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Introduction

Welcome!

This is the next post in my ongoing series of autobiographical stories. TW: this post deals with the physical abuse of minors and descriptions of medical trauma. Reader discretion is advised.

Readers Are Leaders

Growing up, my dad read to me often and even made up his own stories. As a result, I’m a lifelong reader and bibliophile. However, today I’m going to talk about a time when the library became a source of pain and horror for me. I’d just turned six years old, and my class went to our school’s library for the first time.

For legal reasons, I’ll refer to the librarian involved in this story as Mr. M.

I’d taken my seat when the boy next to me kicked me. I kicked him back and Mr. M told us to knock it off. A few minutes passed when the boy kicked me again. I kicked him back and the next thing I knew, Mr. M pulled me out of my seat and threw me headfirst into a bookshelf. I remember him pulling me from my seat and throwing me, then being pulled backward, but the impact is a blank.

Then he made me stand with my arms out like Jesus on the cross for the rest of the hour. In the days after he assaulted me, I didn’t remember anything of it, but luckily a neighbor girl who lived up the street from us saw the whole thing and told my parents.

The school started an investigation but allowed Mr. M to continue working.

The next week, while my class went to the library, I stayed behind and had my first seizure. My parents took me to the hospital and after running tests, they diagnosed me with epilepsy and after an MRI they found a cystic mass above my right temporal lobe at the site of the impact.

They started me on antiseizure meds and scheduled surgery to remove the mass, but a week before surgery I caught strep throat and the doctors prescribed me penicillin, even though my parents told them penicillin allergies ran on both sides of the family.

This was back in the early ‘90s when the only insurance we had was Medicaid, so they forced us to go to the doctors they assigned us. Said doctors told my parents not to worry, and they listened to them.

They shouldn’t have.

A Year-And-A-Half of Hell

The combination of antiseizure meds and penicillin triggered the first and most severe allergic reaction of my life: Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis (TEN, NSFW pictures in link). Initially, I developed a red blotchy rash and flu-like symptoms. My parents took me back to the doctors, who said there was nothing wrong with me.

 But I only got worse as the days passed.

 Week after week, my dad kept taking me to them, only to be told I was fine while I got weaker, and my fever soared.

Two months into this, I ran a fever of 103-104F and not even an ice bath could break it, so at my Uncle Stanley’s suggestion, my parents took me to Children’s Hospital in Detroit.

Within five minutes, they’d diagnosed me with Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS, a less severe form of TEN). The next thing the ER docs did was cover me in icepacks to break my fever. It worked, but the sudden change in body temperature caused me to go into shock and I flatlined.

What I remember most from the time I was clinically dead is the absolute silence and darkness I found myself in, the utter nothingness. I later learned it took them over forty-five minutes to get a stable pulse, but to me, it seemed like only seconds had passed.

When you get defibrillated, it feels like being slammed in the chest with a sledgehammer. And when your heart doesn’t restart, you gain momentary consciousness until the charge dissipates.

Then it’s back to nothingness.

Once they stabilized me and took me to the ICU, they started me on a new antiseizure med that made me hallucinate a giant spider was trying to eat me. I tore my bedding to shreds trying to get away from it and that sparked a lifelong aversion to spiders.

False Hope

I spent the next three months in the ICU and appeared to get better, so they moved me to a regular room, then released me the week before Christmas.

 Everyone at my dad’s job pitched in to buy me presents, including the brand-new Game Boy, all of which my roommate stole while I was at a magic show the hospital put on.

A week after being released, I started having breathing problems and my parents rushed me back to the ER.  

Over the coming weeks my breathing got worse and my skin began to peal, until I’d eventually lost over eighty percent of my epidermis and had damage to my lungs and windpipe. I had to be put on a vent and slipped into a coma for six months.

Rude Awakenings

I came to a few days before my seventh birthday, which we celebrated in the ICU with an Oreo ice cream cake. But the vent tube was the only thing holding things in place, so when they removed it, my air way collapsed, and they had to do an emergency tracheotomy.

When I regained consciousness three weeks later, I now had a breathing tube and I couldn’t talk well, as my vocal cords had accidentally been severed, rendering me effectively mute.

Because of the length of my coma, I had to relearn how to walk and how to communicate. I spent months in rehab and months more waiting for my parents to complete training how to take care of me.

Those first months were the hardest as I was full of displaced anger and lashed out at everyone, blaming them for what happened to me. Then I turned that anger inward, viewing what happened to me as divine retribution for my deviant sexuality (a tale for another time).

A New Beginning

When I finally went home for good, they homeschooled me for a while; a private tutor came to our house once a week and spent most of her time grading my work and didn’t teach me much of anything.

After a few months of this, I started third grade at a school for kids with disabilities like mine. Being the new kid and not being able to talk well made school a living hell. I kept to myself as the other kids didn’t want to work with me, and they would glare daggers at me whenever our teacher made them work with me.

And so my life settled into a pattern: I’d get sick and go into the hospital for a few months at a time, come out, have surgeries on my airway only for them to fail, rinse, repeat. I had anger issues for years and acted out by destroying things and getting into fights with my younger siblings.

Again, it being the ‘90s, my parents didn’t put me into therapy and instead beat my ass with a thick brown leather belt. And when that ceased to make me behave, they’d threatened to relinquish to the state, which gave me abandonment and intimacy issues that I’m still working through today.

As for Mr. M? My parents sued him, and it came to light he’d abused two other students, breaking one’s arm and the other’s leg. They fired him from his job and he lost his limo business.    

And the doctors responsible for my allergic reaction? When I was 12 my parents settled a malpractice lawsuit with them out of court for an undisclosed amount.

I’ve led quite the life for one not even forty. I still have my breathing tube, and while there have been talks of trying to reverse it, right now I’m content with the status quo. Medical technology has advanced a lot since my initial reaction. Who knows?

Maybe I’ll get rid of it yet.   

Conclusion

Thanks for reading and let me know if you want more of these stories.

What early childhood events have shaped you? How did you react?

Let me know in the comments.

Introduction

Welcome!

This is the second post in an ongoing series of autobiographical stories about my coming of age in the metro Detroit area.

Let me set the stage.

The year was 1989, and I’d just left the only home and friends I’d known back in West Germany. Because of the chaos caused by the fall of the Berlin Wall, my father’s discharge from the military got jammed up, so for the first six months of our stay in the US, it was just me, my mom, brother, and sister.

Having spent most of my life oversea in a tiny mountain town, coming to Michigan was a huge cultural shock. Back in Bindlach, no one cared that I and my siblings were biracial, but upon coming to Detroit I got racist comments like oreo, zebra, and worse, hurled at me. But the worst of it came from my father’s mother (whom to this day I refuse to call my grandmother) and my uncles.

The House that Betty Anne Built

 When we arrived in the US, we stayed with my father’s mother in Northwest Detroit (Six Mile and Grand River). Her house was a two-bedroom affair that we squeezed ten people in (eleven when my dad joined us). With so many people in such a small house, we were all over each other, and it was hell.

My father was the only one with a steady job, so money and food were in short supply, so much so, you had to guard your food when you ate to stop others from taking it right off your plate. To make matter worse, my three uncles (all in their 30s) would spend what money they had on the daily lotto and weed.

We were on welfare during this time and while this helped us greatly, my uncles would eat up all the food in the house when they got the munches, so there were days we only had slices of bread or nothing at all to eat.

Betty Anne was a self-proclaimed Baptist preacher and from the moment we moved in with her, she spewed all this bullshit about how white people were the devil and us being half white made us unclean and less than fully Black people like her. My Uncle Stan got in the act too, constantly spouting off about how the (white) man kept Black people down and how they needed to separate themselves from whites.

If that wasn’t bad enough, her house was infested with roaches and my Uncle Patrick’s on-again off-again girlfriend Penny would steal my brother’s and mine clothes for her son, which prompted my mom to label our clothes with permanent markers. But this did little to stop Penny from taking them.

I never understood why Betty treated us like shit while she doted on Penny’s son and his half-siblings, all of whom were biracial too.

But c’est la vie.

My dad was the oldest of Betty’s kids but was and still is a complete momma’s boy and let her walk all over us and I resented him for the longest time for this.

A Silver Lining

School was an escape for me, and it was there I met my first friend since coming to Detroit. My teacher Ms. Mally was awesome, and I still remember the clean up song she made us sing when we put away our toys.

 One day at recess, I got into a fight with another kid and bit him. They called my mom up to the school and had a meeting about it, and that was how I met Wenderryl McKenzie. As young kids are wont to do, we squashed our beef and became fast friends, which made things at home less sucky.

Then things turned for the better. The people in the house next to Betty’s moved and she and my uncles moved into it, leaving my family to live in her old house. The process took a few weeks, but by the end I had my own room and wasn’t crowded anymore. With only five mouths to feed instead of eleven, food wasn’t as scarce and I didn’t have to worry about guarding my plate while I ate, but it took me years to break that habit.

Even though we no longer lived with her, Betty still had a hold over my dad and whenever they were short on money for rent or other bills, she hit him up. This caused friction between my parents, so much so that they separated, and my mom took us to live with her friend Kay up north in Otter Lake, Michigan.

Otter Lake

Kay’s house was a ranch style two-bedroom, and we lived with her and her teenage son for several months. She had diabetes, and a highlight of the day was when she drank a juice because she’d let one of us finish it.

As with any change, it took time to adjust, and one of the biggest changes was going from being surrounded by a ton of other Black kids to being the only one in my class. The kids and my teacher were nice enough, but I missed Wenderryl and Ms. Mally, and my dad.

To help ease the transition, my mom would take us to the gas station near Kay’s house and let me play on their Super Mario Bros. arcade machine. I remember getting so frustrating at not being able to beat it, that I’d give myself nose bleeds.

I also recall that she had satellite TV and how I’d stay up late watching soft-core porn, among other things.

As for Kay’s son Jeremy(?), he tolerated me, even though I followed him around like a lost puppy. At the time I thought he was a jerk for ignoring me, but in hindsight, who could blame him for blowing me off? What teenager in their right mind wants to hang with a five-year-old?

Eventually my parents reconciled, we moved back to Detroit, and I started first grade with my all-time favorite teacher, Mrs. K.

For a while, things were good, then my class took their first trip to our school’s library, setting off a chain reaction of events that forever changed my life.

But that’s a story for another time.

Conclusion

Let me know if you like these stories as I have more to tell.

What were your early years like?

Let me know in the comments.

Description

 His full name is Jason Jordan Miller. He’s 16, 5’7, 185 lb, with light brown hair and green eyes. He has buck teeth and constantly wears a beat-up Tigers’ cap.

Personality

 Jason is a carefree, practical joker and a major fuck boy. An underachiever, he’s more concerned with socializing with friends than doing his work at school and has the habit of putting off assignments until the last minute. He can also be an asshole and take things too far. Jason is also obsessed with money, power, and fame and always has a plan going to get all three.

Likes

 He loves video games, hooking up with anything that moves, sleeping in, and pulling pranks on people and posting them on social media. He loves being the center of attention and can be egotistical, high jacking conversations to talk about himself. He’s also big into weed and drinking. He also enjoys working out with David, Lance, and Matt; and loves crypto, NFTs, and day trading.

Dislikes

Jason hates responsibilities, doing boring assignments and homework, and not getting his way. He also hates having his authority challenged and anyone calling him on his BS.  

Goals

 His number one goal is to have as much fun as possible and sleep with as many people as he can. Second, he wants to become a journalist and report on celebrities and sports.

Desires

 Jason desires sex, fun, and living life to its fullest, and screw the consequences.  

Fears

He fears intimacy, being “trapped” and having to become a responsible adult and being poor.

Morality/Religious Beliefs

Jason is Catholic but doesn’t take his faith too seriously. Morally, he’s hedonistic and libertine, caring only for his pleasure and freedom.

Political Alignment

Politically, he’s a libertarian.

Thanks for reading. Next week’s post will be the second in my series of autobiographical tales about growing a QPOC in the Midwest.

Welcome!

Introduction

This is the first in what I plan to be a recurring series of autobiographical stories.

From the time I was born until age five, I was a military brat; my father worked vice for the military police, and I spent the first years of my life at the Christensen Barracks in Bindlach, West Germany, AKA The Rock. It was called so because it was a tiny town in the Bavarian mountains with only one main road that wound around the side of the mountain.

‘80s baby

Like many kids in the ‘80s, I was left to my own devices for much of the time as both my parents worked, and as kids are wont to do, I found ways to entertain myself. I’d explore our apartment and the surrounding environs, hang out with other kids in the neighborhood, and do typical kids’ stuff like have sleepovers and go to Sunday school.

One vivid memory I have of The Rock is the Christmas I found a snail outside and one of our neighbors gave me a glass container shaped like a Christmas tree to put it in and I proceeded to show it off to all my friends. One of my guy friends whose name I can’t recall had some red food coloring and put it on himself pretending it was blood.

While running up and down the stairs, I slipped, the glass container shattered, and a chunk of it pierced my left side just above my hip. My parents rushed me to the hospital, but on the way there the engine of my dad’s Nissan caught fire and he had to extinguish it with my mom’s can of Pepsi. Afterward it wouldn’t start, so he carried me the rest of the way to the hospital, all the while blood was running down my side.

Once at the hospital, the doctor jammed his fingers into the wound to fish out glass fragments and sutured me up.

Birds and the Bees

   A fonder memory I have is when my sister was born.

I was three when my mother had my sister Sherrie (my brother Jamarr having been born thirteen months previously, six months premature and in the NICU all the while). My father took me to see them right after my mom gave birth and I remember being struck by how light-skinned my sister was (is still is) as she could pass for white. I also recall that my mom had fried chicken with vanilla ice cream and a Pepsi for dinner that night.

While my parents had told me I was getting a new sibling, and showed me an animated vhs tape about the birds and the bees with anatomically correct names of genitalia, it came as quite the shock to me when my parents brought home two babies instead of the one I saw.

I wasn’t happy going from an only child to the oldest.

But that’s life, lol.

There was also the time the twin girls in the apartment upstairs from us got chicken pox and my mom made me and Jamarr go play with them so we could get it too. Our case was severe, and I still have scars from where I scratched myself raw in places.

Then there was the year on my dad’s birthday when all the adults ganged up on him and striped him naked as a joke.

But the best memory from The Rock I have is of my next-door neighbor and BFF.

You Got a Friend in Me

My best friend at that time was a boy named Marcus, and he, I, and his older sisters would play house together. And he and I would play games on his computer (a commodore 64 if I recall correctly). His family and mine would also go on trips together to the beach and PX.

We and a few of the other kids in the neighborhood would hang out at the playground together and regale each other with the curse words we’d learned since our last meetup.

Being such a small town and me being so young, I thought everyone was like my family: a Black dad and a white mom. It wasn’t until we came stateside in ’89, shortly before my fifth birthday and the fall of the Berlin Wall, that I learned differently.

But that’s a story for another time.

We moved to Detroit to live with my father’s mother, and I came down with rubella. Marcus’s family moved stateside too (to Minnesota if I recall correctly), but with it being the era before social media or the internet we lost contact and I’ve never spoken to or seen him or any of the other kids from The Rock since.

Truthfully, I never had any friends later in life like the ones I did back then.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading this piece. Let me know if you want more of these stories as I have tons more to share.

You’ll be the death of me.

Another season has come and passed.

Another pointless fight,

Another sleepless night,

Another reason this can’t last.

Another birthday; man we’re growing old fast.

Another evening of screaming and weeping.

Another reason for ending this.

Another reason I’m done with this hot mess.

Another chance to start anew.

I’m sick of you.

No more time to see this through.

I was such a fool,

But now I’m free of you.

Here’s to the death of the old me.

Reign of the Unfortunate, by Daniel Aegan, is a villain punk novel set in Pristine City and follows five supervillains’ attempt to kill Cricket Man and the aftermath once they succeed.

The five supervillains are dubbed the Unfortunate Five by the media and are led by Dr. Everything, whose biomechanical tentacles reminded me a lot of Dr. Octopus’s. This is a recurring theme, as Aegan mentioned in the afterword that this story began as fan fiction, which isn’t a bad thing, if you like comics/superhero movies.

The other Unfortunate five members are Kilowatt, who manipulates electricity; Osprey, who has no powers but is a technical genius and was lovers with Dr. Everything; Bad Juju, a dark magician whose illusions are real; and Glam Gargoyle, a demoness who controls hell fire.

One thing I loved about this book is that each of the Unfortunate Five got page time, so you could get into their heads. I also loved how this book reminded me of the animated series and comics I read in the ‘90s during the height of the “Death of Superman” story arc. I also loved how Aegan handled romance in the book. It was there, but it didn’t take over the story like in so many books.

As self-published books go, this was one of the better ones. While there were typos and clunky sentences, it wasn’t to the point the book was unreadable. However, it could have undergone another round of edits to catch the things I mention above. I also thought the book went off the rails toward the end. While Aegan managed to get things back on track and wrap things up brilliantly, I felt the plot twist was only added because once the Unfortunate Five gained control of the world, there was no more tension/conflict.

That said, I did love this book and recommend you pick it up if you like comics/superhero movies.
I give Reign of the Unfortunate 4.0 out of 5 stars.




View all my reviews

Introduction

Welcome back readers!

Today’s post will discuss the role music has played in my life and how it’s shaped the creation of Palingenesis. Music has been a part of my life since before I was born. When my mother was pregnant with me, she would play Atomic Dog by George Clinton, a fact I learned when I heard the song on the radio for the first time and my mother asked me if I liked it.

Music has always been there for me when I was sad, angry, or just needed to chill. Were it not, I might not be here today.

Millennial Mix Tape

I was bullied a lot as kid and there were days I’d come home and lock myself in the bathroom with my music turned up so loud no one could hear me sobbing. I’m not gonna lie. There were days I wanted to kill myself and days I wanted to kill my bullies. I was a big old ball of rage and hurt.

But music was there to sooth me.

As a kid I listened to Motown, R&B, rap, and soul like everyone else in my neighborhood did. But things changed at eleven when I heard Nirvana perform Smells Like Teen Spirit on MTV—back when they played music instead of infinity reality shows. Eleven-year-old me connected with the undercurrent of rage in that song and other grunge bands. And as time moved on, I discovered classic rock bands like Zeppelin, the Stones, and CCR. And when Nu metal hit, I devoured bands like Disturbed, Linkin Park, and Limp Bizkit.

Their angry lyrics and guitar riffs spoke to me like nothing had before, and I’d spend hours in my room listening to them and daydreaming about how I was strong and powerful. And little by little, that was how the Idea for Palingenesis formed.     

Songs as Story Fodder

When I turned sixteen, we got a cable modem, which allowed me to surf the internet at much faster speeds than dial up. Aside from all the porn I looked at, I stumbled into the world of AMV’s (animated music videos), where people made music videos of their favorite shows set to a song and later slash videos, that is AMV’s that focused on same-gender relationships.

I was, and still am, struck by the ability to tell stories by piecing together video clips set to a song.  And throughout the course of writing my book, I’ve tried to make it a cinematic experience by having music play a role in the story such as when Travis and Josh bond over listening to music. Or Travis’s ability to recall in perfect detail anything he’s heard and how he uses this to help him learn various human and allien languages.

Moreover, when I don’t know how to write a scene or am stuck, I listen to music and write what I see in my head. My go to songs for fight scenes are anything by Disturbed or Linkin Park’s first two albums. And when I’m having trouble with romantic scenes, I cue up songs by Savage Garden, Ben Folds, and Trading Yesterday.  I’ve also listened to certain songs to set the tone. For example I listen to I Will Not Bow by Breaking Benjamin whenever I write a fight scene between Travis and Oblivion, latter of whom is evil incarnate. 

And when I’m not feeling in the mood to write I cue up Not Afraid by Eminem or Get Up by Shinedown. In fact, I have a whole playlist of songs I listen to when I’m down. If you’d like the link for this playlist let me know.

There are also certain songs like Lux Aeterna, Rise by League of Legends featuring The World Alive, and Heart of Courage by Two Steps from Hell that put me in the mood to write something epic.

On the whole, music has been a panacea to me and I hope you enjoy the influence it’s had on my work.

Conclusion

Music at its core is about the human condition and when combined with an artist’s touch, the experience can be nothing short of sublime. Below is a link to the playlist I created specifically for Palingenesis. I’d love to hear what you think of it. Also, be sure to share this post with your friends on social media and join my mailing list.

Introduction

Welcome!

Todays posts is another character prolife; this time focusing on josh’s friend Brianna.

Description

Brianna Bernadette Burgos is 14, four feet and eleven inches tall, weighs 105 pounds, and has black wavy hair and brown eyes with dark brown skin. She is Puerto Rican and black, allo cis, het and wears her great grandmother’s St. Mary pendent everywhere.

Personality

  She’s a bit of a tomboy, has a temper, and can be stubborn, but loves her friends and will die protecting them. She’s the heart of the Josh’s friend group and tries to keep the peace.

Likes

 She likes rap, salsa, dancing, painting, computers, animals, the environment, and has a crush on Josh.

Dislikes

 She hates video games, meat, fuck boys, wearing anything too girly, getting her hair wet, and anyone who tries to hurt her friends.

Goals

 Her main goal is going to college and getting a high-paying job so she can bring her extended family from Puerto Rico. Second, she wants to start her own line of vegan cosmetics geared toward the Latinx community. Third, she wants to be a singer/songwriter.

Desires

 Her greatest desire is to be close to her friends and family. She also desires to be popular and rich, so her parents don’t have to work so hard.

Fears

 Her greatest fear is the Squad breaking up, followed by Josh not being into her, and roaches.

Morality/Religious Beliefs

 She is deeply Catholic and takes her faith seriously, going to service several times a week and confessional twice a week. Morally she is chaotic good, doing what she believes is right regardless of what the law or society says.

Political Alignment

 Politically she is very progressive and would proudly describe herself as a social justice warrior

Conclusion

Thanks for reading, and please share this online if you liked it.