The sound of coffee laden water dripping through the machine in my kitchen is the metronome to my writing. Although while I wrote that last sentence it stopped, signaling that before I even get started with this piece, I have to get up, and, as the old cliché goes ‘pour myself a cup of Joe’, if you ask me, that’s one nasty expression, but more on that later, I have my cup of Frank, or some other bastard, to attend to.

Back

It’s 1:50 in the morning, this seems to be the time that HBO decides to play all those great movies, right now a Crow is leading Erik to a crime scene to avenge his girlfriend’s death, and last night I was honored to see a cop tear off some kids face with a dirt bike wheel in Pet Cemetery 2, although that’s not what HBO decided to call it on their on screen menu, they revised it to Pet Semetery 2, I wonder if they even noticed.
Ironically, isn’t this the time that rednecks in Montana find it necessary to chop up their kids and bury them in the backyard? Or better yet, kidnap their neighbors and burn them alive in the woods? Nothing like a macabre pondering to start off an essay, that ironically, is being written because I don’t know how to connect the beginning and the end of a story about me getting bored with the way life is progressing and I realize I can’t change that too well, but I can change how it goes for my neighbors, so I strangle them with a clothes hanger. The real fun of this won’t be creating it, but turning it in to my teacher, and asking her to skim it over, and then watching her eyes widen in disgust. Damn, my cup of Albert went cold.

Back

Am I the only one who thinks that the dude in the Crow’s make up is about as cool as a Goth can look? When I was young my brother used to terrorize me by drawing that on my face with a permanent marker every Wednesday, that was back when he had a girlfriend who clawed my face up, and looking back at it, she was high and I was being a buzz kill, so now in reflection, I think I earned it. After all, I slapped my friend Sickboy across the face because he was chasing Ghost with a screwdriver.
Scrolling up and looking at what I’ve written, I never got up to get my cup of Steve instead I got up and forgot what I was doing, for real, I’ll be back.

Back

Did you know that after five days without sleep you will hallucinate? I’ve never been that far without sleep, but I do know it has nothing to do with the amount of time you go without sleep, but with how much energy you expend. How I know this is both trivial to the scheme of life, and, ironically, vastly important to my stalker. When I was in 8th grade I wrestled under the guidance of a large, fun loving man named Bronc. This guy was the exact definition of someone who lives for the moment. He’s overweight, drinks, smokes, swears, and doesn’t care what you think about it. I met him when I was in 7th grade, on my first day of my tragic encounter with school sports. I was a day late for wrestling tryouts. For the life of me I can’t remember why, the story of my life. A day and 15 odd minutes if I’m not mistaken, I walked in and expected a reprimand, but instead I was greeted with a handshake and the words ‘get ready’. He was teaching the team a move called a ‘crack-back’. It’s a move where you go down on your knees, slam into his knees, throw your opponent over your shoulder and slam him back forward on his back. It knocks the wind out of your opponent, makes him see white and blue lines, and gets you 5 points or a pin in Freestyle wrestling. Sadly, it’s not legal in Collegic wrestling, but it’s still one hell of a move.
The schools annual ‘talent’ show was that night, so we only had a 4th of the stage to practice on, and the mats were missing, all that we had were those cushions that schools put under the hoop of their basketball poles so that those unfortunate athletes who run up for the time honored lay-up don’t bash open their precious cranium’s on the wall that they invariably run into every time. Needless to say when I went home from practice with a headache that left me crippled for the rest of the night.
Skip ahead a year, three heartaches, two hairstyles, and the process of getting my favorite shirt torn open from the collar down to the hem, and you’ll find me late January in my 8th grade year, about to fail in math if I didn’t turn in 20 homework assignments the next day. I learned this after being pulled aside after an intense wrestling practice by my math teacher, ironically this is the same man that I wrote a poem about stapling his eyes shut while at the same time gouging his chest with sharpened pencils. Despite how humorous it sounds, it was a very eerie poem, one strait from my heart.
When I got home I immediately sat in front of the T.V. and didn’t do a damned thing. 10 o clock rolls up and I remembered what he had said. So I pulled out the accursed math book, one which is now decorated with several of my favorite obscenities, and threw my face to the grindstone, and hoped that reconstructive surgery didn’t cost too much.
I completed sixteen horrid assignments before I had to go to school that day; I turned them in and was accused of cheating because I didn’t show enough work. Angry and with something to prove, my sleep deprived self went to practice, only to be pummeled into something that resembled a celebrity who had just met with a disgruntled fan.
Returning home, I realized how tired I was and I got into the shower, this is where I had my hallucination. I have on of those stand-up showers, one with a gaudy drain in the center that has squares for holes. When the water drains out of the shower it forms drops and drips down into the dark oblivion that is the pipe under the drain. These drops have a unique way of catching light, that, to the eyes of someone who has gone through the daily mental assault of school twice, and two wrestling practices where the best word to describe it is preparation, preparation for the Iron Man races, all this without sleep makes those drops look like eyes. Big glowing cat eyes looking at me. I think it was then that I became obsessed with the idea that everyone has a stalker, it’s just that most of the time the stalker doesn’t realize what (s)he is doing.
While I admit that the hallucination lacked that heroin addict look and feel, it was enough to inspire me to drift off into sleep on my couch while my dad asked me what was wrong. That was the start of a habit that I still posses, but that’s for a later paragraph, right now my cup of Jim is depleted, but not for long.

Back

Did you know that the human scrotum never stops growing? It’s true, I read it somewhere, and technically, so have you. Though, I hope you take it as a fun fact and forget it, letting people like me continue to feel smart because we’ve amassed a collection of useless facts that will never help us, unless we’re trying to get laid by valedictorian. Then again, if they’re so smart, they should see through the mask and keep their pants on, especially for someone who’s smart by accident, such as myself.
3:39 AM, this would be the time those rednecks who are driving back from whatever obscure place that they left the bodies of their victims, fall asleep at the wheel and park their grill on a tree, and themselves, because they aren’t wearing seatbelts, ten feet ahead looking like Marlyn Manson will when a group of white collar Christians get a hold of him while he’s alone. Poetic justice really, their victims were killed because they were at the wrong place for that time, just like our friend the redneck. Though when I say ‘that time’ in the victim’s case, I mean time that the friendly redneck decided to murder them, and when I say it in the case of the axe happy neighbor, I mean sleep. On second thought, that isn’t poetic justice, but I just love those words.

Back

I hate prank callers, especially uncreative ones. That reminds me of a time when I was drunk (shh, don’t tell my parents, even though they know) with Ghost and we were both bored as students, so we walked to the payphone at a gas station nearby, the following is a transcript of the third call we made, the first two weren’t that entertaining.
Click. “Hello?”
“Hey dude”
“Hey”
“How’s it going?”
“Good”
“Did I wake you up?”
“No”
“Are you stoned or something?”
“No”
“Oh, I love you”
“I love you too”
“You don’t know me dude”
“Oh, well who is it?”
“Tyler”
“Hi Tyler.”
“Well dude, it’s been fun calling you, but I got to go.”
“Ight, peace”
“Later man”

On reflection, it wasn’t that funny, but after five beers it was hilarious, then again, so is running into barb wire, or hearing Ghost yell ‘fuck’ after jumping off a hill and spraining his ankle in a waiting pot hole. Needless to say it was a long night. Sorry my cup of Chuck needs to be accompanied by his pervert cousins.

Back

I had to start another batch, which means I’ve regained my liquid metronome, which means that, in a sense, I’ve returned to my beginning 2 and a half hours later, right about the time that some hapless traveler stumbles across the redneck’s lifeless corpse. And with that, I leave you with a goodnight or better morning, whichever you really prefer, and with this final pondering. If you were to put a selection from Anne Rice into Word and get the statistics on it, you would see that the grade level she writes at is a 11.3, and the first paragraph of this, was 12, and I’m only 14, does that seem right? Didn't think so; so fuck word and whatever it thinks it knows.