& Artificially Flavored

Don had never seen a stranger tractor more strangely misplaced than the one parked right up there against Boiler #6 in the room - technically a spacious multi-boiler facility plant. The only way anyone could have gotten it down there was be disassembling it and then reassembling it after getting it through the door -- which is exactly how Don planned to move it out. And that wasn't even the weirdest part. It was covered in sour candy. Rings, pretzels, worms, you name it, apparently hand-stuffed into every crevice where it would fit. "Seems about a week old," thought Don. "Creepy. Not... dangerous. Gross though?"

He wasn't a farmer but he knew farmers. Either he could sell this or barter it. "Can't trust it to start, who knows if the engine's gummed up... Literally!" He'd just clambered back up the stairs and was mulling over the logistics when the dwarf (achondroplasiac type) approached in a huff.

"Don't you even think of stealing my tractor!"

Don Ferris finds Something

 Don Ferris was a janitor.  He had always thought he was going to be the next big rock singing sensation, but he spent a large amount of his life cleaning up garbage and moving heavy things for people.  Sacrifices are a normal part of being a parent.  And Don was a proud father to two sons, Jack and Harry. They had moved away to college but he still saw them on breaks and kept their rooms clean.  He told them both that if they ever got destitute or in trouble AT ALL to come home and stay with him. His own Dad had kicked him out and told him to ‘sink or swim’ when he’d been 19.  He had tried to be a better father to his sons.  

     It was the end of the school year at Kalamata College, and once again the entitled and mostly well off students were busy throwing away mounds and mounds of perfectly good food, clothing, and a variety of household items that had no defects other than simply being things kid didn’t feel like packing or worrying over any further.  Don had shamelessly harvested whatever useful things he could find.   He’d found all sorts of goodies including a portable record player, a bunch of Halloween decorations, and a full size foose ball table. 

One day Don found something very strange in the old boiler room of Drake Hall.  That day would change the course of his life, though he wouldn’t know that for a few days.

Introduction &

 Years spent without writing on here. Not sure what it was… not wanting to give energy to anything big enough to displace my addiction, distract me from my false goals? A damn shame, whenever I've been in the zone of writing a Joe story, no matter how cringeworthy, it's felt good.

I spent years with no tomorrows, or at best tomorrow as Lou Reed's "just another day." Never brushing my teeth, never stopping smoking until it happily did become just too much, never learning any new skills. All had to be sacrificed before the fire. And the fire had to burn because there was no tomorrow. Round and round it goes.

But there is another side. ADHD sucks, both acutely and chronically. So does depression. Helping with the acute helps with the chronic. Therapy helps. Good therapy is fucking expensive even in quote Eastern Europe unquote, but it helps. For years I couldn't get over the hump of contacting a neurologist to set up meds. Fear. Anxiety. Lack of faith. Amazingly she got me fired up and past that. Atomoxetine, slowly ramped up to 100mg. (Fuck amphetamines; coffee, sugar, booze, nicotine, games, masturbation, and dope and whatever else I'm forgetting have been quite enough addictions of various forms and degrees over the years for me.) It slows down the whirlwind. I'm not magically cured of it all but that's not the point.

Poverty helps. Having no choice helps. I mean, there's always a choice. You can fall out onto the street and die. Then I guess there's no choice. But while you're alive there's a choice. One marriage counselor we had liked to say, "The only thing you HAVE to do is die." (It sounds milder in Czech.) But realistically and with the assumed condition of "in order to not suffer the unbearable," yeah no, sometimes you have no choice.

Stumbling along all these decades I never really trained any skills except customer service, which nobody values, and translation, of which suddenly nobody now accepts the value. Sucks to be me. Editing is still valued, ish. Nothing is really valued in the freelance world unless you know how to sell yourself. Har dee har, yeah, no, fuck you. Anyway, I don't. Also I feel like I'm too old to pick up new salable skills in time. I'm scared. But it's not like not doing Joe is gonna help.

Three years without any Joe is pretty sad. Yeah, let's get back to it.