Well this has been an eventful week! Last Friday I joined the top 39% of American citizens by acquiring a college degree. Although around these parts it’s considered a “what the fuck you going to do with that?” type of degree, I still graduated college. And wowsers, I sure did like college.

 

While receiving my college education I was introduced to binge drinking, marijuana cigarettes, stealing, I learned how to operate an internet system, and I lost my virginity.

 

I vividly remember the night that Radar and Birddawg forced me to get drunk for the first time. It was a Wednesday and I had stopped by their apartment to pick up a book from Furniture class that I had let their roommate Laser borrow. As soon as I walked through the door their apartment hit my face with a stink of incense and ramen noodles. Radar and Birddawg were unable to talk because they were coughing so hard and then Laser vomited on the floor while handing me a bottle of Night Train Express citrus wine. He told me that it tasted like fruit and that everybody was drinking it.

 

“But I don’t even turn thirty-one until this summer”, I said.

“You either open that bottle and turn it upside-down or you can open that door and upside-outside you ditzy bitch”, said Laser.

 

“That doesn’t make any sense”, I said.

 

Then Birddawg held a spatula to my throat in a threatening manner while baby bottling the entire bottle of Night Train down my throat. Apparently I turn into a slut when I’m drunk because I woke up with full makeup on my face and somebody had written “Insert Here” across my top lip and I had a tramp stamp above my ass crack that read, “Coal Train Entrance”. Radar had to explain to me what that meant and I was not proud of it after I found out.

 

Oh, and to anyone in their early to mid thirties that are still looking for that special person to lose their virginity to, just pick someone and get it over with. The first time is such a let down and vaginas are really weird and a little off-putting at first glance and sniff.

 

The biggest thing on my mind today though is a childhood friend, Heather Erickson. I’ve known her since Kindergarten or pretty much as long as I can remember. We were never best friends or anything despite being in many classes together from ages 5 to 18, and at one time we may have been silent enemies because she could always kick my ass at basketball, but we always talked to each other and did all the things that little kids do. Once we entered “adulthood” and bumped into each other at the bar or the gym we’d always be happy to see each other and play catch-up. That’s how childhood friends are; when you no longer see one another on a regular basis, not because one of you did something to ruin the relationship, but just because you separated in the natural drift of life. And when you randomly bump into each other later in life there are no hard feelings for not staying in touch and it’s easy to start up and maintain a conversation about what you’ve missed in their life. Whenever I saw Heather at the YMCA we’d go back and forth about our vast knowledge of fitness and my mental library of supplements and the world of meat-headery, and then we’d go our separate ways.

 

The most significant thing that I remember about my childhood with Heather was that in my three decades of talking shit and delivering insults, she was the first person that I apologized to out of guilt. It was either Kindergarten or first grade, but I pushed her off the side of the slide that had these two fireman poles on each side. She was trying to slide down one of them and I pushed her, causing her to fall and hurt her leg. She didn’t rat me out like most of the nerdy cowards that I picked on before they grew taller than me, but I always talked to her in school and I felt bad about it, so I later told her that I was sorry. I wasn’t forced to say sorry by an adult or because I feared that I would get in trouble, I told her that I was sorry because I genuinely felt bad about hurting her. That’s rare because I have trouble saying sorry.

 

Heather died of cancer this morning and I have been thinking about her all day. I haven’t talked to her since last summer and I don’t even remember what the conversation was about. I knew of her fight with cancer and we had skimmed the surface of it in conversations, but nothing too deep. I’ve spent the entire day moping around my poopy basement apartment and even crying a few times, due to my thoughts of her being gone and the reminder of my own mortality and the lives of other friends. It’s an odd coincidence for this to happen right after I finally finished college and have to throw myself back out into the rat race. Life is the strangest thing, you learn how to pick your own battles but sometimes the battle picks you.

 

I’m sorry Heather, and I hope there are better playgrounds where you are now.

This is… oh geez, um, this is really difficult for me to talk about. You see, I have been shopping at Wal-Mart almost as long as I can remember. I mean, I remember when I was just a wee child and my mother or father would take me to Hinky-Dinky or Alco or even K-Mart to buy food and clothes, and I was known in the village as the kid that went completely ape shit at every store unless my parents bought me the toy that I wanted. Then when I became a man, or maybe it was when I was around ten or so, Wal-Mart came into my life and changed it forever.

 

Wal-Mart was just a shitty generic store that mostly sold clothes and toys when I was a kid, but I grew and became wiser, and so did Wal-Mart. Until one day I was old enough to drive a car and shave my face and Wal-Mart had grown into a very respectable Wal-Mart Supercenter. It just happened so fast. You get so wrapped up in the daily grind that you fail to see them grow. One day they don’t even have automatic doors and the next time you see them they have self-checkout and motorized carts for the ham planets to drive around the store. The Wal-Mart Supercenter grew up to be so strong that it forced Alco and the gayly named Hinky-Dinky out of town. And who the hell still shops at K-Mart?

 

My high school friends and I shopped at the Supercenter daily. We even managed to master the art of shoplifting from Wal-Mart before they put in the detectors at the doors and I still don’t know how the cameras didn’t see us. My favorite thing to steal was the “No Shoplifting” signs because the irony made me giggle. There were so many different ways of scamming Wal-Mart back in the day, but now if you bought a new Playstation 3 and replaced it with your broken Playstation 3, they actually check the serial number when you return it. And all of the video games are behind glass and it’s impossible to walk around eating doughnuts from the bakery without having to pay for them first. Oh listen to me, I’m just rambling on about the good old days. I was so loyal to Wal-Mart and I went there so often that I eventually just called it Church.

 

Times have changed now. Both the Church and I are aging and falling apart. I messed up my shoulder a few weeks ago and I’ll be damned if my left knee hasn’t been fussing with me, all while Wal-Mart stopped selling my omega-3 eggs and their prices have gone up a pinch. Well anyway, I think it was about 4, maybe 5 weeks ago that I realized just how cheap and healthy it would be to make apples the keystone of my diet. This was before I learned the hard way that eating 5 or more apples a day would lead to the most violent and unforgiving diarrhea that isn’t caused by Ebola.

 

So I was about a week into this apple and protein shake diet and had yet to experience the horrible hot-water shits and I was driving to Wal-Mart late at night to stock up on more apples. Just as I was about to take a right to turn into Wal-Mart, I got a wild hair in my ass and decided to take a risk in life, so I turned left and drove into the Hy-Vee parking lot instead.

 

The first thing that I saw when I entered Hy-Vee, or the HIV as I call it, were the largest, plumpest, and most gorgeous red braeburn apples that I have ever seen. These things were the size of dinosaur eggs and when I approached the towering pile of gargantuan apples I looked at the sign to the right and it said, “48 Cents a Pound”. I bought 12 pounds of these freakish apples for less than 6 dollars. I had to buy more egg whites and olive oil while I was there because I didn’t want to pay for less than 6 dollars worth of apples using my debit card. Even with the other shit that I bought it was less than 15 bucks. And those HIV apples, oh boy, I gotta tell you that these were the best goddamn apples that this sumbitch has ever eaten. And they’re so damn cheap that I’m having my car engine converted so it can run off of apples. You know what else? The HIV’s egg whites were of much higher quality and slightly cheaper than the Church’s watery white crap. The HIV’s egg whites look like they just came right out of the shell, with their higher viscosity and clearer complexion. And the extra virgin olive oil that I bought there, well it tastes just like Wal-Mart’s olive oil and it’s about the same price so whatever.

 

Anyway, I have found myself turning left into Hy-Vee whenever I need to buy groceries now. I feel like a traitor or a heretic for leaving my beautiful Wal-Mart. And I thought those leviathan apples at the HIV would go back up to some ridiculous price once they were not on sale, but they’re still just 68 cents a pound. I haven’t bought any more of them though because I am unable to cope with the apple splatters every 2 hours, but still, that’s just so damn cheap. And guess what? The HIV sells omega-3 eggs now and the Church doesn’t. I’m even purchasing my usual Wal-Mart fare like popcorn and Sriracha Sauce at the HIV now. I still buy my generic Mio water flavoring stuff at Wal-Mart though because Hy-Vee water flavoring stuff tastes like cock-snot when mixed in my vodka.

 

I enjoy myself thoroughly while shopping at Hy-Vee. The people there are infinitely more attractive in both the visual and olfactory senses and I have yet to meet a checkout worker that I wouldn’t want to have intercourse with and they look genuinely happy to be there. But whenever I walk out the doors of the HIV, I am forced to look at my faithful Church staring back at me from across the street. And each time I look, those blue colors on the Wal-Mart sign appear to be just a little bit bluer.

(While mingling backstage during college plays, I would have everyone gather around or sit on my lap as I told these stories called “Two Weeks Later”. They were called that because all of them ended with someone dying two weeks later but you never knew who it would be. All of them were very politically incorrect and what I would call “so dark it’s funny”. I never wrote them down and I mostly made them up as I told them so I don’t remember most of them, but I still get comments now and then from people that enjoyed my “Two Weeks Later” stories. I got a few of those comments this week so here’s one of the stories I remember and I have to warn you that these stories are long.)

 

It was mid September in the year 2006, in the city of Kokomo, Indiana. Jeff had recently turned 14 and entered the 8^th grade. He was destined to be a future homecoming king and football star, his future was perfectly aligned to receive all of the wonderful perks that childhood popularity provides. It was lunchtime and Jeff was sitting at the popular table where stories of exotic and pricey summer vacations were told, and innocent young sexual glances were shot back and forth across the table like a pinball game. The popular lunch table almost glowed from the bright futures of every young person sitting at it.

 

On the outskirts of the lunchroom, Rocky was sitting at a lunch table that didn’t shine so bright, if it even shined at all. This isolated table was often rumbling with unwarranted grunts, drooling lips, and thousand yard stares. At the moment the table was in an uproar over the rightful ownership of a loose Animal Cracker that had fallen out of Francine the Forehead’s mouth and landed in Nurp-Nurp Nate’s applesauce. Rocky reached for the cracker himself but he was quickly scolded with a snort and an attempted bite from Peanut Butter Paul. Rocky may have been lacking in the smarts department but Peanut Butter Paul was pants-on-head crazy. This all made for a common lunch period at Rocky’s table, because it was the Special Education table.

 

Sitting next to Rocky was his best friend in the entire world, Barnaby Swandance. Barnaby Swandance had been Rocky’s best friend since Rocky was 2 years old. He went everywhere with Rocky and Rocky always kept a seat next to him empty so Barnaby Swandance could sit with him. Rocky had to constantly grumble loud warning noises for people not to sit in Barnaby Swandance’s spot as well as warn them to not sit on Barnaby Swandance, because Barnaby Swandance was invisible to everyone but Rocky. In Rocky’s malformed mind Barnaby Swandance’s name was as clear as day, but the rest of the world knew his invisible friend as “Jarwock Fleep” because of the way Rocky pronounced it.

 

Everyone in the school knew to steer clear of the empty seat next to Rocky. The students did this partly out of respect for Rocky but mostly because Rocky was a 16-year-old 7^th grader, about 6 foot 4, and weighed around 250. Rocky was a big boy and he lacked the ability to control his own strength.

 

On this day however, there was an unclaimed dare traveling around the popular table. The dare was to slam one’s lunch tray on the empty seat next to Rocky. To the popular kids it would be the simple act of making a loud noise by slamming an empty spot on a bench with a tray, but to Rocky it would be the assassination of the greatest rainbow colored alien fireman that he had ever known, it would be the death of Barnaby Swandance.

 

The dare made several trips around the table until everyone was staring at Jeff and his good friend Seth. Neither Seth nor Jeff wanted to do it, so it all came down to an arm wrestling match. The arm wrestling match was over before it started. Jeff was largely outmatched by Seth’s superior arm strength that had been developed through pitching for his summer baseball team and a hectic masturbation schedule forced upon him by recent puberty.

 

Jeff was already ashamed of what he was about to do, but he knew that he had no choice. In the 8^th grade, being unable to insult or attack those that are lower in social status is a weakness that will leave the person wounded and cause them to be the prey of the popular kids that are not restrained by empathy. Jeff tried his best to hold a fake smile on his face while he slowly finished his lunch. Within 3 minutes, Jeff had taken the last bite of his tater tot casserole and was sitting in front of a lunch tray that was empty besides a scraped clean plate and an empty milk carton. Jeff continued to talk to those around him, hoping that the bell would ring before he was forced to murder Rocky’s dearest friend.

 

“Stop fucking being a pussy you fucking stupid pussy!” Seth chortled towards Jeff in his 8^th grade lingo.

 

“Fuck dude, alright. I’m going man, just give me like a sec.” He replied.

 

Jeff stood up with his tray and looked around the lunchroom as he planned his prison movie-esque attack. He would walk directly to the trashcan, dump his milk carton, place his plate and silverware on the cleaning rack, but hold onto his tray and take the long walk around the right side of the room, where he would end up in the area known as the “Subderps”, where the Special Ed table was located. Jeff performed each of his preplanned actions and then found himself approaching Rocky and the empty spot on the bench next to him.

 

Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion to Jeff. He walked past the trailer park table, his eyes fixed on the empty seat. The entire weeaboo table stopped trading Pokemon cards to watch Jeff’s hesitant walk towards the Subderps. The static chatter of the lunchroom slowly quieted down as every student sensed that something mean and meaningless, but entertaining was about to happen.

 

Rocky turned his head and made eye contact with Jeff, but he was looking right through him. Jeff smiled and came to a stop at the right of Rocky, behind the empty space on the bench. With one swift move Jeff raised his empty tray above his head and then slapped it down as hard as he could on the empty bench space beside Rocky.

 

“Wham!!!!”

 

Rocky immediately looked to his right and saw Barnaby Swandance’s fireman’s hat shatter and then his head disappeared into his own body and the rest of him was smashed flat onto the bench. There was so much glowing rainbow blood everywhere; it was the most violent thing that Rocky had ever witnessed. In a fraction of a second Rocky’s entire soul was crushed and he shouted his beloved Barnaby Swandance’s name in anguish.

 

“JARWOCK FLEEP!!!!!”

 

The lunchroom fell completely silent, and then it roared with laughter.

 

Rocky crouched over the pulverized corpse of Barnaby at a complete loss for words, though Rocky was always at a loss for words. He looked up at Jeff who was still standing there dumbstruck, holding the tray covered in invisible rainbow blood that had murdered his friend. Rocky stood up, towering over Jeff’s thin 5 foot 5 frame. All of the laughter stopped.

 

Rocky was absolutely livid. To this day, Amanda Kalhonik still swears that she saw actual smoke coming out of Rocky’s ears. Jeff was frozen in fear as Rocky grabbed Jeff’s head with his gigantic gorilla hands and in one awkward move he slammed him onto the ground, falling on top of him.

 

Rocky proceeded to pound Jeff’s face and chest with a potpourri of punches, slaps, and scratches. It took 3 handlers from the Special Ed department to pull Rocky off of Jeff and then they calmed him down with fish sticks and a Hershey’s bar. Jeff was sent to the school nurse where his minor wounds were treated and as soon as his nose stopped bleeding he was taken directly to the principal’s office.

 

Dr. Hinky was not happy to see Jeff in his office. Jeff began the argument saying that it was an accident, claiming that Rocky bumped into him and he dropped the tray on the bench as a result but Dr. Hinky wasn’t buying it. Eventually Jeff caved to Principal Hinky’s questioning and admitted that he was pressured into harming Rocky’s invisible friend. Jeff made a point to show that he was the only one that was injured and Rocky didn’t have a scratch on him but Dr. Hinky explained why Rocky could not be held accountable for his actions and he would not be punished. Principal Hinky understood the earth shattering weight of 8^th grade peer pressure, but he had to punish Jeff to make sure that the uptown kids stayed out of the Subderps during lunchtime. So Jeff was sentenced to an immediate 3 day out of school suspension. Jeff’s parents were called and his father came to pick him up. Along with the suspension Jeff’s parents grounded him for an entire month, without allowance.

 

Jeff would spend a month in misery but Rocky had spiraled into a lifetime of lonely hell. Rocky had no one to sit next to him on the bus and discuss topics like the government’s discretionary spending or challenging each other to see who could look at the sun the longest. Rocky’s life was empty, but the space to his right was not. He no longer kept a seat open for Barnaby Swandance to sit in, because Barnaby was dead. Although students were now sitting next to Rocky on the bus and at the lunch table, he felt more isolated than ever.

 

Jeff spent his 3-day suspension playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and enjoyed the time in his bedroom more than he had expected. During the time alone in his bedroom, he realized how horrible he felt about what he had done to Rocky. He decided that once his suspension was finished, the following Monday he would take the bus to school so he could apologize to Rocky personally. He knew that Rocky had severe learning disabilities, but he was sure that all people could feel compassion and forgiveness, as those were instinctive emotions and not complex thoughts.

 

The following Monday, Jeff passed on his mother’s offer of a ride to school. Instead, Jeff walked to the nearest school bus stop and waited. When the bus arrived he entered and quickly looked around to find Rocky. He looked towards the back and there, in the second to last row, was Rocky sitting with his head down and a student sitting on his right.

 

Rocky looked more lost than he had ever looked before, and that’s really saying something. Rocky was struggling to find a reason to go on with the suffering of the slings and arrows of life and Jeff hated himself for causing another person to be in such pain. Jeff approached Rocky’s seat near the back. He looked at the girl that was nervously sitting on Rocky’s right and politely asked her if she would mind moving and allowing him to sit there. She quickly jumped out of the seat and sat elsewhere, Jeff sat down next to Rocky where Barnaby Swandance had sat for the previous 14 years. Rocky silently leered at the floor without noticing Jeff sitting next to him. Jeff whipped up a sentimental smile and gently tapped on Rocky’s shoulder. Rocky raised his head and looked at Jeff.

 

“Hey, Rocky. Look, I’m really really sorry about what I did, man. I mean, it was just a joke and I know you don’t really understand it now, but like, maybe someday you will. But hey, I was just wondering if we could let bygones be bygones and you know, maybe I’ll even let you sit at the cool table with me. I mean it, I’m really sor-“

 

Rocky once again placed his gorilla hands on both sides of Jeff’s head and took him to the ground. Only this time Rocky was repeatedly slamming Jeff’s head onto the floor of the bus.

 

None of the students on the bus knew what to do. The bus driver, Marigold Skolnick, radioed for assistance and then ran to the back of the bus to pull Rocky off of Jeff.

 

Marigold pulled on Rocky’s shoulders and his Handy Manny t-shirt but Rocky’s grip on Jeff’s head was impenetrable. She could see that Jeff was unconscious and she feared for his life. Marigold looked around and saw a hardcover version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy resting on a young boy’s lap. She grabbed the book, raised it over her head, and slammed it down on the back of Rocky’s head. Rocky went limp and heaved over onto the unconscious Jeff beneath him.

 

The aftermath of this incident was a sad one. Jeff suffered severe brain damage that he would never fully recover from. Maybe it was a cruel and odd case of poetic justice that Jeff would now find himself sitting at the Special Ed table during lunchtime and he was now facing the same future that Rocky once faced. Rocky was hit in the back of the head so hard that it caused him to be permanently blind. His brain damage may have been more severe but little change was seen in his behavior other than being blind.

 

As for the bus driver, Marigold Skolnick, her life was left in shambles. The incident was recorded on the bus video camera and despite Principal Hinky’s efforts it was quickly leaked to Fox News where it was shown every 20 to 45 minutes for nearly 2 weeks. At first, the school defended Marigold’s actions but the general public was outraged. The city of Kokomo demanded that Marigold’s job as a bus driver be terminated and that she should face criminal charges for assaulting a minor. Principal Hinky gave Marigold his sincerest apologies but he told her that his back was against the wall and he had to fire her. She understood and left quietly with tears in her eyes.

 

Marigold Skolnick was 52 years old and very unemployable. She had been divorced for 18 years and her only son was serving 22 years in the Ohio penitentiary for selling 11 kilos of Sudafed to a methamphetamine drug lord. She had nobody to support her, she was not yet old enough for social security, and it was impossible for her to find a job due to being nationally known as the bus driver that ruined the lives of 2 children.

 

She got down to her last 20 dollar bill, and she used it to buy a 1.75 liter bottle of Barton’s vodka and a bottle of generic Unisom sleeping pills. Marigold wrote a heartfelt suicide note detailing how deeply sorry she was for what she had done, but also arguing that she had no choice and believed that she had been wronged. She took the entire bottle of generic Unisom with 8 shots of cheap vodka while sitting in a lawn chair on her porch. She was unaware that her regular use of Benadryl and sipping cheap vodka before bed would render this suicide attempt useless because of her immunity to antihistamines and crappy booze. After about 20 minutes, Marigold decided to go into her house and lay herself down in her bed downstairs for her final sleep. She was feeling very groggy as she walked into the house. She came to the stairs leading down to her bedroom and upon taking the first step she fell down the entire flight of twelve carpeted cement stairs. Her right femur broke and she had a crack in her hip. She yelled for help but since she was the most hated woman in America at the time, nobody came close enough to her house to hear her. She tried to dial 911 on her cellphone but the battery was dead because she was unable to pay her electric bill for 3 weeks and was unable to charge her phone nor pay the cellphone bill.

 

Marigold managed to stay alive a while longer with her broken bones at the bottom of the stairs because she had 5 Werther’s Original candies in the left pocket of her bathrobe. But two weeks later, she died.

Thursday, January 1^st, 2015

8:00AM:

I am spending what I plan to be my last college Christmas break in Denver Colorado at my older brother’s house. For some strange reason I got into bed around 11:00PM and fell asleep around 12:30, completely sober, on New Years Eve. At 8 in the morning my nephew that is just shy of being 4 years old jumps into my bed and begins intermittently hugging me and kicking me in the face while telling me that he’s going to Nebraska today. But I know that he isn’t going to Nebraska, he’s going to Brazil, and he’s just confused because he’s been driven to Kearney Nebraska, back to Denver, and now he is going to fly to Brazil within the span of 4 days.

 

8:30AM – 11:30AM:

My sister-in-law and my nephew are going to Brazil for the next 3 weeks and my brother and I are helping them do some last minute packing. Their flight leaves at 2:00PM. I mostly spend this time wrestling with my nephew and watching Katy Perry videos on Chromecast with him. He is only 3 and has an enormous crush on Katy Perry. He’s as wild as any 3-year-old but the moment she appears on the screen he sinks down into the couch and stares at her, and randomly blurts out, “Sh-she-she’s bootiful Unca Luke.” He is now saying the same thing about Lorde after I’ve shown him some of her videos. After eating 2 eggs for breakfast with a lot of coffee and skipping lunch we drive to the airport. For some reason I-25 was closed and we had to take a detour that nearly doubled our drive to the airport, but that’s another story.

 

1:00PM

My sister-in-law and nephew have successfully been transported to the airport, passed through TSA, and have boarded their plane to Miami International Airport. My brother and I waste no time in becoming lazy piece of shit bachelors and we find the nearest marijuana dispensary on the way home. Pot has been legal in Colorado since 2012, and although I lived in Denver for what, like five, maybe six years, I have never bought weed in a legal dispensary here in Colorado.

 

So we pull into the parking lot of a strip mall and park in front of a dispensary called, “The Green Solution”. We enter through a thick glass door into a small white room. A girl that is attractive in that nerdy yet kind of cool looking way is sitting at a lone desk with a computer on it, and she looks awkwardly happy to see us.

“Hello. How are you gentlemen today?”

“Oh, not much.”

“I need to see your driver’s licenses, thank you.”

We pull out our ID’s like fucking bosses and hand them over; in my mind I flicked it like a cigarette at her forehead.

A security guard that I could probably kick the shit out of enters the room through the specially locked door in the wall, as some sketchy tobacco smoker enters from the parking lot.

“I see you’re from Nebraska. Are you visiting or recently moved here?”

“I’m visiting. I’ve heard fairy tales about this state and I’m here to see if they are true.”

Grinning, she says, “Open the door when you hear a click.”

 

We walk to the door and wait for a click sound.

We try to open it… it won’t open.

“Did you hear a click?”

“No, I just thought…”

I try to open the door… no success.

“CLICK!”

I pull the door handle twice, really fast, and it fucks something up. I’m too anxious to get my grubby paws on all that fantastic weed.

“Okay sir, just wait until you hear the click and then open the door as you would normally open a door.”

So now she’s talking to me like I ate an extra chromosome for breakfast.

“CLICK!”

I calmly turn the handle and the great white door in the wall opens.

 

I enter what is best described as the Apple Store of Marijuana. It is a dark but spotless room with lighted glass counters and cases full of THC treats and tonics and tinctures and nerdy marijuana technicians describing these various technical advances to dorky men with bony arms and little beer guts in random lines throughout the store.

 

I am not a newby when it comes to using the poisonous narcotic known as marijuana. I admit that I’m not a regular player of the joint and vape game but I’ve been known to play a few rounds of puff-puff-pass when challenged by Skyrim and League of Legends champions, so I skip the familiar strains and waxes and walk directly to the majestic counter of marijuana edibles.

 

The edibles counter is full of delicious looking chocolates and candies. These wonderful Wonka candies would be tempting even if they weren’t loaded with THC. The employed marijuana addict behind the counter comes over to help me and the first thing out of his mouth is, “If you’re a beginner or light user you do not want to go with the edibles.”

 

In my mind I reply, “Pfft, nigger please. You don’t know my past and procedure.”

But with my mouth I say, “Oh, I’ve been smoking off and on for over half my life now.”

This is partially true because I first tried pot in my early teens, but I never got into the habit of smoking it consistently for longer than a few weeks at a time. I’m a binge smoker at best. I’m just not a fan of smoking stuff. If you die in a fire it’s most likely due to smoke inhalation and it’s considered a horrible way to die. And then for fun and recreation, some people burn stuff and inhale the smoke and that shit just doesn’t make sense to me. It makes me cough and short of breath and I just don’t like to party like that.

 

Anyway, my brother is hanging over my shoulder, hoping that I buy some of the candies, and of course I do. I buy one dozen of the Sour Strawberry Gummy Rings with 10mg of THC for $2.45 a piece.

 

The working weed fiend that warned me not to buy the edibles gives me one last bit of advice, “Only eat half of a gummy ring to begin with, and if you can handle it, go ahead and eat the other half a few hours later.”

 

1:30PM

The very second I get into the car, I unlock the super special child and midget fingered protected legal marijuana bag and take out one of the single condom looking packages that contains a gummy ring. I tear it open and eat half of the ring. It’s so delicious, I mean, it tastes like candy for Christ’s sake. My brother and I make small talk and drive back to his place. I can already feel a slight effect from the magic candy and as we near his house I look at the other half of the gummy ring and think, #YOLO, and then I eat the other half.

 

2:00PM

I’ve hardly eaten anything today, just eggs and coffee and weed candy, and now I’m drinking a beer. I’m sitting on my brother’s couch and we’re talking about I don’t even know. He’s repeatedly hitting the bong that he just bought and I’m getting giggly due to the weed candy gradually kicking in. And then, it happens.

 

2:01 PM

Holy fucking shit I have never been this high in my entire life! The Sour Strawberry Gummy Ring hits me immediately, and it hits me hard. Everything between my nose and my knees goes completely numb and I fall over on the couch in absolute shock of how instantly high I am.

 

2:02PM – 2:30 PM

To say that I am mentally lost in a parallel universe of unanswered questions and extreme panic would be a huge understatement. I am freaking the fuck out. I go into the classic case of checking my heartbeat and wondering if I’m still breathing even though I’m talking. Nothing makes sense. I want this shit to stop.

 

My brother is trying to talk me down by telling me things like, “just go with it” and trying to shift my focus.

“I know what you’re trying to do!” I shout back in accusation.

I can’t trust anybody when I’m eating these fucking candies.

 

2:31PM – 3:00PM

This is possibly the longest 29 minutes of my life. My brother has disappeared and I can hear him laughing at the TV downstairs. I spend this time walking around and staring at the legs that I am unable to feel. Not going into history but I’ve had some prolonged paralysis on the entire left side of my body and I managed to get it working again, and now whenever I lose feeling in any part of my body it throws me into instant fear. It’s the reason I hate taking any kind of painkillers. And you know, you’ll never hear a story about a person dying because they didn’t have enough painkillers in them, it’s always the opposite.

 

People say that pot helps you think deeper and come up with new ideas, but I feel like a one-armed Wal-Mart shopper with a Rubik’s Cube. I just can’t function on this bullshit. Finally, I’ve just had it with this Sour Strawberry Gummy Ring and I crawl into the guest bed and hope for the best. I enjoy that I am able to once again feel my back once it’s pressed against the mattress.

 

3:01PM – 4:00PM

Take a recess from my nightmare through the majesty of sleep.

 

4:01PM – 5:00PM

I wake up after sleeping for what feels like days. I snap out of a pleasant dream and open my eyes to a world where I am even higher than I was in the nightmarish situation that I tried to escape through sleep. I’m really really fucking high. I’m able to hold onto an intelligent thought long enough to get myself to the kitchen. I figure if I eat lots of food and drink lots of water then this bullshit will get out of my system faster.

 

I start with my nephew’s Trader Joe’s Fruity O’s cereal. I eat the whole box in less than 6 minutes. I move on to some salami stuff in the fridge, gone. I scramble some eggs and then wonder where they went. My brother comes upstairs and makes a pizza; I don’t think he even got a slice. I’m eating Chex mix and Christmas cookies throughout this entire kitchen event as well.

 

5:01PM – 10:00PM

We go to a bar and spend $50 on just appetizers.

Then we go to another bar and I spend another $20 on food.

I also get fairly drunk during this time.

 

10:30PM – 1:00AM

This shit just isn’t wearing off. I realize that the only thing that is calming me down is alcohol, so I’m drinking expensive Bulleit and Woodford Reserve whiskey by the bottle. Long story short, I finally drink myself to sleep on the couch but wakeup with zero hangover.

 

 

In Conclusion:

I’m done with weed. I’ve never been a fan of smoking it because it makes my lungs feel all screwy and now I’m deathly afraid of eating it. I don’t know, I guess I don’t mind bongs and vaporizers but still, marijuana is an evil plant put on this Earth to make people frightened and lazy. If there’s a drug that was invented by the Illuminati it’s weed. It makes you watch their TV shows, play their video games, and eat all of their shitty food. And stay away from strawberry candy, it can’t be trusted.

 

I spent the morning cleaning my apartment after a friend of some friends and a semi friend of mine was brought to my place for overnight care while Dr. J. Daniels’ evil fluids were eliminated from his body. Alcohol is a lot like Ebola in the way that you cannot cure the disease, you just have to treat the symptoms while it runs its course. Most of the cleaning was dedicated towards vacuuming popcorn off of my floor because we needed something to eat while his snoring and puking entertained us. Another sign that I am an asshole is that the only time I find hate speech as being hilarious is when it is written on a person that has drunk themself unconscious. I’m sure he came up with a creative way to explain the Swastikas on his body and “Jews = Lose” on his forearm at work today, and of course I used a permanent marker. A fun thing to do to drunk people that pass out in my apartment is to draw Swastikas all over their face with a permanent marker, and then leave the marker next to the bathroom sink. So when they are trying and failing at washing the hate symbols off of their face, they realize that they could cover up the Swastikas with more marker, and it’s debatable whether being covered in Swastikas or wearing blackface is more racially offensive. It’s like my own version of “Saw”.

 

That isn’t what I want to talk about though. I want to talk about a homeless cat that was once a very dear friend of mine but became one of my mortal enemies. I haven’t seen the rat bastard in years but I saw him roaming the street a block away last night and I saw him again this morning as he was pacing back and forth in my driveway, making eye contact with me the entire time. I ran inside and grabbed the same snow shovel that had cast the little shit from my apartment only 2, or maybe it was like 3 years ago.

 

I am a highly social person when I drink. I talk constantly while drinking alcohol, even when I am alone. A few years ago I was enjoying an ice-cold glass of Rich & Rare out on the stoop and a scrappy piss-yellow transient tabby cautiously walked up to me. Being talkative when I drink, I meowed at him until he decided to join me. I told this cat everything. I told this cat things about myself that I wouldn’t reveal during water boarding and for some reason the cat sat about 3 feet away and listened to every word. After a few hours I told the cat, “Goodnight, I love you, God bless you, don’t let the bed bugs bite, sweet dreams, goodnight, I love you with all my heart.” And I went to bed.

 

Well a few nights later I was once again drinking on the stoop and telling the mailbox about the time I peed on an electric fence as a kid, when the same little cat strolled up to me again. I was so happy to have a new friend that I went inside and got a can of albacore tuna for him. Not shitty cheap grey tuna, but pricey albacore tuna. He ate while I drank and told him my problems to see if he had any solutions, and his only response would be to look me right in the eyes whenever I stopped talking.

 

I would tell him something like, “You know, for having my own apartment right next to campus I should be getting a lot more ass.”

 

And he would stop eating and look me right in the eyes. It was as if he was implying that it was entirely my fault for rarely getting laid.

 

I would ramble off, “Christ almighty cat, inflation is getting out of control.”

 

Once again the cat would stop eating and look me in the eyes, implying that it was partially my fault because I was too lazy to go vote during the previous election.

 

He never purred a word, he never meowed a meow, but he always answered with his eyes. And the answer was an implication of everything being my fault, every time. This is how he earned the name Vlad the Implier.

 

So Vlad and I held nightly rendezvouses on the porch until the weather got too cold for me and his sorry ass still had to stay outside. So one night during the winter, it was sub zero temperatures and I was taking the garbage can down to the curb in my bathrobe at 3:00AM, and there was Vlad the Implier sitting on the porch waiting for me. I felt horrible for having ignored him for so long so I brought out another can of albacore tuna for him to eat in front of my door while I watched him through the window because I fucking hate the cold. He finished the tuna and I opened the door to throw the empty can in the trash, and as soon as I opened the door he ran inside my apartment. At the time there was a strict no animal policy in my decadent basement apartment, but I figured fuck it, he can spend one night at my place.

 

So Vlad the Implier made himself comfortable in my miniature weight room and I told him, “Goodnight, I love you, God bless you, don’t let the bed bugs bite, sweet dreams, goodnight, I love you with all my heart.” And I closed his door and went to bed.

 

In the morning I opened the door to my miniature weight room to find a few scattered cat turds and Vlad was gone. I looked everywhere for him and eventually found him nestled in the little storage space under my stairs. I just smiled and giggled at little Vlad as I reached out a hand to help him get out. Well the little fucker bit me! I yelled at him for a second before running to my laptop to look up ‘can cats get rabies?’ and then after I felt sure that Vlad didn’t have rabies I returned to give him a good talking to.

 

I screamed at Vlad, telling him to get the fuck out of my apartment. I explained to him that there was a strict no pet policy in my apartment and he just stared back at me with those eyes, implying that this whole situation was my fault. “Oh no asshole, you’re not pinning this one on me. Get out!”

 

But he just stared back at me, crushing me with self-blame. “Whatever dude”, and I closed the door to the mini weight room and went to class.

 

After class I grabbed a broom and went to the little nook under the stairs. Vlad the Implier went absolutely ape shit whenever I tried to force him out. “Whatever dude”, and I closed the door and went to bed.

 

The next day after class, I went to the door of my baby weight room and opened it. Vlad the Implier bolted between my legs and ran into my kitchen. I cornered him between the microwave and the sink and prodded him with a broomstick until I thought of a plan. I figured, oh, I’ll just grab him and throw him outside really quick. So I grabbed him and Vlad turned into the fucking Tasmanian Devil and tore my hands and forearms apart in a tornado of teeth and claws. I threw him against the wall and he ran into my living room.

 

I devised a plan to lure him outside with a can of albacore tuna. I opened a can of tuna and waved it in front of him. Once again he went nuts and clawed at me. Fucking traitor. I got so pissed off that I loaded my BB caliber handgun and pointed it at him. I didn’t know if it would be strong enough to kill him but I knew that it would be strong enough to make him hate his life. I pointed it right at his face and again, those eyes stared back at me. Implying that my problems will only worsen as long as I resort to violence as a solution. I put the gun back on top of my fridge and tried with the tuna again.

 

I placed the tuna in the hallway where he could see it. After a few minutes he slowly approached the tuna, so I moved the can to the bottom of the stairs. Then I moved it to the top of the stairs… and then I placed it outside the door with the door propped open. Vlad just stared at the can of tuna sitting outside but he refused to go out the door. It felt like a brisk -25 degrees outside so I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to leave at that moment. But he just stared at the can, and I waited.

 

After a few minutes I reached for the snow shovel next to the door. I moved ever so slowly so Vlad wouldn’t notice my movements. After I had the shovel in my hands, I placed it behind him and whispered a threat. “Vlad, get the fuck out of my apartment or I am going to launch you into fucking orbit.”

 

Vlad the Implier didn’t even flinch at my warning. So I quickly scooped him up into the snow shovel, ran outside, and catapulted him across the lawn. Of course he landed on his feet because that’s what cats do, but he ran off screeching like a little bitch. For a while after that I saw Vlad on or near the campus, just looking at me with those eyes. After about a year I didn’t see him anymore. But now he’s back and I know it’s him because of that douche bag look he gives me. I make sure my door is shut tight every time I take out the trash and I’m glad that I won’t be here next summer where I could be drinking on the porch and fall prey to Vlad’s charm again.

 

That’s a really long story and the only people I’ve ever told it to are Birdman and Hans. I don’t know why I’ve never thought that having a stray cat running wild in my apartment for 48 hours was all that interesting, but Hans brought it up after Furniture class the other day and it’s a really strange coincidence to start seeing Vlad the Implier lurking around my apartment again. If Vlad makes a move on my apartment again I’m going to decapitate him with my snow shovel, but I know I’ll drop my shovel and cower when he looks at me with those eyes

After being reminded that I might not be able to graduate with a Theatre degree because I am unable to speak French because I most likely failed another French test today, I tried to cheer myself up by going to Wal-Mart, aka church. Well church only angered me more because they are no longer selling the omega-3 eggs that I practically live on. Because you do know that there is absolutely no difference between organic and non-organic eggs, right? There’s even more than one study proving this, as I’m sure you already know. The organic eggshells are just harder because they feed the chickens mealworms with their normal chicken food. But those omega-3 eggs, well, they throw some flaxseed down those chickens’ gullets and it makes the eggs that come out of their cloaca’s healthier for you and in my opinion more delicious. And yes, the egg comes out of the chicken’s cloaca and not their vagina. So don’t be grossed out by the thought of touching something that came out of a chicken’s vagina but do be grossed out by the fact that the hole it came out of quadruples as the chicken’s asshole, pee hole, fuck hole, and egg hatch. Chickens really are disgusting in an evolutionary sense and humans should feel proud to be murdering them on such a massive scale as well as celebrating our mornings by cracking open eggs and eating their unborn children with coffee and a smile.

 

Anyway, fucking Wal-Mart didn’t have my eggs. So I was picking up some of the instant raspberry green tea packets before going across the street to buy eggs at Hy-Vee, because Hy-Vee might have good eggs but their instant raspberry green tea tastes like poison in comparison to Wal-Mart’s. While I was in the ‘Drink Mix’ isle a lovely young woman wearing a pink tank top and skintight jean shorts which may have just been denim panties with pockets walked by. I looked at her face that was heavily decorated with cheap makeup and then instinctually looked directly at her ass, because I have a penis and my penis heavily influences my eye movements when I am in public or surfing the interwaves on my Macbook Hoe. This young lady noticed my quick glance at her ass and when I looked up again she was smiling at me. I wanted to tell her how inappropriate and naughty her clothes were and that she should go to my room and take them off immediately. I would have asked her for her name and number if I had any balls, and if her parents weren’t standing next to her and she wasn’t 12 years old.

 

Seriously, what kind of parents, what kind of a society allows their kids to dress like that? I’ve heard the whole feminist thing and I do know that no woman is asking to be raped based on their choice of clothing, but some girls really are asking for “it”. And by “it” I mean “pelvis shattering intercourse”. You wear certain clothes based upon the type of attention that you’re trying to attract, and to which parts of your body that you are trying to draw others’ attention. I don’t believe that all girls are whores but it’s pretty easy to identify the ones that are when they’re wearing a tight tank top and what I would call a jean-string. If you don’t consider clothing as being a form of communicating your personality and opinions then put a swastika on your shirt and eat lunch at a Church’s Chicken. I’m sure you’ll have an enjoyable afternoon of laughing and peacefully discussing the nonsense of judging others by their clothing as you and your fellow patrons share a bucket of that repulsive animal known as the chicken.

 

This is why I often tell my friends that if I should ever have a daughter, I will name her Pregnant. I hate to inform women that pregnancy not only kills a man’s bank account, but being on the nest is a notorious boner killer as well. So even if my future daughter is the most amazing piece of jailbait, even if she looks like the daughter of Jennifer Lawrence and Kim Kardashian, even if she has her own show on the Disney channel; no man will continue talking to her after she introduces herself as, “Hello, I’m Pregnant.” Even if she does get a date the boy that’s taking her out will have to tell his parents that he’s “taking that Pregnant girl to the prom”, and no responsible parent will let that shit fly.

 

Some friends tell me that she would become a lesbian out of necessity because women would be more understanding of her name. I’m all right with that because I have viewed the entire internet movie library on xhamster and I must say that the girl on girl films are much more delicate and dare I say passionate than the man on girl movies. Some say that my daughter would probably commit suicide. I hope that doesn’t happen because then I would have to ground her for life because I would never let my daughter date a necrophiliac, let alone a necrophiliac that chases preggers. I’ve also seen the necrophilia pregnant jailbait movies on xhamster and there is no way in hell that any daughter of mine is getting wrapped up in something that kinky and downright amazing. Guys would be trying to hook up with her left and right if she gets involved with that shit and I couldn’t blame them for trying.

Dear Facebook Diary,

 

So far in my 28^th semester of college I have learned that French is the language of the devil and he speaks it with a poisonous tongue. I am only what, like, 5 weeks deep into my French 100: Beginning French class and it is already the hardest ‘foutu’ class I’ve ever taken. We only speak French in the class, the instructions are given in French, we have homework every day of the week, we have multiple quizzes and tests every week, I have to attend night class meeting thingy’s several nights per week, and the teacher tells me that everything is explained in the Blackboard online part of the class… in French.

 

And oh, don’t forget that I need to rent or purchase an Ipad for the class as well as rent a $150 book for the class that I can find online for $5 per month with free shipping, but I have to rent it from the college in order to get the serial number needed to log onto the online part of the class. This foreign language bullshit is the biggest fucking scam going. So in my final year at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, they have taught me that it is a scamming school headed by a mindless puppet that speaks for a committee of crooks.

 

Anyhow, today during French class I was unable to access the internet on my new Ipad that I bought for $700 because I refused to give this shithead school another $15 to rent one from them. It was only yesterday that I had gone into the campus’s IT headquarters located deep within the heavily guarded confines of Otto Olsen’s technological laboratory and a chubby but very un-cute girl had helped me get online, but today the shit wasn’t working. So after class I went back to the IT laboratory and found an Asian guy that was typing on an Apple computer, with an Apple Ipad next to him, wearing an Apple shirt, and not shitting you he was eating an apple. He also had a water bottle that looked to be filled with water but I would like to believe that it was filled with the new Apple clear apple flavored Iwater. Well he turned out to be the coolest guy in the world and he totally hooked me up to have a regular flow of interbutts on my new Ipad. Merci, super stereotypical Asian guy.

 

And let’s not forget that I have to buy a special green notebook from the college to write essays in because if I buy my own green notebook then I would be shorting the college another 52 cents because obviously the $1100 that I paid for this one single class will barely cover a student’s lunch.

 

So I went into the campus bookstore and was all like, “This fucking green notebook. What is it and where is it?” The two guys at the desk had no idea what I was talking about and then some older guy behind me pointed it out to me.

I was all, “Christ alive, I have to use my debit card to buy a 52 cent book?”

And the older guy was just like, “Nah son. I’ll pay for that shit.” So he bought the green notebook for me and I promised to buy him a cup of coffee.

I walked out of the bookstore and saw that there was a line in front of the coffee place and was all, “Nah faggot, you ain’t be getting no coffee today.” And I walked home.

 

Well this is a confusing day for me because I am still raging pissed about this ridiculous and personally useless French class that I am being forced to take and pay for in order to graduate, and yet I have encountered nothing but pleasant and giving people today. What really pisses me off is that learning a foreign language these days is a lot like learning how to solve complex math problems without a calculator. Name a situation where you would be lost in the forest or trapped on top of an erupting volcano and your survival depends on your ability to solve 9.357 divided by 7.2 without a calculator? Yeah, I’m unable to come up with a reasonable scenario for that either. The same thing is happening with language. You download a translator Apple App on your Apple I-whatever and right there you are able to translate every language on Earth. It’s damn near pointless to learn several languages these days, let alone be forced to pay thousands of dollars to a piece of shit school to learn them.

 

The real lesson to be taken away from these enforced foreign language classes is that if you or a relative, or your child wishes to obtain a college degree, do not send them to a Nebraska university. It’s a fucking waste of time and a lot of money and it has forced me to question myself as to why I even want a degree from UNK. Colleges have completely lost the belief that students are customers and that Universities are entirely funded by their customers and government. So without students, aka customers, colleges have no use. An increasing amount of professors are becoming 24 hour douche bags to their students and while they might spout out the bullshit that higher education is a privilege and not a right, well so are their paychecks. And when it is openly advertised that having a college degree means that you will be paid more money throughout your lifetime then it stops being a privilege and more of a right to receive a higher pay like everyone else. And if the University is already being funded by your own tax dollars then what right do they have to demand more money from you by requiring you to take courses that you neither need nor want to take? I like my teachers in the Theatre department but as far as how the overall university is run, fuck college. It’s funny how everyone knows that politicians are unable to run the government as a proper business and then expects a politician to properly run a university.

 

But I only have these two pointless French classes left in order to graduate, so whatever. I’m going to change out of my angry poopy pants and workout now.