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I would often ask myself, "What makes a man?" Also - "Am I a man?"

It wasn't until I met my second girlfriend, the love of my life, that I realised what being a man means to me.

It's not about making money, or being the bread winner. It's not about getting blowjobs all the time and drinking fine whiskey. (All though these things are nice.)

Late one night we were cuddling in bed. With her head buried under my neck, the warmth of her slowly rising chest pressing against my own, I ran my fingers through her hair. She looked up at me and whispered.

"You make me feel so safe."

Nothing anyone had ever said to me before or since has made me feel so masculine, so affirmed in my manhood. She wasn't saying that I was big and tough and could defend her against a gang of Bikers with my bare fists; she was saying she trusted me, both in my actions and my judgements. She trusted me not to hurt her and to be loyal. Trusted me to make the right decisions for myself and both of us. Her trust was in my love for her, which I felt (and still feel) with all of my heart.

There's something unmistakably primal in the way that many women instinctually crave a feeling of security and protection from the men in their lives. I don't particularly care if it seems like I'm denying her (or any woman's) agency by saying so; she's an autonomous, strong, moral, and critically thinking human being in her own right.

The test of my manhood, I've realised, is how I take the fragility and potency of her trust and handle it. I aim to do so with grace and care.

Mysterious phone call
Courtney was a girlfriend I had 15 years ago for a few months. She was middle income, working class, and ordinary in every way. Things ended on a bad note with Courtney, and I had not seen or spoken to her for a week. Life was starting to look good again. The fear that the police were going to arrest me on Domestic Violence charges had waned. My extreme acid reflux, which I became afflicted by soon after I started dating Courtney, spontaneously cured itself. I was spending time with my old friends again.

One night, I was working late in the biochemistry lab at the university. It was nearly midnight. The lab phone rang, and I answered it. There was a long silence. I heard somebody breathing on the other end.

“Hello ……. hello?,” I said.

Nobody spoke. There was only breathing. Then they hung up.

I rode home. It was raining but not cold. My house had been left unlocked, but nobody was home. We usually left the door unlocked because somebody was almost always home. I lived with four roommates, and random people often slept on the sofas. Our house was a hangout for students and some townies to smoke hashish and marijuana, eat LSD, do shrooms, and drink beer. Nobody did harder drugs there. We had a table-bong in the living room. It was a massive water pipe built into the coffee table. It had four hoses, each with its own mouthpiece.

I have a sensitive nose. I can often tell who is home and where they have been by the way the air smells. Sometimes, I can sense where women are in their menstruel cycle.

I went upstairs. Halfway down the hall toward my room, I sensed taht something was wrong. It was Courtney’s perfume and sweat, and she was still here. After what she did the last time I saw her, I was going to be careful. I held my bookbag in front of me like a shield. I carefully opened my door and looked in. I hoped she did not hear my footsteps pause slightly when I detected her. She was not in my room. I picked up the heavy blanket on my bed and wrapped it loosely around my left arm. I held the loose end in my right hand. It would make a good shield if she throws something. I could use it to catch her arms if she hits. I took off my boots so i could move quietly.

I crept back down the hall. At the other end of the hall, my roommate’s door was open. He usually closes it when he leaves. The lights were off, but the street light outside his window was bright enough to see. I have good night vision, so I didn’t bother turning on the hallway light when I came home.

I listened outside his door, then rushed into his room, shielding myself with the heavy blanket. Courtney was standing in a pool of light in the corner pointing a butcher’s knife at me. The glare from the streetlight reflected in its blade. She was holding it over handed in a slasher movie grip. The whites of her eyes showed all the way around the iris. She was crying and her black eye makeup was running down her chalk white face.

I switched on the light. She wore a sleeveless black velvet dress and was soaked from the rain. She had long bleeding cuts running down her pale arms.

“Oh Robin …….” she breathed. “ Robin.” She cried silently for a moment. “…. I love you my Chosen One.”

“Get out,” I said.

“Oh boooh hooh it’s me, your Millennium Girl. You are my chosen One. We are meant to be together. Take me back,” she said. She really talks like that and made up those names.

“What happened to your arms?” I said. She had lowered the knife. There was blood on the blade.

“I’m pregnant. It’s yours. I’m the Faerie Queen,” she said. Her pupils were as big as saucers.

Almost every time we had sex, the condom broke, and last month was another pregnancy scare. I was worried. She talked about it every day but refused to get tested. I finally bought her the test, and she was not pregnant. She had her period a week later.

The first day of her period last month, she went with me to the computer lab at the library. We did class work all afternoon. We got up to leave. Her light grey seat cushion was red. Blood had soaked into the fabric. Her bottom was bloody. She wrapped her jacket around her butt, and we left.

Three weeks later, she was still having her period. This happened every month: the condom broke or she forgot to take birth control pill, her period was late, she said she was pregnant, and I tried to convince her to get tested. She eventually went to student health services. She was not pregnant and had no STD. She was treated and given medication.

I asked her what drugs she was on, and she replied that she had been at PsychoTom’s house (aka Meltdown House) and they gave her “Brain Candy.” Then she went home, got the knife, and ran all the way to my house, about two miles, in the rain. She said she needed the knife because she was afraid somebody was going to rape her.

I told her to leave. She refused. I could not call the police because of the table-sized bong in the living room. I went outside. She followed. I told her it’s over. I went outside and walked toward the bar where I worked. She ran after me. She grabbed my leg and wouldn’t let go. I walked with her clinging to my leg, dragging in the street. She was crying hysterically.

She finally fell off my leg. She curled up in fetal position on the asphalt, still wailing “take me back oh robin take me back waaahhhhhhh.” I didn’t look back. I was about to start an internship 1000 miles away and didn’t expect to see her again.

[video]http://www.bluelight.org/vb/blog_post.php?do=newblog[/video]

The second post of a three part rant. This happened more than 15 years ago, but I’m still screwed me up about it. It’s offensive, gross, and misogynistic.

100 times as many people view posts with the word “rant” in the title than posts without that word. I’m not going to put the word “rant” in the title any more. The rants are unstructured rough drafts edited only for the worst of the speliling and grammatical errors. They are about bad things that happened and are nothing more than an effort to examine them and examine some bad ways of thinking.

Courtney was my first “real” girlfriend. She was a working class American girl majoring in biochemistry and premed. I was finishing college and had met her in one of my classes. She had invited me to spend the night at her apartment. She lived in the student quarter around the University on the West bank of the Mississippi River. It was a modern brick apartment building that looked like a two story ranch house.

She put the Foo Fighters “Fingernail song”, her favorite song from her favorite band, on infinite replay in her CD player. Foo Fighters is to grunge as the Dave Matthews Band is to alternative rock. It has no soul, and I had a bad feeling about the evening.

Reaching nariai
She begged me to do it. I was twenty one years old and had never done this thing before. I had seen it done in the movie Caligula, the only pornographic movie I have ever seen. I thought I knew how to do it.

The Fingernail Song was on its fourth repetition by now. “Fingernails are pretty, fingernails are good, blah blah blah fingernails.” The singer was angry. Harsh sounds from his guitar split the air. Maybe it would be quieter under the sheets so I gave in and descended. I closed my eyes to ward off my claustrophobia.

The scene from Bukowski played in my mind: “Blood and pee come out of there. Think about it. Blood and pee.“ I held my breath, but immediately I knew something was wrong. Something sticky clung to my nose. I went up for air.

“Why are you stopping? Don’t stop,” she said.

I took a deep breath went down again. Something slimy slipped into my mouth. I took it out and held it to the light. It looked like a piece of yellow cheese and was big as the tip of my pinky. I squeezed it. It was firm but had a gooey layer on the outside. It stank bad. I set it down on her stomach. A wave of nausea hit.

“Keep going.” Her eyes were open but blank as they stared upwards. They were like a cat’s when it dozes open-eyed. She had gone somewhere else and was probably with Dave Grohl or PsychoTom in her mind.

The stultifying sound of the Foo Fighters intruded into my thoughts: “Fingernails are pretty. Fingernails are good blah blah blah fingernails are pretty nah nah nah.”

“Keep going,” she said.

“I can’t,” I said.

Her eyes came back for a moment. She said, “please i’ll do you next.”

I tried again. I have a sensitive nose. The longer I went, the worse it stank. It smelled like all the nasty clichés you can think of.

“Keep going,” she said.

“i need a break,” I said. My stomach was churning and gurgling.

“Blood and pee come out of there. Think about it,” Bukowski wrote.

I thought about it. She had been wearing a G-string. G-strings are the E. coli expressway from the anus to the vagina. E. coli are the bacterial flora found in the intestines. When ingested, they can cause diarrhea, meningites, or sepsis.

“Keep going!” she said.

“Fingernails nah nha nah”

I held my breath and went under the sheets again. My stomach heaved for a moment but I suppressed it.

“More!” she said.

My stomach pumped hard. I kept my lips closed tight. Vomit filled my mouth. I tried to hold it, but the pressure increased. I barfed in her and on her.

“Whaaaaa! Whats happening?” she said.

I vomited more. I covered my mouth with my hands, and puke sprayed on her body and bed. I rolled onto the floor and continued to puke. I could no longer taste the rotten fish flavor. She was crying. By now, my stomach was empty, and I was only dry heaving. I was crying too.

“I’m sorry dear,” I said.

“You think I’m gross!” she said.

“No,” I said.

“I disgust you do I? My body disgusts you? How dare you!,” she said, raising her voice. “My body is beautiful and I like the way I taste. You know what your problem is?” she said.

“No,” I said.

“You can’t handle a strong women. I’m a strong woman and you’re a faggot with an AIDS-addled brain,” she said.

“Sorry. It must have been something I ate,” I said.

“You ate me you misogynist pig! You need to leave right now!” she said.

“I meant for lunch,” I said.

“Get out!! And you can kiss my ass on your way! ” she threw an empty wine bottle at me. It hit the wall and broke against the tile floor.

“Calm down I’m leaving.”

I was moving toward the door. She threw her bedside lamp. It crashed against the wall.

“Faggot! Get out! Go fuck your AIDS Faggot boyfriends!” she cackled hysterically when she said that.

She jumped out of bed and hit me dozens of times while I pulled on my pants and grabbed my shirt and boots. I blocked most of it, but a few punches hit me in the body and head. My eyes stung, and I was sure she gave me a bloody nose. She grabbed a handful of my hair and started pulling. When an attacker grabs your hair, they have nearly full control of your body.I couldn’t get away.

By now, Courtney was grinning in her self-righteous rage. She was 5’6” and only weighed 120 pounds. I weighed 200, benched 400, and was taking boxing lessons. I had enough training to know that one solid punch to the face could crush her cheekbone, break the orbital bone around her eye, collapse her sinus cavity, break her jaw, and fracture her skull, leaving her unconscious, brain damaged, or dead. “So this is how domestic violence starts,” I mumbled.

With the enforcement of domestic violence laws often heavily favoring the woman, I feared that if she had so much as one bruise on her body or a scrape on her knuckles from where she hit me, I could go to jail. It’s happened to other people. I was facing her. I gently grabbed her wrist with both hands and pulled it toward my head. I stepped backward toward the door, pulling her with me. She suddenly let go and fell. I jumped back toward the door.

“Get out faggot waaaahhhh waaaahhh WAAHHHHH!” she said. She crying again and was actually wailing now. Her voice was shrill and made my ears ring.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“BWahhhhh! Ayeeeee Ayyeeeeee!” She was shrieking like a tortured cat. She was on the floor hold her bare foot. It was bleeding. She had stepped on a piece of glass.

“Fingernails are pretty...”

On my way to the door, I pushed her CD player off her dresser and it smashed apart on the floor. Silence. I went outside. There was a series of loud crashes and the sound of breaking glass coming from inside. Inside, she alternated between cursing and shrieking hysterically.

It was a duplex. Her next door neighbor Tiffany was in the yard trying to
look in her window. She said she just called the police. I left.


To be continued.

It occured to me today that most of the drugs I have used this year on a regular basis have been drugs that I grew, in my backyard. And legally too! I got my cannabis cultivation license, and I grew some wonderful OG Kush that has been a hit with everyone who has smoked it. I also have quite a few cacti (san pedro, peruvian torch, and until recently, a peyote which unfortunately died in my failed attempt to graft it to a san pedro), and earlier this year I grew a few poppies and harvested the latex. To top it off, the highs I've been getting have been some of the best I've had. For example, the weed I've been growing has a high that is so balanced, i never feel anxious or couchlocked, but instead i have a perfect, relaxing stone. And the San Pedro I've grown have produced some of the most blissful psychedelic experiences I've ever had! It's kinda like how no restaurant food compares to a hot homecooked meal, it's so much more authentic! Plus, putting the time and effort into raising the plants has removed the anxiety and guilt that i get from doing drugs I get off the street because i had the patience to grow it from seed, and didnt fiend over it snd fork over a weeks pay for a few days worth of drugs, which are typically not pure, are unsanitary, and can be taken in many ROAs that are very harmful.

I have a fantasy where I grow everything I use: In my fantasy garden there are tons of vegetables, fruits, medicinal herbs of all sorts, coca plants everywhere, tons of poppies and cannabis, all of the mescaline contaning cacti, amanitas, salvia, datura, tea, kratom trees, coffee plants, tobacco, ayahuasca vines, syrian rue and a few DMT containing plants, and of course a wide variety of psilocybe mushrooms inside. It would be wonderful because I could use all of these plants for a variety of uses that may not necessarily be to get high, for example, making opium essential oil, for aromatherapy, which i'm sure is an amazing medicine, but nobody thought to make it!

This is just my opinion, but i think that the drugs found in nature are the best ones for the reason that they are the most balanced highs IMO, and when you grow it yourself, theres nothing really quite like it. It's like you develop a friendship with the plant, and when you consume it, it gives you back the love you gave it, just like and fruits or vegetables you might grow. i reccomend anyone who legally can grow their oen drugs of any kind do it! you wont regret it if you do the job well start to finish, it will change the way you think about the drugs you take on a regular basis. I use cannabis for all kinds of stuff now that i grow it: i've made bracelets with the fibers, i've used the sugarleaves as a spice (goes well with indian food), I've flavored alcoholic drinks with the water leaves, and ive made massage oils with it, and i'm still coming up with more uses! I look forward to growing more plants and discovering more uses and preparations!

anyway yeah im rlly stoned right now and i had to express this somehow!

This is a rant about something that happened 15 years ago. It’s offensive and misogynistic. The memory is still vivid. I’ve asked myself why do I attract this kind of woman. At the time, I thought they were normal. Her type is what surrounded me growing up. It’s representative of my experiences with American Women but not of women in general. In contrast, my experiences with foreign (not Americanized) women in the US and abroad have been positive overall.

In his autobiographical novel “Women”, author Charles Bukowski paraphrased Hemingway: “Write what you know,” he advised. Hemingway wrote honestly about his life experiences to create fiction stories. Bukowski took the advice further than what seems to have been intended and ran around Los Angeles having dysfunctional relationships full of psychotic episodes with countless women and then wrote stories about them.

Door
Grace Jones was playing on the bar’s sound system. The lighting was dim and the ceiling was low. The interior was the same as it was 100 years ago when it was built. It had white plaster walls and lot of dark, plain woodwork. Wooden bench seats were built against the walls. 19th century photos of Minneapolis decorated the white walls. Twenty tables filled the floor.

I was the dungeon master. I worked odd jobs to help pay for college, and this was one of them. I worked the door at a basement gaybar. It was getting crowded. The usual gay leather dudes were there drinking vodka tonics.

Pitcher Pete, a stout old man, had been sitting alone all evening with his famous pitcher in his usual spot in a dark corner. He was already drunk. You could tell because his bald head swells on account of the steel plate in his skull. Years ago, a flower pot fell from a third story window and landed on his head. He has never formed a cogent sentence and has spoken in “word salad” ever since then. One time, he said goodbye with the phrase “Hold onto your lettuce and don’t drop the salad.”

Psycho Tom and his tweaker roommate Billy with the long blond braids and gold plated front teeth sat at the table across from the door. Billy was twenty something and had already been in prison long enough that he spoke a harsh sounding prison slang.

I was excited because my new girlfriend of one week was arriving. She had just turned 21 and could finally come in. Under 21 were not allowed to enter. (Despite the increasingly high rate of violent crime in the city, local law enforcement spent a lot of its limited resources enforcing underage drinking laws.) Even though I controlled the door, the manager knew her from the LGBT support group on campus and knew how old she was. She wasn’t truly gay but I suspected she was “bi-curious” and had been going through her college girl lesbian phase that was the cliché of the 1990s.

Some frat boys lined up outside the door to come in. I don’t have anything against fraternity members when they behave, but when they’re drunk, I can’t stand them. While they waited, they sang lines from a TV commercial jingle that advertised pickup trucks. “Like a rock,” the group of boneheads chanted in unison. From five feet away, their cologne burned my eyes. This was the only gay bar within an hour’s drive. The bar, and by extension me since I was the doorman, has the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason. Some townies had recently beaten and raped a gay student. The house policy is to be gay-friendly and make sure gays, theater majors, and artfags have a comfortable place to hang out. There were 9 bars dedicated to YUPPIES within two city blocks. YUPPIES, when they come in, order $1 cups of Natural Light beer, yell, sing commercial jingles, don’t tip the bartender, stink up the place with their cheap cologne and perfume, and take up valuable real estate. I looked at their IDs. They looked OK, but I said they looked fake and asked them all for a second form of ID. They whined and left.

My new girlfriend Courtney arrived. We kissed on the cheek. She was pale and her blond hair was almost white. It was cut straight across her eyes and, again, cut square across her shoulders. She was wearing a summer dress. She looked slightly rockabilly but mainstream.

She sat at the table beside the door next to PsychoTom’s table. A number of people came in and many smiled and greeted me by name. My friends Chris and Rick from the band AIDS Faggot arrived. AIDS Faggot was a local “homocore” metal band that was popular then. They were wearing matching biker jackets, biker hats, biker boots, and extremely short Daisy Duke jean shorts.

Each time somebody knew me, Courtney got quiet and stared at me with cold eyes and tight lips. I didn’t know yet what this look meant. I took a break and got us drinks.

Courtney: So Mr. Robin, you’re not seeing other girls are you?

Me: No of course not

Courtney: Are you sure?

Me: of course

Courtney: Don’t ever lie to me. I do not tolerate lying. If I ever catch you lying, you will be sorry. Don’t keep any secrets from me.

Me: ok

Courtney smiled with her lips but not with her eyes. She leaned over and kissed me. Then her face shriveled, wrinkley and puckered. She looked like an angry baby.

Courtney: Who was that girl you were talking to in front of the bookstore?

Me: What bookstore? I wasn’t talking to anybody.

Courtney: Don’t lie to me. I saw you today in front of the Magus bookstore.

Me: Her? Nobody. I just passed a friend on my way to school and said “hello.”

Courtney: I saw the way she was looking at you. Who was she?

me: just somebody who comes to the bar.

Courtney: Mmmmmmm hmmmmm. Courtney knows. You’re lying, but I’ll let you off the hook this time because it was your first time, but only if you tell me who she is.

me: sorry

courtney: Now who is she?

me: it was just Kim. she’s in that Foo Fighters cover band you like.

Courtney: mmmmmm hmmmmmm

Me: Don’t worry about her. she’s happily married. And besides, I don’t like the Foo Fighters.

Courtney: I don’t want you talking to her any more.

Psycho Tom and Billy had been silent and started talking quietly again after we stopped talking. Courtney went to the toilet. Billy leaned over and whispered with a smirk, “I’d fsck her too, but it sucks to be you.”

Diving accident
She had invited me to spend the night at her apartment. She put the Foo Fighters “Fingernail song”, her favorite song from her favorite band, on infinite replay on her CD player. The whole time I knew her, she believed she had superior taste in music and never let anybody else choose what to listen to.

Foo Fighters is the Muzak of grunge. It became popular when the grunge band Nirvana, the mass media’s favorite band of the year, fell apart at Kurt Cobaine’s suicide. Its frontman, David Grohl, had played for Nirvana. With the media needing someone to step into the spotlight and keep it entertained, Grohl eagerly jumped in to fill the void and formed the band Foo Fighters.

His music is a mashup of grunge sounds altered just enough to fool undiscerning consumers of music into thinking Foo Fighters was something special. Like most heavily commercialized acts, the sound is generic and bland. He methodically copied and watered down the style and sounds of successful grunge bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains. It is the nasal whine of Smashing Pumpkins singing to the gratuitously angry guitar playing of a garage full of over-privileged teenagers. Grohl’s act totally avoided being innovative, experimental, complex, challenging, perceptive, or creative. Grohl created something so banal and so mediocre that it appealed to everyone from middle class “alternative”/emo kids to frat boys to jocks to schoolgirls looking for the next boy band to the corporate makers of TV deodorant commercials.

Foo Fighters is to grunge as the Dave Matthews band is to alternative rock. It has no soul, and I had a bad feeling.

It’s good to be in Paris in the summer. The season has been mild, and my flat, despite being under the roof, was not hot this afternoon. My building is a tall, irregular structure built in the 18th century. It lacks environmental shielding and has no air conditioning. I had worked in my room all day and was ready to go out. I looked out my window across the rooftops of Paris toward the Eiffel Tower to the west.

The thing I like most about the summer here is that most Parisiens leave the city and take extended vacations. The city is relatively empty and quiet. Despite the fact that I prefer to be a hermit in the quiet desert, sometimes I like to go to parties. There haven’t been many parties during the summer, so I was happy that my friend Maiz, with whom I have become very close, had invited me to a party this evening at her flat.

She lives in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, one of the most chic and somewhat bobo quarters of Paris. It is located on the Quai de Conti and faces the Louvre on the opposite bank of the Seine. I had to dress up so I put on a shirt and jacket that fit. I wanted to wear sandals, but since Maiz has been threatening to take me shopping for new clothes, I worried that she would carry out the threat if I showed up in sandals. I don’t like shopping, not even if it is for myself and somebody else pays for it. I wore motorcycle boots since I don’t have shoes.



Photo of mouffetard

I usually ride my bike, but some days, I like to walk and take in the scenery. I don’t take the Metro because I don’t know why anybody would when they have a choice. it is crowded and full of germs.

I walked along that wonderful narrow market street, rue Mouffetard, up the big hill in the Latin Quarter. At Place Contrescarpe, a warm breeze gently rustled the leaves of the plain trees. A fountain splashed in the center of the square. Nearby, a street musician played an accordion. Rue Cardinal Lemoine, where the writer Ernest Hemingway onced lived leads down the hill, then across a non-descript flat area, and ends at the river. I needed to walk, and once I got to the river, I continued to walk downriver on the quais to Maiz’s flat. I was overheated and had been carrying my jacket since I passed Notre Dame Cathedral.

Her building is on the quai de Conti. Maiz greeted me at the door. Some 50 guests mingled. It was nothing like an American keg party. A bartender made drinks. Somebody else handled finger foods. There was a four piece orchestra playing in the front of the salon.

Maiz gave me a tour. The flat was huge and occupied the top two floors of an ancient but modernized building. There was a big fireplace. It was decorated with Empire period furniture and art including a Van Gogh and a Matisse painting. She shares it with her husband, a high-ranking diplomat with the Albanian (I changed the name of the country.) Embassy.

A friend of Maiz, Fatima with whom I had eaten dinner several times when I was out with Maiz was there. We talked for a while.

Fatima teaches French Literature at one of the Universities. I asked her if this was the Prince de Guermantes’ house from Proust. Proust’s novel le Côté de Guermantes was set in a similar dwelling at the same location. It’s been ten years since I read it, but maybe the Prince owned the entire building whereas Maiz only rented the top floors. Maiz was from only a minor but old noble family. Like Maiz’s husband, the Prince’s wife, Madame Verdurin, was Nouveau Riche/ Bourgeoisie (rednecks with money - a class of rich people famous for their poor taste, ignorance of culture, impulsiveness, and overall stupidity). Anyway, the similarities were striking. Prince Guermantes and his wife Madame Verdurin kept a salon where they entertained guests and surrounded themselves with artists, writers, musicians, and posers. Tonight there were some real artists and published authors mingling among the guests. I felt like one of the poseurs Proust was mocking. When I met Maiz, I was carrying around a sketchbook at the Proust Salon, a special tea room at the Ritz.

Maiz and I mingled with other people separately for an hour, but the whole time, Maiz kept looking at me and going out of her way to talk to me.

“What do you think of Fatima?” Maiz asked me.”I think she likes you. Maybe I can get you two together.”

“She’s beautiful,” I said. I didn’t believe what she said was possible.

Fatima is descended from a French family who settled in Algeria and mixed with the local population when it was a colony.

The hostess Maiz had made some of the food herself. Her helper was handing out things made from chickpeas, couscous, meat, fish, and some vegetables and an array of French cheeses.

Maiz’s husband Ras Kabir, the diplomat, greeted me. He was cheerful and courtly. His clothing and watch were flashy and obviously cost a lot of money. We talked for a few minutes. His public image is vastly different from the things Maiz says about him. Maiz had revealed to me weeks ago that her marriage was over. He beats her. He is openly having affairs with girls and boys. He makes frequent trips to central Asia where she is convinced that he is indulging a fetish for Bacha Bazi (boy play). Bacha Bazi are also known as Dancing Boys of Afghanistan. Bacha Bazi is a form of pederasty commonly but discreetly practiced in Afghanistan and the Peshawar region of Pakistan. It consists of sexual abuse and human trafficking of prepubescent boys. Young boys are sold by their own parents to wealthy or powerful men for entertainment or sexual activities. And I thought my own parents would do anything for some fast and easy money.

Her husband has encouraged her to take a lover. He is not interested in her anymore and wants her to have somebody else to occupy her time. She has his blessing as long as she is discreet. Her husband seemed to like me.

Maiz whispered to meet her outside on the bridge Pont Neuf in 10 minutes. I found my coat and got ready to leave.

Fatima saw me getting my coat and ran up to me. "When will I see you again?” she said.

I wasn’t sure if I heard her. At North American parties, the women usually say, “Don’t come back @sshole.”

I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was single. Anyway, when we kissed goodbye, her hair smelled like cigarette smoke. Most people would have a problem dating a heroin addict. I enjoy opiates, but I don’t take them every day. I spent my childhood sick from the second hand smoke of my chain_smoking father. (I missed more school days than the kid who died of cystic fibrosis).

I said, "We’ll see each other in parties… "

“It was nice talking to you.” As she said this, she had “the look of love.” I was almost in disbelief owing to the “look of loathing” that America Women wear when they find themselves trapped speaking to me.

I went out to meet Maiz at the bridge. In front of me was the long tip of the island with the park (Square du Vert Galant) on it. Across the river was the Louvre. I gazed upstream at notre Dame. I waited. It has been thirty minutes, and I started to wonder if she meant the other bridge, Pont des Arts. A police patrol boat sped under the bridge. She arrived.

We talked. Her face caught the light of a street light. Now she had The Look, and I felt the same for her. We spontaneously kissed, both of us moving forward into each other at the same time. We whispered and embraced for a half hour on the bridge. She had to got back to the party. I was to wait another 10 minutes and return so nobody would figure out what happened.

She had never been with anyone besides her husband, and she had been nothing more than an item for display at events at the embassy for the last 6 years. Maiz is from an Islamic country. Women are to serve the husband. She has been raised to suppress her own needs and put the needs and even whims of the husband before her own happiness. Marriages are arranged to give political and financial advantages to the parents. Hers was an arranged marriage. The divorce rate in the middle east is very low, but I suspect that does not mean all couples are in happy marriages.

I couldn’t believe my luck. I had become very close to Maiz over the past few months. I was starting to have feelings for her but didn’t know what to do about it. She’s the only person I’ve trusted enough to tell many of my deepest darkest secrets like the things I put in my blog. We’ve talked about our childhood. I told her the worst of what I’ve been through, and she’s done the same about her marriage.

Gold Diggers are whores who make a business transaction in which they exchange their beauty for money in the form of marriage. They read instructional books and websites about how to attract and keep rich men. They choreograph their daily activities and dress according to instructions designed to put themselves in contact with rich men and catch their eye. The intent is to give the impression of class and refinement and make people believe there is more to these women than their appearance. The goal is to fool a rich man long to get him to marry her. I mentioned that Maiz is from an old, noble family and she has a title in her country but I cannot give details.

I can’t complain about old girlfriends to people I know in real life, especially not to current girlfriends. That’s what crazy people do who can’t let go of the past. One has to let go or else they won’t be able to work on their current relationships. It is better to enjoy the present and look forward to the future. I use this series of blog entries as a platform for complaining that won't bother anybody.

Now that I was planning to go to Euro Disney with Heidi, I asked Aelyssa via email if I can get her or her nephew Colton any special Disney Paris souvenirs. They love Disney but have never been to the parc in Paris.

A few days passed until I received an answer: “you never went to Disney with me and my family. You acted like you were too good to go with us…. “

“And BTW, in case you don’t know yet, your cat Mister Bradley is dead. He was hit by a car. And BTW all of your stuff you left in my apartment is gone.”

Perky Pat and Baby Colton
Aelyssa’s sister Patty is pretty and nice. Patty graduated from a prestigious “almost” Ivy League university. Patty is a YUPPIE. She is an accountant for a top Wall Street firm in the San Francisco financial district. She works hard and has done well in her job.She pulls her own weight (with the exception that her father paid for her education at an expensive Almost Ivy).

I mentioned before that a degree from an Ivy League college won’t impress American Women unless the man is from an upper caste family. Similarly, it doesn’t impress American men when an underclass women has such a degree. Patty’s father is a plumber who built up a million dollar contracting business, and Patty smells like pipe-joining compound. Despite her degree, looks, and money, no upper caste man takes her seriously.

Patty’s life is centered around money. Like most accountants, she spends her days counting the money of rich men. In the evening, she watches TV shows about money. When I first met her, she was watching a documentary about the Kardassians, a family of extravagant consumers whose head is the lawyer who got rich defending OJ Simpson.

She is a social climber and has tried to marry into the upper caste. To meet suitable men, she joined expensive social and business clubs. Her clubs require the payment of membership fees but do not require the upper class social connections and pedigree of Eastern clubs. The closest she got was heart-breaking. At the age of 27, an upper caste man abandoned her at the wedding altar. The tickets were already bought, and she went on the honeymoon alone.

Not having read one book in your entire life tells tells a lot about the personality. Patty graduated college without reading a single book. Aelyssa wrote Patty’s university English term papers for her. She is not dyslexic. She think too much about the world. She will never have a conversation about an intellectual or academic topic. She ridicules people who do. Like Aelyssa, she watches too much TV. I could not connect and bond with her despite trying for four years.

Patty takes her toddler son Colton to Disneyland during her vacation days. They don’t mind the 8+ hour drive to Los Angeles several times each year. Like Aelyssa, Colton loves it. He spends so much time there that he even thinks of it as his second home.

Cousin Clinton gets a stomach staple
A stomach staple or Gastric Bypass Surgery is prescribed to treat morbid obesity. In the procedure, the stomach is surgically divided into a smaller upper pouch and a larger lower pouch. The small intestine is then re-routed to connect to both compartments. Patients typically lose 65% to 80% of their body weight. It’s intended to be a last resort when dieting and exercise are not successful. In 2015, gastric bypass surgery cost, on average, 25,574$ in the US.

Clinton or Clint is a half-brother to Aelyssa by the same father and a different mother. He is also half-brother to the Bubbas, also by the same father but a third mother. Clnt, his wife, and children attend the yearly Disneyland family vacation.

There isn’t much to say about Clint except for one thing. After Aelyssa moved in with me, she lost her health insurance. She had a serious health condition and needed treatment. Her father refused to pay for it. I couldn’t afford to pay for it.

I asked her what it was but she said she didn’t know. She had some test results that indicated that it was serious, and she needed to be treated soon. She refused to go to a charity hospital. She nagged me to buy her health insurance so it could be treated. Then she nagged me to marry her because my job would partially pay for a spouse’s health insurance.

I have been warned to meet the mother before you decide to marry. The daughter almost always looks like and acts like the mother when she gets older. Soon after I met Aelyssa, she invited me to meet her family. It was a Sunday afternoon feast held at Patty’s house in San Francisco. Her parents invite themselves over from Fresno ever few weeks for this meal and make all the food decisions. They were both in their early 60s but were decrepit beyond their years. Her father was tall and stooped. His voice was wheezy. Her mother was as tall as she was wide and could not walk without a cane.

We all sat at a long table to eat. Supper was a pork dish, and I was concerned. Aelyssa is a vegetarian, and her parents know she is a vegetarian. They did not serve a second, alternative vegetarian dish. I too have several food allergies, and pork is one of the few foods that can make me violently sick. I had warned Aelyssa about my condition weeks before the dinner.

Her father sat at the head of the table. His knife and fork screeched on his ceramic plate each time he cut off a piece of his pork. The sound was making me wince, and I glanced at him. He stuffed a fat wad of pork into his mouth with his fork. He grunted and smacked his lips as chewed. Gravy dripped down his stubbly chin.

While he hacked away at his dinner, her mom reached across Clint’s plate to get a bowl of gravy. As she reached, she bumped into me. I noticed the wattles of fat dangling from her wrist. They were several inches long and hung like two heavy tea bags. She breathed as they dragged through Clint’s mashed potatoes making a deep double trough.

Her mother had a cold and could not breath through her nose. Her stuffy nose required her to chew with her mouth open so she could breath through her mouth. The whole meal, she sniffled and wiped her nose every 30 seconds. She periodically had coughing fits and messily blew her nose.

By the end of the meal, Clinton and Aelyssa’s parents had eaten 3 servings each of pork and mashed potatoes. By the time they finished desert, they had eaten roughly 3000 calories apiece in that single meal. (I learned to count calories by sight in my own effort to lose weight). Aelyssa and I only ate potatoes, a little of some other side dish, and salad. Patty did not eat much either.

I don’t think my own family sat down together for a family meal more than ten times during my entire life, but after that dinner, I didn’t want to have any more family meals.

I talked to Clint and got to know him a little. I learned that like everybody else in the family, Clint believed that if you had a choice between walking 100 yards and driving a car 100 yards, you should take the car. Exercise makes you sick and old.

Clint was 40 but looked 60. He weighed around 500 pounds. The father asked about his health. He was having a lot of comorbid health problems due to his obesity: type II diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, smelled like sour cheese. It was Clint’s 40th birthday soon, and Aelyssa’s father announced taht he would buy Clint a gastric bypass surgery. I knew him for years after the surgery and he only grew fatter. I can think of other ways to spend $25,000.

Email
Aelyssa lives in the Dogpatch neighborhood near Potrero Hill in San Francisco. Many of the old factories and warehouses of the Dogpatch still stand, but they are either vacant or have been converted to loft space for YUPPIES during the plague of gentrification that began in the 1990s. This area lies east of the fog belt and is therefore the sunniest part of San Francisco.

Aelyssa offered to care for my two cats before I left San Francisco. They were both strays who originally found me while I was sitting in the back yard reading. Except for childhood, I never had a pet cat. It was her choice to adopt them. I had been planning to travel and couldn’t take care of them. She was always praising her own cats and talking about how much she loves cats. I assumed she would treat them as her own.

Her flat is on a hill that overlooks the bay and the city skyline. In the day, cars endlessly speed down her street, and in the night, cars drag race and do burn-outs on the same street while pushers, hookers, and other street people quarrel and shoot guns. She put my cats outside in the street every morning. When she could find them, she let them in at night. She didn’t always find them, and Mister Bradley was scared of her. He spent the last year of his life abandoned and practically homeless. She kept her own cat in the apartment all the time and never let her out. I should have known that it wouldn’t go well for Mister Bradley.

I don’t know what made her to turn. I was polite to her family and didn’t complani about them often. I kept my criticism to my journal. Months ago, she said she had a new boyfriend. His name is Travis. He is a fireman or something and sounded like a good match. We stayed in contact, and a couple of times I even asked her for dating advice. I assumed she would have been happy I had moved on as well.

Just in the last week we have lost a number of highly respected bluelighters to overdoses. While I dontnwantnto speculate on there deaths I know in my own life feint dope has left a number of dead friends. This is getting out of hand. If someone high up in the supply chain reads this then I beg you please start putting normal heroin back out onto the streets. It will still be bought even if it's a little weaker. Killing your customers is not a good long term business strategy

Why stay with aelyssa?

One of the reasons I felt that Aelyssa and I complemented each other is because we came from family backgrounds of physical and intellectual poverty. When I met her, she was trying to improve herself and get away from bad influences. She had moved away and gotten an education. She was exercising, watching her weight, working on her hobbies, reading, and working. I had done and was doing the same with my life. I thought I understood her.

After she moved in with me, she changed. The changes were gradual. She did not try to get a job. She did not help me pay the rent on the house we lived in which she had agreed to do. Almost immediately, she used her father’s allowance to buy a television and spent most of the day sitting in front of that television. I had never owned one and had not watched it since I moved out of my parents’ house. The way she spent her time was alarming. She stopped exercising, reading, and learning new subjects. I did not like to tell her about my work day because I do not like to talk about work and my research when I am not in the lab. I prefer to think about other things at home. If not, I would have married another research scientist. We ran out of things to talk about. She complained and started a fight whenever I listened to my stereo. She has extremely good hearing, yet hates listening to any kind of music other than pop.

She had two cats and overfed both of them. She drank. The cats got fat. She got fat. She stopped bathing daily, and I could not stand her body odor and spunk. She was always mad at me. She concluded the reason I didn’t want to have sex with her was because I was a closet gay.

She had no obligations and nobody was forcing her to do anything during the four years we lived together. She did nothing for four years. A four year vacation in the prime of your life is a luxury. I can only dream about what I would have accomplished during four years had I not been in the lab 80 hours a week. Instead of trying to improve herself, start her own business, learn new subjects, write a novel, learn an art or craft, etc ete c etcd etc etc, she was turning into my parents.

Disney
Every year, she does with her family to spend a week at the Disneyland park. They stay at one of the hotels in the park. I’ve never seen the hotels at the park in California, but the hotels at Disney in Paris are modeled after them. They are resort hotels with swimming pools, bars, restaurants, ball rooms, boutiques and concierge services. They are expensive, and huge, having more than 1000 rooms. Her father made a lot of money with a contracting business and pays for everybody else to go on the trip.

Meltdown
Despite the generosity and the comfortable surroundings, meltdowns from the scale of an argument all the way to a Jerry Spring brawl happen several times a day. Some of them are jealous of each other and quarrel about who receives the biggest welfare or disability payment. Those who have access gossip about it on Facebook. There are also toddler outbursts and constant behavior problems from the older children. Sometimes there are injuries. Most of them are minor like sunburns, dehydration, heat exhaustion, and vomiting from the roller coasters.
Over the day, her father gradually becomes surly and eventually shouts ENOUGH GODDAMMIT! He walks away from the gathering and hides in his room.

Afterwards, she comes back with bags of Disney souveniers: Mickey mouse ears, Goofy hats, mugs, tee shirts, invisible dog leashes, stickers, bags of Disney-branded coffee, Disney branded chocolates.

Every year it was some variant of this. I cannot psychologically handle such family gatherings. Her family is especially hard for me to tolerate, maybe because I understand them too well - my own family was intolerable. They were similar in some ways, and I went to college to get escape. I would never subject somebody I cared about to them. These are just the highlights that I remember. To me, these family outings are a form of birth control.

It is because of families like this that I am convinced the movie Idiocracy is prophetic. I read somewhere that the movie is a documentary made by time travellers from the future to warn us. I’ve done my part and gotten a vasectomy.

I met her family for the first time at a similar large gathering. The day after, I called a clinic and made an appointment for the surgery. The timing of the vasectomy seemed to upset Aelyssa. The night I met her, I told her that I was not going to have children, and I asked her if she understood that I meant it. So I didn’t understand why she was upset. She promised that not all of her family is like this and said I have only met the bad ones. Some on her mother’s side have college degrees. One owns a successful rice mill in Mississippi. Besides Uncle Bob and Aunt Nidia, I’ve only met her father’s relatives. She tried to talk me out of the operation, but I went through with it.

Disney is okay for children. I visited when I was 7 years old and loved it. When you need to budget your time, it’s not a priority. Neither is spending time with family members I do not like. My work year in the US was 60-80 hours a week with 10 vacation days each year. I would get fired if I used more than five. The trip she wants takes two weeks including travel and preparation. She wants to ride the Splash Mountain ride. I liked Splash mountain when I was a little kid. Nowadays, I prefer whitewater rafting down rapids in a river in the wilderness. She likes Space Mountain. I prefer to modify the engine of my motorcycle and ride it 200 mph on a bumpy road. She likes hte Pirates of the Caribe. I prefer to travel to a former remote pirate island or coastline and camp on the beach. Why see a disney musical hen you can go to see an opera?

Aelyssa has told me many times “love me love my family” meaning that I need to spend my vacation time with her doing what she has decided we will do during my five to ten days off per year. Of all the things to do and places to go, she always chose to spend my five days of vacation with her family, Uncle Bob, the Bubbas, and everybody else.

I‘m still getting this out of my system. I will rant here rather than inflict it on anybody in real life. I will never speak about it. This is only a private rant, and it is offensive. Don’t bother reading it.

Mail order brides are popular among American men, and the reason isn't always because the man is a loser. Aelyssa was my last American girlfriend. Despite being American, I've given up on American Women.

Aelyssa’s family made a strong first impression on me, and I got a vasectomy right after I met them. They had been nice to me, and I felt guilty for not liking them. Eventually, she told me about her other boyfriends, and I understood why they liked me. Her first boyfriend was Mexican. They don’t like Mexicans. She never told them about him.

Her boyfriend before me was a good catch. They planned to marry. She was eager to introduce him to her family. She told them all of the important things: they graduated from the same university, he had continued his studies to earn a Master’s degree in English Literature. He had a good job, traveled overseas, was kind, polite, and physically fit. They were excited about meeting him.

She brought him home and introduced him. In person, they found him to be unacceptable. They disowned her - she hadn’t told her parents that he was black.

A few days later, her father called for a family meeting. They all gathered around the TV, on sofas and in Lay-Z Boy chairs. He stood before them, his back to the TV.

Pointing at her he said, "You are not my daughter."

He made a production of cutting her out of his Will and displayed the new document that made it official. Then she was told not to bring him near the family again. Her family agreed. They made racist jokes whenever they saw her. Her half-brothers and the Bubbas concluded she wanted to marry him because she likes “big black dicks in her.” Those who could read gossiped on Facebook.

She had told him, “Love me, Love my family,” but for him, there was no love in return. Her family caused too many problems for their relationship, and it fell apart after several years. I was her first boyfriend who was not black or Mexican. I made such a strong first impression on them that they put her back in the Will.

Low standards is the American Standard
Why did I stay with Aelyssa? A lot of it stems from my childhood. Also, I felt lonely. I went for years at a time without so much as a date, or even sighting an available woman I was attracted to who would not look at me in disgust. It’s “slim pickins’” in America.

70% of Americans are obese. It is shocking. It needlessly shrinks the pool of available women. I was fat for a little while, but I did something about it. I work hard to stay fit.

I can easily think of 20 good excuses to justify why I should be fat: bad genes, medication, fondness of opiates, injuries, stress, job, poverty, endocrine problems, no time to exercise, I can’t exercise because my weiner chafes painfully when I run, I like soda, food servings are too large, I am surrounded by high calorie food, irresistible advertisements force me to eat high calorie food, thanks to my education at under-funded public schools I am too dumb to control my weight, Fat Acceptance, I was sexually abused, bad body image, low self-esteem, depressed, the health risks associated with obesity are all lies and a form of ‘fat shaming’, the diet industry is colluding to keep me fat to make money off me, it’s nobody’s business. Seeing a fat person working out impresses me more than all of the excuses.

It is a choice and is one of the few things about the body one can completely control, except for the unlucky 1% who have a genuine medical reason that cannot be overcome. All it requires self-discipline, planning, and maybe some introspection.

Why should anybody change their lifestyle and date somebody with a weight problem? You can love somebody for their personality, but if there is no physical attraction, not even a hand-full of Viagra can put romance into such a relationship. Obesity is a lifestyle choice, and both people need to have the same lifestyle for a relationship to work.

As for the single American Women who have children, my vasectomy says enough.

Without having money or coming from a better family background myself, somebody like Aelyssa is the best one can do. America is anti-intellectual and materialistic. Idiocracy is prophetic. I have a PhD, and education is a turn-off (loser geek). The exception is going to an impressive Ivy League university, but without a family pedigree (I was born White Trash, and I’m not going to lie about it), that won’t help.

Having an IQ higher than 100 counts against you in America. Women hate men who are smarter than they are. It’s a lot easier to get a dumb guy to do whatever she wants. I prefer women who are smarter than me. Sadly, I’ve only had one girlfriend who was smarter than me, but she did not respect my boundaries. Her IQ was 170. Fewer than 1 in 30,000 people have an IQ that high. My IQ is only 160.

I’m good at math and have some education in economics - could have gone into any line of work. I chose to do something that doesn’t pay much materially. I was PreMed, but most of the (American) PreMed students were dicks. I could not work with such people so I did not go to med school. (In contrast, French doctors are very nice, unassuming, and not nearly so materialistic or entitled as their American counterparts. I know dozens here, and some have been my girlfriends.)

After the age of 30, income is the main thing most American women look for whether or not they admit it. I never display wealth like a Rolex watch or flashy clothes.

I’ve been shot down, insulted, and abused 100s of times while trying to meet American women in cities and small towns across the USA. I have never tried to pick up women, so this wasn’t the result of crude pickup lines at bars. It was this way for years without a single non-fake phone number or date. It is impossible to have so much as a cup of coffee with an American Women. Unless you drive the right car. I should be thankful for the bad luck and that none of those creatures ever got me to marry her or had a pregnancy.

Europe is the opposite for meeting women. I wear the same clothes (second-hand clothing), look the same (homeless version of van Gogh), take the same drugs (high-functioning junkie), have the same level of physical fitness (running/yoga/mountain climbing), have the same income (academic scientist), ride the same vehicle (bike), and have mostly the same hobbies. It took a while to get over my aversion to meeting women, but I realized that it is only Americanized women who are unpleasant. The women here are prettier, better educated, healthier, smarter, nicer, dress better, don’t have the Tramp Stamp. I can usually go home with a real phone number if I go out, but in the US, I was lucky to get a phone number once every five years. And she always had a personality that made her un-marriageable.

Euro Disney
For as big and culturally permeating an Institution that Disney is, it doesn’t teach anything. The stories don’t have any morals. For example, what does Snow White offer in the way of a life lesson? The message I get is that all a girl has to do in life is to be pretty and lie on her back and then her soul mate, Prince Charming, will find her and take her away to his castle and where he will fulfill her every wish forever after. American Women grew up on Snow White. The divorce rate in the US is 70%.

When invited to Aelyssa’s family vacation to Disneyland, I declined. If she insisted, I would say I had to work, or it’s 115 degrees in Anaheim, California - what are you thinking?! These kinds of trips were not my thing: the screeching of toddlers, the pushing and jostling of over-stimulated 10 year olds in an hour long line, and all the other nonsense compounded by Aelyssa’s family. So instead I volunteered to stay home and watch their dogs and cats. I went on a job interview where the boss who interviewed me offered me a free day at Disneyland. I refused, so it wasn’t only about avoiding her family.

Euro Disney, renamed Disney Paris, is the opposite of how I picture the American Disney. It is practically deserted, and there are more adults than children. It is quiet and relaxing. The weather is cool. That is how Heidi described it.

Heidi and I met at a party and started seeing each other about a year ago. She’s a tall, blond Swedish expat. She works at Disney and gives VIP tours to celebrities, royalty, politicians, etc. She deals with people like the musicians Michael Jackson before he died and Bono the singer from the band U2 and actors like Tom Hanks.

Heidi was nice enough to invite me on a tour. She would lead me through the park, take me to the front of the lines with her VIP pass, show me the secret places like the secret restaurant or the secret hotel in the castle. It would be free of course since she works there.

Actually, she has asked several times and i can no longer put it off: None of the old excuses would work. 1) Euro Disney is only 30 minutes away. 2) It’s not crowded, not even on weekends. 3) The climate here is not hot. 4) European children are better behaved than American children. 5) It would be just me and Heidi and none of teh problems and drama with large groups.

Euro Disney is an amusement park built by a movie studio. The whole park is populated by street performers dressed as characters from its most popular movies. The rides and displays are like movie sets, and riding them should be an immersive experience. Such a place is an escape into a fantasy world. So are some of the things I have been doing here: art house films, opera, museums all have escapist characteristcs. I like films, some tv shows, and even cartoon. Maybe I would like the trip.

I thanked her and we made a date.

Ive decided to catch a bus to Portland Oregon. I will have around 400 dollars cash maybe the same on a credit card. I don't know a soul in that whole part of the country. But I talked to the methadone clinic out there today and after the first month I should be able to get on state insurance and end up with free methadone. They also have a good social safety net from what I understand. I'm really excited and I am really scared. I am lucky that my grandma would get me a ticket back her if it all goes to hell.

I've been eating a shitload of benzos recently but I'm going to start smoking pot again since it doesn't matter anymore what theses backward ass thinking folks in alabama have to say. My grandma is the only family who knows about my plan. Im going to tell my mom about this two before I leave so she doesn't have time to sabatoge my plan. I'm a 27 year old man in an extremely co-dependent relationship with mY mother. But not anymore I'm going to sink or swim. My adult life starts today.


Watch out Portland.


Live love do drugs

I've been wanting to write about my experiences as a (semi) former user. Now I believe is the time. Here we go...

I started with hydrocodone. I remember I used to sneak out of my bedroom window at my parents house at 17 and run down the street to my friends car. I have severe depression, so this is my way of feeling alive and having a sense of adventure. Originally the late night rendezvous were innocent, but one day my friend offered my a white oval pill. I put it in my hand and asked what it was, "Lortab, it will make you feel better; try it!." Out of desperation of being sad and wanting to look cool, I did it. I fell in love on the spot. We drove to the Walmart down the street and went inside, I was barefoot because I wasn't planning on going anywhere, but I went inside the store anyway. I specifically remember getting yelled at by someone who worked there, so I grabbed some shoes off the rack and slid them on.

I kept it pretty casual, my use, for about 2.5 years. I only used hydrocodone and only needed about 20mg to feel high (man those were the days.) One day I stumbled across someone we will call Jake (Not real name obviously.) Jake had about a similar experience with hydrocodone as I had at the time. I remember one day at work saying how nice it would be to have a Vicodin. He smiled and said, "can you find any?" I could. We'll call this day 1.

Down the rabbit hole we both went. The months flew by and eventually we were using not just hydrocodone, but oxy (blues specifically) and hydromorphone. We railed those little pills as much and as fast as we could. Tolerance grew, tensions rose, money was running out faster than it could be replaced...we broke up...

That sobered me up. I decided to finally go back to treatment for the first time since childhood and it has helped a great deal...I still occasionally use when I have the money, but I keep that fact pretty hidden from my friends. I've become ashamed, but also accepting of my past at the same time. I don't remember much of my early 20's because I was so busy nodding out and I'll always regret that and the money that was wasted, but I am in a much better place now. I hope 'Jake' is too...

I really do not see the point in seeking guidance regarding mental health when the motive is simply to hopefully somehow become what society considers to be a normal and productive member of society. Society is so messed up in itself, so why would anyone want to fit in or become a part of it? We are what we are. If the way we choose to live our lives does not directly effect others in a negative way, then where is the harm? When they effect others negatively in an indirect way of course.
In my experience and from what I have gathered from others, a person can only truly change if he or she truly wants to. After all of the pain and suffering I have caused myself and others, I still do not truly want to change. I want things to change but can not find it in myself to do so. I want what has already proven itself to be impossible. As good of a person as I would like to think I am, In actually reality I am an empty shell of a human being. Selfish may be an understatement.
They say everyone has damage. Everyone carries some kind of pain with them, many more then others. I know who I am and desperately want to be that person, but many things hold me back that I am not willing to give up. And this is because I cannot be myself without them. See the contradictions here are quite clear. This to me seems proof that I have not a clue or what it is I actually am besides just another random character in the natural phenomenon that is existence. A tool used by those with more power in society.
I want to be free, I have got to be me, but what if being me is wrong? I am lost you see.

In the summer, nearly the whole country is on vacation. Most Parisiens leave for the month and travel. Some stay because the city is quiet and calm. It feels deserted. I almost traveled but was stricken by migraines every time I planned to go.

Last night was kind of a fustercluck. Laëtitia and I have been planning to go to le Maxim’s together on a date. We have been seeing each other regularly for the last few weeks.

Daniella and I have been seeing each other for several months, but we only see each other once or twice a month. Daniella and I have not even spoken since before I met Laëtitia. I assumed Daniella had forgotten about me. Daniella and I have gone together to Maxim’s several times before.

At the last minute, Daniella asked me to take her to Maxim’s. I told her three times that I am busy that night. Daniella finally said she is going to the club anyway. This club is popular.

This week, there is a heatwave. My flat was 100 degrees, and I have been hugging ice packs to try to cool down. Yesterday when I finally went outside, I picked up a box of neomorphine tablets from the pharmacy for my migraine, and went to le Maxim’s club. It was early, and nobody was there. Laëtitia would arrive two hours later.
Maxim’s is one of the most famous restaurants and clubs in Paris. It opened in 1893 and is decorated in the style of Art Nouveau and has a Belle Epoch ambiance. The colors are warm, and there is a lot of woodwork carved in arabesques with floral and woodland motifs. Huge mirrors and paintings cover the walls. Many of the seats are covered in red velvet.

I went back outside to a park on the tip of the island and walked along a path under the trees. The park was crowded with people talking, musicians, lovers, stoners, gypsies, drunks, and pushers. I found an empty bench looking across the river.

I pulled out my notebook and began working on my novel. I’ve been writing this thing for 4 years now, and I work on it every chance I get. It was very hot outside. I was soaked with sweat, but at least it was cooler here by the river. I wrote for a few minutes and started worrying about my migraine which was building. I already had the migraine aura with some visual disturbances that looked like they belonged in a Medieval religious painting. I popped some neomorphine tablets out of their blister packs and swallowed a handful with a swig of tepid tea from a thermos. I made a little picnic and ate a madellien. Several honey bees found me, buzzed around, and kept landing on my hands while I typed.

I wrote for an hour, ignoring the bees crawling on my hands while I typed on my folding keyboard. Just then, some rats ran out over my feet squeaking furiously. It was too hot for shoes - I was wearing sandals, and their little paws tickled my feet. They had come out of the bushes behind me. I went back to typing, and suddenly Odette was standing in front of me.

I have never written about Odette because I didn't think I would see her again. Odette is tall, thin, and athletic. Only in America does ‘athletic’ mean ‘thick, beer-swilling, rugby player looking girl’ when used to describe a girl. In France, it means she is tall, thin, has toned muscles, and graceful. An athletic French girl looks like a tall ballet dancer or track and field runner. She has long black hair. She is from Normandy and is Jewish which is uncommon in Paris. Normandy is in France, of course, and I am wary of French women.

I stood and kissed her cheeks. “Hello Odette, you look beautiful. How are you? It’s been a long time”

“We need to talk,” Odette said. “You are going to Maxim's and so am I. We will be seeing each other at the book club too.”

She sat beside me. I don’t know how she knew this or even that I was at the park, and I did not want to ask. I suspect she has some psychic ability and hides it. She had never been to the club or even this park.

Odette and I met at a book club and spent a lot of time together last January. After our sixth outing, I had considered her a friend and was starting to have a crush on her. I was planning to ask her to do something romantic and make a pass at her. It took a while because things had ended with another girl a couple weeks earlier, and I felt shell shocked.

Had she not abruptly sent me a barrage of angry text messages that evening in January, I would have. She called me a cad and said I had been rude to her. I had never made any advances at her and thought we were becoming close friends. I told her I thought I had been very nice to her and asked her what I had done wrong. Why was she upset? She responded by saying that I should know and that I’m the nastiest person she has ever seen and that I should know what I did. I told her I was sorry for doing it, even though I had no idea what it was. Please tell me. She responded by blocking my phone number and messages from my email address. I had not had heard from her since then.

The honey bees buzzing around her made her nervous, and I shooed them away from her. Just then, yet another girl, Tatyana, a Russian expat who works at the fashion house Chanel, strolled past our bench. Tatyana was dressed like she was going to the club as well. I ducked behind Odette. Tatyana did not see me. Odette noticed me ducking, and I said that was Tatyana and I met her at the club a few months ago.

Odette and I talked for another hour. Couples were dancing the waltz on the opposite bank of the river to old fashioned accordion music. I was afraid to talk about what happened with Odette six months ago. She is French, and I knew I had violated some kind of protocol, but had no idea what. I did not want to upset her. Instead, we talked about what we had been reading. I have avoided the book club since January and there was a lot to catch up.

Eventually we went into the club but together. The line was long. I was wearing sandals because it was too hot for shoes or boots. I was worried the doorman wouldn’t let me in because they were against the dress code. We bought drinks, and I saw my date Laëtitia who was watching me and Odette. By the expression on her face, I suspected Laëtitia had seen me and Odette come in and order drinks together. I started to sweat.

I have never been the object of the attention of more than one woman and consider myself lucky when even one shows any interest.

I introduced Laëtitia and Odette. The three of us talked together for another hour. Odette and Laëtitia realized they had been born in the same village in Normandy. They had seen many of the same things growing up and had probably seen each other as children. They exchanged phone numbers.

Laëtitia excused herself, and Odette pulled me away to the back of the room. She can be persuasive. Laëtitia came back from the toilet, but she had a sticky a Brazilian jiu jitsu dude named Daniel trailing her.

Daniella (who had asked me to go to the club with her yesterday after I had already committed to Laëtitia) finally arrived. I had already told her I was going with somebody else so I wasn’t worried.

I introduced Daniella to Laëtitia (my date), Daniel (the Brazilian who was behaving as though he believed Laëtitia was his date), and Odette (who realized I was with Laëtitia but still kept trying to get me to sneak away with her).

For the first time, I was thankful for the Brazilian. His frat boy antics deflected all of the negative attention I was afraid I had attracted. Three women I had been or am currently involved with were drinking and talking to each other. Two had exchanged phone numbers. As long as nobody suspected there was ever any overlap (there wasn’t), things should be OK.

He had been putting his moves on Laëtitia for the last fifteen minutes. He kept trying to push and stand between us. He told us about his morning sun salutation yoga exercises and meditation. He bragged that he had been asked to write a screenplay to make a documentary. He added that he had never written a screenplay before and did not have a background in either film or writing. He just didn’t know what to do, and nobody would help him write; yet he had magically been gifted with a request from a producer to write a screenplay. I told him that was wonderful. Being asked to write is the hard part. Many people in the US want to be a screenwriter because of Hollywood. They continually write, and submit unsolicited screenplays to film producers, but nobody reads them or even wants them. He sort of won the lottery with that meaning I didn’t believe him.

Tatyana, who had also been at the park, eventually bumped into us, and I introduced her. She was a model, but the Brazilian with the one-track mind would not even look at her. I was trying to help him, but he had already wasted the whole evening.

Laëtitia and I shared a glass of wine. We finished, and she set it on the table with only one swallow left. The Brazilian pounced on it and finished it. Although Laëtitia was giving him hints that she was not interested and that she was with me, he was persistent. It looked to Daniella and everybody else who could see them that Daniel and Laëtitia were a couple.

Maybe because Daniel saw me enter with Odette and then talk to Daniella, he thought he had a chance with Laëtitia. This is why I rarely go to clubs and don’t like to take dates that I actually care about to clubs.

There were no more surprises. Daniella, the old girlfriend, was cool and eventually wandered away. Odette abruptly became sick and rushed out of the club. Daniel thought he saw somebody he knew and would be right back.

It was very late, and Laëtitia and I rushed out. We went to the park where Odette found me earlier. We talked behind the trees for a few hours while hundreds of rats scuttled and squeaked in the leaves under the bushes.

“I’m tired of hearing about your whores Robin.

p.s. you need to get your stuff out of my apartment or I’m going to throw it all out. And you need to get your cat.”


This was part of an e-mail sent to me by my last American girlfriend Aelyssa. Given that she is in San Francisco, and I am in Europe, there isn't much I can do.

Weeks before that, she told me to check my storage space. My rent check was accidentally delivered to her sister, and she forwarded it to them.

The whole time I have been in France, we have stayed in touch with no fights. We sort of kept each other updated with what we are doing. Before I came here, it was she who broke up with me. She let me leave some of my belongings in her apartment, and she has been watching my two cats Mister Bradley and Walter Kitteh.

She had already moved on romantically and started seeing other people. I assumed it was safe to ask her for dating advice which I did a few times, but only in a very general way. I don’t know what made her turn.

Family trip
Aelyssa loves Disney. She likes the amusement parks, the films, the Disney-themed merchandise, and even the Disney-branded food. Each year, her family goes to the sprawling Disneyland amusement park near Los Angeles, California. This family event is like a summer version of a Christmas gathering, but it’s bigger. Aelyssa, her parents, her sister and her sister’s boyfriend_at_the_time with her sister’s toddler Colton, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, a few of her half-sisters, and half-brothers including the two Bubbas (Bubba W. Jones and Bubba C. Jones) attend.

Trump City, California
Most of this is to vent. I don’t complain about her family to her, but I need to complain somewhere. The people I’m complaining about chose to be the way they are despite being surrounded by good examples of how not to be that way and having plenty of chances to stop it.

1Bubba
I’ve mentioned the Bubbas before. Their names really are Bubba, and they are brothers. They are her half-brothers by her father Archie and a mother from a previous marriage. I was disgusted with the behavior of one of the Bubbas and shocked that she stays in contact with him.

One of her half brothers, I will refer to him as 1Bubba, made the front page of the local paper soon after Aelyssa and I moved in together.

One summer, 1Bubba was caring for a house where he lives in the Central Valley region of California while the owners were on vacation. It was a typical hot summer day in Fresno, California with a temperature around 120 degrees.There was a severe drought too. Because of the drought and water shortage, watering lawns was forbidden. Every plant including the trees, shrubs, weeds, and every blade of grass was dry tinder and would explode into flames upon contact with the tiniest spark. A tossed cigarette, a backfiring muffler, or a bullet ricocheting off a rock are all sufficient to spark a wildfire.

1Bubba has lived in that hot and dry region all his life. He has seen many droughts and wildfires. One day when 1Bubba went to check on his neighbor’s house, on his way out, he threw his cigarette in the bushes next to the house and drove away in his pickup truck. Predictably, the bushes burst into flames as soon as he was out of sight. The fire spread and burned down the house and some of the surrounding scrub land. Luckily, the fire department put it out before it burned more than a few acres.

Aunt Nidia and Uncle Bob
Aelyssa’s Aunt Nidia and Uncle Bob go on these trips too. Aunt Nidia, her Mother’s sister, is very warm and kindly. She reads. She has social skills, but her Uncle Bob is distant. Of everyone who goes to the vacation with Aelyssa’s family, Uncle Bob and Aunt Nidia are the only ones with an education except for Aelyssa and her sister. Both have not only completed high school but have been to college. Uncle Bob graduated from a university in Walla Walla, Washington with a degree in math and another in education, the same as Aunt Nidia. Uncle Bob likes to point that out whenever there is a family gathering. They now both teach school in the Central Valley in California and are near retirement age.

Uncle Bob is pedantic. He has a frowning little Hitler/cop mustache, weighs 350 pounds, and smells like sour cheese. He starts arguments, insults everyone at the family gatherings, and indirectly tells the rest of the family that he is better than them. Midway through any function, he starts tapping his watch and elbows Aunt Nidia and tells her it’s time to go.

Aelyssa, her sister, and parents have always complained about his behaviour since I met them. Aelyssa goes further and refers to him as a “Change Jangler.” They have observed that he puts one hand in his pockets and moves it around in a way that causes his pocket change to jangle loudly. As if it is not enough that his hand movements are disturbing, he “jangles his change” while leering at Aelyssa, her sister, or any other female old enough to have gone through puberty who happens to be within sight.

Aelyssa’s grandparents hated Uncle Bob so much that they cut their daughter Aunt Nidia out of their will when she married Uncle Bob. Before and after any family even that he attends, Aelyssa’s own parents grumble about him and threaten to never invite him to a family function or dinner after the last one. This happens several times a year. They keep inviting him because in their words, it is the “Christian thing to do.” They love Aunt Nidia, and want to see her, but they must invite both to maintain contact with her.

Uncle Bob’s hobby is playing with toy trains and programming computers in his basement. Of the entire clan, besides Aelyssa, he and Nidia are the only ones who read and who ever have read a book. That is only a slight exaggeration. Actually, her father read a few Louis Lamour Westerns novels when she was little, but he gave up reading long ago.

I like math and reading, and sometimes I write scientific software for work. I thought we might have something in common. Despite his off-putting outward appearance and bad reputation, I tried to connect with him. When first met him, I said I was a biologist without going into any detail. Simply saying “biologist” is less likely to sound pompous. He asked for details, so I explained that I’m a biophysicist and I research ion channels. I was studying the molecules that were responsible for night blindness. He looked confused and then became aggressive and seemed angry. The next day, he emailed Aelyssa and told her he had tried to find some papers I published on the subject, but could not find them. He wanted Aelyssa to ask me for them. I showed her where they were in Pubmed, the national medical research database and had her send him links. He wasn’t able to figure out how to click on the hyperlinks. They are also visible with a Google search using the same keywords. It went back and forth like this, for a couple of weeks but he never found them. He accused me of lying. Eventually Aelyssa emailed a few to him.

I felt like he was my mother accusing me of putting viruses on her computer after I had repaired her computer and put a firewall and antivirus software on it 20 years ago. I never spoke to him after that.


Uncle Zeek
I met Uncle Zeek once before his accident, but he doesn’t travel to family functions any more. Zeek is in his sixties and retired. He lives in the country somewhere in the Central Valley. Like 1Bubba, Zeek is famous because of a fire emergency he caused. Like many country people, he disposes of his trash by burning it. One day, he decided to burn his old Lay-Z Boy reclining chair. It would not catch fire so he poured gasoline on it, soaking it with gas from a jerrycan. He had spilled gas everywhere including all over his jeans. He walked away carrying the dripping jerry can with him; and set down the can at his feet. He then tossed a lit match on the chair. It burst into flame. As any twelve year old boy in his Pyromaniac stage would predict, the flame followed the trail of drips of gas to the can at Uncle Zeek’s feet. The can caught fire, and so did he. Specifically, his legs, groin, and his penis were burnt to a crisp. With third degree burns covering 70 percent of his body. He nearly died and spent several months in a hospital.

After the accident, I don’t know what I felt. Yes, he’s an old man. He will probably be in pain and bedridden for the rest of his life. How much sympathy does a knucklehead deserve? At some point, the empathy runs out. What I’m really sorry about is that he already had 6 kids by the time he burned off his testicles. Each of those six kids have their own children and, sadly, grandchildren. Most dropped out of school, few have jobs, none went to college, and some are in and out of jail. How stupid do you have to be to remove yourself from the gene pool this way? If he had roasted those nuts before he bred, he would have qualified for a Darwin Award.

So as probably no one knows because who on Earth would keep tabs on me but my life has proceeded to change rapidly over the last year and a half. It found me sober off dope eventually off methadone and my long term g/f of almost 5 years decided to be friends. Now none of that really changed anything surprisingly getting clean has allowed me to pay bills and make positive changes and the decision to break up has found both of us with more individuality which is great.

The discontent comes from my living situation. As I approach 30 i still live with my parents and work the same dead end job as before my heroin addiction. The hilarity in it all is the fact that my former g/f was always the depressed one before we met and definitely during our addiction. I was ever hopeful things would get better... our roles have literally reversed. She use to be the one saying theres no point in doing anything and how she just wanted to change everything, those are now my feelings.

It has literally gotten to the point where i can not stand being home with my family. Everything they do annoys the shit out of me and makes me feel like i never grew up. I know what everyones going to say "why dont you move out" well this is the problem with that... i have literally replaced dope with amateur chemistry and am very concerned if i dont get my own house, not apartment, i can not do chemistry for a large number of reasons and will do what i did before discovering that outlet which was drink myself into a stupor every night. It also doesnt help that i have no one to move in with since from a technical stand point i have maybe one friend other then my ex.

I have drawn up a budget and decided to dramatically cut back any substance i do intake to try to save 60-70% of my weeks pay... but i know that wont really help. I am faced with a crazy amount of debt and moving out requires more money then i make. I have helped my ex in every aspect of her life even getting her a job so now shes a completely different person and its almost like i did exactly what i wished i could on some of those really dark days, remove her pain replace it with my happiness and deal with how she felt myself. Now that has happened and i feel like i am stuck. And before everyone goes "Actively work on fixing it" i am like i said i have drawn up a better budget and everything i just dont see it helping much at all, yeah ill have more free money but my monthly outgoing expenses for bills and living costs already take up 1/3 of my monthly take home... if i moved out id have like 100 dollars a week after everything.

I just cant find a way out of this and have this sinking feeling im really just a (almost) 30 year former drug addict who lives with his parents, dropped out of college, works a dead end job and doesnt have any friends. I dont see the point in even talking to girls for the above reasons like yeah sure im smart and gifted but like i said to my ex "after the whole first part who the hell would even care that i was smart and did go to school for chemistry, to anyone who actually asks i am really just a loser who claims to be good at some academic that no one understands... its never made me friends or gotten me laid in the past" And its hard because for once i love being me i do as there is nothing i cant accomplish but at the same time im experiencing so much discontent because of who i am. I have literally never felt so conflicted and even though i have done everything i can to enact changes i almost dont see the point.

I guess i am posing this because i am tired of ranting to my ex and having her tell me i am a great person and shouldnt feel this way. I literally know that i do some really amazing things and people always tell me "i didnt know it was possible for someone to do that" but for some reason for all the compliments i get none of them make me happy its like it all just gets thrown onto a pile of "stuff i should feel good about but cant because i have a bad self view" I dont know i know people are worse off then me too but its really really having negative effects like i dont want to eat and cant sleep at night because its so bothersome.

I hope to have it figured out in 7 months, before im 30

I've been clean a full week now. Not going to lie, it's a bitch! I just want to fight everyone and want to get violent and fight. It's not like me at all. I'm not having any cravings and i had no disaire to spend my cash on dope. I did watch interventions and felt all wormy when the blood went into the needle and she shot up. Besides that I'm a okay, thinking about calling my old sponsor and taking the offer in the rehab he can get me into. That is About it for now.

You do not realize some of the things you grew up with were abnormal until you look at them from somebody else's perspective. I thought my parents’ behaviour was normal until I left home. Only by being away from it and by talking to other people do I realize a few things were bizarre.

I recently became friends with Maiz. She is from “Albania.” For the purpose of privacy, it’s not really Albania, and Maiz and Ras Kabir are not their real names. Today, Maiz and I went for a walk at the Tuileries and had tea. We talked about our childhoods and bad romances. We both have some things in common - both of us had some bad experiences in each area. Recalling part of my childhood, I told her about something I had never talked about with anyone and that I had not realized was unusual.

The house was three stories high with four identical walls. The drab walls were corroded with black splotches and streaked with rusty drippings from the broken gutters. Where it came out of the wall, the sink drain added its own stain. The glass window panes resembled scum on water. Some windows were patched with plastic and cardboard.

The walls went up to the eaves with no molding or ornaments except for a collapsing balcony on the back wall. The white paint had mostly peeled off the gray boards. Three of the walls had a dirt-encrusted entrance surrounded by old furniture, heaps of firewood, rumpled boxes, stacks of newspapers, broken kitchen appliances, abandoned toys, and battered sports equipment. Several bent TV antennas were perched on the roof. This hovel spilled out poverty and misery through every orifice.

The back of the house was hanging drunkenly over a cesspit that was as deep as the house was high. Where a foundation should have been, the floor joists were held up by boards that had been sunk into the pond of sewage. Pipes hung under the house suspended several feet above the bottom of the pit. Some of the pipes ran from the house into an embankment on one side of the pit. Others were broken and dripped filth into the pond.

One time I had to pee late in the night. Nights are dark in the country. At that house, there were no streetlights outside and no night lights inside. I did not dare turn on any light. I would get in trouble if my parents knew I was awake this late.

My parents' bedroom was directly across from mine, and they never closed their bedroom door at night, not even during their nightly fights or quasi-rapes. Their light was off but they were swearing at each other. Their voices were muffled so they must have been in bed.

Down the hall, a door opened to the back upstairs porch, the one that was falling into the pit. So I opened that door and crept onto the balcony. I was greeted by the smell of the cesspit. The floor shook as I took each step, even though I was stepping as lightly as I knew how. I walked on tip-toe or toe-to-heel thinking I would tread lighter. I did not dare make a loud enough noise for my parents to hear. The floor was slick with dew that night, and it angled down toward the pit thirty feet below. I was barefoot. A rotting wooden railing ran around the porch. Boards were missing from both the railing and the porch in places. If I started to slide toward the edge, the railing would not be strong enough to stop me from falling.

I was not allowed to use the toilet in the house, and it was too risky to walk down the creaky stairs and urinate outside. So I made a game out of it pissing off the balcony. I peed as far into the pit I could direct my stream of urine. During the day, when the family pig Hillary Hog aka the First Lady was wallowing down there, I'd try to piss on her. She would squeal with delight and churn up the mud as she investigated the sudden shower. But she was asleep in the barn now. I finished and was about to go back in the house.

Suddenly, there was yelling and footsteps. The hallway light went on. I watched through a crack in the door. My father ran into the hallway naked. He always slept naked. He turned the corner and the side of his head was bleeding. His ear was dangling to his shoulder by a strip of skin. He ran outside, still naked, and drove away in his pickup truck. My mother never left their bedroom or made a sound. I crept back to my room, closed the door, and gave no sign that I saw anything.

The next day, my mother refused to speak, which was not unusual. She went weeks at a time without speaking. When I asked where his father was, she remained silent. Two days later, my mother had still not spoken, but the old man came home. His head was wrapped in bandages. He settled comfortably in his Lay-Z-Boy reclining chair, turned on the television, lit a mentholated Newport cigarette, and spoke only a few sentences: my mother had ripped off his ear, which I had already assumed. He had driven nearly an hour to the nearest hospital. Once there, pop singer Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon had sewn his ear back on. They continued living together the same as before as though nothing had happened. He never talked about it again except to say one thing, and he said it whenever got a chance: he had plastic surgery and it had been performed by pop singer Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon.

This entry is autobiographical, but I would like to turn it into a short story if that is possible. The ending is too abrupt and doesnùt make sense for it to be a short story. But when it happened; my mother ripping off my father's ear seemed as normal as getting up in the morning and eating breakfast. What could I add or change to make it work?

Today was the first sunny day after a month of rain. Dry weather was important. The famous horse races known as the Prix de Diane aux Longines were going to take place today. The Prix de Diane is famous not only for horses but for the high fashion and hats. Dressing up is mandatory. Maiz, the woman I recently met at the Ritz, was taking me to Chantilly to see them.

She picked me up in her car outside my flat in mid morning and drove to the race track about an hour north of the city. On the car ride she was nervous. Her husband works at an embassy, and the embassy hosts many big social events attended, no doubt, by the same class of people who would be at the Prix de Diane. This is a public event, and she was bound to be recognized. She is from the Middle East, and violent forms of sharia law are practiced in parts of her country. For adultery, especially when the woman is a Muslim but the man is not, stoning to death is sometimes administered to both adulterers. Maiz was not my secret lover, but I did not know what people would think if they saw us together.

We arrived at Chantilly and walked around in the village. Maiz is beautiful and exotic if that word is acceptable. She was tall in her high heels. She wore something that a runway model might wear. She carried a Louis Vuitton handbag. It was not counterfeit. Her outfit, diamonds, and accessories cost more than most people earn in a year. At the same time, she was distant and emotionally closed. The same as when I went to the Ritz, I wore the second hand sport coat, dress pants, and motorcycle boots since I don’t have shoes.

The Prix de Diane takes place on the grounds of the château de Chantilly. At strategic places at the site, big screens were erected showing the races. There is fashion show complete with a catwalk, lights, and a DJ. Next to the track, there was a fair known as Village de Diane aux Longines.

In 37 C.E. the Emperor Caligula forced (Lucius Cassius) Longines, a Roman noble and commissioner, to divorce his sister Drusilla. He then forced her to marry the Roman noble Marcus Lepidus for political reasons. Marcus Lepidus eventually fell out of favor with the Emperor Caligula, and Caligula eventually had Lepidus executed. Drusilla was exiled. These events were featured in the 1979 erotic historical drama Caligula directed and produced by Bob Guccione of Penthouse Magazine. Although the film is considered to be pornographic because of its non-simulated sexual content, I never found it to be arousing. Not only were penises everywhere, but all of the actresses were sporting the tumbleweed bushes of the 1970s. Once the juices started flowing, they looked like glazed donuts.

The watchmaker Longines was sponsoring the race. While a lot of deep-fried doughy pastries were being sold at the food stands today, thankfully, nobody was selling glazed donuts. We sat at a table outside where we could see the horses, and a waiter brought us tea and madeleines. There was lots of eye contact, and I noticed that her makeup looked strange on the left side of her face. The makeup was covering a bruise.







We talked and meandered some more around the racetrack and fashion show. Eventually she said her marriage was in trouble. The infidelity is only part of it. There is abuse. Theirs is an arranged marriage, and if there ever had been any romance, it died a long time ago. It is a sexless marriage, and they sleep in separate rooms. She has her own life and her husband his. They live like roommates.


She talked about leaving him. Unlike many women from Arab countries, she could support herself and would not have to move in with her parents. She is from nobility and has money and options of her own. Even better, she is a lawyer had a career before she came to Paris. She could easily go back to work anywhere in the world she chose to live.

She stays with him. If there is a divorce, she would not be protected by the more egalitarian Western laws. He has diplomatic immunity and the divorce would therefore be handled by the legal system of their home country. Also, leaving him would create a scandal for both of their families. It would ruin her husband's career. Diplomatic immunity makes it difficult to handle cases of domestic violence.

By the end of the day, nobody made a sign of recognizing her, and I realized she didn't care if they did. We drove back to Paris. We had supper at a Vietnamese restaurant. She looked better. She was relaxed, confident, and connected emotionally. She dropped me off outside my flat.

Cool dry sunlight beat down on the city and the foothills that surrounded it. Houses with big yards and lots of trees in the yellows and golds of Fall extended down the hill to the main highway and river. On a big hill and across the river the afternoon light brought out the red bricks of the campus buildings of the University (the U) where I had just been hired. Beyond the hill, snowcapped mountains pushed against the sky. I had just moved into the house I was renting, and I was sitting on the deck in the back yard studying for a project for my new job. My seat was a bench made from a thick plank set on a pair of thick rounds of wood I had pulled out of a wood pile in the back yard.



This is a photo of what was originally my neighbor’s cat, Mr. Bradley (Cat). It was taken on a sunny day in November a few years ago. The expression on his face is strange, and I only realized later that it was because he was high.

My next door neighbor was a philosophy professor at the U. I was a biophysicist in the Pharmacology Department, and he was, obviously since he was a philosopher, in the Philosophy Department. The Professor was fond of marijuana, but enjoyment of a stigmatized and an at the time illegal plant caused some conflict in his house. His wife would not let him smoke inside on account of the arrival of their baby, Beebop.

Behind their house was a ramshackle garage. The white paint was starting to peel to reveal gray wood beneath, the back end of it had rotted and begun to collapse, and many of the windows were patched with cardboard and plastic. It was it in full view of my own back porch. You can see one end of it in the left part of the photo.

By the end of the second day I lived there, I was familiar with the Professor’s routine. Whenever he was home, every hour or so beginning in the morning, he would get up from his desk in his study overlooking my backyard and where he was writing a book about the philosopher Bertrand Russell. His house is the building on the right, and the window is the window of his study: He would walk out of the basement through the door which is the open door you can see in the photo. Then he would go into the garage and close the sliding door to the garage. Soon, clouds of smoke and the strong smell of marijuana were escaping through the cracks around the garage door and wafting toward my seat on the deck. It went on like this all day until around 1 am.

Mr. Bradley Cat did not like Baby Beebop and left the house often, probably just to get away from her. He followed the Professor into the garage and stayed in there while he smoked.

In the only book I read by Russell, Russell often mentioned a famous British philosopher referring to him only as ‘Mister Bradley,’ but without giving any background on who he was, at least not that I could find in my cursory reading of Russell. The professor would have been familiar with this book and would have read about the brilliant Mr. Bradley. So, one day the Professor got high and decided his cat had a philosophical demeanor and looked like a “Bradley.” Thus Mister Bradley (cat) was named after a British philosopher that the Professor read that Bertrand Russell had liked.

The second day I lived there and just after one of these smoking sessions the garage door opened and Mr. Bradley Cat left the garage. Mr Bradley (cat) immediately spotted me sitting on the back porch and trotted up to me. He squinted up at me in the glare of the morning sun and circled my chair, looking for an invitation to jump up on my lap. That was strange behavior because Mr. Bradley and I did not know each other, and in fact we had never even met. I ignored him, but he was persistent and finally he tried to jump on my lap. He fell to the floor at the last second when he noticed the huge book on my lap.

He had an annoyed expression that seemed to say: Why would somebody be holding a book when they could be holding a cat? That’s when I took the photo.

Mrs. Itchy’s Breakfast Bagel

One side effect of opiate pain killers is itchy skin. I don’t remember if I was scratching an opiate itch or if she was scratching her fleas when I first saw her, but the name fit.




Above is Mrs. Itchy. Four of her large black nipples are visible, identifying her gender to be female. One time when she was sitting upright I counted a total of 8 full-sized nipples and another tiny one that was only half-formed.

Mrs. Itchy was the matriarch of a large tree squirrel clan. Every brooding season, she would bring a litter of 5 or 6 scratchy little babies into my backyard and up onto the deck to beg. The kitchen window opened directly onto the deck and my gf Aelyssa left them nuts on a plate outside the window. I fed them sometimes when I was sitting on the deck.

One time, she accidentally bit my finger while trying to grab a broken almond. It hurt bad, but she held on. I could not jerk my hand away. Blood filled her mouth and spilled down her chin. This must have gone on for a minute before she finally realized my finger wasn't squirrel food. When she let go, it felt like somebody had smashed the tip of my finger with a hammer. Blood was spurting to the rhythm of my heart beat.

Here is Mrs. Itchy just before she bit my finger with those big yellow teeth:


Squirrels don’t seem to excite cats the way an escaped paraqueet does. Mrs. Itchy seemed to know this and had no fear of Mr. Bradley and often passed within inches of him. Mr. Bradley (Cat) never attacked.

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Except for the time I lived off the grid, I have never been a morning person. I prefer to sleep through as much of the morning as I can. I am more tired than when i went to bed, even after 8 - 10 hours of sleep. All I can do is shuffle around. I cannot speak or be spoken to. Getting out of bed too early is dangerous - I get plantaritis when I step too suddenly on the cold floor. If I try to exercise in the morning, I suffer pulled muscles. I get severe cramps in my calves if I run, and I get searing spasms of pain in whatever muscle I was exercising if I lifted weights. My injuries are so bad that I have had to put off exercise for weeks afterwards.

I think the problem is the hour that I get up. I can go to bed any time between 8 and 4 am, but when I get up at 8 am, I feel awful until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, no matter how much or how little I sleep. However, if I stay in bed until 10 or 11, i can deal with the day. If it is the weekend, I need to sleep until noon.

Despite that, on work mornings, we woke up together and ate together. But one of our problems was that she demanded I wake up early on the weekends too. She was not working, but I was. She was already 2 years into a long vacation, but I had worked the whole time and I needed the weekend to recover from the stress of the work week. I had already explained perhaps 100 times (once for each weekend we lived together) to her that I needed to sleep late on the weekends.

It was this way on a warm Sunday morning late in the Spring. We had left the kitchen window open for fresh air. We often ate in the kitchen on the small table under the window. We could see down the hill and across a river and the main highway and over to the U that was built on the next hill. By 6 am, Aelyssa had already made breakfast. She had set the kitchen table. She served me a toast and spread it with homemade raspberry jam. She poured a cup of coffee for me and left it at my setting beside the bagel on the table under the kitchen window.

One ought never shout indoors. The house is a quiet refuge from the racket of the outside world. Unless there is a fire, nothing is worth shouting about. When someone in the house wants to communicate, they need to go into the same room and speak quietly and calmly.

Aelyssa shared some behaviors with Archie Bunker from the popular TV series All in the Family. One shared trait that the reader might have figured out is that she was the dictator of the house, just like Archie. Archie commanded like a king and bullied and browbeat everyone until they did what he wanted. Also like Archie, she shouted in the house.

At exactly 6.30am Sunday morning, I was awoken from a dead sleep by shouting: “GET UP RIGHT NOW!!!!”

She was in the kitchen, and I was in bed with the covers pulled over my head to keep the cats from licking my face because they hated it when I slept later than they slept. It was Sunday, and I needed to sleep.

“Mrs. Itchy is eating your breakfast: get up!!! Your squirrel is stealing your toast!!” seh said.



More shouting: “Mrs. Itchy drop it!! Get out of bed and get your toast away from that squirrel.“

I got up and shuffled into the kitchen. Aelyssa was still carrying on.

“Mrs. Itchy (Squirrel) stole your breakfast. I guess you don’t get to eat.”

“I thought she was afraid of you. What happened?” I said.

“I went outside for a minute to talk to Mrs. Crabtree,” she said.

Mrs. Crabtree was our other next door neighbor. She did not like squirrels or cats. She chased both species away whenever they wandered into her yard.

“Then Mrs. Itchy was on the table with your toast in her mouth. I tried to get it back, but she ran out the window.”

“How do you know it was Mrs. Itchy?”

“She’s right there,” she pointed out the window.

Sitting upright on the fence was a skinny squirrell with a toast with raspberry jam was hanging of its mouth. She was close enough to make out 2 columns of black nipples. There was a big notch in the bottom outside edge of her left ear. It was Mrs. Itchy.

I moved to the house by the U late in the Fall of 201x, and within a few weeks, it would be cold. It was my habit to I sit in the backyard and read after work. I usually ate snacks out there while I read. My snacks were almonds and dates.

The Professor was one next door neighbor as I already mentioned, and Mrs. Crabtree was my other next door neighbor. She was retired and had been widowed several years earlier. She liked to see what her neighbors were doing.

One day soon after establishing my habit of reading in the backyard, I noticed a squirrel watching me from the top of a tree in Mrs. Crabtree’s backyard. The squirrel stayed in the tree that day, but he appeared the next day and the next, always watching me and Mr. Bradley Cat from the treetop. I suspected that he could see when I was eating, and he perked up when I ate the almonds. Still, he never came into my yard. That evening after I finished reading, I left a few nuts on the plank bench where I had been sitting, and I went inside. The next day, the nuts were gone. I left food for him a few more times, and eventually, he was sitting on the fence begging and eating while I was there.

Soon, he would climb up my leg and take the food out of the bag or out of my hand. He could smell it. I hid it in my shirt pocket and he climbed my shirt and dug it out of the pocket. This went on every day for a few months, and by winter, he was plump. He alway came alone.

Below is Itchy Squirrel






He visited almost every day, and I noticed that he had some quirky behaviours. This photo reminds me of a couple of them. One is that he would stand upright on his hind legs and scratch his nuts. It is why I start called him “Itchy.” He even answered to his name. I would go outside and call him, “Itchy Ithcy Ithcy Itchy Itchy come here Itchy Itchy Itchy”, and within a few minutes, he appeared.

After a couple of months, another squirrel had taken to watching me from Mrs. Crabtree’s treetop. She was very shy and skinny and did to dare come into my yard.

That winter was cold and it stayed below 10° F for a few weeks. I had the feeling that the only reason Itchy was healthy is because I fed him every day. On one cold day late in the winter, I looked out of the kitchen window and saw that the new squirrel had come and was eating the seeds and nuts I left on the rail for her. She was scrawny and very fearful. She was shaking too. The skin on her face was bare from her nose to her ears like all her fur and been ripped out or fell out. She had scabs and cuts all over her face. Her nose was bloody, and one ear was torn.

Mr. Itchy was perched in Mrs. Crabtree’s treetop silently watching her eat. He did not come to eat which was odd. The skinny squirrel finished eating and climbed up the tree where Itchy was watching. He immediately jumped on her and attacked her. It was a bad fight. She ran away chittering, jumping from tree to power line and ran across the street, jumped into another tree, and disappeared. Itchy ran after her. I heard their angry chittering from across the street for several more minutes.

Since then, I often saw her and Itchy together in the trees with a litter of babies and realized they were a family. She was Itchy’s (Squirrel) wife and the matriarch of the squirrel family.

Aelyssa saw how sickly she was and made some special squirrel food. It was a pine cone covered in peanut butter, rolled into seeds and nuts, and baked. Mrs. Itchy and her pups/kittens/squirrel babies began eating the pine cone food in the backyard every day, and by early Spring, she had put on weight. Although always nervous, she became brave enough to eat when I was there. Itchy himself watched her from the tree and never ate when she was here. Sometimes, he attacked her when she finished eating.

This has been stalking me for years, I knew eventually I would have to confront it, but I've procrastinated and prevaricated to myself as long as I could. So many times I have lived and relived this moment in my imagination, some how I thought it would be different, peaceful. Life has brutalized me and I accept that, but somehow I thought you would be spared. How cruel fate can be, sadistically torturous, nobody is unscathed, there are no exemptions for good behaviour. Justice is a fairytale we tell ourselves to sleep at night. There is none for me, not tonight, not tomorrow.

Time is a psychotic mistress keeping me bound and awake, slowly making me relive it, opening my eyes wider with each iteration, new details flood in with each passing wave. She laughs at my naïveté, whispering truths I've manage to neglect until now. I will never be the same, my life will never be comfortable again, I have been taught difficult lessons, and they are seared into my conscious memory. There is no escape, distractions cannot overwhelm the ever present reality, physics and physiology are bound together undeniably, there is no aging gracefully.

There is no dignity in death. There is no peace, the longer we survive the more ravaged our bodies and minds become until our intellect is less than a fetus, and yet we persist, witnessed in our own feces, struggling to hold on to that life force against the logic of the inevitable. Until our last breath leaves us, we will cling to our primal energy in a hopeless situation, gasping confused, hoping, unaware as our loved ones are destroyed in our transition to oblivion.

One of my hobbies is writing, but I have writer’s block and haven’t written anything in months. I’ve read that doing something creative other than writing can cure writer’s block. So I decided to try painting.

Anastasia is an artist from Kazakhstan. I met her at an art show in Paris last Fall. She moved here several years ago and opened a small studio and art gallery on l’Île Saint-Louis. I asked Anastasia to teach me to paint, and I was happy that she agreed. But first she tested me. She had me draw some birds. She was not impressed and said I need to learn to draw before I can paint.

These are the birds I drew for her at a park during my first lesson in March (crows):



Since March, she gave me lessons and had me keep a sketchbook. I drew this in June:




I’ve painted a few things too but only in watercolor. I prefer watercolor. Oil paint stinks, egg tempera is messy and requires a huge investment in equipment for making the paint, raw pigments, and lots of eggs which I would rather eat than use to make paint. I’m only willing to work with the more natural media so acrylic is out.

I read Marcel Proust in college, and ever since then, I wanted to go on a Proustian literary tour and visit the places he described. Proust once said, “at the Ritz, nobody pushes you.” Thusly, the Ritz Hotel was on my list. I went with Anastasia. There is a dress code. Anastasia wore a dress. I wore a suit jacket and motorcycle boots since I don’t have shoes. Once comfortably settled in plush armchairs in the company of rare books and warm woodwork, we chatted and indulged in the memorable delights of madeleines and tea.





A madeleine is a small, plump cake molded in the shape of the fluted valve (shell) of a scallop. It is a little bit drier than a sponge cake and melts in your mouth. The rich, buttery flavor is brought to life with the zest of lemon. You eat it with tea.

The first time I went out with Anastasia was an afternoon on a péniche on the Seine last Fall. The way she looked into my eyes was disarming, but that is another story. We had madeleines and tea on the boat that day.

Anastasia said it would be good practice to sketch the room. We began sketching in pencil. There was another couple next to us having tea, but we did not sketch them. They were elegantly dressed but not flashy. The man wore a fitted designer suit with gold cufflinks and other details, and the woman wore a dress and gold and jewels. They looked like they had just come from or were about to go to a fancy event. I thought they were Mediterranian or Southern French because of their tans and dark hair. The woman looked over at us sketching and remarked that I look remarkably like Van Gogh and asked if I’m his reincarnation. I showed her my bad sketch of birds so she didn’t think that any more.

They had moved to Paris about a year ago from the Middle East when the man, husband Ras Kabir, was appointed to some high position in the embassy of his home country here in Paris. The woman, his wife Maiz, came here with him. I won’t name it for purposes of privacy.





They were also eating madeleines. I took another bite of mine, and Maiz asked about the American presidential election. I told them everything about it is depressing, and I will not go back to the US if Trump is elected and probably not if Bill Clinton’s wife gets it because she is just as bad but in different ways. Bill Clinton’s wife the calculating murderess versus Trump the impulsive murderer who kills in a fit of rage. That’s how I really feel about those two scumbags, and I don’t hide it.). I only understand politics on a superficial level so I didn’t say much more than that. They talked some about Islam and Trump’s attitude toward Muslims in the US and US and British history of invasion and current American military operations in Muslim countries.

Americans love Rumi, and Maiz must have realized that. She mentioned that she likes to read Rumi’s poems. She reads him in the original language and likes the English translations too. Afterwards, all of us exchanged phone numbers and promised to have tea together again.

I didn’t expect to speak to them again, especially since their country is unstable and I had called the rulers of my home country psychopathic murderers, but a few weeks later, Maiz invited me to coffee. We met at Shakespeare and Co, an English language bookstore and coffee shop across the river facing Notre Dame. She mentioned that her husband had gone overseas on business and invited me to the horse races at the famous Hippodrome in the village of Chantilly the next day for the most famous racing event of the year, the Prix de Diane aux Longines.

Right now I'm in my room gakked out of my mind. I've been in here for awhile now, because I'm afraid to come out and talk to people. Being social right now would be awkward and a huge mistake. I'm feeling good and the paranoia isn't bad at all. The problem I'm facing is my huge bug eyes and my pupil is huge too. I'm afraid, that someone may call the law on me i can't handle that right now.
So, besides that I'm pretty swell. So, check this story out. My dude i fuck with always having shity dope. None is ever worth a damn in my opinion. I got some cash and called up dude. He kept saying it's flame and what not. I blew it off like yeah right, you always say that. So, i get the shit and bust it down. Two okay shots, took the first around 9 at night yesterday. The rush from it about crippled me, i was feeling okay. I got into something and next thing i know it's 12 in the afternoon the next day. I took my last shot at 12 and still am going strong.

Anyways, my first blog I've ever made. I'm hoping it's done right. I'm out for now!