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  From the time I was eight years old until the age of sixteen, I lived with my family in a three bedroom, two bathroom ranch home situated on an acre of a lawn that featured three, count ‘em; THREE small evergreen trees. This square acre of green was surrounded on three sides by huge fields full of amber waves of grain, just outside of a town so small it made Mayberry look like San Francisco. I suspect that my father never planted any more trees in that lawn all the time we lived there because he enjoyed the time he spent every Sunday riding his lawn mower, beer in hand, cigarette in his mouth, pondering his place in a world that would soon turn on it’s side and roll into the realm of the Flaming Absurd while the vibrations of the lawn mower he was riding on gave his lower back and rear end a nice, relaxing massage. What he did do with all that space was build a basketball court in our backyard… Loyal readers of Freakshow Magazine may  have met my 'little' brother Mike in som...

  I was playing in a punk/ thrash metal band that got booked into a dive bar on campus. The first couple of sets went well, until a bunch of frat boys, a couple of football players, and their dates came in. They were drunk, obnoxious, and kept yelling out requests for limp, pasty-faced British synth pop songs, but it wasn’t until one of the squat, fat football players stood at the side of the stage and was literally SCREAMING for “Freebird”… Suddenly, something snapped; the bass player, all 6’5” and 280lbs. of him, took off his bass and swung it at the rude jocks head: a gorgeous shot to the side of the head that knocked him over and onto the table and into the laps of two cute girls that the singer and I had our eyes on. I saw the males of the “populars” stand up in unison and start pushing their way through the crowd and I took off my guitar and threw it across the stage to my guitar tech and then…and I can’t explain how this happened, but the next thing I knew, our drummer had l...

The ride to the hospital was quick and uneventful, largely because the hospital was around the corner and down two blocks from our apartment. At this point, my wife and I were pretty badly sleep deprived, her by virtue of her feeling like a mailbox in which someone had parked a Honda Accord, and me because I was sleeping on the floor next to the couch on which slept a mailbox in which someone had parked a Honda Accord. As soon as we hit the Emergency room, there was chaos. Sick people shocked by the language my wife was using and the detailed threats of violence, my mother, busy stroking my wife’s forehead and humming Christian hymns softly, as if preparing for the exorcism that was going to have to be performed. Two nurses and an orderly appeared, having just graduated clown school, and, for the safety of herself and others, strapped my wife into a wheelchair and rode her into the examination room while a small person who looked like a bridge troll kept following me and asking me ...