Life Lessons with Dr. Pat

Beautiful

2006-03-29T07:46:00.000-08:00

Greetings once again, faithful reader(s).

I missed your smile.

When I last chronicled my self-empowered life quest, I was on the rebound from an emotionally nurturing and sexually perverted love affair with Svetlana, my internet-ordered wife of four days, and was bouncing back by spending the month following our breakup curled tightly in the fetal position on a bed of old newspapers on the floor of my parent’s basement, huffing my father’s spray paint, and tempering hourly anxiety attacks by cutting my left thigh with a broken bottle of Yoohoo.

It was a period I now refer to as “my halcyon days.”

Then things got worse.

My own mother, who gifted me with this precious existence 47 years ago when I came out of her vagina, politely asked me to leave my closeted but comfy subterranean pleasure dome, abruptly ending my post-community college transitional phase after only 28 years.

She was sensitive to my emotionally wounded and cholesterol-congested heart, but was concerned that the self-pity resulting from my failed marriage was prohibiting me from once again embracing the rich existence that exists outside of the couch cushion fortress that my grandfather helped me build in the late 70’s.

“You had a good woman and you fuckin’ blew it,” she consoled as I forlornly packed my plastic Cub Foods bag.

Her words hit me like a mean insult.

“You don’t know how to love!” she then yelled as I angrily peeled out of the driveway, the spokes of my ten-speed flapping my wrestling cards like a thunderous stock-car engine.

Having only a half carton of GPC menthol cigarettes and a slightly used 1985 issue of Cat Fancy in my possession, I purchased 3 sq. ft. of brown urine-stained cement under the Hennepin Avenue Bridge from the de facto landlord, Rodney, a 42 year-old Holocaust survivor and former “Head of Super Secret Intelligence” for the United States Navy.

“Touch my shit and I’ll fuck you up with my screwdriver,” he blithely offered by way of introduction.

“My name is Dr. Pat,” I intoned as I gingerly leaned forward for an urban man-hug. “But you can call me by my street name—Patrick”.

“I don’t give a fuck about you, Patrick,” he replied.

Rodney and I have good days and bad days, but I find his inner strength reassuring. We’re both having relationship issues and have slowly bonded over a mutual appreciation for the transcendental heartache that is the bane of the modern day lover.

“Bitch broke my pipe so I cut her,” he painfully recalled one evening while skillfully torching a discolored meth rock rolled in a discarded gum wrapper.

“I’m having a similar issue with my lady friend,” I replied.

“Love …” he trailed off, exhaling, before his knowing eyes rolled back in his head, gently.

I believe we are kindred spirits, Rodney and I, existential cowboys finally at home on a piss covered concrete range.

In the recent weeks and months, we’ve met other weary-hearted wayward souls seeking shelter from the storm, as it were, which a big bridge is good for.

On a frigid late evening in early December, we met Clayton Kensington IV, a fifty-something former hedge-fund manager who two years ago took an unfortunate three-hour $14 billion position in the Malaysian Ringgit vs. the Pakistan Rupee and now was $724 million in debt to “people who know people”.

His wife Cynthia kicked him out of their Deephaven McMansion when he returned home from work and began talking about “scaling things down a bit.” He’s been aimlessly walking the streets since, still wearing the black Armani business suit he wore that fateful day, softly whispering her name into the uncaring breeze.

Lately, Clayton has been spending his semi-sentient waking hours madly scribbling charts on the back of used pull tabs and mumbling about “a comeback” predicated on a 100% leveraged position in the Algerian high-yield bond market, a bold margin play that does not fully take into account higher than acceptable foreign trade deficits with Slovenia or the inevitable ripple effect of steadily increasing prices for Egyptian grain futures in my opinion.

But why take away someone’s hope? That doesn’t work either.

“I miss Cynthia …” he’ll often murmur when unable to convince himself that the linear logic of his pecuniary ponzi scheme will satisfy the uncaring but consistent gods of concrete rationality.

Math is fucking like that I’ve found.

A few weeks after Clayton’s arrival, we first encountered the warm and luminous countenance of Rosie, a one-legged dyslexic hooker with fresh stitches in her head who practically owns the lower-west metro pity-fuck market niche. She was on the lam from her long-time lover and pimp after a heated political discussion left her on the receiving end of a half-empty 40-oz bottle of Meister Bräu.

“Republicans …”, is all she will say about the end to their spiritually enriching but emotionally destructive love affair.

On these dark, lonely late-winter evenings, Rosie has taken to casually reaching under the gently used garbage bag we all share for warmth and grabbing my groin like a socket wrench.

“You have a fear of intimacy,” she’ll coldly remark as I blankly stare into the graying, dark colored sky.

It’s true.

I’ve tried to resist these passionate entreaties as I am still inexorably plagued by haunting and ethereal thoughts of the lovely Svetlana that still haunt me like some kind of ghost or something.

On an impossibly meaningless Valentines Day, we met Ronald, a hard-worn and unfortunately tattooed ex-con and grifter just released from maximum security prison after serving fourteen years for impersonating a dental hygienist. He had a mystical shaman quality about him and we took to calling him “Ron.”

He was abused as an adult, we soon learned, and carried in his hearty soul the inevitable wisdom that comes from forgiving people who rape you for being such assholes.

“You cannot separate a man from his dream,” is all he would say about his latest prison term, and I soon feared we would lose Ron and his profound life insights and before long he would again be donning a light blue smock and mouth guard in some soulless steel and metal north suburban office park.

When not holding court on the vagaries of periodontal cleaning scrubs, Ron has lately begun to speak in hushed, reverent tones about “Henry”, an avuncular, kind-hearted prison guard that grabbed his ass once after telling Ron to check for tigers behind a men’s room toilet.

“I could build a life with that man …” he often sighs.

Ron has grown on the rest of us and we’ve begun to send him to the Super America dumpster across the street to bring back half-eaten burritos and jerky treats in exchange for resin hits from the gum wrapper.

I’ve perhaps leaned too hard on my fellow lovelorn compatriots in this time of need, and, in recent weeks, have started to distract myself from my heartbreaking heartache by channeling my endless anxiety into my life’s work.

There are no days off in the Life Training game, my friends, and I’ve begun to advertise my renowned emotionally-charged motivational seminars by holding a hand-written cardboard sign at the Dunwoody & Hennepin intersection that reads “Will Illuminate For Food,” a direct marketing strategy that has yielded no actual sales, but a number of good leads.

Also, having recently enjoyed the last of my down-market cigarettes, Rodney has put me to work over my lunch hour giving meaningful backrubs to successful but lonely business executives in trade for the low-grade cocaine and prescription serotonin inhibitors currently favored by the ruling class.

It feels good to give something back.

After our day’s labor, Clayton, Ron, Rodney, Rosie, and I will often huddle around a warm and cozy burning pile of carcinogenic by-products, smoke meth ‘till we’re blind, eat leaves, and casually discuss our day’s pursuits: commercial garbage excavation, $20 hand jobs, petty extortion, psychotic ranting, entry-level life empowerment.

In our comfortable routine and unspoken understanding, we’ve become like a quaintly content and loving elderly couple that can’t deal with life unless they’re totally fucked up.

Inevitably, the conversation will slowly turn from the quotidian banalities of our chosen vocations to the more life-sustaining subject of affairs of the heart and the profoundly deep and spiritually eviscerating love ache we all experiencing because of the shitheads that dumped us.

Like a secret A.A. meeting for dark spirits drunk on love, one-by-one we’ll take turns bestowing burnt offerings from our shattered hearts, impossibly soul-searing tales of unconscionable loss and love sick desperation.

“Fuckin’ whore was gonna cut my dick off …” ended one recent emotionally devastating soliloquy delivered courageously by Rodney to empathetic ears.

“I think the key to any relationship is communication,” I offered as both emotional support and professional advice.

As my supportive words of kindness hung in the air for a moment like a cloud of loving words, we all nodded knowingly and with hard-earned self-acceptance, like you do when an affable townie barkeep stops serving you because he’s tired of breathing your stench.

And in this way we love. And feel love. And don’t we all just want to be heard and understood in this life, even if it doesn’t get us laid?

Not sure.

But I do know that I’ve learned more about heart-felt empathy and basic human compassion and decency these last few months than I have in all my years surfing the internet for graphically explicit Asian pornography.

And I’m also learning a lot about loving relationships, my dear friends. The kind of life-changing loving relationships you read about in good books about loving relationships.

On quiet, peaceful nights when the ultra-narcotizing effect of contaminated methamphetamines overloads her debilitated central nervous system, Rosie will often lay her weary and somewhat infected head softly on my warm and inviting lap as I gently, lovingly pick stray threads from her mangled, self-sutured scalp.

Like the rest of us full-timers, she’s been under a lot of stress at work lately, taking her work home with her and, once unconscious, often softly sucking my right thumb like a tender and innocent little baby that sells it’s body for money.

Having ceased thumb sucking many, many weeks ago after a hastily arranged but well-catered intervention, I understand and am inexorably drawn to Rosie’s need to return to the simple days of her idyllic early childhood and a safer place away from ornery men with disgustingly gross sexual fetishes.

And, as her warm and caring suckle overtakes my senses, I can feel myself being drawn into Rosie and wanting to lose myself--my fear, my desire, my being--in the far reaches of her warm and accepting, glorious soul.

And I image a future life together--a life of love--a life filled with important arguments and foot rubs and erotic ecstasy and watching daytime television together in a comfortable silence.

I’m lost, dear friends, and I don’t want to be found.

But, but I’ve been hurt before and I fear that Rosie will never love me in the way that I love her.

And I wonder, more than anything these days, whether a love is real, is spiritual, is transcendent--if you can live within it--if it is not returned.

I don’t know. Still working on that one, my dear friends.

In the end, I will decide that I cannot just love this one human being. Too risky, given my past. You can only be truly destroyed once in your life, my faithful reader.

I will love humanity itself.

You.

And me.

While dawn breaks in full splendor on the shimmering mire of the underpass and the first warm hint of glorious spring aerates the thawed carcasses of festering sewer rats whose once promising life arc was truncated by the harsh reality of a Minnesota winter, we build a small fire and start our day--our lives--anew.

As Clayton takes match to Coke carton, and Ron divides a partially gnawed Slim Jim into five easy pieces, and I work on a troubling knot in Rodney’s lower back while he methodically prepares the first meth rock of the new day for group consumption, we each silently, and in our own way, seem to revel for a pregnant pause in the self-sustaining, life-affirming community we have built in the inglorious shadow of this urban interchange.

It was at this moment that Rosie passed around a “collection plate” she had fashioned from the bottom of an already licked cardboard cheeseburger box, betraying an undeniable love that I am now aware will one day lead me once again toward her fierce heart and renew my battered spirit before it inevitably destroys me.

“It’s for the less fortunate,” she said.

It is here that I am happy. It is here I am home. It is here I am safe. It is here I shall stay.

Life is beautiful.

Don’t ever fucking forget this.

Forget the Past! Live Now! Spread Joy and Hope!

2005-12-01T14:00:00.000-08:00

Your Putrid Carcass Will Soon Be Rotting for Eternity in a Wooden Box

“Live in the now,” Buddha once said.

Or maybe that was Oprah. Can’t remember. They both seem pretty full of themselves.

Point is, we should do some more of that.

For it is only by living in this very moment that we are able to fully love our life for what it is and spread this love, joy, and appreciation to our fellow human beings while momentarily disregarding the profound embarrassment of our humiliating existence and the random pointless impulses emanating from our brain stem.

Plus, the past sucks ‘cuz it’s so fucking painful.

My wife left me.

I met Svetlana just six months ago through the popular online dating service dirtyrussiansluts.com. I won’t bore you with another forlorn, wistful love story, but let’s just say she wasn’t cheap.

After I printed off the marriage license, we shared countless hours of marital bliss until, later that day, everything changed. The Svetlana I married had changed into someone else. Someone who was different. Not the same. Same person but a little different. It was like she had changed.

“Svetlana leaving you for one reason,” she softly began. “You have small penis.”

“It’s not the size, it’s what you do with it,” I politely demurred.

“Svetlana leaving you for two reasons,” she replied.

I fell to my knees and begged her to stay. “We can work through this,” I cried.

I suggested marital counseling, but she said this would not make my dick any bigger.

Instead, we sought out the help of world-renowned genital-enhancement surgeon Dr. Sanjay Armitraj.

“You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”, was the technical explanation offered by Dr. Armitraj. “Or a big cock out of your little wiener.”

In a last ditch effort to save our marital union, we settled on surgery to make my diminutive sex organ more agile, a procedure that was actually fully covered under the tailor-made medical plan I had negotiated from my employer in lieu of a signing bonus.

Later that night, we laid naked in the shimmering moonlight, two souls reunited in the name of everlasting love.

“Eh, still can’t get off,” she whispered gently in my ear.

I offered to drive her to Canada for risky but potentially relationship saving vagina shortening surgery, but it was too little too late. So to speak.

But that’s all in the past, my friends. I’ve chosen to live in the now.

However, for a while after Svetlana, the one true love of my life, left Dr. Pat, I fell into a deep dark hole of despair.

Days passed when it was all I could do to get out of bed. I often masturbated uncontrollably and then, at times, controllably. I stopped bathing. I drank like a fish that really liked alcohol. I rekindled my interest in porn. I lived on junk food and fried onion rings dipped in cheese. I smoked a lot of reefer. And hash. And pot. Yesterday I ate eight pounds of bacon.

I forgot where I was going with this.

People Need to Love Each Other More

2005-11-13T19:20:00.000-08:00

Love.

Do you think there’s enough love in the world? Are you doing your part to spread love and joy and happiness throughout the world?

According to science people, it takes thirty-six muscles to frown, but only fourteen to smile, and maybe only one to sustain a serious erection--to be enjoyed with a loved one.

But instead we’re always frowning. Not spreading love to other people.

But what if love were like a rubber band, and you could stretch it, like rubber, until it covered the world like a giant rubber band covering a giant marble that represented the world and the rubber band represents, again, love?

That would be sweet.

I’m Dr. Pat, Life Trainer, and I think people need to love each other more.

Quite simply, I believe love and caring are what sustain us in this life, what matter most to people, and what differentiates the human specie from the monkeys, who I find rude and pretentious.

You see, Dr. Pat believes in a simple concept I just thought of: committing random acts of kindness.

What does Dr. Pat mean by this?

Reaching out. Touching people, both literally and with your hands.

Try it. Today!

Hug some homeless guy, assuming he doesn’t look too smelly. Say “I love you” to your loving wife or husband or skanky office-park fuck buddy. Tell your children that your profound disappointment in their humiliating existence is not to the level they might imagine. Ask an elderly person if there’s anything you can do to help them forget that they’ll be dead and decaying really, really soon.

The win-win part of leading this type of love-giving lifestyle is that you’ll feel better about yourself while you help others briefly disregard the undeniable pointlessness of human existence.

This is the self-less life Dr. Pat has chosen to lead and you should too.

“Let he who is most in need of help maybe get some help, since it’s about time,” someone probably said once, and that’s what I try to do sometimes.

Just the other day, Dr. Pat paid a surprise, unsolicited visit to some kind of crippled children’s hospital or something. I had the good fortune of meeting a beautiful young boy named Tommy who unfortunately was born without any arms. Well, after spending just a few minutes with young Tommy I realized that, although he was born without arms, and therefore had trouble catching things, he was gifted with the heart of a lion, an unconquerable spirit, and some kinda weird looking legs, if you ask me.

He was a little boring, and I had to get going, but not before giving this special child a warm and loving hug from one loving stranger to another—in effect, spreading the love, or “Making Love Out Of Nothing At All” as The Beatles once sang.

He had a little trouble hugging me back because—c’mon, no arms.

Wasn’t quite the same.

Dream On!: Using Your Dreams As Something To Get!

2005-10-29T08:07:00.000-07:00

“If you love something, let it go,” my late grandpapa once whispered in my ear when I was but a young child. “If it never returns, well, then you’re fucking screwed.”

He died a few years later of a tequila and opium-induced heart attack while screwing a 14 year-old hooker named Bonita in non-descript brothel just outside of Guadalajara, Mexico.

“He died doing what he loved,” my father was fond of recalling.

Are you doing what you love? After you’ve passed from this life, will you be able to say that you followed the path charted by your dreams, that which you love, assuming you could somehow talk after you’re dead?

For the vast majority of us, our pointless lives will be forgotten within just a few days of our unavoidable, impending deaths, usually sometime during the obligatory post-funeral buffet luncheon at the Ground Round, not long after drinks are ordered and the conversation inevitably turns from banal, courtesy reflections on your innocuous existence and toward more important topics such as the weather or the desert tray. By the time the first slice of preservative-laden apple pie is consumed, it will be like you never existed.

However, for a select few, for those of us who commit themselves to achieving their life-goals and making the most out of their precious lives, they will be largely forgotten within a month or two of their deaths.

You want to be in the latter group.

So how does one go about leading this type of purposeful life, achieving one’s ultimate destiny?

The answer, in fact, is quite simple: follow your dreams. Let them guide you on your predestined path of glory.

For example, I have often dreamed of becoming President of the United States so that I can use the power of the office to dramatically influence public policy and maybe get laid once before I die. Needless to say, I have yet to become Commander-in-Chief, however, at the apex of my working career I wore a paper Trainee hat and barked fried chicken specials like a retarded seal to Food Court visitors who were considering patronizing the Cinnabon next to Chik-Fil-A. The gentleman I directly reported to was on a court-ordered anger management work-release program for crimes against house cats. I grew to respect him.

So, yes, I never became the leader of the free world. But I often wonder, would the powers-that-be at Chick-Fil-A have taken a chance on a middle-aged man with no work history if they had not seen the unmistakable dreamer’s gleam in my eye during my three minute interview?

Hard to say. They were pretty short-staffed at the time.

The point is that dreams are a gift each and every one of us is given to guide us toward success in this life.

Dreams in the literals sense, the dreams we have at night while we’re sleeping, also provide an invaluable window into our psyches and private anxieties. For example, for most of my life, I’ve had a recurring dream in which I’m late for a final exam at school and I’m running as fast as I can trying to find the school, but then I fall off a large cliff and I’m falling, falling, falling. And then I start just fucking my mother like there’s no tomorrow.

The first step in unleashing the power of your dreams is to write them down. In fact, Dream On!: Using Your Dreams As Something To Get! will be the topic of this month’s Successfulize Your Life! Life Improvement Conference, which has moved location from Room 508 of the Frontage Road Econotel to the lobby of the Frontage Road Econotel.

As such, I’ve asked all success-minded people coming to the 45 minute conference to bring a list of 10 dreams that they have that they will be gunning for with their life. If you are planning to attend, please also bring a list of 10 friends who may be interested in reducing the monthly cost of their long-distance service and passing the opportunity on to their friends as this will save time during the last portion of the conference. 2 cents a minute on weekday nights and weekends. The program sells itself.

During this free-to-the-public conference, I will be leveraging ideas. I will also be sharing with you several stories of people who have successfully followed their dreams or fought the battle of dream achieving against all odds.

Stories such as that of Rodney “Rocket” Rodgers, an African-American man from Biloxi, Mississippi, who was born with polio in the 1940’s but dreamed of one day overcoming his affliction to become a world-class sprinter.

As a boy, Rodney would tell anyone who would listen that he was going to one day grow up to be an Olympic track star. They would laugh and tease him for being crippled.

As a teenager, he would attend his high school’s track and field practices and pester the coach for a tryout. Well, over time he finally wore ol’ Coach Montgomery down and was allowed on the track for a time trial.

Rodney’s performance that day was a little embarrassing for all involved. He never was able to run much faster than a slow jog on account of his crutches always getting in the way and the one leg that wouldn’t bend. He died fat, alone, and unhappy.

SUCCESSFULIZE YOUR LIFE!

2005-09-24T08:29:00.000-07:00

“If you chase your dreams, you’ll just look foolish in the end”.

“Don’t rock the boat, just keep to yourself.”

“You will never amount to anything.”

“Stop touching your penis when you get excited.”

How many times in our lives have we been bombarded with these negative messages?

Everyday, our lives, our thoughts, our actions are being programmed for failure by the negative naysayers among us who would like us to fail, lest our lives makes their lives look as pathetic as they really are. Pathetic losers.

Well, you’re in luck, my new friends at Credit America, because Dr. Pat is here to debug your mental software of this faulty source code; to reboot your system in the name of wellness and rewire your brain like it’s a computer or something.

You see, your intelligent superiors at C.A. have hired me on a temporary basis as part of their tax-deductible corporate employee empowerment program to reach out to you each month in this new newsletter with my uplifting message of hope and successful positiveness.

And what exactly qualifies me to teach this positive message of success and uplifting renewal, you inquire. “What have you ever done, Dr. Pat, that entitles you to preach this gospel of success and empowerment?” I often hear the naysayers ask. “You’ve been unemployed most of your life, you live in your parent’s basement, and your doctorate in chiropractic services was printed off the internet and signed by Sally Struthers.”

Well, I’ll tell you what I’ve done in my life that qualifies me to preach this gospel of success and empowerment: I’ve overcome, my friends. I’ve overcome. And that in itself, I believe, is the very definition of success.

You see, just four years ago, Dr. Pat almost gave up on this life he was gifted.

Unable to find gainful employment after the Food Court Chick-Fil-A that I worked at was closed and reopened as Jamba Juice, my life began a downward cycle of despair. The new juice people cared little about my chicken skills. I held no currency, as they say. I was a chicken man, an Old Economy archaic artifact from a simpler, more idyllic time when a man purchasing a $5 fruit juice with ginseng supplements rightfully felt like a wussy.

No longer valued by an increasingly cynical, technocratic society, I began to feel worthless and not valuable.

Seeking solitary refuge in my eating, my weight ballooned to 450 pounds. My days and nights were spent on the couch in front of the television, guzzling down-market malt liquor, eating bricks of cheese like candy bars, and taking J-hits off a one-hitter crafted from a rhesus monkey skull.

But then one night, my friends, everything changed for Dr. Pat.

It was after midnight, and I was watching a rerun of Mama’s Family I had TiVo-ed from earlier in the day when it was up against Card Sharks. As I was eating, Harvey Korman’s character delivered one of his patented zingers that got me laughing so hard a block of cheddar the size of a man’s fist carved out of cheese became inexorably lodged in my lower esophagus.

I couldn’t breathe.

I tried to get off the couch in order to self-administer the Heimlich maneuver, but my buttocks had also become lodged in a crater-sized ass groove in my parent’s love seat from months of stasis and I just couldn’t generate the requisite inertia. It would seem the catheter I had purchased to avoid tedious trips to the bathroom would ironically be my downfall.

It was then that I faced my moment of truth, my friends.

For a few seconds, I closed my eyes and just… gave up. But then, then, I saw a divine white flash and felt a bolt of energy and some flatulence and I knew, I knew I was meant to live.

I immediately lunged from my canyon-esque crevice and grabbed a 40 of warm Old English and took a metaphysical chug, pouring it down my throat and forcefully dislodging the offending cheese slab and sending it back down the other way, Irish-style.

When I regained my breath, I made a pact with myself to make the most of my life, to live a positive life, and to positively lead others so that they may be positive. Having existed solely on cheese for some time, I also took my first crap in a month the next morning.

And now, just a few years later, I have a new lease on life and a will to live a better life. I’ve dropped over 200 pounds by restricting myself to a low-carb, high protein diet and then vomiting profusely after each meal. And the best news is, I haven’t touched drugs or alcohol once since that fateful day except when I’m down and I really need it.

And so, my friends, I’m here to tell you that you can do what I’ve done. You can, if you set your mind to it, overcome. Overcome obstacles. And hurdles. And bad things.

I know this for a fact because I’ve seen it with my own eyes on my own journey to success.

I’ve seen amputees running marathons with some kind of weird devise thing for a leg. I’ve seen others with missing limbs who really missed their truncated appendage and ultimately killed themselves. Couldn’t stand the awkward stares any longer.

I’ve seen really old people who refuse to die. I’ve seen retarded people that don’t seem that retarded. I’ve seen Siamese twins that didn’t freak me out that much. I’ve seen babies with baboon hearts living and breathing just like the rest of us. Not very well, and not for very long, but I appreciate the effort.

And in the end, friends, that’s all that really matters. The effort. What we’ve done with what we’ve been given. Have we overcome or not overcome?

You see, it doesn’t matter whether one becomes The King of Europe, or Number One All-Time Boy Scout, or Chief Head Business Guy for a corporation. What matters is how we’ve lived our lives and have we instilled in others the same positive kind of view on things.

This is my life calling. It’s what I’m chosen to do. It’s why I live. It’s why I’m doing this for Credit America--which is important since I’m not getting paid more than a few bucks for this thing.

It’s why I lead my Successfulize Your Life! Life Improvement Conference the third Thursday of each month at the Frontage Road Econotel, Room 508., where my cassette tapes and self-published books and drawings are sold--now with an easy long-term payment plan if that’s what you need in your own personal financial situation. Looks kinda cheap, if you ask me, but suit yourself.

Because, in the end, getting the positive life-message out is all that really matters in this life. You see friends, we make the choice everyday with what we say whether to lift others up or push them down and into an endless cycle of psychological self-flogging that decades of group therapy have only begun to heal.

I’m reminded of a 4th of July as a young boy when I tired to save my struggling family some money by making firecrackers out of a gallon of gasoline, a box of Kleenex, and a case of my daddy’s shot gun shells. As my father and I sat on the front porch and watched as the firefighters struggled in vain to contain the raging inferno that was consuming our detached garage, my father’s heartfelt words touched me in one my darkest hours.

“You’re a moron,” he said. Then he hit me, so I had to cut him.