What They’re Feeding Me #10 – A Ten Year Retrospective, Three Years Late
Right at the very top, let’s make sure you’re aware this zine is going to contain some triggering content. We’ll be talking about drugs, sex, fights, divorce, alcohol abuse, homelessness – basically if you can think of something fucked up and terrible, it’s going to be in this text. I’m sorry in advance. This is a very personal account of a decade of my life.
Deciding upon a format for this zine was the hardest part. The content will write itself.
One of the hardest parts of writing this has been maintaining a past-tense structure, and in a few places I’ve clearly abdicated my grammatical duty. But rewriting this stuff has made me feel like I’m there again – reliving the moments, seeing the faces, experiencing the same traumas, making the same mistakes. In more than one way, I am still the person in this story, though if you compare a photo of me, or my credentials, or my lifestyle, side by side, you see a distinctly different man. I’m grown. I’m 33 years old now, and I was 23 years old then. But it was still me, just a different, less-evolved form of me. A less honest me, who is ready now to be done with that. Pivot to: Act 3.
As of May 18, 2017, I had spent ten years in Portland, Oregon after unceremoniously leaving Edinboro PA for brighter shores – a place with public transportation, a big Native community, and lots of people with progressive values. This zine will show the path I’ve been on since then, in all its gory detail, in all its horrid splendor. I’ve been alive in the city of Portland for 10 years and this is what happened, to me, to the people around me, to the city, and the country.
I want to begin here with something of a pre-ending. I want to let you know I made it out okay, and I’m sorry for what I did wrong. I am okay and I’m sorry. Some of these stories reveal my lowest personal moments and behaviors. Many of these stories are what I remember most, because they were the hardest points, or the things I needed to survive to be who I am today. I don’t want to give you the indication I wasn’t enjoying every minute here, but having a ten-year snapshot of my life has shown me patterns of behavior, given me insights into prolonged struggles I wasn’t seeing, forest-for-the-trees. Everything happened exactly as I would hope, because it got me to where I am now. There was great levity within moments of pain. I made mistakes that were fortunate. I fucked up spectacularly to end up where I am.
The name, “Ten Times I Told You,” comes from the fact this is a ten year retrospective, it’s the tenth issue of WTFM, and it’s filled with stories I’ve told, and retold, about my time here, about my life. Except unlike some of the big whoppers of my time, this is all true. It’s also a set of stories that need to be lessons learned in order to move ahead. I’ve omitted plenty, but what’s left is all real. All that I care to share and all that it pained me to re-live, just to get it onto the page.
I’m transferring this content from my laptop to the website slowly. When it’s all done I’ll remove this paragraph, in the meantime, here’s what you get: