Table of Contents
TO MY CHILDREN
whom I hope I inspire ...
TO MY WIFE
whom I hope I endear...
AND TO MY GRANDMOTHER
who instilled in me the will to succeed.
I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people.
MARK TWAIN
Active Evil is better than Passive Good.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Fuck it all and fuck itno regrets...
FROM DAMAGE INC., METALLICA
chapter 1
In the BeginningOr How I Learned to Love the Ceiling Fan
I always told myself I would write a book.
I knew one day I would sit myself down and pound words into submissionspinning yarns, webs, and tales of days gone by, of woebegone afternoons tinged with bittersweet delights. I would hunch above the paper and weave in and out of fancy, hoping I would be the next Hunter S. Thompson...or at least somebody like Anonymous. But I also made a solemn oath to myself that I would try to write something not only of value but also something that had never been done before. I wanted to do the unthinkable: Bring to the world a whole new subtext, a wholly different genre. I wanted revolution in wood pulp. I wanted death in the sentence. I wanted to reinvent the word.
Obviously this was not going to happen right away, and on some kind of masochistic level I was okay with that. I was still kicking emotional crabs out of my soul crotch, reaching for the razor while rinsing out the Rid. Anyone confused by that last metaphor can pat themselves on the back and walk away clean, so to speak. Anyone who has dated a stripper or lived with scumbags knows that scenario too well, and we have more than likely met at a survivors meeting or two.
Anyway, between Tony Robbins and Dianetics, I really do not know what the hell is going on in the literary world today. People shill get-rich schemes on late-night TV disguised as tax dodges and government grant programs. Celebrity wannabes suck off traffic cops once or twice and are thrown book deals like fish to the porpoises at Sea World. When Paris Hilton can top the bestsellers lists, we are one more Connect Four move closer to Armageddon. I wish I were being funny, but I am clearly not. No one this awesome gets incensed for no reason at all. No one in my zip code anyway.
I was hoping to have my shot at irreverence. I was hoping to be a shot in the arm for some kind of polysyllabic retaliation. Instead I am just hoping to keep from neutering the global book market. I mean, come on. What can I say that has never been said before? Between the Kennedys and the Royals, what could I possibly bring up that has never been uttered? Unless I plan on making up words, I might be lit out of shuck. Last time I checked, the written word has been around since those Celtic Hippies put little crazy tree symbols on anything flat and called it Beowulf. So therein lies my conundrum: Much like Cialis, what will I do when the time is right?
Fast forward years later, when I found myself across a dingy wooden table from a mysterious learned man in an exotic locale, seated for a meal of foodstuffs called sushi in a dark and cursed land known as Los Angeles. It was in this dinette of Japanese comestibles that I was toiling over this tome you hold in your hands, and I had reached a point of no return when this man posited writing about the Seven Deadly Sins. Now I countered that the only way to do this subject, one that has been driven into the ground with derisive frequency, was to give it my own unique and cantankerous spin. He offered that in order to do that, I should start at the beginning.
I thought for a second. Doing so would mean going in harder than I have ever allowed myself to do in the past. So I asked, The very beginning?
He said, Hey, those are my spicy tuna rolls.
Oh, sorry. I thought they were my B.C.S. rolls.
Do they look like your B.C.S. rolls?
Well, if you squint and look at them from the side...
What the hell are you talking about?
Wait, what was the question again?
I know what you are thinking. You are asking what that whole last exchange has to do with anything. Well, I will tell you the very key to this whole disaster lies in that little tte--tte. For starters, they were indeed his spicy tuna rolls and, by fuck, do not forget it. But more importantly, it gave me a launchpad, an academic Cape Canaveral to blow my little Sputnik into the hearts of a world that might not be ready for this Great Big Mouth.
From the beginning, huh? Insert long, dramatic sigh...and begin.
For me, it all started one frigid bastard of a night in 1995.
I was twenty-two years old, a hard-on with a pulse, wretched and vice-ridden...too much to burn and not enough minutes in an hour to do so. The year 1995 was a full 365-day year of drinking, fucking, lying, raging, and exploring. It was a time of self-shit: self-importance, self-absorption, self-indulgence, and selfishness. I was the only person in the known galaxy, and I wanted what the fuck I wanted sooner rather than later. The gift of life was horseshit; all I wanted was everything and I wanted it fast. There are certain mornings when I can still feel that year in my joints and the fatty tissue of my back. The crazy thing is that if I could do it all over again, I would, but this time I would take it even further than before.
I was a drifter with no leash, no money, and no cares. I slept wherever my body fell, sometimes because I was exhausted, other times because the people I had gone to the party with just left me in the middle of nowhere. The thing you have to remember about nowhere is it is merely a combination of now and here. Grammatically I know that is incorrect, but if you have not spent your whole life in the Land of Nowhere, you do not know what the fuck you are talking about.
When you are stuck in an insurmountable situation, things like sin and hell do not really cross your radar or increase the pressure in your moral barometer. You do not give a shit about consequences as long as you get off and get off hard. You have an image, of course, but unless the Holy Ghost himself comes up and points a loaded .38 at your face and compels you to repent, there is a rats ass chance in Hades that you would comply. These are the psychoses that fester when your world is a vacuum. Bring on oblivion, just do not change the fucking channel.
In 1995 I was an absolute crazy person. I caught gonorrhea twice. I took to stage-diving off of van roofs and onto strangers in parking lots. I picked fights with douche bags openly brandishing guns. I set myself on fire at parties. You see, this was not Bridge Club; this was hopeless abandon. This was Mad Max and
