterwards, but the anger in his voice was obvious as well.

“I didn’t pull him from the game,” Tug said to her looking confused, “Jay came over and told me he was done while you were bandaging your hand again,” he then added with a strange look of his own. “Look, Lily it’s one of the things we love about Jay. He has the killer instinct, but he doesn’t have the ego. I just assumed that he was worried about you, or he just didn’t want to see the massacre anymore.”

Lily looked at Tug a little longer and figured that he was most likely right. Jay goes out there to pitch, and he doesn’t exactly go out there to humiliate people. It’s always been a side benefit to the fans. “It should be kind of funny to see how the sportscasters play this one out tonight actually,” Lily said with a small chuckle, “they will probably have story after story about some phantom injury, and that would probably make a lot of us laugh later,” and even though her false good cheer didn’t actually fool Tug, she started walking down the pen to plop herself down next to her brother.

As always, Jay didn’t acknowledge her and continued to stare out at the field. Most games the only person that would be sitting next to Jay attempting to converse with him would be Jack. Jack not being here, it was up to Lily to fail miserably at getting Jay’s attention. The ice bag that is supposed to be sitting on his shoulder was plopped on the cement floor in front of Jay as it always is. Lily could never understand why the trainers wrap him up after he pitches when he is just going to throw the thing on the floor the minute they walk away. He always hated the feel of it, and was never a big fan of being constrained. Again this is one of the things that had changed so dramatically from when he was a boy, where he would have flipped out should anyone try to put any apparatus on him. Over the years he just learned to tolerate long enough to get anyone with ideas he didn’t like to walk away. It’s been a very strange twenty eight years with Jay in her life, but the more she looks at it, the less she would have ever wanted to be without it.

“You were amazing today Jay,” Lily said to him while staring at the field. She didn’t expect any response, and wasn’t disappointed. The fact that he didn’t interact with anyone while baseball was being played actually went back to when he watched games with Bill. Bill would babble on and on about everything and Jay would just sit there and absorb it all. Jay, as they had deduced a few minutes ago, also hasn’t got any of the ill affects of ego either, so a compliment to him usually rolls off. She had gotten him to mention after his first perfect game with the Pride that “it’s my job” and she actually appreciated that attitude a lot.

“You should have stayed on second during that last triple,” Jay said out of the blue after a few minutes of silence. It took Lily by surprise, even though she knew exactly what he was talking about. It’s the kind of thing her father would have said to her, since she could have hit for the “cycle” but again it brought the reality that these things never really mattered to Lily either. Well they never seemed to matter until she somehow got thrust into being the poster girl for women in sports.

“The trick to being the best is to make sure that you treat every moment the same,” Lily piped up after another minute of silence. She looked at Jay staring into the field and then added, “At that time getting another base was more important to me than a gimmicky title,” was what she said to end her point. Quickly she threw in, “That’s why we are winners instead of posers.”

Jay then patted her on the knee without looking at her as his face was transfixed on the pitcher who had relieved him as he gave up the first hit, a hard single to centerfield. Jays face never changed. Lily felt that Jay was trying so hard to be “normal” and as usual his own nature held him back in the attempt. She also figured that there is a part of him that was relieved that the Blue Jays got a hit, for whatever reason he just never really liked another team being humiliated, it just isn’t the type of fan that he is. Being a catcher, Lily for some reason always appreciated the one to zero games that end in the thirteenth inning as well. Perhaps Jay will get to pitch one of those before this year ends, or just maybe he will be back next year to try again. … to be continued

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I am amazed to say that I just crossed a threshold that most alcoholics never do, and at the same time it meant so little to me that I forgot to write about it. My very first blog entry was entitled “The End of the 16^th Year” and as I have said far too many times I am sure, that it was nothing more than something to fill up the spaces on my Yahoo 360 page. My Yahoo 360 page which was one of the very first as I was one of the thousand or so “Alpha” testers chosen at random from the messenger listings, and of course I couldn’t wait to play with it. This was July 15, 2005 and it really seems like more than 3 years ago.

Through the fighting I caused by not watching what I put in print {and what the fuck did I know … blog this you idiots} the chat rooms that I hung out in became hell for three days. I didn’t realize that my nickname was in a different color so that EVERYONE knew to click on it so they would see the “new” 360, and curiosity could have killed this cat, were it not for my wonderful ability to poke fun at myself, and bullshit my way out of tight spots. The next thing you new, I was posting a new blog everyday with some “world according to Jeremy” and something else happened. I became popular outside of my own little world, then unpopular, then infamous, then obscure, then almost completely unread. It was a long strange 3 years though.

Along the way my writing did pick me up 3 online writing gigs that pay me money, and help to supplement what was a more dismal life than my stories honestly portrayed every day. Sure almost everything I wrote was true, but it was wrapped in such an amusing and oddly fascinating package that it became hard to tell the actual misery from the feigned misery, the actual happiness from the bright side that was being honored and hardly ever rejoiced in. My 3 online writing gigs realistically put an extra 400 a month in my bank account which is slowly disintegrating as inflation rises, and even this weekend I had finally thrown in the towel and admitted that I just can’t afford to date and feed my kids at the same time. The state says that I can’t stop feeding the kids so my spinsterhood began as of last night, when I had to admit to the woman I had been seeing that I could afford to take her out where she wanted to go, and she decided it was time to find someone that could, and she easily will. This has happened before and if I am stupid enough to allow it, it will happen again. Fortunately the loyalty discount at Adult Bouncer is still within my budget and I can pretend.

This is me, thirty eight years old, nineteen years sober, three kids, three divorces, three extra dependants on top of the kids and a little over 10 years to go before I can claim my own life again, assuming I give up the forty nine years before that and start over again. This had actually been a theme throughout my entire blogging career, and it has only been a theme of my sobriety in the last four, but I never actually think about drinking, which might make me strange regardless of how long I have been away from it. When my second wife ran off with whats-his-name and took the kids away from me, drinking wasn’t an option. Murder, perhaps suicide, definitely revenge were coursing through my veins but drinking never factored in the least, and why should it? Let’s face facts, but even a simpleton can realize that booze doesn’t solve these things. My mind doesn’t work up to the level of simpleton, but it does at the very least understand logic.

Five years ago I managed to get the kids all to myself, and the ex wife has been free to do nothing but create chaos and try to damage them all without the fear of having to pay for any of their upbringing. Boy wasn’t that a fine desert at the end of what had already been a shit sandwich, but I know in my own heart that I did the right thing and sacrifice for them by my own free will. Let’s get real here, but there are plenty of ways to escape from it all, not the least of which would be her love to get the kids, the child support, the welfare and all the other goodies that The People’s Republic of Maine would throw at her for bringing fresh new losers into its state. Bitter? Fuck yeah, but nobody in that state can deny it, and I am still above all of that to sentence my children to pathetic soul death like that. It’s still a choice I have always had regardless of how much “trapped” crying I can do when I lay down alone at night. That’s the whole point of being a martyr is that you don’t get regaled, if at all until many many years after you have died, and by that time who gives a fuck anyway? This is what I do, and it is what I am used to so who cares? As I always say, I am at least used to it, and will not bow down to anything out of desperation again. Well actually we’ll revisit that theory when I am on my death bed and the priest comes to visit, because like most I have a feeling I will bow down to desperation then.

The threshold that I had crossed for those that haven’t figured it out yet {either of you actually} is that I have now been sober the same amount of years that I had been alive previous to the day I got sober. Officially half of my life has been sober, and as I said that is a very rare threshold. It is a testament to the desperation I felt when I quit drinking for I had known the race had been run two years before I could even make it to legal drinking age. I have never {and mind you I am thirty eight} walked into a bar, placed a legal ID on the bar and ordered a drink for myself. I have been sober so long that I had never had a Zima, an Ice Beer, a Mojito {commercial just came on as I was typing}, or even a Sam Adams, as they all were invented after I quit drinking. There was a time many years ago when I would look upon these things with a longing for what I had missed, but have in the last decade realized what a true liar an alcoholic is. Our ability to lie to ourselves with such amazing reason and clarity is what sets us apart, because if I were still drinking, I wouldn’t have even considered touching any of that “fag college luxury drink” if you had given it to me for free. All of them would have told my sickening brain that they wasted space for the things that actually got me drunk like Gin and Vodka and Whiskey if I couldn’t afford the clear stuff.

The most glaring advantage that I have had in all of this was the nearly two years I didn’t drink before I went out again and took a month to finish myself off. I lost the best girlfriend I ever had during that period, gained the second best girlfriend I ever had, who promptly left me in sobriety because she liked her men fucked up and needy and I was starting to grow out of that, lost my entire family {which was necessary as their level of fucked up was no help to anyone trying to straiten out} and stripped every last ounce of humanity out of myself. This made me teachable. In some ways it made me more realistic, and I was able to understand the greatest truth with the easiest of comprehension that has interfered with the recovery of more drunks than anything else in the world. I do thank God for this clarity that had made me understand the great riddle of the sick and suffering alcoholics brain that might inevitably keep them from ever recovering from the disease of alcoholism. I have never once sat and said, “I wish I could just go out and have a couple of beers with everyone else, like a normal person” and that is the God’s honest truth. The reason for this is simple actually and it takes the clarity of mind for me to just acknowledge that I have never and will never want a couple of beers and a good buzz on. I want to drink the entire bar, make an ass out of myself, become violent, and possibly go to jail for the night. LIKE A NORMAL PERSON! The people that don’t put alcohol to their lips with that intention in mind are the fucking weirdoes ;8o)

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Fear of the Dark – Chapter 1.3

Whoever would have thought that it would take forty five minutes to get less than forty blocks in a taxi in the middle of the day? Of course to Timmy it felt like four years, his heart has been hammering in his chest from the moment he hung up the phone and went darting out to get the first taxi he could hail down. He had totally forgotten his “holy kit” as he had proclaimed it, which was nothing more than a backpack with the essentials in it. For some reason he didn’t think he would need it, which was just the invitation to need it all the worse. It didn’t matter. He was going to get an answer to something, anything relating to one of his two “God” obsessions. He did of course do his best to stare at his feet and play with his hands so that he didn’t accidentally, of course, take his other God’s name in vain, which he did do on occasion.

The hospital that Gina and Jim were in is the best in the city. The police were obviously just as enthusiastic about having a witness to God as he had ravaged another victim in the barely darkness of the night. Timmy tried to rationalize the amount of carnage that God had splayed throughout these streets in the past eleven years, and he actually lost track. In the beginning, when he was given the uncreative name of “The Shredder” which had taken an initial slew of five deaths in a month, the world media wasn’t really involved. His worst month to date had been thirteen, but it was followed by a month with one, and had followed a month with two, bringing his first years totals down to the usual average of five per month. Of course this is New York City that we are talking about so it took about two years for it to even become a “state” issue and start running in the Albany papers. After about four years New Jersey was starting to warn people to get out of the city before dark, and within six it became common knowledge thanks to the Connecticut papers running stories. Timmy’s mother had called him around this time when the Boston Herald started running the stories.

By the time Timmy had had to pick up the phone and start calming his mother down about it all “The Shredder” had left his cartoonish Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles moniker, and the papers were already walking into blasphemy with “The Wrath of God” when someone finally caught onto the trends. It might have never been documented at all, since a lot of the people in the law enforcement community had just been attributing it to drug mafia warfare as well. “The Shredder” was starting to be commonly regarded as the new “bully” in town since it was mostly, but not always drug kingpins that were being shredded and left for dead in various alleyways. Nobody had pieced together that all of these people had other habits, and although not always proven rapist and torturing natures. In the end when it was a cast off from one of the old Mafia families that was shaking down an entire section of the lower east side but “old school” in the ways of avoiding the heroin trade, Timmy stepped in to explain to the police the trends he had noticed as well.

One of the things that all but two of the criminals had in common was rape. The two that Timmy could confirm truly had no rapist tendencies were not lacking in the prime factor that seemed to be the target of God. Whatever this God was about, he targeted rapists in particular, and that was obvious, but the one indisputable factor that he targeted were those that made life a long deluge of hopeless despair. That class A criminal that everyone in the world hates, who seems to get away with everything they do, and use constant fear, tyranny, hopelessness, and despair to trap entire communities. It was for the most part a very theological outlook on the whole situation, and a certain justification for a man, monster or whatever Timmy had been tracking his entire time in New York. He had also come to the conclusion that whatever was doing this stalked its own victims through research and cunning that somehow escaped the average man. It always brought him back to that voice he had heard as a small boy when his father would break out the old LPs of his favorite radio crime fighter, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of man … The Shadow knows,” and of course it fascinated him.

As Timmy walked through the hallways of the hospital to get to room 606 his mind wandered to his new expression that he repeats to himself over and over again after every attack, “Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of God … God knows, and he ain’t tellin” which gives him that maniacal grin it always does. The door in front of him opened before he could even grasp the handle. “Thank God you’re here, Gina has been going crazy,” Tam Blasdell said the second she looked into his face, and with his warmest smile Timmy held up the brand new notebook and pack of Erasermate pens that he had purchased on the way in at the gift shop. “You never think of these things when you’re having a nervous breakdown,” she then added after she saw them.

Gina was laying on the bed staring at them, and appeared quite calm. She didn’t appear to be the wreck of a begging, and injured young girl that her mother had made her out to be. She looked rather serene despite her wired up jaw and the mouth guard that were covering the lower half of her face. Timmy even thought that she would have been smiling had she not been restricted to do so by all of the hardware. She held out her hand towards the two of them and Timmy walked towards her to take her hand in his, as innocently as he would have anyone, but jumped startled when she lunged her other hand into his with something hard and wooden in her hand. She released it as it made it into his hand and he accidentally dropped it, which made Gina go wild, as if she was trying to get out of bed. Timmy restrained her gently, and said, “I’ll get it, here take this pad of paper, so that we can talk,” and once she stopped stirring he did just that.

He actually got down to his hands and knees so that he could reach under the bed, where the object had fallen. Groping for it, struggling, his fingers finally clasped around the piece of wood that had a rather familiar feel to it, and as he got it out into the light he could see why. It was a hand carved wooden crucifix about the size of a pack of cards, with a hole carved into the top. The hole was obviously carved in as it wasn’t smooth enough to have been made by a drill. It had obviously had a chain through it at one time as there were definite signs of rope wear.

Getting back to his feet Timmy tried to add some levity to the situation by saying, “That’s what startled me, I think was the inner fear that you were trying to convert me back to Catholicism,” and he was the only one to laugh at his joke. He was thinking it was a tough room, like a comedian in the Vaudevillian days might have at this point, as he placed the crucifix into Gina’s panicked, outreaching hand.

Gina started making the “shooing” motion at her mother with her hands, which at first her mother tried to ignore, outright. As Gina started making strangled noises through her facial apparatus, her mother started trying to protest, which made Gina far more animated about it. Timmy was starting to wonder if he should start trying to reassure her mother that she would be ok in here with him, when her mother, most likely afraid of Gina hurting herself turned on her heels and stormed out of the room. The slamming of the door behind her made it so that nurses came down the hall to see what the commotion was, as Timmy could see out the hallway window. Gina started motioning towards the window as well, so Timmy walked towards it and made a motion as if to close the window which immediately had Gina nodding.

While he was closing the window shades Gina started writing furiously on the pad and had it held out for Timmy before he had even come back to the bed. Grabbing the notebook he started reading aloud, “I don’t want my mother to know about any of this, and you read everything out loud, as everyone knows.”

He smiled at her and started to speak, “You write down anything you want, and I promise not to read it aloud for the rest of the conversation,” and he handed her back the notebook. His excitement was still very hard to contain, but he did his best as she started writing furiously again. He asked her a simple enough question, “Did you make that crucifix?”

She stared at him wide eyed for a moment and then started shaking her head furiously the whole time she was writing. She did quite a bit of writing, and it was amazing that she could do it with her head shaking back and forth the way it was. Timmy was starting to think it would have made him dizzy, but she finished up and handed it to him. He started reading it in his head, and then started reading it aloud again, “No, I want you to read it aloud so I can make sure you read it right. I need you to completely understand what I tell you here, and it might take a while to get all of it out,” below that was where she had started writing after the last question, and the writing was exactly the same as before her violently shaking head. Timmy wondered if it is a talent, and yes his mind often travels even in the mist of important things. He continues, “He threw that at me before he disappeared. I think he tore it from around his neck. It makes me feel better for some reason when I hold it, but I don’t know why. A lot of what the police told everyone wasn’t completely true, and I need to tell you, someone, and anyone, but not my mother. She can’t take it right now ok?”

Timmy nodded his head as he handed her back the notebook. He started speaking but before more than, “I” could get out she held up the notebook with the words, “When I write please don’t ask questions, I have to tell you and you can ask me questions after I am done, I don’t know how much time I have ok?” and again he nodded.

Timmy chose the “serenity route” by pulling up one of the reclining chairs beside the bed and sitting patiently until she finished writing. If the truth be told, he was absolutely amazed at how well she was doing under the circumstances. His own twisted teenage years had taught him that most girls her age are not only incapable of being rational during such a time of duress but humorously he thought they couldn’t go this long without the use of their mouths. She stopped as he thought that and glared at him, which actually made him blush as he thought she could read his mind. “One insanity at a time Timmy,” he thought to himself and she didn’t glare this time so he thought himself safe.

She handed him the notebook and she had most of a page covered. He was now thinking that she could write almost as fast as his teenage sister could talk at least. He cleared his throat and started to read, “It was horrifying!!!” with emphasis on the three exclamation points for a reason, “I thought I was dead when that freak Marty stabbed my father and grabbed me. My mind was racing and I was trying to think through the screaming in my head. I was NOT completely terrified like a deer in the headlights, there was still a glimmer of hope, until that huge black shape started falling from the top of the building,” there were some eraser marks here as she was trying to get her wording right, “Then I had no doubt in my mind that I was going to die and it was going to be the worst death that anyone could have ever had. I could barely look at it,” again she had eraser marks, and as Timmy looked at her she was just sitting there nodding. He started up again, “It was human shaped, but a lot larger than one of those freakish professional wrestlers on TV. It’s eyes were totally black and it’s skin was white, but he had a huge mop of dark brown hair like in an old heavy metal video. I closed my eyes and covered my face waiting for whatever it was that was going to happen to me. Nothing did, so I opened my eyes just a crack,” and that was where it ended, so Timmy handed her back the notepad.

Timmy couldn’t help himself as he asked the question, “You said it was a ‘he’ are you sure about that?” which made her glare at him and hold up one finger. Timmy knew what that meant and blushed like a child with a big mouth and went back to fiddling with his fingers, as she handed him the notepad with one sentence on it, “In my bag there is a book that he told me to give you in a voice that was either a roaring man or a woman on the wrong birth control, but thanks for spoiling the ending smart ass,” which was Timmy’s queue to go get the book and leave her alone to write.

He pulled the book out of the bag that was wrapped up in her leotards and tights as if she had been trying to hide it from someone. Timmy knew better than to open his mouth and ask this time at least, but he makes no promises that he will use any tact in the future. The book was eerily like an old King James Version of the bible in its usual pliable leather cover, with the gold painting on the tips of the paper. Scratched into the cover as if with a very sharp, yet wide claw were the words “i Craven” with the lower case quite distinct on the first letter.

Gina was done writing and handed the notebook to Timmy and went back to staring at the ceiling. He started reading aloud again, “What I saw was just as terrifying as I thought it would be, only far worse than what you would read in a book. The creature bit into the neck of Marty like a Vampire would, but then again, not like a Vampire would. Not any of the Vampires we have read about,” and Timmy let out one of the surprised whistles that people often do when they hear something a bit shocking. He continued, “It completely ripped the throat off of Marty and then spit it out. It was the entire front of his throat, and I couldn’t watch again, but was too horrified to move. With my eyes covered I listened to the slurping and sucking sounds as he sucked every bit of blood out of him. When the sound stopped I cracked my eyes to see him rip Marty’s head completely off with one hand and then crush it between his hands before shredding it apart with its huge claws. I put my head down and cried as I listened to it completely shred Marty and throw all of his pieces everywhere,” and at that point it ended, but she remained there nodding with no expression on her face.

She reached out for the notebook, and Timmy handed it to her. Timmy wanted to ask her about what the police had lied about. So far the story she told at least would have meshed with the story he had read from the local paper. His shock was overwhelmed by his curiosity over why he would shred the body afterwards. His mind was floating into one of those dazes where he was computing too many formulations at the same time, he was thinking about the shredding, the blood, the cross. The cross? Why would he be carrying around a crucifix? His mind was wandering so much that Gina had to hit him with the notepad to get him reading again, “With my head still in my arms crying I heard other strange noises, but I just kept my face hidden. I know I should have tried to see more but I was more scared than I ever will be again. I know that in my heart,” Timmy paused for a moment to look at Gina’s nodding head as she stared at the ceiling, “That was when the book bumped against my hip. It wasn’t thrown hard it just grazed me, but my head darted up. I looked right at him. His face was pale white but almost childlike. It was huge of course and the blood was dripping from his chin making me sick. He started talking and it came out like a roaring lion as he said ‘That book is for my Reverend friend’ which let’s face it even in shock at the time, meant you. My father was laying by my feet groaning. He had obviously carried him up and dropped him there, but he doesn’t remember a thing. When he told the police that he had fallen into the basement entry that was the story they went with because they didn’t like my version. He turned away from me, and I heard the breaking chain, and that was when he tossed me the crucifix, and started scaling the building. It wasn’t graceful or catlike, but more of a brute force reaching from window ledge to window ledge. He made a loud roaring grunt as he threw himself over the roof, and he was gone.”

Timmy let out another whistle as he handed the pad back to Gina. She sat there patiently looking at him. He asked her the only question that was on his mind, “You hid the book inside your bag to make sure that I got it and the police wouldn’t take it?” and she nodded and scratched out, “I was scared to not get it to you.”

Timmy opened up the book and started reading the beginning of it aloud, “It has been eleven long years since I have walked among you as a man. I imagine there will come a day when I will think of eleven years as mortals would consider seconds. My thirst for blood has driven me to be outcast in your society, and I feel that it is time for me to tell my tale to anyone who would wish to hear it. To know me, to hate what I have become, to fear me, to be me, it is all irrelev