War

So, the United States is at war… again. We are attempting regime change… again. Lives will be uselessly lost once more. It seems that when it comes to history and geopolitics, our so-called leaders never learn their lesson. Korean War. Cuban Missile Crisis. Vietnam War. Gulf War. Iraq War. War in Afghanistan. The list just keeps piling up like empty whiskey bottles after a long night. We haven’t successfully changed a regime since World War II, and even then it was a Herculean effort assisted by the Soviet Union, a nation we would almost immediately spend the next half century locked in a Cold War with once the dust settled.

I hate war. I really do. It gives me nightmares and anxiety, which is kind of weird when you consider that I’m also obsessed with dystopian and apocalyptic imagery. I love the aesthetics of it in music and film, the ruined skylines, the cold synths, the sense that civilization is hanging on by a thread. But there’s a huge difference between imagination and real life. In a movie or a song you can turn it off when it gets too heavy. In real life, people die, cities burn, and whole generations get fucked over for decades. Maybe that’s exactly why I’m drawn to those genres in the first place, because I hope those things never actually happen.

The fear-mongering over Iran is nothing new. I remember when I was embedded with the Republicans years ago and they simply could not shut the hell up about Iran. It was like the boogeyman they dragged out every time they needed to scare people into supporting another war. I remember attending an event in Pasadena where Barry Goldwater Jr. was the keynote speaker. He told the audience that Iran had the capability to launch an electromagnetic pulse, often called an EMP bomb, against the United States. According to him, they could fire one off, knock out the entire electrical grid, and basically send us back to the nineteenth century overnight. This was around 2008, and he said our only choice was to attack Iran before they could do it to us. Do unto others before they do unto you, I guess.

For anyone who doesn’t know, an electromagnetic pulse weapon, usually referred to as an EMP bomb, is a device designed to generate a massive burst of electromagnetic energy. That energy spreads through the atmosphere and fries electronic systems over a wide area. Think power grids, computers, cars, phones, satellites, hospital equipment, and basically anything with delicate circuitry. The most powerful EMPs come from nuclear detonations at very high altitude. When a nuclear warhead explodes dozens or even hundreds of miles above the Earth, it interacts with the planet’s magnetic field and creates a wave of energy that can knock out electronics across an entire continent.

The United States actually demonstrated the effect back in 1962 during a nuclear test called Starfish Prime nuclear test. The explosion occurred hundreds of miles above the Pacific Ocean but still knocked out streetlights and communications equipment in Hawaii nearly a thousand miles away. That test scared the hell out of military planners because it showed just how fragile modern electrical systems really are.

These days, several countries either possess or are suspected of possessing the capability to deploy EMP weapons. The obvious ones are nuclear powers such as the United States, Russia, and China. Any nation that can loft a nuclear warhead into the upper atmosphere technically has the ability to create a high-altitude EMP. Other nuclear-armed states like North Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel are also frequently mentioned in strategic discussions. Some analysts speculate that even countries without large nuclear arsenals could theoretically attempt an EMP attack if they acquired a single warhead and a delivery system capable of reaching high altitude.

There are also non-nuclear EMP devices, sometimes called high-power microwave weapons, that can damage electronics in a much smaller radius. Those are believed to exist in several advanced militaries as tactical tools. But the nightmare scenario people talk about is the high-altitude nuclear EMP, because the scale of destruction could be enormous.

If a large EMP were detonated over the continental United States, the immediate blast would not kill people the way a ground-level nuclear explosion would. Instead, it would quietly annihilate infrastructure. Power transformers could burn out. Electrical grids might collapse. Water treatment plants would stop working. Fuel pipelines and refineries could shut down. Hospitals would lose critical equipment. Transportation systems would fail. Within days or weeks you would start seeing cascading humanitarian disasters, including food shortages, medical crises, and mass panic. It is the kind of slow-motion catastrophe that dystopian novels love to imagine, but in real life it would be absolute chaos.

Now, whether Iran actually has that capability is a completely different question. Intelligence agencies have debated it for years, and a lot of what gets said in political speeches is speculation wrapped in worst-case scenarios. Iran has missile technology and an active nuclear program that has worried Western governments for decades. But turning that into a reliable EMP strike against the United States would require several extremely complicated steps. They would need to develop or acquire a nuclear warhead, miniaturize it, and successfully deliver it to high altitude. That is not exactly a weekend science project.

And this is where things start to feel like déjà vu. We have heard these kinds of warnings before. Claims about weapons of mass destruction were used to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and we all know how that turned out. Thousands of American lives lost, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives lost, trillions of dollars burned, and the entire region destabilized for decades. That war was sold to the public with a mix of fear, speculation, and outright bullshit.

So no, I do not pretend to know what the answer to the problem of Iran is. But I do know that every attempt at regime change in the modern era has landed us, and often the rest of the world, in a giant geopolitical quagmire. I do not support the current leadership of Iran. Their government has committed serious abuses against its own people, and that is putting it mildly. But I also do not trust people like Donald Trump and the various warhawks orbiting around him to guide us safely away from the edge of nuclear catastrophe.

I think the current leadership of this country has far too much of a love affair with Israel, and a lot of that relationship is tangled up in theology that I personally do not buy into. It has become such a toxic political environment that even the smallest criticism of Israel or of our foreign policy toward that country is immediately labeled antisemitic. That shuts down honest discussion before it can even start. I think it is absolutely disgusting how people use religion as a shield to deflect from their own misdeeds. When that happens, it starts to look an awful lot like the behavior of the very regimes we claim to oppose.

I do not have neat answers for any of this. My only consistent position is condemnation of violence no matter who it is coming from. I do not know what to do about the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons, assuming they are actually doing that. What I do know is that we have a president who promised no new wars. He is a proven liar, and people voted for him anyway based on that promise.

What I do know is that countries like ours, and Israel for that matter, should be peace-mongers instead of war profiteers. What I do know is that civilian life everywhere is in jeopardy whenever the drums of war start beating. And what I worry about, deep down, is some kind of second September 11 attacks that harms even more innocent people.

It is a rocky road ahead. I have a sinking feeling this is not going to be some quick, tidy, month-long military adventure. Those almost never exist outside of Pentagon press conferences. I hope peace somehow manages to conquer violence. And I hope that one day we are able to go to sleep at night without wondering whether we will be jolted awake by air-raid sirens or, worse yet, a mushroom cloud blooming on the horizon.

Marcus Hook Memories

Growing up in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, in the 90s felt like inhabiting the bruised but beating heart of Delaware County. The borough was small, cramped between the Delaware River and the refinery complexes that defined its skyline, yet it carried an outsized personality. Marcus Hook had been incorporated in the nineteenth century and had earlier roots as a Lenape settlement and later as a colonial river port. By the time I came along, its maritime past had long since given way to heavy industry. What remained was a town that felt gritty, loud, and unapologetically alive.

The refineries were its most imposing feature. Long before I understood what petrochemicals were, I understood their presence. Hulking towers of steel and pipe rose like industrial cathedrals, lit at night by orange flares that flickered against the dark. They operated around the clock, exhaling steam and smoke into the humid air. In summer, the heat mingled with the metallic tang of oil and sulfur until the atmosphere felt dense enough to chew. The scent clung to clothing, to hair, to the siding of houses. It seeped into everything. Yet familiarity has a strange way of softening even the harshest edges. That rotten egg smell, acrid and oppressive as it was, became the background note of daily life. It was the smell of home.

Marcus Hook’s industrial identity was not new. For generations, the riverfront had been lined with shipyards, mills, and later refineries that provided steady, if punishing, work. The borough’s location along the Delaware made it strategically valuable during the Revolutionary War, and local lore insists that even pirates once slipped along these waters. By the 20th century, the Hook, as many called it, had become synonymous with blue collar labor. Families traced their livelihoods to the plants. Shifts dictated the rhythm of the town. When whistles blew, traffic surged. When layoffs came, they rippled through every rowhouse and corner bar.

Amid the concrete and corrugated metal, there were pockets of relief. The park along the river offered one such refuge. It was not grand by any objective measure, yet to us it felt expansive. Grass pushed up stubbornly against the industrial backdrop, and benches faced the wide, slow moving Delaware River. On clear days you could watch tankers glide past, immense and deliberate, like floating cities. Kids played on metal playground equipment that was probably contaminated with chemicals, families grilled hot dogs, and teenagers lingered with nowhere particular to be. The river carried its own smell, brackish and alive, cutting through the refinery fumes just enough to remind you that nature had not entirely surrendered.

The churches stood as solemn counterpoints to the refineries. Their steeples rose above modest rowhomes, quiet and dignified. Many dated back generations, founded by immigrant communities who brought with them faith, language, and tradition. Inside, polished pews bore the weight of decades of weddings, funerals, baptisms, and whispered prayers. These buildings were repositories of memory. You could feel history in the creak of the floorboards and the filtered light through stained glass. They suggested continuity in a town that otherwise felt perpetually on the brink of change or decline.

Local legend added its own texture. The story of Blackbeard’s tunnels circulated with the persistence of cigarette smoke. Hidden passages ran beneath parts of the town, remnants of some pirate conspiracy along the river. The legend endured because it lent a dash of myth to an otherwise mundane landscape. On humid summer nights, when the air felt electrically still, it was easy to imagine secrets beneath the grass and pavement.

Smoking was ubiquitous. It seemed less a habit than an accessory. Ashtrays crowded diner counters. Cigarettes dangled from fingers at bar league slow-pitch softball games and outside the public library which also served as city hall. The borough already lived under a haze from the refineries, yet nearly everyone added a personal plume to the atmosphere. As a child, I observed it with a mixture of curiosity and inevitability. It felt woven into the culture, as intrinsic as Eagles games on Sunday or the sound of freight trains in the distance.

Then there was the CB radio culture, an artifact of a particular American moment that lingered stubbornly in Marcus Hook. Antennas sprouted from cars and porches like metallic weeds. Handles replaced real names. Conversations crackled across invisible highways, connecting truckers, night shift workers, insomniacs, and hobbyists. The language had its own cadence, half coded and half playful. In a town that could feel geographically and economically hemmed in, those radios suggested boundless reach. You could sit in a cramped living room and speak into the wider world.

For all its roughness, Marcus Hook possessed a stubborn sense of community. Neighbors knew one another’s business, sometimes too well. Arguments were loud, laughter louder. People borrowed tools, shared gossip, and showed up when it counted. The town could be claustrophobic, even suffocating, yet it was rarely indifferent. It demanded resilience. It taught you how to endure discomfort, how to navigate contradiction, how to find humor in the bleak.

I did not love Marcus Hook in any simple way. I resented the smell, the heat, the feeling of being hemmed in by circumstances and smokestacks, and whatever the opposite of diversity is. I longed for elsewhere, for reinvention, for cleaner air and broader horizons. Yet the borough imprinted itself on me. Its history, from colonial outpost to refinery town, formed the backdrop of my earliest memories. Its park, its stores and shops, its legends, and its industrial skyline shaped my sense of place.

Time has passed, industries have risen and faltered, and I have built a life far from the refinery glow. I would not return to live there. Maybe to visit. Still, Marcus Hook remains lodged within me, complicated and indelible. It was both crucible and cage, both inheritance and obstacle. It taught me toughness and irony in equal measure. Whatever distance I place between myself and that stretch of riverfront, a part of me will always carry the Hook’s smoke tinged air and stubborn spirit.

Vivid Dreams

Ever since I’ve been on psychiatric medication, I’ve been having vivid dreams. I never experienced anything like this before taking these meds, and holy shit, they can be intense. These aren’t fuzzy, half-remembered dreams that evaporate the second I open my eyes. They are full-color, surround-sound experiences. They feel real in a way that is honestly unsettling.

When I wake up from them, it can take twenty minutes or more for my brain to recalibrate. Sometimes I have to lay there and actively argue with myself about whether what I just experienced actually happened in real life. Other times the dreams are so obviously unrealistic, but still disturbing, that they hang over me for the rest of the day like a weird emotional hangover. I’ll be making coffee or scrolling my phone and suddenly think, “Oh right, that was a dream,” and still feel rattled anyway.

Some of them are even pleasant, which almost makes it worse. I had one recently where my wife and I won the Powerball. Not a few million, not a comfortable early retirement. A full-on, headline-grabbing, obscene one billion dollars. In the dream, we were sitting in our room staring at the numbers on her phone, checking them again and again because it couldn’t possibly be real. I remember the exact feeling in my chest when it sank in that we didn’t have to worry anymore. No more mental math at the grocery store. No more anxiety about bills. I remember us laughing and crying at the same time, talking about paying off everyone’s debts, disappearing for a while, buying some absurdly impractical house that made no sense at all.

When I woke up, the disappointment hit fast and hard. It felt like something had been taken away from me, even though it was never mine. That’s how vivid these dreams are. They don’t fade politely. They rip the rug out from under you.

Then there are the truly bizarre ones. I had a dream where I was walking along US 322 in Delaware County at night, which is already surreal enough if you’ve ever been on it. Somewhere near one of those stretches that feels like it shouldn’t exist anymore, I noticed a kind of shimmer in the air. It was like a heat wave, but wrong. I stepped toward it and suddenly I was slipping through dimensions. Not flying. Not falling. Slipping, like reality had turned into wet glass. Every time I thought I’d landed, the world would glitch and I’d slide into another version of it. Same road, different sky. Same trees, different gravity. At one point I could see multiple versions of myself watching me from different angles, and that was enough to freak me out even inside the dream. I woke up with my brain in a twirl, thinking, “What the hell was that?”

I also have recurring dreams, which are their own special category of mindfuck. One of the most common ones is that I’m back in high school, except I’m my current age. I’m 44, I look like I look now, and everyone else is frozen in time. Random people I remember from school are the same age they were back then, sitting in desks, talking about teenage nonsense, while I’m just there, awkward and out of place. I’ll be sitting in class, annoyed and restless, and then it hits me in the dream. I don’t need to be here. I don’t belong here. Why am I doing this?

That part always feels incredibly real. The moment of realization. The internal argument. The slow clarity breaking through the dream logic.

It’s strange because I absolutely hated high school. Except for a brief glimmer of popularity thanks to the backyard wrestling days, it was not a good time. I was an outcast. Not to mention ADHD wrecked my attention span. I was bored, frustrated, and miserable. I dropped out early in my senior year and carried that decision with me for a long time. For years, I coasted through life telling people I was a high school graduate. It worked until it didn’t.

As background checks got more thorough, that lie became harder to maintain. I lost an amazing job opportunity at Cigna when I was 33 because I failed a background check, and that was the moment reality finally smacked me in the face. Only then did I go and get my GED. The test was laughably easy. Embarrassingly easy. I beat myself up for years afterward wondering why I hadn’t just done it sooner. Who knows what opportunities I missed out on because I was stubborn, scared, or just checked out.

The weird thing about the high school dreams is the self-awareness. Even while asleep, my brain knows the truth. In the middle of the dream, I usually remind myself that I got my GED and that I don’t need to be there. And almost every time, that realization is what wakes me up.

Maybe that’s my subconscious still processing old shame. Or maybe it’s just my brain firing off fireworks now that the meds have unlocked some hidden switch. Sometimes I feel like I have so many good things going for myself these days that my brain has to dig down to find the closest thing to trauma that it can, that it feels comfortable examining at least. Either way, these dreams feel like messages written in neon. Some are joyful, some are terrifying, some are just deeply uncomfortable. All of them feel real enough to stick with me long after I open my eyes. Honestly, that might be the strangest part of all.

Through all of that, though, I still wouldn’t ever consider giving up on my meds. The vivid dreams are simply a trade off. I just wish they didn’t blur the lines between fiction and reality so much.

Fired At Lunch

[Some names have been changed.]

By the 2010s, my life had taken a dramatic turn. I got married in 2011 and settled in Philadelphia, trading the West Coast sun for East Coast grit. By 2013, I had stopped political blogging and largely withdrawn from the public sphere. I started going by my middle name in case anyone Googled me and saw my checkered past. Yet not all of my behavioral patterns evolved with the new scenery. I was still bouncing from job to job, either resigning in a flurry of frustration or being dismissed under murky pretenses. When I was not burning professional bridges, I was drifting through temp assignments. These were forgettable stretches of corporate purgatory where your expiration date was essentially pre-printed on your name badge.

Around 2014, I landed what seemed like a promising gig at Independence Blue Cross, Philadelphia’s titan of health insurance. It was a contract position through a temp agency, housed in a department euphemistically called “Customer Support.” In reality, it was tech support, pure and simple. We worked out of a fluorescent-lit call center governed by metrics, those soul-crushing statistics that determine whether you are a hero or tomorrow’s pink slip recipient.

The call center itself had a strange ecosystem. There was always the low hum of overlapping voices, punctuated by the angry beep of someone putting a caller on hold too aggressively. The break room smelled permanently like burnt coffee and microwaved leftovers. Someone had taped a passive-aggressive sign to the refrigerator reminding us not to steal yogurt. It was corporate hell, but it was familiar corporate hell.

I was good at the job. Damn good. I resolved most issues in a single call, rarely escalated tickets, and routinely took more calls than anyone else on my shift. I worked fast, sometimes too fast for management’s taste, but I met and exceeded every benchmark they threw at me. Most people noticed. Supervisors praised my numbers. Coworkers quietly asked how I closed tickets so quickly.

One of them was a guy I will call Mike, a fellow temp with an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure keyboard shortcuts and an alarming addiction to gas station energy drinks. Mike once tried to troubleshoot a printer issue so aggressively that he unplugged half the row, accidentally knocking out six agents mid-call. We watched in horror as the lights on our monitors blinked out one by one like a slow-motion disaster movie. Somehow, he talked his way out of it by blaming “legacy infrastructure.” We laughed about that for weeks.

Another time, during a particularly brutal afternoon, a caller working from home left their line open while yelling at their dog for a full minute. The entire pod heard it through the headset bleed. Someone muted themselves and whispered, “That dog is gonna quit before we do.” It was moments like that that kept us sane.

Most people were impressed with my performance. Most.

Enter Tracy Voss.

Tracy was the director of our department, though the title barely hinted at her authoritarian tendencies. From the moment we crossed paths, there was friction. She scrutinized my calls with the zeal of a literary critic dissecting a bad novel. Even my best work, meticulous, efficient, polished, was never good enough. She flagged trivialities. My tone was slightly too informal. I deviated from the script by a sentence. I closed tickets too quickly, which apparently suggested I was not “building rapport.”

Her managerial style bordered on the militaristic. Everyone existed in a constant state of low-grade dread, terrified of minor missteps. She was especially hostile toward temps, treating us as disposable placeholders rather than professionals with potential.

There were legendary moments that became office folklore, told in hushed tones over burnt coffee. One temp took a bathroom break three minutes longer than the allotted time, and Tracy unleashed a public dressing-down that ended with him in tears and quietly reassigned to another department. Another agent used a slightly off-brand greeting on her calls. Tracy called a department-wide meeting to “correct the erosion of standards.” These were not simple overreactions. They were theatrical purges designed to reassert dominance.

Even the seasoned full-timers avoided her path through the floor. You could tell when she was approaching because conversations stopped and people suddenly became very interested in their screens.

When my temp agency checked in, I was honest. I liked the job. I was proud of my work. But Tracy Voss was, to put it mildly, a tyrant. I was not alone. Other temps echoed my concerns in quiet, nervous solidarity. The agency seemed receptive and told us they would raise the issue. I felt a brief glimmer of hope, followed immediately by a ripple of fear.

Despite the stress, I kept showing up. For the first time in years, I had stability. It helped that I had a partner at home who supported and grounded me. I told myself that if I just kept my head down, things would work out.

A few months later, I got a call from my agency rep, Kevin. He wanted to meet for lunch. It was a breezy summer Thursday. I assumed the conversation would be celebratory, maybe even a formality before offering me a permanent position. I got approval for an extended lunch, which felt like another sign that good news was coming.

Instead, Kevin walked me to the agency’s office under the guise of a pre-lunch chat. Another rep was already there. That was when they blindsided me. My assignment at IBX had been terminated. No explanation. Just a vague reference to a “missed metric.” When I pressed for details, they stonewalled.

It clicked immediately. This was retaliation. Tracy Voss had sunk my battleship behind the scenes, presumably because I had dared to speak honestly.

They would not even let me back into the building to collect my belongings. Someone else retrieved my bag like I was a criminal. I stood on the sidewalk, stunned, and called my wife. My voice cracked as I told her I had been fired. Again.

The agency tossed me a month’s severance. Once that check cleared, I sent a blistering email, laced with profanity and fury. It did not change anything, but it felt necessary.

The cycle was maddening. Slack off, fired. Question authority, fired. Work hard, show up every day, raise a legitimate concern, still fired. It felt like my childhood all over again, walking on eggshells and getting punished whether I acted out or toed the line.

That experience shattered what little trust I had left in employers. I stopped striving for excellence and started aiming for adequacy. Just enough to avoid getting shitcanned. Tracy Voss and IBX permanently altered my mental landscape, and I will always have a hard time forgiving them for it… even though I’m supposed to practice forgiveness.

Maybe things are better there now. Hopefully. Maybe all those tortured souls in the call center have moved on to bigger and better things. But that place, and that director, left me with a scar that never quite healed.

Conservative Cosplay Doubled Down: From Pasadena Pariah To Philly Partisan

[Some names and organizations have been changed. This entry reflects my personal memories and interpretations of events that occurred over a decade ago. Others involved may remember these events differently.]

…This entry is a personal reckoning with a period of my life I am not proud of. It contains honest accounts of harmful behavior, political extremism, and choices that caused real damage to other people and to myself. I am not sharing this to excuse those actions or to seek forgiveness, but to document how easily insecurity, anger, and the need for validation can curdle into something cruel. What follows is an attempt to tell the truth as clearly as I can, in the hope that naming it helps ensure it is never repeated…

I returned to the Philadelphia area after my disgrace in Pasadena at the tail end of 2008. You would think I had learned my lesson about selling out my principles and mouthing off for attention, but that was not the case. Instead of reflecting or slowing down, I doubled down on everything. I kept blogging, kept talking trash, and kept spewing the same recycled conservative talking points on my old mayoral campaign website, as if stubbornness alone could redeem me.

To this day, I cannot believe I once convinced myself that John McCain would have run this country better than Barack Obama. That belief now feels not just wrong, but embarrassing. At the same time, I was working a retail job at the Dollar Tree in Boothwyn while living in the basement of my parents’ house in Aston, Delaware County. It was a long way from my days managing content at LeisureLink or sitting down for pie with Huell Howser while writing for Pasadena Weekly. The contrast was brutal. Oh, how the nowhere near mighty had fallen.

My parents were now in their sixties and deeply frustrated with me. My father was working as a security guard and could not understand why I would not just follow him into that line of work. I could not imagine what it would have been like to work alongside him, especially knowing how often I disappointed him just by existing as I was.

Around the time the Phillies won the World Series in 2008, which was genuinely exciting to witness back home, I set up an online dating profile and met the woman who would eventually become my wife. Naturally, I almost ruined that relationship immediately. While working at Dollar Tree, a customer attempted to pay with a fifty dollar check. I processed it incorrectly, badly enough that I was fired on the spot. Suddenly I had no job, no desire to keep living with my parents, and no real plan. I was still collecting partial unemployment from California and used that money to rent a room in a house just a block away from where my girlfriend lived in the Port Richmond section of Philly. Looking back, it was a rash and impulsive decision, behavior that I later understood, with professional help, was influenced by untreated mental illness, though I had no idea at the time what was actually driving it.

I applied for another retail job at Penn Jersey Paper, only to have my background check explode in my face. It was gut wrenching to have an HR person on the telephone tell you point blank that they don’t want a guy with a charge of making decades-old terroristic threats working for them. That criminal record from Philadelphia that was supposedly expunged back in the day had never actually been removed. Someone had botched the paperwork. A public defender later told me this happened far more often than people realized. I spent an entire month filing forms, making calls, and navigating bureaucratic nonsense just to get my record properly cleared. Only after that ordeal ended did I begin applying for work again.

By 2009, I landed a job with a flag manufacturer. They believed my customer service background would translate well into sales. Around the same time, I let the domain for my old campaign website lapse and began writing for a site called the Philadelphia Examiner. The pay was abysmal, literally pennies per click, and I sank right back into my worst habits. I churned out hateful, reactionary garbage that leaned hard into bigotry and outrage, crossing lines purely for attention. It was clickbait with a mean streak.

All the while, I was selling flags, struggling with math my ADHD brain was never equipped to handle, and steadily disappointing my bosses, who ran the warehouse remotely from Tel Aviv. One day, after mounting frustrations and mutual resentment, I had a massive blowup with them and was promptly fired. Once again, I managed to collect unemployment, largely because they could not be bothered to fly over for the hearing.

As 2009 faded into the early 2010s, I became increasingly consumed by my own delusions, pouring them into bitter, venomous prose. I launched a website called Philly Decline, built on the belief that Philadelphia was “going the way of Detroit.” It was an unfair comparison, deliberately slanted, and intentionally slanderous. The site existed solely as a dumping ground for my acerbic rants. Predictably, it drew attention.

That attention brought me into contact with a group of local Republicans known as the Liberty Caucus. They found my website, saw my political background, and viewed me as a useful asset. By then, I had stripped away the eyeliner and goth regalia and presented myself as a more conventional version of who I once was. They invited me to a meeting at the Union League, one of Philadelphia’s most exclusive and historically conservative institutions, and asked me to join in hopes of attracting younger members. At the time, only about one in seven registered voters in Philadelphia was Republican, making the entire effort laughably futile from the start.

Getting involved with that group remains one of my deepest regrets. While the Pasadena Republicans had been mostly gadflies and neighborhood NIMBY types, the Liberty Caucus included people who were openly and unapologetically racist. Not coded, not subtle, but blunt and crude in their prejudices. The things they encouraged me to say and do were reprehensible. Targeting Muslims was practically a hobby for them, especially in the post 9/11 political climate they refused to let go of. This was during the height of the Tea Party movement, yet very few of their causes had anything to do with fiscal responsibility, limited government, or constitutional principles. What they really trafficked in was resentment, fear, and a thinly veiled hatred of anyone who did not look or believe like them.

And I went along with it. I told myself I was finally winning approval, finally earning respect, finally making all the people who had ever called me the f-slur proud. In reality, I was just participating in small, stupid battles that accomplished nothing but further damage.

One of the most absurd examples came when the city of Philadelphia proposed renaming Christmas Village to Holiday Village. I went on Fox News wearing a suit adorned with a crucifix and an American flag pin, ranting about how the change was supposedly anti-Christian. The truth was obvious even then. It was an attempt to make more people feel welcome. Still, I played my role. I soon became a regular talking head on my local Fox station, humiliating myself with my crooked teeth, and even more crooked takes, on morning shows and evening news segments alike.

That run ended abruptly when someone called the station and informed them about my 2001 arrest. At the time, I was furious. In hindsight, that person was absolutely right. They did me a favor. They saved me from continuing to destroy myself in public, one performance at a time.

The Caucus even hooked me up with a fledgling radio network where I hosted a right wing podcast. The only real highlights of that experience, aside from the ego stroke of having a microphone in front of me, were interviewing various shithead political “luminaries” like Curtis Sliwa and Bob Barr. The one genuinely surreal bright spot was getting to chat with actual professional wrestling legends like John Layfield and Bruno Sammartino. Those moments felt like borrowed credibility I absolutely did not deserve. Somehow and someway, during all those hectic times, in the midst of the fray, my girlfriend became my fiancee and then my wife and she put up with all my bullshit the entire time: even when she didn’t agree with what I was doing and tried to talk me out of doing stupid political things… and I wouldn’t listen.

And speaking of professional wrestling, I was still dragging around the same bad behaviors I should have left behind in my California squared circle days. I spent an embarrassing amount of time harassing fans on a popular wrestling message board. What started as trash talk spiraled into something far uglier. The fights got deeply personal and obsessive, a lot of times moving over into real life. I eventually tracked down where a few of the moderators worked and intentionally caused trouble for them at their real life jobs by sharing some of their controversial posts on the website. The fallout was so severe that the entire message board was shut down. I never admitted my role in that mess until right now, and I am genuinely ashamed of it and definitely sorry for it.

Surprise, surprise, I eventually could not take it anymore. I could not look at myself in the mirror without feeling sick. I no longer knew how much of what came out of my mouth was truth and how much was pure performance and bullshit. I was not some brave voice of a movement. I was the tomato can they threw into the ring to absorb the punches so others did not have to. On top of that, I was dealing with intense, unmanaged anger. Real anger. And eventually I turned that rage on the very hands that were feeding me.

In 2013, I finally ripped off the Republican disguise and walked away. I made sure I did not let the sun set without telling the entire Liberty Caucus exactly how I felt about them and the role they had played in turning me into someone I despised. It felt good to give them one final fuck you. But that rush faded quickly, replaced by a much heavier question. What damage had I already done?

I had alienated friends I had known for years. My name was now showing up in Google search results alongside hate speech and inflammatory garbage I had willingly put into the world. I could not find a job because of it. I was disgraced yet again, this time entirely by my own hand.

Professionally, I started going by my middle name, hoping I would be less Googleable. It was a cowardly move, but I was desperate. I landed a job in customer service and sales for a language instruction company. Of course, I eventually got fired from there too, which is another story for another time. I stopped blogging. I stopped all political activity except for doing my basic civic duty as a voter. I started listening to goth and industrial music again, music I had convinced myself I had outgrown or abandoned, and I started wearing makeup again. I returned to social media under an alias, hiding in plain sight. It was 2015, and even then I was still locked in a brutal fight with my mental health, a downward spiral that would not truly bottom out until 2020.

It is not just that I made a complete ass out of myself during this conservative cosplay. It is that I deeply regret the hateful words I spewed and the harm they caused. I do not know that there is any way to truly make that right beyond refusing to ever be that person again. So I try to do the work. I listen more than I speak. I support causes that protect people instead of punishing them. I donate when I can. I amplify voices that deserve to be heard instead of centering myself. I challenge bigotry when I see it, especially when it would be easier to stay quiet. I try to show up for people in small, practical ways, because changing the world is not just slogans, it is actions.

If you were one of the people or groups targeted by my vitriolic behavior, my screeds, or my so called manifestos, I offer my deepest and most sincere apologies. I am a fucking jackass for doing and saying those horrid things. I own that. I do not excuse it. I live with it.

Looking at the world right now, I am profoundly grateful that I jumped ship from conservatism and eventually got my head back on straight. I see ICE tearing families apart and murdering people. I see endless hate and cruelty from those who claim to care about the Constitution and the rights of Americans. This is not a “both sides” situation when one side is openly flirting with or outright advocating violence against entire groups of people.

I am just glad I am myself again. My true self. My authentic self. And, most importantly, through the hard work of therapy and medication, my best possible self. I cannot undo the damage I caused, but I can spend the rest of my life trying to be someone who adds a little less pain and a little more compassion to the world.

…Of all the things I have written over the years, this was one of the hardest to finish. Not because the facts were difficult to recall, but because sitting with them required a level of honesty I spent a long time avoiding. It is far easier to caricature a past self, to turn him into a villain or a punchline, than it is to acknowledge how recognizable his motivations still feel. Insecurity, ego, fear, and the hunger to be seen are not exotic flaws. They are painfully common ones, and left unchecked, they can take you places you swear you would never go.

I am not sharing this story because I believe confession equals absolution. It does not. Accountability is not a paragraph at the end of a blog post, and remorse is not proven by good intentions alone. What I can offer instead is transparency, consistency, and time. Time spent not repeating these behaviors. Time spent listening instead of performing. Time spent doing quieter work that does not come with applause or clicks or a microphone.

If there is any point to documenting this era of my life, it is as a warning. Not a warning about political parties in the abstract, but about what happens when you outsource your self worth to ideology, outrage, and attention. When being provocative becomes more important than being decent. When cruelty starts to feel like strength. None of that happens overnight. It happens in increments, justified step by step, until you look around and barely recognize the person you have become.

I know some readers will come away skeptical. Others will be angry. Some will decide this is too little, too late. I understand that reaction, and I am not here to argue with it. I forfeited the benefit of the doubt a long time ago. All I can do now is tell the truth as plainly as I know how, accept the discomfort that comes with it, and keep moving forward in a different direction.

If you take anything from this, I hope it is this: it is never just rhetoric. Words shape permission. They shape culture. They shape what people feel entitled to say and do to one another. I learned that lesson the hard way, and far too late. I intend to spend whatever time I have left proving that the lesson stuck.

Thank you for reading…

Grappling With The Wrestling World, The Epilogue

I genuinely thought my professional wrestling career was dead and buried with its ashes scattered, tombstone etched, funeral long over. But in the summer of 2005, while I was still half-assing “work” at LeisureLink, a little spark flared back to life. Out of nowhere, I got a message on AOL Instant Messenger, yes, AIM, the digital equivalent of sending smoke signals, from a Los Angeles wrestling promoter whose name I’ve long forgotten. That’s not shade; my alcohol-addled manic brain just genuinely deleted him to make room for more important memories, like the entire discography of Front 242.
You have to understand: by then, I had pretty much nuked my standing in SoCal wrestling. I’d screwed over PCW after skipping out on a show and skipping into a new life, gotten into my final message board war, and gotten myself rightfully banned from the forums on SoCalUncensored.com. Banished. Excommunicated. Digitally executed. So when a promoter actually reached out to me, I half wondered if it was a prank.
But he insisted: he ran a new promotion called Hybrid Pro Wrestling, and he wanted me to appear on his shows. He said there was a wrestler named Xtreme Loco who needed heel heat, which is what you try to accomplish by getting the audience to boo a villain, because his promos were about as effective as a broken Speak & Spell covered in Cheeto dust. I was cautious because once you walk out on a company in wrestling, you’re not just blackballed… you’re blackholed. I let my ego and untreated mental illness take the wheel, and naturally, I said yes.

The Return That Nobody Asked For

My first appearance that summer was an in-ring segment titled “The Aaron Proctor Show.” Who came up with that name? Me. Obviously.
The promoter was planning a DVD release, so he had an actual camera crew and a commentary team. I’ll never forget hearing XPW alumni announcer Kris Kloss excitedly calling my entrance like I was a returning legend instead of the community theater villain I actually was.
The segment was a half-work, half-shoot (read: half real, half fake) explanation of why I left PCW and why I was suddenly back, allegedly managing champions. I ran down Brawlin’ Bo Cooper in a scripted promo until he stormed the ring and dropped me with a Death Valley Driver. It was cool because the crowd always loved seeing me get beat up. This was meant to set up the next show, where I’d manage Xtreme Loco in his feud with Cooper.
But the crowd reaction?
Oh, they booed, but not the good kind.
Not the “You’re such a dastardly villain!” boo.
More like the: “Oh great, this clown is back,” boo.
And the boys in the back? Most of them treated me like I had the plague and an IRS audit all at once. A few were friendly, but most remembered what I’d done at PCW and wanted nothing to do with me.
Wrestling has traditions. Some are good, some absolute garbage, but one of the most sacred is you don’t walk out on a show. It makes you unreliable. It puts people at risk. And I had done exactly that.
Which always made me wonder: Why the hell did this promoter want me on his shows at all? Did he lose a bet? Was this a dare? A social experiment? We’ll never know.

The Second Act Nobody Needed

I came back the next month, this time calling out Bo Cooper again while accompanied by a punk rock valet with a pink Mohawk the promoter named Roxy, who had the personality of a Hot Topic store mannequin who’d come to life. I think he wanted me to head up some villainous stable of misfits, which piqued the interest of the rebel in me.
Bo came out to kill me again, but this time Xtreme Loco hit the ring and brained him with a steel chair. Beautiful. Classical. Shakespearean, even.
This set up my planned third appearance, which would end up being my final wrestling appearance ever.
Because someone, no idea who, but I have theories, got into the promoter’s ear. Suddenly, Roxy was managing someone else, and the promoter invited me to the show but said he “didn’t have a spot for me.” Classic wrestling speak for: “Hey kid, creative’s got nothing for you.”
The match went on without me: an ambulance match between Loco and Cooper which was pretty high-concept for an indy fed. Meanwhile, I was backstage, awkwardly wandering around like the ghost of a wrestler who died of embarrassment.
I talked to John Webber, aka The Stepfather from this saga’s second entry, for what’d be the last time ever save for a Facebook argument we’d have about 8 years later when I was in conservative cosplay mode. Of course, like all the other shit I’ve pulled, I regret breaking that friendship, too. 
I sat in a corner quietly until the show ended. Then I went home and drank a whole bottle of Scotch straight, no mixer, trying to swallow the truth: My wrestling career was over. For real this time. And I’d done it to myself.

The Backyard Epilogue

There was one little footnote to my days in pro wrestling. Everything ended up coming full circle. During my 2006/2007 Pasadena mayoral campaign (because my life is a series of genre shifts) a twentysomething backyard promoter emailed me through my campaign website. He’d heard about my wrestling background and asked if I could referee his main event at a backyard wrestling show over on Los Robles.
Backyard wrestling. Despised by the pros. Participating in it was the same reason we never booked The Young Bucks. During a mayoral campaign. Sure. Why the fuck not? Who did I have left to piss off? Maybe I’d win the coveted Unhinged Teen Vote.
So there I was, in full goth regalia, standing on blue gym mats in some kid’s front yard, with garden hoses tied up as makeshift ropes attached to trees. I refereed a match between two completely untrained, dangerously enthusiastic kids who used barbed wire, light tubes, and thumbtacks like they were filming a low-budget remake of ECW’s infamous Mass Transit incident. Look it up. During the match, I tried to channel my inner Charles Robinson, but with more eyeliner and existential dread.
Maybe twenty people were there. Maybe they voted for me. Probably not.
I never told a soul about that show until years later. But that was the real end. Back where I started: the backyard.

The Part Where I Grow Up… Sort Of

These days, I’m just a fan and I’m finally okay with that. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of wrestling history, and when I’m not watching Tully Blanchard, my favorite wrestler ever, absolutely cook someone on the mic, or binging Mid-South, WCW, ECW, or Attitude Era WWE, I’m usually converting my wife into a wrestling nerd, one current storyline at a time. My favorite wrestlers these days are probably Gunther and Rhea Ripley but Ethan Page and Trick Williams sure have bright futures ahead of them.
I’ll never fall out of love with wrestling. And I’m glad the backstage culture, from what I hear, is more accepting, less toxic. People always ask me if I’d ever try to go behind the curtain again, maybe take the good parts of my wrestling resume to some small indy promoter as a weekend hobby. I tell those people that I’m 44 years old and I had a wild reputation of physical participation in the quasi-sport. If I took a bump now, I’d end up in the hospital or the morgue.
I keep in touch with a few of the wrestlers, managers, ring announcers, refs, and fans I’ve met along the way. Reminiscing about old times with Benjamin Tomas can be quite therapeutic at times. Sharing an old story with TARO or Disco Machine still makes me feel like I was one of the “boys”, that I belonged to a family for a short while. I lost contact with a bunch of people, sadly. If you’re out there, Scott Abeyta or Thunderbird or any others who I’ve not named, hit me up. I’d love to hear how you’re doing.
Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d gotten control of my drinking sooner, gone to therapy, gotten medicated, stopped blowing stuff up for sport. Maybe this blog would be written by a WWE superstar. Maybe not.
But I like this version of me. And I like being a fan. The story’s still good, it just didn’t go the way 24-year-old me imagined. Speaking of stories, I have a ton of those. An old, comforting memory of a car ride to a show in Fresno or a backstage blooper at the South Anaheim Marketplace pops into my head all the time and I get to relive it over again.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.

2026

I hate New Year’s resolutions. I pretty much think they’re bullshit. They’re often performative, fleeting, and designed to be broken by February. That said, I do think the start of a new year is a perfect time for personal reflection. Not another complete reinvention, not some “new me” stuff, but reflection. Taking stock. Sitting quietly with the uncomfortable parts. I’ve done a lot of damage as I’ve navigated through this life while trying to figure out who I am, and I don’t get to pretend otherwise. What I can do, though, is continue into 2026 trying to be the best person I can be while doing my best to make up for past hurtful words and actions.

That’s the work. Not resolutions. Work.

So while some people make promises to wake up earlier or join a gym or swear off carbs forever, I’m doubling down on promises I’ve already made to myself. I am going to keep going to therapy. Full stop. It has saved my life more than once, and my therapist has been nothing short of amazing. In a lot of ways, she’s a miracle worker. She’s helped me untangle years of shame, anger, self loathing, and learned behaviors that I convinced myself were just “who I am.” Turns out, a lot of that stuff can be examined, challenged, and changed. Not erased, but understood. That alone has been transformative.

I am also going to continue undertaking the craft of being a kinder, more understanding, more tolerant person. I say craft intentionally. This is not instinctual for me. It takes effort. It takes slowing down. It takes listening instead of reacting. It takes admitting when I’m wrong, which historically has not been my strong suit. I am going to continue living my life authentically as my real self, no longer hiding or apologizing for it. That doesn’t mean bulldozing others or demanding acceptance. It just means existing honestly and allowing others the same courtesy. I am also trying, imperfectly but sincerely, to cleanse the hate that seeps through nearly every fabric of our society, including the parts that once lived comfortably inside me.

In the past, I had heavily considered going on an apology tour of sorts… tracking down anyone and everyone I have wronged or slighted or anyone who was the target of my hateful rhetoric. I decided against it. First off, that would be weird for those people and institutions. I don’t want to open old wounds. Secondly, the best way I can make up for my past is by being a humble, kind, giving, empathetic, and decent person in the present. Maybe some people can randomly Google me at some time and see things like this missive and that’s good enough for me.

There’s a lot I’m looking forward to this year, too. Concerts. Date nights. Adventures big and small with my darling wife. We are going to have an amazing Valentine’s Day, and this year we celebrate 15 years of marriage and 18 years of being together. That number still blows my mind. I am indebted to my wife for her unconditional love, her patience, her support, and her care. She has stood by me during my worst chapters, not because she had to, but because she chose to. I do not take that lightly, and I never will.

I turn 45 this year. I’m trying not to be so sore about getting older, at least not as much as I used to be. Aging used to feel like a threat. Now it feels more like a receipt. Proof that I’m still here. It’s funny how much less I worry about what people think of me now compared to when I was younger. There’s a quiet rebellion in that. A tactful one. I don’t want to put others down or infringe upon their happiness, as long as they afford me the same respect. I’m done auditioning for approval that never actually mattered.

I’m finally happy to have a family, too, even if it’s an inherited one. For most of my life, I didn’t really understand what familial love looked like or how to accept it without suspicion. That’s changed recently, and it’s been grounding in ways I didn’t know I needed. It turns out you can learn new definitions of love even in your forties.

Blogging, or whatever these entries try to pass as blogging, has been deeply therapeutic. Writing forces honesty. It removes the luxury of revisionist history. It’s almost as if I can finally forgive myself for a lot of my past mistakes and behaviors. Almost. There are still people who will spit on the ground when they hear my name, and that hurts more than I’d like to admit. But I also understand that some bridges cannot be rebuilt. I can’t undo nuclear disasters. The best I can do is be better now. Kinder now. More accountable now.

I hope I don’t run out of stories to share. Happy ones. Sad ones. Funny ones. Embarrassing ones. If someone struggling with mental health stumbles across my mishaps and decides to make healthier choices, then this oversharing circus is worth it. It is okay to not be okay. It is okay to ask for help. I learned that the hard way, but I learned it. Someone does care about you, even when your brain is screaming otherwise. If rehashing my misadventures prevents even one person from making the same mistakes I did, then good. I don’t wish this cursed illness on anyone, not even my worst enemies. Making fewer of those is also something I’m actively working on.

If you make resolutions, great. I genuinely hope they work out for you, even though statistics are not on your side. You do you. I think what we can all strive for is a little more peace, love, understanding, and fun. We desperately need more humor and joy in our lives, and that’s coming from one of the darkest people you’ll ever meet.

I wish you all well in this new year as we navigate the terrible world out there together.

Safe travels.

Ray, The Fake Employee

[Some names of people and organizations have been changed.]

I worked at a market research firm called Nexava Analytics in Eagle Rock from mid-2003 to mid-2004. The place ran surveys and focus groups for companies testing out new products, new TV shows, new commercials, basically anything that could be shoved in front of a consumer to see if it stuck. It was a just-above-minimum-wage gig that had me parked in front of a CRT all day, entering data like a zombie in a headset. Coding all week, helping run pro wrestling shows all weekend. What a life.

Our computers didn’t have easy access to the internet, so I was bored out of my skull and needed something, anything, to keep myself from going insane. That’s how my friendship with Logan Barrett got started. He sat right behind me, doing the same job, and he laughed at everything I said. That’s really all it takes to make me loyal to someone: laugh at my jokes and don’t be an asshole.

One day, out of nowhere, I had a wild idea. There were always birthday cards being passed around because it was always somebody’s god damn birthday in that building. Nobody knew half the people the cards were for, but they’d still sign them with the standard “Best wishes!” like polite office drones.

That gave me a diabolical plan.

What if I created an employee who didn’t exist? What if I got people talking about that employee so the rest of the building thought he was real? It was performance art. It was workplace trolling. It was the only fun I’d had in weeks.

But it couldn’t be done alone. So during a smoke break, I pitched the idea to Logan. I needed an accomplice.

Logan didn’t even blink. He just took a drag from his Camel Light and said, “Yeah, man. Let’s make a ghost.”

That was all the encouragement I needed. I’d been bored enough to manufacture chaos out of thin air, and Logan, skinny, ginger, freckled, pale, chain-smoking Logan, was exactly the kind of guy who’d help me fan the flames.

The first step: a name. Something believable but weird enough not to raise a single eyebrow. I immediately thought of a wrestler I knew from the indys who worked under the gimmick name The Stepfather, a guy from West L.A. who pretended to be a big Southern bruiser. His promos were half discipline, half comedy, all charm. In one promo he mentioned being from Swinehide, Kentucky. Was Swinehide real? Fictional? Didn’t matter. It sounded like the kind of place where livestock outnumber people and a man can legally marry his sister.

So our fake employee was born: Ray Dunwoodie, from Swinehide, Kentucky.

A good ol’ boy. Hard worker. Quiet. Mysterious. And, most importantly, apparently celebrating a birthday soon.

Logan and I whispered about Ray during lunch breaks like two middle-schoolers planning a séance.

“You hear Ray’s working nights now?”
“No shit? Explains why we never see him.”
“Yeah, B Shift on the third floor. Does all the after-hours checks.”
“Nice guy, though.”

Little things. Believable things. Nothing too big, nothing too stupid. Worst-case scenario, someone would shrug and say, “Oh? Ray? I think I’ve met him.”

But it was the birthday card that sealed the deal.

We passed a dollar store birthday card one Tuesday afternoon, some generic thing with balloons drawn on it and a blank inside waiting for polite corporate scribbles. The moment the card hit my hands it was like hellfire and brimstone opened through the ground and the devil himself whispered: “Do it, you coward”.

I didn’t hesitate.

Under my normal signature, I wrote:
“Hey Ray! Have a good birthday and see you soon!”

Then I passed it to Logan. He wrote something equally stupid about how Ray “always kept the energy up in the break room.”

And then, this is the part that still sends me, people not in on the joke started following our lead. Like obedient little lemmings.

Two or three coworkers wrote things like, “Tell Ray we said hi!” or “Glad Ray’s part of the team!”

One person even drew a smiley face.

In under five minutes, the whole thing spiraled beautifully out of control.

That card floated around the office collecting signatures for a man who did not exist, a workplace character conjured purely by boredom, fluorescent lighting, and the broken spirits of minimum-wage market research drones.

I figured that was the end of it, a little prank to keep myself entertained.

Then Joby found out.

Joby, our boss, wasn’t a monster, but he had the patience of a sleep-deprived parent trapped on a cross-country flight. He was perpetually irritated with me because he suspected I could be a decent employee but chose not to be. He wasn’t wrong.

He called Logan and me into his tiny office, shut the door, and folded his hands like he was about to pray for strength.

“What,” he said, with the icy calm of a man holding on by a thread, “is this about an employee named Ray?”

Logan stared at the floor like answers might rise up out of the stained carpet. I held my breath.

Joby waited. The lights flickered. A phone rang somewhere in the distance.

I opened my mouth to speak and right then, a woman from HR knocked on the door holding the damn birthday card like it was Exhibit A in a murder trial.

“Joby,” she said, “who’s Ray?”

I don’t remember exactly what I said next. I’m pretty sure I tried to talk my way out of it, which never works because when I lie at work, I sound like I’m lying. My brain always tries too hard.

“No, you see, Ray is… uh… he’s transferring? And… uh… he… likes balloons?”

Logan muttered something about a “new hire in operations.” It only made things worse.

We probably could’ve gotten away with it if we’d said nothing. But we didn’t. Because we’re idiots.

Joby pinched the bridge of his nose like he was trying to crush a migraine. “Just… get back to work.”

That should’ve been the end.

Of course it wasn’t.

A little while later, I found a dishwasher commercial online featuring John Webber aka The Stepfather, the very same wrestler whose fictional hometown inspired Swinehide. You see, he was an actor in addition to being a pro wrestler. I swear I once saw him on an episode of “The Hughleys”. Anyway… seeing him in a fake handyman outfit praising the third rack on a dishwasher was too surreal not to share, so I posted it to a wrestling message board.

Unfortunately, I did it from a Nexava computer.

Now, technically, we didn’t have internet access. But there were loopholes, temporary connections, hidden proxy scripts, weird old software. I found one by accident and treated it like a divine gift.

But IT noticed. And IT told Joby. And that was that. The Ray thing made me a problem. The internet thing gave them the paperwork.

When Joby and a security guard tapped me on the shoulder, I already knew the deal. I logged out, grabbed my backpack, and didn’t even argue. I’d never been escorted out of a building before, but honestly? Not the worst thing that ever happened to me. At least they didn’t drag me out by my collar.

Logan watched from his desk, eyes wide. He didn’t say a word. I gave him a little salute like a soldier heading off to a war he’d started, and he nodded as if to say, “Godspeed, you magnificent idiot”.

I never heard from him again.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to him. Did he go to another crappy job and try the Ray prank again? Did he create a new imaginary coworker, maybe a woman this time, and see how far he could push it? Or did he grow up, get plants, and develop coping skills?

I’ll never know. At least Ray still worked at Nexava, even if it was in spirit.

But every so often, when I’m home with a glass of Dewars and an old industrial track blasting, I think about Ray Dunwoodie from Swinehide, Kentucky.

The man who never existed but still got a birthday card.

If I ever wrote a résumé that told the truth: the real truth, it would say:

**

2003–2004: Nexava Analytics, Data Entry.

Created fictional employee so convincingly that multiple departments believed he was real.

Terminated for posting dishwasher commercial featuring independent wrestler.

Escorted from premises.

**

Not exactly corporate-friendly, but absolutely accurate.

And honestly? It’d be the most honest job description I’ve ever had.

Grappling With The Wrestling World, Part 6

It was the summer of 2004 for PCW, and the sun was setting on our attendance numbers. We’d done all we could with the venues we had, so in one of our many grand ideas fueled by stubborn optimism, we decided to move our shows to the Fraternal Order of Eagles hall in Altadena, California. It sounded poetic, “Eagles” hosting wrestling like my favorite football team, the Philadelphia Eagles, or famous KROQ DJ, The Swedish Eagle. It was like fate was giving us one last shot, at least for me. We thought a change of scenery might breathe new life into our fan base: families looking for a cheap night out, kids mesmerized by bodyslams and dropkicks, lapsed fans nostalgic for the old days, maybe even curious newcomers who’d never seen independent wrestling before.

It didn’t work.

Despite the new venue and our hopes, we were still getting the same faces (loyal but few) and we weren’t putting on the kind of shows that drew the attention of the increasingly hard-to-please internet fans. They had a new obsession: Pro Wrestling Guerrilla. PWG was the new king of California indie wrestling, the West Coast’s answer to Ring of Honor. Founded by six wrestlers who actually knew how to book and draw, PWG could afford to fly in top-tier talent from across North America. They had energy, attitude, and money. We had… a banner, a ring, and misplaced confidence.

Not that we were ever trying to compete with them, at least not out loud. But it stung. We couldn’t even run on the same weekends as PWG without being crushed attendance-wise, so we often settled for Friday shows that maybe, if the moon aligned just right, drew seventy-five people. Seventy-five if we were lucky, fifty if the Dodgers were playing.

Still, there were bright spots. One of the funnier stories came from a random night when NWA legend “Ragin’ Bull” Manny Fernandez showed up at one of our shows. We didn’t even know he was there until after he paid for a ticket like a regular fan. Mace and I just stared at each other: “Manny Fernandez is here? Why the hell did we charge him to get in?” Pete’s brother, who was working the door that night, wasn’t a wrestling fan and had no idea who Manny was. When we found out, we announced his presence at intermission. Manny stood up, gave a wave, and got a respectful cheer from the crowd. Looking back, it was surreal to be performing in front of one of the toughest men to ever lace up boots.

But that was one of the few highs during a period of slow decline. The Philly Connection storyline was fizzling out. We couldn’t afford the fly-ins anymore, and guys like Messiah were increasingly unhappy with how things were going. So, I pivoted. I reinvented myself as the babyface commissioner, the nice guy, the crowd’s friend, and started a “feud” with Mike Vega. It kicked off during our Halloween show, where I dressed as one of the Spartan Cheerleaders from Saturday Night Live. Mike hit me with a spike piledriver right in the middle of the ring. The crowd loved it. My neck, not so much.

Outside of wrestling, though, my attention was slipping. The clubs, the nightlife, and my goth friends were far more fun than dealing with wrestlers and the constant message board wars. I was tired of the online fighting, though, to be fair, a lot of it started because of me. I had no filter and way too much time on my hands. The internet trolls hit back hard, taking shots at my appearance, my sexuality, my personality. It wore me down. I was either well-liked, despised, or tolerated… rarely in between. I got along great with the lower and midcard guys, but most of the main eventers big-leagued me. My heart wasn’t in it anymore.

So, I shifted gears again. I joined a goth band called Venus Virus as their keyboardist. I wasn’t good at keyboards (not really) but somehow, I was better at that than at the wrestling game. And just like that, I made one of my trademark impulsive moves: I walked out of a PCW show at intermission one night in the fall of 2004 and never looked back. Mace and Pete called me several times afterward, but I ghosted them. I was angry, burned out, and full of self-righteous pride. In hindsight, I should’ve handled it better, but at the time, I didn’t care.

For the next two decades, I didn’t talk to those guys. I was devastated earlier this year when I learned from Ben Tomas that Foob had recently passed away. Although Foob’s wrestling style didn’t go over well with the internet smart marks, he knew a lot about wrestling and passed it on to younger people getting into the business. Foob always tried to entertain the kids as best as he could, too. I always teased Foob about his wrestling style and his unwillingness to never turn bad guy or “heel” and I kind of regret all of that.

So wrestling was in the rear view. I convinced myself I was destined for something bigger like a band that would blow up in the L.A. goth/industrial scene. I even snagged a temp job with Yahoo for a while, but that didn’t last. They found out I’d dropped out of high school and never earned my GED. (That came later because I didn’t get it until I was 33.) Another self-sabotaged chapter.

Still, there was one genuinely fun story from that time. PWG needed to borrow a sound system for a show, and Pete volunteered ours. I tagged along and suddenly found myself backstage, surrounded by indie wrestling legends and future WWE Superstars: the Briscoe Brothers, Christopher Daniels, AJ Styles, Samoa Joe, El Generico, Kevin Steen, and Adam Pearce. Daniels even seemed impressed that I knew his entrance music. For one fleeting night, I felt like I belonged. I felt like I was part of the big leagues. A few fans even recognized me from PCW and said hello. It felt good, but deep down, I knew the truth. I didn’t belong there. I’d never make it to TNA or WWE. I wasn’t a wrestler, a decent booker, or a promotional visionary. I was just a guy chasing attention, chasing fame, chasing validation.

When the band fizzled out (surprise, surprise!) it was partly because I got romantically involved with the lead singer. That ended as dramatically as you’d expect. Of course I was impulsive, emotionally chaotic, and completely unmoored and she was sick of my shit. I was a ticking time bomb wandering Pasadena, haunting L.A.’s goth clubs, high on my own delusions, pretending I didn’t care about anything. Wrestling had failed, the band had failed, and I was left wondering what the hell came next.

A sensible person might’ve said, “Time to get a stable job, maybe plan a future.” Me? I thought, hell, maybe I’ll run for mayor of Pasadena or something.

But before that ridiculous idea took shape, there was LeisureLink: the best job I ever had, until it became one of the biggest meltdowns of my professional life. As you’ve read in the previous entry, I fucked that up royally.

Loud Quitting At LeisureLink

[All events are described as I personally experienced and remembered them. Some names and details have been compressed, altered, or fictionalized]

If my resume were a movie, it wouldn’t be some heartwarming underdog tale about rising through the ranks and achieving greatness. No, it’d be a black comedy with an absurdist script, recurring themes of poor impulse control, and a protagonist who never quite figures out how to keep a job longer than a season of any show on The CW. And that protagonist? Me, stumbling through each professional chapter like a drunken tightrope walker, juggling sarcasm, social awkwardness, and a profound distaste for anything resembling a spreadsheet.

From the jump, it’s been clear I wasn’t built for corporate life. The cubicle, the morning stand-ups, the soul-hollowing buzzwords, all of it felt like I was being slowly smothered by a throw blanket woven from HR manuals and passive-aggressive email threads. It wasn’t that I was incapable of doing the work. Technically, I could. But my brain always had other plans. It was perpetually hijacked by ideas that had nothing to do with performance metrics and everything to do with making people laugh, blowing up dumb office conventions, or mentally drafting a one-man show nobody asked for.

I was the guy in the corner dreaming up fake movie trailers based on our client onboarding process. Or writing a monologue about my boss’s obsession with “low-hanging fruit.” I couldn’t help it. Give me an empty Microsoft Word document and an overlong staff meeting, and I was off to the races. And the thing is, I wasn’t trying to tank my career. I just had a tendency to follow whatever wild thought occurred to me at the moment, usually at the precise time I was supposed to be updating a CRM or compiling average daily rate reports. I was a liability with a decent vocabulary.

That brings us to LeisureLink: the startup where I almost, almost found my footing.

This was in Southern California, circa 2004, back when tech startups still pretended to be fun and “innovative”. LeisureLink was a primordial VRBO or AirBnb, signing contracts with vacation rental owners for their extra inventory and promising to get them bookings. Vacation rentals were not a “thing” yet so it was a real challenge to get consumers to stray from a hotel. I was in charge of uploading the information about the properties to all the major travel websites and, occasionally, going to properties to take photos and meet with property managers.

We had a pretty relaxed culture when I got there: headphones were fine, jokes were appreciated, people actually laughed at my sarcastic remarks instead of reporting me to management. The office fridge was stocked with drinks that were probably violating some minor health code, and we had a whole “work hard, play hard” thing going on that, for once, wasn’t just bullshit on a brochure. I even met my best friend Jason there, he was my manager and taught me so many things like how to work just hard enough not to get fired. It actually felt like a place where I could be myself and still get shit done. Sort of.

The company was founded by a Canadian serial entrepreneur who was very soft-spoken and kind-hearted but may have been part serial killer, too. “LL” was funded by venture capital from angel investors. Those investors thought I was a hoot even though I didn’t meet their ideal appearance for an employee. The corporate structure was pretty bare bones. We had a CEO, a CTO, and a CIO. 

And, oh, the side characters we had aka my fellow coworkers. We were all confined to one room in a tech startup incubator. There was the Kim Kardashian-obsessed travel agent who I got mad at one time because she didn’t know who David Bowie was. There was an IT guy who drove a different fancy car every week. The sales guy who grew up in Quakertown so I had the sorta Philly connection. Who could forget the former travel agent turned director of sales who worked across the hall and would run into our little lean-to every time someone wanted to know an airport code. They should have made an “Arrested Development”-esque sitcom about that place… if TV wasn’t so overcrowded with office sitcoms.

Everything was running smoothly and didn’t need outside interference or any kind of shake up. Or so I thought.

Along came Larry. The Bulldozer. The destroyer of joy. The human wet blanket with a clipboard.

Larry arrived in 2006 like a cold front sweeping in from the Land of Micro Management. The serial entrepreneur I mentioned earlier? He’d made his money and was on to another project. Larry would become the new CEO. He was the guy who read Harvard Business Review unironically and thought “team synergy” and “Six Sigma” were legitimate spiritual paths. Overnight, things shifted. Headphones? Banned. Apparently they were hindering “team cohesion.” Lunch parties? Shut down. We were now encouraged to eat alone at our desks like Victorian orphans. The vodka-stocked fridge got sanitized into oblivion. Water and sad yogurt became the new normal.

Worst of all, Larry brought performance evaluations into a workplace that had been gloriously evaluation-free. Suddenly, there were metrics and rubrics and vague discussions about “alignment with company values”. He also said Jason and I were too “collegiate” with each other. I was fucked.

It didn’t help that Larry and I got along very poorly. He told me to quit wearing eyeliner, even though I was balancing that look with all black dress shirts and slacks, something that would probably get you sued for gender discrimination in today’s world. He didn’t appreciate my flexible approach to attendance. Mondays, for me, were often optional, the unofficial long weekend was a sacred ritual. Larry called it a “pattern”. I called it mental health preservation. He didn’t see the difference.

Still, it all led up to an explosive event that ended things. At first, it was a slow death by a thousand paper cuts. Passive-aggressive post-its. Dry emails. Eyebrow raises when I wore the same clubbing outfit for the third week in a row. And sure, I didn’t make it easy. Larry was handing out new policies and hiring all sorts of prehistoric tech bros and a new sales director that was always coked out of her mind. Meanwhile, I was busy turning our department white board, which I’d peppered with drawings of the Einstürzende Neubauten logo, into a hub of nihilist memes and writing Letterman-esque Top Ten lists just to amuse myself and stay sane.

One day, even though disaster was creeping, it still seemed out of the blue: I just lost my shit. That’s just part of being bipolar, I guess. Not that it’s an excuse or anything. I’d had enough of the draconian policies and wanted my old LeisureLink back. It wasn’t gonna happen so I sent off a delightfully scathing, most likely drunken email to Larry and his little cabal he’d formed, peppered with sarcasm and veiled threats of existential dread. My modus operandi. 

From the comfort of my home computer, I said Larry wasn’t capable of running a Jack In The Box and all of his changes ruined our company. Larry, who had clearly heard that I had a pro wrestling past and noticed my 6’3” frame, became convinced I was going to show up and throw him into the mini-fridge. It didn’t help that I said I’d love to chokeslam him through a table. I quit. 

Jason allegedly stormed into Larry’s office and lambasted him and his policies for driving me off. Our CTO, who I always played silly pranks on, wondered if I could come back. They even brought the serial entrepreneur back to call me in. I don’t remember what happened after this but Jason says I answered the phone drunk in the middle of a weekday afternoon and declined.

All of that behavior made Larry think I was gonna pull a Columbine. A few days later, a neighbor said she saw that the Pasadena police had knocked on my door. The CTO called and gently suggested I not return to the West Altadena Business Technology Center “under any circumstances”. Not the first time I’ve had a run-in with the law for making an electronic threat (I got arrested the first time!) and not the last time, either.

And just like that, another bridge caught up in my nuclear fallout. Habitual line-stepper, me.

The truth is, I’ve never been cut out for the beige, buttoned-up corporate world. My mind resists it like a cat being shoved into a bathtub. I crave meaning, mischief, connection and not another god damn all-hands meeting about quarterly projections. But at some point, I had to admit that part of the problem wasn’t just them. It was me. My chronic self-sabotage wasn’t cute anymore. It wasn’t some misunderstood genius thing. It was a pattern. And patterns, if left unchecked, become prisons.

It took a lot more burned bridges, awkward exits, and uncomfortable silences in exit interviews to realize that. But once I saw it clearly, I could at least start untangling the mess.

So yeah, I’ve loudly quit or have been fired more times than I care to count. I’ve talked myself out of good gigs, ducked responsibility, and prioritized daydreams over deadlines. But I’m also learning how to own my weirdness without letting it destroy me. I’m figuring out how to channel that inner chaos into something that actually builds instead of breaks.

Years later, I found out Larry abruptly moved the company to Salt Lake City and proceeded to run LeisureLink into the ground. They shuddered their doors one day out of the blue and left a lot of people hanging… even after they scrounged up, per the Wall Street Journal, 17 million fucking dollars in venture capital. I reveled in that company’s demise. 

I guess there’s always a balance, though. That CTO who would always put up with my hijinks and went to bat for me after my manic, alcoholic email? His name was George Wu and he died a few years ago after falling off of Tahquitz Rock in Idyllwild during a hike. True story. Look it up.

So, even now, after all the meds and all the therapy, I’m still working on how to behave when an authority figure tells me what to do, especially when that someone wants to change things around or fuck with my routine. Doubly special if that person happens to sign my paychecks. Always will be.