So, you gotta get sumfin sticky offa your chest? Me, too...So I'll start. I'm crazy and so are you...so get it out of ya and onto here and if any of ya have a bone to pick...pick that fookin' bone here...this is the shite rooom....talk it up...and feel better....I know I friggin' will...and I will feed you back...


CHAPTER I

It Begins


This is it. My own private pity party. A boiling over, like the neglegted pot. My temper rivals that of Poseidon and my resentful thoughts are like the sum of his seas forcing themselves through a hairline crack in the world's crust as a fiery but essential and uncontrollable gushing, an outpouring of all that refuses to be kept inside, shut up, beaten down, and locked away any longer. A revolution and a revelation. Puke it up and move on. Purge the sickness and be well...never forgetting that a bullet fired today may very well kill me tomorrow. So, it's my turn to yell and to scream, to bitch and complain, to piss and to moan. This place is where I will rage against it all. Against the bullet, the sniper, and the gun to expose both the intentional wounds taken as well as the indignities inflicted in supposed "best interest". I will demand apologies that are sorely overdue. This is where I will sadly but gladly rip away the milky film that's grown over my eyes and reveal to myself where I have fallen short of kindness. Confront my demons, admit my wrongs. I will analyze all of my own misdeeds, I will challenge the reasonings that I made to justify those transgressions, and ask forgiveness where there may be little hope of it's being granted. I will rage and I will tire. I will say harsh and uncomfortable things but they are things that must be said. I will tell the truth here...and the truth shall set me free. I can not keep justifying. I can not keep lying to myself. I can not keep making excuses. I have done things that cannot be excused...

Fact. What is. Truth. What is Truth? Not "The Truth"* that I was forced to adhere to while I was being raised in a fucking cult by my beautiful and passionate mother who I remember from childhood as compassionate, outwardly loving, insanely creative and inspired, as well as very intelligent despite her lack of education. Unfortunately, because of her horrible childhood and her own parents' terrible example, was an emotionally crippled soul who was easily and tragically misled by others of similar background who had been priorly very easily and tragically misled...and since that misleeding she has been for the majority of my life not only all of those wonderful things but also very hateful and hurtfully judgemental. Maybe she always was but that's not how I remember it. Truth. Ugh. Not that kind of truth. I am speaking the real honest-to-yourself kind of truth. I have to dig down deep to remember what that word means but I will find it and I will speak it and it will burn like that first beer in the morning...So, what's keeping me?


This is me true love cuz itsa true story....

The Frog

Once, when I was iddy biddy I had the best friend and greatest night-light in the world. He was a huge ceramic green frog with clear glass spikes on his back that were lit up by the light bulb in his belly when you plugged him in. I loved my frog. As I remember it, my grandmother found my frog at a yard sale and got him just for me. My beautiful and gigantic frog night-light. My night watchman. I plugged my frog in every night before I went to bed because ever since I'd stayed up to sneak behind the couch like a mini-Marine while my Mom and step-dad watched "Cat People",I couldn't fall asleep without him by my side. I also lived in fear of the gremlins under my bed unless my dear frog was watching over me all alight. I remember fondly the warm glow that my dear frog radiated and the security he provided me while I slept. I guess it's true that I've always been a neurotic spaz with more imagination than brains and it comforted me to have him there holding the inky and dangerous dark of my bedroom at bay. Those were good times and I truly loved my frog. And my sleep. Then one night I left my frog plugged in like always. I may have been five or six-ish and my frog's lightbulb belly melted a big scary hole into and beyond the poopy, brown-colored carpet, right through the multi-colored carpet pad, and down to the ugly brown-and-cream wood-tile-print vinyl underneath on which it also left a big old burn mark. No loss in my book but it was the Eighties. That's how I remember it...and I suspect that it was due almost entirely to my mother's husband at the time...who I remember as not much more than a mean-faced man habitually dressed in blue jeans and plaid shirts with a deep voice and a penchant for nightly incoherent drunk tirades about petty bullshit like my kindergarten alphabet song "I'm Mr. M...with a munchy mouth..." that I sang only once at the dinner table and was lectured for hours after about not talking shit about people...now I understand, Buddy...I do. Nevertheless, it was he tat I blamed completely when it was decreed on that very morning that I was now too old to need a night light and that I would be giving my dear green frog to the neighbor kid, Denise, who was a year my junior. Denise was a dirty kid. You know what I mean. Well, I hated Denise and I loved my frog. Nevertheless, a decision had been made about something that I loved and that I also considered to be mine all mine. A decision that I had no say in...no control over. This didn't sit very well with me at that time, much as injustice and unfair treatment of any human being sits with me now. I felt hurt. I felt outraged. I felt calm. My mother told me to bring my frog to her so that we could take it to Denise and so I obediently retrieved my frog from my bedroom at the end of the house and contemplated my predicament down the twenty feet of hallway between myself and the dining room where my mother was waiting for my frog and I. I thought of many things on that walk but what sticks in my mind to this day is the fact that once I handed my beloved frog over to dirty Denise, he would cease to be my frog. I would no longer fall asleep almost effortlessly basking in his light. I would no longer have anyone to watch over me. I would be losing something very dear to me and almost essential for my survival. It was then that I arrived at the dining room. The wood floors had been polished to a shine by Denise's mother, Karen, who cleaned our house and my mother's face reflected the wooden sheen. I lifted my beloved frog in offerance to her and before she could take it from my tiny hands to hers, I had let go of my beloved frog to watch him fall to the wooden floor and smash into a million pieces. Clear glass and green-laquered clay scattered everywhere noisily but I did not flinch a muscle. I had made my choice and had decided that it was better to lose my dear frog to no one, when and where I was ready to lose him, rather than lose him with absolutely no control. Upon reflection, it's one of the most selfish things I remember ever doing. Denise was not a dirty kid. She was a poor kid who had a bad home life. I was a not-as-poor kid that had a bad home life. All I do know is that I really wish that I could find another green frog these days but unfortunately, I narrowed my own chances of ever finding one because I single-handedly destroyed the only one that I have ever seen. I miss my green frog...and I bear the blame. I think of the little girl that hated to lose her green frog because she loved him but understood that she had outgrown the need of him so, she let her mother put him in a garage sale so that maybe someone else could love him someday, too...I wish I was more like her.











* Feel free to use finger quotations as you read this aloud...I love those. Oh, and "The
Truth" is what Jehovah's Witnesses call the beliefs of The Watchtower Bible and Tract
Society...the beliefs that they live by as members of their RELIGION and the way that
they believe that every single person on the entire planet Earth should and will someday
live their life.