Brunch at Bob Evans

Something that I feel is a part of the lifestyle of a writer, or at least, my writer’s lifestyle, is writing as a therapeutic exercise to understand the internalization of yourself and the world around you. It can be achieved when writing fiction, I certainly have when writing my books, but in order to go deeper into it, turning the writer’s lens to express and discover the Truth through journaling, is an equal part of that.

A hell of a lot of it is shit I’d never want anyone to see, due to its intense, personal nature, but some of it fills up that time in my life that I’m writing when I’m not in the mood to work on a book, or I’m stuck, but I need to write. It’s usually rough, unedited, rapid-fire puking. It usually characterizes my thought process, how I pick at things and constantly, maybe because of my anxiety or insecurities, remain skeptical and ask questions due to my fear of being wrong.

This is less of that and more just uncensored, what I was feeling when I just needed everything inside to come out but it couldn’t. I wrote it in the bathroom stall at Bob Evans during Brunch on the notepad function on my phone a couple days ago. I was having an anxiety attack, the first one I’ve had in a very long time, and I just needed to get away. I thought of editing it, but that seemed against the point. If any of this needs defense, or retraction, I will do so later. Stuff on Ram’s Head after this.

July Seventeenth, 2011. Noonish.

I’m in a cozy Bob Evans stall. I haven’t slept in fifty hours. If I could, I would, but I seem to be unable. I thought of passing out when the sun started rising this morning, at least giving it a try…but then thought about how my grandma was taking my family and me out to brunch around noon and just decided to duke it out with the haze in the corners of my eyes and wait until after that to do what all the normal people were doing while I was up staring at my ceiling with dry eyes. Outside the bathroom is a restaurant full of hungry Christians, purging themselves of their piety for some hotcakes drowning in gravy after a long Sunday morning, staring in the pews. Outside of that is a parking lot. The first thing I saw when my family and me came here was a bright yellow bumper sticker that said: “WHO WILL SAVE US FROM THE GOVERNMENT? (the ‘o’ in government replaced with the O from President Obama’s ’08 campaign logo) WHO WILL SAVE US FROM THE UNIONS? (the ‘u’ in unions replaced with the communist hammer and sickle of Soviet Russia)”

That seems like an omen now……

I sat down to brunch. Ordered food I knew I’d only eat a bit of.

I turned my head when I felt three fingers tap on my shoulder to see them attached to a hand living up the long black sleeve of a Catholic priest, bald and old and wearing glasses and looking almost like he slithered out of a black and white political cartoon from the newspaper my mom was reading next to me, save for white text reading: “CATHOLICISM” splattered across his chest. Apparently I was supposed to be scooting my chair up to give him more room to sit at the table directly behind me. He smiled and said something that I did not hear, before I said to no one in particular, and intentionally loud enough for him to hear: “you think he needed the extra room for the alter boy on his lap?”

An incredible act of rudeness on my part, also one that I won’t take back until the day I die, and one that give me a million chances to do it again, the only thing I’d do different is do my best to come up with something worse to say, like, that he needed the extra room for the alter boy under the table that he’s skull fucking.

Community exists for a reason. We should be nice to each other, and aim our collective sights on the assholes putting a stick in our spokes, while still respecting and understanding that sometimes they aren’t really, and letting them live their lives unobstructed. I however don’t believe I fit into any of the two latter categories. I’m not just being the anti-Catholic asshole in this situation, I am, I really am. But not in this situation. I am doing what we all should be doing as a community, collectively showing disrespect for those that truly deserve it.

It is very difficult for me to operate in this fucking deranged world in which I live. People who fuck children deserve respect, people who keep said children fuckers out of prison deserve respect, and the all the damn creeps that operate underneath it all with apathy, ignorance or worse, deserve respect. People, of stupidity to vast to speak of and of whom words do not exist to describe the vastness of their stupidity anyway, who sit for 8 years under the Bush Administration, and then a Nigger Democrat is elected and all of the sudden it’s fucking 1984, or 1776, or some other goddamn year it’s not where the rules of sanity need not apply, hide your kids, hide your wives, grab your guns and get ready for fucking Revelation, for no other reason than Glenn Beck says so; these goddamn people deserve respect. Is it so mad to say fuck no? To take the first steps to turning the wheel of our society into the direction of laughing at these fools and making them creep back into their caves, fearful of doing what our community will turn upon them for; expressing the twisted contents of their backwards minds. Perhaps in those caves they’ll find in exclusion from those of us with minds for thinking and hearts for feeling for people other than ourselves, that they are truly fucked up people, what they did is fucked up, and reconcile with us with a guarenfuckentee that they're done done done with the bullshit.

Keep in mind, I’m fully in favor of debate, I’m not talking about just being assholes to shout down debate, if that Catholic priest wanted to debate me, have a discussion with me, I would click my fucking heels. I am just very, very, very certain that the majority of these people are terrified of the result of what an intellectual debate, a fair discussion, what would be exposed would make them hurt, and every time they let that open, try and let the world of Faith and Lies survive in a fight in the world of Truth and Science, every time they do that they lose a bit of themselves that will never come back.

If they want debate, oh boy, please dear god upon that day they can find me, because I’ve been ready for a long time to take them down to china town. Glenn Beck, Mr. Adolf Ratslinger, Rupert Murdoch, all of the curators of what humans were before the Enlightenment; they don’t want a light shone upon their shallow attempts to bring us back to their times of faith and kings and gold and peasants. Maybe they’ll try to in a last ditch effort to just hold on to the scraps of whatever’s left of their kingdoms, but that day hasn’t come. Right now, assholes that not only fight against progress, teachers, minorities, and children, but the very concepts of fairness, unions, and Government as a means to fucking help people. They deserve no respect. The virtues that they hold are holding us back. Showing our disapproval and disrespect for them is the least we can do.