Maybe we should spend more time on others.

Less on ourselves and being alone like a cliche comedy character in a hood movie who “don’t need no man” — when it contributes to premature mortality rates and depression.

Mental disorders such as psychosis and depression — acute physical as well as chronic illness.

Maybe if we stood for each other more than our own individualistic pride? We would be just fine.

To say a human beings development depends on himself is to deny the entire development and sustaining endurance of the human race.

We. Are. Social. Creatures. We. Work. In. Groups. Best.

Whether that is a family a couple or a friend.

Why we choose to set our lives to hard mode when shit could be easy beginner I will never know but the modern world is the most fucked up thing I have ever seen.

So modern day individualism of the likes never seen before 1978 onwards is the answer?

Then we are all doomed.

When denying the base nature of human beings biologically, neurologically and spiritually becomes norm, we become manic depressive dysfunctional despots who pump bullets into strangers.

Intravenous drugs in our arms and dysfunctionally fucked up thoughts in our heads.

we raise fucked up kids. We look the other way when fucked up things happen.

So they continue to happen.

Continuing always, as long as we continue believing in human weakness and delusional idiocy as truths and not falsehoods.

Some will suffer more than others, and the ones who suffer less will pity the ones who suffer more but never help.

Hard times need soft edges, when the emphasis becomes individuality and egoism, we all die.

Those that suffer less will eventually suffer the most, because they thought they suffered least in hopes of self identity and pride preservation.

So what’s worked for 5,000 years of human history is going to change all of a sudden because now we all think that we are super hero’s not human beings?

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

I just saw a family meeting up with their dad.

His dad and a friend. They had been waiting on him for a bit, his wife was there and attentive.

His kids were there and attentive and excited to see him.

I just got off the train with nobody to meet me. Multiples that won’t respond to me or when they do it’s full of malice. Hatred. Or feigned indifference, worse feigned care. Canned care compassion.

Canned like a can of Coke that you pick up at a corner bodega, and find to be flat.

Canned like a can of Pepsi that’s been there for 2 years and never replaced. It’s half full, or half empty. Depending upon which side you’re sitting on. Depending on which side you grab and which side you don’t.

It’s carbonated or it’s flat. Depending on what kind of drink you like,

Carbonation or not.

But I’m missing a soda.

I've always felt weird walking into bars. I've always felt weird doing something I'm working on for too long, because I feel like if I achieve any measure of success in it that should be the stopping point lest I cannot maintain the peak I've come to. Better to quit on a high note right?

That's what I always do and so I walk into a bar. I walk into a bar and immediately feel uncomfortable if I'm not already drunk. The place people come to die slowly and fry mozzarella sticks fast to die even more quickly. I plop down on a bar stool and the bartender eventually makes their way around to me and asks me what I would like to drink. I order a beer, or a mixed drink. My most common concoction being a beer and a shot of vodka or three.

I've never been someone who resigned themselves to a fruitless life but it feels like less and less fruit is in my future. Very little in my past. In terms of the orchard keeper I have very little more than a barren wasteland like a orange farmer who thought it would be a great idea to plant in South Dakota at the turn of the century. Encountering a dust bowl the second seeds were planted.

It was better than before, better than when I felt like for the rest of my life I'd be stuck in my rack shivering and writhing in pain from alcohol withdrawal. It was better when I walked into the bar that I could discount every aspiration and ambition I once had within those four walls that made me as happy as can be but destroyed me. The bartender greeted me with a smile. Pretended I was personable. Pretended that I was meant to be there. Checked off every box that was necessary to keep me there on some misguided, unfounded goal to fuck her. Bartenders know exactly what they're doing.

It was dark, dank, and private. The only light I saw was from the glint of the black out blinds that covered every window. The ring of the blackjack machine was as artificial as everyone else's plastered drunk smile that made me nauseated and cajoling at the same time. I felt extra insecure on top of what I typically am insecure about due to the lack of teeth incurred by the bottle which had introduced itself to my face.

Constant stimulants, and constant depressive substances.

Duality exists in all facets of life I guess. Stimulation was a must and a straight life of rules and laws and responsibilities has almost always been something I'm essentially incapable of.

Jobs, careers, relationships and family affairs have always been a second thought after the inevitable pursuit of escape in a faraway town or city or country with cheap liquor and low hanging fruit like women I could easily acquire.

I arrived in the Caribbean just a few days ago and I already had baby mama drama without the baby.

Enough drama to last a reality TV star five seasons of shit show suck.

Everywhere I go I expect things to be different until they become the same. Everywhere I go and everything I do as a form of escapism turns into the worst decision while simultaneously being the best damn decision of my entire littoral life.

Story of my life, trying to mold-make a psychiatric condition into a wife. The walking borderline personality disorder that I had quickly proceeded to fall in love with was currently throwing every dish in my pantry out of a window onto the street while I could hear the neighborhood constituency vocalizing/ the shit out of their disapproval for my shenanigan like love interest gone wrong.

My newest heart throb from the depths of hell was drunk. She teetered, tottered, and fell out the window with my printer as she tried to throw it of a window.

She didn't know that the cord had wrapped itself most of the way around her leg and arm. Nothing went in slow motion like most claim it to be in these circumstances. She fell quick, she hit the gravel pavement hard.

Blood immediately, broken snaps that audiophile's would pay big bucks for echoed in the thick humidity filled night.

She had been drunk in a ethereal way, trans-dimension like intoxication. She screamed as she fell. As my mind always does, I didn't feel anything at that moment. I went completely television static like numb.

Second story falls don't normally kill people. Maiming, while unpleasant and extraordinarily inconvenient is far preferable to death. That wasn't her story, nor what I live with regarding her death. Death has been all around since the very beginning, and seems to always be a constant visitor to a shitty asshole crust a fault.

She died, and our story began. Her head had become a concave hellscape on a cobble stone road on a hot and putrid shithole in a Caribbean humidity dense as the driven snow in Colorado.

People crowded around, and in familiar Caribbean like lateness the ambulance waited a solid few hours to come scrape her corpse from the cobble stones that had likely seen a lot of death over the years from different kinds of people, persons, and persuasions.

I think I booked a ticket the second her ticket was punched. I honestly did not experience much more emotion than a tinge of panic once I realized that the fall she experienced might render her a vegetable and not a non-issue. I flew out of the local regional airport to my next port of call and smiled as I sipped my gin and tonic in a first class seat I had scammed my way into. This might sound harsh, and if it does, put this book down pussy. It's not for you.

Giving up never feels as good as you imagine it would.

The dejection sets in further than you ever could have imagined. Mirrors become something you avoid like a vampire trying to day walk.

The death knell in your mind is only confirmation of what you already suspected. Perhaps what you already knew. You were too weak to make it. Sabotage was a familiar friend and you can't quite tell if you're doing it right now but goddamn, if your rationalizations don't help you figure that shit out.

I used to think giving up was brave and shitted on people who tried to say it was cowardly to go out the hard way. Now I realize that it is neither cowardice nor bravery. It is unavoidable, omnipotent and the only path forward once a normal human being suffers to the point that they come to the decision -- well. It is the only decision.

People don't arrive at the precipice for no reason. They don't come without transportation. The vehicle that transports you you've likely known your whole life. Perhaps your dad, your mother. You grandparents, or your uncles and aunts. Perhaps they ALL chipped in.

Now they're just mad that you dented it, and that you took it over to the edge of this cliff barely managing not to total it in the ravine below. As you hang over the precipice, the only concern anyone will have is that the rope you're tethered to on the solid ground is fraying.

Last time the lights went out I was underground.

I had been working in this mine for close to 45 years. I lost count 45 days ago. I'm not over 30 years old I don't think. My mind doesn't concieve of time anymore since I was placed here and set to work interminably long hours for nothing more than the company of my fellow denizens of inaneity.

I woke up a few minutes later. This dream had been recurring in my sleep for many years and months now and I don't know why. I always saw a Monarch butterfly in the mine, that was then stabbed to death by one of the perceived authority figures. That I have no power to stop, or even yell or curse at.

I shook the sleep out of my eyes, hair, and mind. I woke up fully as I rose to my feet and the familiar smell of a Indian kitchen filled my nostrils so intensely that I don't have to shave the little fuckers called nose hairs that used to keep me company.

I used to love Indian food, goddamnit.

Now I think I'd puke if I tried to even get it anywhere close to entering my mouth and going down my esophagus to my stomach. Just the description entering my mind and I nearly ran for the toilet. Five minutes later I did. That always used to concern me because of my prior cancer diagnosis. One of the few men who suffered from the conviction of breast cancer in the 4th degree.

Here the fuck I am though, I thought. I wiped the drivel of neon green puke from my mouth.

Stomach bile this morning. My one vice remaining, I hope, was something that discouraged a healthy eating habit among other things. Thank god for steroids and testosterone, times a healthy dose of vain courage and mirror obsession. Propelled me and my steadily dying carcass into the doors of gyms and underneath barbells. It kept me away from the abyss like edge that I teetered on the precipice of and knew I would never survive.

Sweaty, previously ass-sat and ball-sat weight benches that I tried not to think about in my best efforts to get in and out, of a crowded space. Agoraphobia associated with the shit that kept me up at night won against my aversion to ass sweat. Every. Day. Of. The. Week.

My refusal to look like a bag of dicks tempered the blade of neuroses to the point all was well with the mirror image I so obsessively attempted to maintain. Life's all about balance.. right?

Determined not to look like a bag of dicks. Even if I was, indeed, a bag of dicks. Only you and I and god know that.

It reflected very eloquently my current state of affairs that it was literally the fucking only thing that made me get up in the morning. To know that looking in the mirror I'd see the muscular physique that I sought my whole life, and now will fight my whole life to maintain. Life long journey's that I found motivation for are few and well.. let's just fucking say few you assholes.

A familiar voice yelled up the stairs at me unintelligibly. It was the Indian family downstairs. They made me exit my apartment everyday at 0900 sharp because they are the fucking antichrist themselves and hate white round eyed Caucasians. I thought as I seethed in anger and unreleased rage. I gritted my teeth and yelled back at them in slurred english so they couldn't understand me telling them to go fuck their mothers and die. Then I wandered down the stairs. Plopping each foot onto the squeaky shit hole of a foundation this whole house was based upon. It hadn't been maintained in years because apparently whatever shit hole in India these cocksuckers had come from didn't believe in basic building code.

At 365$ a month for a one bedroom, I felt kind of silly complaining. The fatass patriarch who walked around like a rooster through the kitchen I had to walk through to leave my apartment "ALEXANDER - TIME TO GO TO LIBRARY OR FUCKING BLOODY WORK OR WHATEVER YOU BLOODY FUCKING DO"... I didn't feel silly complaining anymore.

At least he served a purpose in my own personal spite fantasy and bitching as well as moaning.

This dude was going to get reincarnated as a cockroach in a career pest controlman's home... Sucks to be an asshole AND a Hindu.

Fantasies had entered my head before of a violent physical confrontation upon the next verbal confrontation they lashed out of their empty heads traveling oh so abruptly to their mouths that it spewed equal parts saliva and shit breath if you weren't quick to dodge it.. but I knew better than to risk my life, limb and freedom for another's unworthiness of sharing the same air I breathed. I did that once and nothing very good came of it.

Okay, I did it many times. You got me. Assholes.

As I finally made my way to the door to the kitchen it swung open with a slam against the door jam opposite wall from me. My favorite individual was there to greet me with a look of disdainful disgusting grimace on his fat, pudgy and very oddly hairy face.

Unibrow thick, hair greasey as a mechanics hands with poor hygiene. He spit as he spoke and I wasn't very quick on the draw this time, so I got a nice spattering of his bodily fluid -- emitic style -- from his dick sucker.

Relaying any form of this conversation I believe would seriously put your neurologic function at risk due to it's intense stupidity. So I will refrain. Suffice to say that I extricated myself from his verbal hostage taking clutches and exited out the back as I do every day.

Life is a cheap bottle of vodka you pull from a plastic bottle. That you pulled from a plastic coated metal shelf on the bottom shelf. The shelf was dusty and you looked dustier. The price label that sticks out like a fat lady trying to fit into her wedding dress in a trailer park high on her 4th day of a crack binge has been there since 1996.

Cheap vodka reminds me of my life. Settling for the lowest common denominator because I don't think anything else will ever make me feel okay. Even when it smacks me right in the face.

Like I get into a fight with a guy somewhere and he slaps me right in the face with a bottle of Grey Goose and I feel the top of the line merchandising advertise worthy coating on the glass bottle. How cold it still is because of it's proper packaging. How it doesn't break across my face and knocks me the fuck out as well as a few teeth.

I think no way man. Shit that was pure luck. Much rather have grabbed a cheap glass bottle of vodka. ALWAYS gets the job done and it's fucking cheap and you can get drunk with the bottle you buy after you run the guys pockets. This one definitely breaks on faces.

When I wake up in a puddle of my own blood, I begin to ponder how the metaphorical is dancing in a circle around my ammonia laden brain. Then I think I shouldn't think such thoughts, because god forbid they manifested wet brain at my young tender age.. fuck I'm not so young anymore man. Going to ignore that thought too, as I shake my head vigorously and likely exacerbate the guaranteed concussion I am currently suffering from.

Checking my teeth, and horrified to discover some of my choice ones missing. I immediately wanted to get drunk. Did he run my pockets? No he didn't. I guess this was close enough to the French Quarter that he dipped the second he dabbled with nearly rendering me a vegetable with a liquor bottle.

I try to clean myself off the best I can, and then walk my drunk, disheveled, decompensating quickly, debilitated emotionally self to the nearest corner store bodega. I have not a single thought in my head. All I know is I feel like shit, and I know why, and no need to think about any of them.

We all know how we spiral mentally when the enormity of the hard lives we lived and undertook and didn't undertake come crashing down on us quite often due to our own volition I daresay always by the volitive of our own intrusive dickhead subconscious trying to bully us like an inner city gang discovering a leaning heroin addict and smacking him in the face hard as they can repeatedly attempting to have him experience a relatively severe fall at that angle. Those kids don't realize that anyone can die.

It's vulgar and cruel but it's fun is all that they know. Even the people they kill with the .38's and 9mm's in their pockets they honestly don't have any accurate conception of that they are no longer with us on this earth and instead died on a sdiewalk in a pile of their own blood, and the blood of everyone who had died in baltimore and seeped into the sidewalk and gutters and grassy shit lawns that barely resemble one. At least they aren't alone as the souls of each person yell out and whisper rather creepily how they died and why they aren't in heaven and how they should stay because you know if you a true Baltimore local you NEVER FUCKING LEAVE BALTIMORE.

Bad places, good places, the worst places, abominable places like where a fucking snowman lives in the artic circle in some shit hole Russian village where everyone the entire population since the beginning of that village existence has died of liver cirohssis and incest related genetic malformities all these places have a terrible habit of sucking you into their gravitational pull through comfortability, through trauma, through dead friends who though no longer living are your tether to a place that will one day prematurely cause your own. The THREE F'S, FENTANYL FIREARMS FOUR BY FOURS.

I used to think about living. I knew I didn't have it in me, nor did I think about it seriously.

I used to think about succeeding, I knew I didn't have it in me. Nor did I think about it seriously.

I used to think about failure, I knew I didn't have it in me. Nor did I think about it seriously.

I experienced the nightmare, I thought about it seriously.

I came out the other side, and now I think more than I can possibly begin to endure, seriously.

You know what I'm realizing? None of us were happy. Not ever, not once. We were all miserable, all the time, from the very beginning.

We reminisce on the old days because we weren't as miserable, nobody but a few of us had experienced immediate friends or family death before. We could still lie to ourselves and say that our drinking was normal, our drug use was normal, and our lifestyle was normal.

We could still say fuck it, I'll take care of that tomorrow. We still had a lot left to experience and do in life, and we didn't think it was going to suck just yet.

But happy? No, the emptiness in each of our eyes glinted like a reverse hallmark card. We all saw it in each other, and knew. I think that's what kept us together as long as it has, did, and will. I think that's what society fails to grasp about anyone that isn't them or doesn't fit into the narrative required of us to line up and dress right dress to.

Sometimes one person's normal is the opposite, and we are those opposites. The ones that have to stay quiet or lie when someone asks us if we're okay, or how we met someone, or what makes us friends. We know, but we never talk about it because the stigma of silence spreads beyond the public spaces and into the closed doors where we would drown our sorrows until we could let a mismanaged sliver of the shit that was burning us alive out of our souls.

We reminisce on the old days, because we had people to reminisce with.

Including ourselves.

The emptiness that bonded us together has managed to kill nearly every single person in a 6 block radius, has managed to put us into shitty relationships with shitty people consistently, has thrown us into association with the most slippery of shit bags that exist who we thought were our friends until we needed them most and found ourselves abandoned.

Then we would always come back to each other, and then one day we couldn't.

Must be nice bonding over anything that isn't the only thing that you can think about because everyday it fucking eats you alive.

You want to tell somebody so bad, but you've experienced so much negative feed back when you do or have.. that all you have is that shitty yet fucking beautiful glint of damage, hopelessness, and the fractured emptiness in eyes that in a few short years will close forever... If you're lucky.

If you're like me, you look around and suffocate in front of a room in your apartment, a hometown street, a local bar, or bodega full of ghosts. The emptiness consumes you, and you destroy yourself some more but now? Now you're all alone.

I miss you guys. SM - SE - KE - MM - MS - D - and the one who got away.

How odd to go from your largest challenge in life being staying alive, to your largest challenge in life becoming living.

Destroying yourself because of the things you saw while staying alive, because of the things you did to stay alive, and because of the people who didn't live. What a mind fuck.