***Dear Readers.

I have struggled over the last few months with the inability to keep writing as this election cycle dwindles to a conclusion.

The nerves. The PTSD. The zillions of fights locally in my political backyard and online with fans. The inability to secure a writing location where I could think and process and finish this thing… it haunts me.

I know it’s egotistical to imagine that I alone can sway a national election, and so I don’t delude myself… but I know that I have the power to reach several million Trump voters, and I feel an obligation to have delivered on that.

And I fell short.

Many reasons, no excuses.

Regardless, I failed to be able to put this whole project before you all and to use the skillset I have in walking people through my story so that I can maybe educate and sway people.

I know that I will regret for the rest of my life– if MAGA wins– that I have failed to deliver here. It eats at me daily. Hourly.

But time is dwindling and resources are scarce and I’m out of punches as I prepare for the worst in my personal life– will I have to flee? Will Trump arrest all the California Democratic Delegates and have us executed/imprisoned? Will I be sent to a re-education camp? Will I be euthanized because I’m mentally ill?

In one last-ditch attempt to feel as though I’ve thrown all my punches and left everything I have on the battlefield… I’m releasing the 2 unfinished posts I had ground to a halt on back in July.

These are unfinished. And I wasn’t certain if they were quality or not… but I need people to at least hear some more of the WHY.

It doesn’t get us to completion. But, these next two I believe add significant heft and point towards where I’m headed. And maybe that helps?

I had mentioned a conversation with an influencer had kind of killed my momentum this summer and I still can’t shake the feeling that I did all of this and only a few thousand people read it… and did I convince anyone of anything who wasn’t already convinced? Did I change a mind? Even one?

Doubt it. Did I sway a vote somewhere red?

And would finishing this have even mattered?

This project was shared to a fan site recently and the fans completely lost their shit from what folks told me.

So. Perhaps this whole thing was a waste of time.

Fuck it. This is all I’ve got.

Please vote. Please.

I’m so tired of being worried about my nation and family and friends and fellow disabled allies. The abuse. The racism. The misogyny. The blatant disregard for laws. The cheating. The lies. The arrogant illiteracy. The psychopathic cruelty. The sadism.

Please defeat MAGA.

Please.

And I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.

(Also these were written during the olympics so somewhat out of date topically)***

SO REMEMBER HOW I SAID THE FUCKING EVANGELICALS™ WERE ILLITERATE ABOUT ART?

And that this is one of the clear hallmarks and signs to look for to tell you that you are in the presence of Fucking Evangelicals™?

Anything happen recently that might prove that point?

Maybe some massive event where the entire world was watching and Fucking Evangelicals™– whose system teaches them to behave like narcissists– misinterpreted something and assumed it was an attack on their religious beliefs when it had absolutely nothing to do with them?

Anybody seen anything like that happen where The Fuckers outed themselves as being illiterate narcissists?

A system that spends all of it’s time fighting the arts and being Endlessly Outraged™ by Everything manages to not understand what the art they are seeing is actually about. (like the Bible™)

I love how they out themselves on the world stage as being functionally illiterate.

The sad part is that their outrage machine is so loud and obnoxious that they actually managed to score themselves an unearned apology… the organizers of the Olympics actually apologized for offended the fragile egos of the illiterate narcissists posing as worshippers of christ.

Seriously, fuck these people.

Their toxic hatred of the LGBT community is bigoted, ignorant, illiterate AF, cruel, mean, selfish… this is narcissist abuse cowering and demanding the world lick their self-inflicted wounds.

Intentionally falling apart so that everyone has to stop what they’re doing to take care of you is a narcissistic abuse behavior pattern that is pathological and studied.

STOP TAKING FUCKING EVANGELICALS™ SERIOUSLY.

THEY ARE NOT SERIOUS PEOPLE.

THEY ARE CRYBABIES AND COWARDS AND BIGOTS AND HATERS.

THEY HAVE THE MATURITY OF TODDLERS.

These are people who watch the olympics and think it’s about them. They think everything is about them because their narcissistic system turned them all into raging narcissists who only care about their own perceived pain and nobody else’s, thankyouverymuch.

Do you see why I call them Fuckers™?

That’s starting to look more accurate to your trained eye now doesn’t it?

Now think back alllllll the way to that first post where I used that phrase the first time… how did that hit you? How did you feel that I was using that language?

After 60+ posts… are you starting to see what I mean?

Back to Our Hero’s Journey Adventure….

Tweekside™ Ontario, California 2002

On the eve of my 25th year of existence, I find myself living in chronic pain with a back injury that has dominated and derailed my life.

I am now “disabled”.

Not for the back, mind you.

My fucked up brain has qualified me… *check notes*… to live in poverty forever.

One of the beautiful ways that acting on Adventures in Odyssey screwed me over was when I filed for disability, it would be my years working on that show that would tip off Social Security that I had a work history. But because the amount of money I made was so low, I never had paid into the system enough to reap a substantial amount of funding so I end up getting a lower payout than if I had never worked at all.

If I had never worked for Focus on the Family™, I would’ve qualified for SSI like my sibling did. My sibling actually gets more money from Social Security than I do. Substantially more.

So working for Focus on the Family ended up costing me the amount of disability I could qualify for. Those first years I got $600 dollars a month to live on.

That’s not a typo.

And no. That’s not enough to live on. Doesn’t cover rent, food, clothing, gas, utilities… and $500 of that went straight to rent to cover our share of condo mortgage. Which left me with a whopping $100 a month to live on.

That’s not a typo either.

In fact, 20+ years later I’m barely cracking $900 a month now.

<Insert picture of social security tax form showing sad numbers>

This is why I’ve been so stressed this week about time running out in my reader funded writer’s retreat. I’m not used to nice things in life. I don’t get special privileges or favors or vacations.

My life is a constant scramble to secure resources.

And yes, I do have some privilege still so I can access resources that others can’t, but when you’re always broke it is exhausting in a way that people with money are incapable of psychologically processing.

Being put on Permanent Disability would again wreck the ego I was trying to rebuild with my duct-taped Broken Mirror that is now being swept into a dustpan.

I’m 25 and being told I will live in extreme poverty for the rest of my natural life.

Ambition? Dreams? Goals? Careers?

Fuck you, DisabledDave™. You don’t get to have those anymore. Your dreams will forever be out of reach. Those goals? That audio series you want to make?

It’s not happening on $100 a month.

A reality of my new Permanent Disability is that I have all the time in the world to do nothing. Which is fine because with my back jacked up I can’t exactly do anything anyway.

Eventually, I get so housebound and bored that I decide to venture out into the HOA Jungle that is GhettoLite™.

Every day I take a limp around the neighborhood.

Most people take walks.

I take limps.

It would take me 10 minutes to limp 50 feet.

And little bit by little bit… I would venture further, and limp for longer… because fuck you bad back I still wanna exist and feel the breeze on my skin and the grass under my feet.

I would actually go outside and stand barefoot in the grass for 30 minutes a day just to try teach my feet to feel again.

And as I would limp along or tickle my toes with blades of grass…

I would start to examine and observe the environment I was living in for the first time since I had moved to the neighborhood.

Tweekside™ Ontario is my favorite neighborhood I’ve ever lived in. It had a certain David Lynch weirdness that was palpable in the air.

Tweekside is a neighborhood of transition and diversity and economic struggle.

On the surface there’s lots of parks and pools and it looks very nice.

But if you slow down and drive down one of the side streets you start to notice certain signs that you may not actually be in AnchorBabySuburbiaLand™ and that this is actually GhettoLite™.

See those bars on the windows on all the ground floor apartments?

There’s a reason for that.

And as you drive past the dumpster you notice at least one sofa sticking out of it. Must be a slow eviction month.

And as you notice the sofa, a movement catches your eye. A flash of hair.

Is that a cat? A raccoon?

There’s something alive in that dumpster.

You glance back for a second look and the hair/fur appears again but this time it is attached to someone’s head.

There’s… there’s a… person in the dumpster???

I must be high there’s no way that is a person–

“That’s DumpsterBobby™…”

Someone in GhettoLite™ is always there to educate the uninformed.

“Why is he in a dumpster?”

“Why are any of us in a dumpster? That’s DumpsterBobby™ and that’s his dumpster.”

“So he lives there?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody lives in a dumpster.”

“This is normal?”

“For DumpsterBobby™ it is.”

A thing I appreciate about GhettoLite™ is how people are more forgiving of other people’s oddness. There’s still discrimination, but when lots of people are thrust together in a high density living environment of poverty and struggle… there’s a kindness, a sympathy for others that I never observed in my upper middle class utopia of whiteness.

Tweekside was a neighborhood that I would say was precisely one rung up from the ghettos of LA.

This was where families that had toiled in extreme poverty in Watts, Boyle Heights, Compton, etc once they had amassed and saved enough to buy their first home outta the Hood, they moved out to the Inland Empire. The late 90’s early Aughts saw a wave of families move from the neighborhoods harmed by the ’91 riots and settle in newly developed communities that were springing up in Rancho Cucamonga, Ontario, Riverside, San Bernardino….

As a result, a lot of these families are displaced from their prior neighborhoods, and so you may have had kids stuck in gangs in Compton and Watts and now that their family has relocated to Tweekside Ontario, there isn’t a local gang to join.

So, what ended up happening was that all the different Crips would hang out with various displaced Crips who lived in Tweekside. The different Bloods would hang out around their various factions. Same thing with the Mexican and Hispanic gangs. Even the neonazis were present in this neighborhood. It had everybody.

But none of these groups are really warring with each other. They mostly are trying to find allies and just hang out and work their warehouse jobs since Ontario, California is the Warehouse mecca for all shipping that comes from China and the Pacific Rim through the Long Beach Ports.

The white people in the neighborhood are either newlyweds in their first starter home that they will eventually move out of to safer neighborhoods in the future where they will tell stories of their years living in GhettoLite™. Or they are on the verge of retirement, their dreams of Middle Class life upended because of a pesky cancer diagnosis that bankrupted their life savings.

One neighbor was a hairdresser for pimps in Chicago back in the day.

Another neighbor was Snoop Dogg’s 25th cousin who drove a Snoopmobile™ through the neighborhood and reveled in his claim to fame. This shit actually matters in Tweekside.

All the petty crimes are present. Shit gets stolen instantly if left out. Meth is a massive problem in Tweekside™. And so any violence usually is meth related– I recall one time being chased down the street by a tweeker wielding a knife trying to punch the window of my car out.

He would later return and ask me to hide his car in my garage so the police wouldn’t find it for a few weeks.

And I did. Because fuck it I’m injured and bored and this is part of the politics of my neighborhood– sometimes you have to show a shitty tweeker some love and maybe they’ll stop chasing you with knives in drug fueled paranoia episodes of destruction.

There are a LOT of first generation immigrants legal–and not– so there’s a variety of languages spoken which means everyone slows down and has a patience with each other. And sometimes to get person A to understand what you’re saying you have to knock on Person B’s door because their grandma is from the same country and if 3 of you are standing there Person B’s Grandma can talk to Person A…. and Grandma can tell Person B what Person A said and that can get translated to me. And people are willing to do this. It’s the social lubrication where people are more willing to help each other in this environment than any white dominated space I had ever been in.

I am a minority in this neighborhood. And this is a Majority Minority hood. For those that don’t understand that, it means that the majority of people in the neighborhood are minority groups. We had everyone. Black, Brown, Other Brown, Other other brown, Asian, different asian, other asian, also that asian group too… Old, young, multi generation families squeezed into 2-3 bedroom apartments.

Disability is here in HUGE numbers.

This was the first time in my life that I would be immersed in the lives and struggles of The Least of These™. The sick, the prisoners, the foreigners, the strangers who aren’t welcomed elsewhere.

People struggling with illiteracy due to language barriers. Illiteracy due to not being able to afford to go to college or couldn’t graduate high school because the gang life made it impossible.

People bankrupted by medical bills. People stuck here because they got out of jail/prison years ago and could never find gainful employment outside of forklift gigs at the warehouses

And this collection of humanity is living in the world’s strangest Lynchian neighborhood because we are living right next to The Southern California Dairy Industry.

So that strange feel in the air? That’s cow shit.

And that strange pulsating mass of black squiggly stuff covering the cars, sidewalks, and windows of every square inch of real estate? Those are the flies that the cow shit feeds.

So this GhettoLite™ is built right next to the Chino/Ontario Dairy Industry which is in a state of transition. Developers are offering big money to get these farms to move up to Bakersfield (whose air quality now sucks like Tweekside’s did) so they can build McMansion Neighborhoods of 5 bedroom houses they can sell for $6-700,000 20 years ago.

It is a dynamic, diverse, world of poverty and struggle that I find myself limping around each afternoon.

And just as DumpsterBobby™ becomes known for his oddness… I would become known to these people as Limpin’WhiteBoy/Dude™.

Many conversations would go like this once I broke bread or smoked a joint with someone for the first time:

“I’m Dave.”

“Yeah I seen you, you’re that Limpin’WhiteBoy™ I seen out there all the time.”

This is the moment in my life that will forever change my politics, my religious beliefs, my understanding of US Government, my understanding of US History, this is where the old Dave dies and a newer, more profane, more angry person is born.

And I blame the Crips.

Or specifically… One Particular Crip™.

I don’t realize it, but I am primed for a new understanding of the world. I’m disabled, broke, constantly in pain, my white upper-middle class world has shunned me and tossed me away, all my privilege has been flushed down the toilet with the exception of this condo that I live in. This is the last piece of privilege I am clinging to. I have housing at least.

But I am psychologically primed for a new understanding.

The discrimination I’ve faced over the prior 8 years has hardened me against privileged people. I have scar tissue in my soul now, a chip on my shoulder.

“Y’all don’t want me? Fine. Fuck you. Your loss.”

The shunning I had received is something I feel no hesitation to deploy towards others who cause harm. This becomes one of my weaknesses in life as time goes on, but for many years this protects me from the abuse of others.

I am just as quick to shun people and would prefer to be the first to do so.

I am at a point of life re-examination, and I live in a neighborhood filled with people who have been crying out in pain to the Privileged World all their lives and getting rejected, eye rolls, blamed for their pain– things I’m now understanding.

But, while I am newly understanding these things, I don’t really understand this stuff the way the people and families in Tweekside understand these concepts.

There is a depth of knowledge I have yet to gain.

If ever there was a Privileged White Boy ready to learn some New Shit™ at the right time and place to learn said shit… I was that white boy and this was the new shit I needed to learn.

What I need, but don’t realize I need, is a mentor.

And one day, as I’m limping around my fly-infested-cow-shit-smelling-tweeker-yelling neighborhood… that mentor arrived.

“S’up.”

The head nod of street stranger talk in this environment– there’s a whole body language of communication I’m learning that is very different from the tree-lined streets of Claremont.

It’s people gently prodding each other to see if the person in front of you is someone who will respect you as a human, or whether that person is trying to scam you, rob you, mug you, stab you, whatever. These neighborhoods everybody is constantly on alert.

Due to the high density, for every decent human you have you also have the shittiest scummiest con artists, thieves, snitches… it was a vibrant neighborhood.

And on this day I am walking to the mailbox even though I already know there’s nothing in it, but I need to stretch my back and this is my daily activity of sadness and sunlight.

“Yo. You got any herb? Trying to find some.”

“I got a few bowls of chronic back at the pad if you need.”

“You sure you don’t need that shit with all the limpin?”

Even gangsters care about disabled people.

It was a moment of boredom and loneliness.

I had spent 10 hours day by myself in that condo bored outta my fucking mind for a year. I am a social critter. I like people. I like interacting with others and having friends. And since most of my friends have wandered off because they can’t handle CrazyDave™– a nickname I would be tainted with multiple times– I was also primed for new friends.

And this is how I find myself sitting in my PrivilegeCondo™ smoking a bowl of bougie weed with…

*checks notes*

Blue

Blue is a good 6-7 years older than me.

And this will be the fundamental relationship in my life that changes everything about my belief system(s).

If I can credit one person on planet earth for being the Patient Educator to this CluelessWhiteBoy it is Blue.

He had grown up in Pomona which is the city right next to Claremont. We had lived within 5 miles of each other for over a dozen years growing up. But our worlds were so far apart as to be other planets.

Blue was a statistic. Born to a father he never met who lived 3 blocks away and wanted nothing to do with him, to a mother who struggled with a nasty 80’s crack addiction. As a result Blue largely raised himself and his younger sister.

And how do you have access to money when you’re 9 years old and your mom hasn’t been home in 2 days and you’re staying with one of your aunties and you and your baby sister are starving?

Blue learned how to steal the things he needed.

At some point in his youth he was jumped into the Trey-57 gang of Crips in his hometown.

School? Who has time for school when you’re trying to find food that day?

The Trey-57 Crips would provide allies and friends and protection when a young kid had none. Nice, polite, educated white people look down their noses at black kids in gangs and it never occurs to them that sometimes you don’t choose the gang sometimes the gang chooses you. And to survive in the systems the white people set up that you will never be allowed to be in… you do what you gotta do.

And Blue is somebody who was given one of the world’s shittiest lottery tickets to cash.

Through no fault of his, Blue is extremely dark-skinned. He is very muscular without trying to be. And the moment he hit puberty, his voice dropped 25 octaves and he sounds like Barry White.

So he is– without trying to be– the epitome of the scary black man that every white person is terrified of. He coulda gone to medical school and people would think he was a gangster.

As a result, wherever Blue is he’s always viewed with suspicion. Somebody stole something from the teacher’s desk? Who does she think did it? Apartment broken into? Who gets pointed out to the cops?

Even if he had tried to live the straight and narrow, our society would never have let him. Blue was born with DNA that would leave him permanently shunned in the United States of America.

Add to that the life factors of a broken home, a ghetto life of struggle across every spectrum of existence from education to healthcare to job opportunities to housing to everything… Blue will always be given the worst of everything. This has colored– ahem– his view on the world.

One other thing about Blue… this motherfucker likes to argue and he is loud AF.

So he’s also the angry loud black man that everyone is naturally afraid of, but because of everything he went through at the hands of white America… he has now become the monster they fear. And he will not let anyone silence him or speak an untruth in his presence without firing back with a wisdom from the streets.

This is the man whose anger and understanding of the world will fundamentally transform everything I thought I knew about the world. Because this man understands what it is to suffer in systems that support white people and punish POCs. He has lived discrimination every second of every day of his entire life.

He is the Emmitt Till kid that a white woman would accuse of all sorts of things.

It was dangerous for him to just exist. Walking into an unfamiliar space could end with police called for no reason.

I will learn all of this in the years to come.

At this moment in time, I have opened my home to a Trey-57 gangsta and I am sharing my back pain medicine with him as we puff and get to know each other.

Me the whitest of white humans to ever exist, but licking my wounds that I can’t get back into that world, and him giggling that a white boy they “tossed out” would ever want to go back to that world of criminals and thieves… ya know the upper managers and white people landlords… to him we were the monsters in a very real way.

In preparation for this section of content I called Blue earlier this week and asked if he wanted me to quote him to my audience of readers:

Blue said:

“The muthafuckas that cheat? Yeah. Tell ’em ‘Tha N**** Speaks tha Truth’”

If you want to understand where my usage of the word “fuck” enters my vocabulary with a vengeance… blame Blue.

In trying to figure out how to tell this part of the story righteously I have been struggling with a technical challenge.

Over the next 5-6 years I will end up spending more and more of my time hanging out with an assortment of Crips loosely united by the Blue shirts– so even though they weren’t from the same hoods and gangs, there was a universal understanding that Crips chill with Crips. And at this point in people’s lives they aren’t teenage gangbangers anymore. Now they’re the OGs who have chilled and survived the shootings and wars and now they’re just trying to find a stable job that pays the bills.

And during these years I will find myself– almost daily– hanging out playing dominoes, smoking blunts, drinking 40’s outta paperbags and shooting the shit as the token white boy of their group. I even had the “N-word pass” with these individuals.

You read that correctly.

The actor who played Jimmy Barclay is now the token white boy hanging out smokin’ blunts and playing dominoes with Crips… and eventually I earn an “N word pass”. This pass only extended to that particular garage and blunt-resin stained cardboard table.

Remember how I said at the beginning that “playing cards with the homies” is where you learn how your vote actually affects people? I was writing that from a place of deep knowledge and lived experience. I was the well-spoken white boy they send out to talk to the cops whenever they show up.

And even though I may have had an “N word pass” for 5 minutes with a handful of Crips in Tweekside Ontario…. that “N word pass” does NOT extend to this project.

And a technical challenge I have right now is that Blue is quite possibly the world’s most profane motherfucka in the history of profane motherfuckas. The N-word flows from this man like the music of a songbird calling it’s mate in the forest.

And I can not quote this genius of a man without seeming to come across as racist as fuck.

I’ve been struggling with a clever way to dispense his wisdom to the masses and I think I may have a strategy… I admit I’m nervous. But in attempting to quote this man I’m realizing that his speaking style will make all of you blush. Some of you may faint. There could be accidental cars swerving into trees from the shock. I don’t want to scare you, dear privileged white Fucking Evangelical™ America.

I think my strategy is that I am going to attempt to interpret what he told me in a manner and way that is most comfortable to nice, polite, white society:

So a sentence like:

“The muthafuckas that cheat? Yeah. Tell ’em ‘Tha N**** Speaks tha Truth’”

I will reinterpret as:

“Those dastardly white people who run everything and destroy it? Yes. Please tell those fine folk, quote ‘The Angry Black Man speaks great wisdom and knowledge to you free of charge. Amen.’ Endquote.”

Or say a sentence like:

“Dave… it’s time to teach those fuckas N**** 101. They need some n****ology in they rotten heads”.

Becomes:

“Dave… our nation is at a critical point where the white power structure needs to learn about the lives of People of Color, your audience is in dire need of unlearning their racial prejudices in their corrupt narratives that they’ve been taught their whole lives.”

Does this work for everybody?

How I wish I could just hand the microphone to Blue.

He says it all so much more eloquently and efficiently.

But I worry that might kill you without proper preparation first. So I’ll do my best to articulate and pass along some of the base level knowledge to you before I feel comfortable having you learn at the feet of Master Blue.

*** This section is about the recording of the 500th episode.

Meeting Fan001

Final Earl Boen and Corey Burton encounters.***

*** This section is about auditing a dramatic improv class in North Hollywood after years of chronic pain and stagnation.

This needs to focus on the desperation of not being able to act. The fire that always burned within me is relit by the recording of episode 500 and is frustrated by the obstacles in my life.

Deeply describe the blackbox theater experience. Bring the audience onto the stage to set up… the emotional hit of…***

*** This section is about finding out I’m going to become a father for the first time and the myriad ways my issues OCD/Panic Disorder/MajorDepression drove fear and terror into me at a vulnerable time.

This section needs to be a deep dive on my psychological state to set up the next post***

This post is unfinished.

My deepest apologies.

Please defeat MAGA