I loved living in the basement because it felt like a cave. That suits me perfectly. Cool. Dark. Less than half-finished and palpably cut off from the outside world. It was hastily decorated with a few very “punk rock” posters; Agnostic Front, Crazy Spirit, and various punk bands that I had played in. I’d hang out down there and blast the CULO album (the flawlessly titled ‘My Life Sucks And I Could Care Less’), swilling malt liquor, laptop open with my neat Darby Crash wallpaper on display. I had decided to start being punk again because my life had fallen apart and I didn’t know what else to do. I say this in hindsight; at the time, I rarely had any idea why I was doing what I was doing. I did know that I had to toughen up somehow. The girl was gone and the only pursuits I had left were my bands (only one of which was consistently active) and my drugs. So I busted out my old leather jacket, obtained a studded bracelet, donned some black boots that I stole from somebody, and moved into my parent’s basement.

I would love to live in that basement once more. Living there is no longer an option; even if I moved back in with my parents, my dad would never let me live down there again. One day I snuck out and did heroin, copping an extra bag and clean needles for later while I was at it. I came home extremely high. I didn’t think that my parents knew, but obviously they did. It gives me chills to think about how oblivious I was; I thought I was getting away with something that I emphatically was not. I went to the grocery store with my mom and she had to babysit me the whole time, wondering what the hell was wrong with her son. Keeping an eye on me throughout the aisles, making sure I didn’t open the cans of pickles and start munching on them or something. “C’mon Jacob, let’s go, we can stop and get something to eat on the way home if you want…”. I can hear the sadness in her voice now, but I barely picked up on it at the time. We went home and I hung out with her and my and little sister, amusing them with my antics until they went to bed (my father was already in bed; it was around 9pm). I sat in the kitchen with the two of them and struggled to eat a bowl of Wegmans Brand Blueberry Muffin Cereal; when I realized what a struggle it was going to be, I started using my hands to toss the milk and cereal onto my face for comedic effect. My little sister found this hilarious; she thought I had just been smoking weed, a misconception that my mom encouraged. They eventually retired to their rooms and I sauntered down to my bunker. After killing a few hours down there, surfing social media and listening to old hardcore records, I decided to shoot up my remaining bag. It was quite late by then, significantly past midnight, and I was confident that everybody else in the house was solidly asleep.

The basement was pitch-dark, other than a modest light emanating from my laptop; I was playing some music quietly. When I decided to shoot up, I had switched the music from hardcore punk to the Velvet Underground ‘Live 1969’; old, art-faggy habits die hard. I tip-toed to the upstairs bathroom to get a cotton ball, and tip-toed back down to my luxuriously cozy punker lair. I sat down on the side of the bed and started the ritual; I had become passably competent at it by this point. I broke off a tiny piece of the cotton ball to use as a filter. I mixed up the dope with water in a spoon I had pinched from the kitchen, dropped the cotton ball into the spoon, and loaded the dope through the cotton ball and into the needle without incident. I then began to fix up my arm, using my belt as a tourniquet. At this point, as I faced away from the entrance to my room, deeply focused on the deed at hand, I heard a low, exhausted voice: “Jacob…”.

It was my father. I must have woken him up when I went to grab a cotton ball. He’d caught me, and right at the worst possible moment. I hadn’t shot up yet, but I was unmistakably about to shoot up. I was in deep shit, and that dope was going to go to waste. He addressed me with a tone of voice I had never heard before. An amalgamation of several forms of distress, all thoroughly draped over with sleepiness; it was as if his unfathomable pain had been made distant and muffled, while still acutely recognizable. He obviously knew what was going on, but he was too exhausted to conjure a fully formed emotional response of any kind. Even in my drug-addled state, it dug at my soul. I knew I’d fucked up this time. But I wasn’t that worried about it, because I was still high from the drugs I did earlier. When you’re high, you feel like you’ll always get away with it sooner or later. He asked me to hand him my stuff and I did. To this day, he still has that needle and spoon and cotton fragment, stored in a ziplock bag, discreetly tucked away in a drawer somewhere. He says he doesn’t want to forget how bad things got, and that he doesn’t want me to forget either. I would assume that the contents of the needle have fully evaporated by now. Does heroin evaporate along with the water it’s dissolved in? I failed chemistry in high school.

7 years later and my father is waltzing through life with barely a worry in the world. He has developed a laid-back, mutedly euphoric manner. His son is alive and his son hasn’t put any needles in his arm in a long time; shit, his son goes to the gym and has a 401K. The first two items alone would be enough to endow him with a lifelong sense of relief. My dad is chief among a handful of people who would be fucking miserable if I killed myself. That’s why I haven’t done it. That’s why I’m not going to do it today, or tomorrow, or the day after. None of those people deserve that. I’m the only person who deserves my misery. Suicide is not an option and dope isn’t either. The fact that people care about me is a curse, because it means that I have to stick around and be miserable forever. I have to keep living for them; for the sake of these goddamn people who are inexplicably and inadvisably invested in me. As I’ve come to terms with this wretched curse, I’ve realized that those people are the most precious of blessings.

Certain members of my family have had some terrible luck. These same people have also made some pretty terrible decisions. Linear wisdom would dictate that you can only get away with one of the two. People without an abundance of luck can thrive by making good choices; dipshits ruled by impulse can thrive by getting lucky. But everyone in my family is thriving either way. Miserable, but thriving. What sorcery enables this? What skill must one develop in order to flourish despite the ravages of both fate and one’s own hopeless impulsiveness?

There’s only one skill you really need. Just get really good at not killing yourself.

The corner of East & Alexander is well-known as a hub of Rochester “nightlife”. It’s also an absolute shit-heap. There’s five bars, a pizza shop, a wonderful burger place called “American Cheeseburger” (seriously; it’s great, a redeeming feature of the neighborhood), a corner store, a rehab facility, and a couple of other bullshit businesses. The bars on that block are cavernous feeding troughs, engineered to accommodate large quantities of ravenous swine. Massive rooms with huge bars. Voluminous space that remains empty and unused during the week. On Saturday night, these hospitable grottoes fill to the brim with a wide range of fauna; everything from West Side blacks with gaudy jewelry to suburban frat boys who would look cute in a white polo shirt, Tiki Torch in hand. All the swine behave the same. They’re friendly enough, except for when they’re not. They’re drunk. I’m invisible to them. I live and work on right that block, and Saturday’s horde doesn’t even notice me. I operate on a different plane of existence than they do.

If you want to bask in the very soul of Rochester, if you care to immerse yourself in its vital essence, take a stroll around East & Alexander on Sunday morning. I do this every week. The streets lie deserted underneath the harsh canopy of daylight. Sidewalks littered with half-eaten pizza and generously pockmarked with cigarette butts. Small, unidentifiable mounds of garbage. Spectacular patches of dried-up vomit (this is seldom difficult to identify). Empty cans of White Claw and Bud Light. Emptiness and the eternally reoccurring indulgence that corresponds with this emptiness, like some wretched Ouroboros; you can feel it in your lungs, seeping into your soul. The only people you’ll encounter are indigents asking for money, or people waiting for rides outside the rehab facility next to Murphy’s Law (an Irish-themed bar, popular among the whites). Pure death drive, flourishing in luxurious abandonment. This is my city. This is life itself.

I live in a real dump. The outside of the building looks passable but unnoteworthy. Red bricks. Cheap green awning with “East Ave Apartments” printed on it. If you look at the windows up close, you can tell they’re cheap plastic. I didn’t notice that when I initially checked the place out. I missed a lot of things initially. I’m not very observant. Too stuck in my own head.

You’re hit by a certain dark, squalid energy as soon as you set foot in the building. I noticed this immediately, I just didn’t think it was a big deal. I couldn’t correlate this sordid energy with any of the material details that were fucked up. I really do have a useless brain. It can’t do anything right. There are four floors and I live on the fourth, which was a selling point for me. I wanted to be high up. The elevator has gone from being occasionally out-of-commission to just never working, ever. The tiles in the “lobby” are dark brown and someone with a better-trained eye could surely tell that they’re cheap and crappy. The walls of the hallways are painted white on the top half, dark red on the bottom half, separated by a silver trim. I think. I’ve lived here close to a year and I barely remember. I don’t pay attention to that stuff. I can’t tell if I block out the reality of my surroundings, or if I’m just too preoccupied with the constant counterproductive (and very important) activities of my own mind. It’s not just my apartment; I couldn’t tell you much about the city of Rochester either, for the same reason. I’ve just been blocking it out or missing it entirely, for nearly 28 years.

The wood of the staircases here feels cheap and hollow to the touch, same with the windowsills. My room is about fourteen feet long by 8 feet wide, with a comically tiny kitchen and comparably tiny bathroom attached, plus a closet that’s reasonably sizable. The doorways aren’t lined up properly; you don’t even need to take a level to them to ascertain this. The doors themselves rest an inch and a half above the floor. The walls in the kitchen jut out in a strange, obtrusive way because it is a corner apartment. The space between the kitchen sink and the wall is a little under two feet long. You can barely fit in there. A fat person probably couldn’t fit in there. When you sit on my toilet, your knees nearly collide with the dilapidated sink that is situated directly in front of it. I never thought about any of this until a chick came over and complained about all of it. She doesn’t come over anymore. One less thing to worry about.

I like it here. Squalor is fine for me, when I’m in solitude. And I usually am. Living like an impoverished fuck doesn’t bother me until I brush up against the outside world. Middle class girls looking at me like I’m a vile threat, more successful friends turning their noses up at me. But I hate the people beneath me too. The people on the street who ask me for money. I see them rifling through dumpsters and for a split second, I feel like breaking their bones. Can’t have anything to do with them either.

I’m flanked by losing propositions. I left my hope in the gutter a long time ago; either that, or I stashed it up some chick’s ass and failed to retrieve it. Either way, I just need to keep going. Just keep working 50 hours a week, two jobs, fucked up hours, completely shot all the time. I can’t win. All I can do is survive.

1. The song “Auld Lang Syne” makes me really fuckin’ sad. I assume it’s supposed to be a sad song anyway, but it hits me hard. I heard it on the radio during the day on New Year’s Eve. I worked from midnight til 4am that night and it was stuck in my head the whole goddamn time. When Love Pork (my band) went on tour with Flip Shit in 2011, we played a show in Charlottesville on New Year’s Eve. I played “Auld Lang Syne” at the end of our set. When I hear that song it brings me right back to that show, and that tour. That show was probably the most “fun” gig of the tour, and the best set that Flip Shit played on that tour. They were extremely good back then. I remember getting drunk and crying to Zach Rooney about how girls weren’t attracted to me. I remember very little about that show, or that tour, or the years of my life between 2010 and 2014. That’s what makes me so goddamn sad. Those were the years when I played in 3 or 4 different bands, each of them fascinating in their own way, working with uniquely fascinating combinations of personalities. The Rochester punk rock scene was also at its all-time peak during those years. Every single show was an adventure. There are no experiences I could write about that would be more interesting than my experiences playing in bands during those years. And I don’t remember jack shit. I think back on those years and all I can remember is the taste of Genesee Cream Ale, intermingled with that of Valium dissolving under my tongue. I can remember that hybrid flavor vividly. I can almost taste it. But I can’t remember any cool stories, so I can’t tell you any either. Fucking sad.

2. I need to meet some new women in 2020. I’ve been saying this every New Year’s since I was 12 years old. But I’m saying it for different reasons now, and the stakes are more dire. I’ve had sex a decent number of times with a fair variety of people. The vast majority of those experiences didn’t make me feel anything, except maybe boredom; two ladies were notable exceptions to this but that’s it (No disrespect to anybody else. Sorry). Somebody needs to show me something new this year. I’m about to be 28 years old. Pretty soon my libido is going to eat shit and I won’t have any interest anyway. I need to get it while I still want it. I’ve already missed the prime window for being horny; you’re supposed to have all the fun in your early 20’s. I spent my early 20’s eating pills when I should’ve been eating pussy. What a fucking waste. My life story is an extensive catalog of missed opportunities; my life is a heaping pile of wasted time. I can’t waste any more time.

3. I’m gonna get really good at freestyling this year. I’m abjectly terrible at everything except using language; but I’m pretty damn good at that. I was at the bar the other night and there were two guys freestyling. They weren’t particularly good but this girl I have a crush on was recording them on her phone. That’s one way to get her attention. Why do something if it’s not going to impress anybody? Nobody’s impressed with this shit. I have to get really good at improvising rap lyrics, so that women will pay attention to me and be entertained. While I was watching those two idiots do their thing, I came up with this in my head:

“Rap Game Mussolini
Got a bad bitch in a diamond-studded bikini
You can’t see me
I’m John Cena with the AK
I slang yay, got it all day
Got the coke in the fannypack;
Fuck the coke, motherfucker I want my Xannies back”

It’s terrible. It fucking sucks shit. I should’ve walked up and shared my brilliance with the crowd of morons at the bar. I didn’t have the balls, because I “don’t know what I’m doing”. I’m always afraid to do things without a set of instructions to follow, when I don’t know what I’m doing. You have to just do it anyway. Whatever it takes to get attention. If you’re not actually useful, you don’t have a ton of options. Being an insufferable peacock will yield results sooner or later.

My friend Jon doesn’t think that I should own a gun. He doesn’t think I’m stable enough. I think I need a gun to protect myself, to ensure my own survival. There’s dangerous people out there. And there’s a couple people that are pretty mad at me. Moreover, I’m extremely stable at the moment. The past couple months have been the most stable months of my life. I fucking hate it. “Stability” means “being done, wrecked, totally miserable, just completely shot“. The air in my lungs has been robbed of the magical, electric charge that it previously possessed. My blood is no longer endowed with vital energy. This ecstatic energy cannot coexist with “stability”.

Life begins when you’re completely shot. Lurching through the fulfillment of your destiny without a shred of joy. I don’t feel alive at all. But as I feel less and less alive, the chances of me ending up dead gradually decrease. Survival is all that matters.

I started listening to Nine Inch Nails precisely when I needed to. About a month ago, at the tender age of 27. ‘Pretty Hate Machine’ and to a lesser extent ‘The Downward Spiral’ capture exactly where I’m at in my life. It’s fucking uncanny. It’s like I asked this guy to make a bunch of songs for me, about me, specifically geared towards my current emotional state. For a while I didn’t understand how or why this was the case. How could Trent Reznor possibly experience anything resembling what I’ve been experiencing? He is a strikingly handsome guy, and multi-talented. He wrote some of this stuff after he was famous. His name is “Trent”. I couldn’t grasp how this man wrote a song like “Sin”, let alone “Something I Can Never Have”. Granted, I haven’t seen the girl that he wrote all that shit about. But presumably he could’ve replaced her in a matter of days.

And then it became clear to me. I took a gander at Mr. Reznor’s Wikipedia page. Height: 5’7”. There it is. The average woman perceives men under 6’ as favorably as the average Schutzstaffel officer perceived Jews. I’m 5’11” and only a quarter Jewish, so I’m able to keep my head down and skate by. Mr. Reznor’s suffering is far deeper and more excruciating than I could possibly fathom.

I’ll wind up as a monster
Or a machine instead
Anything but human
Or else I’ll wind up dead

You’ll find I’m quite the werewolf
Or just a filthy hound
Anything but human
Or find me underground

I’m gonna be a symbol
Become a living Rune
Anything but human, honey
I’m gonna be there soon

I could be your angel
I’ll be your devil too
Anything but human
Just to be with you

I’ve had a litany of illusions shattered over the years. I’ve found myself forcibly removed from the realm of fantasy, kicking and screaming throughout the entire arduous process. And let me tell you: here in the Real World™️, the retard always wins.

‘Coz there’s no light in your tunnel
And I’ve got no claim to fame
I’ve got four walls and The Dark
The Beast is calling your name

You might be more than a friend
But I’m just somebody you know
You’ll kiss my bitterest end
As Above, So Below

You’ve been lookin’ for love
And I’ve been dressin’ to kill
I’ll give you death from above
But there’s no love without Will