Okay, time for a lazy post….
I wanted to leave my stupid dog’s post at the top as long as possible, to make her insubordination worth it as her broken legs heal. That’s right…type your fundamentalist bullshit with spiral fractures, you little Whore of Babylon! Be my guest! Also, I’ve been pretty busy with work, school and doing my first real “interview” that will be published in a semi-renowned monthly periodical within the next few months. I’ll post the transcript on here pretty soon…as long as I don’t name names or the the magazine I was assured I would not get into trouble. I have it, I just need to get a copy that isn’t in .pdf format….no way I’m transcribing that shit. Apparently, the whole bariatric patient/ex-minister/ex-porn dealer angle isn’t represented well enough in today’s market, so who am I to refuse such an intriguing experience? I will say that it is weird to see your words in print, and this was no stupid Oprah moment…..thank God.
Anyway, I am always eager to put SOMETHING on here every week for my few faithful readers to enjoy, and instead of yammering on about how I am literally down to one pair of 20 year old Dockers jeans that I can still fit into, I’ll post something that I wrote a few years ago. Even before all of the “never forget 9/11” chain emails, there was a particular breed of cheesy feel-good “daily blessing” email that just rubbed me the wrong way. Not only were they poorly written, a derivative of “Footprints”, and laden with an annoying amount of cute graphics that would crash Internet Explorer, they always had some guilt-based chain email horseshit at the bottom. “If you truly love God and/or your family you’ll pass this boring shit onto everyone in your address book….”. I hate them…..hate them all. There is not one worth reading or forwarding, and if you send one to me you are not my friend. I don’t care which memory of a dead relative inspired you to send it along, I would literally rather get an icepick to the testicles and lose all of my money to one of those “my father is the president of Ethiopia” email scams than read ONE MORE definition of “What Love Truly Means” or see ONE MORE Special Olympic-level photoshop job touting the dedication of “The Lone Marine”. Seriously, if you are under the age of 70 and you are sending this stuff to people…..kill yourself, and take all of your scrapbooking buddies to hell right along with you.
So with all of THAT in mind, I wrote my own chain email and sent it to everyone that I know. It’s definitely not my sickest work, and it is not fucked up enough to completely freak the “Oprah Nation/Focus on the Inbred Family” people out, and I did that for a reason….I wanted it to be normal enough to actually receive it as an unsolicited forward one day. It hasn’t happened yet, but I am still hopeful. Anyway, I give you Johnny’s Magic Blanket to do with as you feel necessary…..
When Johnny was growing up, it was just him and his mother. He never met his dad and had no brothers or sisters, but his mom loved him very much and did what she could to keep their little family happy and secure. As a baby, he would lie in her arms, listening to her tell stories about her family when she was growing up, and how happy it was. She would keep him wrapped in a blanket that her mother had used when she was just a baby. Johnny would lay there quiet and content in his blanket, night after night, listening to his mom talk about the fun she had as a girl, playing with her cousins and helping her mother prepare the Sunday dinner. She had moved far away from home when she was young, and always wished for the old days, for her and her son.
As he grew a little older, his mother always had to work at least two jobs to make ends meet, and Johnny became a latchkey kid at a very young age. They were very poor, and he didn’t have many friends at school. He would come home every day to their dark apartment, doing the best job he could to make dinner for his tired mom so that she could finally get some rest when she returned home. On most nights she would come home to find Johnny asleep in the chair by the front door, lying quietly on that same blanket that wrapped and quieted him as a baby. He tried the best he could to stay awake long enough to see her when she got home. They spent what little time they had together laughing and telling stories, transforming that dark little apartment into a happy home. That blanket became his magic blanket. It helped him remember the stories his mom told him about her family when he was alone, and he would lay there as he went to sleep, wondering if he would someday have his own family and stories to tell. Many children have a security blanket, but it became more than just that for Johnny. Without other kids to play with, and all of the responsibility that was forced on him so young, it truly did become magic for him. Whenever he was sad, it helped him remember how much his mother loved him. When he was lonely, it helped him remember all of the good things that were possible. When he was tired at the end of a long day, or when other kids picked on him, it was a comfort as he went to sleep.
One day Johnny was all grown up, living on his own and curled up in a chair in his very own apartment. There was a S.W.A.T. team surrounding his building and he could hear the bullhorn, “Okay Johnny, this is your last warning! Don’t make us come in there after you! We don’t want anyone else to get hurt! Just let the hostage go and we can work this out!
Needless to say, things had not gone well for Johnny after his mother skipped town with that seasonal laborer she met at the bar. The events that brought him to a place where he was facing several felony counts, including kidnapping, were all a blur in his drug addled mind. In one last attempt to deal with reality, he remembered his blanket. His magic blanket. He ran to his closet and dug it out from the bottom of a box, then wrapped it around his shoulders. “This blanket saved me as a child”, he thought, “It can save me now!”.
“OKAY PIGS!”, he screamed, “I’M COMING OUT, AND I’M COMING OUT SHOOTING! PREPARE TO DIE!”.
Fortunately, his hostage and all but three of the police officers at the scene lived to tell a very different kind of story to their own families. As for Johnny, I think we all know how well an old cotton blanket protects you from thirty or forty 9mm rounds to the torso.
This is not a chain email, but if this message has touched you in any way, please pass it along to those that you love.
Unsaved Loved Ones 