Open obituary for Cully Ewing. And his friends in the Seattle music scene. Mike Gaylord, Troy Date, Scott Wade, Eric Amrine, Paul Kay, Loren Kratzke, Mike Patterson

Troy Date <fishwithahead@yahoo.com>

To:karl_ewing@yahoo.com

Thu, Dec 1 at 8:14 AM

Hey Karl,

How are you doing?

Sorry I haven’t touched base sooner but I got COVID shortly after Cully’s passing & I am just back to feeling better.

I haven’t seen Cully in person in about five years but we corresponded through e-mail along with a group of fellow musicians at least once a week.

The other folks, Scott Wade, Eric Amrine, Paul Kay, Loren Kratzke, Mike Patterson & others were wondering if the family was going to hold a public memorial for Cully.

Are you still living in Alaska with Bun?

I’m still in Skagit.

Take care,

-Troy

---

Hey Troy,

Good to hear from you. Sorry for the delay in writing back, but I live in a stupidly remote area that has no internet access nor cell phone reception. So I type on a junker laptop, thumb drive my writing, then drive in town to the public library. I know, one look at me and Cully's parents and you can tell I'm retarded.

Also slowing my response was I had to put on my 9-year-old thinking cap, think hard on what to write about and then explain why Cully was supposed to die. I also needed a million words to explain why I had to shed my Ewing family fetal snake-skin, tunnel out of my prenatal caterpillar pupa swaddling saw out of my gestational cocoon and leave Washington to grow up. Staying in Washington was my chunky diaper playpen and leaving was the only way to get clear of my inevitably stunted root growth and truncated tree height. I bled plenty fleeing my hometown, running back in time and landing upon ancient cultures yielding fertile soils aboriginal. I'll also have to adjust my writing for an all-white audience. Now keep up.

That roster of names you detailed sure brings back uniquely bookmarked, epoch time-slots and ancient memories to me. You may recall Cully's roommate and best friend Callahan's chiding, "Shit Cully, what are you gonna do when you grow up?" Cully's response was that he was gonna be a musician. Callahan's retort was, "Cully, you gotta pick one or the other." Funny guy. Callahan referred to our pals from Edmonds as a flashback to AA. I'm lying. He actually referred to me and Cully's pals from Edmonds as an ad hoc meeting of "Homosexuals Anonymous." "Hi, I'm Loren from Hymie-Town. I'm a homosexual." Drunk Irish comic.

My parents died a couple years ago and my sibs are dysfunctional in assembling a memorial for Cully, so you boys will have to take solace in your memories of him and celebrate your continued existential retirement years as pensioners and aged, wizened oracles, folding time and space and toying with multi-dimensional mechanics. Your collection of musical peers, former drunks and druggies oughta continue composing music creating a soft spot between universes. Or soft spots in Paul Kay's head and lighten Loren Crotch-ski's loafers.

I'm not sure if Eric Amrine remembers me, but I sure remember him in my discussions with Cully. I could never forget Scott, Paul, Loren and Mike Peterson, or is it Patterson? I almost overlooked little drummer-boy Mike Gaylord, did he keep smoking and have more heart attacks? It's okay to laugh at our enviable old age and it's also perfectly acceptable to laugh at my younger brother Cully's passing. He made it farther than I expected. 59 is a good long life for a chronically stunted child, existing 50 years past his peak maturity as a drunk. For the rest of my life, I'll think of Cully as my little brother, albeit little brother forever locked at the age of 9. Channel yer Irish, imagine a wake with more humor than crying. Besides, Cully and Callahan were full of old fart drunken humor poking fun at crispy biddies and frosty niggers. Ironically, only one of 'em lived long enough to suffer their own jokes.

*At our ages, you should expect to urinate at 5:00 am, defecate at 6:00 am, finally waking at 7:00.

*If I don't see my name in the obituaries, I get up and have breakfast.

*An invitation to a gang-bang at your senior center only happens when you get a late-night phone call from yer geezer band-mate whispering, "Grandma got poopy butt. Want some?"

Who'd a thought we'd live this fucking long? I'm a year ahead of you chaps, pegging level 61, which means all you boys are rounding 59 and 60. Your ages imply yer trying to have sex with post-menopausal women, so you probably already disconnected the smoke alarms, purchased cases of nose-plugs and keep a quart of motor oil next to your bed. Tomorrow morning when you shower and you find a condom still wrapped around yer Johnson, peel it off and return it to your wife. It's vaginal tissue. Or intestine.

I'm damn glad your email (kudra) still worked. I knew Cully was pretty close to you guys. Sadly, I wasn't. It was too painful to watch. I've been out of contact with most of my family for almost a hunnert years because relapse triggers come in many forms. Like shitty relatives. And the horrible sounds they make with their mouths. For Washington white trash like my family, redneck foreplay means nudging the fish-biscuit next to you and asking "hey sis, you awake?"

Now time-travel back 35 years. I flew Cully up to Kotzebue in the late 80's for a winter visit and overkill exposure to Eskimo territory. Brian was an excellent tour guide driving Cully around town and the region by snow machine and doing live interviews at the KOTZ 720 am local public radio station. They'd done Q&A's about the first Neuroshima album and performing gigs in the Seattle area. The response was overwhelmingly positive, a lot of folks really liked Cully's first record. The community and a slew of native girls wanted to adopt Cully during his week-long stay. Maybe just his dick.

On that trip to Kotz, Me and Cully hopped jump seats on a freight mish aboard Ryan Air's twin prop Cessna up through the Bering Straits and up the Arctic Ocean to Point Hope. Dark as shit, frozen solid and cold, but a very interesting flight up North from Kotz. My pilot dudes gave us a guided tour over the frozen ocean, pointing out the Russian coastline and Bering Straits with a lecture on Point Hope's history: the oldest inhabited town site in all of North America-with 15,000-year-old artifacts and fossils scattered around town. Shit, 15K years ago, us white folks were porking Neanderthal butt-cheeks, spooging CroMagnon creature pussy and creating ancient cave art with our feces. Europeans got 6% DNA from our cave-man rape action. First Nation Innuits got ZERO.

Cully and I took off early in the morning, arriving in Pt. Hope 2 hours later. As the pilots unloaded, tossed and sorted boxes of freight, me and Cully wandered all over Point Hope, freezing our asses off in the -40 below crunchy temps taking pictures. On the return flight, Cully got to see a brief 1 hour twilight sunrise and sunset over the Bering Straits as we flew back South towards home. We burned up dozens rolls of film and Cully assembled a giant photo album labeled Christmas Vacation 1989.

As the 90's started Seattle's Golden Age of Heroin, Cully started "staying home in quiet desperation in the English way," as we both remember from the Dark Side Floyd album. I knew he was working at Care Medical servicing hospital equipment, doing gigs, so when me and Brian (micro-dot Higman) finished inventory at the NW Arctic School District, I covertly smuggled Cully a shit load of equipment. This included numerous overhead projectors, large amps and PA speakers and a couple electric basses (Fender Precision Bass and a Peavy Axceleator) I traded and bartered. When I mentioned a shit-pile of overhead projectors, he jumped. Hence the beginning of his experiments in light shows way above my pay grade. The tall rack of amps and effects he had in his kitchen would come later.

Then Cully went dark. Cully and I were in fairly close contact, but then he closed down and was out of reach ever since. Callahan said he was pissed off at my work with a team of native cops targeting white guys smuggling booze into the North Slope and NW Arctic Alaska Eskimo villages. You can figure out what my work entailed. After Brian moved to Minnesota, he was steamed that I'd undertaken such a Herculean endeavor to clip so many white bootleggers after Kotzebue (and all the other 280 Alaska native communities) voted to close down all the white-owned bars and liquor stores creating a booming black market for illegal and deadly liquor. Deadly to natives and sadly, my own brother.

You see, I was following advice from my wife Bessie, AKA bun. She'd grown up suffering the disastrous effects of invading masses of ugly white people, and their alcoholism and diseases upon Eskimo people. She encouraged me to join a rag-tag team of native village cops and torpedo the illegal booze-smuggling routes into Kotzebue and Barrow, then nuke their routes to the more remote communities. This effort lasted decades spanning massive geography across northwest Alaska, the North Slope and all the way up to the Arctic Ocean to Barrow. 15 years working Kotz, 15 years working Barrow.

Yes, my work was racist. I bagged dozens and dozens of only white guys importing illegal booze into rural Alaska native communities. We seized boats, airplanes and a shit load of guns, meth, money and liquor. Get this: I got commendations from native elder councils, native clinics and hospitals and search and rescue stations. Beat that.

I know, to all us pecker wood white-trash invading Europeans, I'm a rat, snitch, narc motherfucker with a badge and a gun, but to the native communities all over Alaska, I'm a pale stinky hero. I can't put into detail the number of narc jobs I've done, but you've known me since we were kids, I don't possess guide-posts nor guard-rails in matters legal and moral.

As 1980 rolled in, you, Brian and I were troopers and hallucinatory pioneers in the North Seattle LSD scene 40 years ago. My long-stored images of us at the hash house, tripping lab-fresh batches of blue-dot acid and hiking all over Mountlake Terrace with you, Brian (micro-dot), 3 Erics (Henderson, Bjodstrup and Bjorback) Frank Empfield, Gordy Kelly, Todd Larson and the rest of the crew are unique moments in my memories. If you drove by us, you'd know we were wasted on acid, barely keeping our shit together laughing at blinding colors and our silly voiced commentary.

Get this. Our troop of mind-altered time travelers had a significant impact on me. My choices of music and literature evolved massively since those experimental days of LSD fer brekky, beer fer lunch and bong rips fer din-din, with an evening night-cap of mushrooms, and good loud music over Stuart Shreve's giant speakers you purchased. Even today, I still trip dimensionally across the tundra listening to our space music and time-travel writing daily compositions.

When I got up to Alaska, partying wasn't fun like that. Not even close. Stupid native folks froze and died and partying tough ain't the same for Eskimos. Alcohol might be a party favor and the fifth food group for us hairy Nordic animals, but a plague on our First Nation comrades. Party till ye puke, party till you die, and in the Eskimo communities this shit totally sucked. In my first year working at the local village police department, we fetched untold numbers of kids outa overturned boats, sunken and blue, dug frozen dudes outa snow banks and raked up bits of brown humans after snow machine, 4-wheeler, plane and car crashes. And dog attacks. Eskimos are terrible party animals and got no built-in limits. With only decades exposure to alcohol, they ain't got the drinking gene. Like Callahan. Or yer momma.

Back to the dog attacks. Every home in rural Alaska has a string of dogs staked out back for dog mushing. A town of only a few hundred can have thousands of dogs chained all over the fucking place. The sick dogs, or slow dogs that have outlived their usefulness are simply unleashed and let go. This creates packs of semi-feral dogs that often kill children. My wife lost a couple of her childhood pals to dog attacks, so part of our duties was to assemble the entire police department and walk from one end of town to the other, shooting every stray and loose dog we saw. Each week we'd fill a couple pickup trucks with dead dogs, totaling over a thousand every year. Besides keeping drunken natives sober, we also had shit jobs keeping the city dump stacked with piles of rotting dead dogs. What's native and comic, is when we poured fuel over a hunnert stacks of dead dogs and burnt the piles. My first nation coworkers called it a "Gook-BBQ, grilled K-9 pussy or slant-eye steaks." In my view, it smelled like a Nazi cookout. Almost made me puke.

In one short year after Reagan signed legislation allowing natives to outlaw white man liquor, 280 native Alaska villages went totally dry, mirroring all the Indian reservations across America. Induns and Eskimos party almost as bad as Franky. Speaking of which, what ever happened to that cute girl, Miss Jemenez (Hemenez?) after she dumped Fuckered Up Franky, prone to drunken rampages. I'd heard he'd impregnated a really ugly chick and got stuck with a retarded daughter that looks just like Frank and his midget little sister George, same piglet tits and stinky wop twat. To put his sex life in comic context, Franky used to declare, "the smaller the tit, the more the monkey." I never thought dwarf-porn breeding midgets would make me barf.

Regarding my brother's battle with the bottle, one statement that Cully told me in our last days of communicating was, "Fuck Karl, I'm drinking like an alcoholic. My hangovers are lasting weeks and months." My parents weren't doing him any favors by moving him into my grandma Saimi's house in Richmond Beach. Living in our grandma's house allowed him to continue destroying himself and really pissed off the neighbors. Cully trashed the place like a retarded hillbilly. After a million complaints, one neighbor hired a landscaping company to mow Cully's lawn, trim the hedges and shrubs, haul trash and debris, even towed away Cully's junker cars, then sued my dad for the expense. Cully was never prepared for adult living.

You see, our impairment is also the level we stay stuck at. You all have friends that never grew beyond their childish years, or their high school years and few beyond their college days. That line of truncation is metaphorically where drinking became partying and partying became alcoholism. I'm only using booze in this example, but with me, it was fine flake blow and tasty pine bong rips. Our partying and heavy drinking was merely the bug killer that took out my pals and girlfriends early on.

My alcoholism was like genital herpes, it doesn't matter if yer living at my crack house, yer mommy's house sucking on yer daddy's tits, homeless or in jail, my hangovers hurt like a motherfucker. Or in our case, looking at our wives and girlfriends, hurt like a grandmother-fucker. Leaving my house in Mountlake Terrace and closing down what Frank and Marto dubbed "Lem's Mortuary and Crack House" was terrifying for me. I'd hit bottom and had nowhere else to go. Making decent money selling coke was the plateau and peak of my achievement. I would've flat-lined for as long as I could stay out of jail. Or out of a pine box.

When I fled to Alaska, I was looking for another campaign, career or kick-ass business plan. That's when I saw all those fucked up natives, wasted aborigines and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) retarded brown kids. At first I thought it funny, then it to pissed me off. Goddamn Eskimos living to be fucked up all day, drinking cleaners, hairspray and mouthwash, and thinking it was cool. It would've upset you like Ireland in the late 1800's. Or Seattle in the 90's. It also made sense why all 280 Alaska native villages voted to close down every single liquor store and bar. In the first year I didn't have to think too hard where I could put my drug-dealing skills and pent-up anger to work. For me, it was an inverse resume, backwards job application and reverse look at my short list of skills. You can see the direction I was heading. I knew I could take out whole systems of drug and alcohol delivery and whole crews of inbred hillbilly bootleggers. With just my pinky finger. It was that easy.

That's when I joined the Army. Or the French Foreign Legion. Well sort of. That's when I joined Village Public Safety that was recruiting guys just like me. I was asked only one question. Do I know anything about bootlegging and drug dealing. In the last 35 years I've traveled to almost every remote backwards native village and urban town taking out liquor smuggling routes and even stumbled into dozens of meth labs and cocaine networks. I loved it.

I was finally making a profoundly positive difference and helping out the native communities that were completely defenseless against petty white criminals. Petty criminals just like me. And boy was I on a roll. I became an overpriced garbage man and dog catcher. It suited me fine. I found what Proust declared, "our careers are what we do second best." "The career finds the man, not the other way around." I've heard every death-threat from my defendants and convicts, and it's great comedy.

Now that we're old men, nearing the long line at the worm cafeteria, holding reservations for the maggot spa and the long dirt sleep, I wouldn't have changed a thing. You see, I had a chance to play super hero to all these stupid Eskimos and Indians, and it was fun. I could do no wrong. Getting laid off from one police department sent me to another training academy. Wrapping narc job million 6, sent me to University of Alaska Fairbanks for bachelors and master's degrees. On campus, numerous young girls reported that they'd passed out and awoke raped, so you guessed it, I did a narc job buying a shit load of GHB and Rohipnol all over campus. I think those assholes should be ready for parole by now.

I'm bragging, but the frosting on the cake was taking more than 40 trips to Europe and Russia on the cover story I was promoting the exchange student program, but still employed by an outfit I can't remember the name of. All costing me zero dollars and 99 cents. And get this, computer training up the fucking ass and years of service into the state pension program. Money I'm enjoying today, with a comprehensive retirement package keeping me out of the hospital and out of the ground.

You can see more into Cully's childish reasons to cut off contact with me. Life back in Washington became a daycare drama and I couldn't stand to look back. All my ex-girlfriends were dying from smoking crack or drowning in liquor. It also might explain my frustration keeping my million narc jobs from my childhood pals back home. None of 'em could comprehend my mission. I was on a roll and killing it. I got paid to take out guys just like me. Or better put, the guys I took off the playing field were duplicate images of me and if I wasn't wearing guns, badges and wires, I would've likely been pals and business partners with 'em. Where ever I see an old druggy version of myself, I aim and shoot. Simple.

Now back to my alcoholic family stuck infantile and locked dysfunctional. I don't know what happened to Cully's job at Care Medical, I'm assuming he was fired for his chronic drinking and toking. I also don't know why my family hid and enabled his alcoholism instead of shoving his drunk ass into treatment. Sadly, he died from drinking and smoking climate changing bong rips and his failing liver put him in a cremation urn. Accept the fact that I, nor any of you lads could've stopped his one-way trip to the boneyard. If I'd stayed in Washington you'd see me toes-up, tits-up and dick in the dirt. I have wonderful memories of tripping on 'cid, smoking pine bud and snorting flake coke with Marto and Dennis, but my drinking would've kilt me. My drinking days and hangover years are long faded to inconsequential pains in my goat ass.

I shouldn't pick on Cully's deadly alcoholism. I suspect he was stuck on stupid and locked in a diaper dance for children lacking a mission or a direction. I had to grow up someday. I can't explain my one-man war on white trash bootleggers and drug dealers. Yet, I was doing the right thing. If I pissed off Higman, Cully, Callahan, I was on the right track and kept taking more and more narc jobs with the village cops all over Alaska, even taking gigs overseas. Fun, fun. Mind you, Brian left Kotzebue over 30 years ago and I needed a job. A guy's gotta make a living somehow.

Back to daycare drama. At the second Mountlake Terrace House around the corner, Nancy got tagged for a DUI right in my driveway but turned her partying around after getting court ordered counseling. Brian has gone stone-cold sober and recharged his lunatic religious fervor after his partying to near-death in Alaska and Kingston, Washington. He porked his friend Dan Newberry's wife, impregnating her, then marrying Elizabeth Sidoris, having their baby Cenie, then divorcing Elizabeth. He stood by with his dick out, caught a pinched head, cross-eyed disabled baby that looks just like him, then discarded the placenta bitch. Brian swore off all drinking and drugging and will be around to amuse us for decades to come. If we didn't have friends like all of us, we'd have nothing to laugh at. Callahan swears Higman will eventually start his own religious cult. "What the fuck is Micro-Dot, without the Dot?" "The micro-church for small sober gimplets!" Callahan's right you know. Puny religious people are really funny.

I get to look back on a long life tripping balls and partying with you lot and Arctic Alaska missions aplenty. Remember, Brian flew up to Kotz in 1984 and I followed him shortly thereafter. Brian's invitation allowed me to complete an Associate's degree at the local Chukchi Community College, a bachelors at University of Alaska in Fairbanks, with a masters as a nice topping. This is where I was hired to promote the college's international exchange program paying me to take more than 40 trips to Europe and Russia. I traveled to a shit load of campuses handing out Alaska University shwag, literature, software (Word 95, Office 97) and applications for free travel, lodging and tuition. And for your information, yes, I did undertake numerous narc jobs on these trips too. I'm hyperactive, multitask addicted and lack moral and ethical guide-posts and guard-rails, remember?

This is noteworthy, but I flew up almost half our pals to Alaska. You visited me in Anchorage. Cully flew up twice. Marty Hall came up for one summer and Scott Wade came up the next. I flew up Dale Campbell for a spell, then had Harley Bronson come up afterward. Marto, Scott, Dale and Harley all helped me renovate houses in measure to offset airfare, lodging etc. Harley stayed his whole life and had a batch of kids here in Alaska. Some even look like him. I'm not sure if you know all these Edmonds folks, okay, maybe a few from Continuation High School, non-binary gender post-surgery counseling and rehab for sniffing glue.

As far as post-retirement hobbies, I've continued my weight-lifting and subsistence hunting. I volunteer for my wife's family whaling crews and help out with polar bear, walrus and seal harvests too. They're hobbies I started a million years ago and haven't stopped. I'll look for some killer photos and attach them. I still compose stupid shit and send them out to my former coworkers and pals. A few remaining pals still amongst the living cuz most have croaked after getting fitted for wooden jackets, tipping or climbing out of their wheelchairs and crawling into furnaces. Cigarettes and alcohol are the bitches of the bunch.

I remember when you tossed your last pack of fags, stomped the pack and swore off cigs ever since. When I told Cully that you'd quit cigarettes, he was pleasantly surprised. He knew the powerful addiction nicotine can hold on a soul. Then he asked if Troy still has blue lips. Of course, Higman (micro-dot) would fire up one of his Marlboro 100's and toke so deep he was eating the fucker, then declare "ever since I lost one of my lungs, I cut my smoking in half." For a bunch of dirty white boys emerging out of poverty, we were funny fuckers. We ain't so dumb, though, if we hadn't quit our smoking habits, our COVD-19 respiratory plague would've left us boxed lunches of dirt with a side-order of fine aged 30-year-old hash-rich booger-phlegm. Yer not gonna swallow that are ye?

Funny, marijuana is legal in Washington and Alaska now, but I no longer smoke the stuff. Coffee and bong hits were my favorite recipe in the am. Wake and bake nigger! Or tea and toke in the evening. My drinking took a nose-dive living in bone-dry native communities, so I can't take credit for devotion or dedication in my efforts towards sobriety. It just happened. The decision was made for me. Of course if I'd stayed behind and malingered in Edmonds, I'd look just like Franky, Marto, Paul, Scott or Cully. Toasted, tired. neutered, gaped or dead.

If you see Paul and Scott, tell them I dropped off their cassettes and CD's of music they sent, or left me on their trips, at the local radio station. Daniel Ryder is the evening DJ and pounds the shit outa those recordings. Even your recordings you sent me ended up in Daniel's tight grip. He LOVED all the outside music and blasted the stuff at KOTZ 720 am with 10,000 watts all over remote Alaska and even across to Russia where our station is listened to in Siberia. Sort of like Radio Free America, but with space toons or destructive rock all 3 of you sent over the many, many years. To preserve them all, Daniel Ryder digitized them and still takes over the broadcast airwaves from 6pm till midnight.

It's funny, but Lena Henry still asks how Scott is. Those two had a torrid affair during his summer visit. Her heavenly large breasts swell when she talks about Scott and she seems to hold a flame for him. And his fucking. Maybe it was his guitar playing and not his dick. He did an interview and live performance over at KOTZ 720 am blasting the Star Spangled Banner Hendrix song and sure got a lot of Eskimos asking who that fucking white guy was. And who fathered all these shrunken-head mongoloid mud-colored children.

Okay, in summation, I lived in Kotzebue, then Willow a couple years doing dirty work. Then we lived in Barrow, then Nome, and now we're just goofing off on the Kenai Peninsula, south of Anchorage. My tenure in Fairbanks was for the 5 years doing the BBA and MBA mish. I've exhausted numerous passports flying overseas and I've also added serious density to my arrest records in numerous languages. What the fuck, I was born to be incarcerated and pounded on.

It's hard to add up and itemize a life of stupid shit that I've undertaken since we were room mates at the Mountlake Terrace Hash House 40 fucking years ago. Bun retired in 2005 and I pulled the pin 6 years ago at age 55, both of us drawing public employees pensions. It's a comfortable existence with Cadillac health care and top-shelf Long Term Care. 9 out of 10 retirees will require assisted living, rest-home care or in-home nursing from busty babes with big boobs. For our own nursing enjoyment of course. Don't procrastinate, get ready for crispiness. If you'd put on your spectacles and looked next to you this morning, you likely found a crispy shrunken old naked woman in bed next to you. An old woman that still gives you kick-stands and tents. Which brings us back to drunken Irish wisdom. Callahan oft scolded us, "Never sleep with women yer own age. They look just like yer fucking grandma."

When you turn 65, purchase all the Medicare packages. Part B, C and D and supplemental coverage. The Medicare insurances only cover roughly 80% of yer chronic care, ass vacuum and commercial sink disposal. Showing up at any hospital without complete coverage will result in the hospital taking yer house and leaving yer ass sleeping on the beach with Baird. Or with Paul in his Dodge Dart that had the hood scoop made out of a bent cookie sheet. Or worse, left to sleep in a dorky old FIAT still registered to some Wade goofball we met in rehab after gender reassignment.

Baird and Renee are alcoholics in the classic sense, locked in childhood and candidates likely to preceed or follow Cully to the bone yard. Or ovens made in Germany. If you ever hung around Baird, Renee, Cully and Callahan, you'd hear some funny shit out their mouths. Baird like to raz Callahan for letting Bill Pace cut his hair like Bozo the Clown and Callahan ribbed Baird for not knowing the difference between an alcoholic and a drunk: a drunk don't gotta go to all them fucking meetings. Marto told me a while back he'd not seen or heard about Baird's DUI snags, but Renee's sister Teal and Roger Potter told him she has pulled numerous spin dry cycles and rotating recovery vacations at the Sedro Woolley Mental Institution. Oh fuck. I forgot Toby too. And I forgot to include Scott Wade. They'd scored a string of DUI arrests and were court ordered into treatment, lengthening their lives by a gray cunt hair. Wait, I'll get to Nancy later.

You see, I'm retarded. Nobody fucks up as good as me. I had to to leave home and exile in dry native villages in the most remote parts of Alaska, working for a hunnert police departments and narc squads statewide and overseas before my shit sobered up. Scott and Nancy got DUI court ordered treatment. My brother Toby got the same experience: DUI mandated treatment after rolling his truck and 6-horse trailer all over the highway up in Snoqualmie Pass-fucked up. The horse trailer was empty, so the horses didn't become Spic and Spanish taco filling nor Methican Hamburger Helper.

My sister Moira Ann drove over a handicapped mini-limber gimper-dude in a giant semi-truck and trailer loaded with huge landscaping rock. Poor gimp got smashed flatter'n a pancake and Moira Ann tested positive fer trace blow, weed and booze. No DUI conviction, but a serious involuntary manslaughter conviction, pled down from negligent homicide. Some shit runs in families and I come from a long line of liquor soaked uterus pickling and rectal discharged airborne fetal loose stool projectiles. Be careful, next time you pass gas, it might be me.

Some times sobriety comes by accident. Some times by force. From my perspective of limited information and even less intelligence, Cully cleverly slid through the cracks, avoiding car crashes and DUI legal hassles, court ordered treatments and survived long enough and smart enough to kill himself swimming laps in a bottle. I may be wrong, I often am. Like Cully, I'm a mental midget and suffer only minimal brain dysfunction. Okay, maybe maximal. Liquor and smokes take our best friends faster'n shit. In this case, my own brother.

In closing, I've not gone to be with the worms quite yet, so I'll keep in touch. Knowing you and our troop of musicians, comedians and hallucination hikers has given me a fount of fertile memories, good laughs and life lessons.

Till dirt do us part.

Karl.

*Spread the fudge and forward this self-deprecating update and informational correspondence. We all speak retard. We're from Washington.

We were born to be pounded on.

Top of the morning gents,

I was reviewing a stack of bills and receipts from last year. I gotta pack 'em up and mail them to H&R Block, the tax preppers right on the corner of the Parks Highway and Main Street. Yup, you probably drove by it a hunnert times, downtown Wasilla. Right near the capitol of the fudge-packed Colon Peoples where the number one cause of death for ignorant white folks is rectal cancer and in-family anal sex. Colon-ists are the invading hillbilly inbred families that crashed the Indun Pow-Wow, forced the learning of the world's dorkiest dance steps, gaped the copper colored pussy with European Herpes, installed retarded religions killing everything potentially creative and dangerously genius. After their relocation from the redneck Midwest dust-bowl ghetto, to the Mat-Su Valley of Trash, the number one cause of death for First Alaskan Natives inexplicably became, yup, you guessed it: ignorant white folks.

Back to my pile of paid medical bills and receipts. What caught my eye, was the paperwork for some seriously high-dollar eye surgery I had done for detached retina. I was losing vision in my left eye and the eye doctor at the Denaina Native Clinic, Dr. Megan Lincoln gave me the diagnosis. Loose retina. I said to myself, this is just fucking great. The normal repair is to laser the membrane sheet back to the rear of the eye and is the recommended repair for boxers, race car drivers involved in high-impact collisions and incarcerated low-IQ intelligence retards that've frequently had their head beat in.

What I found witty during Dr. Megan Lincoln's diagnosis, proscribed treatment and referral to Alaska Retinal Specialists was she told me that when she was a student at Optometry School, her eye-care professor repeated cynical and shitty jokes about performing eye repairs upon old fuckers like us. He'd quote a cautionary phrase from William Blake about old men, dying police and broken veterans that seeing any longer, isn't always so great.

"The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man."

I was dumbfounded. A kid from Krotchebue fucked my shit up. I've never been pitched such an easy softball, and been bruised and beaten upon the ground. She may be a Kotzebue Lincoln, but she aren't dumB. Don't tell Dr. Megan, but her clever wit fucked my shit up.

The reason I'm whining like a bitch is cuz I always get such good news from native clinics. After an EKG up at the Barrow Hospital, Dr. Sollenberg treated me for a slew of prison-specific respiratory infections, then showed me a scribble on a graph and asked me if I ever had a heart attack. I shrugged and denied any knowledge. He told me that it could be simply a twinge or a pinch in my chest and I wouldn't know any difference. I knew the difference. Some chest pains occurred after a beat-down. Before that, complex drug and alcohol hangovers I survived, yet would kill smaller adults.

Like you fuckers, I'm sick of hearing such cheerful fucking news and reports from dense rotating doctors and thick public health nurses at native clinics all over shit-hole Alaska. Doctors and nurses with a gift for saying shitty news, in such blunt ways. Lie to me, kiss me, don't tell me unvarnished truths. I think they've forgotten their patient is Scandinavian, not native, possessing only a small amount of pygmy blood in my stool. Digested leftovers from a healthy Viking breakfast, similar to the breakfast bar at the back end of native only Mat-Su Valley of Trash abortion clinics.

Another bit of wonderful fucking advice I received was that I could have plastic surgery to improve the scars on my chin under my beard, my abdomen and above my knee. With my wonderful insurance covering 50% of any cosmetic procedures, I'd only be on the hook for fucking $14K. Out of pocket. I think unsightly scars are lovely when concealed. Lethal disagreements with our cellmates, paints floors, stacks time and delays our release. We're more pleasant killers and intelligent murderers when we keep our mouths shut and put up our dukes and swing for the firing squad wall. I'm done talking.

Come on fuckers. Look back. Real life ain't nothing we'd choose. When driving blind, my life-path looks like a spastic was at the wheel, trying to jerk off, leer at girls and drive drunk. I look at your lives and see the same thing. Lots of collisions, lots of break-downs and lots of rest-stop sex and detours for beer and bong hits. Think hard and remember, I've asked each and every one of you how you ended up here. You fuckers just gave that look like I'm supposed to know the passages you did not take, towards the doors that never opened, and here we are, poorly healed 907 Negroes, window shopping ceramic urns. Our gait appears to be lacking proper alignment, worse if we're sober. Out in the parking lot, you'll find my ass sleeping in shopping carts, or under trailers and my beard smells like butt chunks.

That's a fucked up trail, following binges and hangovers, stumbling towards redemption. My fondness for alkaloid boogers, aromatic hydrocarbon-rich lung drainage and strange women has proved to be my downfall. One chapter I remember in a stupid textbook I was forced to digest, mental health is reflected in the quality of our long-term relationships. Yup, I'm fucked. Right when things stabilize, I fuck shit up and fail to resist sobriety and temptation.

"A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke."

I've always thought Rudyard Kipling's arcane scribbling applied to my enjoyment of crystallized green bud and my appreciation for French cigarettes. Like any sex and nicotine addicted dumb shit, I increased my tobacco to include expensive cigars and evermore naked women speaking languages no drunken Finn deciphers. Fatally beautiful unclothed females, fine aged liquor and contraband cigars were my diet. The 3 banes of my existence. Of the stupid cops I befriended, imagine if I returned home and gave you foreign girls and expensive drugs, not illegal cigars. You'd be divorced and need a chiropractor.

I've got 3 nicotine stained teeth that've been replaced. Actually 3 molars the dentist ground down to stumps while I was ripped on Valium and mint flavored nitrous oxide gas, and capped with synthetic composites. They're called crowns and they are real fucking expensive. Don't forget, they're considered cosmetic and insurance only pays for 50% so the $3K nut buster, is out of pocket. In my old age, I've become insensitive to really bad news, but going through this paperwork and the prices I paid, I grit my teeth so hard, you can hear my denture glue cracking.

I'm good at getting my ass kicked. I excel at losing fights. I put my face in front of swinging fists and truncheons and by sheer will, I absorb impacts jarring my brain like jello having ejaculatory seizures, eyes battered to pieces and my teeth punched to fractures. The 3 teeth were broken and cracked many years ago, and since I aren't dumb, service to village, state and country is likely shit. We all suffer Inupiaq Alzheimer's, forgetting everything, except who pissed us off. I ain't bitter. Okay a little.

Dr. Sollenberg told me he likes to give special advice to fucked up, worn-out public safety maggots. After he gives you a terminal diagnosis, he'll also hand you a pair of automatics and a dozen loaded magazines. All he asks is that before snuggling yer dying bed, you visit his heartless colleagues at rural hospitals all over pygmy 907, and dispense some kinetic perforations around their head and neck. You know, go postal nigger and do his bidding. Ours too. Deal. Roger. Copy. Count me in. 10-4 Bravo Foxtrot (butt-fucker).

Doc Sollenberg was amused with my injuries and explained that when a skull receives an impact like a punch, kick or blow from a baton, we lose consciousness for a fraction of a second. When boxers are in the middle of exchanging hooks, jabs and upper-cuts and a glove lands a good connection, boxers go out cold for a fraction of a second. The only reason we don't drop to the ground is muscle memory in our arms, legs, abdomen and shoulders have learned to stay upright and keep us on our legs and in the fight.

Think back. You know this because when you try to recall some serious fights you've engaged, your memory has blank spots lasting fractions of seconds. We were momentarily out cold, but still in the fight taking hits. Body blows or bone impacts on the limbs and ribs don't have this same effect on our consciousness. When we get an asp baton or a PR-24 smack upon our knees and elbows, we get to enjoy the full agony experience and suffer no relief. It also explains why you dumb fuckers never laid down, took a dive and threw a fight, swinging for the fences, or prison wall. I got a headache just writing this shit.

A hunnert years ago, the State Troopers held a 6-week VPSO training academy in Kotzebue, I was nominated to the play the role of the hostile combatant. Yup, all the new VPSO recruits from Nome and Bethel got to try their best to subdue yer author on drugs. The goal was to deliver baton blows to the limbs, spray the arrested with pepper mace, then cuff the prisoner. On most of the exercises, I was to take it easy on them micro-nates and let them get the feel of getting control of taller dumber motherfuckers.

As the training progressed, I'd toss 'em around with simple shoves, hip tosses and flips all over the wrestling mats, but at no time could I deliver finger jabs beyond their eye sockets, palm pumps to their nose or stabs with the open hand to their grapes, nor throat. Lucky niggers. I couldn't even solar plexus their shit.

The combat instructor was the same trooper dude that trained all you coppers years ago at the Sitka Academy and would referee the matches with loud whistles and barked commands. He'd let us wrestle around while the VPSO candidates advised me I was under arrest, then yell for us to go easy or go full-on fight mode. That guy was one tough son of a bitch. He'd squat low on the mats watching closely and coached the VPSO recruits with commands whilst getting their asses tossed in the air or shoved back on their butts. What's a pity is that the hostile combatant, being me, couldn't reach for their tools and pound them to shit. That would come later.

We received coaching from this trooper instructor on how to take swinging arms and gain control, knee blows with the ASP collapsible baton to slow aggressive approaches and spray mildly irritating training pepper mace that was designed for practice, but not the full-on Methican eye-melting, Wet-Back ass-rash fry oil, nor Beaner pepper concentrated butt-spray. The training shit still stung the eyes momentarily, but wasn't nearly as deadly as the shit you fuckers carry next to your batons and pistols on duty.

After class, I'd hook up with Bun and Al Sanders at the Rec Center to lift weights, sauna and shower. Al was impressed with all the bruises on my arms from newbie green VPSO fuckers trying real hard to slap cuffs on me, and swatting my legs with collapsible batons. Al Sanders' joke was that if I was black (African Alaskan), the bruises wouldn't hurt as much. Them little native fuckers started getting smarter and more cunning in taking down my big dumb ass acting drunk or like a drug addled PCP fucker. What's worse, I didn't get no liquor nor drugs.

For weeks we'd dance all over the mats fighting under differing criteria: light impact, mace, batons and even me fighting with cuffs on behind my back, resisting arrest or fleeing incarceration. Being too tall, I could never pull the Delta Force Jump and tuck my feet over my cuffed wrists and get my hands in front of me. But, this'll make you smile, I was allowed to kick lightly and pitch little runt natives with my hips and shoulders.

Them little VPSO fuckers would jump on my back and put me in a headlock, so I'd head-butt 'em in reverse or leap backwards, land on 'em and blow the air out of those pesky little shits. You shoulda seen them brown midgets line up to dole out some whoop-ass on me. Pussies got tough and everyone of 'em eventually prevailed, leaving me fucked up, cuffed on the mat, beat to shit, breathless and winded like the crispy old geezer women we been fucking.

I did my best to play the part as an uncooperative arrested, but after a few hours with them boys, my shit was wasted tired. Every evening I worked out harder and harder lifting weights to keep up with them. Then they all started getting wise and showing up at the Rec Center to lift weights with me and Bun, and Al Sanders. Little fuckers got tough and fit pumping iron alongside an old native woman, a retarded Finn and a beefy nigger broadcaster from KOTZ 720 AM on your moron dial. Funny thing was, them little native boys learned to really like me. Stupid shits.

Years later I heard someone call out my name in the UAF cafeteria. I turned and didn't know who'd yelled at me. A tall native fellow approached and reached out to shake my hand, but I told him I couldn't recall who he was. He told me his name was Hank Anelon from Illiamna and he sure remembered trying to kick my ass at that Kotzebue Rec and Tech Center VPSO training program. A bunch of other students surrounding us looked up at us, worried we were drunken natives, fixing to fuck shit up.

He looked familiar, but he was much shorter when he started working village cop job duties rotating between Illiamna and Tyonek. Fucker had grown almost as tall as me, but was heavier and bulkier. Mr. Anelon stated that since lifting weights at the Kotzebue Rec Center, he'd never skipped a day, and when he told his mom about lifting weights aside an elderly native woman from Kotzebue named Bessie Tikik, she cried out and explained to Hank that his mom, Anisha was good buds with Bessie. Both these elderly native gals attended Chemawa Indun Boarding School together and that Bessie was "high manna." Meaning classy, distinguished and kind. I knew she was a devout sober Tikigaq from the Point Hopeless shit-village, spoke the language fairly well, but I couldn't imagine her being seen as all that sophisticated and snobby, in her younger wilder days. I must've missed seeing those qualities in my wife. Even as we speak, my head is snug between my ass cheeks.

I'd never mentioned any public safety career bull crap to a single soul in my UAF classes, dorms or lunch room, so Hank's stories regaling his bumps and bruises getting spun, tossed and flipped by a big fucking white asshole surprised my classmates. Hank was funny. He hated that tough-ass trooper coach and fighting referee, teaching the VPSO recruits a whole new world of combat. Mr. Anelon thought himself a bad-ass and beyond learning something from the Trooper instructors. You fuckers remember how little we know from elementary wrestling, boxing and judo, until we're beaten to shit by seasoned professional cops that make a living training recruits and whooping our shit.

Hank Anelon never let up on me. He was in the same dorm building complex as me (Moore, Bartlett, Skarland) and always chided me that I was an old fart that pounded natives. He complimented me for bouncing whole armies of darkie midgets on their asses all day long, take a lunch break, and continue getting my ass stomped. Then head to the weight room. My dorm mates thought that an old man like me was a worn out douche bag and couldn't even lift my own dick. One freshman student named Kevin Gee was full of funny shit and stated that geezers like me got one foot in the grave and the other foot on a banana peel. Yup, real funny pals I hang around.

Some kid, named John Trotter, from down the hallway asked us what we were talking about, so Mr. Anelon explained that "fucking Ewing" was nominated to play the role of angel dusted, cocaine infused, drunken asshole that was supposed to make it impossible for a bunch of native VPSO's to subdue, cuff and arrest. He laughed and told Trotter that he'd won all his wrestling matches during high school, but never in his village runt-life gotten pounded and winded trying to "kick this fucker's ass." Hank laughed and explained that even cuffed behind his back, Karl kicked his thighs and hips to bruising and head butted him so hard he almost quit the program.

John Trotter was a freshman and full of funny shit. He'd grown up in Anderson next door to Bill Murray, another announcer at KOTZ and then spent a few years in Met (Metlakatla), the scummy Indun vil. He'd chide me for the village girls I fucked with snarky quips like, "Karl will fuck anything with a uterus. And horns." That is pretty funny, but with good pals of any generation, ya gotta take it, and give it. My common retort was that "his mom had so many retarded hillbilly downer-syndrome vaginal barf-ups that she's just a snatch with a wagging tale and her pussy has become a slip and slide stinky water-park."

Joking aside and on a more serious note, Trotter asked me how in hell anybody could take on a big husky native guy like Hank Anelon. My answer was that Hank was much smaller, way back when, during the VPSO Academy. I would've sounded gay if I boasted that I'd earned the pussy level of green belt in karate at community college, basic judo in elementary, wrestled in junior high and boxed at the YMCA. Boxing was the only program-sanctioned way to settle school-kid disputes at elementary and junior high. Fighting got yer ass expelled. To add flavor and character to my hillbilly farm-tard cred, and rattle John Trotter, I added I was one of 7 farm kids that wrestled goats, dogs and pigs to the ground. And fucked 'em. Trotter shit his pants. He believed that goat part.

The boxing was a juvenile program our swim coach rammed down our throats. He stated that since we were Finns, Norwegians or Swedes, our parents were alcoholics that made us mean, abused, scrappy little shits. But, if we were caught fighting at school, we would be kicked out of school AND kicked off the swim team. Our swim coach insisted we invite bullies to join us at the YMCA, put on gloves and masks and pound each other to death. The bullies could even choose wuss wrestling, wimpy kid boxing or elementary pansy judo. The bullies that picked fights with us declined the invitation and left us alone.

Hank Anelon is still the VPSO for the Illiamna/Tyonek beat, but lost his leg below the knee to poorly managed diabetes a few years back. He wasn't fazed though, he kept walking his patrols and taking meager pay, but wears an expensive prosthetic that he's modified with tape and straps allowing him to deliver decent groin kicks, foot stomps and knee-cap shin peels with a steel shoe. He told me that he still laughs at how bad he got whooped by such a fucking old white guy. He also told me that he hasn't ever had an arrest that injured him as badly.

Hank Anelon kept clippings of the Arctic Sounder story about the Logan Bust in Barrow, and UAF Sun Star headlines about the date-rape narc job I did with Nush. Hank called my narc job descriptions racist and discriminatory, "cuz you only bagged pussy white bootleggers and never sacked any natives." He was joking of course, he knows that jiggaboos, niggers, white fuckers and tundra monkey natives never do any drug business together and to bust one of these groups, ya gotta get a narc the same color. And odor.

Now back to my whining. My composite injuries can be blamed on my career choices, but you coppers know that I've never laid a hand on any drugs, guns nor natives, so my bitching stinks disingenuous. So I blame my collection of scars on my drinking, drugging and accidents fighting young girls, snacking inflamed bush in effort to breed at any cost. Yup, that's a good excuse. Whenever a doctor starts getting nosy, I lie and tell 'em that I got hurt a lot during my years breeding TCBQ's. You ain't lived till ye cracked open a Trailer Court Beauty Queen's foul snatch and butt crack. And bust a nut fer lunch.

When I was 18 I got pinched for minor in possession of alcohol, when I was 19 I got pinched for minor in possession of marijuana. Sitting in court on the second offense, I was referred to the Drug Abuse Council in Lynnwood, Washington. Those courts don't fuck around. You get popped for any booze or druggy shit, yer ass is scheduled at any of a hunnert counseling services. I showed up for 1 meeting a week for 3 months with a review sent back to the judge for his examination.

What I wasn't expecting was that the judge notified me the clinical disclaimer stating I was "high risk of re-offending." Fuck me. The judge then sent to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for another 3 months. I had to show up for a coupla meetings a week at the community center in Mountlake Terrace where I met Don Beuler. He was a sponsor and facilitator for the AA program and did roll call for us compulsory dildos that required him to sign off on our appearances.

I showed up for all the meetings and was startled at how old the group was. Like over 30 or some shit. Those fuckers all looked like Merle Haggard. And KPD cops. I was 19 years old and surrounded by ancient cripppled dried-up old guys, talking about their years of sobriety, numbers of relapses and I sat there listening to their personal stories. Some of their shit was really fucked up. I also started making startling realizations between these old codgers and myself. I just wouldn't admit it. Still don't, outside this white paper intellectual forum fer public service butt fuckers.

A lot of these old drunks in AA started out partying in their youth, but quickly had legal issues like drunk driving shit. Others had legal issues with domestic violence, beating their wives or slugging their kids. Some old dudes even beat their bosses and coworkers. I found these last personal offenses completely understandable. Come on, how many of our bosses and office mates really needed a beating, attitude adjustment and tune-up? Look at the fat Kotzebue city slobs that signed our paychecks, they sure as shit needed a thrashing and ass-kicking. Hell, we were already in jail fer pay, forfeiting our freedom once we set booted foot on retard patrol duty.

Our AA meetings started with them complimenting me on the coffee I brought, brewed and set up with big serving bowls of Coffee-Mate and sugar. When drunks drop their liquor, their replacement drug is substance called sugar. I was a coffee snob even then, and wasn't gonna drink shit-ass red-can coffee with worn out drunks. After greetings all around, and for my benefit, these beat-to-shit cripples would start their tales at roughly my age.

My face got hot when they started their personal testimonials glancing or nodding in my direction and proceeded to expound on their trail of tears. A lot of these old anonymous unnamed individuals (AA remember) tried to make connections between their parents', uncles' and grandparents' problems with alcohol, then drew a sketchy line to their own behavior. This was the moment when I would blank out and ignore their stupid retarded drunk talk. My partying was different and I still had 9 years until I ran out of options selling blow and running a crack house.

Some of their childhood tales would put you old coppers to shame. I heard tales of violent beatings, burns, rapes and sexual mutilations. I shrug off tales of beatings, but the burns, rapes and sex-mutilations got my attention, like right fucking now. Next time you beat, spank or paddle your children or grand children, aim right for the pubes. Yup, I heard tales of moms and dads, teachers and coaches flailing children with whips, belts and boards: landing blows right on girls' and boys' privates. That shit terrorized me, never left me, and I'm still thinking about it as I write to a bunch of fucking cops. Today, 40 years later.

I completed the nightmare Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and after the 3 months of mandatory attendance, Don Beuler, the AA facilitator and sponsor, signed off on my court papers. On my next probationary status hearing, I was released from court supervision, finally healed and completely rehabilitated. You buy that shit? I kept my nose clean insofar as to fly back up to Alaska two more seasons at Cold Bay and D-ham to earn decent bank, working construction gigs when needed, attending community college for the basics in karate, swimming, weight lifting, English (creative writing fer fuck sake) and Math, only dealing weed and blow at school part-time to maintain my living standards. I'm lying by omission of course.

One year later, I received a letter at my parents house. My folks sent smoke signals and farm-tard Morse code informing me that I should drop by and eat something called food, drink with my brothers and pick up my mail. The offer to drink with my brothers sounded pretty good, so I scavenged cleaner clothes and went to drink an entire house of all it's booze. I even sneaked a packet of blow in me pocket, you know, in case of emergencies.

My folks looked older and shorter, my sisters were nervous and spiteful that I stopped fucking within my family, and my brothers were already well into their cups, glowing, smiling and offering me seriously expensive liquors and dark European beers. So I did. I ate real food, drank a shit-load of liquor and beer, even sneaking downstairs to share chunks of sparkling coke with my brothers. We'd taken 3 or 4 breaks for sinus coagulator medications and repairs, then proceeded to empty the premises of a whole liquor cabinet, wine cellar and all the beer in the fridge.

The rest of the evening was a blur, but Cully and Toby agreed to meet me at my house (Lem's Mortuary) for a pile of cocaine nightcap and fumigate ourselves smoking Cully-bud. Don't get snarky, my drug addiction and alcoholism had nothing to do with my brothers. We just partied together, a lot. A whole lot. We could out-drink any smaller humans and with my brothers taller and bigger than me, I had to set a good example of tolerance. I must've forgotten to mention the fact that my brothers dwarfed my 6' 3" stubby frame by whole shoulders taller than me and whole native body weights heavier. Alcoholism only affects little people.

I awoke the following morning, sleeping on the floor with all the dogs, my face crunchy from dried drool and textured from the carpet. I put on coffee, put the dogs out back and filled their water and food bowls, then downed a packet of multivitamins and a big double dose of Alka-Seltzer (alcoholic-seltzer), then as I poured myself cups of coffee and started my chores, I also spied a big chunk of crystalline bud Cully left me.

So as I vacuumed, washed dishes and wiped windows and counters, I smoked a piece. A piece I smashed in cocaine for nutritional and health benefits of course. That's when I think I had my first heart attack. I felt a pinch in my chest. I breathed out the cocoa-puff smoke, sat down fer a spell and let the sharp pain fade, felt better and went back to my chores. Here's the weird part, the dogs came back inside, insisting on leaning against me and whining, looking at me like I was retarded and resting their chins on my lap and even climbing on the sofa, snuggling all over me. All 3 of 'em were such fucking worry-warts. Dogs are a pain in the ass.

I found the letter addressed to me at my parents house in my pocket, so I opened it. It was for a follow-up review and post-treatment analysis. Mail like that just makes yer fucking day. I phoned the number and was connected to the School District psychiatrist and she asked me to drop in this afternoon. I stalled, cuz I was still hungover like a motherfucker. She peristed and requested I "pop in tomorrow morning." I agreed, sat back down, drank more coffee, smoked another bowl of frosted bud flakes and petted my annoying dogs that still whined, nudged and leaned against me like I needed to be directed back to the sofa and sit with them. Dogs are worse than wives.

Fuck. A psych meeting. I completed my chores, stripped and took a real hot shower to clear my head. Here's the shit. I smelled funny. Like a brewery and tire manufacturing plant. I stepped out of the shower to dry off and those goddamned dogs were all sitting on the bathroom floor looking at me. I dressed, brushed my hair and beard, then booked out with the dogs to walk down to D&D Meats to pick up something to eat. The meal and over-indulgence at my parents house left my stomach stretched out and sore, and I thought it best I grab a bag of scraps and bones for the dogs. I bribe my dogs and girlfriends with treats. Just to shut the fuck up.

The dogs followed dutifully and sat outside on the sidewalk while I bought some mark-down steaks and a bag of meat scraps and bone treats for them. They got happy with that action. We walked all the way uptown to the Circle K and I grabbed another coffee for the short walk home. The clerk knew me, bought blow offa me occasionally, but sure liked the dogs and their super good manners. They sat like an army trio of canine body guards while I settled up and paid for the cup of coffee, then all 4 of us headed home. The meat scraps and bones were a special treat, but my impending meeting at the shrink's office worried me. The appointment was for some ungodly early time, like 8:30 or some shit, and I had a busy Thursday night's business to tend to. In the cocaine biz, Thursday's are always the busiest.

I had a hunnert customers, stayed wired all night and had Marto drive me to my appointment at the shrink's. I was instructed to piss in a cup. And my piss melted the fucking cup.

That meeting was the beginning of 3 more years of counseling. Dr. Marilyn Grey wasn't a dummy. She politely asked me how my sobriety was coming along and I blinked. I told her that I visited my parents and celebrated my sobriety with a near-death binge. Like a lot. She looked at me and asked me if it's normal for my parents to serve cocaine at a family get-together. My face got hot, so I told her it was an occupational hazard and that I might possibly be able to limit my intake, lessening my monstrous consumption down to a maintenance level.

She smiled at me, gave a thick textbook titled, "Guilt and Neurosis in Addiction." My orders were read the fucker, take notes and questions, and return that Monday morning. Fuck me in the goat ass. I had a weekend of business to attend to. Which I did, while reading this entire fucking book, taking notes and questions, in between customers and pals dropping by with money, beer and bong hits, picking up packets of blow.

My dudes looked at me just like my dogs. They all started thinking I was retarded and studied seriously weird whacking material. "Fuck dude, what's up with the book?" I told them I was under court orders to follow all the instructions from this goddamned shrink, and digesting this book was job 1. "Whoa dude, that sucks."

Monday morning I was ordered to give another piss test. The cup didn't melt, but the smoke detector erupted from my piss vapors. Dr. Marilyn Grey didn't make any comments about the crystallized urine sample. She simply offered me coffee and started questioning me about the psych book she gave me. I answered them all honestly and completely. She asked me if I had any insights and I told her that alcoholism and drug addiction don't happen in a vacuum, there's causation and materialization displayed in the patient's behavior and relationship skills that should be a fucking clue as to why these subjects suffered so much. Marilyn asked me if I suffered very much. I smiled and said that I truly thought myself to be a decent, kind person and that I radiated warmth and well-wishes. She smiled, then gave me another book and told me to return in 2 days.

Fuck! Being smart didn't pay shit.

The textbook was titled Child Abuse and Alcoholism. What the fuck is this shit? I read the whole fucker, took notes and scribbled questions, returning at the scheduled time and gave her my best dissertation on the literature she shoved up my ass. Between handling customers and partying with my tenants and beer guards at Lem's Crack House, I read the whole fucker and filled a note pad with smart alec notions. I was also starting to have real shitty dreams I was a little kid fighting big grown-ups, and losing badly. I woke up early, took the dogs for a walk, got coffee at the Circle K, returned home, showered, then hitched a ride with Marto to the shrink's office

I took a piss in a cup. No melting plastic, no smoke alarm and no crystals in my piss cup. I was also fairly sober, sharp and prepared for the grilling to come. Marilyn poured me a black coffee, made no comment about the nuclear piss tests and proceeded to ask me about the psych textbook. I answered her on every point, gave my opinions and thought I'd beaten her scheme. She smiled at me, stood up and reached for a really giant textbook, handed it to me and told me I had till the next Monday to repeat the same process.

This book was a doozy. It must've weighed 40 pounds and was over a thousand pages. The fucker was about repressed child memories and the echoes that manifest themselves years and decades later. Echoes that cause patients to have weird neurotic behaviors like bulimia, cutting, suicides, unexplained anger and mysterious rage. And chronic drug addiction and alcoholism. You see where this is going don't you. At that time, decades ago, I had no clue.

Reading about other Earthlings that didn't have to attend AA meetings and sober civilians that don't snort their nutrition while running a profitable crack house had a strange effect on my tactical optics. I started looking at my beers, bong hits and lines of blow like I was outside myself. The view became from across the room and I was watching myself at a distance. My perspective didn't do shit for my hangovers though. They were all right there, in front of me and radiated out my fucking eyes. As with all hangovers, more of the same is the best cure. Hair of the dog, fixer-uppers and just a touch of John Barley-corn with a side order of Frosted Flakes and bong hits. That's when I started to see that my tolerance was also a self-repeating loop of stupidity.

I finished the psych book and boat anchor. I made it to my scheduled early-ass morning meeting and gave a decent recitation of the points I found disturbing. I also told Marilyn about the shitty dreams I just can't seem to drink off my mind. All she said was "fantastic." She got out of her chair, reached way up and grabbed another textbook about more childhood trauma, distortions in adult behavior and more, you guessed it: addiction bullshit.

This book covered repressed childhood memories, their impact on our personality, our relationships, our careers and our chemical diets. My personality is fine, my relationships are best described as serial monogamy, and my chemical diet is delicious and crippling. I rotate through girlfriends like pages of a calendar. Even if girlfriends stick around, I'm overlapping their presence with new candidates and my love-life was crowded combative pussy claiming territory far worse than my possessive dogs.

The only long-term relationships I maintained effectively were with my younger brothers, my drug buddies, my dogs and my love-affairs with green bud, liquor and truckloads of cocaine. My infidelity involved females of the human kind and I was most faithful to the money. Money I counted, stowed and responsibly dispersed on bills, rent, gasoline and wages I paid my dudes for services that Lem's Mortuary and Crack House needed. Like organizing Cully's band equipment, set-up and keeping track of the hunnert arrivals. Every hour.

I'm being snide. One of the upsetting points that these textbooks illustrated was that we bond with and marry alcoholics, just like our parents. If you don't believe me, look at the drunk bitches our sons breed with. We may not look at our own wives that way, but damn, they've battled the side-effects of alcoholism and drug addiction in both their own families and their own bodies. Our wives also married drunks, just like their parents.

To understand that you'll never have a fucking clue about our children and their retard-palsy parents (us niggers), Dr. Marilyn Grey sunk my battleship by quoting George Bernard Shaw. "I tell you there's a wall ten feet thick and ten miles high between parent and child." No matter how hard your kids yell or gesture in mental midget semaphore, you'll never understand the subsequent generations we spawned and fucked over. Here kid, have a beer and a smoke. And a beating. Don't blame us for your fucking drug problems.

We're blind as a fresh steaming turd with goggles, deaf as a maggot infested cunt packed full of cotton plugs and if yer asked, remain silent and don't admit to ever sleeping with a hunnert liquored up girls half our age, twice as pretty as our wives with an 80-proof biscuit, cognac flavored labia and lips we still taste upon our faces, beards and mustaches. I ain't kidding, some highschool and college age girls are finger licking good and no, they don't live next door at your senior center.

We scoff and deny these valid points, but look at our brothers and half-brothers. We've watched them hump and impregnate some seriously fuckered-up skanky broads. Both native and non-native. Look at our coworkers. Westlake scrawged rotten old pussy and spooged nasty underage drinkers, and so did his offspring. Octuck pulled the same shit, insofar as to pump fat white blimpy bitches till they spawned children that suffer addiction and incarceration, or early death like Hildreth and his kin. Let's not give a pass on Nay. His alcoholism and tobacco addiction killed his ass way too early, leaving his wife at loose ends, bad odds and heartbreaking outcomes. His sons also knocked up booze hounds. See, it's easy to diagnose other asshole's kids, but not our own. Identical to our fathers and fathers in-law, our children are hungry to bone drunks. Comatose passed out niggers only invites quicker foreplay and insemination. Just like us.

Now that we're old and nearly boxed lunches of dirt, I've walked a narrow, sober drug-free existence. I underscore the phrase, "lonely are the brave." My brother Toby was a notoriously bigger than life drinker. He could down whole kegs of beer, punch out other drunks and pussies, even pounding his girlfriend Patty resulting her miscarriage, saving the world from hatching a carbon-copy drunk. She fled this combat union and likely made a healthy family free of drunks like us.

My good brother Tobus went so far as to put a rifle round through his best friend DJ Forgaard's hand and thigh. All was forgiven because the culprit was the booze, not our best friends' and younger brothers' chronic inebriation. You see, we're not responsible for our actions. Liquor is the invisible 800-pound gorilla in the room causing such mayhem, not us drunks. Toby only sobered up after rolling his truck and horse trailer over Snoqualmie Pass, after delivering the horses and driving back across the pass, fucked up. Imagine the carnage and Mexican taco, burrito and tamale filling, with 6 horses all churned to highway burger and equestrian road-kill. After a serious DUI conviction and mandatory treatment, just like mine, he kept his snout outa liquor bottles. Those traumatic events were the defining moments of clarity and my younger, taller and larger brother Toby, has been sober ever since. It took only half a life longer for me to figure my shit out.

My older sister Moira Ann was an early innovator in women’s rights and employment opportunities. She just loved operating heavy equipment. She drove dump trucks and loaders of every kind and knew all the technical bits regarding their assembly and function. In Kirkland, Washington, right near the site of MicroSoft HQ, she was waiting at a traffic light and a handicapped gimper-dude, stumpy bitch-let, mini-limber drove her wheelchair through waiting traffic, between my sister's dump truck and trailer loaded with large 5-man landscape rock.

The light turned green and my sister clutched and rolled forward with traffic. Yup, you guessed it, behind all this commercial trucking machinery was a pile of clothes and red paint that was originally a stupid gimp and wheel chair that took a short-cut and got smashed flatter'n shit, pancaked like a juicy burger. My sister tested positive for my favorite drugs, the evil trinity (booze, weed and blow) and was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. And you think your family killed shit. Get this, she got another job at a Washington State Liquor Store and worked till 62, retiring with a fat public employees pension just like you coppers.

My other brother Cully seemed to have a 6th sense in his drinking and drugging. He avoided disasters and didn't became a biblical drunk and lunatic, where God saved us over and over. Cully could maintain numerous irons in the fire: full-time job, band gigs all over Seattle, pesky girlfriends and a love affair with fine marijuana and boat loads of booze. Alas, he kept his climate changing pot smoking and liquor consumption at an even keel, but died a bong ripper and drinker at the age of 59, from liver failure, just weeks ago.

My sobriety arose from living in native villages that greatly restricted my bar-hopping, wine-tasting and champagne breakfasts. As you are well-aware, my jobs were usually running interference on bootleggers and drug dealers, allowing me to indulge in state-sponsored terror-financed monstrous consumption of seized properties. The only way I avoided joining my coworkers and comrades in donning wooden jackets, feeding worms, maggots and flies, occurred as I passed the age of 40 by dropping all hard drugs like cocaine. My 50th birthday coincided with my grandpa's declaration that he abandoned all tobacco and liquor at that same age and succeeded in living well past 100. At the half-century mark in my life, I ceased all liquor and eased my marijuana habit to zero shortly thereafter. Now as I drive past legal marijuana stores, I deeply breathe in delicious smells. Fuck me.

My diabetes counselor at the Denaina Vagina, Susan Schaeffer, while filling out her questionnaire, asked me if I drank any alcohol, which I denied. Then she asked me if I consumed any tobacco products, which I reluctantly denied. Then she asked me if I felt safe at home. I looked at her like she was pulling some retarded Eskimo joke, so I asked her why she was asking. Susan stated that many of her patients were abused at home and it was her legally binding obligation to report it. I shook my head and answered no, but my wife demands we both go to the Kenai Rec Center and lift weights. Every fucking day.

Mrs. Schaeffer was impressed and told me that she remembered seeing me and bun walking to the Kotzebue Rec Center. She also told me that she heard at Manilaq that we spent every evening there because we didn't have running water and sewer and took our showers there. I smiled and told her another dirty bit of village gossip was that I was a Jew and that I didn't celebrate Christmas. She laughed and said she'd heard that one also, but wouldn't dignify that rumor with repeating. My response was that Sara only came home from Seattle for the Christmas holidays and we recommended she just take a credit card back to Washington with her, shopping after-Christmas Clearance Sales for clothes, make-up and hair care products upon her arrival way south.

Susan Schaeffer asked why we did this. I told her that Alaska Commercial and Hanson's sold retarded cold weather gear, irritating shitty make-up and overpriced female grooming products, whereas Sara could go shopping all over Seattle, saving money and purchasing far superior merch than what her pockmarked Kotzebue classmates smeared on their faces and roached their hair with. Besides, Sara's friends in Seattle could guide her to local beauty salons and more recent fashions that Eskimos will never, ever comprehend. Look at our coworkers wives' butt-ugly haircuts and outfits. Retarded.

Back to the meeting with Susan Shaeffer. She asked me if I steered clear of all alcohol, or if I drank wine or beer. I shook me head and told her that I've been a teetotaler (coffee totaler) since turning 50 and I even dropped my favorite habit: shiny, crystalline green bud. All I consume is coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, lifting weights 7 days a week. She asked about my sleeping patterns and if I suffer night-terrors. I looked at her and told her my memories came back and my mood swings went crazy. I'm an old man with a child's mind full of the smells of booze and tobacco. And beatings. Those never go away.

Susan Shaeffer ain't no dummy. She does Diabetes Coordination and intake for the Behavioral Health Department at the Denaina Vagina (Health Clinic) and knows all the key questions and triggers to unsettle the best of us. Even cops. She explained that what counseling aims at achieving is to break down the wall between subconscious and conscious and let us handle and treat memories and experiences we've blocked out. I thought of you guys and all the piles of stored garbage and sewage we call work history.

She also explained that she's seen alcohol used as an insulator between the images and sounds coppers conceal under the very sidewalks and floorboards we walk daily. My thought was to ditch the bitch and pay a visit to my favorite liquor store, marijuana outlet, or sit down and write another posting to a bunch of fucked up public safety and public health motherfuckers. But I didn't. I just sat there and feigned sincerity that I'd schedule an appointment over at the rubber gun squad. Here's the cool part, before she sent my referral over to the loony bin, Susan booked back to Kotz, fleeing some asshole alcoholic ex-husband. She's gonna run out of destinations if she keeps boning and marrying losers. Those Shaeffers huh? Boy or girl, they got teeth on their naughty bits, hungry for the hot in psychotic and the fun in dysfunctional. Man-junk and bitch-twat tastes much better with alcohol de-icing and seasoning.

The reason I was in a hurry to flee the Denaina Vagina was that I felt a tightening in my stomach and having flashbacks. Not LSD or alcoholic moments of clarity, but flashbacks to my meetings facilitated by Don Beuler, soon to be your boss. Beside public safety, Chief Beuler also volunteered efforts towards public health. I just double-checked to insure I didn't type "pubic health." My plan to drop hard drugs, soft drugs and alcohol, was working like a laxative, the sky darkened and the clouds looked heavy with loose stool. I wanted to relapse with a vengance.

Sobriety ain't no stranger to you coppers, but review the suffering of yer coworkers and pals. Race didn't play any part of these phenomenal miseries. Drunk, high, stoned, ripped, wasted or sober as a judge, we all found our way to houses of repute and ill, just for companionship. I joined Kim Nay, Ray Blanchard, Ken Jewell and Dean Westlake after long shitty shifts just to bullshit, drink a bucket of rum and cool down before I walked home. Sara and bun didn't deserve that shit, so structural drunkenness proved remedial. It also proved fatal. All those men listed are dead. I may also be dead too, but I missed the memo.

You see, sobriety ain't no fucking picnic, but it's better than stacked amalgamated hangovers. It also sure as shit didn't make me any happier. You coppers learned clean living as a prophylactic strategy, maintaining abstention with your genetically alcoholic Inuit spouses. What I mean by genetically alcoholic is an intolerance to heavy drinking. My wife oft tells her pals that she comes from a long line of violent alcoholics, followed by my contributory suffix that I come from a long line of tall alcoholics.

Despite a thirst for booze that'd kill an Englishman, your childrens' broken hearts didn't happen because they desired a shattered existence and torn youth, your child's heart was broken because it is easy and convenient. When fucked up or hungover, we bash children like low hanging fruit. Or a pinata. The candy that flies is the possibilities of marrying sober and not like us. In Alaska statute there's a clause that states it's legal to punch a woman, if she treats you like yer retarded children. Don't fret yer worried souls, our children married drunk-ass bitches, because we did the same.

My recommendation is that if you've gained chemistry free of tobacco and drink, cool. If we're still maintaining a substantial habit, walk like an Egyptian and stow a stash in the inner pockets of your cremation urn. All our ancestors stowed tools, snacks and treasures for us to make use of, upon our predetermined worm date, in the dark dirt beyond, under the dog-lot.

You see, you're supposed to be exactly where you are right now, doing these things exactly as you are. We've had families and friends pass away and left us here seemingly alone. But we're not alone, we're still surrounded by similarly lunatic imitators wearing masks of scars and bruises. Old men that withstood life to old age survived horrid lessons of mortality early in life. A counselor told me that I'm supposed to learn some painful lessons, then stay awake late at night communicating these lessons to smarter humans that understand mindless nonsense, and can make sense of a puzzle with pieces scattered all over fucking Alaska.

You've outlived tiny children, younger brothers and friends that suffered greatly abbreviated lives, passing on to you, messages that are important for you to later explain to the right person, at the right moment. This is a big fucking responsibility, cuz messages aren't in the speaking, they're in the hearing. And reading. So speak. Put on your thinking cap, your old man disguises and take a moment to explain to that human the message that truly needs to be said. And don't hesitate, not for a moment. It may be your child or another child that's outside, looking directly at you. Push aside the welfare parents and tell them exactly what's needed to be heard, right there.

Some time, in the next decade or century, that human will recall every word you told them, what you whispered and what they heard and it will make perfect sense. Of course, if asked for clarification, just explain you had a friend that ate too much Ex-Lax and blew shit all over this canvas and you ran to get a mop. Shrug and state you're just art critics and interpreters for the historically deaf, chemically dumb and genetically unread.

We've got a date to get together again. It's in roughly 10,000 years, camels will be back in Barrow, humans will look different due to micro-traces of goat, pig and dog DNA, because they're our descendants, yet still look like us. We'll all be only 100 years old. And holding. I'll check the phone book for an AA meeting, visit yer rest homes and pick you up. We'll get a chance to listen to these unnamed anonymous beings sharing testimonials about childhood beatings, broken teeth, torn eyeballs and bruised brains and how these memories returned with sobriety as they neared their graves.

We'll sit and drink my good coffee, listen to hairless beings, way in the future, that look like us, tell stories of their ancient ancestors' drinking and drugging, smoking and chewing. They'll nod in our direction, regress back to native languages we'll never decipher, with us forced to listen to them chatter aboriginal about prehistoric addictions and ancient traumas.

They will be talking about us.

Karl.