you know, you’re blaming dad for all of this like he was some atom bomb that blew up our family. and maybe he did, maybe he caused all of this chaos and disorder like a blustery tornado–i mean he did. he did do that. but see, life is never about action, it’s about reaction. it’s about how to you react to variables. his reaction to life and mom and kelly spencer and all that shit was to become this firestorm that set this house ablaze for twenty years, like an old pile of tires. his reaction becomes the action that you react to. do you understand? and your reaction is your life. how you react to things is your life. now, look at me. i’m only two years older than you, ted, and i lived through the maelstrom of this family too. and i used it. my reaction, my response, was to channel bullshit into something more productive. i took that energy and i–don’t roll your eyes at me, ted, you know i’m right–i took that energy and went to LA and look at me now. you, on the other hand, decided to react by becoming basically an inert version of dad, like this milquetoast alcoholic who can’t even be bothered to get out of bed in the morning. that was your decision, and you made it years ago. the shitty part is, even if this is real and there’s money in this house, it’s not gonna change what you’re going to do with it.

what did you do? who fucking knows. who knows what those people are hunting you for. all i know is that you’re here, now, and if you take a step outside of this house you’ll be torn to shreds, so you just hang tight and i’ll make you some dinner. you like chili? i had a pot slow cooking already. some cornbread in the oven too, just, you know, simple shit. i also have some maker’s mark in that cupboard next to you, i don’t think it would hurt for either of us to drink until we pass out tonight. see boy, i don’t know what you did but they do, and they think it’s bad enough to hunt you down and see you drawn and quartered in the middle of the street. hell, if i didn’t have such a good heart i might toss you out to them, just for the reward money. oh yeah, i know about the reward. everyone knows about the reward money. but i think morals and ethics are important, so i refuse to take you anywhere until i know if what you’ve done deserves you being murdered in the street. and besides. i know what you can do, and i might … have need of your services. so. a little bit of leverage. my apologies.

donna raised these chickens up from when they was little, she use’ta put the little chicks in the pockets of her dress and run around in the backyard. sounds cute but then mama’d be washing her dress and her pockets’d be full’a chicken shit and down feathers. ain’t much fun cleaning up. but now they’re all big and glorious looking. you watch that rooster strut his stuff around the pen and sometimes i wonder to myself, i wonder, “how’d a little dumb bird like that get to be so god danged confident? how’m i gonna be confident like that?” well one day i’s getting ready to head to town to pick up some groceries for mama and i figure, well, i oughtta spruce myself up real nice like, maybe strut my own stuff down the sidewalk. so i slick my hair back with some’a daddy’s pomade, and i wear my finest clothes, not my church clothes, mind’y, but some real nice clean overalls and a button up shirt underneath. a straw hat from my daddy’s closet. i didn’t ask if i could wear it but he’d let me wear it before so i figgered it was okay. well anyways i also maybe dabbled in some’a daddy’s cologne, he had a stock back then that would knock yer socks off. cologne from here to westchester. anyway i put a little bit of that on my neck so the ladies, if they couldn’t see me, could at least smell me coming.

well, long story short, i walked into town looking all dapper and this real pretty lady caught my eye, and i caught hers, and i kept staring at her even when i tripped and fell into a horse water trough. i bobbed my head outta the water just in time to see her laughing and pointing me out to her beau before they walked off together. i walked into the grocers and mr. tinney told me to shoo until i was dried off. so i sat outside the store and watched another rooster walk by in the street, just strutting like he was cock of the walk. ain’t never seen no rooster fall into a water trough. have’ta push one in someday, see what it’s like.

donald trump for fucking mayor of the universe! look you may not like his politics but you gotta admire the man for speaking his opinion, you know what i mean? that guy doesn’t give a shit what anybody thinks, he just speaks the truth. i love him so much i’m gonna gay marry him! yeah you heard me! i’m gonna gay marry him and take him back to my apartment in astoria and we’re gonna have the hottest gay man sex you’ve ever seen! i’m gonna gay sex him so hard actual gay men will start to wonder if they’re actually gay. and then when we’re done he and i are gonna take a vacation to the hamptons and watch squirrels from the comfort of our bed and breakfast’s back porch. i love trump so much. i love him so, so much. donald i love you and i want you to be president and i want you to gay marry me so i can wake up every morning and sew your hair back onto your head. you know, the way you like it. i want to lick the tip of your big huge dong until you spew gallons of cum all over my entire body, and then cocoon myself in that cum and emerge six weeks later as a brilliant gay butterfly. donald you have to become president, you just have to! i’ve never had an erection as hard or as big as when i think about you standing behind a podium with the emblem of the president of the united states on it, just looking so regal oh god it stirs a feeling inside of me i frankly didn’t know i had. i … i’m having trouble breathing. please call an ambulance, i think i’m having a heart attack.

my therapist recommended i take vitamin d to combat my depression. so naturally i bought the gummy kind, because god forbid i act like an adult and swallow a pill. i headed to fred meyer and they always have a “buy one get one” sale on vitamins and supplements, which leads me to believe that a plastic jug of vitamin d supplements is not actually fourteen bucks, but actually seven bucks. in truth i bet all supplements are made for pennies and marked up like crazy because people into holistic medicine are automatically suckers because they’ll believe anything from a website called “doctor mommys nutritional blessings.org.” in that regard i’m like, yeah, mark that shit up like crazy, if people are willing participants in your snake oil racket then you deserve to get all their money. when it comes to physical health, i believe in medicine. mental health … well that’s a little different. the body more or less we understand, but the mind … how can you really know the mind? but see we know vitamin d helps with depression. who the hell knows why, but it does. so i take it, in gummy form, like a goddamn child. fucking … everything’s made like we’re babies anymore. it’s humiliating. at least the gummies taste good though.

you know i’m never leaving this place, right? i’ve tried, i’ve tried to leave. every day is this constant struggle to get the courage to move, to put the bottle down. but i’m never leaving. this shithole is where i’ve gone to die. a better man would have come here when he was older, but not me. resigned at 30. so what does that make me in the end? did i live a good life? did i live a life as good as yours? i guess not. i guess i could have been a father, i suppose i should have traveled more. but i didn’t. i moved, once, and then moved back a year later because i couldn’t afford to drink and live in a big city. and i have to drink. so i just live in this podunk town and drink every day, and when i don’t drink i have these tremendous seizures, like god’s telling me my purpose in life is to get hammered all the time. it’s sad isn’t it? it’s a waste of a good man’s life. and yet, here i am, alive and drunk. and you’re in your billion dollar suits, flying to abu dhabi to fuck models or whatever it is you do in abu dhabi. congratulations. you’ve lived enough for both of us. you have the collective energy of mom and dad distilled into you like an aged whiskey, and i’m … i’m just drinking to catch up.

did you fart? i didn’t know you were capable of farting due to your different body makeup. maybe that’s just some kind of air excretion? it really smells like you farted. okay so we you know have digestive systems and we eat meat and plant matter, it gets digested in our gut, and then we poop it out. i realize that’s really strange to you, but the point is that sometimes the bacteria in our gut–yes we have little things in our body that help us digest things–the bacteria causes gas to build up in our gut and we fart it out. and if the bacteria is having a real go at it the gas can kind of stink. i only say all of this because i didn’t fart, and you’re the only other thing in this room, and i smelled something that smelled precisely like a fart, so the only perpetrator is you. so you have to tell me: did you fart? or was what something else that smelled really close to a fart? this could be really huge for xenobiologists, you know what i mean? really huge. bigger than the fact that i’m fucking an alien, yes! that is now secondary to the fact that you can fart and your farts smell like ours. i’m telling you this is huge. huge! now just hold on and let me get a jar. where do you fart from? these are important questions okay?!

you know, i could throw all of your stuff away right now if i wanted. i could toss it all on the street and your life would still be the same. how do you feel about that? all you need is food and water and a place on the floor to sleep these days. you’re like a goddamn ascetic, like a, a, a fucking … monk. except here’s the thing: you need me. you need me to function, so no matter how aloof you are, at some point your tummy will rumble and you’ll come crawling back to me. i mean, what do you do all day, seriously? you sleep and you stare out the window. at what? your life passing you by? i know you think it’s my fault–i keep you locked in here after all–but you could still be active with your day, you know? god damn it. all the things i do for you! all the time invested, going to the store to buy your food, taking you to the vet because you ate a goddamn marshmallow peep for some dumb reason, and all you’re going to do is stare at me with this vacant look in your eyes! YOU’RE NOT JUST A CAT! YOU’RE MY CAT! AND I DEMAND RESPECT FROM YOU! this isn’t a democracy or a, or a monarchy where you’re the fucking queen of shit mountain! i OWN you. i’ve ALWAYS owned you. I FUCKING BOUGHT YOU FROM A GUY IN VANCOUVER. i — where you going? where the fuck are you going? DON’T WALK AWAY FROM ME–

alright, here’s my day: i wake up around noon, and right beside me is a bottle of old crow. it’s the bottle i’d been drinking when i passed out, you see. i get up and i feel like shit so i stumble outside and vomit into mom’s old petunia garden, you know, that raised bed she built back in 1981 and planted petunias in once. in the end it was a glorified shit box for cats. now it’s my puke box. you know my puke brought those petunias back? don’t ask me how, it’s goddamn magic. anyway, i puke, wash my mouth out with old crow, and go sit on the porch and smoke a cigarette or five. i do this to get my body from hangover mode to drunk mode. i finish the old crow and grab a second bottle from my fridge. i watch the cars drive by and the other lowlifes wandering around. some of them try to talk to me but the old folks know better. the second old crow i sip, see, cause the remnants of the first one just got me back to drunk level–now i need to maintain it, which isn’t as hard. so i sip old crow and watch people. then when i’ve finished the fifth i head down to the bar. i drink with my buddies there, watch sports on TV. nobody judges me, and tom keeps giving me beer until i’m on the floor or too belligerent. i usually can’t remember anything at this point, and i either have little lucid bits of stumbling around or puking, or i just wake up somewhere the next day. sometimes the cops have thrown me in the drunk tank. that’s a strange way to wake up. but there’s always one constant and that constant is booze. my trusted friend and advisor. don’t leave home without it, but don’t get mad when it betrays you either, cause it’s gonna betray you.

if this is not reality, then what is? who am i talking to, huh? who are you? some kind of artificial intelligence? i don’t believe it. i don’t believe it one bit. this is real, look, i can touch the floor, i can touch my own face. all of this is real. just because i saw some weird shit doesn’t make it any less real, okay? this is the world that i was born and raised in, the one that i remember, the one that feels right. maybe there is a real world out there but i don’t know it, i only know this one and so this is the one i want to stay in. and that’s, that’s final, that’s an order!

you know, it makes me think of that shipbuilder’s paradox, have you ever heard of that? you take a whole ship, replace every piece of wood one by one, and by the end, is it the same ship? except, for me, it’s like i had the ship built already and i was told that it was my ship, that i had been sailing it for forty years, and that i have all these memories of sailing it. the question now is: if i have a real boat somewhere that i’ve never sailed, and it looks almost exactly like this boat that i’ve been sailing in my head my whole life, is that other boat *my* boat? i can tell you every last detail of the boat in my head, and when i see that real boat i’ll know the differences, i’ll know all the differences … so what does that make either boat? which one is real to me?

i think the one that makes me feel real is the one that’s real. and that’s this life, here, with all these people in this world. so that’s why i’m not leaving, android. your world is not the one i remember. period.