Don’t Wanna Carry This Thing Just For Fun

I’ve always been a misanthropic angry little weirdo. As a kid I was a little ascetic, just a perfect little angel. Any mother would have prayed for a boy like me. I was considerate and quiet, I wasn’t gross or violent. I played video games and drew comic books, walked along the riverbank. I dreamed about Star Wars and in 5th grade those dreams turned to rock music and skateboarding.

Truly puberty is when the problems started. I realize now that my mother tried to find fault with the ascetic childhood me as well, but it was difficult because I was so perfect. I remember her once being critical of how much I played Super Nintendo. I threw the Nintendo in the trash. I did always react kind of extremely. I thought that’s what she wanted, and I was terrified of her criticism even as a child. But puberty exacerbated these problems as I went from the sweet little boy who didn’t cause any problems, to a sweet little boy who didn’t cause any problems that wanted to dress punk and kiss girls. Truthfully I was still very well behaved. No drugs, no sex, no drinking, no staying out late, not even really any pornography except for one or two occasions at sleepovers when boys would share whatever weird website they found. This held through middle school and high school. Can you imagine having a child who patiently waited until they were 18 to start smoking weed with their girlfriend? I was a parents’ dream.

But boy did my mom hate me lol. She hated the punk clothes and the shaggy hair. She hated my bad posture and the way I didn’t care about sports or extracurriculars. She hated the way my friends were older than me and would drive me around to do things in 9th grade. She hated the way the girls I dated were pretty and that they liked me. Middle school and high school was fraught with a lot of tension between me and my mom. I remember a few instances that really highlight the dynamic. What I remember from dating one girl is that my mom did not approve of me hanging out with this girl. Little called her Anna. So Anna was texting with me and we decided to meet at the mall. I knew my mom didn’t want me to see this girl so I told her I was going to the mall but didn’t mention meeting with anyone. She was suspicious because she always knew I was lying. When I got home from hanging out with Anna at the mall, my mother had printed out screenshots of my conversation with her making plans to go to the mall. Before she showed me the screenshots she asked me again about who I was spending time with. She then produced the screenshots and confronted me about it.

The accusations typically culminated in “your behavior is an indication that you are not on a righteous, holy, and Godly path.” But she was very wrong. I was on a Godly path. In high school I had read the Way of the Pilgrim and it had shown me a path to ascetic ablution through deprivation. In high school I did an experiment where I didn’t buy food for a whole year and just relied on eating whatever people offered me or didn’t want to eat. That whole year I ate more than enough because everyone was willing to share or had too much food and gave me leftovers. My mother was mortified when she read the article about me in the school paper. She said it proved that my politics were anathema to theirs. I suppose she was right, but if I look at it objectively, my path was taking me closer to God than hers ever had. So I continued on the path of asceticism and became enamored with the Desert Fathers and also started down the path of Zen. I was reading koans on my free periods my senior year of high school and I also read the Bhagavad Gita that year.

Maybe my mother had a point about Anna because she did truly hurt me in a way no one had before then. Anna was vicious. She was very aware of how attractive she was and used that to manipulate multiple boys at once. Her skills are truly unmatched and in the bad girls category she’s one of the baddest. She once kissed me and whispered in my ear that she wrote a note to me on my typewriter. Thinking it was a sexy or sweet message, I blushed and kissed her goodbye. What she wrote on the typewriter was simple. “I’m getting back with Anthony” (her ex). She was a powerfully horrible person and I believe that moment was the beginning of the world showing me just how painful the earth can be to someone who is naive.

It was the next year that I began drinking. Rock n roll was on my mind and college was proving a boring chore. I enjoyed skateboarding between classes while smoking a cigarette far more than I enjoyed going to class. This was the year everything changed. Sometime around 2009-2010 I started drinking beer and whiskey, gave up on God and embraced atheism, stopped playing pop punk and started playing indie rock again, and just basically chose the dark path in life. I remember several dark moments around this time. Firstly I found a warm Natty Ice in the parking lot and drank it over rocks before my roommates got home. That was my first beer experience. Before I turned 21 we went on a trip to a Gatlinburg cabin. They offered to get me something. I said I wanted whiskey. They got me a pint of Jack Daniels (ew) and some Cokes and we all started drinking. That was the first night I got drunk and the first night I threw up from drinking. It was a horrible night of the spins and drinking nasty whiskey but what it did was it primed the pump for a decade of extreme alcoholism. This was also the time period I began to go no contact with my parents. We were drifting apart and my independence that had led me to atheism and alcohol and rock n roll was also leading me far, far away from them. They didn’t want much to do with me and I didn’t want much to do with them. But this time period is what began a lifetime of my parents handing me money for no reason. I don’t think they will ever realize how damaging that was. For all of college I used the money I made from my part time jobs to live life. And I used the money my parents gave me to buy drugs and alcohol. Every time. This was the way for years. My parents paid for my alcohol and weed addictions. And I don’t think they even realize that now. But that’s how I budgeted my money and that’s how I justified spending so much on booze and weed.

I began buying 40s of Bud heavy for 2.50 apiece and drinking two of those while I played Mario 3 and listened to De La Soul. This was a nightly activity for me and soon the easy numbness of the beer drunk would set in and my brain would finally peacefully click into a state of happiness. I think the only time I’ve ever felt truly happy was when I was drunk. Or maybe when I was having sex. Those are probably the only things in this life besides playing music that give me true pleasure. And it was so powerful that now I can’t even touch alcohol or I will act like a cretin. I was working at Baskin Robbins and drinking 40s at night, which evolved to drinking pints of gin on the way home from work at Sam’s club. I would get a cherry dr. pepper from the cafe and fill it with a half pint of gin and drive home sipping on it. Sometimes when I would leave Sam’s class I could taste the liquor on my tongue before I even got to my car. This was the beginning of an alcohol obsession becoming an alcohol addiction.

It was at this time after Anna and I broke up that I began to see, let’s call her Jess. Jess was a quiet and shy girl from my high school, a year younger than me. Tall and pretty with a face like a porcelain doll. We quickly began having sex and dating which was mostly just us having unprotected sex in her bedroom between watching tv shows in the dark. We were never careful and soon she became pregnant. I knew in no uncertain terms that I did not want a baby and she said she agreed. I offered money for an abortion and after she said she did the procedure, she gave me my money back and told me that “it didn’t work.” I was very confused. It wasn’t until late one night a girl I met in the MTSU recording studio explained it to me when I opened up to her. She told me that this girl was lying to me. She never went to get an abortion. She was either too scared or secretly wanted to keep the baby. That was very eye opening for me and I’ll never forget that night talking with that Russian girl. She had a thick accent and I impressed her with my rudimentary Russian and my knowledge of Russian music on the guitar. I gave her a ride home and I’m ashamed to admit that we both discussed cheating on our partners with each other. But she told me it was a bad idea and I agreed even though looking back I probably would have cheated on Jess out of being completely unhappy in the relationship. Jess was very unstable. She was jealous of any girl I talked to or about. She wouldn’t leave the house much, especially after she got pregnant. It was sort of a hidden secret. She would hide in the apartment all day and at night I would bring her food and fuck her and try to make her feel better. She had decided to give up the baby for adoption and found a nice family she was cool with giving the baby to. I didn’t know what else to do so I went along with this. I didn’t want to keep the baby and clearly it was too late to try aborting for real. But a lot happened in that last trimester and it was during that time that I felt my first dose of true, crushing, life changing pain.

It happened when I tried to break up with Jess. I was really fed up with the relationship. Fights had escalated to a point that I didn’t like. Her jealousy was getting intense and as we neared the end of the pregnancy, everyone was getting very fed up with each other. I offered to help her with the pregnancy and be there for the birth, but that I couldn’t continue to date her. That her and I were just finished and that all the fights and the unhinged things that she had said and texted me were becoming too much to manage and I just wanted out. I had stuck around because of her pregnancy but it was becoming clear that we were reaching a breaking point, so I thought the best option would be to explain that I didn’t have romantic feelings anymore but that I would offer to be there physically and emotionally to help with the transition with the baby. This didn’t go well lol.

She grabbed a knife from the kitchen and came back into her apartment room and barricaded the door, sitting down on her butt and holding the knife up at me. She told me I wasn’t leaving until I told her we were back together. It was something to that effect. Like that we needed to talk about it and she needed to hear me say that I love her or she was going to kill herself or me. I slowly approached her without saying much and grabbed her wrist, holding the knife away from us. Somehow I managed to push past her and get the door open. I don’t remember what happened to the knife. I either dropped it or never had it in my hands to begin with. But I made it out and the door slammed behind me from the pressure of her body. I ran out of the apartment as fast as I could and began running down the stairs that sit directly outside of her front door. She was fast on my heels and as I rounded the bottom of the stairs and bolted for my car she was already heading down the stairs after me.

Well she fell. I didn’t see it. I didn’t hear it. But when I got to my car she was still on my tail crying with a bloody kneecap, and she used her body to block the back of my car so I couldn’t drive away. A minute later after hearing the yelling and crazy scene in the parking lot, one of the resident administrators from the apartment came down and asked us what was going on. I told her she was keeping me from leaving. She was a resident and I was just trying to get away and just trying to leave. She told him that I had pushed her down the stairs, which was obviously a lie as I was in front of her running from the knife and the situation.

The RA sort of grabbed her and allowed me to leave while she screamed and tried to get away from him. That was really the last time I saw her for a while. It was after this that she used her brother’s phone to fake her suicide to me. She texted me as her brother and told me that “Jess killed herself tonight. We found her body ________ and she used a gun, blah blah blah” I should have called the number immediately. Because I would have gotten Jess. But I was very naive. Painfully, embarrassingly naive to the point that it could have caused my own death. Luckily I did put it together that Jess was still alive as I had looked on the internet and spoken with some friends about it.

It was around this time that I was told that Jess did not give the baby to the couple who was promised it, because the baby died in stillbirth. The thought that my running away from Jess and her chasing me had caused the fall that caused the stillbirth, haunted me… I remember the next summer being flown down to Florida to play in one of the musicals for MTSU. I cleverly had them take my bass on the bus so I didn’t have to check it on the plane. I filled the bass case with a little bag of weed and flew guilt free to Florida to meet my bass and my bud at the hotel. It was pretty glorious, and I am mainly including that because I kind of felt like I was in a movie like Blow or something ya know? So anyway when I got to Florida I immediately went to the liquor store and got the biggest cheapest bottle of whiskey I could find. The end of the relationship with Jess and the beginning of the relationship with the next girl had brought on a new level of alcoholism and drinking that I think was absolutely detrimental to my mind body and soul for years to come. One thing led to another and our one free night on the beach turned into a slam banging drunken solo night of me crying on the beach, crying on the sidewalk, crying on the road, and then finally crying locked out of my hotel on a bench outside of the room. I had drank half the bottle of liquor to myself. I even got stopped by a cop who didn’t seem to care that I was publicly slamming straight whiskey and stumbling around crying about my dead baby. He just said watch out for the dunes and carry on. LOL.

It was that night that I got friendly with a girl, let’s call her Autumn. Her and her friends caught me outside the hotel trying to sleep and asked me if I was ok. They let me hang out with them and Autumn and I had an extremely flirty late night on the beach. We held hands and I told her about how suicidal I was and unhappy I was. I don’t think I told her about the dead child but I told her that I was in a lot of emotional pain. I’m pretty sure I grabbed her and said “what if we just made out right now?” and she was SOOOOOOOO down oh my god i was awful. I was an awful person especially cuz I didn’t even kiss her. I was dating someone at the time. But the alcohol makes you not give a fuck about your morals. So I was just teasing this poor girl I guess for my amusement.

I just tell that story as an example of how I was using alcohol to try and deal with the guilt of playing a role in that child dying.

So I was never the same after that. There’s a lot more to that story but I won’t tell that here because I don’t think it fits into the narrative of what I’m trying to say. Really I’m trying to trace this emotional pain that has followed me my entire life to where I am today because If I don’t do something drastic, I’m truly afraid of what might happen to me.

END OF PART 1