Blog Post 007

“If I was a superhero, I’d want to be Superheroman. I’d have like, all the powers. But I’d be all the bad guys too.” I said that in 2015, while I was on “acid” for the first time—with some friends, after our high school graduation. It turned out to be a research chemical because our mouths went numb and tasted like metal, for hours while we went insane together. It was still a very profound first “trip.” The experience that day, did kind of make me feel like a super hero, man. When I looked at the things that I accomplished in high school, while falling short of nearly every goal that I had set for myself as a freshman; I found a way to look at the bright side. I overcame a lot of adversity in pursuit of goals that, realistically, very few people probably actually believed that I could accomplish. I appreciated the consolation prizes, and I let that value turn into complacency. Weird though, I wonder if I manifested some of those “bad guy” powers that day, or if I would have acquired them anyway.. but I know that likely; I had already been using them for some time, beforehand. I’ve heard that some theoretical physicists refer to the Universe as a Dark Jester, that operates on manifestation in reverse.. What does that mean? Question for another day. Prior to this experience, I lied for years. I told my friends that I took acid in seventh grade and convinced myself that my own right hand was a government plant; devised to spy on my every move. That’s funny, if you know what psychedelics can do.. how did I know that? In reality, I was just making a myth for an eraser burn that I gave myself, to see if it really worked.. I still have the scar to prove that it does, oh.. sixteen years later, now? I smoked pot for the first time, summer going into eighth grade. I didn’t get high though, might’ve been oregano or cat nip. But I had enough fun to keep doing it relatively often, for.. a long time after. I never smoked pot during wrestling seasons (in high school), though. I used to take half of my lunch money during wrestling season, and buy a g or two—once every other week or so, and I would put it in a mason jar for safekeeping until the season ended. I was very disciplined back then, in that way, at least. I told my parents this story recently, and they didn’t believe me.. hey, not my fault you guys didn’t check the big ass hole that I punched into my wall in middle school (when I couldn’t beat one of the madden franchise challenges), for drugs!! Hahaha I used to put money in our mailbox and have a friend drop it off.. you guys really didn’t notice me walk to the mailbox twice at a time, at random times during the day??? Really? That said.. my dad did catch me twice in high school; doing things that I shouldn’t have been doing. He caught me the first time, sneaking out to a party at a friend’s house, as a freshman.. I walked like seven miles to get there though—I got my steps in, Dad! He caught me because a couple of days later, I was bragging on Facebook, about what a bang up job I did at playing off how drunk I was—which was border line blackout; because an upperclassman didn’t think I had the stones to drink a whole bottle of this random blue shit.. I did though. But I did not log out of Facebook after calling my father a gullible moron, or some shit. I forget how he caught me the second time.. but it was my senior year, and he threatened to kick me out if I failed a drug test, and I would’ve.. but I hammered a bunch of water, and ran like fifteen miles while he was at work. He came home and saw a graveyard of water bottles and empty gallon jugs in my room and said “well, guess we don’t need that test, do we?” Then he walked out and never spoke of it again.. I didn’t understand that, and I’m still not sure I do.. Funny though, I would bring him back.. party favors, the following year whenever I came home from college.. hypocrite! lol Anyway, I was a pretty good wrestler. I won’t claim “Elite” status, because I didn’t earn that. But I was pretty good. - 100-25(ish) in JH, if you count offseason stuff. 59-11, if you don’t. 2011 OAC JH State Runner-Up (3-2 at state, in seventh grade) 7-0 (with seven pins) at the USA Wrestling Dual Meet National Championships in Illinois, and (both) Team Ohio(s) won both the Gold and Silver divisions there, hehe (Yes, the loss in the state finals—preventing me from hitting sixty, irked me) (Also, most of the matches in the offseason count were on days that I wrestled in both the JH and high school divisions, at summer opens.. but I did take down a high school state runner-up at an open in seventh grade, that was cool. He tech’d me after, though.) - 175-31 in high school, no offseason stuff, I was always injured. 2014 NHSCA All-American, Fourth Place, Blood Round L as a senior (with a broken tibia tho). three-time State Qualifier, two-time State Placer, fifth and third.. (I also took third at state in shot put as a junior, missed most of my senior year because.. well, I was injured a lot, you’ll see. All-Ohio Defensive Tackle, too.. Defensive Lineman of the Year in my league hehe) - I have no idea what I went in college, maybe 55-45? (maybe worse, that might be optimistic about college) 2019 GMAC Conference champion though, but that was probably the only real fun that I had on a college wrestling mat, aside from the infrequent but present chance that I would upset national qualifiers and All-Americans when it was a random open tournament with very little on the line though. (Consistently overrated in college, ranked top ten multiple times during the regular season, and led Division Two in pins (through regular season) my senior year too, I probably have two hundred career pins—which, I think; is pretty cool..) - Humiliating, considering my own philosophy… But, I did all of that with a very unstable Homelife. An alcoholic, narcissist for a father.. A sociopathic, manipulative mother, (when she gets backed into a corner). There was inherent abuse, but none that they willingly enacted out of malice, just a lack of mindfulness to the circumstances. That isn’t an uncommon origin story; but I also did all of that while frequently injured. My sophomore year, I upset a senior in the district semifinals, who took third at state the year before, to qualify for my first state tournament. I was all of two hundred and twenty five pounds, weighing in; to this kid’s full, weight class filling—two hundred and eighty seven pounds.. six foot five too, probably. He walked around the gym like the cock of the walk, all tournament. That shit pissed me off. But not as much as coach coming up to me, minutes before I wrestled the behemoth, and, while pointing to a nearby mat; saying to me— “When you lose this match, you’ll have to beat the loser of this one to wrestle back and qualify.” Say less. Wonder if my dad gave him the advice to say that.. I started down 8-0, but I noticed he was already tired and I wasn’t even breathing heavy yet, so—I hit a funk roll to get an escape, and that swung the momentum. I was up by seven or eight points when I pinned him. I broke my scaphoid in the championship match next though. On the underside where there is no blood flow to heal it. I also lost like 5-3 in the Chip that year, that would be the last District Championship match I lost though. I would have to get surgery later, but I didn’t know it was broken yet. I practiced that week and wrestled at the state tournament with a taped-up, broken wrist. I lost my first match at state; against the kid that beat me in the JH State Championship two years earlier. He pinned me, up thirteen to like five or six when he beat me back then. But I kinda would dominate him—in losing this time. He went up 5-0 early, and never ‘earned’ another point again. He won 7-5 after I took him down once, and got him hit for stalling four times.. five is an automatic DQ, but that ref refused to let me win by DQ, despite the fact that the turd spent the whole last four minutes of the match; running for his life, from me. I would pin the next kid in under a minute, then lose in the blood round 3-2, on a terrible last second shot that my coach demanded I never take, in order to avoid overtime. I wanted to win (or lose..) in regulation. I didn’t place that year, but I took fifth at state the next year with a torn labrum, and third there, as a senior—after wrestling for almost three months, unknowingly, on a broken tibia. Those two kids that beat me sophomore year, they were also sophomores; but they never did better than me after that tournament. One never went back to state, and the other never got higher than seventh.. That damn behemoth did take third that year though.. Eyeroll. But—see, by the time I got to college; my wrestling career was already over, but I continued to blow on the embers for far longer than I should have. Wrestling is not the sport to give half ass effort to though; if you aren’t all in, get the fuck off the train man. There are more pleasant ways to travel. But I loved how much I hated it. I’ve never been comfortable doing things the way that everybody else does them, and for a very long time, I struggled to reconcile with what it meant to be normal, or average. I don’t believe in any way, shape or form that I was an Elite wrestler. But the wrestling IQ and situational awareness that I displayed, at times; was close. No, perhaps I should undermine this paragraph: because my wrestling creativity was Elite in high school. I never had the nicest high crotch, outside single, or even my bread and butter; lat drops and double over-hook throws. I wasn’t even very good in referee’s position either, unless it was “getting the fuck off bottom” before I drowned down there. But because I grasped a loose, but rigid enough, understanding for each situation, move and their setups—to make these moves my own; it allowed me to pretend to be an elite wrestler in matches that demanded it, sometimes. But not all of the time, because I doubted how elite my creativity was. The times that I allowed my elite creativity (or instincts?) to be stifled by doubts, are the only times that I fell short of what I (personally) viewed to be Greatness. I was never the best wrestler in any given gym, but when I wrestled; everybody watched. That’s my greatest claim to pride. Whether I won the match or I lost the match; people wanted to watch the match—to see what I would do. In a way, I subconsciously adopted a philosophy (consciously in plenty of ways, too) that I would let that dictate my style when I stepped onto the mat. This was a good and bad thing for me, even as I reflect on it now. See, I am a performer, but despite the fact that I lie to myself and say that I don’t want to be, not only do I want to be, but I am. I care less about my own personal success than I do about people seeing what I am doing. How I am wrestling. How I am living. Not many people want to throw a two hundred and eighty five pound man across their own body, hoping to land on top. But I made a habit of it. Not many people want to sit with the worst thoughts possible, the ones that force themselves into our heads, unwillingly.. but I can’t stand when I am too complacent in my own circumstances, to pursue that noble cause; to resolve the cacophony that continues to manifest itself in ways that are not conscious to me, in my life. I like to talk about the things that I refer to as the “atemporal lessons that we continue to learn throughout a continued linear perspective of a cyclical experience.” The AI Chatbots call that thinking a bit Aristotelian when I include that idea in my prompts, but I don’t know what that means.. This entire essay is just a random conglomeration made from a lifetime of atemporal lessons learned on a wrestling mat(, if we want to call Life a wrestling mat), though. Maybe that’s what it means to “sit with the monke” Maybe not though.. who can say? I wanted to go to college. But my family couldn’t afford to send me, if I didn’t earn it. In a way, my first scholarship offer was the first nail in a coffin that I’d lock myself inside of, for over a decade. I went to school for wrestling and track. I received twenty five thousand bucks (a year) to wrestle, and another five thou to throw shot put. Or; an annual thirty k, to act like I can still do both of those things, while pretending I still cared enough about them—to invite continued success. But they were merely a means to an end that I reached once I signed the papers to commit, however. I just wanted to be a teacher now, and leave behind the sports that I destroyed my body to succeed in, as soon as I possibly could. But my ego is so fucking volatile. ____________________ When I got to college, I had an expectation of the image that I’d hoped it would meet. It did, actually—in every conceivable way possible. I wanted college to create a narrative that would dictate what my adult life would look like, and man; am I the controller of my own destiny, in the truest sense of the phrase. I planned to go to college and continue to thread the blanket that I would one day use to tuck myself in; on nights when life flipped into autopilot mode. That’s cold. I wanted to be a teacher, but I never felt like I lived enough to get to preach. So I focused on the narrative instead. I was there to learn how to teach, and have fun doing it. I wonder what I would have made the villain of this story into, had wrestling not been there to torture my body as much as I did my mind.. I abandoned my in-season wrestling rule this year. I smoked, among other offenses—against a younger version of myself. I also drank pop, minor thing, but I didn’t do that in high school.. seriously, I went pop free from day one of freshman year, to graduation. I drank a two liter of Mountain Dew on graduation day.. and threw up. Wait a second, I’m only just now realizing that I fucken drank alcohol in high school, but I didn’t drink pop. What the fuck man.. hahaha Anyway, I partied. A lot. Too much. But I still like to party. Too much? Nah, not enough sometimes—actually. How sad, to be so boring in my old age. Thirty, here in three months. I did my first dab on the first night of college move in.. so did my roommate, but he threw up on a rug at the wrestling house. I had to carry him home, (even threw him over a fence.. glad he was okay..), and everybody called him Dabby after that, until he transferred at the end of the year.. which meant I only called him by his real name when we were in our dorm room.. pathetic, right? I was probably just as high as he was, but I would—at least, throw up outside with more alcohol in my body to excuse it. That said.. he did steal a double sided Batman pocket knife from me; I got it back from the top drawer of his dresser (after teammates suggested I snoop around to see if various things from their dorms that disappeared after he left, were there), the first time.. but I never saw it again after the second. Later that first week, I would find my ‘brothers in speed and psychedelics,’ and that would pretty much signal curtains on my freshman year. After about six months of heavy, near daily; psychedelic use, (and of course, hundreds of dollars in recycled beer cans..) I had a very unfortunate ego death, at a very unfortunate time in the wrestling season. I was 15-6 and had most recently lost two matches to the same returning all American, en route to taking fourth at a pretty important wrestling tournament. Once by first period pin, then a second time by a point, after winning seven matches in a row to get my rematch with him, for a bronze medal. He lost a close one to the projected national champion that year (that “projected champ” didn’t even all-American, by the way), in the semi finals—to see me in the consolation bracket. So I found myself ranked eighth in the country. I would not win another match the rest of the season. 15-16. Never had a losing season before.. that’s weird. (to be fair though, six of the next seven of my losses would be at the NWCA National Duals, against kids all ranked higher than eighth.. I digress though, point stands.) Could have been dangerous, had I kept performing well.. Might have accidentally achieved all of my wildest dreams, and more!… At a certain point during the journeys into the far reaches of my mind (that only exist when I live in La-La Land), whether chemically induced, or otherwise naturally occurring; I began to wrestle with my inherited traits. It’s funny how closely I resonate now to ideas and concepts that floated around, even back then. Merely flirting with them, of course; I’d never dare kiss ‘em! There takes a certain level of narcissism that has to exist in order to be a successful person, when your vision of success exists outside of the confines of normality. At least, that’s how I felt about it back then. The more often I explored my mind over these months; the more I began to despise the level of narcissism that it took for me to be a successful wrestler, the way I had come to believe that I had to exist, in order to be what I viewed as a successful wrestler, at least. I think I chose a bad time to start using psychedelic experiences the way I did, when I did. I’m not sure there is a good time to start.. but I bet I’d know one when I see it. I ended up getting hurt before the season ended, strained my healthy labrum, or partially tore it, I can’t remember; but between my brain games and the injury, it may as well have been the broken back that Bane gave Batman before he sent him into the pit. Might’ve spent a bit more time down there than ole Brucey-boy, though. I ended up losing to my backup in the wrestle off to keep my spot when I came back from the injury. Actually, that’s an understatement. This dude beat my ass, twice. It was humiliating, kudos to how determined he was to beat me.. But he BBQ’d at regionals the next weekend, and I don’t know if I would have done the same, or not.. I probably would have.. but I’m a gamer, and who knows, maybe if I won that wrestle off, I could have saved myself.. but what does that even mean? I didn’t know. Honestly though, I was about done with wrestling after dealing with yet another injury; for the fourth year straight. After so many injuries kept piling up in my athletic career.. it started to feel like a sign. Especially in the pattern recognition drug clubs, I was frequenting. A sign I would ignore though! I’m a glutton for punishment. My freshman track season was just as much of a bummer as my wrestling one. My throws coach got fired over an incident that sounded very backward to me at the time; involving race (not talking foot) and a spoiled rich kid in the distance crew. Whatever, I didn’t ever have a throws coach again while I was at college, thanks blondie—good looks, bro. Guess that isn’t true. My senior year they brought in a grad assistant that I beat at almost every meet I competed against him in, before he was a grad assistant. But, he doesn’t count.. he wouldn’t really coach me. I think his ego was probably similar to mine. I bet we would’ve been friends. (Doubt he ever reads this, sorry if you do though.. HMU bro!) I didn’t really party or socialize much in the first spring semester of my college career. I made appearances to the stuff that I was expected to be at.. But I was a husk. I thought I broke my brain and I had to emotionally withdrawal, in case I had to make myself disappear. I moved out of my original dorm room, because I was just not very compatible with my roommate. Two of my friends, from across the hall in the dorm (they were my track teammates), transferred after the first semester, so I moved into their room. It was honestly, not a great move. The heater was broken and I complained for months to housing, but nobody ever came to fix it. It was stuck on max heat.. I lost so much weight that semester, I was like two hundred and fifteen pounds when I moved out.. I hadn’t been under two sixty five in like three years!! It was a disgusting time that makes my skin crawl whenever I go back.. I still, unfortunately, have to spend time there though, because there are lessons I’ve chosen not to learn from yet. We’re getting there, though. My PR in shot put that year was not very good, but I was the best on my team.. Yikes. I have some fun stories from that year, despite the ugliness I’m painting it with now, but those are not the point and they do not contribute to the message I’m writing about.. But they were enough to keep me coming back for more. ___________________ My sophomore year was interesting.. I decided not to withdrawal, transfer, or disappear. But I came in (Capital P.H.); FAT. I had to cut for heavyweight for the first (and only) time in my career. I was only five pounds heavy, but damn.. I was fat. Thankfully, I’d get back down to around two forty five-ish after a few months back in-season. I worked construction and made a ridiculous amount of money turning a flag. Like, three or four thousand a week.. five sometimes. Yeah, seriously; go get a flagging job if you’re a broke college kid. I got paid like sixty five bucks an hour on one site.. It was hazard pay because the job was on a shady side of town, and the flagger I was replacing got shot in the leg.. Ha! .. .. .. yeah, nobody told me that until the last day of the job. I even got into a few arguments with disgruntled drivers that didn’t want to be stopped up… I was able to regain control over my mind during the summer, a bit. But I drank a lot, because I had the money to do what I wanted. And, well—I wanted to drink a lot. Only socially though! Anyway, that’s where the weight came from.. I really thought I was going to kill myself, several times over—the spring semester, my freshman year of college; if you want me to be completely honest. I had one night, the night before my interview to get into the Ed Program at my college.. where I decided to do a little bit of drinking. I ended up losing my phone at a “kickback” that night, because our grad assistant coach took it in an act of drunken stupidity. I had to walk home drunk, several miles, no phone.. and no alarm to wake me up for the interview.. I got home at four a.m. and I had no clean laundry. My interview was at seven or eight a.m. I had an existential crisis and a sharp knife, but thankfully I only let one of them hurt me that night. I got into the ed program though. Flying colors, dare I say. Perhaps Chaos is my Ally. I roomed with my best friend on campus this year, and that did wonders for setting a tone. I walked into my sophomore year; Big Ba..—elly Swangin’! My classes wouldn’t really ever be challenging for me again. I struggled my freshman year because .. well, other than World Religions class, I was so fucking bored. The only fun in the classroom I had freshman year, outside of that religions class, was an essay I wrote on the history of American Punk Rock for an English one oh one, or two oh whatever. But I was kinda feeling myself on the mat this year, phat or not. I got really into Adderall as a sophomore. I still dabbled in psychedelics, but I had turned those into a special occasion ritual. I was a really good writer (no, I wasn’t) on Adderall. I wrote hundreds of (terrible!) poems and so many (horrible!) short stories.. but I got pretty good at writing essays (no lies detected). I got an A on every essay I ever wrote in college, except for one in Environmental Science, and a STUPID series of essays in one class specifically, as a senior. The Professor had to have been trolling me. He gave me a C on one, and told me to take my essays to the writing center. I WORKED IN THE WRITING CENTER!!! Anyway.. Sophomore year.. Sophomore year.. right! Yes, I had a pretty successful first half of my wrestling season! I wasn’t ever a projected all American again, like I was as a freshman, but I was ranked as high as twelfth as a sophomore (tenth, as a senior). I wrestled some good matches, lost to some good opponents, but my grandpa would pass away early in the start of the new year, the unofficial start of the second half of the season too.. and well… I don’t know what could’ve happened, but I do know what did happen. I strained the labrum I tore in high school (I never got surgery) around the same time my parents told me to come home and say my goodbyes to the man who I considered my athletic career’s biggest supporter. (Sorry dad, your psychological warfare games were never as much support as Grandpa had to offer) It’s funny what(, even the most conscious (and subconscious)—)support means, to our subconscious. It’s thought provoking, really. My mom’s dad died when I was three years old. Cancer, of course. She always tells me and my brother; how hard our Grandpa fought in his final days, to try and make it to see my baby brother’s birth. He was a few months shy of it (interesting to note that yesterday was the twenty six year anniversary of his passing). She told me growing up, that if he was around to support me, maybe I would’ve been a professional baseball player someday, instead of so readily putting my body on the line for glory on a wrestling mat. How pretty to imagine so. My grandpa (dad’s dad) was given six months to live with cancer, when I was in sixth grade. I had already lost several people in my life to cancer, so I remember shutting down about it every time it came up; but I remember one time, I wanted to dedicate a Biddie league football game to him.. Good thing I didn’t. The ref’s called back six (not an exaggeration) touchdowns. The ref hit us with penalties on three touchdowns in a row, called them back. We went from one five yard line to the other (backward) in three plays. We still only lost by one score.. But, my grandpa made it all the way to my sophomore year of college. Can you believe what a fighter he was? I couldn’t. But I also couldn’t believe it, when it finally got him. It jostled all of us; my brother, cousin, and I—who were all in the middle of the wrestling season, but my parents and extended family on my dad’s side too. I went home for two weeks, and after the painful reason I was home, I used it to fuel the rest of the success I would have this season. I trained daily with my brother (one hundred and ninety five pound state qualifier the year before, as a freshman, btw!), lifting, wrestling, running. Getting after it. I had a disappointing end to the final season my grandpa was alive to see, but I was determined to make him proud, posthumously, with this season. Except, when I got back.. my starting spot was no longer mine, and not even a wrestle off to defend it this time. That said, the last practice before Regionals; I absolutely made sure to make a point to tech my partner in his final seven minute go before the tournament, and stare at coach the whole time, that final practice of my sophomore year. After all of this time and reflection, I do not blame my coach anymore. He likely made the right call at the time, from his perspective.. but from my perspective—even today; I still believe the wrong one. Love you Boom. But I did use these circumstances to blame him back then. I was only hurting myself though. My coach informed me that my backup, who had never beaten me in the wrestling room—or in competition for that matter.. was going to regionals in my place. I didn’t take it well. He lost to two kids that I pinned earlier in the season. How anticlimactic.. again. I’m not sure what my record was that year, I’ve repressed that season from my mind, mostly, but I imagine somewhere between 20-15 and 15-20 It only fueled my writing that spring semester though. I started writing every day. Personal stories, journals, all kinds of stuff. Not school work though. Girls.. I wrote about love and stuff! haha I hadn’t really pursued girls after high school. I had a bad experience with a high school lover as a junior, and made some bad choices with a couple of girls I really cared about as a senior, so I put it on hiatus while I explored a new life away from home. Not sophomore year, though. I started seeing a girl that lived in the same dorm as me, around the same time my roommate (and best friend), started seeing that girl’s roommate. A match made in heaven, for a bunch of horny college kids. For a few months, my roommate and I would take turns alternating between one of us spending the night in either our room or their room, with the other obviously.. in the other. (haha that’s a double entendre) It’s funny, (not really) I was horrible to my partner in the end.. I did care a lot about her, but I wasn’t really mature enough to reconcile the big feelings that I felt for her.. but my roommate hooking up her roommate—did give me one of my best friends, even today! She reentered my life later, at a time when I needed a platonic relationship with a girl my age.. but I’m getting ahead of myself again. The girl I was seeing though, was on the track team.. and that made things, only a little awkward. She was super graceful in ways I did not offer her the same, because I started talking to a (super hot) (eighteen year old) high school senior (please.. I was twenty..) who I was trying to convince to come to college with me, and dropped the first girl I was seeing, for no good reason at all, after how good she was to me. “We were never dating!” I cried to myself! Shut up, dickhead.. Pitiful little guy, I can be! She did get her get-back a year later though, she let me hit one more time.. but I think it was so she could see that without romantic feelings present, I probably wasn’t very good at it.. HA! I tried to get a repeat in, some time after that, and she left me on read. Point taken, have a better life than I could’ve offered you, please! I had a pretty abysmal track season again.. I didn’t have a track coach, after all. I’m not going to get into that though, it’s boring. But I will say, my most impressive feat of determination as a college kid did happen my sophomore year. I was acing all of my classes in a way that was kinda like, whatever for me.. not really; A’s B’s, maybe even a C, but I’m good at convincing myself of things being a certain way. I skipped two weeks of class and came back with two weeks left. (Better than my roommate can say, he skipped a month straight.. he passed though! Barely.. but he passed!) We played so much GTA. We were lowkey ballers that month though, we trolled servers so hard together. However, the impressive feat of determination comes in the form of twelve essays that I wrote in ten days. There were four, twelve page—semester long research papers, two eight page essays, then a medley of two to four pagers that we were given the semester to do. I believe this was the semester of either romanticism or transcendentalism—and a bunch of Ed Courses, so a lot of pedagogy stuff. I did not start a single essay until this ten day period began. I listened to Deloused in the Comatorium by The Mars Volta on repeat, no less than thirty times.. Seriously, I went back to my apple replay from 2017 and the song with the fewest listens from that album was still listened to; thirty two times! I did not listen to this album for three years after this experience, and my subsequent forty eight hour hibernation. 
 I do not want to say the exact amount of Adderall, Concerta, and Vyvanse cocktails I indulged myself in, during this period; but it was thousands and thousands of milligrams, and my kidneys and liver—or whatever, are absolutely permanently damaged as a result. I am not also exaggerating when I say that I only slept three times in that window, all for less than four hours. Funny, I didn’t even take aspirin for headaches in high school because of my beef with the pharmaceutical industry, yet here I was. I took my perc thirties for only one day after a surgery on my broken scaphoid in high school (flirted with my hot English teacher at school the day after my surgery too.. got sent home..), I didn’t even take them after my wisdom teeth surgery. Even had a cavity drilled and filled, with no numbing shit, one time when I was like thirteen. But here I was.. anyway, I got A’s on every single essay. I wrote two twelve page essays on The Empyrean by John Frusciante that year, they both ended up being closer to fourteen or fifteen pages though. I still regret not exporting them from my college email.. stupid, stupid, stupid!!! The lowest score on any of my essays was a ninety three percent. Hello summer. ____________________ I decided that I wanted life to move faster, that summer going into junior year. I started gaining Speed, momentum! That’s a dangerous way to live. Toward the end of my Sophomore year, I had a very profound psychedelic experience. I ate ten grams of golden caps and I started out the night at a party, but the lights got too intense after a certain point, and I had to hit an Irish goodbye. I remember things getting very weird. I walked back to my dorm and sat on my bed; trying to regain control over my mind, but I kept ending up in these weird cycles of thinking about something, or somebody from my life, and visions would play out of their futures, in a hypothetical future of my own. Holy run on. At a certain point, these visions would go from sweet and innocent visions, to horrible, demonic nightmares. I found myself sitting on my bed, feeling as though I were sitting on a rowboat in the sea of my thoughts, peeling back layer after layer—of the rotting onion that I viewed my subconscious as. It was actually a very good trip. I made my way back to the party after, catching up with my roommate and everybody else, who all had their own classic “where tf did you go dude?”s. I ended up staying for a bit, but when my roommate and I left, one of the other upperclassmen who was also one of my backups, followed us back. I remember just trying to mind my own business, knowing this dude didn’t like me, and loved fucken ‘douching’ my roommate. At a certain point, I was in the dorm and my roommate and the other dude were outside the door, and my roommate was trying to get in without letting him in, but he got in. He tackled me. I was still kinda tripping, but it was the mushroom afterglow where the trip ends suddenly, but you have the clarity of the trip on your side? So, I was just sitting there, staring at my ceiling for a second. There were more than just the two of them there now, watching the scene.. but I didn’t move from the recliner I was now laying on the ground in. I just politely asked him to leave. As soon as he was gone, my roommate and I just looked at each other, me still on my back in the flipped chair, and we started laughing maniacally together for a long time. Then we cracked open some more beers. I felt that I had overcome my psychedelic setback from freshman year. I felt resolved in my head (in a way) for the first time, since high school. I started using every single drug I was offered, every single time I was offered any. I; not only, didn’t -want- to say no—I couldn’t! Who was I to refuse a good time? Adderall wasn’t enough anymore, though. I had to get my nostrils onto something more. nuff said? I didn’t wrestle that year. I talked to my coach, in an emotionally mature way too, but I was checked out. I promised myself that I would never wrestle for him again after his decision about my season the year before, I just had to find a way to not lose my scholarship money. I talked to him about concern for my shoulders, that wasn’t a lie. My left shoulder, the one I tore the labrum of in high school, and didn’t have surgery on, was popping in and out of the socket very frequently. If I didn’t manually flex my shoulder in place, I could literally feel the bone slip out of the socket after a bit of time, and I would have to manually pop it back in. My right shoulder, while not as bad, still gave me a lot of problems too. We made a plan for me to use a redshirt to rehab my shoulders, but to still be present and come to practice a couple of times a week. I never sent him another message, for as long as he was my wrestling coach after that meeting. That, that was not emotionally mature. But I had a great year. I set the Indoor and Outdoor school records in shot put. They were not impressive records, in the national view, but it was enough to keep me from spiraling into obsessive short-coming “hunts” again. I celebrated accordingly. Honestly, I don’t remember much of my junior year.. I lived it in a drug and alcohol fueled haze. I bet a lot of good things happened that year, but I don’t really remember much besides the records. Actually, I started taking music a little bit more seriously. Jamming daily, and with other people. I remember I bought a new guitar, a Fender; MIC Thinline Telecaster.. and a new bass; one of my only two prized possessions today—A 2005 reissue, Fender MIJ Jaguar Bass. My serial number tells me it was likely one of the first reissues made, as its serial number actually reads early 2004. I like this bass because it reminds me of the Jag that Frusciante played around the time my bass was reissued. So funny. I think I started messing around with a girl with long black hair around this time too. She liked when I sucked her toes, and I did too.. hahaha! I liked her, too.. but she had opinions that didn’t resonate with me on how finances should be decided in a relationship.. so I couldn’t really get myself to invest in her. However, instead of being the good guy and ending things when I realized the feelings, I would string her along; because I am quite a little coward that masks my fear with “people pleasing” excuses, that only hurt more in the long run when they finally come out.. or don’t. A habit I really wished I could have kicked sooner. Nah, Junior year was mostly just the year I grew my hair out real long for the first time, since I didn’t wrestle that year; it was the first time I could grow my hair out since I was in middle school. Sometimes I wonder if my parents made me wrestle so I could argue with the referees instead of my mom about whether or not I am getting a haircut.. Ref’s won.. But I threw shot put as a junior! Hahaha Actually, summer of junior, junior year, and summer of senior year all kinda bleed together. I stayed on campus in my apartment, not a super healthy period in my life. Give me a second, I bet I can piece together some stuff.. Yeah, okay.. I stayed on campus both summers going into my junior and senior years, that’s what does it. Yeah, it’s coming back to me now. Oh jeez, Painesville Party in the Park.. both times. Huge scene. Oh no, drunk Latina girl that jumped into my lap and started making out with me while I was (not sober) driving us to Cleveland.. probably should have died that night. Swerving through all four of those lanes.. horns honking, roomate in the backseat—screaming at us and shit.. yeah did not deserve to wake up the day after that night, yeesh. Hmm, yeah I caught a baby rabbit once while walking my dog. OH YEAH, I had my dog junior year! Little baby Diz. I shouldn’t have released that rabbit after I caught it.. I found it dead on the sidewalk later that week while walking Yiddel Baby Dizzolve.. Haha, that lovely girl that I was seeing as a sophomore was actually Baby Diz’s puppysitter, most of the time—when I needed one. Bless her heart. Diz broke out of jail one time after she watched him and I didn’t blame her, but I was very scared. I was much more forgiving once I called all of the pet shelters in the area and one of them called me back later that evening with my pup! Makes me sweat thinking about if that didn’t happen. I would have been, and would still be; so sad.. when I was like three years old these two older neighborhood hoodlums stole my first dog.. a little, black and fluffy pocket dog of some type, named Pepper. I shudder at the thought of Dizzy, and a Pepper fate.. Oh man.. there was this poor little freshman that was a demon-child, drug dealer.. he lived with me one of those summers, and he went to electric forest and had an existential crisis on too many psychedelics and found God. Phew.. that was a thing. Happy for him, but he did screw over another teammate in the process.. that teammate probably needed to be a little screwed over, though. I smashed like three playstation controllers playing WWE 2k18 around that time.. got into a fist fight too—in the back of a car with one of my teammates. Hey, wait a second.. it was with that freshman! yeah, it was during christmas break! But only because he pressed a cop over pressing him over his fake ID; so after we had to cut our night short to bail him out of jail.. it pissed me off that the first thing he said when he got back in the car was “This is BULLSHIT..” Yeah, that's funny. We roomed together the summer after that fight. That night ended with another teammate kicking me in the face to get me off of him hahahaha, that was the right call.. I can’t really remember when most of any of that other stuff was though.. hahaha.. ah, so. I do remember though, I was typically the designated six a.m. driver; on Sunday mornings after a Saturday night that could've been more chill, when we transitioned from hotel back to campus. Whatever, A lot of fun in this window, at the expense of my body, and mind.. _________________ I stopped cold turkey my senior year, I met a girl. I’m still not ready to talk about her. — I ended up wrestling my senior year, my coach resigned and we got a new one. I couldn’t heal old wounds, but perhaps this gave me a salve to treat it for a time. Our wrestling team won the Inaugural GMAC Conference Title; my pin—breaking the tie. I actually won a “Tibby” award that year for my pin. The Tibby’s were our college’s end of year, athletic awards ceremony.. but it was mainly just a popularity contest. One, that I did not win as a freshman. I was nominated for “Best Newcomer” back then, which was pretty much just “freshman of the year,” but, again, I didn’t win. I did win the Tibby for “Best Play of the Year” for that GMAC Title pin though, and I felt as though that was a nice gesture to the conclusion of my athletic career. I missed the National Tournament by two points though. I don’t remember my record, 21-10, or fifteen? Dunno, I only lost to All-Americans that year. I had a bunch of losses, but they were all to the same three or four kids throughout the year. Led the regular season in pins though. Let me brag, LET ME BRAG! I actually thought I was going to win the plaque for 2019 NCAA Pinfalls Leader as a senior, even though I didn’t qualify for nationals. I was up by four pins with an eight minute lead on second.. Well, the kid that was in second didn’t get me. But the kid in third, who was down five pins and even more time.. was ranked like twelfth in his weight class, and he had a miracle tournament run to pin his way to a title. and a Pinfalls Leader plaque. Some guys just have it all! Hahaha The NCAA reworked the regional tournament circuit, my senior year. Previously, there were four regionals and the top four placers at each one; went to Nationals. My senior year; it was five regionals, and only the top three from each, went on. Well, shoutout to that rework.. because the returning top three All-Americans, champ to third place, were all in my regional. I beat the regional champ and runner up, in the region that I felt my team should have been in—it was only an hour away from our campus.. but I digress… I ended up taking fourth in my region (fine—I’ll say it, four hour drive..), and actually, the kid that took third at nationals the year before, took fifth here.. That match I lost by two points in the To-Go Match? I pinned that kid in the opening round, and he wrestled all the way through consolation—for the get-back. Hmm.. I graduated with a three point three (gee-pee-aye), a far cry from my two point eight, in high school. I even had a teaching job and head wrestling coach position before I graduated— before I finished my senior year wrestling season, actually. Think I might have taken eighth at my Conference in shot put? Might have extended my outdoor school record by a bit? No nationals there either, but I had a coach, I guess… lol Yeah.. no.. college was pretty sick. Kinda lived up to the hype, in a pretty major way. _________________ I started smoking pot regularly again though, about six months after the girl I met, broke up with me, which was around four years later. The problem with being emotionally unstable as a result of substance abuse, is that you don’t really give the right amount of merit to your struggles when you’re clean. I smoked regularly while we dated too.. only toward the end, but yeah.. Whatever.. I was sober for a good, long while. I was just less emotionally mature than I thought I was.. yeah, yeah, yeah I know. I don’t want to get into it, okay? Can we skip why I smoked during that time? I didn’t ever stop drinking though. I became a very good actor when I was drinking, because we often don’t lump drinking in with the other masks we wear, or when talking about sobriety, because so many wear the same. I never got into the whole daily drinking thing, but yeah, okay.. I couldn’t socialize (outside of a professional setting, or without her,) without it. It’s been a long time since I’ve taken psychedelics now. But I still feel psychedelic experiences now. I started calling them sober psychedelic experiences back in 'twenty two. As it turns out, I don’t need psychedelics to let my mind wander off into the places they would wander back then, only when aided by chemicals. The trouble actually became not being able to stop ending up back in certain locations I would lead myself to, when I wasn’t. I have a lot of decisions that I can linger on and let burn me alive, as I have. But, I think I’m starting to understand how to “weaponize” my “elite” creativity, in the war against complacency and contentment—while otherwise avoiding the traps of self-satisfaction that present themselves throughout the battles. I don’t know what that means yet, but let me meditate on it, and I’ll write some more bullshit about it later. I’ve been thinking about the atemporal lessons a lot in the last few months, started at the top of my thirtieth trip around the sun. It’s funny what pops up when it does. When I was growing up (and presently), my father viewed himself as a beacon of distorted truth in a full world of distorted truths. To paraphrase his philosophy; the right way to teach people—is through psychological warfare.. That’s not an assumption; one time when I was in college, around the time I started bringing him home some of my psychedelics (must be hereditary), the year after he threatened to kick me out of his house for smoking pot; I asked him why he didn’t beat my little brother the way he beat me when I was growing up. He never beat him with switches, vacuum cleaner cords, metal bunk bed ladders, or threw him into any sliding glass doors.. So he said “Well son, I didn’t know about psychological warfare yet—before you started wrestling..” In some ways, I believe I adopted his philosophy when he was sending me screenshots of seed nominations for tournaments, the night before I would be the Man in the Arena; asking me what I was going to do about it—when the tournament directors and coaches didn’t give me the respect that we both felt that I deserved. I’ll show them, Dad. I’ll prove them wrong. That’s what I told him, and maybe that’s what I spent my wrestling career trying to live up to. Hmm… I gotta take a second, to think of a good analogy.. to gift-wrap this pretty little package up with, huh? _______________ Okay. A long, long time ago, when I was.. oh, I don’t know, but it was between kindergarten and second grade, because of the house I was in when I did it; but I remember putting on my dad’s old, leather Cincinnati Bengals jacket, early one morning, while both of my parents were still asleep. It was mostly tan—with a brown tiger emblem, and sleeves. It smelled like my dad; Cigarettes and Old Spice.. and the way old leather does when you sweat in it for a while. I remember sitting up against the wall in our kitchen, pretending to be homeless. Dad’s jacket kept me warm in that corner, as a blanket, even though it was a little chilly in the house. I was experiencing one of my earliest “dead of winters,” and I began to imagine that it wouldn’t be so bad to own nothing but an old leather jacket. Maybe I wanted to be a starving artist, even back then, when art was just homework. Perhaps I doomed myself to a life that I had always expected. All I know is; I bet my grandpas would be proud as Heck, of the Man I am becoming.