“I swallowed sod. I breathed worms. I huffed the entire 50-yard line.”

— an excerpt from Confessions of a Lint Head, pg 13

I have lived a thousand lives.

I have died a thousand deaths.

I have suffered a thousand triumphs and a thousand tragedies.

I have toiled underneath the threat of the lash.

I have been drawn and quartered.

I have been hung.

I have been stoned.

Mostly stoned.

Like for the last 30 years, four months, and 17 days. And during that drug-induced trance, I saw how I came to be, including the day that I was born into this snuff film we call life.

I was born on the Fifth of July in the middle of a small Southern college town in the middle of a football stadium in the middle of the muck and mud and mirth and mayhem of a concert by the Unwashed Masses, a minstrel stain on the perfume-scented silk panties of rock history, a partial-birth abortion of needless jamming and cock-polishing pan-African rhythms.

When I close my eyes and fall to sleep, I see it as it happened. My mother was spread eagle on a mud-stained beach towel, her tie-dyed dress pulled up over her round belly, as my father drove into her swollen cunt. Every other thrust, he rammed his dick into the mud before sticking it in. Neither seemed to notice. And if they did, neither cared. And neither did anyone else around them. They danced and danced and danced as the Unwashed Masses played their signature song, “Uncle Tom’s Band.”

The air was a fog of pot smoke and patchouli, and the ground was a bog of foot funk, crotch sweat, and leaking amniotic fluid. Or at least it was around my mother and father as they fucked on a mud-covered beach blanket. I don’t know if it was the drugs or the miscarriage of music coming from the stage, but they mistook my mother’s contractions for orgasms and their chemical codependency for love. Which wasn’t surprising. As fans of the Unwashed Masses, they had long mistaken a synaptic serotonin shit storm for melody and harmony.

And it was into this world that I was born.

My birth came fast. I recall a dick in my mouth. And next, a baptismal mud bath. I was drowning in muck as the dancers’ oblivious feet pushed me deeper and deeper into the murky football field. I swallowed sod. I breathed worms. I huffed the entire 50-yard line. And then suddenly, I was torn from the soil, by whom I don’t know.

I looked down at my parents. My father was still fucking mud and my mother was pulling at the umbilical cord that attached me to her. She kept saying, “Be free pretty balloon. Be free.” And then she took a bite and another, and then she began to rip and tear at the flesh like a vulture on a piece of asphalt carrion. The drugs were just starting to kick in as the unwashed masses watching the Unwashed Masses began passing me along in the air. I traveled the length of the field back and forth four times before a security guard noticed I was a baby, not a beach ball.

That day, I learned all I needed to know about my fellow man. I learned all I needed to know about love. If this was peace and harmony, then I wanted no part of it. If this was man at his best, then I would have to embrace the worst. The human race deserved no better.