Who would have thought that 75 miles north of the city, amidst the majestic farmland of Ulster County, amidst the rich smell of manure, in the shadow of the glorious Shawangunk Ridge, east of the Wallkill River, that you would find this, that you would find us? The few. The un-proud. The terminally weird. Who would have thought that we would assemble here?

I would imagine that we would assemble in the alley behind the dive bar in Williamsburg, next to the ruptured sewer pipe. I would imagine that we would assemble at the Arby’s, any Arby’s, but probably one down south where they are taken more seriously. I would imagine that we would assemble in the psych-ward, or a detox, or a federal prison, but not here.

Billy owns the property. I heard one time, awhile back, he kicked everybody out. Came through with a bulldozer and leveled all the platforms. Not surprising, really. The surprising part is that this is even a thing. That camping on Billy’s property is a thing. Most of us don’t even know him.

These are the facts. A deck that isn’t connected to a house, one that is free-standing, is called a platform. I have erected a platform on which I place my tent. I have erected this platform in the woods on Billy’s property. At the ranch. That’s what we call Billy’s place: the ranch. South of the runway, west of the sheep farm, halfway between The Golden Tit and Little Odessa.

There are many platforms on Billy’s property but this one is mine. What skydivers lack in overall hygenine they make up for in boundaries and respect. No one will ever pitch their tent on my platform. Besides, there are many platforms on Billy’s property. So much so that, at a yearly “pub crawl,” it requires a map to properly find each location hosting food, beverage, or substance.

Usually a host has a good sturdy, platform, not high off the ground. It’s safer that way. It’s not safe for people who are drunk or high to walk around 5 feet off the ground without a guardrail. But that is how I built mine. It is five feet off the ground. Far away from any critters. And when it was finished, the first time, I remember being able the see the sun light bounce off it like a mirror and return some of that brilliance into the woods around it.

Not all platforms at Bill’s is this well made. No platform at Billy’s is this well-made. Oak flooring is expensive. But some people have used pressure treated wood. And others have covered their non-pressure treated would with a tarp to increase longevity. The result is that water gets trapped in-between the wood and the tarp and can’t evaporate, hence speeding up the process of mold, mildew and rot. Some platforms have been there so long that they are close to being reclaimed by the Earth. That it, they have broken down into the biodegradable elements that wood breaks down into on the Earth-side, and on the Top-side, one can just bearly make out the shape of the platform whose color now matches, exactly, the dirt and leaves around it.

My platform though. I erected my platform so that I could rest between bouts of weirdness, and so that I could spend time in the tent with strange women, on strange nights. I erected my platform so that I could escape my family. But I tell you, I lost my family. I lost them, I say. And I no longer seek strange women or strange nights or anything of the sort. But yet I return, for the floor. The platform floor.

***

It’s the late-eighties or early nineties. I’m anywhere from 40 to 45 inches tall. I have golden, curly hair. And an imagination, to rival any imagination. The machinery responsible for the production of fantasy in my mind is a venerable juggernaut. A sacred being unto itself.

In my dreams I can fly. I am always lucid dreaming. When I wake I have done all the things I wanted to do while I slept. I have met the people I wanted to meet. I have held the girls hand I wanted to hold. This ability was iron-clad until I wanted to kiss them as well and right up until I hit puberty and, well, you know.

Now my dreams are nightmares. My kids are gone and I can’t find them. Or they’re held hostage. There is a knife against Demosthenes’ neck. The fear is worse than falling. In your sleep. How you wake up right before you hit the ground and die. That’s how I wake.

Now I wake up and I have never done the things I wanted to do in my dreams. I never know that I was dreaming anymore. In my dreams. I am never excited. I am not excited to rest. I am not excited to wake.

***

The brilliant sun saturates little areas in random patches on the forest floor. A shirtless man emerges from his tent. From within a cloud of wood-dust, from atop my platform, I see this man. From the corner of my eye.

“Shut! The! Fuck! Up!”

I pay him no mind.

“It’s outside, you know… this is outside.”

There are certain sounds that one is accustomed to hearing at the ranch. For instance, one would not be particularly surprised to hear a woman, or a man, moan in pleasure, from a nearby tent, in the dead of night. Should you happen to hear the shrieking of a man as he runs bare ass into the pond at day break, it would not be the first time. You would know that he’s just fouled himself with mushrooms and has become, all of a sudden, both terrified and overjoyed by the big, round, orange ball that has started to emerge. And on each summer morning with blue skies (and low wind), the Otters will be taking off in quick succession. Every twenty minutes. One after the other. Again, and again until sunset. Plenty of people can sleep through the innocuous drone of an Otter as it taxis down the runway. The distant rise and fall of their twin turboprop engines can be soothing.

This brings us to the sound that has bothered our shirtless friend across the way. One would not expect to wake to the sound of a thirty-five-hundred-Watt generator, 40 feet from their pillow. Nothing but a thin piece of polyester, or nylon, between themselves and the gasoline-fueled combustion required to power my tools.

The man eyes me down for a bit before retreating. Before brushing his teeth in front of the mirror he’s hung on the tree beside his tent. Before rinsing his mouth with water from a plastic water bottle. Fuck him, I say. Before long he’ll be careening from an Otter. Falling from thirteen-thousand feet above the Earth. That fall will help him. Maybe he will feel more alive. Maybe he’ll forget his troubles, for a while. That’s what he needs. Not me.

I need the surface of my platform to be more level. I need to fill the cracks between the boards with filler. If the cracks aren’t filled, the poly will fail to unify and protect the wood underneath. Then the wood will fill with water. And eventually, the platform will buckle, and collapse under its own weight.

I wouldn’t be able to handle a sight like that. The once shiny floorboards, reclaimed by nature. The once shiny floorboards, beset by rot. Eaten by insects. Turned to dirt.

No, I pay him no mind at all. There is too much to get done.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this. The polyurethane I first had used failed. And so certain areas of the wood have been water damaged. Dare I say, have begun to rot. I need to start over. I need to start from scratch.

The only way to keep the rot from spreading is to expose good, clean wood. Get one of those heavy-duty drum sanders. One of those walk-behind deals. Rent it from Home Depot, haul it up to the ranch with the generator. Crack the bitch up and have at it. That’s the only way. Then, only then, I can apply a coating that will be impenetrable.

I have decided to varnish my platform with a Marine-grade lacquer. The floor will be like the deck of a ship. It will last forever, if maintained. But the surface must be prepared properly. I must work, within my cloud of dust, while the others play. Fuck him, I say.

***

See, the boards of the floor are not just any boards. I did not buy them. They were laid in a house in Bergenfield before I was even born. I took them up and had saved them when I renovated my mother’s house. The house I bought with my wife. I took them up and used shitty thin engineered-floorboards from Home Depot instead. No sanding though. I thought I was doing the right thing.

The boards sat around taking up much needed storage space for years until I brought them to the ranch. Before she, my ex wife, had manipulated me into anger. Had used the children as pawns. The only thing that could get to me. After I punched a wall.

She filled in the the blanks at the courthouse with lies and he threw a mirror at me and tried to rape me and said whatever her fucking bitch-lawyer probably told her to say, she got it: the restraining order she wanted. She got the leverage she wanted. Got the kids temporarily. But she couldn’t keep them from me at that time. She could at another. But that’s different story. This is about the home where I grew up. She got me to sign a paper saying that I would never return to the only home I had ever known until the day the divorce was final, except for one day of supervised retrieval of an agreed upon set of assets subject to equitable distribution.

Is that why I work so fervently? There is no way I can keep this platform standing in perpetuity. I have to know that. Still I pour myself into it. I pour money. I pour time. I pour hours lost of jumping out of de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otters with my mates. As if restoring the floor would restore my family.

But the floor isn’t my family. My family is the present. The floor represents my past. The house I grew up in. That family. Every part of it, stepped on. Now it’s the broken window. Now it’s the crumbling steps. The people laughing as they wait for the light to turn. As they wait to pass us by. Now it’s the garbage piled knee high in the basement. My sister and I, wading through it, as if it were a ball pit. I’ve long since left that house but I can still feel the dirt of it on me. I can still see my mother’s tears. They’ve become my own. I don’t even know which broken family I cry for anymore. I don’t know why I polish. I don’t know why I sand. This hardwood floor in the woods, completely out of place, without a chance in the world to survive, destined to degrade, destined to rot and return to the earth, just like me.

It’s just a girl from Bumble

First things first

Feet on the ground

I’m an emotional exhibitionist

Don’t forget the loincloth

Let’s cover THAT at least for now

And first things first

Feet on the ground

She doesn’t go for casual drinks

This is good

Because I can’t drink

First things first

Feet on the ground

I like that she’s traditional

I like that she wants flowers

If it’s flowers, she wants, it’s flowers she gets

First things first

Feet on the ground

Now with respect to sending flowers

With respect floating higher

With respect to all temptation

fantasize,

romanticize

enchanticize

what out there lies

and inward of those deep green eyes

a fool’s errand this floating time

a girl I’ve never met

Oh how I’ve learned

And how I’ve grown

My pain has taught me all alone

That first things first,

FIRST THINGS FIRST

YOU’RE FEET STAY ON THE GROUND

Yet here I muse

from crumbs and clues

besides this plot

doth naught remain

When eyes are green

and smiles seen

and there we sit like children do

Nothing guided

Nothing guarded

Giving some thing

Both ourselves

With folks our age

This is withheld

Not for I

And not for her

So long I’ve searched

For such a heart

The Heart of Gold

It sits before me

Green eyes stare

En-er-gy felt

On this day

I hear her voice

I feel her now

I take the helm

So joy abounds

I am the captain

She’s my crew

With care I’ll send

Her and I

My girl and me

The thing I’ve been saying

I now surren-

der. It’s time

My heart is light

My feet don’t touch

The ground, not felt

We take flight

Our hearts entwined

Our love so right

I do, for her

For her, I do

For her, I fly

She flies with me

We are tremen-

dos part-ners

We are we

And they are they

And we are high

Our lives surrender

Acts of love

Not just for we

Mankind as well

Fairy-elves

Flying pixies

What say you concerns me not

Art is art

And love is love

And with our love we show you art

And with our art

We show you love

And with our love we love ourselves

We love ourselves

We love mankind

Lokah Sama-

stah

Sukhino

Bhavantu

This is how

I’ll live my life

With the girl from Bumble with deep green eyes

Emerald eyes

That’s what

I’ll call her

Or honey

or baby

or lover

or friend

When we’re flying

When we’re high

We’re sober and on drugs as well

I like to write. No, I have to write. It started in high school with lyrics. Then I started playing guitar and singing to the lyrics. And all that time I was an improvisational actor. But after high school something happened. Well, during high school something happened. I started drinking. This isnt a problem for 97% of people. But if you're an alcoholic, then kiss all those lofty yet very attainable goals (for those with talent and determination) goodbye. Goodbye rockstar, or person who is at least a working musician. Goodbye Oscar-winning actor for Best Male Actor in a Dramatic Film, or at the very least a working actor. Goodbye person who is a celebrity for no apparent reason; not even reality television want’s to air a true alcoholic.

The story is always the same with us. Different, but the same. I didn't rise to the top. I became a Marine. The thought of college at that time scared me more than hand-to-hand mortal combat or running through the meat-grinder (think Normandy June 6, 1944 and the very many, very large 50 caliber machine guns that were all pointed down at the beach; that's the meat grinder).

I got a high score on my ASVAB (test to see what military jobs you qualify for) high enough to avoid the meat grinder.

not in original Linkedin bio added for Substack[

It’ll happen again one day. Not Normandy, but the grinding. Of meat. That’s a constant. It’s happened horrifically in our lifetime. We’re heard it on low volume on CNN at the airport while doom-scrolling. But we don’t think about it. It doesn’t cause the arc of out necks to lift from the view towards our phones. Humans need scope for something to sink in. When Britain declared war on France in 1803, that sunk in. The Napoleonic conquests sunk in. Read War and Peace. Tolstoy captures it perfectly. Napoleon marched to Moscow with 600,000 of French and Austrian and whoever else he had and those mother-fuckers went through the meat grinder. Different weapons, same result.* The elements are simple: people, weapons, and a bottleneck. Think of the 300 Spartans. That’s war. That King Leonidas was famous because of the scale of that war. Now his name remembered forever, passed down to my son, the location where he fell marked on the Earth till and it’ll not dare be moved till the next global cataclysm moves it and us humans don’t have a damn thing to say about it because we’re all under water or on top of ice. This is just war. Thank God I’ve never been in it. But you know they say the mind doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what it truly believes is real. Jim Carrey swears that’s how he manifested becoming a huge success. He thought about it. He wrote himself a check for 25 million dollars post-dated 5 years ahead. And that’s why I have PTSD and I never shot a single fucking person. I would have been the best method actor you’d ever seen. Like a Heath Ledger. They say it took Val Kilmer a year of therapy to get out of character after playing Jim Morrison in The Doors. Hahahaha. Jim did drugs and got laid. On Parris Island I killed hundreds of men. I stabbed them with a bayonet and looked them in the eyes and said, “die motha-fucka, die!” Every time I killed I stabbed that fucking dummy it became more and more real, and they told me to scream louder and louder, until I was literally, in my mind, someone who would just gut a mother-fucker because he was in front of me… I was 18 years old. I didn’t get a year of therapy to get out of that character. It became me. But it’s what I chose ah?I could have been a nuclear sub technician. Had nothing to do with this contraption where in comes people and out comes a leg or a eye, or a random piece of flesh or a tooth. THE MEAT GRINDER (MG).

Where will the fall of America take place? On what part of the planet will this contraption be assembled once more? Don’t tell me we won’t fall and don’t tell me it’ll be a nuclear war. First, the MG, then when America suspect’s it will fall, like all empires eventually do, then nukes are on the table. No I hate to break it to you. If you’re around. It’s not gonna be some smooth transition. Adversaries that have outsmarted us but are population conscious. They just gently topple our monetary system, disable our electrical grid and push an airborne disease on our population. No, we have the fleet. The largest in history. And 350 million people not used to working for shit. And some bigot, or patriot, whatever president it is at the time will tell us that the war is essential and we need boots on the ground in numbers. That’s if they don’t come to us while we’re vulnerable, i.e. the electrical grid is down. And when they come (now I can pull a Trump), “they’re bring rapists….” Grunts know fighting and fucking and the women will be raped when the men die. I know that because that’s what happened in Ukraine. And that’s what kind of shit we said on Parris Island. “Left, right… left, right… raping pillaging Yurr! left, right.” That’s what part of the film is about. When Putin invaded Ukraine I was talking to 4 or 5 girls from the area looking to replace my wife in a hurry, as I had just been separated and I was terrified of raising 4 kids alone. So I thought what part of the world is most desparate to come here (for a green card) and which I am attracted to, and Ukraine was at the top of the list. But that was before the war started in February of 2022. I had a month to build these bonds. I was serious. I was going to marry one of these women. And she, locked down in an occupied city and crying because the women are getting raped, and the other is safe in Moscow but her sister is hit by a rocket on a humanitarian safe route. I’m ruining my memoir by the way. Oh well, fuck it. And she, I won’t tell you what happened here. You know I’m smart though right? Have you gathered? Studied computer science at Columbia University. IQ at 133 on a good day. I finally lost it when one of them messaged me that they were getting bombed and she had to get out. And that she had a daughter. I didn’t know about the kid up until then. From then until the time I crossed over into Ukraine two weeks later to try to find her I heard SuperMarine from the Dunkirk soundtrack, by Hans Zimmer, on loop in my head. If it were my child! I swear I can’t remember what satellite it was or how I did it but I got access to a live satellite. It was affiliated with a university or something. Only about an 8 hour lag, but good enough for tracking an evasion route for her as infantry aren’t moving that much in 8 hours. As a refresher, Putin, that mother-fucker, we watched as his military walked and he told us the whole time no we’re not about to invade we’re just training… we watched as they walked all the way up through Belarus in the north to approach Kiev and on the East by Donbas, they all stepped into the country in synchronization. And then they shot, raped, and murdered people.

I know this because I was told first hand accounts all day every day, every day, for weeks, and I was sent pictures and videos in real time about what was happening all across the country. At that time, had I a title with a news agency, I might have had the most pertinent things to say about how vast the difference in opinions could be and where there were offensives or not. I forget who it was who worked as a War Correspondent for Fox, I’ll look it up and update this, he did a great job. I think he might have died too, fuck. Is it worth mentioning now which one of us could have gotten a Pulitzer. What a trivial matter. Why was I even thinking of that? Fuck Fred.

But the fact is this: I might have gone overboard with how many girls I was talking to. But now (this is what I’m thinking in that moment) I have to take responsibility for something. She sent me her address. She was scared. She didn’t know where to go. She asked me things like how much things should I take do I have time to take some bag… “it will be hard to carry bags and my daughter.” I found a humanitarian center on the border of Moldova and I sent her there, and using the satellite, I screenshotted the exact route in case she had to go it on foot. And then I didn’t hear from her. I had no idea if I sent her to her death. Her and her child. I had already heard the tragic story of the girl’s sister in Moscow, who was also in Odessa, where this woman with the child was, who was bombed on a fucking humanitarian corridor. Maybe she suffered the same fate? Maybe I put her there? In the Marine Corps I used to call for “fire,” which is a generic term for any sort of munition. Artillery, mortar, close-air-support, naval gunfire. If you needed backup, my job description was the one that was gonna help you and make sure that shit landed where it was supposed to… i.e. not on any civilians. Once again I never had to use this in combat and I have never taken a life. But something snapped. I had to know what happened to her. And her daughter. If she was killed in a non-combatant zone, I was going to find her, extrapolate the trajectory of the round that hit her, place everyone where they would have been at the date and time, pursue war crimes against the Russian Federation in Brussels myself. I swear to Christ this was one of my objectives for going to Ukraine.

Now, my ex, who had left a few weeks earlier, who, well, we had always been pretty chill about custody and she saw how devastating the fighting in court was to the kids from my first marriage, and seeing that us having always resolved to not use lawyers and to grant 50% custody, even righting so much in a pre-nump that we drafted ourselves and had notarized, well, she was starting to have a change of heart when the day of reckoning finally came and she wasn’t going to let me have custody of my the baby, only about 7 months, unless I had help. We weren’t at each others throats or not talking. I had convinced her that, “well if I remarry, then it’s just like me and you, why not just put in our settlement agreement that I get 50% as soon as I remarry?” She thought about it, and said, “yeah I guess we can do that.” And that’s what I was gonna do. The divorce was gonna be settled, and the next day I was going to be at the courthouse with my new Ukrainian bride and have my custody. Hence, the name of the script, and this is a real-life, this story is inspired by real events, and to put the cursor somewhere, it all started with, the genesis was, the moment I typed MAIL ORDER BRIDE in my browser. Hence the name of the film, at least the working title, is “The Mail-Order Bride.”

To be perfectly clear I did not go Epstein I do not know how to buy a person. I did not see any sites that allowed human trafficking. Even if I did I probably would have been so disturbed that I would have gotten the hell away from it. I ended up looking at woman in Ukraine. I think the only difference from American dating sites and the one I found was they (the women) could check a box indicating if they were interested in your wealth… and a good amount of them were not, they wanted love. And the girl I was talking to in Moscow was loaded, at least her family was we did video chats and I saw how she lived and the building and trust me. Loaded. But all the money in the world didn’t keep their child alive unfortunately. She is one of my favorite characters. She has maybe the best line in the film. How do I know that if I haven’t written the screenplay you ask? Because I knew something special was happening as soon as it started. I took a screenshot of exvery conversation on the app with these women, exported all the WhatsApp logs, took pictures while I was there, on my cell and on a DSLR. Near the end of my time when I finally ran into someone who knew what a proper press credential looked like, he deleted all the pics on my Canon, on the SD card. But any fool knows how to run some simple software to recover deleted pics from a device. So yeah, I have everything.

When you actually get there, to a war-zone I mean, and you see the checkpoints, and you look at the men with their guns, the life of the population moving along as best it can, but everybody stopped, no exceptions, it hits you: these mother-fuckers don’t give a fuck (the military). They are encouraged and lifted up at each stop, “slavo ukraina, ukrain slavum.” That’s the first thing I had to learn so as to not stick out like a sore thumb. And the guys helped me learn it. At that time America was coming big time to their rescue, they loved it when I showed my passport and in their native tongue stated, “glory to Ukraine, glory to the heros.” They were the heros! They were ready to fucking die. As was I as a young Marine. How many of the men I crossed paths with on that trip in 2022 are dead at this point? I think, many.

I needed to make it home to my kids. I told the oldest boy I wouldn’t be going into Ukraine. I told him I was just volunteering at a humanitarian center on the border and he seemed content and almost proud of me, while I felt shame. All the kids loved my second wife. The marriage didn’t even last much more than a year. I couldn’t give them anything in stability. I loved to be loeved by him at that time, at the age he was when I left. I still had the dad card. I love you cause you’re my dad. That card has since been revoked.

I cried sitting in the car there because I lied to him. And I cried because I knew I might not come back. I wanted us all to be one family, my three older kids and the baby. And I wanted a wife. I was hardly looking for just a person to come quickly to marry. That’s how it started, “I married twice for love and look where it got me, this one will be transactional, for family,” but after a day I was back to romanticizing as always. I’m a fucking romantic. I wanted it all and I was ready to die trying for it.

I remember that Q4 by Father John Misty started playing while we were talking and he asked me what I was going to be doing, the younger two kids already out of the car and running to their mothers house. I remember I cried the night before because of the story I chose to read to him. It was not out of the ordinary for us to talk physics, even when the kid was 10, but reading him something from a literary magazine was a stretch.

Somehow I was thinking it was a good idea to plant a seed in his head that a parent can die. I had just read the story… even tho it was from fall 2019, it sat on me poignantly and I mistakenly thought this was our destiny, this, for me to read THIS, to my ten year old son before leaving the country and missing his birthday (my ex wouldn’t have let me see him anyway). I sat this young boy down with a copy of The Georgia Review where Judith Dancoff wrote, in paragraph two, My Father, The Atomic Bomb:

Had there not been a bomb, my biological father-a Manhattan Project physicist-would not have died in 1951 from radiation-induced cancer a month before my fourth birthday, and I would not have grown up fatherless.

I couldn’t finish it. I probably started crying after fatherless. Did I tell you I’m bi-polar?

The boy is a damn near genius. It is a good story. I made it through a few nights before. But even if it (my passing) was all a blur to him at the time (age ten), he’d eventually find the story, somehow, someway, we come from a long line of hoarders. I imagine he would recognize it one day in the storage unit of books and memorabilia my family would set up for them, at least until they became young adult and processed me leaving them so young. I’ve never thrown out a single thing I’ve written. And niether did my father. And a long lost cousin (this is for real) mailed us, essentially a book written by my mothers father, written purely out of spite and hatred for the man.

Slightly off topic, but when you talk about someone having written the book on generational trauma, I think you probably would think about a doctor who has researched it very well and can provide you some great insights on how to heal. Someone famous like Ester Perel or Brené Brown. Or maybe you would think of literary folk like myself, memoirists, but ones with a good reputation and whom have actually published books and or won awards. What we have going on here, which is once again, completely able to be authenticated, a long lost cousin that found me through 23 & Me and mailed me a book my mom’s dad wrote before falling off the face of the Earth again. My dad who I never knew wrote a book, who was in a coma, 50/50 to live or die, who wakes up and hands me pages he typed in Cuba in the 1950s. Pieces of writing from a this one or that one. And take my grandfather’s book. The whole book is basically based on my great-grandfather and his hatred and disrespect for him, and it started because of a newspaper article that was published (that we have). But wait (QVC voice), that’s not all, my uncle, before 23 & Me, before Ancestry, he brute-forced our family-tree just because he was interested. He went to all the places in Bergen County. He found out that we first hit the continent in the Bowery. Yeah that’s before Ellis Island because Manhattan wasn’t Manhattan. And America didn’t exist. It was the golden age of the Dutch. And the boat sailed from Amsterdamn to New Amsterdamn. When these genetic sites came out they just confirmed what we already knew about out ancestry, which is pretty good considering the hundreds of years we had to cross-pollinate and Rayner caught it all. I’m Dutch, Irish, Scottish, English, according to 23 and Me I have some DNA from on the continent, close to the isles tho, and on my dad’s side African and English. I just don’t know of any documented cases of sons hating their father’s with such vitriol as our family has. I tried to break the generational nature of it, but my ex-wives had other plans. Anyway, that’s something I’m going to remain positive on and just you wait and see. I’ll never give up on my kids. By the time my memoir comes out we’ll have it all resolved. I’ll quote my mother’s father’s father and myself when I was 3. We don’t throw away the things we write.

Back to Ukraine. at ten years old, my son loved me. I HAVE to stay alive.

I brought a Kevlar vest. I made sure it wasn’t just rated for stopping a pistol round but for a stopping a rifle round. And not just any rifle round but one that could travel long distances. I bought military-grade shit in other words. I read the specs… like an engineer. I had a tactical helmet. Night vision googles. I had a Garmin with GPS connectivity, capable of receiving and sending texts. And also showing my exact location via the web. My old Marine buddy (and some guys at work who thought this whole thing was incredibly interesting) checked it daily so that if I stopped checking in, or stopped moving, at least my family would now where I might be dead. I can just see them getting into the office at 7 a.m. each morning (we started early, Manhattan traffic gets bad closer to 9), all gathering around “the Fred monitor” and puting on the news to see where the bombs were falling, “lets see where he is today boys!.”

The Marine had instructions to call my sister, NOT my mom. My sibling works for the government (leads a department actually… which I can’t disclose… which she’d kill me for even writing here but we’re half siblings so guess what, you’ll never know her name bithches. Fuck we’re getting old. I don’t lead shit. However, she might have legitimately been able to get someone from the state department to look into her idiot brother. But most likely I was fucked if I grazed across the checkpoints, somehow, into territory controlled by the Russian Federation. They have a hankering for keeping American journalists in prison. They just can’t get enough. And it was right at that time the WNBA player who was caught with weed at the airport was also detained. They’re always detaining someone. If they don’t kill them. What am I going to same, “no the press thing is just some gonzo-journalism schtick I do I’m not really press, I’m really just a former Marine looking for a wife here.”

Anyway, moving on, obviously I had anything I needed to live outside and off the land for awhile. That was incase my rental car was compromised. I had already seen the Russians take out some press on TV. They were in a car and had a HUGE poster stating press but it still started getting rifle rounds inbound… I think they were by a gas station then they drove under a bridge if my memory serves me. I want to say the station was Star something. Not a US outlet. The reporters came out with their hands up, showing that they weren’t soldiers. There were three. Two males and one female. One of the males took a bullet to the gut immediately before these idiots (sorry… no… who could have anticipated it was gonna be that kind of fight; fucking assholes - the Russians who shot press) realized to get the fuck down.

No that wasn’t gonna be me. I’d ditch the car. I had a K-bar, actually a small Gerber blade in the small of my back for concealed carry. But it had been so long since I had held one. Bootcamp. Maybe a bit after? Die motha-fucka die. In the days before I left, while I waited for my bogus press credentials to come in, the blade never me. I practiced for hours. No more idle hands. Remember. I fucking snapped. Unlocking the button and taking the knife out to cross someone’s neck became something I had to do as smooth as walking up to the finest lady in the club. Remember! SuperMarine is playing this whole time. And actually, if you’ve red this far… put it on right now. On YouTube music.

The Oil/ SuperMarine Insane Loop.

The music has this remarkable quality of never falling. The intensity. It’s all rise. By the time I was in Moldova I am certain that if anyone was in front of me and wanted to kill me, my blade would be out and across their neck first. Like I was THE GOOD in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. After that, who knows. I’d probably be shot to bits. But I wasn’t gonna lay down. I was gonna get home to my fucking kids.

The press credential I got stated: International Press Photographer. It also came with some sort of assigment paperwork from a vanity publisher. Or completely fake publisher I acctualy don’t know and don’t care. As soon as I had the press pass I took my two weeks off work and started making my way to Odessa flying into Romania (Moldovan airport locked down), taking a private car from Bucharest to Chisinau, and then renting a car at the closed Moldovan airport, whereafter I crossed into Ukraine with no problem, except for the car rental agency that called me crying about the vehicle because what I did was against the contract and he was certain that he would never see it again or that when he did it would have so many bullet holes in it that insurance wouldn’t pay (that’s a joke). I told him I’d pay him in cash if the car is lost and hung up.

But step back,I was heading into Ukraine, from Moldova, that was where there was that humanitarian refugee camp. Red Cross and the usual suspects all there. A migration of Ukrainians leaving. I did some small things to help. Introduced myself to the military command so that I could take photographs of the area without raising suspicion. The war was so new, I think it took me two week to get out there from the time boots hit the ground, none of the Ukrainian really knew what the real press credential were supposed to look like. My favorite picture of the whole trip I took near that camp, but over by the border crossing, by customs and border control. There I see a mother 20 steps in front of this little kid, he’s wobbling along, family must have been well off, nice jacket on the kid. Just a boy though, maybe 2. I took a knee and captured him just at the moment he left that fucking country and went into Moldova.

My next mission was to find that girl. Let’s call her Anna. Let’s say I was there, in part, to find out what happened to Anna and her daughter. Oh but I was talking to a lot of women. So many loose ends. This is my movie. Tying up all the loose ends. Getting interrogated by multiple countries for being a spy. Ready to lose it all for a chance at love and the family I never had. Where’s my fucking happy ending?

All this will just be a chapter of my memoir. But if I ever get the opportunity, it deserves nothing less than a feature film. Now, who wants to write me a blank check?

]

I was able to not be a Marine. Like, I could have gone to the air force their jobs typically require higher scores. Fixing planes and stuff, not really grunt work. I didn't want to study anything, I wanted to to not think. I wanted to forget. The booze helped with that.

I hated nearly everything about military life almost immediately, except for the amazing friends I met who drank like me.

That first thing you do after high school as far as work, is kind of important. You're drawing a line in the sand. I've been doing jobs I didnt love ever since.

Today I am reinvigorated. I never stopped writing. It's prose more than lyrics at this point. Looking back, I always lacked confidence. Booze was my crutch. And not a good one. It worked in the beginning, and I was the kid with the cool house party’s in his garage. But then Polina. I’m not telling that story now gotta leave something for the memoir…

I have to write. I have to sing. And I finally have enough self-respect to not completely self-deprecate. Any and all self-deprecation is merely for entertainment purposes. Mine, not yours, lol. A nasty lil habit. When someone is shameless enough they don't mind walking away while someone thinks their a freak. That’s confidence. I am that shameless. Have you ever been the girl that told a horror story about the guy you went on a date with and how thank god you got out of there. I was testing you bitch! If you can’t ride for me if I show my ass a little. Be gone. I only ever show my ass on purpose. But you won’t knoow that till we’ve been married 10 or 15 years.

Lol, seriously, I need all of you artists out there. Regardless of your medium. Without you none of this would matter. Thank you for making art.

Also, I need all you who don't create art. I need the ones that don't even like it. I even need the man, or woman, who will look me dead in the eye, know what I am, that my real purpose for writing is to help those with mental health issues, help them to find a way to live a better way, get out of active alcoholism, live better with themselves, I even need the people who will hear that line and still tell me my work is bollocks (it’ll happen, probably in a bar).

No man is an island. Please, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee [John Donne 1624].

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I fucking hate online dating.

So, I was watching SNL last week and Bowen Yang mentioned Raya (it was the first time I’d heard of it). For all you uninitiated, it’s known as a dating app for celebrities. Technically, it’s not just for dating (...one of the fun facts I learned while doing some doom-scrolly research). Despite hearing things like “most people on it are ‘entrepreneurs’ and finance bros,” courtesy of OrdinaryExample9618 (reddit), I wanted to apply (you can't just be on this dating site). Mind you I'm not an entrepreneur, nor a finance bro, and as of the date of application, definitely not a celebrity. I have under 100 Instagram followers. But, I came to find out that the alpha-types OrdinaryExample observed aren't really the demographic the founder was trying to attract when the platform was conceived. Raya's founder, Daniel Gendelman, had wanted an exclusive club for creative-types (which I am). So, maybe I do have a shot, I thought. Due to my reject-level-online-influence, it's a longshot, but it's a shot nonetheless. Read Can Illuminati Tinder Save Us All? to learn about the selection algorithm from Gendelman himself.

I unlocked my Pixel, navigated to the Google Play Store, and searched for Raya. I downloaded “the app,” and started filling out the application/profile. What I didn’t realize at the time is that Raya is only available on iOS and that when I searched for it on my Android device only sponsored apps came up. I had just selected the first one, MillionaireMatch. I have no desire to explain the premise of this site. So, I didn't have the app, I had an app. The point is I wrote an entire essay on myself. When I realized that I was on the wrong app and got over to Raya, well, they only want a few basic details and your Instagram handle.

So that’s the point of this little story. I really liked some of the stuff I wrote and I don’t have anything to do with it. So why not throw it on the inter-webs in hopes that someone will see it on Instagram, like it, and we end up DM-ing and having sex. OK before you cringe I can't take credit for that last joke. That too was inspired by an SNL sketch: Why'd You Like It?

(queue voice of Kenan Thompson) “The game show where we ask contestants, why'd you like it?”

Let's be real people, 99.9999999999% of likes on Instagram are about sex in some way, shape, or form. So, without further ado, my unrealized (yet) and unlikely (ever) Raya profile:

PROFILE HEADLINE

another drunk aspiring writer

ABOUT ME

People used to tell me I looked like Derek Jeter.

The confidence of Channing Tatum masking the self-esteem of George Constanza.

The artistry and vision of Christopher Nolan (pre-Tenet) with the film experience of that homeless guy by Popeyes on W95th.

Somewhere between stupid and brave, humble and broken, openminded and too-smart-for-my-own-damn-good.

Future NY Times Bestseller!

I realize bios aren’t everyone’s thing. Maybe you liked my pictures. Or maybe you thought my headline was interesting, albeit written by someone with a less than stellar chance at becoming a bestseller.

It’s not lost on me that someone who writes is simply a writer and not an “aspiring writer.” I do write, but @anotherdrunkaspiringwriter has been my handle since 2016, since a time when I paid significantly less attention to semantics. I did more drinking than writing back then. I don’t drink anymore, but I’m still a drunk. I need to remember that. So the handle remains.

I guess you could say that I’m “aspiring” to be successful and haven’t broken through yet but that’s not entirely the case either. Yes, we’re gonna talk about what it means to “have” success in this country… sorry I’m a dad.

My first novel was not good and was not published so I spent some time in a writers group working short stories. Currently, I’m working on a memoir in the vein of Another Bullshit Night In Suck City by Nick Flynn. I have a cinema camera that I tinker around with. My creativity flows from prose to screenplay and back again. I was accepted as a graduate MFA candidate at Columbia in 2022 (Writing - Nonfiction) and I couldn’t attend due to the fact that, well, the offer was rescinded, basically (more on that in the memoir). The next year Tisch/NYU interviewed me for the Grad Film program (they passed). The callback from NYU is what I’m highlighting.

Considering I'm 41 years old I realize highlighting these not-even-achievements is somewhat desperate or entirely desperate but feel free to read something that I’ve written (on my website) and decide for yourself if I’m a creative genius who’s about to break-out or some random weirdo on the internet who should be avoided at all costs. The anecdotes about the schools are just to encourage anyone who may be on the fence - I won’t be a complete waste of your time. At some point, some pretty influential institutions almost saw something in me. It doesn't get me down. I'm all the more motivated.

I believe George Saunders. To write a decent story is such a huge and unlikely accomplishment that we shouldn't care how long it takes. How much time would you be willing to spend to create something that lasts forever?

In other news, US Magazine reported that Channing Tatum was on this site and his profile stated, “I used to be a stripper.” Then I googled it and found out that he really was. Ok me too. Myrtle Beach 2003. And a little in 2004. And then just a tad in Manhattan in 07. I’m no Channing Tatum. I can’t dance. I’m not as attractive. But put us in the same venue (pre-his-fame), I guarantee I would have pulled more money each night. I intuitively understood something that he probably did not: I don’t care who you are - a man in a thong is a terrible thing. Once that fabric gets nice and snug against your taint, as a man, you have nothing to offer the opposite sex that they won't feel badly about the next morning or in a year or later the same night. By and large you're better off selling your services as a punishment than a prize. This flies in the face of conventional male-stripper-wisdom.

More about me:

Former Marine. Live in Jersey. Have a small place on the UWS too. I do yoga. Into nutrition, meditation, longevity. I want to retire in Greece.

A thousand summers on the Greek islands would hardly be enough.

I love my kids. I’m building them a treehouse. No that’s an understatement. I’m building them a house that happens to have some trees around it.

Wow, if you’ve made it this far, you’re amazing. I promised you a discussion on success. Perhaps not everyone on this app is on the same page with respect to what it means. Here's where I'm at, and if I'm not mistaken, it's in line with the ethos here, or at least in line with what this space was intended for originally. I read Can ‘Illuminati Tinder’ Save Us All, the NY Times article by Kevin Roose, where he gained access to this app’s founder, Daniel Gendelman. I was impressed. Raya, Gendleman says, is “for passionate people anywhere in the world who have something they want to share with other members,” and the website reportedly states that “We believe in meeting someone who can change a life.” This is exactly the kind of interaction I've been craving more of, and consequently, one's ability to have this kind of deep and meaningful interaction on a regular basis I believe is the measure of one's success. Not that it can only happen here, but this is the place for artists, in cyberspace.

You know who actually had something important to say on fame and success? Matthew Perry. From his memoir, “You have to get famous to know that it’s not the answer. And nobody who is not famous will ever truly believe that.”

We all suffer from the disease of more. Well, let me speak for myself. I suffer from the disease of more. But there is a solution. Self can't heal self. The sick heal the sick. And how does that work? It works through love. I will “have” success, when I love rightly, my fellow man.

ABOUT MY MATCH

I’m looking for a muse. I’d like something (someone) deep but understand that sometimes things start more casually and other times they don’t.

The muse is definitely not materialistic but she likes nice things as do I. She’s kind, strong, strange. Funny. Creative. Artistic. She’s probably an actress… kind of why I’m on Raya. Every director (or “aspiring director” lol) needs to marry a pretty young actress.

I don’t HAVE to actually get married or be in anything with traditional labels. I’ve been there, done that. But I am open to marriage ONCE more if the situation is right. I wouldn’t mind taking things slow.

If the muse is always leaving town because of her job or something, which has made it hard for her to have relationships in the past, that’s fine with me actually. I can wait. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Being a father is my number one priority. But to be a good dad I need to be good myself, so self-care is huge. I have the kids 50 percent of the time for a week straight. It's Monday to Monday, one week on, one week off. So, on my off-weeks I’ll want to do all the things: relax, and recharge, go out in the city, travel if something good is going on.

I’m looking to form a true partnership. For someone who can appreciate what I have to offer. I want to love unconditionally.