HTB Chronicills - Harold's Explosive Exit

Harold couldn’t see the use in it anymore. He wasn’t even sure what “it” was, and he was completely befuddled on whether it was a inquisitive, “What is it?” or a declarative, “What it is!” Of course, Harold never considered anything at these depths, but he probably wouldn’t even if he could because Harold couldn’t see the use in it anymore. Life was bleak, uncaring, and sobering. The first two he considered an inconvenient truth, but the last had him looking for an exit sign.

He had already decided exactly how he would take himself out of the world. The same way he’d come into it... Whiskey and Propane. Yup, I said, “Whiskey and Propane.” But that's a different adventure all together completely a shambles. The Devil’s water and an explosive gaseous hydrocarbon would be the implements, and he had whittled the whole process down to three easy steps:

MisStep One: Drink the whiskey.

MisStep Two: Turn on the gas.

MisStep Three: Figure the rest out later.

Maybe turning on the gas first would be better. Get things moving along right away. It would be a real time saver, like showing up at the bar already drunk. That little gem had shaved at least 25 minutes off the unproductive front end of his binges. Added together that would be…Fuck it! What’s the point in doing the math? Math is so subjective anyway. You can do the same problem twenty-five times and never get the same answer once. Math is the Universal language but to Harold it was all gibberish. Pi is the same way and that’s math too.

Whiskey, propane, and pie! Now, that’s the way to go! His final meal, his last supper, well, last dessert, but what kind of pie is most befitting a Kevorkian closure? And easily shoplifted? Marion Barry!

Marion Berry was one of Harold’s favorite pies. It reminded him of crack and hookers, although he couldn’t remember why. It didn’t matter, there was no use in anything anymore to the exclusion of whiskey, propane, and Marion Barry pie. Oh, and a good epitaph. He would need one of those. He’d spent last night working on the candidates, and pulling lint from his navel. He’d come up with the semi-finalists:

1. “My most attractive feature was my alcoholic blackouts.”
2. “It’s not mine officer. I swear.”
3. “That’s mine officer. I swear.”
4. “Fuck, shit, damn it. I swear.”

He’d work out the winner by accident after he took care of his little “S” word problem. This was going to take some effort, which Harold was unaccustomed to exerting, or even considering. In fact, this may be the first time he’d be putting an effort into anything worthwhile.

He needed inspiration via inebriation for a show stopping epitaph. He also needed a bath, $1,740.00, a McGriddle (Sausage only, please), and a better way to control crotch odor in a sleeping bag, if you’re on the bum’s registry otherwise none of these are germane to this story line. [Narrator: Peeks his nonexistent head up to see if anyone in the audience is buying the claim.] The kind of epitaph that makes you set your beer on the headstone and bend over to read it up close, and after a minute or so you remember that you were urinating when you noticed the epitaph, and you still were. That’s the kind of epitaph he hallucinated.

He’d had great success last night, but a higher blood alcohol content would make him smarter, women better looking, and even the slightest incline treacherous. Popeye has spinach, Bugs Bunny has carrots, Bob Marley had pot, and Harold had every mind altering substance known to man, plus his personal discoveries. Three month old goldfish water to mention one. Maybe he could encapsulate that into an epitaph. Probably not.

Harold half shuffled, half wandered, and fully flailed his way to his favorite 24 hour grocery store. Roughly twenty-two and a half hours later, Harold was lowering property values in the liquor department.

His instinct said, “Go with the good stuff.”

His common sense remained conspicuously absent.

The rest of him said, “Drink. Drink them all. Now!”

Then, something inexplicable happened, Harold resisted all counsel and picked a reasonably priced single malt whiskey from Scotland, and walked to the self checkout line. Weird? Extending his peculiar behavior, he stood in line like a normal person. Everyone else wandered out of line shortly thereafter. Weird. He scanned the bottle just like in the commercials. Truly, a unique experience. He hit pay now, and starred at the display.

“Cash” Nope.

“Credit” Not going to fill out forms today.

“Other stuff I don’t understand” Weird!

No shoplift button? How inconvenient.

Damn! Whoever claimed the power to tax is the power to kill must have been a prophet because these taxes were killing his ability to kill his liver. A double homicide!

Oh, shit! The pie! Fuck this paying shit. I have to get my last, just dessert. Harold grabbed the bottle, stuffed it in his pants, and staggered away from the ill-equipped machine much to the delight of all in olfactory range.

In the bakery, Harold sleuthed out a fine, mold-free Marion Barry pie. Once more, the images of crack cocaine and hookers danced provocatively between his two remaining brain cells. Harold gyrated in unison. Damn! It was getting hot in here. So, he popped the seal on the whiskey and guzzled an ample portion and a half. Now, it was really getting hot in here! Back to the bottle once more. As Harold approached the produce section he was approaching saturation, and damn it was hotter than a desert iguana's asshole in this place. The register was just a few feet behind him. So, he kept walking, sort of. An undefinable increment of time later, Harold had committed three infractions and one gross misdemeanor without foreknowledge and absent any rearknowledge either. His rear was currently putrefying the seat below him in the cabin he and the boy had commandeered before he’d left for school.

School… Harold recoiled at the thought of the word, and all the thoughts that it implied. The boy could have stayed right here and got all the education he needed with Harold as his tutor. All he had to do was listen to everything Harold said, then do something, nearly anything else. He would have been fine. Maybe, even employed.

With the ritual precision of Japanese seppuku, lacking anything precise or remotely cool, Harold turned the gas on full, and drank heavily while eating his pie barbarically. The darkness crept over him, then scrambled for a cleaner place to sleep. Silence… followed suit.

The two toxified brain cells were alternately projectile vomiting into Harold’s ear canals, and ogling what they thought to be a Jennifer Aniston photo, but was, in fact, Michael Jackson’s mug shot.

The brain cells eventually graduated to dry heaves and passed out on or around their broken Q-tip swab decor. Mostly silence followed with a festive smattering of gallbladder gurgling and flatulence in accompaniment. The duet set the ambiance in Harold’s cavernous head.

THROB! THROB! THROB! Gurgle! THROB! THROB! THROB! Gurgle! THROB! THROB! THROB! Gurgle! Like some gigantic percussion artillery slamming out a nauseating discord reminiscent of a 1980’s Swedish death metal band of tone deaf elk smashing their hooves against the strings.

[The narrator pushes his limits and opines, “They all sounded like that, except for Yngwie. He was amazing.” Noticing the Author’s raised eyebrow, the narrator skulks behind the paper thin defenses of the book.]

THROB! THROB! THROB! Gurgle! THROB! THROB! THROB! Gurgle! The band played off, way off in Harold’s splitting brain bone. Hours later, much to Harold’s dismay, he awoke. The real issue in this coming of consciousness was that he woke alive!

That damn gas was bum-proof! Damn it! Rather than a killing blow, all he had dealt himself was a slightly discounted intelligence quotient and an augmented ill-tempered gallbladder. "What a fucked up way to start my day, after unsuccessfully ending my life", Harold thought as he lit his last cigarette before the flash. Slow motion combustion ensued. The fizzle seemed like a lightning bolt fuse which zig-zagged through the air between himself and the couch upon which the little lightning bolt came to rest. All time stood still but only for a brief reprieve as the Fates giggled like little girls again. In the explosion, the couch took Harold through the kitchen window, hyperspace, and something far more painful. That was all he remembered, except for the squirrel spirits which briefly tormented Harold’s soul before kicking him out in the cabin’s smoldering foundation’s yard.

We will gnaw through your nut sack!

The Truth About Lies

Did you ever have a situation as a kid when if you told the truth you and/or a friend was going to be in serious trouble? So, you planned a lie that blamed some unknown other person, but somehow in the telling of the…. “Masterpiece of Fiction”, your friend screwed it all up and made you as guilty as… uhm…. Satan. Yup, Lucifer, or at the very least, as culpable as Astaroth.

So, you had to put in a lot of overtime at the fabrication mill creating yet another synthetic story that had an aroma reminiscent of, let's go with, raw sewage.

About the time your secondary salvo of spontaneous bullshit arrives at your friend's house, he’s completely freaking out and assumes you're trying to blame him, in spite of the fact that you skillfully crafted your crapcraft to do nothing even close to blaming your friend.

However, your friend figured that once he's made one poor decision, he might as well corner the market on asinine choices by “confessing” that it was all your idea and you did whatever hideous act it was cackling throughout like a mad man, while he pleaded with you on his knees to be reasonable.

Have you ever been in a similar situation?

Hmm? Must just be me, then. Oh, I get it… it's all my fucking fault again! You were the kind of kid who rats out his friend because you thought there was a volume discount on stupid assumptions and paranoia.

Sorry. I may still be carrying some baggage from my childhood… or maybe it's natural to equate the name Frank Compansano with dirt bag, douche bag, asshole, fuck face, mother diking sow… or maybe that's just me, too… or not.

That's the way lies work in real life and in real politics, the lie goes surreal almost instantly. Here's a few simple ways to detect falsehood:

1. The story is monolithic. Every source on the planet suddenly agrees that it is “just so”, even though they can't agree on the color of shit on any other subject.

2. Story requires Suspension of Disbelief - One or more Laws of Physics would have to be broken or temporarily abrogated for the pile of horseshit to be true.

3. Nuclear Bomb/Clock Timing - The story has not one, not two, not eight, or even fifteen, but many unrelated pieces (twenty or more) that occur at the perfect time to be catastrophic.

4. Cui Bono No-No - If the story (lie) directly and spectacularly benefits the speaker or their friends and family, it's probably afactual.

5. Subprime Perjury - Upon hearing the story you immediately think, “Man, go back and make up a better lie because I’m too smart to believe that one.”  ...it's probably a true story, because you're not all that smart.

Wisdom of the Prophet: Book 9

Another Generous Helping of Mumblings from the Ether

1. The best things in life are living and free

2. From the Scripture, we are left to assume that Jesus was primarily a self-educated man. All who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. -Luke 2:47

3. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, it is an admonition to reform.

4. Your best feature? Uhm? Your alcoholic blackouts.

5. gov·ern·ment ˈɡəvər(n)mənt/noun 1. Man's failed attempt to turn chaos into order.

6. A few years hence, the Security Struggle will begin. The inevitable budgetary conflict between national security and social security will become the force majeure. No matter which faction emerges victorious, it will leave the nation naked and exposed. The crash is coming.

7. If you create a large enough group of people who have nothing to lose, you will lose much.

8. Every person and institution is obsessed with self-replicating.

9. In the next big war the bullets, bombs, and shells will be ideas, beliefs, and values fought on budgets, balance sheets, and ledgers, and there will be no victories.

10. Why do our elected representatives not heed the warning of the impending crash? Because they suffer from very limited vision imposed on them by a four to six year election cycle. The Framers could never imagine a time when people would mortgage their children's future for trinkets, but we have.The lesson is: Never underestimate the power of self-interest.

11. No matter how virtuous your intentions, when you participate in a corrupt system you become a part of that corruption.

12. America remains true to her prophetic Great Seal. One of the eagle's claws clutches an olive branch and the other grips a quiver of arrows, the symbols of agriculture (plowshares) and arms (swords), of peace and war, and abundance and famine. America's collective conscience cannot allow her to admit she has become reliant upon one to achieve the other. I'll let you make your own moral judgement as to which they are. The scroll which the eagle holds in its beak reads E Pluribus Unum, which means From Many One. During the early years of the Republic the motto was thought to reflect the joining of the States into one Federation. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the motto more appropriately spoke to the waves of immigrants enculturated in the melting pot of America. Today, From Many One means, “We serve monopolies.”

13. Like life, God is experiential.

14. All great wonders are the sum of many mundane tasks.

15. Christ does not command us to understand everyone. He doesn't command us to agree with everyone. He doesn't even command us to like everyone. Christ commands us to Love them. If you feel, think, and act according to the Law of Love, the rest may fall into place or maybe it won't. It doesn't matter if you understand, agree with, or even like them. Love is an exercise which makes you and those you Love stronger. Therefore, Love because Love matters.

16. Here's a quick reality check: Remember all the presents that your parents bought you. Can you picture them? Some of them? Okay, picture your parents. Now, ask yourself which has a bigger influence in your children's life, your presents or your presence? Reality check complete.

17. If Jesus was following the rules and doing the ”right” things all the time they never would have crucified Him, would they?

18. Happy Bird Day! I mean Harry Birthday! Damn it! Ducking smelting correction is milling me. Fuck! I'll hatch you next time.

19. In the way of the world, the thief can always say, “At least I'm not an arsonist”, the arsonist can always say, “At least I'm not a rapist”, the rapist can always say, “At least I'm not a murderer”, and on and on we go reassuring ourselves by means of the least. At least that's the way my mind has always worked. It’s a delusional self-promotion from the bottom. We can always find a way to be greater than the lowest common denominator. But, then there is Christ who says, “Be More, whoever you are, whatever you have done, be More like I Am. Be More. Don't settle for the least. Be More.

20. The fundamental instability with the American banking system lay at its roots. The Federal Reserve is an “independent”, “autonomous”,” anonymous”, and “private” financial institution. Independent in that it is not part of the government. Autonomous means it answers to no higher authority in its daily activities, anonymous means the Fed's stockholders are unknown to everyone but each other, and private means that the institution serves itself before anyone else. So, we can't control it, we can't influence it, we can't petition it for redress, we can't even know what this institution's balance sheet looks like, nor know its true financial position ever. Yet, we are forced by Federal law to be the bondholders of this preposterous corporation’s notes. No market could create such an unstable scheme, only government with its power to make “Law” by virtue of a scribbling pen upon a scrap of paper could give birth to such an abomination as the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

21. In the beginning God Created the Heavens and the earth… We live in a construct and nothing we do here is sustainable. It all falls apart, it all goes away, but God will remain. Perfect. Hear, O Israel, God is One.

22. Today, I will teach you a great Virtue. Once you understand that every human being is a temporary steward of a temporary world filled with temporary things you cannot be anything but humble.

22. To take the moral high ground you must already occupy it.

23. The same government which will throw you in prison for choosing to put marijuana in your body on the grounds that marijuana is harmful to your health will draft you and compel you to catch a bullet in the head, and they see no duplicity in this. Our bodies belong to them and they hold our lives in the palms of their hands. We are still building pyramids for the pharaohs.

24. The world judges us by our television programming. This may be the only exposure to American culture they experience on a regular basis. What are they to think of us when they see Jerry Springer reruns? That we are the rightful moral leader of the free world? That we hold eternal Truths to be self-evident? Or that we are nothing but the lowest common denominator of the human species?

25. Always remember that your most bitter enemy is one realization away from being your closest ally.

26. I am constantly in my own way. Everywhere I turn, there I am. I'm like, Come on dude am I fucking with me?

27. Why didn't Jesus run for the Sanhedrin or try to become High Priest, even though He wasn't a Levite, instead of just wandering around espousing radical ideas? Crazy ideas that didn't become sane until after His death and Resurrection. He could have worked within the System for real change the people could believe in, rather than being Crucified as a criminal. It makes you wonder, I mean really Wonder, doesn't it?

28. When the state places security and secrecy above integrity and transparency, it cannot derive its just powers from the People. No republic can stand if the People are kept ignorant by design, offered lies and half truths in order to manufacture public consent.

29. A nation may exhibit the trappings of republic, the rituals of a free people, and all the teachings associated with liberty, but its People are the most wretched type of slaves; the ones who believe they are truly free.

30. Casinos, whore houses, and jails have the same results, you exit fucked and broke.

31. War is just another word for grand larceny, except the criminals are never charged and the victims receive death sentences.

32. I've been called crazy all my life, learn to wear it like a suit of armor, then no one can ever hurt you with their words.

33. When you see cruise missiles fired from a ship or B-1 bomber strikes do you feel that rush of adrenaline? That is God's subtle way of telling you that you are a murderer.

34. Everyone and everything has a positive value because they are the product of God, the Good, the Unmoved Mover, or whatever Name you ascribe to the First Force. This is the First Principle. Without this First Principle, humanity is less than beasts with only the powers to destroy and eventually be destroyed, civilization cannot survive, and we cannot survive. Remember, the Devil never created anything.

35. History teaches us that the more inclined we are to route out the Devil the more inclined we are to find him in every place and soon in everyone. All the while we are taking his form to doing his bidding.

36. If you are reading this, learn to Love humanity with all its flaws and phobias, with all its shortcomings and nearsightedness, with all its dreams and nightmares because you will be a part of them all for the rest of your life.

37. You've got to love a church where the Elders come riding in on skateboards.

38. ​Today​ ​everything​ ​is​ ​garbage​ ​which​ ​is​ ​why​ ​we​ ​spend so​ ​much​ ​time​ ​and​ ​money​ ​storing​ shit​ ​until​ ​we​ ​can​ ​find​ ​the​ ​time​ ​and​ ​money​ ​to​ go through the shit and ​throw​ ​the​ ​shit away.

39. From seasons to cycles, there is no escaping the inevitable. That's why they are called a “Revolution”. Can you feel the wheel turning? Soon everything will change.

40. Life is a beautiful story which is performed exclusively by a cast of very shady characters.