Hello gentle readers. In the past month I have been forced to attend several family functions, from Christmas to funerals, and have come to a bit of an epiphany, albeit a quaintly obvious one. The realization is this: While in a room full of people who think you are a fuck-up, have screwed your entire life, and are a black mark on the family name, it is usually wise to be drinking. A lot.

Bow before my wisdom.

However, the catch is that overt drunkenness does not help make your case as being a responsible and upstanding citizen, especially when you pee on your 2 year old cousin at the wedding of his parents. Thus, while it is imperative that you be drunk when dealing with these people, it is often wise to conceal your state of inebriation, lest you further tempt fate and lend credence to the baseless accusations against your good name tossed about by your own blood.

And so, having done extensive research on this subject myself of late, I have decided to share with you my empirical findings.

1. Do not talk about being drunk.

2. DO NOT TALK ABOUT BEING DRUNK!

3. At functions that include a free bar, it is a moral imperative to drink as much free booze as possible. Especially if you are underage, as they never card for private bars. However, to camouflage your obscene consumption rate, order only things that look like “straight” drinks. Things like screwdrivers, Bloody Marys, and Rum and Cokes. To the untrained familial eye, these drinks simply look like orange juice, tomato juice, and coke, respectively. A beer can be mistaken for little else, save for carbonated urine. And, as everybody knows, only Uncle Eddy drinks carbonated urine.

4. Play with the little kids in the family. You are able to talk gibberish, sit on the floor, and generally behave like a drunken moron, and come across only as “sensitive” and “fun loving”. However, when they reach an age where they can recognize the stench of booze on your breath and the difference between a “good” and “bad” touch, it is best to ignore them completely from then on.

5. Hang out with the elderly. They represent a group that your drunk ass can blend in with while completely blitzed. Few other social groups make no sense in conversation, fall down a lot, spontaneously release bodily fluids, and smell like pee, even when stone cold sober. The only other comparable group in that respect that comes to mind are Mexicans. If you can find a group of elderly Mexicans to hang with, it would be well advised to do so.

6. All that said, truly the best way to avoid having your drunkenness detected is to not hang out with anybody. Sweet sweet isolation.

7. Flasks are your friends. Easily concealed, quick to drink, good all around. Especially in situations where no other booze source is available, like while in a car, or at a baptism, or while carrying a casket.

When you are concealing a flask of gin, and a flask of tonic, and a lemon in your coin purse during Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, mixing them in your mouth in the back pew, you have done well. Good job!

8. That said, being seen pulling from a flask at family functions is bad form. Thus, it is usually best to conceal your flask in something while pulling from it. I suggest closing your wallet around the flask and pulling from it that way. Thus, when your Great Aunt walks into the coatroom and sees you pulling, she will assume you are simply drinking from your wallet.

9. Formal wear is fantastic for concealing flasks and bottles, as there is often many pockets and layers. I suggest a button up dress shirt with two breast pockets, a sports coat over that, and a trenchcoat with lots of pockets. And cargo pants.

10. Wine is often a socially acceptable spirit served at family functions. For more kick, spike yours with Everclear. If it is red wine, cherry Mad Dog 20/20.

11. There is always one Obscenely Drunk Uncle (ODU) wandering about. Latch on to him, under the guise of “taking care of him”. That way any booze stench, vomit on your lapels, and broken china can be easily blamed on the ODU. Make sure, when the ODU sobers up, to brief him on all his drunken antics that he doesn’t remember not doing.

12. A great way—nay, the BEST way—to conceal booze on your breath is by eating Ranch Corn Nuts. By eating a packet of these, you ensure your breath will smell like nothing else until late August. Unless of course the nuts were chased with paint thinner.

Also, it really helps in your attempts at isolation, as nobody will want to stand anywhere near Ranch Corn Nut Man.

13. If anybody asks, you are not drunk, you are “tired” or “sick”. And the green chunks around the rim of the toilet seat in your Aunt’s house are not “vomit”. They are “digestive problems”.

14. Take the focus off of your alcoholism and drug problems by constantly changing the topic to your inauguration.

15. If you have found yourself in the wonderful and enviable position of sitting up late one night and talking to your Uncle over whiskey sours, keep pouring him more, because your pounding of booze then becomes “social drinking”. When he finally says “no thanks, I think I’ve had enough”, knock him out with your chair and finish the bottle. Blame it on the cat or something.

16. If you are my sister and you write a journal entry on loose leaf paper about how much dope you smoke and how you sell your prescription medication and use the money to buy harder drugs, do not leave said journal entry on the floor of your grandfather’s living room, even by accident, as it will be picked up by your nosy Aunt, read, and quickly disseminated among your entire extended family.

If you are me though, you (I) should be fully prepared to capitalize on this diversion, as it takes the focus off of you and you can then freely move about in a drunken stupor and hit on your cousins while sipping your Everclear Zinfandel.

That is all.

(I am, after all, only here to help.)

I'm back.

Funeral went fine, very nice in fact. Very hard on my grandfather and mother of course. Very glad I went, actually kinda had fun in a macabre sort of way. Travel was hell though.

So don't think you can get away with making snide comments about me in your posts anymore, as I will be seeing them once more.

Never fear, for asylumwhores.com will still work as it always has so theres no need to go updating bookmarks and links. Anyways, since cookies are only accessable by the domain from which they were set, all your cookies have been lost. As for a remedy, follow this simple solution:

click preferences in the forum, set your preferences, click submit. The next time you post you'll have to type in you're username/password but it should save after that.

Pretty simple, let me know if you have probs.

I run my fingers tenderly over the hard cover, quietly noticing the dulling effect the years have taken on the once bright shimmer of the blue and green design. Peculiar how my mind works, I always seem to think of everything remaining as it was, never wanting to take into consideration how time changes all it touches, myself included. For with the change of time also comes letting go and moving on, two tasks that I admit to not being particularly good at. But as I sit here, scarcely able to recognize my own faded handwriting or the passion that fueled the journals creation, the change in myself is undeniable and the confusion of that realization far outweighs any other emotion. I’m confused because my progression from past to present seemed so subtle to me that it passed almost completely unnoticed until now.

It’s difficult to explain why I dispute change so much, especially when I’m obviously much happier now then I was during the time this diary was created. Realize I stated that it’s difficult to explain, not necessarily for me to understand. Change and time go hand in hand, with one inevitably comes the other. Time has long been my unspoken enemy, sweeping me away from places and people I didn’t feel I was ready to leave. I couldn’t rightfully be angry with those that had left me, since for the most part, it wasn’t their decision to go, therefore time itself was the only place to lay blame.

There’s a passage that was written shortly prior to my fifteenth birthday. I vaguely remember being unable to find a pen that night, which explains why it’s carelessly scribbled out in pencil that has since severely paled. And although I do recall the day, the only way I can touch upon the emotions that I must have been feeling is to actually read over what I myself had written. The words depict a mixture of feelings that range from pure self-pity to an innocent misunderstanding of life itself, neither I am very proud of. I wrote of how I fought sleep, somehow hoping that maybe if I did, tomorrow simply wouldn’t come and I would remain closer to the past. I wrote of how I longed to go back to the place I knew before this pain that I had never wanted was given to me. I wrote of how my only desire was to have life as it was before and that I couldn’t understand how I was expected to continue as if nothing had happened.

Clearly, a lot of time has passed since that was written, over ten years to be precise, but this book explains in painstaking detail from where I have come. I’ve become what I had feared so many years ago would happen to me and I fight the disappointment I want to feel in myself only because I know I have no right to feel it. It’s wrong to feel shame in continuing to live simply because others did not. It’s wrong to question why the tears that use to be uncontrollable have ceased. And it’s wrong to judge myself and think that I loved them any less because the grieving has ended for me.

I’ve learned that the past is exactly that, the past. And no amount of tears, hope or wishes will ever give me the opportunity to relive it. I can only be thankful that I was given the opportunity to be there the first time. I enjoy being here and having the chance to do anything and everything I may decide I want to do because I am still among the living. All of the sleepless nights that I endured brought me to a realization. It didn’t matter how great my desire was to remain in the past with those that had failed to follow me in with the sunrise, I would be brought into tomorrow anyway until it is my time to remain behind.

As I close the journal and find a home for it on my bookshelf, I can also finally close that chapter of my life. I recognize that time may not have been my enemy after all. In fact, time along with change has brought me here, so far from the sad and frightened girl that fought them both so fervently. And with the sunrise I no longer feel the pain of being brought further from those left in the past, but appreciation that I was once again brought into tomorrow.

When I was fifteen I moved out of my parents house. “Moved” should be visualized as my mother and father dropping off a suitcase with some of my things in it off at my friends house and asking me not to come around anymore. But that’s part of a different story and only important to set the stage for what was to come later on. I wandered through a few homes and families of friends for a while until I ended up at the Thomas’ humble abode.

A bit about the Thomas’... The Thomas’ were a family I stumbled upon who took me in as one of their own. There was Adrian, the son and my friend. There was Jack, Adrian’s father, and Beatrice, Adrian’s mother. There were a few other additions and side shows that came and went such as Jack's second wife Betty (Beatrice being the third); Jack’s second son, Adrian’s half brother; Jeff and Linda, some drinking buddies of the family; and a few others. I can sum up the entire circus of a family in two adjectives: insane and dysfunctional. Where to start?...

Adrian was a teenage alcoholic metal head with coke-bottle glasses and long frizzy hair. He was a bit on the insane side and often found joy in the torment of his mother (I’ll get to that later.). Adrian also fancied himself a musician and would spend hours on end playing his out-of-tune guitar slightly off time and off key to Doors songs on the radio while smoking his generic-brand cigarettes to the filter. He prided himself on his introverted behavior and would go out of his way to abuse anyone who would allow him...sort of like a hundred-pound bully who would drink too much at a party then get his ass kicked by some trailer trash, because Adrian would call the other guy’s girlfriend a “fat-ass bitch who needed to suck him off right now.” But for all that, Adrian had a small charm about him and could be tolerated, for the most part, if you just got past his “I wanna be a rude boy” façade...and besides, with Adrian around, something entertaining was bound to happen.

Then there was Jack. Jack’s real name was John, but he opted to adopt the alternate name, “Jack,” for obvious reasons. He was a sort of intellectual old hippy type who had a degree or two in human psychology and philosophy and wound up putting them to good use in the moving industry. Jack drank too much and spent a majority of his time sitting downstairs in the living room with all the lights off humming along to old Neal Young or Sonic Youth albums. To describe Jack is difficult, to say the least. He was a saint and a bastard all in the same breath, but he had taken me in and fed me mustard sandwiches and cheap beer so I couldn’t complain too much.

Adrian’s mother was a different story. Beatrice was completely insane. She was a diagnosed schizophrenic paranoid who could be pushed over the edge at any moment by something as simple as a light switch. She was an irritable bag who had thick calluses on her elbows from years of just sitting at the kitchen table drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. She rarely bathed and could be heard most of the time yelling obscenities at Jack while he hum, hum, hummed along to Sonic Youth. She had been in and out of institutions over the years, but due to lack of state and personal funds she was unable to get the real care she needed. Between Jack and Medicare she was able to maintain a steady supply of medications...except of course when the beer money ran low. Then we would get to see Boyd, Jack’s second son, and the pills would be replaced with some cash.

Which brings us to Boyd. Boyd was a true drug addict who peddled and used any controlled substance he could get his hands on. He had done so much LSD that his spine was permanently damaged to the point where he had to wear orthopedic shoes and pee while sitting on the can. He died a few years back after popping a handful of his dead mother’s (Jack’s second wife, Betty) lithium pills and wandering outside in the middle of a blizzard. They found his body in the spring about a hundred yards down the hill behind his house. He had fallen, hit his head, and then froze to death while being covered with four feet of snow.

This was the Thomas family. My family. This household could have been a poster child for dysfunctional families, and the whole time I lived there, about two years in all, was like some horrible dream filled with drunken insanity and all I could do was sit back, watch in rapt horror, and try not to laugh to hard.

So it was late summer, and I had been away for a few days and had returned to find a small party in the making. A friend of ours had managed to dig up a few guys to come over and drink some brew with us that night. John, the friend, had informed us that there might be girls in the troupe, and we expected his prophetic enlightenment to prove true. Adrian was suddenly a bustle of activity. Ashtrays were emptied and bookcases were straightened in the anticipation of the fairer sex actually being present in his room. Floors were vacuumed and beer was ordered and everything was made just so for the proposed arrival.

And wouldn’t you know it, just as the candles were being lit for mood lighting a car full of youths pulled up and amongst the group were indeed two attractive young lasses. I use the term attractive fairly loosely. In this case, attractive meant showered and female, and Adrian was in heaven. At last he could strut and pomp around and show these wonderful young ladies the time of their lives. I approached the whole situation with a bad mood because I knew what was coming, and I knew these poor girls would not have a thing to do with me within the hour.

As everyone made their way to Adrian’s room I grumbled something about a long day and made my way to my own room in hopes of escape. I made it for about a half an hour, but then succumbed to the desire to at least witness the failure in progress instead of having to listen to alternate stories told by Adrian over the next week. I walked into Adrian’s room to find him sitting on his bed with a stoic “I’m a bad ass, worship me” look on his face and the last part of a bowl going around while some jazz musician played just one click over the comfortable volume level on the radio.

Things seemed to be going well for Adrian. One of the girls seemed to be genuinely interested in his ramblings about musical theory and the quality of his new Ernie Ball guitar strings that he spent twelve dollars on at Percy’s music shop earlier that week. But then things took a bad turn for Adrian when she turned her attention to another one of the guys in the group. I could see it on Adrian’s face. He had to think of something fast. He had to keep this girl’s attention on him or she might be lost to him forever. So he did the only thing he could think of. He picked up a bottle of rubbing alcohol from his nightstand and popped the cap off. This seemed to get the girl’s attention again, which in retrospect was probably not so good for him as he was now bound into doing something stupid in a misguided attempt to show off for this fine peach of a girl who sat here in his room directly across from him.

So Adrian takes a quick survey off the room and discovers everyone is now watching him. He looks at the bottle for a second then tips it back and takes a mouthful in. With his head tilted back he turns to me, and while looking out from under his glasses, he gurgles “light me up” to me. It just so happens that I’m in the process of lighting a cigarette and have a Bic lighter in my right hand. I look over to my friend John for a moment and see he has a stunned, almost “you’re not really going to do this are you?” look on his face. My gaze then travels back across the room to Adrian and along the way I see mostly puzzled looks. It’s like no one can see this coming. They can’t seem to fathom the idea that in the course of about six seconds Adrian has a mouth full of a combustible liquid and I have a lighter in my hand. I would under normal circumstances tell Adrian to quit being an ass and spit that shit out, but I was feeling a bit pissy that night so I leaned in and gave the flint wheel on the lighter a spin.

Sure enough a small flame appeared out of his mouth. I think I heard one of the guys start to say “cool,” but before he could get it all the way out the two-inch flame in Adrian’s mouth has turned into a four-inch flame. At this point all Adrian had to do was close his mouth and the flame would have been extinguished, but the flames had burned his lips and he panicked. He started to make this weird gurgling noise and leaned forward to spit the mouthful of alcohol out. Wrong move. Within seconds his whole face was ablaze. His hair crackled and shrunk away form his face as the molten liquid dripped from his chin and onto his chest and lap. He was making this “uuunnnnggg” noise as his shirt caught fire, so I grabbed a blanket from the foot of the bed and made my way over to help him put himself out.

It’s amazing how hard it is to put out a combustible liquid fire once it gets going. Put one part out and another part springs back up. At about the same time I sprung up to put my friend out, his love interest started shrieking, “Oh my god! Oh my god!” over and over. I gave half a thought to just letting him go to see just how crazy everyone would get, but I figured Jack would be pissed at me for torching his son, so after a few tries I finally managed to extinguish poor Adrian. It turned out that he was only lightly burned on his face, like a sunburn, as rubbing alcohol doesn’t burn all that hot. He had some pretty good sized blisters on his chest where his shirt had melted through, but all in all he would be able to sleep it off, and as soon as his eyebrows grew back he would be tip top again...except of course for his love interest.

For a while afterwards everyone just sat quietly in the room trying to think of funny things to say that would direct thoughts away from what had just happened. But in the end I think it was the lingering smell of burnt hair that prompted the early departure of our guests. I think it took about fourteen minutes from the time he popped that cap off until the doors on their car closed, which left Adrian, John and I alone to discuss the height and color of those flames in detail for the next few hours over a couple six-packs of beer. Later that week John slept with Adrian’s love, and their friendship was never really the same again.

So there’s a brief insight to one of many, many crazy happenings at the Thomas household. I’ll tell some more stories in the future, as I happen to reminisce about them.

“GO AWAY!!!”

He hates it when the bats catch up to him...

...

Ten years old, spooning paste into his mouth. Sticking his fingers into his nostrils, catching ants and eating them. School boys and school girls laughing, little jimmy pisses in his pants during recess.

But,

Little jimmy, for all his social troubles, has an awful big personal burden to carry.

...

Listen:

Little jimmy had a flesh mommy for the first year of his life, but this mother slipped into a coma after a suicide attempt only three days prior her failed attempt to abort jimmy’s now defunct biological brother, “kevin.”

Kevin, who would have had one of the worst cases of Down syndrome in medical history, was five months into his little womb life when his symbiotic matron decided to off him. Having failed to remove the unwanted embryo and child within her, mother returned to what she did best: topped off a couple of needles and blew wads of black tar through her bloodstream and into hers and little kevin’s brain and heart.

Boom!

The results: one hospitalized vegetable mother, costing an unaffordable thousands of dollars in doctors bills and lawyer fees, and one toasted fetus, extra crispy.

Dad was a pimp. He dealt in smack and pussy for a whole block of american tragedy. Little jimmy’s birth was an accident, but dad was a catholic, and giving the coat hanger to one of his unborn’s would have been, for him, a free ride to hell, w/out a sack lunch.

Ergo, the abortion had been his wife’s idea. It was a big secret, but when he found out about this, he laced her junk with 60 % adulterated bleach crystals, which was like pumping chernobyl nuclear waste right into her heart.

Boom!

Just like chernobyl, Boom!

...

“SCREEECCCHHH!!!!”

“LEAVE ME ALONE!!!”

The bats fangs bite deep into little jimmy’s flesh.

...

One year previous to little kevin’s brain freeze, mother was trying the same thing on little jimmy. Only she never overtly attempted to abort little jimmy, she instead shot a steady stream of H over a number of months, hoping to miscarriage him. The result: little jimmy hasn’t got enough cortex left to ever learn how to tie his shoes, let alone live any sort of a normal life.

More importantly, however, little jimmy was born horribly addicted to heroin.

...

“SCREEECCCHHH!!!!”

The fangs...

...

Dad was crucified and hung up on the apartment wall with his tongue cut out so he couldn’t scream. He’d been killed over some spat with a hooker and her rival loyalties. Little jimmy had been in the closet at the time, and two days later police would find him alive but covered in his own feces and urine and vomit. He was taken into custody and after half a year in a hospital jimmy was adopted by some middle class family in Everett, Seattle.

Little jimmy was one and a half years old and moving on to sitcom america.

What a happy ending

...

“SCREEECCHHH!!!!”

“please...........”

The bats would overbear him, taking turns sucking on his veins and he would cry...

...

Little jimmy had no track marks, he was only ten years old, sitting on the floor, eating paste, picking his nose, and pissing his pants. He had all of the signs of physical exertion common to an addict because little jimmy was born “chasing the dragon.”

Now, the last I saw of him, he was being chased down the street by about 8 of the nurses at the home here. It seems he got drunk (yeah, I know, what's new) and broke into the med room (yeah, I know, what's new) and replaced the contents of his enema bag with a mixture of Mountain Dew and some of our latest batch of home brew.

I had discovered that the batch had been over distilled and was way to powerful to drink, hell, it had a tendency to ignite when exposed to open air, and I thought I had hidden it well enough until I could figure out what to do with it.

So JEB, in his brilliance, figured that he could still enjoy it if he had it delivered... through the back door, shall we say, removing the risk of setting his face on fire and managed to locate my hiding spot (yeah, I know, what's new).

Now, every time he gets his daily enema, he puts on this big show, hollerin', yellin' and putting up a fight like they are trying to castrate him. The truth be known, he is usually grinnin' like a dog shittin' peach pits when they finally get going. But that's why there are so many nurses around, it is his idea of an orgy, you see.

Anyway, apparently the combination of Mountain Dew and the killer batch reacted with the contents of his colon (that wouldn't even be discussed in the Stileproject) and the resulting explosion turned JEB into a human rocket sled, shooting him through the wall and down the street with a roar so loud you could barely hear his WAAAAAAAAHOOOOO! over it.

I was fortunate to have been sitting out on the porch enjoying the mailman trying to avoid his daily humping by Fred when this all occured and was doubly fortunate that I wasn't sitting in the spot where JEB came through the wall like Old Dexter was (God rest his soul).

The nurses that were able to recover from the blast (they were used to his shenanigans and all wore body armor when dealing with him) took off after him screaming for blood and I figured that if by some miracle, he survived the flight, they would surely put him out of their misery as they have been threatening to do for years.

Now, I haven't actually seen the old buzzard yet, as they apparently felt the need to give him some sort of "special" therapy which usually involves a whole lot of caterwaulin' and wierd noises coming from out of that damnedable Isolation Ward that the two of us seem to wind up in on occasion.

I don't exactly know just what they do in there as I have never gone in there sober and never come out awake. But I am usually pretty durn sore in places I don't thing a person oughta be sore in, that much I know.

Now that I see he lived through it all, I can find out what the hell the Mountain Dew was added for. I've been mighty curious about that.