Profile of a Young Rampage Shooter #2

“his conditioning is worsening and he is withdrawing further into himself. he is also struggling to articulate feelings which concerns us.” this is a part of a letter that a counselor at my school recently sent to my parents. fuck. “what is the problem son? school is a place where you have tons of support groups, it is a safe place, your teachers care for you and you are the most talented student in the tech club,” my mom said to me in response to the letter. what is she talking about? every teacher in that school is concerned about me. i feel like they are constantly on my back observing me. always giving me tasks to stay busy and telling me that they do this because I have special needs. special needs? are they fucking kidding? “you are given the best services to assure that you will be successful in high school,” one of the school psychologists likes to tell me. really? the best that the school has to offer is a bunch of unhappy, under paid and stressed out adults who can’t think for themselves and sound like robots when they talk about procedures and programs? and they want to turn me into a robot like them? are you kidding me. i do what they say because if I don’t I get into trouble. my parents take things away from me. the school gives me more work to do. i have to do what they say for now but they have no idea how much I hate them. i hate all of this but I cant let them see this or they will bury me in crap. but one day they will see it and then like the idiots they are they will wonder why.

the only place in the world that I have to myself is my room. it is the only place that I can feel like my shoulders are unburdened by the crap that adults put on them. i can do just about anything I want in my room. my mom and dad tell me that I spend toooo much time alone in my room. they tell me that I am going to get eye strain from staring into my computer too much. fuck them. they have no idea what I have to tolerate on a day to day basis. every day I go to school I am flooded with support groups, counselors and special needs programs. do they have any idea just how demeaning this is? do they have any idea the stress that it puts upon me to be put through this day in and day out? always something to do, always someone watching me the moment that I step outside my bedroom door making me feel like I am doing something wrong. and they wonder why I like to spend so much time alone in my room. my room is my sanctuary. in my room I am king and my computer is a universe where I call the shots. in my room I am not seen as a kid with special needs, I do not have to walk around with all these fucking labels adults stick on me. in my room I can be myself, do what I want and point my fuck you finger at the outside world.

recently my dad has been giving me shit about only wearing black. he likes to call me the boogie man or remind me that I will never get a job if I walk around like that. at school counselors ask me why I always wear all black. they have even asked my parents to stop buying me black clothes but if my parents do that I will refuse to wear anything at all. i like wearing black because it makes me feel like I can blend in. all other colors make me feel like I stand out and I don’t want to stand out any more than I already do. i already get enough shit and other colors would just bring me more problems. plus I love the color black. it expresses how I feel on the inside. when I wear black I feel like people fear me and stay away. like I am the grim reaper or something. i have heard some kids in my high school call me this. maybe I am. fuck them.

“friends, why don’t you have more friends?” my parents always wine. fuck friends. friends are a waste of time. i don’t like other people and other people don’t like me and I am fine with that. anyways the majority of kids my age are a bunch of sell outs. they do what the school and their parents say and never question anything. all the kids in my special needs group accept that they have special needs. they accept that they are the problem. they have been brainwashed by their teachers and parents. they don’t realize that the reason why they have special needs is because deep inside they are pissed off. they are pissed off by their parents who are pissed off at someone else. they are stressed out by a society that runs its citizens down to the bone. every where they go they are being forced to do things they do not want to do. they don’t have special needs because they are retarded, they have special needs because the entire society that has been erected around them is retarded and fucked up. but these kids are too brainwashed to see that the problem is not them. if any one should have special needs it is their parents, this is what got them into this situation in the first place: their parents special needs.

i know that I am young but I am not dumb enough to think that my condition is worsening. it is the condition of the american society that I live in that is worsening. it is my parents condition that is worsening. what the fuck do they expect from me, to be happy and outgoing when all around me the condition of adults is worsening? the economy is getting worse, the environment is getting worse, adults are over worked, there are more laws telling them what they have to do, it is more expensive than ever to survive and on and on. the condition that the world of adults have created is worsening and they don’t think that this is going to have an effect on us? what the fuck. open your eyes idiots. look at yourselves rather than blaming us. you wonder why the fuck I spend all my free time in my room, the world you adults have created is getting worse and worse by the day and I don’t want to have anything to do with it. i’m trying to escape people. but you blame everything on me. my behavior is my fault. i have a fucked up brain. go do dishes, clean up the yard. feed the dog, be a good little boy. you really want to make me believe that I am the one who has special needs and needs support groups? you really want me to believe that I am withdrawing further into myself? you really want me to believe that I have trouble articulating my feelings? read this motherfuckers, does it look like I have trouble articulating my feelings!!? fuck you adults and all you stupid fucking kids who have gone along with what adults tell you to do. just fuck you that is all I have to say to all of you. you have no idea what is really going on.

The Fuck Up Specialist

I was just sitting in my fly infested backyard trying to soak up some of the morning sun. I had a book in my hands but the words were not really penetrating my tired mind. My knee ached, my elbows pulsated and I found that the sun was irritating my eyes. I got to thinking: “How have I gotten to this place? Childless, 11:31 am, Wednesday morning, 39 years old, hung over, still half asleep, tired and bruised in my fly infested backyard?” There was a big world outside and many people were in an act of productive and ambitious motion, while I sat still not wanting to get up. The night before I worked for seven or eight hours at my job as a bartender, which has left me feeling like I have been run over by a heard of elephants. My body was sore and in my backyard I was barley able to handle the thoughts spiraling around in my forlorn head. But I was able to answer the question that I asked myself.

I am an artist. I have hundreds of un sold paintings collecting cobwebs in my garage and two novels that will most likely never be finished. Neither my paintings nor my writings are my great art works. They are more like self-absorbed average relics that I have created along the path that I often call “my life.” My greatest art is the art of fucking up. I can even be so brave to say that I have perfected the art of fucking up more so than most people. I have been fucking up longer than I have been writing or painting. I have spent more energy fucking up than I have doing anything else. It is fair to say that the reason why I was sitting still, unfocused, bruised, achy, tired and agitated in my backyard this morning is because I am a specialist in fucking up.

I still remember my first fuck up.  I was seven years old. Everyday I took the school bus to and from school and one day when the student filled school bus let me off in front of my house I had the overwhelming urge to pull my pants down and expose my naked butt to those students who were still on the bus. It was my own way of publicly saying “fuck you” to a school community that I could not stand. But I fucked up. There were more productive ways that I could of exercised my grievances but I was too young to know how. It was as if a part of me knew that all of these students were destined for a life of success and I was destined for the opposite. My public display of naked aggression got me kicked out of the private Jewish school that I was attending and thus began my work as a fuck up specialist.

I fucked up in school hundreds of times. I did not listen to teachers. I cheated and I only thought about girls and blowjobs. I was kicked out of several schools before the age of 15 and I even ran away from home for a week (to stay with a 19 year old sex crazed blonde in Malibu) at the age of 16 (this was a catastrophe that I will not go into here). Even though I was attending beautiful private schools that had excellent academic programs and various opportunities for students who cared- I could care less about any of this. I wanted to drink beer, get naked, listen to music and make life difficult for all authority figures. I wanted to fuck up.

When I think back now to all the opportunities that I had in high school and college I often get chills. I think of some of my fellow classmates who went on to have very successful careers. Enrique Iglesias, the prince of Saudi Arabia, David Sassoon, Robert Mondavi, Eric Weiss (the current president of Capri Sun) and many others all seemed to have found a way to have enjoyed the debaucheries of college but then get their shit together enough to go on to have successful careers. Even though I smoked weed with all of these people, several times, I seemed to be the only one who was destined to become a specialist of fucking up.

For more than a decade and a half after college I continued to fuck up. I fucked up good relationships with women, I fucked up in graduate school (I dropped out of a Masters graduate program a few months before finishing) and I fucked up my own health by the amount of booze, marijuana and negative energy that I ingested. At the age of twenty-nine I was committed to the art of fucking up. I was convinced that there was virtue to be found in fucking up- but I was not sure yet where to find it. I spent years and years in and out of odd jobs, I read thousands of books about existentialism and romanticism, I smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and tried to erase every memory I had of a childhood that was filled with so many opportunities for success. I was a fuck up specialist and I was convinced that my fame would be based upon my ability to fuck up. But fame never found me. Only fuck ups did.

My friends were as fucked up as I was. Starving artists from rich families. Depressives. Grown men who wore all black and stared at the ground. Yoga practitioners who were addicted to coffee and weed and were obsessed with pubic hair, orgies and stretching. Men with anger issues and alcohol issues. Men looking for companionship and love but unable to find it with anyone other than prostitutes. A community of drunken fuck ups flocked to me in the same way that a fly may be attracted to a teard. And I opened my arms to all of them. But one fuck up I will never forget. I will not use his name here but he made forty six million dollars by the age of 34. He was a Princeton graduate who made his money by writing the program for what became a website called Ticket Master. His father won an academy ward for doing the sound effects for the first Exorcist film and my friend seemed to have inherited his father’s genius. He also inherited his addictive behavior. At one point in my early thirties when I was homeless and needed a place to stay I moved in with my millionaire friend and thus began a yearlong graduate course in fucking up. To make a long story short my friend fucked up so bad that now he is no longer a millionaire. He has disappeared- no one knowing where he moved off to. His addiction to prostitutes, cocaine and real-estate turned most of his assets into dust and made him into a much better fuck up artist than I.

Now that I am almost 40 years of age and working as a bartender I think I have found the virtue in fucking up that I was looking for over a decade ago. It is through fucking up that we are forced to examine the way we live. Every time I fucked up, whether I liked it or not, I had to think about myself in relation to my fuck ups. “Why did I do it?” was often the question I asked myself and even though most of the time I ignored the answer and continued fucking up- I was collecting a kind of wisdom from my fuck ups that I have not really been aware of until now. I believe it was Socrates who said that an unexamined life is not worth living. Fucking up as much as I have has caused me to spend much of my current existence examining my life. I look deeply. I write. I paint. I keep a journal and I am a student of psychology. I do all of this not in attempt to find answers to how and why I became such a great fuck up specialist. Instead I do all of this because I enjoy exploring the questions. I realize that I am an imperfect human being and it through the examination of my imperfections that I learn the most about myself. It is through examining my fuck ups that I am able to get more clarity, better insights into questions like: “How have I gotten to this place? Childless, 11:31 am, Wednesday morning, 39 years old, hung over, still half asleep, tired and bruised in my fly infested backyard?” For now- this is the best I can do, and for once in my life this does not feel like fucking up.

Shakespeare and I.

At times I catch myself wondering- could I be cleverer than Shakespeare? After all, there may exist valid proof of this. Shakespeare stole the majority of his plots from Greek and Roman playwrights. Rarely did he come up with a plot of his own. He would read plays in Italian, Greek or Latin and then adapt them in his native language- English. The audience was to distracted to ever notice the fraud that was taking place within their manipulated minds. I, on the other hand, have never stolen a story. I create my own plots based upon the tribulations and struggles I experience on a day to day basis. Not once have I adopted any of my stories (well maybe once) from translations, films, plays or any other media source. The stories are natural emanations from mine own mind, created at the source. Sometime I wonder?

Shakespeare owned only 10% of the Globe Theater (the theater where most of his plays were performed). The Burbage brothers built the theater without any hard labor taking place on the part of Mr Shakespeare (more commonly known as The Bard Of Avon). I, on the other hand, created this blog with the hard labor of mine own mind and hands. For hours my back ached and eyes strained as I set out to create a blog that would reshape the way minds think about the world and souls in which they live. I am also 100% owner of this blog, sharing the concept or content with none other than me self! During a performance of Henry the 8th, the Globe Theater accidentally burnt down (fools). The theater was completely demolished. This blog, my blog- is still standing after many months in operation- continually open for the readers theatrical entertainment. Some times I wonder?

However, I can not be so pretentious as to deny the similarities between Shakespeare and I. Shakespeare studied Latin and Greek in grade school as did I. Shakespeare, as a youth, disdained all authority, as did I. After Shakespeare left school, history looses track of him for many years. Historians and Biographers refer to these years as Shakespeare’s Lost Years. I to vanished when I finished college. I disappeared into a debaucherous haze of marijuana smoke and booze. I cut off communication with all whom I knew and was not to be seen again until my early thirties when I reappeared- overweight and working in a shoe store. Some times I wonder?

Eventually Puritans shut down all the theatres in England and thus began the Reformation. Shakespeare was silenced for a time and forced to seek out other venues for his expressions. Strangely enough, I live in a time where Religious Fanatics threaten not only the human right of freedom of expression- but the world in which we all live. I created this blog as an attempt to seek out other venues for my expressions and to re-direct the tide away from the global catastrophe that the Religious Fanatics seem to want to create. In Shakespeare’s middle years he wrote with a fanatical obsession producing a play a month. In my middle years I to have contracted this obsession and write a blog entry almost every day! As similar in many ways that Shakespeare and I are, sometimes I wonder- could I be cleverer than Shakespeare?