Chris Krovatin is a twice-published teen author and a journalist for Revolver Magazine, as well as the singer for Queens-based metal band Flaming Tusk. He lives in New York City, which he loves even though he is almost positive it is trying to kill him.

It’s, what, 2001. I’m sixteen. Slayer just released a surprisingly cool album on the same day that my city was attacked by terrorists. I’m scanning the racks of the now-nonexistant Universal News up on Broadway between 71^st and 72^nd Streets, debating whether or not Metal Edge is giving me cancer. Suddenly, there’s this glossy-ass professional-looking magazine with Slipknot on the cover, but who cares, everyone’s covering Slipknot, right. But as I thumb through it, what’s this, they have a big multi-page piece on Slayer in here, too! And an article about Mudvayne! And fuck, there’s a thing on Opeth? But it’s not just the bands they’re covering, it’s the way they’re doing it. The page layout is beautiful, and the photos have original concepts behind them. Holy shit, someone is doing this right. I buy the magazine, and make a mental note that from now on, along with Metal Maniacs, Terrorizer, Metal Hammer, Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles, Kerrang!, and the occasional issue of AP, I now have to pick up this new one, Revolver.

Reading the trades was a huge part of getting into metal for me. Metal is a subculture steeped in a sense of drama and loyalty, drama because no one else is doing it as big as this, loyalty because no one else is doing it, period. Headbangers don’t just like metal, they adore it with an intensity tantamount to that of the music, often because that love is so sublimely unexplainable. The trades allowed me to learn about the people behind the madness—their philosophies, their tour histories, their influences, their awesome stage get-ups—but more than that, it allowed me to bask in the world of this insane thing I loved. Here, in my hands, was a monthly testament to the altar at which I worshipped, the formless cloud of flame and gravel that made me happier than anything.

I remember these magazines, the single issues of famous heavy metal rags that I carried with me everywhere, read down to their last pages, carved into confetti. The Metal Maniacs October 2000 issue, with King Diamond on the front, huge pieces on Borknagar, Mayhem, and the Crown within, that I carried over every inch of Independent Lake Camp. Kerrang #841, February 2001, featuring an extremely fascinating cover story on a Norwegian band named Dimmu Borgir, devoured repeatedly on an overnight train ride through the Chinese countryside. The July 2000 and March 2001 issues of Terrorizer, the former featuring an interview that helped me understand Glen Benton, the latter with an article the Best Albums of the 80s that helped me fill out my thrash collection. And who could forget S.O.D. #14, with the giant Frazetta-esque reptile on the cover and the full feature piece on Impiety, which has resided next to my toilet since its purchase in, when, 2000? 2001? It escapes me.

Read in the bathrooms of overweight virgins.

S.O.D. bears some mention. Sounds Of Death Magazine was a black-and-white DIY-style magazine featuring the best in the ultra-underground. Throughout my youth, this was the easiest thing I could get ahold of that could be considered a “zine.” It’s creator/chief writer/editor/svengali is David Horn, was (or is, or at least wrote under the guise of) an obnoxious homophobic nutcase who made fun of the musicians he was interviewing (I remember one interview—Incantation, maybe?—in which Horn responds to song explanation with, ‘That sounds pretty stupid.’) Albums were reviewed by skulls—one through ten, then Ten Fucking Skulls, and finally the coveted 666 Fucking Skulls rating. Sometimes, reviews were coherent; other times, they were grandiose descriptions of fantasy-style nightmares and zombie horror. The letters section was two pages of Hate Mail during which Horn would make fun of his fans in prison and insinuate that his detractors sucked bouquets of dicks. Every issue came with an indie label sampler full of putrid gore, scathing darkness, and bad production values (bands I discovered thanks to S.O.D. samplers: Hypnosia, Dead Silent Slumber, Repugnant, Jungle Rot, Walhalla). The magazine’s shirts said Live In Fear! Die In Pain! on them. I always thought that was pretty great.

Of course, it’s all fun until someone gets hurt. Many major players in the metal scene are famously contemptuous of the metal press, and understandably so—magazine sales are dictated by readership, and the readership demands conflict. No one gets into heavy metal because they like peace and quiet, we want drama. It’s nice to hear a musician talk about his love for God and family, but it’s fun to hear said musician talk about that drunk night in Memphis or rail against the posers in Suicide Silence. I’m overjoyed that no one was recording my opinions when I was nineteen, as I probably would’ve bragged about my substance use and sexual conquests, and the reporters interviewing me would’ve eaten it up, blasted it on the front page, and then used it against me a few years later during my fresh-outta-rehab interview. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise—that’s how it works. There’s a hierarchy to most music journalism in which conflict and feud-mongering get an A, tales of violence and debauchery get a B, tales of heartwarming triumph are B- to C+, and the real stuff, the love of the music and the hometown, comes later, if you haven’t exhausted your word count.

That’s not to blow off the people behind these publications, of course. Some of the best writing I’ve ever read has been in metal magazines; if you ask me, Henry James could’ve taken a lesson or two from Liz Ciavarella. But it wasn’t just the articles, it was the whole production. It was the photos I could cut out and tape to my walls (weird rules applied to this practice—if I didn’t own an album, I couldn’t put up its cover, for instance). It was the unsigned band/pen pals section, where I could see the kind of filth being churned up in the underground. It was the mail-order ads from all over the world, giving you a glimpse of records you’d otherwise never hear of and a chance to purchase them for ten bucks. It was the weird sidebars containing lists or anecdotes and stories about tour shenanigans and festival horror stories. Like a meal, the entrees were always filling and satisfactory, but it was the extras, the sides and sauces, that made the experience a treat.

Eventually, things had to change—many of the magazines feel by the wayside, and the blogosphere rose to power. And I went along with it, and gladly. I get the majority of my music news from MetalSucks. I’m rarely seen walking home with a four-inch-thick plastic bag full of magazines. It’s good to be a metalhead in the year 2011, where you can get all your up-to-date information instantly. But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t anything lacking from digital media. Gone are the long tour diaries or twisted post-show party hijinks, of the vital human reaction that comes from a reporter being asked to snort high-grade drugs, look after a stripper girlfriend, or jump into the Baltic Sea. The monthly timespan of these magazines made them bountiful collections of new information and hilarious experience. On the Internet, it’s mostly news, quick and painless.

Chris Krovatin is a twice-published teen author and a journalist for Revolver Magazine, as well as the singer for Queens-based metal band Flaming Tusk. He lives in New York City, which he loves even though he is almost positive it is trying to kill him.

Friday, a cool early-June afternoon. Tonight, I see Marduk perform with Aura Noir, but first, I’m going to get this fucking Mark Riddick tattoo if it fucking kills me.

The design is hard to describe, but: two severed hands, rotting and rancid, cupped as if to hold water, but not pressed together. Each one has a stitched-up wrist, bone spurs oozing out from its stump, and a nail plunged through its palm. Between them hangs a pentagram, twisted and horrible as if grown from meat, with two gnarled goats’ horns sprouting from the top. Over or around it—a banner, maybe, but maybe not—will be the words ‘Carry Me In War’ (it’s a Black Dahlia Murder lyric). Mark Riddick is an artist whose dark and corporeal greyscale depictions of zombies, wargoats, and reeking death have always inspired me to greater brutality. The hands holding the pentagram are a different direction for him, though, a bit more crestlike and symbolic, less concerned with festering anti-life.

I’d stared at this piece of art for a year now, and I still want it, which I believe is a good gauge for whether a tattoo idea is ill-advised or not. If at any point during the year you’ve doubted a tattoo design, you probably shouldn’t get it. (When I was fifteen, I wanted a nuclear trifoil around my bellybuttonl…yeah)  This tattoo is also technically a break-up piece (this idea didn’t manifest itself until “Grim” Kim Kelly brought it up, but we’re not there yet)—nobody likes this design but me, especially my now ex-girlfriend. My other tattoos, though generally of a dark and spooky nature, are relatively harmless and cartoony. This one is gory, Satanic, intense to look at. Since my new singlehood is to be a pivoting point in my life, it was only fair that I get an incredibly hardcore tattoo to celebrate it.

My tattoo artist is Jon Jon, out of Cutting Edge on 8^th Street. He is large, British, dreadlocked, funny, heavily tattooed. He’s also incredibly intuitive and very convincing. In his awesome London accent, he immediately talks me out of a banner, and instead of the Gothic Olde English font I was considering, designs spiny thrashed-out lettering that makes the tattoo much more metal, specifically more death than black metal. I read Inked Magazine nervously in the waiting room while Jon Jon draws the design and cleans his area. This is my fourteenth tattoo, and I still get nervous, every time. He warns me that if it goes over three hours, he’ll have to charge me extra, but Jon Jon is fast, and the idea of this taking longer than ninety minutes is absurd. Then the stencil is pressed on, the padded table is unfolded, the guns are fired up, and it’s tattoo time, Timmy.

The process sucks. For three hours, I get my skin rubbed with a vibrating ink-covered needle, and man, is my calf KILLING me. Whenever Jon Jon gets near my ankle or the inside of my knee, I feel like I’m going to shit my pants. I squirm, sweat, chew the inside of my cheek, and wonder why the fuck I didn’t bring a bottle of water. None of my other tattoos were like this—I was always able to zone out, focus on the pain, and yes, at times during the outline for this tattoo, I meditate it out, but the shading is just murder. At first, we listen to all the metal on Jon Jon’s iPhone—Metallica, Black Sabbath, System Of A Down—but soon, he runs out, and his need for sterile gloves keeps him from choosing more music, so we switch to the radio, where I get half-hour rock blocks of both REM and Pearl Jam. Imagine bees stinging lines in the back of your calf while “Losing My Religion” plays. I would’ve given up nuclear launch codes to not be in that situation, but here I am, paying for it. At least I didn’t hear “Everybody Hurts.

So, uh, er, um, you, uh, come here often?

Exactly three hours later, the tattoo is done, and it looks amazing. I tip Jon Jon and head to the Williamsburg Music Hall. Aura Noir have, sadly, no cool merch. I do,however, get a Raped God 666 patch from a guy also running a “gallery showing” in which he’s selling metal shields (quickly: Raped God 666 are an amazing Mexican blackened thrash outfit whose album The Executioner is an underrated masterpiece) Natur are onstage, and play some cool, weird blackened power metal. My funds are low from having just dropped a pretty penny on getting tattooed, but I have just enough money for a cheese dog and a Lone Star at The Levee (all a growing boy needs). When I come back, Panzerfaust blast my face off with ridiculous bestial war metal. Any band who turns their mic stand into an inverted cross gets my vote.

Everyone is here—the Metal Injection dudes, Henry Yuan, one or two of the more recognizable NYDM folks. Might as well be the Oscars. More importantly, there are women everywhere, cleavage brimming out of corsets and low-cut T-shirts, hips swaying out secret codes in pyramid studs and bullet belts. I get a couple of heavily-painted bedroom eyes, but the Mexican Satanists in attendance are far more impressed by my new tattoo than anyone woman. Bumming around the show, I run “Grim” Kim Kelly, underground metal journalist extraordinaire and admirable young lady. Kim has also recently broken up with her long-standing significant other; she checks out my leg piece and says, with a smile, “So this is your break-up tattoo, huh?” (Right, from earlier) It dawns on me, only then, that I am technically supposed to be “on the prowl,” that my sudden noticing of all these women may be slightly subconscious, but is in no way coincidental. Sadly, it also dawns on me that, being new to singledom again, I have no game. My charm is a withered thing, its skin pale and wrinkled from too many hours in its cave.

But you know what’s great for the romantically-challenged soul? Black metal! Hod are cool, Black Anvil are awesome, Aura Noir shred, and Marduk come out swinging, sounding and performing far better than I’ve seen them in the past. I never used to like Marduk that much until I heard Those Of The Unlight, which impressed me with its insane guitars and raw, irritated atmosphere. My head bangs and my horns throw during the openers, but only a little ways into Marduk, I’m exhausted, a mixture of blood loss and an undertreated hangover from seeing Liturgy the night before. Kim invites me out to the Charleston for post-show boozing, but I decline, and hop in a cab home, in which a mouthy cabbie gives me a good new route from Williamsburg to the Upper West Side.

At home, I have a beer and clean my tattoo, still red with the irritation of being recently etched in my flesh. Rubbing my big hairless calf with A&D ointment feels like greasing up a supermarket chicken. For a moment, I worry about the new piece—it’s so violent, so gory, so big, the font isn’t at all what I expected, the hands look slightly unbalanced—and then I realize that no, it’s just amazing. Maybe my other tattoos are a bit more accessible, a bit more elusive and inviting and mysterious, but this motherfucker is big, bold, and overtly Satanic, and if that’s how I’m feeling right now, I ought to go with it. No more trying to do or be what I ought to, or what perceive I want to. Right now’s a gut period, where my better instincts should reign. Didn’t feel like hitting on metal chicas? Good, whatever. Didn’t catch Marduk’s encore? They tour all the goddamn time.

Chris Krovatin is a twice-published teen author and a journalist for Revolver Magazine, as well as the singer for Queens-based metal band Flaming Tusk. He lives in New York City, which he loves even though he is almost positive it is trying to kill him

Monday morning, 8:30 AM. A week ago today, I broke up with my girlfriend of two years, also my high school sweetheart. We had just moved in together. Today, I’m finishing my move out. At the end of the day, I get to leave the city for a solid week in the country. My spirit chomps at its bit.

My friend Max and I wake up at my parents’ place, hung over and heartburned due to an overdose of fried food at Big Nick’s Burger Joint the night before. Sunday had been a day of non-stop packing, hauling, and driving from Astoria to Washington Heights, and we had celebrated with portcheddar burgers, chicken fries, pretzel M&Ms, and Linie Aquavit; we now feel like our stomachs have live crabs in them. Thankfully, we filled my parents’ SUV at the end of the day yesterday, so all we have to do this morning is drive and unload. Sadly, it’s not that easy. I have a scheduled interview with a well-known metal musician, and my girlfriend, no, now my ex-girlfriend, has left some of my leftover crap at her parents’ apartment building, and is threatening to have it thrown out if I don’t come by the pick it up. The stuff I left isn’t terribly important, but two items—my cashmere overcoat and a leather jacket my Aunt Teresa used to wear as a New York punk in the 70s and 80s—are necessary.

The rearview mirror.

We leave at 9:30 after thorough cajoling on my part. I met Max at Wesleyan. He’s a pseudo-hippie software manager with a comical barbershop moustache, the remnants of a beard he used to enter into international competitions (the exchange of the mountain-man beard for the vaudeville moustache reminds me of how all metalheads and punks, no matter how hardcore, become rockabillies in their old age). Max is great company and sturdy when it comes to lifting, but it takes forever to get him anywhere due to his severe ADD and unshakable laziness. Still, he’s a good listener, and his weird CompSci mind makes him an invaluable asset when it comes to space conservation; yesterday, we managed to fit a desk, a trunk, and a decorative foyer bench into the car in a perfect block, Tetrised together, with room for boxes, a flat-screen TV, and framed posters on top.

The drive up is easy, and thankfully, there are other moving trucks outside of the apartment building, so all side entrances and freight doors have been flung wide open. This will help me move my stuff in solitude, since I haven’t filled out the proper forms or allowed ample time for the co-op board at my building to know I’m about to move in. I assured yesterday’s doorman that I have no furniture, which is only half a lie, as the pieces I do have require no elevator pads or dollies to move around safely. We unpack like mad, huffing up and down my stairs with boxes of comic books, VHS tapes, fancy dress shoes, old issues of Revolver, sex toys, coat hooks, outdated checks, childhood photos, Hefeweizen glasses, bulletbelts, records, power cables, monster make-up, beer steins, coffee table books, patched-up denim vests, and old manuscripts. Soon, my parents’ car is empty, thank sweet sodomizing Christ. Next step: head to my garage, get my car, drop off my parents’ car, do my interview, and head to Pennsylvania. It’s only 10:15, and the interview’s at 11:00. Making great time.

Down in the musty batcave of my garage, things get dire quick. My car, my dust-covered heap of a 98 Accord, won’t start. It’s stood idle in this sunless qlippoth for so long that its battery has just given up the ghost. There’s not even the UNG-UNG-UNG that horror movies have made a tell-tale sign of impending doom. We pop the hoods of my and my parents’ cars and hook up the cables. The minute the black cable hits my car, the alarm goes off—flashing lights, blaring horn. A car alarm is normally annoying, but with an open hood in an echoing underground space, it sounds like God’s clown nose being squeezed (“HAHA!” says God the clown, “the universe is all bullshit! I made it all up on a coke bender!”). We finally turn off the alarm, and the car starts. By the time the car is jumped and ready to go, it’s 10:53.

Out on Riverside Drive West, I do my interview in the front seat of my parents’ car while Max lets the Honda idle behind me, slowly recharging its neglected battery. My interviewee is talkative and gracious, a real champ. He gives me eighteen minutes of solid rambling thought, which I need, and calls me by my first name repeatedly, which I always respect. As the battery symbols on my voice recorder and phone begin flashing warnings at me simultaneously, I ask him one of my staples, one that’s on my mind now especially: do you ever feel like throwing up your hands and fucking off? The question is a great opportunity for metal bands to sound tough and grateful—of course not, dude, I’d never trade this life for anything, what doesn’t kill me, etcetera. My interviewee sounds genuinely confused. “No way, man,” he says. “Look, someone’s got to do it.” I say goodbye as I make an illegal U-turn to avoid the oncoming street cleaner.

Once everything’s dropped off, I hop in my crappy Honda and hit my ex-girlfriend’s parents’ building. The doormen have my stuff for me. A note written on one box reads ‘TO BE PICKED UP BY CHRIS KROVATIN AT 9AM.” I was repeatedly assured via text that if I didn’t pick up my stuff promptly at nine, it would be a great inconvenience to my girlfriend’s parents and their doormen, and my things would be incinerated, but the doormen don’t seem to care, and regard me politely as always. Once everything is packed in my car, I drop Max off, cross the George Washington Bridge, and speed all the way to the Delaware Water Gap.

The house in the country is quiet and fresh. Everything hangs with overwhelming green, tree branches drooped with an apparent assault of glossy verdant leaves. Even the grass seems impossibly fresh, standing up sharply as if exalting life. A turkey pot pie and a Sprite later, a feeling of calm overtakes me me. Chloe, our black and white barn cat, aggressively nuzzles my face the minute I sit down. I sit on a rocking chair on the porch and close my eyes, concentrate on my breathing, let the quiet of the place rule me. No, not quiet, the country has its own springtime white noise, much like a city—insects hurl curse words across the grass, geese honk fatly, frogs swell their throats in bold announcement, and the air hums with wind-brushed foliage and rushing water on all sides. It’s the pace that is different. When I leave the city, the need for speed dies, and an urgency I often find oppressive slips off my back.

The long week, filled with so many tears and so many plans, ends here, in a place as simple and necessary to my sanity as the decision that began the past seven grueling days. In the city, I feel overwhelmed by obligation and decadence, but here, my mind can focus, my days feel fresh from the get-go, and my worries cease their frantic chittering for long enough that I can know what I am. Here I sit, facing a change of life, an opportunity for growth and change, and for once I’m looking at it without dread, but instead with anticipation and good humor. In an entry of this blog a few weeks ago, I wrote that something was wrong, and it was me; that is still true, but now bears a whole new set of potentials.

The mist from the mountain descends into the valley, and soon the air is grey with storm. The sound of droplets flicking glossy leaves fills my ears, and suddenly the sky erupts into soaring thunder and writhing lightning. Wave after wave of water crashes down around me, feeding the green, inundating all around it with the means to grow.

Chris Krovatin is a twice-published teen author and a journalist for Revolver Magazine, as well as the singer for Queens-based metal band Flaming Tusk. He lives in New York City, which he loves even though he is almost positive it is trying to kill him

Late last year, I started working two mornings a week at Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen. This meant getting to the Church Of The Holy Apostles around 9:30 AM, eating a bagel, and then performing one of the countless tasks that go into feeding the homeless for two hours. This means everything from chopping onions to wiping tables to beating the excess food off of trays. Hundreds of unfortunate men and women would pass through our doors every morning. Many of them threw out entire trays of food and insulted us upon learning that we had tea that morning, not coffee. The rewards for this volunteer work were a sense of fulfillment and a free lunch.

What brought me to Holy Apostles was a hangover. It was the third time in as many weekends that I had woken up strung out and miserable on my friend Max’s futon; once before, I was so ruined that I had to miss band practice, which is unforgivable for a metalhead. This time around, I walked to the subway only to be so nauseous that I couldn’t get on the train for fear of puking. After returning to Max’s place and pulling the trigger, I got in a cab from Brooklyn to Wash Heights, in which I literally dangled from the leather hand hold and dry-heaved out of the window the entire ride. When I got home, I dropped a deuce blacker than Hell and lay in bed for three hours drenched in a poisonous mixture of flop sweat and self-loathing. What, I pondered, the fuck was wrong with me? That night, I e-mailed Holy Apostles, mostly on the premise that if every life was a scale, mine was unbalanced on the side of Selfishness, Petulance, and Degeneracy.

At Holy Apostles, everyone was nice. The other volunteers asked me what I did for a living, where I came from. Comments were made on my Slayer shirt and tattoos. I learned the time-honored lesson that cheap restaurant hats come apart quickly if you sweat non-stop. One day at lunch, I was chatting up a cute British girl who was traveling through America volunteering at various soup kitchens along the way (What a Jesus freak, I thought as I ate the food I just served to the poor in a church). As we talked, she asked me what parish I was a part of. When I told her I had been brought here by a hangover, she nodded empathetically, as though she’d known many poor souls who had turned to the Lord in their time of drunken need.

I don't know, Satan, I have an orthodontist appointment at eight in the morning...

Fuck that, is the thing. My break-up with Christianity was hostile on my part: Christianity wanted me to believe a ton of crazy horseshit, and I was pretty set on not doing that. As a youth, I turned to Satanism, believing that the dark forces of Earth had a more tangible power than any deities of light and love (O Lucifer, fallen angel, king of this world, rise up from the abyss and help me ace this Spanish test). And while I later realized that my love for music, art, and the earthly delights was much greater than my feelings for the Devil, I still respected Satanism for it’s emphasis on freedom (‘Do what thou wilt’ is one malleable law, let me tell you) and it’s refusal to accept the Christian church’s nonsense. The few enlightened Christians I knew seemed intelligent and amiable despite the faith they had chosen. They were the exceptions to the ugly, bigoted, close-minded rule. It’s a fairy tale, see, about the coolest dude ever, and if you don’t believe in it, that’s fine, you’ll just burn for eternity. Boo on that.

So why the volunteer work in response to a really rough morning? It wasn’t my first hangover, and it certainly wouldn’t be my last. Catholic guilt is easily to blame. Catholicism is an Ethnic Religion, similar in many ways to Orthodox Judaism; being raised under either tutelage is tantamount to brainwashing, and both are big on self-hatred and repentance. Satanically-inclined or no, I couldn’t forget the Lord’s Prayer or the Hail Mary if I tried, and I know tons of shit about the Bible that my other friends consider weirdo trivia. The concepts of charity and guilt are branded into my subconscious, whether I like them or not. There’s a line in Pantera’s “Fucking Hostile” that I think about—“And call no one my Father who’s no closer than a stranger.” Calling a priest something other than ‘Father’ would take a concerted effort on my part. Fucked up, right? You don’t even know.

But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there. It’s cheap, blaming my guilty conscience on my childhood Catholicism. I might as well go one step further and blame my parents for raising me Catholic, and do I really want to be another metalhead blaming Mommy and Daddy for how I turned out? My parents are loving, kind people who always provided for me and never abused me as a child; they raised me with their religion in an attempt to teach me what was right and what was wrong (and in a lot of ways, they succeeded). So maybe, shit, it’s George Bush, Bart Simpson, Kerry King who’s to blame for my weird pattern of overdoing the sauce and repenting with charity work? Screw that. Screw the blame. Screw guilt.

There’s a line in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol that I love. The Ghost of Christmas Present says it to Scrooge in response to Scrooge’s claim that if the poor would rather die than slave away in the workhouses, they had better do it: “Oh God!” says the Ghost, “to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!” That’s it right there. A hangover is an eternal reminder that man can feel like God one minute and be the world’s toilet the next. I serve food to the homeless because I know that this world is an awful stinking hellhole that hates nothing more than bad luck and poverty, and I hope that if Fortune showed me her middle finger, one of my fellow human beings would be there to lend me a hand in one way or another. The Christians would have you believe that we’re all insects in the dust, and the Satanists would urge the leaf-dwellers to piss down on those below them, but I don’t buy either side. I’m so lucky in my life,lucky enough that I can throw away a night like that. If I can hand a little food down to some of my brothers in the dust, I’m gonna. If a gut-raping hangover is what it took to get me to that point, fine.

Thursday night. My best friend James got into grad school, and we went out to celebrate. We spent the whole evening pounding beers at Double Down and shooting pool with a needy dirtbag who kept trying to teach me proper billiards hand positions (I’m bad at pool and intend to be bad at it forever, guy, so please stop wasting my bar hours with your tutorial). I stumbled home at four in the morning and forgot to leave my girlfriend a note warning her that James was passed out in our living room, a fact she discovered the next morning as she walked about our apartment half-dressed (he was thankfully too comatose to notice). Only today, three days later, have I completely recovered from that night, and even now I’m battling a sore throat bordering on Strep. I’ll be at Holy Apostles tomorrow morning, 9:30 AM, working off my own stupidity. Anyone else wondering what the fuck is their problem should feel free to swing by.