Tonight is trick or treat. Some kids will come by and take candy and I will rot their teeth with it. They will place out large plastic buckets and I will fill it. I used to look forward to this holiday so much that I staked out every store looking for the perfect costume. Today, I stood in K-Mart and looked around and realized that Halloween had passed me by and we were standing in Christmas. And this year, we're gonna cancel Christmas. Don't we promise to do that every year? Let's just cancel all holidays and chain our legs to desks we don't want to be at. Fuck it. But tonight? Tonight I will hand out candy.

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If our hearts could pump out light, I wish it could be neon.

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There's no payoff for the dramatic amount of pain that we put ourselves through. There's no rainbow at the end of your pot of gold. There is just this and then there is dirt and thank whatever the fuck that that's it.

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There is going to be some gray and I'm going to adjust my percentages and I'm trying to adjust my hue and saturation and then I'll be there, inside the colors, gone from the world of CMYK and RGB and existing simply in the nice and easy two colors which are not colors at all. They are the absence ad presence of all colors. But I don't want to get into a long drawn out discussion about the color choices that define my existence, because I won't even be visible in the world of mixed tones and complementary color choices. I will fall and fall and fall and fall and fall forever and laugh out loud so loud it will haunt your every fucking dream.

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If I can quote someone else,
"Whenever you are walking, you're just moving the ground.
Whenever you are talking, you're just moving your mouth."

Live on credit and the bill comes due sooner or later. This movie is almost over and I have no interest in seeing how it ends.

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"Born to lose and destined to fail," the lyrics scream in my headphones, the only outlet of safety from a world of loudness and confusion. I am a little edgier, I gave up on all the things that were supposed to make it easier to get through and have decided to just do it on my own. I feel like the world's safety net, but I am confident in the fact that I have none of my own and that soon, I will do the little dance that I love so much. I will go into that night like its my last, with the hope that it isn't and the lack of caring that makes me me.

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Another when I was young story.

I used to keep my smut under the bed in a zebra striped gym bag. In college, I dated a girl at home and she asked once, "How many breasts have you seen naked?" I replied, in what I thought was a coy manner, "Probably a million." Of course, I meant in magazines. She said, "Oh, I bet you keep your smut under your bed." She busted into the house before I could stop her and flipped out. "I thought I was good enough for you," she pleaded. "They are old ones," I said. I lied. I mean, if old issues are from last week. I think I am the shittiest liar ever. So...short story long, I ended up outside burning them one by one while she watched. I burned my hands really bad trying to save one. Such is the story of my life.

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Ribs were cooking and I know, I promised to cook things on low. But I set them on fire. They were ablaze. En fuego. There was just char and a little meat, so I bit off what I could chew and fed it to the dog. Don't be sore.

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When I am in physical pain, I imagine that it is a giant tablet. I pull page after page off of it, and each page that is removed is one less amount of pain. You have to imagine how big the tablet has gotten. I would say that it could not fit in a building these days.

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If I have learned anything from Death Race 2000, and yes, I have, thank you for asking, it's that the President should have the most awesome car on the road. And this should be his car. Also, I wish Frankenstein was up for election, because I trust a fictional person who has been built from the body of dead race car drivers than the two idiots running.

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Zip City is Ellwood City to New Castle and back and forth. I had that road memorized. Zip City it's a good thing that they built a wall around you. What you build builds you. You should never think your teens and 20s will make your life what it ends up being.

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Walking to the car when
walking didn't seem all that
important or fun

Looking up to the sun
but there is none
when it's two oh seven am

Squall whine scream
white noise in black sky
hum under fake light source

It's the kind of night
where doing something stupid in hindsight
feels right in second guess

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This window could be anywhere in the world, but it's in New Castle.

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Ellwood City stories #4

The Red Hot used to be on the Fifth Street bridge, which is no longer the Fifth Street bridge. Now it has a long ass, Ellwood City Lincoln Junior Senior High School Blue Band and Veterans bridge, or somesuch kind of thingy do.

Pee Wee's is gone, but Red Hot has remained. They opened a Brighton Hot Dog Shoppe next to it, and it is still here. It's the chili. It will beat your ass into the earth.



I have never had fries anywhere like here, either. And I usually hate fries.

It says something for a place if I like the fries.

Once, when I was a kid, I watched an episode of Kolchak the Night Stalker that freaked me out. See, I used to dress like Carl Kochack. When I was 3. I wanted to hunt monster, but I was scared shitless of them. In the last episode (there are only 20, yet I have watched them all so many times), The Sentry, a lizard creature keeps attacking people. Well, I was freaked that the lizard was real. I had an overactive imagination, and well, encouraging parents. Well, I was in the bathroom too long (and this has remained a problem my entire life, I get lost in the toilet), and my dad wanted me to come out and eat. So, when the lizard was about kill, he would knock on the wall, then bust out. So, of course, dad knocked like the lizard, and I fled the bathroom with pants around my ankles.

Yes, I had a good childhood.

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They have never changed the can. I am sure it upsets some people. But man, I have been drinking this since I was a kid and it always brings me back to innocence. It mixes cherry with strawberry and is perfect to balance against chili. You can't always find it. But it's out there.

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This was Pee Wee's. It was an all night hot dog place in my hometown. It's gone. But I wish I could take you back in time so you could see it. It was all metal, the grill never got cleaned and the stools fell apart and it was filled with drunks and staffed by old ladies quick with a retort. In other words, it's what I assume heaven would be like if it existed. There were no french fries. Instead, hash browns. Brutal chili that could mask any alcohol on your breath. And gyros. But it's gone, like I said. I wish I could smell it one more time, that strange mix of staleness and spice, lingering in the air, people lined up against the wall to buy just one more hot dog.

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Today is my dad's 70th birthday. I can think of no better picture of him than this. He's passed out and snuggling with my dog. He loves that dog. He wakes up early to walk him and he feeds him sandwiches by hand. My dad has so much love in him. It's intimidating being his son, because I fear that I will never live up to the example that he set for me. I've done my best. But he's reached more people than I could ever hope to and loved harder and better than I could ever dream of trying. He accepts me regardless of the fact that I am a complete fucking disaster. And he always laughs and smiles while taking care of everyone else. I wish I had all the money in the world so I could make his life easier. But then, he'd probably still play the nickel slots.

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iTunes is on random and Tom sings, "Sometimes at night, I pray to wake a different person in a different place." Sometimes he screams, "They make all the right reasons to fuck it up." And I yell out, every time, no matter how many people are in my office, "You're gonna fuck it up."

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I stopped dressing nice. No one noticed. I started drinking at 10. Nobody cared. I sleepwalk through life. No one else is awake to see.

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There are places that I refuse to go to because they are too easy to be at and aren't real. I can linger in them for much longer than I would like to admit and then it takes weeks to get past them. But I gave in and fell in the other day and it felt good. I didn't end up staring at the wall. I let what felt good feel good and so far, everything was fine. But I have built these walls and I have made this skin and I have spent more time in the valleys than the peaks than I would like to.

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