OF PHOTOGRAPHS AND OTHER DEAD HISTORIES: How Memories Build Up Oceans Around Man's Worldless Islands

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

- H.P. Lovecraft,
"The Call of Cthulhu"
[Full text avail. here]

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- It fell out of a book, a paperback volume of the works of John Donne, the 17th century metaphysical poet.

The photograph, of this bloated, unkempt, drug-distorted 19-year-old, had probably been used as an impromptu bookmark years ago. I can't remember the last time I sat down and read Donne's "Meditation XVII," can't remember the last time I read the words No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main... or what inspired me to use such a foul image as a placeholder.

There is nothing quite like cleaning one's apartment and finding, buried within the bindings of a Cavalier religious writer, the graven image of oneself as a young addict. I sat on the corner of my bed and held the photograph in both hands, not as one cradles a child but as one would hold the putrid remnants of an aborted, rotten fetus.

1998* was such a rotten year, for both wine and life.

Memories, yes, memories can indeed flow like tears. It's why I've systematically destroyed most records of that infernal year, broken most of the ties that bind me to that time. Some things are best cast to the wind like dead leaves, left to fall where they may...

How I stared into the snide, fat face of the kid I used to be! That demonic child, framed in his own Victory-sign forming fists, did peyote with sorority girls on dares, bought intoxicating widgets off Aryan Brotherhood members and Mexican gangsters and sold, at profit, unspeakable products. That vile thing once got off on taking the virginity of Good Catholic illegal immigrant daughters without so much as a care about legality, or, well, whether or not Big Brothers Cholo would mark him for death.

That... person ... a marginal human being, with very little real conscience ... earned every bad thing that happened to him back then. The kid I was lived off of three things - pleasure, power, and the manipulation of everything in between.

And memories, yes, memories can swell in the brain like rivers when visual stimuli break the dams of time. Even good memories, funny stories, from 1998 somehow seem to be nothing more than tragic comedy...

* * * *

GREELEY, Colo. (ZP) -- Crackhead Jim wanted more tinfoil. He didn't knock. Just walked right in.

Basketcase junkies rarely knock, once you show them even the slightest courtesy, once they've been invited into a place. Like Hollywood vampires, crackheads generally wait for that first invitation into a dwelling, that first sign of human weakness, only to choose their comings and goings afterwards as if personal boundaries don't exist.

Crackhead Jim needed tinfoil to help him hide from his probation officer and the all-knowing, all-invasive Grov'ment Agents. They were always watching him, using their spy satellites to track him. Jim said that he'd stabbed a guy in a grocery store parking lot, some gangland Vato who'd called him a dirty nigger, a few days prior – he'd avoided them then, but, well, he'd used up all of his tinfoil wrapping his body in radar-jamming armor.

“Jada” was in the shower, the tiny studio's bathroom door wide open, her wet ebony nakedness barely a feminine contrast against the whitewashed walls. I was contently reading old Justice League comics on the toilet, shitting away three or four forty-once bottles of Olde English 800 and probably a good two or three grams of pristine Mexican blow.

I hollered back at Jim, told him that we were out of foil. He asked if he could take some wire coat hangers, our bags of garbage. He'd dig through them, sell back the recyclables, and have enough money for more tinfoil of his own – and enough money to score one or two tiny viles of rock to get him through the day.

Jim lived in 4B, two apartments down from the pre-op transsexual from Denver, across the hall from the skanky waitress from Omaha, Nebraska, the one who constantly inquired as to whether or not Jada and I were interested in a threesome. She'd already pulled a train with the two frat boys across from me...

And Jim, well, never robbed us. We were the only ones he never seemed to steal from. Jada and I, being junkies ourselves, were nice to him. Because of that common bond, and the steady supply of tinfoil and old aluminum cans and malt liquor bottles, we were probably the only tenants who actually got along in that run-down former sorority house.

From the toilet I carefully watched the junkie through the open door. Jada's tips from dancing were in her purse, right on the tiny table we used for meals. I watched and reached for the heaviest thing I could find – a shaving mug. I'd hate to think I'd have been forced to kill ol' Jim but, well, cold cash is worth more than a warm corpse to a junkie.

Jada'd picked up two private parties in a VIP room that weekend, Mormon businessmen who'd paid for all-nude lap dances, tipped well, and only tried to fingerbang her twice. Being good LDS boys, she'd racked up close to two grand – shamed at violating their faith by staring at a naked black woman, they'd dared not waste their sinning money on equally forbidden booze or soft drinks.

Jim, thankfully, ignored Jada's purse and her housegirl earnings. He was too immersed in gathering up all of the empty booze bottles we'd left lying around on the floor the previous night. He cleaned every scrap of trash up off that studio apartment's floor. He moved fast and furious and, without so much as a thank you, he waved and headed back to his apartment, back to feed his pet rat and to continue trying to remember way back, way back to when he was that young rhythm guitarist out of Washington, D.C.

Jada heard the door shut as Jim left. With one quick jerk, the kind of awkward motion that coke addicts make when they're still high, she pulled the shower curtain open, popping one corner of the plastic loose. Tiny black pearls rolled off her breasts, down onto her still soapy belly and crotch, down towards the fiberglass below her, down into a cold Colorado drainpipe. She yelled something incoherent, some fake hootchie squeal, feigned disgust at how one day Jim would OD and we'd be the first to smell his rotting corpse.

I put down my comic book, wiped my ass, flushed, and hopped into the shower with her. I reached for the tiny plastic bag on the back of the toilet. Jada squealed again, begged me not to drop the precious powdered elixir, to not let half of her Mormon tips wash down the drain.

In one night, we'd already moved into our stash of sacred, emergencies-only Angel Dust. I put a pinch on the tip of my tongue, pulled her into me, and let her tongue work loose the dust's sacred, hypnotic magic. I almost dropped the baggie, almost let that most precious earning wash away as that rush of invulnerability hit...

Crackhead Jim, at least, was smart enough to not fall in love with another junkie. He had his tinfoil and conspiracy theories and memories of those performances with Sam Cooke and Sammy Davis, with Sinatra and Aretha and Marvin...

That crackhead, at least, played music with legends. I only ended up getting played - and then stabbed - by my cokehead stripper fiancée.

And, as strange as it may sound, that's one of the most normal stories I can tell from that period in my life. For some reason, that one moment is burned into my mind like a brand, every detail as vivid as a Polaroid snapshot.

It only took looking at that old photograph of myself to resurrect that moment like Lazarus from the crypt. Needless to say, it wasn't all that pleasurable of a resurrection...

1998 was a rotten year, for both wine and life.

* * * *

BACK IN OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I crumpled up the photograph, tossed it like a baseball towards the trash bag by the bedroom door. The past is, well, the past; there's no sense in dwelling on that which one cannot change.

I was in the middle of cleaning my apartment, in the middle of throwing out all sorts of things and dusting and vacuuming and making the bed - life waits for no photograph, no dream or nightmare from the past, cares not for tragic comedy or pointless wallowing.

No man is an island - of course, Mr. Donne. If we were, we'd all sink like Atlantis under the weight of our own memories.

I clicked on the sweeper and watched as the past's dust disappeared from the carpet.

- # # # -

* - Heh. Even in flashbacks, I can get the year wrong. The first draft of this post listed 1997. My ten-year clean date, by the way, is Aug. 1.

STEEL OF THE SOUTH: More Scary Virginia Stories to Blog in the Dark...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Recently, while stuck on bed rest, I had the opportunity to get some pleasure reading done. At one point, I unearthed my old high school yearbooks.

Flipping through the vulgar comments and past pictures of people I've long forgotten actually brought back some interesting memories.

I found a photograph stuck between a few pages, a photograph of this frightening brute of a kid. He had a sneer on his face that could kill weaker men, eyes full of all sorts of illicit substances, hair parted straight down the middle, bandages covering gashes over his eye and across his nose.

Man, I'd almost forgotten what a hoodlum I was when I was 17. Scared the shit out of me.

And some people wonder why I consider myself fortunate to have survived high school. But I think I turned out just fine. Wouldn't change a thing.

- Jason

* * * *

The machete was brand new, fresh from the Rose's five-and-dime, plastic shrink wrap dangling from the handle.

I heard one of the school's vice-principals shout into his two-way radio as he chased after “Muhammad,” ordering the school's receptionist tell the sheriff's deputies that the “suspect” was armed and dangerous.

Muhammad was normally a peaceful kid, a Black Muslim whose parents had sent him down to Farmville to live with his grandmother. Muhammad had spent his early childhood being instructed in the ways of the Five Percent Nation.

Though a man of peace, who had many friends of many races, he readily admitted to distrusting white people, to being convinced that the FBI had killed Brother Malcolm and Dr. King, to believing that the federal government was pushing crack in housing projects across America.

Muhammad had been suspended from school for fighting with a white kid earlier that day. The white kid had received a lighter sentence. So Muhammad was sent home, and the white kid was sent to In-School Suspension.

Muhammad had obviously gone shopping for some very mean-looking hardware, purchasing a tool to extract his pound of cracker flesh for what he apparently viewed as a racist conspiracy. As he ran past me, after the white kid who'd passed me only a few seconds earlier, I noticed his eyes were aflame with that lust, that murderous thousand-yard stare of a man consumed by his own hatred.

I learned a long time ago that one does not step in the way of a man wielding a machete, even a normally peaceful man. Machetes do not leave pretty wounds and often sever limbs.

Mr. S., a chisel-faced man in his late fifties, was the senior disciplinary administrator of the school district. He'd survived the 'Nam; he once claimed that maintaining discipline in a rural Virginia high school was nothing compared to dealing with Charlie. But despite his reputation as a harsh man, he was also known to be fair and once, according to legend, had even laughed.

Mr. S. plowed through the throngs of 13-18 year-old kids who clogged the sidewalk as they waited for their afternoon buses. He pushed students to the ground as he ran, hollering ahead for students to get out of his way or risk being run down. Some moved out of the vice-principal's path; most did not.

“Muhammad” apparently did catch up with the white kid, who'd run to the school office for shelter. The principal convinced the Five Percenter, the normally peaceful kid with many friends of many races, to put down his weapon before he ended up doing something he'd later regret.

By the time the county mounties arrived, the incident had been resolved. And "Muhammad" went to jail, never to return as a student.

Later that week, the school yearbooks were distributed to those who'd paid for them. I remember wishing that Muhammad had waited to go crazy, wishing that he'd waited until after the school year ended, so I could've gotten him to sign my freshman yearbook.

After all, he was a peaceful man, most of the time, with many friends of many different races.

* * * *

I don't know what inspired me that night.

Maybe I'd seen too many gang-related films - movies about South Central Los Angeles, Miami drug lords and New York crime kingpins were all the rage in the mid-1990s. Or maybe it was the gangsta rap or the aggressive punk music, the stuff I started to listen to the moment I hit puberty.

For whatever reason, I was inspired, after helping a "Max" jump a guy behind the Food Lion, to piss in a kid's face as he lay on the ground.

We used to call this sort of juvenile code enforcement schoolin' a motherfucker. And, as my friend put it so eloquently that night, if this motherfucker wants to steal shit, he needs to be taken to motherfuckin' school.

Nobody else wanted to help this friend of mine out. None of our mutual friends, who all talked a good game, stepped up to get his back. They were all conveniently busy, had baseball practice or dates. So “Max” and I sat alone in his beat-up yellow tank of a car for two hours, drinking forty after forty of Colt 45 and waiting for this stupid kid to leave a shopping center cineplex.

The poor bastard didn't even see it coming. Walked right out towards his car as if he owned the world.

“Max” did most of the work. It was his stolen property, his lost income. The only thing I did was hit the kid from the back while Max informed him of the charges against him, of why this milder sentence of the Court of Street Justice was better than the alternative.

As the kid lay on the ground, squirming and begging, the 160 ounces of malt liquor filling my bladder suddenly demanded a prompt exit.

It was nothing personal, really. I just had to take a leak.

As Max reminded me afterwards, when I felt guilty about it, that kid probably would've done the same to me if he'd had the chance. And if it'd been other guys jumping him, less civil individuals from Church Hill or Hampton Roads or D.C., then he probably would've endured much, much worse.

An eye for an eye, a piss for a piss.

* * * *

That motherfucker had a .22...

When he first pulled it from the front of his boxers and started waving it around, screaming about how “hard” he was, most people just laughed. And when he fired into the air, bobbing his head up and down, one hand holding up those baggy jeans and the other holding a weapon, people just stood there and stared.

Here is this 16-year-old, skinny-ass white dude, who everybody knew was crazy, save for the court-appointed dumbass who'd let him off probation early. Here's this Crazy-Ass Peckerwood, waving a gun around in a parking lot at two in the morning.

And the only thing anyone could do was laugh, then stare in amazement.

If this kid's parents hadn't been wealthy socialites, I'm fairly certain he wouldn't have been set loose by the correctional system. If he'd been poor, or a minority, or poor and a minority, he would've been rotting in a juvenile prison somewhere.

But because he came from a good family, one where the poor little thing's psychosis was easily blamed on a desire to fit in and his parents' divorce, he was set free to go all apeshit in the middle of the night without so much as an ankle bracelet.

When Mr. Crazy-Ass Peckerwood started beating that tiny handgun upon his tiny chest, screaming about how he was going to bus' a cap on someone if he did'n get respec', people finally began to back away from the scene.

The cops, surely, had been called, and nobody wanted to be around an armed nutcase when the cops showed up. As I ducked down to climb into the driver's seat of the Maroon Doom, my prize Dodge Shadow, the idiot started firing again. But this time, he wasn't firing into the air.

I remember being shoved from behind, with a friendly hand on the back of my neck. My chin caught the shifter and my shin caught the door frame as my body fell into the car. My first reaction was to start laughing. Earlier that night I'd watched a documentary on the Reagan assassination attempt - the idea that my friends would choose to play Secret Service agents to a would-be Hillbilly Hinckley was too absurd not to laugh.

I rolled over and sat up in the driver's seat, still laughing. A hand reached up from the backseat and smacked me upside my skull, with voices screaming for me to drive, motherfucker, drive.

As I started the engine and shifted down into second gear, I looked over at the crazy motherfucker. He was pointing that little pop-gun .22 towards the Maroon Doom, firing away. From the back seat, people were arguing about someone needing to see a doctor, about me needing to drive to the emergency room.

As I drove, the person who'd been grazed climbed into the passenger seat next to me, showed me what looked like a long cigarette burn, and said that, no, he didn't need to go to a doctor – our other friends were just being pussies.

He'd been shot before, so I took his word for it. He smiled and pointed out that getting grazed was a much better alternative than having me get shot in the face.

I laughed at first. And then it hit me like a cinderblock to the chin.

I spent the next few days barely sober and rarely narcotic-free, afraid to face the nature of my own mortality, the fact that, yes, a .22 pistol is a small gun that can still, if someone's shooting at you, end your life if its rounds hit you just right.

... And he just tried to fucking kill me.

- # # # -

SO WHAT DOES POVERTY TASTE LIKE? A Sandwich, A Flashback, and Reflections on a Sadistic America

I've got a strong mind that doesn't have to be spoon-fed,
And I can read what doesn't have to be read...

-Revealed by the Prophet MC Serch, 3rd Bass,
From the epic poem, "Pop Goes the Weasel" [VIDEO],
Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-One, Anno Domini

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I stared down at my dinner plate, the startling revelation stripping me of my appetite as quickly as dysentery.

Before me lay a wonderful feast of a meal. The flatbread was moist and green with baked-in herbal goodness, the turkey covered in hummus and horseradish, the cheese sliced and fresh from the pre-sliced package.

I froze as I reached inside the bag of whitish, vitamin-filled seedlings, a strange sensation staying my hand from withdrawing the plant life.

* * * *

I flashed back to when I was a boy, back in rural Virginia, sitting on the porch of a childhood friend's family home, a four-room clapboard shack of a place, home to two parents, a grandmother, and five children.

You know, back in the ancient times, the Dark Ages. 1986, to be exact. Back when the cool kids wore red pleather jackets covered in zippers, while the rest of us waited for grunge to make our thrift-store flannel shirts cool again.

My friend and I sat on the porch, gnawing on leftover fried chicken and dry buttermilk biscuits smothered in melted WIC cheese. We split a warm can of Dr. Chek cola.

My friend's dad worked on a tobacco and soybean farm. Their entire family lived off maybe $500 a month. Without thinking twice about it, my friend's mother fed one more child than she could really afford to feed.

And it was one of the best meals I've ever had, sitting on that porch in Prince Edward County, Virginia, soaked in sweat from riding my bike all morning, savoring every bite taken as crickets chirped under the house, as the blacksnakes baked on the gravel county road.

I've dined in some of the finest restaurants in America. Emeril Lagasse's NOLA? I recommend the hickory-roasted duck. If you're ever in the Twin Cities, give the Loring Pasta Bar a try. Masa's is a must for any visit to San Francisco - great vegetarian menu. And the Tobacco Company's Escargot Rockefeller Stuffed Mushrooms remains the best example of Nouveau Southern cuisine to ever cross my lips.

But very few meals will ever top that one back in rural Virginia, the one given freely by a family that could barely afford to keep their electricity turned on or their rusted-out Olds Cutlass running.

* * * *

I slowly, cautiously, pulled a handful of sprouts from the package, careful not to waste even one sprig of the crisp, fresh greens.

Where I grew up, in red-clay poor Virginia, most people will never be able to afford such luxuries. Hell, there are folks who'll never see one lick of health insurance, will never have the opportunity to even complain about a dental plan. Think they're worried about additive-free food?

Right now, there are 14-year-old single moms who are the children of single moms that I went to school with, trying to split six bucks between diapers and food, trying to figure out the bullshit government assistance paperwork while (hopefully) trying to finish high school, too.

And I just whipped up a sandwich with a street value of more than eight bucks, one meal for one person.

Stupid fucking Conscience. Some nights, when I'm alone, it speaks the loudest.

* * * *

Back in the early 1980s, back before my mother went back to work after my sister was born, (my dad's factory job paid a whopping $800 per month, before taxes, which paid our portion of the farm expenses and kept food on the table), our family dinners consisted of cuisine that would send your average health nut running for the nearest treadmill.

Fatty, cheap pork chops, canned store-brand peas, and Top Ramen. Chopped Red Dye No. 4 colored wieners, stewed in pots full of generic, white-package Mac and Cheese.

My aunt made the world's best grilled WIC cheese and onion sandwiches, served with a dab of mustard and handfuls of deep-fried, trans-fat filled goodness from 99-cent family-size bags of cheese doodles. I had a distant relative who can make even the greasiest squirrel or gamiest opossum taste better than even the most expensive cuts of meat. The secret, of course, was in the sauce - Thrifty Made ketchup, a splash of vinegar, and about three pounds of salted lard and butter.

You know, it's a funny thing, poverty in America.

The United States is, in many ways, a sadistic society, a nation so twisted that its poorest citizens are made fat, and eventually killed, by a cornucopia of cheap foodstuff with barely enough nutritional value to be called food, while its wealthiest citizens are the only ones able to afford things like fresh produce, minimally-processed meats, and chemical-free cuisine.

Only in America do the poor get fat because they can't afford to eat like the rich. Only in America do the rich do terrible things to themselves to look famished, while the poorest folks are encouraged, through slick marketing and product placement, to Super-Size and Go-Large everything.

In other nations, poverty is marked by starvation or malnutrition. In the U.S.? poverty is measured, health-wise, in terms of morbid obesity and heart attacks.

* * * *

It wasn't the random flashback alone that disrupted my otherwise peaceful supper.

It was something that happened here in Oxford recently, while shopping at the local grocery store, that turned a simple meal and reflection into a painful, almost nauseating experience.

A group of young, affluent women - local undergraduates - had been shopping in the organic aisle next to me, buying some of the same foodstuff I was purchasing.

A very large woman (easily more than 500 pounds) was trying to make her way down the same aisle with a shopping cart full of all sorts of clearance and discounted items, mostly potato chips, soft drinks, fatty cuts of beef, and economy jars of mayonnaise and store-brand peanut butter. The woman had five young children with her, all overweight.

The clothes the family wore were old and stained, clearly hand-me-downs or yard sale finds. One of the kids, a cherubic blond boy, sported an Tupac Shakur tee-shirt from the mid-1990s, an adult shirt that stretched tight across his large preteen frame.

The woman seemed very self-conscious about her weight, as she was wider than her shopping cart, apologizing numerous times for having to pass through the usually not-so-tight aisle.

* * * *

After the woman passed, I returned to my shopping. The young, affluent, dangerously thin college students, however, were whispering and laughing to themselves.

"Can you believe somebody fucked that thing? Oh my God, if I looked like that, I'd shoot myself."

"Did you see that little boy? Like, talk about trailer trash."

"See Becky, I told you they had wiggers here. Fat ones."

It was the wigger comment that drove me to, well, force my way into their conversation. I'd had enough, really.

"Don't ya'll skinny-ass bitches have somewhere else to be? Seriously, you ain't all that, especially you with the buck teeth. You shouldn't talk. I didn't know Mr. Ed had a kid.

"And you? Who are you? I've seen better tits on goats. And what is that on your lip? You might want to wax that shit. You look like Hitler in drag..."

I lit 'em up. We're talking Old School snappin'. Haven't laid the verbal smackdown like that in years. Rusty, but I think each scathing remark was dead-on in terms of hitting its target.

Don't ever, EVER make fun of poor people around me. I was a big kid myself, too, and, well, being one of the very few white kids to graduate from a successfully integrated, ethnically diverse Brown v. Board public high school, I don't take kindly to the use of the word wigger.

The women just stood there, jaws maybe three inches from the floor. I thought one of the women was going to cry. I didn't care.

You see, people who view themselves as somehow perfect don't deal too well with the idea of imperfection. As long as there's an us and a them, there's aways a latent fear, some insult that tears deep into the psyche.

Why is it the self-described pretty people just can't take their own imperfections being exposed, but seem so quick to point out the imperfections of others? Do they not know it works both ways, that there's no such thing as perfect or universal prettiness?

* * * *

I managed to choke down my overpriced, homemade sandwich. Memories of my childhood and of recent experiences may have stripped my appetite, but my Conscience wouldn't let me walk away from it.

If you make a sandwich, even an eight-dollar sandwich, you'd better be willing to eat it, especially if you know what poverty really tastes like in Rural America.

Cause' I keep lookin' and huntin' just like a lion,
Let the suckas know that it's them that'll be dyin',
I show no remorse to the source of the tales,
And if they yell, then the hungry better battle...

- Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E., in the Temple of the Faith No More,
"Just Another Victim," [VIDEO],
From the Judgment Night talking picture soundtrack,
Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-Three, Anno Domini

# # #

DOGS PLAYING CARDS ON A SICK DAY: Conversations with Ghosts of Myself

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I did something very stupid Tuesday.

I took a prescription medication on an empty stomach, didn't read those pesky do not drink alcoholic beverages instructions, and ended up puking my guts out for seven hours straight.

As punishment for my very, very stupid mistake, I was sentenced to two days sick leave, in order to recover from dehydration, extremely low blood sugar, and overall ickiness. I'd already been recovering from an upper respiratory infection, so the added stress on my system pretty much guaranteed that I'd be forced to take time off for - gasp - health issues.

I don't do sick days very well. I'm a lousy patient. I'd rather just work through it, keep chugging away until something breaks beyond repair. I'll rest when I'm off the clock or when I'm dead.

* * * *

By the time I could finally hold down anything solid, I was too jittery to sit through any DVD, too annoyed to listen to music.

I wrote long-winded emails, responses to comments on the ol' blog, and caught up on just about every open access journal in my research area.

Well, that killed a whopping five hours of my life.

Boredom is my enemy. And nothing screams boredom like five hours' worth of LIS literature.

* * * *

I crawled out of bed Thursday at around 10 (I normally get up between five and six), had one Lean Pocket and a cup of coffee for brunch, took a shower.

I started to get dressed. Couldn't do it. I crawled back into bed, defeated. I felt like the main character in Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, a helpless cripple damned to an eternity of dreary solitude, waiting - begging - for sweet death.

As I stared at the ceiling, my bedroom too bright to sleep, I decided to do what I used to do as a kid when I'd get sick, those lonely days when I'd be left bedridden back on the family farm, 20 miles from civilization and with only three snowy network television stations to keep me company.

I'll play a game.

Hmmm... what sort of game?

For shit's sake, dude! Got it. Let's play Interview!

Interview was one of my favorite sick day games as a child. Actually, Interview was more of an an exercise in imagination than a game.

I'd pretend to be a reporter, a regular Walter Cronkite, interviewing an older, famous version of myself. The television studio was completely within my mind, laid out like those old network news desks, clocks from a hundred time zones covering the walls. I could see clearly the cameras, the Teleprompter, the shining lights.

When I had chickenpox, I'd interviewed Jason, the famous scientist who'd cured cancer. Once, when I was in middle school, I'd interviewed retired Rear Admiral Jason, the hero of the Cold War who'd single-handedly destroyed the Soviet Empire.

In junior high, I even interviewed Jason, winner of three Academy Awards... and husband of Cindy Crawford (we had 12 children, I believe.)

I laughed out loud with what was left of my stomach-acid stripped vocal chords.

Dude, this is gonna be fun.

But I think we'd better mix this shit up a bit...

* * * *

Instead of interviewing my mythological older self, I decided, for shits and giggles, to interview my younger self.

Honestly, the idea of interviewing the 48, 54, or 68 year-old versions of me didn't seem appealing.

I mean, for chrissakes...

Did I really want to think about the divorce back in 2014, the sex scandals of 2043, or that dead hooker in that Vegas hotel room in 2051?

Or what about the possibility of that love child, the one living down in Mexico in 2032, the one I never knew I had, from that very real one night with that daughter of migrant laborers, back in in a very real 1997?

Dude, you'll have nightmares for a week if you interview Future Jason.

You're too damned pessimistic and paranoid to have an imaginary bright future...

* * * *

So, as I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, I let my mind wander into that dusty, long-forgotten newsroom one more time. I put on the ol' anchor's blazer, tested the microphone, cleared my mental throat.

I thought I'd share summaries of my first round of Interview in more than 15 years:

* * * *

The Motherfucker was 17, a passionate kid with a huge chip on his shoulder. The Motherfucker liked to fight, smoked way too much weed, played in a punk band, and had a taste for MD 20/20.

"Man, I remember once, at this party, I was so fucked up I couldn't see. We was all outside, all jus' chillin' around this bonfire. Me an' ______ snuck off with this one chick, 'cause she had this dusted bud she'd picked up in Charlottesville. She got so fucked up, she like pissed on herself an' shit. Fucking hippy rich chicks, man. She offered blowjobs if we'd give her a ride home, but I was all, like, shit, white girls from private schools carry all kinds of diseases."

The Motherfucker was known to most adults as a bookish, level-headed kid. He excelled in scholarly activities, as a member of the track team, in academic competitions. But he had a dark side, a lust to be accepted, to be the badass, the instrument of God's Wrath. He hung out with some good kids, but mostly ones destined for lives of trouble.

According to legend, the Motherfucker once broke a guy's knuckles with a ball-peen hammer, gangster-style, because the poor college first-year couldn't pay his illicit pharmaceutical bill. He once took a baseball bat to some poor kid's stomach at a house party, retaliation for the merciless beating a friend of his had received on a school bus.

"That cocksucking redneck had it coming. If we hadn't fucked his shit up, he jus' would've called some brother a coon or somethin' and ended up gettin' capped. I prob'ly saved his sorry ass. Eye for a mothafuckin' eye, homes. You wanna trip some shit, I'll trip shit like a fuckin' electric chair."

The first girl the Motherfucker ever French-kissed ended up killing herself - after doing time in a women's prison for her role in her parents' murder. His childhood best friend was relocated to an undisclosed location as part of a plea agreement, in exchange for testifying against a narcotics kingpin. He knows that several of his friends from those years are now probably dead or in correctional facilities for the rest of their natural lives.

Through some act of God, however, the Motherfucker made it out of his hometown, outgrew his rage, cleaned up his act. He'd been saved only by the unconditional love his family had provided him and by the faith his teachers had in his intellectual gifts.

* * * *

Dog Juan loved playing savior to just about every troubled young woman who showed him even the slightest attention.

In high school, he'd been a late-bloomer, losing his virginity at 17 accidentally to a woman whose exact identity he'd been too drunk to recall. By the time he'd reached 20, he'd overcome enough of his awkwardness around women to be at least somewhat romantically inclined.

Unfortunately for Dog Juan, he learned too late that there were some women he just shouldn't be involved with romantically. As an undergrad, he mastered the art of the one-night stand while simultaneously mastering the art of dating women who were completely nucking futs.

"Once, I was like seeing this girl, T_____. I'd met her through one of my roommates. T____ had her problems, sure...I mean, she'd survived being a prostitute in Colorado Springs, had managed to get into college. So what if she was still stripping to pay the bills? And its not like I'd never done coke before.

"C'mon. The sex was fucking awesome. Wild shit. And she was older than me, old enough to buy beer.

"Fuck, we drank a lot. Actually, she drank a lot. And the fucking suicide threats. Yeah, those sucked.

"But dude! Wait. The fucking sex, dude. One time, I went down on her in an Italian restaurant. We did it at three o'clock in the morning, butt-ass naked on the hood of my truck, smack dab in the middle of an intersection. We're talking three to five times a day, seven days a week. Nothing wrong with that.

"I mean, I've faked it a couple of times, when she gets pushy - the fucking coke messes my shit up sometimes, but she gets it free and won't do it alone, so what am I s'posed to do?

"I mean, yeah, she gets violent an' shit. Lots of women do. And so what if my female friends hate her - they're just fucking jealous because I'm fucking happy.

"C'mon...you never had a chick pull a knife on you before, homes?"

By his 21st birthday, Dog Juan had accomplished two things that few men can claim:

He'd won his first award as a sportswriter, and he'd managed to become a certified victim of domestic violence, complete with restraining order against his one-time fiance.

Researchers have long sought interviews with Dog Juan. The mystery of how such an intelligent young man with such charm and passion could be so goddamned dense sometimes has puzzled numerous people for more than a decade.

* * * *

Talk Radio Guy knew he was in trouble the first day he'd gone into work after the Corporate Radio Juggernaut had finally cleared their FCC hurdles and had taken control of day-to-day operations of his station.

He knew he was a fairly popular sports anchor in his market, but he also knew, somewhere deep inside, that the Corporate Radio Juggernaut had no use for silly little things like women's sports coverage, Major League Baseball broadcasting rights, and colorful sports commentary.

The future, he'd been told, was in nationally syndicated talk radio - conservative talk radio. What use did the Juggernaut have, anyway, for unbiased coverage when its advertising gurus had research to show that America had no use for such things.

Talk Radio Guy knew, somewhere deep down, that some idiot would one day get the idea for liberal talk radio, the same nationally syndicated bullshit, only spun a different way, to sell more worthless airtime to gullible sponsors.

He felt sorry for his listeners. He knew they were smarter than the Juggernaut's advertising gurus.

He sat in his new Program Director's office and listened to the new management's pitch for his talent, a lecture about the fame that would come with moving to FM, to an afternoon drive slot on an Urban Contemporary station that had been faltering for years in the ratings.

"We all called this pile of goatshit P.D. Mr. Backstreet Boy. Homeboy was pushing 40, single, living off tanning salons and expensive hair gel. He used words like "bro" and "hella" in a vain attempt to stay hip.

"From the first day I met the motherfucker, I knew by all of his flattering comments that, for all of his talk about me being a valuable member of the C________ Family, I was nothing more than a local personality that they were slowly trying to push out of the business. He talked about how valuable I' was, but there was no talk of a pay raise.

"I knew my days were numbered the moment I told Mr. Backstreet Boy that I had no interest in spinning bad hip-hop for imaginary listeners, waiting for Big Fucking Brother to finally install the new receivers for the syndicated shit out of New York."

As Talk Radio Guy sat in Mr. Backstreet Boy's office, he looked over at a picture on the new program director's desk - a beautiful portrait of the P.D. and his girlfriend of two years, a former cheerleader with a certain professional sports team.

He grinned from ear to ear, interrupting the P.D. to ask him a question about the woman in the photograph.

You see, Talk Radio Guy had met the Cheerleader, a sweet woman - not very bright, but sweet - at a dance club three days prior to what was to be his last face-to-face meeting with Mr. Backstreet Boy.

She'd told Talk Radio Guy all about how she loved his funny sportscasts, how he made her laugh while she was in the shower. Talk Radio Guy had pretended to be shocked when the former cheerleader claimed that she was in her late 30s; he'd told her that there was no way in hell such gorgeous woman could be a day older than his 22-year-old self.

The Cheerleader thought Talk Radio Guy was cute in person, that he reminded her of a short, cuddly teddy bear. She kept saying how her boyfriend had never once held a door for her, or bought her a drink, or even asked her what she wanted out of life. She told Talk Radio Guy that she was sure Mr. Backstreet Boy was cheating on her with a younger woman, a college student at Talk Radio Guy's Alma mater.

In fact, she apologized several times over several hours' worth of conversation for telling Talk Radio Guy so much - she claimed that the few Fuzzy Navels had made her tipsy, and that she couldn't believe how connected she felt to Talk Radio Guy, and how she wasn't sure why she felt the way she felt, the attraction...

"I think that's probably the downright meanest thing I've ever done to another man. And I don't regret it one bit.

"Feel bad about using her - I mean, she was cute, but wow, was she dumb. And pro cheerleaders are rarely dumb - I've known several over the years.

Besides, I think she was using me a bit, too - she was a new girl in town with a cheating boyfriend, and I was a voice on the radio, the guy who made her laugh, somebody who listened. Lord, I'm naive but not stupid.

"You know, that's always been the power of local talk radio. It's not about the guy behind the mike, the guy ranting and raving. It's about the listening. That's the seduction, my man.

"You should've seen the look on his face when I asked him about that tattoo on her ass.

He knew, knew instantly. I don't know if it bothered him more that, well, I'd screwed something that meant something to him in retaliation for screwing something I cared about, or that he just never thought a fat guy could ever pull one over on his overgrown Boy Band routine.

"God, California really made me an evil bastard, didn't it?"

Years later, Talk Radio Guy would find irony in the fact that he actually slept around a lot more as a fat guy than he does now, 85 pounds lighter than he was when he was at the end of his broadcasting career.

He also finds it fucking hilarious that people sometimes wonder why he just can't find anything attractive about dumb women. Dumb women are easy to manipulate; they don't make him feel the least bit self-conscious. All he's ever had to do was to just listen - there's no challenge in just listening.

Smart women, on the other hand...

Well, he's still just as dense as a lead brick.

* * * *

For some reason, after finishing my first-ever adult game of Interview, I started to feel better.

I took a rather long nap, downloaded some new MP3s, and even started to clean the wreck I'd left the bathroom.

Hell, maybe taking some time off from work is a good thing, taking time to just let old wounds heal up the way their meant to heal.

After all, time is supposed to heal all wounds, right?

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