I’ve said it many times before—I hate flying. It fucking terrifies me and not in a distant, abstract way. Currently, I am aloft at 21,711 feet, somewhere over New York, partially through the initial ascent of a fourty-eight minute flight to Burlington, Vermont. Pure, gut-churning terror. No, I don’t want a bag of airline peanuts, thanks.

I find it ironic that in my life, whenever I take a vacation, usually in a state of just past bug-crazy, fully sick of New York City and all the human vermin that turn it’s wheels (myself included), that in order for to get away, to relax and do the things stupid people do when frolicking with the natives, it requires my ass to be hovering many thousands of feet in the air, traveling at 540 miles per hour as a preamble or perhaps as a penance for being such a horrid little man. Say five Hail Marys and then you can go play—something like that..

At heights and speeds such as these, I question the point of it. Five days ass-out, drunk and stoned out of my gizzard, surrounded by plants and barbecued meats for the price of slightly less than one hour of stomach-twisting terror at high altitudes, spiced with the chance of ending my life screaming incoherantly before being enveloped in a giant flaming ball of death. It kind of makes me want to stay home on the couch, safely fused with my PlayStation.

But no. Here I am, trying not to bleat like a baby goat getting castrated as the turbulence kicks the plane about. What the fuck is wrong with me? Why didn’t I take the train? Smart people who live long lives take trains. Personally, I prefer to live a long time and the closest I’d like to get to death by plunging fireball is watching it happen on television, laughing at the misfortunes of others.

I’m on vacation. I’m supposed to be having a good time. I was enjoying myself, until I went to Canada.

A simple, innocent trip to Montreal for some dinner, a croissant, perhaps a Montreal bagel or some poutaine turned into a harrowing near death gauntlet of utter fucking lameness that threatened to swallow me complete, never to let me escape it’s cheese curd and gravy fries eating clutches. Eh, indeed.

It may seem like just about the end of summer in New York City, but in Montreal, it’s colder than my grandmother’s ass on Easter morning. Wandering the streets in what felt like near hurricane winds, dressed only in a t-shirt, jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, I had to keep telling myself that somewhere in Antarctica, there were Ethiopian children, naked and without benefit of parkas, freezing to death and that I should be grateful for what meager clothing I had on.

I had no idea where anything was and the guide books available were obviously written by prunish, evil Canadian gnomes that lived to fuck those who refuse to speak French while wearing flannel. I spent the majority of the time there wandering around, desperately trying to find something, anything close to cool. All the places I went to were hideous tourist traps that could’ve at least sprung for a pedophile in and oversized mouse outfit.

All the food I was hoping to find was buried deep beneath a pile of semi-edible crap, covered in cheese or some maple product. I could’ve paid some Starbucks employees a few bucks to read me some French while I ate some of their crap food and drank the over-roasted swill coffee and my experience would have been quite comparable and cheaper.

I used to love Montreal. I’d head up there at least a couple times a year when I was still living in Vermont. I’m not really sure what brought the wrath of the hockey puck gods upon me and caused them to curse me with the most spleen-burstingly horrible day trip I’ve had in years but I have learned my lesson. I spent much of the time swearing, freezing and wandering around in a blind daze. Not exactly that different from a typical day for me, but the love just wasn’t there.

To finish off my Canadian experience, I and the others I was with became fully fucking lost trying to get back to America and spent several hours driving around, squinting at shitty maps with the fearful thought that Canada, now having us in it’s clutches was refusing to let us go and was contenting itself by leading us in endless cheese smothered and French-spitting circles . Hell. It wouldn’t be so bad if Canadians weren’t so damn polite.

So, obviously and eventually, I was able to get my ass back to Vermont. I highly doubt I will ever be willing to set foot in that godforsaken, moose-humping country ever again.

I’m sitting amongst a mass of very loud drunk people. I have to hop a plane back to NYC at the butt-crack of dawn tomorrow, so I’ve been keeping things understated because there’s not much worse then mass transportation with a hangover.

I spent this weekend going a bit crazy, riding out one night with a big bonfire, watching the sun rise and sleeping on the sand. It’s a certain type of morning misery to wake with the sun in your eyes, hungover, with people stepping over you and I fully explored that slice of life this weekend. With this out of the way, I am clear for the rest of the year to spend my time doing boring, geriatric and repetitive things to my heart’s desire.

While getting blotto and devoured by mosquitoes, I was told that my best friend, from way back when, Jakob Ohlsson, a guy I knew and spent all my time with fifteen years ago, had died.

The last time I saw him was about five years ago, shortly before I moved to NYC. We bumped into each other in a bar and he told me that soon, he’d also be relocating to Brooklyn. I gave him my email address and I hoped we’d touch base later, after we’d both settled in to the city.

I never heard from him again. I assumed he was in New York City and once or twice a year, I’d Google his name and see if I could locate a means to get in touch with him. Just last month, I’d tried searching again. Time had gone by and we’d stopped hanging around, but he was someone that I always wanted to keep in touch with. Maybe once a year have a beer and smoke a joint, paying homage to the derelict train-wreck pair of adolescents that we were, then just shake hands and go back to our respective responsibilities with the knowledge that we’d turned out okay, despite what people predicted. We came out on top and yet we were still crazy enough to be cool by our standards. That’s what was supposed to happen anyway.

This morning, someone emailed me his obituary. It had his photo and there’s just no getting around the fact that my friend Jake is gone. He’d died of asthma complications almost two years ago. He was thirty years old and had a baby daughter. I don’t know where he’s buried.

Jake and I were troubled teenagers, bonded together over the fact that collectively, we were pharmaceutically much more reckless than our peers. We shared an interest in music, art, drugs, being punk rock and seeing who could more successfully interpret “fuck it” into a working lifestyle. Jake was a smart kid. He was calm, laid back and when I think of him, the first thing that comes to mind was his seemingly omnipresent smile and laugh that totally belied his aggressive exterior.

We were angry. We were crazy and we had problems. But, above and outside of that, we were friends. We hung out, doing drugs and being reckless, to escape and to distract. I had my problems and many a person might have looked at me and seen a spoiled whiny brat with a big mouth, destined for a career in convenience store management, but with Jake, his issues seemed heavier. He had a lot going for him, but conversely, much against him. He played the cello, was a talented artist and extremely likable and intelligent, but he also had a drug problem. He was adopted and raised by good parents who gave him everything he needed, but he was the only African American in his town, possibly for several towns. I’m sure it must have presented issues, but he never said anything. Vermont was and is still predominantly white. It was more so back then. For many years, he was the first and only black man I knew, not that I ever once thought about it back then. To me, Jake was the coolest shit, always down and always in style.

Jake ran away when I was about seventeen. He’d violated his parole on a drug test and rather than face the music, he took some money and made off for the west coast. Not the best of decisions on his part, but at my age, the guts that it took to do that had me in awe. I received one letter from him, but for the most part, he was M.I.A. When he did finally come back, two years later, he was still Jake, but changed. He told me he’d been addicted to crack, robbed stores and joined the Crips out in L.A. He’d been squeezed through the wringer and lived, but some things had taken a toll and left him different from the kid I knew from before. He told me he found his birth mother, but I didn’t ask what became of it. Things had changed, but he was still my friend.

I saw less and less of Jake as the years went on. I often thought of him, but did not know where to find him and often I thought that if I did track him down, would I have anything to say to him? I was surprised however, when I bumped in to him in the summer of 2000. He had a girlfriend, seemed to be doing okay and was psyched about coming to New York City.

I don’t know anything about Jake’s last moments. I don’t know where I can go to visit his body, if in fact, a place exists, so all I have right now is this blog post.

Jakob Imani Ohlsson was a good kid and I’m sure, despite his troubles, he was a good man. I will sincerely miss him. He was my friend and I will never forget him.

I was reading this article last night about a bunch of white trash hillbillies getting into a brawl over a pack of cigarettes. When a convenience store clerk refused to sell a pack of butts to a 21 year old girl with a damaged ID, a fight broke out, resulting in backup being called in to the tune of 10 family members, the store being locked and a big-ass fight breaking out while customers waited outside and the security cameras filmed everything. You gotta fight for your smokes, dammit!

Having originally come from a rural setting, I can admit that I am intimately acquainted with the teeming, overweight masses, clad in K-Mart, clutching Big-Gulps and Marlboros as they wade their way through polyester-filled box stores. Contrary to the national image of Vermont as this idyllic hotbed of liberal, latte-drinking, yoga-stretching bohemians, I can attest that the reality of it is the complete opposite. The predominantly caucasian state of Vermont is stuffed to the gun rack with white trash. The image held by most of the nation is culled from a few scant locations throughout the state and even then, these places owe a good chunk of their population to the trailer park masses. It is sheer intestinal-twisting horror to wade amongst these buffalo, but living there, unfortunately, you become used to it. While this brawl over a pack of cigarettes happened in Charleston, S.C., it could have easily occurred in Burlington, Vt. Somewhere deep in the Old North End, no doubt.

I’ve always been a pompous, snotty asshole with unwarranted megalomaniacal and dictatorial leanings. A string of neutered, powerless jobs has left me with a delicate Ted Bundy-like shade of passive-aggressive traits. Mixing with these heathens just didn’t work out, so I moved myself to New York City which is full of angry, useless, and evil people. Naturally, I fit right in. Had I stayed in Vermont, who knows what horrible scenarios I’d be facing now. I’d probably have children which means I’d probably be in jail for at the very least trying to kill them.

Often, being the Napoleon-like person I am, I’ve fantasized of returning to Burlington, not as the twisted, bitter gnome I am now, but as dictator-for-life. I’d build a bunker, and set up shop, declaring that the bloated white buffalo of the north is soon to be extinct. I’d rain fire and brimstone, making the Walmart-browsing maggots subsist off of eating their children. I’d sneak in some nice things, like introducing real cuisine and Jewish delis, but this is about me and me being evil, so mainly I’d just make people suffer for my jaded and petty amusements. I’d also be content with just blowing the entire place to high hell.

Unfortunately, neither of these scenarios seem likely to occur, barring me suddenly becoming filthy rich or stumbling across a cache of nukes on the way to work one day.

Daveb has returned from a vacation in Vermont. He climbed a mountain and is now a man, reinvigorated with all the deadly ass kicking power of a shaved shih-tzu. Sitting, ensconced in his Cubicle of Doom, he bides his time, repairing brain cells destroyed from 4 straight days of non-stop marijuana abuse and plans his eventual and inevitable grab for total world domination or some other really impressive shit, whichever comes first.

In the normal course of life, daveb is at a point where he does not indulge in drugs, nor excessive amounts of alcohol except for when he makes those rare and infrequent trips to Vermont. He finds it enjoyable to lose a week to waking up, taking a bunch of bong hits and trying to figure out why evil alien parasites would bother posing as Regis Philben and Kelly Ripa (WTF? Where’s the motive?). It’s a good morning, you should try it.

On the other hand, it can be a bit disturbing that, upon returning to the city and back to a life of abstainment, the months pass by and daveb feels just as brain damaged. Yup, it’s done. All those years of non-stop hallucinogen-cannabis-alcohol (the Holy Fucking Trinity) abuse have paid off and given birth to a permanently addled space cadet, age 30.

However, daveb is an army of one! Such mental limitations do not keep him down. He straps on the penguins and moonboots and fucks shit up! There’s work to be done in this world. Puppies need kicking. Old people need fondling and licking. Babies need to be ground into taco meat. There’s no time to be brain damaged.