November 2007
Great balls of Beowulf Batman! Okay, okay I’m no super hero sidekick, but thanks to the great folks over at moviehole.net (they hooked me up with free tickets) I have witnessed the future of motion picture entertainment: Beowulf in Imax 3D!
I can’t lie, and I can’t deny, there’s no going back. I’ll never be able to watch traditional projection films again.
Robert Zemeckis has bought us all some great films in the past, Back to The Future and Forest Gump come to mind, but much praise and heaps of thanks to Bob for going with the 3D on Beowulf. I admit that I never watched Beowulf’s predecessor The Polar Express, for whatever reason that film did not appeal to me, but Beowulf
did appeal to me, and I’ll be forever grateful that it was this film that busted my 3D cherry!
Beowulf just sucked me in and filled me with the wild giddy excitement of a 10-year-old boy. It is by far the best film I have seen in over ten years. The 3D was not so much about stuff coming out off of the screen as it was about literally drawing you into the world the filmmakers created. For 1 hour and 54 minutes I was there! Right @#$% there!
Killer kudos to Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery for writing something with an adult audience in mind. Beowulf has some blood and guts amid some of the best action sequences since the original Star Wars trilogy.
No big spoilers here but a quick plot outline. There is a creepy monster haunting a small kingdom and Beowulf is called upon to rid the world of Grendel, the monster. Grendel scared the crap out of me. I was terrified when Grendel first appeared. Thankfully Grendel’s mom just happens to be played by Angelina Jolie! I swear I am not making that up. Angelina Jolie. Naked. In 3D! Why I’d pay to see that! And so should you!
Beowulf is pure cinema magic, total entertainment from start to finish!
The future of cinema has arrived!
KGD
11-17-2007
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Like A Concentration Camp
October 2007
My name is Kenneth G. Donnelly and I was born July 3, 1967. Do you know what they called that summer? They called it the summer of love.
Turning 40 was easy. Thinking about turning 40 was the hard part! I dreaded it for years.
You know what I wanted for my 40th birthday? I wanted to weigh 145 lbs. I wanted to be physically fit. I almost made it. My 40th birthday came and went with no notice by anyone at all, and I was a little sad about that, but mostly I was just relieved. Thank god I didn’t have to look at those black balloons you see around offices sometimes when someone turns 40. Over the hill!
Over the hill my ass!
I can’t tell you if I made my goal weight because I no longer have a bathroom scale and the reason I no longer have a bathroom scale is because I no longer have a bathroom. In July of 2006 I became a homeless man. Two days shy of my 39th birthday I lost everything. Hell I’m sitting here writing this in a public library, and I’m wearing some other guy’s clothes. The only things I have that are truly mine now are my thoughts.
I wrote the above on July 24th of 2007. It’s October 11, 2007 now, and I have been living on the street since August. It turns out I got my birthday wish after all. I have been walking from Largo to Clearwater and from Clearwater back to Largo each day since September 18th, that’s the day my bus pas expired, and since I haven’t been working I haven’t been able to get a new one. I’m only eating one meal a day at the St. Vincent De Paul soup kitchen. I’m hungry all the time now, really hungry. On the bright side I am now so thin my pants no longer fit. They literally fall down if I let them. I have never been this thin in my adult life. I have the whole concentration camp Jew thing going on.
I always wanted to be thin, and I always wanted to die thin, but man I sure would love a slice of Pizza or a Dunkin Donut. Strange how it gets a hold of you, it’s a feeling you can’t shake. You have to eat.
I haven’t shaved in so long I have a beard now. It’s a bit too salt and pepper, I got the look of a hot Hollywood director, Spielberg or Lucas or Francis Ford Coppola. The gray used to drive me insane, but for some reason I’m okay with it now. Maybe cause I’m so far into my own world.
KGD
October 11, 2007
My name is Kenneth G. Donnelly and I was born July 3, 1967. Do you know what they called that summer? They called it the summer of love.
Turning 40 was easy. Thinking about turning 40 was the hard part! I dreaded it for years.
You know what I wanted for my 40th birthday? I wanted to weigh 145 lbs. I wanted to be physically fit. I almost made it. My 40th birthday came and went with no notice by anyone at all, and I was a little sad about that, but mostly I was just relieved. Thank god I didn’t have to look at those black balloons you see around offices sometimes when someone turns 40. Over the hill!
Over the hill my ass!
I can’t tell you if I made my goal weight because I no longer have a bathroom scale and the reason I no longer have a bathroom scale is because I no longer have a bathroom. In July of 2006 I became a homeless man. Two days shy of my 39th birthday I lost everything. Hell I’m sitting here writing this in a public library, and I’m wearing some other guy’s clothes. The only things I have that are truly mine now are my thoughts.
I wrote the above on July 24th of 2007. It’s October 11, 2007 now, and I have been living on the street since August. It turns out I got my birthday wish after all. I have been walking from Largo to Clearwater and from Clearwater back to Largo each day since September 18th, that’s the day my bus pas expired, and since I haven’t been working I haven’t been able to get a new one. I’m only eating one meal a day at the St. Vincent De Paul soup kitchen. I’m hungry all the time now, really hungry. On the bright side I am now so thin my pants no longer fit. They literally fall down if I let them. I have never been this thin in my adult life. I have the whole concentration camp Jew thing going on.
I always wanted to be thin, and I always wanted to die thin, but man I sure would love a slice of Pizza or a Dunkin Donut. Strange how it gets a hold of you, it’s a feeling you can’t shake. You have to eat.
I haven’t shaved in so long I have a beard now. It’s a bit too salt and pepper, I got the look of a hot Hollywood director, Spielberg or Lucas or Francis Ford Coppola. The gray used to drive me insane, but for some reason I’m okay with it now. Maybe cause I’m so far into my own world.
KGD
October 11, 2007
Monday, December 3, 2007
Kiss My Abacus,on iwoz and computers
October 2007
On Computers
So I read iwoz by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith this week. It was nothing special as far as books go. It didn’t stink and it wasn’t great. But I felt compelled to read it any way. Like many people my first experience with a personal computer was with an Apple II back in the year 1977, or maybe, just maybe 1978 at the very latest. I was only ten years old at the time. The computer belonged to a friend of mine, his family; he his brother and his mother and father shared it. His parents were extremely generous and would let us kids sit at the damn thing for hours. Let us play games. The Apple II my friend’s family had was not hooked up to a T.V., they had it hooked up to a green screen.
Does anyone remember them? It was a monitor that was not even black and white. All of the characters on screen appeared “green”, against a black background. I distinctly remember playing a game that was text based. You didn’t have graphics at all. You just read paragraphs, made choices or decisions about what your character would do next, which way they would go, what room they would enter, and then you would read more paragraphs. It was a text-based game. It was fun. The one I like best was called Kidnapped. We played it on an Apple II. There were other games that did have graphics. I remember a pretty fun little Star Trek game. You would chase Klingons to different sectors and report to different star bases. Battle the Klingons and watch how much shield power your Enterprise had. How many photon torpedoes you had, and so on. It was fun.
I don’t recall ever doing anything productive on the Apple II. It was just fun. As I said we were only 10, 11 years old at the time.
It was through this friend of mine that I got to witness a steady parade of different computers through the years. At some point in the late 80’s they abandoned Apple and moved to the readily available and infinitely cheaper IBM clones. I think they had computers that predated Windows. It was not an easy or fun time to be strictly a user of computers. You really needed to have some technical knowledge to make the damn things do what you wanted. An example would be I can remember trying to get some programs to run; more often than not some game we wanted to play, and in order to make it happen, in order to even load the damn program you had to make a batch file. You had to edit the config sys batch file and create a boot disk. It was not for the faint of heart.
Then you would often sit and wait a very long time and watch a little meter fill up as the program loaded. It could take a very long time sometimes. Computers were slow!
At the same time, my friend and his family including his mother and father became extremely proficient at using a computer. They probably still know more than many people who come to use computers today. I witnessed my first Network at this friend’s house. By this time they had moved through so many machines they had more than one lying around. They created a very crude Network by plugging a cable into the back of each computer. The thrill of it is was we got to play a cool NASCAR racing game head to head. It was a first on hour block.
The first computer to enter my house, belonged to my father. This could have been about 10 or 15 years after Apple II. Remember he had six children, a wife and a mortgage. He bought himself a Macintosh when he felt that the technology was something he could handle. They had a reputation back then of being more user friendly. My father never let anyone use his Mac. He bought it and it was his. This is something I never held against him. To him it was more of a tool than a toy. At least that’s how I always looked at it.
Me I didn’t get my own personal computer until February of 1998. I paid over two grand for a Pentium II. It came with Windows 95 and I had to go through a painful upgrade to Windows 98 when it became available.
Now about the book, iwoz by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith; I wanted to read it mostly because it was the first time there seemed to be a first hand account of events that I had read about in the past. Most people have heard the story about how Apple started out in the garage at Steve Jobs’ parent’s house. It’s such a cool story. About how they eventually got invited to the Palo Alto Research Center and learned all there was to learn about great things to come like graphical user interface computers and peripherals such as the mouse. All of these cool things we take for granted today could have belonged to a company called Xerox. But the fools running that company gave it all away to a couple of smart guys from Cupertino. I love that story, but I’ve heard it a number of times before.
Most of this book came out sounding a little to dull.
Wozniak couldn’t seem to make the telling exciting. Maybe because to him it was a little like you or I talking about our first humdrum job, just another day in the life. You know?
I thought he was a little callous when talking about Steve Jobs some times. He mentioned that when naming Apple Computer he actually spoke with Jobs about the recording company Apple Records and a possible conflict. I’ve always felt that Apple Records is Apple Records and Apple Computers is Apple Computers, even when considering the ipod and itunes. Why mention a sore point like that? He did that at least one other time, and I just felt it was unnecessary.
Any way it was fun to remember a time before computers, and the time after. I was 10 when I first got to play with a computer. I was almost 30 before I could afford one of my own. It was that one that I really fell in love with. I remember thinking almost 30 minutes after I had the thing sitting on my desk, “How did I live with out one of these for so long!” I went to school. Learned about Networking. Bought a second computer. Had some fun. Any way that’s my blurb on computers. For now.
KGD
October 28, 2007
On Computers
So I read iwoz by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith this week. It was nothing special as far as books go. It didn’t stink and it wasn’t great. But I felt compelled to read it any way. Like many people my first experience with a personal computer was with an Apple II back in the year 1977, or maybe, just maybe 1978 at the very latest. I was only ten years old at the time. The computer belonged to a friend of mine, his family; he his brother and his mother and father shared it. His parents were extremely generous and would let us kids sit at the damn thing for hours. Let us play games. The Apple II my friend’s family had was not hooked up to a T.V., they had it hooked up to a green screen.
Does anyone remember them? It was a monitor that was not even black and white. All of the characters on screen appeared “green”, against a black background. I distinctly remember playing a game that was text based. You didn’t have graphics at all. You just read paragraphs, made choices or decisions about what your character would do next, which way they would go, what room they would enter, and then you would read more paragraphs. It was a text-based game. It was fun. The one I like best was called Kidnapped. We played it on an Apple II. There were other games that did have graphics. I remember a pretty fun little Star Trek game. You would chase Klingons to different sectors and report to different star bases. Battle the Klingons and watch how much shield power your Enterprise had. How many photon torpedoes you had, and so on. It was fun.
I don’t recall ever doing anything productive on the Apple II. It was just fun. As I said we were only 10, 11 years old at the time.
It was through this friend of mine that I got to witness a steady parade of different computers through the years. At some point in the late 80’s they abandoned Apple and moved to the readily available and infinitely cheaper IBM clones. I think they had computers that predated Windows. It was not an easy or fun time to be strictly a user of computers. You really needed to have some technical knowledge to make the damn things do what you wanted. An example would be I can remember trying to get some programs to run; more often than not some game we wanted to play, and in order to make it happen, in order to even load the damn program you had to make a batch file. You had to edit the config sys batch file and create a boot disk. It was not for the faint of heart.
Then you would often sit and wait a very long time and watch a little meter fill up as the program loaded. It could take a very long time sometimes. Computers were slow!
At the same time, my friend and his family including his mother and father became extremely proficient at using a computer. They probably still know more than many people who come to use computers today. I witnessed my first Network at this friend’s house. By this time they had moved through so many machines they had more than one lying around. They created a very crude Network by plugging a cable into the back of each computer. The thrill of it is was we got to play a cool NASCAR racing game head to head. It was a first on hour block.
The first computer to enter my house, belonged to my father. This could have been about 10 or 15 years after Apple II. Remember he had six children, a wife and a mortgage. He bought himself a Macintosh when he felt that the technology was something he could handle. They had a reputation back then of being more user friendly. My father never let anyone use his Mac. He bought it and it was his. This is something I never held against him. To him it was more of a tool than a toy. At least that’s how I always looked at it.
Me I didn’t get my own personal computer until February of 1998. I paid over two grand for a Pentium II. It came with Windows 95 and I had to go through a painful upgrade to Windows 98 when it became available.
Now about the book, iwoz by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith; I wanted to read it mostly because it was the first time there seemed to be a first hand account of events that I had read about in the past. Most people have heard the story about how Apple started out in the garage at Steve Jobs’ parent’s house. It’s such a cool story. About how they eventually got invited to the Palo Alto Research Center and learned all there was to learn about great things to come like graphical user interface computers and peripherals such as the mouse. All of these cool things we take for granted today could have belonged to a company called Xerox. But the fools running that company gave it all away to a couple of smart guys from Cupertino. I love that story, but I’ve heard it a number of times before.
Most of this book came out sounding a little to dull.
Wozniak couldn’t seem to make the telling exciting. Maybe because to him it was a little like you or I talking about our first humdrum job, just another day in the life. You know?
I thought he was a little callous when talking about Steve Jobs some times. He mentioned that when naming Apple Computer he actually spoke with Jobs about the recording company Apple Records and a possible conflict. I’ve always felt that Apple Records is Apple Records and Apple Computers is Apple Computers, even when considering the ipod and itunes. Why mention a sore point like that? He did that at least one other time, and I just felt it was unnecessary.
Any way it was fun to remember a time before computers, and the time after. I was 10 when I first got to play with a computer. I was almost 30 before I could afford one of my own. It was that one that I really fell in love with. I remember thinking almost 30 minutes after I had the thing sitting on my desk, “How did I live with out one of these for so long!” I went to school. Learned about Networking. Bought a second computer. Had some fun. Any way that’s my blurb on computers. For now.
KGD
October 28, 2007
Sunday, December 2, 2007
The Road, A Book Review
September 2007
It’s September 25, 2007, and I would like to tell you how I spent my day with the Xbox 360, as Master Chief, playing Halo 3 and kicking ass, and that’s exactly what I would have done if I were still living my old life. But my old life is as dead as the dinosaurs. So instead I passed the entire day; that is the time I wasn’t walking from Largo to Clearwater and then from Clearwater back to Largo, reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. So that’s what I’m going to talk about.
I heard so much about this book, many rave reviews, and I have to admit until I did, I had never before heard the name Cormac McCarthy. I don’t watch Oprah, and I could care less what book she is pushing, though I love books so much I’m glad that she pushes them. So I picked it up.
I found myself wondering, just every so often exactly what happened to the punctuation in this book. There are no quotation marks in The Road. But it works. There are so few characters, manly just a man and a boy and the post apocalyptic world that they live in, and such limited dialogue that maybe Mr. McCarthy just figured, hey I don’t need no stinking quotation marks. Does he use them in his other books?
I can’t be sure if this book totally blew my away, or just left me empty. I think it may be both. And if you consider that, it’s actually a huge complement to Cormac McCarthy. I think the book was all about leaving you empty. The man and the boy in his story are lurching through a world devoid of color, devoid of birds, almost but not quite devoid of life, struggling to find food, to make it through the day, to survive.
I’ve never read anything so bleak. Two hundred eighty pages of grim strife, and the love between a man and his son.
KGD
09-25-2007
It’s September 25, 2007, and I would like to tell you how I spent my day with the Xbox 360, as Master Chief, playing Halo 3 and kicking ass, and that’s exactly what I would have done if I were still living my old life. But my old life is as dead as the dinosaurs. So instead I passed the entire day; that is the time I wasn’t walking from Largo to Clearwater and then from Clearwater back to Largo, reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. So that’s what I’m going to talk about.
I heard so much about this book, many rave reviews, and I have to admit until I did, I had never before heard the name Cormac McCarthy. I don’t watch Oprah, and I could care less what book she is pushing, though I love books so much I’m glad that she pushes them. So I picked it up.
I found myself wondering, just every so often exactly what happened to the punctuation in this book. There are no quotation marks in The Road. But it works. There are so few characters, manly just a man and a boy and the post apocalyptic world that they live in, and such limited dialogue that maybe Mr. McCarthy just figured, hey I don’t need no stinking quotation marks. Does he use them in his other books?
I can’t be sure if this book totally blew my away, or just left me empty. I think it may be both. And if you consider that, it’s actually a huge complement to Cormac McCarthy. I think the book was all about leaving you empty. The man and the boy in his story are lurching through a world devoid of color, devoid of birds, almost but not quite devoid of life, struggling to find food, to make it through the day, to survive.
I’ve never read anything so bleak. Two hundred eighty pages of grim strife, and the love between a man and his son.
KGD
09-25-2007
3-D's Second Coming
September 2007
3-D’s Second Coming
Or is it 3-D’s 3rd Coming?
Tell me I don’t have way too much time on my hands! I’m worried about summer 2009. I’m worried about the assault of 3-D! With Jim Cameron’s Avatar and Dreamwork’s Monsters vs. Aliens slated to hit theaters Memorial Day 2009, the final iteration of 3-D may become a reality in the very near future, some time in my lifetime.
I’ve been keeping up with the ins and outs of it. I have read at least one article that said using this new technology it may be possible to present an old film in a whole new format. The film mentioned was Star Wars. I’m such a geek. I would kill to see Star Wars in 3-D. I’m such a geek, I would camp out to be first in line to see Star Wars in 3-D. But there’s a lot I would not care to see in 3-D. And that’s the problem. Do we need to watch every film in the future in 3-D? What is this new format, what is this new 3-D really going to be able to do for a film like Superbad, or L.A. Confidential? Do you get where I’m going with this? There are plenty of great movies that are all about dialogue and not much else. Great stories to be sure, but not a lot of action, not a lot of stuff blowing up, not a lot of chases. Not much action! So what kind of dimension would 3-D add to a film like that?
My biggest fear is 3-D porn. Do I really need a 3-D money shot? How long before or after 2009 till it’s not even an option. How long before you’ll have to duck for fear of um…getting some on you? I guess with those 3-D glasses on at least you won’t have to worry about getting any in your eye.
I’ve seen 3-D done well, but only once. And I’ve seen 3-D done the same way everyone else has with those silly red and blue glasses. The 3-D that I watched that was done well was somewhere in Orlando. It would have been a film called Captain Eo, but
Walt Disney pulled it after the star Michael Jackson was accused of being naughty. So what I saw was a really generic flick with no plot but stunning 3-D effects. I remember a brief scene with kites flying shot from up above the kites looking down at the people flying them. I actually put my hands up to reach out and touch the kites.
What’s to be said about the cheesy red blue 3-D? Not much.
…until summer 2009?
KGD
09-21-2007
3-D’s Second Coming
Or is it 3-D’s 3rd Coming?
Tell me I don’t have way too much time on my hands! I’m worried about summer 2009. I’m worried about the assault of 3-D! With Jim Cameron’s Avatar and Dreamwork’s Monsters vs. Aliens slated to hit theaters Memorial Day 2009, the final iteration of 3-D may become a reality in the very near future, some time in my lifetime.
I’ve been keeping up with the ins and outs of it. I have read at least one article that said using this new technology it may be possible to present an old film in a whole new format. The film mentioned was Star Wars. I’m such a geek. I would kill to see Star Wars in 3-D. I’m such a geek, I would camp out to be first in line to see Star Wars in 3-D. But there’s a lot I would not care to see in 3-D. And that’s the problem. Do we need to watch every film in the future in 3-D? What is this new format, what is this new 3-D really going to be able to do for a film like Superbad, or L.A. Confidential? Do you get where I’m going with this? There are plenty of great movies that are all about dialogue and not much else. Great stories to be sure, but not a lot of action, not a lot of stuff blowing up, not a lot of chases. Not much action! So what kind of dimension would 3-D add to a film like that?
My biggest fear is 3-D porn. Do I really need a 3-D money shot? How long before or after 2009 till it’s not even an option. How long before you’ll have to duck for fear of um…getting some on you? I guess with those 3-D glasses on at least you won’t have to worry about getting any in your eye.
I’ve seen 3-D done well, but only once. And I’ve seen 3-D done the same way everyone else has with those silly red and blue glasses. The 3-D that I watched that was done well was somewhere in Orlando. It would have been a film called Captain Eo, but
Walt Disney pulled it after the star Michael Jackson was accused of being naughty. So what I saw was a really generic flick with no plot but stunning 3-D effects. I remember a brief scene with kites flying shot from up above the kites looking down at the people flying them. I actually put my hands up to reach out and touch the kites.
What’s to be said about the cheesy red blue 3-D? Not much.
…until summer 2009?
KGD
09-21-2007
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Like A Rainbow, A Book Review
September 2007
Rainbow Six Review
Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy is to long by at least 300 pages, and maybe more.The book is about an elite group of guys from different nationalities (thus the Rainbow) that are organized to fight global terrorism. The group is lead by John Clark who I believe was introduced in the Tom Clancy book Without Remorse. Rainbow Six started off great, terrorists attacked a rich guy at his mansion, terrorists took over an amusement park, terrorist tried to hijack the plane that the Rainbow team just happened to be on, and of course each time the Rainbow team kicked ass and stopped the terrorists plot, but after that Tom Clancy just rambles on and on. I mean there must have been over 200 hundred pages of: Guy goes into bar, meets another guy, they talk about secret stuff, one guy leaves the bar gets on a plane, the flight is long and boring…not unlike this book. Two hundred pages of this. Occasionally Clancy would follow the actions of an organization working on a “Project” that involves a plot to kill most of the entire population of the planet Earth, and even these scenes got really boring. It seemed to me Clancy kept repeating himself. You don’t have to hit us over the head with the notion that these are real bad people we are dealing with here Tom. We get it when you tell us that they are going to unleash a deadly virus that will kill all the people on Earth.
I can’t lie. I loved about the first 333 pages. Terrorists do something. Rainbow stops them. Just like the game. I mean how can I even compare a book to a video game? I played the game and I read the book so that’s what I’m going to do. In the game it got pretty repetitious, even monotonous, but it was still fun. Terrorist would do something, and you would take your Rainbow team in and take out the terrorists, rescue the hostages, disarm the bomb, or whatever. It was fun, but after a while kinda dull at the same time, but not nearly as dull as Rainbow Six the book. At least with the video game you had the whole Xbox Live Online play action that made the game so damn cool. That shit never got old if you ask me.
The book jumped the fucking shark when terrorist go after John Clark’s family. Yawn. How come they use this plot in every freaking book or movie? How come? I hate to tell you this Tom Clancy, but some people would Pay to see their family rubbed out!
Clancy is known as some kind of techno geek, but even this techno crap was just a case of to much information. It’s cool to have detail, it’s cool to have facts, but there is a point where too much of a good thing is not a good thing. This book ran 897 pages and could easily been about 500 or less and been a much tighter action packed book. I hear they are working on the movie. The movie should be great if they just use the first 333 pages and the last 50 or so.
The ending was great and for me a bit of a surprise. I just didn’t see it coming. But did we really need all that crap that was in between. I mean how many times are you going to tell me about a guy who gets on a plane and the flight is really long and boring. I get it already. This is not Tom Clancy’s best by a long shot. Try The Hunt for Red October or Without Remorse if you are just getting into Tom Clancy.
KGD
09-16-2007
Rainbow Six Review
Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy is to long by at least 300 pages, and maybe more.The book is about an elite group of guys from different nationalities (thus the Rainbow) that are organized to fight global terrorism. The group is lead by John Clark who I believe was introduced in the Tom Clancy book Without Remorse. Rainbow Six started off great, terrorists attacked a rich guy at his mansion, terrorists took over an amusement park, terrorist tried to hijack the plane that the Rainbow team just happened to be on, and of course each time the Rainbow team kicked ass and stopped the terrorists plot, but after that Tom Clancy just rambles on and on. I mean there must have been over 200 hundred pages of: Guy goes into bar, meets another guy, they talk about secret stuff, one guy leaves the bar gets on a plane, the flight is long and boring…not unlike this book. Two hundred pages of this. Occasionally Clancy would follow the actions of an organization working on a “Project” that involves a plot to kill most of the entire population of the planet Earth, and even these scenes got really boring. It seemed to me Clancy kept repeating himself. You don’t have to hit us over the head with the notion that these are real bad people we are dealing with here Tom. We get it when you tell us that they are going to unleash a deadly virus that will kill all the people on Earth.
I can’t lie. I loved about the first 333 pages. Terrorists do something. Rainbow stops them. Just like the game. I mean how can I even compare a book to a video game? I played the game and I read the book so that’s what I’m going to do. In the game it got pretty repetitious, even monotonous, but it was still fun. Terrorist would do something, and you would take your Rainbow team in and take out the terrorists, rescue the hostages, disarm the bomb, or whatever. It was fun, but after a while kinda dull at the same time, but not nearly as dull as Rainbow Six the book. At least with the video game you had the whole Xbox Live Online play action that made the game so damn cool. That shit never got old if you ask me.
The book jumped the fucking shark when terrorist go after John Clark’s family. Yawn. How come they use this plot in every freaking book or movie? How come? I hate to tell you this Tom Clancy, but some people would Pay to see their family rubbed out!
Clancy is known as some kind of techno geek, but even this techno crap was just a case of to much information. It’s cool to have detail, it’s cool to have facts, but there is a point where too much of a good thing is not a good thing. This book ran 897 pages and could easily been about 500 or less and been a much tighter action packed book. I hear they are working on the movie. The movie should be great if they just use the first 333 pages and the last 50 or so.
The ending was great and for me a bit of a surprise. I just didn’t see it coming. But did we really need all that crap that was in between. I mean how many times are you going to tell me about a guy who gets on a plane and the flight is really long and boring. I get it already. This is not Tom Clancy’s best by a long shot. Try The Hunt for Red October or Without Remorse if you are just getting into Tom Clancy.
KGD
09-16-2007
Blast From The Past
September 2007
On Remakes
How long before Hollywood starts to remake remakes? I’m just wondering because I watched Halloween recently and the original has only been around since 1978.
Am I really going to have to live through yet another Night He Came Home, if I should
live that long? I’m starting to think that I might. That’s like someone deciding to go ahead and remake Star Wars.
My next huge beef with remakes is how come they are always remaking films that were great to begin with? Don’t get me wrong I realize that from a business standpoint it’s a no-brainer, you do a remake of something good because it at least has a built in audience. I get it. But I don’t get it!
Why don’t they freaking remake movies that could have been good, should have been good, but were not any good. Want a list:
Battlefield Earth
Water World
The League of Extraordinary Gentleman
Van Helsing
Deep Blue Sea
Scooby Doo
I could go on forever of course. And I know that you can easily add a few of your own. Go ahead, think about it. There’s a movie you almost like, it just needed a little more work to make it work, to make it great. That’s it! That’s the remake I want to see.
I want Hollywood to fix their damn abominations! Break out the shovels, dust off the money men, I wan to see a risky remake of something that should have been box office gold in the first fucking place!
That’s it. That’s my pitch on remakes.
Kenneth G. Donnelly
09-09-2007
On Remakes
How long before Hollywood starts to remake remakes? I’m just wondering because I watched Halloween recently and the original has only been around since 1978.
Am I really going to have to live through yet another Night He Came Home, if I should
live that long? I’m starting to think that I might. That’s like someone deciding to go ahead and remake Star Wars.
My next huge beef with remakes is how come they are always remaking films that were great to begin with? Don’t get me wrong I realize that from a business standpoint it’s a no-brainer, you do a remake of something good because it at least has a built in audience. I get it. But I don’t get it!
Why don’t they freaking remake movies that could have been good, should have been good, but were not any good. Want a list:
Battlefield Earth
Water World
The League of Extraordinary Gentleman
Van Helsing
Deep Blue Sea
Scooby Doo
I could go on forever of course. And I know that you can easily add a few of your own. Go ahead, think about it. There’s a movie you almost like, it just needed a little more work to make it work, to make it great. That’s it! That’s the remake I want to see.
I want Hollywood to fix their damn abominations! Break out the shovels, dust off the money men, I wan to see a risky remake of something that should have been box office gold in the first fucking place!
That’s it. That’s my pitch on remakes.
Kenneth G. Donnelly
09-09-2007
Friday, November 30, 2007
Blast From The Past Part 2
September 2007
I took the 3:10 to Park Side Mall in Pinellas Park yesterday to catch 3:10 to Yuma. Giddy up!
I can’t lie. I am such a geek I spent more than a minute thinking: Isn’t Yuma where they filmed Return of The Jedi?
3:10 was a good film, but in my opinion not a great film. I actually wanted to see
Shoot’Em Up, but because I am poor and was just killing some time, I chose to watch the film that had the longest running time, thus I wound up at 3:10 to Yuma.
Here is a real brief plot synopsis: Bad guy robs stage coach. Good guy decides to escort bad guy out of town so that he can collect a reward that will save his family. That’s pretty much it.
What I liked best about 03:10 to Yuma is it at least played like a film by and for adults. No offense to the younger crowd, but I have watched a few movies over that past months that could have been great if the makers would have stopped trying to churn out something “The Whole Family Can Enjoy”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I don’t really care for Russell Crowe, but you can’t deny that he was as good in this as he has been in all of his movies. I liked seeing him play a bad guy and he did it well.
Despite how much work he’s been in I have never even heard of Ben Foster, but his turn as Charlie Prince was great. Okay that’s the thing, all of the acting was top notch and believable. I knew I was looking at people I had seen before, and their acting was so good I could not place where I had seen them. This is brilliant film making in my opinion.
My favorite part: They are escaping from the Union Pacific Railroad construction
site and they are on horse back and one guy is going on about how he clocked some guy with a shovel and then just then he gets shot and falls off his horse. I loved the whole Union Pacific Railroad construction sequence. It was cool.
I thought the ending of the film was weak, and not believable. Not sure what they could have done different, but something needed to be tweaked in the script. They had me up until Crowe and Bale leave the hotel and head for the train. There was a lot of action but I just couldn’t buy it. Despite that I had a great time on the 3:10 to Yuma.
* * * * * * out of 10 = 6/10
KGD
09-08-2007
I took the 3:10 to Park Side Mall in Pinellas Park yesterday to catch 3:10 to Yuma. Giddy up!
I can’t lie. I am such a geek I spent more than a minute thinking: Isn’t Yuma where they filmed Return of The Jedi?
3:10 was a good film, but in my opinion not a great film. I actually wanted to see
Shoot’Em Up, but because I am poor and was just killing some time, I chose to watch the film that had the longest running time, thus I wound up at 3:10 to Yuma.
Here is a real brief plot synopsis: Bad guy robs stage coach. Good guy decides to escort bad guy out of town so that he can collect a reward that will save his family. That’s pretty much it.
What I liked best about 03:10 to Yuma is it at least played like a film by and for adults. No offense to the younger crowd, but I have watched a few movies over that past months that could have been great if the makers would have stopped trying to churn out something “The Whole Family Can Enjoy”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I don’t really care for Russell Crowe, but you can’t deny that he was as good in this as he has been in all of his movies. I liked seeing him play a bad guy and he did it well.
Despite how much work he’s been in I have never even heard of Ben Foster, but his turn as Charlie Prince was great. Okay that’s the thing, all of the acting was top notch and believable. I knew I was looking at people I had seen before, and their acting was so good I could not place where I had seen them. This is brilliant film making in my opinion.
My favorite part: They are escaping from the Union Pacific Railroad construction
site and they are on horse back and one guy is going on about how he clocked some guy with a shovel and then just then he gets shot and falls off his horse. I loved the whole Union Pacific Railroad construction sequence. It was cool.
I thought the ending of the film was weak, and not believable. Not sure what they could have done different, but something needed to be tweaked in the script. They had me up until Crowe and Bale leave the hotel and head for the train. There was a lot of action but I just couldn’t buy it. Despite that I had a great time on the 3:10 to Yuma.
* * * * * * out of 10 = 6/10
KGD
09-08-2007
Blast From The Past
September 2007
I reluctantly went to see Rob Zombie's take on the John Carpenter classic Halloween over the long holiday (Labor Day) weekend. There was nothing else playing that really grabbed my attention. Here is my review, including some spoilers.
I liked the new stuff Rob Z added about what made Michael Myers Michael Myers, but at the same time I felt that it detracted from any chance The Shape had of being scary. In fact all the creepy stuff in the beginning made me sympathize with the killer a little bit. I think Rob Zombie should have made an entire movie out of the young character and his downward spiral into killing. It would have been really scary to see a nice suburban neighborhood with a bunch of "lost" or "missing" posters nailed to telephone poles with pictures of kittens and puppies, it turns out Michael started by killing small pets, stray cats and dogs or whatever, I mean really there is a complete movie just in that aspect of this new Michael Myers. A really dark, creepy, scary movie.
I haven't seen the original in many years so I can't really say if it was ever scary to me, but my guess is that it was at least a little scary. I can't say the same thing about the new Halloween. It was not scary.
Malcolm McDowell did not do justice to the character of Dr. Samuel Loomis. I never once believed that he really feared Michael Myers. Watch the original and you can't say the same thing about the performance of Donald Pleasance.
I liked the way they showed how Michael Myers was so uncomfortable in his own skin, that he became obsessed with making masks that he could hide behind. I also liked how intensely angry and violent the new Michael Myers acted. I didn't keep count, but he killed a number of his victims with just his massive size and brute force. Did Michael Myers kill a bunch of his victims with his bare hands in the original?
I thought the movie just fell apart when it came down to the remake of Michael returning home. I thought the ending was just vague and not well done. When the girl was hiding from Michael and she went up into the attic. Who would do this? They showed Michael down below thrusting something up into the attic where she was hiding. I thought this was just lame and unoriginal. There was a total lack of suspense at the end.
It just fizzled out.
* * * * out of 10 stars.
KGD
09-04-2007
I reluctantly went to see Rob Zombie's take on the John Carpenter classic Halloween over the long holiday (Labor Day) weekend. There was nothing else playing that really grabbed my attention. Here is my review, including some spoilers.
I liked the new stuff Rob Z added about what made Michael Myers Michael Myers, but at the same time I felt that it detracted from any chance The Shape had of being scary. In fact all the creepy stuff in the beginning made me sympathize with the killer a little bit. I think Rob Zombie should have made an entire movie out of the young character and his downward spiral into killing. It would have been really scary to see a nice suburban neighborhood with a bunch of "lost" or "missing" posters nailed to telephone poles with pictures of kittens and puppies, it turns out Michael started by killing small pets, stray cats and dogs or whatever, I mean really there is a complete movie just in that aspect of this new Michael Myers. A really dark, creepy, scary movie.
I haven't seen the original in many years so I can't really say if it was ever scary to me, but my guess is that it was at least a little scary. I can't say the same thing about the new Halloween. It was not scary.
Malcolm McDowell did not do justice to the character of Dr. Samuel Loomis. I never once believed that he really feared Michael Myers. Watch the original and you can't say the same thing about the performance of Donald Pleasance.
I liked the way they showed how Michael Myers was so uncomfortable in his own skin, that he became obsessed with making masks that he could hide behind. I also liked how intensely angry and violent the new Michael Myers acted. I didn't keep count, but he killed a number of his victims with just his massive size and brute force. Did Michael Myers kill a bunch of his victims with his bare hands in the original?
I thought the movie just fell apart when it came down to the remake of Michael returning home. I thought the ending was just vague and not well done. When the girl was hiding from Michael and she went up into the attic. Who would do this? They showed Michael down below thrusting something up into the attic where she was hiding. I thought this was just lame and unoriginal. There was a total lack of suspense at the end.
It just fizzled out.
* * * * out of 10 stars.
KGD
09-04-2007
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Confessions of A Peanut Butter Junkie
Interlude: Wherein We Talk About Peanut Butter
Skippy. That’s the kind of peanut butter I grew up on. When I was a really little kid my mom would make us peanut butter sandwiches with Skippy peanut butter. I liked mine without jelly and no crust. She would cut the crust off if she was in a good mood, and she wouldn’t if she wasn’t.
By the time I was a teenager for reasons unknown to me, my mom stopped bringing Skippy peanut butter home, and started bringing Peter Pan peanut butter instead. I loved it. This after she had, maybe once or twice; brought home Jif. Man I hate Jif. It tastes like the nuts were burned in the fires of Hell and topped with a fresh turd. Peter Pan, I was still eating Peter Pan when I moved into an apartment all my own way back in 1995. In fact I was so poor that sometimes I would eat PB&J two times a day, and I’m not complaining. I loved it.
So how is this a confession you may be wondering? Okay. My parents had six kids, and I can’t vouch for all of them, but most of us ate peanut butter on a regular basis, and I know for a fact that I ate peanut butter just about every single day. Again this is neither a complaint nor a rage against my parent’s ability to provide for me. I loved peanut butter just as much then as I do now. It may be, in some small way a confession and an apology. See when we were kids, when the jar of peanut butter got pretty close to empty, when you couldn’t really get any more peanut butter out of the jar with the use of a regular knife, we kids would just pitch the jar of peanut butter into the trash. As far as we were concerned it was empty.
“But it’s not empty,” my mother and father would say. “There’s still some in there. All you have to do is get a spatula and scrape the rest out.”
We kids shook our heads at this madness. Spatula? Scrape? Please! We kids had no idea, no clue what ever of the true value of a dollar, and what it means to get your moneys worth., to get every last drop of peanut butter out of the jar. Lot’s of peanut butter got totally and completely wasted.
I’m a grown man now, and homeless. I haven’t owned and operated a jar of Peter Pan (or any other kind of peanut butter for that matter) in over 18 months. It’s something I miss. Comfort. Food. Comfort food. Now for the confession. In my old apartment, hell in all of my apartments, devoid of furnishings save a chair, a couple of lamps, an entertainment center, and a bed, I would often have five or six jars of peanut butter. Peter Pan of course. It’s the kind I like. One would be full or fresh, and the others would be just about empty. I never ever threw a jar of peanut butter out. Not until I got out my spatula and scraped every last bit of peanut butter out of the jar. Every last bit. I would then combine the globs of peanut butter into one jar, or make a couple of peanut butter sandwiches with it right then and there. I had finally learned the value of a dollar, and was always ready and willing to get my last pennies worth of peanut butter out of the jar, and I secretly hated myself for disobeying my parents, for not listening to them when I was kid and getting out the spatula and scraping out the very last drop. It didn’t feel cheap when I did it as an adult. It felt good. Like I had some how triumphed, like I had won. ****
I was not affected by the peanut butter recall that happened on or about February of 2007. As I was homeless I had not been to the store to buy peanut butter in months. Had I been living in my old apartment I think that there is a good chance that I could very well have been affected by the Salmonella scare as it did involve my favorite brand of peanut butter: Peter Pan.
Skippy. That’s the kind of peanut butter I grew up on. When I was a really little kid my mom would make us peanut butter sandwiches with Skippy peanut butter. I liked mine without jelly and no crust. She would cut the crust off if she was in a good mood, and she wouldn’t if she wasn’t.
By the time I was a teenager for reasons unknown to me, my mom stopped bringing Skippy peanut butter home, and started bringing Peter Pan peanut butter instead. I loved it. This after she had, maybe once or twice; brought home Jif. Man I hate Jif. It tastes like the nuts were burned in the fires of Hell and topped with a fresh turd. Peter Pan, I was still eating Peter Pan when I moved into an apartment all my own way back in 1995. In fact I was so poor that sometimes I would eat PB&J two times a day, and I’m not complaining. I loved it.
So how is this a confession you may be wondering? Okay. My parents had six kids, and I can’t vouch for all of them, but most of us ate peanut butter on a regular basis, and I know for a fact that I ate peanut butter just about every single day. Again this is neither a complaint nor a rage against my parent’s ability to provide for me. I loved peanut butter just as much then as I do now. It may be, in some small way a confession and an apology. See when we were kids, when the jar of peanut butter got pretty close to empty, when you couldn’t really get any more peanut butter out of the jar with the use of a regular knife, we kids would just pitch the jar of peanut butter into the trash. As far as we were concerned it was empty.
“But it’s not empty,” my mother and father would say. “There’s still some in there. All you have to do is get a spatula and scrape the rest out.”
We kids shook our heads at this madness. Spatula? Scrape? Please! We kids had no idea, no clue what ever of the true value of a dollar, and what it means to get your moneys worth., to get every last drop of peanut butter out of the jar. Lot’s of peanut butter got totally and completely wasted.
I’m a grown man now, and homeless. I haven’t owned and operated a jar of Peter Pan (or any other kind of peanut butter for that matter) in over 18 months. It’s something I miss. Comfort. Food. Comfort food. Now for the confession. In my old apartment, hell in all of my apartments, devoid of furnishings save a chair, a couple of lamps, an entertainment center, and a bed, I would often have five or six jars of peanut butter. Peter Pan of course. It’s the kind I like. One would be full or fresh, and the others would be just about empty. I never ever threw a jar of peanut butter out. Not until I got out my spatula and scraped every last bit of peanut butter out of the jar. Every last bit. I would then combine the globs of peanut butter into one jar, or make a couple of peanut butter sandwiches with it right then and there. I had finally learned the value of a dollar, and was always ready and willing to get my last pennies worth of peanut butter out of the jar, and I secretly hated myself for disobeying my parents, for not listening to them when I was kid and getting out the spatula and scraping out the very last drop. It didn’t feel cheap when I did it as an adult. It felt good. Like I had some how triumphed, like I had won. ****
I was not affected by the peanut butter recall that happened on or about February of 2007. As I was homeless I had not been to the store to buy peanut butter in months. Had I been living in my old apartment I think that there is a good chance that I could very well have been affected by the Salmonella scare as it did involve my favorite brand of peanut butter: Peter Pan.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Confessions of A Peanut Butter Junkie
So I wound up back at the Clearwater Homeless Intervention Project shelter. I got back in October of 2006, my second time starting over at the C.H.I.P. center.
I met a guy named Scott Rollins that time. He was cool, and he stands out as the only person I have met at the C.H.I.P. center that I genuinely liked and it’s to bad, because he was my enemy right from the start. He would bring movies back to the C.H.I.P. center and the movies he picked always seemed to have a subliminal message just for me.
One time Scott Rollins and I watched part of the old Tom Cruise flick “Legend” together. It’s a fantasy movie directed by Ridley Scott, and it’s not so great.
The movie features the devil and here is one of his lines,
The Lord of Darkness: Oh, Mother Night! Fold your dark arms about me. Protect me in your black embrace. I sit alone, an impotent exile, whilst this form, this presence, returns to torment me!
Right. Impotent exile. Got it.
He brought a few others that always seemed to have a ridiculous undercurrent or theme that had a little something to do with my hopeless situation.
He insisted on watching “The Ringer” with me. It stars Johnny Knoxville as a guy who fixes the Special Olympics by posing as a mentally handicapped person, all so that he can pay off his bad debt.
Mike Murphy, the fat bastard from Mercury Insurance was a big fan of “The Ringer” and I remember him actually pitching the film to me one time.
Despite Scott Rollins’s poor taste in movies I liked him any way. He had this way of talking and I loved the sound of his voice. Scott is a big guy. Big hands. Big feet.
Big. Not the kind of guy you want to piss off. Not for any reason. So I just stayed cool.
But eventually I called him on his odd choice of films for him and I to watch. He implied that I am a total paranoid schizophrenic. I implied that he is my enemy and that I know that he is my enemy. It’s a shame because I really liked him. Still do.
The guy I met my second time through the C.H.I.P. program that I didn’t like so much was named Rick. His last name sounds like but is not spelled like: Kazmarick. That’s kind of a phonetic spelling. Rick will talk your ear off. Rick is very well read, and smart.
Rick is a Republican, or at least he posed as one to me. Rick will defend President Bush, and will not concede that President Bush is a huge asshole.
But at least Rick would talk about things. Most people at the C.H.I.P. center had no interest in talking about greater social, economic, or political issues. I keep up on current events, and I have some odd opinions about some things. We talked quite a bit, because my bed was right next to Rick’s bed in the men’s dorm room. When I got to an issue I did not agree with him on, I always folded. I would concede and then just restate my own opinion. Often I would talk with him about things that I like such as books or movies, and I would do this to avoid a political discussion.
I never completely trusted Rick Kazmarick. He came on strong, and I always got the feeling he wanted something from me. My soul perhaps?
Ken, Ken, Ken, your saying. You’re a beer drinking, porno watching, drunk driving,
pill popping, pot smoking, coffee drinking, pervert, with no soul left what so ever.
Nope. I’ve still got nothing but soul!
Finally I want to tell you about a guy whose real name I don’t even know.
This dude is an ex junkie or a struggling junkie, and by junkie I mean the hard stuff.
A heroin user.
He’s spooky looking as hell. He looks like the lead singer from the Rock band Anthrax, he’s covered in tattoos, and he has this odd looking goatee. Everyone called him Tweak, because he was tweaking.
One time Tweak approaches me as I am sitting on my bed in the morning. I think I had just put on my shoes. He starts up a conversation. I’m not rude. I talk to the guy.
I admit to this Tweak that I am a convicted felon and things are not exactly looking to good for me and he turns around and says, “I can help you get an unregistered hand gun. It’s what I do.”
Hu? What?
What the fuck?
Then Tweak dropped off the face of the Earth. When I got back to the C.H.I.P. center later that evening he was gone.
Someone pitched a line of bullshit so long I think it stretched from Earth to Alpha Centauri. That’s 4.37 light years, or 25.8 trillion miles from home. If E.T. had been staying at the C.H.I.P. center he wouldn’t have had to phone home, he could have walked home on the line of bullshit someone was pitching.
See they told me that Tweak disappeared because he had an infection around his heart and had to go to the hospital and that he would be staying there a while. I think Tweak may have had an infection, but I think it was around his brain and not his heart.
My guess is Tweak was in jail. I have no proof though.
I think I would have been okay the second time through the C.H.I.P. program if it hadn’t been for First Global Services.
I was glad that they took me back, I needed a job, but man do I hate telemarketing. As much as you hate getting calls from telemarketers, I hate calling you as a telemarketer even more.
Despite how much fun I was having at First Global Services, I hung in until January of 2007. Then one day my boss called me into his office and said that I was not doing my part by not giving my attendees specific directions to wherever the travel seminar was being held. It was part of my job to really sell the seminar, and if the person I was speaking with agreed to attend it was also part of my job to make damn sure they got to the seminar by going over the driving directions with them. I gave the seminars a real soft pitch, and I never went over directions unless the person I was speaking with asked for them. I would give the address of course. But this was not enough. So considering that my boss was not happy with the way I was doing my job, and considering that I was not happy with the job I called it quits.
This created a big problem at the C.H.I.P. center. One I didn’t tell any of the administrators, and two they found out. I knew that they knew, but it was my duty to go to them and inform them. Because I didn’t I was punished, and punishment meant that I would be sleeping on the floor again. This is kind of miserable because you have no where to be. You have to roll out a little sleeping mat each evening and then roll it up each morning even on weekends too, so that you are effectively homeless again. You
have no where to be.
I started looking for work. I didn’t have much luck, so eventually I wound up at Special Data Processing. I took what I could get. But a lot of time had passed and because of my sleeping situation at the C.H.I.P. center I was exhausted. If I could have hung in there another week or so I would have been okay, but I couldn’t. One day I just had to sleep. It was on a weekend. So I checked into a hotel. By doing this I blew my budget. You have to keep a budget at the C.H.I.P. center. Here’s how it works. You get to keep 70 dollars each week. Everything else you come by has to be put into an account. They monitor this activity each week and violation on budget is a big one. They’ll kick you out for this kind of thing.
So I checked into a cheap motel to get some sleep. I crashed. When I woke up and felt a little better I went back to the C.H.I.P. center to get my stuff. It was February of 2007.
This year. I was homeless again.
Now before I left the C.H.I.P. center that time a couple of odd things happened. One time I was accused of smelling bad. The problem was I had just gotten out of the shower. I think three guys came over to my bunk and demanded that I get in the shower. I said no.
But they were really insistent. One of them called me dog. They use it as a kind of term of endearment I think.
“Hey dog, chill,” someone said.
“Don’t dog me,” I said.
See they wanted to get me into the shower for some reason but I was not in the mood to play along. I know I didn’t stink but that’s what they were accusing me of.
Another time I had a little problem there was in December of 2006. Some old guy named Lesley or Leslie, he was talking shit and he was in my area over near my bunk and he started to talk about poisoning the food out in the common are. See at the C.H.I.P. center there is a common kitchen area where you can keep a little bit of food if you want. I never do because people are always stealing each other’s food and I don’t want anything to do with it. But here comes this old guy Lesley and he starts talking about poisoning the food so that if someone steals his food they will get sick. Now I’ve told you about how I have been poisoned, and I have implied that I didn’t think it was so cool. Well when I heard old Lesley talking about poisoning someone, actually laughing about it, I got really pissed. Especially since someone had just poisoned me with dick juice. Right there at the C.H.I.P. center.
I tore old Lesley a new one. I called him a fucking freak.
“Poisoning someone’s food is not funny you fucking freak,” I said.
I called him a fucking freak several times. I yelled. I can be loud if I have to.
There were a number of people standing around, and I think I scared the crap out of all them. After that they tended to call me bipolar. But I am not bipolar. I am anti bullshit though.
Back when I worked at Mercury Insurance sometimes I would walk around all day without my glasses on. Someone once asked me about it.
“Hey Ken how come you don’t have your glasses on?” They asked.
“I’m maximizing my efficiency by minimizing my bullshit,” I said.
Old Lesley left not soon after that. I don’t know if he left because of me or if he had a few issues of his own. The C.H.I.P. center it just has a way of wearing people out.
Another time I was physically threatened by a huge fat guy with enormous bitch tits.
It was such a funny fight. He was trying to tempt me into hitting him, and I begged him to hit me.
“Hit me. Hit me,” I said.
We were fighting over the bathroom really. He had left his stuff in the bathroom and then disappeared so when I showed up to get a shower and I found his stuff I just picked it up and moved it out of the bathroom and then along comes Mr. big boobs and he starts threatening me and giving me a bunch of crap about moving his stuff.
This same guy, the guy with the huge man boobs, he was always going on about how the C.H.I.P. center is just like prison.
The Clearwater Homeless Intervention Project has a number of sponsors. And they are:
The St. Vincent de Paul Society. The Clearwater Police Department. The Salvation Army, and the Clearwater Housing Authority.
The C.H.I.P. center is a police substation. There are always at least two Clearwater Police officers on the premises at all times, although you hardly ever see them.
But still I hated to hear old Mr. Big Boobs saying a thing like that. You get to live there for free. You don’t pay rent, and you usually get at least one really good meal a day.
There was a guy named Rodney Calhoun at the C.H.I.P. center the second time I was there. I never heard Rodney use a sentence that didn’t have the word fuck in it. He never had anything good to say. Okay I take that back. He once went on for twenty minutes about some ribs he had eaten at a place in Minneapolis. It was a combo place. You could eat barbeque ribs and look at naked chicks all at the same time. Rodney Calhoun.
“Best fucking ribs I ever had,” Rodney says.
One time Rodney comes up to me as I am standing out in front of the C.H.I.P. center. I think it was a Monday evening. I was waiting to head over to the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen for a bite to eat.
“They’re serving fucking hot dogs again,” Rodney says.
I didn’t say anything to him. Not my job to brighten up this guys day, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have anyway. But what I was thinking about when he said that to me was how many times I had eaten hot dogs when I lived in my own apartment. See when I lived on my own hot dogs were a staple. I always had a pack of hot dogs and some relish in the fridge. Weather you boil your dogs, cook them in a pan on the stovetop or nuke them, they are a quick delicious meal. And if it is a quick delicious meal, it is the bachelor’s best, best friend. I love hot dogs, as American as apple pie or baseball for crying out loud.
But here’s old Rodney Calhoun, “They’re serving fucking hot dogs again.”
Yikes, free hot dogs with baked beans. Let me run for my life.
Many times as I eat a free meal at the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen I think of my father, and the money that he has given to the Catholic Church over the years. I bet I could eat there once a day for ten years and not recoup that money. But I tell you, when I eat there I don’t feel guilty. I am thankful though, in more ways than one.
I never really completely understood organized religion until I became homeless. But each morning 7 days a week people from various Christian faiths, volunteers mostly, take the time to prepare and serve a meal to people who can’t afford to buy one. And on many nights, volunteers from various Christian faiths come back to the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen and prepare another meal just for the people who are staying at the C.H.I.P. center. This is the one meal a day I would get usually Monday through Thursday. Weekends are kind of iffy as far as meals go if you are staying at the C.H.I.P. center.
But I swear it at least put some of Christianity into perspective for me. Seeing people actually doing something, rather than just spouting the gospel, suddenly all the years of attending Catholic Church at least once a week seemed to make a little more sense.
When I left the C.H.I.P. center in February of 2007 I stopped eating at the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen. I got as far away from that part of Clearwater as I possibly could. I was working at Special Data Processing. I tended to travel up and down U.S. 19 because it was convenient to where I was working. I spent so many nights out doors. It wasn’t that bad.
I usually had two meals a day. I would eat at Dunkin Donuts in the morning, 2 donuts and a large coffee, and then at night I would hit any one of the number of restaurants that are close to the offices of Special Data Processing. Ci’Ci’s Pizza, Subway, Wendy’s, Taco-Bell, yada, yada, yada. Even though I was only having those two meals a day I actually started putting on weight. Eating donuts every day is not healthy.
I had a pay check coming in. It was tiny, but it was something.
“Sweepstakes entry center. May I have your ID number please,” I would say.
Then I would pitch the most unbearable line of misleading bullshit imaginable. They were paying me to.
“If you win the million dollar sweepstakes, how would you spend all that money?” I was paid to say.
After this inane mind numbing insulting rhetoric I would then bamboozle callers into subscribing to a magazine. Then I would pass the call on to a “verifier” whose job it was to sell the poor unsuspecting individual yet even more magazine subscriptions. I talked to some very lonely sweet old people who were being buried alive under as much as 8 monthly periodicals.
The place left me feeling dirty. All the way down to my soul. I knew that it was a temporary thing. I just didn’t have the heart to screw people over with such reckless abandon.
I was so sick of this in about the first five minutes.
With my check I usually squirreled enough away for two nights indoors each week.
The best days were Sundays, and Wednesdays. These were my days off. I would check in at a cheap motel as early as possible and either sleep or watch T.V. No partying. No booze. I didn’t do any writing either. I bided my time and waited to go back to the C.H.I.P. center yet again.
I met a guy named Scott Rollins that time. He was cool, and he stands out as the only person I have met at the C.H.I.P. center that I genuinely liked and it’s to bad, because he was my enemy right from the start. He would bring movies back to the C.H.I.P. center and the movies he picked always seemed to have a subliminal message just for me.
One time Scott Rollins and I watched part of the old Tom Cruise flick “Legend” together. It’s a fantasy movie directed by Ridley Scott, and it’s not so great.
The movie features the devil and here is one of his lines,
The Lord of Darkness: Oh, Mother Night! Fold your dark arms about me. Protect me in your black embrace. I sit alone, an impotent exile, whilst this form, this presence, returns to torment me!
Right. Impotent exile. Got it.
He brought a few others that always seemed to have a ridiculous undercurrent or theme that had a little something to do with my hopeless situation.
He insisted on watching “The Ringer” with me. It stars Johnny Knoxville as a guy who fixes the Special Olympics by posing as a mentally handicapped person, all so that he can pay off his bad debt.
Mike Murphy, the fat bastard from Mercury Insurance was a big fan of “The Ringer” and I remember him actually pitching the film to me one time.
Despite Scott Rollins’s poor taste in movies I liked him any way. He had this way of talking and I loved the sound of his voice. Scott is a big guy. Big hands. Big feet.
Big. Not the kind of guy you want to piss off. Not for any reason. So I just stayed cool.
But eventually I called him on his odd choice of films for him and I to watch. He implied that I am a total paranoid schizophrenic. I implied that he is my enemy and that I know that he is my enemy. It’s a shame because I really liked him. Still do.
The guy I met my second time through the C.H.I.P. program that I didn’t like so much was named Rick. His last name sounds like but is not spelled like: Kazmarick. That’s kind of a phonetic spelling. Rick will talk your ear off. Rick is very well read, and smart.
Rick is a Republican, or at least he posed as one to me. Rick will defend President Bush, and will not concede that President Bush is a huge asshole.
But at least Rick would talk about things. Most people at the C.H.I.P. center had no interest in talking about greater social, economic, or political issues. I keep up on current events, and I have some odd opinions about some things. We talked quite a bit, because my bed was right next to Rick’s bed in the men’s dorm room. When I got to an issue I did not agree with him on, I always folded. I would concede and then just restate my own opinion. Often I would talk with him about things that I like such as books or movies, and I would do this to avoid a political discussion.
I never completely trusted Rick Kazmarick. He came on strong, and I always got the feeling he wanted something from me. My soul perhaps?
Ken, Ken, Ken, your saying. You’re a beer drinking, porno watching, drunk driving,
pill popping, pot smoking, coffee drinking, pervert, with no soul left what so ever.
Nope. I’ve still got nothing but soul!
Finally I want to tell you about a guy whose real name I don’t even know.
This dude is an ex junkie or a struggling junkie, and by junkie I mean the hard stuff.
A heroin user.
He’s spooky looking as hell. He looks like the lead singer from the Rock band Anthrax, he’s covered in tattoos, and he has this odd looking goatee. Everyone called him Tweak, because he was tweaking.
One time Tweak approaches me as I am sitting on my bed in the morning. I think I had just put on my shoes. He starts up a conversation. I’m not rude. I talk to the guy.
I admit to this Tweak that I am a convicted felon and things are not exactly looking to good for me and he turns around and says, “I can help you get an unregistered hand gun. It’s what I do.”
Hu? What?
What the fuck?
Then Tweak dropped off the face of the Earth. When I got back to the C.H.I.P. center later that evening he was gone.
Someone pitched a line of bullshit so long I think it stretched from Earth to Alpha Centauri. That’s 4.37 light years, or 25.8 trillion miles from home. If E.T. had been staying at the C.H.I.P. center he wouldn’t have had to phone home, he could have walked home on the line of bullshit someone was pitching.
See they told me that Tweak disappeared because he had an infection around his heart and had to go to the hospital and that he would be staying there a while. I think Tweak may have had an infection, but I think it was around his brain and not his heart.
My guess is Tweak was in jail. I have no proof though.
I think I would have been okay the second time through the C.H.I.P. program if it hadn’t been for First Global Services.
I was glad that they took me back, I needed a job, but man do I hate telemarketing. As much as you hate getting calls from telemarketers, I hate calling you as a telemarketer even more.
Despite how much fun I was having at First Global Services, I hung in until January of 2007. Then one day my boss called me into his office and said that I was not doing my part by not giving my attendees specific directions to wherever the travel seminar was being held. It was part of my job to really sell the seminar, and if the person I was speaking with agreed to attend it was also part of my job to make damn sure they got to the seminar by going over the driving directions with them. I gave the seminars a real soft pitch, and I never went over directions unless the person I was speaking with asked for them. I would give the address of course. But this was not enough. So considering that my boss was not happy with the way I was doing my job, and considering that I was not happy with the job I called it quits.
This created a big problem at the C.H.I.P. center. One I didn’t tell any of the administrators, and two they found out. I knew that they knew, but it was my duty to go to them and inform them. Because I didn’t I was punished, and punishment meant that I would be sleeping on the floor again. This is kind of miserable because you have no where to be. You have to roll out a little sleeping mat each evening and then roll it up each morning even on weekends too, so that you are effectively homeless again. You
have no where to be.
I started looking for work. I didn’t have much luck, so eventually I wound up at Special Data Processing. I took what I could get. But a lot of time had passed and because of my sleeping situation at the C.H.I.P. center I was exhausted. If I could have hung in there another week or so I would have been okay, but I couldn’t. One day I just had to sleep. It was on a weekend. So I checked into a hotel. By doing this I blew my budget. You have to keep a budget at the C.H.I.P. center. Here’s how it works. You get to keep 70 dollars each week. Everything else you come by has to be put into an account. They monitor this activity each week and violation on budget is a big one. They’ll kick you out for this kind of thing.
So I checked into a cheap motel to get some sleep. I crashed. When I woke up and felt a little better I went back to the C.H.I.P. center to get my stuff. It was February of 2007.
This year. I was homeless again.
Now before I left the C.H.I.P. center that time a couple of odd things happened. One time I was accused of smelling bad. The problem was I had just gotten out of the shower. I think three guys came over to my bunk and demanded that I get in the shower. I said no.
But they were really insistent. One of them called me dog. They use it as a kind of term of endearment I think.
“Hey dog, chill,” someone said.
“Don’t dog me,” I said.
See they wanted to get me into the shower for some reason but I was not in the mood to play along. I know I didn’t stink but that’s what they were accusing me of.
Another time I had a little problem there was in December of 2006. Some old guy named Lesley or Leslie, he was talking shit and he was in my area over near my bunk and he started to talk about poisoning the food out in the common are. See at the C.H.I.P. center there is a common kitchen area where you can keep a little bit of food if you want. I never do because people are always stealing each other’s food and I don’t want anything to do with it. But here comes this old guy Lesley and he starts talking about poisoning the food so that if someone steals his food they will get sick. Now I’ve told you about how I have been poisoned, and I have implied that I didn’t think it was so cool. Well when I heard old Lesley talking about poisoning someone, actually laughing about it, I got really pissed. Especially since someone had just poisoned me with dick juice. Right there at the C.H.I.P. center.
I tore old Lesley a new one. I called him a fucking freak.
“Poisoning someone’s food is not funny you fucking freak,” I said.
I called him a fucking freak several times. I yelled. I can be loud if I have to.
There were a number of people standing around, and I think I scared the crap out of all them. After that they tended to call me bipolar. But I am not bipolar. I am anti bullshit though.
Back when I worked at Mercury Insurance sometimes I would walk around all day without my glasses on. Someone once asked me about it.
“Hey Ken how come you don’t have your glasses on?” They asked.
“I’m maximizing my efficiency by minimizing my bullshit,” I said.
Old Lesley left not soon after that. I don’t know if he left because of me or if he had a few issues of his own. The C.H.I.P. center it just has a way of wearing people out.
Another time I was physically threatened by a huge fat guy with enormous bitch tits.
It was such a funny fight. He was trying to tempt me into hitting him, and I begged him to hit me.
“Hit me. Hit me,” I said.
We were fighting over the bathroom really. He had left his stuff in the bathroom and then disappeared so when I showed up to get a shower and I found his stuff I just picked it up and moved it out of the bathroom and then along comes Mr. big boobs and he starts threatening me and giving me a bunch of crap about moving his stuff.
This same guy, the guy with the huge man boobs, he was always going on about how the C.H.I.P. center is just like prison.
The Clearwater Homeless Intervention Project has a number of sponsors. And they are:
The St. Vincent de Paul Society. The Clearwater Police Department. The Salvation Army, and the Clearwater Housing Authority.
The C.H.I.P. center is a police substation. There are always at least two Clearwater Police officers on the premises at all times, although you hardly ever see them.
But still I hated to hear old Mr. Big Boobs saying a thing like that. You get to live there for free. You don’t pay rent, and you usually get at least one really good meal a day.
There was a guy named Rodney Calhoun at the C.H.I.P. center the second time I was there. I never heard Rodney use a sentence that didn’t have the word fuck in it. He never had anything good to say. Okay I take that back. He once went on for twenty minutes about some ribs he had eaten at a place in Minneapolis. It was a combo place. You could eat barbeque ribs and look at naked chicks all at the same time. Rodney Calhoun.
“Best fucking ribs I ever had,” Rodney says.
One time Rodney comes up to me as I am standing out in front of the C.H.I.P. center. I think it was a Monday evening. I was waiting to head over to the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen for a bite to eat.
“They’re serving fucking hot dogs again,” Rodney says.
I didn’t say anything to him. Not my job to brighten up this guys day, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have anyway. But what I was thinking about when he said that to me was how many times I had eaten hot dogs when I lived in my own apartment. See when I lived on my own hot dogs were a staple. I always had a pack of hot dogs and some relish in the fridge. Weather you boil your dogs, cook them in a pan on the stovetop or nuke them, they are a quick delicious meal. And if it is a quick delicious meal, it is the bachelor’s best, best friend. I love hot dogs, as American as apple pie or baseball for crying out loud.
But here’s old Rodney Calhoun, “They’re serving fucking hot dogs again.”
Yikes, free hot dogs with baked beans. Let me run for my life.
Many times as I eat a free meal at the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen I think of my father, and the money that he has given to the Catholic Church over the years. I bet I could eat there once a day for ten years and not recoup that money. But I tell you, when I eat there I don’t feel guilty. I am thankful though, in more ways than one.
I never really completely understood organized religion until I became homeless. But each morning 7 days a week people from various Christian faiths, volunteers mostly, take the time to prepare and serve a meal to people who can’t afford to buy one. And on many nights, volunteers from various Christian faiths come back to the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen and prepare another meal just for the people who are staying at the C.H.I.P. center. This is the one meal a day I would get usually Monday through Thursday. Weekends are kind of iffy as far as meals go if you are staying at the C.H.I.P. center.
But I swear it at least put some of Christianity into perspective for me. Seeing people actually doing something, rather than just spouting the gospel, suddenly all the years of attending Catholic Church at least once a week seemed to make a little more sense.
When I left the C.H.I.P. center in February of 2007 I stopped eating at the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen. I got as far away from that part of Clearwater as I possibly could. I was working at Special Data Processing. I tended to travel up and down U.S. 19 because it was convenient to where I was working. I spent so many nights out doors. It wasn’t that bad.
I usually had two meals a day. I would eat at Dunkin Donuts in the morning, 2 donuts and a large coffee, and then at night I would hit any one of the number of restaurants that are close to the offices of Special Data Processing. Ci’Ci’s Pizza, Subway, Wendy’s, Taco-Bell, yada, yada, yada. Even though I was only having those two meals a day I actually started putting on weight. Eating donuts every day is not healthy.
I had a pay check coming in. It was tiny, but it was something.
“Sweepstakes entry center. May I have your ID number please,” I would say.
Then I would pitch the most unbearable line of misleading bullshit imaginable. They were paying me to.
“If you win the million dollar sweepstakes, how would you spend all that money?” I was paid to say.
After this inane mind numbing insulting rhetoric I would then bamboozle callers into subscribing to a magazine. Then I would pass the call on to a “verifier” whose job it was to sell the poor unsuspecting individual yet even more magazine subscriptions. I talked to some very lonely sweet old people who were being buried alive under as much as 8 monthly periodicals.
The place left me feeling dirty. All the way down to my soul. I knew that it was a temporary thing. I just didn’t have the heart to screw people over with such reckless abandon.
I was so sick of this in about the first five minutes.
With my check I usually squirreled enough away for two nights indoors each week.
The best days were Sundays, and Wednesdays. These were my days off. I would check in at a cheap motel as early as possible and either sleep or watch T.V. No partying. No booze. I didn’t do any writing either. I bided my time and waited to go back to the C.H.I.P. center yet again.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Confessions of A Peanut Butter Junkie
Interlude: Wherein I Talk About Banking
First Union. That’s the original name of my old bank. I used to call them First Onion, because every time I read my bank statement I wanted to cry. Bankers, they’re always charging you extra for something.
I started banking with them way back in 1992. In 1997 they were nice enough to loan me the money to buy a brand new car. The Geekmobile. It was paid for when I wrecked it.
At some point they changed their name to Wachovia. I didn’t like it. Sounds like they are going to walk all over ya. My checks always have my full name on them. Kenneth G. Donnelly. I like it that way. I think it has a nice ring to it. If I become a published author someday that will be my handle. Kenneth G. Donnelly
When I became homeless in the summer of 2006, I closed my account with Wachovia.
Later that year, when I had money coming in again it was in my best interest to open a new account, and I decided to bank elsewhere.
Before I opened an account I had one conversation about banking, and I named specifically what bank I would be doing business with. I was talking with the aforementioned Mike Hardegree.
I chose Washington Mutual because they have a branch in down town Clearwater at 511 S. Fort Harrison Ave Clearwater, FL 33756. It’s convenient for a homeless bum like me.
My name is Kenneth G. Donnelly, but I never tell anyone what the G in my name stands for. It’s kind of faggotty.
When I went to open my account at Washington Mutual, they said I had to put my full name on my Checks. The entire thing spelled out. So if I owe you money, and I have some, and I write you a check the name you will see is: Kenneth Gerard Donnelly.
Now why the fuck would I want to be sending people checks with my full name spelled out in its entirety? Why?
Why did the good folks at Washington Mutual insist that I spell out my full name on my checks? I swear the answer they gave me was that it was standard business practice since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and that I had no choice in the matter. What the fuck?
****
This next bit in no way absolves Mercury Insurance, its management, or employees, specifically Jack Daugherty, Scott Villwock, Mike Murphy, et. el responsibility in what amounts to extreme continued relentless psychological harassment leading to severe emotional pain suffering and trauma.
****
Did I mention that some asshole probably posing as law enforcement invaded my privacy, violated all of my civil liberties, harassed me into impotence, and homelessness?
Yeah, freedom isn’t free. You don’t have to tell me. I know. I’ve fought my own war right here in the United States of America.
One morning, I think it was a Saturday, Washington Mutual you gotta love’em they’re open from 9 to 1 on Saturday’s, I was depositing a check and they dosed me with dick juice. I swear I am not making this up. The guy … the teller handed my a little receipt, it’s printed with a pin code, I carry it over to the little “ATM” punch in my code and I wind up with 70 dollars and a huge fucking hard on. Now I needed the $70. I can’t lie.
But what the fuck is up with the boner at the fucking bank? What in gods name am I going to do with a fucking hard on …at the fucking bank? What?
There was this cute guy working at the Washington Mutual on S. Fort Harrison. He had dark hair. Dark skin. He was Hispanic, but I don’t think he was Mexican. He had a cute butt. But what the fuck was I supposed to do hit on him? Bend him over the teller machine and fuck him right there?
When I left the bank that Saturday morning, despite my freaking wood, I was practically running!
You don’t believe me do you? But it’s true. Otherwise why would I bother dragging my banks into this sorted little ditty?
I still bank with Washington Mutual. WaMu as they like to call them selves. At WaMu you never get cash from the teller. The teller pints out a receipt and you take it over to a little machine, something like and ATM, punch in a pin and get cash.
First Union. That’s the original name of my old bank. I used to call them First Onion, because every time I read my bank statement I wanted to cry. Bankers, they’re always charging you extra for something.
I started banking with them way back in 1992. In 1997 they were nice enough to loan me the money to buy a brand new car. The Geekmobile. It was paid for when I wrecked it.
At some point they changed their name to Wachovia. I didn’t like it. Sounds like they are going to walk all over ya. My checks always have my full name on them. Kenneth G. Donnelly. I like it that way. I think it has a nice ring to it. If I become a published author someday that will be my handle. Kenneth G. Donnelly
When I became homeless in the summer of 2006, I closed my account with Wachovia.
Later that year, when I had money coming in again it was in my best interest to open a new account, and I decided to bank elsewhere.
Before I opened an account I had one conversation about banking, and I named specifically what bank I would be doing business with. I was talking with the aforementioned Mike Hardegree.
I chose Washington Mutual because they have a branch in down town Clearwater at 511 S. Fort Harrison Ave Clearwater, FL 33756. It’s convenient for a homeless bum like me.
My name is Kenneth G. Donnelly, but I never tell anyone what the G in my name stands for. It’s kind of faggotty.
When I went to open my account at Washington Mutual, they said I had to put my full name on my Checks. The entire thing spelled out. So if I owe you money, and I have some, and I write you a check the name you will see is: Kenneth Gerard Donnelly.
Now why the fuck would I want to be sending people checks with my full name spelled out in its entirety? Why?
Why did the good folks at Washington Mutual insist that I spell out my full name on my checks? I swear the answer they gave me was that it was standard business practice since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and that I had no choice in the matter. What the fuck?
****
This next bit in no way absolves Mercury Insurance, its management, or employees, specifically Jack Daugherty, Scott Villwock, Mike Murphy, et. el responsibility in what amounts to extreme continued relentless psychological harassment leading to severe emotional pain suffering and trauma.
****
Did I mention that some asshole probably posing as law enforcement invaded my privacy, violated all of my civil liberties, harassed me into impotence, and homelessness?
Yeah, freedom isn’t free. You don’t have to tell me. I know. I’ve fought my own war right here in the United States of America.
One morning, I think it was a Saturday, Washington Mutual you gotta love’em they’re open from 9 to 1 on Saturday’s, I was depositing a check and they dosed me with dick juice. I swear I am not making this up. The guy … the teller handed my a little receipt, it’s printed with a pin code, I carry it over to the little “ATM” punch in my code and I wind up with 70 dollars and a huge fucking hard on. Now I needed the $70. I can’t lie.
But what the fuck is up with the boner at the fucking bank? What in gods name am I going to do with a fucking hard on …at the fucking bank? What?
There was this cute guy working at the Washington Mutual on S. Fort Harrison. He had dark hair. Dark skin. He was Hispanic, but I don’t think he was Mexican. He had a cute butt. But what the fuck was I supposed to do hit on him? Bend him over the teller machine and fuck him right there?
When I left the bank that Saturday morning, despite my freaking wood, I was practically running!
You don’t believe me do you? But it’s true. Otherwise why would I bother dragging my banks into this sorted little ditty?
I still bank with Washington Mutual. WaMu as they like to call them selves. At WaMu you never get cash from the teller. The teller pints out a receipt and you take it over to a little machine, something like and ATM, punch in a pin and get cash.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Confessions of A Peanut Butter Junkie
One morning I asked John if he wanted to go out to eat for breakfast. There is a Village Inn a few blocks over from John’s place and I was in the mood for a real breakfast. As a homeless man breakfast is something you just don’t get. I wanted eggs and orange juice. Pancakes or French Toast. A bowl of freaking corn flakes!
It’s September 2006. It’s Florida. It’s still hot and humid outside. You know what I have on my feet most of the time? Flip Flops. That’s right. If I am not going in to work I usually have on a pair of Flip Flops.
That’s what I was wearing the morning I asked my brother to have breakfast with me over at the Village Inn. His response was so unnatural, so strange there is almost no way I can convey how I felt.
John said he would gladly have breakfast with me but that I would have to put on a pair of shoes first. He insisted that they would not serve me at the Village Inn if I tried to be seated in a pair of Flip Flops.
“Then the good folks at the Village Inn can kiss my shinny Irish ass,” I said.
But it wasn’t the good folks at the Village Inn that had a problem with what I was wearing on my feet. It was my crazy, paraplegic, pool shooting, dick juice dosing, brother John P. Donnelly. He did not want to have breakfast with me if I was going to wear Flip Flops.
“Then I will be having breakfast alone,” said I.
My brother pressured me from the lofty depths of his wheel chair. The crazy son of a bitch insisted-insisted that I go into the house and put on a pair of shoes.
I told him in no uncertain terms. I am an adult. No matter how foolish or childish I act, you cannot tell me what to wear. Not now or ever. Period.
Not only do I have very well manicured feet, my feet are so well manicured that they are feet to be envied! I swear I am not making that up.
John finally realizes that he is fighting a fight he cannot win. He leaves with out me.
He returns a short while latter and says we can still go out to eat, and that I can wear my flip- flops, but that we cannot go to the Village Inn. So we went to some sorry ass mom and pop place and paid way too much for some really shitty breakfast food. How can you fuck up eggs and toast? I have no idea but the short order cook at this place did just that. The meal sucked. And the whole time I’m shoveling this crappy food down my throat I am wondering about the sanity of my brother.
For the record college students have visited the president of the United States of America in the White House and when they did…they wore open toed sandals. I read about it somewhere. Time Magazine maybe. Hey if it’s good enough for the President and the White House…it’s good enough for me.
I talked a lot with my brother the first night or two I stayed with him. He wanted to hear about where I had been and what I had been doing from the time I left the apartment at 12480 Rose Street Apt. 1 Seminole Florida 33772, to the time he came and picked me up at the C.H.I.P. center. I filled him in.
I have to tell you now what I think was happening. Even though I have no proof. I can only offer my gut feelings. I am pretty sure what my brother John P. Donnelly was hoping is that I would talk with my other brother Eddie Donnelly and that after doing so I might just decide to move out of Pinellas County Florida and head for Vermont. That’s where Eddie is living now. But I wasn’t in the mood to talk with Eddie, and I wasn’t in the mood to leave Pinellas County Florida. See in my mind I had a few loose ends to tie up. I had this whole stupid sorry story to tell. To the police. To a lawyer. To god and the devil if they still give a care. Surely to someone. But just to up and leave and let it all go.
Nope. Not going to happen.
I filled John P. Donnelly in on all kinds of information. And he used it to attack me.
Or he let someone else do the attacking. All the same while I was in my first week of work at Consumer Energy Solutions some burned out drag queen assaulted me psychologically. Someone had culled the information I had shared with my brother, and reduced it to just a few sentences that would be sure to get a reaction from me and then instructed this idiot I was working with to corner me and basically rape me. A mind fuck to be sure. But a devastating one. A painful one. One that I knew with out a doubt my brother John P. Donnelly had something to do with.
It was September 11, 2006, and I was in training at Consumer Energy Solutions and some guy who should know nothing at all about me seems to know an awful lot about me. And because he is trying to be a hurtful, miserable, son of a bitch, he succeeds.
I can’t even tell you what the guy said. Only that it was meant to get a reaction out of me. An extreme reaction. It almost worked. I just looked at the guy. I called him the burned out drag queen because he had a voice like Harvey Fierstein. He said something to me just to get a negative response from me and it almost worked. I just looked at him. And as I was looking at him I fought a hard battle inside myself. I struggled to keep my cool. I struggled not to lunge at the evil burned out drag queen. I won the battle. I turned from him and walked on out of Consumer Energy Solutions.
Did I tell you that one of John P. Donnelly’s biggest concerns regarding me was that I had maybe joined The Scientologists. I swear I am not making that up. I am fighting absolute poverty, that includes homelessness and my Irish Catholic families biggest fear is that I have joined The Scientologists.
John likes to shoot pool. He has a regulation size pool table in his living room. He also has a rack where he keeps all of his pool cue sticks. He has a lot of them. One of them was actually on the pool table the evening of September 14, 2006. I think it was a Friday.
I got home that evening around 5. John wanted to head on out and look for a place for me to live. I wanted to flop into bed. I got angry. I overreacted. I will not deny it. I was in the process of quitting smoking and I had on a nicotine patch, but I was in the early stages of mild withdrawals. He shouldn’t have fucked with me. I had been living with him for less than a week. He was insistent and it was clear he wanted me out of his house. So I got my stuff packed up and was ready to leave, but I thought what he was doing was so unbelievably wrong that I decided before I go any where I am going to call the cops on him. I tried to use my cell phone. I was not about to dial 911, so I had to find a number for the cops. I found a phone book out on the front porch and brought it into the house.
You know how they drop those damn things off every so often. It was just sitting out there on the front porch of my brother’s house. I needed it so I dragged it into the kitchen, near where the phone is. By then I had just decided to use his phone. But he starts to interrogate me about what I’m doing. I am really pissed off. At him. I believed then and I believe now that he had absolutely no right whatever to be treating me the way he was. We started to argue. I started to shout at him. I mean really, really scream. I could actually feel my brain dump a huge amount of adrenaline into my system and I grabbed the pool cue stick up off the table and I came within a whisper of smashing him over the head and in the face with it. But something stopped me. I put the damn pool cue stick back down. But I still lunged at my brother. He was sitting in his wheel chair. Defenseless. I threw a few sissy punches and only managed to tag him in the head a couple of times. But I had lost it. I was screaming at him and I know I hit him at least twice. There was no blood. He did not need medical attention. But he was scared out of his wits. So he goes and calls the cops on me.
You know what I hate about the cop cars in Pinellas County Florida? The plastic seats.
I swear they have plastic seats. The same kind of plastic that your computer is made out of. How do I know this? My name is Kenneth G. Donnelly and on September 14, 2006
I got arrested for domestic battery. My dear brother John P. Donnelly who had, less than a week before, rescued me from the C.H.I.P. center in Clearwater Florida, decided to kick me out even though he had said I could come and live with him. I lost my cool, threw a few punches, screamed a bit, and got hauled away in a cop car. I can’t remember the cops name. She was pretty. A blonde. She acted surprised when I said this was my first time getting arrested for a fight, and that there were no drugs or alcohol involved. I went to jail because my stupid evil Irish Catholic family couldn’t mind their own fucking business. They were so busy worrying that I had joined The Scientologists.
What a fucking farce.
I put the pool cue stick down because I knew how harmful it could be. Even in my anger.
Something in me had the good sense just to let it go. Just not all the way. The cops even asked me about it.
“Why did you put the cue stick down?” The cops asked.
“Because that would have been horrible,” I said. I meant it.
I spent over 48 hours in county over on 49th street. Not exactly hard time, but plenty of time to get you thinking. I was released on my own recognizance a few days later. I was homeless. No chance of going back to the C.H.I.P. center. No chance of going back to my brothers place. I have never in my life been so mortally fucked.
So what did I do? I went to the movies. I watched Nic Cage in “The Wicker Man”, and then I watched something else. I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the second movie I watched. Later that night after the sun went down I walked over to The Candle Wood suites out on the corner of Ulmerton and 49th. I had to check in at pretrial at the court house. And then I had to check in at pretrial once every Tuesday for over a month. The misdemeanor charges were dropped eventually.
I think I walked around in the same dirty clothes for over 48 hours. I showered in the hotel room of course but I had no clean clothes to change into. I had to return to my brother’s place to get my stuff. To do that I needed a police escort. I wanted him to feel safe, and frankly I didn’t want him starting in on me with any more of his bullshit.
He’s big on bull shit let me tell you.
So I called the cops and waited for them to meet with me and take me over to my brother’s place, but the cops never came. I lost my patience and went over to my brother’s with out a police escort. I grabbed what I could carry. My old back pack and my old gym bag. I walked a few blocks but I had way too much stuff. It’s just over a week now that I have been out of the Clearwater Homeless Intervention Project shelter and I can’t go back there for 30 days. I stopped right there in my brothers neighborhood and I had to dump a bunch of stuff. Some clothes, some towels, an alarm clock.
There. That’s more like it. Only I have no idea, absolutely no clue as to where I am going. I had hit rock bottom, and then I did a Doors number, I broke on through to the other side. I spent a few nights outside. Sorry, not going to tell you where. What does it matter. There were even a few rainy nights. I got caught in the rain. But for the most part, I had found place to crash that was out of the rain. But I couldn’t do it forever.
After a cooling off period I called my brother and he agreed to meet me at Largo Central Park. He brought a check with him. He dropped me off at the Diana Motel 1814 Gulf to Bay Boulevard Clearwater FL 33765. Not exactly the Ritz, but it’s close to a lot or restaurants. Then I went back to the C.H.I.P. center…for the second time.
Staying at the C.H.I.P. center was much harder the second time around. You get penalized for leaving and then coming back. I had to sit through 30 “resource” meetings.
Those are meetings where they go over the rules with you. I wanted to say, “ I am fully aware of the rules, I was not fully aware of what a treacherous bastard my brother could be. Please forgive me.”
I went and got my old job back. The one at First Global Services. Remember you only have 7 days to get a job when you get to the C.H.I.P. center.
There were a few new faces at the C.H.I.P. center when I got back to it in October of 2006. I met two very interesting people. One I liked very much, and one not so much.
It’s September 2006. It’s Florida. It’s still hot and humid outside. You know what I have on my feet most of the time? Flip Flops. That’s right. If I am not going in to work I usually have on a pair of Flip Flops.
That’s what I was wearing the morning I asked my brother to have breakfast with me over at the Village Inn. His response was so unnatural, so strange there is almost no way I can convey how I felt.
John said he would gladly have breakfast with me but that I would have to put on a pair of shoes first. He insisted that they would not serve me at the Village Inn if I tried to be seated in a pair of Flip Flops.
“Then the good folks at the Village Inn can kiss my shinny Irish ass,” I said.
But it wasn’t the good folks at the Village Inn that had a problem with what I was wearing on my feet. It was my crazy, paraplegic, pool shooting, dick juice dosing, brother John P. Donnelly. He did not want to have breakfast with me if I was going to wear Flip Flops.
“Then I will be having breakfast alone,” said I.
My brother pressured me from the lofty depths of his wheel chair. The crazy son of a bitch insisted-insisted that I go into the house and put on a pair of shoes.
I told him in no uncertain terms. I am an adult. No matter how foolish or childish I act, you cannot tell me what to wear. Not now or ever. Period.
Not only do I have very well manicured feet, my feet are so well manicured that they are feet to be envied! I swear I am not making that up.
John finally realizes that he is fighting a fight he cannot win. He leaves with out me.
He returns a short while latter and says we can still go out to eat, and that I can wear my flip- flops, but that we cannot go to the Village Inn. So we went to some sorry ass mom and pop place and paid way too much for some really shitty breakfast food. How can you fuck up eggs and toast? I have no idea but the short order cook at this place did just that. The meal sucked. And the whole time I’m shoveling this crappy food down my throat I am wondering about the sanity of my brother.
For the record college students have visited the president of the United States of America in the White House and when they did…they wore open toed sandals. I read about it somewhere. Time Magazine maybe. Hey if it’s good enough for the President and the White House…it’s good enough for me.
I talked a lot with my brother the first night or two I stayed with him. He wanted to hear about where I had been and what I had been doing from the time I left the apartment at 12480 Rose Street Apt. 1 Seminole Florida 33772, to the time he came and picked me up at the C.H.I.P. center. I filled him in.
I have to tell you now what I think was happening. Even though I have no proof. I can only offer my gut feelings. I am pretty sure what my brother John P. Donnelly was hoping is that I would talk with my other brother Eddie Donnelly and that after doing so I might just decide to move out of Pinellas County Florida and head for Vermont. That’s where Eddie is living now. But I wasn’t in the mood to talk with Eddie, and I wasn’t in the mood to leave Pinellas County Florida. See in my mind I had a few loose ends to tie up. I had this whole stupid sorry story to tell. To the police. To a lawyer. To god and the devil if they still give a care. Surely to someone. But just to up and leave and let it all go.
Nope. Not going to happen.
I filled John P. Donnelly in on all kinds of information. And he used it to attack me.
Or he let someone else do the attacking. All the same while I was in my first week of work at Consumer Energy Solutions some burned out drag queen assaulted me psychologically. Someone had culled the information I had shared with my brother, and reduced it to just a few sentences that would be sure to get a reaction from me and then instructed this idiot I was working with to corner me and basically rape me. A mind fuck to be sure. But a devastating one. A painful one. One that I knew with out a doubt my brother John P. Donnelly had something to do with.
It was September 11, 2006, and I was in training at Consumer Energy Solutions and some guy who should know nothing at all about me seems to know an awful lot about me. And because he is trying to be a hurtful, miserable, son of a bitch, he succeeds.
I can’t even tell you what the guy said. Only that it was meant to get a reaction out of me. An extreme reaction. It almost worked. I just looked at the guy. I called him the burned out drag queen because he had a voice like Harvey Fierstein. He said something to me just to get a negative response from me and it almost worked. I just looked at him. And as I was looking at him I fought a hard battle inside myself. I struggled to keep my cool. I struggled not to lunge at the evil burned out drag queen. I won the battle. I turned from him and walked on out of Consumer Energy Solutions.
Did I tell you that one of John P. Donnelly’s biggest concerns regarding me was that I had maybe joined The Scientologists. I swear I am not making that up. I am fighting absolute poverty, that includes homelessness and my Irish Catholic families biggest fear is that I have joined The Scientologists.
John likes to shoot pool. He has a regulation size pool table in his living room. He also has a rack where he keeps all of his pool cue sticks. He has a lot of them. One of them was actually on the pool table the evening of September 14, 2006. I think it was a Friday.
I got home that evening around 5. John wanted to head on out and look for a place for me to live. I wanted to flop into bed. I got angry. I overreacted. I will not deny it. I was in the process of quitting smoking and I had on a nicotine patch, but I was in the early stages of mild withdrawals. He shouldn’t have fucked with me. I had been living with him for less than a week. He was insistent and it was clear he wanted me out of his house. So I got my stuff packed up and was ready to leave, but I thought what he was doing was so unbelievably wrong that I decided before I go any where I am going to call the cops on him. I tried to use my cell phone. I was not about to dial 911, so I had to find a number for the cops. I found a phone book out on the front porch and brought it into the house.
You know how they drop those damn things off every so often. It was just sitting out there on the front porch of my brother’s house. I needed it so I dragged it into the kitchen, near where the phone is. By then I had just decided to use his phone. But he starts to interrogate me about what I’m doing. I am really pissed off. At him. I believed then and I believe now that he had absolutely no right whatever to be treating me the way he was. We started to argue. I started to shout at him. I mean really, really scream. I could actually feel my brain dump a huge amount of adrenaline into my system and I grabbed the pool cue stick up off the table and I came within a whisper of smashing him over the head and in the face with it. But something stopped me. I put the damn pool cue stick back down. But I still lunged at my brother. He was sitting in his wheel chair. Defenseless. I threw a few sissy punches and only managed to tag him in the head a couple of times. But I had lost it. I was screaming at him and I know I hit him at least twice. There was no blood. He did not need medical attention. But he was scared out of his wits. So he goes and calls the cops on me.
You know what I hate about the cop cars in Pinellas County Florida? The plastic seats.
I swear they have plastic seats. The same kind of plastic that your computer is made out of. How do I know this? My name is Kenneth G. Donnelly and on September 14, 2006
I got arrested for domestic battery. My dear brother John P. Donnelly who had, less than a week before, rescued me from the C.H.I.P. center in Clearwater Florida, decided to kick me out even though he had said I could come and live with him. I lost my cool, threw a few punches, screamed a bit, and got hauled away in a cop car. I can’t remember the cops name. She was pretty. A blonde. She acted surprised when I said this was my first time getting arrested for a fight, and that there were no drugs or alcohol involved. I went to jail because my stupid evil Irish Catholic family couldn’t mind their own fucking business. They were so busy worrying that I had joined The Scientologists.
What a fucking farce.
I put the pool cue stick down because I knew how harmful it could be. Even in my anger.
Something in me had the good sense just to let it go. Just not all the way. The cops even asked me about it.
“Why did you put the cue stick down?” The cops asked.
“Because that would have been horrible,” I said. I meant it.
I spent over 48 hours in county over on 49th street. Not exactly hard time, but plenty of time to get you thinking. I was released on my own recognizance a few days later. I was homeless. No chance of going back to the C.H.I.P. center. No chance of going back to my brothers place. I have never in my life been so mortally fucked.
So what did I do? I went to the movies. I watched Nic Cage in “The Wicker Man”, and then I watched something else. I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the second movie I watched. Later that night after the sun went down I walked over to The Candle Wood suites out on the corner of Ulmerton and 49th. I had to check in at pretrial at the court house. And then I had to check in at pretrial once every Tuesday for over a month. The misdemeanor charges were dropped eventually.
I think I walked around in the same dirty clothes for over 48 hours. I showered in the hotel room of course but I had no clean clothes to change into. I had to return to my brother’s place to get my stuff. To do that I needed a police escort. I wanted him to feel safe, and frankly I didn’t want him starting in on me with any more of his bullshit.
He’s big on bull shit let me tell you.
So I called the cops and waited for them to meet with me and take me over to my brother’s place, but the cops never came. I lost my patience and went over to my brother’s with out a police escort. I grabbed what I could carry. My old back pack and my old gym bag. I walked a few blocks but I had way too much stuff. It’s just over a week now that I have been out of the Clearwater Homeless Intervention Project shelter and I can’t go back there for 30 days. I stopped right there in my brothers neighborhood and I had to dump a bunch of stuff. Some clothes, some towels, an alarm clock.
There. That’s more like it. Only I have no idea, absolutely no clue as to where I am going. I had hit rock bottom, and then I did a Doors number, I broke on through to the other side. I spent a few nights outside. Sorry, not going to tell you where. What does it matter. There were even a few rainy nights. I got caught in the rain. But for the most part, I had found place to crash that was out of the rain. But I couldn’t do it forever.
After a cooling off period I called my brother and he agreed to meet me at Largo Central Park. He brought a check with him. He dropped me off at the Diana Motel 1814 Gulf to Bay Boulevard Clearwater FL 33765. Not exactly the Ritz, but it’s close to a lot or restaurants. Then I went back to the C.H.I.P. center…for the second time.
Staying at the C.H.I.P. center was much harder the second time around. You get penalized for leaving and then coming back. I had to sit through 30 “resource” meetings.
Those are meetings where they go over the rules with you. I wanted to say, “ I am fully aware of the rules, I was not fully aware of what a treacherous bastard my brother could be. Please forgive me.”
I went and got my old job back. The one at First Global Services. Remember you only have 7 days to get a job when you get to the C.H.I.P. center.
There were a few new faces at the C.H.I.P. center when I got back to it in October of 2006. I met two very interesting people. One I liked very much, and one not so much.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Confessions of A Peanut Butter Junkie
Being homeless is strange. I’m often waiting to leave nowhere on my way to nowhere.
Standing at a bus stop with my backpack on, the sun beating down. Waiting.
Then I’m on the bus and before I know it…I’m waiting to get off. Sometimes I’m even in a hurry. No reason why. I’m going nowhere. But apparently I wanna get there right away.
Anyway I found the C.H.I.P. center sometime in mid July of 2006. I had been homeless for approximately 3 weeks. I waited to get in. All day. I sat in the lobby at what is called “the day center”, and then I sat out back behind the C.H.I.P. center. Waiting to get in.
The best thing about the C.H.I.P. center is that it’s right next door to the St. Vincent De Paul soup kitchen. Homeless people eat better than I did when I had a job, and a decent apartment. About the only draw back is you have to wait in line, and you can only eat once a day between 9 A.M and 11 A.M.
For me the worst thing about being homeless is I never feel clean. No matter how much I shower. You get close enough to a guy that has been on the street for long enough, he has that look, and that smell. The smell is like a living thing. It’s alive. It’s really, really mean, and it assaults you. No matter where you are. It gets you. It jumps from him to you and it gets into your nostrils and it slides down your throat. It’s pissed off. And it has its way with you. You can’t react too much. What are you going to say? The best you can do is try and not breathe to much. If you are in an enclosed space-like on a city bus- the smell sets up shop. It gets to work.
Trying to eat at a table with a guy that has been on the street so long he has made friends with that smell is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Starvation made it easy though.
When you get to the C.H.I.P. center you have to take a shower, and wash all of your clothes. So they start you off on the right foot. You are clean, and all of your stuff is clean. Only I never really feel clean. I get out of the shower at the C.H.I.P. center and right away every fiber of my being is demanding that I get the fuck back in there and lather the fuck up! Right Now!
It’s the smell. That homeless guy smell. The scariest thing about the homeless guy smell for me is the sick never ending fear that it’s coming from me. That that horrible pissed off stench is not wafting off of some other guy, but is oozing from the clogged up pores of my own unwashed skin.
And a couple of times it has been. I’m so sorry. But if you are living on the street sometimes getting clean is the hardest part.
People come to the C.H.I.P. center to get clean all the time. Both physically clean as in a quick shower, and that other kinda clean as in I have to dry out. No more booze. No more drugs. Everyone starts off with a shower and clean clothes. The rest is up to you.
It’s the rest that is the hard part.
Every day is someone’s first day at the C.H.I.P. center. Most days are someone’s last.
Weekends are big for violations. That’s what they call it when you break the rules at the C.H.I.P. center, a violation. People are always going out and falling off the wagon, hell they might even be diving off the wagon head first, and then they come back to the C.H.I.P. center and the administrator gives them the breathalyzer test and boom, they’re back on the street. That’s the biggest rule at the C.H.I.P. center. No drinking. No drugs.
For some staying sober is the hard part. Not for me. My problem is the work. See C.H.I.P. is a work program. When you get to the C.H.I.P. center you have 7 days to get a job. For me the job prospects are pretty grim.
I n summer of 2006, in July, I got to the C.H.I.P. center, and I had seven days to find a job. Before they would assign me a bed someone would be verifying my employment.
I think I spent more than a week sleeping on the floor. It turned out to be one of the best things to happen to me that summer. See after my car accident in 2004, the one that made me a convicted felon, I started to have some neck and back pain. It wasn’t really bad, but it was a pain! It would come and go. Sometimes it would really, really hurt, and others it would just be a minor nuisance. But it was something I was aware of. I sleep on the floor in a homeless shelter for a week and guess what? I’m pain free. No more neck or back pain. The cure was just a few nights on a tile floor in a homeless shelter in Clearwater Florida. I’m still thankful for that.
But things went wrong for me that first time at the C.H.I.P. center. I applied for work at a few places. Sun Microstamping and Hi Tech Electronic Displays are the one’s that I remember. But I never even got a call for an interview. So I wound up in the sewer.
Yup. Telemarketing. It’s the best I could do in seven days.
First Global Services. I would call people and try to get them to agree to attend a travel seminar. Sometimes the seminar was a timeshare pitch, and sometimes the travel seminar was a travel club pitch. People were always agreeing to attend and then just never showing up. I swear we would call them and try and reschedule them to attend the seminar. We called them no-shows! I had a couple of laughs at First Global Services. But it was grueling, thankless shit work of the shittiest variety. It was telemarketing.
They day I started at First Global Services, a homeless guy from the C.H.I.P. center started with me. His name was Mike Hardergree. Or maybe Hardagree. I’m still not sure if Mike pretended to be my friend, wanted to be my friend, or really was a friend. I just don’t know. The best thing about Mike was he had a truck. You could hop into that truck and get just about anywhere in no time. Remember in summer 2006 I had already been riding the bus, public transportation for over two years. Being able to get from point A to point B with out all the bullshit of public transportation seemed like a freaking miracle.
It really did. But Mike had his own brand of bullshit that made it way more trouble than it was worth.
Mike wanted me to move to Orlando with him. I swear I am not making that up. Just the fact that he asked made my skin crawl. I’m a homeless bum, I mean officially down and out and this dude is asking me to move to Orlando with him. And his plan involved another homeless shelter in Orlando. What the fuck?
They kick you out of the C.H.I.P. center every morning Monday through Friday at 06:30 A.M.. They wake you up at 5:30 A.M. and you are out by 06:30. I guess in a city that never sleeps, say New York city, or Chicago, or Los Angeles there may be something to do at 06:30 A.M. but in Pinellas county Florida, in Clearwater Florida, there is absolutely nothing to do. Not a damn thing. You are effectively homeless for a little while each day.
Mike and I would hit a McDonalds or a Burger King to get some breakfast. Mike likes to people watch. I do to, but Mike would start saying all kinds of nasty things about the people he watched, and it really got on my nerves. But what really killed any chance I had of being friends with Mike Hardergree was his mumbling. That’s right. He would mumble. He would start off a sentence and you would be able to hear him just fine, but before he would get to the end of the sentence his voice would just trail off and fade away. I was always saying, “What?”
“What did you say Mike?” I was always asking Mike Hardergee.
So one day Mike Hardergree yells at me because he is tired of hearing me say what all the time. I put my hand like a cup up by my ear. Kind of a universal sign for what? Hu?
What did you say?
Another thing that I disliked about Mike is I got the idea that he was hiding something from me. When we were having breakfast a couple of times he asked me a few questions about my situation and how I got to be homeless. I didn’t give him the long version, but I told him as much of the truth as I could. He never did tell me how he became homeless.
He held out on me. And it irked the fuck out of me. People are always telling you their story most of the time. Not Mike Hardergree.
Then finally I just told Mike Hardergee that I didn’t want anything to do with him, that he was a huge mumbler. He hung around the C.H.I.P. center for a while but then he just up and left. I still see him around Clearwater sometimes. Guess he never made that trip over to Orlando.
I was only at the C.H.I.P. center that first time for a about a month, a month and a half.
The reason I only stayed that long the first time is because I got to the shelter one evening and there was a message for me. John P. Donnelly had called and the message said he wanted me to give him a call. He had tracked me down.
My cell phone had died in a down poor I got caught in, and the phones at the C.H.I.P. center are not exactly convenient. You can only use them at certain times of the day and it just seems like more trouble than it’s worth to me. My point is I did not call my brother. The way I remember it …I was leaving the shelter one morning around 6:30 A.M. and guess who’s parked out on Park Street just down the block from the shelter?
My brother John P. Donnelly.
He wanted me to leave with him right then. He told me he was sorry for how things had turned out and that he was worried about me. He said I could live with him. Again.
Leaving just then was not an option for a couple of reasons. One I was on my way to work at First Global Services, and two once you leave the C.H.I.P. center you can’t go back inside until about 4 P.M. so there was no way for me to get my stuff.
But the next morning I did leave with him. I wanted to believe that he was truly sorry and that he was trying to help me. But he wasn’t. What a mess this turned into.
I stayed with my brother John P. Donnelly in his little two bedroom two bath house at
14216 Chamberlain Avenue Largo, Florida 33774 for less than seven days. Less than a week after my brother came to get me out of a homeless shelter he kicked me out.
But before he did that he did some other crazy things I should mention.
When I left the C.H.I.P center to live with my brother John P. Donnelly I had over 800 dollars in the bank. But 800 is not a very big number especially when you are talking about money.
John took me shopping. For clothes. For bed linens. Hell we drove to several used furniture stores until I finally found a bed I could afford to buy. John was a sport. He paid for the expensive part of the bed. The mattress. There are mattress stores all over Pinellas County and that includes in the city of Largo and Clearwater but for some stupid reason we drove all the way over to some place in St. Petersburg just to get a mattress.
I just can’t even begin to hint at how strange I thought this was. Why drive all the way to St. Pete? Even if we had been there and it was just a convenient stop, why not just drive back to Largo or Seminole and stop there for a mattress? I just didn’t get it.
But at least I had a small room and bed to sleep on. Now I needed a job. Moving into John’s house effectively made me unemployed again. Getting to the office of First Global Services was not doable from John’s place. But I didn’t fuck around. I went out and got a job. In just two days. It was still a telemarketing thing but it was work.
I took a job at a place called Consumer Energy Solutions. They offered a week or two of paid training. The place was owned and run by a Scientologist. I liked it any way because it was just a couple of hundred feet from the C.H.I.P. center and just as close to the St. Vincent De Paul soup kitchen. See in my heart I knew damn well my brother was about to do me dirty. I did not count on it being inside of a week though. So it worked out good that I found a place close to the shelter and the free food.
John started dosing me with the boner juice. The morning we started out looking at used furniture stores so that I could by a bed, John took me through a drive through at a McDonalds, and a little while after eating I was sporting wood. For the love of god.
I’m scouring Pinellas County for the cheapest twin size bed I can find and I have to do it sporting a boner? What the fuck?
I’ll avoid a fight every time. I don’t go looking for trouble like that. So I never said a word to John about the dick juice. I just didn’t want to discuss it with him. Not that morning as we hunted for used furniture, not ever. But during the week that I was at John’s place I was getting regular erections because he was poisoning me with something.
As if that was not enough of a burden for me John wanted me to decide on a life changing career. He wanted me to state with absolute certainty exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. But I had no answer for him. The best I could do was offer to take one of those aptitude tests. You know online. You answer a bunch of questions and a computer analyzes your responses and determines what you might be good at. What you might be happy doing. He called a couple of numbers in the phone book. He wanted me to “see somebody”. I was just as happy to do it online. So that’s what I did.
The test taken the answers analyzed the computer told me that I should be a writer, or a film editor. I scratched my head a few times. I needed a computer to tell me this. I have wanted to be a writer since I was about 16. I have wanted to work in the film industry since I saw Star Wars in 1977. I was 10 then. I don’t care how annoying movies and Hollywood can sometimes be, I love them any way. Writing is just plain fun. It’s a quick simple release. Not unlike masturbation really.
I printed the results and showed them to John. I’m not sure he liked what the computer had to say. He was hoping for Fire Fighter or Police Officer, or something a little more tangible I guess.
Now I’m kinda doing battle with him on two fronts, he’s poisoning me with dick juice,
and he is pressuring me to embrace a new career (apparently unaware or unconcerned about the fact that I am a convicted felon), and he attacks me on a new front. Four or five days after moving in with him he insists that I drive around with him and look for a place to live. I have depleted me 800 dollars to something around 200 and now I have to find a place to live? I have just started a new job in telemarketing of all things (you can never really count on making any money in telemarketing it’s simply a numbers game…sometimes the numbers work with you and sometimes they work against you) and the fool is forcing me to look for a place to live. I swear it’s as if he was deliberately
trying to push me over the edge.
Standing at a bus stop with my backpack on, the sun beating down. Waiting.
Then I’m on the bus and before I know it…I’m waiting to get off. Sometimes I’m even in a hurry. No reason why. I’m going nowhere. But apparently I wanna get there right away.
Anyway I found the C.H.I.P. center sometime in mid July of 2006. I had been homeless for approximately 3 weeks. I waited to get in. All day. I sat in the lobby at what is called “the day center”, and then I sat out back behind the C.H.I.P. center. Waiting to get in.
The best thing about the C.H.I.P. center is that it’s right next door to the St. Vincent De Paul soup kitchen. Homeless people eat better than I did when I had a job, and a decent apartment. About the only draw back is you have to wait in line, and you can only eat once a day between 9 A.M and 11 A.M.
For me the worst thing about being homeless is I never feel clean. No matter how much I shower. You get close enough to a guy that has been on the street for long enough, he has that look, and that smell. The smell is like a living thing. It’s alive. It’s really, really mean, and it assaults you. No matter where you are. It gets you. It jumps from him to you and it gets into your nostrils and it slides down your throat. It’s pissed off. And it has its way with you. You can’t react too much. What are you going to say? The best you can do is try and not breathe to much. If you are in an enclosed space-like on a city bus- the smell sets up shop. It gets to work.
Trying to eat at a table with a guy that has been on the street so long he has made friends with that smell is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Starvation made it easy though.
When you get to the C.H.I.P. center you have to take a shower, and wash all of your clothes. So they start you off on the right foot. You are clean, and all of your stuff is clean. Only I never really feel clean. I get out of the shower at the C.H.I.P. center and right away every fiber of my being is demanding that I get the fuck back in there and lather the fuck up! Right Now!
It’s the smell. That homeless guy smell. The scariest thing about the homeless guy smell for me is the sick never ending fear that it’s coming from me. That that horrible pissed off stench is not wafting off of some other guy, but is oozing from the clogged up pores of my own unwashed skin.
And a couple of times it has been. I’m so sorry. But if you are living on the street sometimes getting clean is the hardest part.
People come to the C.H.I.P. center to get clean all the time. Both physically clean as in a quick shower, and that other kinda clean as in I have to dry out. No more booze. No more drugs. Everyone starts off with a shower and clean clothes. The rest is up to you.
It’s the rest that is the hard part.
Every day is someone’s first day at the C.H.I.P. center. Most days are someone’s last.
Weekends are big for violations. That’s what they call it when you break the rules at the C.H.I.P. center, a violation. People are always going out and falling off the wagon, hell they might even be diving off the wagon head first, and then they come back to the C.H.I.P. center and the administrator gives them the breathalyzer test and boom, they’re back on the street. That’s the biggest rule at the C.H.I.P. center. No drinking. No drugs.
For some staying sober is the hard part. Not for me. My problem is the work. See C.H.I.P. is a work program. When you get to the C.H.I.P. center you have 7 days to get a job. For me the job prospects are pretty grim.
I n summer of 2006, in July, I got to the C.H.I.P. center, and I had seven days to find a job. Before they would assign me a bed someone would be verifying my employment.
I think I spent more than a week sleeping on the floor. It turned out to be one of the best things to happen to me that summer. See after my car accident in 2004, the one that made me a convicted felon, I started to have some neck and back pain. It wasn’t really bad, but it was a pain! It would come and go. Sometimes it would really, really hurt, and others it would just be a minor nuisance. But it was something I was aware of. I sleep on the floor in a homeless shelter for a week and guess what? I’m pain free. No more neck or back pain. The cure was just a few nights on a tile floor in a homeless shelter in Clearwater Florida. I’m still thankful for that.
But things went wrong for me that first time at the C.H.I.P. center. I applied for work at a few places. Sun Microstamping and Hi Tech Electronic Displays are the one’s that I remember. But I never even got a call for an interview. So I wound up in the sewer.
Yup. Telemarketing. It’s the best I could do in seven days.
First Global Services. I would call people and try to get them to agree to attend a travel seminar. Sometimes the seminar was a timeshare pitch, and sometimes the travel seminar was a travel club pitch. People were always agreeing to attend and then just never showing up. I swear we would call them and try and reschedule them to attend the seminar. We called them no-shows! I had a couple of laughs at First Global Services. But it was grueling, thankless shit work of the shittiest variety. It was telemarketing.
They day I started at First Global Services, a homeless guy from the C.H.I.P. center started with me. His name was Mike Hardergree. Or maybe Hardagree. I’m still not sure if Mike pretended to be my friend, wanted to be my friend, or really was a friend. I just don’t know. The best thing about Mike was he had a truck. You could hop into that truck and get just about anywhere in no time. Remember in summer 2006 I had already been riding the bus, public transportation for over two years. Being able to get from point A to point B with out all the bullshit of public transportation seemed like a freaking miracle.
It really did. But Mike had his own brand of bullshit that made it way more trouble than it was worth.
Mike wanted me to move to Orlando with him. I swear I am not making that up. Just the fact that he asked made my skin crawl. I’m a homeless bum, I mean officially down and out and this dude is asking me to move to Orlando with him. And his plan involved another homeless shelter in Orlando. What the fuck?
They kick you out of the C.H.I.P. center every morning Monday through Friday at 06:30 A.M.. They wake you up at 5:30 A.M. and you are out by 06:30. I guess in a city that never sleeps, say New York city, or Chicago, or Los Angeles there may be something to do at 06:30 A.M. but in Pinellas county Florida, in Clearwater Florida, there is absolutely nothing to do. Not a damn thing. You are effectively homeless for a little while each day.
Mike and I would hit a McDonalds or a Burger King to get some breakfast. Mike likes to people watch. I do to, but Mike would start saying all kinds of nasty things about the people he watched, and it really got on my nerves. But what really killed any chance I had of being friends with Mike Hardergree was his mumbling. That’s right. He would mumble. He would start off a sentence and you would be able to hear him just fine, but before he would get to the end of the sentence his voice would just trail off and fade away. I was always saying, “What?”
“What did you say Mike?” I was always asking Mike Hardergee.
So one day Mike Hardergree yells at me because he is tired of hearing me say what all the time. I put my hand like a cup up by my ear. Kind of a universal sign for what? Hu?
What did you say?
Another thing that I disliked about Mike is I got the idea that he was hiding something from me. When we were having breakfast a couple of times he asked me a few questions about my situation and how I got to be homeless. I didn’t give him the long version, but I told him as much of the truth as I could. He never did tell me how he became homeless.
He held out on me. And it irked the fuck out of me. People are always telling you their story most of the time. Not Mike Hardergree.
Then finally I just told Mike Hardergee that I didn’t want anything to do with him, that he was a huge mumbler. He hung around the C.H.I.P. center for a while but then he just up and left. I still see him around Clearwater sometimes. Guess he never made that trip over to Orlando.
I was only at the C.H.I.P. center that first time for a about a month, a month and a half.
The reason I only stayed that long the first time is because I got to the shelter one evening and there was a message for me. John P. Donnelly had called and the message said he wanted me to give him a call. He had tracked me down.
My cell phone had died in a down poor I got caught in, and the phones at the C.H.I.P. center are not exactly convenient. You can only use them at certain times of the day and it just seems like more trouble than it’s worth to me. My point is I did not call my brother. The way I remember it …I was leaving the shelter one morning around 6:30 A.M. and guess who’s parked out on Park Street just down the block from the shelter?
My brother John P. Donnelly.
He wanted me to leave with him right then. He told me he was sorry for how things had turned out and that he was worried about me. He said I could live with him. Again.
Leaving just then was not an option for a couple of reasons. One I was on my way to work at First Global Services, and two once you leave the C.H.I.P. center you can’t go back inside until about 4 P.M. so there was no way for me to get my stuff.
But the next morning I did leave with him. I wanted to believe that he was truly sorry and that he was trying to help me. But he wasn’t. What a mess this turned into.
I stayed with my brother John P. Donnelly in his little two bedroom two bath house at
14216 Chamberlain Avenue Largo, Florida 33774 for less than seven days. Less than a week after my brother came to get me out of a homeless shelter he kicked me out.
But before he did that he did some other crazy things I should mention.
When I left the C.H.I.P center to live with my brother John P. Donnelly I had over 800 dollars in the bank. But 800 is not a very big number especially when you are talking about money.
John took me shopping. For clothes. For bed linens. Hell we drove to several used furniture stores until I finally found a bed I could afford to buy. John was a sport. He paid for the expensive part of the bed. The mattress. There are mattress stores all over Pinellas County and that includes in the city of Largo and Clearwater but for some stupid reason we drove all the way over to some place in St. Petersburg just to get a mattress.
I just can’t even begin to hint at how strange I thought this was. Why drive all the way to St. Pete? Even if we had been there and it was just a convenient stop, why not just drive back to Largo or Seminole and stop there for a mattress? I just didn’t get it.
But at least I had a small room and bed to sleep on. Now I needed a job. Moving into John’s house effectively made me unemployed again. Getting to the office of First Global Services was not doable from John’s place. But I didn’t fuck around. I went out and got a job. In just two days. It was still a telemarketing thing but it was work.
I took a job at a place called Consumer Energy Solutions. They offered a week or two of paid training. The place was owned and run by a Scientologist. I liked it any way because it was just a couple of hundred feet from the C.H.I.P. center and just as close to the St. Vincent De Paul soup kitchen. See in my heart I knew damn well my brother was about to do me dirty. I did not count on it being inside of a week though. So it worked out good that I found a place close to the shelter and the free food.
John started dosing me with the boner juice. The morning we started out looking at used furniture stores so that I could by a bed, John took me through a drive through at a McDonalds, and a little while after eating I was sporting wood. For the love of god.
I’m scouring Pinellas County for the cheapest twin size bed I can find and I have to do it sporting a boner? What the fuck?
I’ll avoid a fight every time. I don’t go looking for trouble like that. So I never said a word to John about the dick juice. I just didn’t want to discuss it with him. Not that morning as we hunted for used furniture, not ever. But during the week that I was at John’s place I was getting regular erections because he was poisoning me with something.
As if that was not enough of a burden for me John wanted me to decide on a life changing career. He wanted me to state with absolute certainty exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. But I had no answer for him. The best I could do was offer to take one of those aptitude tests. You know online. You answer a bunch of questions and a computer analyzes your responses and determines what you might be good at. What you might be happy doing. He called a couple of numbers in the phone book. He wanted me to “see somebody”. I was just as happy to do it online. So that’s what I did.
The test taken the answers analyzed the computer told me that I should be a writer, or a film editor. I scratched my head a few times. I needed a computer to tell me this. I have wanted to be a writer since I was about 16. I have wanted to work in the film industry since I saw Star Wars in 1977. I was 10 then. I don’t care how annoying movies and Hollywood can sometimes be, I love them any way. Writing is just plain fun. It’s a quick simple release. Not unlike masturbation really.
I printed the results and showed them to John. I’m not sure he liked what the computer had to say. He was hoping for Fire Fighter or Police Officer, or something a little more tangible I guess.
Now I’m kinda doing battle with him on two fronts, he’s poisoning me with dick juice,
and he is pressuring me to embrace a new career (apparently unaware or unconcerned about the fact that I am a convicted felon), and he attacks me on a new front. Four or five days after moving in with him he insists that I drive around with him and look for a place to live. I have depleted me 800 dollars to something around 200 and now I have to find a place to live? I have just started a new job in telemarketing of all things (you can never really count on making any money in telemarketing it’s simply a numbers game…sometimes the numbers work with you and sometimes they work against you) and the fool is forcing me to look for a place to live. I swear it’s as if he was deliberately
trying to push me over the edge.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Confessions of A Peanut Butter Junkie
Becoming homeless was a lot like turning 40. I dreaded it for a while and then it just happened.
The lease was up at 12480 Rose Street Apt. 1 Seminole Florida 33772, and it was time to go. By this time I had no insurance, so I couldn’t drive. The minute I stop paying for SR-22 insurance, my drivers license is suspended, and so it was. I had no job, no car, no license, no where to go, and worst of all; I had no way of getting all of my stuff out of the two bedroom apartment my brother had rented for me. He was not willing to go through the hell of helping me move again. His advice: call my father. He even suggested that I ask a stranger, the man that was the caretaker at Rose Tree Gardens; the pretty name for the apartments at 12480 Rose Street Seminole Florida 33772.
I did neither of these things. I could not count on my father because I had never counted on him in the past, well not counting that time that he came out with AAA to help get my keys out of my locked car, that time he called me the trashcan man. In fact in all my life I have only really had two conversations with my father. Beyond, “Pass the salt,” or “Can I have some potatoes down this way,” my father and I had never really spoken. The other conversations I had with my father were merely interrogations. I was not about to ask the help of a stranger.
I did try to rent a U-haul, they always try to sell you insurance. But I asked the guy and he said they do not sell the kind of insurance that I would need to actually drive one of the trucks.
So on or about June 30, 2006 I loaded up my little cart, the one I had bought for doing laundry when I lived at 810 1st ave NW apt. 1 Largo Florida 33770, and started taking my stuff out to the dumpster. Everything I owned went in except the few things I could carry.
People came out of their apartments and hauled my stuff back to their apartments. My T.V., my DVD player, my Xbox, my Game Cube. Every Stephen King book published in my life time, most of them in hard cover. All my stuff. In about 1 hour and 45 minutes
my life was reduced to 5 pairs of underwear, 3 pairs of jeans, 4 t-shirts, 2 pairs of shoes,
some socks, towels, and a wash cloth.
I had no idea where I was going or what to do. I did have money though. So what did I do? I took a trip. That’s right. I was all packed up and I had nowhere to be. So I got out of Florida for the first time in more than 20 years. It was a nice trip. It would have been perfect if some candy ass federal agent hadn’t approached me in Montana and tried to get me to by dynamite from a “Friend of his.” I swear I am not making this up. You should have seen this pathetic excuse for homeland security.
“What are you, planning to blow up an abortion clinic?” I quipped.
Otherwise it was a nice trip. Coming home was the hard part. Tough to come back when you have nothing to come back to.
I think I hit Pinellas County on July 11, 2006. And the first thing I did was call my parents. My mom was curt.
“Call the Salvation Army,” she said.
So that’s what I did.
I wasn’t in the worst shape ever, but my situation was way beyond desperate. At this point I still had over $800.00, and what I really needed was a place to stay and a job.
I wound up at the Salvation Army in St. Petersburg Florida. They provide emergency shelter, but not for very long. They would not or could not let me in. They did give me a meal though.
So I wound up flopping in a cheap motel. The next day I went back to the Salvation Army and tried to get shelter. They had nothing for me.
So I wound up flopping in a cheap motel.
This went on until my $800.00 was reduced to about $75.00.
And then someone finally told me about a place in Clearwater Florida called C.H.I.P..
Oh! Oh! Wait. I have to tell you about “The People That Love.” I swear I am not making that up.
What is “The People That Love”? It’s kind of a sad little cult with a little house and some
rooms located at 817 5th Ave N St. Petersburg Florida 33701.
If this is what passes for church in America today Christianity has fallen on some really hard times.
I’ll give them props, they did take me in. They let me get a shower. They gave me some kind of meal. And they let me sleep on the floor of that creepy “Church” of theirs.
I’m lying there on the floor covered under some filthy blanket that has been used by countless homeless guys before me, my head on a filthy pillow that has been used by countless homeless guys before me (these things have never been washed) and what am I thinking?
“Guess I’ll never work with Spielberg or Lucas,” I’m thinking.
Here is a homeless man with some priority issues.
They make you sit through a service at “The People That Love.”
They play some of the worst Christian music I have ever heard at “The People That Love.”
It was the music that got me into trouble. It was the music that got me kicked out of “The People That Love.”
And the Lightning.
I was sitting on the front porch in the stifling humidity watching as a storm approached.
I’m sitting on the front porch at “The People That Love” and I see the storm coming and I say, “I hope the power goes out so we won’t have to listen to that horrible music.”
They march us over to “the chapel”, four or five of us homeless guys, it’s starting to rain, the lightning is really intense. A cop car screeches to the curb, siren warbling, lights flashing-all just to see which one of us homeless guys is going to run. None of us does.
I’m a broke, homeless, hungry, convicted felon, but I haven’t been in trouble since the DUI arrest. Cops annoy me, but they don’t scare me.
I take a seat in “the chapel”. In it’s early years “the chapel” had been someone’s living room. It’s small. Whoever decided to convert it to a place of worship didn’t do much of a job. It’s like someone took a shit on tacky and called it a church.
Thunder. Lightning!
The power goes off.
Someone looks at me and says, “You’re the devil.”
“No,” I say, “I just don’t like the music.”
They kick me out. Just in case. In case I am the devil.
Or maybe they kick me out because by now the guys in law enforcement including John the caretaker from 810 1st Ave NW apt 1 Largo FL 33770 are calling me a pedophile.
Yeah, that’s what they are saying behind my back. They won’t charge me with anything. Probably because they can’t. And the reason that they can’t is because it is just one GIANT lie.
I told you that I worked for Mercury Insurance at 1901 Ulmerton Road Clearwater FL
33762, and that I had fallen in love with someone there. I also admitted that they were too young for me. Yeah, they were too young for me. But the person I fell in love with was
Well over 23 or 24 at the time.
I told you that they started dosing me with boner juice. Night after night as I worked at Transitions Optical and was living at 12480 Rose Street Apt 1 Seminole Florida 33772,
that I would rush home each morning and look at porn and masturbate.
You know how many times I looked graphic depictions of children having sex? Exactly none.
I am not now, nor have I ever been a pedophile. Period. But the same sorry ass scum bags who had bugged my house, my phone, my car, and my computer could find nothing to arrest me for. Nothing to charge me with. So they decided to make something up.
I think they got the idea from Mike Murphy. Mike Murphy hated me so much he was willing to tell the cops that I was a pedophile. Did I mention this guy was the milk of human kindness?
I love kids. Who doesn’t? They still have all that wonder and that innocents. But do you know how many I have fondled or fucked? You guessed it! NONE! Do you know how many I have wanted to fondle or fuck? NONE, again.
Would I jump into the sack with a willing 20 year old? Probably. Am I saying it’s right?
Of course not. But I’m not married. Not dating, and it’s perfectly legal.
That’s it. That’s my sermon on pedophilia.
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming:
…So I get kicked out of “The People That Love.” Apparently they only love so much.
I’m on the street in St. Petersburg Florida, and I’m lugging my huge gym bag and a back pack around. I’ve got about 40 lbs of crap and I’m riding buses and humping from point A to point B with all of it on my back, and I have know idea where I’m going.
So finally someone at the Salvation Army tells me about C.H.I.P. It’s in Clearwater Florida.
I find myself at the Park Street terminal of the Pinellas Sun Coast Transit Authority.
In other words I’m at the bus station in down town Clearwater. It’s pretty scuzzy, but not as bad as Williams Park in down town St. Petersburg.
The reason I’m at the Park Street Terminal of PSTA is I’m looking for an address:
1339 Park Street Clearwater Florida 33756. This is the address for C.H.I.P.
The Clearwater Homeless Intervention Project.
I’m wandering around down town. I see Park Street. Hell I’m standing at the Park Street bus terminal. I’m carrying 40 lbs of shit on my back sweating, dehydrating, looking for some kind of salvation, but the only thing I can find down town are The Scientologists.
I swear I am not making this up. Clearwater Florida is the spiritual headquarters of The Scientologists. They’re all over the place down there. I think they own just about every inch of everything in down town Clearwater Florida. I’m afraid to speak with any of them. Don’t get me wrong. They’re not scary or anything. Hell, they’re clean, they’re shaven, and they’re definitely not homeless. But they’re always bustling around down there like they’re getting ready for Word War III, or global domination.
So I finally crack and I ask some young black guy if HE knows where C.H.I.P. is?
I asked him not because he was black, I asked him because at the time he was by far the cleanest dude standing at the bus terminal. Counting me.
I was in luck. He knew just where it was. He gave me perfect directions.
That’s how I got to the CHIP center the first time.
The lease was up at 12480 Rose Street Apt. 1 Seminole Florida 33772, and it was time to go. By this time I had no insurance, so I couldn’t drive. The minute I stop paying for SR-22 insurance, my drivers license is suspended, and so it was. I had no job, no car, no license, no where to go, and worst of all; I had no way of getting all of my stuff out of the two bedroom apartment my brother had rented for me. He was not willing to go through the hell of helping me move again. His advice: call my father. He even suggested that I ask a stranger, the man that was the caretaker at Rose Tree Gardens; the pretty name for the apartments at 12480 Rose Street Seminole Florida 33772.
I did neither of these things. I could not count on my father because I had never counted on him in the past, well not counting that time that he came out with AAA to help get my keys out of my locked car, that time he called me the trashcan man. In fact in all my life I have only really had two conversations with my father. Beyond, “Pass the salt,” or “Can I have some potatoes down this way,” my father and I had never really spoken. The other conversations I had with my father were merely interrogations. I was not about to ask the help of a stranger.
I did try to rent a U-haul, they always try to sell you insurance. But I asked the guy and he said they do not sell the kind of insurance that I would need to actually drive one of the trucks.
So on or about June 30, 2006 I loaded up my little cart, the one I had bought for doing laundry when I lived at 810 1st ave NW apt. 1 Largo Florida 33770, and started taking my stuff out to the dumpster. Everything I owned went in except the few things I could carry.
People came out of their apartments and hauled my stuff back to their apartments. My T.V., my DVD player, my Xbox, my Game Cube. Every Stephen King book published in my life time, most of them in hard cover. All my stuff. In about 1 hour and 45 minutes
my life was reduced to 5 pairs of underwear, 3 pairs of jeans, 4 t-shirts, 2 pairs of shoes,
some socks, towels, and a wash cloth.
I had no idea where I was going or what to do. I did have money though. So what did I do? I took a trip. That’s right. I was all packed up and I had nowhere to be. So I got out of Florida for the first time in more than 20 years. It was a nice trip. It would have been perfect if some candy ass federal agent hadn’t approached me in Montana and tried to get me to by dynamite from a “Friend of his.” I swear I am not making this up. You should have seen this pathetic excuse for homeland security.
“What are you, planning to blow up an abortion clinic?” I quipped.
Otherwise it was a nice trip. Coming home was the hard part. Tough to come back when you have nothing to come back to.
I think I hit Pinellas County on July 11, 2006. And the first thing I did was call my parents. My mom was curt.
“Call the Salvation Army,” she said.
So that’s what I did.
I wasn’t in the worst shape ever, but my situation was way beyond desperate. At this point I still had over $800.00, and what I really needed was a place to stay and a job.
I wound up at the Salvation Army in St. Petersburg Florida. They provide emergency shelter, but not for very long. They would not or could not let me in. They did give me a meal though.
So I wound up flopping in a cheap motel. The next day I went back to the Salvation Army and tried to get shelter. They had nothing for me.
So I wound up flopping in a cheap motel.
This went on until my $800.00 was reduced to about $75.00.
And then someone finally told me about a place in Clearwater Florida called C.H.I.P..
Oh! Oh! Wait. I have to tell you about “The People That Love.” I swear I am not making that up.
What is “The People That Love”? It’s kind of a sad little cult with a little house and some
rooms located at 817 5th Ave N St. Petersburg Florida 33701.
If this is what passes for church in America today Christianity has fallen on some really hard times.
I’ll give them props, they did take me in. They let me get a shower. They gave me some kind of meal. And they let me sleep on the floor of that creepy “Church” of theirs.
I’m lying there on the floor covered under some filthy blanket that has been used by countless homeless guys before me, my head on a filthy pillow that has been used by countless homeless guys before me (these things have never been washed) and what am I thinking?
“Guess I’ll never work with Spielberg or Lucas,” I’m thinking.
Here is a homeless man with some priority issues.
They make you sit through a service at “The People That Love.”
They play some of the worst Christian music I have ever heard at “The People That Love.”
It was the music that got me into trouble. It was the music that got me kicked out of “The People That Love.”
And the Lightning.
I was sitting on the front porch in the stifling humidity watching as a storm approached.
I’m sitting on the front porch at “The People That Love” and I see the storm coming and I say, “I hope the power goes out so we won’t have to listen to that horrible music.”
They march us over to “the chapel”, four or five of us homeless guys, it’s starting to rain, the lightning is really intense. A cop car screeches to the curb, siren warbling, lights flashing-all just to see which one of us homeless guys is going to run. None of us does.
I’m a broke, homeless, hungry, convicted felon, but I haven’t been in trouble since the DUI arrest. Cops annoy me, but they don’t scare me.
I take a seat in “the chapel”. In it’s early years “the chapel” had been someone’s living room. It’s small. Whoever decided to convert it to a place of worship didn’t do much of a job. It’s like someone took a shit on tacky and called it a church.
Thunder. Lightning!
The power goes off.
Someone looks at me and says, “You’re the devil.”
“No,” I say, “I just don’t like the music.”
They kick me out. Just in case. In case I am the devil.
Or maybe they kick me out because by now the guys in law enforcement including John the caretaker from 810 1st Ave NW apt 1 Largo FL 33770 are calling me a pedophile.
Yeah, that’s what they are saying behind my back. They won’t charge me with anything. Probably because they can’t. And the reason that they can’t is because it is just one GIANT lie.
I told you that I worked for Mercury Insurance at 1901 Ulmerton Road Clearwater FL
33762, and that I had fallen in love with someone there. I also admitted that they were too young for me. Yeah, they were too young for me. But the person I fell in love with was
Well over 23 or 24 at the time.
I told you that they started dosing me with boner juice. Night after night as I worked at Transitions Optical and was living at 12480 Rose Street Apt 1 Seminole Florida 33772,
that I would rush home each morning and look at porn and masturbate.
You know how many times I looked graphic depictions of children having sex? Exactly none.
I am not now, nor have I ever been a pedophile. Period. But the same sorry ass scum bags who had bugged my house, my phone, my car, and my computer could find nothing to arrest me for. Nothing to charge me with. So they decided to make something up.
I think they got the idea from Mike Murphy. Mike Murphy hated me so much he was willing to tell the cops that I was a pedophile. Did I mention this guy was the milk of human kindness?
I love kids. Who doesn’t? They still have all that wonder and that innocents. But do you know how many I have fondled or fucked? You guessed it! NONE! Do you know how many I have wanted to fondle or fuck? NONE, again.
Would I jump into the sack with a willing 20 year old? Probably. Am I saying it’s right?
Of course not. But I’m not married. Not dating, and it’s perfectly legal.
That’s it. That’s my sermon on pedophilia.
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming:
…So I get kicked out of “The People That Love.” Apparently they only love so much.
I’m on the street in St. Petersburg Florida, and I’m lugging my huge gym bag and a back pack around. I’ve got about 40 lbs of crap and I’m riding buses and humping from point A to point B with all of it on my back, and I have know idea where I’m going.
So finally someone at the Salvation Army tells me about C.H.I.P. It’s in Clearwater Florida.
I find myself at the Park Street terminal of the Pinellas Sun Coast Transit Authority.
In other words I’m at the bus station in down town Clearwater. It’s pretty scuzzy, but not as bad as Williams Park in down town St. Petersburg.
The reason I’m at the Park Street Terminal of PSTA is I’m looking for an address:
1339 Park Street Clearwater Florida 33756. This is the address for C.H.I.P.
The Clearwater Homeless Intervention Project.
I’m wandering around down town. I see Park Street. Hell I’m standing at the Park Street bus terminal. I’m carrying 40 lbs of shit on my back sweating, dehydrating, looking for some kind of salvation, but the only thing I can find down town are The Scientologists.
I swear I am not making this up. Clearwater Florida is the spiritual headquarters of The Scientologists. They’re all over the place down there. I think they own just about every inch of everything in down town Clearwater Florida. I’m afraid to speak with any of them. Don’t get me wrong. They’re not scary or anything. Hell, they’re clean, they’re shaven, and they’re definitely not homeless. But they’re always bustling around down there like they’re getting ready for Word War III, or global domination.
So I finally crack and I ask some young black guy if HE knows where C.H.I.P. is?
I asked him not because he was black, I asked him because at the time he was by far the cleanest dude standing at the bus terminal. Counting me.
I was in luck. He knew just where it was. He gave me perfect directions.
That’s how I got to the CHIP center the first time.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Confessions of A Peanut Butter Junkie
Only that’s not even the half of it.
Did I tell you about Kelly Dorr? Or maybe it’s Dore? Not sure about the spelling. She worked at Mercury Insurance. I think her mom worked at Transitions Optical. There was a lady named Debbie Dorr out at Transitions Optical. She was a huge fan of mine. She’d seen my show, or heard about it.
Remember they had bugged my house, my phone, my car and my computer.
The weirdest thing about working at Transitions Optical was the boners. That’s right. The erections. I had one that lasted 3 hours. I had to cover myself up with a sweater by tying it around my waist.
The other really strange thing about working at Transitions Optical was the corporate culture. They had masterminded the most cut throat corporate culture I have ever witnessed and I have worked for some huge companies.
The regular full time employees at Transitions Optical were some very angry over worked individuals. And every so often they had to train a new temp. A few months would pass or maybe just a few weeks, and then they would have to train a new temp. again.
And so on. Into infinity. They hated training the temporary employees.
Everyone at Transitions Optical had to work every other Saturday.
Someone once asked me how did I like working at Transitions Optical?
“They have the same system down in hell,” I said. “An endless lake of fire and you never get a day off.”
I worked with a woman named Carole. Or maybe just Carol. If you think I’m nuts-look this lady up. She was totally and completely out of her fucking mind. And she had it in for this poor young lady I worked with. They were at each others throats so often I had to step in and tell them just to shut the fuck up once. When I lose my cool I do it in style.
And the boners. Night after night I was dosed with dick juice and I have no idea how this stuff was getting into my system. I was required to wear gloves as part of the job… so I just can’t figure it.
It could not have been healthy. This stuff, it wasn’t really making me horny so much as it was making me feel …almost itchy. Like I had to touch myself. Or Fuck someone’s brains out. It was creepy. And I couldn’t ignore it. If I did I would get the freaking blue balls like you wouldn’t believe.
So what was I doing. I was getting home as quickly as I could and beating off. Shamelessly. It was like someone had created a perfect hell just for me.
John P. Donnelly had something to do with this. He’s guilty. There can be no other answer. I count this as betrayal number two. The first was when he said I could live with him and then rented the expensive apartment. It just was not worth the investment. Not for me. If I had a wife and kids maybe. But it was just me. What did I need with a huge two bedroom apartment?
Don’t get me wrong I loved the apartment. I even started to cook again. Betty Crocker, she had her way with me. I made Lasagna just about once a week when the money started coming in again. I cooked a lot of chicken. I would buy those ready made meals where you just add the chicken and let it simmer on the stove top until the meat is cooked. They’re not great, but they beat the crap out of frozen dinners.
And I was always baking a cake or making brownies. I love doing shit like that.
I was a prisoner. A slave. A crazy Irish Catholic motherfucker being dosed with dick juice night after night, shamelessly beating off and looking at porn online each morning after work.
I was doomed at Transitions Optical before I ever set foot in the door.
Spherion called me one day and said that they would not need me back. I was so relieved, even though I knew what was coming. It was mid June 2006. I had two weeks to find yet another job… and a roommate.
The two weeks went by, and by now my brother and I weren’t even speaking to each other. I think I was mad at him because he left me at the Laundromat one day and I had to call a cab to get home. I think he may have been mad at me because I didn’t fall in love with someone at Transitions Optical. The lease was up on June 30th 2006.
Did I tell you about Kelly Dorr? Or maybe it’s Dore? Not sure about the spelling. She worked at Mercury Insurance. I think her mom worked at Transitions Optical. There was a lady named Debbie Dorr out at Transitions Optical. She was a huge fan of mine. She’d seen my show, or heard about it.
Remember they had bugged my house, my phone, my car and my computer.
The weirdest thing about working at Transitions Optical was the boners. That’s right. The erections. I had one that lasted 3 hours. I had to cover myself up with a sweater by tying it around my waist.
The other really strange thing about working at Transitions Optical was the corporate culture. They had masterminded the most cut throat corporate culture I have ever witnessed and I have worked for some huge companies.
The regular full time employees at Transitions Optical were some very angry over worked individuals. And every so often they had to train a new temp. A few months would pass or maybe just a few weeks, and then they would have to train a new temp. again.
And so on. Into infinity. They hated training the temporary employees.
Everyone at Transitions Optical had to work every other Saturday.
Someone once asked me how did I like working at Transitions Optical?
“They have the same system down in hell,” I said. “An endless lake of fire and you never get a day off.”
I worked with a woman named Carole. Or maybe just Carol. If you think I’m nuts-look this lady up. She was totally and completely out of her fucking mind. And she had it in for this poor young lady I worked with. They were at each others throats so often I had to step in and tell them just to shut the fuck up once. When I lose my cool I do it in style.
And the boners. Night after night I was dosed with dick juice and I have no idea how this stuff was getting into my system. I was required to wear gloves as part of the job… so I just can’t figure it.
It could not have been healthy. This stuff, it wasn’t really making me horny so much as it was making me feel …almost itchy. Like I had to touch myself. Or Fuck someone’s brains out. It was creepy. And I couldn’t ignore it. If I did I would get the freaking blue balls like you wouldn’t believe.
So what was I doing. I was getting home as quickly as I could and beating off. Shamelessly. It was like someone had created a perfect hell just for me.
John P. Donnelly had something to do with this. He’s guilty. There can be no other answer. I count this as betrayal number two. The first was when he said I could live with him and then rented the expensive apartment. It just was not worth the investment. Not for me. If I had a wife and kids maybe. But it was just me. What did I need with a huge two bedroom apartment?
Don’t get me wrong I loved the apartment. I even started to cook again. Betty Crocker, she had her way with me. I made Lasagna just about once a week when the money started coming in again. I cooked a lot of chicken. I would buy those ready made meals where you just add the chicken and let it simmer on the stove top until the meat is cooked. They’re not great, but they beat the crap out of frozen dinners.
And I was always baking a cake or making brownies. I love doing shit like that.
I was a prisoner. A slave. A crazy Irish Catholic motherfucker being dosed with dick juice night after night, shamelessly beating off and looking at porn online each morning after work.
I was doomed at Transitions Optical before I ever set foot in the door.
Spherion called me one day and said that they would not need me back. I was so relieved, even though I knew what was coming. It was mid June 2006. I had two weeks to find yet another job… and a roommate.
The two weeks went by, and by now my brother and I weren’t even speaking to each other. I think I was mad at him because he left me at the Laundromat one day and I had to call a cab to get home. I think he may have been mad at me because I didn’t fall in love with someone at Transitions Optical. The lease was up on June 30th 2006.
Confessions of A Peanut Butter Junkie
I continued to look for work. I had a few interviews, but telling someone you are a convicted felon is not the way to get a job. So I didn’t get one. My money ran out.
The rest of this story is about how I became homeless, but it also includes some more crazy behavior on the part of my Irish Catholic family and in particular my brother John P. Donnelly. I have to tell part of John’s story to finish telling my own.
The only person I am aware of on Earth who came to drugs and alcohol earlier than my brother John P. Donnelly is Drew Barrymore the chick that played Gertie in the Spielberg classic E.T. John found drugs and booze at about age 15 or 16 and he hit them pretty hard. John was smart. He was the kind of kid who would get bored in school because he probably wasn’t being challenged enough. When we were really little kids people would always ask if we were twins. John is two years older than I am.
When he was 16 or 17 John did something he should not have done. He took my father’s tithe. That’s church money. My father’s reaction was extreme and brutal. I will not go into the details. John had a drug and alcohol problem that would not go away. I have no idea what avenues my parents pursued in an attempt to get him straight, but in the end what they did was kick him out of the house.
John dropped out of high school, got a GED and joined the United States Army. I think he went through basic training at Fort Knox in Kentucky but don’t quote me on that. He did just fine and was trained in the lethal art of operating a huge tank of some kind. After his training he was stationed somewhere in Europe. He was only 18 or 19.
I am not shitting on the US Army, but people are people all over the world and they have the same problems and fears and yada yada yada…
John’s adventures in booze and drugs continued in the Army. In Europe.
When my brother John was 19 he got into some kind of accident. A fall of some kind. John became paralyzed from the waist down. He never walked again.
The Veterans Administration has been good to my brother. They have taken very good care of him. He has a house, a huge van that he drives, and number of different wheel chairs to get around in.
But try and imagine what it would be like to wake up in a VA hospital at age 19 with a doctor telling you that you are never going to walk again. …I just can’t do it. It’s the kind of thing you would not even wish on your worst enemy.
When he was a teenager John used to love Rock-N-Roll. He played foosball and was fond of the video game Missile Command. He was also an outdoorsman. He liked to fish and would do it often.
To say that something changed in my brother is an understatement. A million things changed in him. Time marched on. He grew up. Stopped listening to Rock music. The fall that took away his mobility cured him of any alcohol or drug problems.
He found things to do to stay sane. But I’m not so sure he made the right choices.
I can’t remember what year it was that John discovered billiards, but he took to it. John decided that he would spend the rest of his life shooting pool. He replaced Rock-N-Roll with talk radio, and worshiped at the church of Rush Limbaugh. At some point my brother began to listen to talk radio 24/7. No music at all. I think a person who can’t enjoy music of any kind is a person whose soul has died and moved on.
For the record I don’t much care for talk radio. And I hate Rush Limbaugh.
One thing my brother never took to is computers. He gets online via something called Web TV.
John came to my rescue in October of 2005 when I was about to become homeless.
My time was finally up at 810 1st Avenue NW apt. 1 Largo Florida 33770. It was time to leave and I was glad to be going. Tony was still living right next door.
John stops by my place one day and says it will be okay if I move in with him. I have no place to go and no money so what do I say? Yes of course. But on the morning of the move John doesn’t take me over to his place. He takes me to an apartment complex located at 12480 Rose Street North Seminole Florida 33772. He rents an apartment for me. Apt. 1. I am so dead set against this, but I am in no shape or condition to argue with him. Papers are signed and I move in on a prorated 6 month lease that in essence gives me 7 months.
It was a tough move. John could not drive a U-haul and neither could I because my license had long since been suspended and revoked. John let me load up his van with all my crap and then I would unload it at the new place. I bet we made more than five trips.
It was a tough move. It took all day and on into the night.
The apartment at 12480 Rose Street North apt.1 Seminole Florida 33772 was a huge step up. It rented for $700.00 per month. Had two bedrooms that were both larger than the apartment that I was leaving behind and best of all, it had a full size kitchen with a fridge, and a stove.
Unfortunately my brother had some odd plans that he never articulated to me.
My brother betrayed me. More than once. In some really big ways.
My brother John was extremely helpful at this time, but some of his ideas made no sense to me.
One of his ideas was that I should get my drivers license back. I don’t have a car, and I don’t have any money what do I need with a drivers license? He was insistent. It got complicated. Remember I’m a convicted felon because I was arrested for DUI and not only was I arrested for DUI, I was involved in a high speed car accident that resulted in the total loss of my vehicle. The aforementioned Geekmobile.
In order for me to have a drivers license, I have to carry a certain kind of insurance called
SR-22. I have no idea what this is or what it implies, only that to carry a Florida drivers license I have to have SR-22 insurance even if I do not own a car.
So John springs for the insurance. He pays for me to have a non owners insurance policy complete with this “SR-22” stuff and after two trips to the DMV and one to the insurance company I get my Florida drivers license back. I think this cost almost $600.00. The insurance wasn’t cheap and neither was the DMV. I know it was over $150.00 at the DMV just to have them take my picture and hand me over a license.
Great. I have a piece of plastic with my picture on it. NOW what the fuck am I going to do with it?
I almost starved to death at 12480 Rose Street apt. 1 Seminole Florida 33772. It was winter, I had no money, no job, and no food. I had a Florida drivers license though.
Ever had peanut butter on apple slices? I did. It was all the food I had.
I applied for food stamps. The government gave me 70.00 dollars, but said because I was getting so much financial help from my family it was all I was entitled to.
I ate like a king one night.
So now John is paying for my food. Is this insane or what? We started this little odyssey
with the agreement that I was going to be living with him. It would have been taxing, but it would not have cost him much of anything. So he’s paying for my rent
700.00 cha-ching, insurance 350.00 cha-ching, food cha-ching, drivers license 150 cha-ching and he’s spending time with me that he would otherwise be spending watching T.V. or shooting pool. He likes to play in tournaments and if you own a pool hall and live anywhere near Pinellas County Florida you have seen my brother shooting pool in your fine establishment, or leaving it in his big blue and white van with the handicapped lift.
Now to get an idea of what both of us were going through I have to describe a little bit of my life as it was back at 810 1st Ave NW apt 1 Largo Florida 33770.
Back at my old place I could walk to a Publix grocery store in less than 8 minutes. It made it just doable for me to go grocery shopping with out need of a car or a taxi cab.
I would buy just what I could carry and lug it back to the apartment. It wasn’t easy, but it was doable. Ditto on laundry.
Did I tell you I used to own over 40 pairs of underwear. I did. Mostly because I hate going to the laundromat. You can never have to many clean towels or to many clean pairs of underwear.
Following the demise of the Geekmobile I bought a cart. What the fuck? A cart you say!
Yes. A cart. I had to shop around online until I found just the right one, but I did it.
I needed a cart to get my laundry to the laundromat. When I lived at 810 1st Ave NW apt. 1 Largo Florida 33770 I would put my clothes and stuff in three laundry baskets, and my cart would hold two on the top tier and one on the bottom tier. I would tie the stuff down and push my cart to the nearest laundromat which happened to be just down Clearwater Largo Rd next to the 7/11. It sucked big time doing it this way- BUT it was doable. It took less than 7 minutes to push the stupid cart down to the laundromat.
Now at 12480 Rose Street apt.1 Seminole Florida 33772 I still had my cart, but I could have pushed it all day and not actually gotten anywhere. There was just nothing close by.
There was a Win-Dixie down Park Blvd. for shopping, but I could not carry my groceries that far. So I would have to steal a shopping cart every time I did make it to the grocery store.
The apartments at 12480 Rose Street Seminole Florida 33772 had a laundry room but it was in disrepair and was not acceptable for actually doing laundry.
Now John has to come over once a week, or once every other week, and hall me and my sorry ass, plus all of my clothes and stuff to a laundromat. It gets to be a chore. For both of us. It really does.
Meanwhile I am applying for jobs online. That’s right I’ve hooked myself back up to the internet. I’m starving. But I’m online with a high speed connection. This is of course getting me nowhere. So John offers to take me around to apply in person. I get dressed up and hit the bricks. I applied to places like Raymond James. Timer Warner. I’ll be honest, applying at Time Warner was my idea of a really silly joke. I mean if anyone on Earth had a right to know what I was looking at online it was Time Warner. They actually called me in for an interview and I think I almost had that job. I put on a suit for the interview and everything. Maybe calling me for the interview was their idea of a silly joke. They just wanted to see the pervert in person. Yawn.
I got desperate to be back at work and I even had John take me over to one of those day labor places. I swear I am not making this up. They had this strange test that they gave me at this day labor place. You were asked a bunch of questions that were in essence essentially the same stupid question over and over again. I failed it! I couldn’t even get a job at a shitty day labor joint. Now not even the convicted felons who hire convicted felons wanted me. This was the low point of my life. I swear.
So in the end what I did was slink back to a couple of the temp agencies that I had used in the past. I was dead set against this, I did not want to be a temp. I wanted to be back on the chain gang! For real. But I was so out of options. Time was running out. Christmas had come and gone.
In March of 2006 Spherion placed me at Transitions Optical out on Belcher Road.
This was a huge disaster in so many ways.
This was so fucked up I’m not even sure where to start. Hum…let me see. Okay..let’s start with the work. Factory work. I’ve worked in a factory way back when. I’m starving and mooching off family members. I’ll do it! Factory work!
3rd shift. It was all they offered me. I clocked in at 10 or 10:30 at night. This sucks even if you have a car, and I don’t. So my commute is an unbelievable cluster fuck that involved me catching a bus, riding it down Park Blvd., jumping out at the corner or Park Blvd. and Belcher Rd., and then walking all the way down Belcher Road to the location of the Transitions Optical. Because of the bus schedule I was required to get to work 2 hours before I had to clock in. I would just hang out on bus stop benches for and hour or so and the head inside. An hour or so. Hanging out on bus stop benches. But there was a pay check in it. Real money. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
Only that’s not even the half of it.
The rest of this story is about how I became homeless, but it also includes some more crazy behavior on the part of my Irish Catholic family and in particular my brother John P. Donnelly. I have to tell part of John’s story to finish telling my own.
The only person I am aware of on Earth who came to drugs and alcohol earlier than my brother John P. Donnelly is Drew Barrymore the chick that played Gertie in the Spielberg classic E.T. John found drugs and booze at about age 15 or 16 and he hit them pretty hard. John was smart. He was the kind of kid who would get bored in school because he probably wasn’t being challenged enough. When we were really little kids people would always ask if we were twins. John is two years older than I am.
When he was 16 or 17 John did something he should not have done. He took my father’s tithe. That’s church money. My father’s reaction was extreme and brutal. I will not go into the details. John had a drug and alcohol problem that would not go away. I have no idea what avenues my parents pursued in an attempt to get him straight, but in the end what they did was kick him out of the house.
John dropped out of high school, got a GED and joined the United States Army. I think he went through basic training at Fort Knox in Kentucky but don’t quote me on that. He did just fine and was trained in the lethal art of operating a huge tank of some kind. After his training he was stationed somewhere in Europe. He was only 18 or 19.
I am not shitting on the US Army, but people are people all over the world and they have the same problems and fears and yada yada yada…
John’s adventures in booze and drugs continued in the Army. In Europe.
When my brother John was 19 he got into some kind of accident. A fall of some kind. John became paralyzed from the waist down. He never walked again.
The Veterans Administration has been good to my brother. They have taken very good care of him. He has a house, a huge van that he drives, and number of different wheel chairs to get around in.
But try and imagine what it would be like to wake up in a VA hospital at age 19 with a doctor telling you that you are never going to walk again. …I just can’t do it. It’s the kind of thing you would not even wish on your worst enemy.
When he was a teenager John used to love Rock-N-Roll. He played foosball and was fond of the video game Missile Command. He was also an outdoorsman. He liked to fish and would do it often.
To say that something changed in my brother is an understatement. A million things changed in him. Time marched on. He grew up. Stopped listening to Rock music. The fall that took away his mobility cured him of any alcohol or drug problems.
He found things to do to stay sane. But I’m not so sure he made the right choices.
I can’t remember what year it was that John discovered billiards, but he took to it. John decided that he would spend the rest of his life shooting pool. He replaced Rock-N-Roll with talk radio, and worshiped at the church of Rush Limbaugh. At some point my brother began to listen to talk radio 24/7. No music at all. I think a person who can’t enjoy music of any kind is a person whose soul has died and moved on.
For the record I don’t much care for talk radio. And I hate Rush Limbaugh.
One thing my brother never took to is computers. He gets online via something called Web TV.
John came to my rescue in October of 2005 when I was about to become homeless.
My time was finally up at 810 1st Avenue NW apt. 1 Largo Florida 33770. It was time to leave and I was glad to be going. Tony was still living right next door.
John stops by my place one day and says it will be okay if I move in with him. I have no place to go and no money so what do I say? Yes of course. But on the morning of the move John doesn’t take me over to his place. He takes me to an apartment complex located at 12480 Rose Street North Seminole Florida 33772. He rents an apartment for me. Apt. 1. I am so dead set against this, but I am in no shape or condition to argue with him. Papers are signed and I move in on a prorated 6 month lease that in essence gives me 7 months.
It was a tough move. John could not drive a U-haul and neither could I because my license had long since been suspended and revoked. John let me load up his van with all my crap and then I would unload it at the new place. I bet we made more than five trips.
It was a tough move. It took all day and on into the night.
The apartment at 12480 Rose Street North apt.1 Seminole Florida 33772 was a huge step up. It rented for $700.00 per month. Had two bedrooms that were both larger than the apartment that I was leaving behind and best of all, it had a full size kitchen with a fridge, and a stove.
Unfortunately my brother had some odd plans that he never articulated to me.
My brother betrayed me. More than once. In some really big ways.
My brother John was extremely helpful at this time, but some of his ideas made no sense to me.
One of his ideas was that I should get my drivers license back. I don’t have a car, and I don’t have any money what do I need with a drivers license? He was insistent. It got complicated. Remember I’m a convicted felon because I was arrested for DUI and not only was I arrested for DUI, I was involved in a high speed car accident that resulted in the total loss of my vehicle. The aforementioned Geekmobile.
In order for me to have a drivers license, I have to carry a certain kind of insurance called
SR-22. I have no idea what this is or what it implies, only that to carry a Florida drivers license I have to have SR-22 insurance even if I do not own a car.
So John springs for the insurance. He pays for me to have a non owners insurance policy complete with this “SR-22” stuff and after two trips to the DMV and one to the insurance company I get my Florida drivers license back. I think this cost almost $600.00. The insurance wasn’t cheap and neither was the DMV. I know it was over $150.00 at the DMV just to have them take my picture and hand me over a license.
Great. I have a piece of plastic with my picture on it. NOW what the fuck am I going to do with it?
I almost starved to death at 12480 Rose Street apt. 1 Seminole Florida 33772. It was winter, I had no money, no job, and no food. I had a Florida drivers license though.
Ever had peanut butter on apple slices? I did. It was all the food I had.
I applied for food stamps. The government gave me 70.00 dollars, but said because I was getting so much financial help from my family it was all I was entitled to.
I ate like a king one night.
So now John is paying for my food. Is this insane or what? We started this little odyssey
with the agreement that I was going to be living with him. It would have been taxing, but it would not have cost him much of anything. So he’s paying for my rent
700.00 cha-ching, insurance 350.00 cha-ching, food cha-ching, drivers license 150 cha-ching and he’s spending time with me that he would otherwise be spending watching T.V. or shooting pool. He likes to play in tournaments and if you own a pool hall and live anywhere near Pinellas County Florida you have seen my brother shooting pool in your fine establishment, or leaving it in his big blue and white van with the handicapped lift.
Now to get an idea of what both of us were going through I have to describe a little bit of my life as it was back at 810 1st Ave NW apt 1 Largo Florida 33770.
Back at my old place I could walk to a Publix grocery store in less than 8 minutes. It made it just doable for me to go grocery shopping with out need of a car or a taxi cab.
I would buy just what I could carry and lug it back to the apartment. It wasn’t easy, but it was doable. Ditto on laundry.
Did I tell you I used to own over 40 pairs of underwear. I did. Mostly because I hate going to the laundromat. You can never have to many clean towels or to many clean pairs of underwear.
Following the demise of the Geekmobile I bought a cart. What the fuck? A cart you say!
Yes. A cart. I had to shop around online until I found just the right one, but I did it.
I needed a cart to get my laundry to the laundromat. When I lived at 810 1st Ave NW apt. 1 Largo Florida 33770 I would put my clothes and stuff in three laundry baskets, and my cart would hold two on the top tier and one on the bottom tier. I would tie the stuff down and push my cart to the nearest laundromat which happened to be just down Clearwater Largo Rd next to the 7/11. It sucked big time doing it this way- BUT it was doable. It took less than 7 minutes to push the stupid cart down to the laundromat.
Now at 12480 Rose Street apt.1 Seminole Florida 33772 I still had my cart, but I could have pushed it all day and not actually gotten anywhere. There was just nothing close by.
There was a Win-Dixie down Park Blvd. for shopping, but I could not carry my groceries that far. So I would have to steal a shopping cart every time I did make it to the grocery store.
The apartments at 12480 Rose Street Seminole Florida 33772 had a laundry room but it was in disrepair and was not acceptable for actually doing laundry.
Now John has to come over once a week, or once every other week, and hall me and my sorry ass, plus all of my clothes and stuff to a laundromat. It gets to be a chore. For both of us. It really does.
Meanwhile I am applying for jobs online. That’s right I’ve hooked myself back up to the internet. I’m starving. But I’m online with a high speed connection. This is of course getting me nowhere. So John offers to take me around to apply in person. I get dressed up and hit the bricks. I applied to places like Raymond James. Timer Warner. I’ll be honest, applying at Time Warner was my idea of a really silly joke. I mean if anyone on Earth had a right to know what I was looking at online it was Time Warner. They actually called me in for an interview and I think I almost had that job. I put on a suit for the interview and everything. Maybe calling me for the interview was their idea of a silly joke. They just wanted to see the pervert in person. Yawn.
I got desperate to be back at work and I even had John take me over to one of those day labor places. I swear I am not making this up. They had this strange test that they gave me at this day labor place. You were asked a bunch of questions that were in essence essentially the same stupid question over and over again. I failed it! I couldn’t even get a job at a shitty day labor joint. Now not even the convicted felons who hire convicted felons wanted me. This was the low point of my life. I swear.
So in the end what I did was slink back to a couple of the temp agencies that I had used in the past. I was dead set against this, I did not want to be a temp. I wanted to be back on the chain gang! For real. But I was so out of options. Time was running out. Christmas had come and gone.
In March of 2006 Spherion placed me at Transitions Optical out on Belcher Road.
This was a huge disaster in so many ways.
This was so fucked up I’m not even sure where to start. Hum…let me see. Okay..let’s start with the work. Factory work. I’ve worked in a factory way back when. I’m starving and mooching off family members. I’ll do it! Factory work!
3rd shift. It was all they offered me. I clocked in at 10 or 10:30 at night. This sucks even if you have a car, and I don’t. So my commute is an unbelievable cluster fuck that involved me catching a bus, riding it down Park Blvd., jumping out at the corner or Park Blvd. and Belcher Rd., and then walking all the way down Belcher Road to the location of the Transitions Optical. Because of the bus schedule I was required to get to work 2 hours before I had to clock in. I would just hang out on bus stop benches for and hour or so and the head inside. An hour or so. Hanging out on bus stop benches. But there was a pay check in it. Real money. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
Only that’s not even the half of it.
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