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].