A Season In Hell

There’s are several quotes I’ve thought of a lot since the first day of the year when my entire world changed.

There are several quotes I’ve thought of a lot since the first day of the year when my entire world changed.

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

It’s only the end of February but it feels like I’ve lived years in the span between the time I found my mother dead on the ground to where I am now sitting shirtless, in the dark in my college roommate’s basement, listening to Journey in Satchidananda.

The basement is where I’ve lived since everything happened. I stay up until 3 or 4 most nights. Sometimes I listen to music and other times I watch TV. Sometimes it’s Deep Space 9, sometimes it’s The Simpsons when things are really bad and I just need comfort food.

Some times I watch movies. I’m mostly focused on stuff I haven’t watched. First Bringing Out The Dead, which on the surface seems like a bad idea but provides some much needed catharsis. Like Nicolas Cage, I am haunted by the sight of the dead.

The image of two people dead from gun shots to head is seared in my mind. I don’t always see it but I know it’s there. I blink and I see them both stiff and motionless on the floor.

Mom is still in her clothes from the New Year’s Eve party she went to earlier that evening. The carpet is stained with her blood. She’s face down.

Her killer is lying on his back, what’s left of his head is just past the threshold. His lifeless eyes stare up, taking in the blood, skull fragments and gore splattering the door frame. I can see brains peeking out of the entry and exit wounds.

I’ll recount later that I stepped over him like A.I. over Lue, pure disrespect and disdain.

I call my mother’s name, but I already know she’s dead, seeing the gun on the ground tells me all that I need to know. She’s cold to the touch.

At the time I wonder if she was shot in the stomach and bled out a floor above me. That’s an agonizing death and I chastise myself for not responding to the loud crash I heard above my head at three in the morning.

I later learn what a mercy it is that she was positioned that way. The funeral director tells me she was shot between the eyes. I later learn it was point blank and there are powder burns on her face. There was nothing to be done.

I call the cops. Then my editor. It’s a news story and I’m still a journalist at heart even though I’m trapped in hell. Then I call my friends. They don’t believe me, but they can hear the grief and rage in my voice.

Chance hears me scream at the corpse of my mother’s killer, voice dropping to a lower than normal, one seething with rage.

I’ve been trying to write something about what happened to me since the first day of the year.

I just don’t have the words. There’s nothing intelligent to say after a massacre.

Writing seemed like an impossibility, something I’d have to relearn. Even as I write this I fuss over every line. Not because I think highly of myself as a writer, I just want to do justice to the story.

This is the first thing I’ve written since New Year’s Eve. I don’t mean that literally. I’ve written texts and tweets since then and emails, but nothing like this.

It gets old having to rehash your trauma to so many people. My own personal stations of the cross.

Earlier this week I watched First Reformed. I experience a gut punch when one character finds another dead from a self-inflicted gun shot to the head. It causes me to flashback to the carnage I saw. He’s face down and more of his head is gone. His blood soaks the snow.

He kills himself due to depression and existential dread over the looming disaster of climate change. At his funeral, they sing a Neil Young song.

Aside from him having a wife, that could be me. Each new report on insects dying, fish being wiped out or the end of clouds twists my stomach and fills it with battery acid.

When I met with the financial guy about what to do with my blood money, the money from the life insurance policy, I tell him I don’t plan to be alive in 12 years. I’m not trying to pay the piper with everyone else.

He tells me how 35 years from now how wealthy I could be. He says he could turn the $250K into millions. It’s a fact that makes me sick to my stomach, imagining the ghoulish things that money would fund just so I can have a few more zeroes in an account.

In the weeks after the murder, as we wait and wait for the death certificate, more comes to light. Like the man mom was planning to leave Dan for. Turns out he’s a romance scammer. He suckered my mother out of $30K. He’s still doing it because he has no conscience.

I joke that I need to head to South America for a triple tap: first that puppet Guaidó, then Bolsonaro followed by this Argentine fuck. I joke about giving him the Reservoir Dogs treatment, cutting off an ear, soaking him in gasoline. I talk of flicking open a Zippo.

It feels good to say that, I feel powerless.

That’s the word I use when the FBI and Secret Service pay me a visit the day after I turn 30. I’m not worried because at this point, nothing can hurt me. I’m Homer stepping on a nail. “Fiddle-dee-dee, that will require a tetanus shot.”

I have to explain irony and jokes to them. They tell me to keep posting but knock it off on certain things.

The whole thing is absurd, they have pages of my tweets printed off. They’re wasting their time on me instead of Atomwaffen but I assume that’s just professional courtesy.

I joke to friends that while I’m not comparing myself to MLK, we both were hassled by the FBI.

They’re not the only authority figures I’ve irritated this year. When asked what we will do with all the guns at the house, I joke about sending them to the Naxalites, a Maoist separatist group fighting the fascist Modi.

Later the same cop hears me refer to the American flag as a cum rag when I’m on speaker phone with my brother and am unaware of that fact. My mom’s murderer’s daughter wants an American flag, it’s either his dad’s or my grandfather’s. The question fills me with rage because the last thing I want to talk about is a fucking flag.

The other quote I’ve been thinking of is from Big Bill Haywood, a labor organizer and one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World.

“I’ve never read Marx’s Capital, but I’ve got the marks of capital all across my body.”

I’ve seen first hand the cruelty and indifference of the system. Dan was going to rehab through the VA but there was a waiting list. Perhaps if the VA was better funded my mother wouldn’t have been murdered.

I apply for FMLA but get denied. When I am ready to reapply, I learn that the paper has been sold leaving me little runway to resubmit.

Instead I take medical unemployment which i learned from the woman working in the unemployment office isn’t a real thing. It’s a nightmare the hoops you have to jump through just for a pittance. I keep explaining that I haven’t been looking for work because I’m traumatized and haven’t driven since NYE because I worry I’ll have a bout of panic and crash the car.

When I get my mail forwarded, I get a letter telling me I was approved for FMLA.

I didn’t realize that COBRA kicks in immediately and was under the impression that my coverage had ended on Jan. 31. I wait and wait for my COBRA info to come through.

I ration my SSRI until I run out. It’s a bitch to withdraw from Effexor. Your head is in a fog and you feel like shit all the time and the smallest thing can set you on a crying jag.

I live on credit cards until the money comes in.

I’m fortunate, I have a safety net and people to look after me. Not everyone else has it so lucky.

So much bad shit has happened that I keep waiting to hit rock bottom.

It honestly wouldn’t surprise me to learn I have cancer or some other horrible disease. It’s been that kind of year.

Through it all I’ve manage to keep my dark sense of humor. I’ve also been more open about my politics and that I’m a communist. I still don’t post my spiciest takes on Facebook.

Not everyone would find my tweet about the Mohammed bin Salman Fuck A Fan Contest amusing or the one about someone thinking AOC wants to ban pussy eating because they think she was referring to a different kind of burger.

Part of me is grateful that it was me who found them dead because it meant everyone else didn’t have to see what I saw. As a reporter I heard all sorts of fucked up shit on the police scanner.

Currently, I get asked about my future plans, if I plan to take on part time work or volunteer somewhere. I don’t know if I have it in me currently. The last thing I want is a fucking boss.

Prior to the murder, I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, I was so burned out from work. I smoked a lot of grass to get through it and that’s also what’s powered me the last two months.

I’m in a holding pattern, I don’t know when I’ll get out of it. There’s still so much to do and and it feels like a task that’s beyond me.

I’m taking some small steps, though. I rented a car and drove my friend to be with his dying father. It felt good to do that for someone. I know how hard that is. I don’t know what the fuck to do with my life, but if I can make life easier for others, that’s reason enough to stick around a little longer. Even if that means boiling in sea water. Good to have options.