New gaping hole at the farmhouse.

Hello, kitten, what is it you are looking at?



















Is it all this garbage on the floor?



















All of this garbage?














Don't get wet, sad kitty!















You're sitting under a gaping hole in the ceiling.














It will spill insulation upon you.

Mike's reflective shoes.

Right after I graduated high school, I started spending a lot of time with my friend Mike. Mostly, we'd play punk rock in his basement, with Mike on a drum set that came out of a dumpster, and myself banging out power chords on my guitar. When we got bored with that, we'd drive around, digging in dumpsters and getting harassed by rednecks. Mike was probably the punkest guy I ever knew. He wasn't some dumb rich kid who shopped at Hot Topic and secretly aspired to be a successful rich guy. No, Mike was a high school dropout who dug in the trash, made his own clothes, and aspired to be punk as fuck forever.

Mike was the only person who I ever actually saw smoking crack. We were sitting in his bedroom one night before going out for a night of dumpster diving, and had just finished smoking some weed. Mike dumped the ash out of the pipe, and then popped in a crack rock.

"What the fuck, man?" I asked, concerned that my good friend was about to smoke crack.

"Don't worry, man," he said, "I can't afford to smoke this shit. This is just something my brother stole from some guy."

I'd always wondered if crack instantly turned a person into a crazy person, or if it took a lot of smoking to get them to the point where they wandered the streets talking to themselves. Mike didn't seem any different after he smoked his rock. He just seemed like Mike.

As far as I knew, he never became a crackhead. He came from a family of potheads, and I never knew any of them to be too interested in anything else. When his brother was in a serious car accident and was prescribed a bunch of powerful pain killers, he sold them all for weed money.

Mike loved to make and modify his own clothes. While most of my clothes-modification experiments consisted of me safety-pinning things to other things, Mike learned to sew. A routine dumpster-diving expedition once landed us a fine bounty of brand new clothes intended for obese women with preferences for extremely loud clothing. For a while after that, our clothes were often lined with pieces of that bounty: leopard prints, plaids, and plastic imitation snake skin. In addition to lining things with other things, Mike would paint his clothes, add spikes or straps or zippers, and sometimes briefly set his clothes on fire because he liked how it looked afterwards.

Another time, he glued bike reflectors to the bottom of his combat boots.

Mike was a young guy, several years younger than myself, but he had already had a number of run ins with the police. It seemed to be common in his family. One day, Mike was walking around outside when he saw the police driving nearby. He wasn't carrying any contraband, and he hadn't done anything wrong, but the sight of the cops scared him. He started running, and when the police got too close, he jumped into a ditch so they wouldn't see him.

They didn't see him, but they did see the reflectors on his shoes shining in their headlights. They arrested him for resisting arrest, since he was evidently trying to hide from them.

I haven't seen Mike in a few years, but when I did, he still had his mohawk and leather jacket. Everybody else I knew had gotten rid of them long ago. Punk as fuck, I tell you.

That guy took a drink out of the trash!

There was a period where I would always get free drinks by pulling a used cup out of the trash and getting a free refill. The trick also worked for buckets of popcorn pulled out of the trash at the movie theatre, which made for great free times after sneaking in without paying in the first place. Humans are equipped with this wonderful thing called an immune system, which protects them from nasty communicable illnesses, and I never got sick doing this. I no longer advocate such behavior, though, or even partake myself, out of fear of finally catching something from the practice. If I knew what my odds were, I'd probably still be doing it, but ignorance can be terrifying. In truth, it's probably almost as safe as eating in any restaurant. You don't know where the people making your food have been any more than you know where the person who threw away their cup has been.

Once, I was waiting in line at Taco Bell when I decided to show my friend how it was done. I went to the trash, pulled out a cup, got a refill, and got back in line.

"See that? Free drink!" I said.

"That lady is telling on you," he said, and pointed behind me. A woman was sitting with her teenage daughter, pointing me out to an employee with a broom and looking completely disgusted and offended. The employee looked at me, and then started walking in my direction. I wondered what she was going to say.

"Excuse me," she said. I moved out of the way, and she walked passed me. Apparently, there was no policy against doing that. When I ordered my food, I placed the cup conspicuously in front of me on the counter, but they didn't have anything to say about it, either.

When we left, we stuck it to The Man by taking all of the Fire Sauce.

"The guy who eats from the trash."

Where I work, there is a coffee stand near the vending machines. They sell a variety of caffeinated beverages, as well as stuff like bagels, cookies, soups, and sandwiches. I might think it was kind of awesome if I didn't work a late shift. When I'm at work, they're not open. I still have access to some of the food, though, and I get an incredible discount. At the end of their day, around the time I'm arriving at work, they throw much of the food in the trash. It's clean, it's wrapped, and I have no problem eating free food out of the garbage.

I have a dilemma, though: I don't want to be "the guy who eats from the trash." I used to pull bagels and such out more frequently, but I pretty much stopped when I got caught taking a cookie. Luckily, the dudes who saw me were a couple of construction guys, there for one night, and not anybody I work with. I hadn't taken anything out of the trash in a while, but since I still don't have access to my money, thanks to the bastards who robbed me, I went looking for a free sandwich today. There weren't any sandwiches, but there were some bagels, wrapped up in clear plastic wrap. I took one, and it was the freshest bagel I've eaten in a long time, much better than the ones my girlfriend buys in a bag at the grocery store.

I should have access to my money within a couple of days, but now that I've eaten that bagel, I have an appetite for more free food. I feel like it's something I'm going to start doing more frequently, because hey, free food. There's just something extra tasty about something for nothing. I'm just worried that now it's only a matter of time until I'm "the guy who eats from the trash."

Hanging out with Kenny.

I had just moved to a new town, and was living with my girlfriend at her mom's house. We were both actively searching for jobs, and she landed one working nights in the dildo and porn store at a nearby strip club. Not wanting to be stuck with her mom and her mom's boyfriend, I asked her if she had any friends I could hang out with while she was at work. She said she knew this guy named Kenny I could hang out with. Being new to the area, I had no idea that the only reason she picked Kenny was because she had no friends on account of being completely fucking crazy. Kenny was the only other person she really talked to, and she probably only talked to him because she was a sociopath and he was a pathetic loser who was completely in love with her.

We picked up Kenny on the way to her job, where she was to be dropped off and picked up hours later. In the meantime, I was supposed to hang out with Kenny all night. When Kenny lumbered out of his house, I was in awe of his girth. He was a hulking figure, nearly as wide as I am tall, and towered over me. He also dressed to impress, wearing a button-up shirt printed with a graphic of a dragon and smelling of urine and heavy perspiration.

We dropped the girl off at the strip club, and then it was just us guys. Kenny held his seat belt in place in case the cops were out, because he couldn't make it actually fit around him.

"So, what is there to do around here?"

"Uh, Idunno."

The problem was that Kenny had absolutely no life. He had no friends. He had no job. He was a 20 year old high school dropout who did nothing but sit at home playing Evercrack, eating, and reeking of stale pee.

We finally decided we'd hit the video arcade first. On the way there, Kenny tried in vain to impress me by telling me he could rap all the lyrics to a Limp Bizkit album. When I wasn't interested in hearing him rap, he went on and on about Everquest, filling me in on all the most mundane details.

"Well, you have your bronze pieces, and you get 10 of them and it's worth one silver piece, and then you get 10 of them and it's worth one gold piece. Oh man, do you realize how much a horse costs in Everquest? I've been questing for hundreds of hours a week, and I'm not even close! There are these monsters, and..."

Since he seemed into computer RPGs, I asked him if he ever played oldschool paper Dungeons and Dragons. He told me he and his older brother had tried it, but couldn't get into it. I assume it wasn't visual enough, or took too much thought. They were, however, avid fans of Yu-Gi-Oh.

Yes, a 20 year old and his older brother collected and played Yu-Gi-Oh.

We got to the part of town where the arcade was, and there we ran into another problem. Kenny didn't know where it was. This would be a recurring theme throughout the night. Kenny, despite having lived there his entire life, didn't know where fucking anything was, and he was going to be my navigator for the night. Wonderful.

We found a structure to park in and wandered some streets looking for the arcade. While we walked, Kenny bragged about how all he needed was a thin denim jacket, while I was freezing my ass off in a big coat. We ended up asking somebody where the arcade was.

"Across the diag," she said.

I asked Kenny where the diag was, and if it was a long walk. Apparently we were right next to the diag, but it was an incredibly long walk and we needed to go back to the car so we could drive to a different parking structure. I later found out that the diag is a very short walk, probably less than the equivalent of two city blocks.

We got to the arcade, which was Kenny's idea, where he told me he didn't have any money. Annoyed, I decided we'd spend 10 bucks and then leave.

When we left the arcade and went back to the structure, I asked Kenny if he minded taking the stairs instead of the elevator, because it was closer. I may have asked because subconsciously I knew he would have a hard time with it, and I was already really annoyed with this guy. He told me he didn't mind taking the stairs, he did it all the time.

On the way up, he paused, panting heavily, and pretended to wonder what some unintelligible graffiti on the wall said.

We started driving around again, trying to figure out what to do next. Kenny was really thirsty, and wanted me to stop at a gas station and buy him something to drink. What's a guy like Kenny drink, you ask? A two-liter bottle of Coke, and a two-liter bottle of cream soda. Hell, if somebody is nice enough to agree to buy you something to drink, you need to take advantage of it. When Kenny got back in the car, he made a failed attempt at opening the cream soda, spraying it all over my car. Moments after the soda explosion, there was a loud breaking noise, and the seat Kenny was sitting in snapped backwards from his girth. This would be the first of no less than 3 chairs of mine that Kenny broke. He would later go on to break a recliner and a papasan, the latter of which I was always scared of breaking, and I'm a really skinny guy.

Predicting that Kenny would want me to buy him food at some point, I decided we should go dumpster diving at some pizza places, which he was easily able to direct me to. If you're unaware, most pizza places have a policy of throwing away full pizzas in the box if the order is somehow messed up. The boxes are used to keep track of how many pizzas are made. I asked Kenny if he had any problem eating some free, clean, dumpstered food, he said he didn't. When we found pizza, he ended up eating a whole pepperoni pizza and a full order of cheese bread, minus the two or three pieces that I had. He later went on to tell somebody that this was "the worst thing" he ever did.

Unsure of what to do next, we decided to go to one of the many 24-hour superstores surrounding us. We wandered around the store aimlessly. At some point, we passed the books, where I noticed this book I had seen there before and briefly glanced at. It was a book written by a supposed child-abuse victim, but the entire book, from what I saw, read like some kind of twisted internet torture fetish fan fiction. I told him I thought the book was bullshit written to capitalize on peoples' morbid curiosities.

"No," he said, "It's all true. That guy was on Oprah."

"So?"

"Do you honestly think somebody would go on Oprah and lie?"

"Yeah, to sell books."

"No, no. They had a police officer there to back it up. Do you think a police officer is going to lie?"

"Are you serious? You don't think cops lie?"

"You can't just go on TV and lie! I saw him on Oprah! You're so cynical!"

I was awestruck. Not only did this guy watch Oprah, but he believed every word she or anybody on her show ever said. He didn't believe it was even possible that somebody would lie on TV, and I was just an incredibly cynical bastard. No wonder the guy loved that Eminem movie so much. He was convinced it was the true story of his life. I had to ask him about that, and once again I was told I was very cynical for not believing some story about a famous person.

Bored, we drove off to another 24-hour superstore. At this one, we walked to the furniture section and sat down on a couch. A few minutes later, a plainclothes security guy came and told us we had to move. Kenny got up, and I moved to the adjacent couch. Rent-a-cop glared at me.

"Come on, man," Kenny pleaded.

"If I'm going to buy a couch here, I need to know that it's comfortable."

Rent-a-cop said nothing, he just kept glaring at me while Kenny continued to plead with me like a little baby. I finally gave in just so he would shut the fuck up.

We went back to visit my girl, hard at work selling sex dolls and rubber vaginas to guys who all claimed they were novelty gifts for friends. I perused the pornography selection while Kenny went to the counter to talk to his only 'friend.' He thought I was out of earshot when he started bitching about the music we were listening to in the car the whole time.

"He just kept playing it!" he said.

I was going through a death metal phase at the time, and so the music was loud, abrasive shit that most people, including the current version of myself, cannot listen to for very long, if at all. The thing is, though, I had asked him what he thought about it, and he had told me that he really, really liked it. What the fuck?

When we left, I turned the death metal up louder as we drove to yet another 24-hour superstore. We wandered around the store, and I tried to get him to stop in the furniture section to just relax. He was too scared of security, even when I told him they couldn't do anything to us for testing out furniture we might buy.

When it was finally time to pick up my girl and drop him off, I was so relieved.

A person reading this might think I'm being excessively hard on Kenny. Sure, he was an idiot and a huge loser, but so what? It's sad, and we should feel sorry for people like Kenny. I shouldn't be talking shit about him on the internet, giving people actual quotes from him like, "Sometimes when I eat a whole pizza, I feel fat."

I used to feel that way about Kenny. I felt bad for him after hanging out with him, and I felt bad for him for pretty much all of the time I knew him, despite his attempts to make moves on my lady. I thought he was a pitiful excuse for a human, which he is. I feel fully justified calling him a goddamn motherfucker, though. Allow me to explain why.

At the end of my relationship with that girl, she was living in my apartment and contributing absolutely nothing. She wouldn't help pay the bills, she wouldn't help pay rent, and she wouldn't lift a finger to help keep the place clean. She would hang out with Kenny all day while I was at work, letting that sniveling worm kiss her ass and make her feel great all day, and then she'd come back and sleep at my place. She didn't work. She didn't go to school. She did spend all of my money, though. And she was an mean, evil, and completely crazy fucking bitch on top of that.

When I told her she had to move out, the two of them had me arrested on false charges and then robbed my apartment while I was locked up. I was eventually cleared of the charges, but being cleared of charges doesn't mean you get back all the time or money you lost because of them.

I hadn't seen Kenny in a few years, but he was working at a store where I went to buy something. I left as soon as I saw him and never went back to that store.