My mom and dad took full advantage of the debauchery of the 1970's. In fact, I was told that my mom took acid with my dad at an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer concert and a week later she found out she was 8 weeks pregnant will little ol' me. Which explains the bad trip I had in kindergarten (The cow on the Elmer's Glue Paste called me the Walrus. Goo goo g'joob). It also explains my random ability to smell sounds and hear colors.

Some people are born with a legacy. They may have grandpa's ears, mom's smile, and dad's lack of penile length and girth. My legacy? I was born on probation, had a training wheels case of sclerosis, and a copy of, "My First AA Handbook" clutched in my little fist. This was the less than auspicious beginning to my life.

I was raised in a chaotic haze of neglect, meth fumes, and counting the days until the welfare check showed up. Somehow I managed to buck my family's preoccupation with burning out instead of fading away. I did well in school, avoided the criminal justice system, and since I didn't become a connoisseur of meth, I kept a full head of teeth.

Still, you can educate the trailer trash boy and take the trailer trash boy out of the trailer park, but you can never take the trailer trash out of the boy. As such, I have never met a psychotropic medication I didn't have an appropriate diagnosis for. I can still tell you the SNAP benefit (that's food stamps to those who grew up in a nurturing environment where parents had jobs and/or put the needs of their kiddos first) to meth exchange rate. I can tell you the horrors involved in trying to digest gov'ment cheese. If you call it, "Government Cheese" you're either too young to remember this colon blocking government handout or had parents who understood that the refrigerator was for more than Stroh's Lite beer and ketchup packets. Finally, like all my family members, I am extremely fertile meaning that before I had myself neutered for the good of humanity my love lava could impregnate with extreme ease. This fertility can be directly linked to the sad fact (and example of Ma Nature's sick sense of humor) that the least capable humans can crank out kids faster than China can crank out knock-off electronics. Ultimately, this insures that CPS social workers, the welfare department, drug dealers, and those employed in the criminal justice system have total job security. It's our humble gift to you and the economy.

In short, cut me off, take the last donut, or STEAL MY ENERGY DRINK FROM THE BREAKROOM FRIDGE and I will make it my mission to insure that my children both date and procreate with your children. Hope you like Lynyrd Skynyrd, because their music will be featured heavily at your kids and my cum fruit's weddin'! Everybody fucking sing! IF I LEAVE HERE TOMORRRRRROWWWW...

You can sit next me, but I must forewarn you. I’m not like anyone you’ve ever met. If you find yourself intrigued, the further from me you should get. If you say I love you first, I will never love you like that. If you seem like you might hurt me, I will follow you to the moon and back. I’m forty-seven degrees of insanity, in seventy-four shades of play. If you marry your favorite dream and worst nightmare, I am their love child. Either way, I’ll leave you screaming in the dark. Could be my name, could be exquisite pain, could be the freeze frame of ecstasy before terror, or terror before ecstasy. What is it you want to explore? My mind, my body, my misplaced sense of humanity? Or yours? We can open all the doors, but - disclaimer, there is one which will shut you all the way out.

I get drunk and talk about my mom. I get really angry when I'm hungry. There's a fine line between complaining and just generally hating everything, and I'm riding it like a an escort, sometimes in a similar vein, just going with the flow until I get paid.

I close my eyes instead of rolling them. Don't get me started on other people driving. Before coffee, you best not talk to me. Every morning there's a security guard who greets me at the door, I can't talk at 7am so I nod and give him a grim little smile, go to the coffee machine and pound caffeine like I might win an award for obliterating sleepiness. But then I can't take the anxiety drugs used to calm me down, because with coffee, the drugs make me shake uncontrollably, a seizure of two worlds colliding.

Did I mention I talk about my mom a lot? As it turns out, when you hurt someone, really get to the part of them that hurts anyway, and then screw into it like a screwdriver hell bent on breaking the screw, that gets to some good conversation points in therapy. I go to therapy. I go to therapy and rant about my mom, and bad drivers, and security guards who are too cheerful - I ask, are they trying to screw me, too? Are all people screwdrivers, and I'm the screw, waiting to be used?

I think I just need some coffee, or a drink. Or both. But remember: I can't take the anxiety medication with either one, so the anxiety medication doesn't get taken very much at all.

DISCLAIMER: I might seem weak, broken, down and out. But I’m resting, rebuilding my strength, gaining back my stamina, and I’ll come back like a Phoenix on fire, stronger than ever before. I’ve defeated depression, addiction, PTSD, many an unwitting bar patron who had the misfortune to insult someone I care about, I’ve defeated heartache and loneliness, rejection after rejection, the pain that keeps you up at night crying and howling at the bleeding moon. I’ve conquered joblessness and hopelessness, gods and demons, weight loss, running, karate, Crohn’s disease, liver disease, bipolar disorder. I’m a legitimate super hero. I’ve beaten it all. I’ve beaten bullies and low self esteem, deaths of loved ones, alcoholism and the pain of not fitting in. They’re all just new notches on my bedpost, scars on my Killmonger chest. I’ll beat divorce too. I’ll come out roaring like a lion breaking out of its cage. So don’t think a little setback will knock me down forever. I’ll just come back stronger and better. Persistence is my middle name. I don’t know how to give up. There won’t be any breaking me. There won’t be any destroying me. There won’t be any stopping me. And one day, when things get really really hard, I might be the one helping you, pushing you along, carrying you if I have to. Whatever it takes. So this is my disclaimer: never, ever underestimate me.

FRIENDSHIP WARNING: If you aren’t ready to be hit with deep, true emotional truth, don’t bother getting close. I cry at sad movies, and sometimes harder at happy ones. I generate story-telling poetry—of joy, fear, comedy, and tragedy in equal measure—on the fly, and I write stories designed to pull on heartstrings, and then twist and transform at the last moment.

I give away a lot of love to others in my life, and since it is the one gift you always get back in bigger measure, people tend to love me back, which is just fine with me. I am patient, kind, and generous, unless you threaten someone I care about, and then I will replace my cuddly teddy-bear smile dentures with sharpened fangs, and I will bite if provoked. Not many will ever see me remove the smile I wear like a mask; the world is a dark place, so I do my best to brighten it with a smile on the outside, even when I’m not in a smiling mood on the inside.

I may be old, fat, and getting gray, but my heart is still very much alive and well, and I wear it on my sleeve. So if you start caring about me, just know I cared about you first, and then just accept the fact that friendship with an old Poohbear is a forever deal.

I am the pox of vox,

the gutteral utteral,

the jokalization of vocalization,

the word absurd,

a phraser laser,

the chyme of rhyme,

the hearse of verse,

meter defeater,

the piety of notoriety,

wrongs at the feet of diphthongs,

the ass of assonance,

the illiterate alliteration,

sentence repentance,

poem maelstrom and

poetic injustice,

the gutter of utter,

manic iambic and

depression expression,

the vile of style,

sonorous malodorous,

the frack of frickin' fricatives,

and the final glottal stop.

And I use cookies you should reject forthwith.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwdL_Zn5nCE

Dear Alice,

Sit tight a moment, before you go chasing after that rabbit and your meeting with the Hatter. There is something you need to know.

The hole you're thinking of crawling down? It's a trick. No one is late to anything, because there is nothing to be late for.

The tea party is a dream.

But the Queen, she's very much real.

The beheadings? Real, too.

And they aren't at the bottom of that warren you're so desperate to explore.

They're right here, on this side of the looking glass.

Besides, you know what else is found in rabbit dens?

Snakes. They sleep together in knotted bundles at the bottom, and the rabbits avoid the whole thing like the plague, if they have any sense about them. Any hare that would go running into there is the mad one, hat or no. You have sense about you, girl. If it feels wrong, it is wrong.

That hole is all wrong.

Choose a different adventure, Alice. Find a new garden to explore, this one is overgrown and toothy; burs and briars and grasping vines are hungry for you.

But most of all, just know that there is nothing there other than a hole in the earth where you throw your hopes. They get swallowed up and eaten by shadows; that corner you'll be crawling towards, that bend in the warren, it just leads to a drop-off where the snakes sleep. There, it is nothing but rabbit bones and rattlers dreaming of sweet little girls stumbling and bumbling.

But you won't take my word for it, girl. I know you won't.

By the time you realize that I was right, you'll be swimming in tears at the bottom of that hole, feeling too small to matter.

Just remember that snakes can swim, girl, and they eat little girls and doormice, too.

Let that rabbit be, Alice. Just sit with me here on this bank, and let's enjoy what is.

Don't go chasing that dreamy nightmare.

With Pragmatic Love,

Your Sister

https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Alice%27s_Sister

my soul comes

without warning

inserting itself

into the most

innocuous of

conversations,

whether whispered

or screamed,

it shows proudly,

unaware of its

consequences

(the shame

comes later).

my soul comes

with jokes

made when

cornered:

like an animal

in a cage

i show my teeth

when i laugh

at my own expense.

my soul comes

with complications,

imperfections,

like boils from an

unknown illness

that continue to erupt

into emotions

that i cannot name

or comprehend.

my soul comes

with questions

that have no answers,

messages

that have no receiver

thoughts

that vanish

before they can be

spoken aloud.

so i speak them,

maybe more

than i should,

because i am not real

unless you hear me

even the parts

that deserve to be buried.

my soul comes

like a house

built

where a crime scene

used to be:

the horror

is still there,

but there’s no tape

to tell you when

to stop walking

inward.

my soul comes

without a warning,

an assault on the senses,

and even if i don’t intend

to cause panic,

i might.

after all,

i scare myself

night after night.

because i can’t

warn myself

away from my soul:

it follows me,

even as i grow.

Are you struggling to find the right words to say? Do you have a tough time discerning connotation or denotation? Diction can be taxing – never mind grammar and syntax. With R.E. Feiner, it’s easy! R.E. will let you know when you’re not making any damn sense. It’s like your own personal human thesaurus and Chat GPT in one, without the worry that AI might all kill us one day!

With just three installments of $30,000 per year, you can finally communicate everything you’re thinking and get the understanding you deserve.

Disclaimer: R.E. is not for everyone. You should not take R.E. if you plan to be obnoxiously aggressive or ignorant. If taken incorrectly, side effects are a guarantee.

Side effects may include:

• nausea

• depression

• anxiety

• incontinence

• headaches

• loss of appetite

• drowsiness

• paranoia

• infertility

• night terrors

• dissociation

• bankruptcy

• hair loss

• burnout

• bibliophilia

• disillusionment

• neck/butt pain

• sensory overload

• feelings of rejection

• constant defensiveness

• selective hearing

• excessive eye-rolling

• anger management issues

• difficulty concentrating

• ecological or economic concern

• a sudden desire to abandon reality to live in nature

If you experience any of these side effects, you may want to stop using R.E. and consult with a licensed professional immediately.

Try R.E. Feiner today to see if it’s right for you. If you don’t like it, you may be entitled to compensation (probably not though).

Say what you mean and mean what you say, or you’ll never hear the end of it! – R.E. Feiner

Caution slippery when wet.

It is not what it sounds like. One might find themselves following that disclaimer expecting a provocative end but then you would be disappointed. But now that I have your attention maybe stay and see where we end up.

I have been referred to as a walking, talking oxymoron. I am a liberal conservative. I’m a fire fighter scared of heights. A gay that is too straight to associate with the LGBTQRSTUV community. A feminist surrounded by men. An extroverted introvert. I dream of living in the mountains but hate being cold. A mom that appears and fulfills the role of dad. Dressed in cowboy boots with my wranglers all day, and then slacks and suspenders for a nice dinner and musical after.

My Christmas list consists of DeWalt tool bundles with a nice new pair of oven mitts. I’ll pour your concrete patio and then pour batter for your cake. My Pandora list can shuffle from Frank Sinatra to The Offspring, and I wouldn’t miss a beat. There is more to me than meets the eye. I am deeper than the depths of the ocean and more versatile than a Swiss army knife. Superficially stable with a storm of emotions raging inside. So, if you get close enough you just might find the slippery slope that truly leads to me.