独家优惠奖金 100% 高达 1 BTC + 180 免费旋转

FLOWERS IN THE SUN VOL. I

A TALE FROM HELL; THE OTHER “PROJECT PM”; BOAT STORIES; DEATH ON THE HIGH SEAS; WHAT MY FORMER WRITER DID; OLD FRIENDS, NEW FRIENDS, AND OLD ENEMIES.

Once upon a time I was a real news editor for what is called in the news-person trade a “college” newspaper. Prior to that I edited the Arts & Life section. I took that job because you got a free trip to Los Angeles out of it where you’d get to go meet a bunch of real journalists. This was way back in the day. One of the keynote speakers was a guy named Brian Seltzer.

Brian Seltzer got his start as a blogger and then eventually landed a job at America’s most prestigous news outlet, CNN. He told me this. Not personally but while doing his keynote speech. I had to walk out about halfway through this speech because he was trying to tell me to turn into a brand.

I’m not a big fan of brands, see?

When I think of a “brand” I think of a brand. That is to say something that is permanently branded upon one’s skin with a branding iron, or a fork, or a superheated piece of iron.

Following this I wrote a rather long and boring essay about how something called “neoliberalism” was about to destroy the news industry through people like Brian Seltzer and friends. If all the journalists kept branding themselves, well, then one day there would be no journalists left in the whole wide world. There would just be a bunch of brands shouting at each other forever on a website called “Twitter.”

I was sort of a prophet. At the same time I was just about the only “journalist” at this convention who was not in fact on the country of Twitter. While this was happening there was a horrible controversy going on: Some people saw a blue dress; some people saw a gold dress. In the meantime I was working very hard to get a man named Scott Walker cancelled in whatever way I could. I was trying to get him branded.

I was trying to brand him as a used condom.

This did not work. Mr. Walker would not be permanently branded until he ran for President of the United States. After that he choked on a ham roll and died.

Since then no one has seen Scott Walker in person.

Coincidentally, when my friend and I went to see the Bernie Sanders show in Madison, WI, we never saw Mr. Walker either. According to the locals there he was never even in Madison.

We later discovered that he was riding up and down the freeway on his motorcycle harassing service workers at a restaurant named Ruby Tuesdays. He was ordering ham rolls.

Eventually I got promoted to “News Editor.” The former news editor warned me, “You’re going to hate this job. You’re laughing now but you’re going to hate this job. You thought Arts & Life was hard. Just you wait.”

I laughed him out of the room. I had already drawn up an entire plan to start an investigative news team. I had put together a an advertising campaign. And I had developed a short list of people I thought would be good for it, some of whom had returned with me from our recent adventure in Spain.

But this was not to be.

Everybody I had flagged for my investigative news team dropped the fuck out of college, did not want to join the newspaper, or were otherwise pre-occuppied with stupid things like getting “grades” and going into the more recoverable kind of debt that comes from going to a State School instead of Fancy-Pants College like Harvard or Yall.

My college did not have a journalism major. I was an English Major, of course, which is why I get to refer to myself sometimes as “Major English” despite being Cuban-Italian. My college did have one journalism class but I didn’t take it. Why didn’t I take it?

Because.

That’s why.

Instead I went up to the library and read history while ignoring all of my homework assignments that had nothing to do with history, Islam, or Spain. Spain seemed like a rather interesting place, which was why I went there, and moreover one of the things I learned on my trip there was that Americans tend to be trashbags wherever they roam and will immediately seek out a McDonald’s every day despite being in a foreign country that is arguably superior to the United States in several ways.

Coincidentally while in Spain I briefly considered converting to Islam but then decided this was a bad decision and remained an agnostic instead.

Several things happened as soon as I became News Editor. The first was that all the previous news writers had become editors instead of writers. What this meant was that I had to train a bunch of new writers to write for news. The second was that a lot of our trained staff decided to focus on their grades instead so that they could get a “diploma.” A diploma is kind of like a passport but instead of letting you go to another country it lets you go to a place called work. The third was a statewide phenomenon which became known as the ILLINOIS BUDGET IMPASSE. The fourth was an ambitious newcomer to the newspaper who bore a passing resemblance to our former editor in chief. His name was “Project PM.” Unlike the Project PM founded by Barrett Brown, this “Project PM” turned out to be a huge fucking piece of work.

I call him “Project PM” because he was a project and his initials were PM. Even today I can’t really say his real name because there’s an off chance that he is undocumented. I know this because one day he forged a document claiming that a black disabled kid, who happens to be my friend, was stalking him when in reality the opposite was going on. He handed this to pretty much everyone in the school after I dropped out and in it claimed that he was undocumented.

But more on that later.

This “Project PM” would take any story you gave him. He would take any story at all. Send him to a meeting, check. Send him to hell, check. Send him to the cafeteria, check. Send him a check? Check. During this time I was making roughly $50 a month working as News Editor, where I did not get paid for writing stories despite writing most of them, and working roughly 80 hours per week. “Project PM” was working 80 hours per week and making $8 to $15 per story. He was churning out stories like no one’s business.

When he wrote for the News Section he tended to get a lot of things wrong so I would have to make about fifty phone calls to his various sources and then rewrite the whole story so that I wouldn’t get yelled at by everyone on the Earth.

But this was not true when he wrote for the opinion section. One time he wrote an opinion story genuinely wondering whether a certain former President would friend him on Facebook. We all thought this was very funny. Another time he wrote an opinion story claiming that a car had nearly run him off the road while he was biking or something. His opinion stories were basically incapable of being edited and he nearly drove or opinion editor, who had a not so secret crush on, insane. One time he stole one of her cookies and ate it in front of all of us and the denied that he had ate it. We also thought this was funny. Then one day he stole my water bottle while it was sitting right next to me.

I saw this mfer pick it up out of the corner of my eye and then put it back down.

“PM!” I thundered, “Did you just drink from my water bottle?”

“No!” he cried. Then he thought better of this and said, “Er, yes, yes I did.”

“The fuck man.”

“Dude, don’t worry about it. You can buy me another one.”

“Buy you another one? Buy you another one?” I asked. I was kind of pissed off he even floated this idea. “No. You can have that one. I’m just going to buy another one for myself.”

I did not find this funny because I was basically powered by Ritalin, coffee, Red Bulls, and no food around this time and weighed about 98 lbs. That water was the only thing diluting this extremely toxic mixture. I also was making less money than this dude and was working in a coffee shop on the other side of the city.

One day he wrote an article for the Arts & Life section covering Trans issues in which he misgendered basically everyone in the article. This caused a huge uproar. Had I been editing this article I would have caught that almost immediately since I had already had some experience covering such issues as well as covering the university’s undocumented community. I was very, very, careful to ensure that nothing I ever wrote regarding that community could ever come back to harm them. That’s because as both a citizen and a person technically of White Cuban descent I am pretty much “undeportable.”

But this slipped by everybody else because they figured he knew what he was talking about.

Anyway, later on he made another big mistake; he decided to cover “GamerGate.”

Now, I did not follow Gamergate too closely at the time because I don’t really follow controversies in the gaming press. I knew that it was basically about a bunch of Incels who naturally could not get laid and so decided that they were going to tackle “corruption” in video games journalism by harassing and doxxing various women writing for that industry.

I was preoccupied with other things like trying to prevent some of our goofier writers from writing stories about the stupid 2016 election in the News Section. I told them to fuck off to the Opinions section where you can write whatever you want. I was trying to do real journalism of the local and investigative variety. Not the kind of rewrite other people’s articles from a distance journalism that so many “journalists” are fond of and love doing.

But our “Project PM” was determined to cover Gamergate and cover Gamergate he did. Now, this was another article that I did not edit. This was published in either the Opinions section or the Arts & Life section. I don’t remember and I don’t particularly care. Suffice to say it was probably completely wrong in its own right but it was at least strongly critical of the Gamergaters and their fellow scum.

This was why it was the only article that ever attracted any amount of attention online.

Generally speaking our articles would receive one or two comments on the internet. For example, when I went to cover a bullfight in Spain in the traditional Oak Parker fashion I wrote an article about it and said that the bull had been stabbed something like 5000 times at 8000 miles per second. I also said that the bull stood no chance because right after he kicked the Matador’s ass a bunch of Picadors popped out as if from nowhere and murdered the bull.

These statistics are what we call, in the trade, “Hyperbole.”

But this went over the head of one of the Spaniards who worked at my Alma Mater. This guy thought I meant this literally and commented to express his frustration. Dumbass.

I digress.

When our “Project PM” covered Gamergate he got mobbed by something like 8 million comments coming from all directions of the internet. And then a creep, probably one of my former co-workers, the Irish-Puerto Rican Incel named William O’Donnell, appeared at the university to do some stupid journalism of his own. He wound up getting escorted out of the university by the police. The police recognized him as a threat to the university’s fragile money supply.

The money supply was in turn fragile because a guy named Bruce Rauner had cut the budget by 100 percent. And then the Democrats refused to make any deal whatsoever with him that might even somewhat make this situation more survivable. At one point the university was considering a very risky legal move called “FINANCIAL EXIGENCY”

Financial Exigency is a legal move in which a university can nullify all contracts, including union contracts, with workers, teachers, whatever. It’s not very easy to pull off. If it were easy to pull off it would have already happened for no reason at all except to turn everyone into adjuncts.

Our “Project PM” was somewhat aware of the details of this sort of thing because he was one of the few reporters I could send to just about any meeting, no matter how boring, anywhere in the university. For the most part people coming to the Newspaper were just looking to shore up their resume with something impressive sounding and so wanted to write about the election, or cover a show, or do any other number of articles. There’s nothing wrong with that. But none of those things were going to be allowed in my News Section.

So we were all very much reliant on this guy for a great deal of coverage. And I generally had his back because I would contact the same sources he used to ensure that he didn’t get things wrong. Everyone gets things wrong sometimes. So it seemed to me a very good thing to do as an editor to ensure that I had my writer’s back. Especially those who were busting their ass.

Another kid who wanted to join the Newspaper was my black disabled friend who shall not at this time be named. He wanted to join the News Section because he had read almost all of my work and liked it.

Now, I could not in my right mind have him reporting on things in the News Section because, 1) News Reporting is extremely stressful, 2) unlike what our silly Northwestern “indebted” opinion editor once said it’s actually much more difficult than writing opinion articles, 3) because my friend was not just disabled in the physical sense but was having sudden strokes at the time one a semi-regular basis; my friend would later be diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s disease. He’s a few years younger than me. I am almost 30 now. This was back in 2015–2016.

So you can do the math; if you can’t you can fuck off.

I could not rightly subject this kid to more stress and, truth be told, did not have the time in my schedule to train anyone anyway. I was too busy correcting mistakes that a bunch of other people were making and re-writing all of their articles. That’s why most of my best work at that newspaper does not have my name on it.

And then there was another thing. I had secretly been plotting to drop out for some time but could not do so because I did not have an adequate successor to take control of the News Section.

As I said I had been secretly planning to drop out for some time. At the end of the day nobody really wanted to go through with the difficult work of producing an actual news section besides myself and a few others who, for various reasons, could not do so at the time. In order to cover some of the more complicated stories I had to rely upon myself, former editors, impromptu teams of journalists who were not so experienced, and then of course our actual editorial team who were themselves quite busy. We had only one other, if you will, full time news reporter besides our “Project PM.”

Technically we had another one as well but he ended up going to Poland on a trip and so I was completely unable to use him to cover local news.

The second semester I served as News Editor our opinions editor quit her job. I don’t know the exact reasons she did this but I suspect it was because she was tired of dealing with working multiple jobs and especially tired of dealing with “Project PM’s” bizarre and unrequited crush on her. She was probably also tired of him constantly stealing her food.

This news editor was replaced by a “real journalist” who came from a place called Northwestern University. This place was similar to my university in a few ways but significantly more expensive and full of morons who hang out around frat houses and pretend that they’re Harry Potter. Coincidentally, one day, one of them would become Harry Potter for real. By that I mean he became a cop.

I digress. I don’t have my Ritalin right now so you’re just going to have to bear with me as we travel back and forth in time.

I only mention this Opinion Editor because she was supposedly a real journalist. Now, I did not know this at the time, but it turns out in real journalism you don’t really have to do your own reporting because sometimes people will just hand out press releases to you and then you can rewrite them like a lazy person and people will promote you higher and higher through the industry.

This is what is called, in the news-trade, the “FAIL-LADDER.” The FAIL-LADDER is especially easy to climb and if one knows how to climb it you can make lots of money. You could become Glenn Greenwald, you could become Chuck Todd, you can even become Matt Taibbi. That is what happens when you climb the FAIL-LADDER to such great heights that you are given a podcast and a million dollars. If you climb the FAIL-LADDER high enough you might even get to become Michael Tracey.

Now, our Opinions editor constantly suggested that we start covering national politics instead of hyper-local politics. The thing about national politics, however, is that there were at the time some 80 billion reporters covering national politics — most of them doing so not so well.

In the meantime there were only a few reporters covering the events surrounding my university. Most of these worked for places such as DNAinfo (rest in peace) or the Chicago Reader (which remains alive and well) and occassionally larger outlets such as the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times.

When the budget impasse struck the state of Illinois at high speed it naturally impoverished most of the state funded institutions and forced them to seek funding from private sources such as venture capital. The state appropriations allocated to the state universities had, of course, been dropping incrementally since around the year 2001 or so (and you can probably go back a bit further than that).

But the budget impasse cut the state allocation by roughly 100 percent. What this meant was that there was no money coming in from the state. Not even lunch money. Not even nickels and dimes.

Some of the State Universities fared better than others. Ours, for example, was able to get through this without being completely decimated. My university, Northeastern Illinois University, had been saving money for years. Some of the schools on the South Side of Chicago, those which served predominantly Black constituencies, were not so lucky. At least one of them actually did have to implement the measure known as “FINANCIAL EXIGENCY”

So that was the set-up. In the meantime the dolts who were running the Council of Clubs, an offshoot of the Student Government Association which had control of all the monies allocated to the various clubs of the school, was constantly trying to de-fund the radio station, WZRD, and our newspaper, The Independent. Why? Nobody really knows. But the most important thing is that none of them understood how money works and what is and what is not expensive. A lot of them just wanted to go on fancy trips, I believe, to other universities that had things like water parks at them. Or just on trips to water parks. Who knows. The Council of Clubs was secretive lest someone find out that they didn’t know what money was.

Luckily some parts of the administration understood that it was not a good look for the university to de-fund its more functional organizations out of existence and so overruled their various attempts to redirect our funding into the Trust Fund category.

Anyway, this was all getting very stressful. In fact it was getting so stressful that I stopped doing my homework. My homework was also stressful. I took a full semester back in 2015 because I thought I would have a full news team and ample resources to work with. Instead I had a skeleton team and barely any resources to work with.

Moreover much of the faculty had become more tight lipped regarding such things as corruption and malfeasance at the university. Most of the faculty, which had been very open to such things just a year ago in 2014, realized that with no money coming from the state it was only a matter of time that there would be no money going in to their paychecks. Pretty much everyone knew that the university, were the budget crisis not solved in time, would have to start putting employees on furlough, cutting staff, and eventually cutting instruction. This was well known because the university was telling people this all the fucking time.

But every time I tried to report it someone would get a panic attack and then ask me to do Pubic Relations — sorry, Public Relations — for the university. I told them that they already had a PR Guy. He was called their “PR Guy.” I told them that he had his own website which was on the same website that the university had their website on.

This was the university’s “official website.”

Finally I thought I found some allies in a place called the Faculty Senate. While I was there I found all their minutes from 2014. This shit was crazy detailed. So I printed them all out. Shortly thereafter the Faculty Senate put a lock on their website so nobody could read their minutes. This was probably because the Faculty Senate President wanted to get promoted one day and so was being kind of a loser. I can’t prove that. That was told to me off-the-record and I’ve long since lost my old notes. But I’ve never lost any of their business cards so I bet I can get someone to talk about it now if anyone wants to challenge me on this.

Anyway, my mental health was starting to give way for real during the summer of 2016. I was at this time developing something called “PANIC DISORDER.” Many people ask what “PANIC DISORDER” is and why it has to be medicated. I’m not going to explain that.

If you can’t either figure out what PANIC DISORDER is on your own, or are unable for whatever reason to look it up on Google or some other search engine, you are clearly not worth the time of myself nor anyone else on this Earth. You should probably [REDACTED] [REDACTED].

So I had to drop out for real. And I did. But I had another secret plan at the time to go back to that University one day and then just straight out Lenin the shit out of it. I wrote this all down in a giant and incomprehensible document which shall, thankfully, never be published anywhere on the Earth. The only way to get this document published anywhere would be through the Kacynzki strategy. Nobody can spell Polish words.

One day, many years ago the Central Intelligence Agency decided there were too many Karens. They were all going about ordering too many lattes and then complaining about their lattes. So they made a mental wellness initiative called the MKULTRA and put it everywhere. This was designed to fix the Karens for good.

But something terrible happened. A non-Karen, the deeply disturbed math fanatic named Ted Kacynzki, was trying to get therapy and instead wandered into a McDonalds. Then he got a MKULTRA. Then he went to the woods to find out how to stop Global Warming. But instead of stopping global warming he made a manifesto. Then he got a McUltra. It was then that he became the Unabomber.

The rest, as they say, is history….

So I dropped out and the Newspaper naturally got shuffled up a bit. Things were gong A-OK until one day everyone there started asking my black disabled friend who would later be diagnosed with early onset Parkinsons why he was so depressed while he was having strokes every day. Gee, I thought, isn’t it fucking obvious? This isn’t like Rocket Science after all. It was pretty that this guy had some good reasons to be depressed.

What people didn’t know at the time was that he had yet another reason to be depressed. Our “Project PM” was giving him massages every day. He had decided that he was a bisexual and also decided that my disabled friend was his new boyfriend. Even I found this to be kind of unlikely but it turned out to be true. One day, for example, our “Project PM” locked my friend in the production room of the Independent for who knows how long to teach him some kind of lesson. But there was another problem. This guy was now an editor.

One day it became obvious that “Project PM’s” affections for my black disabled friend were not reciprocated and so he went kind of crazy. Around this time a bunch of people were hitting on my black disabled friend and I was getting kind of worried because I was visiting him every day and I definitely was not hitting on him. We were both very confused about what was going on. But then everything became very clear when “Project PM” forged a very obvious typewritten note accusing my black disabled friend of stalking him and then gave it to like half the university.

Now, it’s important to note at this point that my black disabled friend was having seizures pretty frequently, could no longer even use his cane to get around, and on top of that was being yelled at by everyone because he wanted someone to be his friend.

But he did do one thing which garnered favor in his name besides being non-black and non-disabled. He was a malignant narcissist and a pathological liar. So he made a gamble. He wrote an article that sounded like anything else he had ever write — this kid is borderline impossible to plagiarize — and as a part of it he said that he was “undocumented.”

I personally highly doubt he was actually undocumented. Most undocumented people don’t rat on themselves. Especially when there is an extremely anti-immigration fascist candidate running for President. So I think he was probably lying. But I also think this was enough to tick off enough alarm bells to get pretty much everyone to side with him instead of the black disabled kid who could not physically stalk him.

When I say that my black disabled friend could not physically stalk him I do not mean this as some sort of metaphor. I mean this in the sense that it was physically impossible for him to be stalking this kid. Literally.

Not a metaphor. Another guy named “Frantz Fanon” came up with that one. Then Jean Paul Sartre wrote an introduction to his book and annoyed Fanon but Fanon was on his deathbed so he couldn’t really object to it too much.

…..

So anyway this guy decided to hit on my black disabled friend with Parkinsons disease who was having strokes all the time and then managed to get most of the people I trusted to back him up. Now, he had always been a rather unique writer. I know this because I edited his work every day for years. I also know that when he got to go to Los Angeles upon becoming the runner up for Production Editor he brought an entire wardrobe with him and would change it in the middle of the day. Everyone was making fun of him for this but I thought that was a little harsh. There were much better things to make fun of our “Project PM” for. Things like his constant mistakes and inability to write a coherent opinion article.

But then he eventually decided to do the thing I keep talking about. There was what one might call a semi-public break up. The school by and large, or rather entirely, decided to take the side of our “Project PM.” Unlike the real Project PM this project PM was completely full of shit.

So there was that. But then another thing happened. My black disabled friend started getting hit on all the time by variously confused bisexual men. I had already dealt with these types before. But now he had to deal with them for some reason. This is because these people are what are known in the News trade as sex-pests. It was shortly thereafter that a malignant alcoholic Puerto Rican stumbled into my friends life.

Now, I want to make it abundantly clear that the Puerto Rican I write about here is not the Irish-Puerto-Rican Incel for whom I hold a special candle of hate within my heart. No. This was a Puerto-Rican Puerto-Rican. Not an Irish-Puerto-Rican.

They had gone to the same high school and had been good friends. One day this Puerto-Rican Puerto-Rican got down on his luck. He had joined the Marine Corps, you see, and his squadmates failed to understand what happens when you give a Puerto Rican a bunch of drugs. Well, they found out pretty quick. Or we should say that he found out pretty quick. He found out because he almost immediatley got into a brawl with one of his officers and wound up in military jail and was hence dishonorably discharged for fragging an officer.

Back in the Vietnam war fragging an officer was more or less the rule of the day. The officers generally were highly educated yuppies who had joined the military in the hopes of becoming the next Douglas MacArthur. Instead they mysteriously disappeared in a cloud of smoke that would probably be blamed by Westmoreland on the VietCong.

So when the Puerto Rican Puerto Rican fragged his officer all the other officers panicked and worried that there might be another kind of Vietnam style Puerto Rican Puerto Rican mutiny amongst the working class recruits they had tricked into joining the military. The Harvard and Yall grads had a collective panic attack and sent him to the jail.

But then he came back to Chicago and wound up living with my friend. He promised to take care of him. Instead he stole a bunch of my friends money, my money, my friends money, my moms money, all the moms money and spent it on alcohol and drugs. While he was supposed to be taking care of my black disabled friend he was actually standing out in the middle of the street drunkenly cat calling women in the typical Puerto Rican tradition, not to be confused with the Cuban-Italian-American tradition, and then getting into arguments with his ten thousand relatives for no discernible reason.

By this time my “Project PM” had long since given up on dating my black disabled friend. But then my black disabled friend took a picture with the Puerto Rican Puerto Rican who may have also been trying to hit on him. I assume he was not but he too was among the confused bisexual archetype. This type will sexually harass you and then claim you sexually harassed them because you rejected them. They’ll also confuse you all sorts of other things. Anyway, the only thing I know about our old “Project PM” is that he’s not dead.

Even at this point, being a journalist journalist, I was somewhat skeptical f everything that was going on. But once that picture was taken our “Project PM” went nutzo on my black disabled friend and accused him of basically cheating on him despite not being any type of relationship whatsoever.

Of course, prior to to this, all of this had come to a head in a shush-shush manner at the university. My black disabled friend and his mom confronted both the Independent and the Dean of Students and were accused of being hood trash and other such things. Our normally very good Student Media Advisor surprisingly took the side of the probably fake undocumented immigrant “Project PM” of Illinois. In so doing he tarred the name of the other Project PM of which I hold in high esteem and have contributed to in the past.

The Dean of Students, who himself may be a confused bisexual in my estimation, for whatever reason took the side of the PMPM. I only say that he may be a confused bisexual because as a gray-asexual you start to pick up on these things after the confused bisexuals and the “supposedly straights” hit on you too many times confusing you for a confused bisexual. As a straight Gray-ACE I have a long, long, line of rejections behind me. As does my black disabled friend. But they’re not the usual rejections where we got rejected. Nope. It’s where we rejected people. Even people we like.

But some people just don’t learn jack shit. Jack shit. They don’t learn it.

That’s why I now must write the gritty reboot to Thomas the Tank Engine. That’s going to be my revenge on the world. That and some kind of mutual aid fund that will help both myself and my black disabled brother as we navigate the hellscape that is going to be the 2020s.

Add a comment

What is your view?

Send

Related posts:

The people behind the Oceanlove Retreat

It is in our interest to create for you unforgettable experiences, memories to bring back home, and this insatiable need to get out on the road again. Our idea of traveling is intrinsic to the…

A lost Englishman in Wales

I realise the written word can never really convey the personal human emotions stirred by the kindness of a stranger, or of a man who has trumpeted and coined his own mantra this Summer of “Well you…

When Can a Revival Be Called a Revival

I would never pretend to judge what is happening at Asbury Seminary and around the country. It is not my place to pronounce whether the outpouring of the Spirit there is a legitimate revival. So, I…