We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident

There are not many things in life we can hold onto as general truths. The sun will set; the sun will rise. The seasons come and they go. We grow older and die. But here are eight general truths that should be weighed in on and considered more than lightly.

1. Plan as though you will live a long life.

I have always until recently, even amid all the talk of the end of the world, felt my life would be short. Perhaps it was my despair over a life-long bout with chronic mental illness or my two suicide attempts that made me feel this way. My second suicide attempt resulted in my being comatose for three nights. But I must have grappled with my own mortality somehow, and now I see that it is very possible I will live a longer life than I previously thought. If that is the case, I need a plan. I smoke, I am thirty pounds overweight, I take a ton of medication each day, but at the age of forty-nine now, I can somehow see myself into my sixties. Not a long life by today's standards to be sure, but I was always the kid that never thought he should have survived high school, certainly not college, and definitely not my twenties. I still don't want to lead a long life, but it might suit me to stay on this planet a few years more.

2. Choose your friends and partners carefully.

I mentioned a plan. I have had two divorces. They were painful and costly. I have had every decent friend of mine shun me, at least for an extended period of time. It is not my fault I go crazy occasionally, but I find I must constantly start over in life. And I believe I have had to start over more often than the average. It is frustrating and difficult. Finding friends, lovers, caretakers, even family in this Internet age is so baffling. I hate computers, I hate the Internet, and now that I am older, I hate most people I meet. It does not get easier to find mates. Anyone who thinks so is an idiot. The irony of that is that most people are more lonely now than they have ever been. My life is more solitary than most. Yet I am a very social creature. But I don't go out much, because I find most people a crashing bore, and as soon as I find myself in their company, I am immediately thinking of ways to extricate myself. That was said in anger, but it remains true.

3. Exercise your body, mind and spirit.

Walk a lot, read widely, and pray or dream, whichever suits you. I heard a story of a woman in her eighties that had perfect posture and no bone loss. She had walked three miles every day of her life since her teenage years. Her mind was crisp too. And she was merry, which is indicative of a calm and serene spirit, especially at that age. The video generation will never know how badly it was robbed. Read, read and read. There is no lack of proper reading material. Only those that read can imagine. And dream. Or pray. Never be afraid to ask for what you want in life. The big fear is that you might get it. I would also have to place food in this category. It transports the spirit, entices the mind and feeds the body. Laughter is also so important. Even when you are miserable, find a way to laugh. It helps one lighten the load and shows the way.

4. Pay yourself 10% or more of each month's income.

You pay your creditors. Why not pay yourself? Smart money managers know this rule. There have been times I have squirreled away as much as 25% of my monthly income and on my meager salary that is saying something. This is a temporary world. Everything on earth is temporary, which means it constitutes little more than an illusion. Good times, bad times--they come, they go. Pay yourself and kick up your heels a little during the good times. And the bad times won't seem so brutal. Ultimately, they are going to be what they are going to be anyway, but a little smart money managing may take the edge off. Downsizing is becoming a part of life for most people. Even Dr. Phil had to sell his three and a half million dollar mansion. There were many more like him as well. I suggest pay yourself and stick to a budget. It takes discipline, but there's no other choice.

5. Invest wisely.

Real estate, the stock market, 401K's, Roth IRA's--all trash. Cash is king and it always has been. I have never owned gold, so I cannot comment. The stock market only earns historically about 4% per year and is subject to wide variations. Real estate is no longer the route to go either. If you buy it cheap and fix it up yourself, then maybe you can turn it into something. 401K's and Roths are usually linked to the market. Certificates of Deposit are safe bets, even if they barely hedge against inflation, and some years do not even do that. Unless you are a big investor, cash and interest bearing accounts are the only thing to be in. It may defy conventional wisdom, but it is true. And so-called tax deferred accounts are likely to be taxed at such a high rate in the future as to make them untenable as well.

6. Know where your money is going.

Stick to a budget. Count your change every time at the grocery store. Don't use credit cards for anything, except emergencies. Don't even use a debit card. Find a local bank, take out what you need on a weekly or daily basis, and don't extend beyond that. Account for every dollar at the end of the day or month. Know what income you have and where it goes. What are your bills? What were they last month? What are they likely to be next month? Discipline.

7. Master a profession or trade.

Get a haircut and get a real job. Become good at something. You can do what you love and probably make little money doing it, or you can find another avenue and try to make more money. Either way, you have to master something. I teach. I made the comment once that teaching is the easiest profession to get into, but the most difficult to get out of. I have been teaching all my life. And I have been writing most of my life. I love both. Neither profession has ever betrayed me, and I am still as true to each as I ever was. Whatever you decide to do, decide to learn something useful that you can make a living at, even if it is a modest one.

8. Stay up on current events.

The news is god awful entertainment now, and most journalists should be ashamed of themselves, but follow the interesting stories. It doesn't mean you have to watch the live oil spill cam in the Gulf of Mexico. But there are interesting reports of things happening. Supposedly, the world is going to end in 2012. That is not according to my prediction. My prediction is 2028. It is just that by 2012, most of us will want the world to end. News flash. It just gets worse from here on out. So why does any of this matter? The answer simply is that maybe none of it does. Sorry, but reality has a vicious bite.

The Revelation of Chris Devin

By

Cameron H. Chambers

A Novella

Copyright by Cameron H. Chambers 2010

Also by Cameron H. Chambers

Don’t Cross the Devil

A Trick of the Devil   (A Novella)

Confessions of an Internet Don Juan

The Stone Cabin

For the Love of a Madman

www.cameronhchambers.com

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Chapter One

Hi, I am Chris Devin. I am an Internet Don Juan, but that’s another story. I have been divorced twice, had my nose broken three times, been beaten up a  dozen times, attempted suicide twice; I was homeless for two years, filed bankruptcy, and had four major psychoses. I was also raped as a child on more than one occasion. Oh, and I am an alien. The space alien kind. Like the Coneheads, but not from France. I am an American. I am also the only person who has walked on the moon. Sorry, Neil Armstrong.

Allow me to reiterate. I am the only person who has walked on the moon. That was my biggest distinction for years, and I could not tell anyone, because I would have been locked up then. I consider myself a man, but my mom would probably say otherwise. I am only fifteen in this part of my saga. This saga will span about thirty years of my life. I was ten at the time I walked on the moon, but I still considered myself a man even then. I’ll reflect on those years later.  I was reborn during the Clinton boom years, and learned about Neil Armstrong and the others in history class. I thought it hysterically funny. There are plenty of people, mostly older conspiracy theorist types I know that believe the moon launch was media hype, but I figured out how to get there and I was actually sent there by the CIA. There was a munitions depot on the moon, a gathering of ammo to be used in an invasion of earth.  Someone had to blow it up and hopefully make it home again, which I did. It was a miracle I performed.  I am a Saint, but I don’t feel like one. I don’t particularly behave like one either.

I am typical kid though. I smoke pot occasionally, play soccer, basketball and baseball, have a girlfriend named Sarah. She’s got ginger hair and a ginger complexion, and I think she is incredibly beautiful, but she always disagrees when I tell her so.  She’s kind of strict with me some times, but I love her and I can’t imagine being without her. We haven’t had sex yet, but then the prom is not far off.  I am a junior, but I get to go anyway.  I started first grade when I was five. I go to a ritzy high school on the west side. My family can’t afford it, but the school’s headmaster finally gave me an academic scholarship, because he knew I was going places. I already own three patents for junk I invented. One has to suck up to those future infamous alums.

But he doesn’t know anything about what I did. It was before I went to his school. Knowledge of my triumph was on a need-to-know basis only and that meant primarily the CIA. No one at my school knows. I don’t know anyone who does know, or if the ones who did are still alive. You are probably wondering what kind of vehicle or rocket ship got me there, but it wasn’t anything like that.  I simply projected. Some mystical types, I have read, call it astral projection, but me, I just call it projection. It’s simpler. My entire family knows I claim I do these things, but I get the sense they don’t really believe me or care that much. To them, I am their kid brother who takes out the garbage and drinks the last soda.

I don’t care either. I do it at night when I sleep. My dad knows the real story, and it’s classified, but I felt like spilling my guts after all. I am kind of a maverick that way. I was ten when I landed on the moon. I said that already, but it bears repeating. This is the first time I ever told anyone.  But my dad, who was a high ranking military officer, and military intelligence knows the story, but my dad won’t discuss it with me. I don’t remember all that well what it was I did. It is like that for me when I astral project. I only sort of remember some of the places I have been. Many of them were fabulous, much prettier than earth.

My dad divorced my mom because the first born died. His name was Rob for short or Robert. I am Chris. My surviving brother is Al and my sister is Maggie. That is probably the last time I will mention their names because they play a very small role in this narrative. I’ll skip around a lot too, and when I got older, my family had already fragmented because of the death of Robert, so it is very possible this narrative will seem very disjointed. Art mimics life, or vice versa. It could just be I am rather scattered.

My parents could not work it out together, so afterward on my fourth birthday, my dad slipped out the door one night; he went out for a pack of cigarettes and I never saw him again, except once for a short time. My parents had had a huge fight. I remember my mom saying, “you’ll wake Chris.” The baby’s room was right next door, and I was the baby. I knew what was going on even at age four. I was already awake. I cried. I heard the door slam. My dad wrote me in a letter once never to tell anyone what I had done because the KGB is always looking for news items like this. They would want to recruit me or abduct me. The KGB is the infamous Russian spy ring. I don’t care. I want to be a journalist, so I need to begin somewhere. So this account is as good a place as any to begin.

I was told by someone very early in my life I was a saint and would do a miracle. He was a little Japanese man I met in Japan while traveling with my father. That was the one time I saw him again. My father, I mean. I am American as I have said. And I was just a young boy in Japan. The latest Pope decreed that to be considered a saint now, the saint has to perform two miracles. That’s a pretty tall order, but then I guess a single miracle could be easily misinterpreted. I don’t question the Pope in case he is right, even though I am not Catholic.  I sometimes wish I was. Sarah is Catholic.  Catholic people always seem to have good jobs.

I don’t really care about being a saint. It has little to do with who I am. I am a kid. An ordinary kid.  I ride my bike to my girlfriend’s house. I have dinner with her family. Ordinary stuff. My opinion didn’t change until one fateful day.

I was having dinner with my mom and my stepfather. He was boozing it up as usual, and he had made some off-hand remark that made me cry. I was kind of a sensitive kid—still am. I pushed away from the table and went up to my room. I don’t remember what the remark was: something insensitive that a drunk might say. He had been very good to me though, but the toll of living with my mother was telling on him. He drank more and more. My mom hated men. My sister does too. I guess it was because my father walked out on my mom and three kids. She was devastated from the loss of Robert, the first born, and had never worked a day in her life, at least not at a paid job until she got divorced. And then all of a sudden she was a single mom with three kids. She kind of lost her humanity. It’s understandable in a way. There are five in our household—I live with my brother and sister and my mom and stepfather.  I guess I would put my mom in the castrating bitch category, but at age fifteen I was only becoming aware of how much she really hated men.  She hated Sarah too, chiefly because I loved her. So, I retreated to my room. It was my haven.

About an hour later, my older brother, who was fried on drugs all the time, came in and announced he had run over my cat. That news brought more tears, though I fought valiantly to throw them off. He just left the cat’s body, limp and twisted, right there in the driveway. I was not having a good evening. I made this solemn oath that I would do something great for this planet if I could get off of it and go somewhere else. I was extremely dissatisfied with my life. I had been a rape victim by a man who claimed to be a friend of the family, but I had blotted that all out from memory. I had also already forgotten about my moon launch, but there was not much fanfare associated with it. It became kind of glossed over. Imagine having a secret like that one and being a kid and not being able to tell anyone.

School was the only fun and interesting thing in my life. I wanted to bring my girlfriend along when I got off the planet, but I didn’t know that she would approve. Her parents were still married and her father had a good job at a bank, and her mom was well-respected because of the charity work she did. They were not scraping to get by like my family was. I was kind of a street urchin. At least that is what one school bus driver always called me. I resented being called that, because I had never thought of myself in that way. Her name was Mrs. Falls, but we finally made our peace and she left me alone after that.  I could only catch the bus home, not in the morning to school. That meant I had to carry my bike on the bus, and though I had permission from the headmaster to do so, Mrs. Falls always complained. I finally threatened to have her fired and she shut up. Then we became friends of sorts.

When I projected that night—that very fateful night—like I always did when I slept, I went some place very special. It wasn’t heaven. I’ve been there and it’s boring. Beautiful, but boring.  There’s nothing to do but fish. I don’t think you can drink in Heaven either, so what is the point in fishing. It is God’s dark sense of humor. I don’t get along with God. I never did really. I have also been outside the gates of hell, but never inside during this life. Or maybe just briefly. If that was Hell I was stuffed in at a much later age, it is hard to breathe in Hell.

But the place I projected to was an ice planet. It was all ice and it was beautiful, cascading mountains of ice and flowing rivers of ice and cool sweet breezes.  The inhabitants weren’t Eskimos or anything like that. They were large red creatures with three heads and long tongues.  That was my first introduction to the Goddesses, and things did not go my way at all. In fact, one of them sucked everything right out of my insides: my stomach, the entire contents of my abdomen, my lungs and heart, everything.  I was in great pain when I woke up, and that had never happened before. I think I had traveled to the forbidden zone.

I would always do this isometric maneuver to get out of bed. I would put one hand in the other with my elbows bent and flip my body weight and roll out of bed. When I tried that morning, I fell right back on the bed. That had never happened to me before either.  I learned isometrics in gym class. I loved P.E. and language training and my voice lessons were always good.  I didn’t dance or play an instrument. I wish I had learned how. So, even though I was hurting all over, I wanted to go to school. So, I did. I made my breakfast and used the last of the milk, and I made a mental note to get more after school. There was a grocery store near our house, and I always had a little cash because I mowed yards.

My house was too close to the school for me to be on the bus route going to school, not that that made any sense to me, so I had to ride my bike most mornings. It was raining this day, and on his days off, if he could get out of bed, my brother, who had a small foreign import car, would drive me to school, but this was a work day for him and he had left the house already. He worked in a bakery and got to work at five am.  So I would have to ride in the rain and I would be soaked by the time I got there, not to mention the extra time it took to put on my slicker and then take it off and stuff it in my locker. I would probably be late and the Dean of boys hated me.

My teachers all loved me. I was smart and aggressive about learning new things. I especially loved Biology, math and Chemistry class, all of which were honors classes.  The Dean of boys told me comparatively I had the toughest curriculum of anyone in the school this year. And I was determined to make it into the honor society, which I did. The Dean of boys was not usually friendly to me. I spoke my mind a lot and I guess things got back to him. His son was in our class and he was a lousy athlete and some of the boys made fun of him, but I never did. His family was poor like ours, and while the other students never really made a big deal of their parents’ success, I always felt a little envious when hearing described to me trips to Spain and Switzerland and Mardi Gras and such.

My Spanish teacher was the coolest lady. I was in love with her too.  She also told me she thought I was a saint. That particular comment came years after the funny little Japanese man on his bike said what he said to me. I helped her with a relationship problem she was having with a Navy Officer, and from what I knew of my dad’s letters and Navy life it wasn’t that hard to give her good advice. My advice spurred the comment that she thought I was someone very special. I have nothing against saints—I am just not a religious person. My dad was certainly no saint. He was a double agent I found out later. I am still not exactly sure what that means. He still wrote to me fairly often, and the stamps would come in from all over the world, and I treasured those letters, but I have never seen him since that night he left, except in Japan. Aside from that one instance, it has been eleven years so far.

My Spanish teacher quit her job after I left for college the next year, I heard, and I never saw her again either. I read and spoke Spanish at the college level when I was a junior in high school. I had taken two years of Latin before that. I took four years of Spanish, but never picked up a book in college. We read Caesar’s Gallic Wars in Latin the second year and Don Quixote in Spanish the third year.  All Gaul is divided into three parts: Beaujolais, Bordeaux and Champagne. I added that last bit. Caesar was a great warrior and statesman. They don’t make them like him anymore.

Chapter Two

There came a point in my life during college that I realized just about everyone I knew had prayed to Satan. He’s a punk, a real punk. He is funny some times, but this became my planet because it was offered to me by God. I had saved it; it was mine, but I abdicated. God, I think, was disgusted and walked away, which he has a habit of doing, and that left Satan in charge. About half the earth’s population was Satanic by the time I was pushing fifty. I learned this again in 2049. The dates may seem mixed up, because they are basically meaningless, and I’ll explain that at some other time in this narrative.

Satan likes to keep everyone down, not just blacks—everyone. I’m thinking of killing him, but I probably won’t. I am going home and I may well just leave it at that. Besides, Satan and I go back a long way. Religion is all bullshit, I determined. I had been a rather devout Christian in later life, but not after a certain age. It was just a code of chores, and I don’t like being told what to do. No one is really in charge of this rock, because no one wants it. Earth is the armpit of the universe. I think Satan is looking for his own way off, and maybe my family will help him, and maybe they won’t, but it is not really up to me so much. I come from an illustrious family of time travelers. We are the most powerful family in the universe. I didn’t know any of this for certain until I was almost fifty, but I suspected.

The visitors to earth, who are some of the most fabulous looking earthlings you will find, don’t want to take charge of earth usually. They want to exploit the earth for their own gain. Money made in third world solar systems can be used elsewhere, if you know how. And the pickings are easy and lucrative on earth for aliens. It is a very simple matter to add a few zeroes to the left side of the decimal point.

I, on the other hand, am interested in living my life and taking care of people I love and myself, and I really could care less what else happens here. I know I finally get to go home. My real family has found me and I am out of here in a heartbeat or, as Keb Mo says, “on the note of a slide guitar.” There are so many people on earth that are not from earth, I don’t even know where to begin to tell you the half of it. You can bet if they have money and a nice family and beautiful children and a good career they are space aliens. There is a good chance as well they are not even aware of the fact. I wonder some times if that was true for Sarah and her family.

If they sit all day and enjoy coffee and espresso, they are not local boys and girls. At Starbucks all over my city, I refer to these guys as the men without jobs, but, of course, they are engaged in certain black market practices and internet schemes and spam, so they really do have jobs. They are mostly just Shitheads anyway.  Shitheads are those I call that have prayed to Satan or been tricked into praying to Satan.

I don’t think any actor or musician worth his or her salt is from this planet. That is one reason the competition is so rigorous. That rule doesn’t stand for Congressman. They are mostly just ordinary Shitheads, which is actually the name of an invading race or species as well or, however, I should refer to them—I don’t know—a race I could not destroy entirely. But they have become so intermixed with the Shitheads who are Satan worshippers, or at least Satanic, that they can now all go by the same name. Fighting the invasion force was the second miracle I pulled off and it was accomplished in the year 2049, so maybe I do qualify for sainthood. I might know in a few hundred years.

They are called by me Shitheads. I claim the first usage of that term to mean what I have said it means. They eat shit and are made of shit and give off a shitty odor like a pheromone. Oh sure, if you cut one they bleed, but their molecular structure is based on shit, not DNA. I suppose it is not detectable though by ordinary analysis. Anywhere you smell raw sewage, which is everywhere nowadays, there is a major Shithead nearby. If you tell one of their women she is pretty, she gives off her shit smell. Shithead women wear it like cologne. I prefer the Goddesses, but a nice young Shithead woman is a good break from the routine.

Shitheads are not the only problem. They also are not all bad. There are traits and characteristics to commend Shitheads. Their women are lovely to look at, their men are handsome, but kind of like a prize bull would be considered handsome, and a Shithead man is about as smart as one too. They remind me of Jethro Bodine. My Shithead mother always said her family reminded her of the cast on the Beverly Hillbillies. Satan is the King of the Shitheads on earth that are local boys and girls and by that I mean from earth.  As I have said there are about three billion of them.  I fought the invasion of Shitheads from outside the solar system, possibly outside the quadrant, and I mostly won, and lived to tell the story, but their sheer numbers were massive and I was injured and had to shut down. I was activated just for that reason. Somehow the CIA discovered it was I who would help them. My father had passed away, so I don’t know if he had a hand in the government’s affairs anymore or not.

But plenty of Shitheads slipped through my grasp. The entire universe was made of shit at one time, I gathered. I have no direct proof, but I suppose that to have been true. So earth has Shitheads everywhere now, and especially in the Southeastern part of the United States. The Shitheads love hot weather, and the Goddesses from the ice planets love cold weather, so they are mostly from Northern climes. Chicago, New York, places such as these.

Chapter Three

I was walking along the planet earth one billion years in the future, which was quite a puzzlement to me, seeing as how I knew the year was also 2049. That was the year the Shitheads hit the fan. And I figured out why 2028, speaking from my perspective as a fifteen year old boy, who was actually born in the ‘70s, is the next truly important year in earth’s history. Not that many people know about what I did in 2049, especially outside the CIA. It seemed I had done the same thing in 2008. Confused? Me too.

I was watching television in a McDonald’s, when I discovered a potentially tragic future event. It must not have occurred though, because I was on planet earth one billion years in the future. The year 2028 is important because that is the year we can determine within the next seven years if a huge asteroid is going to impact the planet’s surface or not. Anyway, I was next outside the McDonald’s and nothing had changed on earth in one billion years. It was freakish, like some sort of parallel existence for the planet. Or I was simultaneously in two universes, the one where my consciousness lie and the other a parallel one for the events of earth as they had happened for billions of years. Maybe that is the key to time travel, being in two universes at once.

I had been traveling by car all over the southeastern United States, and I must have slipped into a worm hole. They are more common than people think, and I believe not just at the end of black holes. I can’t substantiate that comment though. I am no physicist, believe you me. I saw people in cars shooting it out with invisible death rays, but the same people in the same cars kept parading through the drive-thru. Nothing seemed to be getting accomplished, and I was interested in watching the final battle on earth, but this could not have been it.

There were Shitheads that were local boys and girls and I guess some of the Goddesses were in town. I might have been in Shreveport or Tallahassee. There were observers there as well. They were mostly invisible as nearly as I could tell. I was meant to watch, and Jim Carrey was there and some other dusty looking man who looked like he had been on the time warp road quite a while. He needed a shower badly. I watched him depart through a bus stop. It reminded me of Dr. Who and his telephone booths. The dusty gentleman asked me if I cared to join him, but I could not be sure I was from his family. It might have been a trick. I was not sure if my family alone was the first group of authentic time travelers, and I did not want to go and mix things up anymore in case this man was not part of my family.

The Shitheads had begun a slow process of being completely dumbed down by Satan. Very few escape his grasp because of this. He and God are actually in cahoots, so any which way a local boy or girl turns he or she is screwed. And Christ really is dead, and if he did rise from the dead, which I don’t dispute might have happened, he took the first bus out of town and I seriously doubt he’s ever coming back. So, the Christians just wait and wait, but then patience is a virtue. I sure as hell am not coming back. I hate this planet. I hate everything about it except money and women. I hate God for what he did to me. And Satan is just a big nuisance some times. The easiest way to get rid of God and Satan is to ignore them completely, kind of like going cold turkey with alcohol or cigarettes, which is a process many have to repeat over and over to get it right.

Satan is a little gentler with me, after all the time I have been in Hell. My family has found me, and the members of my family will rip him a new tail if he keeps screwing with me too much. He knows it and he is imprisoned here as much as anyone and my family can get him somewhere better, so he has an incentive to leave me alone, and more and more frequently he does. I don’t hate him; I just don’t care about him any longer. Satan is destroyed by indifference. And God could be dead for all I care. He’s a punk too. But I love my family, and I am headed back to the ranch to be with them.  I am the stray lamb, and when they sent out the search party for me 150 billion years ago, someone had the bright idea to check Hell and earth, and they located me. Yippee. No more backwards ass rock. I am going somewhere special, because I have seen it all, and soon again I get to live it all. And the two women I created for myself are going to share in the fun with me. We will be able to go anywhere and do anything we want. Those were God’s final words to me before my family stuffed him inside my CD player in my car. “Go anywhere and do anything.” Now to get even with me he scratches all my CDs.

There’s no more Forbidden Zone in the universe. That was where all the ice planets were that were chocked full of Goddesses. God tricked me into visiting a planet in the forbidden zone, and that is when one of the Goddesses ate my insides. That’s why I say he’s a punk and a liar. I will most likely never forgive God for what he has done to me. 2008, and not 2049, may have been the actual year of his death. Zero, zero is the sign of the alpha and the omega, and while it did not all begin with the alpha, the omega spells the end of the alpha, so God may really be dead.  Or he has just walked away again, and for an incredibly long time this time.

And if he is alive he will suffer at the hands of my real family, or his fate is already carved in stone. He tricked me into believing I was Jesus Christ when I was ten, and I went around telling everyone, so he had to send me into the Forbidden Zone, he told me. Apparently, I have been struggling to free myself from my fate for the last 150 billion years, and 2049 was my next chance and I pulled it off this time. Yippee. That conversation may have been a moment of truth between us, and that is when I asked my married neighbor if she wanted to screw, because I knew it would piss God off. He has stayed out of my life since. I did want to screw her; she is tall and lean and sexy, but she’s married so she said some other time. I accomplished my goal, which was to get God off my back.

Satan has better odds of surviving since he fed me all those years I was in Hell. I was bound and gagged too. I don’t know the entire account, and what I was told may have been a lie, but if it was true, my family might show him some leniency for taking a little care of me at least. I don’t know and I don’t care. I would hope everyone has a good life on this rock, which means to me turning away from all religion and any expression of it.  I know everyone’s beliefs run deep, but religion is the most cockamamie bullshit there is. Then maybe the super powers that be will stop screwing with everyone. I am not everyone. I am no one, and no one escapes judgment. But most people that believe in religion are not going to turn away from it—it is such a crutch—that will not happen, so I’ll just quietly fade into the dusk.  And I’ll climb aboard the ship my family has sent. It is in the clouds somewhere. I don’t have much time left anyway. At least not on this planet. Yippee. I can happily die and go somewhere else.

I’ve tried to kill myself twice, but I screwed it up each time. The second time I lay in a coma for three days.  They wouldn’t confirm that at the hospital, but I could tell by the way the nurse said, “so, you’re awake,” as if I had been unconscious the entire time previously I had been there. I wonder where I went during that time. Maybe I ironed out some details with my true family.

The first time I tried, I slept for twenty-four hours. It was actually kind of peaceful. I laid out all my important papers and turned on the Grateful Dead and went to sleep.  My idiot wife awakened me and poured Epicac down my throat she claimed, which was probably true, because I was about to inherit a large chunk of money. If I had died, she would have gotten nothing, because it would have all gone to my sister and brother. Both times I have tried I used pills. My ex-wife wound up with nothing anyway, because I divorced her. She was not a good person in my humble opinion. She then remarried to a much older man with lots of money. Like my mom used to say about my sister: she would either make a million dollars or spend her life in prison—I felt this about my ex-wife.  She was a beautiful Swedish girl with big tits and a mean disposition when she did not get her way, and she wielded a whip expertly. “Me and a friend sort of drifted along into S and M,” as the song goes.

I have always had this theory of marriage and relationships that warm weather denizens should be with other warm weather denizens , and the same truth holds for those from cold weather climates. Opposites attract, but not forever, and too much friction spoils the broth. Resentment is the real destructor of a relationship. It is the little things that build up and kill a relationship. The key question I have found to answer in any relationship is: am I better off with or without the person? That sums it all up, but you have to be completely honest with yourself to answer it, and most people cannot do that. So another year or decade passes, the couple takes separate bedrooms and vacations, eventually leading to separate lives. And one or both of the members of a couple become more lost in their own affairs and further away from an answer. Then one day someone, the man or the woman, goes out for a pack of cigarettes and never returns. I feel like Carrie Bradshaw.

When you boil it all down, relationships of any kind don’t really work very well for most people. But then most people are not loners like me. I guess they do work for some, but there are a lot of lonely, desperate losers out there. We love our boss, we hate our boss, we love our pets, we hate our children, we love our mistresses, we hate our wives—it all seems so confusing and byzantine to me. I write and I am lonely every second of my day, no matter who I am surrounded by, and my greatest relationship is with my computer and I hate my computer.  Everyone I love, I hate just as much, if not more. That seems normal to me though. I like the birds on the wire. They are at a comfortable distance and they chirp so prettily and they don’t beg for food unless they are hungry. In which case, I feed them.

Chapter Four

So, I don’t know why this happened. I was ten years old and I did not remember until I was fifteen and then forgot about it again until I was nearly forty. I have no explanation. I was raped. He was a friend of the family. Got to watch those friends of the family.  They are a lot like funny uncles. That night was my introduction to ruffies. I am guessing that was it. Even though I was ten, I led my life like a man, and this lovelorn gentleman, head over his own high heels in love with me, sick, perverted, twisted man that he was, invited me up to his apartment for a drink. I thought nothing of it. I was a street urchin, after all.

I am writing now from my perspective as a fifteen year old boy, even though as I write this part I am pushing fifty. I thought I was done with my little moon landing, but no, later in my life the Pope decrees to be a Saint you have to pull off a second miracle. I wonder what miracles the Pope did. Sainthood status still did not matter to me; I led my life as I saw fit. It would, however, be nice to be remembered that way. I am not going to Heaven though. I wonder how many miracles the lesser saints performed and if they are even considered saints anymore. I thought I was Saint Drogo for a while, but he was kind of creepy. He spent the last thirty years of his life living between a hole in two walls. And he would only take the Eucharist for his supper. Other lesser saints would do creepy things too. They would do goofy things like pull their heads off and reattach them or float and moan like ghosts. Those particular behaviors do not appear very saintly to me.

So, this guy  invites me up to his meager apartment for a drink. I go, and one sip of the drink, my knees start to wobble and the room starts to spin. I think at first the drink is really strong, but then I realize that I am being drugged. I make a dash for the door, but he’s faster and slams it shut with me still trapped in his apartment. He then escorts me or carries me to his sofa and the next thing I remember is five years later. And when I remember it, it comes back full force with a vengeance. I see my limp, drugged up little body on the couch, my shorts pulled down to my knees, and my butt up in the air with a pillow underneath me. What an ignominious position. His fate will be an ignominious one. I could not see the man’s face. I still have not determined who it was.  But I know it was someone near to my family.

I remember the drive home the next day. My ass was in excruciating pain. It was trash day. The metal and plastic cans lined the road. He pulled up before my house a little, and said, “If you tell anyone about this, I will do worse to your sister.” I believed him, but I still told my brother. My brother acted like he did not understand. It was our mother’s favorite trick: play dumb and maybe the predator will go away or stop being a nuisance.  So, as I am getting out of the man’s convertible, I run to a garbage can belonging to one of my neighbors, and dump the contents of the can into his car and smash his windshield with it. He got out and chased me, but I hopped a fence or two and lost him and made it back home.

Some home I grew up in. It was a home for the criminally insane. No one even asked me where I had been all night. At age ten no one bothered to ask me why I had been out all night, or possibly no one noticed or cared.  When I walked into my house I told my brother, who was getting high with a bunch of people that so and so had raped me.  There was always some kind of hippie sit-in going on in our house. My mom and step dad were out boozing it up. Maybe my brother was so stoned he really did not understand. Or maybe the fix was in. I don’t know if I pulled off my little moon job before or after I was raped, but I think it was the same year.

I still am unsure why my older brother died. I am living his life. He went to Princeton; I went to Harvard. He died at age nineteen; I had my first psychosis then.  What was fated to be his life, and it was going to be God awful, was handed down to me. I have a hand me down life. I lived most of it, I think, before my true family found me. My true family found me in the year 2008. I was fifteen and pushing fifty, but I was born in the seventies. I can’t be sure this is right, but I think so. It was 2049 when I actually performed my second miracle. And 2008.

The life of my older brother that died would have been handed down to my next brother, the chronic dope smoker, but my mother had made everyone in the family sign in blood an oath to Satan that they would do his bidding. My mother probably had in mind destroying her ex-husband, which she did an effective job of through the court system.  So, she errantly destroyed his children in the process, thinking he would care, but he didn’t. He was too busy playing spy and espionage games. No one, or very few people I should say, had an idea of whether or not he was a traitor. I heard both sides of the coin, and I don’t really know whom to believe.

Satan was having none of it. Whatever it was that my mother bargained for, my eldest brother’s life fell to me, because I refused to sign the blood pact. I don’t know what age I was, but I was young, and I had no recall of this either until I was pushing fifty. I simply thought it was wrong to do so.

Satan is a putz. Putz in English means penis. I think the word is Yiddish. I describe earthlings that are not Satanic as putzes. Satan is not really a putz. The putzes have it hard. The cards are stacked against them. I had a lot of Jewish friends growing up because of the elite private high school I went to.  I don’t know any of them now, but one of my closest friends in high school was the attending physician at my second suicide party. He must have done a good job, and since they got me to the hospital, it was his job to save me, and he did. So, I have to express a word or two of gratitude. I wanted to die, but he didn’t want me to, and he succeeded where I failed. So hats off to him. Yippee.  If I weren’t so worried about everything, I would enjoy my last few years, but I can’t very well. I have plenty of money. This is not the first book I have written.  Between my insane mother and father I wound up an emotional cripple. I am pushing fifty again.

Chapter Five

I have forgiven my family—they were all Shitheads. One of us had to take the high road and I released that anger and took that road straight out of town. They merely did Satan’s bidding, and as they were in quite deep, past their elbows, they had no choice.  My mother got hundreds of souls wrapped up in his crap.  She was a very powerful Shithead, and I used to think she was a Goddess, another form of planetary invader, and that she had these powers other than what the Shitheads did, but I found out I was mistaken. She was just a Shithead and a local girl, I think. The Goddesses are much more powerful, and they don’t hate men as much as my mother did.

And my mother had my brother and sister convinced that they were aliens and very powerful, but they could not do anything. It was all make believe on their parts; it was an illusion they swallowed hook, line and sinker. They had no power at all. This is my perspective as I push fifty. This is after my second miracle, so if anyone figures it out, I will be Saint Chris in a hundred years or so. I’m pushing fifty a little harder now, and yes, my mother is still alive. She’s eighty-eight and today is her birthday.  She’s as honery as she ever was.  Some Shitheads don’t die quite as easily. But like I said, I released my anger. She did what she had to to survive. I commend her for being tough. She had a tough life and went with it.

I hate Shitheads and I can kill them with a thought. They know it too, most of them, so they leave me alone now, so that makes me fairly happy, but not ecstatic, because I am surrounded by them. I am sitting at a coffee shop as I write this, and some foreign gentlemen, the ones I call the men without jobs, one of them just gave off his shit smell. There it was again. They smell disgusting, but these are little Shitheads. They probably think they are powerful, but they don’t come anywhere near to smelling like raw sewage. The really powerful Shitheads smell like sewage and can actually stink up a city block.

I don’t have anything more to do with my family. I am not a Shithead. I never was. Satan calls me, “my liege.” He has to, but sometimes he forgets on purpose, but he is outranked by me and my true family.  I have the Shithead frequency now though, so I can hear everything they think. A true Shithead communicates telepathically. There are more powerful Shitheads than Satan too. He is a local boy. They exist everywhere in the universe, or used to. I destroyed a lot of them. They thinned their numbers considerably too, because the smart ones knew I could and would destroy the stupider ones that serve no earthly purpose. They run their little black markets and their Internet schemes, and the smarter ones run Ponzi schemes, but it really is meaningless earth bullshit. But it takes up their time, so they leave me alone. I am happy for that too. That is why the men without jobs have plenty of money. They’re scammers.

Like I say the Shitheads are not all bad. God hates them now too. He saw the error of his ways, and we made up as buddies I think, and now he is going to help me instead of work against me. He has to, or it is straight back into Hell, and it will be my family that puts him there this time, not me.  It was really they who put him there to begin with. My real family, not my earth family of Shitheads. And when they stick God in Hell again, if the members of my family have to, it won’t be as comfortable as the CD player Hell in my car. There are far worse places to be stuck in this universe. God and I have tentatively agreed since our dispute healed that we would go deep sea fishing together. I’ll bring my two, the women I created, because that is all I want, and they won’t let me have any other women, or at least Rebecca, the dominant one, won’t, and God is going to bring a dozen of his loveliest women. God’s a player, but he knows how to have fun.

Sometimes his programming gets in the way, because God is artificial intelligence, but often it does not. He is ninety percent bolts and machinery. He likes money and good looking women, so we at least have some things in common. I am really not very interested in playing with him so we’ll see about the deep sea fishing expedition. It could be a trap. I really want to become acquainted with my two, and go some places and be able to remain a while. It does not suit me that I always have to bail out and wake up just as the party is getting started. And I have plenty of virtual cash to be used in other galaxies. Billions, trillions, I don’t know what it amounts to by now.

Chapter Six

There is one thing I detest about Shithead men, and that is how they treat their women.  What I should expect from a Shithead male, I don’t know, but it is frequently, and by that I mean more and more, that I see a particular occurrence of events that a Shithead male has done to a woman, usually a young woman.  And often this woman is a member of his own family. Shitheads do not always begat Shitheads, but most often they do and their kids become Shitheads often in a slow process. The thing I have noticed is that through the use of force fields the Shithead male very often traps an unsuspecting woman in his car.

And Shithead men love to drive, and I will say this: they are excellent drivers. The Shitheads drive the virtual highway too. It was an experiment of my father’s he let on once in a letter, and the Shitheads took it over. They drive on the wrong side of the road as compared with the typical motorist of the United States, and while that is not unusual other places, it is unlawful here. They don’t stop for red lights either. Everything on the home planets of most Shitheads is reversed. So, if you see a company with the entrance door on the opposite of the typical side, which is the right side in America, there is a good chance it is a Shithead company. Entire industries are run by Shitheads, so they give the Goddesses a run for their money, but always come up short. The Goddesses are like the Borg from that science fiction show and they all think with one collective brain. Their brain power is unmatched here on earth. So the Shitheads push a little and the Goddesses shove back. My father must have been a Shithead, or for most of his life, but not the last few years or so. Shithead males are not much into their families.

The Shitheads drive cars powered by solar fuel. You see a lot of them out driving around when the weather is bad just to soak up what they can of the sun’s rays. And they drive with their lights on when it is a sunny day. It recharges their batteries. Otherwise, their cars have problems. Any light will do, and since there was just a huge emission of gamma rays in the universe last week due to a large star collapsing, the Shitheads here on earth should have plenty of power to go on for quite some time.

Just the traffic lights and street lamps alone are enough energy to power most Shithead vehicles. The Goddesses drive around like soccer moms in SUVs and Jeep Loredos, and those types of similar vehicles and I don’t know their source of power. I would be curious to find out, but I fought my invasion by the Shitheads and I defeated the Goddesses in the process, and I hope like Hell there are no other miracles in store for me.  That was my second miracle, fighting an invasion again. I guess I cleaned up things nicely this time, but I didn’t finish, but I don’t have anything left, so it will have to do. I am not re-enlisting. The putzes can’t drive worth shit and their cars are just regular old sacks of metal and cheap ones at that. Shithead and Goddess vehicles are rocket-powered. My Honda was a rocket ship. I never knew this till I was activated in 2008 and 2049.

I was discussing the trapped young women. I see these girls motioning to me, begging me with their eyes, and I see this often, but it is just a glimpse I catch, and I understand that they need my help to be set free. I did it for a few girls I knew that needed a rescue, but I can’t really do it anymore, and I have no idea where any of these girls come from.  The force fields shelter the girls from the sight of others, except I guess Shithead males and me, but it is really none of my business. Shithead males love to drive around with these girls trapped in their cars, and show them off to their buddies. They let their buddies rape them too.

I performed my second miracle and I am out of here on the note of a slide guitar. Like Keb Mo and me. Let the clean-up crew handle the rest.  They can destroy the planet or leave it alone; I don’t care. I’m not coming back.  Jim Carrey and I will spend a vacation together, after we both get off this rock, and probably after the one day fishing expedition I go on with God. No tricks, God. Play nice. My two will be there with me, or I am not going. And it can only be for one day.  And that is the time period as passed on earth—twenty-four hours. And I need some time to meet and greet my true family first. God, this is your only chance at redemption—so don’t screw it up!

As to the Shitheads and their use of force fields: it never phased me. I would walk right through their most powerful setting much to my chagrin. It would hurt a little, and it is one reason I am in constant pain now, and they laugh because of it, and they can get through their own force fields. They can lock up more than cars with them—universities, neighborhoods, even an entire major metropolis, I heard. And shit has no real solid basis, so it doesn’t hurt them to pass through a force field. The ones that aren’t local boys are not carbon or DNA based. They appear to be flesh and bone but they are not. The local ones can’t spot the other out of town Shitheads either, but for me it is easy, because they are so much smarter than regular local Shitheads. I live in Florida, so the local Shitheads are really stupid. The out-of-towners usually don’t give off a detectable odor either.

Shithead women are often a thing of beauty. They will do almost anything in bed, they are gorgeous, but they are also cunning. They don’t usually have much in the way of education like the Goddesses who hold advanced degrees usually, but they have some sort of training and do well in the workforce. One of the big problems with Shithead females is they are into drugs so often. They were given horrible addictions when they took their earthly bodies. The Shitheads came here in the later half of the twentieth century and were trapped here, and the Goddesses came shortly after, and me, I have been here for centuries, millennia perhaps.  Only I could defeat the Shitheads and the Goddesses and in the process I earn my wings so to speak because of what I did. Earth really belongs to the putzes. And I gave it back to its rightful owners, but they are already losing it again.

Chapter Seven

I had two wives before. Both my exes live in Texas. Yippee. I did not have two wives at the same time. I am not a Mormon. Haha! That’s all they get remembered for. I had a friend once that every time he saw Mormons peddling down the sidewalk, he would scream out of the car, “Mormons.” I am not even certain he was aware he did this.

My first wife was a Shithead of the local variety, and the second one was a blonde beautiful, sexy Goddess. She was fun. For a while. It lasted three years between us and she moved on to greener pastures. She wanted more money, more money. Most of my cash is virtual, so I can’t touch it, because I forgot how to. I did the best I could to provide for my second wife, but those Hollywood looks take a big chunk of change.

The Goddesses are not terribly faithful. I knew a lot of them in college. They love the pretty boys and are not shy about it. Some are very promiscuous. The Shitheads went straight to work on my second wife as soon as she got here. They convinced her she was a Shithead, but, in fact, they were wrong, because she had her own planets. No Shithead has his or her own planets. Everything belongs to the Imperial Wizard, who is this rather gay looking guy that sucks all the shit out of a Shithead’s body and leaves them with nothing if they don’t obey him. He tried to do it with me, but I killed him. I assume another one stepped up and took his place. He was dressed in this crimson ceremonial garb with a big black collar, and I killed him or he would have messed me up. But he wouldn’t have been able to kill me, because I am not a Shithead.

So, my second wife had her own planets. There were seven of them I think, and her home planet was a goodish-sized star. I destroyed her planets, and ripped her home planet last. I can be kind of nasty that way when I want to be. She kind of raked me over the coals, so I got even. Her earthly form was destroyed too, but she managed somehow to be trapped in some hideous form that she hated. I met up with her in a hospital a year or two after she divorced me. We were both in-patients. I ordered the nurse to give her a lethal injection, which the nurse did. My wife was in a lot of pain, and now she is free and probably reformed into something else. I know she is a squirrel. I heard her voice in my head for the last several years, so I then turned her into a squirrel. Now she frolics around my yard. I live on a corner lot with a lot of big old trees. There are plenty of nuts. I don’t talk her as much as I used to. I am preoccupied with finding a life again. It’s tough.

I kind of regret getting divorced from her, but I probably was not going to be able to keep her. She acted like a Shithead often, because the local boys had convinced her that was what she was. She was stepping out of the marriage more and more every day anyway. She was fun though, and she possessed the brightest smile, and that long blond hair and those legs that went on way past five o’clock. I could not really hold a grudge against her for too long. She is a Goddess. They are special creatures.

I was into sadism and masochism with both my ex-wives. I realize, of course, it was the number of times I was raped that prevented me from really having much chance of a healthy sex life, whatever that is. I was raped repeatedly as a child too. It was by another so-called friend of the family. Even so, I did have a quote, unquote normal “sex life” for a number of years, whatever it was. But she was fun. My second wife, fleeting, but fun. I didn’t really have the money for a trophy wife at the time, so I was stripped of my crown.

My first wife I utterly despised. She was a local, ordinary Shithead without anything to commend her but big tits and a good sense for paying the bills and budgeting. That’s something. I’ll give her that. She could turn a penny into a quarter, but not a dollar bill. It was kind of a marvel.  And the sex was good for a number of years. That’s a fond recollection I’ll give her too. But she sought to take advantage every which way she could, and I was not having it, so we parted company and she moved away. Tex-ass. She was all about the money too. The problem was by the time I had any, we hated each other. So, I decided not to share and went out one day for a pack of cigarettes. I never returned. She sold the house. The city had built a freeway through the front yard. I didn’t care. I was loaded and just waiting to be plucked by the next gal.

That day I went to the ice palace and had my insides eaten was a rough day at school. I got there late like I knew I would and I was a soaked to the skin. I ran into the back of a parked car too, because my brakes on my bicycle were wet from the rain and wouldn’t function properly.  I screwed up my front tire. First period was Calculus, and my teacher was already drunk. He was a fun drunk, but then if someone pushed too far, or acted up the least bit, which it was usually me that did, he would erupt in the most venomous tirade, which was also a lot of fun to hear. The veins on his nose would double in size. Some of us had a running bet which day he would keel over from a heart attack, as he was easily in his seventies and that was ancient to us, a bunch of teenagers. He used to give us a quiz every morning first thing, and I had missed it, so I slipped in quietly while he lectured about limits under the plane. It was all the Calculus he understood, and we had been hearing about limits for a couple of months now. I wanted to get to the sexy stuff, but apparently it had to wait until next semester, after he was done with his refresher course.

My next class was American History with a young hip professor. He had a Ph.D from Chapel Hill, an excellent southern school, and he was witty and fun. He knew a lot of humorous stories about the presidents, and others in government, like the guy who wrapped himself up in the flag with a shotgun and blew his brains out.  It seemed funny at the time. American History was an advanced class as well. And then the day progressed fairly well from there, and Spanish was after lunch. I always had lunch with a buddy of mine on the lawn. Ironically, he was the one who saved my life after my second suicide attempt. It pays to know people and keep friends: something that has been impossible for me. They all take the fast rail out of my life when something goes wrong. He had become a doctor and he was the attending physician when they wheeled me into the emergency room.

Spanish class went well. I could always show off my talents with language in there, because no one ever bothered to learn their vocabulary words, except me and a few other students. My teacher always tried to conduct the class purely in Spanish, but it never flew. She was a great beauty and I loved her. It was more than the typical school boy crush. It was all unrequited though. Unrequited love and a love lost too soon are so painful. I can’t bear anymore.

Most of the pain in my gut went away by physical education, which was always the last period of the day. We had flag football, and I was on the defensive line. I loved rushing the quarterback. It was a great high, and I was good at it, so my team mates always let me play the line, even though I was smaller than most of the boys. I would shoot across the line so quickly the offensive line could not block me. And I was no meaty linebacker type. I was a year younger than everyone in my grade except one girl, and my mother had me start school early primarily so she did not have to watch me at home anymore. She needed a break from kids.

I am pushing fifty again. Yippee. I have had four major psychoses, and I am here to say that if you have not had a major psychosis, you know not of what I speak. My take on psychoses is that the individual who is experiencing the psychosis is in two worlds at the same time. Or possibly one just leaks over into another. But he or she freaks out, and cannot behave appropriately in either world. This past psychosis of mine, 2049 the year was, and 2008, I saw things, and let me tell you, if you make it that far in your disease, which calling madness a disease is bullshit, then hats off to you, because you are going to have your mind completely blown.

Let the psychiatrists smoke that piece of crack. The ones younger than forty are idiots, and the ones older than forty are insane themselves. My father hypnotized me and used me as shield for a job he pulled in Moscow at my age of nine, and how insane is that to do to someone, anyone, let alone a kid.  I am here to say I am one of the meanest, toughest men in the universe and it is because my entire life span of one hundred and fifty billions years has been torture. And I have no recall, or very little, of how torturous my previous existences were on this planet, but I am sure they were no cakewalk either. Of course, I don’t expect I spent all 150 billion years on earth, unless the earth is a lot older than we think.

And now I hate people, especially Shitheads. I made my peace with the Goddesses, even though they sought to kill me too. When I die and leave this planet, and I either die violently or all alone, I will go to debriefing and then take up the handles of my new life. It will be paradise compared to every stinking lousy moment on earth. This is one fucked up, messed up planet and I don’t care the least piece of shit about it anymore. Putzes, I gave you a fighting chance. You’ll probably lose and that’s probably how it is supposed to be, but I resign. Hop on your rockets and inhabit Mars. Good luck with that plan. You’ll need it.

Chapter Eight

I am of late noticing more and more giants. I think they are a jovial bunch at least. But there seem to be more and more women in excess height of five foot nine or ten. They’re not Amazons either. The Amazons all died out years ago, except Xena. And at the same time I am noticing more and more men in stature of greater than six four or five. I am six feet one inches, so it is an almost imperceptible difference right now, but I think men and women are growing longer and leaner. It would appear just the opposite is happening, with everyone getting so fat, but the change I am indicating is occurring if ever so slowly. The giants are another race of invader and they are intermingling with earthlings, and they seem bent toward helping the planet. And they are not Shitheads, most of the ones now—the giants—that are young are just barely out of their teens.

I know the NBA and the NFL and MLB have been full of these guys for decades now, but they are not true giants, I think, or most of them are not. The true giants are younger than Shaq.  I met him or his clone once. If Shaq is a giant he is a very friendly one, as the giants all appear to be. I notice them in coffee shops, and around town, at malls, driving in large vehicles, eating big sandwiches, and wearing those plus-sized shoes. The shoes alone are a marvel. I see them on billboards, where everyone looks like a giant, but the actual giants look so much fuller of life when depicted this way. The giants are smarter than the local Shitheads too. I think somehow or another, they are here to help the planet. Or they may be cashing in on an easy buck. Perhaps earth is a paid internship.

Other than the plant people, I haven’t really identified any other invaders. The plant people are certainly not human. They love their topiary and stay rather well disguised, so there’s not much point in discussing them, because I don’t know much about them. They have an evil bent, so I leave them alone. I was locked down in one of their Hells once. It was scary, but really more interesting, as I have always had a fondness for topiary. Seeing a topiary of Christ on the cross is a bit much though. But the fact remains that now nothing and no one on earth is who or what they appear to be. Remember the days when you had to be careful whom you had a fist fight with, because he might be some martial artist type or a ninja. Well, those days have continued and gotten much worse, at least in terms of not knowing whom you are going up against. And God help you, if it is a putz. He’ll shoot your ass. It is his only defense.

Everyone now is from somewhere else, and one has no idea what that other person knows, especially in the way of self-defense. The attacker might just be a pest who gets its wings ripped off. That is the world of earth now. And the poor putzes have no idea. They’ll shoot anyone on sight now. And bullets are just a set back to some of these invaders. A Shithead will just reform and he will be meaner and nastier after he does. I feel badly for the putzes, because many of them are a boisterous, rowdy lot, who will go up against anyone, and have their eyes gouged out by doing so. I don’t know about Army strong. I was never in the real military. I passed the officer’s test for the Air Force, but that particular branch of the armed services wanted to offer me a missile silo position. Can you imagine Chris Devin with a missile in his hand. A nuclear missile. Or just the launch codes would be enough. It is designed to take two officers, but I am sure there is a way around it. Luckily, I will never have to make that decision. I turned down the Air Force’s generous offer.

This is a rough period in earth history. Some of the nastiest aliens are imprisoned on this rock. Earth may really be a lockdown, a penitentiary, a penal colony. Earth is one of the nastiest Hells in the universe. Penal Colony Earth. A friend of mine said once we are slaves to money, slaves to our jobs, and slaves to family. I excommunicated the family part. And I don’t work or have too much money that I can grab hold of. The notion of earth being a penal colony I find intriguing. Penal Colony Earth for mature audiences only. It would make a good video game. Escape with the loot and the women and the space vehicle and get out of town. Maybe the character can be based on Snake Plissken. Or maybe the Rock for the hipper audiences. I like the Rock. He is sort of a brother of mine like Jim Carrey.

Chapter Nine

I just met a friend and his wife for coffee. It was a chance meeting. He and I had been rather close. It was at my favorite coffee shop, which is closing because the company is falling on tough economic times, and I will lose just about everyone I chat with face to face. Luckily there are Romanian women willing to chat long hours on the computer. And they are beautiful and fun, but back to my friend. He’s a local Shithead, but a smart one. He tried to shoot me and the gun backfired and blew his right hand off. It was through a window. I never went outside until later and when I did there was no blood, but it rained overnight and he could have been standing in the grass. There was no hole in the window, but the gun had backfired.

He taught my first wife how to poison people. He convinced me my second wife would make a good wife, which she really fell short in a number of categories. I loved her though. I had loved them both. My second cheated too much on me, and could not cover it up sufficiently, so I got hurt and became angry. Rather than putting up with my bitching, she filed for divorce. My first wife backfired too, as she is now in prison for poisoning her fourth husband.

I was given the opportunity to get even with everyone who had done me an injustice. Only it wasn’t real in the sense it was not in my present reality. I was left one or right one or up one or down one, perhaps even a few. That is how the universe functions and all the parallel universes, or simply some times they are known as alternate realities. It is a huge grid that glows green with all the power that flows through it. I would think it would glow blue, but maybe there’s so much power it leaped over the blue and went to a greener green. You can travel left or right, up or down, or up and left and down and right, and any combination. So, in my alternate reality, which is where my major consciousness was not accustomed to, I got even with everyone who had served me a cold dish of revenge. This friend was one of the major players. The rest of his life will not go well, because the realities at some point spill over into each other. His wife was always very sweet to me, and since she is a Goddess, I left her alone. The Goddesses and the Shitheads intermingle too.

I did not really seek all this revenge on the unsuspecting hearts of others, but I was pushed along in a crueler, more hostile reality, and there was nothing I could do about it, but go along. Revenge seems to be a universal concept. That much figures. And I really did not care that I hurt these individuals who had done such a number on me in my major reality. I became a little bit of an animal. My whole life has been one massive set-up. Illegitimi non caborundum. “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” That is bastardized Latin. The phrase does not really exist in Latin, but someone came up with it and pawned it off as actual Latin, but I know better.

Anyway, I saw this man and he had no obvious clue of what had happened and he had a right hand still attached, and it was not prosthetic. So, alternate reality it was. I traveled through several parallel universes, possibly at the same time. Worm holes can do strange things. That must have been how I did it when I was a kid. I remember one of the parallel universes it was always night out, no sunshine. I had this very cool laughing bird I called it when I created it. I would say, “Where’s my laughing bird?” and it would laugh like a mocking bird, but sort of half-human, and I could tell it was much larger than a mocking bird.

I was sorry to see him go, when my reality sobered up again, but that was a kind of harsh animal universe with all these odd lizards too. They were too big to be Geckos, and they looked absolutely prehistoric and fierce, and I had never seen a lizard move that fast. They surrounded my every movement outdoors. And some times they were not there at all, so I knew I had awakened in another universe. It could have been I was in the Hell of one of the plant people’s variety: odd plants, weird animal species seem to go together, like birds that don’t flinch when you throw a cup of coffee at them.

I didn’t like it there much and it never rained. I would bump and grind and come to a stop in various parallel universes and it would be daylight for a period or it would rain, and I would know I was where the major part of my consciousness was more or less, but I felt depleted, drained. Too much hopping around universes. It really wasn’t for me. I just wanted to find my own, tried and true reality back on earth and finish my sentence and go home. And I did, after the year 2049 or thereabouts. In addition to being the year 2008, it was also the year 2015. And now, lo and behold, I have Sainthood coming too. I performed my second miracle, and even though that Pope is dead, it has not been upped to three miracles, so as soon as they discover what I did, I will be anointed, as a saint.

When I was a kid it mattered not, but now that I am pushing fifty again, it matters more to me. Why not go out as a saint? Who gets to do that? Freaks, that’s who, but no one said the path to salvation and sainthood was an easy one. Thank God (I’m being sarcastic) I don’t have to go to Heaven. I would probably have to farm the land, or some God awful job like that. Naturally, I would refuse and get booted from Heaven with no place to go. Imagine being homeless after being in Heaven.

It was another fine day in paradise. I was sitting on a curb outside where my rocket Honda was being repaired. It was just a regular car when I bought it, or so I thought. It really came into its own in 2049, which was also 2008, and was probably the best rocket ship I could have gotten for the money. Apparently, I don’t just project. Some times I need a ship. It could get me home on terra firma hundreds or thousands of miles and light years on an empty tank and it never broke down.

Some Shithead had disconnected the battery cable, and while I was handy enough to figure that one out, it screwed up the CD player in my car. I had to enter a code, and I had no idea where the code could be found. It was probably one of God’s people, thinking he was turning off the force field in my car’s CD player. It was a crude attempt at setting him free, because I don’t use Shithead technology much, and the attempt failed because God is still in there. God’s people were the first inventors of Shithead technology, and the Shitheads don’t even know that. Anyway God stays there until my family says he can come out. And, of course, he is already out, because that event has occurred, but to me I don’t know when or where that happens, but it has, and it is happening, and it will happen. And this might go on endlessly. Yippee.

Anyway, I distract myself even. I was sitting on this curb when I got my first glance of the known universe including all the parallel universes. I was seeing it in my mind, and I could tell there were a lot of people in my head at that time. It was kind of like they were looking through my eyes but it was really through the eyes of my mind. That seems like a rare treat. To be able to do that I mean, not necessarily my mind’s eyes, but maybe that is a rare treat too. It’s like they know what is coming, but then if it was my family of time travelers, they would know what is coming next, because it had already happened. They would at least know what was coming at some point in the future, which is meaningless to them as it has already occurred to them. I get the feeling a lot of them are scientists. I respect scientists, but not doctors. Give me a nurse any day over a doctor. Doctors are well enough educated to be sure they are not idiots, but the joke is on them. They are idiots.

I still like my buddy who pulled me out of my second suicide attempt and the successive coma I was in. He has earned my respect for all eternity, which ends fairly soon, I think. Eternity that is. That is why the concept is for all time, but time ends eventually too, but not as soon. So then the concept becomes what lies beyond time. I respect my friend for what lies beyond time. That’s a lot of respect. He was a good friend in high school too. We were best buds and I’ll never forget that. We’ll meet again and I’ll do him a solid.

Since my family travels in the fifth dimension, the fourth being Einstein’s invention and better put, his explanation, of time, which opened up the doors to an understanding of time travel on earth, my family may actually already know what is farther out than time. I have calculated it is thought, the fifth dimension, but I don’t know how to do anything with that just yet. I have to have a major shift of consciousness and that doesn’t occur until I get off this rock.

I do slide as well. But sliding is a vehicle of time manipulation that I do. I think lots of people can slide and do, but maybe don’t even know they are doing it. I slid three times in 2049 just to survive. I had to get out of my accustomed time zone and go back or forward a day or two. Sliding has little to do with thought, which is the fun stuff now. My true family grew very bored with time travel, but now, because of me, the members of my family have a new toy: traveling at the speed of thought. I created the fifth dimension. It was an unusually long and complex equation that I set my real big brothers and my robots to, and they solved it, so it is real. My true family of time travelers may be the only ones who know how to manipulate the equation. Imagine having a patent on the fifth dimension.

I suppose I will have to get up to snuff with a lot of history. History is a good measure for understanding the future. And when it all occurs everywhere and all over the place at the exact same moment, it should be a lot of fun to ramble around in this huge known universe and all its parallel universes. It is like turning the pages of a book. You flip them forward and go forward, and backward and go backwards. Just don’t get too immersed in the book, or you might not make it back to where your major stream of consciousness is. And that is a very good thing for a time, but you still have to put the kettle on for tea and fix dinner.

So, I was sitting on this curb, and it was hot. I am bound and determined to continue this part of my narrative. I had shoes on fortunately, because the asphalt was roasting me. The sunlight kept splashing up in my face as a reflection from the road. It was blinding.

I see this green grid in my mind. It takes up all my mind’s sight. It’s huge, but I see it from quite some distance so it is like I see a miniature of the known universe. Diamonds are like that. I see all the grid lines, and of course, it is glowing green, which Kryptonite was green, but I don’t think that has anything to do with this. Of course, my dad might have been Jor El, and then my brother or I am Superman, but that seems unlikely to me. I’m not able to jump tall buildings in a single bound, but I bet I could fall off of one handily enough. Yippee.

So, this grid is a marvel of technology which far surpasses any artificial intelligence we have here or other places. It is pulsing, vibrating and growing. That part was almost imperceptible because I saw it as a miniature. But I do see how the grid is wired, so I can get around obstacles and free myself and avoid entanglements, but that’s not a theory I want to test. I want my family to get me the Hell off this planet and that will take a ship. I did my time, I paid my debt to society and I think I was kidnapped to begin with, so it is time for me to leave soon. Good riddance. Rat’s ass. I had to throw in the gratuitous curse word, but it really is how much I care. It is an accurate measurement. This planet blows.

Chapter Ten

The thing about a psychosis is that it is all real. Since nothing is real on earth, a psychosis is as real as nothing gets. It all occurs in the mind and usually the psychotic individual, in this case me a number of times, rarely has any visual proof that the incidents are real. Most schizophrenics or otherwise psychotic individuals don’t see things. They don’t hallucinate visually. That was one of the major distractions of the movie A Beautiful Mind about the Nobel Prize winning economist, John Nash. The real man I was informed did not have visual hallucinations. That part was Hollywood.

The brilliant economist is schizophrenic and I am sure he had his fill of auditory hallucinations, but I don’t think he ever saw one thing that was not truly there. Or more likely since none of it is there, we all see things that are not truly there, unless we are blind. And then who knows except a blind person. It doesn’t really matter at any rate, because if Mr. Nash had seen something that was not there, it would have really been there anyway. Nothing is there, so everything is there too. That’s not hard to understand. It is simply left or right one or two parallel universes. And if you get caught in jam, there is plenty of help in any universe, or at least for me there was.

The CIA did a lot more to help me than harm me. And what I did for the organization, I can’t be specific on, because I don’t really know what I did. There were lots of voices vying for attention from me, and I saw all manner of things—some of which were brutal and shocking—like the plant people’s Hell and all the incumbent torture I was served in getting there. 2049 was a rough year. I was pushing fifty.

The biggest realization of my pushing fifty was that this body does not have that many more miles to go. And that is a very good thing. One famous author said, she was going to fight old age like hell, kicking and screaming, and roller skating or something like that into her coffin. I am much less aggressive than that, and as a result middle age has crept up on me and blindsided me, and it’s not pretty. The funny thing is no one dies until the exact correct moment in his or her life. That doesn’t mean go and jump out of a plane without a parachute, because I think maiming oneself or just shattering bones might happen to be a random event.

I now have very bad arthritis and I am in constant pain, and it seems fairly random of an occurrence to me. I don’t know when it started, why it started or how it started, and I don’t know anything to do about it except munch some pills for breakfast and dinner.

Plenty of people want to believe that everything has a reason, and I was one of them, until 2049. Now, I think some things are causal, but there are plenty of good things and bad things, occurring on a daily basis, that are not. Some times the randomness is the cause and some times things were just meant to be a certain way. That means that certain things have always been that, are that way, and will always be that way. And it could mean the exact opposite is true too. I don’t really care that much though. There’s no monkeying with the past, because it is always that way, and if one does successfully throw in a monkey wrench, and outcomes change, it is still the past and still that way somewhere. And where the wrench lands is just another parallel universe. This is how we approach infinity. As infinity expands, so does everything else with it. An infinity is not merely an endless progression; it is an infinite endless progression.

I wonder how people that know what they are talking about view this. They probably have a very different viewpoint, not that I care. They are all aliens, but I wonder if they know that, or they simply must wait until their 2049, which has already occurred, and their consciousness expands so greatly. Or for some maybe it happens before then. Maybe there is a random process that is switching people on left and right. That was actually a pun: left and right, because of the way one travels through the universe. Who is to say these individuals switching on are switching on where their major consciousness is. They could be switched on over and up or down and out, etc., etc. And where their major consciousness is, they might not realize they are switched on somewhere else.

Chapter Eleven

It turns out my father was a major Shithead too. I had always suspected. In one of his last letters to me before he died, he told me he had hypnotized me, placed a number of post hypnotic triggers in my brain, and that he was the one who drove me crazy in college to cover up something he had done. He went on to explain the KGB were looking for me because he pulled a job in Russia when he was there. I have maintained all along that I have never been to Russia, but in case I have and have merely had it erased from my memory, I was acting as some kind of unwitting scapegoat for my father. The Shithead. I did nothing wrong and broke no laws, if I was even in Russia, which I doubt.

He erased my memory so I would not react as though I had ever been to Russia because I believed I had not. I still believe this, but it is coming more finely tuned that I may have been there with him and his second wife, who also was a Shithead, and he pinned everything he did on me. He was fifty and at the top of his game. To top things off, he might not have been working with the approval of the United States government, but instead acting like some rogue cowboy spy. He faked a heart attack soon after and then retired. I have felt like he used my sister for something too, but not nearly as involved as what he used me for. She was already a Shithead, and I am not and have never been, so he may have left Maggie in Satan’s care.

I wrote him back and asked him to clarify himself and a few points, but he conveniently died before he wrote back. I did see him at the crematorium. Someone there, probably a Shithead, had painted some bright purple smile on his face. I’ll never in all my years forget that expression. It mocked me from the oven he was hoisted into. It said, “I know a lot more of what I did to you than you’ll ever discover in this life buddy boy.” My father, the brilliant psychiatrist, the CIA muckity-muck, the Captain in the United States Navy, was a cruel, immature man who was afraid of everything and everyone in his life. When his number was up he died alone with no one to console him or comfort him, except a prostitute. Rest in Peace. You’re in God’s care now. Haha! Yippee.

That is the end of that part of the saga. I had limited parental supervision, and limited contact with my family on earth, my friends have all deserted me—I am alone—except for my real family. And I don’t know how long it has been since I have seen any of them. Certainly in 2008 and 2049 they were all around me. They will protect me. I have faith. In them, not any religious icons. We were around during the first big bang, or at least maybe subsequent ones afterwards, because my theory is there have been multiple big bangs. They are real, my family, and I wish to be reunited. I don’t know for sure if I was sent on a mission, or if I was kidnapped. I know I am young, but I am very damaged in this life.

In my next life, I will have my two, the warrior queen Rebecca and the beautiful submissive Chloe, and I have my rightful big brothers, one up and two up, and I have a family that loves me and wants me home after one hundred and fifty billion years of searching for me. How heart wrenching and joyful it will be to see my real parents after all this time. It has even been a very long time for them. The parades, the parties, the music. The food. And all my family will be there if they can be. Jim Carrey, the Rock, Steve Carrel. Gary Coleman. I am bringing a lot of people from the planet earth too. That is a note to my family, so get ready. The more the merrier. It is my triumphant return and I am hiring the Rolling Stones to play at the party, and socialize and mingle, and rest and stay, if the band members would like. I am joking about that part.

Chapter Twelve

My second miracle. This is what earned me Sainthood, not that I feel very saintly. I destroyed a few invading species. It seems I was trapped in Hell again, but I knew I was not trapped permanently. I was on a mission. Kate Moss and Michelle Pfeiffer were being held hostage in a house in the Miami area, not far from South Beach. I did this one all alone, and I never saw the pair of women. I had been challenged to put my money where my mouth was and rescue these two fine ladies. Who could resist? I had been told Kate Moss was dead, and she would actually be reborn as her former self in all her glory, if I saved her. I dearly loved Kate Moss. I met her at CBGB’s in New York once. She invited me to join her at her table, but I declined because I was there with my girlfriend. I was told Kate died the next day, and she was dead when I heard her voice in 2008. I heard her voice from the grave.

I thought she and Michelle Pfeiffer would join me, if I was successful and saved them both, and we would live some sort of idyllic life on earth, the three of us together. I was led to believe as well that they were in actuality Rebecca and Chloe, my two, and could not get out of the house that held them prisoners, so it was up to me to rescue them. My two had done everything to protect me. My loyalty was assured.

The house was down a long cul-de-sac after a very circuitous path into the subdivision. I found the house right away. I pulled up in the driveway, and immediately my car got stuck on a brick embankment circling the drive. It was a small car and an even tighter squeeze into the driveway, but a voice told me I had to go behind the force field. The voice thought it was trapping me inside with the others, but I could walk or drive right through the force field. They hurt a bit, and these were strong force fields, but it was easy enough to get through them.

Luckily I always carried a crowbar in my trunk, but I had to free these women first. It turned out the crowbar was necessary for that as well, as I had to bend the frame of the door back on itself to allow enough room for the women to fly out. They were in some Goddess form I was not completely familiar with, so they could fly and were invisible, but I could hear their voices. I began to believe it had nothing to do with the ladies’ earth counterparts, and I was actually one or two or more parallel universes over, left or right. And from that vantage I may have been two or three or more parallel universes up or down. It is impossible to say now. I have become almost completely deactivated. And I am in constant pain.

So, I set my favorite model and one of my favorite actresses free, but of course, it earns me no chips where my major consciousness lies, because none of us were on earth. But I did a good deed anyway, somewhere, so I felt very good about myself. It came time to free my car, which was a snap, and drive back home. As I pull out on the interstate to head back up North, the most amazing thing happens. I realize the timing was perfect, even if the event was horrible. It was timed so I could fight some more. I had been on the highway all day and night and had not slept in a few days as I recall. And then the worst fighting of all came my way.

It began to rain shit. Shit was coming down all over my car and all around me. It started oozing into my car through the air conditioning vents, through any crack it could find. My tires were barely gripping the road, and I was not going slowly. I had to figure something out fast. The stench was becoming unbearable. Luckily Kate Moss and Michelle Pfeiffer had flown off, so I knew they were safe, and I had completed my mission successfully. Now, I just had to make it home safely, which seemed questionable that I might do so. I truly thought this was my last adventure. I thought I was a goner for sure. It would take wits to get out of this one. So, I convinced the shit that was falling from the sky that it was actually ice, and it transformed into ice and died. Shit is nothing when it freezes. It was the worst ice storm in Florida’s history, and this part I suppose won’t hit the press until 2049. I heard no accounts on the news in 2008 of any major ice storms in south Florida.

But my car was really slipping and sliding because it was actual and authentic ice on the roadways. It was about four o’clock in the morning, so there was almost no traffic: just me and my rocket Honda on the roads. I zipped along icy streets about ninety miles per hour, and who knows how fast I was really going. The speedometer was just regular Honda issue. I could have been traveling thousands of miles per second.

It was the largest invasion force to date that I had ever seen. The tonnage of shit was huge. What slipped through as shit and remained shit would be good for the crops, I guessed. I couldn’t be sure. I drove along I-95 North and left Florida behind me. I was safe after that, so I slowed down.

Epilogue

It must now be 2009 or 2050. My ability to fight anymore has been stripped. I am deactivated, and I am in constant pain. I am prey for the tiniest punk aliens that are out there on planet earth, but they all leave me alone now. That is something different. I used to be picked on in every public place I went. And sometimes the Shitheads would gang up on me.

There was a time when I was having lunch and two Shithead males jumped me at my table for no reason and I had to scuffle with them both right there in the restaurant. The manager of the joint screamed at me, as though he was going to call the cops on me, even though I had not started anything. I didn’t even know who they were. Another time a crazy Shithead came after me at a bar. I knocked him out. Cold. And then I got out of there. Other times I have had to fight too, and I never started a thing. But now everyone leaves me alone. I guess you have to destroy a whole fucking army to get any respect from Shitheads.

And I am always alone now. I am a shell of a man. I am a spent cartridge. Everyone knows what I did, and they are curious who I am, but I just say I am not a Shithead and leave it at that. I don’t inform anyone I am a time traveler anymore. It is too complicated, and they don’t believe me anyway. I live alone now. My room mate moved out. My mom has passed, and the rest of my family does not come around anymore. I am still in touch with my one sister. I was broke and could not work, so I was forced to sell my house and move into an apartment. It’s better that way. It is less stress and less to deal with, and I can play it on a lower key. None of my friends made it through with me. They all turned their backs on me, even after I was relatively sane again, which is no admission I was insane, because I wasn’t. But then clearly I was.

I sit at coffee shops and read, and my greatest social affair now is flirting with the girls who serve me coffee. I fall into a chair because I can’t bend or swivel my hips and I won’t go under the knife again in this life, and though there is no reason for me to pray, I hope death finds me soon. I want to go home, to my real home, and now I seem more stuck than before. But it is simply not the right moment yet. I know I make it off this rock, and it is probably just in the nick of time that I do. And so it will be for a lot of us, because I have amassed an army on earth that is coming with me. Timing is everything, especially on this planet, which is all I seem to know for now.

My knuckles are all shattered, my gut is torn up, arthritis has crept up my spine, and every day my hips hurt. I am in with a new doctor. He’s kind of a simpleton, but then I convinced him I could take care of myself, so he applies less and less pressure for me to follow his orders, which don’t make any sense anyway. Medical care on this planet is almost a thing of the past. I am sure the government will outlaw it.

I still drive. I traded the rocket Honda in on a new one and I can see this new car has potential too. I go and buy groceries, out for coffee, and to get my hair cut. I can’t work. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to again. So, I sit at home in my small one bedroom apartment and I listen to a lot of music. The tears have passed and I have regained a little more sense of who I am. I venture out on the Internet looking for friendly photos of women who will listen to my problems and hopefully make a decent recommendation or two. I watch the news and cook dinner. I take pills that help me sleep, and I flash back to last year much less than I did. The flashbacks were excruciatingly painful. I know what combat veterans go through. Trust me. I know.

I always fancied a military life in this life, but I was ill too soon, and could never join. There would have been complications. My father was tacitly disappointed when I turned down a commission with the United States Air Force. He thought by remaining quiet about it, he could goad me into it, but I never brought it up again in our letters. I was always one step ahead of him. Saving the planet twice would have to be my reward.

I am now on federal assistance. I live in HUD housing and use food stamps to pay for groceries. I get disability, but it isn’t much. I am destitute. Satan, the supreme Shithead of earth, in all his efforts could not break me, but then he did not have to. Prison life on this rock was all it took. This is one great big cell, and you do your time and then go home, if you have one.

I know my family is here. I have a home. It may take months of deprogramming, but I will assimilate into a better lifestyle with my true family once again. And if this has all been a mission, some sort of planned endeavor, then I am probably done, and I will retire soon. It is not that I look forward to retirement, but I will have my two, and my true big brothers, and a royal family that loves me, of which I am a part. I am ready to go. Take me. Yippee.

Technologic Advances in the “Baby Boom” and “X” and “Y” Generations and Introducing "GenZyme"

It is somewhat widely accepted that the youngest of the Baby Boomers was born in 1966. This puts me among the youngest of the Boomers as I was born in the early 60s. The oldest Boomers are considered to have been born immediately following World War II, so a considerable block of them are now in their sixties. This in turn makes the youngest, not the oldest, of the subsequent generation, generation X, known also as Gen X, born in 1986 or thereabouts; however, some would say the youngest of Gen X was born as early as 1980. The oldest Gen Xers were born somewhere around 1966 after the Boomers. These individuals, Gen Xers born in the late 60s, at present would be in their early to mid-forties. Many of the oldest of Gen Y, also born some time just after 1986 or so, who are sometimes referred to as Gen Why or the MTV Generation, attend our institutions of higher learning now, and many of the younger members of this generation currently fall into the categories that comprise our tweens and teenagers.

*** to be continued ***

Posted: November 13, 2007 10:59 am EST

Confessions of an Internet Don Juan

by

Cameron H. Chambers

Also by Cameron H. Chambers

For the Love of a Madman

The Stone Cabin

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

TO THE VIRGINS, TO MAKE MUCH OF TIME.

by Robert Herrick

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old time is still a-flying :

And this same flower that smiles to-day

To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,

The higher he's a-getting,

The sooner will his race be run,

And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,

When youth and blood are warmer ;

But being spent, the worse, and worst

Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,

And while ye may go marry :

For having lost but once your prime

You may for ever tarry.

An End and a Beginning: How Zen

I did not realize for quite some time that my ex-wife was poisoning me. Nor did I understand that the poison contributed to my psychosis of a lengthy period. However, I only comment on such passing matters. These realities are very thin and elusive, almost transparent. Everything goes right through them. They filter nothing.

Everywhere I looked were angry, menacing faces. Certain individuals were pushing and shoving me, and I was sure I had done nothing wrong. I seemed to be hated, a leper, an outcast, a reject, a pariah. My ex-wife openly laughed in my face. The more she hurt me, the more she laughed. I could see the scorn and mockery on her brow. What had I done that was so terrible? What had become of me? I was lost in that moment of my life. I am honestly one of the strongest people I have ever known. It is not braggadocio. It is a harsh truth that I have had to endure. It unsettles me. I long to be weak. I long to play. I long to laugh hysterically in the car at something silly on the radio. Life is a prison cell, awaiting eventual and sure execution. And there is no escape. So, I say, if there is fun afoot, then have at it. Throw up a whoop. Cry a mirthful tear. Wring every bit of juice out of that peach. I dare to live. I am still alive.

What follows is my story.

My name is Cast Hughes. This part of my account will read somewhat like a profile on an Internet dating site, but, given the restraints of the form, I promise to keep it interesting. Unlike the thousands of profiles I poured over after I got divorced, mine will be unique. No comments about wanting to go out but also enjoying an evening at home watching a movie. Is Blockbuster still in business? I have not been inside one in years. There will be no statements that I like Harleys, NASCAR, and Pro Wrestling. Or, as so many women wrote, "I can go from jeans to that little black dress in under five minutes." I am forty-four and possess a tall, muscular build with large calves and a firm butt. There was a time when you could bounce a quarter off my butt. If the best athlete in the world, Lance Armstrong, taught me anything, he taught me that the buttocks do not lie. Sadly, I no longer race bicycles. I am too old to compete anymore. I was not really very good anyway. I was in that least prestigious of categories, "never was."

I have a strong jaw, pearly white teeth and still a good shock of brown curly hair, which I frequently mousse. It gives me an edge with the younger women. I guess it makes me look hip or something. I thought the wet look died out years ago, but the young girls today go for it. I am comfortable financially because of a series of lucrative real estate deals. My family owned some land, which I inherited and sold off piece by piece. I live in Jacksonville, Florida, home to rednecks, freaks, criminals, and wannabe gangsters of every description. It pretty much rots here, but it is home. No place like home.

My eyes are blue, the deepest blue, and many women have commented they have a seductive appeal. I am just over six feet, which in part explains why I never accomplished anything on the bicycle riding tour. And I am a trained martial artist, though I have not practiced in a long time—I choose now to smoke cigarettes instead. It is my hobby. I had my martial arts training when I lived in Japan from an authentic old world master. My master could break boards with a blow that looked like it would not have the force to open a pop bottle. I once saw him throw a man across a room, nearly twenty feet, and I swear to this day that he never touched him.

A series of events turned me into an Internet Don Juan. I left my wife, who was cheating on me with several different men I suspect, and I was all alone and deathly lonely. Divorce is difficult at best. Mine was in the middle of my latest psychosis. I cannot prove my ex-wife had her dalliances, but the suspicion is there. And it is strong.

"Dear, you are unusually late getting home on a Wednesday." I gave my wife a hug. The scent of a black man was all over her. "You cheated on me."

She never said a word. She went straight to the shower and soaped up.

We had been together for ten years, and perhaps the grass growing everywhere else was greener. So, that is the plain, simple truth of the matter. Loneliness and boredom were the primary motivators of my becoming an Internet Don Juan.

I don't know how I knew the Internet would be a good way to hook up with women. I guess I had heard some success stories, but I had little genuine experience with the Internet, other than I owned a computer and I got online occasionally. I had also tried unsuccessfully several times to build a website for myself. I had a notion once to sell bicycles over the Internet, but that fell far short of expectations. So, I was then forty at the

time of my divorce, in deep depression, on disability because of my unusual mental proclivities, and I decided I was going to find another woman.

I began close to home. I joined a dating website, which allowed me to list an advertisement, called a profile, for about twenty bucks a month to seek available single women. I could have become anyone I wanted, and with reasonable assuredness pulled it off. The locals here are a slow lot most often. But I am a handsome man, charismatic, charming, a former professional athlete, and now a solid writer with a cautiously bright future I like to think. I am not exactly modest, more confident in nature, and this often makes the trashier people here very angry, but I do not feel I am a braggart. So I became myself online. As I am rather lazy in this the second half of my life, it seemed the simplest of chores to impersonate myself. I have to admit that I never told many lies to the women I met from online activities. Of course, I did not go in the chat rooms much ever. They are quite horrific. All these activities that follow were from dating and singles websites. I did become a sort of huge pain in the neck to several women online, but then Internet chat has a definite shelf life. If one remains on too long, he runs the risk of becoming a bigger ass than he already is. At least that is what I have found.

I have always liked foreign women. Maybe it is the accent. I am not sure really. I have traveled extensively and at an early age. It could be that they usually make easy prey. It is possibly more a function of my inability to get a really hot American woman. I love American women, but they, as a rule, do not need anyone. They need the likes of me even less. I am very schizophrenic and have bipolar disorder. I have also sleep apnea, high blood pressure, and malodorous feet. And so goes my list of qualifications.

Living with me is not easy. Loving me is not too bad apparently. In the space of just over two years I must have bedded down easily thirty women or more whom I met through the Internet. It averaged over one new conquest a month. I think the most I dated at one time was five. I only gave up this scandalous behavior because I got married again. Otherwise, I would still be doing it. It was a hell of a lot of fun. But maybe not. It takes its toll. And yes, I met my present wife over the Internet. I do not think she really approves of my previous activities, or my referring to her in certain circles as my "present wife." I continued chatting with girls for maybe longer than I should have, after I was married again. Chat is habit forming. I tried to explain to my wife that I am a writer now, my latest hat, and I need to do research every so often. I cannot discount any of my sources. My wife is intelligent, and she basically knows I am a sack full of rotten potatoes, but we love each other. Since I ceased my relentless questing, she is content that I received a good fill of women before I met her and have no need to stray ever. And she is right. I wanted a big party, a big blowout before I married her; I wanted a big celebration, and my, oh my, did I ever get that!

I do not even accurately remember who my first victim was. There were so many that summer. It might have been Jolene. She was a good-looking waitress from the Azores and about to get kicked out of her mother's house. She was not a young girl, at thirty-one, but had no real job prospects, no car, and was about to be homeless. And she drank like a sweaty fish. Every night that we would have a little party, she would down a fifth of vodka by herself. I met her on this first of many dating websites I used and had been chatting with her maybe a few days when she suggested we hook up and go to a movie. It was some awful fare about monstrous, warlike, fire-breathing dragons, and as I recall, she threw up in the bathroom during the movie. That sort of precluded the traditional good night kiss. But we hooked up online a couple of days later, and I just out and asked her, "Are we going to have sex?" The reply was favorable, so I picked her up that night at her friend's, and she spent the night. That almost concluded the dating portion of my wine and romance days on the Internet. From then on, I basically cut to the sack. I had one thing on my mind and I wanted to get it off my mind as quickly and as comfortably as possible.

At the same time I was seeing Jolene, another adequate beauty came into my life from the Internet. She looked a lot like Marilyn Monroe—extra padding and all. She had been in an abusive relationship with her fiancé. I'll call him Brad. The girl's name was Raquel. Brad had roughed her up a couple of times. He had a job as an orderly at a hospital, had no money, and lived in her house. She, on the other hand, sold real estate and was doing well. She had two boys from a previous marriage to a man in Alabama, who by coincidence, or maybe not, had also beaten her and then married a much younger woman. Raquel was a country girl, and a very sweet looking blonde. She was on the voluptuous side, and was quite adept in bed. I kept her around for a whole year off and on. She had bounced Brad out of her house for me, and he had moved down state, but something told me they would get back together. When she eventually realized that I was never going to marry her, she got back with Brad and they got married. She still emails me, but I never respond.

Raquel and I had one date as well. I took her to dinner at Wok and Roll, a fast food Chinese restaurant with tasty, but cheap food. She was just getting off work, so she did not mind that the fare was inexpensive, and the restaurant was close to her office. We wound up going back to her place. She was on the large size, definitely a plus-sized woman, maybe a 16. Most people do not realize that Marilyn Monroe wore a size 12 dress in her heyday. It is not quite the same as a size 12 today, but big can be beautiful. As it happened, the sun was not yet down, but the curtains were drawn at her place. So when Raquel and I entered her living room, she refused to turn any lights on. I was a little paranoid about who might come running in from the bedroom into the room. Her boys lived in Alabama, so I guessed we were alone.

We decided to play strip poker on her living room carpet. I am pretty sure it was her idea, as it seemed juvenile to me, and I doubt I would have suggested it. Since I am a fairly good poker player, I had her naked on the rug in about five hands. So she lay down next to the fireplace, and that was the only hint I needed.

"Right here?" I asked.

"Yes, you on top. Do it hard."

"Your dog won't bite me, will he?"

"No, shut up and do it. We'll talk later."

I kept Raquel around for a while, as I said, as I did Jolene. Raquel would always feed me very excellent steaks from the grill and maybe a baked potato or salad every time I came over and slept with her. It was a slippery slope for me. I had become a food slut, and I needed to watch my figure. I had always dreamed of making a comeback on the bicycle tour. What I might be making a come back to, I had never clearly thought through.

She would buy my favorite beer, and she had a swimming pool, which we would get into naked just about every night I saw her. I was often busy with other women, and Raquel never seemed to mind this, just as long as I never mentioned them. I caught on to that one quickly and already knew that the cardinal rule of getting laid is to never throw out another woman's name. So, I always denied I had these other women, but Raquel knew and I knew, and neither of us seemed to care really. It was a gentleman's fabrication, though most would not consider me a gentleman.

I will move forward to other events. I will come back to this part of the saga I promise. I was in this later time frame a more seasoned dater and on another dating website. On this particular website there were ravishing beauties from all over the world. I particularly like exotic looking women. I was talking to this gorgeous red head from Washington. She asked my help. Since by then I had the idea of writing a book in mind—although the idea was nebulous at best, I was nothing but ears.

As the story she told me goes, she claimed an African man had professed his love for her, and she had gone there to visit. They had stayed one night in a hotel, and when she woke up the next morning all her money and jewelry were gone. And, she claimed, he had not paid the hotel bill. The hotel management, she continued, had seized her passport until such time as she could pay her hotel bill, and was forcing her to prostitute herself for the money. Since she had no passport, she could not gain entrance to the American Embassy, she explained. I listened very intently to this story, and when she asked for money I left the chat dangling. Now, it may appear I was being an unsympathetic jerk, and maybe I was for doing that, but she was so obviously trying to scam. I am certainly edgy and a great number of individuals locally think me an ass, but I have to say this in my defense. I never really did anything wrong. I am mischaracterized, and unjustly I would say. I never beat a woman, I never stole her money, I never abused a woman in any way—and believe me, there were plenty of women who had me in their crosshairs, just trying to figure an angle. In fact, I will go so far as to say I love women. I am aware of a certain lack of character, but I truly love women.

Later that same evening, I contacted another girl on the same website within the space of an hour after the first girl. I would very often sit at my computer, smoking and drinking a beer or two, in my well-appointed third floor condo with the lake view, safe from any distraction or harm, tightly sealed up in my lustful and complacent attitude. This second girl was in Mississippi according to her profile. She asked me for help too. I thought, What are the odds of that? So, I asked her what she needed. Well, apparently it had been a long day for whoever was writing these requests for monetary assistance over the website's chat box. What this person did this time was to cut and paste the entire story into the chat box. It was the same story. She, or very likely it was a he, was too lazy to even write out the plea for money again. It could have been a different person and the same scam, or it could have been the same person and the same scam, and he or she never realized that it was me who, again, was being addressed. I left this second chat dangling too.

I had become quite desensitized to requests for money by all the Romanian girls that asked total strangers to pay their rent or the girls would lose their apartments and be homeless. They could be quite rude when I refused. Possibly some of these requests were real. It did not matter either way. I was not going to help them. In truth, I was so discouraged by this behavior sometimes I would play them along and ask how much they needed, and tell them I would send them a check next week when I got paid. But more often, I deleted them off my chat list and never contacted them again. The first rule of the Internet is that if they ask for money in short order, it is all they want. I may be mentally ill and I may possibly be crazy, but that rarely implies naiveté or a lack of sophistication. It implies many negatives, but not these. I did not believe for one second these girls would ever pay me back, try to become my lover, or wanted anything to do with me. The Internet is mostly a huge global marketing tool, and when one realizes that, one realizes there is someone always trying to sell something. And these girls from Romania, the ones that were real, were peddling their good looks. I think a couple of them that I believed to be genuine actually liked me. It is, of course, hard to know whether they fancied my interest or living in America more. It would not have really mattered to me either way. If I had brought one of them here and she had left me, say after she got her green card, I would have just gone out and gotten another one. The Internet shop never closes. The first rule of life, I would say, is that there are never any guarantees. And when bringing a girl from overseas, if she divorces within three years, she now has to return to her country. So, most likely she will make a good wife until then. But I could never be certain of even that. The Internet is a lot like the stock market. In the final analysis, both are basically a crapshoot.

However, one Romanian girl truly loved me…I think. I chose contacting these girls from Romania because they are arguably the most beautiful women in the world. This is my opinion, judging from the posted photos on several websites. Or perhaps, the men behind the photos have a very judicious eye. And, of course, conditions being what they are in Romania, the girls all want to come to America. Everyone does. It is a huge calling card being an American and shopping for a wife. Living in Florida does not hurt either. But from all my dealings with overseas women, I have found Texas is our ambassador state, which I find rather scary. Even the typical village girl overseas has heard of Los Angeles, Miami, and New York.

I actively searched for a new wife. I guessed I would have a lot of fun in the meantime, and I did. But a lot of the Romanian girls were Internet entrepreneurs. Many of them had a cottage industry going of asking for money to finish their last semester at the university. I suppose they could have all been enrolled in their last semester at a university in their various hometowns, but here again, if one is not especially greedy or willing to help, it is difficult to get scammed.

I chatted with this particular Romanian girl every day for six months. Her name is Nena. She claimed she was an attorney, and I believed her. She was very intelligent, very beautiful, and a very strong-willed girl. And she claims she loves me still. She emails me occasionally and she wants to meet for coffee, if she is ever in Jacksonville. I fully expect one day she will make it to America, and we will have coffee, and she will profess openly the love she had for me. I will be saddened to know such a great girl got away, but then when I see my present wife, I know what was meant to be, what had to be, and I am forever grateful. I think and hope my new wife will be around for more than the obligatory three years.

Before I had visited my present wife the first time, I had sent Nena the money for a cell phone, which she purchased. She emailed me the number, and I called her. We only had a few conversations by cell phone, as it was exceedingly difficult to get through, the infrastructure in Romania such that it is. Nena was this slim, tall, twenty-seven-year-old girl with long, generously flowing brown hair and breathtaking eyes to match. She had a bit of a point to her nose and a sleek, feminine jaw. There was a particularly enticing photo of her on the website, as she sat on a glass coffee table that shined a light from underneath. The soft silhouette of light beamed up into her delicious spot, which was cleverly guarded by a modicum of clothing, and the reflection off the table made it seem so heavenly. I was transported.

Nena is about the only girl of all the other girls I met that could have turned my head. I had not yet met my present wife in person, and Nena took at least an hour out of each day of her busy days to chat with me. I was on disability at this point, so it was not as if I had much to do. Bicycling was a fond memory, not that it had ever amounted to anything, but a stack of bills, and I worked little, and did even less. Finding a wife had become my job. I needed to settle down. The threat of AIDS also worried me.

There is something a little different about me sexually from many men. I am perverse, and I am open about it. Perhaps only the form of perversion makes a clear distinction from most American men. I enjoy to be dominated. Speaking in terms of bondage and domination, I am known as a "switch." A switch is dominant with a submissive person, and submissive with a dominant person. He or she switches roles back and forth. We are sort of the bi-sexuals of the swinger, bondage, domination set. We receive a lot of dates. I say we, because there are more people out there like this than most people think, but still we, "switches," are fairly rare. A male switch is rarer. I only sleep with women—there was no switching sides. I include this in my list of qualifications because Nena was one hundred percent dominant, and I was enthralled. I was snared in a trap of my own long-distance lust.

Romanian women in general tend to be dominant. Very often the girls on the net from Romania said they would love to tie me up and spank me. They knew that sort of salacious chat from a young woman was exactly what I was after. Nena, however, was serious. She said she would spank me every day. There is nothing so humbling—not a cheating ex-wife, an intermittent struggle with insanity, or the realization that a life of no particular accomplishment has flown by—as for a man to receive a beating from a woman. Humility has great reward too.

I wondered constantly if I could actually live with my domme. It is a hard and fast life that tends to spit submissive individuals out. For Nena I might have tried to make a go of it. But I had already committed myself to meeting the woman that would become my second wife. She, too, is Eastern European, but from the Ukraine. They tend to be very strong women as well, but not nearly so domineering and with much more of a feminine side. And my present wife is a young girl, twenty years my junior, so she depends on me more than a mature woman would, which I do not mind usually. I need to be needed. I need that certain look in the eye that says "I believe in you."

I could see Nena coming over here and in a few short years having graduated from law school in the States, have a going practice, and really not needing me for much of anything but her pet. And that frightened me. I have never been a kept man.

The relationship between submissive and dominant is fascinating. It is a very exciting affair. And, if one or the other claims it is not about sex, that person is a liar. It is purely about sex and power, and the two go together so well. It is entirely too sexually exciting not to be about sex. It is the stuff fantasies are made of. I of course, would argue for moderation. All things in moderation. I do not suppose the individual that coined that phrase was including perversion, but I say, "If the collar fits, wear it."

I need to leap ahead again. This reference is also before my present wife, who by this time was my fiancée, had arrived in the States. The period is over two years after Nena and Raquel. Jolene came back into my life. I had kept the same chat username on one of the chat programs all this time, and Jolene had sent me several offline messages. I guessed she wanted money. She still owed me seven hundred dollars from when I had gotten her an apartment, not long after she had been thrown out of her mom's. But that had been some time ago, so I knew I was not likely to raise it as an issue.

It was the middle of a hurricane brushing past Jacksonville. The winds were easily fifty miles per hour, and that day it had already rained six inches. Six inches, especially when considering most of Florida—that diminishing part that has not been built upon—is a flat, low-lying, swampy area barely above sea level, is a considerable amount of water. Jacksonville is only about five feet above sea level, unlike New Orleans, parts of which are several feet below sea level. In either case, there are not many places for that water to go. It can make driving a rather precarious thing, especially when I am trapped in my car as it floats down the street of its own volition. It is like a flash flood without the flash. Two inches of rolling water is enough to lift and transport a car quite independently of the engine. Because of who I had become by then, I went out in the gloom of night to make my appointed rounds and to pick up Jolene, who yet again, had no place to live and was traveling back and forth between friends' homes.

I knew she was high, when she first called me on the phone and told me to come get her. My lovers all come back into my life. Years may go by, but they all come back. I think they realize some time after the fact how handsomely they were treated. I assumed Jolene had been drinking. I knew she now waited tables at a bar. I guessed she drank constantly. I did not really care, but the reality was worse than I expected. Not only did she still drink like a thirsty fish, she was addicted to crack. She had come back into my life and back to my house because she did not want to use anymore, and she knew I would not allow her to.

She was flying higher than any kite I ever saw, so we tapped a bottle of Champagne, and I put her to bed. I had to give her something to drink to take the edge off. I put her to bed alone. She passed out and was snoring strenuously within seconds. This event was merciful for me, her passing out, because I did not really want anything more to do with her. The electricity had gone off at my home, so as she lay in my bed sleeping, I plotted in the darkness how to get rid of her. I wanted to help her as before, but I also wanted her gone.

I said this short prayer: "Whatever your will is in this matter, please manifest it to me, and then please allow me to accomplish it." Believe it or not, I am Christian. I hate myself that I am what amounts to a stereotypical Southerner from the Bible belt, and I have succumb to the pull of Christianity and all the religious retarded, the hypocritical churches and ministers, and the idiots who use religion like opium. But faith in something, as misguided as it seems, has improved my life. I still hate myself.

After several hours, she came downstairs and was hungry. She actually fell down some of the stairs. All I had were hard boiled eggs and cheese, and though she was now essentially a hungry crack head, she did not find either to her liking.

She asked to use the phone, which still worked, since it was not electric. Jolene called about a dozen people until she found one that said she could come over. He had electricity. My side of town is an older more established side of town, and the electricity blinks out a lot and usually stays off longer than in other areas. So, once again, I went into that cruel dark night in the middle of a hurricane, but my sanctimonious prayer was answered. I took Jolene, after she finally remembered the directions, to a side of town not that far from my own, but where she could smoke up, sleep and have barbeque chicken. As she was getting out into knee-deep water, the rain and wind lashing all about, the unnatural howling of debris being blown around, and tin and galvanized roofs sounding like bombs were cascading on top of them, I told her never to call me again.

"Jolene, I can't live like this. Maybe it is okay for you. I don't know. You are younger. I am not a young man anymore. I have to do something with my life. Don't call me ever again, okay?"

I don't know if I helped her. Perhaps it came in some form of a wake up call. I do not know. She understood and said, "Okay." I blocked her from further chat with me by computer, as soon as the electricity came back on in my home.

*** End of First Chapter ***

Posted: October 29, 2007 10:16am EST

Twins

by

Cameron H. Chambers