It's alright

A friend of mine, who is as beautiful as she is intelligent (Not to mention she has a fantastic set of breasts, I mean those things are immaculate.) Told me that she didn’t like a lot of the stuff I’ve been writing recently, and while at first I must admit that I was hurt,  I can’t really blame her.
She’s known me for a long. She’s been my friend through out these formative years, the grim months and divine days that shaped me into the person I am today. For better or absolute worse, she’s been around. And in the days when we didn’t share a bed, she was never far away from my thoughts. (I originally wrote heart, but that is far too mushy. And hearts are actually pretty gross. All purple and pulsating and pear shaped. Yucky-Ducky-Fucky.)

And to let her down, to fail to entertain her with my writing, was a cut. But I don’t really blame her (Not that you can actually blame someone for not finding you entertaining. That’s like getting mad at a shoe for not fitting right when it’s your own foot that’s grown.) My writing recently has been bullshit, especially on this (or That, I’m not sure where I wanna post this yet.) shit-hole blog of mine. It bullshit because it’s me trying to do a literary impression of someone who is much smarter (or whinier) than me.

And while writers do experiment, especially young writers, (Cut me a break sweetheart, I’m only 22.) It’s still little reason to pump out pages soulless, un-funny, boo-boo trash.

So to redeem myself. I’m going to HONESTLY, and with SOUL write about something that I sort of don’t feel comfortable talking about. The following well be UN-EDITED stream of consciousness essay. You’re probably saying; ‘Adam, your spelling, grammar and syntax are terrible. You never edit anything.’ You’d be half right. I edit word choice and sentence flow, but never mechanics of things, if I linger on my own words to much they kinda get stale. So the next passage will have no, back spaces or rewrites. I’ll just keep on going. No covering my tracks, no ego stroking. 100% real starting now;


As a child, I grew up in an all black neighborhood. Playing with black children having the, well not ‘the’ there is no ‘the’. I had ‘a’ black experience. And with having that South-side Chicago experience you get introduced to things. Like, hmmm, I guess ‘ebonics’ is the term.
Although that’s an extremely, Anglo, accusatory, derogatory word.
On the south side of Chicago, people talk like niggas. Slow down Adam, aim your words.
Hmmm….
In the 2 grade, I told my mom I was ‘finna’ go outside. She looked at me, stone faced, and said;
“You’re going to do what?”
I looked at her, as if she was some sort of deaf fool and full of conviction I repeated;
“I’m finna go outside.” Pleased with myself, I begin to walk toward the door to go outside and play with my friends, who were all talking in forms of English, so mutilated and wrong the very utter of them sound like some sort of underground poetry.
My mother stopped me again and said;
“You’re fixing to outside?” She gave me a little le-way. ‘Fixing to’ people a southern term, meaning ‘preparing to’.
“No. I’m Finna go outside and play.” Fed up, I twisted the knob to the door but my mother stopped me once more.
“Finna?” She asked.
“Yeah. Finna.” What didn’t this woman understand, I thought. It’s a simple concept. I’m finna eat breakfest. I’m finna ride my bike. I’m finna go outside and smash some bugs. It was a simple concept to me.

“I don’t think ‘Finna’ is a word, Adam.” My mother said. She got out of her chair and walked over to the dining room where she kept a davenport cabinet full of books.
“Yes it is.” I said to her, but I think I was already folding. It sounded forced in my mouth. Like a bad mimic. My father has a stretched out croaky voice, militaristic in nature. and my mother, while she doesn’t speak the queen’s English (She grew up in Cabrini Green) isn’t slack jawed and slang spewing. So speaking in the way my friends spoke wasn’t genetically adhering to me.


She mad me find ‘Finna’ in the dictionary. And, of course I couldn’t. She then, in her
OPPS, ITALICS WAS STILL ON
FUCK, CAPS IS ON.


Gotta learn how to type without looking down
Italics is still on

She made me try and find ‘Finna’ in dictionary, and of course I couldn’t. She then sat me down, and in that way that only mothers can, she told me to never use a word unless I could look it up in the dictionary. She told me that when she moved out of Cabrini Green, she was so sick of that way of talking she never wanted to hear it again.

She eventlully let me go outside, and when my friends greeted me with their ‘Yo’s and I replied’

‘Good Morrow peers. I bid you hello. Say, who is up for a rousing game of stick balls. I do so enjoy the feel of the bark on my palms. Or, mayhaps, you should fancy a good smashing of bugs with rocks. What fun, to crush insects with mineral deposits.’

My best behavior

Note: I posted this on my tumblr a few months back. I wrote it one morning while drinking a Bloody Mary and looking out my window. I thought this shit was cold blooded but no one seemed to like it to much. What do you think?

“Hey Aryn!” I scream from the side walk. She was half way through the street walking that little rat dog. I hated that dog, It was barely bigger than a squirrel and it was always yelping and it walked funny, all bow legged like a horse. I just knew that when I finally collected the nerve to tell Aryn how I felt about her that we’d fall in love and then in our third month together, I’d say as she wore her paint stained overalls, with blotches of red and green paint smearing her light fingers and tanned cheeks, I’d tell her that the little rat dog had to go. That it’s yelping was waking me up and I tell her I couldn’t write without right amount of sleep. I’d lie and say that the dog bites on my ankles.

She swung her head around and her red hair had a glow in the sun. I’d been in love with a red hair earlier in the year. An internet superstar, she was tumblr famous. But our love never quite lifted off, she stayed a fantasy while I stayed a stranger. But I just knew Aryn was going to be different. Angel blood pumps through Ayrns veins. She turns around and the sun washes over her face and she looks great and I know in my head that I should savor that moment and way the sun rides your forehead and the way her smile grows slow on her face like that raindrop on a windshield that eats the other raindrops.

She gives me a wave and starts to turn around to meet me at the corner, dragging the rat dog behind her. It’s a fantastic day in Chicago, a Sunday in its infancy.

“Hey.” She says. I open my mouth but my eyes dart to the yellow blurring taxi. There is a clunk and a grinding noise, how you would imagine throwing a rock at a fan must sound. My jaw drops so low I’m surprised gravel doesn’t get stuck in my beard.

“Shit.” I say shaking my head.

“What?” I read her face. When she feels the tugging on the leash I watch her smile crack like an egg dropped from the sears tower.

The rat dog, Sid, is stuck up the taxi wheel. It’s yelping its final yelps. The engine revs and the car goes forward. You can hear grinding and tearing of skin.

“Shit.” I’m petrified, a profanity spewing statue. “Fuckkkk.”

She screams the dogs name; “Sid!” over and over again. It would be erotic if it was my name in that tone, but it is not me. It is the name of her mangled box terrier. “Sid.” She’s screaming and people are looking.

“Fuck.” I’m frozen on the sidewalk. I see what I now know is blood dripping from under the car. She is in a panic, on her knee’s reaching under the car. I remember her first day I’d ever seen her, eyes fixed at the ground, those baggy blue jeans, stained with paint. I was too slow to catch a sight of her full face but when I turn around the elevator doors are already closing, I see for the first time her face her bright brown eyes and her perfect skin. I see her mouth open and my heart bursts. It slices right through my heart, right through my ribs and my heart and guts poured out on the floor and as I struggled to pick them up and stuff them back into the fissure like cavern that was my chest I gasp.

when I turn around to get a full look at her face before the elevator doors close, but I can’t help but think she was looking at me. And those doors slide shut I see her face and a nature felt a flutter slice my heart, Right through my ribs and my heart and guts poured out on the floor and as I struggled to pick them up and stuff them back into the fissure like cavern that was my chest I gasped. I wanted her to like me, I wanted her to talk about me with her roommates, and her friends from back home over skpye. She’d talk about the boy that open his chest and painted the floor with his love.

But now as I watch her dog yelp, that little rat dog, Sid.

“Damn.” My face contorted as if Larry David smelled a Indian food fart. I want to help her. I want to grab the dog and pet its blood matted fur. I want her to thank me and kiss me. She is still screaming. The cab driver pulls off fast, I watch him as he speeds down the block, I see a bundle drop from underneath the cars body. The bundle doesn’t move. She turns to look at me. Tears rolling down, just like the raindrops on the on the windshield. She looks at me and I take off running.

I run for 3 minutes. Our love is that bloodied bundle.

Stutter, Stammer, Stagger,

*This is my rejected thoughtcatalog submission. Guess I'll try something different. Anyway, hope you dig it.

Growing up I had a really terrible stutter. My words were diced and chopped up so badly that, what in my head seemed like amazing sentences, came out as these mangled glitches of sounds. My Friends could all talk normally, firing off words all fast and sharp, thoughts would form in their brains and travel right down and out the mouth with no issue. My brain would cultivate words and send them out too, but at some point during the trip to my mouth, my words would take a wrong turn and get the shit kicked out of them in an alley. Then they would hobble, all bloodied and beaten, under my pallet and across my tongue and everyone listening would have these pained and pitied looks on their faces. They could tell by the look in my eyes that what I was trying to say was either funny or poignant, but what they heard were just off-putting and static gasps for air and syllable repetition. It was embarrassing to say the (very) least.

The spring time for my speech impediment was during grammar school (Elementary school, as some call it. I never like the term ’elementary’, maybe because of the condescending denotation that Scottish detective says it with.) Children, though unassuming and generally not malevolent, are cruel at this age and I was the subject of much cruelty. Although not as much cruelty as one would think for my stuttering. I was short, near sighted, Pokemon obsessed and had a gnarly case eczema that centralized on my forehead, so the hounds had much to chew on. I was called a midget, four eyes, nerd/lame and Dr. Spots (due to my glasses and the pattern the eczema left on my face.) Although my stutter wasn’t the hot button issue in my social executions, it was the one thing I felt the most ashamed by.

Scientifically speaking, the disorder isn’t tied to any neurological status. Not to say that I’m neurologically sound. I’m on my third bloody Mary and I’m in my boxers wearing the top hat from my Abraham Lincoln Halloween costume. I’m only saying that whatever abnormality exist in my brain doesn’t cause the porky pig routine. But it can cause immense shame, fear, frustration and in my case anxiety. 3 million Americans suffer from stuttering, less than 0.01% of the entire population. Not to mention the fact that four times as many males are suffering from it than females. So my chances of laconically reciting love poems to a girl who knows my plight is massively lowered.

In spite of general ridicule and mild social ostracizing. I was a pretty happy dude. Had my group of friends (nerds and outcasts), got decent grades and had enough gamecube discs at home waiting for me to put that extra fire in my step on the days I’d have to run home with the bullies chased me. I was content in stuttering, and although it shook me up sometimes and caused my hands to pour sweat on the tortuous occasions I was chosen for in class reading it didn’t really stop me from getting a reputation as the funny kid. (Not the class clown, the class clown is never all that funny, he is just the jackass that throws paper at people and pulls your pants down.)

During the latter years of grade school the stuttering halted, I think boobs helped. (The growing of classmates boobs, not my own. I’m a male and if I were to sprout chest protuberances it would open up a whole new galaxy of ridicule and confusion.) Girls began to take their first steps into the grassy field of womanhood and when the boobs started to bloom, the stutter faded out like some evolutionary trait kicked in. And while I still had a multitude of other socially crippling conditions (I was beginning to get dandruff and Digimon had just begin to air on American television.) I found a way to somewhat bury the impediment in order to tell Lindsey Griffin and her gaggle of 12 year old harlots crude jokes and over heard secrets.

Which brings me to the now, I’m 22 and while 8th grade seems like light years away I still bear the scars from my years I spent stuttering. I’m a writer now, and a comedian, I take pride in my words and how they affect people. I still stutter to this day, and it still triggers within me vivid, often horrific flashbacks that send me into chaotic anxiety likened to that off a Vietnam vet. But instead of Ho Chi Min cutting off the ear of a fellow GI, its me reading behind a podium in my social studies class trying, to no avail, to inform the class about Sojourner Truth.

To fat to chase my dreams.

Cheer me up cheer me up, I’m a miserable fuck.

Chasing the dream, I need better cardio

I’ve spent the past 5 months in a grey blanket. But maybe I’m not giving proper credit to these new people who have found there way into my world. Nostalgia and felicity are dangerous when dwelled on.

What I mean to say is I’m getting fat. At first I thought the bulge forming was a badge of honor. It has long been a sign that a wealthy man is often plump. Look at medieval kings, all fat and greasy and loud and rich. Even if they aren’t adored they are at least respected and revered. No one would dare call the king fat to his face for fear of the guillotine or the gallows or that thing with the spikes in it that looks like a casket. (Spanish king Al-Mansur would put criminals in iron boots, bound their hands and dangle them above fire, the flames would heat up the metal boots and scorch and singe the victims feet. I assume Al-Mansur would jerk off as he heard the screams. He would have had me killed if he read that. Hope I don’t run into him in hell.)

Back to my fatness, I thought it was charming and to the right eyes it is. But in the way a stinky bum with a funny joke is charming, tolerable but far away for desirable. When I sit down at my desk and scot my chair forward my stomach perches on the edge of the desk like a fat owl on an annoyed tree. My stomach is about 2 centimeters away from completely eclipsing the sight if my feet as I stand up. Its visible in my face too, although my mom denies it. My chin is doubling over so much that when I crane my neck back it folds and resembles that gross stretchy segment of dangling skin under a roster’s beak. Now if you haven’t seen me in a few months you’re probably thinking that I’ve blown up in size comparable to Jaba the hut or that slug thing form the first blade movie. I promise I’m not a blob or a balloon, but yesterday I noticed a crease over my dropping stomach and my pelvic bone could comfortably hold a pencil in between it. I’m actually embarrassed to admit but my arrogance formed a wall around that fact that I was wildly out of shape. The pre-existing zealous devotion I had formed around my face and its perfectly arched eyebrows and my zorro-eque mustache kept me from really being to embarrassed about my weight. I figured what an extra ten pounds when you look like Prince’s cousin?

It wasn’t until last week that I saw my gut as hindrance. As if my appetite wasn’t a sign of power but a tool of self-destruction. I saw it as if I had been eating my own life, devouring my soul. And my stomach acid was melting away burritos and whiskey, but instead it was putting out my fire. I realized that as I was picking a film of dirt out of my belly button and talking to a girl with spite in my voice. I’ve been in the practice of deprecation for a while now, but let me honestly tell you nothing makes you feel more like a piece of shit then looking down at your maternally inflated stomach as you try your hardest to break a heart that doesn’t deserve to be broken. I got off the phone feeling low and angry and dark and I looked at the wreck my room was in. The piles of clothes wrinkling on the floor, the stains on the carpet and the sheets, the curtain I hadn’t put up, the way the bed sheet rolled up on one side exposing the plastic wrapped mattress. The general disarray of my life reflected in my room. My dog shit soul had made a dog shit room, and all the way up on the 23^rd with a room with a view too die for their lived a fat little brown boy who was eating away his own talent.

When alcohol and me first started going out back in 2008 it was always fresh and new. She was vibrant, wild, and spontaneously sexy. When we would meet at night, our lips would touch we felt infinite. Everyone around us was a painting on a wall, admirable but little more than decoration. She made bathroom floors feel like plush beds with satin sheets. The stars I had in my eyes for her have sense faded out and our love is now the relationship I have with booze is one purely based on sex. (Bad analogy, ever put your dick in gin? I have and it hurts.) But food gave me that feeling again, there is a subtle romance in a 3am trip to the refrigerator to heat up the double cheddar cheese bacon burger on pretzel bread you had from Bennigans. Food grants me that instant satisfaction that alcohol once did, and it was maddeningly beautiful reunion with a sensation I’d been chasing. It was medication. Medication for the anxiety I felt around these new people, and new ways, and slipping away from old ways, and turning 22, and bombing on stage, and feeling unsteadied and lonely and annoyed and foreign in my own body.

Sorry, that last bit was melodramatic, I’m forever emo. (Forever emu, always a bird.)

I’m a man child. I need the spiritual equivalent to a bib and a diaper. I’m a miserable fuck and I like it that way. All I need is a girl to cheer me up and a noteworthy amount of people who adore me for my art. I’m trying to chase my dream but I’m fat and my cardio sucks.

Norman Raine wrote; ‘An artist should remain true. Otherwise his talent, like his stomach, grows fat and stuffy.’ I haven’t necessary been myself this year and a huge part of that if because I haven’t been writing as much ass I should. I’ve been doing stand up, and while the connection between writing and stand up is clearly visible, I’m a way worse comedian than I am a decent writer. I love words, and while extracting laughs out of crowds is intoxicating, it’s not quite as rewarding as the scientific manipulation of words. The book I’m working on is in its infancy, my stand up is barely funny, and my brain is being dulled. I’ve been caught up in a bunch of spiritual bullshit. I’ve been over eating and under thinking. Writing is my mediation, except way cooler. (Mediation is kinda stupid. I tried it for awhile but all I did was spend an hour in the park every Thursday making fun of people.)

So this is me slicing a vein and finger painting in the blood. Here is me with no guard up, here is me fully and honestly, no more eating my life out of fear. Here are my words medicating me. Her is my art helping me, wiping my boogers, cleaning my finger nails. This is my art as my wheel chair and my girlfriend and my joint and my bottle and my……socks.

Don’t no body like cold feet.