O My Brothers

Here's to all the men, the bungled and the botched
Here's to all the guys with dicks and balls at their crotch
Here's to all the heroes risking lives while fighting fires
Here's to all the workers raising Freedom Tower spires
Here's to all the voters who gave their brothers equal rights
Here's to all the cops who captured terrorists in gunfights
Here's to all the roughnecks sucking power from the ground
Here's to all the truckers bringing happiness to town

Here's to all the victims who are rotting in a cell
'Cuz some woman said he raped her and the system said oh well
Even though there's next to no evidence of crime
You're a man, and therefore guilty, bound to doing time

Here's to all the husbands getting beaten by their wives
And with nowhere else to go end up taking their own lives
'Cuz society and government will never donate money
To a man's domestic violence shelter. They just think it's funny.

Here's to all the fathers who had their children ripped away
By a system that said the better parent's the one who cannot pay
'Cuz even if the man was the solitary provider
The woman gets it all just for the uterus inside her

Here's to all the fellas watching women's lives get longer
While their sons are getting weaker and their daughters getting stronger
Who have to listen every day to all the women say
They can do anything a man can do and better in every way

Until the pickle jar won't open or the roach is on the wall
Then they're screaming for a man to come and heed their beck and call
And god forbid the man should say "Take care if it yourself."
She'll play her pussy trump card and make his life a living hell.

So, here's to you, my friends, and to all the unnamed others
I raise my beer and proudly dare to call you all my brothers

Programming

I was conditioned to hate myself for the first eighteen years of my life. My mother would punish me if I got a single grade below a C. It was most common for her to ask me, "What's wrong with you?" after, say, I had lost a brand new wristwatch or broken another pair of glasses. Over and over, it was hammered into me that there was something wrong with me. Since I wasn't a stupid kid, I concluded that whatever it was that was wrong with me was the reason my mother never really loved me the way the mothers on TV or in the movies would love their kids.

My brother was (is) two years older than me. He remembers our father better than I do. He would take out his frustrations on me by slugging me in the arm. He would make up games about it, and I, desperate for some kind of affection, would play along. Other times, if I was watching TV by myself, he would come in the room and snatch the remote away, turning the channel to whatever he wanted to watch. "What are you gonna do," he'd say. "I'm bigger than you." So now, I'm small and weak and there's something wrong with me.

The bullying I got from my classmates only solidified, codified this perception of myself. Since it was all I'd ever known, I had no clue as to just how much I hated myself and how screwed up I was.

Five years of college and one suicide attempt later, I found myself in a relationship with the worst woman in the world. She treated me like dogshit and told me it was my fault. To me, that was how things were supposed to be. It was all I'd ever known. Except, this woman kept escalating the abuse until it got physical. Then it got truly evil. She would lie to people in front of my face. She lied to the police. She was and is a genuine psychopath. She manipulated everyone around her. When I finally saw through her bullshit and started calling her on it, she would freak out and do things like hitting me over the head with a garden hose. Since I knew the cops would believe her lies over my truth, there was nothing I could do. I lived the last six years of our sixteen year relationship in this state of mind.

I doubted my sanity. I wondered if all the crazy shit she spouted at me was, in fact, true. Like when she would deny what she'd said not ten seconds after she said it. And she was so serious, so adamant in her position that I wondered if, in fact, I hadn't heard her correctly, that it was really me who was screwed up.

Five years out of that relationship, and I can see the truth now. I see how completely twisted and wrong she was. Just like my mother. Just like my brother. Just like my classmates. They were all wrong to treat me the way they did. And because I endured so many years of constant harassment, I have been programmed to hate myself.

Self-hatred undermines everything. The smallest details of simply being human become sources of blind, screaming rage. If I tear off one too many sheets of toilet paper. If I forget that one thing I went to the store to get. If I leave out one step at my job and have to backtrack to fix it. Silly, minor, inconsequential stuff that shouldn't mean anything--it all becomes proof of my complete worthlessness, and justification for my raging hatred.

When I'm around other people, I clamp down on the rage. I learned the hard way that it scares people. Like, really fucking frightens them to see me slamming my fist repeatedly into my thigh or the nearest hard surface until my hand is swollen and bleeding. So I don't do that around people anymore. I keep it to myself. Thus, when I'm finally alone and something happens, there's extra fuel behind the rage. All the anger I kept bottled up gets released at the first opportunity. I've lost a few things I really cared about in those kinds of fits.

The cold, intellectual, emotionless Spock side of me realizes that this is a very unhealthy way to live. My lizard-brain survival instinct doesn't want to die any sooner than is absolutely necessary. So, I think to myself, what do I do? The answer is always "get treatment." I have a disease, I'm told. The disease is depression. At least, that's the best label I've found, because I'm pretty sure the DSM doesn't have a single diagnosis for "raging self-hatred that's the result of 34 years of programming by evil fucks who didn't care about anyone but themselves." That's a little wordy. Doctors like three words, max, for a diagnosis. Borderline Personality Disorder. Bi-Polar Disorder. Paranoid Schizophrenia. Et cetera.

So, treatment. How does one treat programming? With more programming, except this programming is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Dr. Drew once described it as "re-wiring your brain." What it boils down to is programming yourself to no longer have these "undesirable" thoughts and feelings.

So, why is one programming bad and another good? How is the organ that was conditioned by outside forces supposed to now condition itself from within? And why should I believe the people who stand to make money from me for their treatment? Aren't they going to tell me anything they can to get me on their couch so they can bill me ridiculous amounts of money to re-program me?

I already know that treatment isn't going to work. For programming to be effective, you have to buy into it the way I bought into it for many years. Now, I'm utterly opposed to programming, and I'll resist it in any form. Whatever therapies or techniques a therapist prescribes for me, they'll be undermined by my own core belief that I'm being programmed again.

Anti-depressants are the worst kind of medicine. They force the brain to behave in unnatural ways. They're the chemical equivalent of an old Henny Youngman joke: "A guy goes to the doctor and says, 'Doc, it hurts when I go like this.' Doctor says, 'Don't go like this.'" Doesn't exactly solve the problem of why it hurts in the first place, does it? That's anti-depressants.

The one thing I've found to be effective at all is illegal, and there are other physical side effects that make it less than ideal. Plus, I'd lose my job if I failed a drug test. So I'm pretty much fucked.

The worst part is when someone spouts some simplistic crap to me like, "You need to lighten up." As if I have a choice. That kind of bullshit does several things at once. It directly states that I have a choice when I don't. It then implies that I'm making the wrong choice, which is a judgment about me as a person. And it also tells me that the decades of baggage and programming that I drag around behind me every day is, to other people, a simple one-note issue that can be solved as easily as blowing my nose. All of which only serves to reinforce my self-hatred that much more.

I've been programmed into this. I'm supposed to program my way out of it. It's all bullshit. I just want to be me, free from the self-hatred. I don't want to be what someone else thinks I should be, and that's what programming does. Even if I'm the one doing the programming, it's someone else's code that I'm writing into my brain.

Maybe I should just kill myself and be done. There doesn't seem to be much point to trudging any further.

Playing the P-Card

So, there's some backstory to this that, unfortunately, must be waded through. Please, be patient.

Years ago, I ran into a guy who put on an awesome karaoke show. I'd never sung karaoke before, thinking it was the milieu of drunken idiots who didn't know any better. But this guy had Dead Kennedys, Frank Zappa, and Mudvayne in his catalog. It blew me away. Plus, he would play videos during his shows that were either hysterical comedy or super-cool lesser-known acts. In short, he worked very hard at being a great entertainer, not just a guy who droned into the mike, "Okay, up next is blah blah singing blah blah."

The fact that he was an unabashed AV geek just made him that much cooler in my view.

Then he got a girlfriend. I didn't know her before he started fucking her, but since I was a regular attendee at his shows, I kept seeing her. Eventually I started chatting with her, mostly to be social. As I got to know her better, I started to like her. She seemed like she was pretty smart, had a creative streak, and was generally a good person. In fact, for a bit, I found myself far more attracted to her than I wanted to be. She was someone else's girlfriend, and I don't do that homewrecker shit. I actually backed off for a while until I got my shit together and dealt with my feelings. Which I did.

So, very recently, the girlfriend posted one of those photo thingies you see on Facebook all the time. Something that's supposed to contain pithy wisdom or whatever, except that this thing was all about the fucking P-card.

If you don't know what the P-card is, think about the OJ Simpson trial, and how everyone decried Johnny Cochrane for "playing the race card." The "P" in "P-card" stands for pussy. It's the idea that women are better than men simply because they're women. It's bullshit. It's sexist, bigoted crap that society and the government has bought into, and it is responsible for my life being ruined.

The girlfriend used to tell me that I shouldn't be so down on myself, that she saw me as, in her words, an "attractive, intelligent man." More than once she told me this. I knew it wasn't an indication of any serious feelings on her part, but it made me think (actually believe) that she knew me, understood me, to whatever degree.

She knew I'd been abused by my ex-wife in the past. She knew the ex-bitch was preventing me from seeing my daughter, and there was nothing I could do about it.

So, she posts this thing on Facebook that says, basically, whatever you give a woman you'll receive tenfold. "Give a woman sperm and she'll give you a baby. Give a woman food and she'll give you a meal. So, don't give her any crap or you'll get a ton of shit." That kind of drivel.

See, I gave my wife sperm, and she took my baby away. I gave my wife food, and she demanded I cook the meal and serve it to her. While she spent every dime I made on useless crap we didn't need. And if I told her we needed to save money, I got "a ton of shit," which in reality meant things like a garden hose upside my head, resulting in a bleeding scalp wound. My ex is a reprehensible, worthless piece of shit who ruined me and my life, but she knew how to work the system and society to make everyone around her believe SHE was the victim of MY abuse. She played the P-card.

I worked. She didn't. She told me, at various points, the following: "Don't think; you only get yourself in trouble" and "Why don't you use your fucking brain?" I was a worthless, incompetent moron every time I made a mistake. If I tried to stand up for myself, she accused me of "verbally assaulting" her, which justified her physical violence against me. If I tried to physically respond, she accused me of "not liking what someone said" to me. I was fucked if I did and fucked if I didn't. It was domestic abuse, through and through, and because I'm male I have no resources for healing anywhere. I am ruined beyond repair thanks to that fucking cunt.

The girlfriend knew this (I thought). And STILL posted that horseshit about how great women are.

I wanted to call her and scream. I wanted to post a long rant in response to her post. Ultimately, I decided to just un-friend her and walk away.

The worst part is that I can't ever go to that karaoke show again, because she's always there. I thought about sending a message to the guy himself, asking him to let me know if he ever does a show his girlfriend won't be attending. Then I thought about his asking "why" and my explanation, which would undoubtedly lead to more conflict, more confrontation, and more drama. So I just threw my hands up and walked away.

She'll probably try to text me in a few weeks. She's done that in the past: "Just wanted to know if you're doing all right" kind of thing. At this point, I don't know how I'll respond. I'm torn between letting her know what she did and just ignoring her.

I feel betrayed, but I don't know if I should. I feel wounded, hurt, and most of all WRONG. I was so wrong about this person, it makes me feel like a fucking idiot. And that brings up all the shit my ex hammered into my head over the course of sixteen years. Everything gets mixed up and complicated, and all I ever wanted to do was sing karaoke.

Judgmental Horse Shit

To anyone who's ever told me "just let it go" or "don't be so hard on yourself" or "don't let it get to you" or any other exhortations along those lines:

FUCK YOU

Is there some food you enjoy, say, brussel sprouts? I hate brussel sprouts. But I won't tell you what to like or dislike. And I won't tell you how to feel about something. Because It's not my place to judge your emotions.

Every time you say that kind of crap to me, you're judging my feelings, which I have NO CONTROL OVER. You may think you're trying to help, but all you do is make shit worse for me.

STOP IT. I feel what I feel. Don't tell me not to. I don't have a choice, any more than you have a choice in what foods you like to eat. When you tell me that kind of crap, like "Just let it go," what you're really saying is, "I've decided it's wrong for you to feel the way you do, and I'm JUDGING YOU to be an asshole for feeling that way." Anyone who really cares about me won't say that shit. And I will hate you for saying it. HATE you.

It's your choice. Do I, as a person, have value? Or are you just trying to eliminate those parts of the world you're too weak to accept? If you try to tell me how I should be, you are NOT a friend of mine. And you can fuck off and die for all I care.

It's judgment. By directly stating I have a choice, you are implying that I'm making the wrong one. Why would you urge me to make a different choice if you didn't think my original choice was wrong?

People who don't know me and what I've been through aren't part of this. When they say it, sure, it annoys me, but I don't take it personally. It's the ones who do know me, know my history, and say it anyway that piss me off. Because they're also the ones who claim to care about me. The ones who get mad when I tell them I don't count them as a friend. Buddies, sure. Friendly, absolutely. But not FRIENDS.

Friends trust each other. Friends understand each other. Friends respect each other. No one who trusts me, understands me, and respects me should ever say that kind of judgmental crap to me.

This is why I have but one friend. He has NEVER told me that kind of shit. He cares about me and tries to help me as best he can, but he has never made me feel like I'm an asshole just because I feel bad. Sometimes I upset him when I'm especially down on myself. He's yelled at me in the past, saying things like, "Dude, why are you so down? You're fucking amazing! You write awesome stuff! You're super smart! I fucking love you, dude!" And sometimes, he upsets me; he's done some uncaring things in the past.

But he's never judged me. And he's never told me to lighten up, let it go, or to stop being hard on myself. He asks my WHY I'm hard on myself, but he doesn't tell me to "just stop it."

That's why he's my friend. That's why the rest of you aren't. Fuck you all.

Nature Finds a Way

There's a local business a mile or two away from where I live that I patronize occasionally. I happen to love their business model, and they provide a service much needed by guys like me. The place describes itself as a self-serve porn studio. By any other name, it's a brothel.

So, think about this. It is illegal in every state in the U.S., except Nevada outside of Las Vegas, to pay someone to have sex with you. Given my own gender and the fact that the overwhelming majority of both prostitutes and porn stars are female, I'm going to drop any pretense of gender neutrality for the rest of this post. Just realize that, yes, I know men do these things too.

Anyway, back to the point. You can't pay a woman to have sex with you. You can, however, pay a woman to have sex with someone else, as long as you take pictures or videotape it. (It makes me smile that, in this digital age, we still use "tape" as a verb. I guess "videoflashmemory" doesn't have the same ring.) So, none of the men in porn are "johns," they're actors or models. The women aren't whores, they're also actors or models. If a producer gives a woman money to have sex with me, it's not prostitution. Are we clear on the distinction? If you give money to the woman, it's a crime. If you give money to someone else, it's porn.

Enter the self-serve porn studio. You enter the establishment and are greeted by a friendly woman (always a woman) who has you initial two documents. One is a statement that you're over eighteen. The other is a "contract" that makes you a one-time producer of porn. You then show your cock to the woman, who gingerly inspects it with gloved hands to make sure everything looks healthy. Then you meet the girls.

I am of the opinion that the cock inspection is more of a safety net than an actual health screening. It is a known fact in these kinds of circles that a cop can't engage in illegal (sexual) activities with the subject of their investigation; doing so makes any evidence they collect inadmissible in court. This is exactly what happened elsewhere in town years ago; many massage parlors got busted after a long, undercover operation, but when it was revealed that the cops doing the investigating were getting hand and blow jobs from the women, all the cases were thrown out. Showing your cock is considered over the line, a sexual act that taints evidence.

The girls "choose" a "studio" with a pre-determined time-limit and price. One half hour for $120 to $160. You give the cash to the friendly cock-handler and go with your girl to your studio. Said studio is a room with a bed, a photographys studio light fitted with a diffuser, and a digital camera on a tripod. The girl strips naked and lays on the bed. You take some pictures of her while she fingers herself. After about eight snaps, you're done, and the sex begins. A timer goes off after half an hour, and bob's your uncle.

Make no mistake: the people who run this place know what's up. You don't just walk in; you have to call ahead and tell them you're on your way. Once outside, you call them again and they unlock the door to escort you inside. When you're done, the girl calls the friendly cock-handler to escort you back to the door, which she locks behind you. You never get copies of the pictures. No video is ever shot. The pictures are never sold or displayed on a web site. This is a gray-market business, carefully weaving through the legal maze of anti-prostitution and pornographic artistic expression laws. It's fucking brilliant (ahem).

Is there a point here beyond my describing how I can finally get laid again? Why, yes, there is. The point is that there are some simple facts about human nature that will always be true, no matter how many laws we pass against them. One of them is that people like to fuck. Men, especially, like to fuck so much that they're willing to pay a woman to fuck them. And there will always be women who are willing to accept payment to fuck a man. That's never going to change, no matter how harsh the legal penalties for doing so. The same holds true for drug use. And eating unhealthy food. And homosexuality. And abortions. This is who we are as homo sapiens.

Quit wasting our time with useless, irrelevant laws that only consume taxpayer dollars. Quit busting the whores and potheads; start busting the financial regulators, the fuckers who do real harm to people.

I love that self-serve porn studio, and I'm not ashamed to say so. I love that it's so close to my house. I love that it's technically legal. I love that I can get laid anytime I want (except Sunday; even whores gotta got to church, I guess) without worrying about the social interactions that a suck so badly at. I love that all the girls are fairly cute, and at least two of them are significantly to heavily tattooed. I love that someone was clever and creative enough to come up with the idea and implement it with such grace and style.

There's apparently a second location somewhere in town, but they don't have enough girls to staff it. Any ladies need a job?
UPDATE 6/21/2013: The studio has been busted for prostitution. Nine people arrested: seven model/actresses, the friendly cock-handler, and the owner. A female undercover cop applied for a job there; that's how they got around the "no showing cock" limitation. I'll either keep updating this post or make a new one if developments warrant it.

The Closet

The bedroom closet is a walk-in with clothes hanging along both sides, deadening sound. Pitch black silence, it envelops, provides scant comfort. I huddle in the corner, pulling my knees tight to my chest, trying to become as small as I can.

She will return soon with a car full of useless things purchased with yet another credit card she opened in my name. It's legal because we live in a "mutual property" state.

The gash on my scalp has quit bleeding, at least, although my bathrobe is ruined. A long rivulet of blood runs down the side of my face and onto the terry cloth, leaving a hard ridge of crust in its wake.

She'd hit me over the head with the garden hose when I was sitting on the back porch. The hose had a heavy metal spray nozzle, thus the laceration.

I had retreated to the porch to escape our latest fight. The details differ, but the framework is always the same. Disagreement. She attacks me verbally. I defend myself. She attacks me physically. I retreat. Years ago I used to try to resolve problems but always failed. Now we merely see who can hurt the other worse. She wins every time.

This was one of the worst. We fought, argued, and yelled at each other. I made one last snipe and went outside to smoke and calm down. After a minute, she followed and grabbed the hose. I thought she was only threatening me with it until the final swing.

Go ahead and call the cops, she said. I'll tell them it was self-defense.

My mind goes back to the time I called them after she hit me across the face with a stick and left a mark. One cop talked to me outside; the other went inside. I told the truth. The cop saw the mark. His partner came outside, and they conferred. I was told they couldn't do anything because they didn't see it happen. I was told to get it on video if I wanted to prove anything.

The police won't help me.

An old friend of hers had come to visit and saw how we constantly sniped at each other. She laughed and said we were a real-life version of "Married with Children."

Witnesses won't help me.

My mother was a controlling bitch who would blame me for things that weren't my fault, like the behavior of my friends. My wife consistently reminded me that mother didn't care and only wanted to control my life.

My family won't help me.

I am alone, in pitch black silence. The hopelessness crashes over me, and the screaming sobs begin. I grab a towel to press against my face, trying to muffle the sounds so I don't wake my little baby girl in the next room. Thank god she's been asleep this whole time.

It's all my fault, she says. She can't get a job and it's all my fault. She's miserable every day and it's all my fault. She can't lose weight and it's all my fault. Something goes wrong and it's all my fault. She hits me with a garden hose and it's all my fault. She spends every dime I make and it's all my fault. I'm in the grips of suicidal depression and it's all my fault. No one will help me and it's all my fault.

I'm a worthless, incompetent moron, she says. I should kill myself so I quit sucking air away from those more deserving of it, she says. No one will even notice if I'm dead, she says. And it's all my fault.

The sobs have melted together into a long, wailing moan. I can barely pause to take a breath. My body shudders from the effort. I rock back and forth, clutching my knees. My skull wants to burst out of my face. My eyes are swollen shut. The snot and tears soak the towel, smearing slime everywhere. I turn it over to start on a clean spot.

She likes to follow the example of Leo, the abuser from "Twin Peaks," using a bar of soap in a sock to hit me. She believes another character from that show who says such a weapon causes internal damage but leaves no bruises. She, however, bruises if you sneeze too hard next to her. If I bat her fist away, it leaves a mark, which she then shows to the police, and I am kicked out of my own house that I alone work to pay for.

I installed the picket fence around the newly-landscaped front yard. I assemble any new furniture. I installed the kitchen floor. I painted every room. I ran the wires for the surround-sound speakers through the walls so the living room would look nice. I installed the dog door in the back room. I taught her how to use a computer. And I am an incompetent, worthless moron who doesn't deserve to live.

If only I could do better. If only I could remember every word she says, even when it was months ago. If only I could anticipate her every whim. If only I could never disagree with her. Then she would finally relent. It's all my fault, you see, because I don't do better. I could, but I don't. Because I'm worthless. According to her.

Her car pulls in the driveway. The switch flips, cutting off the sobs. I climb out of the closet, splash water on my face, and prepare to meet her. I must do this, for the consequences of not are far worse. The key turns in the lock. I steel myself and hope I can make it through the next round.

Death would be a blessing. One I don't deserve. So, it continues.

Gimme a Break

So, yeah, I took a break from this blog for a while. I lost my job back in February, and since my personal history makes it so my sense of self-worth is directly tied to what I do for a living, getting laid off hit me really hard. I've been mired in near-suicidal depression for two months.

I got a new job today, at least.