The Ever-Loving Virgin Prince
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Everyone Has A Sex Blog But Me
My loyal and lethargic listeners,
Back when I was in high school, when everyone else was buying Collective Soul albums and picking colleges, I was busy writing my will and planning out my funeral. There were a few things I figured out about that eventual occasion: my buddy Immoral B would play Mellow Yellow (which had been my theme-song of sorts during my teenage years… not that the song’s multiple references to vibrating female sex-toys had much to do with me) at the service, and my very coffin would be carried into the building by an army of pallbearers wearing Stormtrooper uniforms while John Williams’ Imperial March played. In my view, funerals especially, of all things, should be handled with a sense of humor. I’d rather not have a dry and somber event to further add to my friends’ and family’s already intense feelings of grief. Give ‘em a smile, that’s my motto.
In retrospect, I suppose I also wouldn’t mind getting Attractive Nuisance to play after the funeral (though they’re already bound by oral contract to play at my eventual wedding) and I’d hope I’d have enough funeral money set aside by then to be able to afford buying a final round of Bass for all my friends and family… well, all those who aren’t recovered alcoholics, which I’m sure I will know plenty of by then. But all the alkies still get a frosty mug of sarsaparilla. And I’d be particularly touched if for my funeral a chorus of my friends sang a full, boisterous rendition of I Am the Very Model of A Modern Major General.
By now, you’ve probably picked up on the fact that I’ve always assumed I’d die before the rest of my friends. I’ve not smoked a single cigarette without entertaining thoughts of my eventual death by cancer. I’ve not had a single drop to drink without visions of eventual kidney failure and cirrhosis of the liver. When I walk down the street at night, I always expect a load of buckshot to the gut every time a car coming from the opposite direction passes by me. It’s not from watching Easy Rider.
No, I’ve always been a bit more of a Werewolves On Wheels fan anyway.
The truth is, I’ve always been a bit preoccupied with death, particularly in the case of my own mortality. I think this has caused me to act a bit more cautious than the rest over the years; perhaps it’s worked to my benefit. Perhaps not. Nevertheless, the knowledge that the Reaper is just around the corner has shaped the way I’ve lived my life, without question.
Eventually, I simply came to accept that my own death is inevitable. This resulted in a carefree enjoyment of vices and an emphasis on partying down and focusing on living a life of fun. I’ve come to the conclusion that life is simply much too short for a lot of the bullshit that people invite into their lives, or the poppycock they create themselves. To this end, I focus on friendship, happiness, and direct and truthful conversation. Let others pussyfoot around what’s on their minds, let them hide themselves behind carefully-crafted appearances and pretense. Life’s too short. With me, what you see is what you get, and when I think something I say it. When I want to know something, I ask it. I found that a lot of the females I’ve dealt with have been generally unfamiliar with, and even occasionally suspicious of this form of to-the-point honesty. Others seem to admire it. Whatever the case, it’s simply how I am.
Of course, all of this stems from my firm belief that death is just around the corner. So the question becomes, why do I have this absurd preoccupation with my own mortality? There’s one reason that comes to mind. It’s not a widely known fact, but I’m the third-generation result of living on borrowed time.
As far back as I know the history of my direct family line, it started with my grandfather; I don’t really know what occurred before him. I know I had an ancestor in the Civil War that caught a bullet meant for his heart in his trusty Bible, but not much beyond that. But I do know the story of my grandfather. It starts like this:
When my grandfather was just a young boy he discovered his father’s gun, removing it from the gun’s hiding place and bringing it to a friend so that they could marvel at the gun together. Caught up in their pre-adolescent wonder, they began to play with the gun together. It was at this point that my grandfather’s friend shot him in the chest at pointblank range.
I don’t really understand how my grandfather lived through that, nor, really, did his doctors. The medical science of the day wasn’t what it is now, and he wasn’t expected to live. But somehow, miraculously, he did. That’s not to say that it wasn’t incredibly close or that he wasn’t very, very near death’s door for quite a while.
But to my knowledge he eventually recovered to the point where he was able to function normally once more, growing up as boys do and eventually meeting my grandmother. They produced my uncle, a second child that didn’t survive birth due to my grandmother's exposure to the pesticides of the day, and then my father. Life continued along as normal, with them all living a normal family life until one day when my father was around ten years old. He was suddenly made aware that his father was in the hospital.
From nowhere, the gunshot that had felled my grandfather as a boy had now returned, this time to finish the job. Doctors x-rayed my grandfather, finding themselves astounded at seeing the twisted state his insides were in, viewing in awe a massive, knotty hole where none should exist, and unsure how it was he was still living. My grandfather died in that hospital not long after, the doctors couldn’t do anything to save him, unable to fathom how he’d ever survived the gunshot to begin with.
Times were tough, and my grandmother, father, and uncle survived as best they could, adapting and engaging in several adventures together, numerous cross-country road-trips among them (on one such occasion my uncle spotted a sasquatch which crossed the road in two steps while my father and grandmother were sleeping; he later sketched the creature, the sketch eerily matching later sketches we viewed one evening while casually viewing Unsolved Mysteries, and not the more popular preconceived notions of the day… whatever the case, my father was rather unnerved.) Fortunately, my grandmother has always been an admirable woman, and was able to hold the family together quite well.
And the sons grew up.
Like myself, my father liked to party in his youth, though he was much more reckless, and he tried out quite a few more vices, though I suppose considering the culture of the day, that’s not all that unusual. We once had a conversation regarding a corduroy shirt I’d been wearing, each of us shocked to find that the other had once had their single worst drinking (over-drinking) and vomiting experience while wearing our similar corduroy shirts at similar points in our life. The sins of youth repeated. Destiny, genetic memory, what-have-you can be a real dark son of a bitch sometimes. My father ended our conversation with one statement, “if I can just give you one bit of advice, never try coke.”
Words that later ran through my head, rang in my ears, and otherwise haunted me as a telltale heart the one time when I did succumb to peer pressure and try coke, which was crap anyway, being the best that Mission Street had to offer. I stopped hanging out with my heroin-addict ex-buddy not long afterward, and with that my exposure to hard drugs had ceased. Never again did I want to do cocaine, I couldn’t stomach the guilt that came with it; couldn’t ignore the earnestness of the plea from my father, or forget the sound of regret in his voice as he said it.
Besides, after several years of taking Ritalin (thanks to America’s wonderful obsession with over-diagnosing disorders, particularly A.D.D., leading to the point where I eventually ground up my pills and snorted them, using the lens of a broken pair of novelty nerd glasses I owned and the back-end of a Phillips screwdriver as a makeshift mortar and pestle; back when I calculated how many I was allotted per month, hoarding the extras while getting my prescription refilled the second I was able to; back when I only slept an hour a night; back when I didn’t know I was very addicted and had a serious problem), cocaine seemed rather trite by comparison.
Incidentally, I wouldn’t recommend snorting Ritalin to anyone. It’s fun at first, but it messes up your nose something fierce; I couldn’t breathe normally through both nostrils for several months after the last time I did it. Back to the tale at hand…
So my father liked to party. He lived in Venice and in Los Angeles; he met movie stars and had drug buddies. He collected switchblades and butterfly knives, and went out with a daughter of one of the policemen that had been on the scene after Sharon Tate’s murder at the Roman Polanski residence. He still remembers vividly the descriptions of how blood had covered the walls. His apartment was robbed by old buddies that were now drugged out and desperate for fixes. He was kicked out of one apartment by his landlord, The Amazing Criswell (the fortune-telling hack that later went on to star in Ed Wood films) because in Criswell’s eyes he was a hippie, and he’d just had a party shortly after moving in. One time he bumped into Sly Stone while on the street, another time he introduced himself to Harry Belafonte while very drunk on Harvey Wallbangers, yet another time he met Larry Fine (of The Three Stooges) while at a bar; Larry being particularly tipsy (and old at this point) and with a buxom female on each arm. Yes, my father liked to party.
On one fateful night, my father, leaving a party (whether to go home or to pick up more drugs or beer, I can’t recall) hopped on to his motorcycle. At this point he was already drunk, and possibly had other things going through his system, but it didn’t stop him from giving the bike some gas and taking off. I don’t believe he’d made it very far before he’d hit a car, and as he was lying there in the darkness, two more cars ran over his legs. Much to his good fortune, someone noticed him, and help was summoned. My father doesn’t remember much of this, his main recollection is of looking down at his leg and seeing several inches of the bone pointing up towards him.
It goes without saying that my father lost a lot of blood, and if he hadn’t been brought to a hospital as quickly as he had, he most likely wouldn’t have made it. It was fortunate that whoever was in charge opted for the hospital that they did, because the other hospital in range wouldn’t have been as adequately suited to treat him. Just the same, he very nearly didn’t pull through, even in the hospital, and was in recovery for quite a long time. A lot of surgery went into repairing his legs, and when all was done, he was shorter, and his legs were uneven, leaving him to walk lopsided, and forever causing him to need special shoes from then on. Ricardo Montalban has uneven legs as well, and this is why today he’s in a wheelchair. It throws the spine out of alignment and causes all sorts of problems and pain.
As for my father, the scars on his legs are still quite visible (though “scars” is an understatement; his legs are literally reshaped, curving inward and outward at entirely different places than does your leg or mine) though if you ask him now, he’ll likely tell you that the damage is from a shark attack, which sounds much cooler. He can tell if it’s going to rain from the feeling in his legs, and he’s had two corrective surgeries so far that have alternately made him taller, and shorter still, though neither procedure took. This week he’ll be going in for yet another attempt, which I very much hope succeeds this time, and I’ll be going up briefly to assist him while he recovers.
Of course, after he got out the hospital then, he didn’t stop partying. His eventual reformation didn’t occur until some years later.
So there you go, I’m the son of a man who should have died long before I was born, and he, in turn, was similarly the son of a man who should have died long before he was born.
As for myself, I have no tales of near-death anywhere near as impressive. Hours after I was born I was rushed back to the hospital, suffering from an apparent hernia which prompted me to be cut open (on both sides) and fixed back up. When I was around 4 or 5 I fell into a friend’s pool, flailing wildly and gasping for air as I sunk slowly to the bottom. Fortunately, a neighbor saw me, running to the pool and diving in, saving me from certain death. It was quite fortunate she could hear my screams and gurgles from inside the house. As recently as a few months ago I was in a car crash with a few friends of mine. The crash wasn’t terrible; it totaled the car but it was one we were able to walk away from. But later on I was made aware of the fact that due to the way the back of the car was loaded, had the vehicle behind us not been able to stop before smacking into us as well (and I’m still a bit amazed that he was), I very possibly could have been decapitated or at the very least suffered from some very serious head and neck trauma. I consider myself very lucky.
I’m grateful to be alive. I consider myself very fortunate to be here. I know that by many ways I SHOULDN’T be here. John Wayne said something once while he was dying from cancer, that being, “every day you get out of bed is a good day.” Words to live by. Words to ponder.
I was going to say more, but I’m tired. Stay happy.
Be seeing you,
The Virgin Prince
Back when I was in high school, when everyone else was buying Collective Soul albums and picking colleges, I was busy writing my will and planning out my funeral. There were a few things I figured out about that eventual occasion: my buddy Immoral B would play Mellow Yellow (which had been my theme-song of sorts during my teenage years… not that the song’s multiple references to vibrating female sex-toys had much to do with me) at the service, and my very coffin would be carried into the building by an army of pallbearers wearing Stormtrooper uniforms while John Williams’ Imperial March played. In my view, funerals especially, of all things, should be handled with a sense of humor. I’d rather not have a dry and somber event to further add to my friends’ and family’s already intense feelings of grief. Give ‘em a smile, that’s my motto.
In retrospect, I suppose I also wouldn’t mind getting Attractive Nuisance to play after the funeral (though they’re already bound by oral contract to play at my eventual wedding) and I’d hope I’d have enough funeral money set aside by then to be able to afford buying a final round of Bass for all my friends and family… well, all those who aren’t recovered alcoholics, which I’m sure I will know plenty of by then. But all the alkies still get a frosty mug of sarsaparilla. And I’d be particularly touched if for my funeral a chorus of my friends sang a full, boisterous rendition of I Am the Very Model of A Modern Major General.
By now, you’ve probably picked up on the fact that I’ve always assumed I’d die before the rest of my friends. I’ve not smoked a single cigarette without entertaining thoughts of my eventual death by cancer. I’ve not had a single drop to drink without visions of eventual kidney failure and cirrhosis of the liver. When I walk down the street at night, I always expect a load of buckshot to the gut every time a car coming from the opposite direction passes by me. It’s not from watching Easy Rider.
No, I’ve always been a bit more of a Werewolves On Wheels fan anyway.
The truth is, I’ve always been a bit preoccupied with death, particularly in the case of my own mortality. I think this has caused me to act a bit more cautious than the rest over the years; perhaps it’s worked to my benefit. Perhaps not. Nevertheless, the knowledge that the Reaper is just around the corner has shaped the way I’ve lived my life, without question.
Eventually, I simply came to accept that my own death is inevitable. This resulted in a carefree enjoyment of vices and an emphasis on partying down and focusing on living a life of fun. I’ve come to the conclusion that life is simply much too short for a lot of the bullshit that people invite into their lives, or the poppycock they create themselves. To this end, I focus on friendship, happiness, and direct and truthful conversation. Let others pussyfoot around what’s on their minds, let them hide themselves behind carefully-crafted appearances and pretense. Life’s too short. With me, what you see is what you get, and when I think something I say it. When I want to know something, I ask it. I found that a lot of the females I’ve dealt with have been generally unfamiliar with, and even occasionally suspicious of this form of to-the-point honesty. Others seem to admire it. Whatever the case, it’s simply how I am.
Of course, all of this stems from my firm belief that death is just around the corner. So the question becomes, why do I have this absurd preoccupation with my own mortality? There’s one reason that comes to mind. It’s not a widely known fact, but I’m the third-generation result of living on borrowed time.
As far back as I know the history of my direct family line, it started with my grandfather; I don’t really know what occurred before him. I know I had an ancestor in the Civil War that caught a bullet meant for his heart in his trusty Bible, but not much beyond that. But I do know the story of my grandfather. It starts like this:
When my grandfather was just a young boy he discovered his father’s gun, removing it from the gun’s hiding place and bringing it to a friend so that they could marvel at the gun together. Caught up in their pre-adolescent wonder, they began to play with the gun together. It was at this point that my grandfather’s friend shot him in the chest at pointblank range.
I don’t really understand how my grandfather lived through that, nor, really, did his doctors. The medical science of the day wasn’t what it is now, and he wasn’t expected to live. But somehow, miraculously, he did. That’s not to say that it wasn’t incredibly close or that he wasn’t very, very near death’s door for quite a while.
But to my knowledge he eventually recovered to the point where he was able to function normally once more, growing up as boys do and eventually meeting my grandmother. They produced my uncle, a second child that didn’t survive birth due to my grandmother's exposure to the pesticides of the day, and then my father. Life continued along as normal, with them all living a normal family life until one day when my father was around ten years old. He was suddenly made aware that his father was in the hospital.
From nowhere, the gunshot that had felled my grandfather as a boy had now returned, this time to finish the job. Doctors x-rayed my grandfather, finding themselves astounded at seeing the twisted state his insides were in, viewing in awe a massive, knotty hole where none should exist, and unsure how it was he was still living. My grandfather died in that hospital not long after, the doctors couldn’t do anything to save him, unable to fathom how he’d ever survived the gunshot to begin with.
Times were tough, and my grandmother, father, and uncle survived as best they could, adapting and engaging in several adventures together, numerous cross-country road-trips among them (on one such occasion my uncle spotted a sasquatch which crossed the road in two steps while my father and grandmother were sleeping; he later sketched the creature, the sketch eerily matching later sketches we viewed one evening while casually viewing Unsolved Mysteries, and not the more popular preconceived notions of the day… whatever the case, my father was rather unnerved.) Fortunately, my grandmother has always been an admirable woman, and was able to hold the family together quite well.
And the sons grew up.
Like myself, my father liked to party in his youth, though he was much more reckless, and he tried out quite a few more vices, though I suppose considering the culture of the day, that’s not all that unusual. We once had a conversation regarding a corduroy shirt I’d been wearing, each of us shocked to find that the other had once had their single worst drinking (over-drinking) and vomiting experience while wearing our similar corduroy shirts at similar points in our life. The sins of youth repeated. Destiny, genetic memory, what-have-you can be a real dark son of a bitch sometimes. My father ended our conversation with one statement, “if I can just give you one bit of advice, never try coke.”
Words that later ran through my head, rang in my ears, and otherwise haunted me as a telltale heart the one time when I did succumb to peer pressure and try coke, which was crap anyway, being the best that Mission Street had to offer. I stopped hanging out with my heroin-addict ex-buddy not long afterward, and with that my exposure to hard drugs had ceased. Never again did I want to do cocaine, I couldn’t stomach the guilt that came with it; couldn’t ignore the earnestness of the plea from my father, or forget the sound of regret in his voice as he said it.
Besides, after several years of taking Ritalin (thanks to America’s wonderful obsession with over-diagnosing disorders, particularly A.D.D., leading to the point where I eventually ground up my pills and snorted them, using the lens of a broken pair of novelty nerd glasses I owned and the back-end of a Phillips screwdriver as a makeshift mortar and pestle; back when I calculated how many I was allotted per month, hoarding the extras while getting my prescription refilled the second I was able to; back when I only slept an hour a night; back when I didn’t know I was very addicted and had a serious problem), cocaine seemed rather trite by comparison.
Incidentally, I wouldn’t recommend snorting Ritalin to anyone. It’s fun at first, but it messes up your nose something fierce; I couldn’t breathe normally through both nostrils for several months after the last time I did it. Back to the tale at hand…
So my father liked to party. He lived in Venice and in Los Angeles; he met movie stars and had drug buddies. He collected switchblades and butterfly knives, and went out with a daughter of one of the policemen that had been on the scene after Sharon Tate’s murder at the Roman Polanski residence. He still remembers vividly the descriptions of how blood had covered the walls. His apartment was robbed by old buddies that were now drugged out and desperate for fixes. He was kicked out of one apartment by his landlord, The Amazing Criswell (the fortune-telling hack that later went on to star in Ed Wood films) because in Criswell’s eyes he was a hippie, and he’d just had a party shortly after moving in. One time he bumped into Sly Stone while on the street, another time he introduced himself to Harry Belafonte while very drunk on Harvey Wallbangers, yet another time he met Larry Fine (of The Three Stooges) while at a bar; Larry being particularly tipsy (and old at this point) and with a buxom female on each arm. Yes, my father liked to party.
On one fateful night, my father, leaving a party (whether to go home or to pick up more drugs or beer, I can’t recall) hopped on to his motorcycle. At this point he was already drunk, and possibly had other things going through his system, but it didn’t stop him from giving the bike some gas and taking off. I don’t believe he’d made it very far before he’d hit a car, and as he was lying there in the darkness, two more cars ran over his legs. Much to his good fortune, someone noticed him, and help was summoned. My father doesn’t remember much of this, his main recollection is of looking down at his leg and seeing several inches of the bone pointing up towards him.
It goes without saying that my father lost a lot of blood, and if he hadn’t been brought to a hospital as quickly as he had, he most likely wouldn’t have made it. It was fortunate that whoever was in charge opted for the hospital that they did, because the other hospital in range wouldn’t have been as adequately suited to treat him. Just the same, he very nearly didn’t pull through, even in the hospital, and was in recovery for quite a long time. A lot of surgery went into repairing his legs, and when all was done, he was shorter, and his legs were uneven, leaving him to walk lopsided, and forever causing him to need special shoes from then on. Ricardo Montalban has uneven legs as well, and this is why today he’s in a wheelchair. It throws the spine out of alignment and causes all sorts of problems and pain.
As for my father, the scars on his legs are still quite visible (though “scars” is an understatement; his legs are literally reshaped, curving inward and outward at entirely different places than does your leg or mine) though if you ask him now, he’ll likely tell you that the damage is from a shark attack, which sounds much cooler. He can tell if it’s going to rain from the feeling in his legs, and he’s had two corrective surgeries so far that have alternately made him taller, and shorter still, though neither procedure took. This week he’ll be going in for yet another attempt, which I very much hope succeeds this time, and I’ll be going up briefly to assist him while he recovers.
Of course, after he got out the hospital then, he didn’t stop partying. His eventual reformation didn’t occur until some years later.
So there you go, I’m the son of a man who should have died long before I was born, and he, in turn, was similarly the son of a man who should have died long before he was born.
As for myself, I have no tales of near-death anywhere near as impressive. Hours after I was born I was rushed back to the hospital, suffering from an apparent hernia which prompted me to be cut open (on both sides) and fixed back up. When I was around 4 or 5 I fell into a friend’s pool, flailing wildly and gasping for air as I sunk slowly to the bottom. Fortunately, a neighbor saw me, running to the pool and diving in, saving me from certain death. It was quite fortunate she could hear my screams and gurgles from inside the house. As recently as a few months ago I was in a car crash with a few friends of mine. The crash wasn’t terrible; it totaled the car but it was one we were able to walk away from. But later on I was made aware of the fact that due to the way the back of the car was loaded, had the vehicle behind us not been able to stop before smacking into us as well (and I’m still a bit amazed that he was), I very possibly could have been decapitated or at the very least suffered from some very serious head and neck trauma. I consider myself very lucky.
I’m grateful to be alive. I consider myself very fortunate to be here. I know that by many ways I SHOULDN’T be here. John Wayne said something once while he was dying from cancer, that being, “every day you get out of bed is a good day.” Words to live by. Words to ponder.
I was going to say more, but I’m tired. Stay happy.
The Virgin Prince
