I tried to stay away from cocaine…or what I like to refer to as ‘Captain Cocaine’ so that it sounds much less serious even to me. Gives it some flavour, you know? Sort of like a freakishly twisted parody of a Saturday morning children’s show:

‘Hey kids, it’s time for (everybody shouts) Caaaptaaaiiin Cocaaaaiiine! Okay, now everybody get out your straws! Not you, Suzy. You’re fucking cut-off.”

But just like the kick-in-the-withering-sack that is life; whenever you decide that you’re done slowly killing yourself and finally make the choice to be a healthier, well-rounded person without the raging substance abuse -that thing that you’re trying to get away from? It has ways of finding out where you are, of creeping up behind you like a musician on your woman and dangling itself out right in front of you, pushing your nose into it, getting your back up against a wall while doing so and making sure that you fully understand:

I haven’t seen you in a while so I thought I would come see what you’re up to…and this avoidance thing isn’t going to work with me. Oh no. Because I know you. I know what a weak little bitch you really are so you come here and you take this and you fucking LIKE it. Yes. Yesssss. That’s better. See how happier you are right now than ten minutes ago? See how groovy everything is with me around? So you can try running away like a little schoolgirl but you’ll always find me waiting there for you, wherever ‘there’ is. So go wake up party-boy, because you know what?

It’s party time.

You even try to reason with it:
“Come on, Man. I don’t want anymore. It’s not who I am. Why can’t you just leave me alone? I’m not hurting anyone. I’m not stealing from people or fucking them around. I’m not being an asshole to anybody. I’m just here minding my own damn business. So why do you have to be such a fucker to me? All I want to do is better myself. All I want to do is remain clear-headed and sober. Why can’t you understand and respect that?”

You shut up! I don’t want to hear your lame excuses. It says as it holds the bag of fine white powder up within reach. Just get it up your nose. All of it. Right now. You don’t say no to the captain!

I wasn’t planning on staying up late. I had a laundry-list of things to do on Saturday. But that evil substance found its way into my home Friday night. I had nothing to do with it. It must have broken into a basement window and slithered up the stairs because there was Captain Cocaine sitting at my kitchen table waiting for me. And I did all of it like a gluttonous sow basking at a free buffet as he cheered me on, “That’s the ticket!”
I totally regretted it the next day.

Saturday productivity = 0.

Saturday night. Take 2. I was ready to go out. So I had a little setback, so what? No problem. On with the show. Everything was just fine until I saw Captain Cocaine outside in the alley, waiting for me, having a cigarette.
‘I’m coming in to party!’ He motioned to where I was going.
“No you’re not.” I replied and brushed past him, up the stairs, down the hall and inside.

When I arrived he was there already, gloating while chatting up my friends. He even had his arms around a couple girls. ‘See? Fucking told you. You can’t get rid of me.’

I managed to ignore him for about twenty minutes. I started the night swigging vodka from the bottle and ended it slamming rails. It seemed like a fine idea at the time but then came 7AM and I had put enough shit up my nose that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep any time soon or ever again.

And that’s when they came in; loud, drunk, all hot and ready. What can I say? It was his room and I was lucky to have a place to crash on the couch beside the bed. And now it was front row.

They got right to it. But this wasn’t normal love-making, pillow talk, sweet-nothings. This was something else entirely. No matter that there was two other people crashed on the floor, although one of them looked like the same Jewish girl from last week so she just might have been dead. No worries at all. It was dirty. It was grimy. It was grisly even. It was real and in my face like a horrible accident happening so slowly.

“Come on, punch me in the Jimmy, kick it! Yeah, YEAH! Kiss the midget, kiss the MIDGET! Yes… ggrrrrrrr ….grrrrrrr ….GRYFFINDOR!”

They were definitely taking shit to some other level. Maybe they were professional love-makers. Ha! More like professional drunken bangers.

I tried to ignore them and return to my gloom. I had laundry to do. I had to go get groceries. Clean out the garage. Vacuum the cats. None of this was going to get done today which meant that I would have to mix it into my work week. Fuck, I hated that. And don’t even ask me if I’m going to be working out tomorrow. Obviously I had no control over myself, was never going to learn and now had to deal with going into another week rough as shit because it took me a couple days to get back to my usual manic self when I did this to my system.

Sunday, Monday, and maybe Tuesday productivity = 0

“You want to do WHAT?! That’s disgusting…but okay!” Yeah, let’s not forget them. Now they were only getting louder to the point that it sounded like someone was choking the shit out of an orangutan as it was giving birth underwater.

“Yeah, Baby.Fuck Ya….OH FUCK YES! Gaaa! GAAAAA! GEICO!”

This was it. I felt it in my bones. This was the Hell that would kick-start my leap into eternity a coke-free soul. I was finally done with this shit. Now all I had to do was let the healing process begin, get back on track and come out the stronger man for it.

But I could see him in my mind: Captain Cocaine, sulking against the wall beside a dumpster all covered in stale booze and piss and shit, snickering to himself all mad, empty and alone. He takes a big swig out of a bottle and smashes it on the ground beside him. He starts cackling as the day breaks on his grimy face. He can hear me just fine and he laughs and laughs and dances around amongst the homeless and the rats.

Hahaha…think you could quit me? Go ahead, think it. You can tell yourself this now, but I’ll see you around the bend. We both know the same people. I’ll pop up at parties, be around when you’re all wasted at the end of the night and the show’s not over. Or how about next time you’re at the back of a club with a hot twenty-year old looking for uppers? We’ll see, my good friend. We’ll see what you say then.

It hurts to see him so assured that I will never quit. Because he is me if I don’t. This is my devil. This is my Hell. This is my open wound. Fuck what other people have done to me, I can deal with that. It’s him that is my worst enemy. It’s him that I am really afraid of. He was the bottle, the secret stash of pills, the lover you were ashamed of, the gambling debt, the slow death and he was God in the lives of the weak. He’s the driver to the asylum, the prison, the back-alley basement where the stink of the diseased and the dead permeate into everything until there is nothing else left, nothing of hopes or dreams, nothing but the empty glaze of a dead soul. It’s the fear that he will take me to that place where life is cruel, hideous and brutally unforgiving. That place that there is no returning from. I’ve seen that point in other men. I’ve seen what it’s done to them. That was some place I never wanted to go. But now, right now, I can see it. I can see that place from here as though it was right in my face staring back.

Now I was so pissed at myself and would just have to suck it up and deal with it. Since I wasn’t right to leave I laid my head back down, closed my eyes and endured my penance as the sun shone hard through the windows, as cars mingled on the cold, cracked streets outside…

“Yeah Yeah…put the corn on the cob…that’s it….UGGA UGGGGAAAA GAK GAK GAK…FEDEX!”

And as they screwed and screwed…

and screwed.

Wondering Where I Went
In pursuit of
the great big
fuck
of it all
that I can’t seem to find
for the life of me.

Maybe it’s under the bed
or in it.

It might be burned away
throughout the years
now hopelessly scattered
between sparse
moments of lucidity.

It’s sad to see
the past
open
so wide.

One day you just
wake up
and wonder where
you went.

From Natasha’s Light:
        “You are much like a woman, you know that?” Natasha said, picking away at another dandelion.
        “So you’ve been thinking about me.”
        “The only time I’m not with you is when I’m in bed. When I sleep.” She replied quickly, laughing nervously. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
        “Funny, I’ve actually heard that before,” I cut in, saving her from stumbling any further, “about being like a woman. Usually it’s referring to my cleaning habits and my long times in the shower, but how do you mean it?”
        “With my husband…”
        I turned on my side to watch her. She seemed embarrassed again. Her husband was a careful issue. I’ve never met him and didn’t want to, wasn’t interested. This was the first time she had brought him up so I listened.
        “He is very simple. When he is hungry he wants food. When he is mad he becomes impatient. Usually he works all the time so when I do see him he is tired and wants to sleep. What I mean is that it is easy to know what’s going on in his head. But you’re not like that at all. You’re different all the time. You change from one minute to the next.”
        “Sorry about that.” I said, smiling.
        “No. Don’t be. See, a woman will hide things because she doesn’t want others to know what she is feeling. A woman is much more complex than a man and is cautious because of that. Men like to run head-on into things and tackle the problem so they can get on with other tasks. All I am saying is that you have more inside your head than most men. I can look at you, but I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
        “That’s probably a very good thing.” I admitted.
        “I like you.” Natasha stated. The way her eyes fixed on me it seemed like she was trying to look into me instead of at me. “I like the way you feel things. I like the way you notice things, the way you say things. When I am with you everything is so new and exciting, even though we do the same thing every day.”
        Natasha paused, sighed, and rolled unto her stomach, gazing off into the distance.
        “Maybe I say too much.” She said.

Book Cover Design: TOTNP
Full Book Title: Tale of the Nightmare Princess: An Adult Fantasy Comedy Adventure

I am in the process of prepping a novel for self-publishing on Amazon. I have a couple more books doing nothing and sitting nowhere so now that self-publishing is a valid venue for authors I feel the need to put them out before I start my next one. I currently have two that I am going to most certainly publish and afterwards will assess the quality and readability of the third as to whether it would be something that I want public with my name on it or whether it is worth the time spent in repairing it. I truly hope this is the case because it is by far my most ambitious project but at the time of writing it I was not prepared to indulge in such a venture. This is not the first time this has happened. The last time I had a similar problem I did not finish the book and almost quit after a year of trying to stubbornly produce it. Instead I started this novel (TOTNP) as a joke. By the fifth chapter it wasn’t a joke anymore. At least not to me.

Here are a couple of notes on the process so far as I have found it:

Blog: Because I knew I was going into self-publishing I had started a blog as means to provide myself with short writing exercises and to start a presence online, albeit an insignificantly small one. I also had wanted to use it to network with other writers with the same aspirations as myself. I am sorely lacking in this area due to my current time constraints, however, this is something that I plan to become more involved with as soon as I am able as I fully realize its importance. Overall, there is much needed work to be done here, starting with the header in creating one that does not make me look like a sadistic child-killer. But overall I have found that change does not need to occur all at once and I am picking at it here and there.

Book Title: The original title was just ‘Tale of the Nightmare Princess’ but I have recently added ‘An Adult Fantasy Comedy Adventure’. Why? Because it sounds a little nuts that someone would do so but it does fit the theme nicely. And self-publishers are lucky to sell one book so whatever I can do to give the reader pause or add flavour to the cover or at least make them more curious may just well work for me. Overall I’m not entirely sure but at this stage I am willing to experiment. Besides, there are four good key search-words in there. And Hell, this kind of title is definitely something that I would go for. It sounds totally fucked.

Editing: Because the thought of someone else fucking with the way I say things greatly unsettles me I currently do my own editing. And because I’m not a professional editor each time I pass through my work with a red pen it’s like a net: you’ll catch some of it, most things if you’re proficient –but some mistakes will get through, so you have to do it again and again if need be. I just started the third edit of this title because I found some mistakes that should not have been there in the first chapter, therefore it’s all getting done over. Yes, it’s as much fun as it sounds. Yes, it’s a fucking nightmare. No, I will not put something out that contains mistakes.

Packaging (Interior): This is my next part and final part. I have chosen ‘garamond’ as my font but other than that will not be sure how this will fly until I actually start the process. If anyone has any suggestions I’m all eyes. But I will go through this as painstakingly as I do everything else. This book is a big deal to me, and it is not going out until I am completely satisfied with both its content and appearance. And I am one meticulous OCD Motherfucker when it comes down to it, you should see how clean my kitchen is.

Cover Design: I went old-school with this simply because I had to learn photoshop because I wanted to do everything myself and now, beyond the extreme frustration at times, I am glad to have done so. First off, the back cover is redundant because this is only going to be an e-book. This is my folly because I like to come out swinging with both fists before even reading the damn instructions. But hey, I needed the photoshop experience. Secondly, I wanted to utilize my paintings where I could IF it suited the theme and aesthetic of the book. This does, I believe. If you think it’ shit definitely let me know so I can tell you to go fuck yourself. Just kidding. I’m all open arms to all suggestions, comments, and considerations.

I picked up a job at Medicote. Night shift. Minimum wage: $8.65 an hour. I processed bus bumpers, moving them from the paint line to the drying line, from a horizontal rack to a vertical rack. They weighed about a hundred pounds each.

My trainer was Petey. Nice little guy. He was five-foot-three and about a hundred and thirty pounds. And he could move them like they were nothing. After the first hour I could not keep my quota. Not even close. I was six-two and one-eighty at that time. I thought I was strong but I had really learned something that day: I wasn’t. I was so far from strong that it wasn’t even a blip on my radar. And this little guy so calm in demeanor to the point of achieving Buddhist Zen could throw me around the factory floor while eating his lunch and texting his girlfriend. Now here he was doing double the workload because of me.

I really needed a boost at that point, something to put me back on my feet at least in perspective as things were not generally going so well. And this wasn’t it.

Petey must have seen something in my face at that moment. He’s seen it before, and he explained to me the nights where temps would leave halfway through the shift yelling, “Fuck this!” Or after the first hour. Or after trying their hand at a couple then staring at Petey with disbelief and fright at the ease in which he handled those heavy fuckers and scrambling away from him when he went to shake their hand goodbye.

Petey placed a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, Man. It’ll get better.” I’m glad he didn’t squeeze or I probably wouldn’t have a shoulder left. Arm-wrestling was definitely out of the question.

I looked up at him then I looked around the metallic Hell of the factory floor that surrounded me at 3AM –sparks flying out from the arc welders, tow motors frantically speeding skids every which way, the maintenance crew all gathered around another broken machine scratching their heads.

I asked bitterly. “How the fuck would you know?”
He smiled. It was entirely without malice because all he had was patience and understanding because he was just so much better than me in every way.

I stayed until the end of my shift. Not once was there a time that I thought I could manage another night, another week or a month. Not once.

Six months later I was a data-entry filing clerk at a health firm along the Grand river. It wasn’t developing business applications but it wasn’t slinging bus bumpers either. It was an easy and aesthetic place where I got to dress well and eat lunch on a grassy knoll right beside the river. After the first week a wonderful brunette took fancy to me and began spending her lunch hours at my side. The first time she did I remember so well her asking me if she could join me as I looked up at her tall, glowing, statuesque frame.

Good God, really? For me?

So what if I wasn’t the hardest motherfucker to ever walk the face of the earth? It was alright. At that moment it was very much okay with me as I made room for her to sit down.

Petey was right, things did get better. And at that point I imagined he was still moving bus bumpers from horizontal to vertical drying rack throughout the night at Meticoke; as strong, patient and naturally content as any human being could be. Some things hit you hard in the gut and this was one of them. I still could not fully piece together why. But I do know one thing: I still wouldn’t fuck with him.

And I still can’t look away from him either.

Not Without a Fight
You’re not going to get much of anywhere
these days
without a fight.

You have to want it
bad enough
to keep going for it
with the understanding
that you may never have it.

It may break your back.
It may wreck your mind.
But you have got to keep
chipping away
even if it doesn’t
amount to anything in the end.

And if that doesn’t work for you,
than might I suggest
that you move out of the way
for someone
that will.

You Go Live Your Own Will
I’ve seen people
build empires
out of nothing
but their own will
so don’t you sit there
and tell me
that I can’t do anything
based on yours.