I stand before you naked and accused; bottled and tagged; stuffed and mounted.

        I have been labeled with a warning sticker by the agency and its authorities; the Surgeon General says I'm a danger to myself and pregnant or nursing women; I have been fitted with a child-proof cap and you have to be 18 to even look at me. My legs weren't blown off in Vietnam, but Brundlefly is back and its pussing.

        I am writing to tell you about life on my planet for the past two decades. I am certain that, other than a group I can count on my hand, there are no intelligent life forms here. I just need to lay the grisly details on the table and let you flesh out the ghastly images in your own head. Expect something sporadic.

        The gore that will precede this necessary introduction is, at best, a ragged synopsis of a life derailed so many times that the engineer has often thought of calling it quits. As the baggage of being writer/artist has had me do, I have donned the guise of a poverty-stricken, alcohol-soaked psycho for so long that it almost fits now. And all I have is shit to show for it. Shit, that's it.

        But that's me, Mr. Overkill. If you are going to do something, go all the way-"Balls to Wall," I say. Well, it looks like I have inadvertently elected to go mad…and take notes. Nobody likes a poser.

        But I question honestly if I have it in me: The stamina, that is, to describe in some respectable fashion the ill-reputed tale that has been my life since my college days and the chemical-induced sanity that protected us all there. But I must muster up the strength from somewhere, for I will not be able to rest—not even in the ground—knowing that I took with me these stories that have made me perhaps one of the first real Generation X-troverts.

        As far as style, grammar, and all the other good graces that accompany a professional writer's submissions, forget them. They may not be present here.

        As luck would have it, as it usually doesn't in my case, the store I had been assigned to was actually in one of the best parts of the entire city; the literal Greenwich Village of Indianapolis. Artists, musicians, literates, poets and coffee shop owners frequent the store often. I walked into work and danced like Peter Pan.

        After being here nearly a month, I am trying to reflect back on my time here and summarize it in the proverbial nutshell. To take this month and examine it on a daily basis would be a boring, boring, boring example of my vile daily habits: sex, music, liquor, pubs, bars, dope and (did I say?) liquor. The bottom line is: My role as the babbling, prancing, drunken jester hasn't changed much from my days at Pleasant Street. The only real difference is I'm making love to a whole new audience.

        For the first ten days of this ill-begotten adventure I was truly a man without a home: a traveling herder without a flock to tend. To be a romanticist I will say that I slept in the fields, which is essentially what I was doing. I was driving daily, one solid hour, to and from a field called West Lafayette, Indiana. This field also happens to be the resting spot of Purdue University. As I attended Indiana University, their biggest rival, I was conditioned to loath Purdue and its students. I made certain to drink extra heavy to assure a good night's rest in such horribly foreign surroundings.

        I eventually scraped enough cash to get myself an apartment. This helped, for now I had a home base, a place to attack from, so-to-speak. (What I'm really saying is I found a place close enough that I could walk to any of the local bars, get as hammered as I wanted, and still stumble the five blocks home: which, coincidentally, is what I've done every night but two since).

        I hate to itemize after I said I wouldn't, but as I was walking to work the Friday before last, I passed three skate-punks sliding their boards across the parking blocks. "Shred asphalt!" I hollered that at them to let them know that I accepted their kind, "Skate or die!" One of the punks flipped me the bird and the other two jumped on their dirt bikes and took off. The first kid grabbed his board and skated away telling obscenities at me. I yelled things not printable here and spit lung phlegm at them. I hate skate-punks.

        Another night while I was hanging out in my pad alone I noticed that I had no drapes and the neighbors were watching me like "Cheers" reruns, as I ran around nude in the apartment. After a few good belts of the Bacardi, I couldn't shake the line "making love to a whole new audience." I stripped the few moral values I may have had (and some I didn't) and masturbated in the front room window. Soon after, a number of the neighbors showed up knocking at my door, bearing all sorts of gins and good tidings, in eager anticipation to meet me. We laughed and joked and drank and smoked cigarettes and discussed human virtues and all their shortcomings. It was a gas. They love me.

        I truly believe that most people like freaks, mutants, social nonconformists and people of the like, contrary to popular belief. Hell, look at the people I'm telling this to. Indeed I am a mutant, but I am part of a band of gypsies who will chew on this planet, spit out its remains, and view a Garden of Eden. Someone has to.

        I blush now as I close this first letter to home. Davey always says that I think I'm someone other than who I am; that I'm trying to live the life of my role models. I am thinking that embarrassingly now. The couple of people I've met and tried to plug into must see me as Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's On the Road: bouncing around, rambling maniacally to anyone who will listen, and sweating profusely with the "fever of life."

        I'm telling you boys, I will eat this city alive.

Sincerely,

        Indeed.

        In my own strange way, I have noticed that I'm getting older. As I figure it, that means you are getting older too. Well, where are we and what have we done? That's where I'll start. I want to tell you what's been happening on my planet for the last while, and let you live it out in your own head. Expect something sporadic.

        It appears that most of my personal tragedies have occurred in the fall of each year. I have started work on a novel to be titled In the Fall. Scholars will ask, "Did he mean 'in the fall' as in autumn or as in his personal fall from grace?" and literature teachers will eat it up. I want to translate that into a screenplay, then into a film. My visions are amazing; my feats have much to follow.

        I have talked this writing bullshit for a long time now. I have only minor notches in my holster and nothing really to show for them. I am certain of only one thing: I am here for a reason. Damn the existential thought. A power greater than me stopped me from doing the inevitable—drinking myself into a coma.

        And it was certainly a power greater than me that had me keep notes during my most severe blackouts—which by the end of my last binge, were lasting for weeks at a time. Realistically I was blacked-out all but two weeks of fall semester. Amazingly, I pulled a 3.3 GPA. There has to be a reason for that.

        I had a shrink tell me that I'm too smart for my own good. perhaps that's true and that, friends, is potentially dangerous. The psychiatrists have already warned me that I'm likely to poke someone's eye out if I'm not careful. But there is certainly a reason that I am here, knowledge fuzzy but intact. I had become so disillusioned during this last fall, that I started thinking that God had bigger plans for me than I expected.

        I started thinking that He had sent me here to suffer the pains and grief of humankind. I really started to think I was a Christ figure. If that was the case, I believed, then I have to die eventually a martyr, set an example of what not to do. By Christmas, this idea consumed me—I would sacrifice myself.

        I wrote a 15-page analysis of Martin Scorsese's depiction of Christ figures in his films. The characters in the film were me. By the end of last term, I was arguing with other film students about Scorsese's portrayal of love relationships gone sour in his portion of New York Stories, titled "Life Lessons". I went to class inebriated and every time someone would say what they thought, I would say, "I totally disagree."

        My film professor, whom I have had for four semesters, asked me to elaborate on why I disagreed. I was suffering from a condition I call "too much mindscreen." These are episodes where my mind plays sound and vision bytes that envelop my normal perception and create new meanings to real situations. "Mindscreen" is the term Stanley Kubrick uses for his shots of a character's thoughts (i.e., Alex's visions of horse-whipping Christ as he reads The Bible in A Clockwork Orange). The French critics of the Cashiers de Cinema would probably call this "montage".

        "I don't know why I disagree. It's too complicated, never mind," I slurred. I did this several times, at one point telling a classmate that they were full of shit and they didn't understand the magnitude of what Scorsese was saying. I told them that they probably thought The Old Man and the Sea was about an old guy who goes fishing.

        Again the film prof, tried to coax me to elaborate on why I disagreed.

        "I don't know why I disagree. I just do," I said and slumped.

        I don't remember even going to class. I was told all of this. I got an "A" in that class, however, despite the many scenes I caused. I'm a natural.

        As the fall of the year approached, I prepared to weather any emotional or mental storm that, per self-fulfilling prophecy, came my way. I quit drinking at the start of August (after my birthday binge); started working out; lining up freelance business; got a job working in the library; lined up recruits for what looked to be a lucrative business venture; had a steady, faithful, live-in girlfriend; had a nice apartment in my favorite part of town; was writing and studying like never before. The world was mine.

        By the start of October I would have lost it all, By November I was arrested for public intoxication; by December I was evicted from two different places; and by January I was in a rehab hospital. Only now, in February, am I even remotely able to talk about it without wanting to shoot something. I blame that mostly on the impact that Taxi Driver has had on my life. I call two scenes to the stand:

I. OPENING DIALOGUE: (Robert DeNiro):

        "Loneliness has followed me all my life. The life of loneliness pursues me wherever I go: in bars, cars, coffee shops, theaters, stores and sidewalks. There is no escape. I am God's lonely man."

RESPONSE (Author):

        There is a magnitude of difference in being alone and being lonely, and I know that disturbing distinction. During my mental and emotional collapse(s) I was rarely left alone (We had a "party house"). My roommate said he always expected to come home and find me hanging from the chandelier. Nice. (I'll talk more about that ass-munch at a different time—otherwise I'll get too pissed to write and right now I'm rolling). The people who were there to watch my fall from grace didn't know what it was like to see someone really lose it. They had never seen anyone or anything so close to self-destruction. And I was trying, oh my brothers, I was trying to just simply quit existing. Surrounded by people, I was as lonely as an agoraphobic without a pet.

        I thought I had done this whole drinking-too-much thing to myself before, but I had never even come close in comparison. I was on an island of three: irrational thought, irrational behavior and my ability to disregard the two and let better judgment in the driver's seat. I was lonely—suffering from my inability to provoke empathy from any one for the madness and chemicals that had taken over my thinking. I was "God's lonely man".

II. DEMENTED PASSENGER SCENE: (Martin Scorsese to DeNiro):

        Scorsese is a demented passenger in the back of Travis Bickle's cab. They are parked outside an apartment building. There is a silhouette of a naked lady in the upstairs window. Scorsese tells DeNiro that is his wife, but not his apartment. He says he is going to kill her. PASSENGER: "Ever see what a .44 Magnum can do to a woman's pussy? That you should see."

RESPONSE (Author): I started looking for a gun.

        This is just the start of my treacherous downfall. It really started two years ago with the mental collapse of my ex-fiancé; or even farther back, when I left South Bend. Or even further, to the childhood trauma when I found out that Sesame Street wasn't just a few blocks away. And don't even talk to me about Nixon's trip to Peking in the first part of the sick 70s. I'll get the vapors.

        I am currently under house arrest for three DUIs. There is an electronic "bracelet" attached on my right ankle. There is a monitor attached to my phone which lets the nice people at the Falstaff County Community Corrections facility know when I come and go (I get to leave for school, AA meetings, haircuts and psychotherapy). I feel like a video cassette: if I leave without getting deactivated, an alarm goes off.

        Big Brother's not only watching, he has me on a leash.

        I have to end the testimony here and fill in great gaps of gossip later. I just wanted to touch base and let you know that I survived the storm and am only credits away from being graduated (as awkward as that sounds, that is grammatically correct). I want to tell you in great lengths about life in my world, and I have nothing to do for the next three months except study and write. SO: Be prepared. Start a folder. Wave at the next person to flip you off while driving. Tape an episode of Oprah over your roommate's favorite video. Transplant hairs from your butt on your chest. Make up a dirty nickname for your pet. Call the Psychic Friends Network and when they ask to whom they are speaking, say "Don't you know?"

        And, for God's sakes, start a really cool rumor about yourself.

       The days of free-hippy-love shit are over. It is time to eat or be eaten.

Saturday, Feb. 19, 1994

       Today is better. Stoned, of course. I got access to a video camera. On the night of my bitch maelstrom (see prior entry) I made my very first film short with a friend and fellow journalism student, Sean Rodriguez. He is Neal Cassidy, my maniacal chauffeur. He has a groovy little two-seater that we zip up to Hamilton County once a week for my "check-in" with the probate office. He is naturally wired. He is also only one of two friends here who weathered the storm of my last binge. Everyone else freaked out and washed their hands of me. Understandably so. I was a dangerous individual. My suicide was proving to be communal homicide. Rome was burning and I didn't even know one note on the violin.

       He and another girl, Ashley, were the only ones to stay and pick up the pieces. They made sure I went to school, had a place to stay (from Dec. 1 - Jan. 161 didn't sleep in a bed or house that was even remotely mine) and something to eat. They even made sure I had something to drink when the DTs were especially bad. Ashley is a journalism graduate student and works as a producer and writer for informational videos and films. She has been sending me freelance work and has found advertisers for Kitchen Haircut. She, Sean and I are writing a script for a film that we are going to enter in the Indiana Film competition. I get to direct it. Watch out.

       Went to Derrick's to smoke Buddha, though I was supposed to be at a meeting of Narcotics Anonymous. You can tell where my priorities are.

       I had made plans with my ex-cunt, ex-girlfriend, Kim, so I cancelled a scheduled video shoot and made Ashley go home (Ashley is madly in love with me for some crazy reason). Then the bitch stood me up. She called and said her mom had to take her to the emergency room because she fell at work. She, by the way, is a hypochondriac. If you have a cold, she has the flu. If you have the flu, she has pneumonia. If you break a bone, she gets an amputation, and so on.

       The problem with living with a hypochondriac is that you never know when they're just crying wolf. I said I hoped she was Ok and she said she would call me back when she was done at the hospital. For someone who was supposedly bleeding to death (her words) she sounded as if her wits were relatively gathered. I played along anyway and waited for her to call back.

Sun. Feb. 20, 1994

"Regard the society of women as a necessary unpleasantness of life, and avoid it as much as possible"

       PS It is not a federal offense to write back. Then, after a response from Davey, yes Davey—that non-letter-writng fool, I continued:

March 21, 1994

        "The impression left by such encounters was that we were herald-from some other world whose destiny it was to make momentary contact merely to preserve the tiny spark of faith."