Twisted Treatises

  Bensenville '94. Me at 17 under a tree in Bensenville, IL. I remember staring down an undeveloped access road that led to the tracks in one direction and in the other to the dingy apartment complex my mother, sister and I lived in, a place where gangsters, meth cooks, and one serial killer (I didn’t find out about him until after we moved, but we all smelled his handiwork) did dwell. Was it October? I want to say it was. Someone knows and in this case it’s John Bruni. He knows because he is half if not more of the reason that I was standing under that tree 29 years ago. I wrote it on his computer. It was a real piece of dogshit called “The Dark”. One positive about it— the tale contained an easy chair which would prove to become a legendary inside joke that has since taken form and made it into things that have seen print. The chair was immortalized; the story died on the launching pad. “Just the way she goes,” A great man would have said. I have to backtrack a bit. I think

For Fuck's Subholy Sake.  I’m laughing at football itself. The sport always has been rife with hype, but these days anyone can see that there is an abundant awareness of the horseshit of which the NFL reeks—the stench is on the wind—ironically, a lot of this is due to a woman who is named after something you can be on the wind and indeed, the stink is swift and foul. The Kansas City Chiefs have dome more over the years to make football look dumb as fuck than any other team that comes to mind—Tony Romo being the announcer for the team and having once made them look like plastic shit during his Jessica Simpson romp, and Travis Kelce repeating a like debacle for Gen Z with Taylor-the-fuck-Swift just makes it worse and all the more obvious. I wanted to lead with this because I know a lot, not all, but a lot, of my friends will see this post and be like, “Rob, really? You like football?” Kinda. My bad. I’m not all happy about it. I don’t paint my face and holler at the TV, I gave u

Fuckin' place is so ghetto I can't even find a picture of it. Here's what I used to see most mornings, though. I miss it.* TN it was, below Rock City, hotel sitting behind the soft shoulder of Lookout Mountain Road. I lived there for years…Mountain Valley Inn was the name of the hotel. Later it would become Chattanooga Inn and Suites. Is it still there? Maybe not. Whole place was a meth lab when I lived there, back in 2006. I was stylishly strung out back then, the dope-sick evident but I was able to stand up to it well enough to cook food for people at a square job so I could still pay weekly fee. My neighbors, BJ and Shandy, helped a lot with this. BJ always had weed, sometimes he had a hydrocodone, and on these mornings when my connect was dry and I was (at this time) one of those junkies that don’t like fucking with every pusher in the city—my only recourse was to check and see if he had, at least, a bit of keef to get me on my feet and in the fucking shower so I didn