Enjoying a 40 in my early 30s : The COLONoscopy :

Things I will quit today: procrastinating, dangerous behavior. Things I will quit eventually: opiates, amphetamines, tobacco (mouth), procrastinating. Things I want to quit: none

Things I want to do tonite: push a weak premise until it shits out nothing but punctuation.

Things Ive done tonite :

My friends, at 31, if I'm enjoying the Private Stock, I wonder what dusty bottle sits on the bottom shelf. If this is the premium, whats in the well? Well, Ive made a list.

I am thankful for: Whitney, Jasper, my dad, my evil female twin who is actually 34 and female, my job.... my experiences : I was one of those shitheads who shouldn't have survived his teens, never mind his twenties, and in my nascent 30s I feel like a soldier without a war. For the past 16 years I have done a fuck of a job trying to kill myself. A ouja board told me Id be dead by 17, so I told my parents Id be rich by 21. Y2K didn't drop a 747 on my head like the cabbie told me it would, I was hitchhiking after my car ran out gas when I had a headfull of blue gelltab acid.

Fuck. There I was 18 and still alive. So like most kids who find themselves alive at 18, I went to college. I didn't die stuffing 300mg of prescription speed up my nose for three months, eating two blister packs of cold medicine, or doing full funnels of blackberry brandy. But I did find myself on thin ice during the first freeze of a New Hampshire October. Four years later, you'll be happy to know that I graduated college, and fuck that ouja board. I was STILL alive.

2004. 23 years of age and ready to take the world by its, I don't know, hand? Not its balls at all. Maybe by its forefinger. Like a toddler shakes hands, I tumbled into shift work, temp jobs, and fifths of brown liquor. Busted 8 balls had me ghostbusting the carpet. One contact lens, stumbling walks in Sunderland.

The highlights : falling in love with a Jersey girl, and pissing on a cop outside the Elm Street Tavern.

2006. Started to account some of the damage in this domain. Look it up. I was still alive and living in the bEAST. Sean, Jay and a rottweiler named Jade saved me when a liter of Jim Beam pushed a TV and a cable box on top of me when I did nothing but try and take my pants off. I sold shit door to door, and bilked the residents of Hartford's fine Albany Avenue out of their welfare checks. Drank my breakfast daily with a salt and pepper superhero salesman from Manchester, UK, and burned out on bourbon whisky and broken promises, briskly did a runner down south to America's phallus. When I got there and found a fedora, threadbare shirt, and the game of tennis, I was remarkably still alive.

2010. 29 years of age and back on Cape. In April I found Whitney. Two years into new job on the water with the love of my life bubbling on my arm, I found the streets paved with opiates. Two bulging discs in my back after losing a game of chicken with a blue hued Saturn sedan, a sympathetic doctor who moved here from Florida turned relief into repast, and help to hindrance.

The winter: laid off, strung out, in love, still alive.

2012. Early fall I turned 31, and two weeks later a cunt named cancer killed my mom. I peaked into the tunnel of life's regression and saw the span of two weeks turn my mother from just that into a raving psycho and subsequently to a vegetable on a life vine of morphine. Bedpans, bedsores and RNs with degrees in mollification. I arrived at her death bed achingly clean to find her room the same way. I took a sabbatical from any attempted sobriety until now.


The ouja lied, planes didn't crush me cause computers can tell the difference between 1999 and 1000, even the Mayans fucked me. My moms last words were, "You don't know what your up against." I figured once again on the eve of 122112, that this was it. Nope. I'll make a go of it with the woman and dog I love. I'll plan for sobriety whilst preparing for life......

While being proud that I made it out of this 40 alive.