Jesus Christ, Iggy Pop & Karl Marx

Bless me father for I have sinned. It has been, shit, well over a decade since my last confession. In that time I have sworn profusely, violated myself sexually, gleefully engaged in acts of wanton sacrilege and rebelled against pretty much everything imaginable and to be completely honest I have no plans to give up any of this shit in the near future. I have also lost my mind and my faith and managed to gain the latter back to some degree from some pretty fucking strange places. Lets just say I found more then one prophet, though there both Jewish heretics with bitch'n beards....

Maybe I should just start again at the beginning.

I was born and raised in a relatively conventional, reasonably conservative, mostly Irish Catholic family and in the beginning everything went pretty smoothly. God made sense and so did his rules, more or less. I excepted the Bibles absurdities with the unblinking devotion of a dewy eyed babe in arms. Catholic school wasn't always fun but at least on some level it made sense. Do on to others and all that noise. But somewhere around eleven or twelve things became more complicated. The rules still made sense but it became abundantly clear that those enforcing them held themselves to a different standard if they held themselves to ant standard at all. My teachers and priests used the Bible like a bludgeon towards anyone who didn't fit in to there little cookie cutter, parochial utopia, myself included. I dress in all black and suddenly I'm an infidel. I speak my mind or god forbid ask a question and I'm a heretic. I question my sexuality in a moment of teenage doubt and I'm fucking firewood. Meanwhile these figures I once trusted practiced hypocrisy like a competitive sport. Bearing false witness against there neighbors with reckless abandon and gleefully cheering on senseless war and capitol punishment while loudly proclaiming themselves pro life and pissing on anyone who so much as brings up the complications of rape and rusty hangers. Suddenly Jesus' table didn't seem to have a place for me or any of the other misfit toys. I found myself rudderless, lost in a deep dark sea of doubt and resentment. I had no more patience for god or his Bible thumping lunatics. So I lapsed and hit the proverbial pavement in search of something else to believe in. Some place where freaks like me belong.

After some soul searching and trial and error, I discovered the majestic fury of punk rock music but it was more then just music to me. It was salvation. From the moment I heard Iggy Pop snarl " I am the worlds forgotten boy" I was hooked for life. Finally, I had found a place where I didn't have to hide who I was, a place for the freaks, the geeks, the queers and the sluts. Not only did we belong but we were celebrated, not in spite of our transgressions but because of them. But there was still something missing. I found my church but I still needed a creed, a jihad, a crusade, something to fight for, something to believe in.

My search for something righteous to smash my fists against began with punk rock heroes like Joe Strummer and Jello Biafra, who turned me on to the wonderful world of left wing radicalism. After flirting for a while with anarchism, I stumbled upon the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Something about there philosophy clicked with me. A system in which people came before profit and mercy came before greed, where the needs of the many outweigh the desires of the few. Marxism fit like a fucking glove. It made perfect sense to me. It also felt strangely familiar. That was because the teachings of Marx were nearly identical to the teachings of Christ that I grew up believing. Jesus too stood firmly against greed, gluttony, exploitation, empire and even the tyranny of organized religion. That's why the Romans and the temples decided he had to die. Like Che Guevara, Jesus shook the cage of injustice to loudly and the bastards took him out.

It hit me, Jesus was a socialist and Marxism was scientific Christianity. Not only that but Christ was something of a punk as well. He didn't give a flying fuck about the status quot. He was nothing like the sanctimonious tight wads who bandy his name about today. He didn't hang with the high and mighty. He rolled with the freaks, the geeks, the queers and the sluts. His boys were peasants and his girl was an ex prostitute and they didn't play nice with the fucking powers to be. He turned over there tables and fearlessly defied there authority. Jesus Christ was the worlds forgotten boy, the one searching to destroy or as he once put it "I came not to bring peace but with a sword". Christ didn't come to punish freaks like me. Like Marx, he came to lead us to victory against the pious dicks who spat on us. There wasn't a place at the table because my place was in the fucking mosh pit.

So here I am father, a punk, a Marxist and oddly enough in my own weird way a Christian again. I honestly don't know if I believe in god but I do believe in the righteous path, a long, winding path that leads from Christ to Marx to Iggy and hopefully to me. My sins may be many and counting but I have the better part of a lifetime to make up for them by fighting the good fight. Let that fight be my penance and let it begin on this blog.

In the name of Jesus Christ, Iggy Pop and Karl Marx, Amen.

Beware of Wolves in Doves Clothing

Do you smell that in the air? That all to familiar stench of carbon punch cards and Vaseline. It smells like election year and you know what that means. It's time to bend over, grab your ankles and vote for another plutocratic hose bag who would sooner sell your children into sex slavery then do anything resembling the right thing or you can do what I do. Hold on to your dignity and vote your conscience even if it doesn't amount to much more than a hearty fuck you to the partisan pollsters. In that case its time to pick a deliciously fringey protest candidate who represents the issues that matter most to you. Now, personally there are few things that piss me off more then the loathsome single issue voter but if there's one issue that matters most to me, one issue that can make or break my support for a candidate, it's the fatalistic issue of war and peace.

I strongly believe in my heart of hearts that the biggest threat to the world today isn't ISIS or even global warming but the wicked scourge of America's military industrial complex which has hijacked our dear republic and transformed it into an insatiable empire, hellbent on global conquest at any cost, regardless of how many dollars or dead soldiers it takes. Never in the history of mankind have we witnessed a beast more bloated or blood thirsty then the american war machine. With more then a thousand military installations in over one hundred countries and counting, on every fucking continent on earth, the United States spends more per capita on "defense" then China, Russia, India and Pakistan combined, nearly half of all military spending worldwide at a price tag of over one trillion dollars a year! That's trillion with a motherfucking T!! A FUCKING YEAR!!!! All to wage an endless fucking war on country after country after country, Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada(Grenada?!)Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Iraq again! And now China and Russia with no end in sight and for what? What have we gained from this epic, never ending holocaust? A tower of crippling debt and an ocean of grave stones stretching from the concrete shores of Arlington to the gates of the Pentagon, not to mention a planet full of mortal enemies desperate to avenge the families and nations we callously robbed them of in our ego maniacal quest for manifest destiny. So, with that being said, if I'm gonna vote for somebody, anybody, they damn sure as holy fuck better be anti-war. Which is why I find myself in such a pickle this election season because even the  supposedly anti-war candidates on the fringes don't really seem anti-war anymore. I'll show you what I mean with two glaring, upsetting examples.

First up is Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, gunning for Killary's spot as the Democratic nominee. Every single fiber of my fucking being want's to embrace this gnarly old bastard with open arms. His grouchy, zero bullshit demeanor, His weird fetish for all things Scandinavian, even his abject refusal to even buy a fucking comb, I love all of it. This is a registered independent(though he caucuses Democrat) with the cojones to proudly proclaim himself a democratic socialist while other pussies hide behind the word progressive like scared rabbits. This is a motherfucker who voted against both gulf wars as well as both NAFTA and CAFTA. So why cant I warm up to this ornery, curmudgeonly, old New Englander? Has fat, old, commie pinko pants here finally snapped and gone jaded? Nope, not yet anyway. I just know a little too much about old Bernie's spotty record.

On the surface Senator Sanders looks perfectly righteous. On fiscal and social matters he legitimately is. Sadly, on the tell tale issue of war and peace, not so much.

Bernie voted against the Iraq War in 2003. This much is true but after this very public protest vote that pleased the stalwart pacifists back home, the good senator then very quietly joined the rest of his colleagues in voting, repeatedly, to continue to fund and fuel that totally illegal war for the better part of the next wretched decade, sending scores of America's finest to die for what Bernie openly admitted was a despicable lie. Those soldiers lucky enough(or unlucky enough) to come home alive were sent back again and again and again until there was no piece of them left to give to there ungrateful nation but hey, Bernie had to be a team player and compromising is what American politics is all about, right?

This seems to have become a disturbing pattern with Bernie and many other so called progressive Democrats(including former senator Obama). You can vote against the initial bill to save face with your left leaning constituency but you sure as shit better vote to fund the goddamn thing and that's precisely what good old lefty Bernie did and not just with Iraq but the establishment of the crypto-fascist Department of Homeland Security as well, which he similarly took an initial stand against only to vote, repeatedly, with the rest of the Dems to finance but I guess that's the price you pay to eat lunch with the cool kids on Capitol Hill.

Bernie also voted with the majority again on the deceptively named Iran Freedom Act which sent millions of our tax dollars to fund "pro freedom" terrorist organizations in there bloody war against the unforgivable Islamic Revolution. "Freedom fighters" like the bloodthirsty, Al Qaeda linked Jundallah, who made a name for themselves by slaughtering scores of civilian Shia infidels. Or the creepy, pseudo-Marxist cult, Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a heinous horde of violently reactionary opportunists, who's profile reads like a perverse cross between ISIS, Blackwater and the Lerouche movement. Like there comrades in arms Jundallah, the MEK are designated terrorists or at least they were before Madame Secretary Killary Clinton decided, in her infinite wisdom, to have these good freedom fighters removed from Uncle Sam's shitlist, despite the fact that there long list of victims included American soldiers, but not before fuckheads like Bernie Sanders saw it fit to send them a treasure trove of American dollars to buy new bombs with. Good looking out there, Peace nick! Why not throw the Manson family a bone while your working on that Nobel Prize.

I also find it hard to forget about Bernie's passionate, full throated support of then President Bill Clinton's ruthless and cowardly assault on Yugoslavia, the last truly socialist nation left in Europe, all based on a despicably fabricated genocide. In fact so passionate was Bernie's support for the NATO sacking of Kosovo that when his own constituents came out in droves to his Burlington office to protest America's latest adventure in nation smashing, the former veteran of the antiwar movement of the sixties pulled a fucking Humphrey and sicked the cops on them.

I could go on and on like this about the senators support for absurdly unleftist projects like the Pentagon's installation of the locally unpopular F-35 fighter jets in Vermont or his undying loyalty to the apartheid state of Israel, even during there latest genocidal carpet bombing of Gaza, but I think you get the point. Far from being our social democratic savior sent to save us from the billion dollar juggernaut of Madame Killary, Senator Sanders appears to be just another devoted servant of spineless post McGovern neoliberalism, when push comes to shove. Maybe old Bernie was the real deal Hollifield, once upon a time but he's clearly cashed his street cred in for a position as the DNC's pseudo socialist, gerbil faced mascot attempting to convince "jaded" lefties like myself that the Democrats are still the cool party. To that come on, I say no fucking thank you.

A quick confession: I myself humbly regret to inform you, dearest motherfuckers, that I, Nicholas Adam Reid, confirmed Marxist and sometimes anarchist, am a member of the Democratic Party. I switched over from the Green Party in 2008 to vote for a real maverick pacifist named Dennis Kucinich but the brilliant little bastard dropped out of the race just before the Pennsylvania primary, so I ended up voting for Nader anyway(no regrets). The only reason why I remained a member of a party that I frankly despise is the shallow hope that another brave, left wing populist like Kucinich will make another quixotic go at the top spot. Which is precisely why it fucking burns me when goddamn posers like Bernie butthole Sanders jump in and jack the fringe vote. But this kind of sleazy behavior isn't relegated to the Dems alone. This year it affects the Grand Old Party as well.

I may be a hardcore leftist but above all else I am an anti-imperialist and believe it or not the Republican Party has its own proud if often forgotten history of anti-imperialism, usually tarred with the derogatory label of isolationism, as if putting your country first is some kind of hermetic disease. This proud tradition has recently seen a stunning revival thanks largely to the hard work of one spunky, little, Pittsburgh born gynecologist turned Texas congressman named Ron Paul. I'll never forget the first time I saw this crazy bastard on CNN in 2008, during a Republican primary debate. This virtually unknown old motherfucker came out of nowhere and fucking bitch smacked ex New York City mayor and professional 911 revivalist, Rudy Giuliani by informing the former Fuhrer of 42nd Street that the hyper interventionist foreign policy that neocons like him so relish, indirectly lead to the very tragedy he built his putrid, self serving career on pimping out. I thought Noam Chomsky had crashed the fucking party but it was all Ron Paul, all 90 pounds of the little motherfucker, rearing to take on the whole derelict Republican establishment by himself if he had to but he didn't. Ron Paul didn't stand alone. Ron Paul had a fucking posse. A devoted following of young, well informed libertarians, many of them veterans, fresh from the twin hell holes of Iraq and Afghanistan, more then ready to join Doctor Paul in his quest to take their party back from the barbarians who hijacked it during the heat of the Cold War. I didn't agree with Paul and his posse on every issue but goddammit if I didn't respect there dedication to the principle of non interventionism. So much so that when it looked like Ron Paul actually had a shot at the nomination in 2012, I, Nicholas Adam Reid, confirmed Marxist and sometimes anarchist, actually considered going fucking Republican, in hopes of demolishing the military industrial complex, once and for all. I didn't fucking do it, mind you but I had my finger on the fucking trigger for a second there. If that's not cross over appeal then I don't know what the fuck is.

Needless to say, I was more than a little bummed to see the mighty little congressman go when he decided to retire from politics in 2013, but I had high hopes for his son, Rand Paul, when he was elected to the Senate in 2010 and initially the Kentucky Senator didn't disappoint. Rand took ballsy and decidedly unconventional stands against everything from Killary's war in Libya(read "Ready for Killary" below) to Americas increasingly Orwellian police state. He even brought back the real filibuster, taking a stand against Obama's ultra violent and constitutionally questionable drone war, holding the floor for nearly thirteen hours, all while maintaining the too cool for school, Ray Ban wearing, go fuck yourself attitude of a John Hughes, Brat Pack antihero. Everything about the new senator seemed to be a refreshing fuck you to politics as usual. Once again, much like Bernie Sanders, I was very much tempted to like this motherfucker. But a very strange thing happened when Rand began running for president. He became a politician.

It all started with a bizarrely timed trip to the holy land, that indispensable apartheid state on the hill, career politicians love to bow too in hopes of scoring a taste of that sweet, sweet Israel lobby cash and Rand the libertarian wunderkind decided he was no exception to the rule. He even took the trip with the infamously despicable American Family Association, a gross cabal of fundamentalist, Christian Zionist, homophobes, rightfully designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. While there the senator made a point of very publicly abandoning that sacred libertarian sacrament of property rights by defending Israels right to continue there ruthless ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. All of this tell tale treachery coincided closely with Rand's equally public flip flop on his previously held position in support of cutting funds to Israel while maintaining his support for similar cuts to Muslim countries like Egypt and Pakistan, not to mention his not so private meetings with billionaire, ultra Zionist, war junkie Sheldon Adelson. And shit somehow just got worse from there.

Senator Rand continued to flex his election season war muscles by endorsing the feckless bombing of ISIS and further fueling the fires of sectarian war in Iraq by supporting the arming of the corrupt Kurdish gangsters in the Barzani clan. He also continued to kiss up to the jackals in the Israel lobby by pushing offensively cruel legislation to cut off desperately needed aid to the starving children of Palestine and blasted the Palestinian Authorities attempts to join the International Criminal Court but the once proud Rand wasn't done dancing for his supper yet.

The icing on the fucking cake came when Rand Paul, A man who had once bravely stood alone in the GOP, supporting Obama's attempts at peaceful diplomacy with Iran, made the decision to sign Zionist lap dog senator, Tom Cotton's threatening and racist letter to Tehran, along with 47 other quisling senators, in a cowardly and downright treasonous attempt to chuck a fucking wrench in the finally grinding gears of peace. It then became excruciatingly clear that Rand Paul was not his fathers son. Rand Paul was a politician.

Once again, sadly, I could go on and on like this, about the young senators support for absurdly unlibertarian projects like increasing Americas already morbidly bloated defense budget or his nauseatingly chummy relationship with hate mongering neo-crusader Glenn Beck, laying down support and much needed credibility to the Beckstards ludicrously Islamaphobic conspiracy theories about international caliphates and creeping sharia law but I think you get the point. Far from being the millennial approved reincarnation of his fearless father, sent to save us from the dreaded revival of the Bush oligarchy, the new Senator Paul is sadly just another servant of pitiless, post Goldwater neoconservatism, when push comes to shove. Maybe Rand's still got a little fight left in him. After all he did help sabotage the extension of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, even if it was just a crass publicity stunt to raise campaign dollars but, unfortunately, it's probably far more likely that he will continue to sell out his largely inherited street cred in hopes of becoming the poster boy for post conservative Republican hipsterism, trying desperately to convince "jaded" libertarians that the grand old party aint so old after all, even if it comes at the expense of its grandness, once again I say no fucking thank you.

So what do we make of these inconvenient truths? I, personally, have come to the rather ugly conclusion that both major parties have become so irredeemably corrupted by the influence of the war machine that even there so called malcontents have become stooges of corpratist blood lust. Lets put it this way, you wouldn't look for Robin Hood in the fucking Gambino Family, so don't go looking for mavericks in Washington's two bloodiest crime families. Your best bet is looking to the third parties and if all else fails there's always that old stand by revolution, I mean, shit, it worked for Jefferson and Gandhi. Regardless, I'm registering as an Independent, the first chance I get.

Fuck parties! And you can quote my fat, commie, pinko ass on that.

Zero Dark Bullshit

Well dearest motherfuckers, he's done it again. That splendid, glorious bastard Seymour Hersh, the Pullitzer Prize winning truth jihadist who brought you Abu Graib and the My Lai massacre has ripped the scab off yet another American fairy tale, exposing the putrid viscera of harsh reality to all you sheltered sheeple out there in motherfuckerland. This time the lie exposed, via a scathing article in the London Review of Books, is none other then the long cherished fable of America's victorious slaughter of the evil 911 mastermind, Osama Bin Laden.

In hindsight the "official" story reads like the stuff of Camelot.

After torturing there way down a long trail of mysterious couriers leading from Kabul to Abbottabad, the heroic agents of the Central "Intelligence" Agency tracked down the dastardly Bin Laden, naturally living high off the hog in a plush Pakistani fortress in the burbs of Islamabad and sent in two helicopter loads of hearty, farm raised American heroes, real life G.I. Joe's known as Navy Seal Team 6. After a crash landing, these big dick swinging titans of men shot there way into the Devils palace, killing a few well armed demons in the process. After the customary Hollywood shootout, they found there way to Satan's lair and took Bin Laden down with a double tap to the dome before the still spry super villain could reach his nearby A.K. and then they were off like a hot fart in the wind, freshly killed corpse in toe, leaving the outraged Pakistani's none the wiser. The rest, as they say, is history.

Almost sounds too good to be true, right? Well that's because it is.

After carefully checking with the sources he's cultivated over the decades in both the American and Pakistani intelligence communities, Mr. Hersh managed to expose a far less cinematic narrative. Which is probably as close to the uncensored truth as will ever get.

The true story begins about a year before the raid in Abbottabad, after a senior Pakistani intelligence officer walked into the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, looking for C.I.A. station chief Jonathan Bank, with a story to tell and what a fucking story it was for he knew the whereabouts of the terrorist boogie man himself, Osama Bin Laden and he was willing to squeal for a price. Upon assuring our good rat of his safety and awaiting riches, the veteran Pakistani spook went ahead and painted a vivid and hideous picture with his own spew.

Upon escaping George Dubya's withering, half hearted barrage at Bora Bora, Mr. Bin laden found his way to Pakistan, where he was captured in 2006 by the I.S.I., Islamabad's answer to the C.I.A.. Pakistan quickly came to the decision that Bin Laden was more useful to them strategically then the yank's $25 million finders fee. So they kept the Terrorist mastermind a secret to almost everyone so they could use Bin Laden's head to keep there own Al Qaeda/Taliban problems under control, threatening to give the old bastard up to Uncle Sam any time the shit got too rowdy on the Afghan border or anytime the Talifucks considered making a move against Islamabad.

So they put up Bin Laden up in an old crash pad in the I.S.I. vacation town of Abbottabad within swinging distance of the agencies headquarters, turning a modest mansion into a single inmate prison complete with barred windows, barbed wire and 24/7 surveillance to keep there golden goose under lock and key. The Pakistani's however didn't have to foot the bill alone. The Saudi's, Who always seem to mysteriously find there way into the loop on all things Al Qaeda, caught wind that there wayward son Osama had been nabbed by there old friends in the I.S.I.. So they offered a generous sum of cashish to Islamabad, under the condition that they keep there star prisoner a secret from the american's, who might be less then thrilled to hear from the horses mouth of the house of Saud's involvement in the attacks of September 11th.

The C.I.A. agents in Islamabad relayed this shocking information to the White House and then first term president Barack Obama was understandably skeptical. All further action was halted until the agents could scrounge up some solid proof. They decided on acquiring a DNA sample from Bin Laden but this couldn't be achieved without the help of the Pakistani's. So the agents approached the powers that be in the I.S.I. and once convinced that they were caught dead to rights they reluctantly agreed to aid the C.I.A. in there plot under two conditions. The first being that Pakistan's involvement remain a secret. They couldn't afford giving there already fed up populace another reason to resent there relationship with the great Satan and support the jihadists hell bent on there destruction. The second condition was that under no circumstance was the aging Bin Laden aloud to leave his private prison alive. He simply knew too much. The C.I.A. readily agreed, undoubtedly concerned that the veteran cold warrior might leak a secret or two of there own, lest we forget the pivotal role old Osama played as a middle man supplying man power to the agencies own little Afghan pissing match with the Soviets. Obama had zero complaints about the hit either, considering the political ramifications of capturing the Devil alive and giving him the trial of the fucking century, handing the GOP a political football that would make the KSM trial look like traffic court. With 2012 just around the corner the incumbent president couldn't afford to look like that most loathsome of creatures, the "humanitarian"( add shrieks of disgust here). Running under the banner of the bad ass motherfucker who clipped Bin Laden however would officially silence the accusations of Obama being an ivy league, limp wristed, liberal pussy. So it was decided by our own powers that be that Osama Bin Laden would die but not before the I.S.I. had one of there doctors extract a DNA sample, under the guise of an inoculation. With the president finally convinced and the I.S.I. on board a plan was hatched to snuff out the Devil himself.

It all started with a blackout. The I.S.I. shut off the power in Abbottabad and the Pakistani's cleared a flight path for the Navy Seal's helicopters. Bin Laden's guards were ordered to flee the compound the moment they heard the whir of the chopper's blades. After a rough crash landing, the Seals were guided through the darkened compound by an I.S.I. liaison. There was no resistance, there was no firefight and there would be no heroes. The Seals entered there targets pitch black bedroom, armed with night vision goggles and high powered assault rifles, only to discover a crippled, flea bitten, unarmed old man, defenseless and cowering in a corner. The Seals took aim and, in the words of one of Hersh's American sources, they "obliterated him". By the time the ruthless onslaught of gunfire had finally ended there was little left of Bin Laden but blood and guts. The great boogeyman who's ever present shadow had terrorized a generation of young Americans was reduced to little more then a fuming, bullet riddled rag doll. I'm sure there was probably a chorus of high fives and gun cocking to play him out.

Let me take a moment right here to make my own feelings crystal fucking clear. Osama Bin Laden was a cunt. I'm sorry if that word offends you, quite frankly, it offends me too but I cant think of a better word to describe a man who made a lucrative career off the suffering of innocent people, Christian and Muslim alike. However even a cunt deserves there day in court, especially when they have a fucking story to tell. With that being said, back to the story at hand.

With there target destroyed, the Seals fled the scene of the crime with little more then a couple arm fulls of tattered notebooks containing nothing of real consequence. Don't buy into the latest media hype about newly disclosed paper work from Bin Laden's lair. One glance over these documents is more then enough to convince you that there nothing more then the ramblings of a delusional old has-been at best, if not outright forgeries. Just like the fabled, epic firefight, the so called treasure trove of information confiscated from Abbottabad is simply just another White House sponsored myth. Anyway, bullshit in hand, Team 6 annihilated there crashed aircraft with concussion grenades in one last attempt to destroy any evidence of there presence at that loathsome place and hitched the next ride back to Virginia.

The initial plan agreed upon by the White House and the Pakistani's was that Washington would hold it's tongue for a week or so then announce Bin Laden's death via drone strike deep in the Hindu Kush mountains, a tall tale but a believable one, thus allowing Islamabad to feign outrage over yet another Washington over reach and save face in the embattled Islamic world. Obama however had other plans. With his head fully inflated with the bravado of a burgeoning psychopath, freshly christened in the blood of his virgin kill, our darling pacifist president decided to go rogue with out even giving the intelligence community so much as a heads up. In a matter of hours Obama's A-team hastily slapped together there own tall tale, this one tailor made for prime time popcorn munching. The story of Barack the mighty dragon slayer, wiping out the bad guys in a blaze of glory. With his trusty teleprompter fully loaded with this Schwarzenegger grade horse shit, the president broke the news on live television, strutting on stage arrogantly like a Tarantino gunslinger and mugging it up for the cameras about his bad ass act of state sanctioned slaughter. The C.I.A. and Pentagon were beside themselves with fury over this betrayal, but there hands were tied. There was nothing left for them to do but clean up the mess the president made and try to fudge the evidence to make his self serving lies ring true.

Of course the compliant American media ate this modern day fairy tale whole, hook, line and sinker without even bothering to check the "facts". After all what point is there to painstakingly put together a real story when the State Department can right one for you with all the predictable pyrotechnics of a Hollywood blockbuster. So they gorged themselves shamelessly on a buffet of salacious details and made a fucking mint off of trafficking the shit to an equally compliant American public with an orgy of special exclusives, T.V. movies, best selling books and critically acclaimed torture porn.

So I guess it should come as little surprise that these same amoral jackals with the gall to call themselves the fourth estate reacted the way they did to Seymour Hersh's work of legitimate journalistic integrity. Rather than cop to there shoddy reporting and launching there own investigations into Hersh's expose they instead decided it was easier to simply shoot the messenger. Asshole after braying asshole stepped forward to take a steaming shit on dear old Mr. Hersh's impeccable reputation, painstakingly built over decades of the kind of sweaty, white knuckled work totally alien to these loud mouth prestitutes who's only real work is done on there knees servicing the beltway insiders who give there vacant lives the illusion of purpose with candid interviews and indulgent press galas. By far the most disgusting displays of derelict denialism and outright character assassination occurred on the airwaves of MSNBC, the alleged bastion of progressive journalism. These shameless, Prius driving, Apple liberals practically gave themselves a fucking hernia, doing spine bending back flips to defend there precious, beloved, dear leader from the terrible indignities of the truth. Even after there own fact checkers back at the mothership of NBC gave hersh's piece a clear bill of health, they continued to struggle relentlessly to make the laughably absurd argument that the article was simpatico with the White Houses bullshit. I hate to use this same word twice in one post, let alone four times but, cunts, all of them, cunts.

Is this the same media my parents grew up with? Is this the same press that went to the fucking Supreme Court, defending the right to publish the Pentagon Papers? What fucking happened to these people? When did they decide to trade in there integrity for the privilege of whoring themselves out to big business and bad government? Have they no shame? If this were 1973 the calls for Obama's impeachment would be louder then his bombs. On the flip side if Watergate happened today media parasites like David Gregory would probably be calling for Woodward and Bernstien to be waterboarded and shipped off to Gitmo. When good journalists like Seymour Hersh and Glenn Greenwald are blackballed as conspiracy nuts and morally defunct despots like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton pass for liberal lions, then you really know this countries fucked. Thank Christ for the Internet. Stay tuned dearest motherfuckers. The truth still means something here.

Confessions Of A Fat Male Feminist

I'm fat.... There I fucking said it. In fact, I'll say it again. I, Nicholas Adam Reid, am fat and I'm not talking husky, chubby, pudgy, cherubic, stout, or rubenesque. I'm talking fat with a capital ass. I wont give you my weight and measurements because quite frankly, in spite of the confessional nature of this piece, its none of your goddamn business.

I'm also a feminist. You would think these two things have nothing to do with each other and you would be wrong. You see I'm a feminist because I'm fat. Talk about a mind fuck right? Well let me break it down for you.

I could never in a million years even begin to pretend to know what its truly like to be a woman in this hyper chauvinistic society. To have to check myself in the mirror every time I leave the house after dark, not to see how I look but to ponder if this is the get up that will inspire some inch dicked psychopath to violate me inside and out and I'll never in a million years understand what its like to have the seed of just such a beast growing inside me and having to make the impossible decision whether or not to destroy that demon seed or continue to remain a hostage of my own biology in the name of an unnamed life. No, thank Christ I'll never truly understand that horror....

But I do have some idea of how it feels to be objectified for my body, for something that's not completely within my control. You see I wasn't born fat, in fact as a kid I was a skinny motherfucker, down right scrawny believe it or not, so much so that my parents even worried that I might have rickets because I was so damned emaciated. It wasn't until I started taking antidepressants for O.C.D. and depression that I really began to pack on the pounds, which isn't an unusual side effect of the drug. I found myself faced with a hard decision. Be thin and miserable or be fat and relatively happy. I chose the latter and I think I chose right but that doesn't mean its been fucking easy.

People treat you different when your fat, having spent most of my life crack head skinny this realization was more than a little jarring. Suddenly I was no longer seen as a person but a fat person. My identity was no longer up to me. Other people decided who I was, not based on my character but by the shape of my body. I could no longer eat at a restaurant or shop at a grocery store without being judged by a crowd of strangers who had my whole story all figured out the moment they saw the size of my ass. I couldn't even walk through a fucking locker room or past a construction site without feeling defiled by a cavalcade of jeering snickers and crass half whispered jokes from a posse of muscle bound knuckle draggers, drunk off each others sweaty testosterone. I also couldn't seem to turn on the news without some wispy, new age, weight Nazi blaming me for the downfall of western civilization.

Perhaps worst of all I couldn't seem to make a meaningful connection with a girl without being relegated to the infuriating purgatory of the friend zone. Apparently my flabby body made me permanently un-boyfriendable regardless of my personality. Then again I suppose my karmic taste for skinny girls betrayed me. I know, I know, I'm a fucking hypocrite, especially considering that fat women have it ten times as hard as fat men, but I am who I am. I cant change that and believe me when I tell you I've fucking tried. But is that really so criminal? Should a fat person be any more obligated to date another fat person then a black person is obligated to date within there own race? When did self segregation become a touch stone of political correctness? Anyway, off topic.... Jesus fuck balls! Where in the holy shit was?.... Oh yeah, feminism.

After suffering the humiliating indignities of teenage obesity, my discovery of feminism, through the furious majesty of Riot Grrrl bands like Bikini Kill and Hole, felt like a welcome breath of fresh air in my apnea stressed lungs. I got it. They wanted the same damn thing I wanted. To be seen as a fully actualized human being and not just a set of saggy bitch tits to gawk at. They wanted to be judged based on the quality of there character and not what they chose to put into there bodies. They wanted to be heard and not just seen and They wanted to be taken seriously. In fact they fucking demanded it and they gave me the courage to do the same.

So I'll fucking say it one more time. I, Nicholas Adam Reid, am a fat fucking feminist who also happens to have a dick. Hear me roar! And if any of you chauvinistic trolls out there in motherfuckerland feel like tossing rocks at the girls you call sluts, you best remember those rocks land in my yard too and thanks to bad ass bitches like Kathleen Hanna and Courtney Love I can throw them back like a girl, right in your fucking faces.

Stand strong ladies. As long as my fat ass has you to lean on, you don't stand alone.

Ready for Killary

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.

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.

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.