In this blog post I'm going to discuss two things--brothers and bricks--which, on the surface, seem unrelated, but which enjoy a tenebrous tie to one another, so bear with me.

My youngest brother has been having some problems for the last five years or so. He's been an alcoholic, been on and off drugs--including crystal meth--and alcohol, been jailed twice and done a stint in rehab. An unrepentant thief, user, and loser, he just went back into rehab tonight. The whole family, particularly me, has had enough of him and his hollow promises to clean himself up, get a job, and act right. He is an overgrown 23-year-old child. I have perhaps suffered the most under him, physically, emotionally, and financially. He has mocked, threatened, and physically attacked me on numerous occassions. He has repeatedly stolen from me to support his loathsome habits, including swiping my strongbox cthat ontainied all my cash and checks. He didn't even have the decency to try to hide the evidence; the box, its hinges pried off and the lid removed, was among his stuff when he was taken into custody, as if he didn't even care if he were caught. I started getting sick and losing my voice--a well-trained instrument I honed for years--reduced now to wheezy croaks and grating grunts--four years ago, because of the stress and rage I have swallowed in dealing with that disease passing itself off as a human being. I know I should be charitable and hope he gets the help he needs to be a better person, but I can't help but wish he would die and thus spares me, my family, and the world a lot of pain.

When he went to jail earlier this year I had terrible nightmares about seeing him back home. Some of them were awful dreams within dreams, like in Nightmare on Elm Street...awful heart-rending visions that left me in a cold sweat, kicking my legs and pounding on the mattress in terror begging to wake up.

I was a wreck. For several nights running I wasn't sure what was reality and what was the dream. Was I going to walk into the living room and see that stupid troll sacked out on the couch, swilling Mountain Lightning, grinning that smug contemptuous little smile of his? I was assured by my family that he wasn't coming back, that he was to move into his own place. Then, I knew only peace. For four months I lived happy and free for the first time in years. I put together a new book and, at the suggestion of my publisher, decided to put the ms. on a disk. I moved the files--and there were many--over to his computer, reasoning that thing was never coming back, so I was free to borrow his CD burner. I nearly, after many days of arduously resizing some ninety files, had it all set. The files were almost all transferred, and ready to go. Then, on Jul 4, with no warning, he was released from jail. He knuckled-walked right into the house as if he hadn't been away longer than it takes to buy a pack of smokes and spirited away the computer back to his new place--with all my redone files on it. I watched in open-mouthed, impotent horror. There went my work. There went my long-held dream of going back to ASU within a year or less about to come to fruit, now shuffling right out that door in the hands of that ignorant, grinning gargoyle...and I was helpless to stop it. I saw my dream crumbled to dust in my hands. My family never even told me he was getting out that day. It was an ugly surprise. If I'd had time to prepare, I could have at least readied myself psychologically. If nothing else I could have burned my files to CD-ROM and had them in the mail two months ago. My new book, one of several I planned to release over the coming year, would be in galley form right now and on shelves by Christmas. But noooooooooooooo. Captain Stupid swooped right in and undercut me. He selfishly refused to let me use his equipment for fear I would mess it up. I ceased to see him as my brother, but merely as a living roadblock to my personal happiness that I had to knock down. And if that wasn't bad enough, instead of going to his place, he crashed here for the next two months--eating my food, sneaking into my room, stealing my money, sleeping all day, leaving garbage strewn about and never returning dishes and silverware to the kitchen, not looking for a job, doing nothing, contributing nothing. It was as if he was mocking me. Nyah, nyah! I'm here, but my precious, faster computer with the CD burner you need to rebuild your shattered life is miles away, and you can't get to it! Ha, ha, ha! My nightmares had come to vivid life. I spent weeks fighting an old slow computer with its inadeqaute e-mail program. I couldn't even look at the boy. I resented and despised it. I didn't even see it as a human being. It was just an ugly sponging thing that lived in the house, ate, slept, and screamed. It was a fungus. It was a lump of radioactive waste that sickened all who came in contact with it. Not a day went by that I didn't pray for it to die in a flaming car wreck, or choke on a piece of one of my purloined Hot Pockets, or slip in the shower and crack open its worthless head on the floor. I wondered if it was possible to "accidentally" chop someone's head off with an axe...or make it look like someone just "happened " to suffer cranial trauma...37 times in the exact same spot. I mentally went over every good place I know--and as a great explorer of the Armorel woods I know many, friends and neighbors--to dump a body where it wouldn't be found for months.

Iargued a lot with my family over the weeks The Stupid Boy spent with us. I repeatedly declared my intent to return to ASU the first chance I got, if only to get away from it. I would get the money, I said, that's no problem. I just have to figure out a way to get around The Big Five. Pummel them in the court of public opinion. Use my blog, books and website as weapons. Hit them relentlessly. Leave them bloody and broken at my feet. Force them to knuckle under and admit there is no sketch. Get the charges dropped and the flag lifted so I can re-enroll. Then I could move right in and rediscover all those lovely perks: buffets three times daily, a better cable package, faster Internet, and being propositioned nightly over the phone for sex by some of the most beautiful young women in the tri-county area.

However, I got another very nasty surprise last month in the mail--the ASU Alumni newsletter. It informed me that earlier this summer they tore down the Seminole Twin Towers. It seems the building was festooned with mold and filth and thus demed unsafe and uninhabitable. I was hurt. I spent three years there, considered it my second home--as did many generations of male students--and they tell me it's gone as an afterthought in a blurb in some cheaply-produced mass distribution? Perhaps I would have liked to have been on hand when they tore it down. Perhaps I would have liked to have been among the last crop of students to live there before it was condemned and imploded into rubble. But noooooooooooooo. Because of Boss Bonnie and that sycophantic pinhead Roger Lee, I can't even set foot on campus without being arrested.

And that's when I realized that things have changed so much that even if I went back to ASU tomorrow, free and clear, it would never be the ASU I remember. I'm turning 33 in two days. I'm balding, paunchy, weak, and sick. I'd have to compete with men ten years younger and a lot better looking for those hot random girls. I'd have to enroll in a couple of courses, find a part-time job to pay tuition and bills, figure out how to balance work, a courseload, and still put out a monthly comic. Plus now I'd have to find a new place to live, since my old room no longer existed. It's all ghosts and memories--the threadbare carpets, the dim lighting, the stench of drunks' urine and pot hanging in the halls, the barely-legal girls retching their guts out in the bathroom after downing two gallons of Hawaiian Punch and vokda in a sitting. The lounge computers with half their mouse balls missing. the carpet that sumped a ton of water during an especially bad storm when the lobby flooded and that never quite lost that fishy stench, the corner table where a thousand games of cards were played--gone. The convenience store that sold the great chicken strips, the big-screen TV where I watched cartoons every Saturday, the microwave that was so old it had a knob on it, and it was broken ,so you had to insert your student ID sideways into the little slit on the plastic stub where it fell off to turn it--gone. Ghosts. Dust and rubble.

So I hereby announce that I am giving up my dream of going back to ASU. It is not something I do lightly. I have thought about it for days. Iam sorry to let it go. It is a dream which has kept me afloat through some rough times--the frequent beatings my brother gave me, or the nights I lay awake crying while he raged and bellowed and punched holes in the walls and hurled my mom's porcelain figurines across the room while having one of his tantrums, or all the times I went hungry because he'd gobbled up all the food in the fridge and stolen my petty cash so I couldn't go out and buy a sandwich at one of the take-out places. And I know soon enough he's going to get out of rehab, and he'll sob a few crocodile tears and swear up and down he's changed, and my family will forgive him--against my better judgement--and let him back in. Just like they always do. And not two weeks later he'll be acting up again, just as he always does. He'll steal, he'll abuse us, he'll rave and throw fits if he can't have his way, he'll generally treat us like filth. And I will have no choice but to sit, and wait, and wait, and wait it out, and endure, until the nightmare ends with him slipping up and going off to jail or rehab or wherever they send him this time to get clean, and I'll enjoy my brief reprieve before this endless cycle comes around and he's back in my life again. And again. And again. Because thanks to the evil Bonnie Thrasher, there is no escape for me from this hell. There is no Peter Pan-Land for me to run to and hide, because I was away too long, and too much time slipped away. Now I am too old for Neverland. I guess I will have to accept I've grown up and forgotten how to fly.

So I've decided to spend the bit of money I saved up all this time to cover my tuition on a little something that will allow me--if not in person, than in name, to live forever at ASU. I have a chance to buy a commemorative brick that will be laid in a path near one of the campus buildings. I have already written my inscription and submitted it to the committee, and it has been approved. I'm hoping my loyal fans will help cover the $165 cost of this little piece of immortality by buying books and comics from my webstore. And I sincerely hope it is in set in a place where Thrasher has to walk by and look at it every day on her way to work, and every morning she will see my hated name, and that it burns in her black heart like a coal. And who knows? Maybe someday, after the old bat either resigns or drops dead, I can visit ASU without fear of arrest, and see my brick for myself. That will be my new dream.

Adios for this week.