Well folks, the American left has lost its fucking mind again. It seems like just yesterday they were shitting there collective pants over Barack Obama's wishy washy chicken noodle soup for the hipster, millennial's soul bullshit and we all know how that one ended, with PRISM, drone strikes and mom jeans. Well dearest motherfuckers this time I'm afraid its far worse. The newest object of mindless liberal sanctification isn't new at all, its her royal highness, Hillary Rodham Clinton. From Whole Foods to MSNBC, yuppie granola munchers everywhere are absolutely infected by Hillary fever and I for the life of me just cant fucking understand it. Hillary? Really? Again? The only people who seem to be immune to this noxious virus are my old enemies on the right and that's only because there tiny brains have been thoroughly pickled in a brine of sexism and Fox News approved conspiracy theories. I personally despise Hillary, not because she's a "bitch", I actually rather like that quality in a politician as well as a woman in general for that matter. That's why, despite my Marxist pedigree I have an odd soft spot for Ron Paul (sadly I cant say the same about his Quisling son) and I'm shore your all more than well aware of my schoolgirl crush-style fixation with Courtney Love. No, I despise Hillary Clinton because she's a heartless, craven, war monger who's never stepped foot on a third world country she wasn't willing to bomb back to the motherfucking stone age, yet your garden variety progressive seems almost willfully ignorant of this harsh reality. That's where my demented commie ass comes in to shove your shiny, happy faces into the fucking truth. I could go on for years about old Hilldogs lifelong love affair with all things war, after all she's been a vocal supporter of every American imperial entanglement from Vietnam to the Levant, and I'd probably enjoy that but I'll save you some time and sanity and just give you a quick sample of her savagery.
There's probably no example of Clintonian war mongering more garish or grotesque then Hillary's "Soft Power" experiment in Libya. It began, as most wars do, with a tidal wave of lies. After a tiny insurrection was sparked up by a band of British S.A.S. trained and equipped Islamist rebels who apposed Muammar Gaddafi not so much because he was a dictator but because he was a secular socialist from the wrong desert tribe, then Secretary of State Clinton hit the media, often with her equally war hungry minions, Susan Rice and Samantha Power in toe, like a woman possessed, howling, hysterically at the top of her lungs of an impending genocide against the rebel held stronghold of Benghazi. The only possible cure to this tragedy in the making, she said, was bombs and plenty of them. There's only one problem with this little theory of her's, it was all fucking bullshit and she knew it from the jump. The good Madam Secretary had been told, repeatedly, by top Pentagon brass that not only was Gaddafi highly unlikely to launch a massive attack against civilian targets under the microscope of international opinion but a bombing of the nature Hillary demanded would put the stability of both Libya and the region at large in severe danger of a real catastrophe. Hillary politely listened to the concerns of the experts, then turned around and promptly spewed a gullet full of acidic deception all over the American public as well as President Obama, who made the oh so stoic decision to wash his hands of the whole damn mess (What a leader right?) and leave the war completely up to his all too eager Secretary of State who gleefully pulled a full Rumsfeld and hypnotized congress into a lull with the soothing sounds of full tilt horse shit propaganda. Even then with America and its NATO stooges primed for another savage bloodbath in the Muslim world, a few brave and diligent leaders within the Pentagon desperately attempted to save the tiny desert nation of Libya from full scale annihilation. Without the knowledge of the former First Lady, these men reached out to the Gaddafi regime in one last attempt at peace. Libya agreed to a ceasefire, offering a truce to freeze all combat operations and withdraw to the outskirts of the major cities, taking a defensive position and allowing the African Union to oversee the entire operation and maintain the peace. Both Africom and the Pentagon threw there complete support behind this more then reasonable offer but Hillary and her devoted flunkees in the state department dismissed it out of hand without consideration.
Desperate to prevent the carnage of yet another american air war as well as the likely slaughter of his entire family, Muammar Gaddafi actually offered to step down from power and permit the establishment of a transition government under two conditions:
1. That a Libyan military presence be left in tact to contain the growing resurgence of Al Qaeda in the region.
And 2. That sanctions against Gaddafi, his family, and loyalists within the Libyan government be lifted and that they be aloud safe passage out of the country.
Once again the Pentagon found this offer to be exceptionally reasonable under the circumstances, after all wasn't the whole point of this goddamn venture to remove Gaddafi from power, but to there shock Hillary ordered the Pentagon to stand down. Only now had it become painfully clear how truly macabre the Madam Secretaries intentions were. The Pentagon brass that had worked so courageously, putting there very careers on the line to do there patriotic duty and prevent a totally unnecessary war were forced to the hideous conclusion that Hillary Clinton didn't want Colonel Gaddafi out of power, she wanted him dead. After all what better title to campaign for President under in red state America then monster slayer.
So Killary had her bloodbath and what a wonderful bloodbath it was. Nearly 10,000 bombs were dropped on the heads of the defenseless people of Libya, many of them uranium warheads. Nearly a third of the targets were civilian in nature. Thousands were killed including scores of women and children, most of the latter were younger then five. The Gaddafi strongholds of Misurata and Sirte were carpet bombed into scorched oblivion. All in defense of a merciless horde of jihadist maniacs, many fresh from the killing fields of Iraq where they cut there teeth murdering american soldiers and Shiite civilians alike. They found themselves a new playground of carnage in NATO raped Libya where they quickly made themselves at home executing infidels and berrying there mutilated corpses in mass graves in the desert. Many of these charming "freedom fighters", as Killary and her amen corner in the press so eloquently labeled them, went on to join the ranks of ISIS and made there big screen debut decapitating Coptic Christian laborers on Youtube. Of course the show wasn't over until the Colonel screamed.
On the run during the twilight of the Battle of Sirte, embattled Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's convoy was hit with a surgical airstrike by NATO fighter jets and American drones as they attempted to escape the crumbling city limits. A mob of heavily armed jihadist rebels swarmed the wreckage as there remorseless patrons hovered above in vehicles worth more then enough money to feed there city for months. A battered but still breathing Gaddafi was dragged from a nearby storm drain, begging in vain not for himself but for the life his son, captured from the same smoldering convoy. As the gang hustled the wounded dictator off to a nearby ambulance, presumably to prepare him for capture, something very peculiar occurred. Out of nowhere a single shot rang out killing the North African strongman instantly, eliciting surprised cheers from the confused mob. In a crowded circus of camera phones not one person caught footage of the actual kill shot. Gaddafi was executed at close range, but why? Why then? Why like that? Why go through all the trouble of capturing the man alive, even procuring a goddamn ambulance to treat his wounds only to unceremoniously execute him the moment the camera phones are turned away? According to Mahmoud Jibril, the NATO backed interim Prime Minister of Libya at the time "It was a foreign agent who mixed with the revolutionary brigades to kill gaddafi". The former N.T.C. Head of Foreign Intelligence Rami al-Obeidi later confirmed as much to be true which leaves me to wonder, perhaps presumptuously, if one of those foreign agents hadn't received a call from old Killary's second cell phone, telling them to finish the job.
Say what you will about Muammar Gaddafi, he was a dictator and an eccentric one at that but he was also something of a philanthropist in his own strange way. No other modern African leader gave more of his nations natural wealth back to his own people. Before the scourge of Killary, Libya had one of the highest qualities of life on the continent with free education and health care that ranked among the best in the third world and even rivaled some in the first. Life expectancy and infant mortality rates were similarly exceptional and Gaddafi's charity didn't end with Libya. He gave unprecedented amounts of money to combat disease across the African continent. He was also an outspoken supporter and financier of Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress back when the U.S. was still backing the apartheid government of South Africa. Gaddafi, never forgetting his anti-colonialist roots, also gave his desperately needed support to struggling stateless peoples like the Tuaregs, the Sahrawi and the Palestinians, not to mention my own fucking people back in the old country, fighting against the illegal and immoral occupation of Northern Ireland by the United Kingdom, so I guess you could say I have a horse in this race and don't even give me that fucking bullshit about about Lockerbie. Anybody who knows dick about the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 can tell you the attack was carried out by the PFLP-GC on behalf of Iran in retaliation for the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by the U.S.S. Vincennes but the U.S. desperately needed Iran's support for the upcoming Persian Gulf War (A.K.A. George H.W. Bush's Own Private Libya starring Collin Powell) which Gaddafi had already come out and loudly apposed, so Libya was framed. My point is Gaddafi may have been a thug but of all the many, many thugs across the Arab world, why did we have to whack the benevolent one?
Well boys and girls I'll tell you why. Aside from Killary's own callous political motivations, Gaddafi, always the maverick fire starter had recently announced his intentions to stop selling his nations massive oil reserves in U.S. Dollars and to create an African Central Bank as well as a common African currency backed by gold. This would have been a huge threat to America's already dwindling influence on the dark continent and beyond. So it should come as little surprise that the Obama administration confiscated some $30 billion from the Libya Central Bank, which had been earmarked to bankroll the aforementioned African Bank and currency, under the guise of a Security Council Resolution, and then of course there's Benghazi.
Despite what you think you might know about the 2012 attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi that cost the lives of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others, the real scandal is far more insidious then anything Fox News or the GOP could ever cook up. All available facts support the theory that the events in Benghazi were in fact the relatively random actions of local jihadist militias taking advantage of the outrage caused by a crude, Islamaphobic Youtube video. All available facts also strongly suggest that the so called diplomatic mission in Benghazi was in reality a front for the C.I.A. to run heavy weaponry, procured from Gaddafi's sizable arsenal, to Killary's next bloodbath in Syria. This is also quite possibly the source of the sarin gas used by Al-Nusrah to frame Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad, the Arab worlds other remaining secularist, in 2013. As the great American journalist Seymour Hersh, who exposed the My Lai Massacre in '69, put it "The consulates only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms, it had no real political role" in other words Stevens and the men charged with protecting him didn't die defending the export of democratic values to the third world. Sadly they died fueling another one of Killary's psychotic adventures in Amerikkkan imperialism by arming yet another clan of Islamic extremists who would inevitably bite the hand that feeds.
And what is the end result of all this treacherous carnage and misery. Libya, once a beacon of hope to the long maligned people of the dark continent, an alternative to the empty promises and backroom deals the IMF, the World Bank and other assorted capitalist cock roaches has now been reduced to a hell scorched, fucked to death, post apocalyptic wasteland with a seemingly endless array of teeth gnashing, blood drenched, rape-aholic militias vying for power in what resembles a bad re-enactment
of a Mad Max movie. What was once a nation refugee's flocked to for shelter from across the Sahara is now a perpetual war zone that its own citizens are willing to drown in the thousands to escape in bullet riddled rust heaps and for what, I ask again? FOR FUCKING WHAT?!!!
So one scheming, conniving, lecherous, malignant narcissist can boost her fucking profile, score brownie points with the Israel lobby and become the vaunted, first female president of these United States of Hysteria.
With all that being said and done,as you struggle to digest my latest vitriolic diatribe, I only have one question for all you progressive teenie boppers in lily liver liberal land. ARE YOU READY.... FOR KILLARY?!!!
I for one would rather vote for a blood thirsty rabid wolverine or even that dickhead Rand Paul.
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Friday, April 10, 2015
Nick Reid: Portrait Of A Hermit Visionary
For the most part my childhood was pretty normal, borderline idyllic really, polliwogs, fireflies, all that noise. Backyard swimming pools and Christmas' were beautiful as The Red House Painters once so poignantly put it. My teenage years were typically tumultuous but ultimately rewarding when all was said and done. My twenties on the other hand, I wish I had a receipt because I want a fucking refund. Lets just say it aint easy being a poorly trained hermit visionary when there's no more pretty girls left to inspire me. These days I've got nothing but time to waste. So sit your ass down and uncle Nick will tell you a depressing origin story and maybe, just maybe, if I'm lucky, I can figure out how the hell I got here in the process.
The seeds of my troubles were planted somewhere around age 12 when my peaceful preteen world was first engulfed by the flames of mental illness. That's when O.C.D. hit me like a goddamn Mack truck. I didn't even see it coming. When most people think Obsessive Compulsive Disorder they think Monk or Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, all hand washing, light switch flicking and wry humor. I wont lie, I had my share of that kind of shit too, in the beginning but for the most part mine was a much more insidious beast. My O.C.D. was always more about self doubt and self loathing, dwelling on the past and fretting over the future, that tiny, ugly little voice that whispers over and over, your not good enough, your not worth it, your not loved and you don't deserve to be. Sometimes those whispers got to be so loud I'd have to shout FUCK YOU!! Just to shut them up. Needless to say my O.C.D. came with a heaping helping of good old fashion all american depression. So my early middle school days were pretty fucking blue. I went to a shrink for a while and she did her best but she was also kind of a dick. Finally I gave anti-depressants a go and after a few false starts I discovered Zoloft, Sertraline, my first love and knight in shining armor and slowly but shirley shit started looking up, that is Intel I stepped on another fucking rake with Lyme disease, a nasty little bitch of a chronic illness that's basically incurable unless you catch it early and go fucking figure I didn't catch it early, neither did my mother for that matter, who managed to ketch it at the same damn time. We used to like going for hikes, now I'll never step foot in another fucking forest for as long as I live. I must have been about 13 when it started and once it started it was fucking relentless, one thing after another, chronic fatigue, Bells Palsey, leg cramps, shooting knife like pain in my neck, even my O.C.D. kicked back up, you name it, I got it and the worst part was being shunned and called a liar by one pompous doctor after another including my own shrink, all part of a crippling conspiracy of silence that goes to the very top of the medical establishment. I cant go into all the details now but its dirty as hell, just watch the terrifying indie doc Under Our Skin if you don't believe me. After getting the shaft from these assholes for a few months we were finally forced to go off the grid. My mother and I began seeing a series of doctors who were part of a small, embattled community of brave physicians risking there jobs to experiment with various kinds of antibiotic treatments, looking for an elusive cure. I guess you could say I became a reluctant guinea pig.
After a couple years of hit or miss treatments I finally managed to get the Lyme disease more or less under control. It goes without saying that middle school was one hell of a ride made even rockier by the unfortunate fact that all this seismic upheaval occurred in the hostile environment of a small conservative Catholic school, already not the ideal place to go through puberty, just add mental illness and chronic pain to the formula and PRESTO! Instant clusterfuck. By 8th grade my dark clothes,dreary demeanor and unpopular politics had convinced the good christian's at ST. Johns that I was just one Uzi shy of the next Columbine massacre, never mind the fact that I was an outspoken pacifist who came to school the day after the opening bombing of Baghdad with a goddamn peace sign rapped around my arm. Apparently listening to Nine Inch Nails and popping Zoloft was more than enough evidence to declare me the Antichrist. After several "concerned" conversations with my parents and me, not to mention a panicked call to the Diocese, the frightened villagers put down there torches, called off the exorcism and came to the all too obvious conclusion that I was just another run of the mill, pissed off American adolescent lost in the fog of teenage wasteland and I managed to graduate from that parochial gulag without further incident. Why none of the other shiny, happy, Jesus freak Barbie and Ken dolls in my class seemed to have experienced the turbulence of puberty, I'll probably never know. I do however thank Christ on a regular basis that I had one descent teacher, Mrs. Teeple, who was subversive enough to encourage my eccentricities and introduce me to the revolutionary power of creative writing. wherever the hell she is I thank her for being the silver lining of that shit storm-cloud called Catholic school.
High school started out pretty shitty too with the usual underclassmen indignities of ham fisted bullies and pretty cheerleaders who couldn't seem to remember my name, not to mention a couple of excitable, close minded teachers who could have easily fit right in at St. Jerk-offs, but once I learned to relax and stop trying so damn hard to fit in I actually managed to find my place and shit got pretty bitchin. I made a few friends as well as some equally amusing enemies and managed to have a pretty good time. This is also where I discovered my second love, journalism thanks in part to another decidedly unconventional teacher Mr. May and the works of the good Doctor, Hunter S. Thompson and I spent what was quite possibly the best year of my pathetic, young life writing for my high school paper, The Red and White. In hind sight I probably had a little too much of a good time because I was totally unprepared for what came next. I ended up protesting my own graduation in one last act of teenage defiance, mostly because it came with a mandatory banquet the night before, dedicated to kissing the asses of the honor rolling serial brown nosers I had came to despise during my time at Bellefonte Area High School. I knew they would never celebrate the people I had come to love, the stoners, the geeks, the sluts and the freaks. MY people went unrecognized so I simply took my diploma and left. Unfortunately I also never got the opportunity to properly say goodbye to those people that meant so much to a teenage weirdo like me and just like that the bell rang and it was all over.
It wasn't like I didn't have any plans. In spite of my numerous learning disabilities and equally numerous problems with authority I still managed to raise my grade point average just high enough to get a provisional acceptance to Penn State University, where my parents went and where I planned to study journalism but something happened that summer, my world blew up.
It started small and grew slowly like vines strangling my psyche. This strange pitch black terror that stalked me closely over three months of searching for part time work before classes started in the fall. I found myself sabotaging my attempts to find even a volunteer job as this tension built deep inside me. The anxiety finally grew too large to ignore. So I relented and tried a new medication that was supposed to aid my Zoloft. Instead it backfired horribly and triggered a massive nervous breakdown which in turn triggered a bizarre relapse in my Lyme disease. I quickly dropped the new drug but it was too late. I ended up spending some six weeks on the couch terrified and in pain for reasons I couldn't and quite frankly still cant fully comprehend. Slowly I managed to get my bearings and attempted to soldier on and start classes in the winter but as that date approached that terror began to grow again and I backed out at the last minute to avoid yet another breakdown. Stubbornly I tried doing the same damn thing again the next year but after a tell tale visit to Old Main to check out a computer lab I would need for my disabilities I took a long look over the crowded campus and it hit me like a fucking bullet, the hard conclusion that I just couldn't do it, not then and maybe not ever. I just wasn't emotionally equipped to handle a large, traditional four year school. I would be setting myself up for disaster. I knew it would have been just a matter of weeks before facing another massive meltdown. I was lost. I had no plan b, no exit strategy. The world had suddenly become an overwhelmingly hostile environment. So I just gave up and retreated.
No one chooses to become a shut in and it doesn't happen all at once. Its an agonizingly slow process of telling yourself that tomorrow will be different, tomorrow will be better until tomorrow becomes a week, a week becomes a month and a month becomes a year, then two, then five. Suddenly you realize you haven't left the house in a month and the very idea of leaving it in even a year is too terrifying to contemplate so you through yourself into distraction. I personally buried myself in an avalanche of research and antibiotics in order to convince myself that I wasn't giving up on my life. I dove headfirst back into Lyme treatment, hoping against hope that somehow the cure to my existential terror lay there. So I began a seemingly endless regimen of hardcore antibiotics, one after another, the side affects of which tore through my aching guts like a fucking chainsaw. It got to the point where I was virtually couch bound but still I chose this physical agony over engaging the outside world and the psychological agony that came with it, like some strange form of masochistic, body horror, self mutilation. During this time I embarked on my own form of bizarre self education, reading voraciously. Book after book, I lost myself in a diverse range of odd subjects, covering everything from serial killers to feminism to punk rock music to conspiracy theories to the Russian revolution. My bedroom quickly became a cluttered library of books stacked foot high and I didn't stop at literature. I also immersed myself in foreign and art house cinema, living vicariously through the works of David Lynch, Lukas Moodysan, Harmony Korine and Park Chan Wook. I also became obsessed with shoegaze bands, pigfucker noise rock music and all things Nirvana and Hole. I created a vivid sanctuary for myself of strange characters and exotic locales. Who needed the real world when I could build my own, free of the fear and pressure of the terrifying outside universe. The straight world didn't fucking see me, why the hell should I see it but I could only close my eyes and plug my ears for so long before my sanity began to fray. It started with the loneliness, crippling, agonizing loneliness like a dull rusty dagger twisting in my heart. I lost touch with everyone. I went months, sometimes longer, not speaking a word to a single person outside of my immediate family except for my doctors. All my friends were gone, they had all moved on with there lives without me, going to school, getting jobs, falling in love and having families. I tried seeing a shrink again but for me paying a stranger, even a professional one, for conversation felt about as dignified as paying one for sex. The second thing that hit me was the anger which quickly boiled over into borderline rage as I watched the world go madder then I was through the flickering screen of my TV set from the comfort of my own cozy prison cell. I watched liberals vote for war and conservatives vote for blatant, unmitigated racism. I watched America continue to run rough shot across the globe, dropping bombs on children, overthrowing democracies and creating Frankenstien monsters just to justify there destruction. I also witnessed the perverse spectacle of my own government, under the tutelage of an alleged progressive reformer, eviscerate what remained of the Constitution once Bush was done with it, with increased drone strikes, wire taps, and increased executive power. Perhaps worst of all, I saw my very own community revealed to be something unfathomably grotesque. A riving, quivering mass of spineless fanatics, more then willing to sweep the lives of innocent children aside in order to protect the prestige of a greedy, sociopathic university I'm ashamed to admit I almost attended. All these things and more twisted through my skull like a cyclone. I had so much I wanted to say, so much I NEEDED to SCREAM with no place to scream and no one to FUCKING HEAR ME! The final straw though was the medication, the antibiotics, the supposed cure became worse then the disease. It got to the point where I couldn't even sit up at the computer for more than a half hour without my guts aching like bloody fucking hell. Finally, exhausted, I threw in the towel and went off the pills only to discover to my confused horror that the pain didn't go away without them. So began yet another agonizing saga of tests and examinations, being poked and violated in every last orifice imaginable, ruling out everything from colon cancer to celiac disease before a plucky nurse practitioner with an uncanny resemblance to Amy Sedaris finally figured out what a cartel of overpaid specialists apparently couldn't. That antibiotics, those goddamn antibiotics had given me Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which is about as unpleasant and undignified as it sounds. After even more pharmaceutical trial and error, I finally found a cocktail of pills that brought me just next door to normal and even improved my anxiety.
Things didn't truly start to turn around, however until I began to right again for the first time in years. It all started with one of my many books, Come As You Are, a rock bio on Nirvana by Michael Azerrad that touched briefly on a period of lead singer, Kurt Cobain's life spent as a twenty something shut in like me. In spite of Kurt's self imposed exile or perhaps because of it he still continued to focus on his art and ended up writing some his best work during this time. Something about that story struck a chord deep inside me. I decided I wasn't going to let a college degree tell me who I am. I am a writer. So I began writing every single night after dinner often while listening to bands like Nirvana and Hole and Sonic Youth and everything just came pouring out like a massive flood of words. All the anger, all the sadness and grief and frustration and heartbreak. I had no fucking idea how much I was keeping locked up in my head until I put my pen to that paper and let it all out and let it all go. I felt free for the first time in years and it gave me the confidence I so desperately needed to finally step out of my prison into the unfiltered terror of the outside world.
So here I am today struggling to figure out how to hotwire my derelict life after years of neglect. Its a bit like getting out of jail after over half a decade inside and having to re-acclimate to society. Needless to say its fucking overwhelming and there are days I still feel like returning to the safety of my cell but at least now I know who I am and a finally have a place to scream and hopefully some sympathetic ears to scream in. Its not much and it shore as shit doesn't pay the fucking bills but it beats the hell out of the purgatory of my early twenties. Like I said at the beginning of this angry heart song, it aint easy being a poorly trained hermit visionary but somebodies gotta do it.
The seeds of my troubles were planted somewhere around age 12 when my peaceful preteen world was first engulfed by the flames of mental illness. That's when O.C.D. hit me like a goddamn Mack truck. I didn't even see it coming. When most people think Obsessive Compulsive Disorder they think Monk or Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, all hand washing, light switch flicking and wry humor. I wont lie, I had my share of that kind of shit too, in the beginning but for the most part mine was a much more insidious beast. My O.C.D. was always more about self doubt and self loathing, dwelling on the past and fretting over the future, that tiny, ugly little voice that whispers over and over, your not good enough, your not worth it, your not loved and you don't deserve to be. Sometimes those whispers got to be so loud I'd have to shout FUCK YOU!! Just to shut them up. Needless to say my O.C.D. came with a heaping helping of good old fashion all american depression. So my early middle school days were pretty fucking blue. I went to a shrink for a while and she did her best but she was also kind of a dick. Finally I gave anti-depressants a go and after a few false starts I discovered Zoloft, Sertraline, my first love and knight in shining armor and slowly but shirley shit started looking up, that is Intel I stepped on another fucking rake with Lyme disease, a nasty little bitch of a chronic illness that's basically incurable unless you catch it early and go fucking figure I didn't catch it early, neither did my mother for that matter, who managed to ketch it at the same damn time. We used to like going for hikes, now I'll never step foot in another fucking forest for as long as I live. I must have been about 13 when it started and once it started it was fucking relentless, one thing after another, chronic fatigue, Bells Palsey, leg cramps, shooting knife like pain in my neck, even my O.C.D. kicked back up, you name it, I got it and the worst part was being shunned and called a liar by one pompous doctor after another including my own shrink, all part of a crippling conspiracy of silence that goes to the very top of the medical establishment. I cant go into all the details now but its dirty as hell, just watch the terrifying indie doc Under Our Skin if you don't believe me. After getting the shaft from these assholes for a few months we were finally forced to go off the grid. My mother and I began seeing a series of doctors who were part of a small, embattled community of brave physicians risking there jobs to experiment with various kinds of antibiotic treatments, looking for an elusive cure. I guess you could say I became a reluctant guinea pig.
After a couple years of hit or miss treatments I finally managed to get the Lyme disease more or less under control. It goes without saying that middle school was one hell of a ride made even rockier by the unfortunate fact that all this seismic upheaval occurred in the hostile environment of a small conservative Catholic school, already not the ideal place to go through puberty, just add mental illness and chronic pain to the formula and PRESTO! Instant clusterfuck. By 8th grade my dark clothes,dreary demeanor and unpopular politics had convinced the good christian's at ST. Johns that I was just one Uzi shy of the next Columbine massacre, never mind the fact that I was an outspoken pacifist who came to school the day after the opening bombing of Baghdad with a goddamn peace sign rapped around my arm. Apparently listening to Nine Inch Nails and popping Zoloft was more than enough evidence to declare me the Antichrist. After several "concerned" conversations with my parents and me, not to mention a panicked call to the Diocese, the frightened villagers put down there torches, called off the exorcism and came to the all too obvious conclusion that I was just another run of the mill, pissed off American adolescent lost in the fog of teenage wasteland and I managed to graduate from that parochial gulag without further incident. Why none of the other shiny, happy, Jesus freak Barbie and Ken dolls in my class seemed to have experienced the turbulence of puberty, I'll probably never know. I do however thank Christ on a regular basis that I had one descent teacher, Mrs. Teeple, who was subversive enough to encourage my eccentricities and introduce me to the revolutionary power of creative writing. wherever the hell she is I thank her for being the silver lining of that shit storm-cloud called Catholic school.
High school started out pretty shitty too with the usual underclassmen indignities of ham fisted bullies and pretty cheerleaders who couldn't seem to remember my name, not to mention a couple of excitable, close minded teachers who could have easily fit right in at St. Jerk-offs, but once I learned to relax and stop trying so damn hard to fit in I actually managed to find my place and shit got pretty bitchin. I made a few friends as well as some equally amusing enemies and managed to have a pretty good time. This is also where I discovered my second love, journalism thanks in part to another decidedly unconventional teacher Mr. May and the works of the good Doctor, Hunter S. Thompson and I spent what was quite possibly the best year of my pathetic, young life writing for my high school paper, The Red and White. In hind sight I probably had a little too much of a good time because I was totally unprepared for what came next. I ended up protesting my own graduation in one last act of teenage defiance, mostly because it came with a mandatory banquet the night before, dedicated to kissing the asses of the honor rolling serial brown nosers I had came to despise during my time at Bellefonte Area High School. I knew they would never celebrate the people I had come to love, the stoners, the geeks, the sluts and the freaks. MY people went unrecognized so I simply took my diploma and left. Unfortunately I also never got the opportunity to properly say goodbye to those people that meant so much to a teenage weirdo like me and just like that the bell rang and it was all over.
It wasn't like I didn't have any plans. In spite of my numerous learning disabilities and equally numerous problems with authority I still managed to raise my grade point average just high enough to get a provisional acceptance to Penn State University, where my parents went and where I planned to study journalism but something happened that summer, my world blew up.
It started small and grew slowly like vines strangling my psyche. This strange pitch black terror that stalked me closely over three months of searching for part time work before classes started in the fall. I found myself sabotaging my attempts to find even a volunteer job as this tension built deep inside me. The anxiety finally grew too large to ignore. So I relented and tried a new medication that was supposed to aid my Zoloft. Instead it backfired horribly and triggered a massive nervous breakdown which in turn triggered a bizarre relapse in my Lyme disease. I quickly dropped the new drug but it was too late. I ended up spending some six weeks on the couch terrified and in pain for reasons I couldn't and quite frankly still cant fully comprehend. Slowly I managed to get my bearings and attempted to soldier on and start classes in the winter but as that date approached that terror began to grow again and I backed out at the last minute to avoid yet another breakdown. Stubbornly I tried doing the same damn thing again the next year but after a tell tale visit to Old Main to check out a computer lab I would need for my disabilities I took a long look over the crowded campus and it hit me like a fucking bullet, the hard conclusion that I just couldn't do it, not then and maybe not ever. I just wasn't emotionally equipped to handle a large, traditional four year school. I would be setting myself up for disaster. I knew it would have been just a matter of weeks before facing another massive meltdown. I was lost. I had no plan b, no exit strategy. The world had suddenly become an overwhelmingly hostile environment. So I just gave up and retreated.
No one chooses to become a shut in and it doesn't happen all at once. Its an agonizingly slow process of telling yourself that tomorrow will be different, tomorrow will be better until tomorrow becomes a week, a week becomes a month and a month becomes a year, then two, then five. Suddenly you realize you haven't left the house in a month and the very idea of leaving it in even a year is too terrifying to contemplate so you through yourself into distraction. I personally buried myself in an avalanche of research and antibiotics in order to convince myself that I wasn't giving up on my life. I dove headfirst back into Lyme treatment, hoping against hope that somehow the cure to my existential terror lay there. So I began a seemingly endless regimen of hardcore antibiotics, one after another, the side affects of which tore through my aching guts like a fucking chainsaw. It got to the point where I was virtually couch bound but still I chose this physical agony over engaging the outside world and the psychological agony that came with it, like some strange form of masochistic, body horror, self mutilation. During this time I embarked on my own form of bizarre self education, reading voraciously. Book after book, I lost myself in a diverse range of odd subjects, covering everything from serial killers to feminism to punk rock music to conspiracy theories to the Russian revolution. My bedroom quickly became a cluttered library of books stacked foot high and I didn't stop at literature. I also immersed myself in foreign and art house cinema, living vicariously through the works of David Lynch, Lukas Moodysan, Harmony Korine and Park Chan Wook. I also became obsessed with shoegaze bands, pigfucker noise rock music and all things Nirvana and Hole. I created a vivid sanctuary for myself of strange characters and exotic locales. Who needed the real world when I could build my own, free of the fear and pressure of the terrifying outside universe. The straight world didn't fucking see me, why the hell should I see it but I could only close my eyes and plug my ears for so long before my sanity began to fray. It started with the loneliness, crippling, agonizing loneliness like a dull rusty dagger twisting in my heart. I lost touch with everyone. I went months, sometimes longer, not speaking a word to a single person outside of my immediate family except for my doctors. All my friends were gone, they had all moved on with there lives without me, going to school, getting jobs, falling in love and having families. I tried seeing a shrink again but for me paying a stranger, even a professional one, for conversation felt about as dignified as paying one for sex. The second thing that hit me was the anger which quickly boiled over into borderline rage as I watched the world go madder then I was through the flickering screen of my TV set from the comfort of my own cozy prison cell. I watched liberals vote for war and conservatives vote for blatant, unmitigated racism. I watched America continue to run rough shot across the globe, dropping bombs on children, overthrowing democracies and creating Frankenstien monsters just to justify there destruction. I also witnessed the perverse spectacle of my own government, under the tutelage of an alleged progressive reformer, eviscerate what remained of the Constitution once Bush was done with it, with increased drone strikes, wire taps, and increased executive power. Perhaps worst of all, I saw my very own community revealed to be something unfathomably grotesque. A riving, quivering mass of spineless fanatics, more then willing to sweep the lives of innocent children aside in order to protect the prestige of a greedy, sociopathic university I'm ashamed to admit I almost attended. All these things and more twisted through my skull like a cyclone. I had so much I wanted to say, so much I NEEDED to SCREAM with no place to scream and no one to FUCKING HEAR ME! The final straw though was the medication, the antibiotics, the supposed cure became worse then the disease. It got to the point where I couldn't even sit up at the computer for more than a half hour without my guts aching like bloody fucking hell. Finally, exhausted, I threw in the towel and went off the pills only to discover to my confused horror that the pain didn't go away without them. So began yet another agonizing saga of tests and examinations, being poked and violated in every last orifice imaginable, ruling out everything from colon cancer to celiac disease before a plucky nurse practitioner with an uncanny resemblance to Amy Sedaris finally figured out what a cartel of overpaid specialists apparently couldn't. That antibiotics, those goddamn antibiotics had given me Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which is about as unpleasant and undignified as it sounds. After even more pharmaceutical trial and error, I finally found a cocktail of pills that brought me just next door to normal and even improved my anxiety.
Things didn't truly start to turn around, however until I began to right again for the first time in years. It all started with one of my many books, Come As You Are, a rock bio on Nirvana by Michael Azerrad that touched briefly on a period of lead singer, Kurt Cobain's life spent as a twenty something shut in like me. In spite of Kurt's self imposed exile or perhaps because of it he still continued to focus on his art and ended up writing some his best work during this time. Something about that story struck a chord deep inside me. I decided I wasn't going to let a college degree tell me who I am. I am a writer. So I began writing every single night after dinner often while listening to bands like Nirvana and Hole and Sonic Youth and everything just came pouring out like a massive flood of words. All the anger, all the sadness and grief and frustration and heartbreak. I had no fucking idea how much I was keeping locked up in my head until I put my pen to that paper and let it all out and let it all go. I felt free for the first time in years and it gave me the confidence I so desperately needed to finally step out of my prison into the unfiltered terror of the outside world.
So here I am today struggling to figure out how to hotwire my derelict life after years of neglect. Its a bit like getting out of jail after over half a decade inside and having to re-acclimate to society. Needless to say its fucking overwhelming and there are days I still feel like returning to the safety of my cell but at least now I know who I am and a finally have a place to scream and hopefully some sympathetic ears to scream in. Its not much and it shore as shit doesn't pay the fucking bills but it beats the hell out of the purgatory of my early twenties. Like I said at the beginning of this angry heart song, it aint easy being a poorly trained hermit visionary but somebodies gotta do it.
Thursday, April 2, 2015
Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is Rape State
Across the vast expanse of Penn State's chiseled campus empire the unmistakable smokey reek of teenage outrage and twenty something rebellion wafts in the early spring breeze. Livid throngs of righteously irate students, mostly female but some male flock before Old Main demanding an end to there Alma Mater's long standing culture of rape and chauvinistic hegemony. "We are not safe" they shout in unison, in hope of shaking the office windows of the powerful men who will decide the fate of the latest fraternity, Kappa Delta Rho, caught red handed, joyfully partaking in disgusting acts of sexual degradation against innocent young women, this time using Facebook to celebrate there vile exploits at the expense of there unconscious play things. This time they've gone too far. This time there victims and would be victims are taking a stand and demanding action. Suspension is not enough for video date rape. Heads must roll and I'm not just talking about the gigantic ones between there shoulders but the tiny ones between there legs. Part of me wants to be there with them, to stand there with them, to scream there with them. Solidarity, the old commies call it, solidarity indeed, but there's also another part of me, a part of me I'm almost tempted to ignore, that's anger is not reserved solely for that bastard frat pack alone, but for the students who demand there elimination from campus life completely as well. Not because I disagree, quite the contrary. This ugly little piece of me wants to fucking scream WHY NOW!!!
Where was this righteous rage some four years ago, in November 2011, when it was revealed that not only were 40 some preteen boys savagely raped by a twisted beast named Jerry Sandusky but these heinous crimes against the innocent and defenseless were covered up and berried by the two most powerful men at Penn State, Dean Graham Spanier and Coach Joe Paterno for at least a decade, A FUCKING DECADE! Ten long years of cashing checks and making incoherent press statements. Ten fucking years, they sat by and let that fucking animal prey on the innocent on campus property and where was the outrage then. Where were the angry crowds of students demanding justice for victims then. Well I'll tell you where they were, they were gathered outside the house of Joe Paterno, not to protest his despicable actions, or lack there of, but to cheer on and rally around that putrid fucking scum bag, there precious fucking Jo-Pa and days later they were in downtown State College, rioting furiously in response to there soiled idols firing, destroying property and shouting obscenity's. The victims were the last thing on there minds. THEY were the real victims for being deprived of the figure head of there favorite children's game. Who cares how many kids lives had to be annihilated to ensure the victories that gave there empty lives shallow meaning.
This was the flavor of teenage outrage and twenty something rebellion in 2011. So what changed? When did rape become unacceptable to Nittany Lions? My guess, it was probably right around the time THEY became the victims. Is that jaded? Maybe, but take a long walk around downtown State College sometime and count the nauseating propaganda posters, bumper stickers and other assorted paraphernalia shamelessly exalting Joe Paterno and demanding a return to there universities pre-sandusky glory, demanding to "restore the roar". Turn on your TV to the local news and watch Paterno's disgraceful family spinning batshit conspiracy theories that exonerate there dead patriarchs undeserved legacy and a return to there exalted status as first family to the Nittany Nation, often with there desperate,groveling, flunkee surrogate son, Franco Harris purring at there feet and watch that supposedly independent news here in Happy fucking Hell present this vile revisionist horse shit as a legitimate argument and just try standing up on your seat at the Corner Room and shouting Joe Paterno sucks cocks in hell at the top of your lungs and count how many milliseconds it takes your fellow diners to devour every last ounce of your spewing viscera raw.
O.K. that last one was a bit of a jump but you get were I'm going with this. In spite of the overwhelming outrage at the sickening actions of K.D.R., the enraged students of Penn State seem completely oblivious to the arguably far more heinous crimes of the late coach they continue to lionize. There is no connection made between the victims and would be victims of K.D.R. and the victims of Jerry Sandusky. There is no, what do the old commies call it, solidarity? No solidarity indeed.
P.S. I don't believe in hell but I do believe in reincarnation and I can honestly say without a shadow of a doubt that Joe Paterno will spend the next dozen life cycles as a puss filled cock leach.
P.P.S. My original title for this blog was supposed to be Fear And Loathing In Happy Valley but that title was hijacked by some twisted, Jo-Pa dick riding, asshole who defiles that name and the good name of MY late hero, Hunter S. Thompson with a revolting cavalcade of ludicrously contrived conspiracy theories that pathetically attempt to revive the bad name of HIS despicable hero Joe fucking Paterno. If there was a hell I'd tell that shithead not to trip on his dick on the way down there.
Where was this righteous rage some four years ago, in November 2011, when it was revealed that not only were 40 some preteen boys savagely raped by a twisted beast named Jerry Sandusky but these heinous crimes against the innocent and defenseless were covered up and berried by the two most powerful men at Penn State, Dean Graham Spanier and Coach Joe Paterno for at least a decade, A FUCKING DECADE! Ten long years of cashing checks and making incoherent press statements. Ten fucking years, they sat by and let that fucking animal prey on the innocent on campus property and where was the outrage then. Where were the angry crowds of students demanding justice for victims then. Well I'll tell you where they were, they were gathered outside the house of Joe Paterno, not to protest his despicable actions, or lack there of, but to cheer on and rally around that putrid fucking scum bag, there precious fucking Jo-Pa and days later they were in downtown State College, rioting furiously in response to there soiled idols firing, destroying property and shouting obscenity's. The victims were the last thing on there minds. THEY were the real victims for being deprived of the figure head of there favorite children's game. Who cares how many kids lives had to be annihilated to ensure the victories that gave there empty lives shallow meaning.
This was the flavor of teenage outrage and twenty something rebellion in 2011. So what changed? When did rape become unacceptable to Nittany Lions? My guess, it was probably right around the time THEY became the victims. Is that jaded? Maybe, but take a long walk around downtown State College sometime and count the nauseating propaganda posters, bumper stickers and other assorted paraphernalia shamelessly exalting Joe Paterno and demanding a return to there universities pre-sandusky glory, demanding to "restore the roar". Turn on your TV to the local news and watch Paterno's disgraceful family spinning batshit conspiracy theories that exonerate there dead patriarchs undeserved legacy and a return to there exalted status as first family to the Nittany Nation, often with there desperate,groveling, flunkee surrogate son, Franco Harris purring at there feet and watch that supposedly independent news here in Happy fucking Hell present this vile revisionist horse shit as a legitimate argument and just try standing up on your seat at the Corner Room and shouting Joe Paterno sucks cocks in hell at the top of your lungs and count how many milliseconds it takes your fellow diners to devour every last ounce of your spewing viscera raw.
O.K. that last one was a bit of a jump but you get were I'm going with this. In spite of the overwhelming outrage at the sickening actions of K.D.R., the enraged students of Penn State seem completely oblivious to the arguably far more heinous crimes of the late coach they continue to lionize. There is no connection made between the victims and would be victims of K.D.R. and the victims of Jerry Sandusky. There is no, what do the old commies call it, solidarity? No solidarity indeed.
P.S. I don't believe in hell but I do believe in reincarnation and I can honestly say without a shadow of a doubt that Joe Paterno will spend the next dozen life cycles as a puss filled cock leach.
P.P.S. My original title for this blog was supposed to be Fear And Loathing In Happy Valley but that title was hijacked by some twisted, Jo-Pa dick riding, asshole who defiles that name and the good name of MY late hero, Hunter S. Thompson with a revolting cavalcade of ludicrously contrived conspiracy theories that pathetically attempt to revive the bad name of HIS despicable hero Joe fucking Paterno. If there was a hell I'd tell that shithead not to trip on his dick on the way down there.
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