Uncle Ted's Guide to Disposing of a Body: Part I

March is Cannibalism Awareness Month.  In celebration of this, and in light of recent events, I decided now would be a good time to begin posting this.

So let's get on with it, shall we?  I have other shit to write and this topic has gotten a lot of attention from me but sadly, not all of you have had the pleasure of my mentoring.

So let's say you suddenly find yourself with a dead body.  The circumstances are meaningless and I really don't care.  You have a body and you can't report this to the authorities.  Given the current state of affairs, I don't blame you for coming to me, because we cannot trust the government to see logic and reason anymore.  These days, they will most likely crawl so deeply into your personal life, you'll wish they had kissed you first.

No, you have a body and it's on you to get rid of it.  But how?

Time is important here.  Blood gets into the most hidden of places.  The cracks of floors, carpeting, clothing, under book cases, etc.  Trust me, if the body is bleeding, you've got blood someplace.  This is why it's always best to snap a neck if you get the chance.  This eliminates the possibility of getting blood all over the place.

But you didn't get that chance, did you?  You had to act quickly and now you've got a bleeding body.

Tick-tock-tick-tock.

Where this is happening is key.  If you're in your home, this has good potential and bad potential. But, the dead body is leaving DNA all over the place and this is the first place the cops are going to look. You need to do something fast.

First, get the body someplace where bleeding doesn't matter.  That means containment.  A bathtub or shower stall is great.  You can clean that up with bleach in a short time.  But dragging a body through your house is a bad idea.

This is where garbage bags come in handy.  Commercial garbage bags are best because you can stuff an entire body into one.  Most will hold well over 100 lbs and they're water-tight, so blood and other fluids will stop leaking all over the place.  If you need to, use plastic sheeting for windows.  Even a shower curtain.  You have to contain this body at all costs!

Blood = Failure.

Any blood, fluid, hair, skin, or nails that come off that body increase your chances of getting caught.  Prison sucks.  Nobody wants to go there.

Once you have the body contained, keep in mind that containment is only temporary.  That body will continue to seep and ooze until it is dust.  You can't stop that.  All you can do is channel that flow in a controlled setting.  This is why a bathtub or shower stall is the best if suddenly having to get rid of a body.

If the body is too heavy for you to lift, roll it onto a blanket and drag it.  Plastic slides on carpet, a blanket slides on hard surfaces.  If it's too difficult, use flour or talcum powder on the hard surfaces. Don't use water.  Keep it dry as possible.

Blood is heavy.  One pint of blood is a pound.  The human body has about ten pints, give or take, depending on size.  But there are many reasons you need to get the blood out.  Blood makes decomposition happen faster and you don't want that.  It smells to high heaven and alerts neighbors you have a dead body someplace.

Once the body is in some sort of containment, and before you begin draining blood, you will have a brief period of time to collect yourself.  Get your head straight and look around you.  What have you missed?  This is the time when you look over your cleaning supplies.  Bleach is now your best friend in the whole, wide world.  Get some!

Hint:  Change clothes before you go out for supplies.  There is a good chance you have blood on them someplace and you've missed it.  People will notice you have blood on you.  Change clothes, and change them back when you come home.  The clothes you wore when you did the killing will be the clothes you wear when you do the cutting.  Those clothes will also be burned when you're all done.  Sorry about the nice pair of pants you like so much.  Do you want to keep them or go to prison?  Your choice.

Pay for your bleach in cash.  Never use a debit card or check.  Buy it in two-bottle purchases in several places and make sure to buy the unscented kind if possible.  Also, buy extra garbage bags, duct tape, paper towels, lighter fluid, matches, baking soda, and gloves for dishwashing.  Use cash!

Spreading your purchases keeps red flags down to a minimum and using cash makes them harder to track.  You don't want the cops looking at your purchases with your debit card and seeing our little supply list, do you?  Be smart!

Once you have cleaning supplies, you can begin draining the body of blood.  Careful with arterial spray.  A dead body will still spray blood all over the damned place so use caution when you slice open the main arteries around the neck.  This is also a good time to cut the clothes off.  You'll be burning these later so put them in a garbage bag, too.

If they have a cell phone on them, find it, and take out the battery, then destroy it.  You should be wearing glove when you do this.  Make sure you wipe any fingerprints off this phone before you destroy it.  Once that is done, put it in a bag for later.

The best way to get rid of a smashed cell phone is to drive out in the country with the window down and every half-mile, throw a piece of it out.

Once the body is totally naked, you can begin squeezing the blood out.  It will also seep other fluids, like piss and shit, so be careful of that, too.  Elevate the legs and bend them to the belly like a pump. You'll know you're done when the blood stops flowing.

A hacksaw is great for cutting up a body, but it's a lot of work.  You can use a power saw, but you have to be careful of getting DNA on that, too.  Everybody talks about a wood chipper, but it is impossible to run a body through that and get all the DNA cleaned out.  Hollywood is full of shit so you'll have to disregard most of what they show.  Don't use a wood chipper.

Yes, sawing by hand is tiring, but rewarding.  Be careful not to saw through and nick your tub or shower stall.  A quality CSI team will notice this and could possibly extract DNA from the groove. Avoid this by being careful.

If you have a chest freezer, consider freezing the body before cutting it up.  A frozen body cuts much better.  If it's winter and well below freezing outside, you can risk leaving the body in the garage for a day, but that's a risk you'll have to calculate.  Will somebody be coming around soon for a look?  If so, don't do it.  A chest freezer will need a good 36 hours to completely freeze an average body.

Make sure you run a healthy amount of bleach down your drains along with the blood.  Use hot water with it.  Wear your gloves and make sure you've bleached everything in your bathroom.  Then, use the bleach to clean your house.

If you have blood on your carpet, cut that part out.  If anybody asks, the dog had diarrhea or you puked after drinking a bunch of red wine.  Whatever.  Getting rid of carpet is suspicious, but not illegal.  Suspicion is better than proof.  There are recipes online to make your own luminol.  And you can make any light into a blacklight with a purple marker.

The next installment will be about what to do with those body parts.

Bacon to the Rescue!

This weekend I felt like shit.

Nothing physically wrong, just the usual head problems, like normal.  It was Valentine's Day and that never goes well for anybody.

Everybody knows I hate Valentine's Day.  It's the sulfuric acid of holidays.  It stings, it hurts, it makes one cough and hack, the fumes hurt my lungs, and I can't drink it.

Valentine's Day is the day nobody is happy with anything.  The pretty girls don't get gifts from the right guy and instead get cheap gifts from beta males too terrified to ask them out.  It's the day men can't do anything right.  It's the day women are reduced to game animals.  It just doesn't work as a day of romance.

So, I was feeling shitty for a whole host of reasons.  I haven't been writing in months.  I haven't even tried to write.  Why bother?  It's all crap, right?

My employer announced they were shutting down our building by the end of February.  In truth, they have to be out of the building by then, so it's a mad rush to get everybody fired or set up to work from home.  Most of my friends have lost their jobs.

Worse, in just a few days, I'll start working from home.

We haven't even begun training for this.

We haven't gotten our computers, been told many of the details we need to know, nor have we sorted out the simple flow of information we'll need to do our jobs.  Instead of being able to ask the person across from you a question, we'll have to have a chat room going 24/7 because we rely so much upon a hive-mind approach.

No one person knows everything so we're constantly having to ask each other questions.  At least five or six times a day important questions come up and if I'm working from home, I'll need to be able to talk to somebody about it.  We haven't sorted that out yet, though.

We're the canary in the mine for our company.  Our whole industry is going to a work-from-home model and our company is testing software, management hierarchies, client relations and feedback, plus HR modes on us.  We're lab monkeys covered in mascara and lipstick in cages.

My life of poverty has been stressful enough.  Because of my financial parasites, it doesn't matter how much money I make, I will always be reduced to living hand-to-mouth.  Always.  It doesn't matter where I work or what job I have, I will always bring home about the same amount of money.

But because there aren't many jobs out there that will give full-time hours, or even hire somebody like me, I'm stuck.  I'm incredibly trapped working for a company that is little more than a human gristmill while financial parasites suck the life out of me.  And the only way a host gets rid of the stronger parasites is death.

So, to review, this weekend I was lonely, stressed, depressed, angry and anxious.  I was a bit of a wreck.

But something called to me from my fridge.  It was a siren's song.  It was the seductive voice of bacon telling me things are going to be okay.  Just eat some bacon, it said to me.  Just eat some bacon and the day will get better.

So I did.  And instantly my life got better.

Just the smell of that fatty, salty, greasy love lifted my spirits and made me feel okay about existing. The sound, the sizzle and crackle, the beautiful promise of pig candy.  Hell, I even fried some pancakes in the grease, because if you're going to binge you fucking do it right.  We don't fuck around here.  I've never wanted one of anything in my entire life and indulging on bacon and dough fried in bacon grease is simply the best way to express that.  Or at least the best way available.

The other day somebody gave me shit for eating bacon.  "Bacon is not healthy.  It clogs your arteries and is terrible for your heart."

"Bitch," I said.  "I don't have a reason to wake up tomorrow.  Why in the fuck would I want to live another twenty years?"

One of my favorite bands, Bloodhound Gang, had a motto:  No reason to live, but we like it that way.

The only thing keeping me attached to this planet are a handful of friends and morbid curiosity. What train wreck will I get to see today?   I'm stuck in mud, chained to boulders, while the rest of the planet moves forward with their lives.  I'm still in the same shitty rut I've always been in and I can't seem to break free of it.

But bacon fixes that.  Bacon sings to me and asks me how I could possibly live in a reality that didn't include it.

If I die of a stroke or a heart attack, I want the coroner to put "Death by Bacon" on my Death Certificate just to give credit where credit is due.  I was euthanized by bacon so at least my death was merciful.

I'm too broke for a headstone.  But if I could have one, I would want it to say, "Oh, Death!  Where is Thy Sting?"  And then I'd have an image of bacon carved into it.

May the Bacon be with you.

Die, Jar-Jar! Die!

What character in all of Star Wars is the most hated?  

Most will shout, "Jar Jar Binks" at the top of their lungs.  And they would be right, because Jar Jar Binks is without a doubt the shittiest character to ever be in any Star Wars film.  

He destroyed The Phantom Menace.  He destroyed the following two films as well.  Jar Jar Binks was sand rubbed into the eyes of the Star Wars faithful.  Just to hear his ignorant sayings and verbage was an assault on our senses.  

If you ever want to annoy somebody into punching you, speak to them in Jar Jar's voice, using his phrasing.  

"Meesa be wantin' da double cheeseburger, with some of dat bomb-bad Mt. Dew, okee-day!"  

Fuck!  Just writing that makes me want to stab a kitten with a spork.  

George Lucas needs to go back and edit out Jar Jar but he can't because he made his idiotic bumbling so intrinsic to the plot.  We're stuck with Jar Jar Binks.  

So as compensation for having to endure three movies and countless Clone Wars episodes featuring him, we fans deserve something in return--we deserve to see the death of Jar Jar.  

Not a reference.  No, sir!  Not some off-handed comment by Rey when reading a tablet, "Oh, look!  It says here that after the passing of Ambassador Jar Jar Binks, the key to the plot was taken to another silly-named planet."  

Bullshit!  

We deserve some kind of flashback or a holographic projection from a historical document where we get to see the brutal and savage execution of Jar Jar Binks while he screams in agony and is torn apart limb from limb.  

Jar Jar Binks must fucking die and we fans deserve to watch it all happen.  

That stupid walk of his, the way he stuffed his face with that long frog-like tongue, the way he tripped and fell over his own goddamned feet while somehow saving Anakin and Obi-Wan from death, those stupid long ears that looked like a jackrabbit after doing bong hits--he needs to fucking die in front of us.  

Jar Jar needs to be devoured by a pack of hungry rathtars who throw him around while he makes those insipid noises he always makes when he does something clumsy.  

"Meesa muy-muy dyin' from blood loss!"  

The rathtars can use their tentacles to rip his arms and legs off while he screams and shouts for Anakin to come save him only for us to hear Darth Vader's breathing in the background as Lord Vader watches in amusement.  Then, we hear him say, "It is done."  

FADE OUT

We fans will continue to suffer the legacy of Jar Jar Binks for decades to come until we know for sure he's dead and won't come back.  We need to know the shitheads writing the script don't suddenly decide Gungans can live for hundreds of years like Yoda because they'll do shit like that if you don't nip it in the bud right away.  Writers can be real assholes sometimes.  

Worse, Jar Jar Binks is like the protoplasm of bad writing, so if they're in a hole of some kind, the temptation to suddenly bring in Jar Jar to get people out of a jam is too great.  

"You mean I can bring in some bumbling fucktard to trip and fall like a buffoon and still help the dozen or so heroes escape from prison?  Well shit, let's do it!"  

Steven Moffat, I'm going to piss on your grave after you finally die.  But I digress...

Jar Jar cannot be erased.  He can't be edited out.  He must be killed.  Horribly, painfully, and with finality.  

We fans deserve this.  We demand it.  And dammit, it needs to be added to the next script!  What's thirty seconds of death in a movie that is promised to be dark and bloody?  We've got stormtroopers than can actually aim and hit something--let's use one of them!  

Or better yet--Chewbacca went to marksmanship training and figured out how to hit the fucking bullseye.  Let's let Chewy nuke the annoying Gungan.  

Or even better still--Leia kills him because he's fucking up an op and she can't stand to watch it anymore.  He's giving away their position with all of that buffoonery and she gets fed up so she blasts him in the back of the head twice and we all get on with our lives.  

Or the Emperor does it himself.  He invites Jar Jar to a meeting where he uses his electric force-shocks to fry Jar Jar Binks into bacon while laughing and shouting, "Die, Jar Jar!  Die!"  

There are so many ways for Jar Jar to die and we deserve just one of them.  Just one.  

It's time for us fans to stand up for our canon.  Star Wars belongs to us.  We've spent enough of our time and money keeping it alive and it's about time we had some kind of reward.  Forget action figures we have to shell money out to buy or some licensed Official Merchandise.  It's time the writing reflected our love of the Star Wars universe.  

It's not about anger and rage, or even hatred.  It's about fucking respect.  When a writer gives us a shitty character like Jar Jar Binks, they don't respect us, and they sure as fuck don't care.  We do, though.  We care a lot.  And it's time they showed us fans a little respect.  

I hope you all share this.  Pass it around.  Let's get Jar Jar's head rolling so we'll finally get some kind of closure on having to suffer through the worst character ever created.  

  

The Year of the Mad Shitter and 2016

I'm glad 2015 is finally over.  It was a demented chimpanzee cranked up on meth while running around a party of adults with a machete and hacking at all of our ankles.  Filthy little bastard!  It wore a t-shirt that said "ZIPPY" in bold red letters and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't shoot the fucker and save us all.

I don't know where a chimpanzee would get meth, or a t-shirt like that, or even a machete.  I'm pretty sure some swarthy asshole outside the party thought it would be fun.  There's always that one asshole who wants to give a primate a heavy drug and a weapon just to add life to a party.  And that greasy motherfucker ruins it all the time for us.

He is the bastard half-brother to Death and the distant cousin to Fate.  He was never given a proper name but I'm sure he thinks he's funny as hell.  One of these days I'm going to lure him into the back of my van where I'll give the dirty shit a bath and wax every strand of hair off his swarmy little body. Then, I'll dress him in plaid pants and a print shirt from the 70's, with a pair of white vinyl loafers before shoving him out into the public on a bright, sunny day.
 
And that, folks, pretty much sums up my headspace--I'm angry about an aspect of life.  I hold life itself in contempt.

The Judge Dredd comic book had a great villain named Judge Death.  He was from an alternate dimension where the Judges realized all crime was committed by the living, so they judged everybody alive, and sentenced them to die.  It was brilliant.

Sure, I'm angry about 2015, but angry in a way that you are after somebody takes a shit outside your doorway and runs off because you can't see who did it.  The world is full of mad shitters and 2015 was the Year of the Mad Shitter.  Somebody was shitting on our doorstep and running away before we could figure out who needed to be shot.  Piles of shit were everywhere!  In doorways, cabinets, in the middle of the floor, on the hoods of our cars.  Everywhere!  

Nothing is more depraved than a mad shitter.  And I'm almost positive the original reason Springfield Armory developed the newer M1 variants was because of the prevalence of mad shitters in our society.  

Imagine every other day or so finding a pile of crap where you least expected.  Every day, almost. Piles and piles strung out all over because somebody was so angry at you they felt the need to get back at you, but they didn't have the balls to face you or at least make their name known.  

You scream, you curse, you shout, you make oaths of revenge to anybody who will listen.  But you never know who took a shit on the hood of your car while you were asleep.  

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I would recap 2015.  I think that pretty much sums it up.  

I'm not going to let 2016 even start with me.  I'm still pissed off.  I had high hopes for this last year and it turned into a disappointing flash in the pan.  So instead of me looking around for somebody to shoot and asking, "What the fuck just happened?" I am going to be pro-active and aggressive.  

I pronounce 2016 to be The Year of Aggression.

I am going to be aggressive in all facets of my life.  You name it, I'm going to be aggressive about it. Except for work.  But the rest of my life, you bet.  I'm going to submit more stories and I'm going to publish more stories, dammit.  I'm going to have shit ready.  

And ladies, get ready, because no more of this nice-guy bullshit.  I'm gonna slap some asses and honk some boobs.  My goal for 2016 is to have three pregnancy scares and to break four hearts.  I want somebody to demand I take a paternity test!  I want somebody at work to be knocked up and to have my name on the long list of potential daddies. 

I'm going to leave 2016 on a sidewalk at night, crying, and too shocked to talk about what the bad man in the van did to it.   

The End of a Flight

A good pilot knows when to eject.

Sometimes the plane just doesn't want to fly.  Or worse, it's over.  The plane is going down in flames and the pilot knows he's not going to make it.  Some folks just want that flight to last forever, as if the restrictions on the plane didn't exist, and the laws of physics excluded them.

But no, every flight has to end.  What comes up must come down.

And a good pilot knows when to eject.

Our pilot is contemplating this right now.

Do I eject?  Is it time to get out of this machine?

It's a final thing, pulling the EJECT lever, and launching yourself out of the aircraft you once knew so well and out into the void.  The great unknown is waiting.

A good pilot knows when the time has come.

"Take good care of your aircraft," they said.  "You'll never get another one," they said.  Bullshit.  Our pilot had flown several aircraft over the vast expanse of his career.  And from what he could remember, those flights weren't so bad.  They all ended abruptly, he recalled.  Violently, even.

The big difference was having a co-pilot on those journeys.  With a co-pilot, sitting next to you, turbulance didn't matter.  Navigation was simple and there always seemed to be a lot of blue sky. Plenty of blue sky, really.

But not this flight.  No, this flight was shit.  Tons of heavy, dense cloud cover.  Terrible communications, storm after storm, and flak from all sides.  Right from the moment of take-off, it seemed, he was taking severe damage that compromised his flight.  Instead of a scenic path over beautiful terrain, he was dodging mountain peaks because he just couldn't climb out of the dense fog.
All along his fuselage were scars.  Holes and torn sheet metal, while some bore blackened scorch marks and hydraulic fluids.  It had been a rough flight right from the moment his wheels left the tarmac.

Just an hour ago he took a massive shot from another aircraft.  It tore a gaping hole in the underbelly.  Flames shot out through the other holes left by previous attacks.  He knew it was coming.  It had to come.  That other plane was going to fire upon him, he knew it.  But he had to fly his course and keep his path because he had a line-of-sight with that plane and he thought if he could just keep that line-of-sight they could get out of this miserable cloud cover and into blue skies together.

But he knew it would fire upon him instead.  The pilot took the damage knowing it would almost destroy him.

A good pilot always knows when to eject.  An hour ago it looked like it might come to that, but he somehow managed to keep his plane in the air.  Still no blue skies, though.

It wasn't the plane's fault.  It had been a decent plane, actually.  It took damage that would have knocked other planes right out of the sky.  In a way, our pilot felt bad about ejecting.

But a good pilot knows when to eject.

He wanted those blue skies.  Once again, just once, to be above the clouds and soar high into the stratosphere.  Our pilot found blue sky once.  It was just for a few fleeting minutes, but he was there, out of the clouds.  Sunlight bathing him, warming him, nurturing him, feeding him.  Sunlight, beautiful sunlight, piercing through the thinner cirrus clouds as if they weren't even there.

But something happened.  Catastrophic failure after a series of fluke wind-sheers.  He was in a dangerous valley and his engines just didn't have the horsepower to climb high enough.  He lost all airspeed and went into a stall, then a flat spin, as he tried to correct the plane.  Eventually he got the nose down, built up airspeed, and got the plane moving again.  But he was too low.  The peak of a snow-crusted mountain tore off his Number Four Engine in a ball of fire, sparks, and smoke.  And down he went into the heavy cloud cover.

A good pilot knows when to eject and he didn't eject then.  He fought to keep the nose up.  He ignored the loss of heat in the cabin and the dense black smoke that made it hard to see.  He kept that nose up and got enough control back to avoid running into the side of a mountain.

But that was hours ago.  And while he's not in a flat spin anymore, he just can't seem to climb out of the dense clouds, storms, and fog.  Blue sky seems to be a fairy tale now.  He's gone over and over again his memories of blue sky as if they were the only minutes of the flight worth talking about.

He just wants blue skies again.  And it doesn't seem like he's going to make it.  Blue skies, he suspects, are for other planes but not his own.  His plane was never built for blue skies.  It was meant to drop down into the clouds and fly until a wind sheer or mountain peak knocked him out of the air.  This plane, this entire flight, was about him crashing into a ball of flames on the ground, where would smolder and burn until there was nothing left but ashes.

So maybe it is time to eject.  Why bother?

A good pilot knows when to eject and this might be the time.

But what would he tell them back in the hangar?

Yeah, I got sick and tired of being alone in the clouds with shit tearing my plane up so I decided fuck it, I'm out of here!

They would ask if the plane was still in the air, and he would have to tell them it was, because they'll pull the flight recorder and see if he was telling the truth.  He would have to be honest and say the plane was still flying.  

It wouldn't make for a very epic tale to be told to children, he realized.

"So children, our hero the pilot gave up on finding his blue skies and decided to jump out of a flying airplane because he just didn't think he would find blue skies again.  The end."

That wouldn't do.  Children, stupid and happy, would see right away there was a problem.  No mythological tale ends like that!  Not one.

A good pilot knows when to eject.

Our pilot looks down at the EJECT lever and knows it is always an option, but one that will have to wait, because there might be another chance.  Maybe this cloud cover will lift a bit.  Maybe these mountains will end.  Maybe he'll fix his remaining engines and get his nose up, and out, of these storms and flak.  Or maybe he'll find another plane, establish a line-of-sight, and together they'll find blue skies.

A good pilot knows when to eject and our pilot is a good pilot.  He's flown through storms of shit, taken heavy damage, gotten thrown around in hellish winds, and navigated the harshest of valleys with smoke and freezing cold flooding his cabin.  He's a damned good pilot.  Not the best, but good enough to have lasted this long.

He decides to give it another hour.  One more hour of this flight to see if somehow he can reach his blue skies, or at least find a reason to keep in the air, because right now he doesn't have one other than the simple question, "what if?"  That single question is all that is keeping him from ejecting right now.

It's not hope.  He refuses to call it hope.  Instead, its a calculation.  There is still a chance and while it grows slimmer by the minute, it's enough for right now.

And a good pilot knows when to keep flying.

The Ghosts of Christmas Past

I was always jealous of Ebenezer Scrooge.

He was guided on his path to redemption by three ghosts who showed him the exactly what he was supposed to do.  They cared about him.  Somebody from his past came back and helped him.

It's hard not to be jealous of something like that.  To be seen, to be known.  Scrooge was a single domino in a large Rube Goldberg device.  Scrooge was important to the system.  He needed to pay Bob Cratchit more and help keep Tiny Tim alive.  Why?  Because Tiny Tim was the heart of a family, the ever-hopeful and joyful boy who sang the praises of his Christian god to anybody who would listen.

Tiny Tim needed to live so he could keep being the mouthpiece and PR Man for Jeebus.  And in the world of Charles Dickens, that meant Scrooge needed to find redemption, so Scrooge would be the cog in the machine and do his job.  Scrooge was used and manipulated.

The other side of this was Charles Dickens himself.  Dickens was bitter about his childhood.  He was a young gentleman until the age of 12 when his father was put into prison.  Dickens had to sell all his books and possessions, then work in a factory, amongst the lowest classes of people.  In Victorian England, that's a huge slight.  In fact, he stood out so much, the other workers called him "The young gentleman."

Dickens was angry at his fall from social standing and blamed his father.  In so many ways, I sympathize with Dickens and with Scrooge.  Both men had terrible issues with their fathers.  Scrooge was sent away to a boarding school and even younger sister couldn't talk their cold, distant father into letting him come back home.

I used to really love Christmas.  It wasn't the presents, or what I was going to get, because honestly everybody always bought me clothes.  For me, it was all the other stuff.  Family I hadn't seen in a long time would come visit from all over, the lights, the way other people were nicer, the food, the colors and music.

But something changed.

As the years progressed, Christmas got worse and worse.  I began dreading the day for decorating the Christmas Tree because Dad would be drunker and more abusive.  Eventually, he sat down and just said mean things to us until he passed out.  Mom and I would do it together until my sister was old enough to help out.

The Ghost of Christmas Past in the book was a spirit that constantly changed shape into different forms.  It helped us understand why Scrooge became the miser who said "bah humbug!"  That ghost gave us the back-story we needed.

So now I suppose I have to go back.  I won't do all of that here.  But in my mind, I am going back into my years and asking myself, "why am I so miserable this time of year?"  Christmas depresses me the way nothing else does.  I feel disconnected, rejected, and undeserving.

Christmas just isn't fun for me anymore.  And I am resentful of those who do enjoy it.  The Ghost of Christmas Past is always whispering in my ear about how it used to be a wonderful time and how it slowly turned into an emotional meat-grinder when year after year painful things would happen. But instead of forgetting this, I am invited to relive these events when the holiday comes back around.

It's hard for me to shut those memories off and live more in the moment in front of me.  And that's the key to happiness all too often.  Focus more on what is in front of you and less on what was behind you and life will be grand.  But that's easier said than done.  And when I see people posting Christmas stuff in July I feel like I'm being dragged into a pit.  I resent it.

I wish the other ghosts would come visit me.  I'm sick of the Ghost of Christmas Past reminding me of all I've lost.  It would be nice if another one came out and helped me with some sort of redemption or peace.  But they don't come to guys like me.  Those sorts of things are for other people.

I always feel so sorry for Scrooge.  Nobody else seems to feel any empathy for him but his nephew Fred, who toasts him and in a way, says a prayer for him.  Nobody else gives a shit.  I'm way too broke to be like Scrooge.  And my sins are far too deep for redemption.  People like me don't get redemption.  We die alone in a small apartment full of books.  Nobody finds us for days until the smell gets bad.  It's fate.  Some things are just written into stone and cannot be changed.

Just like having three ghosts come by and screw with your head.  I'm sure if somebody in my circle of connections were important, I would be pushed and toyed with, too.

Dickens pushed a social agenda.  He was originally going to publish an essay on how the poor need to be helped.  He decided against this and instead used a story about Christmas to push his beliefs forward.  Christmas used to be known for wild orgies, drunken benders, and sodomy.  If it still were, more people today would be happy to celebrate.

Maybe this is the key to Christmas.  Maybe if Christmas were about hooking up, getting laid, finding some good drugs, and just bingeing into oblivion we'd be much happier about celebrating it.  And through my cult, The Branch Tedians Church of the Stretch Armstrong Messiah, this will be the New Christmas.  We will start new traditions and actually live life.  It will be something to look forward to!

This way, when the Ghost of Christmas Past fucks with me some more, I'll have something cool to watch.  And I can turn to it and say, "Damn, that was fun.  I hope we can do it again this year!"

Writing With My Middle Fingers

It's two o'clock in the morning and I can't sleep.  I've been reading more Hunter S. Thompson as of late and that's left me missing him more than ever.  This blog post has been needed for a while and now is as good a time as any to hammer it out.

I'm out of booze, though.  I'm out of a lot of things, really.  Poverty sucks.  Thompson's last collection of letters to have been published is basically him bitching about money.  People owed him, he needed more, he spent it way to fast, and had nothing to show for it.  He was pissed.

But at least he had booze and good drugs, which is better than the situation I'm in tonight.

The shooting in California really set me off.  Not the shooting, exactly, but the reactions of the people afterwards.  It was as if an army of ignorant pigfuckers were waiting for another one of these massacres with giddy excitement so they could pounce with their memes and slogans before the bodies stopped twitching.

Shootings don't bother me.  I expect the worst out of humanity and am rarely disappointed.   But stupidity and the slimey capitalization on the bones of the dead with pre-made graphics and canned outrage reminds me of just how depraved and devoid of conscience the world has become.

We're so numb we don't feel the crunch of the dead under our feet while we scream about whatever single issue we're obsessed over.  Every fact is just a lie re-told and whatever side we believe in has been corrupted by the opposing side via slick marketing campaigns, fake videos, paid actors, and bots that post in forums.  Every issue has become a sock puppet show with the same hands inside and similar voices reading the scripts.

But it wasn't like that a few decades ago.  It used to be, men could wield a baseball bat and swing it with a typewriter.  It used to be, words penetrated.

Maybe that's why I loved Thompson so much.  I was eighteen when I first read him.  I had read a reference to him in a blurb buried deep in the Sunday Edition of a Chicago Tribune article.  The only book our local library had was Generation of Swine:  Tales of Shame and Degradation in the 80's.  It was a collection of his weekly articles written for the San Francisco Examiner in the mid-80's.  Not his best work, but enough--I was hooked.

Over the course of the next month, I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hell's Angels:  A Strange and Terrible Saga, and On The Campaign Trail in '72.

There were many others, but I was obsessed.  Thompson spoke to my soul and taught me a few things.  Through his work, I learned it was okay to be different, and to see the world for the ugly, festering sore it really was.  I learned to accept that I was alone and it was okay, because I knew I didn't belong, and that wasn't a bad thing.  It made me special.

I've taken two trips to Colorado.  On the first trip, I went to Boulder, where Thompson was known to sell his art at a gallery.  I found that gallery and damn near ran inside.  I asked the guy if he had any of Thompson's work but he didn't.

"There's a guy that just came in," he said while pointing to the back.  "He just got back from Thompson's where he did a photo shoot."

I walked back and in this poorly-lit room was a guy who looked like hell.  He had at least a week's growth of facial hair, his own was badly in need of a comb, and he was wearing dark sunglasses.  I asked him about Thompson and if he had any of his work.

"No," he said.  "But I just took these photos last night."  And the he proceeded to show me several 18 X 32 glossy photos signed by Hunter.  They were of him sitting in a red Caddy convertible (The great red shark itself!) and of him with an American flag wrapped around his neck.  What I hadn't realized was I was one of the first handful of people to see the photos for the dust jacket cover for Thompson's latest book, Better Than Sex.

The importance of this didn't sink in until a few years after.  

I asked the photographer what Thompson was like.  He said those shots were taken at four o'clock in the morning.  "Thompson," he said.  "Was amazing!  He would have three televisions on at once, a radio, a newspaper in his hands, and a conversation going on to the side and he'd keep up with everything with acute awareness."  

The second time I went to Colorado, I made it to Aspen.  I even made it to the Woody Creek Bar, where Thompson drank, and often wrote about.  To my dismay, they closed at nine o'clock, and it was just after that when I had arrived.  

My dream of meeting Hunter S. Thompson, like many dreams, was just not to be.  

I'll admit I tried to write like Thompson.  It's a cheap, horrible thing to do.  To be a writer and copy somebody else's style is childish.  I do what I can now to rid myself of this tendency and I have to be careful because after reading him for a few minutes, it comes out of me naturally.  Thompson's unique style is infectious.  

But he's gone now.  Thompson is gone.  He shot and killed himself.

I'm not sure if I'm sadder because he's gone or if because I don't think he could help us much anymore.  We're pretty far gone, as societies go, and some guy speaking truth would just fade into the white noise we're baptised by in a constant immersion.  We're numb--too numb to know when truth is spoken and too distracted to seek the truth out for ourselves.

But thank God Facebook never lies to us.

Maybe that's why I keep politics off my blog.  Everybody would rather read jokes about necrophilia and cannibalism recipes than read yet another fucking blog about truth.  Everybody has truth.  Deep down, we know the answers to the questions before we even ask them.  Plus, we live in a world that makes us ask questions despite already knowing the answers.

And everybody is full of shit.  There is no truth.  We're self-aware parasites on a cold rock hurling through space that is slowly being consumed until there is nothing left.  Once that happens, we'll consume each other until a handful of wicked and brutish survivors realize the stupidity of it all.  By then, everybody will be bat-shit insane and laughing hysterically because all the truth-sayers were right.

Res Ipsa Loquitor.  The the good times roll.