Here’s the funny part. My doctor told me the bacteria was probably incubating for a week or two and didn’t flare up or start to cause pain (excruciating pain) until the Saturday I made an emergency appointment. Which means I very possibly became infected during the few days in the last week of April that I was living on the streets.

Why is that funny? Well, on Wednesday, April 25th, I had a dream that eyeballs were growing out of my face like spokes. One even grew out of the top of my head on a stalk – it was very bizarre. In my dream, I was desperately trying to dig them out with my bare hands in a mirror. And at one point I realized that I had accidentally taken out my own right eye, but I kept going on in this nightmarish scenario thinking, “Better to be blind in one eye than to be covered with these things!” That was the same eye that got infected, and it is possible it became infected that day. Strange coincidence, right?

Falling off track

Crying Girl by chozoWarrior

The other reason I was in hibernation was the pending event that occurred on May 15th. I can’t really talk about it much here, but lets just put it this way: It was the most devastating day of my life. As of May 15th, all I feel, all I see is darkness. I’m dead inside. This poem was a response to that day…

Like Father, Like Daughter

Taking flack

There are basically two things I can’t stand on this blog: Anonymous commenting/posting, and ignorant smack talk. Well, last week, I received two anonymous comments to my Let The Journey Begin blog post. One was an actual good suggestion – kind of.

“V” wrote:

You should take MB’s name from these blog posts, unless she gave you permission.

Fair enough. I took her last name down. However, I responded with a somewhat lengthy explanation of Adam Smith’s concept of the Teatre of Approval which is worth reading.

Another commented under the anonymous name “p9244″ wrote:

I feel sorry for you. In addition, I hope your friend Brianna is out there with her head held high without you. This was a disappointingly sad blog to come across. Especially in this day & age with internet bullying as bad as it is.

This was quite obviously written by someone who didn’t just “come across” this blog – their IP address traced to Des Plaines. This person also obviously didn’t read the blog, because the only mention I made of Brianna was that I asked people to pray for her to heal from the hurt I have unfairly caused her.

I wrote a lovely little response to this individual’s post which I recommend you checking out.

And finally, I received another response to a different blog post, but this one was not anonymously. Melyssa Donaghy identified herself as the “Melanie” referred to in my previous post Surviving the ravings of a mad woman in an attempt to defend her not-at-risk honor it would seem. Rather, all she was really doing was coming here to further abuse me because she recently found out I quit working at Angie’s List and she wouldn’t be receiving a bonus check for recruiting me.

I highly recommend that you check out her comments. In the context of everything I disclose about her in the blog, her comments are very true to nature and only further reinforce her character. Except, the particular timing of this comment takes things to a new level entirely seeing as I had just gone through one of the darkest and hardest times of my life, having attempted twice to kill myself, and was still recovering mentally and emotionally.

It takes a certain kind of cruelty to go out of your way to try and kick someone when they’re down. You can check out her comment and my response here.

What’s next?

Well, after Tuesday’s punch in the gut I haven’t been much use to anyone or anything. I can’t eat. I can’t really stay awake or go to sleep – I’m in a half daze all the time.  I’m pretty much good for nothing, and there seems to be no end in sight. I am experiencing the strangest cocktail of conflicting and painful emotions and I am so overwhelmed and confused that I think my body has just completely short circuited and shut down.

In an attempt to try and jump start my system and move on with my life, I have decided to rent a car and drive to Joplin for the weekend to see my friend Erica Tremblay’s documentary Heartland – The Joplin Tornado Documentary. If I can survive the drive down and back, maybe I’ll be able to see a few old friends and that will lift my spirits.

Maybe.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

He’s waging a war that he never will win.
For the casualty is his own soul.
But the triage list doesn’t end there.
It is all who accept his control.

Bitterness eats him alive like a cancer,
And he feeds the cancer with glee.
He spreads the disease to those he would touch.
And today, he offered it to me.

Challenged to fight, I wasn’t afraid.
I was ready to take on his guile.
But then I remembered something that gave me pause:
His daughter’s sweet and innocent smile.

I was warned the fight would cost me dear
Even though I could probably win.
But every war has its share of collateral damage.
And that is why I finally gave in.

For the weapon he weilds in this particular fight
Is the one I love more than my life.
He wants to cut out my heart (what little is left),
But he would make his own daughter the knife.

What makes a man so sick and so sickly depraved?
His own parents disowned him long ago.
Not speaking to them for near twenty years
Surely has made his cancer grow.

Twenty years ago he tried to share his disease:
He told his daughter he bought her for a dish.
With his lie he wanted to stifle her own mother’s love.
And for years he got his own wish.

Her eyes were first opened as a young little thing
When her own step-mother beat her down.
Physically and emotionally abused to a pulp
She decided it was time to leave town.

Into her mother’s loving arms she fled
Almost escaping his deadly snare.
But he pulled her back in with money and lies.
For his sickness he needed to share.

It was during this time that I met this dear girl,
Though a woman she wanted to become.
It was during this time she told me of how
Her father was abusing her numb.

I listened in horror at the stories she shared
Of a childhood raked through the fire.
Like the times that they teased their poor little girl
For singing in her middle-school choir.

Try as I might to make the pain go away,
I found myself in the middle of a war:
A war between this man and his hatred for love;
A war filled with her guts and my gore.

Though an angel to me, I was weak in my love
And I treated her, sadly, less than such.
So the cancer took hold and burrowed deep in her soul
Immune to love’s tender touch.

As her quest to discover herself pressed on
I found myself clearly in the way.
For how could I support a woman who only
Knows how to submit and obey?

Meanwhile her father made her feel like the trash
That is thrown out with yesterday’s news.
And that poor girl in her fragile state,
This sick man continued to abuse.

Until the blame for her misery fell into a line.
And that line pointed squarely at me.
Thought I share a small part for the pain she’s endured,
I bore all of the blame for her misery.

The poor girl is the victim of a cancerous man
Who teaches hate and bitterness and scorn.
And despite my best efforts to reconcile with my love,
From my side she’s been violently torn.

Like a puppet on a string, she dances to his tune,
Causing pain and destruction in her wake.
But little does she know she’s fighting his war,
And both of our hearts are bound to break.

Identity is not found is singing another’s tune,
And the excuse that they’re blood doesn’t work.
But like father, like daughter, she embraces his disease,
While her step-mother chases me with a smirk.

And he passes his disease onto his daughter with grace.
She accepts it without making a sound.
I throw myself on my sword for the battle to end,
And I float on the tide, nearly downed.

I want nothing more than her eternal happiness,
A wish I fear will never arrive.
For today I learned that she has embraced his disease,
And I’m afraid she will not survive.

Blood is no excuse to poison your soul
With conflict and venomous hate.
Forgiveness and reconciliation is the only cure,
But for her, it may already be too late.

Two years of darkness she has chosen to abide.
Two years of just wandering lost.
Without closure, without a word, without forgiveness, without love,
Two years come at a precious cost.

And that cost that I speak of is a balm for the soul,
A cure for the cancer that grows.
Yet the cancer is in her, like father, like daughter,
And its tragic, but that’s just how life goes.

Reconcile your differences with those who offend.
Don’t burn bridges with those who love you.
Don’t trust blood - because it’s meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
Blood isn’t a magical glue.

It won’t hold your soul together, it may tear it apart
By bitterness and hatred and spite.
It won’t teach you a thing about being yourself.
It won’t give you your wings to take flight.

Like father, like daughter, the cancer has spread.
She has chosen the dark path instead.
I only pray that someday she will square things with me
Before it’s too late and we’re both dead.

Crying Girl by chozoWarrior

For those of you offering to help and saying to me, “Is there anything I can do?” then this blog post is your answer. If you meant what you said, then please read what I have to say and respond as you feel led.

A quick recap

If you are reading this for the first time, it is important to know that on Sunday, at midnight on April 22nd, 2012, I made a very weak attempt to end my life. This was followed, twenty-four hours later, by a more carefully planned out attempt that would have easily succeeded had I not been, at the last second, confronted with something very thought provoking and compelling that persuaded me to delay the deed another twenty-four hours. And at that point, I backed down and changed my mind altogether. This entire process was bookended by two blog posts, one in which I announced my intent to kill myself, and the other in which I explained my reasons for not doing it.

April 22, 2012: The Cask of Zachariah

April 24, 2012: Hints, Allegations, and Things That Need to be Said

During this time, I spent about 60 hours wandering the streets of Chicago and sleeping where I could find a safe place to sleep, and eating… well, nothing. Now that I have come back from the edge, had a few good nights sleep, and put some food back in me, I have processed what I have gone through and received a calling, or an action plan, of what to do next.

Please allow me to share with you some of my thoughts.

Why did I want to do it?

Just to be clear, my motivations to kill myself were not what I could consider typical “depression” symptoms or a “lost the girl, life can’t go on” moment. I understand how it could appear that way. Rather, I very calmly and rationally came to the (mis)realization that although I had managed to keep my head above water in the past, despite my very best efforts to do the right thing, I had fallen into an inescapable pattern of hurting people around me.

I had hurt the person whom I loved most in this world while very intentionally trying to do the exact opposite and I didn’t understand why, how to undo it, or how to make it better. I was convinced that my continued “existence” was nothing but torture for this person, a torture that I carried the pain of as well, and that if I was unable to figure out how to unwind that situation, then I was forever doomed to continue in that pattern towards everyone else I came into contact with for the rest of my life.

What changed my mind?

As I explained in my second blog post, I came to a realization that my self awareness of my brokenness as a human being was something that all humans are destined to face. We are all broken. But we are intentionally put on this earth broken to be used as vessels of God’s love, not to be discarded once we outlive our usefulness.

In fact, it is when we reach our most broken state that we are most “useful” as an instrument of God, thus serving as a true testament to God’s ability to heal and a transparent conduit of God’s ability to do good in this world. I say transparent, because when something truly “worthless” and “broken” manages to bring something good into the life of someone else, it is crystal clear that the source of that goodness is not the vessel, but rather God miraculously intervening in this world.

The power of prayer

As best as I can understand, hundreds of people across the country and around the world have been praying for me: For my survival, for a peace of mind, and for God to reveal a path and direction to me. To me, payer is less of a supplication for God to accomplish something and more of a conversation with God that benefits the one praying more than anything. I am certain that at a minimum, all of you praying for me have had a chance to commune with God and hopefully catch a glimpse of the universe through his eyes. And that is good.

I cannot say with certitude whether these supplications on my behalf had a direct influence over my change of heart, my peace of mind, and the quickness with which I have been able to develop a plan (a crazy plan, but a plan nonetheless) to move forward. However, I am willing to accept on faith that this also has played a role, and if it has, then it has played a major role, because the transformation I have experienced in the last few days from “walking dead zombie about to end it all” to where I am now is nothing short of a miracle.

My first request from you

That is why I would like to make one very important request to all of you out there who have felt lead to pray for me. Please pray for Brianna. My life and my happiness is no more or less valuable in God’s eyes than hers. Don’t for a second think of praying for me without also praying for her. For one, I have caused her a tremendous amount of pain if for no other reason than the fact that I announced on Facebook that I was going to kill myself if I did not have a chance to speak with her.

Bri has suffered tremendously in her own life and is very much in her own process of healing. She also needs to reach a place of peace and reconciliation with her pain and the sources of that pain. She is a beautiful child of God and is in as bad of or worse of a place than I am right now thanks in no part to my own actions. Pray for Bri. She deserves no less prayer than I do, and if your prayers for me exacted such a transformation on my heart which was hardened and nearly dead, then I have no doubt that the same can happen for Bri.

My crazy plan: The Journey

I have taken stock of where I am and where God is calling me to go. I have realized that I should not be living in Indianapolis, and I am currently incapable of performing satisfactorily at my job at Angie’s List. Therefore, I have resigned my position at Angie’s List, and this weekend I am packing up all my things in Indianapolis and moving back to Chicago. I am leaving for Indy to fetch my things as soon as I post this blog.

I have realized that I am not in a place where I can even commit to a permanent job at all right now. But this leaves me having to figure out how to “earn my keep” so to speak. Furthermore, I am sensing an overwhelming urge to not even sit still, but to travel across the country with a very intentional purpose in mind.

I would like to journey across the country and visit each and every one of you. I want to reconnect in person with all of the wonderful people who have been pouring out love for me. I want to, no matter how briefly, share in your lives and hopefully bring a little of the light God has shined into mine back into yours. I want to see what is happening in various parts of the country where you all reside, and do everything in my power to volunteer to help.

And along the way, I want to document my journey and share your stories as part of the fabric of the large narrative that God is trying to tell by this journey. I want to post videos, pictures, and write first hand accounts of what God is doing in your lives and how God is working in my own.

Making The Journey possible

I usually don’t have confidence about plans that seem to be so based in a fantasy as this one, but there are many very real barriers to my embarking on, much less getting very far on this journey. For one thing, I don’t own the necessary minivan which I would need to take this trip (I’ll explain why a van or minivan later). I don’t have a video camera or even a still camera. I also don’t have a job. I am about $20,000 in debt. I don’t even know how I’m going to pay my cell phone bill next month. I certainly can’t imagine how I’m going to acquire all these things in my current state, much less be able to afford gas and food along the way!

However, I am in possession of a few things. I have many worldly possessions which I no longer want or need which I am attempting to sell (any buyers out there for a 3,500 book comic book collection?). I also have the excellent work ethic my Grandpa Bob instilled in me, and the character my father has helped me develop. I have experience and know-how to design websites, design print/marketing materials, solve small business problems, and perform a variety of short-term business/marketing/operations consulting functions. I have experience as a nanny, doing hard physical labor and even a bit of carpentry.

Here is how you can help

1. First and foremost, keep praying for me.

2. Reach out to me and let me know if I am welcome to visit you so that I can factor your location into my ever evolving map of stops across the country.

3. Subscribe to my newsletter for updates. Feel free to follow my other social media links (in the sidebar) well, but the email newsletters will be the best way to get updates that you can easily ignore when you’re not in the mood.

4. Buy my stuff! I’m putting up a Buy My Stuff page on this blog soon (as soon as I get my stuff organized) that will link to all the things I’m selling.

5. Hire me! I’m primarily focused on making websites, but as you saw in the last big paragraph above, I can do just about anything.

6. Refer me to someone to hire me. Or just share this blog with people you think might be interested.

7. Donate some funds. Any donations received in excess of necessary equipment (I’m trying to buy a van) and basic necessities (food, gas, etc.) will be re-donated to others in need whom I encounter along the way. If I use any donations early on, but find myself earning excess income later, I will still pay all donations forward out of excess income. And of course, this will all be documented and posted on my blog.

There are plenty of other people out there who need financial help more than I do. I am just stuck right now and figuring out how to get started. My entire purpose of this journey is to pay-it-forward and to be a conduit of God’s love and support for others, so please don’t think for one second I am expecting to be subsidized. I’m just in a hole right now and need help crawling out so I can continue to walk on my own.

To donate, go here: http://www.gofundme.com/the-journey - active now

Thank you for the love

Again, I cannot say enough how grateful I am to the outpouring of love and support and prayers from the hundreds of people who have already made the effort to reach me. I am still in the process of digesting everything and returning correspondence. It is quite overwhelming, and it is quite humbling.

I hope you can learn from my mistakes: Be intentional and proactive with your relationships and don’t let the important people in your life drift into the past without a fight. And remember, someone else is still hurting. People matter more than any idea more than any dream and more than any personal sorrow.

Should I thirst for knowledge
Can I beg you for some water
Should I fight your battles
Can I rest upon your shoulders
I hope I’m able to ride out this storm
So come on Gabriel and blow your horn
Reach, reach out to me
Can’t you see I need you to save me
Yeah, reach, reach out to me
Can’t you see I need you to hold me

- Collective Soul, “Reach”

Most people are used to me being long-winded, but for those of you who are not, I am going to warn you: This is going to be long. Please, though, for those who have reached out to me, silently worried about me, prayed for me, this is necessary for you to read.

This is the “payoff” for all your worry and prayers, otherwise, it wasn’t worthwhile. And if you have been asking people to pray for me who do not know me, please share this with them so that they can share in the “payoff.”

Until last night, the closest I had ever come to killing myself was in 1997 when I found out I was kicked out of my Christian rock band, Crosseyed. Upon hearing the news during lunch, I went into a trance, walked out of school, “stole” my dad’s minivan, got on a back highway, and drove with the intention of jumping off the nearest bridge when the car ran out of gas.

Just being kicked out of the band wasn’t why I wanted to end it all. It was because I had been experiencing tremendous guilt and pain for having very foolishly walked into a dangerous situation two years prior that lead to me being raped. Singing “God music” was my penance for my guilt. However, kids being what they are, and Joplin being what it was, I was constantly teased about being gay – which is, for the average insecure heterosexual male, difficult enough, but, for a guy whose first sexual experience was being forcibly violated by another man and believed it was his own fault, it was quite another matter.

So, the real kicker to the story was that I heard a rumor that the reason I was being kicked out of the band was to spare the band’s reputation of having a rumored faggot as their front man. It was an irony that my young mind was unable to interpret this as “hilarious irony” but rather interpreted the situation as being so far “gone” that I could not even earn my dignity (and God’s forgiveness) back, as this one lost opportunity was supposed to accomplish.

Down by the sea
I think I saw our love dissolve

So plant a little seed
Soon it starts growing
Shed a little light
Soon we’ll be glowing
Hear a little tune
Soon we’ll start singing
Give a little love
Then love will start breathing

- Collective Soul, “Breathe”

There was about an hour’s worth of gas in the car, and there was a tape in the tape deck, so I had just enough time to listen to Collective Soul’s first album, “Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid” before I did the deed. It was the first time I ever heard God speak directly to me, and it came through the voice of an unlikely alternative rock band with a picture of Sweeney Todd on their album cover.

The album started somewhere in the middle, which ironically made the songs play in an order that made even more sense to me than if they had started with the first track and play to the last. As is obvious, I did not kill myself that afternoon, and for the first time in my life, I learned, through Collective Soul lyrics, that God felt my pain and wanted me to let him in so that he could shoulder my burdens.

Last night, I came so much closer to finishing what I started almost exactly fourteen years ago. But this time, I didn’t have a one-hour drive and a rock album. I had 24-hours of excruciatingly painful, yet carefully planned time to literally feel completely dead mentally. I have never felt so numb nor desired to be so cut-off from everyone in all my life. I literally felt like the walking dead ever since the clock struck midnight and I had “missed” my deadline to finish the job.

This time, however, my reasons were quite different. As I said before, I have not been suffering from depression, I simply had woken up and saw all these signs pointing to the same conclusion: It was my time to exit stage left, and God wanted me to carry out the stage directions myself. If there was no God, then it made even more sense: It was a process of natural selection and nature was simply taking its course to self-eliminate inadequate and inefficient creatures from its ever improving universe.

Push me to the left, hold me to the right
I never know where to go
Burning that trail to the promised land
You’re moving on out of control
Well I don’t want to be some puppet on a string
And I don’t want to learn of things you can’t explain
And I don’t want to have your views on everything
I just want to scream

Scream about hurting
Scream about mercy
Scream about something
Scream about nothing

There you go with all your might
Giving promises by decree
Well God is great and God is good
But God you’ll never be
Well I don’t want to be in your hospitality
And I don’t want to live in false reality
See I’m the one obsessed with truth and honesty
I just want to scream

- Collective Soul, “Scream”

I find it disheartening to know that so many people thought I was joking about killing myself. I have a dark humor, but goodness… not that dark! I also find it disheartening that some people didn’t take me seriously and thought I was putting on a show. I guess no one wants to not be taken seriously. Maybe those people have threatened suicide for a manipulative reason themselves and they just thought this was the same thing. It certainly was easy to interpret that way.

I’m not going to try to change anyone’s mind: If I really wanted to change people’s minds, I would just go through with it. That would show them! I’m also not going to go into too many details of how close I came. I certainly didn’t have a “come to Jesus moment” at the last second, but I also spent a good 24 hours plotting and planning and practicing being “numb” so that when the time came it would be harder to have last second thoughts or chicken out. But, I’ll get to why I didn’t go through with it in a moment.

What I do need to do right now is better explain why I wanted to go through with it which my Edgar Allen Poe references and Facebook posts didn’t do very well. Cue eye rolls and “here we go again” sighs.

You see, I’ve gone through the “lost the girl of my dreams” once before and managed to survive. Twice in fact. And each time, “suicidal threats” were involved but not at all serious. The first time, I was very poorly advised to check myself into a hospital and “fake” wanting to commit suicide because it was an excusable escape – a vacation – from the pressures at the time that were preventing me from grieving and healing. And, after all, my insurance would pay for it! What a great scam, right? Except, as it turned out I wasn’t insured, and after about two days of “vacation” I was ready to go back out and face my problems, but the hospital had a seven day minimum holding period and so it actually became the opposite of a vacation, and my problems were much worse that time.

The second time, I’m ashamed to admit, while I did feel down, and I did feel depressed, I manipulated those feelings and myself into creating a false suicide plea to get some attention. At this point in my life, I have learned to be quite content with being single, and no amount of “lost love” would ever push me over the edge.

Been thinking a lot about my ways
Guess I’m sorry baby
Been searching
Out a way to say
Guess I’m sorry baby
This time I gave all to you
It’s time I prove something to you

So I’ll lift you up and hold you near
Warm your heart and calm your fears
See I don’t want to lose this love I found
So I’ll burn my bridges, burn them down

Been hurting a lot without  you here
Guess I need you baby
Been sleeping upon a bed of tears
Guess I miss you baby
This time I give all to you
It’s time I prove something to you

Take all my world and shake it
Take my dear heart and embrace it
Take what I say and listen
My world’s changing, changing for you

- Collective Soul, “Burning Bridges”

This time was very different. You know how they say that every time God closes a door, he opens a window? Well, in my life – maybe because I’m such an optimist – I’ve noticed that every time God closes a door, he opens a giant gate for me.

When I lost my Air Force career, I could have dwelt on the shock and the sting of it all and let that turn into seething bitterness over the injustice and unfairness of my four-year roller-coaster ride that ended in a cliff drop. But, I was too distracted with the “vision” I had of my bright future.

You see, I was going to go back to UIC, make straight A’s, participate in all the “right” extra curricular, and earn my way into being competitive enough for a top rated Masters of Public Administration program. During the summer off, I was going to take a bike ride across the U.S. (see my first Aspirations post on this blog) and pay for it with a video blog gimmick and corporate sponsorship (an idea that was slightly ahead of its time then, but seems pretty normal now I guess).

After I earned my MPA, I planned on joining Teach for America, then going BACK to school with a TFA fellowship at the Kennedy School for Government to get a joint PhD in Public Administration and JD at one of eight participating Universities (such as University of Chicago). Then, with all this knowledge and experience, I was going to launch my “revolutionary” and completely unheard of private school system which was designed to actually make private school as affordable as public school, thus slowly eroding the need for “public” education altogether and becoming a model for other social entrepreneurs to follow.

Okay, so delusions of grandeur are not anything I was suffering a shortage of. But, on paper, everything except the last part of the plan was completely achievable… IF I was able to follow my plan perfectly and not make one misstep. On paper, I had everything else I needed up to that point to achieve those goals, and I was very confident in my ability to follow through.

Then I had a few missteps. The first was my attempts to transform UIC’s Undergraduate Student Government: Which I initially approached as a resume building hobby (like all the normal college students who were participating in it) but quickly felt honor-bound to throw my entire soul into “fixing” to the point that it appeared to be nothing more than an sick obsession to those who didn’t know me very well. And I lost sight of my goal and suffered my first major blow to my plan when I bombed my GPA.

This was something I could recover from, however. I just had to be academically perfect with a capital P from that point on. Then came my next distraction: the Argus. Again, motivated by a sense of honor and justice, I threw myself full force into launching this newspaper and providing what I thought was a good and necessary service to the school I loved so much.

In the process, I discovered something in my business partner, Brianna: I was a half, and she completed me. Now, before you start rolling your eyes again, I’m not referring to the romantic, soul-mate, Aristophanes sense of being a half. I don’t believe in that stuff. I believe the opposite: You can only truly love someone when you are a whole first.

I’m talking about a common situation that arrises among entrepreneurs. Every Jobs needs their Woz. Many of the most successful entrepreneurs achieved success because they found the perfect “business balance” partner to temper each other’s strengths and weaknesses against. Many times, these partners work together on project after project because they realize that the perfect business partner is a once-in-a-lifetime find and some people can’t even find theirs in their own lifetime.

Girls come and go, and love is always waiting around the corner. But, “Briannas” are my Unobtanium, and once you find one you never give them up. Bri expressed a similar feeling about me, and when we started dating, we vowed to never let a possible break-up destroy our partnership because we both recognized how well we complimented each other and how rare that would be to find in others. It also helped that we loved each other. At least, I know I love Bri, I shouldn’t really presume to speak for her just because I wanted to believe that was true.

Watch my world spin round
It stops for you
I’ll give you heaven for a view
I set my sights on high my aim is true
I’d walk on water just for you

All is all I can give you
All is all I can do
All is all I wish for when I’m with you

Come lay your troubles down
Rest here with me
My kingdom is all yours to receive

Well, I’ll push the clouds away
So you can have sunshine
I’ll give you anything that your heart desires

- Collective Soul, “All”

This assurance of Bri’s rarity, and of our mutual devotion to our friendship and partnership lead me to make some very dangerous decisions. I allowed our first venture, the Argus, to take priority over school: After all, an MPA, PhD, and JD can be obtained anytime and anywhere, but a Bri: That is something worth fighting for (again, feelings of love may have also been playing tricks on my logic here).

I think Bri and I both pushed ourselves to limits neither of us knew we could sustain trying to make the Argus succeed. But, the cards were stacked against us. I would like to say it was a miracle we made it as far as we did, but it was really a combination of our insane and tireless efforts and the contributions of some crazy helpful, valuable, and oh-so-destined to be successful college students who joined our staff. So, maybe it was a miracle. I recognize now that without each other, both of us would have given up sooner: We pushed those limits more for the other person for ourselves at times. And it took its toll.

So, I torpedoed my “perfect plan” for the Argus, although I think it was really more for Bri. I had found something more valuable to me than a “perfect plan.” I saw less risk in this new path I was taking. In fact, when all was said and done, I was quite apt to regret having gone to college altogether: I realized in hindsight that I could have pushed myself further towards my newly discovered career path as an entrepreneur without college and even learned a lot more in four years than I did at UIC.

But, I didn’t regret it, because one extremely good thing came out what I otherwise would have considered a giant waste of time: Bri.

Somebody told me about a worn out distraction
That I had let slip away
Then it comes back and rides my shoulders
And burdens me every new day
Well I’ll just sit here like a slow burn out
And try to figure out how to do without you

Who’s going to straighten me up when I’m leaning
Who’s going to soothe my heart when it’s burning
Who’s going to be the one to tell me everything’s
All right well, goodnight, good guy

- Collective Soul, “Goodnight Good Guy”

This is all a very round-about way to bring it to answering the question, “Why did you seriously contemplate suicide!?” I’m almost there…

The strange thing is, for the past month I have had an itch in the back of my head that everything was leading up to my inevitable demise. I pretended that the feeling wasn’t there, but in retrospect, it explains a lot of my behavior. For example, about a week ago, I felt the need to write some old friends with whom I had lost contact and felt I never told them how much they meant to me. It seemed out of the blue at the time, but now I know that I suspected my own death was eminent.

As the day of reckoning drew closer, I went to even greater lengths to mask the feeling of my inevitable demise from myself and those around me. Yet the suspicion was still there. And just like when I was kicked out of “Crosseyed” the reasoning was two-fold and intertwined.

First, as I said before in my Facebook post, I was becoming confident and painfully aware of a persistent fact about my life: I hurt people. Even when I have the best of intentions, even when I believe I am acting out of love, I still somehow manage to hurt people! I even was beginning to believe that I actually CHANGE people and leave them worse off than when I found them. You can try to debate me on this all you want, but you’re not going to convince me otherwise. I just knew one thing: Surely something was wrong with me. Surely my time of productive contribution to society had jumped the shark at an earlier point in my life.

And my love for Bri, not just as a girlfriend or a partner, but as a beautiful human being whom I respected and admired, ran very deep. If it was true that I had somehow contributed to the pain of her life and somehow held her back for three years as she seemed to communicate to me, I felt that I had committed a crime which was unforgivable, and worse yet, I didn’t know how to avoid committing it in the future! The only logical solution was capital punishment.

Second, what I didn’t mention before, was my selfish and insecure reason which I am still somewhat coming to grips with: For the first time in my life since I lost my position of lead singer in a rock band, I didn’t see a gate, much less a window, looming around the corner of this closed door in my life. Really though, I admired Bri so much, and she was so “larger than life” to me, that I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her as a friend or partner.

And I placed a great deal of trust on Bri’s honor to keep her word to me that we would never let a broken relationship destroy our friendship and partnership. If she was willing to forsake that, then to me that was an obvious sign that I really must have done something tremendously damaging and unforgivable.

Give me a word
Give me a sign
Show me where to look
Tell me what will I find (will I find)
Lay me on the ground
Fly me in the sky
Show me where to look
Tell me what will I find (will I find)

Oh, heaven let your light shine down
Oh, heaven let your light shine down
Oh, heaven let your light shine down
Oh, heaven let your light shine down

Love is in the water
Love is in the air
Show me where to go
Tell me will love be there (love be there)
Teach me how to speak
Teach me how to share
Teach me where to go
Tell me will love be there (love be there)

- Collective Soul, “Shine”

And thus my conundrum: Even if I did win Bri back as a friend or girlfriend, I was already convinced of my “cancerous nature” to those around me and I figured that it was inevitable that I would only cause more pain down the line. And if I didn’t, it would just be someone else. Either way, I realized that I had sacrificed my “perfect plan” for naught and that the one redeeming value of the past four years was now gone.

What was worse, the place I found myself currently in was all just a tremendous sacrifice for the hope of a future with Bri and I didn’t find any value outside of that hope to be there nor did I conceive of any way to progress to a better place where I would be happy. What was the point of living friendless in a city I didn’t enjoy much, struggling at a job that only a fraction of me was really suited to perform, over the course of three to five years raising venture capital if I couldn’t be an entrepreneur with “the most perfect partner in the world?”

The real kicker was simply that I concluded that I was now caught in what would be a never-ending cycle that would never get me anywhere worthwhile, would repeatedly hurt those closest to me, and found its origins in the fact that whatever good I was meant to do on this earth had run its course.

That is why when people would say to me, “You meant so much to me! You positively impacted me!” I couldn’t help but think, sure, the first season of Heroes was groundbreaking and amazing, but after a few more seasons the show got so bad that it just had to be canceled. In other words, sure I did “good” things to people in the past, but that was just my first few seasons. Those people didn’t know who I was now or comprehend where my life was going, so they couldn’t truly estimate the necessity of cancelation.

Something’s going wrong inside of you
Burdens bearing down and seeping through
Well, I don’t want to bleed anymore for you
And I don’t want to breathe any hatred too

Sitting while your world just floats around
Now you want to move ’cause it’s crashing down
Well, I don’t want to sing you guarantees
And I don’t want to cling to our used to be’s
So take your heart, take your soul
Just get yourself on out of here
Yeah, just take your hurt, take your pain
Just get yourself on out of here

Wasting time
That’s all you’ll do if you’re waiting for me
Wasting time
I don’t see what you think I see
Wasting time
That’s all you’ll do if you’re waiting for me
Wasting time
I don’t want what you think I need

- Collective Soul, “Wasting Time”

So, thus began my twenty-four hour journey towards (and wrapped in) death. I pridefully made a bargain with God. I knew that no one was going to convince me not to kill myself: I’d heard it all before, and I wasn’t of a mind to give anyone a chance to get through to me now and try to talk me down. So, I told God that if I could successfully avoid discovery over the next twenty-four hours then that was a sign that God wanted me to go through with it.

To be fair, I didn’t go hide in one of the million cozy hiding places in Chicago I could have gone (although these places did make some nice sleeping spots two nights in a row – being homeless in Chicago isn’t as hard as it looks!) I actually made it pretty easy to find me. I went to many public places where I was likely to run into someone I knew. I went to places where, if the police were looking very hard, they would have been looking for me there. I even got pretty brave and hung around outside a police station for four hours!

Funny side note: I went to the Student Center East at UIC, but I was convinced it was a pretty safe place to not be noticed by anyone I knew. Almost everyone I knew had graduated. It wasn’t until later that I found out that, due to social networking, my story had been passed around among many current students in Asian American InterVarsity and I had probably made it very likely that I would be “spotted” there. Maybe not as likely as I think – I was probably more of a name than a face to most people – but certainly more likely than being “spotted” in the laundry mat in Pilsen where I charged my phone.

Needless to say, I wasn’t discovered or “spotted” by anyone even though I was making it easy. This was a good enough sign to me. By the time I posted my second Facebook post and updated a few spelling errors in my blog (who wants to be remembered as having poor spelling?) I had arrived at the place I wanted to finish the job and I was ready to make the final preparations.

Oh, and in case you are wondering, I opted on the hanging method. Not a rope hanging (ropes are so unreliable) but a nice modern-day reinforced coaxial cable hanging. Hanging carries many negative risks if you don’t do it right, but if you are meticulous, scientific, and work in a few redundant backups it can be extremely effective and not very messy – IF you do it exactly right. There is a pain risk that can be reduced by careful planning, but I wasn’t really afraid of pain. Why waste your last moments alive by NOT experiencing a sensory blast that most living people never get to experience?

Plus, if you’re feeling extra confident and creative, you can get extremely poetic with a hanging and – well, I have never been accused of not being confident or not being creative. In fact, I was feeling so creative that as a courtesy, I planned out a pretty good method of informing the appropriate authorities of where my body would be found so that some “innocent” wouldn’t stumble upon it. I was going to complete the task in the early morning hours which only gave me a few hours to be found by someone I told.

If I was too direct, I risked being found within 10-15 minutes, and in a worst case scenario, if the hanging didn’t go as planned, I needed about 20 minutes for the “backup” to finish the job. In a botched hanging, those 20 minutes can be crucial. If you are rescued before you are finished, you are probably going to spend the rest of your life as a quadriplegic and possibly brain damaged. Now, this thought didn’t really scare me that much, but if you’re offing yourself as a means of removing a “burden from society” then transforming yourself into a quadriplegic invalid is not moving in the appropriate direction.

Overseas through the air
Touched your heart down with care
All the thoughts left behind
Soon will catch you in time
Well, if I could, you know I would
Let salvation reign on you
So, won’t you push away
All this pain that you’ve been through

While the scenes shuffle ’round
Let your wold anchor down
Pull your heart from your sleeve
First react then believe
You won’t always get thunder
To warn you of storms ahead
So bury all this pain
And get on with your life again

Conquer some serenity
Lay yourself in fields of poetry
Close your eyes to all you see
Lay your weary head here with me

- Collective Soul, “Sister Don’t Cry”

All this time it took to pay attention to detail and to properly tie a coaxial cable into a perfect noose (there’s a trick to it, and most people mess this part up, TRUST me) started to take even longer than I had thought. I actually became bored and decided to pass the time reading all the comments on my blog that I had been stubbornly ignoring. I figured, what is the risk? I’m so desensitized and numb now, nothing I read is going to give me pause at this point.

And, I hate to say it, but for the most part nothing did. It was what I expected and I had done a pretty good job of meditating myself into a very numb trance as I prepped to avoid the likely “last minute struggle for survival.”

Then I read something I didn’t expect. And it came from the last place I expected to read it which was even more impacting. Oops.

Has anyone here ever read “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” per chance?

Well, that has nothing to do with what I’m about to say, but I figured this story was getting way too serious and heavy for anyone to believe it was actually from me if I didn’t throw in a completely random inside joke. Have some humor folks.

Now, please take what I am about to say with a big grain of salt: I despise my brother, Daka. No, I don’t sit around thinking about how much I don’t like him. I do the opposite! I sit around thinking about how much I love him. I try so hard to love him. But for some unexplained reason, no matter how much I really do love him (I do love you, Daka), I can’t help but have a complete and in-extractable lack of respect for him. I’ve tried. I’ve prayed. I’ve rationalized. I’ve looked for plenty of good things to change my seemingly irrational, unchangeable gut feeling. But, I have struggled with this for years and never could shake it. This morning, I think I discovered why.

Wait just a second now
Love’s easier lost than found
So learn baby learn
It’s time to up and turn the other way
Yeah peace baby peace
It’s past time to release and fly away

Once I was down and couldn’t see
Then love lifted me
Yeah love; it was love
I believe that love lifted me

- Collective Soul, “Love Lifted Me”

So, Daka wrote a very interesting response on my blog post that I actually stumbled across while on a break from knot tying and cleaning out my email inbox. That’s when you know someone has OCD, by the way: They are hours away from killing themselves and they can’t resist the urge to make sure they don’t have any spam sitting in their inbox.

I’m not going to try to repeat or paraphrase what Daka wrote to me. You can check out the previous blog post and find his comments below it. It is better to read his own words. But, out of everything I had read, even in my numb state, this managed to pierce through and surprise me. And considering the source, THAT surprised me even more!

Okay, I won’t make you work too hard – here’s what I basically read (or at least the impression I got) from the comment Daka wrote to me:

All my feelings about being a cancer in the world and not deserving to live were dead on. I don’t deserve to live. But, then again, neither do those guys who raped me. Neither does the Sergeant who bragged about abusing prisoners at Gitmo and then worked to kick me out of Chinese school when I confronted him about it. If I’m feeling extremely mean, neither does the kind of girl who would date other men while we were in a serious relationship, lie about our relationship to string men along, and then stay with me just long enough to get what she needed before casting me aside.

Wait a second. I have my faults, but I’m not as cold and premeditated in my sins as those people! My sins tend to be more mistakes or crimes of passion. Plus, even ignoring all those, I still felt like when I tried to do good things, even THOSE turned out bad! So, I really shouldn’t compare myself to all the scumbags in my life whom I felt had done me injustice. They were cold hard criminals who knew what they were doing. I was worse! Even my attempts to be good hurt people, and if I turned into a cold hard criminal, well, just imagine the damage I could do.

This made me think of a verse in the Bible that illustrates this point:

“All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all of our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.” ~ Isaiah 64:6

No one ever thought about sharing that Bible verse to someone contemplating suicide, did they? Well, neither did my brother, but that was basically what he was saying.

My brother went on to state, as the verse does, that we are all pretty worthless. Even the best and most righteous among us still deserve to die – not eventually, but right now! The only reason we are kept alive is because God wants to demonstrate grace and, get this, work THROUGH us.

And why would God want to work through such imperfect and filthy vessels you might ask? Well, it would seem to me, that if someone as evil and worthless as me – someone who causes others pain when he tries to do right by them – can somehow do something good, then that is a pretty powerful indication that God is at work and he is working a miracle and people better pay attention.

Okay, that gave me something to think about. Maybe God created me as a cancer (sorry guys who kept telling me it was impossible for God to create a cancer) because he wanted to show the world how miraculously he could HEAL me rather than what I originally assumed which was that I started out somewhat okay, but had turned into a cancer later in life and now God was trusting me to self-eliminate. Yeah guys, I didn’t even think that God had actually created me as a cancer, I just figured I eventually ended up that way: But, now I am pretty convinced that he did!

I decided to take some more time and think about this. It didn’t take me very long to figure out something else. The message itself which I was pondering wasn’t the most important thing for me to think about: It was the syntax. How on earth could my little brother, the guy whom I had almost no respect for – especially where spiritual maturity was concerned – have managed to write something so wise and gifted that it would give me pause?

Clearly, this wasn’t my brother speaking. This was God speaking directly to me through my brother. And just like the message was already trying to say: “God wants to work a miracle by revealing himself to the world through you, you despicable and worthless vessel,” God was reinforcing that message through my (no offense Daka) despicable and worthless little brother.

And all of the sudden, it made perfect sense why I could never get over my seemingly unfounded and irrational feelings of disrespect for my little brother. God has been planning, all these years, to someday use him as a way to get through to me in a very complicated and yet completely poetic way.

The walls came up as the thoughts went down
To the hush of disparity
Sure we know the problem lies
With some insecurities
But we’ll never see eye to eye
As long as our tongues are tied
And we’ll never be seen as one
Until we find love

In a moment it could happen
We could wake up and be laughing
In a moment it could happen
We could forgive and be happy

It’s a shame our world responds to life
As a puzzle in disguise
I wish our course would lead us towards
The peace and loving kind
But we’ll never walk hand in hand
Until we let old wounds mend
And we’ll never sing songs as one
Until we find love

In a moment some wisdom could be learned
In a moment new voices could be heard
In a moment we could make heads turn
In a moment we could change

- Collective Soul, “In a Moment”

So where do I go from here, you might be wondering. Well, I really don’t know. I know that because of my actions, my options have become much more limited than they were 48 hours ago. Which is bad, considering that my options felt so limited that I wanted to kill myself 48 hours ago. So, now that I am coming out of the valley, I can’t really see any light at the end of the tunnel, but I have the faith that there is a slight chance that it might be there.

And considering the mental game I have been playing with myself in order to assure “suicidal success” I am going to need a little more time to unwind, clear my head, and figure out the next step.

Am I in a mental state that is going to lead me to relapse? No. But, am I in a mental state to move back to Indianapolis (where I am isolated and cut off from my support network) and fulfill my duties in my job there as I was hired to do? Maybe not. It is embarrassing and hurts my pride, but I don’t want to walk out of the frying pan into a fire right now.

As completely irrational and foolish as this might sound – and as selfish as it might sound (something my pride also doesn’t want anyone to think of me), I might just need a few weeks or a month to go on a journey – or continue the journey I started a few days ago – to discover exactly what I can do next.

Then again, maybe what God wants me to do next is to suck it up and go right back into the belly of the beast so he can very quickly and immediately prove his ability to work miracles through me and somehow I’m going to transform into an incredible salesman overnight DESPITE the fact that by all measurable accounts, I am not in a mental state to pull that off.

Then again, maybe that would make TOO much sense and be TOO easy and I am getting ahead of myself for the purpose of appearing “strong and put together” to everyone else.

As you can see, I’m very confused (and mentally drained right now) and probably am not going to have any clear ideas of what to do next tonight. So, I am going to try to find a place to rest my head and get some sleep and then spend the better part of tomorrow in solitude sorting through my thoughts. If you’ve been dying to hear me reassure you in person that I am okay, I’m sorry, but I’m still not ready for that yet. I have too much on my mind right now to be able to keep it together and offer a sincere conversation – or even just a vocal hello – to anyone right now. I’m sorry.

And to my family members, please don’t take offense that I still haven’t reached out to contact you and tell you in person that I am okay but am opting to do it through this impersonal blog. I’m not quite ready. By tomorrow evening, I suspect I will be. It will be hard, and will require me to swallow a lot of pride, but I might as well peel that bandaid off. Sometimes, a drastic shock to the system in a good and necessary thing. Just maybe not a “final solution” drastic shock.

Who’s gonna bring me to heaven
When heaven’s already here

No more living in darkness
Now that love lights my way
I don’t need any new change
To make me love today

- Collective Soul, “Heaven’s Already Here”

The Cask of Zachariah

Or, how a girl named Brianna became the final brick in the wall.

BRICK #1 – 1995: I was raped by two men while waiting for my older sister to get off work.

BRICK #2 – 1996: I suffered humiliation and ostracism and was called a fag and rejected by Joplin. I gave up my virginity to a random skanky girl just to prove they were wrong to myself.

BRICK #3 – 1997: I was kicked out of my Christian contemporary music band because “everyone thought I was gay.”

BRICK #4 – 1998: I transferred to Seneca High School and lost all hope and motivation of getting a good education or into a good college. So I completely gave up even though I had scored a 31 on the ACT in 8th grade.

BRICK #5 – 1999: I did not make it into acting school. Instead, I went to Greenville College and began to take on mountains of debt for one of the most worthless and miserable years of my life.

BRICK #6 – 2000: I transferred to UIC and promptly dropped out at the promptings of my girlfriend, Nicky. She also encouraged me to build up my credit card debt. When she was done with me I was over $30,000 in the hole on just plastic alone. I have still never paid it off.

BRICK #7 – 2001: Nicky dumped me and I checked into a hospital without insurance. I walked out a week later over $70,000 in total debt.

BRICK #8 – 2002: I dropped out of college again because I couldn’t keep up with credit card payments and classes. Then I lost both my jobs. At one point, I found myself going through trash for food. I lost all my dignity.

BRICK #9 – 2003: I joined the Air Force and was tricked into switching from EOD to linguist under the pretence that I would be a Chinese linguist. I got assigned to Arabic. I fought for six months to switch to Chinese pr back to EOD. Unable to handle it, I got black out drunk twice and found myself in a hospital once and at a stranger’s house another time, losing what little dignity as a human being I might have had left.

BRICK #10 – 2004: My hero, Grandpa Bob Wiedeman, died a couple months after my Grandma Rosie (his wife). I was devistated they never lived to see me make anything of myself and I am devistated to this day. On the bright side I was switched into Chinese school… but…

BRICK #11 – 2005: In my quest to reinvent myself as the most honorable and best Airman I could be, I made enemies with other unscrupulious Airmen who stopped at nothing to nring me down until I was stripped of my honor as Flight Chief – something I worled 8 months to attain – on completely made up (yet corroborated by two individuals) accusations of making racist remarks. I also privately confronted an Army Sergeant who bragged to my classmates about abusing prisoners when he was an interrogator at Gitmo. He and an Army Master Sergeant and Army Captain conspired together and had me kicked out of Chinese language school three months before graduating. I was reassigned to computer network maintenance. At my next tech school, I met and fell in love with a girl named Karen, but…

BRICK #12 – 2006: After financially and emotionally supporting Karen when she lost her job and house in Katrina, she moved to California with me and once she got back on her feet, she dumped me and complained to my First Sergeant to kick me out of our house with only 2 weeks notice. Then, I found that not only she been dating numerous other guys the entire 18 months we were dating (and living together) and among the many excuses she made to guys who found out about me, my favorite was the one where she told one guy I was “just some creepy stalker guy who was obsessed with her and thought we were dating because I didn’t have a grip on reality.” That excuse happened 6 months into our relationship when we were discussing how she could move to California with me and whether or not we should elope.

BRICK #13 – 2007: My next roommate kicked me out with of her apartment with 4 hours notice because she thought my dog stayed at the apartment one night. My dog stayed in my car that night because Karen contacted my sister and told her that if she didn’t take her that night she would take her to the pound. Cracking under the stress of my failed relationship and continually taking heat from my Commander due to the fact that Karen still was calling my unit to “complain” about me (despite the fact that I had not seen or spoken to her in months and about opposite things: “The utilities are all still in his name!” Then next week: “He canceled all the utilities!”), I begged my commander for a way to get out of Sacramento and away from Karen. He took the initiative, without informing me, to get me out of the Air Force for “mental health” reasons. Thus, despite making Staff Sergeant in under 4 years and having one of the most promising Air Force careers of the decade, my “career” came to an abrupt halt. I vowed to “give Karen her space” harboring the secret hope that she would feel bad for what she did and someday come back to me. I never heard from her again.

BRICK #14 – 2008: I was fired from being a Kaplan tutor because of a misunderstanding in the first week of training about our teaching assignments, thus crushing a dream and derailing something I had worked so hard to achieve… Then I started my job as an RA which marked the beginning of the end of my straight-A college career that I miraculiously was allowed to restart at UIC.

BRICK #15 – 2009: I became involved in Undergraduate Student Government and fought to make positive changes only to have me efforts overwhelmed by slimy “politician” wannabes Joel Ebert & Chris Olsen who almost stole an entire election but failed due to my tireless efforts to expose their fraud. I nearly failed out of school and my efforts were rewarded by… nothing. I became the victim or a negative PR campaign and lost my reputation, my credibility, and some of my closest friends.

BRICK #16 – 2010: The greatest love of my life, Brianna, and I started a newspaper only to falter due to two of our partners and coworkers being incompetent, lying, substance abusers. We lost sleep, lost GPA standings, and lost many friends in the process…

BRICK #17 – 2010: Due to excessive turnover and a small core of vital team members continually failing to follow through with their commitments and duties, Bri and I gave up on the Argus, but not after first working 80 hour weeks, losing numerous friends and almost losing each other. It burned us both out to the core. I dropped out of school (again) to try to keep it going. This caused my GI Bill to go “retroactive” simultanioisly indebting me to the government for several grand and causing me to go into collections on all my credit cards. Bri and I swore we would reinvent the Argus again someday and that would be the first of many business ventures we were planning together. I came to value Bri as the yin to my yang and couldn’t image launching a business venture without her.

BRICK #18 – 2011: After a rough year, Bri and I broke up/took a break. My roommate and former Argus Editor (and one of Bri’s and my best friends), Tommy Barnett, screwed me out of over $1000 in rent and attacked me with a knife when I threatened to sue him. Bri was horrified. It nearly destroyed what little relationship we had left.

If curiosity can kill a cat, can false hopes kill a Zach?

THE FINAL BRICK – NOW: After my relationship with Bri began to show signs of mending, I turned down a job offer in Chicago and took a promising ($$) job in Indianapolis to help Bri get out of Chicago ASAP (she told me she HAD to get out of Chicago) and help us become financially independent enough to go anywhere and start our own business together somewhere. I moved to a stange city where I knew no one, left all my furniture with Bri, slept on a foam matt and blankets, ate PB & honey sandwiches and ceriel every day (sometimes I would have a lunchmeat sandwich as a bonus to myself) to save money, tripled rent expenses, and took what was supposed to be a temporary salary cut (while I built up my “pipeline” in this 100% commission job). All while paying Bri back $$ she had loaned me the year before when the business was failing and I had lost all my money in it. I paid her full rent every month since I left.

After being gone two weeks, Bri started to have a breakdown and supposedly missed me so much it was driving her crazy And making her feel so much pain… After a crazy “argument” one night which basically revolved around nothing I did being good enough for her, Bri and I decided that she had codependency issues with me and that it was unhealthy for both of us to talk on the phone every day while adjusting to the seperation. We (I thought) agreed to take a “technology break” and only write letters. This “seperation” killed me and caused me to feel even more lonely and stressed in my new unfamiliar environment, but I vowed to keep it up “for Bri” and I wrote her letters weekly.

After a month of this, I visited Chicago and saw Bri and learned that she at first had misunderstood our “mutual” agreement and thought I had “commanded” her to not contact me (which didn’t actually fit with the text messages she sent me after our last conversation thanking me). Even though she was “slightly angry” with me for this but “getting over it” she was grateful because the seperation was actually helping her realize some of the “best and most positive changes in her life” that she had ever experienced. We left on good terms and she told me the only thing really preventing her from writing me back was that she didn’t have stamps.

I sent her a book of stamps in next letter to her. The next week, I received a very positive letter that said she had never felt so happy in all her life and “thank you forth the stamps.” I wrote her again offering to visit her on her Birthday (April 11), but never heard back.

Meanwhile, my discomfort with being “standed” in Indianapolis without a car, striking out week after week at making friends, my low income, my dog, Starbuck, not living with me, and the stress of discovering myself “failing” in my new job all started to weigh me down. The only thing keeping me going was a going away gift Bri gave me (a handmade framed art piece of all the things that Bri and I shared) on which she wrote on the back that she missed me, she was proud of me, and she would be joining me in Indianapolis soon. I might have been miserable, but the one thing that kept me going was the hope of soon being reunited with Bri.

I returned to Chicago this weekend, slightly puzzled that I had only received just the one letter from Bri that month despite sending her four letters myself, but cluelessly optimistic about seeing her and catching up and receiving that breath of fresh air to return to Indianapolis and be miserable and lonely for another month.

Instead, Bri “greeted” my return (via text) with coldness and anger and a refusal to see or speaking with me. Completely confused and getting no explanation of the seemingly sudden change of heart from Bri over texts, I finally got her on the phone.

And that is when she blasted me with so much hate and bitterness and anger for…

(a) the fact that she only just now realized that she was never happy, but was always miserable in our three year relationship (all because of me),

(b) the fact that I had “forgotten” her Birthday (somehow she never received the Birthday letter I sent her two weeks prior nor had she received the Birthday gift I bought and mailed to her),

(c) the fact that I had “abandonded” her when she “needed me the most” (for switching to the letters only communication attempt),

(d) all the drama I forced her to suffer through including the collapse of our business and the drama of Tommy Barnett,

(e) and every other transgression I had ever committed against her or someone she cared about throughout the past few years. She told me she was never really over anything or had forgiven me and had “suppressed her true feelings” about because I “never allowed her to express her feelings to me” and I “always twisted everything into being her fault anyway.” Something I also have been woefully unaware of. For example…

Nearly 9 months ago, I disrespected and insulted her step-sister online during a heated political discussion. For this offense, I confessed my guilt and shame to Bri, begged her forgiveness, and wrote her sister an appology letter after struggling for a week just to word it right to convey my sincere guilt and sorrow over my missdeeds. I even ran the letter by Bri for her stamp of approval to make sure it came across as humble and appropriately appologetic. Bri had told me she had forgiven me for this, and up until this weekend I thought it was all water under the bridge. But now, apparently, Bri says she has been harboring bitterness and resentment against me this whole time and that my doing that was, “an offense so great there is no recovering our relationship from it.”

At first, I reacted by apologizing for any misunderstandings and tried to explain to Bri where I thought she was assuming I felt or did things to hurt her which were either just misunderstood or completely “missed” all together (like her birthday mail that she says never arrived).

This only made her more furious and she kept coming back to the fact that despite the fact that our technology break had forced her to go through one of the most rewarding, self-discovery processes of her life and as a result she had never been happier, she was incurably angry with me for “abandoning” her. I finally cracked and went off on her for rewriting history in numerous places and discounting all the sacrafices I had been making for her and the suffering I had gone through for her sake (including the very technology break she all of the sudden wasn’t in favor of anymore and apparently never was all along despite what she told me and despite the fact she had never once reached out to me to tell me otherwise). Thus ended our phone call.

The next day, alone for several hours with my thoughts and a computer, I waded through all our old phone correspondences and texts. I sent her text after text after text detailing what had “really happened” regarding the technology break (pointing out conflicting accounts of what she said and now claims to have been thinking at the time) and complaining about her ingratitude. It was overly excessive and repetative. I ended with a demand that she either have the decency to confront me and continue this argument with me until we worked out our differences or she had to immediately return all my furniture. I tried to get an answer out of her all day but received nothing.

Finally, after my anger and hurt subsided, I decided to take the opposite approach and bought her two bouquets of flowers (18 red roses and 12 pink tulips) and a happy belated birthday card, a card with a “you changed my life” love poem in it, and blank card in which I wrote an appology for having let her down and having made her feel that she couldn’t express herself to me. I left them for her on her doorstep.

Today, having still not heard from her, I began to despair. I missed my bus back to Indianapolis having become petrified to go back feeling the way I did. I couldn’t face my prison city now that my only hope and my whole purpose for being there in the first place was gone… I tried numerous times to reach out to Bri, but she never responded. Finally, I tried stopping by her apartment, but her roommate informed me I had just missed her by 15 minutes. Then, I saw the flowers, thoughtlessly tossed on the couch and the three cards in which I had poured my heart out to her in there with them, not even opened, and still wrapped in the protective plastic around the flowers. They were already dying. Like me…

Bri’s roommate informed me then that Bri had been complaining of feeling “physically ill” do to all the stress I had caused her and that she in no uncertain terms ever wanted to talk to me again – partly on the advice of “everyone she knew” assessing the situation for her.

The worst part is, although Bri says she is getting “better” and is happier, she is doing it all predicated on a false version of reality and a gross, almost purposefully misunderstanding of my actions and intentions that have all lead her to conclude that I am the sole source of all her problems an misery whether I am in her life or I am not.

And I guess she is right. When I first met Bri she was this charming, optimistic, joyful, and hopeful girl. And being with me – from everything to the Argus to our relationship drama, from my personal weaknesses to “the Tommy episode” – put her through hell. She helped me survive some of the hardest times in my life… and I have somehow repaid her with pain and misery. Whether it is justified or is based on misunderstandings or not… I have caused her all this pain. My very existance in or not in her life causes her this pain. And I don’t deserve to live. Whether I wanted to or not, I have murdered beauty.

And I physically carry the pain of it all with me in my heart and my heart cannot take it anymore. It is signaling me that the only way to fix this – for Bri and for me – is to permanintly wipe myself out of existance all together.

Then, Bri won’t have to deal with the pain of me “ignoring her and forgetting her” or the opposite of “pestering her and overwhelming her.” I will just be gone. And she will be free. And I will be free of the pain I carry, her pain and mine. I’m useless anyway. And it will be the last worthwhile thing I ever do.

And here I am. Dying. Being buried alive. Under the weight of a uselless and fruitless life of squandered potential and persistent pain. Here I am watching that last brick slide into place, Brianna, making me realize: I’ve been dead these last 18 years all along. I just didn’t know it. People say “it gets better” but experience has taught me that I just keep making things worse.

And now the nightmare – for everyone around me and for myself – finally comes to an end.

The blog seems to be based on a statement by actress Jennifer Lawrence and presents The Hunger Games as a mirror to our violent society and the desensitization that comes from our obsession with watching violence as a form of entertainment.

Collins offers the readers/viewers “a terrible kind of mirror,“ according to Jennifer Lawrence, who plays the teenage leading role, Katniss. “This is what our society could be like if we become desensitized to trauma and to each other’s pain,” said Lawrence.

In my opinion, the only kind of mirror The Hunger Games offers is the kind that coke heads use to snort lines off of. Allow me to explain…

While Suzanne Collins may have written The Hunger Games to hold a mirror up to society and critique our lust for violence, I think the book and the film’s success may be more a result of the included violence rather than society’s urge for a thought provoking critique. It would seem to me, then, that Collins is profiting off the very thing she is trying to depict as deplorable which places her in a rather precarious position.

The most common image from the film is sanitized violence. But don't kid yourself: This teen uses this bow repeatedly to bring bloody death and destruction to other children. The film shows the result of the arrow. Audiences cheer.

Collins gets to basically have it both ways: On the one hand she gets to publicly decry violence for entertainment and those who would profit off of it. On the other hand, she lines her pocketbook as if she were a lanista (Roman term for one who owns, trains, and leases gladiators) from book readers and audiences drawn to theaters to watch that violence in action!

Common Sense Media gave the film a 4 rating on a scale of 0-to-5 for violence, partly because of the scene where the Games first launch. Says CSM’s Betsy Bozdech to EW, “It really is kind of a bloodbath.”

To be fair, here are a few excerpts from the book:

A boy, I think from District 9, reaches the pack at the same time I do and for a brief time we grapple for it and then he coughs, splattering my face with blood.  I stagger back, repulsed by the warm, sticky spray.  Then the boy slips to the ground.  That’s when I see the knife in his back.

And what about this one…

It takes a few moments to find Cato in the dim light, in the blood.  Then the raw hunk of meat that used to be my enemy makes a sound, and I know where his mouth is.  And I think the word he’s trying to say is please.  Pity, not vengeance, sends my arrow flying into his skull.

Our society still has a lust for violence, and I believe this is what draws people to The Hunger Games – not the message Collins claims the books are portraying. Since its open, The Hunger Games has dominated the box office, bringing in $322 million between March 23 and April 13 (according to boxofficemojo.com). In 2011, ten of the top grossing fifteen films were extremely violent films targeted at children or adults: Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Fast Five, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Thor, Captain America: The FIrst Avenger, and Kung Fu Panda 2. Of the remaining five, Bridesmaids and The Hangover Part II are filled with crude and often “violent” humor.

I do not believe that the average person in our society “gets” the deeper message of The Hunger Games, and Collins is hypocritical for using and profiting off of depictions of violence as a means of critiquing violence.

THG has just as bloody and violent scenes as these in Fight Club. But for some reason, screen shots of these aren't available online. Why are they trying to hide the violence?

David Fincher encountered this problem when he adapted Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club into a film in 1999. At its core, the film/book is a critique on the foolish outcomes of adopting a Nietzschean worldview. Fincher called the film a “satire” that isn’t “advocating” the violence contained in it saying, “You know, I was very cautious to say that this Nietzschean uberman is a great idea for high school seniors and college sophomores, but it doesn’t really work in the real world beyond that, you know? And that’s kind of what the movie’s talking about.”

Edward Norton said of the film, “I feel that Fight Club really, in a way … probed into the despair and paralysis that people feel in the face of having inherited this value system out of advertising,” and Brad Pitt was quoted as saying, “Fight Club is a metaphor for the need to push through the walls we put around ourselves and just go for it, so for the first time we can experience the pain.”

While the film’s creators may have had high-brow ideals, society’s reaction to the film was nothing but low-brow. Actual fight clubs sprang up all over the United States among adults, on college campuses, and even among teens and preteens. Several young men, including teenagers, used the film as inspiration to commit senseless acts of violent terrorism designed to mimic events of the film. Palahniuk, Fincher, Norton, and Pitt may have been selling the film because they wanted to hold a mirror to society about the futility and foolishness of violence, but for the most part society bought the film because they hungered for the violence being portrayed.

Kyle Shaw, 19, set off a bomb outside a Starbucks inspired by the anarchist "message" of Fight Club. {Gawker Media}

On the subject of young men asking Palahniuk where they could find a fight club in their area he responds, “‘I always felt bad telling them that they didn’t actually exist, that I made them up, but the fact they were looking for them somehow attested to the power of the fiction.”

Little has changed in the past 2000 years. Society’s hunger for violence as sport is still as insatiable as ever. We may have dressed it up by making it “fake” in movies and television, or non-death-causing in real world arena spectaculars such as UFC, the NFL, and the NHL (although these do cause deaths and fantastic injuries), but society still hungers for violence as entertainment. It is intellectually dishonest and entirely hypocritical for people like Suzanne Collins then to “legitimize” depictions of violence by somehow saying that they are a “mirror” on society she is using to show us how depraved and foolish it is to entertain ourselves with violence.

The Hunger Games has earned over $300 million in the box office because it gives audiences a chance to fill the shoes of the depraved individuals depicted who are watching the ‘real’ Hunger Games for entertainment. Don’t kid yourself: The audience isn’t critiquing that sick society: They are participating in an escapist fantasy where they get to bethat society for a few hours.

Look for Hunger Games mock tournaments to hit college campuses soon just like Quiddich tournaments and fight clubs have in the past.

Requiem for a Dream depicts the darker sides of substance abuse without forcing the viewer to partake.

When I saw Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, I literally felt like I was a victim of substance abuse like his characters in the film were portrayed. It made me sick to my stomach and I’ll never watch the film again. It also made me understand, without trying them, that the drugs depicted in the film were very bad and ruin lives.

When I saw, Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting I certainly gathered from the film that heroin addiction was a terrible thing, but I didn’t feel like I experienced first-hand what heroin addiction was like. Would it make sense, then, to really get the message across that Boyle require everyone who watches his film to also try a hit of heroin? How much worse would it be if the target audience of the film was a bunch of heroin addicts and partaking in the drug was a requirement to watch it?

That is why I think Collins is playing a dangerous game. The society she is holding a mirror up to is one which craves and enjoys watching violence for entertainment. In order to show them how depraved they are (or could be) she offers up violence for entertainment. That is why I say the “mirror” here is like the mirror that a coke addict uses to snort lines off of. It might show their reflection, but it is simultaneously enabling their addiction!

I looked for online polls describing the favorite scenes of Hunger Games. I found one on Yahoo! Answers that had 10 (legitimate) responses, but it told an interesting story.  Seven of them described scenes of death, murder, and suicide. Three of them described the “Cave Kiss” scene. The one voted best answer was:

“When that big black guy smoothered that one girl.”

My suspicion if that if I were to conduct a real-world poll, the results would be similar. People go to the film to see the violent fight scenes and they leave with those as their favorites. The second favorite scene is probably going to be a kiss scene, which also doesn’t support the theory that the film is a mirror to society for our finding entertainment in watching violence.

Collins, don’t you realize that you’re trying to teach a bunch of addicts a lesson by giving them the very thing they are addicted to? Meanwhile non-addicts who are drawn in by the “deeper” concepts of love, liberty, and critiquing society are becoming further desensitized to the violence you are portraying in your books/film. You can’t have it both ways.

Like the lanistas of old, Collins is raking in the cash with one hand while patting herself on the back with the other for supposedly teaching society a high-minded lesson. If it is true that Suzanne Collins is trying to teach us a lesson and/or be critical of a society that entertains itself with violence as a form of entertainment, then she is either a hypocrite or a fool.

What does this mean?

News outlets are now calling the race in favor of Mitt Romney.  But, they seem to be getting a bit ahead of themselves. Why? Because the nomination is won by getting 1,144 delegates and Romney still has a fight on his hands to get that number.

I’ve been watching Cincinnati’s Fox-19 where evening news anchor Ben Swann has done some fantastic reporting in his Reality Check segment explaining how wrong the AP projected delegate count actually is. Considering the current projection, I think Mitt Romney sure hopes it is wrong… or is the AP trying to send us a subtle hint?

You will see, that Lemon Global, a Ron Paul supporter blog has very different delegate projections. While they are possibly biased in favor of Ron Paul, the blog’s author posts that he has tried to make them as conservative as possible and may actually be underestimating Ron Paul’s delegate count. Here is what he projected the delegate count would be on April 4th, and to the right is his prediction after Santorum’s withdrawal assuming that Santorum delegates are all unbound (which they aren’t) and that they almost all swing towards Ron Paul (which is doubtful).

At any rate, Ben Swann over at Fox-19 , Cincinnati, has done a wonderful job explaining exactly what is going to happen to Santorum’s delegates.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Of course, not everyone is as optimistic that the race isn’t over. FiveThirtyEight over at the New York Times has published an article stating that the race has reached its Endgame and begin to perform a “living autopsy” on Ron Paul’s campaign: http://nyti.ms/HIDiGD. Here is something interesting though: They show that Ron Paul has more than doubled his vote count and vote share since 2008 despite raising slightly less money than he did in his 2008 campaign.

So is the race over, or is there a fighting chance for New Gingrich and Ron Paul?

Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul Vow To Stay In GOP Primary Race

Newt Gingrich & Ron Paul {AP}

Huffington Post: http://huff.to/HJ6ayV

Apparently, both Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul believe they have something to gain by staying in the race. Does that mean either of them think that a brokered convention is still a possibility and they could still win? That is certainly what Ron Paul thinks.

At this point, who is likely to perform better? My guess is it will easily be Ron Paul. Newt Gingrich’s campaign is $4.5 million in the red according to the Christian Science Monitor, and his $500 check to get on the ballot in Utah just bounced this week. The man is in trouble. It is obvious he has no financial sense, though, what with his impossible-to-keep promise of lowering gas prices to $2.50/gallon and his idea that a moon colony large enough to apply for statehood is a reality in the next decade.

On the other hand, Ron Paul’s campaign is flush with cash and having another big grassroots money bomb on Tax Day to raise funding to blanket Texas with this clever new ad:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Meanwhile, Ron Paul’s plan of racking up delegates in states he “lost” is paying off big time. In St. Charles County, Missouri, where the caucus was originally shut down and leading Ron Paul supporter,  Brent Stafford, was arrested for who knows what, the script has been flipped in the do-over caucus. Brent Stafford was elected chairman of the caucus and Ron Paul went on to win all the delegates to the district convention. This is huge, considering it is the largest caucus in Missouri and positions Ron Paul to possibly sweep the entire slate of 52 delegates up for grabs in Missouri.

In Colorado, where the delegate selection process is also still underway and the Ron Paul campaign has already bragged of winning majority and unanimous slates of delegates, CBS-4, Denver reports a groundswell of interest in the GOP State C0nvention. Look for Ron Paul to do extremely well there and pick up many more delegates than the AP has estimated.

But isn’t Romney unstoppable? Not according to CBS News.

Romney still needs almost 500 delegates to clinch GOP nomination

Mitt Romney {CBS News}

CBS News: http://cbsn.ws/HUQ8yL

According to this CBS News article, Mitt Romney must win 80% of all the remaining delegates up for grabs in April and May in order to cinch the nomination. And that is assuming that he has the amount he is estimated to have – which could, in fact, be fewer.

This race is far from over, and only promises to get more interesting from here on out. Although some are speculating that Santorum’s suspension of his campaign has made the brokered convention strategy less likely, they are missing a key point. Romney supporters are more likely to stay home now that they think their candidate has the nomination in the bag. Paul supporters aren’t going anywhere and are more enthusiastic and committed than ever before. And Santorum supporters, who were comprised of two primary factions, Anti-Romney folks and Evangelical drones, are now faced with the tough decision of where to turn now that their main man has let them down.

Dough Wead, former Special Assistant to George H.W. Bush and advisor to the Ron Paul campaign reports that Ron Paul is meeting with Evangelical leaders this week to take up the standard for the coalition that was giving Santorum his edge in the heartland. The Anti-Romney vote is now faced with choosing between broke-as-a-joke Gingrich, Ron Paul, and staying home.

Meanwhile, Ron Paul marches on, drawing bigger and bigger crowds and showing no signs of slowing down.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

It is probably just a narcissistic form of catharsis for me to do this – especially since he probably doesn’t read, nor would appreciate reading, half the articles I send him. So, rather than let all that go to waste – and in the interest of keeping up the narcissistic-catharsis, I’m going to just post those articles here from now on. You know, where they can be politely ignored by the billions of internet users out there and not just my dad…

Just One More Game … Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’

The New York Times: http://nyti.ms/InM8mJ

This is a very interesting (and long) article in the New York Times about “stupid games” on phones and the growth of the “gaming culture” in general. I personally like this article for a couple of reasons: For one, I identify with the author’s addiction to then rejection of video games throughout his youth. I also identify with the author’s somewhat sentiment that “stupid games” on phones are destroying our culture.

Over the last few weeks, several people I’ve hung out with (girls especially!) have become ridiculously distracted by their phones to play dumb games. Normally, I would write this off as just another sign of how boring it is to hang out with me, but these have always been in group settings so it couldn’t have just been me. All of the sudden one or more people in the group will withdraw and become engrossed in some stupid game on their phone: The latest is a Pictionary rip-off a-la-Words-With-Friends. Pretty sad, huh?

Infinite Comics: Marvel’s New Format Changes How Comics Are Created—And Read

Gizmodo: http://gizmo.do/HG61uB

I am really starting to hate myself over this one. I don’t know if you remember, but back in 1998 I thought up the idea for Netflix DVD-by-mail business model and pitched it to the store manager of Hastings as a way to expand our video rentals. I saw DVD’s coming into the store and immediately recognized how light weight and easy to mail they would be. The idea, of course, was rejected, and one year later Netflix was founded.

Almost ten years later, in 2007, I thought of another crazy idea: Digital comic books. My idea actually came to me as an add-on to a still-in-the-works (soon-to-be-stolen) idea for an internet based mega comic book store called ComicBookKingdom.com. I was inspired to bust up the Diamond Comic Distributors monopoly on comic book distribution and “democratize” the comic book industry. I simultaneously was getting into downloading illegal scans of comic books I collected so that I could read them without damaging my originals.

That is when it hit me: I should legitimize the “digital comic book” format I was stealing off the black market with direct-from-publisher books that could be offered through my CBK store. It also occurred to me, that if comic books were going to become digitized, it wouldn’t be long before we could offer features such as delaying when text appeared and layering in frames and affects.

When the iPad came out three years later and DCD started to take a crack at digital comics, I though, “Okay, I there’s another idea I’ve sat on for too long.” I’m actually surprised that is has taken another two years for the digital-only effects part to kick in. Either way, I’m kicking myself all the way to the food-stamps line (note: I’m not on food-stamps, but I am a lot “poorer” than I should be).

Judge Napolitano on President Obama’s Supreme Court Comments

Judge Andrew Napolitano

Fox News: http://youtu.be/2d-faOTaFaA
Fox Business: http://youtu.be/yHm2QE0MIJc

Love him or hate him, (former) Judge Napolitano makes some very compelling and intellectually convincing arguments for his side of any argument. And he’s entertaining to watch. That is why I tend to seek him out on political/legal issues that I find especially interesting – the President’s remarks on the SCOTUS’s authority to rule against his health care law, being one such issue.

In this case, I think Judge Napolitano is absolutely right, and President Obama, as well-intended, friendly, and likable as he is, is being intellectually dishonest in his address to the American people. I said this about Obama in 2008 when he made promises about getting us out of Iraq within 18 months – something he was smart enough to know was logistically and politically impossible (and arguably, he still hasn’t done considering that tens of thousands of American troops are still in Iraq, they are just considered permanently ”based” there rather than “deployed” there).

At any rate, as much as I keep trying to like President Obama, things like this just blow my mind and undermine every other seemingly good thing he does or says. The SCOTUS doesn’t have the authority to strike down laws as unconstitutional? Really, Mr. Constitutional Scholar? Really? All due respect, Mr. President, but you’re kind of a intellectually dishonest scumbag for saying that. Welcome (again) to slimy politics, sir. And thank you, Mr. Napolitano, for saying that in a much kinder and intellectual way than I every could.

Ron Paul Projected to be in 2nd Place with 380 Delegates!

Rep. Ron Paul

Mat Larson: http://youtu.be/gyv8U1U_cTU

I love it for one simple reason: It educates people about how delegates are selected in the nominating process and how full of shit the main news outlets are in the delegate projections. After spending hours researching the issue, I am certain that the media estimate of delegates is wildly inaccurate and it is a shame that they throw out these numbers as if they were fact when they themselves know it is all just BS.

It may just be wishful thinking that has lead the creator of this blog to project that Ron Paul will have 380 delegates, but at least the author of this video acknowledges that this is also conjecture and guesswork: Just more informed and accurate guesswork than that being done by the mainstream media. Thank you, Mat Larson.

Writer Anne Rice: ‘Today I Quit Being A Christian’

Anne Rice {Getty Images}

NPR: http://n.pr/HIedM6

As both a self-identified Christian and a massive fan of Anne Rice‘s vampire and witch books, I had very mixed feelings about her decision a few years ago to only write about Jesus. Granted, I was more of a fan of her books for the struggles with spirituality and morality she put her characters through rather than the subject matter itself, but I was very concerned about her 1998 conversion to Christianity would change her tone of voice to “preachy” and steal from the “interesting” factor.

So, it was with equally mixed feelings that I found out this week on The Colbert Report, that Anne Rice is releasing a new book about a werewolf called The Wolf Gift and has rejected Christianity. After investigating, I suddenly found Anne Rice more relate-able to my personal experiences more than ever: Why would one want to self-identify with a group of people or institution which is characterized by hateful bigotry?

While her tipping-point reasons may not be the same as mine, I certainly identify with her desire to “reject Christianity” as an institution or label in order to set herself apart as culturally different than what that label represents. And the interesting thing about that, in my mind, is this is exactly what the early church of the New Testament did in a way to institutionalized religion in its own day.

Is Anne Rice just representative of a new breed of “christian” Deists? I don’t know, but I certainly sympathize. And I often feel as if I’m about to jump ship myself.

Also, I have come across my new book idea: Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter. Look for it on the best seller list in about two to four years… written by another author who wasn’t as lazy as I am about making his ideas a reality.

10 things about Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson

Gov. Gary Johnson

The Daily Caller: http://thedc.com/IWVdqC

I probably should keep all my political articles together. Of course, so much of what I am interested in is politics, it can be tiresome to read one political article after another, so I’ll just continue to mention these things in the order I read them.

I just absolutely love Gary Johnson. This article only re-affirms it for me, even though I get the feeling it wasn’t intended to be very serious and possibly even damaging.

A brief history of my political identity: In the late 80′s I became obsessed with politics and global affairs when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union started to collapse. Desert Storm only drew me in even more. Then Ross Perot showed up and I fell in love with federal budgets, flowcharts/graphs, and boring infomercials. Growing up in a wildly conservative and Right-wing Republican area (southwest Missouri) I was a closeted Democrat and explained to my friends I only registered Democrat because I was trying to influence the primaries, but the truth was that I was very socially liberal.

In 2003 I became a huge fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the brand of neo-Republicanism he supposedly represented when he was running for Governor of California. This made me realize certain kinds of Republicans could be found palatable. Although, I was still more convinced no Republican could ever eclipse how much I loved Dennis Kucinich.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine listened to my political views and told me I was a Libertarian – a word I never had heard of, and an idea I rejected when I saw how kooky and disorganized the Libertarian party was. I thought, “God love ‘em, but they ain’t goin’ nowhere.” Then, I heard Kucinich quasi-endorse Ron Paul by dropping his name as a potential VP pick so I researched the Congressman from Texas and was instantly hooked.

Ron Paul, I discovered, had his flaws and I didn’t agree with him on every issue… However, during my Ron Paul education process I re-affirmed my long held belief that Republicans and Democrats aren’t very different at all on most issues – especially in practice (ignoring the rhetoric). This lead me to decide that I would never vote for another politician with an (R) or a (D) by their names so as to not support the farce that is our two-party system of false-choices.

I also decided to look for an even more agreeable “Libertarianesque” politician to get behind since I didn’t think Ron Paul would be around in 2012 (oops – predicted that wrong!). And that is how I found Gary Johnson and joined a movement to draft him to run for president and later supported his political action committe, Our American Initiative.

Poor Gary Johnson. He was the GOP’s Ron Paul of 2012 – completely marginalized by the party and the media. Unlike Paul, though, he decided to reject the GOP and run for the Libertarian nomination pretty quickly in the process. Finally, an (L) presidential candidate that I can actually get excited about. If anything, I sure hope he brings in the support and attention necessary to get the Libertarian party to get their act together and become a legitimacy force on the political landscape. That would be refreshing.

Granted, I juxtaposed the image of the starving children with this actual Burger King ad, because when someone says “hunger” this is the first thing that comes to mind. My question is, if Burger King discovered that eating a Whopper reduced your risk of getting cancer, would their genius ad agency come up with a poster that says LOL@CANCER?

And maybe I’m being picky, but instructing someone to use their mobile device to take a survey – on a poster at the drive through window – isn’t that basically acknowledging that the context of using their mobile device to take this survey is one of the customer driving their car since that is where they already plan on eating their meal they just purchased from you?

Think, Burger King, think…